Av’ry returned to the sitting room the next morning, coffee in hand and ready to resume his task, to find the room empty. Which wouldn’t have been surprising, except that even the books and papers were missing. He was still staring, bewildered, when Mikiva entered behind him.

“What’s going on?” she asked sharply.

“Where in the Void is everything?” he turned to face her.

“What do you mean?” it was Mikiva’s turn to look bewildered. “It was like this when I got back last night. I figured you two had moved things after I left.”

Av’ry’s jaw dropped an inch,

“I didn’t move a thing. It was all here when I went to sleep. Could it have been stolen?”

Mikiva scoffed,

“This is likely the most secure room in the palace. Even if they could get past the wards, there is no way anyone carried away all of those books without one of K’ivin’s people noticing.”

“Right, but who else could have… Jade!” Av’ry slapped his forehead. “When I left last night, she was alone, with all the materials.”

“Well, she must have moved them sometime before I came in, then,” Mikiva reasoned.

“Where in the Void could she have gone with it all? And why?”

“I suppose we should look around; she can’t have gotten very far,” Mikiva sighed. “Why must everything with you people be such an ordeal?”

“Well, I see your excursion last night did nothing to improve your mood,” Av’ry muttered.

“Ramming my head against a brick wall rarely does,” she replied darkly. “Let’s just split up and look for her, alright? I am in no mood to bicker with you.”

“Fine. Did you sleep in your room last night?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” she snapped.

“Well, since you are sharing a room with Jade, I’d say it is rather relevant, wouldn’t you?”

Mikiva flushed slightly, dropping her eyes,

“Of course, you’re right. I did sleep there. Jade didn’t. None of the books were there either.”

“Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know,” he rolled his eyes. “You know, if we are going to keep working together, you could at least try to be civil.”

“I’ll consider it,” she mumbled.

“I suppose that is the most I can ask, from you,” Av’ry gritted his teeth.

She was really beginning to irritate him. He wasn’t sure exactly what he had done to offend her, recently, but it didn’t matter. He needed this to work, because he needed K’ivin’s help, and the advisor wanted him supervised. So, he was just going to need to try harder to win her over. He took a deep breath and calmed himself,

“Ok, if she isn’t in the room, I bet I know where we should look. She hasn’t really been anywhere in the palace except here, the servants’ quarters and the map room down the hall.”

“So, we try the map room then?”

“If she isn’t there, we’ll split up and search, agreed?”

“Fine,” Mikiva flung open the door and Av’ry followed her off down the hall.

Pushing the door open impatiently, Mikiva stopped dead and behind her, Av’ry’s coffee slipped from his hand as he collided with her back, the tin mug clattering to the stone floor.

“What in the…” Mikiva gaped, open-mouthed, at the state of the room in front of her.

The map room, usually impeccably organized and tidy, looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Books, both those from the library and the books from the sitting room, were spread all over the floor. They touched and overlapped in a mosaic-like pattern, obviously linked in some way, but the logic behind it eluded her. The rest of the room was plastered with maps, obviously taken from the drawers and shelves in the room itself. They were tacked and pinned to every flat surface, on walls, across bookshelves, even spread over the windows, blocking the morning light. Coloured pins dotted the maps, and strings ran from the pins to the small groupings of books below them. And there, sitting in the center, like a spider in its web, was the Esrasean servant.

“Jade, what is all this?” Mikiva finally found her voice. “K’ivin is going to have you killed for what you’ve done to this room.”

Jade blinked and looked up from her books, as if noticing them there for the first time,

“Oh, Av’ry, Mikiva,” she stood and stretched. “Is it morning already?”

“Has been for some time,” Av’ry replied dryly. “I take it you didn’t get any sleep, then.”

“Hmm, sleep?” Jade looked distracted. “No, no. I was too busy.”

“So I see…” Mikiva murmured.

“Oh, don’t look at me like I’m crazy,” Jade snapped. “There is a point to all this. I needed to see how it all fit together.”

“Want to share with the group?” the spy prompted.

“Of course. Av’ry, have you told Mikiva the story you told me yesterday?”

He shook his head mutely, still staring in bewilderment.

“Well, I need food. Catch Mikiva up and I will be back in a few minutes,” Jade carefully picked her way across the cluttered floor, pausing as she passed them. “And don’t touch anything while I’m gone, I’ve got it carefully organized.”

Then she disappeared down the hall towards the kitchen.

“Well,” Av’ry blinked, shaking his head. “I guess I’d better talk fast.”

Mikiva sunk into a chair by the door, careful not to disturb anything, and gestured for him to proceed.

“Do you know anything about Dragons?” Av’ry began.

He told the story just as he had to Jade, though Mikiva listened with considerably less interest. She did, however, wait quietly until he was finished, which was something.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“So, what does this have to do with anything?” she asked tartly.

“I can explain that part,” Jade chimed in from the doorway.

She popped a hunk of bread slathered in jam into her mouth as she re-entered the room. Picking her way back into the center of her web, Jade sat cross-legged and began her explanation.

“So, what we have been trying to do here is to reverse engineer a question from the components of the answer. But, if you really think about it, we actually have more information than just what is in the texts. See, we also know is the order that the books we obtained in, and the eventual location that they settled on for their search.”

“And that’s important?” Mikiva was sceptical.

“Of course it is. It’s all about the context. Each book on its own offers many possible avenues for investigation. However, we already know which one our adversaries chose, because the books selected next only overlap with the originals in certain respects. So, if we link them all together, we should be able to see what they were after.

When Av’ry told me his story, I realized that we had our first link. It explained why they were looking in Maaskal, they wanted to find something relating to the dragon’s disappearance, and this country was where the last dragons were seen. The seven stories Av’ry read suggested a total of 5 different fortresses as the final location of the dragons.”

“Five?” Mikiva asked.

“Yes. One book suggested three different options, two had no locations at all and several overlapped. Five total. So, I went to the next set of books Istaria acquired. Suffice it to say that they are all about the various ruins that were excavated during the golden age of exploration, when the humans were continuously seeking out the relics and remnants of the lost Draconic Civilization. To sum it up briefly, the books describe many excavations, but the five most interesting…”

“Are at the five sites mentioned in the previous books,” Av’ry finished.

“Exactly,” Jade grinned. “Now, the problem is that the naming of these fortresses was a little spotty at the time. The problem seemed to lie in the fact that the pronunciation of the original Draconic names is physically impossible with a human tongue. People adapted them to be pronounceable, but different groups modified them differently, which seems to have created a great deal of confusion over what most of these places were actually called. This, of course, causes us a problem because, though each ruin was called one thing in the original stories, the people excavating them often used different names entirely.

I spent quite a while thinking that I’d made a mistake and hit a dead end. But then I started mapping them by location, based on the landmarks they were near. You can see that here,” Jade gestured to her maps. “That’s when I noticed that some were clearly the same, but with a different name, so I finally was able to identify the five ruins we are interested in. I marked them with pins,” she pointed each one out in turn: “The grand fortress of Turessen; the repository, Synvelleassen; the great library, Pelless; the meeting place Morreesen; and finally, the dark tower, Svaeleth.”

“All of them are in the mountains of central Maaskal,” Mikiva mused, staring at the map.

“They are,” Jade nodded. “Which finally leads us to the last step. Now we know which ruins we are looking at, and who excavated them, so we can check what relics were located in those ruins, because it isn’t enough just to know where the relics were, of course.”

“Why not?” Mikiva asked.

“Well, the ruins were extensively looted. There is nothing left in the original locations. The only hope in finding anything is to locate who removed it in the first place and try to track its progress from there. There were plenty of books pulled on the relics from each of these ruins. The problem is, I don’t think that they found it in any of these,” Jade sighed.

“Why?”

“Because they kept looking,” Jade shrugged. “Context, remember? If they had what they wanted, they wouldn’t have gone back for more resources. The final book Istaria requested was written by a pair of notorious relic hunters, B’elitz and Bareina. They are mentioned in several of the other volumes. Apparently, in their day, they raided dozens of draconic ruins for fun and profit. They prided themselves on solving puzzles and discovering relics that the official investigators missed. They made quite a fortune in their work, and they considered themselves sort of high-class adventurers. They also felt the need to record their conquests for ‘posterity’, so every ruin they explored and every relic they found and sold was meticulously recorded in two journals, one kept by each.

It seems likely that if Istaria could not find the relic she was looking for in the original excavation records, this would have been the next place she looked. Given that it was the last book requested before they began sending out search parties, it is possible that she found it there. Or at least a good lead on it. I also suspect this because none of the official relics are very interesting, by the accounts I read. Certainly nothing seemed to be worth this amount of effort to find, and they have all been extensively tested and investigated. No, this is more likely something else. Something more… powerful, and less well known,” Jade’s eyes glittered as she spoke, she was flushed with excitement and frustration in equal parts.

“But unfortunately this was as far as I was able to get,” she sighed deeply. “Because we don’t have a copy of that journal.”

“Well, we’ll just have to find one, then,” Av’ry replied firmly, shaking his head. “This is very impressive work, Jade. Now, we are only one step away from our answer.”

“It isn’t going to be that easy, I am afraid. In fact, I’m not even sure it will be possible,” Jade chewed her lip anxiously.

“Why not?”

“Well, the problem is, only two copies of this journal ever existed. B’elitz and Bareina each kept an identical record, but that was all there ever was. No copies were made that I can find a record of. Now, K’ivin was very thorough in his tracking of each of your tomes, Av’ry. When he traced this journal, he noted that both copies changed hands two years ago. The first was stolen from a wealthy collector’s library.”

“Istaria,” Av’ry nodded, mentally checking off the first book.

“Probably,” Jade continued. “And the second, which had been stolen decades before, was purchased on the black market by an unidentified buyer.”

“Fox,” Av’ry sighed.

There it was, both copies really were lost to them.

“So, you see the problem?”

“Yes, yes I do. Unless we can find Fox’s stash, the location of which I couldn’t even begin to guess at, or somehow steal Istaria’s copy, we are out of luck,” Av’ry sighed deeply.

“Basically,” Jade concluded.

“All that work, just for a dead end,” Av’ry was frustrated.

“I warned you, this was always bound to fail,” Mikiva scoffed.

“You didn’t just warn me, you wanted it to fail. Which is funny, considering that you say you want to help,” Av’ry snapped.

“I do. I just didn’t think that centuries old books would help solve a modern problem.”

“What do you suggest then? Maybe we could go with your strengths then and just keep killing people until we get answers?” he muttered.

The blow to his jaw came without warning, and he staggered back a step. Mikiva stepped forward, seemingly planning to take another shot at him, but Jade placed a hand her elbow, halting her.

“Really?” she raised an eyebrow, clearly irritated. “Why do I even bother? Honestly, I don’t want to go into what your problem with each other is, I really don’t, but I need you to get over it. This setback isn’t either of your fault. We have got some important information out of this, but there is still a lot of work to do to make use of it. I don’t know if we can get out ahead of Istaria, here, but if we are even going to try, we need to work with each other, not against.”

Mikiva opened her mouth to speak, but Jade cut her off,

“Stop. I do not want to hear even a single word out of either of you right now. I’m tired. I am going to go get some rest. I suggest both of you take a long walk or something, separately, and decide what your priorities are: proving each other wrong, or actually figuring this out.”

She spun on her heel and stalked out. Mikiva looked as if she was going to say something, but then she too turned and left without another word. And then Av’ry was alone.

Slumping into a chair Av’ry rubbed his jaw gently. He had to give the assassin one thing, she had a terrific left hook. Looking around at all the scattered papers and maps, he couldn’t blame Jade for being upset with them. She had put in all the work and the two of them did nothing but bicker. He wasn’t sure why he let Mikiva get under his skin like that. He knew better. Usually, winning people over was his strong suit, but he couldn’t seem to do anything right lately. Maybe he had never been able to do anything right in the first place. Had he always been this useless? Had Fox just been carrying him all the time they were together? Honestly, he wasn’t sure anymore.

“Rough morning?” K’ivin’s voice broke into his reverie.

Raising his head, Av’ry turned to see the older man standing in the doorway, staring at the chaos with a vaguely bemused expression.

“I suppose you could say that,” Av’ry replied.

“Would you mind explaining what the meaning of all this is?”

There was an edge of anger to his voice, but he was carefully supressing it, waiting to see if Av’ry could justify this. Av’ry swallowed hard, he had better make this good.

“Of course. Though I warn you, it is a long story, and the ending leaves something to be desired.”

“Why am I not surprised?” K’ivin groaned. “Bad news is the only kind I hear lately. Well, might as well get it over with then.”

And so, for the third time in less than a day, Av’ry began to tell tales about dragons.