10. Demon in a Bottle (13)
10. Demon in a Bottle (13)
Once all the auditing students were confirmed present, the tour began.
They followed the senior students through the school's main entrance.
The moment they stepped inside, they were greeted by the stone statue of a man wearing a crow mask.
The Emperor's statue out in the courtyard gave the distinct impression of having been erected out of obligation to a benefactor.
The care invested in this one was on an entirely different level.
The craftsmanship of the statue itself went without saying.
The ceiling height, the column placement, the angle of the light.
Every element of the entrance layout seemed designed to amplify the reverence the statue commanded.
Simply standing before it and looking up, they could feel a profound sanctity.
Yet no name identified the figure. Nothing around the statue marked who it was meant to be.
The stone plaque bore only the inscription: <Imperial Rekachev Circus School>.
The visiting students tilted their heads, studying the figure.
"Looks like someone important, but... who?"
"Was there an acrobat like that?"
"Feels more clown than acrobat."
Clara answered their murmuring with a soft smile.
"There's no shame in not knowing. This person has nothing to do with the circus."
Most of the auditors reacted with some version of "Then why is he here?" But a few caught on the moment she said it — who he was. And why his name was missing.
"This is Saint Victor."
Rekachev had been founded twenty-eight years ago by a single court jester and five acrobats.
At the time, the Emperor had employed every stratagem available to break the Orthodox Church's influence.
One of his initiatives had been purchasing historic cathedrals and repurposing them into cultural facilities for the common people.
Rekachev, too, was born that way.
No one would have erected such a grand stone edifice just to house a circus school.
This building had once been a cathedral of the Orthodox Church.
"Yes. The original name of this building is Saint Victor's Cathedral. It's also known as the Palace of Miracles. You will all be familiar with Saint Victor. He is famed for eradicating the Black Death and defeating the demon called the Plague Lord."
Standing before the statue of the crow-masked man, Clara recounted Saint Victor's achievements and the cathedral's history in detail.
It had nothing to do with the circus, but her delivery was engaging enough that everyone listened with interest.
"But why make Saint Victor look so terrifying? A crow mask?"
"Right. In most cathedral stained glass, Saint Victor is shown as a handsome blond man."
Clara, living up to her reputation as Rekachev's top student, fielded the questions without a flicker of hesitation, her tone unhurried.
"Typically, yes, Saint Victor is depicted as a handsome young man. But Yeterinpurk is the land where Saint Victor performed his miracles. Many records survive of him tending to the sick here. Whenever he walked ground ravaged by plague, he always wore a crow-shaped mask. That is why the stained glass in the churches around here shows a crow-masked man in place of a handsome blond man."
Clara led the students through every corner of the school building, explaining the history of each space and how it was used today.
She had a gift for breaking down stories into something easy to follow.
Even offhand questions were answered with patience.
Thanks to that, even the children who had arrived nursing a vague hostility toward Rekachev found themselves warming to her.
Once they had covered the building's general layout, they arrived at the garden in the school's center.
"Whoa."
"What is all this?"
The children stepped into the garden and their mouths fell open.
The space was enclosed by walls rising roughly forty meters high.
True to its name as a garden, it was dense with trees.
But there was no variety of them as one might expect.
Only a single species.
Bamboo.
"This is Rekachev's signature feature — the Jungle Gym."
Across the modestly sized garden, bamboo stalks shot up tens of meters, spaced apart, but only in the vertical plane. Factoring in the horizontal and diagonal growth, the grove was reasonably dense.
The Jungle Gym's bamboo didn't simply rise straight — midway up, the stalks tangled in every direction.
The sight of the bamboo forest struck Ella as oddly familiar.
Something similar had stood in the yard of the school where she had grown up.
Her master had gathered lumber himself and lashed together a complex climbing frame with rope and hammer — built to drill the children in strength and balance.
That creation of his was a miniature version of this.
One difference stood out, though.
Here, there were no signs of artificial joinery among the bamboo.
"How do you make bamboo grow diagonally? Horizontally?"
The question, tossed out by one of the auditors, was answered by a scruffy old man who emerged from the corner.
"That would be me!"
He wore a grass-and-soil-stained apron and gardening gloves.
"I am this school's..."
"Gardener, right?"
Ella's hand shot up with the answer.
The old gardener's eyes went wide with surprise.
"Eh? How'd you know?"
"Just... a feeling."
"Ho-oh. Ever thought of learning horticulture, young lady? The brutes around here treat these trees something terrible. Every single day there's something snapped or fallen off to tend to. The compound developed by the Alchemy Guild to maintain the strength and elasticity of the grafted sections..."
The old man's sudden, rambling explanation drained all momentum from the atmosphere.
Ella cut in swiftly.
"That's fine. I don't think we need to learn about gardening while we're talking about the circus."
"So it's not just the locals with no manners! Acrobats, I swear..."
The gardener shot her a glare and stalked off toward the courtyard, grumbling.
Clara offered the students a rueful smile.
"The gardener has good reason to grouse about this bamboo grove. We inflict that much damage on it. The grove isn't merely decorative. In Rekachev, we use the Jungle Gym to cut our travel time across the school."
She stood in the middle of the garden and looked up.
On every floor of the surrounding building, large windows notched the facade — each easily wide enough for two people to pass through.
"The next stop on the tour is the faculty offices, right? Those are on the fifth floor."
Clara launched herself straight up a nearby bamboo stalk, then seized a horizontal stem with both hands.
She swung her body forward and back, building momentum like a pendulum. At the crest of the arc, she let go and snapped her hips, flinging herself upward.
Her body traced a parabola, and she landed on a diagonally growing stalk.
The highly elastic bamboo bent under her weight and then sprang back. Her body cut a slanted line upward through the air.
A stalk obstructed her path mid-flight; she hugged her knees to her chest and slipped past it by a hair.
Within moments, she touched down on a horizontal stem ten meters up.
She moved along it as comfortably as if jogging across the ground, then launched herself once more toward a still-higher perch with the same sequence of motions.
In under twenty seconds, she had landed on the sill of a fifth-floor window.
Given that the building had once been a cathedral, the fifth floor looked to be well over thirty meters high.
She gazed down at the gawking auditors below and smiled.
"Please make your way up here and line up so we can move on to the next stop."
Her expression and tone remained perfectly friendly, but something cooler lay beneath them.
Clara fought to keep a smug grin from leaking out.
Did you think we'd just play nice and make your guide duty easy?
If you want to be treated as guests, you clear this much.
Otherwise, you're no better than pests and hangers-on, and you've got no room to complain.
Then, looking down, she noticed that something was off.
The people below were looking upward, all right — but not at her.
Even the senior students assigned as guides had their gazes fixed elsewhere.
They were staring at a spot a little higher than where she stood.
"Oh, now this is fun."
"Using this every day would make for solid training."
Two voices. Coming from above Clara.
She looked up and her face went rigid.
At the highest point of the cathedral, two figures stood atop the bamboo. One was perched with her legs idly swinging. The other stood still, arms crossed.
Ella and Reina.
"When did they...?"
Clara murmured it like she couldn't believe her eyes.
Ella caught her voice and waved.
"Ah, the moment I saw you spring off the bamboo, I couldn't help myself and jumped in. Then Reina did the same."
"We picked a route on the opposite side, out of sight, so we wouldn't get in your way. No wonder you didn't see us."
A muscle beneath Clara's eye twitched.
A later start than her? And they'd gone the long way around out of consideration — when even the optimal route was challenging enough — yet still reached a higher point in roughly the same time?
Clara's gaze shifted between the two of them.
Awe, desolation, and jealousy surged together inside her.
But she couldn't show her true feelings in front of a crowd this large.
She forced the rising emotions back down.
She looked below.
The senior students, at least, had collected themselves and were proceeding with the plan.
That meant provoking the auditors with subtle words and expressions.
"If it's too difficult, you're welcome to take the stairs over there."
"Fair warning, it's a free period, so the halls will be crowded with students."
"Heh, heh. Your patience is appreciated."
True to their word, enrolled students were already gathered at the open stairway along one side of the courtyard, on the railings, and in the windows, peering down with smirks on their faces.
The color drained from the auditors' faces.
This was exactly what Clara had intended.
Climbing to the fifth floor via the Jungle Gym was no simple task.
Even new students typically managed it only after months of practice.
Innate skill mattered, but the real factor was learning the approach through repeated trial and error.
There was no chance that visiting students seeing this bamboo grove for the first time could pull it off.
Ella and Reina were the exception.
To reach the fifth floor, they would have to use the stairs. And there, Rekachev's enrolled students were waiting — ready to mock them openly as they trudged up in humiliation.
The teenagers who had come to audit at Rekachev had all left their troupes with the same words ringing in their ears: encouragement, and a warning.
Watch your conduct.
When you go to Rekachev, you represent the circus.
There was no way acrobats, proud as they were, could simply admit defeat and take the stairs.
Clara's trap was clever. It would be hard for anyone to call it outright 'insult.'
The demonstration she had given was, strictly, nothing more than a casual introduction: "Our students typically get around like this."
And suggesting the stairs as an alternative for anyone who couldn't follow was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
The students lining the route wouldn't shout abuse at them either. They would insult them with soft sighs, low murmurs, ghost-smiles of contempt.
"Please hurry so you're not late for the rest of the tour!"
Clara called down from above in a ringing voice.
Smiles bloomed on the faces of the enrolled students. The auditors' faces curdled.
But no one stepped forward first.
While everyone hesitated, one figure walked out.