9. Black and Gold (19)
9. Black and Gold (19)
A week had passed since Maya began her solitary excursions.
She would leave the lodgings at sunrise and return only after sunset.
Her destination was always the same.
Tetromino Plaza, the very heart of Yeterinpurk.
There are exactly seven shapes that can be formed by combining four squares.
J, L, T, Z, S, O, I.
These seven blocks, each colored from red to violet, were laid across the ground without a millimeter of gap.
Each square tile measured fifteen centimeters per side.
By calculation, the plaza held ten million individual square tiles — which meant 2.5 million tetromino blocks.
Maya walked briskly, eyes sweeping over the blocks beneath her feet.
The possible arrangements of seven block types were finite.
She hadn't been studying the ground long before a pattern emerged.
Groups of tetromino blocks formed roughly five hundred distinct patterns.
Maya assigned a number to each one.
They repeated constantly.
The problem was that their sequence was irregular.
Sometimes Pattern 43 and Pattern 187 repeated together. Sometimes Pattern 368 appeared in a long, unbroken string.
Over the past ten days, she had committed over a million blocks to memory.
Her mind now held every pattern.
She replayed those million blocks.
From the beginning, one by one.
A few minutes later, she clutched her throbbing head and let out a sigh.
Sweat trickled down her cheeks and the back of her neck.
Genius or not, this kind of work placed an immense load on the brain.
It was not simply a matter of confirming memorized data.
She was simultaneously forming hypotheses about hidden rules and testing them.
That required pushing her available computational capacity to its absolute limit.
Maya retreated to a nearby café and sat down.
She cooled herself with an iced coffee.
The rumor that scholars who tried to decipher the secret hidden in Tetromino Plaza's pavement had collectively gone mad no longer seemed exaggerated.
They would have had no trouble cataloging 2.5 million blocks.
They likely managed to systematize every possible pattern combination as well.
The real question was what the irregular arrangement of those patterns meant.
Patterns like these were bound to correspond to symbols from a specific field of knowledge.
It was said the plaza's blocks reproduced a design left by a certain cleric.
Theology or magicology were the likeliest candidates.
Yet none of the theological or arcane symbols Maya knew yielded a clue when applied.
Should she stop?
This was a puzzle that had stumped gatherings of world-renowned scholars.
Genius though she was, there was no way she could solve it in ten days.
Truthfully, she came here every day to stare at the blocks, not because she had a special objective, but because she had nothing else to do.
The Rekachev Circus School's entrance exam was themed "Technique."
They meant to assess not acting, scriptwriting, direction, or box-office appeal — but acrobatics in its purest form.
Which left her with no part to play in this exam.
She collapsed from exhaustion even during physical conditioning.
She could hardly attempt acrobatics.
When Ella had been present, Maya had stayed close to the villa.
Ella kept clinging to the Troupe Leader, and that bothered her.
But since Reina arrived, she felt no such need and began venturing outside.
She drew a flat golden disk from her coat.
The Memory Disk.
Decoding it was, in truth, her most important task.
Yet no matter how she wrestled with it, she made no progress.
So she had decided to cool her head by picking at the plaza-floor riddle instead.
It hadn't cooled her head at all — only multiplied her worries — but still...
An illusion shaped from the seven tetromino blocks materialized before her.
'Even the Troupe Leader wouldn't know this one, would he?'
-Mrrrow.
A red-furred cat climbed onto her lap.
It purred deeply and rubbed its head against her stomach.
Maya made the gesture of stroking its head.
Wally twisted with pleasure and exposed his belly.
This creature was also an illusion.
But not one constructed by calculation, like the blocks.
Her own heart had shaped him.
The illusion of him had merged with the memory of the dead Wally buried deep in her mind. Now he behaved exactly as if he were truly alive.
She knew the most effective method for reading the Memory Disk.
It was simply to nurture this Mind Illusion.
But that was easier said than done.
If mystic insight could be summoned at will, she would not have agonized over Illusion Magic all this time.
She had a guess at a method.
She had awakened Wally in the moment she held Troupe Leader Wonderstein in her arms.
Something had been stimulated inside her then.
She could attempt it again.
Starting with an embrace, then rubbing cheeks, or touching lips...
-Mrrrowr!
Wally furrowed his brow and stared up at her.
His eyes seemed to reproach her.
She pretended not to notice.
She understood now why he reacted this way.
He was a phantasm shaped by her own heart.
And at present, only one person stimulated that heart.
Whenever thoughts of that person surfaced, Wally sensed it and responded.
And whenever she harbored feelings toward that person she could not face squarely, the cat shared her discomfort.
Heat crept into Maya's cheeks.
Every time she'd scolded Wally for acting up, she'd really been rebuking her own shady imaginings.
A wrinkled hand approached her table.
"Here, dearie. Have a candy."
The elderly café owner held out a basket of sweets wrapped in colorful paper.
Maya regarded her blankly and answered in a flat voice.
"I didn't ask for any."
"Hehe, it's on the house. You've got a headache, don't you, miss? From puzzling out the plaza's secrets...?"
Maya was about to ask how she knew before realizing the old woman was looking at the illusion hovering in front of her.
Seven colored tetromino blocks.
Anyone who saw that and couldn't guess her preoccupation would have to be an idiot.
"Plenty of clever folks before you have come here, miss. Nothing better than sweets for the thinking mind. Here, try one."
"Thank you."
She unwrapped a candy and put it in her mouth.
She had eaten plenty of candy back home.
She expected nothing remarkable.
If anything, she thought it might be inferior.
Sugarcane, the raw material, grew mainly in equatorial regions.
But the moment it touched her tongue, an unfamiliar softness enveloped it.
"It's tender."
At her words, the old woman nodded with a native's pride.
"Isn't it? That's a Slagbort Confectionery product."
"A confectionery shop?"
"Ah, not a shop anymore — a factory now. When you get old, your mind keeps wandering to the old days, haha. You can see it across the plaza, can't you?"
City hall, the courthouse, the police station, the newspaper offices — all the city's key institutions ringed this vast plaza.
The most colorful building was the Rekachev Circus School, painted in every shade imaginable, but the largest building by far was a massive factory whose silver metal exterior emitted smoke like cotton candy.
Dozens of freight wagons laden with huge crates streamed endlessly in and out.
Maya read the large sign hanging above its entrance.
<Slagbort Confectionery Factory>
Next to the main gate, a pedestrian door stood open.
A line of people who were plainly not factory employees stretched before it.
Half were adults, and half were children.
"You're not yet of age, are you, miss?"
"No."
"Then you ought to visit. The Candyman is kind to children."
"The Candyman?"
"Fufu, that's the owner's nickname around here. Have you heard about the custom we have in this city? At Halloween, children dress up as monsters and go house to house receiving sweets. The owner of Slagbort — he's the one who started all that. And he allows every child exactly one tour of the factory in their lifetime. So long as they bring one adult along."
In that instant, the Troupe Leader's suggestion from two weeks ago surfaced in Maya's mind.
-Miss Maya, would you like to tour a candy factory?
-I'm not a child.
She had been deep in independent research at the time.
She'd hated being treated like a kid by Wonderstein.
And in the middle of that, he'd proposed a candy factory tour?
She'd only sharpened her tone and answered coldly.
But it had been an invitation for just the two of them to go out?
A way to nurture the Mind Illusion!
She hastily swept away the tetromino illusions.
What am I even doing here?
The two weeks without Ella had been her chance!
Maya shot to her feet.
She bowed deeply toward the café owner.
"Thank you."
"Think nothing of it."
Leaving the beaming café owner behind, Maya headed back to the lodgings, earlier today than usual.
***
The trade season arrived before they knew it.
Ella realized she was due to return to her original circus next Tuesday, the Monster Circus Troupe. Back to where Wonderstein was.
A smile touched her lips.
Her heart pounded at the same time.
Her pulse carried an unease it hadn't held before.
She was happy to see Wonderstein again, yet somewhere in the corner of her heart, resistance stirred.
Why?
Was life here simply too enjoyable?
She had spent the finest ten days of her life at the Golden Carnival.
She had performed the finest acrobatics alongside the finest acrobats.
She felt as though her perspective had expanded several times over.
The nightly debates about acrobatics with Lord Fantastic were also fun.
It was something she had never done with Wonderstein.
Once, she had thought he was a circus maniac like herself.
But after being close to him since Dvalchev, she realized he was different from what she had expected.
He rarely watched shows. He was ignorant of cultural phenomena and jargon that anyone in the industry would know. And he had no interest in what kind of performance they would stage after the Circus Grand Prix.
She acknowledged his scriptwriting skill, his encyclopedic knowledge of other troupes, and his astonishing acrobatic techniques — but she understood now that he did not truly love the circus.
He was much like Reina.
He performed because his goals required it, not because he loved it.
Still, her affection for him hadn't changed.
She still admired him. She still liked him.
But the doubt was real.
Why had she never recognized his true feelings before?
Why had they almost never talked in Rouge about anything other than work?
A knock came at her door.
Lord Fantastic had come calling as he always did.
"What shall we discuss tonight? The tightrope-walking theory from the Christian Guide?"
"Haha, that would be a pleasure, but I have something more pressing."
He told her they were expected in the city at noon the next day.
The owner of the villa where they were staying had arrived.
"A duke, you said? Must I go too? I'm not even a formal member."
"Fufu, the gentleman is a circus enthusiast as well. He's curious about the face of the newcomer who blazed across the Rekachev entrance exam like a comet."
Ella broke into a wide grin.
"Then gladly! A pleasure to meet him. What sort of person is he?"
Simon tapped the invitation in his hand.
"Do you know the name Candyman?"
"No."
She shook her head, and he answered with a smile.
"Duke Wilhelm Slagbort. Lord of the vast sugar-beet plains and owner of the Slagbort Confectionery Factory here in Yeterinpurk."