After speaking through a human translator to a fat bullywug on the docks Tilda bought a pass to board whatever craft into the Wilds was next available, paying an extra ten silvers for the privilege. In return she was given a short, flute-like stick with irregularly cut air holes and told to come back at first light though there well might be nothing available for a day or two. Or three. Half a tenday, tops. The additional delay was well down Tilda’s list of concerns. She secured the flute in the belt with her money and took the horses back into the city to the first heavily trafficked corner. In half an hour Tilda had sold both at a profit that covered the pass though she had to take payment in Daulic coins that were much more cumbersome than Miilarkian notes.
The only inn Tilda had seen in the city not full to overflowing was the Stars and Stones adjacent to the Shugak dock, and when she entered the common room she divined why. There were not many people at the tables or the bar but those present consisted of a bewildering array of adventuring types, all armed to the teeth and many still wearing dented breast plates and chain sleeves even as they ate dinner. There was a tall woman so pale she was almost albino, all in dark blue leather and with a mace set atop her table next to a gloved hand lazily swishing a glass of wine. In one corner was a pair of dark Oswambans, a twin brother and sister, wearing warm woolen clothes but with lion skins over their shoulders and matching spears with long steel tips bound around with bright feathers leaning against the wall. The furnishings and appointments of the inn were all of the highest quality and the place was obviously catering only to those who could afford to pay more than any commoner or refugee.
Dugan was at the bar talking to the only two women in the place who did not look like they were bound for Vod’Adia. Not unless prostitutes were assailing the Sable City this year.
Tilda went to the far end of the bar and dealt with the grinning barkeep. A single room and an evening meal were one and one-half silver pieces, several times what would have been fair. Tilda got a small measure of vengeance by paying in thirty coppers, ridding her of most of her least valuable Daulic coins.
Tilda stowed her gear and locked her room upstairs, and after some consideration she returned to the common room in her Guild cloak over her vest and daggers and with her buksu club still slung across her back. Her meal was waiting on the end of the bar, catfish and mead. Dugan was alone now for his companions had moved to a trio of well-heeled young noblemen who had come in, slumming. He shrugged at Tilda and she ignored him, taking her board and glass to a corner table beside the fireplace. The fish was good, basted with a creamy sauce tasting only faintly of leeks, but the mead was not sweet enough to Tilda’s palette.
A familiar man entered the room, not from the door to the street but from a side hall past the kitchen. It was the counterman from the jewelry store though he now wore a long, plain coat and a wide-brimmed hat. He nodded to Dugan at the bar but walked across the room to Tilda’s table, Dugan looking after him with an eyebrow raised over a tankard of ale.
“A bol aloha,” the man said in the Trade Tongue, flashing his gold tooth and producing his hands from his pockets for a little gesture, still a welter of shining rings. He switched to Codian. “We did not exchange names, though mine is Pagette.”
Tilda looked at him and said nothing. His smile faltered.
“All right then, Miss. If you might have a moment, I hoped you could spare it for a brief talk with…a certain important party. A man who has much to say to you, which I am sure you will find of interest.”
Tilda made no move though her right wrist was resting on the edge of the table, just on the knob of the dagger sheathed in her sleeve. If she pressed down while pulling her arm back she could tug the blade free and catch the pommel before it fell. Something about Pagette bugged Tilda but she spoke to him.
“You are going to have to be far more specific than that.”
“Oh. Well. Allow me to say there is a nobleman, in this very inn just down that hall there, who wishes to render you a proposition that if accepted will be to your considerable financial advantage.”
Tilda cut her eyes briefly toward the prostitutes snuggling the boisterous young nobles at the bar.
“Mr. Pagette. If you are saying what I believe you to be, you had best walk out of this room right now.”
The man looked in that direction and his eyes widened.
“Oh, gods Miss, no, I mean I would never…” he sighed and waved both hands apologetically, then started over.
“A high noble of this city wishes an escort…a guardian, for two people traveling to the Camp Town at Vod’Adia. As you are going there already if you are but willing to look after these others along the way, they can pay you handsomely. And if you are so willing you can all go on your way at first light, with no more delay. They have an arrangement with the Shugak.”
Tilda continued to regard the man coolly, then she stood up so fast that he took a jerky step back. She drained the last of her mead, which was a mistake. While Tilda thought she was doing rather well so far, the large swallow forced her immediately to stifle a belch, producing a squeak between her pressed lips that was in no way impressive. Nor ladylike. Pagette had the good grace to ignore it completely. He took a step to the side and gestured back toward the hall from which he had entered.
“You first,” Tilda said, and after a moment’s thought she took her buksu from her back and held the club loosely at her right side. Dugan had been watching from the bar and now he stood up as well.
Pagette nodded and walked back for the hall, passing Dugan on the way. The former legionnaire looked at Tilda but she did not meet his eyes as she honestly had no idea what she wanted him to do. She walked past without giving Dugan any sign, but he followed her. Tilda was slightly disappointed in herself that his presence made her feel a bit better.
The hall was short and lit only by the light from the common room. Pagette knocked on and opened a door halfway along, out of which spilled flickering fire light. He motioned for Tilda to enter, and she waved him in first with her club.
The room was a study of a sort, or perhaps the inn owner’s office. Rugs on the floor and whitewashed walls, bookshelves full of scroll tubes and plush chairs beside a brick fireplace. There was a desk that had been shifted to the center of the room as a table and dining room chairs had been brought in and set two on a side.
The two chairs across the desk were occupied by a middle-aged man with a barrel chest and a lovely young woman the size of a girl. The man stood as Tilda entered. The pair did not look much alike in the face, but the brown shade of their hair in the firelight was identical and made Tilda think they must be father and daughter. A second man stood behind them, a gaunt old fellow with his arms crossed and the pommel of a sword visible on his left hip as his cloak was drawn back on that side. All three wore plain garments; cloaks, tunics, and trousers of only moderate material yet much cleaner than would have been clothes which someone actually wore every day.
Pagette had stepped in to one side and he spoke formally.
“Miss, may I present his Grace, the Duke Cyril II of Chengdea, city and province.”
Tilda blinked but tried to give no more sign of surprise than that.
“ Bol aloha, Miss…?” the Duke said.
“Matilda Lanai.”
The Duke’s daughter raised an eyebrow as though recognizing that Tilda’s last name simply meant “porch,” in Miilarkian. She probably thought Tilda was giving a fake name, but sadly, no.
The Duke asked Pagette to watch the door, and Dugan let the man squeeze by him back out into the hall. When he shut the door Dugan shot the bolt without asking. The older man was giving the buksu in Tilda’s hand a hard look, and after thinking a moment she slowly held it back to Dugan. He took it, dropped the head in the leather cup of the sheath on Tilda’s back, and snapped the strap across its neck between her shoulders. The old man did not relax appreciably.
The Duke gestured at a chair and retook his own after Tilda sat down, perching on the edge of her seat. There was another chair beside her but Dugan remained standing behind Tilda and crossed his arms, making himself the mirror image of the old knightly-looking fellow behind the two nobles. There was a wine bottle and glasses on a silver tray atop the desk but when Cyril held a hand out towards them Tilda shook her head once. She waited until he began to speak, then interrupted.
“Pagette says you want someone escorted to Camp Town, your Grace. Who would that be?”
Cyril frowned and squinted, concentrating to follow Tilda’s words in the Trade Tongue. His daughter spoke it fluently.
“Are all the women of Miilark so swiftly to business? Not a word of polite small talk?”
Tilda looked at her. “I have had a long day. Forgiveness…your Grace?”
The Duchess nodded. She gave her name as Claudja, and was quickly to business herself.
“It is I who must go to Camp Town, in the company of this knight, his Lordship Sir Gideon Towsan. Commander of my father’s guard.”
Towsan gave no sign he had been mentioned. He and Dugan were busy sizing each other up.
“So go,” Tilda said. “What do you need me for?”
The young Duchess was about Tilda’s own age or perhaps just older. She gave a slight smirk.
“Owing to circumstances with which you need not be concerned, Sir Towsan and I shall not travel openly with guards, but in a clandestine fashion I am sure a woman taught in the Guildhalls of the Islands can appreciate. If we are attached to another group, even to a small one, we will attract still less notice.”
Tilda glanced at the knight. “He might pass for an old soldier if he scuffs himself up a bit. But you, your Grace, do not look like an adventurer bound for Vod’Adia.”
Claudja raised a dark eyebrow. “The same might be said of you, Matilda Lanai, without the cloak and weapons. But some adventurers do take servants with them as far as the Camp Town, and I can pass myself as one of those. Scuffed up a bit.”
Scuffed up a lot, Tilda thought, for the Duchess had the looks of a porcelain doll from the Celestial Empire of Cho Lung in the Farthest West. Tilda looked back to the Duke, still squinting to follow the conversation, but he seemed content to let his daughter speak for herself. Tilda crossed her arms and leaned back a bit, buksu clunking against the back of her chair.
“Just how much trouble are you expecting between here and Camp Town?”
“None,” Claudja said. “Though only fools and drunkards discount trouble altogether. Your simple presence, Miss Lanai, and the reputation of those of your ilk should in all likelihood be of more importance than actual protection. In return, there is a reserved Shugak craft that may be underway as early as the morning. No need to wait for another to return from a run. And, of course, you will be fairly compensated.”
“How fairly?” Tilda asked from force of habit, for gaining a day or more would by itself probably be worth what did not sound to be much of a task.
The Duchess narrowed her gray eyes slightly and the small smirk that had flashed a moment ago crept back to the right corner of her mouth. Tilda did not know who typically conducted the business of buying and selling within a noble Daulic household, but she had the sense that Claudja Perforce did so in hers.
“You have already bought passage with the Shugak, I am sure,” Claudja said. “That will be unnecessary now, and we will of course return to you the difference.”
“Obliged, your Grace. But making good a loss is different than making a fair profit.”
“What would you consider fair, for riding a raft to a place you were going already?”
“Oh, your Grace, these realms and environs are wholly your own. You should be the one to propose a fair price. From which point, we may begin.”
Tilda was aware she was beginning to smile as well, just as she had hawking the horses on the city streets earlier today. The three men in the room were now looking between the two women uncertainly.
“Shall we open the wine?” Claudja offered.
“Let’s do.”
*
It took half an hour but Tilda and the Duchess eventually settled on forty-four gold pieces, which just about put Tilda up for the day even after her payment to Dugan. She took half in advance and as the old knight Sir Towsan produced Miilarkian notes from a bank in Bouree to give payment, Tilda was able to change much of her coinage for more easily managed paper. Pagette and the nobles left the inn from a back door at the end of the hall while Tilda and Dugan returned to the common room where a few customers still lingered.
“What in the world was all that about?” Dugan asked. “I caught no words apart from duke this and duchess that. Jobe, and Vod’Adia.”
Tilda stopped walking. For a moment she had plain forgotten that she and Dugan were not actually traveling together anymore. She bit her lip, stopped biting it, and turned around to face him.
“That girl and the old knight want a traveling companion as far as Camp Town, and to a Jobian temple there. They just hired me.”
Dugan looked unconvinced. “Just you, eh? Could have sworn a thumb was jerked at me a time or two.”
“The Duchess asked what the smell in the room was.”
Dugan cracked a smile, something he had not done much since the far side of the Girdings, before the knight Procost, and Block. His beard had come in now which was a look Tilda had never found particularly attractive growing up in Miilark where all the local men were clean-shaven. Dugan’s did not look so bad however, and he was still handsome when he smiled. Not that one glass of bitter mead and two of wine was enough to allow his looks to influence Tilda. Not quite.
“So when you show up alone to meet them,” Dugan said. “They are not going to wonder where I am?”
Tilda did not answer, so Dugan went on.
“The two of us have worked well enough together, Tilda. We have gotten this far.”
“We did not all get this far.”
Dugan’s mouth lost its trace of mirth. “Believe it or not, I am sorry for that. Truly. But I mean you and me, Tilda. All the way through Daul, and we just handled that meeting well enough.”
“I thought you and Sir Towsan were going to stare each other dead. You really don’t like knights very much, do you?”
Dugan glanced at the floor, no doubt thinking for a moment of Sir Procost of the Roaring Boar Order, as was Tilda.
“I do not much care for nobles,” Dugan admitted. “Call it a hazard of being a foot soldier.”
Tilda’s eyes were narrow. “Do you still mean to catch John Deskata and the others in Camp Town? Even though your money is not an issue?”
Instead of answering Dugan rolled back the right sleeve of his rough Orstavian tunic, where he still had a plain bit of cord looped around his wrist like a bracelet. He had now run the cord through an air hole of a short flute identical to the one Tilda had been given as a receipt for her passage with the Shugak. He shook it briskly, and from inside the hollow stick he produced a string of beads on a wire hook, multi-colored and of different substances, with tiny runes inscribed.
“This is what a license to enter Vod’Adia looks like, in case you were wondering,” Dugan said. “I could not go in alone with just this, but if I join with a party of adventurers it gets fastened to some other Shugak stick. That is what the man in the tree-tower says, anyway.”
“What did you pay for it?”
“Fifty-three. I know, you would have done better. This one is only valid starting eight days after Vod’Adia Opens, though I am told I can pay for an ‘upgrade’ in Camp Town to use it sooner. I reckon they tie an extra bead on to it if I join a party entering the city before that.”
Dugan looked at Tilda evenly in the eyes.
“What I am telling you, Tilda, is that I have other plans. I am going into Vod‘Adia. I don’t give a good damn about John and the others either way. Not anymore. They stole from me, but you have now made that good.” Dugan shrugged. “As it turns out, I’ve blown the whole stack already, so it really matters little at this point.”
“So you do not mean to even look for them?” Tilda pressed. Dugan sighed.
“Not for myself. But if you want support when you go looking…you can have it.”
Tilda’s eyes were down to slits.
“Why?”
“Because I feel like I owe you something. I feel like I owe Block something.”
Tilda studied Dugan’s face just as she did when she was haggling with someone, looking for any tic or tell to let her know if she was north or south of what would be the final price. She believed Dugan but she was self-aware enough to know that she wanted to believe him.
“We meet the others at first light,” she said. “On the Shugak dock.”
Dugan nodded. “And once we get to Camp Town?”
Tilda let out a breath through her nose. “What is the expression in Tull? We will burn that bridge when we come to it?”
Dugan smiled. “That, is not that expression.”
Tilda looked at the short flute still in Dugan’s hand, just like the one she had bought as proof of payment for passage on a Shugak raft.
“We should not need these now, should we?” she said.
“I don’t suppose we will.”
“May I?”
Tilda held out a hand, and with a shrug Dugan unthreaded the carved whistle and dropped it into her palm. She dug her own out of a cloak pocket, looked around at the inn patrons at tables and the bar, and held both aloft.
“Has anyone not yet purchased a raft pass from the Shugak?” Tilda called, trying the room first in the Trade Tongue. Several people looked over, and Dugan chuckled.
“You are a credit to the Islands.”
“Leave no coin behind,” said Tilda. She slapped a smile on her face and bounded into a smooth stride for the table of the Oswamban twins, who had looked up at the first sound of the Trade Tongue.
*
Pagette walked beneath the spreading arms of the Shugak-built tower well after midnight, sighing at its weird silhouette against the starry sky. He had watched the bullywugs and hobgoblins raising the place three months ago, an abysmal process during which the whole mess had fallen over at least twice and rolling brawls had frequently broken out among the construction crew.
Behind the tower a tall pier normally used for large river vessels extended empty out over the water. Pagette took a trail down the bank through clumps of reeds and slick rocks to the end of a floating dock bound to the bank with ropes twisted together from the vines of the Vod Wilds. When he put one foot on it the whole structure seemed to move, and Pagette took his bejeweled hands out of his pockets for balance. The boards were narrow for it made little difference to the amphibious bullywugs who operated the rafts that would moor here whether they fell into the water or not. Pagette was getting a belly in his middle years but the nimbleness of his misspent youth was not totally lost. He made it to the end of the dock still dry.
A single bullywug stood waiting on the end, a very small one hardly as high as the man’s waist. Its dark hide looked blue-black in the night, and Pagette mostly saw the creature by the faint phosphorescent glow of its yellow, cupola eyes. Size was not a reliable determinant of age among the frogmen, and this little one did not seem young.
“Greetings,” Pagette said in Daulic as he stopped and steadied himself on the bobbing boards. The wug chirped neutrally. So much for small talk.
From a jacket pocket Pagette produced a missive he had just written in Zantish in his shop, then sealed in a water-tight tube made of tin, the two ends of which screwed together in the middle. He held it out toward the wug.
“You know where to find him?” Pagette asked before handing it over. The wug made a rumble from low in its belly, then a flute-like whistle that billowed out fleshy pouches where its throat would be if it had a neck. Together the two sounds meant that the wug was not an idiot.
Pagette gave it the scroll tube and the wug deftly used its webbed hands and long fingers ending in round suction pads to place it into a small pouch bound across its torso. The wug wrapped a long trailing strap many times around the pouch, then cinched the harness tight.
“Swim swiftly,” Pagette said, and the wugs glowing eyes turned on him. It made a series of croaks, ribbits, and slaps of its hands that roughly translated as, What in the green hell would you know about fast swimming, pink thing? Mind your business.
With that, the wug slipped off the dock and into the dark water with hardly a ripple, leaving Pagette alone.
He made his way back to land, then up the path to street and pier level. Rather than returning immediately to his shop Pagette stepped out on the pier some little distance, went to the railing, and fished his pipe and a clever little steel-and-wheel lighter from his coat pockets. He smoked, looking up the river to the north, and his eyes eventually drifted to the right, up to the sharp shapes of the Ducal castle high on the hills.
“Apologies, your Graces,” Pagette said around the stem of his pipe. “The money was just too good. And I, less so.”