The bank was only accessible by riding on a gondola. Quinn admired the engineering. The cars rotated around a bull wheel as people shuffled in. Quinn and Seth barely had enough time to sit down inside the little car before the door closed and locked itself. And then they went up, the ground slowly shrinking away below them. "I wonder what it would look like to fly," Quinn said. "How fast would the world vanish below?"
There were guards at the top armed with rifles in front of the broad glass doors. The people walking in and out of the bank were well-dressed and generally older. In fact Quinn didn't see anyone who looked young.
Inside the bank an oculomancer confronted them immediately. "Come with me," she said. She led them through the lobby to a long hallway. There were rugs on the floor, paintings on the walls, golden sconces for light, and the wood was varnished and polished to a shine. It looks like money, Quinn thought.
The oculomancer stopped at one door and brought them inside. Quinn thought that the room must be her office, because she sat down behind the desk and started shuffling through some papers. "I am certified by Spire Lin to provide banking services to citizens who are interacting with Heritors. Please let me see your documents."
She looked over the two documents that Maxius had given them, and then checked her ledgers. "This is highly unusual Citizen Quinn," she said. "You have a travel restriction placed on you."
"I don't know anything about that," Quinn said. "Do you know why?"
"I do not," she said. "Some oculomancer from the Spire probably wants to make sure that you stay in the city. These things happen sometimes to young people. It's generally not safe to leave the city until summer. You could end up starving to death in the snow."
She flipped to the end of her ledger and read something. Then looked at the two documents again. "So, just travel, no banking restrictions. So I can get you the auras presently. Stay here, I am going to go get a Maiden. Oh, before I do that, I have a question. Do you intend to cause harm to the Maiden when she arrives?"
"What?" Quinn asked.
"I will be able to tell if you are lying," the oculomancer said. "It's a standard question, please answer it."
"Of course I do not intend to cause her harm, I have no idea who she even is."
"I'm not going to hurt any girls, heh," Seth said.
"You are telling the truth, that's good. Right, I will be right back."
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"Please send this letter to the Empress Sasha," Kiera said, handing the envelope to the woman in the post office. She wasn't an oculomancer. It's probably not important enough of a job to make oculomancers do it.
"Are you finished?" Fiona asked.
"I just don't want my friends to worry about me."
"Come with me then," Fiona said. "I have already summoned an Aura Maiden from the bank in Grael Nydia to come recover the sien in your aura. She should be landing soon."
Fiona led Kiera through the interior of the Spire. It was mostly natural stone caverns in most places, dark rock marbled with glowing blue and green ethersteel. In some places there were funny little cone-shaped rock formations hanging from the roof. Other places of the Spire had buildings carved out of the stone, and some stone chambers were large enough to contain buildings that were not integrated into the cave at all. They arrived at one such building in a chamber that was so large that it contained an entire promenade filled with shops and restaurants. Women walked around on the street in fashionable clothing and sipped cherry wine at the "outdoor" tables. Kiera counted that maybe one in ten of the women were oculomancers.
Strangely enough, Kiera counted a few men darting about as well.
"Why are there men in the Spire?" she asked.
"Most of them are thralls," Fiona said. "The Charlatan King created thousands of thralls that he tasked with cleaning. After he died his thralls just, kept on cleaning. All this time, over a thousand years, and they still dart about cleaning toilets and doing dishes."
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"They, are forced to do that work?"
"Not quite. Imagine you write with your right hand. Then one day, you find out that you cannot do that anymore. Writing with your left hand is easy though, so you start doing that instead, and you don't think about it. That is what has happened to thralls, they have been given a specific skill and focus and they sort of just, gravitate towards doing that. A thrall is a witch that has been compelled with such a focus. This compulsion is permanent, and generally causes the thrall to lose most or all emotions. Nobody alive today is powerful enough to create thralls, so the ones left over after the war were kept around. However, it's obviously very unethical. Reyndell Marunavi, the man you call the Charlatan King, was very cruel and created thousands of them. He even turned his own children into thralls."
"That's terrible." Kiera said. She looked out at the men going about their business. They seemed to be bussing tables.
"Have you ever heard of the Purifier or the Bloodraker?"
"I've heard of the Bloodraker before," Kiera said. "My grandma always told me that she would leave me outside for the Bloodraker if I didn't eat my vegetables. It was some sort of monster, right? From the fairy tales?"
"The Bloodraker was Reyndell's daughter Annatiki Marunavi. He turned her into a thrall. He used her to hunt down and murder other witches. That was her focus. The easiest way to kill a witch is to kill them after you know they will manifest powers, but just before they do manifest powers. I have no idea where the scary stories come from. By the way, our Maiden is about to walk around that corner."
"How do you know?" Kiera asked.
"I can see her aura," Fiona said. "Her aura is this size of a small country so she is kind of easy to keep track of."
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Quinn found the Maiden to be deeply disturbing. Her face looked completely blank and she just stared off into space. "I store sien." she said in a monotone voice.
"You are now going to administer sien to this man," the oculomancer said, pointing to Quinn. "You will administer exactly enough sien required to construct an aura of the first harmonic. You will shape this sien into a standard spherical aura and bind it to him. You will mark the aura with this pattern." She held up a piece of paper to the Maiden with a complex pattern printed with various colors of ink.
The woman walked up to Quinn and placed her hand on his chest. Then he immediately felt... something. The room around him felt different, like he as floating in a liquid, or if he suddenly gained the ability to experience the air around him in a new way. He felt like he could reach out, and do... something to it.
"Don't do that," the oculomancer snapped. "All the ether in the building is already claimed. Wait until you get off the gondola before trying to do that again, please."
The process was repeated for Seth, though the pattern on the paper was different. These two pieces of paper were filed away with the original documents. "All travel restrictions placed on you are gone. Your aura is locked to you. Attempting to transfer your aura to another person will instantly kill you, kindly avoid doing that," the oculomancer said. "So that's it, you are free to go."
"Are you going to take us back out?" Quinn asked.
"You remember how to get out?" She asked. Quinn nodded. "I can see your aura no matter where you go. Show yourself out. Good day."
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"So why do we need her?" Kiera asked as the Aura Maiden walked towards them. Another oculoancer walked with her.
"I'm not actually powerful enough to take your aura from you," Fiona said. "Or, more specifically, you are quite a bit stronger than me, so I actually cannot take an aura from you. You would need to transfer it to me, and there is no way I am waiting around for you to practice how to do that."
The oculomancer looked uneasy. "This," she said, pointing to Kiera, "creature? Are you sure you want to remove that aura?"
"Yes," Fiona said. "I have been given total freedom with this one."
"I don't think an aura like this has ever been removed from one of them. How do we know she won't just kill both of us after we remove it?"
"Just ask her, obviously," Fiona said.
"Do you intend to cause harm to us if I remove your aura?" the oculomancer asked.
"Of course not! I would never want to harm anyone ever," Kiera said.
"Do you intend to steal the sien from this Aura Maiden if we remove your aura?"
"I don't know what that means, but no. I do not intend to do that."
"See?" Fiona said. "Just do as I have asked."
"There is enough sien in her aura to reach the eighty-first harmonic. The sien is organized into a standard spherical aura. You are now going to blank out and remove all sien from this individual," the oculomancer said, pointing at Kiera. "You are to store this sien."
"I store sien," the Maiden said. Her voice made Kiera shiver.
The Maiden placed her hand on Kiera's chest. "Hey!" Kiera said.
"Relax," Fiona said.
After a few moments Kiera suddenly felt an enormous weight crushing down on her from all directions, like she had swam down into very deep water. She fell to one knee and gasped. "Fiona?" she asked. "What is happening to me?"
"You are probably feeling ether for the first time," Fiona said. "You will get used to it after a few days. Just sleep on it. Oh, and do not reach out and try to claim it."
Kiera was struggling not to fall on her face. This is going to be a very long, strange few days.