I remade my helmet as we exited the mansion. The carriage we boarded didn’t look as ornate as the one we had rode into town, and when we arrived I stepped out to see a church with a pair of tall stained glass windows on either side of a belltower. Daniel met a man at the door, and he took me down a flight of stairs by the entrance. In the basement, there were some desks, but the most notable thing was that there were a lot of books. What Daniel and his friend led me to was a standing desk, and it already had a book opened up.
Before we got distracted with whatever we were here for, I tapped Daniel on the shoulder. Now that we were inside, and inside a church no less, I took my helmet back off. After both of them were looking at me, I went for a handshake with the new guy.
“Creighton.”
“Remin.”
Remin and Daniel got back to whatever they were doing, and I just stood there. Eventually, they brought me a map. I didn’t recognise it, and they took it away. They did this with two more maps, and then they brought me a large, blank sheet. I drew a rough map of Earth for them, I’d forgotten some things, the other islands around Cuba, what exactly the area above Australia looked like, being what I knew I got wrong. But I got the big picture down. I labeled it Earth at the top of the page, in english, and they seemed pleased.
They then promptly brought out a fourth map, it looked like the third map, except time had passed, and continents had shifted. After some time comparing my map to theirs, they seemed to give up and went back to the book. They then rolled all the maps back up, and bringing the book too, we ascended back upstairs and into the carriage we’d arrived in, Remin was coming back with us.
~~~
Remin wasn’t sure just what to think. The world the Soulsteel had drawn didn’t match to the First, the Second, and certainly not to modern Trezemek. The chances he was from the Lost Continent was also nonexistent, as the Soulsteel had drawn more than one continent, and This ruled out Pre-Calamity Trezemek as well. This excluded the change it was just the changes the First Calamity would have brought.
Their only other options were to either locate the mythical ‘Universal Translation’, or try and recreate it with modern spellcraft. Neither option had seemed tenable, however there was one last thread and they were on the way to get the Duke’s permission to investigate it. Not because it was some guarded secret, but because their inquiries would give up information about the soulsteel, and while the Dwarves were always neutral no matter the current political climate, they were also known as notorious gossips.
While Remin had come to the Estate, they had planned he would stay with the Soulsteel during the discussion, and use the time to start teaching Creighton Wernst. It wasn’t going very well, as once he had realized Remin’s intentions, he had put a chair on the table and started calling it a number of different words. Remin was just trying to get Creighton to start with a simple greeting when Daniel briefly returned.
“How is it going, The Duke wants to have an estimate for how long it might take for him to learn.”
“Not well. He’s focused on nouns right now, and his language seems to have a lot of different words for the same thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what we’ve spent this whole time doing is going over the multitude of different names for a chair. This includes Chair, Throne, Seat, Armchair and Recliner, among others.”
“So a long time?”
“Yes.”
Daniel reentered the Duke’s Office. Remin didn’t envy the Archbishop’s status as a Ducal Aid, as it seemed to him that more often than not it only entailed breaking bad news to the most powerful man in the country.
~~~
“Keith, are you busy?”
“Ah, Mage Cole. I am not, what do you require of me?”
“I’ve got a couple questions about Creighton, specifically about how he speaks a language we can’t translate.”
“I don’t have any artifice that could help you with that.”
“I just meant, well, Do you know if the Cloven Dwarves have more complete records of the people left behind on the Lost Continent.”
“They kept an eye on the passes, aye. If a group of more than fifteen crossed the western ridge, I’d say it’s written down somewhere. Do you think he’s one of the Lost?”
“No, that’s not it. Daniel found references to a universal translation spell in the church’s records.”
“And you couldn’t find the actual spell?”
“It was used by a Conclave of Mages, and we think they were lost with the First Calamity.”
“It sounds to me like you just want to find another excuse to go looking.”
“We don’t need to argue about if an expedition is feasible yet, What I need to know is if we need to argue about if an expedition is feasible.”
“You lot are far too obsessed with that cursed land, but yes. If it was a Mage Conclave, and they passed into the forbidden lands, the Cloven Stacks would have a record of it.”
“Okay. If we go there in the spring, would you be interested in coming?”
“It depends on if I’ve gotten through all my work by then. Natasha and Archibald are keeping me busy these days.”
“That’s relevant to my second question. Trying to teach him Wernst is not going very well, and Creighton seems bored. Would you like his help?”
“I would love to get another look at those joints of his, and is it true he made the Baron’s eye in one day?”
“It took him about two minutes after he got his hands on the electrum.”
“Send him down then, I don’t have to tell him what to do, I can just show.”
~~~
The biggest problem was trying to keep what I’d learned in my head. Their language sounded just enough like English that their words felt wrong. Remin kept trying to get me to work on pronunciation, when I still couldn’t string more than two words together properly. I was dreading each session with him more each day, and it was with great relief that I would leave with Tommen or Natasha when we were done.
Natasha had wanted my help with her rendition of my plumb bob. Specifically to solve her total inversion problem. She tried one additional test flight with her current design, and then I tried to impress on her how the spell she was using was wasting efficiency with how high her center of mass was compared to her center of buoyancy, and if she could raise it high enough she wouldn’t need the pendulum.
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My time with Tommen was simpler, he wanted to watch me weaving mana, summoning my wings, or to just go out and play in the snow. He seemed to be getting out of lessons with Cole and coming straight to me. I enjoyed my time with him, but the way it reminded me of my childhood felt bittersweet. It was during a snowball fight that Cole came to get us. He hadn’t spent a lot of time with either of us, as he’d been working with Daniel, Archibald and the Noble on something for the past few days. I say working, but really when I stopped to listen it sounded like they were just arguing.
“Cole.”
“Creighton, Come?”
“Yes.”
I had stagnated as I just couldn’t cram that many simple words into my head at once, but my ability to converse had made some progress.
“Where?”
“Keith.”
“Yes.”
Keith was the dwarf I had only met in passing. I wondered what he’d want from me, as of the few times I’d seen him he’d been working in his forge, or talking with Natasha about some design. We’d been in one of the exterior yards, and he worked on the other side of the mansion. Cole just dropped me off, he and Tommen just left me here alone. The dwarf didn’t answer when I knocked, but he might not have been able to hear me with how loud that pounding was.
The dwarf only turned to look at me when I walked right up to him, but he did seem happy to see me. He gestured to what he had been working on. It was a U joint I had been using for my ankle. He must have cast it, and now he was heating the metal and engraving that mana script on it. He tapped on a paper on the workbench behind him, and it showed the completed pattern.
It looked like it was using the same light and dark mana I had used, but there was going to be the same light mana pattern on the top that I’d needed to add to the eye. I started forming the full picture in my head, and I was about to try and put it into the leg, when he stopped me. He put his chisel and hammer in my hands instead.
~~~
Cole had left his problem child with Keith, so now he had to decide if Tommen should come with him to today’s meeting. He was normally reluctant to bring him in with nobility, and if he watched today’s argument he might develop the same bad habits he was still struggling to break. He was just about to send him off to do more spell practice, when Tommen stopped at the stairs.
“I’m coming today.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I know you’ve been arguing about what to do. If I’m not there, you’ll make a decision without me and by the time I find out what you are going to do with Creighton you’ll be halfway to wherever you’re taking him.”
“How do you know we are going to take him with us?”
“Archibald told me.”
The old man had a very peculiar way of always interfering with how Cole raised his apprentices, he’d forgotten just how pushy he’d get because they’d both agreed Natasha was better off in the capital.
“Well, did he tell you where we’re planning to take him?”
“No, just that it was gonna be a long trip, and that I should tell you if I wanted to come.”
“We’re going to see the Cloven Dwarves. They just want to have a look at Creighton, and we want to have a look at their records.”
“So can I come?”
“I was going to ask you tonight, but that’s because me and Archibald haven’t finished convincing Daniel and the Duke you would be ready for a journey like that.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Do you still want to observe? And I mean observe, Daniel and Archibald are old time friends of the Duke. You can’t talk to nobles the way they talk to him unless you’re friends.”
“Yes, but Master Archibald always seems to be fighting with Duke Drake. Are they really friends?”
“Yes, Tommen. As you get older, you will start to find that your best friends fight you more often than your good ones.”
“That doesn’t sound very nice.”
“I know I’ve told you this before Tommen. Being friends isn’t just about being nice to each other.”
“Yes, Master. When are we planning to leave?”
“The snow is already too deep on the mountains, so it’ll be spring before we can go. We also are going to bring Baron Raphor his new leg, while we’re passing through.”
~~~
Leona and Tarrik were both exhausted. They had expected it to be a greater wyvern, but they didn’t expect its hide would be so untouched. There were less than three major blemishes, and when it came to killing a greater wyvern you normally needed more than three attacks. The nights were growing longer, and the winter deeper, as Larrik kept slicing, and Leona kept dyeing the scales with balance mana to keep them pristine.
“So, About that trip they are planning to go meet the dwarves. Are you gonna sign up?”
“I don’t know, the pay is good, but there’s no bonuses, and It’s a tall mountain.”
“The Duke doesn’t put out requests like this often. It’s a chance to make connections and we might even get hired on more permanently.”
“You said the same thing about this job, and all I do all day is cut rotten meat off wyvern hide in the freezing cold.”
“Yes, but think about how it will look when we try and get onto some of those professional adventurers' parties. We’ll have worked with the Rodney and the Archmage Archibald.”
“I’d rather we actually go learn something actually difficult, otherwise all we can say it that we’re experts in living metal babysitting.”
“Come on, chances are there won’t be any good work until summer anyways.”
“I’ll think about it, okay? I’m too cold to make a choice right now.”