Free The Wizard That Wasn't (Mechanized Wizardry) by Ben Rovik

days ago.   They weren’t bone-white now, but a neutral tan, like kid leather.  “The ojing respond to magical change,” Archimedia explained.  “The spells you weave in their presence will color them white.  Magic from external sources, whether drifting by in passing or there to compete with your spell, will appear as patches of black.”
    “How do they work?”  Lundin asked, inspecting the ojing with what he hoped was the proper reverence.
    She actually patted him on the knee.  “You are very enthusiastic, and thoroughly incapable of understanding the answer.  Right now, that is,” she added, softening the blow.
    “What are they made of, at least?”
    “Something precious.”  Archimedia lifted the other ojing up, showing him its surface.  It was smooth, but not featureless; gentle whorls and lines crisscrossed its face.  “If you insist on studying them further, first draw your attention to the patterns created during a spell.  What appears pure white is in fact alive with motion.”
    The two ojing that Lundin had hung from the low rafters in the workshop were not alive with motion now; their leathery surfaces were static in the absence of magic.  But when the magic happens … Lundin turned to the Melodimax, with its scuffed wooden case and its side panel swung wide open to the air.  If the magic happens , he thought more soberly.
    With Dame Miri’s help, and Archimedia’s notes, he and Samanthi had adapted the squawk box’s mouthpiece to speak Mabinanto instead of Old Harutian.  At least, so they thought, none of them having a damn idea what they were really playing with.  Lundin was seized with a pang of anxiety as he looked at the stacks of perforated metal disks they’d run through the presses over hours and hours of painstaking labor.  Would any of it work?  When the disks were inserted into the squawk box, they’d speak some words, all right—theoretically, the entire pingdu calabra was ready to test.  They’d even completed about two-thirds of the Illustration for a spell of friendship; one of the simplest, least invasive spells he’d found in searching Archimedia’s journals.  It might take four or five more hours to lay out and press the remaining disks they thought they needed, and that was if no major errors happened.  And then they would test the spell on one of Dame Miri’s dogs, an old, blind, neutered curmudgeon named Cort.  The dog was not long for this world, and after a good deal of deliberation she’d agreed to volunteer him for the enterprise.  The dog was sour-tempered, and hated new faces.  If he showed any signs of a sunnier disposition after the spell, there would be beer and Kessian bubbly all around (surreptitiously, where Sir Kelley wouldn’t be able to find it.)
    That was the plan; a small chance of modest success, and a thousand and one ways to go completely bust.  They didn’t even know if the squawk box worked yet, or if it really could speak Mabinanto.  Archimedia was dubious, to say the least, that a mechanical being could ever channel magical energy, or that the verbal component of a spell would suffice to create an arcane result.  The whole notion of mechanizing this process hinged on Lundin’s premise that the contortionist showmanship magicians practiced was extraneous to the business of magic.  But maybe magic was, by nature, a chaotic, full-body, spur-of-the moment process utterly dependent on inscrutable spirits.  Maybe a hundred generations of magic-using humans the world over were right, and Horace Lundin was completely wrong. 
    His eyes were stinging, and he felt lightheaded from lack of sleep.  He looked around the empty workshop, dark except for his one gaslight.  Lundin tapped a finger against the half-dozen cold metal disks that made up the pingdu calabra .  “I need to know, I need to know,” he muttered.
    Samanthi had finally gone home to get some sleep about two hours ago.  (Lundin had slept for about ninety