Chapter 109 — E=1.66
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Under the persistent questioning of Gao Yang and Hetty, Jennie finally broke her silence. The story of this notebook and its successive owners was laid out in full before them for the first time, and Gao Yang learned a great deal more about that wild mage.
The notebook's first owner had indeed been that wild mage, though even in its pages he had left no name of his own. All Jennie knew was that he had been a down-and-out, eccentric, and much-shunned elder, a wild mage from the Violet Kingdom in the north of the continent who had once belonged to the Arcane Council, the largest of the human mage organizations. But as Gao Yang had said, his powers were meager, he was pushed aside by his peers, and his research was reckoned heretical in the eyes of orthodox mages. His life was therefore one of utter destitution, and in the end, to cure his daughter, he left the Arcane Council and entered Ansuland. The notebook Jennie now held was one of the manuscripts he had let slip away in his early years—if she was not mistaken, sold off cheap to a mage of the Kingdom of Ansu to raise traveling funds.
Perhaps it had fetched three coppers, perhaps not even that—merely thrown in as a gift along with a heap of books and notes.
Its second owner had fared no better. The lines of the notebook made that plain enough: that mage too had pursued "heretical" research, and for the same reason—his own powers were meager and his prospects of advancement hopeless.
A mage who struggled to progress in magic and runes had pinned his hopes on logic and mathematics to help him explore the truth of this world. The wild mage's research into the universality and underlying laws of runes lit a lamp for him, letting him dimly grasp a path by which one might probe the mysteries of magic without mighty power or personal strength. But this second researcher did not get far along that road.
Perhaps to raise funds for his research, perhaps to verify a certain figure gleaned from the notebook, this nameless mage died on an expedition abroad, and the paltry possessions he left behind were swiftly divided up. The precious notebook passed from hand to hand until it fell into the hands of Jennie's mentor.
But Jennie's mentor never became its owner, for that "orthodox mentor" held the notebook in utter contempt. He did not believe that two low-ranking mages scribbling a mass of formulas on paper could reveal any truth, and he held that the second owner had lost his life on an adventure precisely because he had believed the nonsense on those waste pages—that poor wretch who died in the ruins was proof positive of the errors in the notebook's theories.
So the mentor simply threw the notebook away, into the rubbish heap outside the mage tower, where his "apprentice" Ravenkess picked it back up.
And that so-called "apprentice" was in truth that archmage's slave.
This was common among orthodox mages. Their apprentices generally came in two kinds: true apprentices and apprentices who scarcely counted as people. The former were those of high magical talent, or else of noble birth and pure bloodline; the latter merely bore the name of apprentice within the tower while in practice being used as slaves and experimental material. Ravenkess belonged to the latter sort.
Poor in magical talent and of no distinguished family, Ravenkess was never taken seriously in the mage tower. Though he possessed extraordinary gifts for mathematics and logic, his feeble spellcasting and wretched rune-sensing ability earned him the labels of "half-wit" and "freak" from everyone in the tower. The archmage grudgingly taught him a few rudiments, then used cheap potions and rituals—burdened with terrible aftereffects—to force his advancement into a formal mage. After that he was trained in the manner of a rune master, intended for the work of drawing magic circles and crafting implements.
It was then that Ravenkess found the notebook and became its third owner.