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Chapter 2

“Lady Wagner, could you please review my work?”

The pale hand of a Vampire Bride released a folder onto Liane’s ebony desk. Liane reached out to pick it up, feeling a jealous twinge as her gaze crossed over the Vampire Bride’s voluptuous figure.

Dammit, why does she have to be so stacked? They’re all as big as Florine.

Muttering darkly to herself, she went over the Vampire Bride’s submission. Her finger traced over a table listing the data collected for the new test course built on her recently-expanded territory. It consisted of different types of roads built over all types of terrain, meant to put new vehicle frames undergoing development to the test.

“Looks good,” Liane handed the folder back. “Make two copies for the archive, another two for the office and distribute sets to each of the shop and test crews.”

“Right away, my lady.”

Liane frowned as the Vampire Bride returned to her desk. Her hips swayed as streams of morning sunlight cast a silhouette of her generous figure through the diaphanous fabrics of her alabaster dress. Over half of the people working in the office stopped working to watch her as she passed. Liane narrowed her eyes.

Why did the Vampire Brides all do that? Even when there wasn’t anyone around to look good for, they carried themselves that way without fail.

Well, she was usually around…were they trying to get her? They weren’t, were they? They might be…

With the exception of the Sorcerer King, Lady Shalltear exclusively favoured women. Maybe the members of her household were the same. Maybe it was because they were Vampires. Tales abounded of their dangerous and hedonistic nature – they were often portrayed as the embodiment of carnal pleasures and unbridled violence.

She spotted Ludmila wearing a collar once. Was it to protect her neck? Liane mulled over whether she should purchase protection as well.

The door to the hall swung open and her butler appeared, arms filled with the morning’s mail. A longtime member of House Wagner’s household, his family had been with hers since before they migrated to E-Rantel. The man weathered his advancing years well, and the streaks of silver in his hair only added to his distinguished air.

She eyed the various envelopes and folders as he arranged them over the polished desk.

“Anything interesting, Lars?”

“Whether it is interesting or not, my lady,” Lars replied, “your work still awaits you.”

Liane harrumphed. As nice as it often was, there were disadvantages to having long-standing retainers as well.

Nearly her entire household had either watched her grow up or had grown up with her. This gave them a closeness that also happened to make them impervious to her character. It was gratifying that they were warm and protective, yet it was also sometimes irksome when they still treated her as ‘Mistress Liane’ rather than ‘Lady Wagner’.

She stuck her tongue out at her butler’s retreating figure as he left the hall. Liane caught the Vampire Bride staring at her, and the Vampire Bride quickly looked back down at her work.

The Undead handmaiden was part of the trio that Lady Shalltear had left with her over a month ago. They were each assigned duties by their mistress, but they were also there to learn about anything that was related to the Ministry of Transportation. The other two Vampire Brides worked with her shop crews and out in the field testing areas in her demesne. She still hadn’t figured out good names for them, and they didn’t seem to care that they had none.

Since these locations were where Liane was most of the time, it meant that there was one close by for ninety per cent of her waking hours. Considering that Lady Shalltear had provided her with a Ring of Sustenance at the same time she brought the Vampire Brides over, it was a lot of hours. The Vampire brides often came shopping with Liane too – they especially loved to frequent the boutiques around the city, staying on top of trends in fashion and making occasional purchases.

Despite this, Lady Shalltear’s Vampire Brides never changed out of their usual outfits. Unless they were the ones working for the postal service. Come to think of it, their new postal uniforms were incredibly trendy, too.

Liane sifted through the mail, flipping through merchant reports, demesne business, notifications and letters. Her heart skipped a beat when she found an envelope at the bottom of the last pile. A wax seal occupied the centre, sporting the emblem of the Sorcerous Kingdom.

If something like this came in, tell me, old man!

She wanted to rip the envelope open right away, but she knew why her butler had put the thing at the bottom of the pile. If business from the Royal Court came in this form, it was something that could wait. If it was urgent, one of the Sorcerer King’s servants would have been waiting for her.

Liane continued to work through the morning, trying her best to ignore the presence of the envelope. With most of House Wagner’s business being with the Empire, the majority of her tasks dealt with various things related to their neighbour in the east. Though Liane thought that House Wagner was generally doing well, not everything that crossed her desk was good.

One of the points of greatest concern revolved around the Prime Minister’s directives regarding the Imperial Legions. The dissolution of twenty-five per cent of the Empire’s standing military would send destructive shockwaves through the markets of the region. Every industry that supported the Imperial Legions would scramble to figure out how to survive the drastically shifting demands for everything that the Legions once consumed.

With the revivification of the Dwarf Kingdom, mines and metalworkers would be doubly squeezed. Tens of thousands of Imperial Knights, auxiliaries and the people in the vast support industries under them would lose their livelihoods. In total, the dissolution of two Legions affected upwards to a half-million of the Empire’s citizens – roughly six per cent of its total population. The effects on the regional economy would be telling.

Understanding the Emperor’s relationship to the legions, Liane presumed that many of the Knights would be placed in what positions the Imperial Administration could find or afford to create. Everyone else would be out of luck and flooding the labour markets. All the belt-tightening that resulted would in turn kill discretionary spending.

The change to the Legions was purportedly made to bolster the Empire’s military as it was now a protectorate of the Sorcerous Kingdom. It did exactly that, but it also required the Empire to lease Undead. This in itself was not a bad thing, but the directive had been unfortunately handed out in the high handed fashion that everyone feared when they first heard the terms of their relationship.

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Under the placid surface of the Baharuth Empire was an oncoming wave of economic chaos and uncertainty. The only thing that would keep a lid on unrest was fear of a crackdown by the Sorcerous Kingdom. How Baharuth’s administration would weather things was yet to be seen. For the most part, the Sorcerous Kingdom left the Empire to run its own affairs. As a result, the Empire’s citizens had been content with their transition to a client state, but the sudden, arbitrary change to its military affected the entire nation. The Imperial Administration was probably working like crazy to make sure they didn’t give the Sorcerous Kingdom justifications to hand down more arbitrary changes.

If the Empire’s administrators fell behind in their management of the oncoming crisis, their pristine exterior would shatter. Jircniv Rune Farlord El-Nix was reportedly a brilliant ruler who had drawn on the institutions that had been cultivated by generations of previous Emperors to secure his power base and bring about a stable and prosperous reign. Understanding this, Liane had begun her own preparations to take advantage of the new opportunities in the Empire that would result from the period of change.

The second point was what Liane informally referred to as the ‘cultural embargo’ against the Sorcerous Kingdom. Simply put, exports from their nation were treated with suspicion or outright shunned by their neighbours – except for the Dwarf Kingdom – due to associations with the Undead.

It was not a formal embargo enacted by any government and thus could not be solved through diplomacy. People treated goods from the Sorcerous Kingdom as cursed, third rate, or unpopular, depressing the prices of everything the Sorcerous Kingdom produced. This would probably pass with time, but it was a pain in the ass while it was so pervasive. Those exporting goods from the Sorcerous Kingdom were scrambling to find effective ways to market them.

On the domestic front, things were proceeding apace. Her new lands had transitioned smoothly to House Wagner’s administration. Merchant operations had expanded twenty-fold to meet the demands of the Sorcerous Kingdom’s increased production and appetite for imports. Liane was also in the process of raising funds to charter two new towns. All that was left was for her to settle on how to allocate industries in the new lands of the county.

Early afternoon saw the completion of her paperwork. She snatched up the envelope and rose from her seat. The men and women working at their desks looked up at her expectantly, but Liane only walked out of the hall. Her steady pace betrayed none of the excitement that welled up within. She knew what the letter was at a glance. All that mattered was what she found at the bottom: the personal seal of the Sorcerer King. Her proposal had been approved.

Heels tapped quickly from behind Liane.

“My lady, what’s going on?”

“This,” Liane didn’t stop as she waved the approved proposal in the air. “Round up Fried and the others. Have them get the workshop ready. Nab Ein and Zwei from wherever they wandered off to, as well.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Rose stopped and turned back around. Skirts whirling around her knees, Liane climbed the stairs to the second floor and made her way to the vault. Beside the door stood one of her footmen: a Platinum-rank Adventurer who had retired to raise a family several years previous.

“She’s in there again,” he said.

“She? Oh. Wait – how do you know it’s a she?”

“Sounds like bloody murder whenever she opens her mouth, so she’s a she.”

Liane frowned at his reasoning. Within the vault, she found who the footman was referring to: a Shadow Demon.

“Still no luck, huh?”

The Shadow Demon looked up from where it was trying to figure out its way into a large safe. ‘She’ shook its head. It was the only place in the manor that the Shadow Demon couldn’t get into, and not for lack of trying.

Unlike most safes, it wasn’t installed into a wall. Instead, it was fixed atop a platform in the centre of the vault. Shadow Demons could move from shadow to shadow, passing through floors and walls to enter places barred from mundane entry. They could even gain access to locked safes like the one before them…as long as there was a shadow to enter and leave out of.

The vault was flooded with magical light, as was the interior of the safe. The safe was both physically and magically locked, and too strong for the Shadow Demon to damage. For the past month, it tried something new every day. The Shadow Demon gave Liane a resentful look as she approached.

“Well it just so happens that I got something nice today,” Liane told the Shadow Demon. “Since I’m in such a good mood, you finally get to see what’s inside.”

She withdrew a key from her bag. The Shadow Demon eyed it suspiciously. Twice it had stolen the key, only to find that it didn’t work. Liane smiled as she sauntered forward. The key and the safe were imported from another part of the continent and were magically attuned to members of House Wagner. Despite one being able to turn the key in the lock, the mechanisms of the safe would not work for anyone but her.

Inserting the complex-looking key, she slowly gave it a turn. A series of mechanical clicks softly sounded in the air as both the mundane and magical protections undid themselves.

Beside her, the Shadow Demon swallowed. Liane smiled as she teased the handle of the safe. With an air of grand anticipation, she threw open the door. The Shadow Demon darted in, the yellow slashes that were its eyes looking eagerly this way and that.

“I dunno what you were expecting, but…”

The Shadow Demon placed its hands on the brightly lit walls of the space, poring over every millimetre. It was a futile effort, however, for there was absolutely nothing stored within. After spinning around inside the safe for several minutes, it turned to regard Liane with a confused look. She only offered a mischievous grin in return.

The Shadow Demon fled from the vault, the sound of Liane’s laughter chasing it down the corridor.

Ah…was it crying. I didn’t know Demons could cry. Well, the more you know…

Liane tossed the approved proposal into the safe, then locked it again. She made her way over to a long shelf built along the wall nearby, its space half-filled with plain wooden cases. Her slim hand brushed over them until she reached the one she had come for, eyes turning misty as she lovingly caressed the letters carved into the front.

Ernst Koen Dale Wagner

K.Y. 124 – 154

She wiped away her tears. Reaching up Liane pulled the chest down off of the shelf and placed it on a nearby table. A smile crept onto her face as she lifted the lid to reveal the jumble of junk within.

Bits of metal haphazardly piled on top of one another; gears and rods and other knick-knacks. They were all well-fashioned and polished to a reflective sheen, but otherwise meaningless to those who did not know the tale that came with them.

She held up one of the objects in front of her face, her father’s voice echoing from the depths of her memory.

Too soon. Too ignorant. No demand. Someday.

Every piece had a story of its own. In the wooden case were ideas without a place; concepts with no application; innovations ahead of their time. Many of them came from elsewhere, while others were a product of personal effort. Rather than discard them as worthless curiosities to be lost to memory and time, Lord Ernst Wagner had preserved them for the future.

In short, it was a box filled with dreams.

Re-Estize was a land where ignorance and superstition ruled the minds of its people, and the contents of the case were as pearls before swine.

The Sorcerous Kingdom was established with an act of raw strength, and raw strength was applied in direct and uninspired ways. Innovation mattered little when that strength was sufficient to suit the purposes of those in power.

But while this may have been the case, the fact remained that much of what mattered to those in power mattered little to those without. In the Sorcerous Kingdom, where the weak could thrive under the protection of incomprehensible strength, an unprecedented opportunity had presented itself.

After taking the pieces that she came for, Liane shut the lid of the case and returned it to its place. Her gaze swept over the shelf and the many cases laid upon it. Like her father’s, they, too, were filled with the work of her forbearers.

Liane knew every one of them, for the vault was also the playground of her childhood and the playground of all the scions of House Wagner since its founding. The cases were their tradition. They were their greatest treasure. Arrayed along the wall were the dreams of House Wagner’s daughters and sons. Though they were gone, their house still lived on.

Their dreams were now hers. She would take those dreams and turn them into reality – no, with those dreams, reality itself would change.

With hands on her hips, Liane looked up proudly at her family’s legacy. House Wagner would take the world by storm.