Chapter XLII

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Mhm!” Carrot replied with a bob of her head.

Silas looked at her, then glanced over to Iris who simply shrugged a shoulder. He returned his attention to Carrot. “Let me get you something to drink, at least.”

“Oh, that would be nice, thank you,” Carrot said.

She was still in her Vow-created costume, sitting in a lotus position in his rental’s small backyard. She had grabbed a cushion from the couch, but that was the only bit of comfort she had. Her eyes were half-lidded, and she seemed like she was either on the edge of a trance or was nearly asleep. 

He watched her for a moment longer, then reached out and felt the wavering force of magic shifting around her in great plumes. It was daemonic magic, definitely, but it was also all under Carrot’s control, and she seemed to be slowly working with the magic, circulating it in a large vortex of some sort. 

He left her to it. 

There was some real value in not poking at a complex spell when it was working. Something that his lessons had drilled into him. It was a good way to get blown up. Or at least screamed at by a higher ranked wizard.

He moved into the kitchen, and soon Iris followed him in. He expected her to say something, but instead she pulled out a phone and started to scroll through some media. She didn’t even turn the volume down.

Sighing, he opened the fridge, rooted around, then set everything out to make some lemonade. It wasn’t much, and maybe it wasn’t appropriate for the temperature, but it did have lots of sugar and he always felt like citrussy drinks helped recover from magical exhaustion.

He filled a glass up to near the brim, then went outside and set it down next to Carrot without bothering her. She noticed, judging by the small twitch, but she didn’t grab it.

Silas slipped back into the house and wandered to the livingroom where he’d be able to keep an eye on her. He opened his satchel and then placed the solen laptop on the coffee table. That caught Iris’ attention and she wandered over. “Going to break into that?” she asked.

“If I can,” he said. “I’m not an expert with technology. It could be password protected. Our best bet might be to send it back to the Ordos and wait for them to check it out.”

“Sure, but we can at least look first, right?”

“Right,” he agreed as he pulled the screen up. Both he and Iris stared as a small piece of yellow paper slipped out and flew off to the side.

She picked it up first and turned it around. “Heh.”

He leaned to the side, then sighed. “Is that the password?” he asked.

“Probably. I does say password on it,” she said.

He reached over, pressed the power-on button, then waited. It wasn’t too long before the machine was on. “We don’t have a power plug,” he said as he looked at the battery level. It was only at thirty percent or so. They wouldn’t have forever to play around with it.

Snatching the paper from Iris, he entered the password, then grunted when it worked. “I’m getting the sense that this Master guy isn’t the smartest enemy we could be dealing with,” Iris said.

“No, I’m getting the same impression,” he replied.

The laptop didn’t have very much on it. The desktop had a few icons, but as far as he could tell with his admittedly limited experience with such things, they were mostly the default things that just came with a new computer. 

Iris pointed at the screen, to a set of files.

He moved the mouse over to it with the little built-in mousepad, then double tapped it.

“Oh god, you’re like a grandpa,” Iris said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You type with two fingers and move super slow. Do they not have computers in the big fancy Magic Society?” 

“We do,” he said, then shifted awkwardly on his seat. “But they’re ancient? We’ve always been a few decades behind in terms of fashion and such, but I think in the past it never mattered.”

“Damn,” Iris said. “Yeah, that’d matter now. If you’re a year behind it shows. Both in fashion and tech. So what, you’re using big bulky computers? Like... DOS or something?” she pronounced the name of the operating system like it was unfamiliar to her, which he imagined that it might well be. 

“Honestly... yes? We don’t have social media much, and the older generation still use spells to communicate more than anything else. Plus, signal-based communications could be intercepted. It puts the whole society at risk.”

“Lame,” Iris said. “Just pull the band-aid off. It’s all going to get out eventually,” she said.

“Maybe,” he replied.

There was only one file folder on the computer’s background, and he slowly swiped over to it and double tapped on the icon.

It opened a folder that had some text files and a few images. The images seemed easier to digest in a hurry, so he decided not to open those first.

Clicking on the first text file opened what looked like the scans of a book. The first page had the title, Actuation of Magical Phenomena at Scale, and below that publishing information.

“This is by the Ordo Cognito,” he said before flipping forwards a few pages. There were some pages that were redacted, but once past those, it was just thick text in a tiny font. “This could be pulled directly from one of our libraries.”

“Heh, maybe I’ll grab a copy,” Iris said. 

“Maybe,” he allowed. He wasn’t going to let her. This could be classified information. Then again, if it was, it wasn’t meant for easy digestion. It was thick, academic writing, with a few complicated diagrams thrown in that didn’t simplify anything.

He opened the next few, but it was more of the same. “If that’s the Master’s computer, then the guy’s a massive nerd,” Iris said.

“We prefer the term scholar,” Silas corrected. He didn’t entirely disagree, however. This wasn’t the kind of stuff he had worked on until the very last year of his schooling. This was Wizard-Knight levels of research.

Interestingly, a few of the books came from other Ordos. Ordo Sanare, Ordo Lumina Diffusio, even his own Ordo Venator. The ordos shared information and books all the time, but these felt like the kinds of texts that would be behind at least one or two layers of security.

“I’m going to need to spend the night just skimming all of this,” he said.

“Check the image?”

Soon he was frowning in confusion at what looked like diagrams of complex mandalas. 

“Spell formations,” Iris said. “Pretty complicated ones, too. Look at that, it’s magic absorption there, output here... uh, looks like something for... maybe transference to a liquid medium?”

He tried to parse the spell, but it took him a while to get even the basics of it. Iris’ was really showing off her family’s talent by understanding it at a glance. “I think this might be what we encountered in that factory. Turning magic into a liquid?”

“Okay, show me the next one,” Iris said.

He flicked through the images, one at a time. They were, for the most part, just more spell formations. But then they came onto maps of the city itself, from the air, with certain areas circles out.

“Wait,” Iris said before pointing. “Looks like... look at the way the locations are marked out.”

“What of it?” he asked. 

One of those was the factory, another the office. But there were others, sprinkled across the city. It took Iris shifting the computer to the side and opening an editing tool that let her draw onto the image (something he didn’t know could be done) for him to start making sense of what she was saying.

He felt his blood go cold.

“What wouldn’t work, right?” he asked.

Iris was frowning, any signs of previous teasing were gone. “I... maybe? It would be wildly, wildly inefficient,” she said. But in theory, yeah, it would.”

“And if it did, would it be obvious?” he asked.

Iris hummed. “I’d have to look at the spells. Hell, I’d have to write out the spell structure, maybe on a large piece of paper and then activate it to see how effective it is, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t work. It would just be very weak.”

“Weak, but at that scale,” he muttered.

“Yeah. At that scale, even a weak effect would add up.”

What he was looking at was a spell formation, one large enough to encompass the entire city in its area, and one that looked like it could very easily end up sucking the life out of every person living here and feeding it to a single point.

But now... they did have that point’s location.

***