Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [54]
Burek fitted the tang of the lower die into the hole on the anvil, and Arcolin set the hammer die atop it. “That much fits,” he said. He looked in the sack of coins and found a mix of coins: some Guild League with different marks, some from the far south with the marks of Immerdzan and Aliuna, a few from the duchy of Fall. In the bottom of the sack was another, of thinner leather, holding pewter disks, a dozen or so plain and several bearing confusing blurred marks.
“Practice,” Devlin said. “The shop I saw, a ’prentice was learning to hammer straight, and the master used disks like this for him to learn on.”
Arcolin upended the hammer die and looked at the surface that would shape a coin. He could not read the design—surely it was intended for a Vonja coin, but …
“Let me try,” Burek said. “We can use one of the practice disks. Someone get me a hammer.” One of the soldiers rummaged in the tool bag they always carried and found one. Burek fitted the disk between the two dies and struck the top one a solid blow. The disk looked lopsided—it had not been exactly centered—but now Arcolin could read the mark: the Guild League symbol on one side and Vonja’s own mark, PCV, on the other.
“In silver, it would be a niti,” Arcolin said. “I wonder if this is the only coin they make.” He pulled a niti from his belt-pouch to compare.
“Those nas and natas we found in the merchant’s wagon were some of them counterfeit.”
“And where did they get the dies?” Arcolin said, thinking out loud. “These are hard steel, not something an artisan can carve out.”
“Mints have dies. Maybe they’re stolen?”
A breeze rustled the leaves overhead, and Arcolin looked up: clouds moving in again. “Later. Pack everything up; we’ll go back to our home site.”
“Take the dies and anvil?”
“Of course. We need proof for the Vonja Council. Scouts, be alert for rigged trees. I think they’re still north of us, but we don’t want more losses, in case they sent for reinforcements.”
By dusk, the cohort was back off the ridge and within a glass’s march of their former campsite, where they’d left the wagons and two tensquads.
“I don’t think we’ll see any attacks for a few days,” Arcolin said. “They’ll be resupplied, no doubt, but that will take time. We must be hurting them. We’ll send word back to the city. These dies could be stolen from their mint, or made elsewhere. I want to take them in myself, in case they do have a traitor who might intercept them. Perhaps if we get word about Stammel.” It had been so long, he did not expect good news.
Burek nodded. “I wouldn’t trust them either—not after what they tried before.”
Arcolin gave the dies to their own smith, who looked them over carefully.
“This little anvil’s definitely a coiner’s,” he said. “At the mints they’d use a water-powered hammer to strike multiples at once; this would be a merchant’s set. Seen them up north, to strike Finthan coins with Tsaia’s mark.”
“I thought both passed easily in the northern realms,” Burek said. “Doesn’t the north have a sort of Guild League?”
“No,” Arcolin said. “Finthan and Tsaian coins are commonly accepted at mint value—at least in Vérella and Fin Panir—but everything else must be changed—at a cost—and some are regulated.”
Burek looked puzzled. “But doesn’t that impede trade? I mean, if the money changers take their snip, and the realms—”
“Yes, but not so much that most people mind it. We use letters of credit, as you saw. And the periodic bankers’ caravans—heavily guarded—often carry gold bullion and lump silver, so it can be fresh-minted in Tsaia. There’s no tax on letters of credit and much less on unminted metals.”
“What about the others, like Pargun and Lyonya and so on?”
“Pargun doesn’t trade in Tsaia.”
“But they trade on the coast,” Burek said, scowling. “I’ve seen Pargunese