Chapter 10 - Skeletal Showdown

Lillia pulled herself up the last step to the third floor of her first, and hopefully final, challenge. It was likely to be one of many, but it was too early in Lillia’s whole ‘dungeon torture’ process to be negative about the future floors. If she didn’t know what came next, she could still hope it would be easier than this.
This chamber was at least different. While the first two had similar runes and identical altars, this room was small and plain. Flickering torches replaced the soft blue light, each in inlaid sconces and staggered every several feet. Near the room’s centre, black tile gave way to haphazard planks and then a solid wood floor that looked like it had never been polished.
In the middle, instead of an altar, a skeleton in ragged robes slumped over an old wooden chair, the kind people found in the corner of an inn that didn’t match any table. The skeleton’s neck looked like it had snapped over the chair’s back. If someone had placed it there, they hadn’t cared about the end result.
If Lillia had known skeletons needed muscles and ligaments to hold together, its assembly would have been a red flag, but she understood neither of those things.
Lillia understood this much: upon her first cautious step into the room, the skeleton twitched. The princess drew Vianaffir, and torchlight ran along the sharp edge of the blade as she held it at the ready.
The chitin battle gown made it impossible for Lillia to sneak up on anything; she’d learned that several time.
If she couldn’t be stealthy, she could at least do it at speed. Lillia tightened her grip on the sword and held it out to her side as she got low, ready to break into a run.
One deep breath. Lillia was getting used to that process. Almost as if she allowed herself the one moment to become someone other than herself. It didn’t help; she still felt wrong holding a sword and scared between each swing, but like pulling back her foot to change her sword stance, it felt like something she should do.
With the reminder in her head, Lillia pulled her right foot backward. She knew it was pointless. She was about to run.
It didn’t really make her feel better either.
Lillia broke into a sprint. The weight of the sword pulled her to the right as she ran, but she heaved her weight to keep her on her target. The skeleton shifted as she approached.
Ten steps away, the skeleton snapped its head up.
Five steps away, Lillia started her swing.
Three steps away, the skeleton’s jaw dropped.
One step away, Lillia’s sword clashed with the wood of the chair, catching in the splinters. The force of the jam threw Lillia off balance. The chair slid along with the swing and then tipped over. The princess, the skeleton, and the sword crashed down to the ground, tumbling over each other across the wooden floor.
Lillia skidded to a stop, staring up at the ceiling with wood splinters in her hair and her hat askew.
“Ow.”
She reached for Vianaffir, and closed her hand around—
Around a femur.
Lillia screeched and kicked, throwing the femur away. It landed on the other side of the wood with a dull thud.
Something scraped along the wooden floor behind her. Before Lillia could wheel around, a voice cut in, nasally and whining.
“Oh, come on! Who the hell doesn’t say hello these days?”
Lillia craned her neck backward and blew strands of hair that had escaped her hat off her nose. There was a skull behind her. It had narrowed its eyes at her. That wasn’t how skulls worked. Was it?
“Yeah! You. Hey you! What the hell?” the skull asked.
Lillia blinked, then sighed. Sure. Whatever. The knight’s bones had been unsettling enough, and now they were talking. Skeletons might as well speak. Not like she was short on new horrors.
Wait. Did that mean Sir Nobody had been giving her the silent treatment? Could he have explained everything to her?
“Girl,” the skull said.
“Your Majesty.”
“You a queen?”
“Princess.”
“Your Highness,” the skull corrected. “If you’re saying you’re a princess, that would be the title.”
Lillia returned to staring at the ceiling. If she didn’t scare at the skull, she could pretend it was an annoying man instead of bones.
“The kingdom is led by a steward. I am the heir apparent and—”
“Princess. I don’t need your life story,” the skull said. “I need to know why the hell you tackled me.”
“You’re a moving skeleton?” Lillia suggested.
The skull sputtered—a sound that should have been impossible without lips—then scoffed. “Just a moving skeleton? That’s rich.”
Lillia started peeling herself off the floor. Each time was a little slower than the last, and she’d smacked her knees on too many tiles today to move faster than a snail’s pace.
“Are you something else?”
“Am I something else?” the skull asked. It seemed oddly confused by the question, considering that was exactly what it was. “Lady, I’m…”
Lillia stood up mid-sentence and faced the skeleton. It wasn’t the first time she’d rendered someone speechless with her looks. She just wished it was for a better reason and that the speaker was better to look.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“This whole place happened to me!” Lillia said. “This place is a nightmare! Do you know what those spellmite things are? They’re mean!”
“They’re beginner—”
“They laughed at me the whole time! And there was this gross bug and…” Lillia caught her breath as she sped up. The words tumbled out too fast for her to keep up with, and she broke down into a cough.
“And now I’m talking to a skeleton.”
“Not just a skeleton.” She skull hopped forward. Lillia flinched, but stopped herself short of jumping. “You know anything about bones?”
Lillia nodded.
“Know what order they go in?”
“What?”
“You did this,” the skull said. As he spoke, the femur Lillia had thrown rattled against the floor. “Least you can do is help me reassemble.”
“Oh.”
“So, do you know anything about bones?”
“I think—”
“You’ve said enough,” he sighed. “I’ll take care of it. Last thing I need is a tibia in the wrong place. Again.”
The bones scattered by Lillia’s ‘attack’ began to tremble and then shimmy along the ground toward the skull. Lillia stepped out of the way of an… oddly shaped bone after it tapped against her shoe twice.
“Everyone’s got a skeleton inside them,” the skull muttered as the pieces assembled into a pile. ““Does that get us any respect? No. All it gets us is wrapped in gross fluids. Then they look at us like we got two heads when we ask them to help us find a wrist bone…”
Lillia wasn’t fully listening, but she crossed her arms at the implication that she was filled with gross fluids. She’d encountered too many of those in the past days, but had heroically managed to keep them on the outside.
By the time the skull, who had rudely neglected to introduce himself or ask Lillia’s name, had finished assembling the top half of his body, Lillia had grabbed the chair and Vianaffir and sat down to wait for the skull to finish his work. The chair was shockingly uncomfortable, even when Lillia sat cross-legged in it, as she hadn’t been allowed to in court. Multiple parts of the chair’s back jutted into Lillia’s spine at strange angles no matter how she sat.
The skull—now half a skeleton—walked across the floor on its arms, hobbling over to some of the larger leg bones to push them together.
Lillia nudged one of the bones over to try and be helpful once she understood the assignment.
Was she supposed to do that? Wasn’t Lillia supposed to fight the things on each floor of the challenge? Havoc had been able to talk, and she’d gotten him to work with her. The spellmites couldn’t be convinced, but…they only laughed. Laughing was like talking. Wasn’t it? Maybe it was even better. Lillia knew noblemen who could talk forever but never laugh; none of them impressed her.
Now that the skull had arms, it was pulling pieces onto itself instead of letting them shimmy together. It was faster, though still more deliberate than quick.
He spoke up as he snapped his pelvis in place. “So. Why’d you do that?”
“What?”
“You ran in here with a sword and tried to hit me.” He stopped assembling himself to gesture with both hands. “Which, also. You missed.”
“Am I not supposed to fight you?” Lillia asked. She looked around as she asked. There were no stairs in the room. Even if she had ignored the skeleton, there was nowhere else for her to go.
“What? Why would you fight me?”
“I’ve had to fight everything else in the challenge.”
“Lady. Princess. Your Highness,” the skeleton went over all the options as her pulled himself across the floor and grabbed his cloak. “But why me?”
Lillia ran her tongue along her teeth and looked away from the skull She opened her mouth to speak several times before finally committing to one of them. “Well you’re—”
“A skeleton?”
“In the room,” Lillia properly finished. Once she’d processed the interjection she shrugged. “But also that.”
“Yeah well, ain’t anyone teach you manners in that fancy castle of yours?”
The skeleton finally had both legs. He righted himself on jittery jumbling legs before wrapping the cloak back over his shoulders. As the cloak fell, it covered more than it should have, extending and draping impossible shadow over any gaps in the fabric.
A golden glint hovered in the centre of the skull’s left socket now that he was complete.
“None of the manners involve skeletons,” Lillia pointed out.
The skeleton walked over to Lillia and loomed over her. Even without the heels she would have been taller than him while standing. “What about the rich?”
“The rich?” Lillia asked.
“Gold. Silver. All of it.” The skeleton’s eye sockets narrowed.
“…I don’t believe there is a good answer to that question based on the…look you’re giving me.”
The skeleton continued to glare for several breaths, but its brow softened after that until it started to match Lillia’s expression of genuine confusion. “You’re not an adventurer. Are you?”
“What?” Lillia asked. “I’m wearing all this stupid stuff. I have a sword. I’m gross! What makes you say I’m not one?”
The skeleton pulled back from Lillia, no longer looming over her so much as addressing her.“Well for one. You don’t seem to know who I am.”
Lillia shook her head.
“Rickshaw.” The skeleton offered a hand from its cloak to shake Lillia’s but she didn’t take it. “Merchant.”
“Your name is Rickshaw?” Lillia half-asked before remembering her manners, despite the location. “Princess Lillia Ashvalin.”
She shook his hand. It was shockingly warm.
“Pleasure, Lillia.” Rickshaw pulled his hand back into his cloak. “First time in a dungeon?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, have no fear, young lady. That’s what I am here for.”
Lillia shot up. “To get me out?”
“Well… no. Not that. I am here for all your economic needs.” Rickshaw took two steps back from Lillia. He was wearing boots despite clearly never having put any on. “But you should be glad you ran into me. Tell me what you need and I can find it.”
“A way out?”
“Materially, darling.”
“A bath.”
“Objects, darling.”
“A…A key to the door out.”
Rickshaw sighed. “Anything you need as a turn of phrase, my darling.” As Lillia’s shoulders slumped, he continued. “But don’t get too down. That was my fault. I started too broad and you lacked the needed context to…” Rickshaw snapped their fingers a couple of times, doubly impressive without skin. “To wrangle the possibilities I’d laid out before you.”
Lillia stared at the floor. For a brief second, discussing escape had sparked an ember of hope deep in her stomach. That had been a mistake. At least it had been snuffed quickly.
The princess looked up as Rickshaw laid a bony hand on her shoulder, guiding her back down into the chair. He crouched to match.
“I’ll keep a long story short to avoid any confusion,” he began. “I am a merchant who deals in the goods of the dungeon. I am here. I am on your side. I want you to succeed. However that might be. Okay?”
“Can you help me fight?” Lillia asked.
“I am here to help you succeed economically.”
“So, no?”
“No. But I will always be happy to talk about it whenever you find me.”
Lillia sighed. Rickshaw crouched even lower to stay in her drooping vision. Eventually he pushed up the brim of her cap to stay in view.
“Lillia. You’re a princess. I haven’t had the pleasure, but I have met noblewomen, and all the ones I’ve met have gotten cheered up by a little shopping.
The princess met his gaze and carefully tucked the strands of hair that had escaped their hat-prison back within their cage. The skeleton with the weird name was right. She had set her sights too high, but retail was the only kind of therapy she knew.
Not that she had any gold, but name and title were worth more than riches.
“Yeah. Okay.”
Rickshaw snapped back up. “Great choice, my darling. You are going to love this!”
The text appeared in front of Rickshaw even as Lillia tried to look past it. Behind the white text, the skeleton’s single golden eye shone brighter.
[You’re being invited to Rickshaw’s Traveling Market: Accept?]
Lillia closed her eyes. Anywhere but here sounded good.