A Tenacious Breed
Even begging has its kinds.
There is the strategy that lays a life of want bare without softening a single edge—exaggerating it, when exaggeration serves—and so coaxes pity from the people passing by. And there is the other strategy, the one that draws a crowd by showing off some skill or another.
The vast majority choose the first.
The talent to gather a throng with a song, an instrument, or acrobatics is not handed out to everyone, and those who beg rarely have the leisure to learn such arts in the first place.
I had been no exception.
Set aside the luck of having picked up a book of magic, and I was a boy with nothing remarkable about him.
I did try practicing a trick, once.
It must have been around the third year I spent living beneath the bridge. Starvation had gone past the point of endurance, and in desperation I attempted every odd skill I could think of, any way I could manage it. Of them all, I worked at juggling until people would grant that I was passably good.
In the Empire, juggling seemed to have been worth less than a single coin. In the end it did nothing at all to put money in my hand.
Things are different now.
This is the Frauvia Federation. And I am no longer a beggar under a bridge—I am Benjamin's disciple.
Which is to say I no longer have to hide the art I trust most. Magic.
Whoosh— whoosh— whoosh—
Balls of four different colors rose one after another into the sky, tracing arcs so precarious they looked ready to fall at any instant.
Before I knew it, a dozen or so people had closed in around me, a blonde girl among them. I borrowed Benjamin's confident smile and pushed the pace higher still.
Perhaps that was why. One ball shot out ahead of the rest.
"Oh— oh no!"
"It's falling!"
The children in the crowd were wonderfully responsive. The rest were thinking much the same, even if they never let it past their lips.
I wanted their jaws to drop.
In my mind, I recited the activation phrase.
Move.
⟨ Type 1 Magic — Move ⟩
The black ball, already on a path I could not possibly have caught, struck something like an invisible wall and reversed course, coming back into my hand.
"Huh? What was that."
Every spectator's eyes went wide at once.
They say expectation pays off best when you betray it in the right direction. It seemed to be true.
Now it was time to show them, in earnest, that I was more than a simple trickster.
I drew two more balls from my pocket. Someone, somewhere, might manage to juggle six at once, but that was a feat beyond me. So in the middle of the act I had to float the balls—and that proved a finer spectacle than juggling six of them by skill alone.
"Magic? Is that magic?"
"Whoa..."
"Looks like Type 1 Magic. Move. Even granting that—can anyone handle it that fast, that finely?"
This was the Federation, after all. The heartland of magic.
Even ordinary people seemed to carry a basic knowledge of the art; they saw through the trick almost at once. That suited me. The more deeply one understood magic, the better one would grasp how difficult it was to govern the paths of six balls all at the same time.
Commotion drew more spectators, and more spectators drew more commotion. At last, when dozens of people had packed in around me until I could no longer see past them, I lowered my arms.
Only the six balls rose into the sky, circling freely above the railway station. After gathering and scattering a few times, they drew into a straight line and flew back toward me.
And then—
"Hup."
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
All six dropped into the bag I was holding, without so much as an inch of error.
Once the bag was shut, two things remained. To bow as ridiculously as I could, on the foundation of the etiquette I had learned from the encyclopedia. And to receive the applause, and the shower of coins.
Ten minutes or so passed, and most of the crowd had scattered. I stepped outside the station for a moment, took off the mask, and set my hat back the way it belonged—the hat that had hidden every strand of my hair.
When I stepped inside again, no one recognized me.
It is true that gray hair accounts for a large share of the Empire's people, but not everyone with gray hair is an Imperial. To decide that gray hair means Imperial blood, or to hate it on sight, carries a high chance of being wrong.
Hatred and discrimination exist to set others beneath you and lift yourself above them. However easily emotion tangles itself into the act, it is, surprisingly, a calculating one. So long as there is a chance of guessing wrong, people find it hard to pursue with any real vigor. Perhaps the reason folk of the Federation dislike meeting the eyes of someone with gray hair is nothing more than this passive aversion showing itself.
It is not a matter of great importance. They are not doing me harm, after all. Set beside what I had gone through in the market near the Lehman garrison, this much I could let pass easily enough.
What mattered now was that they did not recognize me.
I strolled over to the ticket window.
"Hello."
"Ah. Yes."
The clerk let out a sigh, making certain I could see it. His true thoughts were surely something along the lines of, Here comes the penniless one again, and he still isn't tired of it.
But if he imagined that the me of two hours ago and the me standing here now were the same person, he was badly mistaken.
He opened his mouth as if the whole business were a nuisance.
"The train arrives in an hour. No credit. You can't cadge a ride in the freight car. And riding without a ticket is out of the question, obviously."
"Whatever do you mean?"
"Pardon?"
"This is a ticket window. I've come to buy a ticket."
Clack.
Right in front of him, I stacked the coins neatly and set them down all at once.
The assortment was impressive. From pence coins to shillings, and even pound coins. The clerk wore a look of pure disbelief as he counted them, and thirty seconds later he had no choice but to let out a hollow laugh.
"Fifteen pounds. Exact."
"One third-class ticket, if you would."
"Ha ha... Here you are."
I took the ticket.
"Have a pleasant journey."
I answered with a slight bow and turned away.
"Wow."
Only then could I let myself be astonished.
If I settled the accounts from a moment ago, they came out like this. The mask and the six balls, three pounds in all. The final take inside the tin, twenty-four pounds.
"Wow..."
A heartening profit. I had expected a good result—I had staked every coin I had left on the attempt—but I had not imagined success on this scale. Had I ever, in all my life, held so much money at one time?
Even after buying the ticket, nine pounds remained in my hands.
Mmm.
"Ah. I shouldn't be thinking like this."
I folded the thought away in a hurry. Was it because I had answered, all too successfully, the old grievance I had nursed as a would-be man of business while living under the bridge? For a moment I caught myself entertaining, with real seriousness, the notion that I could simply keep making money this way.
Don't get confused. My dream is still to be a magic scholar....
That was half in jest. There was another reason I could not keep the juggling act going.
It would not last.
About half the audience had bought train tickets, but the other half worked at the station or had come to see someone off. If I planted myself in the station every day and kicked up a racket, the staff would hardly look kindly on it, and people's interest would fade as well. Strip away the shock of a first glance and the performance itself, and the simple truth of the thing—juggling joined to magic—would show itself soon enough.
I had to board the train.
I had just settled on that conclusion again when it happened. People who had been passing the time in conversation began, one by one, to rise and move toward the tracks.
There had been no signal. No sound.
What had they felt?
I understood only when I followed them and drew near the rails.
Thump. Thump.
Vibration. The tremor traveling up through the soles of my feet was announcing that a body of enormous mass was approaching from far away.
Before long, the sound arrived as well. This time, it was sound.
Shhhhhk—
A noise I had never heard in my life. According to the encyclopedia it had to be steam being vented, but the sheer size and scale of it kept the fact from feeling real.
I remembered seeing a steamship for the first time, only a few days earlier. I had been astonished then, too, at how far it had advanced beyond the plans of sailing ships I had seen in books. Would it be the same this time?
A moment later, the train began to come in from far down the line.
Rumble. Rumble.
Shhhk—!
The oppressive weight of massive steel, and the smell of coal. White steam rising. A bulk that filled the empty tracks from end to end.
Until the train came to a stop, I stared at it, forgetting even to breathe.
All at once I felt betrayed.
"......Benjamin. You said it was twice as big, and ten times as long."
Unlike length, area has to be reckoned by the square. Volume, even, by the cube. The train before my eyes looked four times the one I had seen in the encyclopedia—and once the length was counted in as well, something like twenty.
I presented my ticket and boarded.
For all the grandeur of the exterior, the inside of the train did not astonish me.
"......"
Perhaps because this, too, was only a place where people lived. Third class had something to do with it, but the weariness and the grim resolve on their faces pulled me—drunk as I had been on sentiment—back to a sense of reality.
By luck, I managed a seat by the window.
What sort of work is there near Leslie Station?
I had been wondering when, and to whom, I ought to put that question. Looking at it now, it seemed a question I had no need to ask at all.
True to the crowding of third class, the passengers' talk reached me without any filter, and more than that, I could infer a good deal from how many of them had fingertips stained dark.
Leslie Station.
That is to say, Leslie Province, in Oslovia, has coal mines.