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the smell of massive wealth was in her nostrils when she walked by those rooms.
    Jalia went to the stalls and petted Swift and Jet. The night shift stable boy came up to her as soon as she touched the horses and assured her that they and the donkeys were being well looked after. Jalia had known the boy would approach her because men always did wherever she went. She casually asked him who was renting the lockup rooms.
    The boy tapped his nose and grinned at her. “The Mine Owners themselves. This is the safest place in Jalon to store their wealth. The strongest rooms with the best locks in a hotel nobody has ever managed to rob, in a city where the Mine Owners control everything, including the city gates. Brinan is one big strongbox for them.”
    The two continued to talk about nothing in particular for another hour. Jalia gave the boy a big tip and told him she would be back each night to check on the horses. She then went from the stables towards the lockup rooms.
    Once there, she went to the room nearest the cavern entrance. “Magic Ring, please open this door for me.”
    Jalia felt as if she was cheating using the ring to open the lock. It was something she could have done without magic, but she didn’t want to waste the time. By the light of the lamps in the corridor she saw a large stack of gold bars at the far end of the room, exactly what she had hoped for.
    Jalia worked late into the night. It took four hours to move the gold bars, two at a time, which was all she could lift, from the first two rooms to the tunnel wall going down into the caverns. As she built up a wall of gold bricks alongside the existing tunnel wall, she ordered the magic ring to coat them with brick and mortar dust so they looked exactly like the wall they covered. She was halfway through moving the bricks in the third room when the magic ring.
    “Out of magical power,” Jalia said and sighed impatiently. “Still, we have two more nights to finish the job, don’t we, Ring? And you should be charged again by tomorrow night.”
    Jalia went to the lockup that was still open and relocked it using the tool kit she carried in her boot. It took her half an hour to get the levers to move into place, because she was very tired and because it was a sophisticated lock.
    She smiled and nodded at the guards at the passage to the lobby, before slipping out of the back entrance of the hotel without being seen and making her way to Karn’s house.
    Daniel was waiting for her at the backdoor. He had the key and she had expected to have to pick the lock to get in.
    “Did it go well?” Daniel asked. He was not sure what she had been doing, but needed to know if she was binging further trouble upon them.
    “Better than I expected, and you’ll be glad to hear I didn’t run into anybody. How is the boy?”
    “He seems to be recovering. His father took him back to their quarters.”
    Daniel opened the door for her and she walked tiredly into the house, “Daniel, the magic ring will be exhausted when we leave, so don’t plan on being able to use it.”
    “Are you going to tell me what you’re up to?”
    “Before we go, I swear I will. But I want to finish the job first.”

6.        The Equinox Ball
     
    “Ow that hurt!” Kalla, Karn’s eldest daughter protested as Jalia smacked her hard on her naked backside.
    Jalia and Karn’s three daughters were practicing unarmed combat in the lounge of the town house. The girls were trying very hard to do the things that Jalia wanted, but they were finding her moves difficult to copy. Kalla was twenty, Jema sixteen and Ralta barely thirteen. Jalia roused them out of bed the moment the sun rose and began to teach them various unarmed combat moves. They shifted the furniture out of the way and were over an hour into the first lesson.
    Jalia’s rather unorthodox technique was to teach them to fight in the nude, so they didn’t have the advantage of clothes to hold onto. She had decided on a penalty