Chapter 126 – Staying in the Shadows

After that, Mirian committed to laying low. She attended classes like any dutiful student, pretending to take notes while she worked on ideas for improvements to her leyline analysis artifacts, spell engine design, and ways she might create unified celestial and arcane devices. So far, her actual experimentation with combining glyphs and runes had led mostly to whatever she was working on catching on fire. Her leading hypothesis was that arcane runes operated on a similar rule to the way flux glyphs and static glyphs worked; some runes were inherently unstable, and changed functions based on what was near them.

The problem was she still only knew a handful of runes, compared to the hundreds and hundreds of glyphs she knew. And experimenting was both time consuming and expensive. Since she was trying not to cause a stir, she had to keep her budget reasonable. She also had to be subtle about harvesting the local myrvites for soul energy. That further limited her, because there was only so much you could do with a bone-rat and prism moth souls. Half the runes she knew couldn’t even be formed by such weak souls.

A big focus, then, became how the Akanan airship worked.

Antigravity glyphs were key, obviously; it was so much more efficient than using a force spell. Yet while she knew how her wand of levitation had done it, and had applied that to her seeds of chaos design, it wasn’t so easy to lift something as bulky as an airship. Her first idea had involved just having an antigravity sequence in the core of the ship, like with her seeds of chaos.

However, her seeds of chaos spun around wildly because there was nothing to stabilize them. That was fine for what was essentially a lightweight incendiary. Put a person on something like that, though, and they’d be dumped overboard immediately. Strap them in, and they’d probably die of nausea. It would also wreck the aerodynamics of the ship, sort of like trying to sail a boat sideways.

So she tried two antigravity sequences, and while the result didn’t flail about wildly, it did spin like the axle of a carriage. That was great for bullets being fired from a rifled barrel; not so much for an airship.

Three antigravity sequences gave her tiny wooden model airship great stability. It also burned the fossilized myrvite fuel in record time.

Well, I guess that’s why it took people a while to make airships, even after they figured out levitation, Mirian thought, after her prototype that tried to spread out the applied antigravity force to the hull crashed into the ground. At least this one didn’t catch on fire, she thought, but as soon as she approached it, the glyphs started sparking and the artifact burst into flames. She sneered at it.

Professor Torres had gotten her several pieces of key information about the airships. The wings were important, and were doing something to stabilize the vehicle. Obviously. The force was spread out, but somehow, there was only one engine. However, while the research professor Torres had talked to had been happy to show off the interior of the flying yacht, he hadn’t shown her the engine room, and most of the glyph sequences were hidden behind panels, or inside locked spell engines. She could say conceptually what each piece of the airship did, but that was nearly useless for actually building one that could transport a person across the Rift Sea.

Mirian began to conceive of another plan.

She couldn’t help herself. Airships were, objectively, the coolest artifacts around. And they would be incredibly useful. So somehow, she needed to set up a situation where the Akanans would be willing to share airship designs.

Fort Aegrimere had airships. Some other forts probably did, too. The Arcane Praetorians had airships. Those airships were fine for short-range reconnaissance, or emergency extractions or insertions. Anything they could do, though, she could do with a levitation wand. She needed the Akanan airships, because they’d made some sort of breakthrough Baracuel hadn’t.

Which, of course, was why it was a highly protected state secret.

But Sulvorath was having that state secret delivered straight to her doorstep now.

She was beginning to reconsider her tactics.

Meanwhile, Mirian got a crash-course in academic politics, which turned out to be as infuriating and nonsensical as regular politics. She had absolutely no desire to learn about the personal lives of the Akanan professors, but it turned out petty grudges and serrated gossip weren’t just the domain of her girlfriends in preparatory school. The professors made even a rumormonger like Valen look like an amateur.

It seemed that Specter was the one who ordered the second assassination attempt on Jei if the first one failed. Or, perhaps the orders from Agent Hache changed because suddenly his own people were now part of the Divine Monument research project. Or maybe Sulvorath had intervened, even though he usually didn’t do that. Either way, Mirian had worked with Jei to prepare her home with defenses and gotten Torres to stand watch, but it had turned out to be unnecessary.

Instead, Mirian and Jei chatted inside a secure area of the Artificer’s Tower to avoid the new Akanan eavesdropping devices.

Jei was laying out her understanding in her usual stiff tone. “…and so the older academic takes partial credit for all research done by the younger academic. This is considered beneficial to the younger academic because the older academic is introducing them to networks of colleagues, or is able to exchange the accolades they would earn for additional resources. Refusal to play this game is highly detrimental to their career, as the older academics, especially those interested in prestige, monopolize the hiring committees. It is far more effective to advance your career by making friends with the Archmage—or Provisional Archmage, if no one in the institution is powerful enough for that title—than it is to do novel research.”

Mirian made a gagging noise.

“Indeed,” Jei said. “There are exceptions, of course. Also, if you are a genius, or you can make allies with older academics outside the usual channels, you can often bypass a parasitic academic.”

“Yeah. It’s still… stupid. It doesn’t even… I mean, isn’t the point of research to advance human knowledge? To create the technologies that will make a better world?”

Jei sighed. “You are now too worldly to believe that. Do you believe the Torrviol Guard exists to uphold the law? Do you believe Parliament seeks primarily to represent the people of Baracuel?”

“Ugh. None of it works the way it’s supposed to work. Did it ever?”

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“You should read the works of Zhuan Li. She was doing research on political theory, but to greatly summarize her work, the answer is, ‘probably never.’ She said… hmm. I cannot remember. It was something about how elite control of a political system requires an ‘ideology of internal rationalization.’ I am not sure if that term translates well. Regardless, I chose to mostly avoid political maneuvering. It was… how do you say ‘cannot concentrate’?”

“Distracting?”

“It was distracting. But Torres and I have analyzed the social relations of these Akanans. They are smart, but parasitic. I doubt they will add much to the Monument research.”

“So most of these researchers have big names because of work their junior professors and apprentices have done?”

“Correct. Except for Archmage Tyrcast. This is not to say that Tyrcast is not a parasite; he has benefited greatly from an army of apprentices and a great deal of resources that have been poured into his projects by Akana’s government and his wife’s joint stock company. However, I must regretfully inform you he is also smart.”

“Regretfully?”

“I am Zhighuan,” Jei said simply.

Mirian sneered. “Oh. That fucker. He really…?”

“I do not like discussing it. But you should know.”

“Ugh! Why do Akanans always have their heads so far up their asses?”

Jei started thinking about that. “If the head is… hmm. So they cannot see. Ah, it is like the Zhighuan phrase, ‘they stare at the sun because they think it is their only equal.’”

Mirian laughed. “Sounds about right.”