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“Perhaps the drake eats coin after all, though I beg your pardon for saying it.”
“Nonsense. Who searched Sekyw?”
“Myself, and then two others. We felt his clothes, he removed his boots—”
“Yes, I know the procedure. Perhaps he ate it. The fat would mask the sound of its clinking.”
The accountant bristled. “Never. There’s a magic on it. It’s death to swallow it—I’ve dusted the gold with powdered poison myself. He had no water to wash it with.”
“So you told me,” Djer said, looking at Auron in the back of the open wagon with a wounded expression.
Auron lifted his head. “My friend, I did not touch so much as a coin. And if I ate it, wouldn’t it have killed me, as well?”
“I never tested the formula on a dragon,” the accountant said.
“Send for Sekyw,” Djer ordered.
“I don’t mean to add to the mystery, but there’s sand on the floor,” Auron said, sniffing at a crevice between thick planks of the wagon bed.
“What’s that?”
“There’s sand on the floor of the wagon. Not much. A pinch or two. But it smells like the riverbank. It wasn’t there before. I know the smell of every crack in this cage by now.”
Dwarves began to gather, sensing something wrong. Sekyw came up, looking as bulky as ever.
“I wish we had weighed him before and after he rode with the money,” Djer muttered to Auron.
“Sir,” Sekyw said, rolling his eyes at the other dwarves, “I’m a dwarf of years of experience. I hold a position of trust with the Company. Am I to understand you think I took a few handfuls of coin? To what gain, at such risk? My pension is worth more. The dragon must have eaten it.”
“Only two have been alone with the money, you and the young skyking. I just wanted to have both of you present while I thought this through,” Djer said.
“Are you sure there is no error in the count?”
“None,” the accountant said.
Sekyw walked over to Auron, pointing with his stick. “Then it must be the dragon, as I was searched when I left the cart—”
Auron snorted.
“Quiet, please. I can’t think when you’re talking,” Djer said. “Shut up or I’ll cram that stick in your mouth. . . . Umta, did you check the stick?”
“Solid orewood,” the accountant dwarf said. “I felt it myself—it was no heavier when he left as when he went in.”
“There’s gold in it,” Auron said. “I can smell it.”
“Umta!” Djer said. “The stick!”
The dwarf called Umta swore and snatched the stick from Sekyw’s hand. He worked first the handle, then the tip, trying to open it.
“This is outrageous. That stick was a present from my master when I was just an apprentice. To my knowledge, it’s nothing but solid orewood.”
Djer went over to Umta and took up the stick. He cracked it across his leg, breaking it in two. Dirt flew in all directions.
“So it was hollow, and weighted with dirt. That proves nothing,” Sekyw said, but his face had grown pale.
Auron sniffed at the stick. “Empty the ground-end, Djer. On something clean.”
Djer poured the end of the stick out on the accountant’s tally sheet. A trickle of sand, golden against the other dirt, poured out.
