Stump filled Morgish in on his plan as they settled at a table and waited for Jin to cook their meal.
Two steaming bowls of spicecap stew found their way to them by the end of it. Steam curled under their nostrils, and after a word of thanks to Reema they ladled generous portions into their mouths.
"So?" said Stump, tongue doused in scalding broth. "What do you think?"
The dwarf had offered little more than contemplative grunts and careful nods while he listened, and Stump was eager to hear what he had to say.
"Yhhwndnww?" said Morgish.
"Sorry?"
He swallowed. "Ye sure ye wanna do this?"
Stump paused at the uncertainty in the dwarf's tone. "You don't think it'll work," he observed.
Morgish had already spooned another beet into his mouth. He started to speak, but only garbled vowels tumbled out. He tried again, gave up, and shrugged. He gestured vaguely.
"I don't know what that means," said Stump.
When Morgish was done chewing, he was somehow out of breath. "It's not that it can't work, but why're ye goin about it like that?”
"People have to know about the Nobodies, like you said. I thought bringing them to the inn would be the best way."
"Aye, that it is. But yer talkin' about riskin' more'n ye should for some attention for yer comp'ny."
Stump tore off a piece of their fungal loaf and sponged it in the stew. "It's not just for my company. It's for the inn, too," he said. "For Reema and Jin. It used to be busy when her father was around, wasn't it?"
"Before me time."
"Must be hard losing a father who liked you."
"I s'ppose."
"My father didn't like me. Did yours?"
Morgish fished a carrot from his meal and snapped it like a finger in his jaws. "Y'ask a lot o' questions," he grumbled.
Stump's ears fell. "Sorry, I thought that's what friends did."
"Fr—" Morgish choked on his vegetable. He looked about in a mild panic, eyes wide and cheeks red, and snatched Stump's water from across the table. With a swig and a few thumps of his fist against his chest, he managed to suck in air.
"Friends…?" he wheezed, as if that configuration of letters had never left his tongue before.
Stump watched the struggle with concern. "We are, aren't we?"
The dwarf was hunched over, savouring every inhale. "Don't know. Never had many o' those."
Stump brightened, and his ears flicked up so fast the momentum nearly threw him off the chair. "Me neither!" he said. "I suppose that means we have plenty to talk about. I've never been friends with a tall man before."
"Tall man? I'm a dwarf, case ye hadn't noticed."
"You're taller than me."
Morgish considered that with a scrunched brow. "Hm," he said.
After composing himself and resuming his meal, the dwarf seemed to sit with a straighter back and wider shoulders, and through his tangled beard Stump caught the ghost of a smile.
"You never told me your name was Morgish, by the way," Stump said with an apologetic dip of the ears.
Broth ringed the dwarf's lips. "Saw me in yer book did ye?"
"I did. I'm sorry for calling you the wrong name." Stump was thankful Morgish wasn't a goblin, for if he was, Stump would have endured a beating for the insult.
"Wrong name?"
"I've been calling you Morg, but your name was Morgish all along."
Morgish paused mid-chew. His eyebrows met over his nose. "They're both my name. Morg's just quicker, s'all. Ye gobby's are a strange kind to be tripped by somethin' so simple, ye know that?"
Stump shrank a little in his seat. Quicker? he thought, perplexed. Names held meaning. Power. Warnames especially. Chopping it off to get to the end faster was as bizarre as abandoning a sentence halfway through, or filing the point off a blade. He shivered at the thought of the punishment he would receive if he ever dared to call his tribesman "This-Spear-Is".
It was another quirk of the tall men he would have to get used to.
"So I should rethink my plan?" Stump said after a while, re-igniting their original topic. He was sure it made sense, but Morg's doubts hinted at a storied career of watching schemes gone awry.
The dwarf hemmed amidst a spoonful of stew. He wisely waited until swallowing before he spoke again. "I s'ppose I'd be interested… if we plan it well, 'n we agree to some percent o' the final sales."
"Deal." Stump beamed and offered his hand over the table. Hot steam licked his elbow.
Morg looked at it flatly. "We haven't even laid out the details, yet."If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Stump withdrew his hand. "Oh. Right."
The dwarf tore off a small piece of sporebread and held it by his boot. There was a patter, and then the food floated from his grasp and vanished in small, staggered bites. He scratched Bubbles' barely visible fur.
Stump kept his distance, and his nails at the ready.
"We're goin' to the tank, then?" said Morg, after the creature bounded off.
"I can't," Stump whispered. He hesitated at the swirling of Reema’s magical warmth behind him, then stole a glance over his shoulder, and only continued when she vanished into the kitchen. "They saw me there. Could we lure him somewhere else, do you think?"
Morg cocked an eyebrow. "Don't know if ye met Dagg, but he's not much for friendly gatherings outside the inn. Not many inns to gather at 'round that part o' Grimsgate, now that I'm thinkin' on it.”
"Most of them are closing down because of him."
"Aye. He's outcompetin' and buyin' up the properties when they're cheap as dirt, what I hear."
Stump mulled the idea as he swished broth around his cheeks. "Maybe that's how we get him to meet us?" he ventured.
"Aye… could be a way," said Morg, pensive. He dabbed a cloth to his stew-speckled beard. "So. Goin' to rob Dagg, are we?"
"No. We're going to rob the Midnight Ocelots."
"Ye say that like it's better."
 

 
They left early the next morning and made their way through hilly streets slick with receding fog, and found the inn down a forgotten alley of an unremarkable road spun off the great Crooked Cranny.
It stood like a broken thumb, shouldering its leaning neighbour. The door was a piece of driftwood slotted into the threshold in the hopes it might fill the same purpose. The roof's many holes made islands of shingles, the walls sagged, its colours stained by time, and its foundations crumbled to the slow digestion of lichen and mushrooms. Even the lamplight flaring within did so dimly, as if the building itself could no longer spare the effort.
Stump appraised the tired structure with lowered ears. It reminded him of the Knight Inn, though much further in disrepair. He thought of Reema and Jin, who were kind to him, and couldn't suppress a desire to step inside and meet the stranger whose dreams might be dissolving around them.
After he said nothing for a while, Morg cleared his throat. "Well?"
Stump had forgotten the dwarf was there. "You sure it's an inn?" he said.
"Aye."
"What's it's name?"
A splintered stake was the only thing that remained of a signpost, and a newer plank above the doorway had browned with rot.
Morg hummed in thought. "Dusty… somethin'. All's I know is they've got books inside."
Goblin ears stood to attention. "Books?"
"Aye. Does that mean it'll do?"
A shutter squealed back and forth with the wind, like a wrinkled hand inviting them over.
"It'll do."
Morg picked up the door and set it down again once they were inside.
A sphere of ruddy light threw deep shadows between books lining the walls and in the decay gnawing the floors and ceiling. But it wasn't mycolight.
A gasp escaped Stump and Morg at nearly the same time.
The lumen glowed dim in its glass jar on the hardwood bar top, beneath a burly green-skinned fellow with a tome cracked open in front of their face.
They lowered it to reveal the yellow eyes and bottom tusks of an orc.
"Oh! Bright Queen's rot!" she cried, dropping the book and knocking back her seat. She kept her eyes on the two of them as she frantically searched the wall behind her until her fingers found the hilt of a sword displayed above the bar. She swung it and herself into a battle pose, and took the sheath with her.
"Damned thing!" she said.
Stump and Morg exchanged a glance as the orc rattled the sheath, then held it between her legs in an attempt to yank the weapon free.
"I don't have anything to give! I've no glimmer! Just books! Not even good books! It's mostly smut! Well, some of it isn't half bad. What do you want?"
"Is that how ye greet all yer customers?" drawled Morg.
She returned a skeptical frown, scabbard wedged between her boot and the countertop. "Customers?"
He gandered at the dark interior. "We are in Dusty… what's it…?"
"Dusty Taps. You're here to buy something?" she said uncertainly.
Stump ventured a step. A plank wet with rot squelched under his foot. "Actually, we're here to help, if we can," he said, and then couldn't help but add, with sparkling eyes, "You're a Lumenurgist?"
She took her foot off the sword and relaxed her shoulders. "Pa!"
There was a stir through a moth chewed curtain behind the bar. Moments later a much older orc with a hunch and a cane hobbled through, stopped, and peered in Stump's direction. He made a slight wave of the hand and the lumen fizzled through the glass and buzzed around his shoulders.
His foggy white eyes could see nothing, Stump realized, but like the books of the inn they were heavy with the promise of wisdom.
"Boragu, please set Bonesapper on its hooks," he said. "It is bad manners."
She obeyed with a scowl.
The old orc shuffled to a chair and lowered himself into it without the aid of vision or cane, and indicated two stools opposite. Like a trained bird the lumen fluttered with him, and all the shadows moved and settled again in their hollow nooks.
Stump took a seat.
Morg hesitated, then grumbled his way over. "What kind o' name's Dusty Taps?" he said. "Not really sellin' yer brews with that one."
The old man offered a single, pained chuckle. "My interests lie not so much in words but in stories. Though Bonesapper has been my quill for much of my life, the inn has replaced it some time ago." His voice was kind, grandfatherly, but with an undercurrent of the sadness that comes with hindsight.
"I keep it on display as a reminder of that old chapter," he went on. "My daughter thinks she should have it, to train with, but what are possessions if not the pages of our own books?" He reached his hand across the table, but the gesture was different from the clasp Stump had learned in Penny Square. The orc's palm was open, facing up. "I am Borag, once of the Rimewood clan. Now I am Borag of Dusty Taps, proud father of Boragu."
Morg regarded the gesture with a heavy brow. "Morgish," he said. "Once o' don't-matter-where, now o' here 'n there."
Stump placed his hand in the orc's palm. "I am Stump, once of the Stone-Dweller tribe, now I am Stump of the Nobodies. Proud… uh, I don’t have any children.”
Borag raised his bushy eyebrows. "A mercenary?" he said. His fingers curled gently around Stump's, and a warmth passed between orc to goblin on a deep arcane hum.
Stump received it with closed eyes, and recognized the magic that hung beneath the roof of the Knight Inn. Even in the withered hollowness of Dusty Taps that same power now swirled, surging around and through him like an anti-bloodlust, calming his soul, mending his pain, and letting him know that everything was going to be alright. When he opened his eyes again, Borag's white pupils twinkled like moonlight off a still pond.
"You here on behalf of the Ocelots?" said Boragu, from the bar. "To put us under your heel?"
Morg bristled. "We're tryna help ye from that fate, as it happens."
"She means no insult by the question. We're wary of visitors because they are so rare these days," said Borag, in a pacifying tone. "First it was Swiller's Will, then Backalley Brewhouse, and just last month it was the Draughty Flagon that closed its doors to Daggan's corruption. But you knew all that, which is why you're here."
Stump leaned forward, his voice low despite the lack of anyone who might overhear. "I was there, at the tank. I overheard Daggan talking to the Midnight Ocelots. I don't have proof, really, but I found one of their badges."
"Proof would do nothing." Boragu's voice was biting. "Everyone around here already knows what they're up to, but no one can do anything about it. Neither can you."
"Instead o' tryin' to rip the scabbard off that sword ye might do well to sheathe yerself," said Morg.
Before the dwarf's anger could carry him away, Stump went on. "I don't think I can stop them. My company is just me. But I think I can help you. I want to try, at least."
The old orc studied Stump for a long time, but through what senses was unclear. Finally, he allowed a wrinkled smile. "Boragu, would you kindly pull our guests a pint of Amber? It seems we have much to discuss."