Anyway.
All this skin blistering and lung searing meant it was clearly Our Kind Of Job. Lethal and illegal? Sign us up.
The gold would be still in its ingot form, carefully stashed within one of the smoking heaps of ash and, under cover of our lowly task, we were to make off with enough to buy someone a house. Possibly a village. And if it sounds like the smart course of action (instead of turning over our trove to our employer in return for fifty pounds in silver) would be to hightail it out of there with all that raw wealth in our saddle bags, don’t think I hadn’t already made that suggestion.
“And do what with it?” sneered Garnet.
“Spend it!” I said. “Obviously.”
“It’s bars of gold, not coins,” said Orgos.
“Sell it then!” I replied. “We’d make a fortune.”
“We’d get killed,” said Mithos, ever the ray of sunshine.
“We’re just cutting out the middleman,” I replied.
“Who will come after us,” said Garnet.
“And do some cutting of his own,” said Renthrette, completing her brother’s thought before he could have it.
“We don’t have the connections, Will,” said Lisha. “Unminted gold is carefully regulated. We’d need to be able to show provenance.”
“Where we got it,” said Orgos helpfully.
“I know what provenance means,” I snapped. “But we’re making a fraction of the profits despite doing all the work!”
“Welcome to real world economics,” said Orgos, returning to the dagger he had been sharpening on a whetstone.
I slumped to the table.
“It’s just that there will be So. Much. Gold,” I managed.
“For which we’ll be paid,” said Mithos.
“After which we will walk away with all our fingers and toes still attached,” added Orgos, eyes on his blade. “Won’t that be nice?”
“Assuming we don’t burn them off rooting through the red-hot ash,” I grumbled.
“Right,” said Renthrette, “because what our employer wants is that we risk melting all his gold. The ingots will be hidden in old ash. Cold ash.”
I muttered mutinously into the tabletop, opening my eyes to see the great white hound watching me with the canine equivalent of wry amusement.
“And you’ll be helping how?” I demanded.
The dog gave me a blank look, but Renthrette rallied to his defense as if I’d kicked him.
“He’ll be our watchful companion, won’t you Durnok?” she said, brightly at first, then in her best gruff doggie voice. “Yes, you will! Good boy, Durnok. Ignore silly Mr. Hawthorne. What does he know about anything? That’s right Durnok, he knows nothing! Stupid Will. He’s an idiot, isn’t he, Durnok? Isn’t he? Why don’t you bite his leg?”
“We should get our gear loaded,” said Lisha. “Raines will be here within the hour.”
Rasnor Raines was our contact at the forge, the man responsible for the creative accounting and, to all intents and purposes, our employer, though—for obvious reasons—he didn’t know our real names. He was the one who would be strolling off with the Empire’s hard-extorted cash minus the ten per cent grudgingly pushed in our direction. The son of a gold smith who had combined his father’s skills with a talent for finance, Raines had been in business in Bowescroft for a little over a decade. In that time, he had upgraded his facilities—and his contracts—twice, finding his way onto the Empire’s payroll four years earlier. Whether he had pulled this kind of stunt at their expense before, I couldn’t say. Maybe I’d ask him when he showed up.
I rethought that the moment I saw him. I wasn’t sure what I had expected—some kind of mild mannered and soft-spoken accountant-type, I suppose—but that was not what we got. Rasnor Raines was at least three quarters pirate, complete with eye patch and gold teeth. The remaining quarter also had a vaguely nautical feel though it was all stuff that lived under the surface. His skin was oily and his hair—braided into three thin rat tails—was yellow and lank, and hung down like the tentacles of a squid. His eyes were fishy too, not bulbous but blank, unfeeling and impossible to read. He would have made a good card player, assuming they played cards under the sea.
The dog didn’t like him. It grew stiff and watchful the moment he showed up, and its hackles prickled in little waves as he sat at the table and started talking in a low rasping voice without inflection. His eyes moved without interest or concern from hound to us, to the papers he had brought with him, sliding languidly back to the dog when its guttural snarl became impossible to ignore.
“Don’t mind Durnok,” said Renthrette, fractionally embarrassed. “It takes him a moment to get used to strangers.”
Raines shrugged, uninterested, and went back to his outline of our mission.
“You’ll need to be positioned here as soon as the gate opens at four,” he said, pointing at his makeshift map. “If you’re late, you’ll have to take your place in line with the other ash haulers and they’ll want to know who you are. There’s a community amongst these low lifes, and you’ll stand out. Park your wagon behind Franklin’s cotton warehouse on Low Street. Bring wheelbarrows to move the ash and move fast. Take only from vat 4. The ingots will be bagged. You’ll need to be loaded and gone in a half hour. That’s when the guard arrive. I’ll be making a show of opening for the day then, which means we need to be closed and you need to be gone well before.”
I made a sour face at Orgos. Four in the morning? This job just kept getting better. Raines caught my glance.
“Or you can sleep in and get arrested on the spot,” he said, his hard little shark eyes meeting mine and holding them. “Then I can say I’ve never seen any of you before, and you can take your chances in court.”
He flashed his sharp little fish teeth in a kind of mechanical smile. We all knew how the courts handled people suspected of trying to rob from the Diamond Empire.
“We’ll be there,” said Mithos.
“And you’d better be at the meet that evening,” I remarked, feeling the need to stand up to him a little. “With our money.”
He gave another impassive shrug as if my concern was unworthy of his attention, but he said, “Ten-o’clock in the alley behind the Clockmaker’s Arms on the corner of Jarvis and Hessian. Don’t be late then either.”
And then he was up and leaving, leaving a single coin on the table to pay for our food and drinks and five more “As a taste of things to come.”
That rather changed things. I hadn’t liked the man, but you couldn’t argue with gold. I picked up one of the coins and examined it closely, looking for that hint of brass which might make his generosity less impressive.
“Gold,” I pronounced. “Solid and as pure as I’ve seen in a long time.”
“He is a smith,” said Lisha cautiously.
Something in her tone caught my attention, and I looked up to find the others looking still and thoughtful.
“What?” I said. “He’s the real deal. His money certainly is. What’s the problem? We show up—admittedly earlier than I would like, but still—we load a wagon, and we take it to a pub where we get paid. Simple.”
“The dog doesn’t like him,” said Renthrette.