A Suspicious Pet (3)
"What in the world is that supposed to mean? Calling a sacred phoenix a magma dragon?"
"Are you saying my Ifrit is nothing more than a common lizard?"
"I could have sworn it was a salamander..."
Counterarguments rained down like hail. I was the only one in the room who understood what Lucian meant. No matter how many bestiaries and treatises I combed through, the only creature capable of producing magma under its own power was the larva of a magma dragon.
"You there! Keep spouting such preposterous nonsense, trying to hoodwink the Young Lord..."
"Pardon me a moment."
Lucian abruptly rolled up his sleeves and took hold of a kitchen knife and a pair of tongs. While everyone else reeled at the sudden display, he deftly carved slices from the smoked ham hanging from the kitchen ceiling, speared them with the tongs, and thrust them deep into the hearth.
At that, the wriggler that had done nothing but lie plastered in a corner of the hearth shot upright, darted over faster than it had ever moved in its life, and snapped the meat up in a single bite.
Everyone who witnessed it stood speechless with shock.
"He's right. It's a magma dragon."
When I nodded, the shock struck them all over again.
"You knew, Lord Iden?"
"I only suspected."
"Then you might have said so! Do you have any idea how I've suffered, convinced I'd made you throw five hundred thousand Bart down the drain?"
"You can start laughing about it now, Vitten. Thanks to you, we have ourselves a dragon."
Vitten did not look remotely comforted.
"A magma dragon is a top-tier species even among Grade 1 monsters. They normally keep to the Underworld, so they seldom cross paths with humans. But if that day ever came, it would take a whole host of Grand Master-class Awoken Ability users and knights to handle one."
Thalia was laying out the case for caution. What she meant to ask was whether I was confident I could control the thing.
"You seem to have forgotten. I'm not keeping it as a pet. I need monster materials. And if it's a dragon, its heart will make a fine one."
The lizard in the hearth flinched. There was no way it had understood the words; having gorged itself for the first time in ages, its stomach was probably simply overwhelmed.
A magma dragon's heart was a far more precious material than the red dragon heart I had originally set my sights on.
Of course, the day its heart became a material lay in the far, far future. Right now the creature was no dragon, only a very lucky lizard.
"It seems to have strength enough to eat, but the environment will need looking after. Not a hearth like this. A proper home."
"And what does a proper home look like?"
Lucian pointed at the hearth with the kitchen tongs.
"It must be at least ten times hotter than this. The larvae are highly active, so the more room, the better."
"You know a remarkable amount about the ecology of earth dragons."
That earth dragons evolved from lizards was by no means the settled consensus of the academic world, yet Lucian, for reasons unknown, had every last detail at his fingertips.
"In my position, one naturally hears a great many things."
"The people at that auction had positions of their own, and not one of them knew."
"Well, my circumstances are a little... special."
Lucian never did give a straight answer, right up until the day he left the palace.
Work on the lizard enclosure began the very next day. Since the creature's future promised to be exceedingly grand, the garden was chosen as the site.
In other words, the garden we had never been able to afford to finish repairing was to be burned to the ground, root and branch.
"No! My Mystic Roses! My Starlight Irises!!"
The groundskeeper tore at the few strands of hair he had left as he watched the shrubs go up in flames.
I did feel sorry for him, but there was no installing a space ten times hotter than a hearth inside the palace. In exchange, I had as many of the valuable flowers as possible dug up and moved to the back garden; there he could exercise his talents to his heart's content.
Two tasks lay before me. The first was to supply endless heat. The second was to keep people safe from that heat.
I settled the first with a fire-attribute spell called Yeolhwa Cheonsang, the Thousand Forms of Blazing Fire. Jet-black stones known as caon, or firestone in common parlance, were dug from the Underworld, and once heated by the spell they went on radiating heat and light for a very long time.
Heating the whole of the garden took an enormous quantity of firestone. And an enormous quantity of firestone took an enormous sum of money.
Specifically, fifty thousand Bart a month, upwards of six hundred thousand Bart a year, was being sunk for the sole purpose of keeping the enclosure hot.
The upkeep cost more than the purchase price; the navel, as the saying goes, had grown bigger than the belly. Even so, so long as the lizard actually grew into a dragon, the ledger would come out ahead in the end.
The second task was no trouble at all. It was enough to widen the domain of the formation I had laid down in advance.
The finished enclosure made for a striking sight.
From beyond the walls it was a perfectly peaceful palace with nothing amiss, but the moment one stepped into the yard, its true nature laid itself bare. The ground seethed like red bean porridge at a rolling boil, scalding steam jetted from the thermal vents at the bottom of the pond with a long, sputtering hiss, and the shimmering haze made every feature of the scene before me sway like the surface of rippling water.
It was as if a corner of the Underworld had been scooped up and set down beneath the open sky.
Watching the lizard trundle to and fro across this land of scorching flame, I felt an unbidden swell of pride.
"Young Master."
"Hm?"
I turned to find Lily standing behind me with the lizard's feed bucket in hand.
"The head cook says he was generous with the portion today."
"Thank you."
I took the bucket from her. Only two people could pass into the formation to feed the lizard: Caroi and me.
"Have you given the little one a name?"
"No. Why?"
"You can't simply go on calling it 'the lizard.'"
"What's wrong with that? It comes along just fine when I call it lizard."
"It's a precious friend, after all. A name would make it feel all the more special."
A precious friend. The difference in perspective was staggering.
She had no idea, it seemed, that I was raising the creature to be harvested for materials. She must have taken it for an ornamental pet, the kind nobles were forever keeping at their elbows...
"Lunchbox."
"I beg your pardon?"
Gazing at the lizard, which was staring back at me wide-eyed from a distance, I said it again.
"From this day on, that creature's name is Lunchbox."
"What a cute name. Though it does sound a little odd..."
She laughed, looking rather at a loss.
There was nothing odd about it. The purpose for which I was raising it had simply become its name.
"Time to eat, Lunchbox."
I called to it as I stepped into the formation. Something, however, was wrong. The creature that would ordinarily have lost its mind at the smell of meat and come tearing over instead scurried off and vanished into the pond.
It was far too late in the day to start fearing me now, so it must have glimpsed the shadow of a cloud or some such.
I set the bucket down at the water's edge and spoke gently, taking care to make clear that I meant no harm.
"Eat plenty, Lunchbox, and grow up fast."
It did not come out of the pond again that day.
Wooden swords cracked together in midair, fast as thought. When I had turned aside every one of the dozens of stormlike blows, Caroi gave ground and spoke in a tone of evident satisfaction.
"You've improved considerably."
"I owe that to a good teacher."
"You have talent, no doubt. But you had best strive harder still. Your father's situation is far from secure."
"Is Father in grave danger?"
Once a year, Father emptied the ducal residence to go and fight the demons. The state of the front lines did not sound good, yet in all my life I had never once heard it said that he had been wounded, or that the duchy's army had been beaten.
"That fellow is quite tough, for a human, I'll grant him that. But if I were you, I would never rest easy. If I were you... yes, I would be working to master the Crimson Blade as quickly as I possibly could."
"I am doing my best."
Of all the subjects I was tutored in, it was the sword alone to which I devoted myself beyond all reason. If my old master were still alive, he would have said his disciple was straying from the Dao.
"Work harder. I cannot play the nursemaid forever."
"So you mean to give up teaching me the sword?"
"I will raise your skill at least to the level where you can lead a knight order. My departure comes after that."
"A knight order? Is that not a long way off?"
Caroi laughed without a sound. Between his parted lips, a clump of black smoke seeped out.
"My kin are not soft the way I am. There is no such thing as later. When the time comes, it is already too late."
After the lesson ended, I turned our conversation over and over in my mind.
His parting words ached: when the time comes, it is already too late.
Father was not invincible. He was a man of flesh and blood. And a man of flesh and blood could die as easily as any other.
If ill news came winging home from the front tomorrow, who was there to blame?
The thought set my heart fretting. These were precious people I had somehow come by; I had no intention of lounging through life as I had in my past one and losing them for it.
I summoned Vitten and Thalia and pressed them for particulars. When a man came to command a knight order, how one was kept running, things of that sort.
"Every house has its own circumstances," Thalia said. "The previous heads of House Esterzy made a habit of founding their personal knight orders at fifteen. With the renown and the coffers of a ducal house, one can raise and maintain an order at a younger age than the children of other noble families could manage."
"Oh, I heard something of that myself. They say Lady Mabel has recruitment notices for a knight order posted far and wide as we speak."
My sister Mabel was fourteen this year, so by the precedent of our forebears the timing was a fitting one.
"Did you happen to read what the notices actually say?"
"Don't all such notices read the same? 'Seeking hale and hardy Awoken Ability users,' I'd wager."
"Hm."
So without an Awoken Ability, one could not so much as become a knight. From where I stood, the waste of talent was beyond reckoning.
Even among common folk, there were bound to be any number of people born with a gift for the martial arts, or for the Daoist arts.
Laszlo, eldest son of the Abaro family, for one.
The blue-haired boy with the terribly sad eyes.
A few more days had passed when Lucian came calling at the palace.
"I have one piece of good news and countless bad ones. Which would you like to hear first?"
"The countless bad ones first."
"The market is in very poor shape."
"Why?"
"The market is always in poor shape, my lord. As you know, war and famine never give us rest. But the reason it has grown so much worse of late is the crows."
I stared levelly at Lucian's sly face. He had hardly come all this way to blame dumb beasts, so this was metaphor, beyond a doubt.
"Then explain it so a man can follow."
"A trading house called Ravenshade is swelling its power at a startling pace, mercenaries at its back. They bear the raven as their emblem, and their methods are so brutal and so lawless that the whole market is sickening from it. I suspect that Lord Chris stands behind these people."
"Your evidence?"
"Ravenshade's money finds its way into Lord Chris's pockets."
"Evidence that is hard to deny."
"There is more. Ravenshade was founded on the joint capital of several nobles, and every last one of those men is classed among Lord Chris's faction. Which brings me to the matter at hand..."
Lucian lowered his voice to something discreet. The good news, it seemed, had arrived.
"Have you by chance heard the name 'the Young Saint'?"
Instead of answering, I wore a bitter smile.
How could I not have? The Young Saint was what the market districts had taken to calling a mysterious healing-type Awoken Ability user who had appeared only a short while ago.
"The goods the Young Saint sold in those days have since soared to monstrous prices. It has reached the point where the buyer simply names his figure. Those things can never be obtained again."
"So. You are asking me for some of those goods?"
"Rather, if you should happen to know that person, I hoped you might pass along a word. I believe it could help us weather this crisis."
Lucian knew precisely who I was. Even so, he spoke as though the matter concerned some third party, circling it from a polite distance. He was leaving me room to maneuver, and I could not call that a bad way to do business.
"I will think on it."
"Thank you."
Lucian withdrew.
Loosing mercenaries to seize a market: thoroughly Chris.
So it seemed I would be needing that knight order after all.
Caroi had sworn to it: his kin would not be soft and yielding the way he was.
The longer the war with the demons dragged on, the more the domain would descend into chaos. Chris cared for nothing but his own interests, and Mabel was far too slight a power to hold him in check.
In the end, this would become my problem.
I could not hope for someone else to solve it in my stead.
I had to fill the space Father's absence left, and I had to grow strong enough to shield the people who were mine.
Of course, I could not raise a knight order right away. I was still far too young, and Mabel was said to be in the middle of her own founding campaign.
For the time being, then, the priority was to study the sword in earnest and win back my Daoist cultivation, so as to pull that date forward by even a single year.
The target: five years.
I would allow myself a little more ambition than Mabel.
Within five years at the latest I would have my knight order, and then I would set my mind to what I could do for Father, and for this land.
Never again would I sleep while my udumbara flower was stolen away.
I would build the strength of a collective, and with it protect the things I loved.