"Why do we have to do this?" Rika complained as she scrubbed down the clothing in the bucket. The night air had made the water cold and her fingers felt like they were frozen now. And that was without considering the kilometer long trip to the nearest spring to get that water.
Not only had Quinn decided that the two guests would not perform their turns to cook or take watch, their party would also do all the washing, cleaning and tidying up of their tents! How rude could those two be?! An expedition with the knights was not a camping trip for the pets of nobles to enjoy themselves.
"You know what we're getting paid, right?" Tarral said as he plonked down his bucket next to her. Inside was another set of clothing reeking of metal filings and soot. "For triple the escort rate, you'll shut up and do whatever they want. "
Rika scowled but did not stop moving her hands. At least the new foaming soap made cleaning that much easier. "Even so, every person on an expedition has to do their part," she grumbled again, "pushing all this work onto us, Landar should know better, she's a knight too!"
Tarral glanced around and heaved a sigh of relief when he saw the subjects of her current irritation at the mine entrance. They seemed engrossed in some sort of argument and most definitely had not heard Rika.
"You better not let them hear you," he hissed at her, "Cato works directly with Minmay, you know. Who knows what could happen to you if he hears you badmouthing Landar. "
Rika sighed, "they're not lovers. And Cato is too nice to abuse his power. He's not a noble after all. "
Tarral kept one eye on the pair while talking, "the second part is true, I've never heard of him acting like one of those nobles. But you look at them and tell me they're not seeing each other. "
They looked at the two, still arguing and gesturing around at the mine entrance. Cato was leaning against the rock wall, nodding as Landar drew something on the rock. The pair stood right next to each other, huddling in front of whatever they were doing, not caring whether they touched or maintaining any sort of personal space.
"All right," Rika conceded in the face of the evidence, "even if they were involved with each other, how does that..."
Another bucket joined them at the cliffside, the few spits and knives from the lunch were floating inside the soapy water. "Hey, Rika," Quinn sighed as he squatted down beside Tarral, "you're just whining about having to wash the clothing, aren't you?"
"Ugh. " She pouted and scrubbed the cloth again.
"I understand you don't like doing these jobs but think of it as a way of earning an extra bonus," Quinn took out the knife and began to pick out the charred debris from the cooking. "Landar is teaching us alchemy too. And who knows, maybe with that, we'll be able to make spell cannons too. "
Rika scowled and scrubbed away silently.
"Well, I won't disagree that asking knights to do your dishes for you isn't rude," Quinn sighed. Both of them froze and looked at the party leader incredulously, Rika most of all. "But at least we don't have to worry about those two even noticing us, so you might as well complain all you want. As long as you get the work done. "
Tarral shook his head sheepishly, "and I guess I could hear you out too, it's not like I'm very happy doing this either. "
All three of them sighed.
Behind, at the rock face of the mountain, Cato and Landar continued to pry open the secrets of magic, completely oblivious of the knights' grumblings.
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"With the enchantment process being so slow, there's no way we can finish this whole tunnel in reasonable time," Landar was saying.
Quinn stepped forwards, carrying a large wooden cube in his hands, when Cato suddenly stopped him with a hand.
"Watch it!" Cato said, pointing down at the rock floor. Quinn looked down to see the threads lying on the rocks in a bewildering circular pattern. "I don't know what'll happen if you step in it, but it can't be anything good," Cato said.
Landar shrugged, "I expect it'll be the same as if you tried to enchant a person with alchemy. The magic would just bounce right off. "
"It might damage the threads, I wasn't worried about his lifeforce," Cato said.
Quin sighed and cleared his throat. "Is now a bad time? I just have some questions regarding the device enchanter. "
Cato looked down at the strings on the ground, "we have our own problems with the device enchanter too. But go on. "
Quinn held out his cube. "I've been trying to use the enchanters you had us make yesterday to build a power box, but I can't seem to get it right," Quinn indicated the enchantment, "after I bound the power to the wood, I imprinted the power transfer circuits as you taught us, but then now I have to hollow out the cube, which destroys the transfer lines. "
"Quinn, you can't start with a solid cube," Landar shook her head, "the box has to be built in separate pieces. "
He looked down and shrugged before tossing the cube aside, "all right. I just thought I had a better way to do it. Getting perfectly fitting doors is a pain if you don't start with a single piece. "
"If you can restrict the depth of the enchantment," Cato said, bending down to the cube, "it should work. Of course, you're now trading the problem of making a tight sealing door for making a very precise hole. "
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He held it up for Landar to disenchant and picked up the threads from the ground then laid them around the now nom-magical wooden cube in a clear region of the mine floor. "We were working on improving the enchanter actually," Cato explained to Quiin, "instead of imprinting the pattern into the spell, which as you note, makes controlling the depth difficult, we wanted a way to precisely control the formation of the spell and the enchantment process. "
At the center was a circle of magical thread laid around the cube twice. Then he took out different colours and tied them in a complex varying pattern that went all the way around the outside, with six golden branched lines, four in each cardinal direction and two at the corners, that entered the inner circle with a series of lines. Off to one side, was the more familiar pattern that generated the power transfer circuit.
Come to think of it, Cato and Landar had been sketching variants of this sort of pattern again and again over the last day. Quinn stepped back as Cato nodded to Landar.
She poured out magic into the block of iron Cato placed next to the transfer line pattern. The magic flashed down the threads leading to the circle and the two inner circles glowed strongly in the magic sense. A spike of power snapped into place on the cube, baking into the wood before fading into the glow of an inactive alchemy enchantment. Quinn felt his jaw drop. An alchemy enchantment! Just like that!
Landar then sent a tiny pulse of magic down the black coloured thread in a circle around the outer edge of the formation. It didn't zip down like the power lines, instead taking its time slowly crawling down the black thread. The black thread had a huge mass of lines hanging off it, and as the pulse of power flowed past each thread, the line from the power source block connected to the black thread sent its power down the branch. Each time that happened, the transfer line enchanter flashed to life, creating the magical circuit on the gold thread at the target point. This circuit then traveled down the gold thread to the circles around the rock, going down one of the branches of the lines entering the circle before leaping into the air to imprint itself into the cube. As the pulse crept down the black thread, the enchantments took each of the branches in order, proceeding to imprint a copy of the transfer lines all around the cube. The corner lines were last and the enchantments leapt upwards and below the rock to enchant it from those sides too.
As the black thread reached its end and the entire circle shut down, Cato stepped into the circle to remove the cube. Quinn examined the surface of the enchantment, dimly noting through his shock that the spacing on the transfer lines matched that of the golden threads they issued from.
The whole process was complete in less than a minute. And now, if not for the fact that the target was a solid block of wood, the circle had essentially created a power box for a spell cannon! In practically no time and to a ridiculous precision. Knowing how the device enchanter worked, Quinn had no doubts that placing a new cube into the circle would give an identical spacing.
"Here you go," Cato said, "the depth here is one centimeter. Frankly though, I think it's still just as hard as the original..."
Cato trailed off as Quinn tried to take the wooden cube out of his hands. Um. He looked up at Cato to find the man frowning at it.
"I have been so dumb," Cato sighed.
"Cato?" Landar asked him.
"The box," Cato said, indicating the cube in his hands, "why did we think the box has to cover the entire tunnel? Magic can travel through rock! It doesn't care if the inside of the box is empty or now. If we could change the enchantment to create a hollow portion inside... " he shook his head and sighed, "I still can't shake the Earth assumptions that things can't overlap. "
Landar looked at the floor and laughed, "oh yes, I see. Like Muller's water pipes. A hollow tube of magic, but not hollow tube of stone. I must say though, that understanding that magic travels through solid non-magical objects isn't something that we are used to either. "
"Indeed," Cato said, then he gestured down the tunnel, "so we just need to lay a very long but thin line. We should be able to drill some holes in the floor so we can put the magic power probe in it to tell if the mountain's attraction field extends past magical barriers. With less total volume, we should be able to finish in a few days instead of some time next month!"
"Well, it's not like our efforts to improve the device enchanter was wasted," Landar said, "this central bus and switch you've designed is going to be called overkill by just about every practicing alchemist. Although now I do understand what you mean by wanting a general computing device, after all, that is basically an abstracted version of this design, isn't it?"
"I never thought I'd be drawing magic circles though," Cato grinned. "My world put a lot of superstition in magic circles, even though they didn't do anything. "
"Um, Cato?"
Cato looked back at Quinn, as if surprised that he was still there. Quinn tugged on the wooden cube.
"Can I have my cube back now?"