by Scott Warren
“A list of accomplishments and merits. I think you’ll find I’m more than qualified.”
I looked up from his documents, incredulous when I realized the implication. “You want to work for Kelstern Merchant Banking?”
Marlin Fost shrugged. “Well, I’m recently unemployed. I have to keep up my figure somehow,” he said, hefting his considerable stomach. “I don’t know exactly everything you’re doing with Dragon’s Daughter Trading, but I know I want to help you do it. Twins know you need it.”
Marlin Fost had been looking at a path straight to the top of one of the biggest banks in Borreos. Another ten years and he’d have been a full partner with a vested stake in the bank. That he gave it all up for an attempt to make things right with me said more than any apology ever could. He didn’t even have to join my bank. Marlin was wealthy enough to retire completely and live off his earnings. And he was right; I did need his help. Especially with the disaster at Spardeep and our timeline getting cut in half. Marlin brought with him an array of expertise and a network of contacts that I could never have tapped while he was at Fost and Lavender.
I looked back at Dahli, whose arms were folded across her chest. “What do you think?” I asked.
She shrugged, and I saw much of her cousin in that shrug; their mannerisms were much alike for distant relatives. “It’s your bank, Sailor. But I believe him.”
I looked back at Marlin. “It’s going to be a long time before I’ll be able to trust you again. And you’ll start as a junior partner, like Bendric and Tokt. With junior partner wages.”
Marlin nodded. “I can live with that,” he said.
“Good. Truth told, Lady Arkelai has me running every which way so much I could use someone to manage things here. Come with me.”
I took Marlin into my office and detailed where we stood with Dragon’s Daughter, including our deadline. He whistled at the end of my story.
“Want to reconsider coming onboard?” I asked. Marlin shook his head, but he was certainly a little deflated.
“It’s just a good thing I came along when I did. You’re going to need me this winter.”
Chapter 26 – Dragon-Eyes
I spent the next two weeks waiting for Jassem’s return with his first load of cargo from Aedekki. Marlin jumped at the chance to take Dahli’s place as the liaison to Kuvtka’s Freight, and she vacated the position with just as much vigor. It was a great comfort having my secretary back.
Jassem had estimated a return to Borreos that turned out to be optimistic. Three days after that date, I arrived at the office to find most of my staff crowded around one of the main tables where Tokt and Jassem stood arguing over a spherical lump of squash-sized… something. It had not quite the luster of metal nor the dull grit of stone, but something in between. I approached and picked it up, nearly losing my balance at the weight of the thing.
“Blessed Twins,” I said, dropping it back onto the clay platter with a dull thud before it could topple me over. It was at least twice as heavy as it looked. My staff jumped at the noise of it as it landed and realized that I had joined them.
“What in the Gates is that thing?” I asked.
Tokt looked absolutely forlorn. He sank to his chair and cradled his head between both hands. “Our new cargo,” he said.
I hefted the thing again, this time better prepared for its unusual weight. It had a slightly slick exterior, like whale oil on glass, and my fingers left white trails across its surface that vanished almost instantly.
“What is it?” I asked.
Jassem interjected before Tokt could answer. “It’s a Vass’lock,” he said.
“That’s what the orcs call them,” Tokt moaned.
I looked down at him. “Orcs? Where?”
Tokt rubbed his temples. “In the jungles of Aedekki. Jassem’s up-river contacts weren’t other elves, Sailor. They were orc-men. And this is the cargo I could get.”
Dragons in the Redfangs. What’s next, orcs in the jungles? I had asked that question to Cas the day I’d met Lady Arkelai. I shook my head and looked again at the sphere in my hands, able to see a shadow of myself in it—if not a reflection. “What does it do?” I asked.
“Best we go outside,” said Marlin Fost, extending his hand.
I handed the orc device over to Marlin, and he hefted it toward the front entrance. We followed in a procession. Myself, Tokt, Dahli, Jassem, and even Dannic meandered out to the courtyard where Marlin set the Vass’lock in a patch of bare dirt. He took out his pipe-striker and handed it to me.
“Be careful,” he said as I took the device.
I struck the treated flint and cast a small shower of sparks over the orb, then retreated.
The effect was instant. Sparks hit the sheen of the Aedekki device, and the entire thing caught flame. The air above the Vass’lock twisted with shimmering heat, and I shielded my face against the wash of its flame. Several paces back, it was as intense as a bonfire. It burned for several minutes before it sputtered and died; a scorched ring of dust circled the device on the ground.
“How many do we have?” I asked.
“Twenty-four,” said Jassem Bol with what I felt to be cheer far outstripping the circumstances. “And many more shiploads waiting for us in Aedekki.”
“The orcs pull them out of a vault or catacomb or something,” added Tokt.
“There was more room in the hold than that. What else did you bring?”
Tokt and Jassem looked at each other, and then back at me. I considered that while the little orbs were small, they were extremely heavy. “A few pounds of medicinal herbs and spices. More will come, I swear,” said Tokt.
“Oh dear,” I said.
“On the positive side,” said Marlin, “customs mistook them for ballast, so they didn’t even get taxed.” He looked at my face and his half-smile disappeared. “Sailor, it’s not all bad.”
“Not all bad?” I asked. “We’re building a fleet of ships to haul furnaces to a desert at the height of summer.” I turned to Tokt. “What in the Gates happened over there?”
“Brackwaldt happened,” said Tokt. “He knew you were building ships and sent his new agent to make sure no one in the reputable Aedekki venues would sell produce or alchemical flora to us.”
Jazalkorin. The dragon’s wayward son was interfering with our operation once again. Tokt continued. “He doesn’t need to beat us through the Kraken’s Teeth if he can poison the well before we get there. This was all I could get. I didn’t know what else to do, so I bought all they had.”
He’d followed my instructions to the best of his ability, though it may have damned our entire enterprise. But it was not Tokt’s fault that Brackwaldt had made it his personal mission to undermine us and that he had the same source of funding we did. If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine. On a whim, I approached and reached my fingers out toward the sphere but felt no residual heat. I brushed the thing with a fingertip. Nothing. I reached out with both hands and picked it up. It had the same amber hue as Arkeleera’s eyes.
“Is it my imagination, or is it lighter than before?” I asked.
“It needs to be recharged,” said Jassem.
“With what?”
“Seawater,” said Tokt. “It takes it in like an ocean sponge. Once it drinks its fill, it will burn for nearly half a day, or longer and cooler if you dilute the seawater with freshwater.”
Now that was interesting. Clearly some alchemical process was occurring within the device. It was like wood that could be reused. Only it burned hotter and longer than wood. It was heavy, but not altogether cumbersome. I wondered how much water it drank and whether it would be more cost effective to bring the device to water or water to the device. More importantly, I thought about applications. Fuel had value in Borreos. More so in winter, but generally good wood was too useful to burn, so peat had to be hauled from the jungles to the east. Therefore: fuel became even more valuable the further west you went. I knew a place where both fuels were limited commodit
ies, and a radical increase in efficiency was necessary to keep the Dragon’s Daughter a profitable enterprise.
“Tokt. We’re going to need more of these. A lot more,” I said.
“More Vass’lock are waiting for us in Aedekki,” he said. “And once we show ourselves trustworthy, the orc-men might open up other resources.”
“Good,” I said, remembering Arkeleera’s amber eyes flashing as she tackled me to the deck of Ur’s Gift. “Only they’re not Vass’lock anymore. They’re dragon-eyes. From this moment on, the method of recharging these stays with the people in this courtyard. Dragon’s Daughter maintains sole ownership of these little orbs. We don’t sell them. We lease them. To bakers, blacksmiths, bathhouses. Anyone with a need for heat who pays a premium for fuel. Find out how much they’re paying and beat it. I want people to know that we’re the sole source.”
I turned to Marlin. “Take half of our supply. Get some of Kuvtka’s men to haul them to Spardeep. As heavy as they are, it won’t take many to bear down their wagons. After that, they’re going to be making water runs between Spardeep and the coast.”
Marlin’s eyes widened. “You want to use them for the fire setting?”
I shook my head. “That’s just the start. I still want to bring in a black-powder specialist. But what I really do want is to establish the only financially viable smelter in the Redfangs, and I want it producing by the Feast of First Winter.”
I could see the gears turning in my old friend’s head. Most ore mined in Borreos was shipped north, where timber and coal were more common. Smelting required a great deal of heat, produced by burning wood, and a good deal of either charcoal or coke to refine the iron ore into something useable. Coke was plentiful and easy to move, so it could be imported, and the dragon-eyes would replace the timber. We could then charge other mines in the region for the use of our smelting facilities, refine their ore, and transport purified bars of iron, tin, copper, and bronze wherever they needed to go using Kuvtka’s caravans and Jassem’s ships through the port at Harborlight. It should more than make up the deficit.
I’d told Lady Arkelai that Dragon’s Daughter should have a third focus, and it looked like fuel was the likely (and only) candidate. I just hoped that, in the end, we wouldn’t be the ones getting burned.
Chapter 27 – Cut Losses
By middle autumn, we had finished two more of Jassem’s Teeth-runners, though after a trip through the treacherous confines, I found that they looked like vessels with years of service. Blasting had also begun at Spardeep, which redoubled its output such that it was nearly breaking even. Construction was underway on the smelting equipment as well as a set of small warehouses on the Borreos waterfront boardwalk that we used to store (and recharge in secret) the dragon-eyes. The warehouses had been Marlin’s idea. Dahli secured the lease for space from a landlord fed up with the prior tennant’s tendency to leave fish and imported meat past the point of spoilage. The small warehouses contained pumps that could be used to bring seawater up through the boardwalk. Storage was a reliable, if slow, profit-generating business, and the dragon-eyes took up little space despite their prodigious weight. Come winter, heated storage space would be looked on favorably, and we were in an excellent position to provide it with minimal overhead.
The dragon-eyes themselves seemed to be popular with the nobility as more of a novelty than anything else. But we were able to lease some and send others to Spardeep in equal numbers. The one that had left a smoky stain on my courtyard now sat in its clay dish on my office desk next to a pot of Jassem’s water-repelling unguent. It was the most flammable and impractical paperweight I had ever owned, and it became a habit to roll it across the surface of my desk as I waited for word that the smelter at Spardeep was near completion. I would see it for the first time at the Feast of First Winter. There, too, I would meet this grenndraki specialist hired to stem the flow of silver from our wayward iron mine.
Bit by bit, the new bank notes were rolling in, especially when we took advantage of the five percent refund for trading profits in precious metal for bank notes. We even switched the entire payroll of Spardeep to fiat instead of coinage. The Crown had taken on an enormous financial burden to foster the migration of their new printed notes, and it meant an extra five percent margin for us that slowly turned Alkazarian’s gold, silver, and platinum into equivalent linen and cotton.
All seemed to be going as planned until Tokt burst into my office one evening as I was revising the projections in my all-important notebook.
“Sailor, we have a big problem,” he said.
I stared at him for a moment, waiting.
My junior partner glanced at the sun glaring through the main office windows and then looked back into my office. “I’ll be back,” he said. And then he left as abruptly as he’d arrived. I watched after him in such shock that by the time I had risen from my chair and circled around my desk, which now seemed altogether larger than necessary, the man was already through the front door and tearing a trail across the courtyard so fast he nearly stumbled in the fountain.
Marlin and Dahli Fost stopped their conversation to witness his egress. Marlin slowly lowered his stack of loose papers and turned to face me. “What in the Shadow Hells was that about?” he asked.
“Search me,” I said. I tried not to let a note of panic enter my voice. “I didn’t even know he was back from Aedekki.”
The next two hours passed as an overladen and aged mule: slow and with much complaining. Tokt could have just as easily delivered the warning and the pending action in a single visit instead of leaving me to wallow in uncertainty and mounting panic. Any one of a thousand things could have gone wrong: Jassem’s secret shipyard could have been raided, a dragon-eye could have burned a hole through one of his boats, the orc tribes could have reneged on their deal and cut off our supply, or even worse begun to sell to our largest rival.
When Tokt finally reappeared, he was dressed in dark dockside clothes and had a second set for me. I donned them in my office as my junior partner explained that we would meet Jassem in the southwest area of the city, which was primarily docks and shipping and home to two of our little warehouses.
Dannic drove us as far as the banded wheels on my new carriage would allow, after which Tokt and I continued on foot. I had a burlap tunic and canvas poncho around my shoulders, Tilia’s reliable boots on my feet, and my long hair tucked under a loader’s cap. I hoped the effect of the ensemble made me look like a dockhand and not just like a banker trying to pass himself as a dockhand. Tokt had on a striped shirt that left his decidedly un-banker-like arms glistening in the evening heat, and he wore no shoes at all. His bare feet, callused from the deck of Ur’s Gift, slapped the boardwalk as we walked down to the docks.
Before long, I spotted the familiar silken braids that Jassem wore around his neck, though the elf had added an additional strand. He faced away from us, but his ears twitched at our footsteps, and he turned without an ounce of surprise. It seemed the elf captain knew both our gaits by heart.
“Is it back yet?” asked Tokt.
“Not yet,” said Jassem, reaching out and pulling each of us off the main thoroughfare and into a side alley. Whatever it was had Jassem at least as much on-edge as Tokt. His hawk’s eyes darted about as though making sure no one followed.
Our shadows grew long on the boardwalk as Jassem led us west, away from the elven hovels and closer to the drydocks and shipwrights of Borreos that serviced the enormous merchant fleet. Ships of all sizes crowded the piers in various states of construction and disrepair, and I could imagine Jassem perched on a pylon with his charcoal sticks and parchment taking likenesses. Pine and pitch were heavy in the air, intermixed with salt and the offensive fishy odor that seemed to plague all docks.
Eventually, Jassem Bol led us behind a timber seasoning shack and up a rope ladder to the roof of a warehouse, where we crouch-ran to the seaward edge. We waited there a time. The last dregs of orange light began to vanish over the western sky
before the elf captain’s avian eyes spotted his target.
“There,” he said, pulling a small spyglass from his pouch. Even with the sun below the horizon, he was careful to shade the right side of the lens, lest its glare betray his position among the netting and barrels that had found their way onto the roof. Once he’d verified his find, Jassem handed the spyglass to me.
I trained the scope as I had seen him do, spotting several ships coming in from the bay. I scouted three or five before the vessel of our interest presented itself. Despite my self-imposed prohibition on profanity, I cursed under my breath. Limping back to the harbor was a near duplicate of Ur’s Gift, though tattered sails and a fractured mast suggested a rough sea trial.
“We spotted her on our return,” said Tokt. “She was heading for Andil’s Hammer.”
“And it looks like she made it, barely,” I replied. I looked at her waterline under careful lettering that read Sea Splitter. There was some sort of alchemical treatment discoloring the hull, but the vessel did not skate across the water in quite the same way Jassem’s ships did. It appeared the knockoffs were not perfect copies, and I rejoiced at the Dragon’s Daughter’s monopoly on several of the key reagents. This also explained the intense interest from several unlicensed alchemists over the past weeks. Now I knew who had really come knocking.
“Brackwaldt owns these ships,” said Tokt. “But how did he get the designs?”
That much was obvious, and I should have picked up on it on Tokt’s first return trip. “You said you were boarded by a customs ship on your first cargo run but nothing was taxed.”
“So?” asked Tokt.
“When was the last time customs did not tax you?” I replied.
“Six Gates! We let them on board to inspect the cargo, but they were actually taking the ship’s measure. Those damned snakes!” said Tokt. His palm slapped against the thick wooden beam.
I handed the spyglass back to Jassem, who sat back on his haunches with his slender arms crossed. “No one was trying to challenge the Kraken’s Teeth before I came. Why are they in such a hurry now?”