Chapter 11 - Rickshaw's Travelling Market

Lillia opened her eyes to colour.
Not the muted flickering orange of torchlight, or the sickly blue of dungeon runes. Colour. Proper, overwhelming colour. Bright banners of luscious fabrics hung from the rafters of a tall wooden room. A glowing rainbow of lanterns dangled from tangled ropes strung between banisters and trunk-like support beams that stretched from floor to ceiling. The myriad pools of light they cast swayed back and forth across a thick-planked wooden floor that looked like it had been swept and mopped recently. Recently! Lillia had been worried she’d forget what it felt like to stand on something that had been cleaned on purpose.
The air smelled like spice and wood-smoke and something sweet that Lillia couldn’t place. Her eyes watered.
“Welcome, your highness,” Rickshaw said from Lillia’s left. He’d changed, or something about him had. The tattered cloak had been replaced with a swirling, colourful set of robes that hung loose and elegant over his bones. The golden light in his eye sockets swayed with the lanterns, following their same soft rhythm. “To my traveling market.”
Rickshaw waved an arm. A circular thoroughfare wound through a dozen stalls, each filled with strange, bright objects Lillia’s eyes couldn’t quite focus on. Beyond the lanterns, beautiful cool light glowed up in the… sky?
No. Not the sky. Lillia had to squint to see past the lanterns, but up above the rafters burned a massive, humming white flame. She knew a dawn crystal when she saw one. She had just never seen one that large. It made the one in the ballroom look quaint.
“Where are we?” Lillia asked.
“The travelling market.”
“But where is…this?” Lillia turned around and wobbled as the floor moved under her. It felt like she was onboard a ship, but if they were, the ocean under their feet was gentler than any she’d seen.
“Wherever you need it to be,” Rickshaw said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the best one I have, darling.” Rickshaw pushed past Lillia and swept into one gap between stalls. His boots clicked against the wood. It was a warm, familiar sound, the sound of a home as opposed to a dungeon floor.
The skeleton disappeared for a moment, appearing behind the counter of a nearby staff. He leaned over to Lillia, resting his elbow on the plush roll of fabric covering the wooden counter. The pattern on it was beautiful.
“The market,” he continued, “isn’t a place. It’s between the floors. Between the rooms. It’s the moment a dungeon isn’t watching.”
“What?”
“Think of it as a pause. A breather.” Rickshaw bent down below the counter. Lillia heard clinking. “The dungeons don’t follow the same rules as your castle.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” he popped back up with a polished wooden tray. It was empty, but that allowed Lillia to see the ancient crest burned into it. “My point is, things don’t need to be somewhere. Things are where they are.”
“And this is…” Lillia looked over her shoulder to the other empty stalls then stepped toward the room’s centre. Her heels sounded different on the wood here. Almost musical. As she walked, the chitin dress caught the lantern light and threw iridescent patterns across the nearest stall, which was draped in fabrics she didn’t recognize.
“This is where we are. As much as anywhere else.”
“Quick learner, darling.” Rickshaw was back beside her. There was a plump and glistening exotic fruit in the tray.
Lillia eyed it, but didn’t reach. This was a market after all. “Is it safe here?” she asked.
“As safe as anywhere in the dungeon, which is to say…” Rickshaw tilted his skull in a way that was almost a shrug. “Safer than where you just were.”
The skeleton held the tray closer to Lillia, but not close enough for it to be considered an offer.
Hunger had retreated during the struggles of the past floors, but it didn’t like being teased. Lillia snapped her attention to the stall opposite the one Rickshaw had gone into. As she approached, the shelves and items took shape. They were fabrics. Bolts of cloth in colours that Lillia hadn’t seen since the castle. Deep blues. Forest greens. A red that reminded her of the curtains in her mother’s chambers. Her breath caught for a moment, but she pushed past and reached out to run her gloved fingers along a length of pale gold silk.
[Everweave Silk - Requires Level 8 - Defensive Material]
Lillia’s hand wanted to linger. Level 8. She pulled away.
“Don’t think too much about the numbers,” Rickshaw said. He’d manifested behind the counter, his bony hand resting on the same silk. “Most of this will be here when you come back. We keep good stock here.”
“How? From where?”
Rickshaw let go of the fabric. “You ask a lot of questions that scholars have given up on. Hope you don’t lose that, darling.”
The skeleton put the tray with the fruit in front of her again. A salesman. “People trade for things in dungeons. Some things I have. Some things people gave me. It works.”
Lillia looked around the room again. Even the stall Rickshaw had been behind earlier was slightly blurred and beyond the reach of her eyes. She knew what was there, but she couldn’t force it to return.
“Now, princess. How about we get to why you’re here.” Rickshaw slid the fruit across to Lillia, almost off the counter. That was an offer.
Lillia still hesitated.
“That one’s a hello. Guest rights.”
Lillia snatched the fruit faster than she knew she could and much faster than she should have. Years of being told to eat slowly grabbed her wrists and stopped her from shoving it right into her mouth. Hunger wanted to devour. She had to settle for eating.
Rickshaw watched intently. Lillia closed her eyes with the first bite. The fruit was sour, stringy and strange on her tongue. Thick juices stuck to her teeth as she pulled away from the small bite she’d allowed herself. She had to run her tongue over her teeth several times to clean them off.
Back home she would have asked for something different. At the moment she wanted a second bite more than anything. Lillia abstained. Years of practice.
“I don’t have any money on me.”
“Money?” Rickshaw scoffed at the word.
Lillia’s stomach dropped. She raised the fruit to her mouth to cover the heat rising in her cheeks.
“Do you want me to give this away?” he asked. “Money is useless in the dungeons. Nobody comes to the market looking for money.”
The lantern-light danced off the dress as Lillia stared at Rickshaw. One of them changed from red to blue. The glint in Rickshaw’s eye socket darted to note the change.
He sighed. “I don’t deal in coin. Okay? Coin is a luxury for surface dwellers who don’t know any better. It’s for people who don’t need solutions right now, darling.”
Lillia’s lessons covering the workings of the kingdom’s gold had always posited that money was the solution.
“Money can buy anything. We just skip right to anything.”
“Anything,” Lillia repeated. She took another bite. It was as strange as the last had been, but in a different, sweeter way. Unsettling.
“Materials,” Rickshaw said. “Things you find in some rooms. Monster drops. If the dungeon has given it to you, I’ll take a look.”
“Oh. I have some…” Before she could reach into her dress to check, Rickshaw disappeared behind the second counter. In the quiet of his absence, Lillia smelled something cooking on a fire across the room. The half-finished fruit was suddenly less enticing with that option in the background.
A moment later Rickshaw popped back up with a second tray in hand, which he exchanged with the box he’d used for the fruit. The new tray was blank, dusty.
“Hand on there, please,” Rickshaw said.
Lillia complied with her left. Some of the fruit juice was on her right, and that felt rude to smear on the counter. As soon as her fingers touched the wood, something flared under her nails. It was bright. Warm. Smoke followed, but nothing hurt.
After a second of watching the light dance across the tray, Lillia recognized the burned symbol of House Ashvalin. The flaming rose. A thorny crest.
“Thank you, darling.” Rickshaw took the newly burned tray back to his side of the counter, creasing the soft purple tablecloth. “And inventory?”
Lillia thought about it, and the text appeared.
[Inventory]
[Key Item - Note of Sir Nobody]
[Empty Bottle x 1]
[Ruined Gown of House Ashvalin x 1]
[Rusty Knife x 1]
[Ruined Royal Slippers x 1]
[Scroll - ??? x 1]
[Burnmite Cloth x 2]
[Spellmite Cap - Burning x 2]
Rickshaw looked down at the tray. There was a small version of the inventory text above the crest her fingertips left behind. His jaw clicked as he processed the list. “That’s…”
“Bad?”
“Well, mostly.” The light in his eye socket had cooled from shining gold to an off-white yellow. “Quite the killing spree.”
“Pardon?”
“You went to town. Didn’t you?”
“They tried to kill me first.”
“I get that, just think I might have underestimated you,” Rickshaw said. He blinked, “How many spellmites did you hunt?”
“Three.”
“Right, you have three caps, but how many did you—”
“I killed three. I have three hats.”
“I see three caps listed but—”
“They were all wearing hats. Why wouldn’t I—”
This time Rickshaw cut Lillia off by snapping his fingers. The sound resounded through the market, amplified by a magic that lingered in the air and rested on Lillia’s ears as it faded.
“You don’t know how drops work. Do you?”
“I kill things and they drop stuff.”
Rickshaw nodded. “But not everything drops everything every time,” he said. “You said you only killed three spellmites?”
Lillia echoed Rickshaw’s nod.
“If you hadn’t told me that, I would have guessed twenty.”
“Why?”
“Caps are hard to get, darling. And people like them. Good starter equipment for wizards.”
“That’s good,” Lillia chimed in.
“It’s good product. Moves fast. Won’t linger too long. Hm.”
Lillia reached into her dress and pulled out one of the burning caps. The red was certainly softer on the eyes than the bright yellow she was wearing. “So, you want this?”
“I’d be willing to trade for that. Yes,” Rickshaw reached for the hat. Lillia pulled it out of reach.
“How much?”
“Since when does a princess haggle?”
“Is this what haggling is?”
“It’s close enough.”
“Tell me what I can get for the hat,” Lillia said.
Rickshaw looked around him in the stall he’d taken over for a moment. The skeleton murmured to himself. After digging in the shelving behind him, he spoke up. “Back in just a moment.”
One moment he was there. The next he was gone.
Lillia leaned over the counter and saw the floor behind it. The skeleton was nowhere to be found, so she took the chance scarf down the mysterious fruit.
Each bite was sweeter than the last. It quickly teetered past sugar and into saccharine. If she hadn’t been worried about where her next meal was coming from, she probably would have thrown it away. There was a lesson in there somewhere for royalty; she just didn’t know it.
Rickshaw returned as Lillia was trying to find something to wipe off her hand. A pair of spectacles balanced on the bridge of his nasal cavity, where a nose would have been.
Lillia didn’t comment. It felt rude.
“Darling. If you wouldn’t mind…” Rickshaw was staring down at his box. Lillia couldn’t see anything within, but the movement of his glint gave away that he was reading. “What class are you? I am trying to find something fair to offer for the caps.”
“Princess.”
“No. No. What class?”
“Princess.”
“That’s what you are, and trust me, as a skeleton merchant, I understand the importance of owning your identity. What class have you taken?”
“My class is princess.”
Rickshaw stopped reading and sighed. The glasses fell further down a nose that wasn’t there so he could look over them. “Once again, I am assuming you just don’t understand and figuring out that you’re right. I’m usually much less appreciative of getting corrected.” He leaned down to the countertop and rested on his elbow, tapping his chin with satisfying clicks. “So, then what do you need?”
“Tiaras, crowns…” Lillia started the list the interface had given her for hats.
“Unsurprisingly,” Rickshaw said as he pushed himself up off the counter. “Fresh out of both of those.”
“Other formalwear, I assume.”
“You assume?”
Lillia just shrugged. Her right hand was still sticky; it was becoming distracting.
“You should know that, just bring up the class menu and check.”
Rickshaw turned away, checking something on the shelf. The princess just kept staring at him. The skeleton slowed. Stopped. “You don’t know what that means. Do you?”
“I understand the concept; I don’t know how,” Lillia corrected.
“Why the hell are you in a dungeon?”
“Thrown and locked in by my aunt and—”
“That’s enough backstory. Thank you,” Rickshaw said as he held up a hand to silence her. “Not going to remember it, darling. I hear a different sob story every afternoon.” After continuing his search for a moment, Rickshaw finally put his hands on his hips. “I can do dresses. Well, she can do dresses.”
“Who?”
“My wife, she’s not here right now though. This is my travelling market, not hers, but she might have left something for me…”
Rickshaw was gone again. Lillia heard him digging in another stall.
Had he said wife? He was married? Was she a skeleton? Was it rude to ask if she was a skeleton? If she wasn’t a skeleton, were they both alive when they got together, or did she marry a skeleton?
Lillia bottled away a dozen questions for another time as she rounded the market. The market’s centre was a massive wooden beam, like a ship’s mast but twice as thick. Many of the lanterns and banners were lashed to it, connected with hooks screwed tight into the wood.
Had it been a stone column, Lillia would have run her hand along it, but she wasn’t interested in splinters.
The princess discovered Rickshaw behind the back stall. It was dustier than the rest. The room was circular, but this was clearly the corner nobody bothered to clean.
“So I can’t do a dress,” Rickshaw said as she approached. “Not for the spellmite stuff. Turns out Honeybee ignored the lower tax bracket when she left the women’s section here.”
Honeybee? Was that a nickname? Who would call a skeleton Honeybee? More questions. The bottle was getting full.
“You didn’t need to come all the way over,” Rickshaw said. “I would have brought the stuff over, but—Yeah it’s not much.”
“For the caps? I thought you said they were rare.”
“They’re rare and popular to get from spellmites, but those are spellmites. They’re…” He turned to Lillia and saw something desperate on her face she shouldn’t have allowed through.
“Good job killing them, darling, that really must have been a challenge.”
Lillia had been around court enough to know insincerity from a league away. She had also been there long enough to ignore it as long as if benefited her. “So I can’t buy anything.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t buy anything,” Rickshaw said. “Just the caps alone can’t get you much. I can swing more for you if you’re willing to throw in the dress.”
Lillia covered her chest.
“The other one, darling, the one you brought here. It’s worth…something.”
“Something?” Lillia asked. “The royal tailor fashioned it out of eastern weave!”
“And that quality means it could be enchanted someday, but it’s not right now,” Rickshaw turned from his spot behind the dusty counter to look back at Lillia. “High fashion is like the money stuff I talked about before. It’s a surface privilege. I can’t sell something that isn’t gonna help someone in the here and now.”
Lillia’s shoulders sagged. She reached into the neck of her current dress and pulled her ruined gown out of it. Laying it out on the table in front of the skeleton.
The gown had been through the wringer. Bug guts were stuck between the layers. Boning on the left side cracked and bent in the wrong direction. Long black streaks stained the pale pink where Lillia had dragged the fabric along the stone.
Broken threads. Scrunched seams. Torn fabric.
Rickshaw reached out for the dress. Lillia snapped her hand out first and held onto it. The skeleton met her gaze.
She let go first.
She loved that dress. It had been one of her favourites to wear around the castle. The colour reminded her of her…
“Take it,” Lillia said. “I think I need the help.”
Rickshaw pulled the dress behind the counter. Lillia handed over the two spellmite caps she wasn’t wearing.
The skeleton gave Lillia the moment. When he resumed speaking, it was quieter than before. “Darling. Do you know what you want, or do you want a suggestion?”
Lillia sniffed. Her voice cracked as she spoke. “Suggestion, please.”
“Potions dear. You look like you’ve been through it.” Rickshaw waved his hand over the box—when had it gotten there—and four thin glass bottles appeared within. They all contained a thick red sludge. “Those will keep you standing.”
“Anything else?”
“Well. I have a dress, but it’s more than you’ve got and it’s above your level either way.” Rickshaw moved to show it off, but then clearly thought better of it. “I’d suggest a weapon, but even without the equip bonuses, I can’t sell you anything that will hit harder than Vianaffir there for what you’ve got.”
“But I’m not allowed to equip it.”
“Even unequipped, a sword is a very sharp stick,” Rickshaw said. “And that, darling. Is a rare stick.”
Lillia sniffed again and then turned to politely wipe her nose without Rickshaw watching.
“So, just potions?”
Rickshaw shrugged. “Either that or I can swap one of them out for soap. Keep the armor clean and stave off the ruined sta—”
“Soap.”
“But—”
“Soap,” Lillia repeated.
“All right. All right.” Rickshaw took a potion away, vanishing it into his palm, and a bar of lavender-coloured soap appeared in its place. “Use it on the armor during a rest for upkeep. It won’t run out for a long time if you use it like that. Try to stay on top of cleaning so…” Rickshaw cocked his head. “Feel like I don’t have to lecture you on that part.”
Lillia ignored the potions and locked on the soap. Was that herbal? Would she smell like something other than the dungeon? Was there honey? Was the honey from Honeybee?
Was that last question weird?
“I’ll take that as transaction complete, darling. Those will be in your inventory. The exit is over there. Take a rest before you head back.”
Lillia pulled her attention away from the soap. “Rest? I just slept a little while ago.”
“I—” Rickshaw took a deep, impossible breath. “Just go over to the fountain behind the door, darling. You’ve got this. I have other clients.”
“Thank you.”
“Just business,” Rickshaw said. “Remind me next time. You have some credit left for the dress you gave me.”
The skeleton vanished. The lanterns went out. The creaking of old wood on the sea took over.
Lillia checked over her shoulder and then all around. She was alone. The stalls were empty. The colour was muted. She picked up the soap and headed to the door.
[Exit and Rest? Resting in this location will progress the Dungeon by [1] Day]