A Perverted Path to Victory

Sara Brown

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Deep in the city of Ta-Pet’s underground mazeways, where slogging through ankle-deep water was more common than finding a stretch of dry stone, Evie Brown held a hollow needle to her throat. An unremarkable, flat, weather-worn stone was in her other hand, which she was using to rapidly tap the end of the dye-filled iron tube into her skin. Sara was holding up a piece of shattered mirror– stolen from some noble’s house they had passed on the way down– while Hurlish’s calloused mitt of a hand was drawing their wife’s skin taut, pinching the nape of her neck like a mother cat carrying a kitten.

They were all three working under the supervision of a gnarled old woman, one who was so covered in tattoos that Sara hadn’t the slightest idea what color the skin beneath may have once been. Faded artworks had been endlessly overlaid with new ones, creating a dizzyingly intertwined tapestry of half-defined shapes that flowed from one to the other. Every tattoo she wore was of an animal of a sort, a few familiar to Sara, most not, with each limb and extremity forming the torso of the next creature. The only distinct piece, perhaps because it was newest, was that which ran up her spine, visible when her clothing shifted, showing the edges of a wyvern’s wings spreading from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. It was as if every graffiti artist in Detroit had chosen a single small canvas for all their works, a thousand pieces of art blending into one unfathomably elaborate end product.

When Evie had told Sara that her desire for pregnancy was the result of a misunderstood desire, the mourning of the collar which prominently displayed her attachment to Sara, the idea of a tattoo had been easy to come up with. It was permanent, but didn’t restrict or endanger her. It was locating somewhere to get the damn tattoo that had been hard.

Sara had worked hard to find this place. Even her Blessings had told her nothing of the woman she’d eventually found, who she still didn’t know the name of. Sara had been forced to do things the hard way. In the few hours she had to spend away from Evie every few days, Sara had spent her time whispering, nudging, and cajoling the natives of the city, wearing a hundred different illusory faces. Much like Tulian and Sporatos, the people of the Empire did not wear tattoos. The word itself, despite existing in the Kemari language, was unfamiliar to almost everyone.

Yet Sara had seen tattoos. A few soldiers in the Imperial army had, half-hidden beneath their armors, sported pictorial representations of various monstrous animals. These soldiers were invariably armed with massive longbows, counting themselves amongst the few who were skilled enough with the weapons that General Borek did not mandate they take up muskets instead.

Sara had tried talking to them first, of course. She had been totally stonewalled. No matter what face she wore when she came to her, the moment she asked after their tattoos, they had stared at her in absolute silence. Her Blessings had told her there was, quite literally, nothing she could say to convince them to open up. The words, no matter how many or in what order they were said, did not exist.

Thus, the canvasing. Hours spent nudging the people who seemed to maybe know something, who prickled at the edges of her supernatural senses. Her work had led to this ancient and withered human woman, who Sara was told to meet deep, deep underground.

“Faster,” the living artwork of a woman rasped, her eyes watching Evie’s hands like a hawk. “There. A good speed. Stay at this.”

The tip-tip-tip of stone against iron continued to echo in the damp, lantern-lit cavern. Sara could hear no difference in the rate Evie was tapping, but there clearly was one. A few dozen yards away, the walkway was blocked off by a cave-in. Sara occasionally felt the slightest tremor beneath her feet, as if another collapse was soon in coming. She ignored that in favor of keeping her arms as still as possible, holding the mirror up for Evie’s benefit.

She had wanted to have this be a surprise for her wife. Her first plan had been to give Evie something to knock her out, one of the army’s primitive anesthetics, perhaps, and have her wake up surprised by the image in the mirror, but the people who had pointed Sara this way had warned her against it. Sara didn’t understand it fully, but whatever she’d stumbled across wasn’t anything as simple as a tattoo artist in a society which shunned tattoos. From the moment she’d first spoken to this woman, there had been a crackling tension in the air, nearly physical in the way it filled every breath. There was a deeply important symbolism to the process that Sara didn’t yet fully grasp.

“Too fast, now,” the woman instructed. “Slower. Guide the ink to your skin, give it a place to rest. Place every drop with Intent. Like the apawniea tree. Do not choke the dyes with the growth of their fellows, but do not leave them alone to wither and die. If you wish your skin to flourish, you must know its place.”

A tiny shiver ran down Evie’s spine, as if an icy breeze had raced down the abandoned corridor, but, held firmly in Hurlish’s grip, her neck remained perfectly still.

The tattooed woman had refused to do the work for Evie. She had taken Evie into a separate room from Sara and Hurlish, demanding that their wife swear herself to secrecy, and when Sara had tried to use her Blessings to shift her ears to those of a catfolk, the woman had come bursting through the door, fury in her eyes. That was obviously impressive for several reasons, but most of all because Sara’s efforts hadn’t been achieving the slightest thing. Her ears hadn’t even twitched, much less transformed. She’d only ever managed to change her body’s shape during sex, not for any practical reason, befitting the Skill of a Champion of Amarat. The woman didn’t make the distinction of effort from success, clearly, so Sara had stopped trying.

When they’d emerged, the woman had decreed that the tattoo was not her place to make. Only Evie’s own hand, inexperienced and unaided though it might be, would suffice.

“Stop,” the woman ordered. She held out a wooden, hand-carved bowl, one that was filled to the brim with pitch-black dye. Evie lowered the tip of her needle into the ink, held it for a moment, then pulled back, resuming the staccato tapping of metal into flesh. The flesh that ran behind where Evie had worked was red and inflamed, more than enough so that Sara would have physically assaulted any earthly tattoo artist for their brutality. Evie didn’t, so Sara didn’t, either. Thin lines of blood ran down her wife’s neck on occasion, wetting the collar of her shirt. That was the only time the woman intervened personally. She would lean forward with a threadbare, ragged cloth, firmly dimpling the flesh as she wiped the blood away.

If the strange woman thought anything unusual of Evie’s reaction to pain, which varied from completely ignoring it to enthusiastic embrace, she didn’t say a word. There didn’t seem to be much about the entire process the woman hadn’t seen before. Considering her nearly-ebony skin, that was probably true.

It took hours. They wouldn’t have another chance to come here, and that meant it had to be completed in one go. Occasionally the woman would allow Evie a break for water, but only for brief gulps, and certainly never a long enough rest to eat, even as the hours wore on. Sara had no doubt they were all being missed, up above. Requisition orders were piling up, messages from Tulian were going unreceived, and even Hurlish’s smithy would be falling behind on work that her few army pupils relied heavily on her to complete. They weren’t going to leave until it was done, however.

Evie had said she missed the collar’s signal of who she was to her wives, and the moment Sara had learned that, only the gods could have stopped her from finding a replacement.

Much later, how much later Sara had no idea, the woman called for a stop. Evie reached out, expecting to receive one of her rare sips of water, but was instead handed an unfamiliar flask. Surprised, she looked down to find a small vial of a potion. It resembled a healing potion in color and consistency, but was thicker, sludgier.

“Drink it,” the woman instructed. “If the meaning of the work has truly taken to you, the work will not be undone. If you do not feel certain-”

Evie downed the potion. The woman harrumphed, but did not make an issue of her haste. She leaned back to watch, crossing her arms. Sara and Hurlish also took a step back, curious.

The raw, red flesh that had encircled Evie’s throat was slowly wiped away, fading like a blush in reverse. The black ink specks in her neck seemed to shift with the potion’s advance, dots widening, brightening, colors swirling together.

A minute later, Evie’s neck was cradled by a gentle band once more. A gray ringlet spread to fill the skin which had held her collar once upon a time, then went further, blossoming with color as it crawled up and down her neck.

As the slate-grey iron rose, it began to break apart, tendrils curling as they brightened into the silvery sheen of polished steel. The tattooed collar was peeled apart to become elegant filigrees, twisting and curving into the exact patterning that Hurlish had so long ago used to decorate the handguard of Evie’s rapier. Floral patterns were the smith’s preferred form of flourish, using roses, orchids, and fluer-de-lis to indicate the works she was particularly proud of. Many people thought that every sword or musket smithed by the famed Hurlish of Tulian was equal in quality, but that wasn’t so. It was only when something was marked with those steel flowers that she considered it a weapon to be truly proud of, a blade worthy of being called art. Evie was now embraced by those same steel flowers. Of her wife, Hurlish of Tulian believed two things without reservation. The first was that Evie Brown was an unparalleled wonder, a work of art itself, her very form a singing inspiration for all to aspire to, a thousand times over deserving of Hurlish’s personal mark. The second?

That Evie Brown was, without doubt, the finest weapon Hurlish had ever laid hands on.

The underside of the dull collar, in contrast to its upper half, did not brighten. The grey there rapidly shifted and spread, darkening into brewing clouds of purple smoke. Now healed by the potion, the tattoo seemed to have gained an impossible depth. Harsh lines of stark pink set the boundaries of murky purple fog, lit within by hidden flashes of crimson lightning. It was a rendition of the smoke that rolled off Sara’s body in battle, now permanently etched into Evie’s skin. Not as a simple mark of association or ownership, but a promise. A threat, almost. Strikingly beautiful at a distance, yes, but if you were lucky enough to study it up close, the image seemed to shift and swell, unnervingly… alive. Beneath the obvious beauty was a design which, upon study, prodded at the same instinctual fear some distant ancestor must have felt when they stumbled upon a den of venomous snakes. It evoked the same sinking fear and awful revulsion that rose up in the belly when once was met by a thousand evil hisses and a thousand eyes glittering with lethal malice, daring any to approach what could only be certain death. Evie had been marked. Claimed. To challenge her, for someone unfit to place a collar upon her once more, was to invite the thundering wrath of a Divine Champion.

Evie stared at herself in the mirror. Her exhausted hand trembled as she reached up, sliding one finger along the tattoo.

“I… did not have the skill to make this,” she half-whispered, her words as distracted as they were awestruck.

“You held the needle,” the old woman said as she began to pack away her supplies. Wooden bowls were placed into tanned leather bags, iron and stone bumping and clicking in the echoing corridor. “You worked the art. That your body took it well is no less your accomplishment than it is when your legs steady you through swift water.”

“Is there anything we should do for the tattoo?” Sara asked. If it hadn’t been for what had come to life on Evie’s skin, she would have been asking after the usual concerns. Keeping it covered, maintaining cleanliness, things like that. Looking at it now, there was clearly something… more to it. Unnatural, certainly, maybe even outright magical. Some Skill or spell that the ink-dipped woman had discretely employed, Sara could only assume.

“The ink has taken,” the woman declared, straightening as she slung her bag over a shoulder. “Care for the girl, not the work. A strange thing, she is.” The woman looked at Evie, who was still sitting before the mirror, transfixed by her tracing of the tattoo’s lines. The woman turned back to Sara and Hurlish, sticking out her gummy, toothless jaw. “You wonder who I am, I am sure. What I do. I will tell you this. When I was young, when I first held the needle in my hand, my gods came to me, telling me that my work is to be meant for the lonely hunters of great and terrible beasts. That it would be my duty to commemorate and prove their magnificent conquests.” The woman jerked her head towards Evie’s neck.

Her lips split into a toothy grin, the first crack on her stony face. “It is rare that the hunter brings their conquests with them, and rarer still that their prey still lives. I have seen deadlier prey, true, but stranger? No, not at all, I think. A strange, strange girl.”

With that, the tattooed woman turned and left. The echoing tunnel, one which had announced each and every one of Sara’s splashing footsteps, was silent at her passing.

Evie stood, taking the mirror from Sara’s hand so she could turn this way and that, inspecting from every angle the tattoo that now claimed more of her neck than any collar ever had. If she’d paid attention to a thing the woman had said as she left, she showed no signs of it.

“I truly didn’t have the skill to do this. It did not look nearly so fine before the healing potion.”

“Didn’t look like a normal potion,” Hurlish said, reaching out to swipe a thumb across Evie’s neck. There was no smudging, and her skin was completely free from irritation. “I bet it helped things along.”

“Still, it is…” Evie trailed off, adjusting how she held the mirror.

“I take it you like it?” Sara asked, grinning.

“Of course. I had heard of the tattooing practice before, even seen it on a few dignitaries from exceptionally foreign lands, but I never considered it to be used in such a manner.”

“Not worried that the purple is gonna leave people thinking you’re bruised?”

“Perhaps if they are blind they could make the mistake.” Evie extended the claw of her index finger, tracing the bold black line which served as the border of a purple thundercloud. “I will have to have my dresses altered to accommodate for it.”

“Why?” Hurlish asked. “It wouldn’t fuck up the colors. The dresses would cover most of the purple. ”

“Mm,” Evie hummed. “Precisely.”

Sara tossed a smile at Hurlish. Evie was enamored with her own appearance, a dreamy expression on her face. It was the first time either of them had seen that expression on Evie’s face when she was looking at herself, instead of one of them. Sara let her enjoy it for a few minutes more, but had to speak up regretfully soon.

“Alright, we’re gonna have to get going. Sorry to say it, but we’ve got a lot of crap to do.” This was the last day the army was spending in Ta-Pet.

“Of course,” Evie murmured, letting her gaze linger a moment longer on the broken mirror before finally setting it aside. She blinked several times, as if surprised to find herself still in a waterlogged tunnel.

“Let’s hope I can remember the way out of here,” Sara mumbled, taking the lead.

“We’ll run into some people eventually,” Hurlish said. “Then you can just follow the talking to know your way around.” She chuckled. “Bullshit Champion powers.”

Evie silently filed in behind Sara, in front of Hurlish. Though the short woman was forced to high-step her way through the water even more than her wives, she still seemed distracted. She kept rubbing at her neck, a little shiver running through her every time. It was an ostentatious, gaudy tattoo, but she clearly loved it.

Even with gods-knew-how-many tasks doubtlessly piling up in her absence, Sara considered the day an unmitigated success.

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Tinvel

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“TCA requesting two,” Tinvel said into the crystal. It was held in a brass bowl that he was cupping over his mouth, to keep out the howling wind. He put it to his ear, awaiting the response.

The crystal communication network the Governess had created was an incredible innovation. One of the rare few inventions throughout history that were the product of someone looking at a tool that already existed, was widely known and its potential thought to be fully explored, and saying to themselves hey, why has nobody been doing it like this?

It wasn’t as if the Governess had actually invented anything herself, nor stumbled upon some grand idea. She’d simply come up with an idea that made everyone else look stupid. In Old Tulian, being bestowed a communication crystal by the King meant no less than the fact that you had direct access to the King, something that was in many ways more valuable than a dukedom. They were rare, treasured things, meant to be bestowed as a reward to the nobility’s most loyal followers, and that was the way it had always been. Sara Brown, however, having never been exposed to the culture surrounding communication crystals, saw them as just another tool, and it was through that lens that she came upon what should have been an obvious innovation:

Just toss them in a pile and let everyone talk to each other.

It was more complicated than that, of course. The central sphere of enchanted metal and wood had been created using magical interlinkages and Intent-sharing enchantments of such complexity that even Tinvel barely grasped them, but the core idea was still laughably simple. Put them next to each other so you can hear what noise another crystal was making. When the secret eventually got out, Tinvel couldn’t imagine how many master artificers across the world would be disgusted with themselves for being so wrapped up in their preconceptions the idea never came to them first.

Unfortunately, the ability to have the entire upper echelons of a city-state’s government linked together was proving almost too much of a novel miracle. The crystal network could easily be overloaded, the harmonics of too many voices created dangerous feedback loops, a worst-case scenario theoretically allowing for the violent self-destruction of all the crystals involved. That disaster had already been narrowly avoided on at least one occasion. Not because of any particularly ostentatious event, but simply because too many people tried to reply to one person’s innocuous question at once. A quick-thinking tender of the network, seeing the crystals beginning to tremble violently, had physically ripped the cables apart with their bare hands, bloodying themselves terribly in the process. Tinvel always wondered what they thought, knowing their heroics had been prompted by the Minister of Steelworks asking if anyone knew whether the fish markets had any good purikechi left.

It was a sobering event for all involved. The amount of spellwoven energy contained within even a single communication crystal was roughly equal to one of the army’s bursting cannon shells. The same shells that had killed a dozen Sporaton spearmen with a single shot. Not only would the central network’s detonation in Tulian have annihilated a solid chunk of the Artificer Union’s lower levels, the paired crystals had nearly burst in the pockets or hands of every important person across Tulian’s government. It would have been a coup of a magnitude King Sporatos could only dream of.

Thus, the introduction of a strict communication code. The crystals had been taken out of the hands of ministers and generals, who clearly couldn’t be trusted to use them properly, and given to specially trained individuals, who were assigned to them as staff. Professor Brown had coined the term “crystal jockey” for the trained users, after the way they had to fight to tame a system determined to maim its users. Being the pilot of a two-seater plane, Tinvel obviously couldn’t have a ‘crystal jockey’ with him, so he’d been forced to learn their codes for himself.

It was fairly simple, once Tinvel had been allowed to understand the underlying limits of the crystal network. In his case, Tinvel’s message, “TCA req two” could be translated into “Tinvel-Chona Aerocraft requesting two minutes to speak.” Easy to understand for now, but it wasn’t always. He could have added more modifiers, like an M for Military, or even something specific like MSR for Military Scout Report, but he didn’t use them in this instance. The crystal jockeys at the central nexus, collectively referred to as “central”, were a team of people listening to the network that noted every transmission throughout the day, so he’d omitted the extra details, trusting them to understand who his message should be routed to. That was the first tenant of the new system: less is more. The shorter every individual message was, the more information that could be pumped through the system each day.

“TCA granted two minutes,” a clipped voice finally responded. Tinvel took a deep breath, sorting his thoughts into neatly sliced categories before speaking.

“Our current position is approximately ninety miles north of the capital,” he reported, pausing for a moment to double-check his rough map of the Tulian coastline. “Still no sign of the reported Sporaton Navy vessels. Only a few isolated ships-”

“Three!” Chona called out over the wind.

“Three isolated ships,” Tinvel quickly corrected, “none of which appeared militant in design. Despite reaching and exceeding the area of the claimed sighting, no evidence of Sporaton magecraft approaching the capital has been found. Energy levels are sufficient for…” Tinvel leaned forward and touched the engine’s crystals, judging their levels once more. It was a tricky thing, translating magical impressions of the shifting ephemera into concrete measurements. “...a half hour of further recon, but it is TCA’s current opinion that nothing further is warranted. If no orders to the contrary are received, we will begin our return within five minutes. Message complete.”

Tinvel shifted the crystal back to his ear, setting a mental timer for five minutes. General Voth (technically General of the Sky Voth now, but he was petitioning to have his title changed to something less dramatic) had sent them up the northern coastline on the word of a harried crew of sailors that had slid into port the night before. A fisherman’s vessel, being freshly built to Professor Brown and Admiral Nora’s new hydrodynamic standards, had claimed to have spent the entirety of the last day and more retreating back to Tulian, trying desperately to outrace the magecraft they imagined to be nipping at their heels. They claimed to have been fishing the less-traveled waters of the Tulian-Sporaton border when they were suddenly accosted by a forest of military masts, describing a fleet line which included a number of ships matching known Sporaton magecraft designs.

The claim had been a bomb tossed into the middle of Tulian’s government. By the time a chaotic and confused report finally reached the newly-formed Air Force, it was nearing morning. Tinvel and Chona had been roused from sleep by none other than Voth himself, who ordered them to have the Sunrise ready to fly at first light.

As more information had come in, all the way up until they were frantically working to clear the street for takeoff, Tinvel had grown less certain that the claim was worth investigating. The ship’s captain was already under suspicion for fishing so far out of the safer waters of central Tulian, and the cracks in their story only widened under investigation. The sighting had been a day and a half earlier, near sunset, and the captain described seeing ships in deeper water than he, to the east, where they would have been shadowed in darkness rather than backlit by the falling sun. The captain also claimed that he was a fishing vessel, despite the fact that he’d come back with empty nets and a deck free of any of the usual blood or caked layer of fish scales. Further, only large and valuable fish were worth traveling two days out of Tulian for, and by the Captain’s story, he’d been near the coast, not in the deeper waters where such animals lived.

Evidence against the sighting had kept piling up. By the time Tinvel and Chona were in the air, he was convinced they might as well turn around and set back down. General Voth had ordered them onward, however, so onward they went.

“I still think it’s bullshit that we’re up here,” he said to Chona. “We’ve got better things to be doing than chasing some mad captain’s delusions.”

“At least we’re flying,” Chona said back. “And besides, I still think it was worth checking out.”

Tinvel and Chona were chatting through the third edition of the Sunrise’s speaking tube, and he could hear her almost as well as he could have before takeoff. This was the newest version’s inaugural flight, and it was proving to be the leap in capability he’d been searching for. His initial idea, to create a wind-blocking enchantment, had been an abject failure. The wind was defined by its ability to weave, bend, and slip past obstacles. As if the wind itself had been eager to make a mockery of his hubris, trying to create a solid barrier against it had actually worsened the noise. That was why he’d created a new enchantment to attract still air, encouraging it to gather inside the hose. He’d had low hopes for it before taking off after its poor performance on the ground, but it had proved shockingly effective in actual flight. His working theory to explain the discrepancy was that, while there were far more places down low for still air to coalesce, finding shelter from its boisterously windy sibling was near impossible at altitude. Once gathered, the puddle of still, dense air created a more effective barrier against wind than any direct enchantment could ever manage. That the mask constantly smelled like a musty basement was a downside, but one he could happily deal with.

“What even is there to believe?” He asked Chona. “One captain claimed to see an entire fleet of magecraft, but of course he and his crew are the only witnesses, and naturally no other ship has come in to report it.” Tinvel scoffed. “And he said he was fishing. On the border. Without a single fish in his hold. The guy’s a smuggler for sure. I don’t know if he’s smuggling things out of Tulian into Sporatos or the other way around, but he was definitely up to something. ”

“The fact that he sailed in to report it when he’s probably breaking the law makes him more likely to be telling the truth, not less,” Chona argued. “If he’s risking getting arrested to report what he saw, I’m betting he at least believes it, even if he’s wrong. Besides–”

“AGV req one to TCA,” a voice said over the crystal. Tinvel recognized it as the crystal jockey assigned to Voth, and held up his hand to tell Chona he was listening for something.

“AGV granted one minute, go ahead,” the central nexus’s commander said.

“TCA, continue scouting within the limits of your range. You’re already out there, might as well be thorough. Make sure to leave energy reserves for the return flight. Message over.”

Tinvel rolled his eyes, pocketing the crystal. Of course Voth would want them to keep searching. He went on and on about how important aeroplanes would be for reconnaissance, but hardly stopped to consider how much more Tinvel could be achieving when he wasn’t out chasing ghosts. Turning around to complain about the orders to Chona, he opened his mouth to speak.

Only to leave it hanging there, half-open and silent.

He’d caught Chona leaning back in her seat, fingers interlaced and raised high over her head, her eyes scrunched up as she stretched as best she could in the cramped cockpit. The day was hot enough that she’d forgone her flight jacket, leaving her svelte black fur glistening in the morning light like a black cat caught in a dusty sunbeam. Her fur was less of an obstacle than usual, pulled tight like a bowstring and pressed further down by the wind, highlighting the sweeping lines of the body it usually hid. She was wearing a green chest wrap today, two layers of dyed cloth that were fluttering in the wind, pressed equally tight to her chest, showing the curve of–

Tinvel’s head whipped back around, staring directly at the skyline ahead. He pursed his lips, resisting the urge to tap his foot nervously.

“Voth wants us to keep searching,” he said, almost mechanically. “We’ve got another twenty-five minutes to look. Keep an eye out.”

“Ugh,” she huffed, collapsing from her stretch. “You need to get some of those binoculars Professor Brown was talking about inventing. I’m tired of being the only one on lookout duty.”

“I’m busy flying the plane.”

“Oh, come on. You could do that blindfolded by now,” she said dismissively.

Though he normally would have kept bickering, Tinvel didn’t respond. He was too busy working through his thoughts. He was too distracted by the pit in his stomach that had formed when he’d caught Chona stretching, then caught himself staring at her stretching.

Gods, it was weird. So weird. He’d thought Chona was joking when she first asked him out. Or… pranking him, he supposed. Why else would she ask him out on a date? When it had taken her a while to show up, he’d almost left, assuming the joke was that she’d sent him off to get ignored. Even once she did show up, he’d still been convinced it was a prank. He’d spent most of the first half of the day bracing for impact, and by the time he’d realized she really wasn’t screwing with him, they were already at the armory, which had been distracting enough to let him forget the implications of… everything else.

Actually, he’d started off even more confused than that. He’d mostly agreed to the date because he wasn’t sure what Chona was asking for. Seriously. A “date.” He hadn’t even know what that was. He had no idea how Chona had heard the word used like that. He’d had to ask around, and plenty of other people didn’t know what it meant, at least beyond the idea of a “date on the calendar.” It wasn’t until Professor Brown had overheard him that he was told it was probably a term people had picked up from the Governess, to describe a certain part of courting. It was the word for when two people went out to socialize with the intention of seeing if they could be in a romantic relationship, tentatively feeling out their compatibility.

It had been a few days since that date, and he still didn’t really know what he was supposed to be doing. It seemed like they’d gotten farther apart, oddly enough. At least in some ways. Physically, absolutely. The projects he and Chona worked on together often had them in tight confines, trying to see the same tiny enchantment or notebook or whatever, which meant their arguments traditionally included plenty of shoving, elbow jabs, and shoulder checks.

The day after their date, Chona was working on something and asked him a question. Instead of shuffling over to her desk and leaning over her shoulder like usual, Tinvel had been struck by a profoundly uncomfortable indecision. He’d hovered a foot away, unable to see a thing, until he’d eventually asked her to hand it to him so he could look for himself.

Chona… wasn’t quite like that. She still got up close. But she’d stopped being rough about it, no longer jabbing or shoving. Now she just… stood. Close. Her fur up against his clothes, sometimes even against his skin. In his mind’s eye, Tinvel could still feel how warm that silky black fur could be. He’d learned that when she’d been in direct sunlight for a while, it became uncomfortably hot to the touch. Almost painful, in fact.

He never asked her to step away.

They hadn’t done anything… else. Since that first evening, when Chona had… kissed him. Which was a memory that caused his stomach to do flips, even now. Her soft lips against his, pressing inward for no longer than it took him to blink in shock. He could still see her quick retreat, tail flicking all around her, pumping up and down like he’d only seen when she won a competition between the University’s mages. He didn’t think she’d even known she was doing it. Her furious shouting of “fuck off!” had been severely undercut by her tail’s painfully obvious victory dance.

Which was maybe the strangest part of it all. That Chona seemed happy to have done… that, with him. He didn’t know why that would be. They argued constantly, having nearly come to blows several times during the early months since they met one another, yet she seemed happy. And Tinvel was, too? He thought he was, at least. The idea of doing that again, of kissing Chona for a second time, filled him with so many flaring emotions that he couldn’t even tell how he felt about it. And if he had to initiate it himself? Was that what she was waiting for? He didn’t think he could–

“FUCK!”

Tinvel jerked, rattling the whole plane.

“What?!” He screamed at Chona.

“Look! Fucking hells, that bastard wasn’t lying!”

Tinvel followed her pointing finger to the horizon. As usual, he couldn’t see a damn thing. Maybe a few smudges if he really squinted, but he could easily be imagining them.

“Give me a heading,” he demanded.

“Three o’clock. Bit further. There, perfect. Keep it straight and level.”

Tinvel started to get the communication crystal out of his pocket, readying to report that they’d found Sporaton ships, but stopped himself. A big fleet like would be required for an invasion would be tied down by slow supply transports, which meant they’d easily take another day or more to reach Tulian. A few minutes wouldn’t make a difference, but causing a panic with inaccurate information would.

“I think they’re…” Chona trailed off, sounding confused.

“What?”

“I think they’re heading north,” she said. “I mean, it’s hard to tell from here, but it seems like it.”

“Let’s keep going, then.”

“Think there’s any danger in it?”

“Not unless they’ve got a spell that can reach five thousand feet, no.”

They approached the fleet at cruise speed, not combat speed, preserving their dwindling energy reserves. That still gave them a blistering hundred-plus miles an hour of advantage over the plodding ships. What started as uncertain smudges to Tinvel’s eyes soon resolved into a line of dots, then into a loose pile of sticks, until eventually, at a mile or so away, he could distinguish the full spread of white sails and the ships they propelled.

And they were going north.

“The hells?” Tinvel muttered, tipping a wing as he began to circle. Tiny figures were roving around on the decks of the ships, pointing at the Sunrise as they, for whatever good they thought it would do, began putting out extra sail. He supposed magecraft cews weren’t used to being chased by something faster than them.

“Why are they going north?” Chona asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe they turned around when they saw us?”

“I don’t think they could do it that fast, even if they’re all magecraft,” Chona said. “And look. They are all magecraft!”

Tinvel had already been appreciating that baffling detail. There were fifteen ships in the miniature fleet, and all of them had the distinctive lines of magecraft. Tinvel was no sailor, but even someone who’d never seen the ocean could tell these weren’t normal vessels. Their hulls were so shallow that they seemed to barely graze the tips of the waves, long poles sprouting out of their sides to act as stabilizing pontoons. He had no idea how fast they were traveling, since they looked practically stationary from the Sunrise, but they were each trailing a white, foamy wake. The other, slower ships he’d seen from the air didn’t do that. Every one of those ships could run literal rings around even the fastest ships of the Tulian Navy.

“It’s not an invasion fleet,” he decided aloud, suddenly certain. “So what the hells are they doing here?”

“How do you know they aren’t? If you have that many damn magecraft in one place, what else are you doing with them?”

Tinvel shook his head. “Look at how many people are on the decks. A hundred, maybe, at best. That’s everyone they can carry. Professor Garen has talked about magecraft before, and he said they trade off so much for speed that they only have enough room below the main deck for people to crouch-walk to a sleeping hammock, so everyone spends their time up top. Fifteen ships, that’s fifteen hundred soldiers at best. Unless every single one of those dots is a Knight in enchanted armor, they couldn’t take Tulian from the militia, much less the Army.”

“So what the hells are they doing here?” Chona asked, confused. Then, with a grin he could hear, “What do you think boiling thermite does to a wooden ship?”

“What? No! Chona, they have mages, too. And we put just enough boiling thermite in the tanks to not have to worry about adjusting the trim!”

“But if we come in fast, faster than they’re ready for, they can’t prepare. There’s no way they have experience trying to cast a spell at something as fast as–”

“Chona, they’re full mages! Battle mages, trained at entire universities built just for war! They’d tear you apart!”

“But if we dive-bombed-”

Tinvel popped the control stick to the right, swinging the nose around until they were aiming southward.

“No. No, for real this time,” he said, raising his voice. “If we get blown out of the air by a lightning bolt in the middle of that fleet, we’re dead at best. We’ve got to get back and report.”

“But-”

“If that fleet really is coming for Tulian, we’ll be fighting them, too. Probably the first of anyone! I bet Voth will want to send every plane we have after them. You remember what Professor Brown said about the Battle of Midway! If we get enough in the air, planes can kill ships all day long. Give me a minute, I’m going to make the report.”

Chona cursed a few times, but fell quiet. She knew he was right. Keeping one hand on the control stick, Tinvel struggled to draw the communication crystal out, frustration building as he unsnagged the unwieldy cupped brass mouthpiece from the cloth pocket.

The moment he did, however, Central’s voice came through. “...non-military transmission for minimum six hours. Central to TCA, urgent.”

“This is TCA,” Tinvel said, eyes widenting in surprise. What was that about the military?

“Message from AGV to TCA. Return at maximum possible speed. Sauvin’s blackpowder mill suffered what appears to be a catastrophic detonation. Number of injured are unknown, but assumed high. The shockwave was felt across the capital. Be prepared to switch geodes upon arrival and begin ferrying healers to the site. All other available pilots are already engaged in this task. Message complete.”

Tinvel pulled the crystal off his ear to stare at it in shock. A blackpowder mill blowing up? Tulian only had two! He’d known it was a risk, everyone did, that’s why they weren’t built anywhere near the city, but the amount of safety precautions those buildings had was absurd! Tinvel had personally helped the Artificer’s Union meet the demand of enchanted flame-repellent planks that had been ordered for the powder mills. Sure, blackpowder barrels would obviously explode if they were exposed to fire, but there shouldn’t have ever been an open flame within a quarter mile of the storage areas.

“TCA to AGV, req… uh, I guess two?” The instant the audibly hesitant words left his lips, Tinvel winced. He was already getting thrown off his game.

There was a brief wait as someone else’s message was put through, something about difficulties locating healers that were widely spread throughout the city, and then he was given the go-ahead. He took a deep breath.

“TCA confirming presence of Sporaton magecraft in Tulian waters, approximately…” he cursed, doing quick math with the glass-covered map attached to the left side of his cockpit. Gods bless Professor Brown’s lessons. “A hundred and ten miles north of the capital. Visually identified and confidently confirmed as a fleet of fifteen, that is one-five, magecraft. The fleet was heading north. Please confirm clear reception of last statement. The Sporaton fleet was heading north. Repeat, northward, away from capital. Message complete.”

There was a brief, shocked silence before Central responded.

“TCA… message received clearly. Sporaton fleet, fifteen magecraft, heading north, away from Tulian. Message complete.”

Messages began to fly fast almost immediately afterwards, the network humming with various jockeys transmitting their attaché’s requests for further information. The crystal vibrated ominously in Tinvel’s hand for a moment, but quickly stilled. The sudden influx was exactly what the new system had been designed to handle, and it seemed to have taken it well.

As he began tipping the plane’s nose downward, seeking the thicker pressure which would give their prop a firmer bite on the air, he began filling Chona in on what had happened. Her reaction was similar to his own. Shock and horror, mostly, then incredibility that it could happen. The Governess and Professor Brown had warned them over and over again about the dangers of industrialization, but it had always been an abstract, historical concern. They were implementing the right rules from the start, so no one really thought it could all go so horribly wrong.

Apparently not. And with the Sporaton fleet now in apparent retreat, as if its mission were complete, suspicions were already beginning to brew.

Things were about to get very, very complicated.

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The entire street outside the aerodrome was locked up, guards placing temporary barriers to hold back the crowds. For only the second or third time since they’d been revealed to the public, there were multiple aeroplanes in the skies over Tulian, and the people were eager to see them in action. There wasn’t the same jubilant mood that the crowd might have otherwise had, what with the towering smoke cloud visible even now as a smudge on the horizon, but their interest in such a unique experience trumped even that.

It was a new experience for Tinvel, too. For the first time in his flying career, he had to wait for an opportunity to land. Two aerocraft had touched down a minute or so before he’d arrived, forcing him to wait until they were wheeled off the street into the aerodrome. The mules usually required to move them were replaced by teams of city guards pushing hard on their wings and fuselage.

“Can’t they go any damn faster?” He muttered.

“Told you that combat speed to get back sooner was a stupid idea. We’d be crash landing right now if you hadn’t held back.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled, winging over to continue his impatient orbiting of the landing zone.

At that exact moment, Tinvel knew that Tulian only had a grand total of six operational aerocraft. They could have had a lot more, and in fact technically did, but there weren’t enough pilots to put all the extras in the air at once. People with the artificery skills required to operate the finicky aeroplane engines were in far too much demand, however, and few people in charge were willing to weaken other industries to let them get trained up on something so experimental. Sorting out that political mess was yet another thing that creating a formal Air Force was supposed to help resolve.

Those future pilots couldn’t do anything to help today. The only help would come in the five other university students who were trained on the aeroplanes.

Even as the two planes were still turning into the aerodrome, Tinvel began his descent. The crowd underneath the Sunrise roared so loudly in excitement that he could easily hear them over the wind, a sea of hands reaching up to wave him on. It felt like the entire city of Tulian had come out to watch the healers get ferried toward the disaster zone.

“Do you know many people work at the blackpowder mill?” Tinvel asked as he guided them down.

“No,” Chona said. “A couple hundred, maybe more? We’re making a lot of damn blackpowder. I heard Professor Brown say the other day that the Empire is still losing their asses paying our southern mill to make up for their slow production. so it’s gotta be a big operation.”

“That many, you think?” The Sunrise’s wheels hit the street– the old teeth-rattling cobblestones now paved over by fresh concrete– and Tinvel cut the engine, beginning the process of letting them coast to a stop.

“It’s gotta be a lot of people hurt bad if they’re doing all this,” Chona said. “They could have got there on foot in a few hours if it wasn’t so urgent. Not to mention that a lot of those people are the only ones in Tulian that have real experience making blackpowder.”

Tinvel feathered the wheel brakes, slowing by degrees. As he passed the entrance to the aerodrome, he hit the right brake hard, swinging the Sunrise straight into the shade of the hangar. The planes he was used to seeing were gone, save for the two who were being wheeled over to begin the laborious process of unloading the amethyst geode which powered their engines.

“I want to get there fast,” Tinvel said as he slid into the Sunrise’s bay, slamming hard on the left brake to spin them in a circle that killed the last of their speed, leaving the nose pointed at the aerodrome’s massive sliding doors. “We need to figure out what happened soon.”

Chona hopped out before the plane fully stopped, jogging towards a geode-carrying cart that was being brought over by a city guard who looked very out of their depth. “Why?” She called out over her shoulder. “What’s there to figure out? Some dumbass lit a pipe next to a powder keg. Not hard to guess.”

“I think you’re right. But after we reported those Sporaton ships?” Tinvel grunted as he stretched to reach under the instrument panel, clicking open the latches which held the geode in place. “That’s not what people are going to be thinking.”

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