Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 465 of 619

The caller ring arrived. Both brothers were linked, the lodge was full, the vault was deep. But Ajax could not say how deep. He called Aldric to the vault at dawn to learn what he truly held. Aldric came with his ledger under his arm. He had grown gray at the temples in Ajax's service, and he read the vault the way he read old scrolls, slow and exact. Grayson opened the iron door with his key while Ajax turned his own. The two locks clacked. Cold air rose from the shaft cut past the spring into dry rock. Aldric climbed down first with a lamp. Ajax followed. Crates of northern silver lined one wall. Gold bars stacked another. Coin filled two sealed chests. Aldric ran his finger along each row and counted under his breath. "Nearly full," he said at last. He tapped a crate near the ceiling. "Two ship runs more and we breach the top. There's no floor left to cut. The spring sits below us." Ajax looked at the stacked bars. He had chased coin for a year. Now the coin was the problem. "How much room?" "A season. Maybe two if the runs stay half-empty." Aldric shut the ledger. "Silver you can't store is silver you must move. Sit on it and it rots your walls the way grain rots a store." They climbed out. Tucker waited in the yard, two gold chains catching the light, chewing a stem of grass. He had heard Ajax was counting. "You've got more metal than the port sees in a year," Tucker said. "And nowhere to put the next load." "Then we spend it," Ajax said. "Steel. Grain. Men." "You've got thirty men and three winters of grain," Aldric said. "Spend it wrong and you buy attention you don't want." Ajax found Chalam in the workhouse. The wizard sorted chalk into his satchel, robe open at the chest. Ajax asked him plain. "Can you cut a second vault? Deeper, or wider, past the spring?" Chalam shook his head. "The spring runs under the whole hill. We can double the size if we don’t cut toward the spring. The water will stay out of the vault with no danger.” Ajax stood between the three of them. The vault was near full. Aldric opened his ledger and began to write. Bran was called, Chalam cut stone, and in three days, the vault was doubled.