Teaser
Read on for an excerpt of Michelle Sagara’s Heir of Light, available now!
The Academia required students. Apparently, it also required vast quantities of paperwork, much of which appeared to be stacked
in teetering piles on the chancellor’s desk. The chancellor in question eyed those piles with narrowed eyes. Lannagaros had
a large desk, although it was almost buried at the moment beneath bureaucratic detritus.
“I do not suggest burning them,” the voice of the Academia said, tone dry as good tinder. “Some of those papers are student
applications.”
“I am aware of that.” It was not the student applications that the chancellor wanted to reduce to ash. Students were the life’s
blood of the Academia; their presence gave Killianas, the sentience behind the Academia’s many buildings, strength.
An influx of students, however, required teachers. Professors. Experts in their fields of knowledge.
Lannagaros’s choice—at the start of his tenure as chancellor—had been limited. Barrani scholars came, of course; the Barrani
had famously long lives and memories, and if most had not attended the Academia in its golden years, they had heard of it
many, many times.
Lannagaros was currently inquiring into two possible Dragon scholars—both of whom had chosen the long sleep some centuries past. It was Imperial custom—and law—that those who slept remain undisturbed in their chosen slumber; Dragons did not always wake gracefully, and if they were startled into their new surroundings, could be quite proactively defensive.
He had requested permission to disturb, or attempt to disturb, that slumber.
The Emperor had yet to make his decision.
Lannagaros had accepted a handful of mortal scholars with far less pickiness than he had similar Barrani professors; he felt
that their presence would prove a comfort to those mortals among the student body, given the number of mortals who comprised
it.
This had not, in at least one case, proven true.
But now, on his desk, he had over three dozen applications and requests for professorial positions, all from humans. Some
of the names he recognized; some, he did not. Of the nearly forty requests, only two had family names that were not immediately
familiar to a lord of the Dragon Court, and he set those aside for further investigation.
His sigh had smoke in it.
The interest of so many people of note in the human caste court was not a coincidence. None of these scholars had shown any
previous interest in the Academia. Some of these scholars were Imperial mages. He had a natural suspicion of the Arcanum,
but many of the current Barrani professors had been trained and schooled in higher magical arts in that very place.
Some of their Arcanum confederates had carelessly experimented in a fashion that could have become literally world-threatening.
“Their studies within the Academia could be more easily curbed. The Arcanum was never hosted within a sentient building,”
Killianas said.
“The Barrani tend to avoid sentient buildings, where at all feasible.” The chancellor’s very toothy grin was possibly petty; the High Halls from which the caste court ruled the Barrani was now subject to a similar sentience, which had been trapped for almost a millennium in its effort to contain a dangerous Shadow imprisoned at its heart.
The Barrani who wished to be Lords of the High Court had no choice but to subject themselves to the inspection and knowledge of the new High Halls.
Killianas agreed. “Mortals would not avoid them in the same fashion.”
“They would, if they were wise.”