“Do you want us to help you pick up the stuff you need?” I asked.
Valthorpe’s simian head pulled back a little in surprise.
“Help? Oh. No.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Uh, thank you for the offer, but I’ve got a few errands to run. Very boring. Anyway, I won’t be needing any muscle before I pick up Bessie from the stables.”
I blinked. When Valthorpe had said the name of their pack animal, his mouth had moved for at least four syllables, but I’d heard “Bessie,” like this was some badly dubbed kung fu movie.
But neither Warcry or Valthorpe seemed to notice anything weird about it. It was just another reminder that this universe wasn’t my home, like how none of the scripts were in English, but I could read them.
Valthorpe headed off into the city to get his errands done.
After a little wandering around, Warcry and I found the outdoor market in a big open plaza bustling with shoppers. Instead of stalls or tables, sellers sat on colorful tarps crammed between a crisscrossing grid of those shallow canals. We picked up a tent apiece, the canvas and wood kind you saw on old Civil War shows, then started looking for enough food to feed both of us for a couple weeks. There was plenty of fresh stuff—meat, fish, vegetables, fruits—but a bagful of raw fish was probably the last thing you wanted to pack around in this brutal heat.
Death cultivator should have kept Sheigo’s casket ring, Hungry Ghost said. Food does not spoil in such Spirit apparatuses.
Instead of answering, I reinforced Jealous as the Grave. I hadn’t kept the dead cultivator’s storage ring because I’d wanted to give something nice to Kest. Besides, with scavenging and building stuff, she got way more use out of the ring than I would have.
It would’ve been really useful just then, though. It even negated the weight of whatever you put in it.
“What do you think the odds of finding an incredibly rare ancient storage apparatus are?” I asked Warcry as I squinted across the market.
He snorted, then realized I wasn’t one hundred percent kidding.
“Here? In this backwater? D’ya think the artifact team would have a pack mewler if storage rings and the like were easy to come by?”
“That’s a good point.”
The glint of metal caught my eye at the edge of one of the canals. A potbellied kid with six arms was selling jewelry on a sun-faded square of tarp.
“Couldn’t hurt to check, though,” I said, heading over.
Warcry let out an exasperated sigh and followed me.
The potbellied kid grinned at us like a third grader playing hooky. “Whatcha need, big-timers?”
Most of his stock was tarnished, dented, and scratched, and some had dried blood in the etchings. Maybe the kid was a scavenger like Kest used to be, or maybe he was a little more active in getting his hands on the jewelry. Either way, he was the only one in the market with the shiny stuff.
“Got anything for storing gear?” I asked, shrugging the tent bag higher on my shoulder. My Ki-sight wasn’t picking up any Spirit apparatuses in his collection, but I figured it would be best to ask anyway, in case he kept the good stuff out of reach of shoplifters.
The kid crossed his lowest pair of arms and used the top set to pick out a silver ring with a reel the size of my thumbnail on top.
“I got script ribbon carrier.” To demonstrate, he pinched a sliver of paper from the reel and pulled it out a few inches. “This script makes you stronger, faster, with double Spirit—”
“Knock it off, you little scag, we can read,” Warcry growled. “It’s a roll of bath scripts, grav, look at the characters.”
Just like with the titles of the jade books I’d read, when I looked closer at the thin strip of paper, the kanji-like script resolved into words my brain understood. It said For a Fresh and Fantastic All-Over Clean! the words repeated in tear-away sections.
The kid chuckled. “Yeah, but you can refill it with whatever script you like, big-time.”
“How does it work?” I asked.
“Rip it and stick it, trigger it with a bit of Spirit,” Warcry said. “Cleans whatever it’s stuck to.”
That sounded useful, especially since the only clothes I had kept getting drenched in blood, and the only ones I’d seen on sale here were brightly colored dresses and scarves.
“How many scripts are in there?” I asked the kid.
“Twenty to fifty.” He shrugged, stuffing the paper back in. “I never rolled it all the way out to count.”
“So about five or ten, then,” Warcry sneered.
The kid opened his top two pairs of hands. “How do I know if I never rolled it out?”
“How much do you want for it?” I asked.
“Two hundred and eighty credits.” The kid said it like Kest had when she gave Biggerstaff her list of demands for signing with the Eight-Legged Dragons, like he didn’t expect me to say yes, but wanted to start off with an outrageous number and work down to something reasonable from there.
Warcry scoffed at him and stalked off to inspect the herbs on the next tarp.
“I’ll give you fifty,” I said, figuring no matter what the ring was really worth that would be a lowball after his first price. “Seems pretty good for not even knowing how many scripts are inside.”
“But it could contain as many as fifty,” the kid said.
“Yeah, but I only saw three.”
Grinning, the kid reeled out a forearm’s length of paper ribbon. “There’s at least six. See?”
I didn’t know what one script was worth on this planet, so I guessed based on what feral loot went for on Van Diemann.
“I’ll give you ten for each script I can see,” I said. “Sixty total.”
His grin got wider as
