The Dragon's Banker

by Scott Warren

  The embargo on using water-cutting hull treatments for non-military vessels turned out to be somewhat lucrative. The initial investment had been twenty thousand marks for eight of the small ships, making Bol’s Shipwright a very profitable—if unstable—venture indeed. But I couldn’t shake Arkelai’s statement about digging one hole to fill another. When it came down to it, that’s how a debt-based economy worked. Ten men stood in a circle, and each promised the one to his right that he would work so long as the man to his left did. And then, through some miracle, the work got done! Products were manufactured, goods moved, and money was made.

  Was it my fault that dragons could not comprehend such a phenomenon? I shook my head. That was pride speaking again. Alkazarian’s lack of understanding stemmed from his perception of the impermanence of human achievement. He could only compare it with gold, which would never rot away in his cave or renege on a bargain or go extinct in an age-ending cataclysm.

  In truth, I had my own love of gold and all other precious metals. Their textures, their weights, and the images stamped on their coinage all fascinated my senses. But my true interest lay in a value with no king’s face stamped on each side. It lay in people, in their works, their goals, and most importantly their spirit. I made my fortune believing in people, not gold. More specifically, I made it by believing in the right people and giving them just enough of a boost. I looked at my partners. Bendric was speaking with Dahli as he beat the dust from his coat. Marlin had taken Tokt aside to show him the figures from the harbor-front warehouses. All of them had worked hard and sacrificed for Lady Arkelai and for me.

  Whatever happened to me, at least they would be provided for. I had made sure of that in my contract with Lady Arkelai.

  But how secure was it really?

  Chapter 34 – Reported Earnings

  Dragon’s Daughter’s profits dropped off significantly as temperatures climbed. Fewer people required renewable fuel as the first day of summer (and my deadline) approached. The smelter became a beacon for ore moving north along the Redfangs, but with the loss of the mine, our profits in the west slowed to a trickle. Lord Brackwaldt’s embargo had continued with renewed vigor since the alchemical ban, so the only overland cargo Kuvtka did not contract himself was the water hauled to Spardeep to recharge the smelter’s dragon-eyes. Nearly half of them were lost in the tunnels when the mine flooded, a devastating loss that represented a huge investment of time and operating costs for Dragon’s Daughter. We may as well have thrown the platinum bar returned by Lady Arkelai down one of the shafts.

  I looked at the dismal figures in the notebook on my desk. All the careful planning, all the plotting and deals and workarounds, amounting to nothing more than a column of red ink because of one overenthusiastic grenndraki. Though she bore little of the blame. I was the one who’d overruled Bendric’s council of caution. It was likely my last major decision as Dragon’s Daughter’s financial representation.

  Soon my part would be over. If it came down to it, Kelstern Merchant Banking insured all investments for ten percent of their value. The clause was not explicitly outlined in our contract, but when faced with slighted dragons one does what one can to make amends. My lone ship, Windraider, was running routes between Whadael and Grenn, passing over the lucrative Borrean ports that refused to accept my business. Soon it might become my loan ship, as I signed its deed over to Lady Arkelai along with my remaining stake in Kuvtka’s Freight. Perhaps she would give it to Arkeleera as her own private sailboat.

  Thinking of Arkeleera made me glance again at the dragon-eye on my desk. Even with summer nearing, the evenings had a chill. Though I burned it as much out of habit as anything. On a whim I tried pouring a little of the brandy in my drawer on the thing, but the alcoholic offering resulted only in a sputtering green flare that briefly chased away the night’s shadows as the liquor burned off. I sighed and restoppered the flask.

  Dahli came into my office, curious of the noise. She wrinkled her nose at the smell. “What are you doing in here?” she asked.

  I shrugged and noticed the black leather envelope in her hand. “From the warehouses?”

  My secretary nodded. “Payroll has already been handed out. This is Dragon’s Daughter capital.”

  I accepted the envelope. It didn’t have the reassuring weight of payment in silver marks or gold dinars, but when I opened the clasp, I could smell linen and ink intermingling with the unfinished leather of the envelope’s interior. That scent had been steadily growing on me for the past year as I collected Arkelai’s profits in my safe.

  I thumbed the runes on the heavy stone case and opened the lid of the coffer. Inside lay the remains of Alkazarian’s initial funds: half a platinum bar, an assortment of gold dinars, and a few pounds of silver marks. Her profits were cordoned off with a separate ledger. Anything we received in hard metal we converted to printed notes and stored. There was almost forty thousand silver marks’ worth in notes there. Almost a third of that was from the sale of Spardeep, which represented a deeper loss—more than offsetting its sale price. The holdings of dragon-eyes, warehouses, and cargo currently being carried on Kuvtka’s wagon trains represented a significantly higher number. The remaining value of Dragon’s Daughter lay in deeds and writs, not capital.

  As I closed the lid, I felt a slender hand on my shoulder. I froze at the touch, and Dahli withdrew as if bit by a viper.

  “Sorry, Sailor, I just thought…”

  “No,” I said, “forgive me. I was lost in thought.”

  Dahli Fost glanced at the notebook on my desk, the little journal in which I’d detailed every turn and gambit of the Dragon’s Daughter Trading Company.

  “That little book would make for an interesting read,” she said.

  I huffed a laugh. “Only as a manual on what not to do,” I admitted.

  Dahli crossed her arms and sat on the edge of my desk, careful to keep the folds of her skirt away from the dragon-eye. “That’s foolishness, Sailor. You built a small kingdom in a year, and you did it with half the nobles in the city lined up against you. Not only that, but you did it with honesty and integrity.”

  I pursed my lips. Neither Tokt nor I had told Dahli about our illegal escapade into Barron Dancin’s shipyard to sabotage Brackwaldt’s competing fleet. I saw no reason to include her in the conspiracy now.

  “Beyond that, you helped Jassem Bol achieve his dream of becoming a captain, you let Countess Tilia retire in peace while you tried to turn around a doomed mine, and you let Kuvtka run the company his way even though you owned the business. You opened up new routes for him and his daughter, safer and more stable routes. And when that fell through, you created security positions for the extra men he hired. Every challenge that arose you met with ingenuity and an approach that no one else would have considered.”

  “Did he ever replace the sign?” I asked.

  Dahli kept the smile from showing, mostly. “You know he didn’t.”

  I sat back. “When you put it like that, I suppose we did advance a few frontiers. Though they weren’t what we set out to do.”

  “Do you know why I’m working for you, Sailor?” asked Dahli.

  I shrugged again. “Lack of options?”

  Dahli laughed, full and rich and haughty as a highborn. “I’m a Fost, Sailor. My family is richer than half the nobles in Borreos. Any banking house in the country would hire me just for the connection.”

  I frowned. “That’s not why I hired you,” I protested.

  “And that’s my point,” said Dahli, throwing up her hands in mock exasperation. “You put trust in people first. You may call me a secretary, but I’m as much a partner as Tokt or Bendric because you trust me just as much. More than any other banking house would. When it comes down to doing right by folks or maximizing your profits, I’ve watched you hang the silver every time. Who else knowingly gives an unsafe loan to an alchemist and then works all night to make sure it will turn a profit? Do you know how rare that is in a banker?”

&n
bsp; When you took into consideration other bankers’ attempts to murder me in the name of capitalism, the conclusion of her veracity was inevitable. I don’t consider myself a generous man. But neither am I a cheat. After all, I have—or rather had—a reputation as an honest banker to uphold. Now my reputation was something entirely different, since I’d lost two fortunes totaling a queen’s ransom in just over a year’s time.

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said as I handed the now empty envelope back to Dahli. “But what you describe as challenges, I describe as a series of rapid-fire disasters.”

  I looked out the window at the fading orange glow of the sunset through the south window and sighed.

  “Well,” said Dahli, “at least not much else can go wrong—”

  I help up my hand.

  “What time is it?” I asked, slowly rising to my feet.

  “Ninth bell, I think. Why?”

  “The sun set a full hour ago. What’s that light?”

  Dahli turned, as if seeing it for the first time. Beyond her, the front door to the banking house banged open with such force that the bell snapped off and bounced across the floor. Marlin Fost appeared in the main room, gasping for breath and holding his chest.

  “Sailor!” he said. “The docks are burning!”

  Chapter 35 – The Economy of Dragons

  I could see a dozen or more fires dotting the bay from Westend to Lowport and along the military quarter further east. Alarm bells rang up and down the city, carried by a bitter, hot wind.

  I started down toward the dock, but Marlin stopped me. “What are you doing?” he asked, his eyes wide.

  “The warehouses,” I said. “If those dragon-eyes go up, there won’t be any containing the blaze—they’ll burn down the whole boardwalk and half the city. Some of them have alchemicals that will go up like one of Heja’s blasts. They have to be moved.”

  I grabbed Dahli. “Find Bendric and Tokt and whoever else you can to come help. The pumps we use to recharge the dragon-eyes can help with the fires.”

  My secretary nodded and then ran off, skirts hiked above her knees lest they trip her and send her sprawling in the dust. Marlin looked on the narrow side of death. His physique made him suited to long winters and thick cushions but not fighting fires. He still fought to regain his wind, and I twisted him back toward the banking house. “Stay here. We’re going to have people and cargo coming in. I need you to help organize.”

  Marlin nodded without answering. I left him in the courtyard and headed for the docks.

  * **

  Rarely had I seen the boardwalk in such frenetic chaos. How they started I couldn’t say, but efforts were already underway to quell or at least contain the blazes. I headed for the warehouse near Barron Dancin’s office that held the majority of our dragon-eyes. All of the warehouses had pumps meant to feed the little orbs, and it pleased me to see that the security had already deployed them against smoldering embers blowing in on the breeze. Most of them were Kuvtka’s men: capable, competent, and eager for a little extra work between caravan cycles. They were likely eager to be elsewhere, but their quick thinking had prevented the fire from reaching any of the adjacent structures for now.

  I clamored up onto the roof ladder for a better view, shielding my eyes from the infernal wind. While I expected several of Kuvtka’s men on duty, I did not expect Kuvtka himself, who helped me up with a meaty paw.

  “Master Kelstern,” he said with more than a little surprise. I had not seen him since he was forced to let go of personnel and equipment. Behind him, a pair of men doused a smoldering spot on the cargo nets securing our neighbor’s goods on the next lot over.

  “Kuvtka, what are you doing here?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Making rounds when all this started. The other warehouses…”

  “Are being seen to. Focus on the task at hand,” I said. I looked out over the boardwalk. Chaotic wind was whipping in all directions, blowing smoke, soot, and dangerous embers in a glowing tempest. I watched the canvas screens hiding Lord Brackwaldt’s fleet whip about and even struggled to prevent the bound ends of my own locks from smacking me in the face. Ships aweigh in the harbor were turning their pumps toward the dockside fires in an attempt to prevent the spreading, with some success. I saw several buildings I recognized burning, including other secure alchemical stores, two timber warehouses, a shipwright, and two merchant docks where more than a dozen ships were caught in a conflagration.

  All rival industry, direct competitors to Dragon’s Daughter. In fact, if one were picking strategic locations to remove as barriers, I could not have done a better job myself. Except for one obvious target: the shipyard behind Barron Dancin’s shipping office where Lord Brackwaldt moored his copycat fleet. It was almost as if…

  I turned my gaze skyward. The smoke mixed with low clouds a few hundred feet off the deck in roiling blankets lit by the wash of fire. I scanned and scanned.

  There.

  There was a shadow, so brief I almost doubted myself, of red and green scales and a flash of gold dipping beneath the cloud layer. My eyes unfocused as if my mind had erected a shield from the sight of a dragon on the wing. When I regained control of my senses, the telltale signs, real or imagined, had vanished.

  Instants later, Barron Dancin’s shipyard erupted with such violence that I was thrown flat on the roof of the warehouse.

  Bits of burning debris began to land nearby and take hold in the dry air. The wood roof of my warehouse offered prime real estate for the flames to occupy. More landed on the boardwalk behind and, with alarming finality, on the stretch of boardwalk granting us access to the shore. I waved to the pump team, yelling over the ringing in my ears and pointing wildly until they swung the nozzle around and attempted to douse the path back to shore. The stream fell short—far, far short—even with the men below pumping as fast as their tired muscles would allow.

  There was no containing the blaze that was Barron Dancin’s dock and shipyard, and we had minutes at best until those flames reached us and set the dragon-eyes ablaze. I grabbed Kuvtka.

  “We have to drown the dragon-eyes,” I said.

  He looked at the flames encroaching from both sides and nodded. There was fear there, something I’d never expected to see on his face. Not for himself, I imagined, but of leaving his daughter alone in the world. I broke his gaze, able to look into that terror no longer lest my own rise to match it. That’s not to say I wasn’t scared, because I was terrified. But I had come to grips with my mortality over the past year, and if the dragons wanted us dead, we would have already been incinerated. Unlike Alkazarian, the encroaching flames possessed no malignant intent, only careless, insatiable hunger.

  We opened the hatch on the roof and shimmied down one by one to where more than two hundred and forty dragon-eyes rested in neat rows on a sturdy rack waiting for their turn in the charging station. The pump brought water through a line some fifteen handspans below the boardwalk, feeding seawater to the devices until they could burn for hours. About half of them were charged, but that was more than enough to turn the entire district into an inferno if they caught even the slightest ember.

  Well, more of an inferno. I looked around. The walls were also lined with clay flasks, several filled with an assortment of alchemicals, and a few filled with Jassem’s alchemical unguent, which we were unable to use under Commodore Yasmin’s embargo. The tools used to make those shelves and the stolid rack holding the dragon-eyes were still present, and I hefted a heavy hammer with both hands while Kuvtka picked up a small axe. Our lease stipulated no damage to the boardwalk itself, but I felt that a moot clause no advocate would enforce.

  Bright orange flames began to lick at the hide covering the south windows, and the temperature started to climb inside the structure. I brought the caravan master to the end of the dragon-eye rack, and together our alternated blows managed to make a hole large enough for the devices to fall through. In truth, Kuvtka did most of the work. His strength seemed almost limitless
. But even with his impressive bulk and all of us working together, moving so many of the dragon-eyes by hand would take an age too long. It is difficult to impress upon you the sheer weight of the little globes. Their heft is otherworldly, especially when laden with seawater.

  I remembered the way the grenndraki brothers on Jassem’s crew had used their mallets to knock away the supports pinning Ur’s Gift in place on the ramp, and how the boat had slid smoothly into the water. With somewhat less finesse, I cracked and finally splintered the legs under one side of the wooden rack, and the dragon-eyes began to slide and then roll down to disappear beneath the water. It represented even further loss for the Dragon’s Daughter Trading Company, nearly three hundred thousand silver marks’ worth, compounded by the flasks I knew to contain priceless (and explosive) alchemicals that I threw down after them. But somehow, I doubted Lady Arkelai was overly concerned.

  The last of the little brass orbs disappeared below the black murk of the Borrean Bay, and I cast the hammer aside and looked at Kuvtka, who was surveying the structure. Smoke was beginning to choke the rafters of the warehouse, and the oiled hides over the high windows had already blackened and shriveled away. Tongues of flame licked through the gaps they left behind, and I could see roiling plumes of smoke drift past from the remains of Barron Dancin’s office. The wind was not on our side.

  I reached a hand out toward the north door but drew back when I could feel the heat of the brass handle.