Tulian Republic

  Capital

  Forty-One Days Until Spring

  Sara moved from corner to corner in Hurlish's forge, lowering the storm shutters with a rattle. The sun hadn't yet risen, but it wasn't long in coming, and with it would bring the rest of Tulian's smiths. For this task, they needed privacy.

  And for once, it's not 'cause we're gonna fuck, Sara reflected, amused. I mean, I'm not gonna say no if they ask me, but that's definitely not the purpose today.

  Evie watched Sara's preparations from atop Hurlish's bck-topped anvil, swinging her feet. Hurlish was ying out her supplies, selecting hammers and pieces of wrought iron with an artisan's eye. When Sara finished closing the forge off to the outside world, she turned around and put a hand on the pommel of her sword.

  "Y'all ready?"

  "Yup."

  "A moment, Master." Evie reached over to the bag off Hurlish's hip, drawing out one of her many notebooks, followed by the fountain pen Sara and Hurlish had recently finished for her. She flipped the book open to a bnk page, then looked up. "Go ahead, Master."

  "Only got an hour on this, remember? So we'll have to work quick."

  "It shouldn't be a problem."

  "Yeah. We've already got most of what we need, this is just the st piece of the puzzle."

  "Alright. Here goes."

  Sara gripped her sword, focusing on an old, old memory, and whispered, "Ta-da."

  The men on the field were much older than they should be, Sara thought. Dad said most of them were old because they're the only ones interested in doing these kinds of things, but she at least thought they could have dyed their beards or something. All the real soldiers they were pretending to be had been young, and definitely didn't have white hair.

  "Oh, look! Look, Sara, they're getting ready right there!"

  Sara followed Dad's pointing finger to the closest line of gray-coated soldiers, a little bit of his excitement spilling over to her. The closest man was old and fat, and his fake uniform didn't really fit him, but he was at least loading his gun fast. She watched the whole group of twenty people get ready, which took a silly amount of time, and then they put their weapons to their shoulders.

  Suddenly, Dad's hands were over her ears. She looked up at him, confused, then jumped when there was a loud crashing sound from across the field. She looked back at all the fake soldiers to see them covered by a cloud of white, barely visible through the smoke. When it blew away, they were already loading again, one of the fancier dressed officers yelling at the rest of them as if it really mattered. Sara still didn't get it. If they really cared about this all that much, why were they pying the bad guys?

  Sara blinked fiercely as the memory finished rushing through her. When her head stopped swimming, she was staring at the frozen face of a civil war reenactor, just as fat and bearded as she'd remembered.

  "Ugly motherfucker," Hurlish commented, mirroring Sara's thoughts.

  "Yeah, well, he liked to py pretend as a Confederate. 'Good old boys' usually live off a steady diet of bullshit topped with grease, so it's no surprise."

  Sara twisted her grip on the sword, advancing the memory until the reenactor had the gun at his shoulder. Her girlfriends stepped up to opposite sides of the weapon, Evie taking hurried notes, Hurlish holding up measuring devices for her reference. Sara joined them and began pointing out parts of the weapon, the memories of which had suddenly jumped to the forefront of her mind, compliments of her Illusion spell.

  "That there is the priming pan. You put a little bit of powder in it, then the flint hammer, above it, sms down and makes sparks. That sets the whole thing off."

  "And this symbol, Master, by the mechanism?"

  Sara stepped around the illusion, squinting. "Just the serial number, I think, and the manufacturer's logo. Doesn't mean anything more than when it was made, and who made it. Springfield, in this case, according to my dad."

  "Your dad?" Hurlish asked. "How'd he tell you that? Ain't he a bit far away?"

  Sara tapped her temple. "The spell freshens the moment up to make the illusion, thankfully. My Dad was big on civil war stuff, and he didn't shut up the whole time we were there. This here is..." Sara snapped her fingers a few time, digging through her spell-jumbled recollection. "A Springfield Model 1840. Last flintlock the army used, before they went to more modern stuff."

  "Huh." Hurlish finished taking her measurements, and Evie finished her sketch. She'd been getting a lot better at those, tely.

  "Can you allow the illusion to operate the weapon, Master?" She asked.

  "Sure."

  They all three took a step back as the illusory Confederate jumped into motion, pulling a wad of paper from a pouch. Evie took careful notes as he went through the borious effort required to load, ram, and prepare a musket weapon, ending in a spray of sparks and a puff of smoke.

  "Again, if you don't mind. I'd rather not miss any detail."

  Sara obligingly left the illusion to run, circling so she was out of her girlfriend's way as they worked. Hurlish had already seen the demonstration on several occasions, as she was the one who'd been discretely overseeing and making the parts over the st few months, but she was paying attention to different things this time around. Today she'd be assembling the weapon for the very first time, and that meant she was paying close attention to the arrangement of the parts and their tolerances.

  "Just don't know if the damn spring'll hold," Hurlish murmured, speaking to herself.

  "It will, babe. You made it."

  "If you think I never made something that didn't come out right, you're gonna be in for one helluva shock."

  Sara snorted, leaving the woman to her analysis. She circled the illusion, looking for something to entertain herself with. Now that she'd cast the spell, Sara's role was to sit around and answer questions when they were posed. While she waited for that to happen, she decided to pay attention to the illusory magic itself.

  Her regur exchange of letters with Garen had continued unabated, and the far-off wizard had taught her a lot. The source of magic, for example. Sort of. He expined that the common wizards of this world drew their power from themselves, maniputing an internal reservoir that was inherent to all living beings. Garen cimed that some aspect of life, even if he couldn't point to a specific mechanism, was constantly producing arcane energy. Every bde of grass, every leaf, and every person, they all had at least a tiny spark of energy stored within, and it was by shaping and expelling that energy that a creature was able to alter the rules of reality.

  Truth be told, that had been a pretty disappointing expnation for Sara, who'd really hoped for something more mystical than an obfuscated version of RPG mana. It made sense, too, which she was pretty sure shouldn't be the case with magic. In her opinion, arcane energy should be an ill-defined, ephemeral thing, its workings grasped only by wizened and worldly masters of the craft, not a bag of magic juice that was sloshing around in every John and Jane Doe.

  When she'd expressed that to Garen, he'd taken considerable offense to the notion. As if to prove to her that his life's work wasn't that simple, he'd moved on to the question of Champions, who apparently operated on an entirely different, much less understood, system than the rest. Unlike literally every other being on the pnet, Champions had no internal energy. No matter how closely one investigated their bodies, even as they were actively channeling magical abilities, there was simply no sign of arcane energy.

  The implications of that little tidbit were more interesting to Sara. As no one had thus far succeeded in pinning an adequate definition to arcane energy, superstition and religion had naturally dug their roots into the topic. Many churches and religious authorities cimed that the energy was the very soul itself, proven by the fact that thinking humanoids had some of the greatest size-to-energy ratios of all living creatures.

  Sara didn't put much stock in that, both because it implied she didn't have a soul, and because Garen had helpfully provided counter examples. Things like dense yers of moss, algae blooms, older whales, tree saplings, and a litany of exceptions existed, their small formwere positively awash with energy beyond their physical size.

  The second theory of arcane energy was less philosophically compelling, but more internally consistent. Magic, whatever it was, was simply a chemical byproduct of life. Garen hadn't the terminology to describe it properly, but after some discussion, Sara had gathered a more modern gist of the idea. Life, if defined as an organized, self-perpetuating, reproducing pattern of molecules, had some element to its function that just so happened to squirt magic into the surrounding aether. Garen had seized on that idea with wild abandon, as the knowledge of single-celled organisms leant a depth to the definition of 'life' far beyond anything mages had yet managed, only for Sara's next letter to blow the idea apart. She'd told him about viruses, self-sustaining chemical reactions, and evolution, the st of which had really fucked his worldview up. (The astounding beauty of the thinking mind, both a product of and subject to callous genetic chance? The horror!)

  Sara had at least been able to reassure him that the second theory made the most sense, to her. If magic was a byproduct of life in this world, universe, dimension, or whatever it was, it would make sense that Sara cked it. She just didn't have the magic-squirters in her biology. Even if Garen loathed the way Sara had phrased it, he'd been unable to provide a better answer.

  Which then left the question of how the hell the fat Confederate staring into empty space in front of Sara was possible. Sara didn't have magic, period, yet she cast spells anyway. Garen supposed she had a direct connection to Amarat's divine energy, but even that was an imperfect expnation, because the divine energies cast by a god's faithful could be detected by skilled mages. To Garen's eyes, she was a walking, talking chunk of stone, a physical impossibility. She shouldn't be able to move, much less cast magic, yet she did it anyway.

  At the end of the exchange of letters, Sara's response to that final idea had grated Garen the most: she'd been relieved. She'd been happy there was at least some mysticism to magic, not just fshy calculus. She'd seen her Carrion Artificers at work, and their diagrams and expnations had reminded her an awful lot of the jargon that electrical engineers used back on Earth. Energies and circuits and gates and channels and all that. Sara had taken an online css for electrical engineering before, when she'd thought it might be a good way to pad her resume. If magic had worked like that infuriating mess, she would have been pissed.

  I do wonder what's limiting me, though, Sara thought, humming thoughtfully. The illusion of the reenactor she'd produced was, much like her earlier reproduction of the USS Constitution, impossibly detailed, beyond even the greatest of mages. Every pore, every whisker, was faithfully reproduced, down to the rolls of fat and the powder-tainted barrel of his musket.

  An idea came to her suddenly, something she'd never thought to try before. Slowly, so as not to disperse the illusion, Sara leaned forward, sticking her head into the man's spine.

  "Holy shit!" Sara yelped, buried up to her neck in Confederate muscuture.

  "Master?"

  "I can see into this dude's lungs, Evie! Y'all gotta check this out!"

  Sara turned her head, moving back and forth. Illusion magic was composed of light, which meant there wasn't a single dark space on the interior of the construction. She'd known she could look inside the images, as that's how Nora and her shipwrights had inspected the Constitution, but she'd never considered using it on a person.

  "We are rather busy, if you hadn't noticed."

  "It's not gonna take the full hour to get everything you need. One quick peek, c'mon!" Sara crouched a little bit, moving her head through the man's body. "Shit! That's his stomach! There's, like, a bunch of chewed up burger in here! A whole lot, actually. No wonder this dude's fat."

  Abruptly, Sara's inspection of the man's innards was interrupted by a thick forehead smming into hers. Hurlish grunted, pulling back a little bit. Still bent over, Sara looked up at her, the orc's face visible from within the man's stomach.

  "So... come here often?"

  Hurlish groaned and rolled her eyes. "I'm leaving."

  "Oh, come on! That was the best time to use that joke!"

  "There's never a good time to use that joke."

  True to her word, Hurlish retreated, returning to her measurements of the musket. Sara was left inspecting this strange new facet of her abilities alone, eagerly bobbing her way through a fat man's torso.

  "But it looked cool, right?"

  "Pretty neat, I guess," Hurlish admitted. "Never seen a person's insides when they were still inside, before."

  "Yeah. This'll be amazing for teaching Nid's surgeons..." Sara's eyes widened. "Wait, I've got an idea. Is it alright if I have him move?"

  "I have no objection, Master."

  "Go for it."

  With her head still inside the man's rotund belly, Sara advanced the illusion's 'animation.' She was treated to a front row seat of muscuture twisting, stomach contents sloshing, and bones being pulled into pce by tendons. As far as Sara could tell, every st detail was perfectly replicated, providing her a comprehensive anatomical model that she could peruse at her leisure.

  "Shit," Sara murmured again. "This is a big deal, actually. Do you know how many medical questions we can answer with this spell? It was only like a hundred years ago in my world that doctors could open someone up without them either being dead, or, uh, screaming."

  "An evocative euphemism, Master."

  "There's not a good way to say it, unfortunately. But seriously..." Sara pulled her head back a bit, watching ligaments twist around spinal disks. "This is incredible. How deep do you think the illusion goes? If we put a microscope up to it, could we see cells moving?"

  "I would not rule it out, Master. Remember, your abilities are borne of a god. This is no mortal magic."

  Sara shook her head, wondering how in the hell she was going to find time to show up to Nid's hospital to give him an opportunity to study.

  "If you could halt the illusion again, Master?" Evie prompted.

  Sara got herself back on task, retreating to a more chaste distance. There was something subtly revolting about pulling her face out of the swollen gut of an elderly man, a shiver running through her. If she was going to use this spell again simirly, she'd have to find a better model. Actually...

  "Evie? I'm about to pay attention, I promise, but before I forget to ask you, would you mind if I use an illusion of you for medical students to study?"

  "Why me in particur, Master?"

  "Well, it'd be best if the model was naked, so they could see the muscles moving from the inside and outside, and of the people that I've seen naked, you're definitely the one that I've got the most memories of moving without your clothes."

  "Dunno about that," Hurlish grunted, sounding almost affronted.

  "Yeah, you'd work, too, but most of the medical students aren't orcs. They'd need a dder to see inside your chest."

  "Heh. Yeah, I can see how that'd be a problem." As always, fttering Hurlish's height succeeded in distracting the orc from her compint.

  Evie poked her head around the illusion to frown at Sara. "So you are not asking if I my likeness may be used for medical reference. You are asking me if my sweaty, sex-coated body, writhing in the throes of orgasm, can be studiously pored over by young medical students."

  Sara blinked. "Uh. I didn't say all that. I was more thinking of using your image from when we were cleaning up afterward, or before you got dressed–"

  "The answer is yes, either way. Educating the next generation of healers is a far greater goal than preserving whatever shreds of my modesty this retionship has left intact." Evie smirked. "And it might be amusing, to see a healer recognize me some distant day. An interesting power, to be able to recall such a memory to their minds with my mere presence."

  A part of Sara was growing concerned that Evie's slide into debauchery was outpacing her own. A different part of her was very, very turned on by the idea. Sara, standing in front of a packed lecture hall with the illusion of Evie beside her, announcing to the enraptured audience that they would now be studying her form, then contorting the woman into the very throes of pleasure, pretending all the while that it was simply a convenient way to study muscle structure... Not too bad, all things considered.

  "Whore," Hurlish stated, tone casual.

  "And?" Evie snipped.

  "It was a compliment."

  "Oh. In that case, thank you."

  Sara shook her head.