The Dragon's Banker

by Scott Warren

  Ur’s Gift could mark a turning point. It had been built in secret by migrant elven-kind. It and the ships to follow would service the avarice of a dragon in disguise. Conspiracy under conspiracy, and I was at the heart of it. We would sail this ship under Brackwaldt’s nose and earn a fortune in spite of his interference. I loved it.

  “Come by my office tomorrow, and we’ll finalize the details,” I assured Jassem. “I’ll see that you have what you need. And when the time comes for sea trials, I’ll be on that deck beside you.”

  I held my hand out. Jassem looked at it. Instead of taking it, he bowed deep with a flourish that would have made any nobleman jealous. It was true that he might renege on our deal. It was possible he would finish his ship using my silver and sail it into the unknown, leaving me with nothing but empty pockets and empty caravans. But his passion, his lust for ships, was one I recognized in my lust for enterprise. He would be there when the mast was set and when the sails were cut. He would rub every ounce of the water-repelling alchemical liniment into its planks. And he would sail to Aedekki and come back with his small hold filled with freight.

  The sun was well down by the time we made it back to Highport. I did not expect a reception, but a messenger boy was waiting for me outside Barron’s shipping office. He sat on a stoop, head cradled in his arms as he fought an obvious yawn. I knew him; he was one of my regulars, and Dahli trusted him and few others to carry missives to me. That he had stayed this late spoke of some urgency, and I fished in my pocket for the feel of silver on my skin.

  The faint jingle of coinage awakened him, and upon seeing me, he stumbled to his feet and thrust a hand into his messenger bag.

  “Master Sailor, sir!” he said.

  “Castin, you shouldn’t be on the docks this late.”

  He shrugged and pulled a crumpled envelope from the depths of his satchel. I held out the coin but didn’t quite drop it in his outstretched hand.

  “Did Mistress Fost pay you in advance?” I asked.

  There was some internal struggle that played across the lad’s face that told me the answer before he opened his mouth.

  “Yes,” he finally admitted.

  I dropped the coin in his hand. A silver penny—not a full mark but more than he would have made in several days of running messages. His father was recovering from an injury sustained working dock freight, and that silver would go a long way. I believe perseverance and honesty are both fine traits that merit reward from time to time. But late was late, and I sent the boy home as soon as the envelope was in my hand. It bore the seal of my own banking house, and Dahli’s normally careful hand was scrawled across it. I carried it closer to a gas lamp on the side of the boardwalk, and Tokt leaned in to read with me.

  A second envelope was inside the first, this one marked with the dragon’s fang Lady Arkelai had improvised. The seal was already cracked. Dahli had my authority to receive, read, and respond to any post addressed to me. I unfolded the message from the dragon’s daughter.

  Harborlight and Spardeep.

  She had written the names of two mines in the lower Redfangs.

  Acquire the mines.

  Chapter 15 – Fost and Lavender

  With Tokt on his way to Aedekki in advance of Jassem Bol’s arrival and Dahli overseeing the scaling up of Kuvtka’s Freight, my human resources were stretched appropriately thin. Delegation is a wonderful thing if you have confidence in your underlings. But that only left me with Bendric and a handful of overworked clerks. To oversee the transfer of a mine and the founding of a shipwright required a great deal of paperwork. Despite the wealth of dragon-given capital in our coffers, we could not afford the appearance of wealth. To buy the mines outright would not only draw attention but would constitute an amount of undeclared wealth that was not supposed to exist in Borreos. The money used to make Alkazarian’s purchase had to come from somewhere.

  That meant a loan. As silly as it seems, bankers borrow from one another with alarming regularity. Five days after setting up Jassem Bol’s legitimate shipwright company, I secured an appointment at Fost & Lavender, a banking house of some repute. It was no mere happenstance that Dahli found her way to banking. It was in her blood, and her great grandfather had laid the foundation for the titanic lobby in which I awaited a meeting with her second cousin.

  Marble was a luxury in Borreos, quarried almost exclusively in Kaharas, and hauling it by river and road down to the coast more than tripled its price. Fost and Lavender had six columns of the exotic stone lining the antechamber. Fully a dozen clerks rushed about, carrying missives and figures from one end of the building to another through arched doorways of hand-tooled limestone. A house like this ran on paperwork.

  One of the clerks approached me from behind as I reclined on an opulent chair, and I held out my cup for more water as I perused my notes. Over half of the dragon’s coin was already spent or earmarked for purpose, but I still had much of Alkazarian’s wealth to disperse. The two mines would take the Bone King’s share of what remained. I considered how best to use it.

  I felt the weight of water enter my cup and heard its cool dribble rise in pitch as it filled. I thanked the clerk, but rather than return, the man took the seat opposite me and set the decanter of water down on a small table between us. Curious, I looked up from my notes and promptly spilled water all over them.

  Darrez Issa sat my opposite, hands steepled in front of his mouth. His brow was low, flat, and stiff. The Queen’s Master of the Royal Mint examined me. His left hand had one ring of copper, one of silver, one of gold, and one of platinum. I will readily admit that I became a gibbering mess for the next several heartbeats as I collected myself. It was a shame I had deposited the water on my lap, because at that moment my throat had chosen to become dry as the dunes of the Borrean Waste.

  “My Lord Issa, I did not expect to see you…” I managed.

  “…in a bank?” he finished, one eyebrow cocking above a cold blue iris. I felt a fool indeed, as there were few places I was more likely to meet the man behind the Royal Mint than at a bank. Especially this bank. If anything, I was the interloper here, and I’m sure he knew that. I was the mouse to his jungle cat, and I felt that I was wearing every secret of the past several weeks upon my face for him to read plain as day.

  Gone was the crowd-shy old man forced out in front of an audience by his queen. This was his hunting ground. He withdrew a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles from his immaculate black silk jacket and began to clean them with a hank of cloth. “I’m told your new client is making waves around town,” he said. “But I don’t like waves. I prefer a calm sea. I get seasick easily. Do you?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been on a boat.”

  Darrez Issa smiled as his eyes narrowed. “Ironic, considering your propensity for rocking them. Your last adventures made quite a lot of work for me.”

  An actual clerk approached then. My appointment with Dahli’s second cousin was at hand. I offered silent thanks to the Twin Mothers (at least I hoped it was silent) and excused myself. Even though I could not bring myself to glance back, the pressure of Darrez Issa’s gaze followed me out of the room.

  “Caravans, water freight, and now mining? You’re sure bouncing back with a vengeance, Sailor. Are you not stretching yourself too thin?”

  Marlin Fost, one of my closest and oldest friends, reclined behind a gorgeous teakwood desk and cleaned his fingernails with a silver letter opener. The little blade matched the pendant around his neck and the marriage bracelet on his wrist. I was still on edge from my brief run-in with Darrez Issa, but Marlin’s easygoing bearing always put me at ease. We had known each other since we were both clerks wetting our feet in a harbor lending office. His familial connections led him down a different path, but Marlin remained one of my most steadfast friends. This meeting was as much about visiting him as securing credit. But if there was anyone that could secure me a loan in the wake of Lord Brackwaldt’s multi-front assault on my livelihood, he sa
t before me.

  “Demands of a client,” I said.

  “When I sent that scruffy alchemist your way, I didn’t expect you to build the ships for him!”

  “Not that client,” I replied.

  Marlin leaned forward. “Ah yes, Dragon’s Daughter Trading. Tell me: who is the dragon’s daughter?” he asked.

  I set my notebook on the corner of his desk. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. And if you did believe me, you’d wish you didn’t.”

  “Then tell me something I will believe, Sailor.”

  There was one thing I could tell him. “She’s obscenely rich,” I offered.

  A grin split Marlin’s face, chased by a rolling laugh that swept me up along with it. We laughed long and hard, until my cheeks hurt and a tear rolled down my face. I dabbed it with my kerchief and reflected on just how much I’d needed that reprieve. Tension had built steadily since that first carriage ride with Lady Arkelai. Alchemists have told me that any pressure vessel without a relief valve will eventually burst. The human mind is no exception.

  Marlin’s laugh settled into chuckles, and then he managed to still those as well with a final sigh. He struck his pipe alight and began to puff before continuing. “Now that I do believe. Does she really wear an entire necklace of platinum?”

  “Calling it a necklace is a bit like calling the Queen’s Grace a sailboat,” I admitted. At the time of that carriage ride, those fingernail-sized discs of platinum were the largest collection I had seen in one place.

  “I also heard she’s incredibly beautiful,” said Marlin, gazing out the window of his office. “It’s a shame she couldn’t be here to confirm that.”

  “Beautiful in the way a summer thunderstorm or a jaguar is beautiful,” I said. “Which is to say powerful and dangerous.”

  “And,” he said, “she wants a loan. Being as it’s you asking, I’m inclined to give it. You’re not without friends, Sailor. Even now.”

  “But…”

  Marlin winced, an over-exaggerated thing. It was so disingenuous that it came full circle into earnestness. Then he straightened. “But the Dragon’s Daughter Trading Company is a newly formed organization, seemingly possessed of no cargo to trade, carried on ghost ships that are not yet built to caravans that are not yet crewed.”

  I raised a finger. “Technically, those not-yet-caravans are mine,” I said. “And speaking of mines, once Dragon’s Daughter has a pair of them, it will take care of our cargo deficiencies.”

  Marlin lifted both eyebrows and nodded. “And then you can start doing real business. If those mines produce and your ships appear, you’ll be able to reach all corners of Varshon. How much are you asking for?”

  I pushed a figures sheet across the table. “A line of credit for one hundred thousand silver marks.”

  Marlin dropped his pipe with a clatter. He looked between the folded vellum and me, eyes wide and wild. “The Dragon’s Daughter Trading Company does not fool about, does it?”

  “I don’t open the purse strings. I just set what pours forth to purpose.”

  “Poetic as ever, Sailor. But I can’t extend that level of credit on prose.”

  I pursed my lips. “Collateral,” I said. Between bankers, the implication that a material demonstration of value was required to offer credit could be considered insulting to a good name. The idea being if I reneged on my obligations, I would surrender something of equal or greater value.

  Marlin was quick to try to placate me. “Sailor, it’s not you,” he lied. “It’s the company you’re keeping. No one knows who Lady Arkelai is or where she’s from. If you were wise, you’d send her and her money packing.”

  I recalled the coals in the vapor basin bursting to life beneath Alkazarian’s gaze. “Her family can be very persuasive,” I said. It wasn’t entirely true, but I couldn’t very well tell him that if I could turn back the clock and reconsider the dragon’s offer, I would make the same decision. Alkazarian was the client of a lifetime. Nay, of a hundred lifetimes. It was only sitting here arguing on Arkelai’s behalf and forced to justify my service that I realized the only person I did not need to justify it to was myself. This realization in and of itself warranted consideration. After all, an addict feels the same way about their chosen intoxicant.

  “It still doesn’t solve your problem, Sailor. If you were asking for ten or twenty thousand, I would grant it with no questions asked. But you’re asking for five times that. And you’re asking it on behalf of a ghost—”

  I held up my hand. Marlin stilled his tongue, but he wasn’t happy about it.

  “I came for a loan, Marlin, not a lecture. You say I should have run from Dragon’s Daughter. Maybe you’re right. But I didn’t. You say that it’s not me—it’s my client. There’s no need to coddle my ego when we both know the truth. You say you need collateral because Lady Arkelai is a ghost…”

  I reached into the inner breast pocket of my jacket and withdrew a small bag of black velvet. A bag as long and wide as my hand. I tossed it on the desk between us, and it made no sound as it fell against the black polished wood. Marlin’s eyes tracked it across his desk, much as I must have when I first spotted the little bags in the tucked away cubby. Then they rose back to me, widening as they went.

  “…let me show you how real she really is.”

  At the end of the day, I left Fost and Lavender with two items. Marlin had gone out on a limb to underwrite me a letter of credit for sixty thousand silver marks. The bar of platinum was worth at least that much by itself, but based on the risk Dragon’s Daughter presented, I was lucky to get that figure. Since platinum was much too rare to be stamped into coins for the most part, it was difficult to spend per se. But I did not have to explain its origin to use it as collateral. I believe Lady Arkelai may have anticipated its use in large transactions such as this.

  The second item was a personal fiat loan of twenty thousand marks in the form of newly printed and bound bank notes. The money had come from Marlin’s personal accounts, and he expected it returned with six percent as his fee. It would go to Jassem for his fleet.

  In total, it was twenty thousand less than I had hoped, but still twenty thousand more than I had expected and enough to acquire Harborlight and Spardeep with some careful negotiation. More importantly, it was proof that I still had friends in the city. I hoped that, come two summers from now, that would still be the truth.

  Chapter 16 – Spardeep

  To be present for the maiden voyage of Ur’s Gift, I had to ensure that the purchase of one or both mining operations went smoothly. That meant being there in person, which in turn meant several days of uncomfortable travel stuffed in the back of a carriage with Bendric Landaux. Do not mistake me; his company was not the uncomfortable aspect. Bendric spent his travel time engrossed in books of northern adventure that had little to do with finance or trade and therefore held little interest to me.

  The discomfort stemmed from taking a carriage off the smooth cobbles of the Borrean streets and onto the rough ruts of dirt roads and untamed country of the badlands. The further west we traveled, the more creature comforts would be denied no matter how heavy our pockets were with gold. I am not a man of the land. My love for my country is dependent on being separated from it by a thick mattress, four stolid bed legs, and a lush rug. Beyond that, the enforcement of law diminished greatly even a few hours’ travel outside the city walls (and a few places within them). Security had to be hired to mitigate the risk leveraged by travel over land. The captain came recommended by Fost and Lavender and had his men arranged in my office courtyard. Much to my surprise, I found Cas lined up alongside them. A club was tied at his belt, and he held in his hands a battered shortbow that looked to be more knot than branch.

  “Captain?” I asked, tilting my head toward the vagrant.

  Captain Destain shrugged. Thus far it seemed to me that he should have been called Captain Disdain. I took an immediate disliking to the man, for reasons I could not rightly say. His dislike for me
was more than immediate; he seemed to have settled his opinion on me before we ever met.

  “Told ’im I weren’t paying him nothing, but says you already did. I hand-pick my men.”

  Cas held up a pair of gleaming coppers as he grinned, the two I’d given him the day I met Lady Arkelai. I had no way of knowing that for sure, but somehow I was certain. They were the only thing shiny on him.

  “Do we have enough provisions for an extra man?” I asked.

  “Aye sir,” he said and then shrugged, turning to inspect kits and equipment. “No difference to me.”

  On our return, I would see that Cas received a full silver penny for each day of labor, despite his insistence that he had already been paid. Had he been so inclined, I would have found work for him earlier. But Cas always seemed content to doze the days away and never seemed to want for food or other necessities. It amazed me how he could be so at peace with no more than a few coppers to his name. A life without gold was a life without air as far as I was concerned. I nodded at the man, and he tipped his hat to me in response.

  Dahli came out to see us off and offer some last-minute advice on avoiding road sickness by boiling drinking water. Hardly necessary. For all but two or three days of the trip, we would be bedding down at crossroads inns along the way. But I thanked her regardless. One of the dragon’s platinum bars was tucked into my breast pocket as well; I felt it press against my chest as the carriage ambled out of the courtyard and onto the main thoroughfare.

  The buildings began to slide by, structures becoming short and tightly packed as we left the wealthier districts and drew closer to the Western Quarter. Just within the shadow of the city’s walls, homes and storefronts squeezed together almost as tightly as those cliffside hovels crowding the elven boardwalk.