To Secure a Vault Part 2

Quick note- I changed the date of To Secure a Vault from a century before Mage Errant to forty years before. And sorry this one took so long, and had to be split into a two-parter- it took a LOT of science research to write, and I'm still not 100% that I got all the chemistry right. Not to mention the fact that it bloomed from a short story to a whole novella.

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It only took four days to fly to Corb’s Bet, despite being hundreds of leagues away. 

The messenger, Edsen, wasn’t just fast, but had absurdly large mana reservoirs as well. Thanks to his gravity magic, we were as much falling in the direction we wanted to go as we were flying.

Our actual route was fairly convoluted— we wanted to stick to mostly higher mana density regions, while avoiding the territories of great powers and dragon flights. A few times, we even risked flying over the Aito forest, just to follow the most up-to-date maps of mana density. 

Risky, but Tetragnath usually ignored isolated fliers over his woods, if they didn’t fly too low or cause trouble.

We didn’t get to visit Ctesia, but we did, at least, get to overnight at Helicote. There’s no strict border between Tetragnath’s part of the forest and Helicote’s part of the forest, but it was immediately obvious when we transitioned from one to the other.

Mostly because of the butterflies and flowers. There were more flowers in Helicote than any other city in the world— they were, I’ve been told, part of the lich’s ruler’s demesne. As a consequence of that, there are thousands of butterflies for every citizen of the city. The demesne’s enchantments kept the city warm even in winter, so the flowers and butterflies stayed year round.

Edsen clearly resented sitting still, even at one of the great cafe theaters of Helicote. Rather than a stage, the balcony seating overlooked a great fountain pool adjoining one of Helicote’s countless flower mazes. Fire and water illusionists sculpted the actors and the scenery entirely from flame and fountain water. It was quite a testament to their skill that it worked— live actors were preferred to illusionist companies in Helicote, thanks to the faint afterimages that trailed behind anything that moved in Helicote. It made most theatrical illusions impossible to follow, but the illusionist company tonight was clearly well-practiced in Helicote.

Edsen only threw up twice in Helicote— not too bad, for a first-time visitor. The shifting afterimages so common in the city can really mess with the eyes for some people. 

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There are dozens of powerful city states scattered about the eastern side of the continent, and hundreds of lesser ones, but no proper nations of note between Ctesia and Sica. 

Well, save for the Havath Dominion, but we steered well away from their territory. The expansionist empire might intend to reach the sea eventually, but their borders still fell well short of the shore.

Not as densely packed with cities as the lands near Tsarnassus and Alikea, of course, but the northeast corner of the continent has always been its most civilized region, even back to Ithonian times.

The land grew steadily drier and more arid to the south, interrupted only by the lazy Greywise River, stretching half a league in width, and the fertile lands around it. By the time we reached the Barren Range, the country was proper high desert, despite its proximity to the sea.

The natron fields of Corb’s Bet didn’t look like much from above. Just a particularly lumpy salt flat, with a single, bright blue wooden shack near the center. 

I’d expected the natron fields to smell unpleasant, but as we landed, I could only detect a faint whiff of salt, with a weak alchemical tinge.

It was brutally hot on the salt flat, and biting flies harassed us as we walked from the landing site to the beat-up shack. They were persistent enough to even get past Edsen’s wind magic, and their bites hurt almost as bad as a bee sting. 

Despite the beautiful blue paint job, the shack looked like it would collapse at any moment.  There wasn’t a floor inside. Instead, there was a deep open pit, with a staircase carved into the side, descending dozens of feet below.

The instant we descended below ground levels, we escaped the heat and the flies— there was a ward carved into the lip of the pit keeping both out.

The compacted natron of the stairs crunched beneath our feet as we descended, and every brush against the walls sent course powder running off the walls. The air felt unnaturally dry, even for the high desert.

“Lovely,” I muttered. “Edsen, no flying while we’re down here, you’ll send grit flying everywhere if you do.”

Edsen just sighed at that.

When we finally reached the base of the stairwell, there was only a single tunnel leading out. It was, at least, much cooler down here, and the walls appear to have been significantly better compacted than the stairwell down. 

I stopped at the bottom, took a deep breath, and channeled mana into my restrictor tattoo to relax it again. My affinity senses immediately shot outwards. I reigned them in quickly, but they’d grown to encompass nearly a league in diameter, revealing every single grain of gold nearby, every single coin, and there, glowing brilliantly in my senses, like staring into the sun, was the Corb’s Bet vault. 

It wasn’t even that much gold for a bank vault. 

I took a deep breath, then stopped the flow of mana into the tattoo on the back of my neck. My affinity senses quickly retracted again.

“This way,” I said, and set off down the tunnel.

“I don’t see another tunnel,” Edsen muttered.

I don't think he liked being underground much.

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We didn’t see anyone for a few dozen yards, until a bend in the tunnel took us into a wide-open cavern, three times the height of one of my sisters, and a few hundred feet across. Thick columns of natron were scattered about the cavern, holding up the roof, though I had no doubt that the town’s natron mages had hardened the natron around the cavern to the point where it was unnecessary. Homes and shops were carved into the natron walls around the outside, and food stands and market stalls littered the village. There was even a boxed garden for children to play in, surprisingly.

The whole scene was lit by the columns, which cast a gentle light over the whole scene. If I had to guess, there were glow crystals embedded inside the natron columns.

It was oddly beautiful for a mining town, but the people were just as rugged and tired looking as any other mining town I’d ever seen.

And every single person in the town square, of course, was staring at us suspiciously.

Mining towns were notoriously less friendly to strangers than most villages.

I set out immediately towards the nearest food stand, sliding onto a natron bench at the natron counter.

Part of me vaguely wondered if even the toilets were made of natron here.

Or…

Hmm. I had no idea how toilets would even work in a town carved under a salt flat would work. Should definitely look into that, toilets were often a huge flaw in security.

The suspicious gazes eased up a bit as I ordered noodles for Edsen and myself, though not entirely. I imagine that if I’d been alone, there would have been far fewer looks- middle aged women like myself are absolutely invisible while doing mundane things like ordering food. 

Really, I’m shocked that more middle aged women haven’t taken up lives of crime. No one ever suspects us of anything.

“What brings you into town?” the cook asked.

I watched her scrape some natron off one of her counters with a rasp, then dump it into the noodle pot.

“I’m a security consultant down from Tsarnassus,” I offered. “Your bank sent a message to my bank, flew down here.”

The cook stopped what she was doing. “You’re the consultant? We only sent that message ten days ago. How…?”

No surprise she knew about me. Everyone knows everything in a town this small.

I shrugged. “Message got picked up by one of the gryphon relays, got to us quick, then this one flew us down here in just four days. Seems some important people took a liking to your town.”

“I’ll show you to the bank after you eat,” the woman said.

Edsen seemed twitchy and uncomfortable underground, which was common enough among flying mages, but he seemed to relax a bit once their food arrived and he had eating to focus on instead. I idly noted the unusual taste of the noodles— the natron definitely had a distinct taste from regular salt, but I wasn’t sure if I could precisely articulate said difference. 

I wasn’t paying much attention to the noodles, though.

No, my attention was on the thin cloud of gold dust I was levitating through the caverns of Corb’s Bet.

The individual grains of gold were minuscule, and I was keeping the individual grains far apart from one another, and running along either the floor or ceiling, so it was unlikely that anyone would notice them. 

Not many mages could manipulate individual particles of their affinity material anywhere as dexterously as I could. I’d never heard of another who could manipulate a whole particulate swarm even a quarter as gracefully as I could, not even among great powers.

Every time a single grain of gold impacted a wall or a column, I could feel it, and I rapidly began mapping out hallways and rooms by sticking bits of gold to the walls, floors, and ceilings. I had several pounds of gold dust hidden throughout my clothing, and even some under my skin for emergencies, though I was loathe to remove the last except in emergencies. I wouldn’t need to, though— it wouldn’t even take a fifth of my gold dust to map the entire town and its mines, if I wanted to. A little gold goes a long way for me.

As I mapped more and more of Corb’s Bet with gold dust, I had to weaken my restrictor tattoo even more. 

Restrictor tattoos were obscure and largely forgotten by most people these days. They’d been a failed attempt by post-Ithonian warlords to find ways to subjugate their populaces by removing their magic. A miserable failure, at that— the amount of mana it took to disrupt them was laughably small, a tiny fraction of what it took to cast basic cantrips. No amount of clever design seemed able to make them more than a minor annoyance— most likely because no one was actually entirely sure how affinity senses actually worked. 

They’d quickly become a deeply obscure footnote in the messy, incomplete histories of those chaotic, awful decades. When my affinity manifested, it was sheer luck that one of the bank scholars, an older Child of the Vault, had been researching methods of trying to make bank vaults opaque to affinity senses, and had found mention of the restrictor tattoos in his research. Just a few footnotes, but enough to reverse engineer the principles.

I barely remember the weeks after my affinities manifested. The first week or so had been fine, and my adoptive parents had been quite excited for me— banks were one of the very few places that considered gold affinities actually useful. 

My affinity senses, unfortunately, had just kept growing and growing. By the end of the second week, I’d been trapped in bed with an endless migraine, feeling every single gold coin across a sizable chunk of Tsarnassus city. Each and every one burned to look at with my affinity senses, like staring into the sun.

By the time they’d tattooed the restrictor tattoo onto the back of my neck, the healers were keeping me in an artificial coma. I don’t know what sort of life I would have had without my tattoo— at best, I might have lived the life of an invalid, in some deep desert with no one around for miles, relying on drugs to suppress the pain whenever a trade caravan came within leagues of me.  

Once I had the restrictor tattoo, however…

Well, my mana reservoirs weren’t anything to brag about— about the size of an average battle mage, maybe. 

But my affinity senses? They were, almost without question, more sensitive than any other living mage with any affinity on the continent, great powers, seers, and storm mages excluded. Recruiters from two dozen great powers and cities tried to buy my loyalty, though I had never wanted to work anywhere but the banks. For that matter, there was a rather heated competition among the various bank departments for me— rumor has it there were even a couple of fist fights. There were still bank officials who resented me choosing to go into vault testing and design.

It was all rather enough to go to one’s head, really. 

Of course, there was one big factor keeping my ego in check.

I could only ever be the second best gold mage on the continent. 

There was no competing with Dorsas Ine. 

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By the time we’d finished eating, I’d mapped the entirety of the town. The gold dust was embedded into the walls, ceiling, and floor, not to mention the furniture. Individual grains were tucked into shoes and clothing seams, and I was tracking the movement of everyone in the city at once. 

I’d also mapped the entirety of the town’s steel vault— not with my own gold, but with the gold already inside the vault. I’d counted every coin, and mapped out the internal structure of the vault with the gold dust already in there. (Pile up a bunch of coins, some is always going to get scraped off.)

I even mapped out their wards. I wasn’t sure anyone but me was sensitive enough to feel it, but material-specific wards had an impact on their targeted materials even before they crossed the ward boundaries, even for mere alarm wards. After this many years of practice, I could actively figure out not only the shape of a vault’s gold wards, but even their function and weaknesses.

I could have robbed their vault in minutes if I’d wanted.

So I did.

Just of a single coin, though, which I guided through a flaw in the wards. I crumpled the coin into dust, and piloted said dust through just the smallest crevice in the vault door hinges. Then I reassembled the coin out of its constituent gold dust. Only the most dedicated anti-forging inspectors at a major bank would have noticed something wrong with it, and, since it was actually even purer gold than when it started, I doubt they’d care.

I didn’t keep the coin, of course— I tossed to the bank manager when I entered his office, just to prove a point. 

“You have a thousand and thirteen Lothalan blanks in your vault; twelve hundred and twenty-three Highvale Crowns; seven hundred and nine Tsarnassan fullweights; two hundred and eleven Tsarnassan halfweights; four hundred and nine assorted coins from various city-states; and nine thousand, four hundred and thirty-two Sican falcons. Minus this one.”

The bank manager, who was also the town constable, gaped at me like a fish.

“We’ve only got a week or so to secure your vault against one of the most dangerous monsters alive,” I said. “Let’s get to work.

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The first solution I offered was, sadly, rejected out of hand. I knew it would be, but I had to try.

People tend to envision bank vaults as larger than they really are. Sure, some of the more important ones are huge, house-sized affairs filled with gold bars and precious jewels and the like, but a little gold went a long way. 

Gold was heavy, and even the largest gold coins were small affairs. You could fit the entirety of Corb’s Bet’s fortunes into surprisingly small travel bag. It would rather hard to carry, though— it would weigh as much as a large man.

The Corb’s Bet vault itself was the size of a walk-in closet, and most of that space was wasted.

So my solution was simple enough— remove the gold, ride like hell across the mountain passes to the nearest Sican treetown with a decent sized bank, exchange the gold for bank script. Or even silver. It might be pricier than gold, but the exchange rate wasn’t awful.

Dorsas Ine doesn’t care about silver, jewels, or anything but gold. If the town removed the gold, he’d just pass it by entirely.

The miners, of course, refused this perfectly good plan entirely out of hand. I’m sure they valued their reasons highly. Independent-minded frontier folk wanting to get away from claustrophobic, rigid Sican society, worked hard to keep their independence, not going to sell out their dreams, blah blah blah.

Look, I definitely get having pride in your accomplishments, but frontier folk always forget one important fact— frontiers are ephemeral things. Civilizations, cities- they ebb and flow over the centuries, like waves in a bathtub. A frontier today will be cosmopolitan tomorrow, and a ruin destroyed by the great powers the next day.

So the simplest, best solution was out of the question, and no one else in the region other than Sica could exchange this much gold on such short notice, or secure it reliably against Dorsas Ine.

So I abandoned that plan.

I made the natron miners sign papers agreeing that they’d rejected that suggestion, though. In triplicate. They got a copy, I got a copy, the head branch got a copy when I returned. 

Look, it’s important to make sure everything is documented when you’re in my line of work, else people are going to start trying to accuse you of going from being a security consultant to a, well, self-employed bank robber. 

Not trouble I wanted. So signed and documented paperwork for everything.

(Of course, said paperwork is a security risk of its own, and honestly should be guarded within the vault it described. Which I note over and over in the paperwork, and even make bankers sign a legal agreement to do so, and yet it’s depressingly common for the papers to still end up in a random desk somewhere. Or taken home by accident by a random clerk. Ugh.)

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The second solution proposed wasn’t mine. It was, instead, proposed by the bank manager/ town constable.

He thought we should try to kill Dorsas Ine.

I made him sign paperwork in triplicate detailing how big of an idiot he was, how many times he’d been dropped on his head as a child by his mother, how many times she’d been dropped on her head by her mother, and so on and so forth back five generations. 

That’s not hyperbole at all. I actually made him sign the papers in triplicate, and detailed insults about his ancestry are on file at the Tsarnassus head branch now. We stopped at five generations because that’s as far back as he knew his ancestors’ names. 

(Oh, and you might have thought that if the signed paperwork was a security risk, wasn’t it a risk for me to keep copies? Well, rest your fears— I keep them in my own personal vault, which I won’t tell you anything about. Let’s just say I’m quite confident about its security.)

Don’t piss off great powers by trying to kill them. Especially not gargantuan phoenixes armored in a small mountain of molten gold. We would have failed, and everyone in Corb’s Bet would have died.

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The third solution was brilliant. Genius, even. Some of the best work I’ve ever done.

It’s just too bad it failed completely.

I’m still mad about that. It definitely should have worked. In literally any other town in the world, it would have worked.

But we’ll get to it later, because it took most of a week for Corb’s Bet’s alchemists to ready the necessary materials for the plan. Exotic acids aren’t exactly something most alchemists keep lying around in large quantities, despite fictional portrayals of them, and the one we needed was esoteric indeed.

And, worse, we had to manufacture it in secret.

So I’ll talk about the other ideas we tried first.

Of course, there were other things going on in that week other than attempts to secure the miners’ tiny vault. I managed to exhaust every one of the limited culinary options in the mining town, I bored myself to tears looking for any sort of entertainment other than the truly vile alcohol the miners drank in absurd quantities, and I had a fling with Edsen.

Sure, the aspiring Thunderbringer was half my age, and really didn’t have much he liked to talk about beyond mind-numbing discussions of flying at high speeds, but look, I was bored. Really, really bored. I might not respect most wealthy people, but I had to admit that I’d picked up a taste for the finer things in life from them. Which included a bit of good old fashioned debauchery.

And, sure, I was filthy rich by any reasonable standards, but I earned that money fair and square. No extorting brutal rents from slum dwellers, hoarding basic foodstuffs to drive up prices, or forcing workers into inescapable debt spirals.

Just clean, honest bank robbery.

…Alright, vault security tests that banks specifically hire me for, not really bank robbery, but it’s more fun calling myself a bank robber.

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The fourth solution we tried was old and creaky. So rusty I doubted there was any real iron still in it anywhere. Bankers have been using this one for so long that it’s standard for heists to have a mage specifically to counteract this trick by default- which, in turn, has lead to banks not even using this trick often anymore, it’s so old.

Using it against Dorsas Ine, however? It was inspired, really.

Here’s the thing: there was absolutely no brute force method we could use to keep Dorsas Ine’s talons off the miner’s gold. He’s just too powerful. So we needed to come up with some clever way to make it more effort than it was worth for the gold phoenix to steal their gold. To slow him down, somehow.

Quicksilver was the seemingly perfect tool for the job.

The silvery liquid metal is a nasty, nasty substance. Highly poisonous, stays in your system forever, does some real nasty stuff to you over time. Your skin falls apart in horrible ways, you get the shakes, you start drooling and sweating uncontrollably, etc, etc. No fun. Some idiots with quicksilver affinities tried to become battle mages, and they all died of quicksilver poisoning within a few horrible years. If you had a quicksilver affinity, your only real job options were ones where you were as careful as possible with the stuff. Or jobs where you just didn’t use your quicksilver affinity at all.

Despite all that horribleness, just about every alchemy lab has plenty on hand. It’s useful in an absurd number of alchemical reactions and formulas, and while it was best to have a quicksilver mage to manipulate it, it could also be manipulated with force, gravity, and plenty of other affinities applied creatively.

Quicksilver has one particular trait that I cared about:

It eats other metals.

Drip some quicksilver on some clean iron, or copper, and the quicksilver starts soaking into it, merging with the other metal, eventually forming an amalgam with properties different than quicksilver or the host metal. And that amalgam can’t be easily manipulated by quicksilver mages or the mages for the other metal.

Tarnish can keep the quicksilver out, but there are tarnish cleaning cantrips for most metals, so that’s not a problem.

Best of all for our purposes? 

Quicksilver absolutely loves to eat gold. 

It might seem foolish to use something as dangerous as quicksilver for this purpose, but, unfortunately, there aren’t many substances gold will react with, save for alloying it with other metals. Gold is often called the royal metal by alchemists— not for its value, but for its refusal to mingle with most materials. Pure gold doesn’t even tarnish. There are, unfortunately, remarkably few alchemical reactions involving gold. Which actually gives it value of its own to alchemists— inert materials are vital to shield alchemists from all the nasty substances they work with. 

We could have also used fool’s silver instead of quicksilver— it ate metal more slowly than quicksilver, but the end result was the same. Even better, fool’s silver wasn’t toxic like quicksilver.

Unfortunately there aren’t many uses for fool’s silver, despite its remarkable similarity to quicksilver. The alchemists of Corb’s Bet didn’t have any on hand.

So the fourth idea was simple— feed all the gold to quicksilver, create an amalgam that Dorsas Ine can’t do anything with. 

Removing the gold from the amalgam was simple enough, but it was exhausting, time consuming work— a quicksilver mage and a gold mage together could separate the two materials with work. It would take a couple weeks, but it was straightforward enough.

Dorsas Ine, for all his city-destroying might, couldn’t magically separate even the smallest quantity of gold-quicksilver amalgam. He’d likely just ignore Corb’s Bet entirely.

I was, at the time, oddly baffled that no one seemed to have thought to use quicksilver mages to fight the phoenix before.

It was one of the phoenix’s odd quirks that he only destroyed cities for fighting him— passive, petty resistance like this he largely ignored. Like the majority of other phoenixes, he spent the vast majority of time dormant, storing up mana to keep his fires lit, and he simply couldn’t be bothered with little tricks like a town trading all its gold for silver.

Of course, he also mainly targeted cities large enough that trying to exchange away all their gold for silver would cause economic chaos— and then he simply sat in said city and collected tax revenue until their economy collapsed entirely. For small towns like Corb’s Bet? He simply yanked all their gold into the sky as he flew past.

The quicksilver plan started to fall apart before we’d even made any amalgam.

The miners, unfortunately, didn’t have a gold mage of their own, and the one of their alchemists with a quicksilver affinity never used it, and so had a truly runty and underdeveloped quicksilver mana reservoir. It would take months instead of weeks for even a gold mage as powerful as myself to work with him to separate the amalgam— the process was limited by the speed of the weakest mage involved.

And there was absolutely no way I would stay in Corb’s Bet for months.

So we delved into the alchemist texts to try and find a non-magical means of separating the amalgam. There was just about always a non-magical means of replicating any alchemical procedure. Half the time, the non-magical route was easier and more effective than the magical route, in fact. Some of the greatest alchemists of all time had hardly even been mages.

And, well, we certainly found the non-magical means. It was, in fact, much easier than the magical means.

You just had to heat the amalgam until the quicksilver vaporized.

It didn’t even have to get that hot. A slightly hotter-than-usual campfire would do the trick— the most mediocre of fire mages could do the job with ease.

In retrospect, it’s clear why I’d never had to worry about that method in my line of work. Vaporizing quicksilver inside a bank vault is a surefire way for thieves to give themselves a horrific case of quicksilver poisoning. 

The main use for quicksilver amalgam, however, wasn’t bank security. It was in gold mining. Thanks to gold’s royal temperament, most methods of extracting metal from ores weren’t well suited to gold. Adding quicksilver to powdered gold ore was a simple, if highly toxic, way to do it. (There are other methods that include nasty acids and other alchemical solutions that are even worse.) 

Then the miners get the amalgam out of the gold by heating it.

Really, bank security and bank robbers are just about the only ones who used the magical means of separating a gold-quicksilver amalgam. So I just feel a bit silly now, but at the time, I felt like an idiot.

I was tempted not to document this attempt, but I did. I documented and signed it in triplicate, gave a copy to the Corb’s Bet constable, and feelt like a fool. I document EVERYTHING.

Because, after all, Dorsas Ine was a phoenix. His flames were hot enough to melt steel with ease. Amalgam wouldn’t even slow him down, and I imagine he easily has means of dealing with quicksilver fumes. He is, after all, a great power.

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The fifth solution was proposed, by all people, by Edsen. 

I was surprised as anyone by that. I didn’t think he had the slightest interest in anything other than flying really fast— he’d spent most of the days while I was working zooming around at high speeds over the salt flat, trailing shockwaves of natron dust.

But a good leader of a heist crew— or the security equivalent— listens carefully to suggestions from all their team members. It’s a job that requires far more creative thinking than any one person can accomplish, even me. 

One of Edsen’s friends in the high-speed flight community came from a family of jewelers, and he’d been telling Edsen about some cleaner method of processing gold, one that involved, of all things, glass. 

Essentially, you put powdered gold ore into a crucible with shards of glass, then cooked it up. As the glass melted, it started absorbing all the assorted minerals and metals in the gold ore— except for the gold itself. Gold’s royal temperament does the purification work for the miners in it— it refuses to become part of the glass, unlike everything else in the mixture.

Unfortunately, there are alchemical and economic reasons that process can’t entirely replace the more toxic gold purification processes, more’s the pity. Probably why I hadn’t heard about it yet.

Or maybe I just had been doing a sloppy job of keeping up with recent scholarship in gold magic, but in my defense, bank robbery was a field that rewarded breadth of knowledge over depth of knowledge, more often than not. There were a lot of fields of magical scholarship I had to keep up with, and I spent several days every week doing nothing but learning new things from far-ranging fields of study.

I had already known about a similar process using lead instead of glass known as cupellation, but, well… heating lead has its own health risks, really.

There was, unfortunately, one crippling problem with Edsen’s suggestion.

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Namely, there was nothing to it beyond telling me about that new gold purification method. He was just trying to be helpful, in his eager-puppy sort of way.

Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to learn about it— new knowledge of gold was always useful to gold mages— but the method wouldn’t achieve anything other than making Dorsas Ine’s job even easier.

Give Edsen credit for trying, though. It was nowhere near as bad a suggestion as trying to fight one of the deadliest beings on the continent. I still documented it and signed it in triplicate, and did my best to make Edsen look good, while still being honest.

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Edsen’s proposed solution did give me a potential line of research, though. I spent the next few days, while the alchemists readied my most brilliant solution, researching methods of gold purification used in mining. I was hoping for, I don’t know, some way to reverse the purification process.

Most of the methods I found were variations on ones that I’ve already mentioned, but I did find a couple of unique ones. One uses lightning mages, and is quite the bizarre process. The other, however, uses an alchemical eutectic- a substance that lowers the melting point of other substances— to make melting gold in cupellation cheaper and easier. And that alchemical eutectic— a soft, powdery white crystalline substance— was most easily found in dried lake beds— seasonal or permanently dried up.

Remarkably enough, the eutectic in question was found in small quantities in the salt flats of Corb’s Bet, and the town alchemists had quite a bit stocked up.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a single cracked idea for how to use one of the purification methods against Dorsas Ine. 

In between my research and my fling with Edsen, though, I found myself fiddling with my restrictor tattoo more and more, watching for Dorsas Ine.

I never pumped enough mana into my tattoo to relax it fully and let my affinity sense reach its full power— not once in my adult life have I risked that. I have no idea what the upper range of my affinity sense is.

But I found myself stretching out my affinity sense farther and farther each day, battling through headaches to peer in the direction of Dorsas Ine, to check and see if he was moving.

I didn’t even have to deactivate my tattoo halfway to spot the phoenix. Even over thirty leagues away, the small mountain of gold wrapped around him shone brighter to my affinity sense than the sun did to my eyes.

And every day, I could feel it getting hotter and hotter, closer to melting entirely.

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There were only a handful of days left before Dorsas Ine’s armor melted fully and he started to move again by the time the third proposed solution was ready to test. 

I was so proud of it, and it should never have failed as it did.

Like quicksilver amalgam, it was inspired by a vault security technique. This one was even more dangerous, though.

Not because of the alchemy side of things, though. Well, actually, the alchemy side of things was horribly dangerous. It involved the brewing of a truly nasty acid, known as royal solvent, out of two other acids. One of the two others was relatively safe, so much as flesh-melting acids could be safe— it was just a more concentrated version of the acid found in human stomachs. 

The other constituent acid in royal solvent was far, far nastier, could be absorbed through your skin, and could poison you and make you horribly sick. Royal solvent was also FAR from something you wanted to get in or on you.

For all of royal solvent’s nastiness, it had a property that was absolutely perfect for us.

Gold was soluble in it. 

It was, so far as alchemists knew, the absolute only liquid gold was soluble in, outside molten metals like quicksilver. Gold would basically ignore both constituent acids, but drop it into royal solvent, and it dissolves, turning the whole thing into an ugly brown liquid visually indistinguishable from muddy water.

It was only of moderate difficulty to actually manufacture— nowhere near as difficult as, say, the mana-reactive alchemical products used in enchanting. (All of which are among the most horribly toxic substances known.) The reason it had taken so long to manufacture, however, was due to the fact that most alchemists made it as difficult as humanly possible to manufacture it in their labs.

The real danger of royal solvent wasn’t what it would do to flesh.

No, the real danger was Dorsas Ine. 

Unlike quicksilver amalgam, gold couldn’t be easily retrieved from royal solvent via heat. It takes painstaking alchemical processes to free it from the royal solvent. 

Royal solvent was, in essence, the perfect weapon against Dorsas Ine.

So he annihilated any alchemist who dared manufacture it. Then he annihilated their families, their friends, and their entire cities. He’d killed half a dozen great powers for daring to manufacture it as a weapon against him.

Outside of Tsarnassus, Sica, Skyhold, and a handful of other well-defended locations, it wasn’t safe to manufacture royal solvent, and even those strongholds avoided manufacturing it in any significant amounts. Whether or not they could drive the phoenix off, there was no question that huge chunks of their territory would be lost.

So the alchemists of Corb’s Bet manufacturing it only thirty-odd leagues away from Dorsas Ine? 

It was absolute insanity. 

The only way it was even remotely safe was to compartmentalize it. The various necessary reagents and precursors were prepared by different alchemists, none of them knowing what they were for— I had them fulfilling dozens of seemingly inexplicable alchemical requests, after all. Then, the royal solvent was manufactured by just a single senior alchemist who well understood the horrible consequences if word of it ever reached Dorsas Ine.

Convincing the senior alchemist to help was what took most of the week to accomplish— the actual manufacturing of the royal solvent only took a fraction of the time.

The senior alchemist then passed it on to Edsen, who secretly levitated the sealed glass containers to our test site. He then left, leaving only me and one of Corb’s Bet’s natron mages, alone and far out on the salt flats.

The plan was convoluted and dangerous, and it absolutely had to be compartmentalized to prevent any potential information leaks. I was the only one with the full picture, and the alchemist was the only other one who knew that royal solvent was involved. He had no idea what I intended to do with it, though.

That compartmentalization, in the end, was the downfall of my plan.

The plan was actually quite simple. I’d dissolve the gold in the royal solvent, then simply dump the royal solvent out onto the salt flat. It would percolate down through the soil, and the gold would be hidden, dissolved in the natron. The natron mage, meanwhile, was there to create a sealed, impermeable layer of natron— a box hidden within the salt flat, essentially, that the royal solvent wouldn’t be able to percolate down through.

Once she’d done so, the natron mage left, leaving me alone. I didn’t proceed until the grains of gold dust I’d hidden in her shoes and clothing reached the interior of the mining town, so that I had no witnesses.

I was, in essence, reversing the gold mining process. Putting the gold back in the ground. 

Dorsas Ine was an unstoppable force, but he didn’t mine his own gold. He needed civilization for that. The phoenix never paid a hint of attention to gold ore or gold mines. Of course, that was also in part because he recognized that if he started attacking gold mines, gold mining would become a FAR less economically attractive proposition. Dorsas Ine is a monster, not a fool.

And, once Dorsas Ine had moved on, the natron miners could turn into gold miners just once to get their gold back. And my gold purification research would have actually come in handy there. It would have been a hassle, but it would have worked fine, and I would have been more than willing to stay and oversee it. My affinity senses were sharp enough I could have guaranteed they wouldn’t have lost more than a single grain of gold dust.

So we did the test. Just with a single gold coin— a Tsarnassan fullweight. One of MY Tsarnassan fullweights, at that. 

I know I sound a bit frivolous at times, but I take my duties extremely seriously. I was there to protect the gold of Corb’s Bet, not perform dangerous experiments on it.

I mixed the gold coin into a vial of royal solvent. I stirred it with my magic until the coin dissolved completely and my gold magic couldn’t affect it anymore.

Then I dumped it on the ground.

And that, in the end, was where I failed.

It hit the ground, and didn’t soak in at all.

Instead, the royal solvent began to bubble, fizz, and hiss.

And, to my horror, my affinity sense started to pick up the gold from my coin on the ground again.

-----------------------------------------

It was the natron that beat my brilliant plan. That stupid, weird tasting salt.

I really should have spent more time researching natron, but I ignored it. It was just another source for wealth, so far as I was concerned, and a far less objectionable one to me than the way the wealthy and powerful exploit the weak.

Natron had one property that I should have known about. One property that senior alchemist could have told me about if he knew why I wanted the royal solvent.

Drakeshit, anyone in Corb’s Bet could have told me my plan could have worked, but I kept it from them all to protect them.

Natron is alkaline. It reacts with and denatures acids. It wasn’t perfect- not all of the gold precipitated back out, it was sloppy accidental alchemy duplicating a difficult and finicky process— but enough did that there would just be pure gold sitting around in the natron of the salt flat. Maybe with enough repeated treatments it would have worked, but it would have taken days we didn’t have anymore.

Taking the gold out of the salt flat wouldn’t work anymore, either. Moving any significant amount of gold at this point would probably attract Dorsas Ine’s attention this close. I was fairly sure my affinity sense range was better than his, but not enough to try and run with the gold this late in the game.

This is the part where the hero of a story thinks of a brilliant, last minute solution to their problem. Figures out a way to pull disparate elements of their story together, to win the day and beat the monster.

I’m not a storybook hero, though. I’m a middle aged woman who works for a bank. Admittedly, I’m a badass middle-aged woman who works in a bank, but… 

I couldn’t figure out anything else in time.

I failed.

I didn’t record this attempt. It was far too dangerous to write down what I’d done.

Edsen and I left, and from a distance, we watched the immense molten wings of Dorsas Ine pass over the salt flat.

The phoenix didn’t even slow down as all the gold of the town ripped its way out of the ground and joined his molten armor.

I found out later that only two residents of the mining town died— the constable, when the bank vault melted, and one fool who thought he could hide his gold from Dorsas Ine beneath his bed. It punched a hole through his bed and his torso without slowing down.

-----------------------------

My mission wasn’t a complete failure. Well, it was from the perspective of the natron miners, but I got better data on Dorsas Ine’s affinity sense range than anyone else had before.

All my gold dust I’d used to monitor Corb’s Bet while I was there, and my coinpurse? I scattered it all across the salt flat and the nearby Barren Range. Once Ine had passed by, I was able to map out precisely how much of it he’d torn from the ground.

He had an affinity sense radius of twenty-six leagues. 

My range is better, but pushing it that far puts me into crippling pain, and I can’t move around with it activated that much. Dorsas Ine, in contrast, flew almost as fast as Edsen. 

I wonder if Dorsas Ine knows the name Drysa of the Vault at all? And, if he does know my name, does he even care?

I’m not the greatest bank robber in the world. The most inventive, maybe, but…

I will never match up to Dorsas Ine.

----------------------------------------

After the phoenix was gone, Edsen and I flew back to Tsarnassus. We took our time, spent a few days in Helicote and Ctesia on the way, saw the sights. We both knew our little fling would end when we reached Tsarnassus city. It had been fun, but I didn’t see any future with a man twenty years my junior, and he… well, Edsen didn’t really see a future with anyone, I don’t think. His heart was fixed on the sky.

The pompous, arrogant banker was infuriated at my failure, of course. He’d wagered on my success to advance his career, and he took my failure as a personal insult, tried to have me fired.

He failed miserably. More, it turned out he’d failed to fill out much of the necessary paperwork to send me away on a mission. They might not have noticed his failures, if he hadn’t made such a stink and tried to get me fired. Instead, he found himself unceremoniously booted out of the bank, futilely claiming that he had filed the paperwork, while I got a nicer office.

Of course, I was too valuable to the bank to get fired over the failure to protect a single tiny vault in a nowhere mining town. I’d had far worse failures before without getting fired.

…I do have one confession to make, though never to my superiors. 

That annoying banker that tried to get me fired?

He actually had filed all the paperwork through the proper channels to send me on my mission to Corb’s Bet.

Remember how I delayed my trip to Corb’s Bet to gather supplies and send messages?

Those messages were all to other Children of the Vault, who quietly made sure all of the banker’s paperwork vanished before getting to their destinations. 

Even if I’d succeeded at protecting the natron miners’ little vault, I would have still tried to get him fired.

Us Children of the Vault have long memories. Every time the upper crust gets too many scions into management of a bank, things go badly for us. They start pushing us aside, and even maneuvering to end the adoption programs that recruit us. 

Because the only way for the wealthy to salve their consciences about the gross exploitation it requires for most of them to reach the upper crust of society?

It’s to pretend that poverty is a disease carried in the blood of the poor. To pretend that being orphaned or abandoned is a moral failure. Some of them, like the nasty little banker I’d displaced, use that self-delusion to despise us. Others wrap it in layers of charity, and use gifts to the poor to feel better about themselves without actually changing anything. 

The very presence of the Children of the Vault, successful and capable, is a blow to that illusion, that fantasy that lets the wealthy feel better about themselves. 

The Children of the Vault don’t have the power to change Tsarnassan society wholesale. We’re just a bunch of clerks and accountants.

We do, however, have the power to sabotage the careers of a few entitled rich assholes.

Things were quiet for a long time after that. I spent my time playing with my nieces, gossiping with my sisters, and designing horrific deathtraps to guard precious jewels and rare magical artifacts. Boring, everyday stuff.

I stayed friends with Edsen, surprisingly. Went to his aerial races. To my shock, he actually succeeded at becoming a Thunderbringer. First in decades. He was automatically inducted into the ranks of the Champions of Tsarnassus— Thunderbringers were far from the mightiest of the great powers, but flying faster than sound absolutely qualified you to carrying the title.

Edsen died a month and a half after becoming a Thunderbringer.  His focus probably slipped just a little bit, his spells wavered just a fraction, and he exploded in midair, with a shockwave that shattered windows for leagues in every direction.

I think he would have done it again, even knowing how it would have ended.

And I still think a lot about the banker that sent us to Corb’s Bet, the one I got fired.

Even if we hadn’t framed the banker, even if my failure had been far worse, I don’t think I would have ever been fired.

I’d like to think I’m indispensable, but I think it’s more likely that the banks are terrified of the thought of not having me in their sights and on their side.

After all, I am the second greatest bank robber in the world.

-------------------------------------------

There is one more part of the story to tell, though.

I have to admit, I did something foolish, floating in the sky with Edsen as Dorsas Ine flew past that day.

For the first time in my life, I fully deactivated my restrictor tattoo. 

And with both my eyes and my affinity senses, I perceived the golden armor of Dorsas Ine in all its glory.

Ine’s armor was riddled through with looping currents of molten gold forming elaborate three-dimensional spellforms that I couldn’t even begin to understand. I didn’t really try, though. The air around him burned so hot that anyone who flew within hundreds of feet of him would simply be incinerated. Even from leagues away, I could feel the heat on my skin.

I didn’t pay much attention to that, either. I only paid attention to one thing— the sheer mass of his armor.

People think it’s an exaggeration that his armor is the size of a small mountain. And it is a bit of an exaggeration.

His armor is the size of the biggest it is possible for a hill to be before it becomes a mountain. Ine, fully armored, is the biggest thing in the sky, save for the giant storm jellyfish Ephyrus, or the Sleeper Under the Sands, who last woke centuries ago.

And he weighs more than any of them. Remember how many men I said it would take to carry Corb’s Bet’s tiny little chest of gold across the mountains? Gold’s one of the heaviest materials there is. 

And Ine might not be the size of a mountain, but if anyone ever found a way to measure the weight of his armor, I would be shocked if it didn’t outweigh some of the largest mountains.

I passed out in pain moments later, as though I’d stared directly into the sun for an hour, only coming to fifty leagues away from Corb’s Bet as Edsen flew us away. We had to return to collect my scattered gold, and check the size of Ine’s affinity sense radius, but as we did so, my mind was stuck on one line of thoughts.

There’s an implication to the size of Ine’s armor that most people don’t realize.

There’s only so much gold in the world. 

By best estimates, seven tenths of the gold on the continent is part of Ine’s armor. Maybe more. I’ve seen some scholars estimate that more than half of the gold ever mined on our world is a part of his armor now.

Dorsas Ine is one of the primary stabilizing factors of our economy. 

If Ine died, unless his armor was sunk into the deepest part of the sea, the gold in it would flood out into the market, devaluing crashing every currency not backed by silver or land or something more exotic instead. More than the death of any other great power, the death of Dorsas Ine would destabilize the world. For all that he’s a city destroying monster, his absence is even worse.

I lied, before. Dorsas Ine isn’t the greatest danger to alchemists trying to manufacture royal solvent.

The banks are. 

There have been mages with royal solvent affinities before. Natural ones have been born, and cities have cracked the puzzle of manufacturing artificial royal solvent affinities.

Each and every one of them has been murdered. Every scholar involved in the research projects, too. If Dorsas Ine dies, civilization will be plunged into economic chaos worse than anything since the Fall of Ithos.

The greatest conspiracy in the world is one in plain sight. The banks of the Ithonian continent are united in stopping anyone from training royal solvent mages, or from finding other creative ways to stop Dorsas Ine.

Dorsas Ine was only part of the reason I didn’t record my experiment with royal solvent. I think my employers might have reacted rather… poorly to that knowledge.

And we all live in dread of the day that the Crystal Sphinx or the Sunwyrm decides that the Gold-Armored Phoenix has incinerated one city too many, and kills him without concern for the consequences.

I’m not sure they’d be wrong to do so. Every time I hear about Dorsas Ine ravaging a new town, part of me remembers two dead fools in a tiny underground village. And that part of me thinks that it’s not worth it, that decades of economic chaos are worth the price of destroying the phoenix. That it would be worth the countless dead to starvation, the massive rise of banditry, the civil wars that would surely erupt.

And that part of me, that gets stronger every year, has been planning a heist.

Not for gold. 

For knowledge. 

Because when the agents of the banks perform their assassinations and sabotage to stop anyone from developing royal solvent affinities or other weapons against Dorsas Ine, they don’t destroy everything.

They keep records. They hoard it. That’s what banks do.

And I’ve spent decades working to secure vaults. I know where those records are kept. I didn’t design the vault they’re kept in, but I know storming well that I can beat its security.

One of these days, I think I might rob a bank for real, for the first time in my life.

And then I just might teach Dorsas Ine’s enemies how to kill him.

----------------------------------------

A few science notes:

- Natron was immensely prized by the ancient Egyptians for dozens of different uses- most notably preserving mummies, and for the production of the pigment Egyptian Blue. Natron is less used today, but it does still have one incredibly important use- it’s a key ingredient of pretzels, and gives them their distinctive taste and brown color.

- Quicksilver is just mercury, and it works essentially as described in the story. (Mercury poisoning is even worse than I described, though.)

- Gold mining is immensely environmentally destructive on Earth. It’s such a horrifically toxic process. The glass method, however, is considerably more environmentally friendly, and was used widely in medieval Africa. (Medieval Africa was a far more advanced and fascinating place than most people are taught in school— it was, in fact, more important than Europe in global politics at the time, for the most part. Medieval Europe was very much a global backwater between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the start of the Age of Sail.)

- The method of purifying gold with lightning mages is basically electrowinning, another real method of gold purification. All of the gold purification methods mentioned in the story, in fact, are real methods of purifying gold. 

- The white, powdery crystalline alchemical eutectic is borax. I cannot, for the life of me, find a good medieval-ish/Reniassance-ish name for borax. 

- Royal solvent is a real liquid— it’s a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids that chemists on earth refer to as aqua regia, or royal water. I didn’t want to just randomly stick obvious, non-loan word latin into the story, though, hence calling it royal solvent. (Same thing with calling gallium fool’s silver or mercury quicksilver— though quicksilver is, in fact, an older Earthly name for mercury.)

- Anastis has a LOT more gold than Earth does— all the gold ever mined on Earth would only fill a couple of Olympic swimming pools, if that. This is partially due to Anastis’ geology, partly due to the fact that a lot of gold has been brought to Anastis from other worlds by the Radhan, many of Anastis’ early settlers from other worlds, the [redacted], and others.