Page 56

“The sun set on five and rose on four.

Four friends fast, one betrayed.

Faith keep the dark at bay, at bay.

The sun set on four and rose on three.

Three wives home, one astray.

Faith keep the dark at bay, at bay.

The sun set on three and rose on two.

Two minds whole, one afray.

Faith keep the dark at bay, at bay.

The sun set on two and rose on one.

One body sound, one decayed.

Faith keep the dark at bay, at bay.”

— The Counting Song

S CIONA ’ S

HEART

BEAT in her temples as she mounted the steps to the Main Magistry.

“You wanna stop breathing so weird?” Carra hissed at her shoulder.

“Am I breathing weirdly?”

“Yeah. You sound like you’re about to pass out.”

“I might be.”

“And keep your head down,” Carra said. “I know your hair’s covered, but your eyes are a dead giveaway.”

“Right.” Sciona was used to holding her head high when she walked into the Magistry.

She was also used to it feeling like home, not the mouth of a monster that might snap shut on her with one misplaced foot—or gaze , she reminded herself, training her eyes on her boots.

Well, not actually her boots. They were Thomil’s, three sizes too big for Sciona, laced as tight as they could be around the ankles and stuffed with paper at the toes.

Fortunately, an ill-fitting uniform wasn’t at all unusual for a Kwen boy working a man’s job.

Carra had shown Sciona how to pin her hair under the cap, and the janitor’s garb was baggy enough to hide anything particularly feminine about Sciona’s shape.

Under the eyes of the Founding Mages, a pair of Kwen cleaning boys shuffled through the Magistry doors in Thomil’s clothing and made their way to the interior halls totally unnoticed.

They had to make five trips—Sciona carrying one bucket and the stronger Caldonn girl carrying two—to transport all the copies of Sciona’s spellwork into the first-floor janitor’s closet.

Then, with the spellpapers loaded onto a cart and carefully concealed under various cleaning supplies, the pair made their way to their destination.

Carra had insisted that she could push the cart herself, but even she struggled with its weight.

“Just a little further, I think,” Sciona said.

“You think?” Carra grunted.

“I’ve never been in this wing,” Sciona said, gripping the bar beside Carra to help her push, “but I’ve read plenty about the towers, and archmages have a certain way they like to arrange their buildings.

” Arms straining, the pair pushed the cart into the maintenance lift, and Sciona hit the topmost button.

“They just can’t help putting their treasures on the highest floor of the tallest tower, even when more subtle placement might help with functionality. ”

“Why?” Carra asked.

“Symbolism?” Sciona shrugged her burning shoulders. “I think it makes them feel like Leon on the Mount, conquering the natural world to touch divinity.”

“Oh.” Carra frowned. “When you said ‘symbolism,’ I thought you were going to say it was a penis thing.”

Sciona let out a snort of laughter and clapped a hand over her mouth as the lift creaked to a halt. “I suppose you’re right. It is a bit of a penis thing.”

“You Tiranish have problems,” Carra muttered, then braced a heel against the back wall of the lift to push the heavy cart forward as the doors opened.

Sciona was astonished that Thomil had let Carra come with her, but he couldn’t re-enter the Magistry with the guards keeping an eye out for him, and this plan was a two-person job.

Luckily—or perhaps, on purpose—Mr. Dermek had yet to deactivate the janitor’s badge that granted Thomil access to all floors of the Magistry.

It was ridiculous, upon reflection, that the only person with as much clearance as an archmage was a janitor.

But Sciona supposed, if one didn’t consider the cleaning staff to be fully human, it didn’t seem like much of a safety hazard.

Sciona had consulted the master schedule in Dermek’s office to make sure she and Carra arrived within the window of time that the normal cleaning staff would have, so their presence raised no suspicion.

The two highmages conversing on their way out the gates for the day didn’t pay Sciona and Carra a moment’s notice as they pushed their cart in the opposite direction.

The janitor’s badge allowed them through a pair of magically powered gates outside the lift, then another, and another, and Sciona knew they were in the right place.

Archmage Orynhel’s domain would be the only place in the Main Magistry behind three separate gates.

The hum of siphoning was palpable, vibrating the floor underfoot as they reached the oldest and final gate.

Here, Sciona had to take out her copy of Dermek’s keys and manually open the lock as mages and maintenance workers would have done a hundred years ago.

Sciona had read all about the Reserve siphoning towers and their construction, but like most people, she had never laid eyes on it.

She had been prepared for the size and quantity of the siphoning barrels—two hundred of them, each three times the height of a grown man, standing in rows like the pipes of a great organ.

She had not been prepared for the vibration of so much energy barely contained in layers of steel.

“What are they?” Carra whispered, staring around at the towering cylinders.

“These are the master spellographs that siphon the Reserve.”

“Does that mean…?”

“Yeah.” Sciona pressed her lips together. “These are the machines that killed your parents.”

Something went wild and hard in Carra. Her grip tightened on the cart handle. “How do we destroy them?”

“We can’t,” Sciona said. “Not directly. If we’d brought a cannon with us, we might put a crack in one, but the resulting explosion of energy would blow us to bits before we got to vandalizing the others.

That’s why we have these.” Sciona uncovered the buckets of spellpapers.

“With any luck, they’ll do better than tear down the machines.

They’ll tear down the men who made them. ”

Carra turned to Sciona with pure hunger in her eyes. “Show me how to do it!”

“Take these”—Sciona handed the girl a stack of paper—“and follow me.”

The master spellographs were massive in order to withstand the amounts of energy they siphoned through to Tiran’s public utilities.

Sciona and Carra had to climb a set of stairs just to reach the paper rest of the first one.

Even with all the thick layers of steel and absorbent springs in place to contain the siphoned energy, the steps shook beneath Sciona’s oversized boots.

“So, what is this machine doing exactly?” Carra asked, clearly feeling the thrum as Sciona did.

“The label is here.” Sciona ran a thumb over a plaque on the master spellograph’s steel exterior. “This machine siphons electricity to Sector 33.”

“What’s Sector 33?”

“A part of Tiran,” Sciona said as they reached the steel grate platform at the top of the stairs. “The city is divided into a forty-sector grid for the purposes of electricity distribution alone. Hence the number of copies we had to make.” She gestured to the laden cart on the floor below.

“I wondered about that,” Carra said. Once Sciona and Thomil had finalized the spellweb, Carra had been the one to run all over town making copies, going to six different printers to avoid suspicion.

“Watch closely.” Some primal thing in Sciona thrilled as she ran a finger along the humming platen of a master spellograph. “You’ll need to do this perfectly many times.”

“I’m watching.”

“Alright, as you can see, there are actually two spellographs to every one of these barrels.” Sciona indicated the active spellograph hungrily indulging the continuous siphoning spell on its paper rest and the idle one beside it.

Unlike the composition spellographs Sciona used in her lab, these machines had no keys, mapping coils, or type wheels.

Their only purpose was to process pre-written siphoning spells and withstand the amount of energy that came through, meaning they had massive steel and spring bases instead of keys and house-sized energy barrels instead of mapping coils.

But even the most robust machines could fail.

“Any spellograph that runs continuously like these is at risk of malfunction,” Sciona went on, “So, every siphoning spell in this chamber has a backup spellograph ready to pick up if the main one fails or when it’s time to switch.”

“When it’s time to switch?” Carra repeated.

“Every day at the stroke of noon, the master spellographs rotate. This spellograph will go idle”—Sciona laid her hand on the active spellograph—“and the other will activate. It’s the reason the lights sometimes flicker or the water sputters at midday.

Now, you can see that the backup spellograph already has its spellpapers in place for tomorrow at noon.

The mages responsible for these machines will have put them in place before leaving for the day. ”

“But we’re going to change the papers,” Carra said in understanding, “change the spell.”

“Not change the spell, exactly.” The siphoning would still run as normal come noon tomorrow. “We’re just adding our own on top of it.”

She took a copy of the spell from the stack Carra had brought up the stairs. Thomil had clipped each copy into a bundle, then checked and rechecked that the pages of each were in order.

“First, you’re going to remove the clip and insert the papers onto the rest on top of the existing spell like this.” Sciona demonstrated on the idle spellograph. “Now,” she handed Carra the next clipped packet. “You do the next one.”

Sciona hovered and watched Carra insert the spell into a few of the master spellographs before asking, “Are you alright on your own, then?”

“I was fine after you showed me the first time. It’s not that hard.”

“Alright,” Sciona said. “I’ll be back to help you finish here, but there’s something I need to take care of.”