Bram Orvyn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Bram Orvyn knelt at the bottom of his vault and knew it would never fit him. The cellar under his lakeside lodge held his gold, stacked in tight rows he counted twice a day. But the ceiling brushed his shoulders when he stood. As a man, he managed. As what he truly was, he could not curl even a wing here. Bram wanted one thing before the frost came: a pit deep enough to hold a dragon at rest, buried under coin, warm and hidden from every neighbor who bought his goods. The problem was the digging. He could not swing a pick for a week without someone noticing the dirt, the noise, the merchant who never hired help. And if he dug in his true shape, claws through stone, one open shutter would end everything. He had lived thirty years as a trader with scorched fingertips and eyes like banked coals. He would not lose it to a curious child at a window. On his workbench, his magpie hopped along the wood, a gold coin pinched in its beak. The bird dropped the coin into a crack in the floorboards and cocked its head at the dark below. "Not there," Bram muttered. But the bird had shown him the truth. The floor was thin. Under it, only earth, waiting. He needed a digger who asked nothing. That night he went down to the water and found the dwarf who slept in a lean-to past the boat sheds. Thorak Deepdelver had been driven out of his own tunnels; the town said he'd killed no one, only argued with the wrong elders. He sat sharpening a short pick, his black beard heavy with lake damp. "I have stone that needs moving," Bram said. "Underground. Quiet." Thorak did not look up. "Everyone's got secrets in a cellar. Coin buys my silence longer than my curiosity lasts." Bram set down a purse. Thorak weighed it in one thick hand, then bit a coin. "Real," the dwarf grunted. "When?" "Tonight. Every night after, until it's done." They worked while the lodge slept. Thorak read the rock like a page, striking where it split easiest. He carried out the spoil in sacks and dumped it in the lake shallows before dawn. By the third night the vault dropped twice its old depth. Bram stood in the new dark and finally felt space above his back. On the fourth night, Thorak stopped and held his lamp to the far wall. He pointed at the fresh cut with the pick. "That's not my dirt," he said. "That's dressed stone. Old. You didn't tell me you were digging into somebody's tunnel." Bram came close. Cold air breathed through a seam in the rock, air that smelled of deep places and iron. The vault was deep enough now. But the wall between his hoard and something buried under Windscour had just cracked open.