Free Thaumatology 12: Vengeance by Niall Teasdale

to it.’
    ‘Inside… You’re going into the circles?!’ He turned around just as Ceri zipped up her bright orange boiler suit. ‘Are you insane?!’
    ‘Well… that’s a matter of opinion, but I’ve lived through worse than what’s inside there and I’m not risking anyone else. Now, when I come out I’m heading straight for the isolation box.’ She indicated a metal box about ten feet by five feet sitting in a corner of the room. ‘No one gets in my way. I don’t think it’ll be too bad, but it’s best to be cautious.’
    ‘That’s meant as a refuge,’ Torpen said. ‘It’s supposed to keep magic out if something goes wrong.’
    ‘Yes, but there are thaumometers inside and out, and it’ll keep anything I’m carrying in. Now, let me do my job and we can be out of your hair.’ It was not, perhaps, the most tactful of phrases to use; the engineer did not have that much hair to be in. Turning, Ceri headed for the structure which took up much of the middle of the room.
    The generator was a rather clever construction based, very loosely, on Stonehenge. There was an outer circle of eighty pylons, each a stack of geodesic devices which Cheryl had invented to turn thaumic energy into electricity. They also acted as the outer layer of a harmonic system which concentrated energy within the ring and negated it outside, but Ceri could still feel the slight rise as she got within a couple of yards of the metalwork.
    She blinked on her Sight, and quickly blinked it off again. The energy flowing within the circle made any view beyond the mundane a confusion of shifting streams and colours. She was probably not going to find anything that way.
    Beyond the first ring the tension in the back of her neck jumped markedly. She was in a strong magical field, maybe ten thaums, and it would be stronger closer to the inner circle of thirty-three transducer pylons. Still, she had a job to do and she started doing it. If someone had tossed something into the circle then it would likely be here, outside the inner circle, but probably close to it. She walked around, scanning the concrete floor for anything which should not have been there.
    There was nothing. In truth she was not sure she had expected to find anything since the power driving the spell probably needed to be more than it was going to get even at the very edge of the inner ring. She slipped through between two of the inner pylons and her skin began to tingle.
    In here the readings they had got were up above twenty-eight thaums, pushing twenty-nine. At thirty and above probability tended to throw up its hands and cry foul. Twenty-nine was just about safe, but long-term exposure to it was likely to result in… interesting issues. The only ‘natural’ areas of the world with this level of energy were the three sites in Germany where thaumic bombs had been detonated at the start of the Shattering. Feeling as though her skin was trying to crawl off the top of her head, Ceri began walking around the circle, searching for the source of the spell though not really knowing what to look for.
    It was only when she turned to the central pylon that she found it. Right in the centre of the generator, sunk into the concrete and then into the ground beneath, was a hexagonal, granite rod carved with glyphs. Naturally black, it shone from the energy being directed through it. Around that were four columns of transducers, and there were more mounted over it. The whole structure was about twenty feet in height, but the thing Ceri was looking for was at the bottom.
    It was a metal cube with the edges and corners sheared off. Moving closer, she peered at it, shading her eyes against the glare from the rod. She could easily see two of the faces and those were carved with intricate patterns of tiny glyphs. Her fists clenched and she blanched at the sight of them; if the position the cube was in was not a big enough clue, the glyphs were draconic. A demon could have survived in the inner