“I wouldn’t judge, ma’am. It’s all the same to me.”
“Well, it’s very much not all the same,” she said indignantly before remembering the more important topic at hand. “So—what do the preachers in your neighborhood say about the Otherrealm?”
“That God opened the Otherrealm up to the Founding Mages when he tasked them with building Tiran. Um…” Tommy frowned as though trying to recall more. “They call it the Garden.”
“So, Leonite preachers, then.” Tirasian preachers usually called the Otherrealm the Bounty and referenced God creating it for the mages’ use rather than just ‘opening’ it. “And that’s all they explain?” Sciona supposed the workings of the world were always dumbed down for the general populous—probably doubly so in the Kwen Quarter.
“Yes, ma’am. But I’ve gathered from the mages’ conversations here that the Otherrealm is not a garden of earthly material… or… not just earthly material, anyway.” He looked tentatively at Sciona. “Mages can pull energy out of it. That’s what powers spells, yes?”
“Exactly!” Thank goodness Tommy seemed a little sharper than the average Kwen. “That process of finding and pulling energy is what we call sourcing. When you hear someone say a ‘sourcing spell’ or ‘hey, Mordra the Tenth is a terrible sourcer,’ that’s what they’re referring to.”
A smile twitched at the corner of Tommy’s mouth—so small Sciona barely noticed before it vanished behind the gray veil of indifference. “I see.”
“Now, sourcing can be difficult and dangerous because the Otherrealm is variable. Not every part of it contains the same concentration of energy. In that way, it really is like a garden; if you go into a vegetable patch blindfolded and start grabbing for produce, you’re going to end up with a lot of dirt and leaves—maybe some bees—but probably not that much vegetable, right?”
“Right.” Tommy seemed to grasp the metaphor, and Sciona was pleased with herself.
“Mapping is what a mage does so he isn’t walking into the garden blind,” she continued. “It’s the part of a sourcing spell wherein we open a sort of window to the Otherrealm—big or small, depending on the coordinates we choose. Through this window, we can see where the energy is concentrated, where it’s sparse, and where it’s basically nonexistent. That’s my specialty: manually mapping to tap into an energy source proportional to a given action spell. So”—she plucked a teacup from the box next to her and set it on the desk—“say the goal of my action spell is to push this cup an inch to the right. I’m not looking for a very broad or deep well of energy there. If the goal is to move this building one inch to the right, I’m looking for a lot of energy, and I’ll probably need a series of sourcing spells to get the amount I need. We call that a spellweb—which we’ll get to soon.”
“So, your specialty is finding energy sources of the right size in the Otherrealm,” Tommy said.
“Yeah. Not too difficult to understand, right?”
“No, ma’am. I think I follow.”
“Good. Because now I’m going to show you examples of the three basic types of mapping spell before we get into my weird custom ones.” Sciona pulled the spellograph toward her. “Let me just write up an action spell to demonstrate them. We’ll use a pushing spell on, um”—she looked around the desk—“not the cup.” That would break if she accidentally pushed it off the edge. “This book,” she set Mordra the First’s Magical Engines on the desk before the spellograph and started typing.
When she glanced up at Tommy, his gray eyes had gotten a little wider. People always described the gray of Kwen eyes as lifeless and dull, but wonder had made Tommy’s eyes electric—like clouds backlit with lightning.
“What?” she said, oddly self-conscious in the glow of that bright bank of clouds.
“I just… I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone type that fast, ma’am.”
“You’ve worked on this floor for a while, haven’t you? You’ve seen other highmages typing.”
“Not like that.”
Sciona smiled. “Well, I started behind most of them. I’ve had to be fast to catch up.”
He nodded.
“Alright, so the spell I’m writing right now is pretty boring.” Knowing Tommy didn’t have a prayer of following the magical symbols as they hit the page, she opted instead to narrate her process. “Right now, I’m directing the action spell to recognize a rectangular object under two Leonic pounds within two Vendric feet of the spellograph,” she said over the click of keys. “That’s a quick way to rule out everything except the book. And, because we’re being boring, we’re going to name this rectangular, under-two-pound element ‘BOOK.’” She punched in the tag. “So, whenever I refer to ‘BOOK’ for the rest of the spell, the magic will recognize it as this object.” She nodded to Magical Engines.
“So, magic recognizes Tiranish words, ma’am?” Tommy said in confusion. “I thought it was all written in this old runic language?” He gestured to the half-page of spellwork he couldn’t read.
“It is,” Sciona said, although she understood his confusion. “The magic will only recognize our object as a book because that’s what I decided to call it and wrote the word into the fabric of the action spell. I could have called it by its title, or TEDIOUS READING, or GASLAMP, or TOMMY, and the magic would recognize it as such. That’s the fun thing about being a mage. You get to call things by whatever name you want, and, through magic, it becomes true.”
“Hmm,” Tommy grunted with a thoughtful frown but didn’t say anything more.
Sciona didn’t know why she prompted, “What?” She was supposed to be the one doing the explaining.
Tommy shook his head. “That’s a lot of power.”
It was such a banal and basically useless observation that Sciona wasn’t sure why she smiled. “Yes, it is. And now,” she said, as her fingers clattered through the end of the composition, “I’m directing the action spell to take any input energy and use it to exert force horizontally along the nearest side of BOOK.”
“You can’t tell it how much force to exert?” Tommy asked.
“Aha! Excellent catch!” Tommy was asking the questions Sciona had when she first started learning magic; that was a good sign. “I can tell the action spell how much force to exert if I’m siphoning the Reserve because, in that case, the Reserve siphoning towers will do the hard part for me.”
“The hard part?”
“You know, those towers on either side of Leon’s Hall?”
Tommy nodded. “They’re hard to miss, ma’am.”
“Those hold the energy automatically channeled from the Reserve siphoning zones and release it based on the demands of whatever action spells tap the Reserve. But
Tommy tilted his head.
“Something doesn’t make sense?” Sciona asked.
“No, ma’am—I mean, the part about the Reserve makes sense. I just don’t understand… Respectfully, if there is automated siphoning, what is the point of your job? Why not just use the Reserve?”