Chapter 347 — The Behemoth
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Of course, Gawaine's and Heidi's "child-beating" (in the literal sense) was by and large just for show. Rebecca was an adult now, after all, and held the title of viscountess besides; it would hardly do to string a grown woman of her years up from a roof beam for a thrashing or chase her round the house. A token scolding or two would suffice. There was another reason too: Rebecca's skull was genuinely iron-hard. A beating mostly did no good at all, and the more you hit, the more your own hand hurt...
But speaking of Rebecca's rank—if one went strictly by the kingdom's law of succession and the rules of the noble hierarchy, then once Gawaine had risen from his coffin and secured the ducal title, Rebecca, as the family's sole current heir, ought by rights to have received the rank one step below, that of marquess. In other words, this scatterbrained girl who ran all over the territory and occasionally blackened her own face with a great fireball was in fact supposed to be a marchioness... Who on earth would believe that if you told them?
Only, Gawaine had struck an agreement with Francis II back then. To keep the Crown from growing overly wary of the Cecil family, Gawaine Cecil's ducal title was for the present to be a personal title only; until the Cecil family regained sufficient noble capital—land, population, property, and military strength—the ranks of Cecil descendants were not to be advanced. So Rebecca still bore the title of viscountess...
But judging by how happily this silly doe went about each day, she had probably never once considered anything so complicated.
"Once the several large laboratories of the Arcane Technology Research Institute are up and running, some mechanical projects that have been shelved for the time being can be started," Gawaine continued only after Heidi had plucked the fork from the ceiling with a mage hand and given Rebecca a knock on the head for good measure. "The north-south avenue between Kant Territory and Cecil is already complete; a carriage needs only a day to travel between the two. But we still need more convenient means of transport before the two lands can truly be bound together. As I've said, control of land depends to a great extent on the degree of transport."
Rebecca was clutching her head and pretending it hurt dreadfully, hoping to win some sympathy, but the moment she heard the word "mechanical" she forgot all about it. The girl's eyes lit up, and she looked at Gawaine delightedly: "That's the thing you mentioned before—the arcane-powered motor vehicle?"
"Technically, we can already manufacture ninety percent of the thing," Gawaine nodded. "What's always been missing is manpower. Once you've gathered the people and set the Institute's large laboratories running, the project can begin."
To build a more advanced means of transport, one that could match the present pace of Cecil Territory's industry—this was an idea Gawaine had been mulling over for a long time. Cecil's arcane engines had now developed to the second-generation rotary engine; in mines, factories, and construction sites, arcane engines great and small, together with the steel machinery they drove, had become the greatest engine of the territory's growth. Yet mechanical engineering and the territory's overall rapid development had also placed higher demands on transport: the factories needed ever more industrial raw materials, the territory's controlled range grew ever larger, and all manner of great and heavy machinery emerged without end. Traditional haulage by human and animal power had plainly become the bottleneck constraining the territory's further development.
They could hardly go on forever hauling ore to the steelworks by carriage, could they? And carrying building machinery's components to construction sites by human muscle and shoulder poles was even less a lasting solution.