The greatest irony of the Second Italic War is that Rasenna’s early success persuaded Concord to use its greatest—and as then unused—asset. Bernoulli was not yet twenty when the Curia founded the Engineers’ Guild in Thirteen and Twenty-Eight and appointed him First Engineer.9 He set to work with enthusiasm, though keener perhaps to apply principles discovered in his anatomical studies than to bolster Concord’s ailing war effort.

Unlike previous anatomists, Bernoulli was unhindered by the Curia’s traditional prohibitions: they forbade only dissecting corpses. If his technique of “wet dissection” required immense numbers of experimental subjects, the resulting data was also immense.10 He created engines with the moving joints and suppleness of living flesh and, with them, turned the course of the war. The Guild’s real importance, as we shall see, is not how it hastened the inevitable decline of Rasenna but how it brought about the unthinkable: the end of the Curia.