Read The Orb of Wrath (The Merchant's Destiny Book 1) Online
Authors: Nic Weissman
The Orb of Wrath (The Merchant's Destiny Book 1)
THE ORB OF WRATH
NIC WEISSMAN
The Orb of Wrath: © 2015 by Nic Weissman
Cover Design: Nic Weissman
Second Edition: © June 2015, Nic Weissman
This edition has been translated by Emma Colina.
Cover Image: © Atelier Sommerland, used under license from Shutterstock.com
Page divider ‘divider”29115_640.png’ is public domain (CC0) and was obtained at pixabay.com.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
To my love
TABLE OF CONTENTS
First Part: The mansion on the hill
Chapter 1: The Commander's house
Chapter 4: The Garden of Jasmines
Chapter 5: The mansion on the hill
Chapter 6: The city of the Emerald Lake
Chapter 8: An unexpected meeting
Chapter 10: Truths and secrets
Second Part: Assault to the vampire's crypt
Chapter 2: The soldier, the gnome and the wizard
Chapter 10: Leap into the void
Chapter 11: The prelude to the battle
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 for 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 in 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.
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 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 used to relax again when it had been over a year since 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 was 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 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 on the corner, next to the door. Between the center of the room and the balcony, there was a large desk with several drawers and several papers on the table.
The safe, which was found again 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 footprints 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 in the jugular. The hardest training of these animals was, precisely, that they may learn to curb the instinct of barking 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 stuck out of its mouth, making it clear that it had detected him. Luckily, the piece of "prepared" meat was already 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 an option to attack before it knocked it out. Less than a minute later he heard the animal collapse in the hallway. Erion came 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, probably was 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 a messenger, had shown him the way that the stamp would look like: 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 reasonably could 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 that 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 wasn't 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 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 was 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 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 clients' interests were the priority.
When he was 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, versus the ones who ended up in jail or hanged. The cadence of the steps indicated an elderly person. Possibly it would be the housekeeper. Because of his vigilance, he knew the Commander and his wife would not be in the 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.