The Orb of Wrath

THE MANSION ON THE HILL

PROLOGUE

The hatred and rivalry between Azuharr and Tazar dated back to almost a thousand years ago. Azuharr was a black dragon, evil and twisted, like all black dragons. Tazar was a silver dragon, wise and well-meaning.

When Tazar was just a teenage dragon, in his eighties, he lived with his mother in their lair, a huge cavern in the depths of a mountain in the Metallic Mounts. Tazar would become an adult in a few years and leave his mother's home, but the time had not yet come.

One night, without warning, two black dragons attacked them by surprise. They were father and son. The oldest of these was a great wyrm, an extremely old and fully developed dragon, powerful and huge. The other was Azuharr, an adult dragon somewhat younger, but also very dangerous. Somehow they had managed to find out the location of the lair, where his mother had accumulated a prodigious treasure spanning centuries.

Tazar and his mother fought against the intruders bravely. In an epic battle, one the bards would have sung for generations, if any had been privileged to witness it, Tazar and his mother managed to bring down and destroy the great wyrm. Unfortunately, Tazar's mother received a fatal wound. Before dying, his mother told him to flee, knowing that Tazar would have no chance against the adult dragon, enraged by the death of his father. She also asked him to never return to the lair, as it would put him at serious risk.

In the most difficult and painful decision of his life, young Tazar left his mother before she lost her last breath, and managed to flee and save himself, not without great difficulty. In the following years, some humans helped the dragon. Without such support he might not have survived and therefore Tazar established a bond of appreciation, committed to the human race.

Tazar then hid and waited.

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CHAPTER 1: THE COMMANDER'S HOUSE

Erion should exercise extreme caution now. He glided with very small steps on the cable that he had tended from the guard tower to the roof of the commander's mansion. As he walked, he concentrated on the next step, and tried not to look down at the void beneath him. He must be about fifteen or twenty steps above the street. A fall from there would probably be fatal, but Erion had a lot of experience and was not worried, nor particularly nervous.

At the moment, everything was going smoothly. The surveillance he had done in previous days had worked perfectly. He had been able to determine the schedules of the city guard and also of the commander's house, which allowed him to plan the day and the right time to strike. On Wednesday at eleven, when it was pitch black, the guards changed shifts. He knew the right moment in which he could slide smoothly through the window of the first floor of the guard´s tower and climb quickly and quietly to the highest floor of it, while the soldiers were switching weapons on the ground floor.

From the roof of the tower, and with the help of his small hand crossbow and a harpoon, it was easy to lay the cable. But he had to move quickly and remove it before the new guards took their positions at all levels of the tower.

While walking along the cable, he could hear the noise of the soldiers leaving to go to their homes, or perhaps to an inn. Luckily they were already distracted and none of them happened to look up just then. In addition, his dark clothes were very well camouflaged against the colors of the stone with which most of the buildings from the area had been built. This, coupled with the fact that this was a night with a waning moon, made it a little more difficult to distinguish him.

Gradually, he came closer to the facade of the commander's palace. He was about to get there. Maybe five steps more. Suddenly, a small gust of wind shook him slightly and he had to struggle not to lose balance. The cable had some slack and began to wobble on the sides. He waited, patient, while the movement ceased. He took a deep breath and continued. Two, three, four steps and hop, a little jump let him reach the roof of the mansion.

Without missing a beat, he dropped the harpoon from the place it was embedded in. He verified that there was no one on the street and then, with a deft flick of his wrist, released the cable from its handhold on the tower, and withdrew it quickly and without making any noise. He hid the material in a corner of the roof where it was hard to see. He was in.

One of the advantages of entering a home for the second time is that you know the layout of the building and you know where you can hide. The big disadvantage is that, because people do not like being robbed, you always find surprises or additional protection that was not present the first time. However, Erion was wise and insightful. He always waited for at least a year and a half before visiting a house for the second time. He had found that people would relax again a year or so after a robbery. However, they always added some extra precautions permanently. He wondered what surprises awaited him this time.

He walked stealthily to the door leading to the terrace. It was locked. And the lock was of good quality. If he remembered correctly, the time before that door couldn't be locked. Surely, the commander had thought impossible for someone to come in from there with the guard tower right in front, but this time he had been careful by protecting all possible entries.

He put his hand in a pocket inside his jacket and pulled out a set of picks. Even good-quality locks weren't going to prove difficult in his capable hands. He slid the pick in the lock. A flick of the wrist. Clack! A second attempt and he heard the musical sound of the lock giving way and opening.

He hurried into the building. The booty would probably be found again in the commander's office. Although, maybe this time, it would be stored in a vault as Oris commands and not in the simple safe like the last time. After looking out and seeing that no sound was heard, he began to descend the stairs. Arriving downstairs, he went straight to the office. The door was open.

The office was as he remembered it, a lovely room with a balcony overlooking the main square of the city, walls covered with hardwood, premium Tylar furniture, and some family portraits and a few landscapes. There was also a small bookcase in the corner, next to the door. Between the center of the room and the balcony, there was a large desk with several drawers and some papers on the table.

The safe, which used to be in the corner under a small table, was gone. He began with the obvious, checking behind each painting without success. Then he began looking for hatches under the carpets, also without success. He approached the desk and began to check the drawers. One was locked.

At that moment he heard a noise somewhere in the house. The sound seemed to come from the lower floors. Rapid footsteps going up the stairs could be heard. Immediately he recognized the footfalls of a dog or similar animal. For some reason, the dog had not barked. He had heard about guard dogs that were trained in Golsou to surprise their victims and kill them with one bite to the jugular. The hardest training of these animals was, precisely, that they may learn to curb the instinct to bark and thus avoid alerting the victim.

Erion had to act quickly. He put his hand inside another pocket and pulled out a small package wrapped in a crumpled paper. He undid the wrapping and found a small piece of meat. He walked to the doorway and threw the piece of meat down the aisle, just as the animal was approaching that particular floor.

It was a large attack dog. Brutal, murderous teeth jutted out of its mouth, making it clear that it had detected him. Luckily, the piece of prepared meat had already been placed before it, and the animal could not help but jump on the piece and devour it in two bites.

In a flash, Erion perched on a corner of the roof of the office. Now he just had to wait. The poison was quick, but he didn't want to give the dog the option to attack before it fell. Less than a minute later he heard the animal collapse in the hallway. Erion climbed down and went to check the situation. The dog lay on the ground. He couldn't tell if it was dead or had lost consciousness but, considering the size of the animal, it was probably just unconscious. In any case, it wouldn't bother anybody in several hours. He put it into a utility room facing the same corridor, closed the door and went back to the office.

Normally, he would have rather not gone into that house, with his relatively recent previous visit. The home of the Royal Commander of Andon wasn't the same as the home of any other wealthy person, especially if it was located opposite the tower of the town militia. But his biggest client had made a special request, and he couldn't say no. He must find a document that was allegedly kept in the house in a sealed envelope. His client, by messenger, had shown him the design of the stamp: a griffin with outspread wings in the wind.

His client had offered an interesting sum for completing the work, delivering the document during the afternoon of the next day, at a meeting previously arranged in that city. But one of the conditions was that the envelope had to still be sealed. In other words, his client didn't want him to see the contents of the envelope. For him, this wasn't a problem. The payment that had been offered was fair for the difficulty and risk of the job. Another instruction was that the job had to look like an apparent common robbery. So he had to take all the valuables that he could reasonably get his hands on, and obviously he could keep them all. This was excellent. He could thus get a double reward for that job. And, as usual, he was going to try to get every last gold coin.

He approached the closed desk drawer and took out his set of picks. After a couple of scuffles, the drawer gave in and opened. There were several documents inside the drawer. He began to read: Irrigation Project of the Xelake Valley. That could be interesting, though, of course, it wasn't going to provide much gold. He had to find the safe.

Erion stood in the middle of the room and looked at it again carefully. He had observed the commander in public. He had seen how he behaved in front of his wife. He seemed to be a man who didn't even trust his relatives. Money was probably one of those things that he didn't trust his relatives with. For some reason, he was convinced that the safe would be back at the office, not in the bedroom or any other room in the house. Then he remembered ... the library. He was sure that it hadn't been there the last time.

He approached the cabinet that stood in the corner of the room and began checking behind the books. He found nothing relevant. The bottom of the unit was apparently a hollow base that also served as an ornament. Then, for an instant, he saw something strange. He wouldn't know how to define it. Maybe a reflection? No, not that exactly. It was something very dim. Erion had a great visual acuity. The ability to quickly perceive and interpret small details was a useful skill in this occupation. Probably someone with a less trained eye wouldn't have seen it. But it was there, no doubt.

He began to feel the base of the bookcase with his hands. Then he was surprised. After touching the wall behind the bookcase, he perceived texture and a temperature that didn't correspond with what he expected. It was the unmistakable feeling of chromed metal that is often used to build the doors of safes.

They had set up the safe in plain sight, directly on the wall under the bookcase, and then had applied some kind of spell to hide it. It was possible that any other thief, who did not know that the bookcase had been recently installed, would completely overlook it. Erion was glad of the insight of his eye, his visual memory and having been in this house a while ago.

His deft fingers slid through the door of the safe to reach the lock. It was a new safe and had a very modern double system of numerical combination and a lock. Erion had little experience with such safes. He decided to start with what he knew best. He pulled out his picks and began working on the lock. It was certainly of good quality. It took a couple of minutes to visualize the mechanism in his head and after some struggle, he saw the solution. He pushed with the pick in his left hand while making small circles with the pick in his right hand. Suddenly, he heard a clack. Then he took a different pick, more like a hook, and introduced it into the keyhole. After a couple of attempts he managed to hook it on the part of the appropriate gear and after another turn, he heard a new clack. This time it was slightly louder than the last. It was the unmistakable sound of celestial music, a lock opening.

Now he had to deal with the combination. He slipped under the furniture to support his ear to the door of the safe. Erion put his fingers on the combination wheel and began to spin the mechanism. A while later, after some effort and concentration, the last number of the combination triggered the mechanism, definitely opening the safe.

Inside he found a bag with coins (thirty-five platinum and fifty gold coins), love letters and a small locked chest. The coins amounted to a value of four hundred gold coins (which was the currency of reference in the Kingdom of Bor and in most of the world of Oris). This amount could be considered a small fortune, something like the income of an average family in Bor for four years. But compared with the fortunes that the rich and noble accumulated, it was not a really large sum.

He put the box in his pocket, to examine it later, while he took a look at the letters. The commander exchanged passionate letters with a woman named Jeifer Kibat, certainly his mistress of the moment. The origin of the name indicated she was from the Aurum Emirates, a very exotic choice for a lover. He thought about blackmailing the commander with the disclosure of such information, although possibly, his wife already knew. Even if he decided to do such a thing, he thought it best not to use the letters as evidence, as this would link him to the theft. In this job, the client’s interests were the priority.

When he was about to continue reviewing the letters, he heard footsteps again; clearly, this time, they were human. He narrowed the door of the safe so it seemed closed, quickly hid behind the portiere next to the balcony and waited. His experience told him that in such situations, usually you could get away with it if you kept your cool. Being able to remain calm at all times or not was often what distinguished a good professional from the one who ended up in jail or hanged. The cadence of the steps indicated an elderly person. Possibly it might be the housekeeper. Because of his vigilance, he knew the commander and his wife would not be in residence. However, with rich people like him, you could always count on one or more servants staying to guard the house. Discretion and secrecy were his greatest allies in this case.

The truth is that the dog being trained as an attack dog was actually a stroke of luck. This had allowed him to neutralize it without the housekeeper noticing his presence. If it had barked, the servant would have become a serious risk because they would have tried to set off an alarm. This would have put Erion in a difficult juncture, between leaving or having to use more drastic methods, which was always a nuisance. He never wanted to hurt any servant. Even if their master was the most despicable person in the world, they were often innocent people.

After a while, a very long one, the steps began to fade, toward the downstairs area, and then he heard a door shut. Probably the servant had gone to bed. Perhaps the servant had risen only to use the bathroom or perhaps suffered from insomnia. In any case, he had to have the utmost discretion, until he left the house.

He came out of hiding and continued looking through the letters. Among the letters of love, and some other minor letters, he finally found what he had come for. The seal of the griffin was unmistakable. He decided to take everything he had found in the safe and put it inside his jacket. The best thing was for them to think that he had emptied the safe without looking carefully at what it contained, so it would be more difficult for someone to understand that the intention of this theft was to take that letter. To give a more dramatic touch to the situation, he decided to leave the door of the safe wide open.

Then he turned back around to see what else he could take. Only one of the paintings seemed to have some value. He picked it up and, with a small knife, quickly removed the canvas from the frame. He rolled it and put it into his small backpack. On the desk he found an elaborate silver paperweight. It was a sculpture of a castle. The work had some merit for the level of detail that the artist had put into it. He took it, as well.

He glanced at the bookcase, but none of the books seemed particularly old or valuable. All were recent and indicated the dubious taste of its owner. He rechecked the desk drawers and found nothing valuable. Again he found the folder he had seen before and decided to check it out. The documentation described various details of an irrigation project in the valley near Xelake, north of the mark. This project was not known by the public. From what he saw, the plans were highly developed and it was obvious that there was an intention to carry them out. The documents indicated dates that year and the following year. The maps indicated the areas that would be flooded to create a small dam and the pipelines that would be established and the lands that would be irrigated.

The information itself was quite valuable, especially if the commander never perceived that the plans had been looked at. With this information, he could buy some of the land that would be later watered at a low price and then sell them after completion of the project for a much higher amount. He could sell the information to any of those affected by the flood in the area of the dam. They could get rid of the lands before they were devalued, or worse, expropriated by the mark or the kingdom. He could set a seed store in Xelake, with other agricultural products that allowed or would facilitate the growing of crops from the irrigation. This would make him an instant monopoly because at the time, that part of the mark had some very arid lands for those crops and only wheat and other cereals were cultivated there. Surely there were other, more intelligent choices, if he thought a bit, but this is what he could quickly improvise.

He kept flipping through the sheets. They included a detailed accounting of the project. Mr. Balta'ryon would be in charge of the monopoly on water management, in a lifelong concession and in which he was free to set any price for the water. Since then, they seemed to be extraordinary privileges. And everything despite that, the mark and the kingdom equally funded seventy percent of the cost of the work, and the employer only thirty percent. This was getting interesting at times. In the last section of the file of documents he found a loose sheet in the middle of the papers. It seemed to be entries from a bank account. A number of important amounts had been deposited in the Calen Bank, which was the only bank in the mark and had just been established a few years earlier. All proceeds were in the commander's name. In another document, the commander appeared as head of the Commission of Water Development of the Mark.

That son of a bitch! How many people had suffered from shortage to pay the taxes that would finance that work? How many peasants would be abused in the future once the project was finished? He had to do something. He had to think of something.

He decided to act. He took the pen and inkwell that the commander used to write regularly and opened the terms and conditions page of the concession to the employer. That document was final and was confirmed with the signing of the king of Bor. The idiot probably didn't even know what he had signed. The fact was that the document would be difficult to change. Moreover, as it was past all controls, it would probably remain intact until publication.

After reviewing the document for a while, with maximum concentration, he sought the table of terms and under the conditions for setting the price of water, added: With a maximum of the market price of water in the Deepcliff Central Square; the original text stated to be determined by the dealer. Deepcliff, capital of the kingdom, had abundant water sources of high quality close to the city and was one of the cheapest places to buy it in the country. The change in practice nullified the privileges of the businessman and this would make him feel deceived and betrayed by the commander. Erion had a knack for forging documents and knew that only the best expert could distinguish the handwriting that was added.

Then he took a sheet of paper from the table, the same kind that the commander had used to write down the bank account entries, and began writing a letter saying:

Dear Principal Cashier of the Calen Bank

Hereby I beg you to undo the following entries in my bank account number 4392:

(The letter listed below all the entries of the fraudulent transfers contained in the sheet, with the amount, entry date, and volume, page and log sheet thereof.)

I also request that you issue a check for the value of such amounts on behalf of the social work of the Order of Light for use in their charity work and their soup kitchens, and remit it to its headquarters located in 4 Arrow Street, Roko, Norvik County.

Signed

Ahruman, Commander of Andon

Erion took an envelope from the desk. He folded and put the letter inside. He closed the envelope and applied the commander's seal he found in the top drawer. He stamped the letter and put the letter in his pocket. Then he replaced all the documents as he had found them and placed them in the drawer.

Erion chuckled. Once the bank executed the order, the commander would notice the money having disappeared from his account. Although the bank would say it had been from his own order, the first suspicion of the commander would certainly be that he had been a victim of foul play by the businessman. His reputation was not exactly that of a gentleman, and this favored Erion. This way, the farmers from Xelake would probably be greatly benefited, as well as the poor that the Order of Light attended throughout the kingdom. The two brainiacs, the commander and the businessman, would get nothing, and they would become enemies.

Well, maybe not everything would turn out so great, but he had to try. Luck is for the bold. In addition, he had nothing to lose because they could not track the mess back to him; obviously he was counting on getting away without being caught. The stakes had increased; if he was caught in that moment, he was to be surely hanged. A way as any to make life more interesting.

He shuffled the room a little more, knocking some books off the shelf, to reinforce the impression of a hasty and messy theft, but carefully as to not make noise. There was not much else to do in that office. He slipped into the hallway and then quickly checked the rooms in that floor: essentially two bedrooms. There was always a fine balance between how many goods you could get, and how much risk you wanted to take. He quickly decided he would not seek to steal anything from the other floors. With the presence of the housekeeper, it was too dangerous. He also decided to invest only five or ten minutes more checking the rooms on that floor before leaving the house. He almost always managed to find valuables in the first minutes. He had a lot of practice.

He picked up a few more objects, including some jewelry, and put them in his backpack. Then he climbed to the roof and picked up his hook and cable. He had lost too much time. The tower guard had already taken their positions at every floor. He had to find a different way out.

He approached the south side of the roof, facing Elf Street. It was a busy street during the day, not the best way to enter or exit. However, at that hour of the night, with a little luck and if he was fast, he could escape without incident. He fixed his harpoon, and dropped the cable to the street. He carefully observed if the road was clear and then quickly slid down the facade. At the bottom, with a deft flick of the wrist, he picked up the harpoon and the cable and put them away.

He walked stealthily to the corner, looking at the junction with the next road. There was no one. He slipped back into the shadows until the next site. He would be well hidden there, as this street was narrow and dark. He took his hood off and changed his jacket into a more appropriate one he carried in his backpack. Then he went on his way like a normal passerby.

Erion walked through the empty streets without stopping for a moment. He passed very few people. A while later, he was back in The Flying Donkey where, even at that time, there was noise downstairs, where the tavern was located. But he didn't stop. He climbed to the second floor and went into his room and locked it.

Mithir was awake and waiting impatiently. With a quick gesture Erion said that everything had gone well. Whispering, he explained in detail everything that had happened. His friend's face lit up when he got to the part of the story about the fake letter. Mithir had to stifle a laugh. In the adjacent room, people were sleeping and they didn't want to wake them, especially this particular night.

Mithir was dumb. Maybe this was not entirely accurate. The boy did not seem to have any physical problem that prevented him from uttering words, but for some reason, he didn't speak. Erion couldn't remember ever hearing him utter a word. However, he could issue grunts, groans, murmurs and laughter, for example. Mithir was also the closest thing to family he never had. He had met him as a child in the orphanage. His friend had entered the orphanage when he was very