Downtown Druid (Book 2 Complete) - Ch 55: That's not what your mother told me
Dantes stepped out of the Vixen and took a deep breath, savoring the slight taste of salt in the air and the morning breeze whistling through the alleyways. He hadn’t felt a breeze in a long time, it wasn’t something you realized you’d missed until you felt it again. He pulled up the hood on the graverobbed tunic, to both hide his face and keep his ears warm, and began walking toward Needle Street.
The first thing he wanted was a new jacket, he felt naked without one, and handicapped without the many hidden pockets he was used to. The long sleeved tunic and simple trousers he’d bought weren’t enough to keep him from feeling exposed. He wasn’t even able to properly hide his dagger, and had to wear it on his hip. Not that that was uncommon, but he’d always preferred a unseen blade to a seen one.
He began walking, but when he made it a few alleys down, he felt Jacopo squirm, and leap from his pocket.
Jacopo shook himself and fixed his whiskers. “That pocket is not as comfortable as the ones I’m used to, and there are no holes to look out of.”
“I’m on the way to buy a new jacket now, if you can stick it out. You can always just look through my eyes.”
Jacopo shook his head. “No, I need to see the city for myself. Taste the air, feel the warmth of the sun, eat the morsels lining the streets.”
Dantes nodded. “Alright, be careful. There are cats up here, and other predators you may not be used to. If you get lost, the map I have in my head shouldn’t be far off.”
“I will not get lost. I will stay in touch.”
With that, Dantes watched him scurry away, his furry brown form sliding into a crack in a wall, and disappearing. Dantes couldn’t blame him, he could feel the excitement radiating from Jacopo as he moved. Dantes began moving in the opposite direction. There were a few tailors he’d known in midtown, as well as smiths, and working mages who could help him out with what he needed, but he didn’t want to risk showing his face there until he had more information. News traveled faster there than anywhere else in Rendhold, and while he could trust Vera, he knew the rumor mill in midtown would start turning if any of his other acquaintances saw him.
He started by moving through main streets, but as they filled with other people going about their mornings, he could feel his heart speed up, and his eyes beginning to dart too and fro. Eventually he moved to take alleys, and he slowly calmed down. He was no longer used to streets filled with so many people. The busiest day in the Undermarket was nothing compared to the average Rendhold Street on which thousands could walk every day. Once he’d regained his composure, he forced himself back onto the main streets, taking small cuts through the alleys when he felt he needed to. He’d keep doing it until the discomfort didn’t exist for him anymore or shrank into something that could be ignored.
He passed through one more alley on the way to the tip of Needle Street, and as he passed a man, some kind of mutt like him, stepped out from behind a pile of trash and lifted a sharp kitchen knife toward him.
“Your money or your life,” said the man. His pupils were heavily dilated and his breathing rapid. He was high.
“O-okay. No problem,” said Dantes, shaking as he reached for his coin purse. He held out his hand, holding it, but dropped it just before the mugger could grab it. “Sorry!”
The mugger grunted, and bent over to grab the coin purse from the ground.
Dantes took that opportunity to drive his boot into the man’s face, throwing him backward into the same trash he’d stepped out from behind. He picked his coin purse back up, and kicked the knife, which the man had dropped, across the alley.
He smiled widely. “This is almost as good a welcome as I got from Vera.” He muttered to himself. He bent down to go through the man’s pockets. He put up some slight resistance, but Dantes simply struck him a few more times, and he gave up. Once he was done he found a few copper rings with cheap stones, a handful of copper, and a single silver.
“This is actually a pretty solid haul for muggings. You probably should’ve taken it to your dealer sooner, could’ve gotten a hit or two off of half this. ” He tucked the coins and rings into his pockets and purse. “For the record, you’d have better luck toward the middle of the Needle. Down on this end you’re more likely to run into a rougher class of people.”
The man groaned in response.
“One more thing.” Dante drove his foot into the man’s ribs one last time, and the man was winded and struggling to breathe on top of everything else.
Dantes whistled lightly pausing only to say a quick prayer to the god of Thieves, “Full pockets, quick wits, quicker blades, and the Lord’s luck.”
He walked out of the alley, sending a message to nearby rats and roaches that a hurt man with some exposed flesh was ripe for them to take a few nibbles from. Then he started walking up Needle street.
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The street was busy, but Dantes fought down his discomfort as he began walking down it, catching snippets of conversations as he moved.
“-giant tree-”
“Two hundred prisoners escaped!”
“-guard managed to keep all the prisoners locked down.”
“-ope Benny got out. That girl lied to get him thrown down there.”
“-need to pay guard for some extra walk bys.”
It seemed that news of what had happened was starting to spread. Though he could tell a lot of it wasn’t accurate. The guard was probably trying to keep things tamped down as much as possible, but with his method of escape it was probably a hard thing to keep a lid on.
At the thinnest point of the Needle were the resellers, and small time tailors who didn’t finish their apprenticeships or were more self taught. They were more able to patch a pair of pants than to mend them, but their price point was low enough that those without family to rely on had a place to go. Their shops were either unlabeled or had crudely written signs simply saying, ‘Tailor’, or ‘Tayler’ or in one unfortunate case ‘Taylwhore’, though seeing what the elderly seamstress sitting in front of the store was wearing, that may have been on purpose. Dantes ignored all of those on the low end, only really looking once he reached the center of the Needle, where it began widening. It was at that point that he saw a smaller shop, squeezed so tightly between two other buildings that the sign could barely fit the words, “Tailor & Reseller” in a straight line.
Dantes walked inside, the door creaking as he did so. The building was longer than it was wide by a large margin, and its narrowness was further emphasized by clothes hung along the both walls all the way down to the other end of the shop, where a bored looking young man with spectacles sat reading. Dantes ran his fingers along the clothes as he moved. He didn’t exactly have access to nice fabrics in the Pit, and the touch of fine cotton, wool, and even silk was worth savoring. He made note of a few pieces as he walked, until he reached the desk.
The book the man was reading was, ‘The Dragon’s Heat,’ and featured a lurid picture of an underdressed woman in the clutches of red talons etched on the front. Despite the obviousness of the book’s content, the young man was holding it up in front of his face without even a hint of shame, clearly engrossed in every word.
Dantes lightly knocked on the desk to get his attention.
He sighed and put the book down, looking Dantes up and down. “Huh. You’re almost perfectly average sized.”
“That’s not what your mother told me.”
“What?”
“Nothing, just wondering if you have any long coats, medium weight, lots of pockets, easy to alter, dark color.”
The young man blinked a few times, clearly readjusting to reality after spending so much time engrossed in his book. Dantes had seen the look many times before when walking through Collared territory.
“Hmm, there’s a few pieces that may work.” The man stood and began walking down the long line of clothes, checking an item here and there, and pulling a few pieces before returning to the desk at the far end and laying them out. Once he had them all down, he put his head back into his book.
Dantes looked at the coats. They were high quality, more so than he’d expect at this part of the Needle. “How did you get all this inventory?” he asked, curious.
The man didn’t look up from his book. “I buy unfinished and unpaid for pieces from the tailors at the wide end at a large discount, and finish them before upselling them.”
Dantes looked back at the coats. He was no tailor, but he knew a bit about sewing and mending. Vera and his mother had taught him when all of his trousers started to get holes at the knees, and when he’d started stealing and they taught him knowing how to sew extra pockets would be helpful. He couldn’t tell that any of the coats were finished by different tailors. The stitching all matched perfectly from what he could see. Dantes wondered what a tailor as talented as the young man was doing as a reseller, but considering how happy he’d looked flipping through his book, perhaps he had other priorities.
Dantes went through the coats. There was a dark blue one, but he found the material too stiff to move comfortably in. He found a black one, but the sleeves were oddly short, which made them useless for him considering how he liked to hide his knives. He sorted through a few more before coming upon one in green. It was so dark that it was almost black, and the material was firm, but easy to move in, and on the inside it already had a half dozen pockets of various sizes sewn into it. He slipped it on and found it to be a near perfect fit.
“How much for this one?” He asked.
The man peeked from over the top of his book. “Ah, the old noble gardener’s coat. That one’s been here for a long while. Hmmm, let’s say… one gold, three silver.”
Dantes smiled, that was robbery even for a coat like that. “How about one gold and I put these other coats back for you?”
The man looked at the coats, then Dantes, then his book. “Fine, one gold it is.”
Dantes pulled a single gold coin from his pockets and slid it over to him.
“It may have been cheaper without the comment about my mother,” said the young man, not looking up from his book as he slid the gold coin back across the table.
Dantes smiled. “Fair enough.” He turned around and started to put the coats back, slipping a few shirts and a pair of pants into the folds of his new coat as he did so. The young man never even looked up from his book as he did so. By the time Dantes had walked out, he’d gotten more than his golds worth. He could’ve simply stolen the coat as well, but had decided against it. A robbery in broad daylight was too risky, but some petty shoplifting? That was an easy risk to take.
Dantes walked out, and rearranged his stolen goods in his makeshift pack in an alley before making his way further up the Needle to an old shortcut he remembered to the docks. He made his way down, still in a good mood, when he saw a woman at the far end of the street. She was tall, and lean, with long dark hair up in what he guessed was a fashionable style. She was wearing a dark red dress with black accents, and even at the distance he was from her he could see the twinkle of expensive jewelry on her neck and ears. She was Mutt like him, with a mix of just about everything you could think of, but she seemed to get only the best features from each bloodline that was mixed in. The fairness of elves, thick lustrous hair of a dwarf, and the lean muscle of an orc. In spite of that, she could still easily pass for human. It had been five years, and she was certainly dressing differently than she had back before he’d been tossed in the Underprison, but he’d recognize Mercedes anywhere.
