INSTINCT
Executive Editor: L. J. Hachmeister
Associate Editor: Sam Knight
This anthology is dedicated to Scott Cromer and all the wonderful folks at Lifeline Puppy Rescue.
Thank you for all the work you do to save lives.
The Gold Standard
By A. J. Hartley
RIGHT OFF THE BAT I SHOULD say that I didn’t like the dog. It wasn’t anything personal. I’m just not a dog person. I prefer my companions to have a bit more conversation and a bit less in the stink and teeth department. I should also say that the feeling was mutual. As the others fawned over the great brute, it stood there glowering at me as if determining if it would prefer me raw or lightly broiled.
Renthrette and Garnet had brought it home. Naturally. They said it would make an excellent watchdog, but really, they just liked its fur, which was white, and its eyes, which were blue, and its teeth, which were massive.
Also, they liked that it scared me.
“It’s just a dog, Will,” said Renthrette, pulling her sword from its sheath and rubbing its edge with a greasy rag. “What’s the big deal?”
“I don’t trust large animals,” I replied. “You know that.”
Getting me to ride a horse had required the kind of effort usually reserved for redirecting rivers.
“Being only a small animal yourself,” she replied with that wicked little grin she wore when she thought she was being witty.
“Hilarious as ever, Renthrette,” I said. “But the others won’t let you keep it anyway, whatever I say. We’ve barely had work in a month, and that beast will cost as much to feed as I do.”
“Maybe we should keep the dog and drop you,” she replied. “Or feed you to it.”
“More sparkling repartee. Excellent.”
“Well, at least the dog has a use.”
“Which is?”
“It’s an imposing guard,” she shrugged. “If people try to break in it will bark loudly and scare them off. Do you think you could learn to bark, Will?”
“I have proven myself more than useful to this little band of outlaws, thank you very much.”
“Look at those ears though!” said Renthrette, rubbing the dog’s head so that it half closed its eyes and grinned at me triumphantly. “So soft and cute. It’s really too bad you don’t have ears like his.”
“Stop. I’m, laughing too hard,” I said flatly.
“I’m enjoying myself,” said Renthrette. “I have a new adorable pet.”
“So, you are enjoying yourself at the expense of your old adorable pet,” I said, batting my lashes winsomely.
She rolled her eyes.
“His name is Durnok,” she said, “after the ancient wolf god.”
“You shouldn’t name it,” I cautioned. “You’re only making it harder on yourself.”
“Why?”
“Because,” I said very slowly, “the others won’t let you keep it.”
They let her keep it.
I argued, but the great brute padded around snuggling up to them, and they smiled at each other and rubbed its head till even I knew the battle was lost. Then it curled up at Lisha’s feet like the world’s most lethal rug, eying me in a smug sort of way and growling softly if I made any sudden moves, which Renthrette and Orgos thought hysterically funny. I managed a few growls of my own but when I did so the dog’s hair stiffened and it developed the kind of sudden stillness which promised bloody death soon after, so I stopped. That made Orgos laugh all the louder.
“What is with you and the dog?” he demanded when he had recovered. “And don’t give me that I don’t trust animals thing. We’ve been through too much. What I think is that you resent the dog because you’d rather it was your belly Renthrette was rubbing…”
I told him to shut up and when he started laughing again, I threw a bread roll at him, missing badly and startling the elderly woman who had come in to make up the fireplace, making Orgos laugh all the harder.
We were waiting on a job. More specifically, we were waiting for a man with information on a job. I was waiting to get paid. The man in question was one Rasnor Rains who we had never actually met because he was far too important to deal with the likes of us, but he had sent a handful of assorted flunkies to handle the details of our assignments. And the money. This was job five and, we surmised, the most important one to date.
So far, we had escorted a Lazarian spice dealer, whose breath could strip varnish, and his five camels, which smelled so bad they left you longing for the simplicity of varnish stripping, a wine merchant with a cargo of a sweet russet vintage he absolutely refused to let me sample (twice), and a Cherrat silversmith whose entire cargo fit in the hampers of two mules. The last job had been the shared harvest of a village some thirty miles from Bowescroft: three wagons of rice in sacks.
Pretty gripping stuff, right? In each case our job was to handle fees to guards (bribes), make sure the cargo made its way to the right collection point (different each time) and oversee the transit of said cargo from a distance which balanced inconspicuousness with the necessary immediacy required by actual combat. Fortunately, everything had gone smoothly so far. So much so, in fact, that I had started to think we were being overpaid; not a thought I have often had since I started putting my life on the line for money. That thought evaporated when we were given the details of our fifth and final cargo. It was gold. Not just gold though. It was gold from the Blackbird mine, which meant it was Empire property, but it wasn’t being handled by Empire operatives, which meant—in turn, as it were—that it was stolen.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am quite happy to lift anything I can from the Empire and will sleep like a babe the night that I do. Why? Because the Empire is a brutal, soul crushing machine that flattens the world beneath it like a mill stone and anything I can do to be a thorn in their side, I’ll do. I’ll hold my hand up to that. The problem is that if they see me hold my hand up, they’ll cut it off, along with other assorted bits to which I am (in every sense) attached. So, acting as armed escort for whoever had stolen from the Empire made me, shall we say, uneasy.
When I say the gold was stolen from the Empire, I don’t mean someone broke in, fought off a hundred heavily armed troopers, and made off down the alley with a couple of sacks. That wasn’t how things worked. This was what you might call creative accountancy. Someone on the inside filled in a form, made some completely believable errors in basic arithmetic and quietly siphoned off a stream of ready coin into a corner where, officially, it didn’t exist. With the right connections, it was just a matter of marks on a few papers and a few inspectors being paid to look the other way. In other words, it was good old-fashioned corruption. But conceptual theft—robbing someone of numbers in a book—becomes a very different beast when those imaginary numbers have to become actual money. Then we get the aforementioned sacks which have to be sneaked down the alley.
Which is where we came in.
The minting process requires a lot of heat: all that melting of precious metals followed by a cooling process Orgos says is called annealing, repeated multiple times before the blanks are ready to be stamped into coins. This means that the mint consumes wood and coal at a massive rate, and produces tons of ash every week, but since the Empire knows how to turn everything—and I mean everything—into gold, the ash is carefully carted away and sold on to make soap, fertilizer and God knew what else. The poor sods whose job it was to collect the ash, sweep it into crates and haul it away, were only one step up from the miserable buggers who carted out the night soil. In some ways, the ash haulers had it worse since the blokes who handled the contents of the latrines didn’t have to worry about it still being hot enough to seer the skin off your hands, or roast your lungs from the inside if you made the mistake of breathing in. Actually, I suppose inhaling is best avoided in both professions, but you know what I mean.