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.”
“The other tower?”
“What?”
“From outside, it looks like there are two siphoning towers,” Carra said, “this western one and an eastern one.”
“Right.” The twin siphoning towers bracketed the dome of Leon’s Hall, giving the Main Magistry building its distinctive silhouette. “Both towers siphon the Reserve. But this one siphons for public utilities—electricity, running water, trains, all that—and the one on the other side siphons energy for private use. That’s if some rich businessman pays out of pocket for magical services or a mage gets a grant to use Reserve energy for a research project. Although most research mages will just employ a good sourcer, like… well, like me.” Sciona looked at the toes of her oversized boots so she wouldn’t have to endure the shame of Carra’s gaze.
“So, are we hitting both towers?” Carra asked flatly.
“It’s not worth it to cover the other tower.” Sciona had only considered it briefly before coming to this conclusion. “Private energy use is contained to specific spaces, most of them—well—private. Public energy use is everywhere.”
“Okay, so where are you going?”
Sciona took a deep breath. “I’m going to rob the Archmage Supreme’s office.”
It wasn’t hard to deduce the location of Orynhel’s secret office—right at the steepled top of the tower above the Siphoning Hall—the Mount, the pinnacle, a penis thing.