He gave a shiver. A cloud had come across the sun again and cast the muddy valley into shadow.

The Dragon’s Hoard

It was cold, but the lethal sting was off the air. The snow was melting fast, chill water dripping from the eaves, filthy tracks of stomped-up slush down the pavements, dirty slop gurgling in the gutters. The queues were already long outside the bakery and the coal merchant, bundled-up Citizens ready to fight to the death for whatever had leaked into the city overnight. At the street corner a district crier cheerfully called out the names of yesterday’s denounced. Most likely he’d be at it a while.

“They found the manager, then?” Tallow gave a long sniff as he looked up at the bank. Before the Great Change, Valint and Balk had towered over every scrap of business done in the Union, an untouchable colossus. Now the marble skin had been stripped from the pillars of its headquarters to show the cheap bricks beneath, the word Usurers slopped in red paint a thousand thousand times, all over the ruined façade.

The banking hall had been picked clean. Chill and empty but for broken furniture, torn papers, two or three dozen frowning Constables and dust. Commissioner Pike stood gazing up at the giant vault door, its brass wheel, its two tiny keyholes, no more than a few bright scratches on its black surface for all the efforts of the People’s Inspectorate to get inside.

“You found the manager, then?” asked Vick.

Pike glanced over as she strode up. “Thanks to your efforts, in fact. Once that cellar in the Three Farms was shut down there was no one to bring him food. An old woman heard him singing and alerted the authorities.”

“Singing?”

“He had bricked himself into a secret space between two slum tenements owned by the bank. He had been hiding there for weeks.” Almost as uncomfortable as having Bremer dan Gorst wedged into her tiny apartment, she imagined. “He appears to have gone quite mad.”

Vick resisted the urge to ask who hadn’t.

“But he did have this.” Pike held up a long steel key and offered her another. The one the senior over-clerk for loans had given her the day she broke into the bank with an unloaded cannon. “Perhaps you might help me do the honours?”

She looked up at the towering door, feeling the need for something more momentous than the turning of a little rod of metal. But that’s how locks open. She slid the key into one of the keyholes and looked across at Pike as he did the same.

“On three,” she said, “I suppose.”

“Whyever not? One, two, three.” They turned the keys together with a gentle click. “Constable?”

The biggest man to hand gripped the wheel, dipped his shoulder and began to turn it. There was a whirring of well-oiled gears, then an answering clatter, faint, from within, and the door began to edge smoothly open.

Vick had never been that interested in money. But even she couldn’t help a shiver at the thought of what might be beyond that mighty thickness of steel. Her imagination spun out heaps of gleaming coins, chests of gemstones, jewelled swords, ivory drinking horns. Incense and pearls, silks and resins, too, why not? Sculpted relics of the Old Empire, lost works by Aropella, deeds to whole countries, the Master Maker’s private diaries. The plunder of a barbarian army and the profits of a city of merchant princes combined.