The Dragon's Banker

by Scott Warren

  My lungs puffed from the effort of matching her gait. I’ve had occasion to read about the difficulty men face when achieving altitudes such as this, and to my knowledge none had ever scaled the King’s Sword. “Lady, this stone has been dead since before the founding of Borreos,” I said. The Jaws of the Mountain loomed ahead of me. A trick of distance had convinced me that twelve men could stand abreast at its entrance, but as we descended into the gully where that open maw waited, I could tell it would easily fit twice as many men. Six Hells, they could all be Queen’s knights astride destriers and not muss the feathered plumes on their helmets as they passed under a stone lip as red as any sunset.

  “This was long before your time,” said Lady Arkelai. She walked on a well-worn path that led down into the gullet of the ancient volcano. “Long before the Free Cities or Shaitaccea, before the dwarves were chased into their holes by the ice devils at the roof of the world. Before any of that, this mountain held living flame that flowed like water. Until it spat forth the hottest, brightest flame of them all. One so fierce and radiant that the land trembled and the seas boiled. And then, only then, did the mountain have nothing left to give.”

  The stench of sulfur, or brimstone, as Lady Arkelai called it, grew stronger as we made our way beneath the mountain. The temperature rose first to a comfortable level and then warmer. I doffed my jacket as we continued. My shoes—designed for cobbles, carpet, and clean floors—were woefully inadequate when it came to insulating my feet from the untamed ground, and each step either pinched or jabbed. But I held my tongue about the heat, the feet, and the breakneck pace my host set without apparent effort. This was well-trod ground for her, and as I examined the foot-worn stone beneath, I wondered just how many times she had made the trek. Despite her heavy jacket, stiff and flared at both shoulders and waist, she gave no indication that the rising heat bothered her. Not one bead of sweat formed on her face; not one red ringlet appeared to be damp.

  “You speak of faerie tales as if you were there to witness,” I said through heavy, rapid breaths. Arkelai said nothing, simply continued on her way. It was all I could do just to keep up with her. My mounting wind gave me little pressing need for further questions. I was unsure of how long the descent was, but I was certain the climb back up was going to be absolutely miserable. There was no shame in admitting when one’s profession lent no natural affectation toward athletic pursuits. Young men and women seemed to love competing in races, passing balls, and throwing spears while wearing as little clothing as possible, and I, in truth, never understood the appeal. If they had been passing parcels of gold and silver, it would have been a different story. But those parcels instead passed from hand to hand in the gaming houses, and mixing banking with gaming makes quick paupers of wealthy men.

  After what seemed like a full hour (but felt like half a day to my poor feet), the descent began to level out. It wasn’t until I glanced behind me that I realized there was no source of light left to illuminate the red-orange stone surrounding us in the cave. I knew less about spelunking than I did about most endeavors but did seem to recall that you only had what light you brought with you. We had brought none, but it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. A quick glance at Lady Arkelai left me dissuaded of any notion of asking about this phenomenon. If anything, it was the least surprising event of the past several hours and seemed hardly worth mentioning. Not when there were a thousand other details pressing about me like a blanket.

  Before we had gone another hundred paces, my hostess stopped with such abrupt finality that it was unclear how she did not topple over. But stop she did, and she gripped my shoulder to prevent my progressing past her and around the next bend.

  “I will give you three warnings,” said Arkelai, holding up the last three fingers on her right hand. The segmented armlet shone on her forearm beneath, and was it my imagination or had it always been in the form of a serpent?

  “Firstly, touch nothing. I know full well what you are and what your heart desires. But if avarice compels your hand, you will never leave this mountain.”

  Arkelai folded her pinky. “Second is this: speak to no one, save myself and my father. I cannot guarantee what you may hear or what others may do with carelessly wrought words,” she said. She did not wait for, nor seem to expect, a response. She expected obedience. “Last, there is nothing I can do to prepare you for what you witness here tonight. No beguilement or enchantment within my power to give can mask the sight of my father from you. It has broken better men.”

  A lesser man would have been offended at the implication that there were better men. But I kept such reservations unvoiced. In our brief interactions thus far, Lady Arkelai had ranged from amused to flippant to nonchalant. Offering these three pieces of advice was the first time she had seemed serious. Only a fool would have taken her words lightly, and I had perked up around the time she had mentioned the possibility that I might never leave the next chamber. I had not been spirited away in the dead of night to speak of faerie tales and hike mountaintops. I steeled myself and stepped around the bend.

  Lady Arkelai claimed the mountain’s fire had gone out, been forever quenched to shine no more. Yet before me lay a mound of sparkling fire rubies that blazed like summer. Behind them, sapphires, amethysts, emeralds, onyx, malachite, and other precious stones. Mountains of silver, wealth to beggar kings, were strewn across the cavern like carpet such that it clinked underfoot with each step. Statues of marble, bronze, and ivory lined the walls underneath tapestries of silk splendor worked with thread-of-gold. Most depicted scenes unfamiliar to me, and those with writing were scripted in a language I had never before seen in my life despite possessing fluency in four (and a working knowledge of two more besides). A lord’s long table was vacant but set with over a dozen golden dining sets and crystal goblets, and just as many solid teak chairs running with gold inlay and cushioned with rich purple velvet seats. At the head of the table, the chair was of iron and much larger than the others.

  My hands had begun to quest toward the nearest treasures before I was fully aware of myself again and before I recalled Lady Arkelai’s warning. I stilled my fingers, content instead to leer at the enormity of the wealth being squandered on, well, on a cave. A well-furnished cave to be sure, but at the end of the day it was a hole in the ground stuffed to the brim with more physical holdings than I had expected to ever see in a dozen lifetimes. And not a single ledger or account book was in sight.

  Recall, if you will, that I claimed the realest concept of wealth existed in the detailed notes and records of banking houses and trade contracts such as mine. Let it be known that before that moment I had never witnessed wealth in a form such as this. It is fair to say that my concept was… incomplete. Now, I watched as those riches seemed to slide past me. It was only when I attempted to stop and admire a cast golden chalice set with ivory and pearls that I noticed the firm grip of my hostess’s hand on the back of my collar ensuring I keep to a path of her design. Lady Arkelai would brook no detours or sightseeing.

  She guided me to the center of the wide chamber, wider even than the palace dictate, which could comfortably hold an audience of thousands. In the center rested a hollow depression. Though everything within the cave took on the red cinder hue of the stone, I immediately recognized the texture of the liquid within. It was gold. Molten gold. A very real lake of it. Depending on the depth, it could very well make a mockery of any king’s coffer on the continent. Or queen in our case. How could any economy in the world account for stray riches such as these? Where had it all come from? And how long had it been sequestered here?

  I was so enamored by the opulence of this marvel that I failed to notice a glow mounting in the depths of that pool. There on the shore, the two of us stood as a swell formed in the center of that golden pond and began to rise like a skyward comet with a glittering tail of shimmering metal droplets. But as the molten metal sluiced down, so too did my exuberance.

  The gold drained away from a
crown of bone-white horns, then slid further to reveal a reptilian snout as red as the stone and yellow eyes the size of cavalry shields. I was the focus of those black slit pupils as the creature’s stature continued to climb. Two clawed hands emerged, each large enough to crush flat a carriage. They reached to either side of me to push the bulk of this demon clear enough of the pool to stretch his wings like the sails of a fleet of ships. As he rose, so too did the molten gold recede. The unfurling wings dripped much of the gold across the room. The gold cooled as it fell until it crashed into piles of treasure like the hail from a summer storm. If two coins colliding in a tin cup was music to my ears, this was a symphony.

  Draconic jaws opened wide, twisting toward the roof of the cavern and expelling a gout of steam and a yawn so deep and long that it caused the stone to tremble. Several of the more precarious piles of offerings toppled over as they vibrated like sand on a drum. The whole affair reminded me of a jaguar waking from a nap, which I’d witnessed once at a client’s menagerie. This was no jungle cat though, and it felt more as though I was the one on display. After all, in coming here I had traveled further than the jaguar.

  At some point my legs had gone shaky and dropped out from under me, leaving me to sit on the shore and gawk up from my posterior. With my eyes watering from the sulfur fumes, I must have looked to an outsider to be striking a very undignified pose. It came to me that Arkelai had dropped to a knee near my left side, and she was no longer alone. More figures on the shore of the dragon’s lake shared her kneeling stance with their faces to the ground. Men, women, and even a child of what looked like twelve or thirteen summers. Each had a bevy of accoutrements that rivaled Lady Arkelai’s finery, and most shared her unusual stature. I’m not sure when they arrived, and I could not tell you how they departed later. I had more pressing concerns at that moment.

  The dragon shook his wings free of any remaining gold and refolded them, an act which stirred the sweltering air of the cave. Then he looked down at me and the figure of Lady Arkelai as she climbed back to her feet and met his gaze.

  “This is the one you’ve brought me?” he asked. His voice was the tremor before an eruption, the crash of vicious tectonics that could level kingdoms and sink empires into the sea. And it was… a perfect, unaccented rendition of the Trader’s Cant most commonly spoken in Borreos. Of everything, that stuck out to me the most. That voice made it real. And it made me spill the empty contents of my stomach over the red stone between my legs.

  “Yes, father.”

  Chapter 8 – Alkazarian

  “Well, he’s still conscious,” said the dragon, eyeing the mess dribbling from my mouth. “That’s a start. Very well, Arkelai. You may introduce me.”

  A hand on my collar pulled me to my feet, rather rougher a hand than Arkelai had shown me thus far. I endeavored to clean the spittle from my lips and ignore the taste of vomit, which mixed quite readily with the rotten-egg scent her father seemed to exude. I imagine this was not the most pleasant encounter for my hostess; of course, her situation did not compare to mine. I was seeing a dragon for the first time.

  “Of course,” said Arkelai, brandishing me as one would a prize pig. “I present to you Sailor Kelstern, Head of the Kelstern House of Merchant Banking in Borreos. Master Kelstern, this is my father, the Alkazarian.”

  “Alkazarian,” I stammered.

  The enormous eyes narrowed. “Eloquent, this one,” said the dragon. Then he chuckled. The beast actually chuckled at me. Of course, the chuckle caused a flare of black smoke to erupt from the two chimneys he had for nostrils, pushing me back a step and knocking loose my carefully arranged locks. Had I not been both stupefied and utterly gripped by the deepest terror, I might have been aghast at this colossal monstrosity’s outrageous manners.

  Perhaps it was because of the familiarity of the Trader’s Cant with which he addressed me, or perhaps due to the joke at my expense, but I returned to my wits enough to shut my gaping mouth and straighten my jacket. My heart still tried to beat its way out of my chest, and my stomach must have learned contortion from a passing circus act, but none of that was any excuse for incivility.

  “Lord Alkazarian,” I called up, pushing my hair back in place. “It is my very great honor to meet you. The legends do not do you justice.”

  “Oh?” asked Alkazarian. “I imagine not. How could they? Your kind has never before needed the words necessary to describe me.”

  As he spoke, he leaned to the side of his pool, fishing through the treasures there until he found what he was looking for. Which turned out to be a hollowed wooden log, lathed smooth and carved with intricate scrollwork. One end was connected to a coil of canvas that ran underneath what I had taken to be some sort of altar. When I realized its true purpose, it took some effort to stifle a chuckle of my own, one that might have ended poorly for me. I expected Alkazarian to breathe fire at the coals lining the basin of the device, but he simply glanced at them and they burst into red flame. Yes, a chuckle would have ended very poorly.

  With surprising dexterity for such massive hands, Alkazarian brought the log to his mouth and inhaled a deep draw through the coil, adding a hint of spice to the sulfur. Now I knew where Lady Arkelai had picked up the habit.

  “Now, Master Kelstern, I did not bring you here to fan the flame of my ego,” said Alkazarian. He swept the other claw over the contents of the cavern. “Tell me, what do you see here?”

  I answered honestly. “The richest room on the continent,” I said. And then hesitated.

  “Go on,” said Lady Arkelai. I jumped at her voice; I had almost forgotten that she was standing beside me. “This is why you are here.”

  “Yes, go on,” said Alkazarian. “Explain to me why the greatest hoard of treasure ever amassed is made worthless by scraps of paper passed between the grubby fingers of overgrown dwarves.”

  The colloquial atmosphere vanished in an instant. Alkazarian’s anger shook the mountain, and I wondered if there would not be another eruption after all.

  “Tell me, Master Kelstern. Tell me how, by your measure, nothing in this entire mountain has value. How your kind will leave silver and gold behind, and how I will no longer be the wealthiest being in the world because the wealthiest in your world no longer care for gold and silver.”

  My mouth became dry, and it had little to do with the heat of the cave. Worse, Lord Alkazarian’s speech did not seem to be rhetorical; he expected an answer. From me.

  “Well,” I began. Not the best start, all things considered. How best to proceed in such a way that would not make a snack of me? “The term ‘value’ is somewhat fluid. Malleable even. Like gold. Gold’s value is derived from three factors…”

  I cast about my person but found nothing to aid my demonstration. I turned to Lady Arkelai. “Is there perhaps a slate and some chalk here?”

  Alkazarian’s daughter stared at me, eyes half-lidded with that look of an adult who has had the misfortune of spending too long in the company of a profoundly stupid child.

  “Never mind.” I returned to my analogy. “Gold has value for several reasons. The first is rarity. There is a finite amount of gold in Borreos. Most of it is stamped into coinage managed by the Royal Mint. More is hard to come by. The second reason is that it represents a promise of liquidity. One man can give gold to buy a horse, and the man who sold the horse can then use that gold to buy several colts. That man in turn can—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Alkazarian. “I am familiar with the human novelty of buying and selling. But what of those who are wealthy without any gold?”

  “Well, it’s true that many banks and businesses hold a very limited supply of hard currency. Their wealth is stored in enterprise: in their ability to make money by lending money. Or by producing goods or services. If an artificer knows how much clockwork his workshop produces and how much it can sell for, then he can barter against that production.”

  Alkazarian gave me a perplexed look. I continued.

  “Consequently, a man w
ho owns a dozen artificers has the wealth of those dozen workshops. A man such as that can make deals that move his money from one hand to the next without ever needing to touch it. His trade partners see the workshops, see what they produce, and will make deals based on the promise of that production instead of buying with gold on hand. The bank notes are evidence that people no longer require the strict guarantee of gold to anchor those promises.”

  The hollow log crashed to the ground as Alcazarian spread his claws and wings as wide as the cave allowed. “Can I not buy whatever I wish with what you see before you?” he asked.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “And no. The volume here, well it would throw off the value of goods across an entire region. The very fact that you’ve accumulated so much and gathered it all in one place actually reduces your purchasing power. And once the bank notes go into full circulation? The greatest wealth will be in recorded ledgers, not stacks of gold. As it stands, I—”

  There was a light touch on my shoulder. Lady Arkelai wore an expression of warning, and I looked at the ground beneath Alkazarian’s claws. The stone started to sizzle and brighten in his grip. When I looked up, his eyes were upon me with some intensity, and I remembered the coals in the brazier that had ignited under his regard. It might have been my imagination, but my jacket seemed to be growing even hotter on my shoulders.

  One should never tell a dragon that he is becoming… well, not poor but at least less obscenely rich than he was before. I am by no means an expert on dragon lore, but in the legendary poem, Alkazarian was the richest of all dragons. And men in my line of work know better than most that those who consider themselves rich will jealously guard that perception, often at the cost of their actual wealth. Even though I was likely the only man on the continent even aware of Alkazarian’s existence, he needed to know that his wealth would not be going away. He needed assurance that bank notes were not going to undermine his hoard. More importantly, he needed to know how they were not going to.