Industry & Intrigue (74 page)

It was a small statue
of the agorid god,
The Great Hunter. The Hunter could take on the guise of any
predatory animal, but in his natural state he was an amalgam of
beasts. The head of a wolf, the wings of hawk, the arms and claws
of a bear, the legs of a tiger and several other animal parts to
make a monstrous, chimeric body.

Atira didn’t believe in the Hunter of
course, but she kept if there for appearances sake. The only god
she believed in was the Endless. It had been a long time since her
father had connected to the Endless and spoken its
words.

The voice overwhelmed
her
and made
her feel a part of something bigger and more ancient than she could
ever conceive. Soon all of the Order would feel the same intimate
connection that father had with their god. His plans and this war
were only the first steps to something greater.

Several hours later, there was
a knock on her door. It would be her father. S
he opened it and he stepped
in.

“
Atira
,” he said. “Thank you for seeing
them to me. They were nicely shocked at seeing an agorid. It kept
the minister on his toes during our negotiations.”

“
How did it go?”
she asked. She was
eager to hear how her father’s design was panning out.

“
Excellently,
” Varko gave her a wide smile.
“Blake is easily manipulated by his hubris and arrogance. He wants
to see Galrian power curbed and Alkos triumphant. He needs me to
use my contacts in the Enzian government to push them towards the
Alkon side.”

Atira grinned, showing her
fangs. The small kingdom of Enz wouldn’t enter this war unless
directly attacked.
“Foolish,” she said.

“
Yes,” replied Varko, nodding in
agreement. “King Luca is far too timid to join either side. H will
sit out fretting about the borders until one of them goes too far
and decides to use Enzian territory without permission.”

Varko stretched his arms
and his bones
creaked. He was old, far older than he looked and sometimes she had
the irrational thought that he would not live to see through his
plan.

“
Of course he still thinks I
helped arranged the assassination of the Galrian foreign minister
for business reasons, namely the Alkon contracts I’m about to
receive. The new emperor is a weak-willed man, he will grant
Minister Blake more and more power. And Blake will continue the war
until he sees Galria burned and broken. Alkos and Galria will
weaken each other to exhaustion in the fighting. They will pull
troops away from Kangur and once they have whittled each other
down, we can begin the next phase.”

Atira
sat ready and waiting for the
commands he would give and how she would be contributing to this
next phase. She wanted to make up for the mess up at Crean and
failing to retrieve the sphere.

Varko looked at her face. “I will need
you for a delicate and specialized task Atira, something that will
be vital to my plans. It will mean returning to the land of your
people.”

Atira took in a deep breath. Her father
needed her to go to Kangur. Until this point in her life he had
kept her away from the steppes, warning her against travelling
there. She remained dutiful, but could not deny that part of her
had always been curious. Now it seemed she would have the chance to
satiate it.

Chapter
75

The frosted glass of
t
he window
was starting to fog from the heat of the fire in her office as
Xerin looked out.

Reese Galius
was making his way
along the field of grass and away from the biology department. She
put her talons against the window and kept watching, until he
crossed the field and was out of sight amongst the apartment
blocks.

What a shame
she thought.
He was one of the
brightest and most passionate students I’ve had in
years.

Now
he had been infected with the war
fever gripping the empire. He stood every chance of dying before he
could grow into an adult. It was always the young that paid the
heaviest toll in a war. The other races often forgot what war was
like, they lived for such a short amount of time that before one
war had finished they were already finding problems to argue about
for the next one.

Not that the longer-lived
drakons didn’t have wars, but they were few and far between. Ever
since Weicarus had stabilized
under the rule of the Zuren line several hundred
years ago, the Wei drakons had fought amongst themselves only
once.

The
Daiyun Ascension, which been little
more than the rebellion of a power-crazed madman who had engulfed
most of the southern islands and provinces in war. Afterwards Drake
Lashi had granted an amnesty to all who had fought for the Daiyun,
an act which had secured and kept the peace to this day.

They had fought wars against
foreign powers but the Wei only engaged after exhausting and
considering all possibilities other than war.
Those wars were also rare,
thanks to Weicarus’ distant location to other nations and its
geographical defenses. Weicarus had a line of mountains called the
Ren-San, along the length its northern and western coasts, a
daunting prospect for a potential invading force. Translated into
Alkon, the name meant Shield of the Backbone.

Xerin
moved back towards her desk, her
sandals clacking on the hardwood of the floor. Her toes were
beginning to feel the chill. Another week or two and winter would
be here in full force. She would have to start wearing more
suitable footwear for the cold weather.

She sat down and
reach
ed into
the box of her mail her cousin had sent from Valhai, the capital
and her hometown. Her cousin, Ling Saryu, regularly sent her new
books and scientific publications from Weicarus related to her
field of study. She liked to keep up with the latest material and
see how her rivals back home were doing. Weicarus was not known for
its study of life sciences, preferring to focus on physics and
chemistry, part of the reason she had moved to Alkos. Another
reason was that progress in her homeland moved too slow for her
liking.

Research took decades, most of
the researchers and professors at the prestigious Grand Hall of
Higher Learning were too stuck in the mud for her taste. They never
wanted to explore anything controversial
or exciting in case they upset anyone
or were proven wrong. So they plodded along with the same old
ideas, never truly progressing.

The first two books
she pulled out were
studies of dragon fossils from west Weicarus, she set them aside.
They would make for intriguing reading, but would be ponderous and
detailed, with lots of footnotes. They could wait until she had
plenty of time to delve into them.

T
here were several scientific journals,
with details about newly discovered species of plants, insects,
birds, and their classification. Nothing jumped out at her as she
thumbed through the thin pages, most of these new species she had
heard about already.

She put her
scal
ed hand
on the last book. It had a thick hard-cover and was heavy. She
pulled it out and put on the desk with a small thump sound. Before
she could read the title, there was a knock on her office
door.

“
Come in
,” she called and pushed the book to
one side. In walked Cassandra Breac, another of her students and a
friend of Reese. From the look on her face, Reese had told her of
his decision.

“
Ms. Breac
,” said Xerin. “How can I help
you?” She leaned back in her chair.

“
Reese Galius is leaving the
university
,”
said the girl.

Xerin nodded.
“I know. He left
here a few minutes ago. He told me about his decision.”

Cassandra’s head
sunk
. “I
see,” she said, her voice dropping slightly.

T
he girl must have been hoping that she
would be able to talk Reese out of his decision. “Let me guess, you
were going to ask me to convince him to stay?”

Cassandra nodded.

“
Sorry to dash your
hopes
,”
replied Xerin. “He told you why he left?” she asked the
girl.

She
nodded in response.

“
A tragic s
tate of affairs, the murder of
a young student on campus. And coming right after the assassination
of Rossiv. The university is not as safe as it once was and I fear
whatever is going on, is not over yet.”

Cassandra tilted her head
quizzically. “What do you mean
?” she asked.

Xeri
n had her suspicions, but she had
ignored them when news of the Galrian attack and the war had
overshadowed everything. Now that she had lost her favorite
student, they were buzzing around her head again.

“
I shouldn’t say anything.” She
didn’t want the girl getting herself mixed up in it. Xerin didn’t
have all the facts yet, it could be dangerous.

“
Please
,” begged Cassandra. “I lost someone
I cared about a great deal to a senseless madman. Now I’ve lost two
friends. I need to know why?” She was getting emotional, as humans
were want to do.

But Xerin sympathized with
her
, so she
answered, “The watch officially stopped investigating the death of
your friend. They are far too preoccupied with city security and
militia training for the war. They have passed it on to university
security, who labeled it as a burglary gone wrong.”

“
But that’s
crazy
,” said
Cassandra.

Xerin agreed with
her, even if she
had not said so to the university chancellor. “Yes it is. From what
few details I could gather, it did not sound like a burglary at
all. There is something bigger going on here. Unfortunately,
between the incident at Crean and my classes I have not had time to
dig deeper.”

“
Reese knows
more. I’m sure he does. There’s
something he wasn’t telling me,” said Cassandra.

At least the girl had a good
sense of intuition.
Xerin had come to the same conclusion. “That may be true,
but he is in pain and if he chooses to keep it to himself, there is
not much either of us could do to pry it out of him.” Xerin had
considered dropping the matter altogether, but she could use
Cassandra to help her look into it further.

No stupid
she thought.
Best to let it lie,
for now at least.

She folded her arms, her blue and
white lecture robes brushing on her desk. “Was there anything else
Ms. Breac?”

“
Uh, no
, except…I did want to ask you. What
is the Sphere of Katarus?”

Xerin blinked in surprise. She had not
expected her to ask about that. Where in the world had she heard
about it? “Why do you want to know?”

“
I overheard one of our captors
at
Crean
mention it. I figured it was an ancient relic and you would know
what it was,” replied the girl.

“
Nothing more than whimsical
legend Ms. Breac
,” she said. “Whoever those criminals were, they were
chasing legend, as untouchable as a dream. Best not to dwell on
it.”

The girl nodded. “I see.
Th
ank you
professor.” She exited Xerin’s office, leaving the drakon to return
to her new books.

Xerin looked
down at the book
title she had been about to read before Cassandra had knocked on
her door. The title read
The Real Avathrax, Possible Evidence of the
Immortal Tyrant
.

She scoffed
. What a waste of paper. Who in
their right mind thought that the myth of the Immortal Tyrant could
be real? It would be another hatchet hoax piece, like the discovery
of the long lost city of Anlei. That had turned out to be nothing
more than the ruins of a small village from the Five Kingdoms
period.

She would
get round to reading it when
she was bored. For now she had better books to read than wasting
time on the conspiracy theories of whatever fool believed the
Dragon Tyrant was real.

Epilogue

On the other side of the world
from Alkos, across the Twilight Ocean, past the cities of the
Kordate Union and b
eyond the Dawn Plains with its tribes of native Kordatian
humans and drakons, there was a small village sitting north of the
Shadow Mountains.

It was a village of drakons;
though they were shorter and thinner in stature than their Wei
cousins. While Wei drakons had brown, red or golden
scale
s, the
Kordate drakons were colored in shades of green and blue. The
village was populated exclusively by green drakons; they were far
from contact with other tribes or settlements and had become
homogenized as a result. They had long thin tails and painted
themselves with red tattoos.