Chapter 525 — Observation
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Cecil had arranged the most comfortable lodging for the guests from the royal capital—not in the lord's mansion, but nearby, in a separate building under the authority of the administrative hall. This structure, it was said, had been built expressly to receive important guests, and the people of Cecil called it the "Autumn Palace," for it had only been completed this autumn.
This novel arrangement once again made the visitors feel the peculiar character of the Duchy of Cecil.
Duchess Victoria reclined with a touch of languor on the soft, comfortable sofa, easing the muscles grown stiff from the rigors of travel and the banquet, and carefully observed every furnishing in the room—frankly, none of it had anything to do with the word "luxury." The objects were exquisite, to be sure, yet their style was utterly unlike the guest chambers of Silverhold; even so, everything here left a deep impression.
Every light fixture in the room relied on magic crystals as its core. This cheap, simple luminary was difficult to popularize, since it required a constant infusion of magical power, yet in Cecil it was a thing seen everywhere, in every street and alley. The room was warm as spring, yet the fireplace on the west wall was unlit—clearly it was no heating apparatus but mere ornament, and the true warmth came from something called a "magical energy thermal system." Before the great floor-to-ceiling windows hung broad, vivid curtains, their fabric woven by a most peculiar method, the stitching simple, even bearing a hint of cheapness, yet their regularity was astonishing—as though some skilled old weaver had worked without sleep or rest to produce such cheap, simple cloth…
The dark-haired maid Maggie stood behind Victoria, gently massaging the taut muscles of her mistress's shoulders, feeling them loosen little by little beneath her fingers. Then the black-haired servant spoke softly: "You have been observing every single thing here."
"Have I? Is it so obvious?" Victoria's tone lifted slightly, and she stretched out more languidly still—she could maintain her most flawless bearing on any unofficial occasion, but this moment was her time to relax. She sighed. "I'm beginning to regret not bringing some mediocre, shallow noble of the capital along as a 'gallant escort'—he could have asked this and that about every novel thing in my place. There is simply too much here I cannot make sense of, and I have already asked 'why' far too many times along this journey."
"There are indeed many novel things here—but they seem to be nothing more than assorted magical devices, no more advanced than the magical mechanisms you installed at Winterhold, are they?" Maggie offered her view. "The people of Cecil light their way with magic-crystal lamps, and so does the inner court of Winterhold; their gates open on their own, and so does your mage tower; ah, and they have self-propelled magic vehicles—no faster than a dragon-blood horse, and nothing beside your white-feathered griffin."
Clearly, in this dark-haired maid's eyes, her mistress had been dazzled by Cecil's bewildering "conjuring tricks," to the point of paying undue attention to those novel and amusing magical devices. But Victoria shook her head. "No, Maggie, you don't understand—none of the Cecil magical devices surprise me. What truly surprises me is that every kind of magical device they have exists by the tens of thousands."
Maggie's fingers, pressing on her mistress's shoulders, paused for a moment.
"Grand Duke Gao Yang is pushing extraordinary power out to everyone; he is breaking down the boundary between the extraordinary and the ordinary. And the terrible thing is—he not only has the right to do so, he has done it," Victoria sat up, her expression turning grave. "I cannot fathom how he managed it…"