“Sorry we couldn’t help,” he said.
“No, we were simply curious. Do not let it bother you,” Her Majesty said, shaking her head. “The palace mages are prepared to conduct an investigation, and the Guld Workshop has offered to send researchers over to help. We were simply seeking any possible clue that might be had before we began.”
“All right, that’s a relief,” Shinichi-san said with a little shrug.
As for me, I took a fresh look at the stuff in the “coffin.” I stared at it as hard as I could, but it didn’t so much as move. Not the gelatin, not the little red ball suspended in it. They were just... there. As if time were somehow stopped inside that container. And yet...
I shivered. Somehow, to me, the stuff looked alive.
Class was over, and Romilda had invited us to come to the Guld Workshop. Mostly because Shinichi-san had hit on this idea that maybe if we saw the place where the “coffin” had been discovered, we might get some clue about what it was.
Normally, we might take what we referred to as a “bird-drawn carriage”—a carriage literally pulled by an ostrich-like avian—but with Romilda being what amounted to a dwarf princess, her favored mode of conveyance was a little different. Instead of a large bird, clay golems pulled the carriage along. In spirit, I guess it was similar to a rickshaw. Unlike a rickshaw, it had two rows of seats for up to six people, and the pullers were a pair of rough-hewn clay dolls, so the whole thing looked a little strange. Although no stranger, I guess, than an automobile from our world would’ve looked to the locals here, without anything at all to pull it along. Conversely, if you thought of the golems as like an engine, maybe it turned out this wasn’t so different after all.
“Boy. What is that thing, anyway?” Shinichi-san mused. The benches in the passenger compartment faced each other, and I was sitting beside Romilda, with Shinichi-san and Minori-san across from me.
“I guess it can’t be some kind of toy,” Minori-san replied. “I’ll bet it’s magical, though.”
“My father tells me it was the only one they found,” Romilda said.
“Huh? Weren’t you with them, Romilda?”
“No, not me. I’m not allowed where the tunneling team works—too dangerous, I’m told.” She started digging through a bag slung over her shoulder. “But sometimes they find the coolest stuff,” she grinned.
“Like what?”
“Like this,” she said and put a small, wooden box on her knees. She opened the lid, and when I looked inside, I was surprised to find an assortment of rings and necklaces.
“What?” Shinichi-san said. “They found this while they were tunneling?”
“Yeah. Every once in a while, something like this will come up,” Romilda replied.
“Does, uh, does Petralka know about this? Isn’t this, like, treasure?”
“It looks pretty, but there’s a lot of fakes buried down there,” Romilda said.
The objects in the box were, it seemed, all imitations. What looked like jewels were simply glass beads, and what seemed like precious metals were only normal metals that had been specially treated. Overall, none of it was very valuable. For a while, it seems, a flood of objects like this had been found, and to save the empire the trouble of having to inspect each and every one of them, the dwarves were given special dispensation to dispose of anything that was obviously a fake.
“Although we do check them for magical properties,” Romilda added.
That made sense. Some items could have dangerous enchantments on them, not unlike the “forbidden armor” we had encountered, so the dwarves at least looked to make sure there was no magic on anything they found. And for better or for worse, nothing in this box had been enchanted.
“A lot of times these things just get thrown away, so if I see one I like, I ask to keep it,” Romilda said, trawling through the box with her fingers. “Ah, here we go.” She took something and held it out to me. “When I saw this, I thought it would be perfect for you, Hikaru-sensei.”
“Huh? For me...?”
I was a little taken aback. I was under the impression that Shinichi-san was the most popular teacher with the students, including Romilda. Not that I thought anyone hated me or anything, but I would have expected any gifts from the students to be directed at Shinichi-san. And yet here we were.
“What’s this—a choker?” I said. When I looked at it, I could see where she was coming from. It was a small strip of black material, like leather, with a metal clasp and a single turquoise stone carved with a geometric pattern. It was too small to be a belt; it had to be a bracelet or a choker of some kind. I had never known Shinichi-san to wear any kind of jewelry other than his interpreter ring, and black was definitely more my color—it would go perfectly with a Gothic-Lolita outfit. I guess that was why Romilda had wanted to give it to me.
“Can I really have it?”
“Of course!” she said, nodding eagerly. Maybe there was a touch of flattery in it, but knowing she thought it would look good on me personally felt pretty nice. I took the choker from Romilda and fit it around my neck.
It had a surprising heft in my hand—that stone was heavier than it looked—but when I put it on, I was struck by how little I noticed the weight. The clasp must have had magnetic stones in it, because the ends came together with an audible click, and it sat comfortably in place when I let go of it.
“It looks great!” Romilda said, clearly pleased to see her judgment vindicated.
“Wow, it really does,” Shinichi-san said.
“You wear that well,” Minori-san nodded. I actually found myself a little embarrassed to be on the receiving end of this shower of praise from my two colleagues.
“Thank you, Romilda,” I said, smiling at her. I brushed the choker
