Chapter 19

The trio quickly made their way out of the cavern and Lord Mare delivered them to the front of the Adventurer Guild using the same spell he had cast earlier in the morning. Several shouts met them as they stepped out of the tree – a food vendor had apparently set up his stand next to it, and several of his customers fell over themselves in surprise. Lord Mare apologized for the disturbance several times before running off into the Adventurer guild.

When Ludmila and Howe caught up, they found the interior of the guildhall empty, save for Ishpen and Wina at the reception counter. They set their crates down and returned to Lord Mare.

“Everyone is probably in the observation room already,” Lord Mare said as they approached. “I-I’ll be going too.”

“Can we come along?”

Howe seemed curious how training was monitored. Ludmila was as well, but the lunch at the Wagner Manor was in an hour. To her surprise, he nodded.

“I guess?” He said, “You’ll see it sooner or later if you become proctors after passing Gold Rank.”

“Nice.”

“I won’t be able to attend,” Ludmila apologized, “There’s a lunch appointment that I need to prepare for.”

At her words, Lord Mare turned and left with Howe. Ludmila exited the building after them, finding herself following the same streets. After several blocks of her tailing them, Howe looked over his shoulder.

“I thought you had lunch?” He asked.

“I do,” she answered. “I just happen to be heading the same way.”

In the weeks following her first visit to E-Rantel after the annexation of the city, its streets slowly returned to a semblance of its former activity. The traffic in the streets seemed mostly on tasks surrounding the territories, with men and women purposely heading to and from various storefronts and warehouses. Many no longer bothered to make wide berths around the occasional Undead patrol or sentry, and wagons drawn by Soul Eaters were given no more consideration than a regular wagon hauling cargo through the streets. She thought that the sight would be utterly incomprehensible to outsiders: that the citizens would be so calm around what all others would normally treat as a nightmare beyond reckoning.

However, just as Ludmila thought this, a new, unsettling sensation filled her. Goosebumps rose on her arms and she felt the hairs on her skin stand on end. Alerted to danger, she placed a hand on the dagger sheathed at her belt and looked all around the city street. The Undead sentries appeared to be oblivious to the feeling, but everywhere beyond their posts she could see the citizens shrinking in trepidation and ducking into buildings. Like her, Howe had stopped walking: glancing nervously about. Lord Mare continued on his way with no sign he had noticed. Unlike the fear produced by the presence of the Undead, which she had long become accustomed to, the new sensation was one of a looming predator. It did not take long for the source to reveal itself.

With a cry that pierced the unnatural stillness that preceded it, a reptilian form crossed over the inner wall of the city. With a long, sinuous body clad in brilliant white scales, it glided overhead, casting its huge shadow onto the streets below. Ludmila tilted her head to the sky and her gaze followed it as it beat its wings once; twice, before disappearing over the roofs of the nearby buildings. Nearby, Howe walked to the centre of the wide street, hopping on his toes to see if he could catch another glimpse of the creature that had just passed overhead.

“Lord Mare!”

Ludmila called to Lord Mare, who was still walking on ahead without a care. He had not missed a step as the Dragon flew by overhead, but he jumped at her shout.

“My apologies, Lord Mare.” She lowered her voice as she fell in behind him, “Did you know a Dragon was coming?”

Another cry echoed over the city street. Ludmila looked up reflexively, wondering if the Dragon had returned. Instead, she saw three Dragons circling far overhead. She could not tell if the first had joined them, or if there were now four Dragons above the city.

“Un,” Lord Mare confirmed. “Shalltear had them fly over to the city from the mountains in the north.”

“Lady Shalltear has returned?” Ludmila asked.

Short of seeing her briefly the previous day, she had not heard from her liege for over a week – the last communication she received from her was the written missive to join the Adventurer Guild.

“I’m not sure what her plans are,” Lord Mare replied. “Was there something you needed to see her about? I can see if I can get a hold of her…”

“No,” Ludmila said quickly, “no. I was just curious, my lord. There is nothing of mine that currently requires her attention – I do not wish to take time away from her duties.”

“Oh. Ok.”

Their journey brought them before the central district’s southern gatehouse. The Crypt Lord – she had learned what it was actually called at some point during her repeated visits to the city – that had given her directions when she had first arrived in E-Rantel was still standing its vigil. She nodded to it as they walked by, but it did not respond to her silent greeting.

“This is where I was headed,” Lord Mare said as he stopped in front of a door to an administrative building Ludmila thought had been vacated. “Bye.”

The door shut behind him, and she heard the sound of running steps behind her as Howe raced to catch up to them.

“I guess Dragons are no big deal to you two,” he said breathlessly as the Rogue passed her to enter the building.

Howe’s parting words made Ludmila look up to the sky again. The Dragons had separated; she spotted three of them lazily making slow rounds over the city walls. Several more crossed her line of sight, and she stopped to count them again. There were four just a few minutes ago, and now there were twelve.

The rustle of leathery wings turned her attention to another, which was perched over the gate they had just entered. It was looking out over the rest of the city, its tail lazily swishing back and forth. It was the first time she had seen a Dragon up close – it was the first time she had seen a Dragon period, actually. Creatures obscured by myth and legend, she doubted that any of the Humans in the duchy had seen one before. Most of her knowledge concerning them came from the tales of Bards, fancifully spun.

Unlike those tales, however, these Dragons were far from the noisy, fire-breathing harbingers of destruction portrayed. They were lithe, agile and possessed of an incredible degree of stealth. Ludmila didn’t even notice the one landing on the gatehouse and, whenever one of them crossed overhead, it may as well have been an owl for all the noise they made. She couldn’t help but marvel at their forms: sleek and powerful predators that she could instantly appreciate, far from the ponderous and clumsy things that appeared in song.

There were rumors of Dragons making their homes in the Azerlisia Range to the north – which was apparently true – and the idea that some Dragons ruled over the Agrande Confederation, which bordered the northwest corner of Re-Estize. It would not be unfair to say that the word ‘Dragon’ was only a representation of an idea: a collection of fantastic tales, rumors and whatever her imagination used to fill the spaces between them.

Now that there was one perched on the wall above her and many flying overhead, the fantastical lore dispersed as simply as if it had been cast into the spring breeze, replaced by the reality before her. They were powerful, to be sure – undoubtedly dozens of times stronger than herself – but, at the same time, they fell short of the legendary image that Dragons had held in her mind up to this point. Looking around at the household servants carrying out errands in the district, it seemed that they had recovered entirely as well. These Dragons were only a small addition to the legion of powerful Undead that had already occupied their city for weeks.

Ludmila found herself standing before her manor without realizing she had walked the rest of the way there in the midst of her thoughts. One of her Death Knight footmen led her up the walkway and opened the door. There was the sound of footsteps quickly descending the courtyard stairs and Aemilia appeared in the hallway.

“Welcome back, my lady,” her maid greeted her with a curtsey. “I’ve prepared a bath and your outfit for lunch.”

“Did anything new arrive?” Ludmila asked.

“Yes, my lady,” Aemilia replied as she rose and followed her up the stairs to her solar, “it seemed to be regular business from the barony. Terrence and Rodney haven’t returned from their errands yet, so there might be something when they get back as well. Still, it seems like it will be the usual routines for this afternoon after lunch.”

Mention of her afternoon work reminded her of Terah’s impromptu meeting before dinner.

“Do you know what Terah wanted this afternoon?” Ludmila asked, “It seemed strangely cryptic, coming from her.”

“I didn’t know before, my lady.” Aemilia replied, “I do now. She’s right that it’s better to focus on your duties until then; it’s not an immediately pressing concern.”

The more her maids assured her that it wasn’t important, the more she itched to know what it was. She pushed it once again from her mind by glancing over the new information from Warden’s Vale. As Aemilia had mentioned, it was simply an update to the village inventories by Jeeves, with requests for various replacement goods that could not be produced in the village.

“Was there anything else from Wagner?”

“No, my lady,” Aemilia said as she helped her out of her equipment. “It seems to be a normal lunch invitation.”

Ludmila finished her preparations with half an hour to spare. Once again, she was in her only dress, with its forest green skirts that were definitely hanging too high off of the floor. She was already acutely self-conscious about the fact that she repeatedly wore it to formal occasions without needing this additional worry.

“Aemilia,” she asked, “would you be able to do some shopping for me?”

“Shopping, my lady?”

“I need a larger wardrobe,” Ludmila told her, “especially for formal occasions.”

“But…don’t you want to be there as well?”

“I do,” Ludmila sighed, “but as we can see now, I never seem to have time. Nothing overly extravagant, just outfits that are presentable for meetings and such.”

“Very well, my lady,” Aemilia said. “I’ll see what I can do while you’re out doing Adventurer Guild things…though you’re due to be back at Warden’s Vale soon, yes?”

“That’s right. We’ll just have to make everything fit in together somehow.”

Ludmila was particularly anxious to return to her demesne. The long list of migrant candidates that had been handed to her by the Temple finally filled several crucial trades whose absence had been throttling development. Even though it was still spring, she felt that there was too little time to finish everything that needed to be done before winter.

“I suppose the best course would be to collect designs and we can go over them while we’re in the Barony...then we can place orders on our return to the city. Will that work, my lady?”

“I think so, yes,” Ludmila replied. “The formal announcement of our new relationship with the Empire will be a week after we return – the new outfits need to be ready by the time merchants and representatives from Arwintar begin to arrive several days after that.”

Aemilia looked down at her hands, silently tallying whatever she had in mind.

“That will be close, my lady,” she said, “but I think I can coax at least one outfit to be ready by then.”

“Good enough,” Ludmila nodded. “Between the demesne, my work here and the Adventurer Guild I don’t think I need a whole lot to start with.”

With one last check in front of the dresser mirror, Ludmila descended from her solar and left the manor with Aemilia in tow.

Baroness Wagner’s manor was on the other side of the gardens that spanned the front of the Royal Villa, a five minute walk away from Ludmila’s own. As House Wagner had opted to live in E-Rantel rather than out in their demesne nearby, the manor had seen a number of extensions and renovations which had transformed it into a building significantly larger than the regular guest manors in the district. It still maintained the general theme of the buildings surrounding it, with its arching limestone architecture that matched the Royal Villa’s but, beyond that, it was fashioned as the permanent residence for a noble house.

Human footmen in the chestnut and silver livery of House Wagner were stationed on the street, ready to receive the day’s guests. A well-groomed young man, perhaps twenty years of age, received her, leading her into the entrance where the Butler awaited. From there, the Butler guided her to the hall of the manor – the room where the official business of a noble house was usually conducted, as well as the place where large functions were held.

Much like Countess Jezne’s aged Butler, the steward of House Wagner announced her entry.

“Lady Ludmila Zahradnik,” he said in a clear voice, and those in attendance turned to look in her direction, “Baroness of Warden’s Vale.”

After a quick scan of the faces lining the tables in the room, Ludmila realized that this was not going to be an ordinary lunch.