“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.