The Dragon's Banker

by Scott Warren

  A roar filled the cavern, as loud and ferocious as the eruptions that had formed Bastayne with flows of molten rock. I clapped my hands over my ears, and several piles of gold and silver toppled over. Lady Arkelai was forced back a step and shot me a look somewhere between apology and anger as Alkazarian began to shout.

  “You dare suggest my second eldest child defies me? You think me incapable of managing my brood as your forebears failed to manage theirs?”

  That unearthly roar shook the mountain again, and with it the impressive heat in Alkazarian’s chamber began to swell. Several fires burst to life, including one a few handspans from my feet that stunk of sulfur. I jumped, and Arkelai grabbed me by the collar of my night tunic.

  “Go!” she yelled. I could not hear her over the rising fury of the dragon, but it was not a particularly difficult exclamation to read from her lips. I needed little further encouragement. The walls and floor had begun to shake, and clips of stone began to rain down from the red cinder ceiling.

  I ran.

  I ran until I emerged once more under the night sky. Only then did I pause to catch my wind. The ground rumbled twice beneath my feet, and I resolved never to mention Jazalkorin to Alkazarian again.

  I heaved, breath after breath, hands resting on my bare knees until I could stand straight once more. Worry crossed me that I might be sick again from terror, but it passed with nothing more than a few dry heaves and a dribble of spittle. I’d avoided death by fleeing Alkazarian’s rage, but had I not labored to improve my fitness, the escape might have done the job for him. My bedslippers were ruined, and I had fresh blisters on my feet.

  There I waited, eyes on the lightening eastern horizon. Twice more the mountain rumbled, far beneath the boulder upon which I rested. Without my notebooks and something to scrawl with, I passed the time by arranging loose pebbles into aesthetically pleasing patterns of ascending value. The sun had climbed a third of the way to its zenith before Arkelai finally emerged, a full head taller than I had ever seen her. Her heavy coat was covered in scorch marks, and the tips of her fiery curls were singed. Smudges of ash marred one cheek, and the gold earings on that side had softened and sagged. A few of the platinum discs on her necklace were missing.

  I smelled smoke as she drifted over and sat beside me. Not her typical aroma of spice, but a harsh odor of cinder smoke as you might get from a blacksmith’s forge. She sat there a time, towering over me even now as she looked out to the east and then down at my curious little pebble arrangements. As she did, I noticed for the first time the tiny white-gold tips of horns poking out through her swept-back hair.

  “I managed to calm him down, but that was a very foolish thing you did, Sailor,” said Arkelai.

  “I gathered as much,” I said, looking for a way to change the subject. “If Jazalkorin is the second eldest, are you the eldest?”

  “No,” said Arkelai, smiling. “My eldest brother does not see things the way my father does. He is loyal but has no interest in avarice. Jazalkorin resents him and tries to be more like our father. I’m the third in his lineage still living. There were two twins as well. But they died in the fall of what you call the Age of Wonder. Along with my mother. She was among the last of your Progenitors.”

  My chest tightened. It was generally accepted that the Age of Wonder had existed at some point and that somehow humanity had survived its fall to rise from the ashes. I had always been skeptical. The only real proof of the Progenitors’ existence at all were scattered records and great ruins of their time that living men could not enter. To have Arkelai confirm it so casually, and with such authority, was akin to meeting the Twin Mothers or the Eldur Knight face to face.

  “Thank you,” I said. Arkelai turned down to me, and I could see more cracks in her veneer: an impression of tiny scales at the soft creases in the corners of her eyes and pupils, which had stretched to resemble those of a snake. Her black, polished nails had lengthened too and were beginning to resemble the claws of the jungle eagles found in the eastern borders of Borreos.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For keeping him from killing me. And for trusting me.”

  Arkelai said nothing for a time, only sat in distracted contemplation. As time passed, those hints of her true lineage began to abate, and even her stature shortened. Eventually, she stood, drawing a small velvet bag from her jacket pocket.

  “You’re going to need this,” she said.

  I took the bag and felt the hard bar within. “Is this…?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “The one you lost. You didn’t think Alkazarian would let brigands keep his platinum, did you? Or that you would have walked out of that cavern if they had?”

  “What happened to them?”

  Arkelai looked away. “If I bring you to the Jaws of the Mountain a third time, you will not leave. Do not give me a reason to bring you a third time, Sailor. My father’s patience is shortened. He won’t wait two years any longer. Alkazarian must be established in Borreos by next summer.”

  I coughed. “Next summer? We’ve barely had a full season to establish our growth plan! Trying to shorten it by half is inviting disaster. What if it can’t be done?”

  The familiar spicy smoke began to drift about us, and Arkelai did not answer me before I lost my wits. She did not need to, as I could hear Alkazarian’s warning from our first encounter as clear as the day he’d said it.

  “You would not like the alternative.”

  I managed to cough out a single word before the fog took me.

  “Spardeep.”

  Chapter 24 – Cooked Books

  With our timeframe shortened by half, I could not afford the luxury of dalliance. An eight-day trip from Borreos to Spardeep to speak with my partner Bendric was untenable.

  Arkelai must have deciphered my slurred request because I woke on the outskirts of the mining town, still in my smallclothes and under the shade of a juniper tree. A scorpion watched me from a nearby slab of sandstone where it sunned, and I gave it a wide berth as I climbed to my feet and made my way downhill to Spardeep.

  Miners and laborers alike treated me just as I had the scorpion, regarding me at a distance lest they catch whatever madness drove me to wander the foothills of the Redfangs in a night-tunic and tattered bedslippers. For my part, it was convenient. None tried to bar my way as I navigated to the operations building and spied a familiar face at the head of a train of wagons.

  “Kuvtka!” I called, raising my hand in greeting.

  The solid caravan master raised his head at my shout and understandably reached for his cudgel. I’ll admit I must have looked a state to be questioned, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit hurt. He had good eyes or else recognized something in my gait that betrayed me since his daughter wasn’t around to do it for him. Times past, I would have been terribly embarrassed to be seen in my smallclothes, but having twice survived an encounter with a dragon seemed to have inured me to such trivial concerns.

  “Master… Kelstern?” Kuvtka asked. He looked to the left and right, as though making sure his company men could see me as well. “How did you get here afore us?”

  There was no acceptable answer to that question that I could offer. Dahli, Kuvtka, and I had spoken on the eve of his departure. That I should somehow have passed him on the road in nothing but my slippers was all but impossible, so rather than offer a feeble excuse, I waved the question off entirely.

  “That’s of little importance,” I said. I noticed that most of his men were idle, which seemed to me a great waste of wages. “I need to speak with Bendric. Are you loaded up already?”

  Kuvtka scowled under the wide brim of his hat. “May as well be, there’s not enough to fill the train.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean there’s not enough?”

  Kuvtka shrugged and spat on the ground beside him. “Just as I said. We’re waiting for one more haul of ore up the Number-Two shaft. Then we’re moving out. Be lucky to scrape even on this run, Master Kelstern. Yo
u told me there’d be cargo what for the new caravans.”

  “And there will,” I persisted. I held up a finger as I backed up toward the operation office. “I must speak with Bendric.”

  Two of Kuvtka’s men whispered a brief exchange and laughed. I felt my back stiffen as they did so, and I turned it toward them lest they see my expression. Perhaps I was not as immune to embarrassment as previously claimed.

  Inside the shade of the operations office, I spotted Bendric almost immediately, hunched over the desk where Countess Tilia had reclined on my previous visit. Stacks of ledgers flanked my junior partner, and his dark hair was matted with sweat that splayed it across his pale forehead. His quill scrawled a path across his vellum, and I noticed several crumpled sheets of rougher parchment littering the planks on the floor. He was so engrossed in his penmanship that he failed to notice my arrival until I dragged a chair across the floor and sat in front of his desk.

  He looked up from his blotter, his cross expression fading fast as he recognized me.

  “Sailor!” he said before looking down at the forest of discarded missives. “I was just writing you. What are you doing here?”

  “Lady Arkelai has impressed upon me a sense of haste,” I said, leaning back against the chair. “What is it you were writing me about?”

  Bendric looked from his quill to the stack of ledgers beside him. “I think we need to trim some of the fat from this operation,” he said.

  I glanced at the mess of crumpled papers beneath my chair. “All this for that? It’s moot, anyway. I came here to tell you that we need to look at scaling this operation up, not down. It won’t be long before the next wagon train is here for a load of ore.”

  “Sailor,” Bendric said, his tone somber. “Lady Tilia wasn’t up-front about Spardeep’s profit margins. There’s a lot of creative accounting here, and I spent the last week untangling it. Best guess is she’s been running this mine at a loss for nigh on six years.”

  Hairs began to rise on the back of my neck. “How is that possible? This is the second-highest producing mine in the Redfangs.”

  Bendric shook his head and pulled over one of the leather-bound tomes, scattering a half-dozen loose sheets of notes to the floor as he did. “It was the second-highest producing mine in the Redfangs. Then one of the primary seams ran out. To keep up with output, the iron had to be pulled from deeper and deeper underground. The overhead on this operation is staggering. The mine produces a lot of ore, but fire setting requires fuel and water, two things in short supply.”

  I thought back to our earlier visit. The countess had taken us into the mine for a demonstration. We’d watched rock in the iron seam be heated with fire and then dashed with water to fracture the stone enough to break into manageable chunks. All that water and fuel had to be hauled in, and the ore had to be hauled back out and transported north. I quickly ran some figures in my head and then realized that was probably what Bendric had spent the last few weeks doing.

  “How bad is it? What kind of loss are we running?” I asked.

  Bendric checked one of his notes before answering. It was an exercise in procrastination as he and I both knew that the exact value was at the forefront of his mind. “Six thousand silver marks,” he admitted.

  “Six thousand a year?” I asked.

  “Six thousand a month.”

  I brushed my locks back with a dusty hand. We’d acquired the mine for half the expected price, and it seemed this was the real reason for Tilia’s eagerness to part with the thing. If she even knew at all. The prior foreman had made a hasty departure upon the sale of Spardeep. Perhaps he was saving her the worst of the gory details out of fondness. At this rate, the favorable purchase would reverse in another six or seven months, and then Spardeep would begin to drain the Dragon’s Daughter.

  Bendric rubbed his eyes. “Scaling back isn’t an option, is it?” he asked.

  “Nor is selling,” I said. “Turning around the property for a quick profit is legal, if a bit underhanded. But I could not, in good conscience, hoist an unprofitable mine on another as it was put upon us.”

  Bendric barked a laugh. “You and your conscience. We’d be ten times richer without it.”

  The door opened, and I was surprised to see a familiar face. Cas stood at the threshold with tea and a fresh change of clothes, which he offered to me. Word of my arrival must have reached whatever part of the mine he’d been in and included my clothing situation. I dressed as he began to sweep up the stray scraps. It’s amazing how even simple work clothes can make one feel like themselves again.

  “What are you doing here, Cas?” I asked, lacing the heavy boots.

  “He’s been here a week almost,” said Bendric. “Tilia took her secretary, so Cas has been doing a lot of the daily chores. Truth told, he’s been a great help to me. So, we can’t sell and we can’t scale down. How do we proceed?”

  I considered. Six thousand silver marks a month was a terrible deficit to run. We had to turn it around. “How do they mine in Kaharas?” I asked.

  “They don’t,” said Bendric. “Kaharas imports iron and steel. Quarries are more common. Stone is softened and cut by dwarven runeshapers using excavation runes. And the human-run operations in the North have easy access to timber and waterpower.”

  I sighed. “If only we could get a few of those dwarven runeshapers down here to soften the seams, it would eliminate the need for fuel and water for fire setting.”

  “Yes, but you’d never get them in this heat, even if you paid them in ice water and ran them a bath of the stuff every evening. Dwarves aren’t made for it. They’re cold-weather creatures,” said Bendric.

  He was right. The few I had met in my travels wore the lightest of robes, out of modesty if not comfort, even when the temperature began to warrant a fur-lined cloak. We would never get their kind to cross the Wastes to streamline our mine.

  “Is there another way to soften stone? Perhaps an alchemical—”

  My thoughts were interrupted by Cas. In the course of his sweeping, he caught the edge of the clay teakettle with his broom, and it fell to the floor and exploded, soaking the floorboards with tea.

  “Pardon, Master Kelstern,” he said, beginning to sweep away the fragments of the clay pot. But as I looked at that tea kettle and replayed its destruction in my mind, I also remembered the fires bursting to life in Alkazarian’s lair. I remembered too that thick smell of sulfur in his presence, like spent musket cartridges. Perhaps what we needed wasn’t softer stone, but stone that burst apart like a dropped teakettle.

  “What about black powder?” I asked.

  Bendric quirked an eye at me. “You want to hire a company of grenndraki mercenaries to shoot the iron out of the walls?”

  I waved him off. “No. But think about it. Could black powder not have the same effect as an excavation rune? I have heard tell of their long guns misfiring with such violence that it twists the very metal of their muskets. We could fracture it and gather up the ore.”

  “You’re talking about detonating charges in a confined space.”

  “Would it not do the same for stone?”

  “It might,” Bendric admitted, “if you can get some here. Grenndrakes don’t part with the stuff easily.”

  “Grenndrakes do not share dwarves’ aversion to warm climates. We don’t need to buy black powder. We need a specialist,” I concluded.

  By now, Bendric was nodding along. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  “In the meantime, keep up the operation here. I’ll return to Borreos,” I said. Eight days’ absence was going to be keenly felt, but there was no helping it. I stood and turned, with every intention of thanking Cas for the clothes and the tea, but the drifter had vanished. In less dramatic terms, he had made a stealthy exit through the front door while I was lost in the throes of epiphany.

  Chapter 25 – A Fish out of Water

  My return trip was much as I’d hoped the last would be. That is to say, completely uneventful. I left half the
platinum bar with Bendric to settle debts, wages, and Spardeep’s other deficits until we could make the mine profitable. We had converted the entire mine’s payroll to the new Borrean bank notes, and Bendric would have no issue getting a loan against the value of that bar to keep the miners paid. The rest I brought with me. This time, I was able to secure a comfortable journey, though I made much of it on foot or on top of the simple carriage. I seemed to have lost much of my taste for staying inside them over long periods.

  As I returned to my banking house, instead of the deluge of admonishing beratements I’d expected from Dahli Fost, I received a request.

  “Sailor, before you say anything, hear him out.”

  I looked at my secretary, the freckles at the sides of her mouth pulled tight as she pursed her lips. Behind her, I could see a figure examining the slate opposite me, which held the new prices for goods in and out of Kaharas. Even from behind, I recognized the broad shoulders and rotund figure of Marlin Fost. Anger seized my chest, and I pushed past Dahli.

  “I thought I made it clear on your last visit,” I said, “that I never wanted to see you here again.”

  Marlin turned and held up his hands. “Sailor, wait! I came to say you were right.”

  I stopped in my tracks. Marlin took it as an invitation to continue, and the words began to gush out as if he feared I would staunch the flow should he stutter.

  “I did some digging after we spoke, and I think you were right. Fost and Lavender were working in bad faith, and Destain was paid to make sure you went missing so your loans would default. There’s no hard evidence, of course. When you showed up again and it was Destain that vanished, they buried the whole thing pretty quick. Needless to say, I’ve parted ways with the bank.”

  “Completely?”

  “And totally. Sailor, I can’t begin to apologize, but I can at least try to start making things right.” Marlin handed me a leather folio, and I took it and unwound the thong binding.

  “What’s this?” I asked.