well away from the others, making it an ideal workplace for a man disliked by his fellows. Bak’s interest quickened and he strode across the workshop to stand before it. Unlike the other shelter, where everything had its own place, this was cluttered and messy.
“Was this Heby’s place?” he asked.
“It was.” Neferperet came up beside him. “He had no sense of order, as you can see.” In his hand, the goldsmith carried a round spouted pottery bowl with a flat bottom, a crucible.
Bak’s eyes drifted over tongs, rods, blowpipes, crucibles, and molds. They were strewn around the lean-to as if deposited by a whimsical wind. The furnace was cold, its charcoal ashy.
“Did you use this space today?”
Neferperet shook his head. “We had no need.”
Bak thanked the lord Amon in one breath, prayed in the next that Heby had left some sign of how he had taken gold when, according to the weights, none could be taken. He knelt to pick up a baked clay mold, a simple affair, a rectangular dish with thicker, sturdier walls than those used for cooking. Can molds be altered with no one being the wiser? he wondered.
“The furnace awaits us,” Neferperet said.
Reluctantly, Bak replaced the mold where he had found it and followed the chief goldsmith to the pavilion. He had much to learn; Heby’s workplace could wait.
A guard hurried through a flurry of blowing dust to stand with Bak in front of the scale. Neferperet knelt beside the platform on which the ingots lay and set the crucible next to them. Like the scribe, he seemed indifferent to the precious metal, but Bak, who had never before seen so much wealth, felt its lure as Heby must have.
The scribe handed a cone to Neferperet. The clay plug, Bak noted, was stamped with the seal of the royal house. The goldsmith held the cone over the crucible and, with a wooden mallet, knocked off the pointed tip. A stream of golden granules looking much like coarse sand flowed into the crucible, along with larger grains up to the size of peas and a considerable number of flakes large and small. Bak smothered the urge to reach out and let the glittering particles trickle through his fingers.
The flow stopped. Neferperet tapped the cone to eject a few more bits and laid it in a bowl of water. Any gold remaining inside, he explained, would be washed out and added to the next batch to be smelted. A second cone was poured into the crucible and a third, depositing a mound of ore reaching halfway to the rim.
The chief goldsmith rose and carried the crucible to the furnace, the guard at one elbow, Bak at the other. The workman with the tongs stoked the fuel. The other two took positions atop the bellows, standing with one foot on each of a pair, and began to march in place. As each man lifted a foot, he pulled a cord attached to the upper surface of the bellows, drawing air inside as the goatskin swelled. When he dropped the foot, the air shot through a hollow reed outlet with a pottery nozzle inserted in a hole bored through the bottom of the fuel container. The charcoal glowed, the heat became intense.
Neferperet set the crucible next to the molds on the bricks. The stoker laid his tongs aside. They cradled the crucible between two flexible wooden rods and lifted it onto the charcoal.
Sweat poured from the men marching on the bellows. The stoker added charcoal, then aimed the tip of a reed blowpipe at the fresh fuel and blew long and hard, goading the heat from it. His face grew flushed; moisture dripped from his brow. Neferperet hovered like a man awaiting his firstborn son. Bak and the guard retreated to a place where the heat was not so extreme. The wind, Bak noticed, was stronger, the gusts more frequent.
The mounded ore gradually slid away and sank into the molten liquid below. The mass turned fiery. Neferperet hovered closer, studied it with a practiced eye, pronounced it ready. The pair on the bellows halted their endless march and backed off, giving their overseer and the stoker plenty of room to shift the crucible and pour the liquid gold into the molds.
Bak was stumped. From what he had seen thus far, Heby could have taken no more than a grain or two of gold without every man in the workshop being a party to the theft-a situation he could not imagine. Two men might hold a secret forever, a half-dozen for no more than a week.
“Now we let the ingots cool,” Neferperet explained.
He glanced at the pavilion, which shuddered in a gust of wind, and began to issue orders to his men. The light structure must be dismantled before it blew away, the scribe’s belongings moved to a more substantial shelter. Heby’s place would be best, but first the tools and vessels had to be moved out of the way.
Bak muttered an oath. Heby’s lean-to was his last hope of tracing a path to the stolen gold and the man who had slain to protect it. “I’ll clear a space,” he offered.
Ignoring the surprised look on Neferperet’s face, he strode toward the shelter. A gust of sand-laden air caught him midway. He scrunched his eyes to slits, ran the last few paces, and ducked inside. The wind lashed the roof, the palm fronds crackled, but only an erratic breeze disturbed the air below.
He quickly sorted through the clutter, his thoughts racing. A small amount of gold would be lost each time the ore was transferred from one container to another, and the weight would probably change-he had no idea how much, but at least a modest amount-when the ore was melted down. The difference between the raw and smelted metals, he had no doubt, would be well known, easily accounted for by the scribes. The total loss from beginning to end would in no way match the large amount unaccounted for in the scrolls Azzia had given him.
He retrieved five molds, all identical in shape and form, and examined them with care. They seemed impossible to alter in any way. Disappointed but unwilling to give up, he stacked them next to the wall and began to separate tools from vessels, searching for the molds Heby had broken the previous day and for anything else that might provide a lead. He glanced up once, saw Neferperet and the stoker quenching the smoldering fuel in the other furnaces. The pavilion stood roofless with only its frame remaining. One of the bellows-men, his back to the wind, was untying the cords that bound it together. His mate was helping the scribe gather up the scale and weights. The guards were getting ready to move the gold. Bak’s time was running out.
Working as fast as he could, he placed like objects together out of the way behind the furnace. Along with the usable items, he found the spout and rim of a broken crucible, several rods and reed pipes too charred to be of further use, and a crushed blowpipe. He found no cracked or broken molds, not even a shard, nor anything else out of the ordinary.
Neferperet ducked into the lean-to. One arm encircled a bundle of rolled mats, the other the scribe’s stool. He eyed the neatened workspace with an appreciative smile. “To see order here is as pleasing as the sight of a well- formed woman.”
Bak’s smile was automatic. How, he wondered, can I learn what happened to the missing molds without asking outright? He toed the pile of broken and burned objects he had set off to the side. “Heby threw nothing away, it seems.”
Neferperet glanced at the trash, shook his head in disgust. “I told him many times to let his stoker clean up at the end of each day, as the rest of us do. No man could please him, however, and he was seldom moved to do the task himself.”
Bak’s eyes narrowed. “How long had he refused the help?”
“Since he came a year ago.” Neferperet stalked to the other side of the furnace, let the mats roll off his arm, and set the stool beside them. “Yesterday, to show you how he was, his stoker turned away to realign the molds while they were getting ready to pour. That’s all he did, turn away. Heby picked up an empty crucible, the one you see there broken to pieces, and threw it at him.”
“I saw no parts of the molds he broke yesterday.” Bak smiled, making it a joke. “Did he throw them as well?”
Neferperet snorted. “If he had, I’d have marched him straight to the chief metalsmith for a flogging.” He moved to the edge of the lean-to, ready to dart into the blowing sand. “As for the molds, I’m not surprised you didn’t find them. The one he dropped couldn’t be saved, so I’d guess he threw it away. The other he may’ve taken home, hoping to repair it.”
“Can molds be repaired?” Bak asked, surprised.
“Most can’t, but Heby was as clever with clay as he was with gold. He brought several vessels back I thought never to use another time.”
Bak trotted down the narrow, curving lane, counting off the mat-covered doorways in the unbroken row of dwellings to his right. The wind swept him forward, released him, shoved him ahead. Sand swirled past at many times his speed, forming drifts along the walls, creeping into the smallest cracks. The tiny projectiles abraded his
