One Last Cook

The Silverun District
Hours after leaving The Tops

On most nights, the city was asleep at this hour. But tonight, in the hours just before dawn, it was alive with activity.

Ethan sat on the rooftop of his Silverun guest house, watching the warm glow of a fire that raged in the distance. Somewhere, in a district far removed from this island of wealth and plenty, a handful of dilapidated apartments were burning.

The fire began sometime in the early morning hours. The cause was simple enough: An old man returned from his long day of selling baked goods to discover the secured lot where he usually stored his mobile food stand was full for the night. Tired, and unable to bear the risk of leaving his cart unsecured for the night, the old man brought the rickshaw into his home, stowing it next to him as he slept.

Maybe the ovens had not cooled as much as he thought they had. Maybe it was just an ember that sparked from the coals and caught hold of something dry and flammable. Whatever the source, the fire quickly gained a foothold and began to spread.

Luckily, someone spotted the smoke early and cried out. The neighbors stirred from their beds as collective shouts joined together in a chorus, singing out a single word of warning – that one word which warned of a fiery pestilence, eating its way through their homes.

Fires were a serious threat to that part of town, so far from the rivers that snake around the city’s edge, and once a structure began to burn there was little that could be done. After getting clear of the flames, the crowd could only watch the blaze grow and wait for the hungry flames to gorge themselves to death.

In the morning they would pick through the ashes, salvage what little remained and count the dead.

The casualties should be low, Ethan thought. Just the one…

The apartment block where the flames began were unusually vacant. The night air was thankfully still. The flames would not spread far. The fire would claim the homes of dozens, but no lives should be lost. Except for one. One old, blind baker who would never be seen on the streets of Northgate again.

The next day, Ethan sold an entire cartload of copper coins to a back-alley banker. As the Baker, Ethan dealt almost exclusively in copper. He collected a small fortune but he couldn’t exchange the coins without drawing attention to the amount of money he made. If word got out the Baker was “rich,” the guards would start charging him a special tax beyond the simple bribes of a good meal; that type of financial bleeding was a wound that only got worse over time. Worse still, thieves of all kinds would become a serious threat, both on the streets and as he slept.

Even as Luke Bastion, Ethan did not have the resources to tender heavy bags of copper without drawing suspicion, and he never could think of a new identity that would allow him to appear from nowhere with a small fortune in worthless currency.

So, he had never really known what to do with most of the money. He’d given some away, bought what he needed, and tendered small amounts whenever possible. But mostly, he’d just hoarded it. Bag after bag of trifling coppers.

In the end, the shady banker had agreed to take the shipment of copper at an exchange rate of half their value – twenty copper for every silver piece. The exchange rate was even worse for gold or platinum. The barrels Ethan had stacked into a cart were worth thousands; Ethan received hundreds. He didn’t have any leverage to negotiate and the banker knew it. The man would launder the money over a period of weeks or months, exchanging the coins for a fair price and he would make himself a tidy profit in the process. Ethan considered finding the man afterwards and taking back the rest of his money, but that was a dark road he knew was best avoided.

Instead, he took his earnings and deposited half in a bank. The other half went to repay the Silverun family and pre-pay his current residence for the remainder of the year. The Silverun’s provided Luke a loan in advance of a shipment of coin the allegedly rich man had coming from his family back in his hometown. Now that it finally arrived, he would be back in their good graces and Luke Bastion’s already strong cover would be cemented. Afterall, only someone of genuine means could have a windfall of gold and platinum shipped halfway across the kingdom.

Luke Bastion was the only thoroughly established alternate identity Ethan had at Northgate. He was grateful for the paranoid level of effort he took to ensure the two identities (Luke and the Baker) were entirely separate, otherwise they both may have been lost and he would have nothing. Instead, he’d only needed to sacrifice one.

With the Baker dead, his life’s work sifted down to a few hundred coins, and Luke Bastion’s gracious hosts thoroughly appeased, it was time to focus on safely collecting his friends. There was work to do and Ethan couldn’t do it alone.

Back to:

YMDT

Explorer

One Last Cook