The Dragon's Banker

by Scott Warren

  Spearmint.

  Lord Brackwaldt glanced back at the closed door and smiled. “There are many newcomers to Borreos these days. Would you not agree Master Kelstern?”

  I mumbled something. It may have been “Yes, My Lord.”

  “New minds bring new ideas and opportunities, and it has reinvigorated my interest in frontiers to the south. I’m told you’ve also found… reinvigoration.”

  This time I said nothing. In fact, I kept my eyes keenly trained on the solid gold buttons of Lord Brackwaldt’s waistcoat, on the elven-tailored filigree trim, anywhere but his narrow face and copper-colored beard. My heart ran fast enough to retread the route to Bastayne in half the time of Lady Arkelai. You may think it foolish that such a thing could frighten me now, having been down the throat of a mountain to deal with dragons. But men like Lord Brackwaldt are privileged by birth over men like myself. No matter how high my station might climb, my family name holds no gentle blood, and I must show deference. Brackwaldt may as well have been a dragon for all the difference in our stations. It is not right, but it is the law. He had in his power the ability to do me great harm should I fail to respect his privilege. Six Gates, he’d demonstrated that power only a few nights past.

  Lord Brackwaldt brushed past me in the narrow hall, shouldering me aside with a self-satisfied smirk.

  “See that you don’t get carried away with your newest unfortunate victim.”

  A calm came over me then. Alkazarian would be a victim to no one. I represented him in Borreos; I was the proxy of his power here in absence of Lady Arkelai. With that in mind, Brackwaldt’s threat did seem foolish, as did his failed attempt on my person.

  “Lord Brackwaldt,” I said. He halted, back still turned to me. “I do hope your associates are mending well. I did not intend our conversation to grow quite so heated.”

  The nobleman offered no response. But even from behind, I could recognize the expression of a man calculating. Perhaps it was the way the little hairs on the back of his neck raised in concert. Perhaps the tightening of his shoulders under his silk coat. After a heartbeat, he continued away, pushing open an exterior door and flooding the interior with sunlight. There seemed to be a tad more haste in his step. I glanced again at Barron’s office door, and then faced away and returned to the waiting area.

  “We’re leaving,” I said as I emerged.

  The orderly jumped up in startlement. “Oi, you can’t go back there!” he said. Tokt had so enraptured the man that he had forgotten about me entirely.

  “Boss?” asked Tokt.

  “There is nothing for us here, nor in any shipping house in the harbor,” I said. I left out my encounter with Lord Brackwaldt. I would fill him in later. Tokt pulled himself away reluctantly with a promise to rendezvous for drinks at a later hour.

  Once back on the street, I brushed the sweat-damp hair out of my eyes and explained the desperate gravity of our situation. For his part, Tokt understood our situation. But he kept looking at a spot just over my left shoulder. Finally, my curiosity got the better of me and I followed his gaze. However, I saw nothing of note.

  “What do you keep looking at?” I demanded.

  “That elf fellow is staring at us. There, between those shacks,” said Tokt, raising a finger. I hurriedly pushed his hands back down and looked again. Sure enough, there was an elf. Slight of stature, barefoot, and with a clutch of papers pressed to his chest. When he noticed my regard, he shifted his weight back and forth between his feet. Then he ducked out of view.

  “Come on,” I said, setting off after him.

  “Why?” asked Tokt. “It’s just a sea elf.”

  “Yes, but I recognize him,” I replied. Or rather, I recognized the peculiar brass stud on the left side of his nose and the woven silk braids worn as unadorned necklaces.

  Like all his kind, he had the avian eyes of a raptor. His were accented by a smear of black grease on the top of each cheek, as sailors often wore to dim the glare of the sun. Those eyes peered over his narrow shoulders at us as a hawk might spy a field-mouse, though a hawk lacked straight silver hair and ears that ended in a point.

  Tokt and I continued to converse but quieted as a trio of sailors passed us with stuffed seabags. They had the lighter olive skin of Whadaens, but there was still a good chance of their knowing the Trader’s Cant. They vanished into an alehouse without sparing us another look.

  We followed the elf out of the reputable part of the harbor (if such a thing could be said to exist) and into the squalid Lowport slums where much of the poor migrant elf population lived in ramshackle shanties. I looked around at the loose boards cobbled together into temporary shelters that the next sturdy winter storm would flatten like a breakfast cake. Of course, the shacks might be long abandoned by the time winter came. No one could say what drew the elves or what bade them to leave a place. I saw many narrow faces watch us with those avian eyes as we descended deeper down the boardwalks and further from the safety of the Queen’s justice. It was clear our finery made us stick out, but with the elf leading the way, we proceeded unmolested.

  The elf took us out onto the bluff in the southeastern quarter of the city. When I say onto, I rather mean to several platforms strung beneath struts secured to the sheer face of the bluff. Tokt did not seem bothered by the height, but I must admit my palms began to twitch on the rope handholds.

  Finally, we arrived at the home of the migrant elf. Compared to most of the shacks on the dockside, it was a castle. He drew back a hanging cloth and welcomed us inside.

  “Master Kelstern, yes?” the elf asked. “You probably don’t remember, I’m—”

  “Jassem Bol, the artist,” I said. Many shipping offices, including Barron Dancin’s, displayed his charcoal works. The elf was famous for his renderings of Borrean ships. “I remember you. Not many elves ask for merchant loans. Why the subterfuge?”

  One corner of his mouth turned down in a frown. “We could not be seen together in public, but I have been told you are in need of wares. Yet the harbor is closed to you.”

  “Who told you that?” asked Tokt.

  “That’s not important. What matters is that we can help each other, Master Kelstern. I can secure you any amount of Aedekki cargo.”

  Jassem Bol continued inside with my partner and I close behind. A single oil lamp lit the shack, flame burning low. Smoke intermingled with the scent of cedar pitch to completely displace the aroma of salt air and sea waste outside. The walls had a curious textured shingle, and when Jassem turned up the lantern, I saw the majority of the space was plastered with charcoal sketches of ships. There were ships of all kinds, skiffs, schooners, and sloops (as I do not know the difference by sight, I assigned these terms at random), as well as many of Queen Liza’s military vessels. Jassem Bol had a steady hand for detail that rivaled any illustrator I had seen.

  The elf saw my regard and correctly surmised my impression because he offered a smile, a hungry thing of little sharp teeth. He set down his portfolio with the utmost care and joined me. “These are the result of many hours atop a pylon, dodging gulls as I captured likenesses and studied details,” he said. He raised a finger. “That’s the Howitz, and the Queen’s Grace. And that one there—”

  “The Bastayne,” I whispered, looking at the flagship of Queen Liza’s fleet and the pride of the Borrean Sea with its rows of scorpions and ballistae. Eight hundred men crewed the deep-draft monster. The cloth from its myriad sails could have draped half the harbor.

  “Just so,” said Jassem, producing a teakettle from a small cupboard. As he set the water to boil, he continued. “I was born in the Archipelagos, sailing pontoon boats from island to island. But ships, real ships, are my life, Master Kelstern. They are the blood within my veins and the breath within my lungs. And I will be a captain of them. But one thing stands in my way.”

  “And that is?” I asked.

  “Your kind, sir,” he said.

  “Humans?” I posited.

  “Bankers,” he replied
.

  I was somewhat offended by that remark but held my tongue as I did not completely disagree with his sentiment.

  “When I came to you with my hand outstretched, do you recall what you said to me?” asked Jassem.

  “I said that only a truly desperate man would offer a loan to elvenkind. That you come and go as the wind,” I said.

  I saw a flash of fierce pride cross the artist’s face. “We are not like the wind, Master Kelstern. We are the wind. None can tame us, nor bring us to heel,” he said. He opened his portfolio and drew out several loose pages. “And I will show the world what happens when my kind masters the waves.”

  He handed those pages to me then. They were scrawled with sketches and figures in a mix of an elfish dialect and the Trader’s Cant, but the content was so foreign to me that the latter was just as incomprehensible as the former. The sketches were clear enough. They outlined a low-lying vessel with an array of three sails from a single mast—two at the fore, and another running behind the mast, parallel to the narrow frame. It reminded me of some smaller vessels I had seen, but the lines and angles had an otherworldly feel. An elven flair, I suppose.

  I handed the drawings to Tokt, who drew a pair of spectacles from his pocket and peered down at the arcane figures. While he shifted through the pages, Jassem served the tea. Tokt took several minutes scrutinizing the designs. As I have said, the man knew ships. Finally, he looked up.

  “What you have here, it’s impossible. You want to build a ship to conquer the Kraken’s Teeth,” he said.

  Jassem smiled again. “Not want to. Have. Let me show you.”

  Chapter 14 – Ur’s Gift

  Sequestered beneath the stolid studio of Jassem Bol lay an improvised drydock with a small ship restrained on the ramp. It was completely within shadow; all light from the outside world had been blocked out with scraps of canvas to discourage prying eyes that might find their way to the clandestine shipwright’s hidden grotto. For the elf, the value lay not in what his ship could carry, but in the craftsmanship with which he had shaped its keel and laid its planks. I could see his love for sailing reflected in elements borrowed from ships in the harbor: the curved portals of the Bastayne, the sharply rising bow of the Adjudicator, among others.

  Seeing the ship in person awed me. I traced my hands along the rough lettering near the back of the vessel. Ur’s Gift. I did not know who Ur was, nor what significance his gift held to Jassem.

  “For years I sat at the docks, drawing and scraping together silver. But I wasn’t just drawing. I studied. I found the secrets of each ship, and bit by bit I built her,” said Jassem from a gantry that ran cross-length over the deck. “She runs a crew of twenty. She won’t haul as much as one of your schooners, but full sail will put her at sixteen knots across the beam.”

  I looked at Tokt. “Is that fast?”

  Tokt stood enraptured, passing his hands over a trio of fins running beneath the keel. I had seen elven ships before: pontoon barges and coastal war canoes manned by five or six. But this was like a war canoe scaled up to the size of a human vessel, and my junior partner was getting lost in its sinuous curves.

  “Tokt,” I prompted.

  “It’s fast. Fast enough to outrun the Queen’s Grace with the wind. Or she would be, if it were possible.”

  Elves are many things, but liars they are not. They may be ephemeral beings, changing their mind on a whim, but in the moment I have only ever heard them speak truth. Jassem Bol believed that his ship would sail at sixteen knots. I looked up at him. “How did you make it possible?”

  The elf grinned and dropped down to the deck. There he picked up a small urn and joined us on the ramp. He dipped a finger in the urn and then rubbed his hands together vigorously as I watched. The contents of the urn had a peculiar fetid odor. Though not overly unpleasant, it would fast become onerous on the senses if forced on a body.

  With his skin completely coated, Jassem walked down to the water and submerged his hands, drawing them back up cupped as if to take a drink of the brine. Instead, he returned to us and opened his hands, allowing the liquid to flow through his fingers to splash on the deck below. Before I could lament his ruining the polish on my shoes, he grabbed one of my hands as well as one of Tokt’s. And all worry for my footwear vanished.

  The elf’s hands were cold, ice-cold, and bone-dry. Not a hint of the seawater remained on his skin; it was as though he had never touched it at all.

  “Alchemicals,” I said, growing excited.

  “Just so,” said Jassem, nodding. “I’ve been treating the bow and keel. She’ll cut through the waves like they weren’t even there. And with her draft, I can sail her straight up the northern waterways in Aedekki to barter cargo direct from the natives and expedition teams.”

  There were rungs built into the side of the hull, and I climbed up them. I wanted very badly a view of the deck. Tokt and Jassem followed me. There was no wheel. A long rod extended from the very back of the boat on a raised platform, creating a split-level weather deck. It looked like the yardarms used by elven mariners to pilot their pontoon boats, but this one was linked to rather complex gearing. It was a marriage of elven tradition and what I assumed was modern naval engineering.

  “Alchemical formulas aren’t cheap,” I said, examining the inlaid carving on the yardarm pole.

  “No,” admitted Jassem. “I need more. And silk cabling for the rudder assembly, and material for sails and a cedar mast to hang it on.”

  I looked above, noticing for the first time that there was currently no mast present on the deck as there had been in the drawings. I spotted the place where it was to go, with several coils of thick rope nearby that would become the rigging.

  “With a ship like this,” said Tokt, “you could make the trip to Aedekki faster, cut the transit to Whadael almost in half. You wouldn’t carry as much, but your produce would be fresher. Your crew would be smaller, and you could make more runs in the same amount of time. If you can conquer the Kraken’s Teeth.”

  Not only that, but this ship would be the first to arrive with news of new prices and demand for raw materials and equipment. It would also be quicker to meet that need. It was a ship built for cornering the markets of the southern coast. What could I do with this ship? What could I do with two of them? Ten of them? It wouldn’t matter that no shipping house in the harbor would deal with me. Not even Brackwaldt had thought to poison the well of the elves. The very notion was laughable. Yet here we were, laying eyes on an illegal ship built in the hollow underneath a slum in one of the poorest parts of Borreos. Everything the elf promised hinged on the ability of Ur’s Gift to conquer the Kraken’s Teeth, something only a handful of sailors in history had ever managed. But I had to make a decision. And as it turned out, at this very moment I was desperate enough to loan money to an elf, though it was not simply desperation that drove me. I wanted Jassem to succeed.

  “Jassem. I’ll invest for a stake in your shipping company. Six Gates, I’ll even set up your company and make sure everything is right under the eyes of the Crown. Unless you already have a license and deed for this vessel?”

  “As though the registrar would entertain the idea of an elf owning this kind of property,” Jassem remarked with a sneer. “I’d have been ridiculed, probably arrested, and my ship seized under whatever pretext they cooked up.”

  It was an unfortunate likelihood. His kind were often victimized by the more corrupt elements of bureaucracy. Which in Borreos meant any bureaucracy. My clout could protect him. I knew the legal avenues and all the right people in all the right offices. I could ensure that his property remained in trust. It seemed a small price to pay. “That’s not a problem. The ship will belong to your company. You will be at once an employee and the majority owner. Nothing will appear out of sorts. Once you have what you need, how long until she’s ready to sail?”

  Jassem shrugged. “It will take a few weeks to have the sails cut and the mast shaped, and to secure enough unguent to finish the
treatment on the underside. But Ur’s Gift will be ready for sea trials in as little as three weeks.”

  Tokt leaned in close. “Are you sure about this, boss? You know how his kind are,” he said. He didn’t bother lowering his voice; those pointy ears on the elf weren’t just for show, and a whisper would not have provided privacy.

  “I am sure,” I said, glancing at Jassem, “because if the sea trials are successful, Jassem Bol will be producing eight more of these vessels.”

  The elf’s avian eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Eight?” he asked, a waver in his voice as a grin spread across his face. He jumped up, thrust his fist to the sky, and let out the most true-to-life facsimile of a hawk’s cry I have ever heard. “Eight! I’ll build eight ships!”

  Tokt looked skeptical, but he ran his hand along the rough banister, and I could tell he was practically in love with the elf’s progeny.

  “In fact, I am so sure,” I said, “that I’m sending you to Aedekki with one hundred thousand silver marks.”

  Tokt snapped back up at that, dark eyes wide. “Aedekki?” he asked. Then paused. “One hundred thousand?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I need you to set up a company there to secure cargo, whatever you can get. Jassem will pick you up on the maiden voyage. When Kuvtka gets back from Kaharas, we’d better have something for those new wagon trains to haul. If no one will loan us the ships or sell us cargo, we’ll very well build a fleet of our own right here in Borreos and haul it ourselves.”

  “You mean I am… to sail again?” said Tokt. His voice had grown soft, and at first I thought he might be angry, but lantern light reflected water welling in his eyes.

  “Will you do this for me?” I asked.

  Tokt nodded, drawing a deep breath. A wide grin appeared on his face, and I relaxed. It struck me that perhaps being stuck in a banking house watching other men go on voyages was not how the former sailor had imagined his career would go. The shame of it was he was a great banker. Damned great. Probably too good to justify leaving the money behind in the interest of self-indulgence at sea. Not with his grandfather reaching the age where medicines from the apothecary became a regularity. His own parents had been lost at sea nearly a decade before he entered my employ, and his grandfather had raised him in their stead.