Chapter 77 - The Farm in Irttat

 

Chapter 77: The Ship of Exile 11

"What a pity." Lucita rested a hand on the piano frame, leaning to one side, and sighed. "A treasure like this, silent for five years in that records room."

"More than that," Lesley said. "It will go on being silent."

“If I wanted to...” A light of some indeterminate quality flickered in Lucita’s eyes. “To spread it. What would happen?”

"You would receive a cell." Lesley shrugged.

"Is there really no exception?"

Lesley caught the seriousness in Lucita's voice, and couldn't help searching her face with a puzzled look: "Why can you be so unafraid?"

She already knew Lucita had no distinguished family name, which meant getting involved in something like this was a path straight to ruin.

A person with no connection to the matter at all, who had displayed neither particular rage nor deep empathy... could mere curiosity really be enough to drive someone to put herself in danger? 

Lucita met Lesley's puzzled gaze and gave a reassuring smile: "Don't look at me like you're looking at a warrior. What's dangerous for you is different for me. You understand?"

She only hinted at it, but Lesley almost instantly recalled the experience of “another world” from moments earlier. 

Lucita had said before that the only reason she had been able to come to the magical tower was because she was powerful. Lesley had assumed she meant only exceptional talent.

Now, looking back, perhaps she truly possessed a kind of power ordinary people could not approach.

Once that understanding formed in her mind, the closeness Lesley had just begun to feel toward Lucita receded into an infinite distance.

A person of unknown origin, perhaps not even of the same kind...

Unknowns always brought fear.

Lesley swallowed and nodded.

Lucita did not particularly care how Lesley saw her. She had no interest in clinging to a human for warmth.

Strictly speaking, Lucita was a unique entity in this world, and the world she perceived was unlike anyone else’s. She had long since adapted to the inescapable loneliness this brought.

Patiently, she repeated her question. When it came to the unspoken rules of the human world, locals were more familiar: "So, is there any exception? A way to avoid a cell?"

Lesley hesitated and said: "Unless... you hold a distinguished family name."

"I don't." Lucita stated what they both already knew.

"Then perhaps you could wait a few years? After becoming a certified intermediate mage, you would receive an honorary earldom. At that point, so long as you don't alarm the higher-up great personages, no one can govern your behavior if you go a little too far. The city jail that was able to hold Franka has no authority to detain you. With the talent that got you accepted as a special case, becoming an intermediate mage probably won't take many years."

A sensible suggestion.

Lucita hummed softly, finding it highly practicable: "Do magical certifications have levels? How does one take the examination?"

“Right next door. Robin Street 49, the tower you passed when you arrived. The Spring Tower.”

"When are examinations held?" Lucita was interested now, and leaned forward to ask: "Can I go and take it right now?"

Lesley jumped slightly at the brightness in Lucita's eyes: "Any... any time. The Spring Tower continues the prehistoric tradition of openness. It welcomes and encourages anyone who wishes to climb the peaks of magic."

“Openness,” Lucita thought dryly. An ironic name for what the Spring Tower had become. 

"Thank you for letting me know."

Lesley looked at her expression uncertainly and hesitated: "You only need to ring the golden bell on the side of the tower and someone will open the door. Do you truly... want to take the examination right now? I have to say, though your talent is exceptional, becoming a certified mage is not as simple as you might imagine. And intermediate certification even more so..."

As a magical apprentice, offering advice like this was risky. Many young nobles would take offense, and a single furrowed brow from one of them could affect the rest of Lesley's apprenticeship.

The fact that she said as much as she did was a genuine expression of trust in Lucita's character.

Lucita thanked her, but went ahead with her unilateral decision to take the examination anyway.

Lesley could say no more. She only sighed.

Many people had rung the golden bell hanging at the Spring Tower’s entrance. But over all these years, the number of certified mages in the kingdom remained pitiably small, small enough to count on one’s fingers. 

In March of the year 577, Lucita rang the first golden bell of the year.

Dong, dong. 

As the peal echoed, the stone door boomed open, sliding slowly to either side.

A parrot beat its wings, startled, and landed on the top of its cage with an abrupt squawk.

An upstairs window was suddenly pushed open. An old woman with gray-white hair leaned out and called down: "Who's there?"

Lucita raised her voice: "I've come to take the examination. Is this the right place?"

The old woman looked her over, muttered something about "an unfamiliar face," and still nodded: "Come up."

The moment she stepped through the tower door, the stone door boomed shut behind her.

The lights went out, and then the interior lamps came on.

Used to the dim gas lamps, Lucita blinked at this flawless brightness and looked around.

From the stone walls on every side, familiar stone lamp-holders extended, casting a soft amber light that illuminated overlapping shadows.

Brighter than gas lamps, steadier, and probably safer too. The light she had liked best from her earliest memories.

These were sturgeon-eye lamps.

The old woman was already descending the interior stairs. Seeing Lucita staring at the lamp-holders on the wall, she smiled and explained: "These are ancient magical lanterns, made from special materials. They’ve been passed down from remote antiquity."

There was a faint pride in her tone as she described them.

Lucita stood in the center of the empty tower floor, watching the old woman come down the stairs. 

To be candid, she did not quite match what Lucita had imagined a human mage to look like.

The books Lucita had read in Irttat were all prehistoric magical texts, and their descriptions of magical culture reflected prehistoric customs. Triangular crystal spectacles, voluminous layer-upon-layer magical robes with generous cut, staff inset with crystal conduits... The mages described in those books typically maintained a simple and mysterious aesthetic to signal their commitment to magical research and their distinction from the mundane world.

Judged against that standard, the woman before her looked nothing like a mage. The words “ancient” and “dignified” had nothing to do with her. 

Her clothes were perfectly ordinary, the kind of overcoat one could buy in any ready-to-wear shop outside, the sort favored by middle-class tenants of garden houses. Her unruly curls were completely white, but her posture was not bent in the least. She carried the air of someone who could pick up a pen and instruct the world at any moment.

If not for the large, pure amethyst set into her cane, Lucita would never have connected that unassuming walking stick to the magnificently described magical staffs in the books.

Compared to the teachers and classmates Lucita had encountered since enrollment, this person was far, far more unassuming.

Lucita strongly suspected this elderly woman could put her hat on and walk out to the market to buy evening groceries without looking remotely out of place.

If Lucita had known the basic common knowledge circulating among the Spring Tower's students, she would have recognized this as Duren, the Spring Tower's aging guardian and examiner, who had held the role of examiner for over forty years.

By all accounts, in her youth she had studied at the Spring Tower, and had then voluntarily renounced her family's inheritance rights to devote her whole life to the study of magical materials.

Madam Duren had no particular interest in increasing her magical power, but through exceptional research ability she had reconstructed a series of magical instruments described in the historical texts, including this magical lantern that burned continuously without needing to be lit, one of her proudest achievements.

For this reason, though she held only the nominal title of resident guardian at the tower's second floor (since theoretically a magical tower had no need for a guardian), she commanded universal respect throughout the Spring Tower.

"Hello?" Lucita ventured.

"Hello, child." Duren spoke from the stairs. "Come up. We'll conduct the examination on the second floor. What level of certification are you here for? Earth, wind, water, or fire?"

One was much the same as another to Lucita. Since she was currently enrolled as a fire-stream student, she answered casually, “Fire, I suppose.” 

The wording made Duren look at her a moment longer, but she said nothing.

"Your stream is fire?"

"Yes."

"Your name?"

"Lucita."

"I need your full name, little young master."

"Ah. Lucita Cameron."

"Cameron? Is that some newly risen family? I fear I can no longer keep up with the times..."

Lucita followed Duren up the stairs, and her eyes opened wide.

The second floor had two relatively small windows. Daylight filtering through the narrow openings relieved much of the oppressive darkness below. 

The rooms here were arranged in a ring, with doors on all four sides and a broad open space in the middle, covered by a deep blue woven rug. In the center stood a stone sculpture. 

Stone tower walls, ancient masonry, bluestone flooring, stone sculpture... against this austere interior, the woven rug was clearly a later addition, at odds with everything around it. 

A row of sturgeon-eye lamps hung in a circle on all four walls, casting a soft luminous glow.

Duren said: "This is a sculpture of Gaia the creator god. Whatever your beliefs may be, the magical tower has long maintained the ancient earth-mother worship."

Lucita nodded to acknowledge this.

It was the first time Lucita had seen a sculpture of Gaia since entering the human world. The image had already diverged considerably from Gaia’s true appearance, but even so, it was notable. 

She thought of the churches at the city’s center: Gaia’s curling-haired statue, the human weapon in its hand, a longsword, and the thoroughly muddled legends of the twelve subordinate angels beneath it. The sculpture before her now looked almost respectable by comparison. 

Madam Duren led her to the central door.

"This is my research room." She mentioned it in passing, rummaging behind a bookshelf.

The room was not large. Bookshelves, storage racks, and an experimental bench took up most of the space. 

The table was cluttered with laboratory equipment: powders of various colors, a kerosene lamp, flasks and test tubes filled with liquids, everything in considerable disorder. 

"Don't touch anything, these materials are dangerous."

Duren said this without looking up, still rummaging, until she found what she was looking for.

It was a well-bound leather notebook, carefully tied with leather cord, still looking new with little sign of wear. 

She untied it and opened it to a blank page: "Write your name."

Lucita accepted the ink-soaked quill and did so.

“Then I’ll need your seal for the registry. Produce the stream-badge unique to you. Every person’s stream-badge is different.” 

So there was such a custom as well. 

Lucita pretended to reach into her pocket (a gesture sufficiently inelegant to draw another sideways look from Duren), and actually retrieved from her personal space the stream-badge that had been enclosed with her invitation letter — the ruby pin.

The back of the badge was engraved on its base with scrolling foliage, dotted among it with small delicate flowers.

Duren glanced at it: "You didn't have a custom badge made? Most of you young people prefer not to use the school's standard designs."

Lucita shook her head: "Something that identifies me is enough."

She used the dark blue sealing wax Duren had melted to press her personal impression onto the registry page, beside her own name.

Registration complete, she turned right out of the research room, pushed open a worn wooden door painted dark red, and entered the fire-stream examination chamber.

Dust rained down on her.

She coughed twice and remarked: "This door could use replacing too."

Unexpectedly, the room appeared narrow from outside but the interior space was considerably larger.

At the far end of the stone chamber stood a simple desk. In the center was a circular stone platform, smoothed to a perfect flat surface.

Duren pulled open a drawer and removed a box of classified minerals.

"We’ve always used the simplest means to test the intensity of flame a fire-stream mage can produce. Recently I’ve been trying to reconstruct the instruments described in the historical records, ones that could directly measure elemental concentration, but there’s been no significant progress yet."

As she spoke, she placed a box of brightly colored minerals on the platform in front of Lucita. 

"The most direct test is simply this: what temperature can your flame reach? It tests both your ability to draw fire-element concentration and your control over the element. The more fire element you can draw, and the more densely you can layer it, the higher the temperature your flame can reach. Flame-layering is very difficult for beginners, but to become a certified combat-capable mage, it must be mastered."

“However...” Duren produced a small box of gold ingots and set it beside the platform. “Your examination material is here. Entry-level certification doesn’t require too much. Gold is enough of a challenge for beginners. You must keep trying to melt the gold ingots until your mind is exhausted and you can no longer draw on elemental power. If you can successfully melt five ingots within half an hour, you will qualify as a certified mage.”

Lucita: That's very generous!

"...When it's over, does the melted gold belong to me?"

Duren looked at her, baffled.

A Spring Tower student, about to take an examination, not thinking about how to pass, but already eyeing a few gold ingots?

Does this actually happen?

In theory, used examination materials were waste products that needed to be collected and remelted into new ingots. But with examinations held only once a month or so, and only two or three ingots expended each time, the small loss was usually ignored. Duren typically gathered them for use as experimental material. 

Duren had never been asked this before, and was momentarily at a loss. She finally said: "If you pass, certainly."

Clever. Set a condition on the spot, and there was no need to worry about students coming back again and again just for the gold. She was confident Spring Tower students would never stoop to that, but there were apprentices to consider…

Of course, the greedy student before her was an exception.

She cleared her throat: "If you have no other questions, we can begin."

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