Chapter 278: Magical Duties
"What do you propose that you will do with us if you purchase us?" One of the boys asked.
"The Princess is looking for a few more trustworthy veiled maids, and if you hold true to your Clan’s oath, then the ladies of the Purity Sect should be good for that.
The others, I intend to move into a tower in town to work off their sentence. Infrastructure, street cleaning, defensive magic, magitech factory work. All are options suitable to the employment of criminals, and you will be suitably housed and fed for the remainder of your lives.
If you want to take in new members, that is fine too. These fine gentlemen will ensure that the tower is large enough for them."
The mages simply stared at Dominic for a moment.
There was something wrong with his logic, but they couldn’t quite place it. While it was true that they were serving a life sentence, it sounded a lot like he intended to be their employer, not their jailer.
Did the Duke misunderstand the irrevocable nature of the magical contract they had signed when they were sentenced?
But they had underestimated the utter shamelessness of Dominic’s plan. He needed magical workers, and these literally could not leave once he purchased their contracts.
A loyal base of skilled mages? All of whom were young, and sentenced to a lifetime of hard labour? Wasn’t that decades of guaranteed skilled workers? Even diverting a few to the Princess’ Veiled Guard wouldn’t harm his efforts to develop the Duchy into a cutting edge magitech factory city.
Well, town. It would be some time before they could claim to be anything so grand as a city.
After a moment, the mages bowed. "We will agree to your fair purchase terms, Your Grace. Please assign us tasks."
Alexis smiled as she looked at the group. "This will work out perfectly. I will take all five of the girls as trainee veiled maids, and they can bolster the domestic staff. Ladies, please follow my assistant to change into your new uniforms.
Gentlemen, the first task that we have for you is to assist the Architects in preparing an area for housing expansion. After everyone’s belongings are unloaded, that is.
You will have the honour of helping build your own new home."
She wholeheartedly approved of Dominic’s choice to take the mages into the house instead of looking for locals. Every Noble Lady worried about the staff trying to gain favours by sneaking into the Lord’s bed when she was away.
But these ones were literally incapable of such things.
Not that she doubted Dominic’s loyalty. Plus, he was pathologically incapable of keeping a secret, and if one of the staff actually offered, he would never be able to hide it from her.
Dominic tossed Julio a pouch full of coins to pay the merchant for the mages and the finding fee for the architects, then let them go about their day.
The men had a lot of work ahead of them, planning the exact locations, staking out house and street plans for the expansion, and deciding what they would do for a mage tower. It should be obvious to them that Dominic intended to find more mages for the tower, so they would make it with plenty of extra space.
Having all those extra mages would make life much easier for the architects, and Dominic finally had hope that they could keep up with the influx of refugees.
Even a half dozen apartment blocks built over commercial buildings would go a long way to housing workers, and they shouldn’t have to wait long for the factory to be built. It might actually take longer to get the raw materials that they needed for production than to get the factory built.
"If you will excuse us, My Lord, we will go scout the locations right away. We need to unpack our belongings as well." The architect suggested.
"Take your time, get unpacked, shower, eat. The land will still be there." Dominic agreed.
The male mages followed him out just as the girls of the Purity Sect came back out in their new uniforms, simple black dresses with long sleeves and veils covering their lower face.
It wasn’t difficult to tell them from the sisters, as the mages were all still children. But at least now they looked like proper veiled maids. The sisters led them through the house, pointing out all the various rooms and the chores that went with them.
Keeping so many maids in the house seemed a bit excessive, but Dominic could hear the cook welcoming them, and the maids explaining that they had a spare room set up with bunks, so the mages could continue to share a room.
At the rate that they were going, Dominic was going to have to put an expansion on the Manor as well, just to hold all the extra staff.
There was an unused barracks building in the area, but that had been vacant long before the invasion, and probably wasn’t suitable for occupants.
He could have them upgrade that later, so they would have somewhere for a standing military force to stay once they had a full-time town guard.
They could work on that once the Militia was trained.
Now that they had experts in place, he could relax a little and let them work on the hard parts while he approved development plans. His spell book was coming along very well, and soon he would be able to create pistols with proper tool steel quality directly from the [Clay to Steel] spell.
Once he was at that standard, Dominic knew that life would get much easier. Many magitech items could be created using spells at that level with much simpler tools and materials.
It would save him both time and money.
And that meant that he could put more effort into developing new products.
He had sketches for the simplest of magitech hanging lamps, and those could be their first product for the factory. But first, he would have to ask the mages if they knew the spell to create simple gems.
It was possible, he knew. He just didn’t have the spell knowledge.