Instinct

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.

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.

I laughed but she turned an acid glare on me.

“I was serious,” she said.

“So was I,” I shot back.

“You didn’t say anything,” said Garnet, always helpful.

“No,” I agreed as if this was obvious, “I didn’t need to. My seriousness was in that dismissive laugh, so full of scorn and derision.”

“Meaning?” said Garnet.

“Meaning the dog doesn’t get a vote,” I clarified, “because it’s a dog.”

“Dogs can be excellent judges of character,” said Garnet pensively.

“Is there evidence for this preposterous claim?” I shot back.

“He didn’t like you,” said Renthrette, as if that proved it.

“That’s not the point,” I scoffed.

“What is the point?” asked Mithos with his patented your-stupidity-is-starting-to-annoy-me stare.

“That we are the thinking, talking, ruling mind of our little band of warriors and we don’t take advice from dogs.”

Orgos leaned forward, one hand massaging his jaw thoughtfully.

“He’s right,” he said. “The dog didn’t like him.”

I was so caught up in that “he’s right” stuff that I almost missed the tail end of the remark, and it was a moment before I realized that the “he” who was right was not me but Garnet. Which is never true.

“What?” I exclaimed. “Are you serious? You are going to trust a dumb animal over me?” Garnet glared murderously, so I qualified my rhetorical question. “I meant the dog. A dumb animal and Garnet.”

“And me,” said Renthrette.

“And I’m starting to lean that way,” Orgos added, grinning brightly at me.

“Of course you are,” I snapped.

“Mithos?”

Lisha had said nothing so far, drawing vaguely with her finger on the table where the wine had splashed. Her question made the others go quiet and watchful. Mithos considered the dog for a moment, then nodded very small and solemn like a judge agreeing that, on the preponderance of evidence, the large man who had been found covered in the victim’s blood and yelling, “He got what he deserved” should be released immediately.

It was enough for Lisha.

“Then it’s settled,” she said.

“You’re joking!” I yelled. “This is insane! We are changing our entire plan, our basic attitude to this whole situation because the dog didn’t like him? It’s madness. And if Raines is so obviously untrustworthy, what exactly do you think he’s doing paying us?”

Lisha nodded.

“A fair question,” she said. “Thoughts?”

“Say he’s been milking the Empire for a while,” Mithos ventured, putting his mug down. “Someone has gotten wise to him, or he fears they might have.”

“So, he’s looking for someone to blame,” Orgos joined in.

“Right,” said Mithos. “He’ll pin the accountancy stuff on some lowly clerk on the inside, but he needs outsiders to be caught red handed with the gold.”

“Enter us,” said Renthrette. “We show up, load up our wagon, only to find a couple of platoons of the Empire’s finest blockading the street.”

“Raines expresses his amazement at us and loyalty to them, hands over the expendable clerk and,” Mithos concluded with a self-satisfied shrug, “life goes on.”

There was a thoughtful pause and Orgos took a sip of his ale.

“So, we don’t go,” I said. “We pocket his money—serves him right too—and we make sure we are nowhere near Low Street at four in the morning. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

Mithos tipped his head on one side, his eyes narrowed in thought. It wasn’t a look I liked.

“Right?” I said, trying not to sound desperate. “Stands to reason. Hello?”

“Or,” Mithos mused, “we take the opportunity to repay a scoundrel for his bad faith and leave the Empire’s nose out of joint in the process.”

Orgos put down his mug and grinned widely. “I like the sound of that,” he said.

“What?” I demanded. “No. That has a terrible sound. It has the sound of people being arrested and tortured, people being creatively executed, people a lot like us. It is not a good sound.”

Lisha turned her gaze on Mithos.

“You have an idea?” she asked.

And, as it happened, he did. It was an awful idea almost certain to get us all killed, but it was an idea, and—perhaps predictably—they liked it. Even the bloody dog.

So, we went. First, we sat up till everyone else in the inn had gone to bed, eating and planning and trying not to throw up with terror, though that last one might just have been me. Then we went, picking our way across town in the dark like suicidal moles.

There was no curfew in Bowescroft like there was in Cresdon, but the Empire kept sentries at the gates and patrols around the streets. The soldiers stopped you or didn’t if they saw you, depending on their mood. There was no curfew, but their default position was suspicious with a side order of hostile, and they were always armed to the teeth.

Our fiendishly clever plan to outsmart the evil gold smith was to show up precisely where he had told us to at the very time he had instructed. Genius, right? But—and this is where it got really good—I was to go in alone.

Why me, you ask, as—believe me—did I?

“Because we don’t know what you’ll find when you get there,” said Mithos levelly, “and you are good at thinking on your feet.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I exclaimed.

“It means you lie like other people draw breath,” said Renthrette nastily.

I gave her a wounded look.

“It means,” said Orgos, grinning, “that you, my friend, can talk the hind leg off a donkey and then persuade it to enter a dancing contest.”

I frowned and Lisha leaned in, her dark eyes serious.

“We need someone who is good at improvising,” she said. “Someone who can stall and who can convincingly play innocence.”

“And idiocy,” Renthrette added.

Lisha ignored her with difficulty.

“You’re an actor, Will,” she said. “A storyteller. In this situation, that’s what we need.”

“I’m gonna get killed, aren’t I?” I said, matter-of-factly.

“You’re not going to get killed,” said Lisha. “We’ll be on hand and, to make doubly sure, you can take Durnok.”

“The dog?” I exclaimed. “You are sending me into a trap where a dozen Empire troops will be lying in wait, spears at the ready, but I’ll be fine because I’ve got the bloody dog that tries to bite my hand off every time I look at it?”

“Him,” Renthrette corrected. “Not it. He’s not a thing.”

And that was that.

So, at precisely four in a dark, cold morning, I sidled unhappily up to the side door of Raines’s forge, took a breath, and rapped imperiously on the wood in the manner of a man who didn’t want to be kept waiting. A thin fog hung between the silent, ramshackle warehouses and workshops, and the place felt ominous, as if I was being watched by eyes I couldn’t see. At my side the big white dog stood still and silent as the street, its breath clouding like the fog. I listened, and heard nothing inside the forge, and gave the dog a nervous glance. The thin chain leash chinked, and the great beast looked up at me, its cool blue eyes meeting mine expressionlessly.

“Just you and me, dog,” I muttered.

It continued to watch me with those frank, animal eyes, till I felt uncomfortably transparent, and looked away, just as I heard the snap of a bolt. The door cracked open. A glimmer of lamp light showed a heavily shadowed face peering out. I didn’t know the man.

“Ash transfer,” I managed. “Vat four.”

“You’re early,” said the door keeper. He sounded curt, irritated. “And where’s the rest of them?”

“On their way with the barrows.”

“You don’t have a barrow?” he snapped.

“Like I said, they are on their way.”

“I’ll let you in when they arrive,” he said. The door started to close but I jammed my foot in the gap.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” I said. “I need to get started. Get the paperwork signed off.”

The shadowed face creased into bafflement.

“Paperwork?” he parroted scornfully. “What paperwork? You’re a garbage hauler! You come in with a barrow, you cart out the crap and you leave. There’s no paperwork!”

“Basic commodity exchange practice,” I said blandly, easing into my role. “Your trash for my labor, signed and quantified according to pre-agreed upon terms as set down in certified contractual documents like these which, conveniently enough, I have here for your perusal.”

I gave him a suitably bureaucratic smile and produced a sheaf of closely worded papers.

He opened the door another inch so he could give the paper a disbelieving stare.

“What the hell is that?” he muttered, his eyes wide and anxious.

I pushed them into the light of his lamp, confident that his being able to see them better would not ease his mind. His gaze wandered vaguely around the documents, an unfocused and random movement which made my heart sing a little song of joy. He couldn’t read.

“There’s been some sort of mistake,” he mumbled, his eyes still blank. “This isn’t how things are done. You come in, you cart away the crap, you get paid. No papers, no signing.”

He pushed the documents back toward me, but I tutted smugly and shook my head.

“No can do,” I said. “See?” I added, flipping the pages at random and pointing to a numbered paragraph, “according to the terms of this subsection all traffic between the parties of the first and second part must accord with all printed citation, vis-à-vis said contractual agreement, and be ratified by signatures at the moment of transactional completion. More than my job’s worth to forego the legal niceties. Let me in and we’ll find a nice light spot to go over the terms and, assuming you are in agreement…”

“I can’t do this,” he said.

It wasn’t defiance so much as panic. He was out of his depth and knew it, but he was also worried. I played a new card.

“Perhaps if you consult with Mr. Raines…”

As soon as I said the name, the door man blinked and his already mounting anxiety ratcheted up a notch like a spurred horse. He licked his lips and his eyes flashed about. Another minute and he’d be sweating, despite the cool morning air.

“No!” he sputtered. “Mr. Raines said he wasn’t to be roused till seven. You were going to come, and I was going to help, and he was to be left out of it completely.”

He said it like a child reciting something learned by heart, like he was reminding himself.

And there it was. Mithos and the rest had been right. We were being set up, and this poor dolt at the door was Raines’s fall guy. If the Empire weren’t already there, they’d be arriving any moment. I needed to be elsewhere and quickly, but there was—maddeningly—something I had to do.

“Just initial each page,” I said, “and I’ll load up your ash.”

“Initial?” he said stupidly.

“First letters of your name, or whatever mark you use in place of a signature.”

“Can’t you just take the ash and go?” he wheedled.

“The moment this is done,” I said, forcing a smile.

I could feel the minutes ticking away, could practically hear the regular stomp of marching sentries coming toward us, but I pushed my impatience down and tried to look casual. He was sweating hard now, and his furtive glances around were getting more frequent and more worried. I didn’t know what Raines had told him, but he knew he was sliding toward trouble with each passing second, even if the worst he could imagine was a furious boss kicking him out of his job.

Trust me, I wanted to say, it is far worse than you know.

So, he squinted at the papers he couldn’t read and, with my careful prompting, painstakingly scratched his little ham fisted cross, tongue poking out between his teeth in concentration, on the first page, then the second, then the third…

Suddenly he glanced backward into the darkness of the shop.

“What was that?” he said, more to himself than to me.

“Let’s just get this done, shall we?” I said.

He hesitated, listening, his eyes focused on nothing, then shrugged and turned back to me.

“Every sheet?” he muttered pleadingly.

“Front and back,” I said.

When it was finally done, he pushed the door wide.

“Now can you please just get it and go?” he begged.

“My colleague with the barrow hasn’t arrived…” I stalled.

“You can borrow one of ours,” he snapped. “Over there. That’s vat four at the end. Just load it up and get out. Here.”

He thrust a dusty shovel into my hands.

“All right,” I said. “No need to be rude.”

“You don’t know Raines,” he shot back, his guard dropping. “If this doesn’t get done just how he said…”

“What?” I asked.

“He’ll…” But he didn’t want to say. “He’s just not a man you want disappointed, all right?”

I gave him a careless shrug and turned to the ash vats.

It was smoky and hot inside, the forge lit by a handful of oil lamps which gave the place an amber cast with pockets of deep shadow. The dog didn’t want to go in, and I couldn’t really blame him, but we had no choice.

I gave the leash a tug, and he made a chuff of protest but followed me in. The door keeper eyed the animal warily, keeping his distance. Inside was a huge leather bellows, studded with brass and worked by a hand crank. Anvils of various sizes littered the flagged shop floor and the walls hung with pincers and hammers of every imaginable size. The soot-stained walls were stone, presumably to reduce the risk of fire, and it was clear how well they insulated the place. I could feel the inside of my nostrils scorching. I breathed through my mouth and could taste the ash on the air, a fine, bitter powder. I turned aside to cough and spat on the ground.

“Quicker you get done, the quicker you can get outside in the air,” said the doorman without sympathy. “Vat four.”

“I know,” I shot back, my annoyance real.

“There was supposed to be a team of you,” he said shoving the oversized wheelbarrow into my midriff. “If you don’t finish on time, Mister Raines will be…”

“Disappointed,” I finished for him. “Yeah, you said.”

“I have to get the fire going,” he said. “Yell when you’re done.”

And he disappeared behind the forge, glad to have better things to do.

I looped the leash over the horn of an anvil and climbed down into the vat. The dog watched me but did not object, though it sniffed the air uneasily. The ash looked pale and gray, but I could feel the heat of it on my face. I spat again, my throat beginning to burn, then thrust the shovel in and began to spade the hot fine powder into the barrow.

It was miserable work. Each stab of the shovel raised a stinging ash cloud that clung to my sweating face and hands. Somehow my labor didn’t seem to reduce the ash heap at all, and what I had thought would take no more than a couple of minutes had started to feel like it would take most of the morning.

“You not done yet?”

I turned and saw Garnet with a barrow and shovel of his own, the red-faced door keeper showing him in, fidgety and anxious as before.

“What kept you?” I demanded as Garnet patted the dog’s head absently, then dropped into the vat beside me in a cloud of ash.

“Here now, aren’t I?” said Garnet. “This is all you’ve done?”

“It’s hard,” I said, trying not to sound pathetic and failing.

He ignored me, shoveling at twice my speed just to make my inadequacy clear. My throat was parched.

“You don’t have something to drink, do you?” I asked the doorman.

“Just finish up and go,” he snapped.

“Rude,” I observed to Garnet. Or the dog. It made little difference.

Ten minutes later we had both barrows fully loaded and were straining to force them out into the street. The air was blessedly cold, but there was so much ash stuck to my skin that I could barely feel it. The dog led the way, glad to get out of the stifling forge, but as soon as it reached the street it stopped, froze in fact. It was rigid, mid stride, head cocked and hackles up.

Something was wrong.

“Garnet,” I said warily.

“What?” he replied, his breathing labored. His barrow was rather fuller than mine.

I glanced down the street. On the corner I could see our wagon parked, waiting. The figure sitting at the front looked like Renthrette. There was no sign of the others.

There was a shout from somewhere beyond the wagon, an answering one from somewhere behind us, and suddenly the silent, empty street was full of noise and people. Soldiers. Diamond Empire troops: at least a dozen wrapped in gray wool night cloaks and wearing iron helmets. They carried full body shields marked with their garrison number and business-like cut-and-thrust swords, and they swarmed toward us. We, having nowhere to go, stood exactly where we were and tried to give them no excuse to kill us which, historically speaking, wouldn’t take much.

An officer emerged and started barking at us not to move (which we weren’t doing) if we valued our worthless lives (which we did). The dog growled and one of the troopers with a halberd-like spear materialized beside us and pointed the spiky business end at the animal. Ignoring all warnings to the contrary, Renthrette leapt down from the wagon and came sprinting over, yelling the dog’s name with such unreasonable ferocity that the guard with the halberd took a step back, his eyes on her. Another produced a bow and nocked an arrow.

“Not another step!” bellowed the officer.

I raised one hand to stop Renthrette and cautiously reached out to the dog with my other. I patted the beast on its head gingerly, and the snarling stopped.

“Empty those barrows!” ordered the officer as stillness returned.

A couple of the soldiers elbowed Garnet and I out of the way and pushed until the barrows overturned, splintering under their own weight. Ash and cinders, some of them smoking hot, spilled onto the cobbles and billowed up in clouds which doubled up the soldiers and left them coughing and spitting. The officer was annoyed.

“Get on with it!” he roared.

Humbled, and with dust encrusted hands clamped over their mouths, the soldiers began a desultory search, raking the ash heaps with the tips of their swords. There was an expectant hush, broken only by the creak of the forge’s front door. The doorman, terrified and miserable, stumbled out, shoved by the bigger man who emerged after him.

Rasnor Raines stood in the doorway, barely suppressing a smirk as he took in the unfolding scene.

“Morning officer,” he remarked conversationally. “Anything I can help you with?”

“Everything seems to be in hand, thank you,” the officer replied pointedly. He was on his dignity and wanted the civilians to keep out of it. Raines wasn’t that kind of civilian. He strode purposefully over to Garnet’s barrow, pulled a knife from his belt and plunged it into the ash heap. He moved it around, came up with nothing and tried a few alternate spots. He got up, unperturbed, and came over to me. His eyes met mine and his upper lip curled into a scornful and self-satisfied smile.

“Got something for me?” he inquired.

“Some ash?” I suggested. “Though it will cost you. And the embers are extra.”

His amusement turned to irritation, and he pushed me aside, setting to a sifting of my spilled barrow with increasingly baffled gusto.

“Where is it?” he demanded without looking up. “Where the hell…?”

There was an embarrassed silence from the troops. A couple exchanged glances, and the officer took a step toward me.

Raines leapt suddenly to his feet and got in my face.

“What have you done with it?” he demanded.

“With what?” I answered guilelessly.

“My…er,” he began, then corrected himself, “the Empire’s gold.”

I served him a blank look and took a moment to let it land.

“Gold?” I said. “We are garbage haulers. Not a lot of gold in our line of work.”

“Why you thieving little…” he spat. He made a lunging movement toward me but one of the guards put a hand on his shoulder. It was more caution than restraint, but it did the job. For now.

Renthrette stepped quickly between us, not to save me, you understand, but to make sure the petulant gold smith’s rage couldn’t redirect at the dog somehow. Soldiers bustled and shouted, the dog barked, the officer roared, and eventually we were all peeled apart and shunted aside at sword and spear point.

I raised my hands in surrender, as did Garnet. Renthrette—ignoring her guards—stroked the bristling hound, and Raines shouted more furious bile and assorted accusations, some of which included the hapless door keeper, whose puzzlement had hardened into resentment. For a long moment that was all there was: stillness and tension from everyone else, and Raines shrieking his ass-covering lies and accusations at us, the soldiers, and his surly employee.

And then it was like a light went on in the door keeper’s head. He frowned once more, deeper this time, and stared at Raines as the tumblers of the lock which had kept his brain from working for years finally clicked into place.

“Wait,” he said stupidly. “Me?” He glared at Raines who gave him the kind of dull amazement which would have been the same if the question and had been asked by the dog. “You’re saying I’ve been stealing from you—from them,” the door keeper continued with a wary glance at the Empire troops, “for months and working with these idiots? I’ve never seen them before in my life.”

His dull outrage was so clearly honest that the soldiers flashed more uncertain looks at the officer, who hesitated, then nodded his command.

“Search the wagon,” he ordered.

A pair of soldiers, glad of something definitive to do, bustled off down the street. The rest of us stood in watchful silence, and there was a profound sense of the story changing. The officer and his men had come on stage sure of their roles, clear in their minds as to how the crisis would build and resolve, how they would go through their lines until gratefully receiving the audience’s applause. Suddenly it looked like they were in the wrong play, as if the whole stately tragedy they had dutifully rehearsed had somehow turned into a comedy full of twins and women dressed inexplicably as boys.

“Nothing,” said the troops shame-facedly as they returned from their search of the wagon. “No gold.”

Well, of course there wasn’t. Raines’s gold was nowhere near here. It had been liberated via the back entrance by Mithos, Orgos and Lisha while Raines slept upstairs, and I kept the illiterate door keeper busy at the front. By now it was heading to the other side of the city along with everything we owned from the inn. Assuming we got through the next few minutes, we’d be living elsewhere for a while. I said nothing and tried to look mildly interested.

“Gold?” said Garnet stupidly. “Don’t know anything about any gold.”

I glared at him. This was not the time for him to start dipping his toe into the noble thespian arts. That was my department.

“Personally,” I said, turning to the officer, “I’m offended that humble laborers like our good selves can’t go about their business without being falsely accused…”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the officer, waving me into silence. “No gold,” he said to Raines. “You said these people would have it. They don’t, but it’s still gone. Which makes me wonder if…”

“It was him,” said the door keeper, whose resentment had hardened into decision. He pointed at Raines, then took two long steps toward him, index finger still aimed like a crossbow, and prodded him squarely in the chest. “I knew there was something funny about the way he always insisted on doing the final cash count alone, the way he always kept two sets of books.”

The officer’s face tightened, and his eyebrows slid up into his hair. Raines stared at the doorkeeper in horrified disbelief. The look was as good as a confession.

“Two books?” said the officer.

“Oh yes,” said the doorkeeper. “There’s the one he has in the office which anyone can see, and the other he keeps under the loose floorboard in his bedroom, that he thinks no one knows about.”

There was another loaded silence. I was starting to like the doorkeeper. He wasn’t very clever, but he was a positive well of useful spite.

“Show them,” said the officer, nodding to the guards holding Raines. The doorkeeper led them inside.

“This is outrageous!” Raines protested, recovering some of his haughty righteousness with difficulty. “I am a respected citizen and a pillar of the community! For five years I have been a loyal servant of the Empire…”

“A long time to have been skimming profits,” I agreed conversationally.

His mask of innocent indignation slipped, and his eyes slid after the doorkeeper as if he had just realized he was no longer under guard. He moved quickly after them, shouting about the violation of his privacy and threatening various kinds of legal action if anyone “planted” anything.

That would be his defense. And somehow, we’d find ourselves in custody, “temporarily detained” until the facts of the matter had been made plain to the authorities… Except that by then they’d figure out we weren’t who we said we were, and then they’d start asking around, and all manner of things might come out about us and our activities, all of them—from the Empire’s insensitive and close-minded perspective—bad.

So, I went after Raines and the dog came after me. It was madness, but I had no choice. Renthrette tried to follow, but the officer, who had been momentarily caught off guard, had recovered in time to throw an arm across her path. Two of the Empire troopers quickly blocked the door, but I was already in, rushing after the spitting, cursing Raines, the great white hound at my heels.

The doorkeeper led the soldiers through the hot and smoky workshop and up a flight of timber steps to the living quarters above. They moved with hasty determination, men on a mission, and we came behind like the tail of a comet which was, for reasons I couldn’t begin to explain, extremely pissed off. By the time we reached the top of the stairs the door keeper was already on his hands and knees, prizing a floorboard free.

Raines bellowed his inarticulate fury, but the doorkeeper sat up grinning maliciously, a little leather-bound volume in his hands.

“Very interesting,” he said, flicking through the pages. For all his glee, he wasn’t really looking at the book, and I remembered that he couldn’t read.

“I’ll take that,” I said adopting my previous, officious manner.

He hesitated, uncertain, then held it out toward me. Raines lunged like a pouncing cat, snatched it and barreled back down the stairs. Being the closest to him, it was me who gave chase before the guards knew what was happening, me who leapt the last step and landed awkwardly on the workshop floor, and me who was the first to realize what he was doing as he reached the forge, wrapped a towel around his hand and yanked open a venting shutter in the steel smelter.

There was a great belching and a lance of pressurized fire shot out toward the stairs. I dived under it, rolling and falling badly on the stone flags as the jet stabbed at the guards. The second soldier shrunk back, but the one at the front was less fortunate: the flame caught him squarely in the chest. As he twisted away, screaming, his cloak became a torch which filled the stair well with a sheet of fire. By the uneven blaze of the firelight, I saw Raines turn to the front door where more guards were fighting their way in, saw the calculation in his eyes, as he reached for another of the great shutters on the smelter and heaved it open.

There was another roar as the vent clanged open, another tongue of flame flicking out like some caged beast testing its new freedom. The guards hesitated, and Raines moved to the great bellows and began to pump. The flame creature at the heart of the smelter roiled and swelled, spewing white-hot heat from the open vents. I felt my eyebrows crinkle and singe, smelled burning hair over the hot wood and metal, and I shrunk away from the furnace, half closing my eyes.

He turned back to the stairs, assessing his options. One guard had dragged his burning comrade back up to the door keeper in the bedroom, but the staircase itself was already on fire. There was no way in or out that way.

Raines pushed the shutter facing that way closed, then gave another yank on the bellows. The jet of fire blasting toward the front was bigger, longer, more intense than ever. The guards ducked back, and in that instant he made his move, thrusting the incriminating book into the heart of the furnace, then ducking behind the smelter and heading for the back, the very door through which Lisha and the others had liberated his gold not so very long ago.

I knew they would be long gone, knew that Garnet and Renthrette couldn’t reach me from the front, knew that with the fire raging untended, the building wouldn’t last much longer. The air was dense with hot smoke. Even as I watched it thickened like fog so that the inferno at the heart of the smelter only showed in occasional flashes of orange. My breathing was thin and ragged. If I waited much longer, I wouldn’t be able to walk, even if I could find my way out.

But Raines would be waiting. I was the only person who could stop him getting away, and I had made an impression. He wouldn’t leave before he was sure I couldn’t go after him.

I sucked in air, coughed half of it out again, spitting, lightheaded, then forced myself as close to upright as I could manage. Face half buried in the crook of my left arm, right arm held fumblingly in front of me, I slunk around the smelter. Navigating as much by the feel of heat on my skin as by sight, tripping on tools and jarred by the edge of work benches, knowing that the smoke was getting to me, that I was getting weak and unsteady, I blundered toward the back of the shop.

The fire was spreading now. It rolled and rumbled low and purposeful all around me and the air had turned sour. Soot and cinders swirled around the cramped workshop, burning the skin of my arms and neck, but I peered through the gloom and could see the back door only yards in front of me.

But no Raines.

And then I realized. I spun on the spot to face the smelter and there he was, behind me, his hands on the remaining vent shutter, poised to send a fiery blast right at me. I couldn’t move, couldn’t get out. He knew it too, and something mad and vengeful flashed in his eyes, bright as the firestorm at the heart of the furnace.

Then something else was moving, something big and fast, something whose white fur smoked and kindled as it leapt like it had emerged from the smelter itself; a beast which drooled molten metal, a hell hound whose eyes—even in the crimson and amber of the fire light, burned blue.

Durnok.

The dog pounced, slamming into Raines and throwing him back against the smelter. He shouted in surprise, and I heard the hiss of skin against the smoking heat of the steel, but by then the smoke had forced the air from my lungs and I collapsed, wheezing, gasping, feeling the fire in my chest as if I had swallowed it. The world went dark.

And then, somewhat against my recent run of fortune, it went light again. And cool. I was on my back, and I was, improbably, alive. I rolled, gathered myself onto my knees and retched, hacking and spitting black slime onto the ground.

“Classy,” said Renthrette. “These theatre types are such sophisticates, don’t you think, Garnet?”

Garnet’s face swam into view, and he gave me an appraising look.

“A study in elegance,” he remarked.

I sat up, a rope of gray drool trailing across my chest.

“I’m alive,” I said. “Unless you two idiots are my special hell, which is not beyond the realm of possibility.”

“You’re alive,” Renthrette confirmed.

“I got out!” I gasped. “How did I…?”

But Renthrette’s broad and knowing grin told me all I needed to know. As if to make the point, a wet muzzle thrust itself into my face and licked me.

“The bloody dog,” I said, trying to escape and failing. “The dog saved my life and pulled me from the forge before the building collapsed.”

“Correct,” said Garnet, matching his sister’s grin.

“And his fur got singed,” said Renthrette in her talking-to-a-baby voice, “and will take weeks to grow back properly just to save smelly old Will. Isn’t that right, Durnok? Isn’t it? Aren’t you a brave boy?”

“Is there another burning building someone can put me in?” I asked.

“There is not,” said Garnet.

“And are we under arrest?”

“We are not.”

I sat up, putting one hand gingerly around the great hound’s head in a way which was supposed to be friendly, and checking the street for any sign of the Empire soldiers. The forge was a blackened ruin, and the officer and his men were all gone.

“And are we…” I ventured, “by any chance, a bit richer than we were yesterday?”

Orgos loomed over me, lowered his face toward mine, and whispered.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “we are.”

“Yeah?” I said.

Lisha squatted beside me and grinned at Mithos.

“Yeah,” she said.

I sat up, braced myself, and turned to the great hound.

“Who’s a good boy, Durnok?” I said, matching Renthrette’s tone. I ruffled the dog’s fur and his tail thumped rhythmically against my leg. “Who’s a good boy? That’s right. You are.”

A.J. Hartley is the bestselling writer of mystery/thriller, fantasy, historical fiction, and young adult novels.

Look for more Will Hawthorne short stories and check out A.J. Hartley’s full-length adventures in Act of Will and Will Power. His most recent novel is Burning Shakespeare.

Visit https://ajhartley.net for more information.