II CAMPO
And so great Crasedes came to the city of Apamea, on the edge of the Sea of Ephios, and though no text survives of what he said to the kings of this city, it is clear from secondhand sources that he brought his usual message: of co-option, of integration into their empire, and urgings of surrender. By now word had spread of the hierophants’ arrival in the region, and many were fearful — but the kings and wealthy landowners of Apamea refused him, and rudely rebuffed great Crasedes.
Crasedes did not respond with any wrath, as some had feared. Instead he simply walked to the city square, where he sat in the dust and began to build a cairn out of gray stones.
The legend goes that Crasedes built the cairn from noon to sunset, and the height of the construct grew to be extraordinary. Exact accounts differ regarding the height — some say a hundred feet tall, others hundreds of feet. However, every version of the story omits two critical parts: if the cairn of stones was extraordinarily tall, how did Crasedes, an average man in height, manage to keep stacking the stones on the top? It was said Crasedes could make many things float, and could fly himself — but this is not noted in this story. So — how?
And secondly, where did all these stones come from?
Some sources suggest that Crasedes had assistance in the construction of the cairn. These renditions claim that before he began, Crasedes took out a small metal box, and opened it — though the box appeared to be empty to onlookers. However, the stories say that the people of Apamea then saw footprints forming in the dust around the cairn, footprints far larger than a person’s. These versions would suggest that Crasedes had held some kind of invisible sprite or entity within the box, which he released to aid him. Yet such tales hew close to some of the more fantastical stories regarding the hierophants — fables of Crasedes making the stars dance with his magic wand, and so on — and thus must be treated with skepticism.
Regardless of the particulars, Crasedes began to build the cairn, and did not stop. And as night fell, and as they watched this curious display, the people of Apamea suddenly grew fearful, and left.
In the morning, when they returned to the city square, Crasedes was seated in the dust, still waiting patiently, and the cairn was gone — as were, the people later discovered, all the kings and wealthy landowners of Apamea, along with their families, old and young, and all their livestock, and the very buildings they’d lived and worked in. All had vanished overnight without a sound — perhaps taken to the place that the cairn had also gone.
The purpose of the cairn remains unknown, as does the final destination of those who resisted Crasedes in Apamea, who are still lost to history. Apamea, of course, no longer resisted Crasedes, and submitted to the rule of the hierophants — though it, like all of the lands of the Occidental Empire, was eventually totally destroyed. As is well documented, it is unknown if a civil war was the source of this conflict, or if, perhaps, the hierophants battled against another, greater force.
Such an idea troubles me — and yet, it must be considered.
16
Orso ground his teeth, rubbed his forehead, and sighed. “I swear,” he murmured, “if I hear one more insipid shitting word…”
“Quiet,” whispered Ofelia Dandolo.
Orso rested his head on the table before him. He was talented at putting abstract concepts together. That was essentially his entire profession: he wrote essays and arguments that convinced reality to do some new and interesting things.
So if there was one thing he truly despised — one thing that absolutely, positively drove him mad — it was when someone just could not get to the scrumming point. To observe someone fumbling around with words and ideas like a schoolboy trying to navigate a woman’s under-robes was akin to swallowing shards of glass.
“The point is thusly,” said the speaker — a Morsini deputy hypatus, some overdressed asshole whose name Orso couldn’t be bothered to remember. “The point is — is it possible to develop criteria by which we can measure, analyze, and establish the possibility that the Commons blackouts were a natural occurrence — by which I mean some by-product of a storm or meteorological fluctuation in the atmosphere — as opposed to being anthropological—by which I mean, human-caused?”
“Little shit probably just learned the word,” growled Orso. Ofelia Dandolo glanced at him. Orso cleared his throat as if the comment had been a cough.
This was now hour four of this Tevanni council meeting on the blackouts. To his surprise, they’d somehow managed to drag both Eferizo Michiel and Torino Morsini out of their campo cradles. You almost never saw either house head at all, let alone in the same place. Eferizo was trying to sit up and look nobly concerned, whereas Torino was nakedly emanating boredom. Ofelia, as always, comported herself quite well, in Orso’s opinion — but he could see even her stamina was flagging.
Yet Orso was quite alert. He kept looking from face to face, thinking. This room contained some of the most powerful men in the city — and many of them were founder lineage. If anyone acted surprised to see him alive — well. That would be a helpful indication.
Ofelia cleared her throat. “There is no recorded natural occurrence of scriving blackouts,” she said. “Not like a typhoon or some such, anyways — neither in our history, nor that of the Occidentals. So, why don’t we cut to the chase, and simply ask — was this the product of something we did here, in Tevanne?”
The room swelled up with muttering.
“Are you accusing another merchant house of this act, Founder?” demanded a Morsini representative.
“I accuse no one,” said Ofelia, “for I understand nothing. Could it not have been an accidental effect of some research endeavor?”
The muttering grew louder. “Ridiculous,” someone said.
“Preposterous.”
“Outrageous.”
“If Dandolo Chartered is willing to make such a supposition,” said one of the Michiel deputies, “perhaps the Dandolo hypatus can provide us with some supporting research?”
All eyes turned to look at Orso.
Great, he thought.
He cleared his throat and stood. “I must slightly correct my founder’s testimony,” he said. “There is, in hierophantic history, one obscure legend in which the phenomenon we witnessed possibly appears — the Battle of Armiedes.” He coolly looked around at the gathered crowd. Come on, you bastard, he thought. Break for me. Show yourself. “Such methodologies remain beyond the abilities of Tevanne, of course,” he said. “But if we trust our histories, then it is possible.”
One of the Morsinis sighed, exasperated. “More hierophants, more magicians! What more could we expect from a disciple of Tribuno Candiano?”
The room went silent at that. Everyone stared at the Morsini representative, who slowly grew aware that he had greatly overstepped.
“I, ah, apologize,” he said. He turned toward a part of the room that had hitherto remained quiet. “I misspoke, sirs.”
Everyone slowly turned to look at the portion of the room dominated by Company Candiano representatives. There were far fewer of them than the other houses. Sitting in the founder’s seat was a young man of about thirty, pale and clean-shaven, wearing dark-green robes and an ornate flat cap trimmed with a large emerald. He was an oddity in many ways: for one, he was about a third of the age of the other three founders — and he was not, as everyone knew, an actual founder, or indeed a blood relation to the Candiano family at all.
Orso narrowed his eyes at the young man. For though Orso hated many people in Tevanne, he especially loathed Tomas Ziani, the chief officer of Company Candiano.
Tomas Ziani cleared his throat and stood. “You did not misspeak, sir,” he said. “My predecessor, Tribuno Candiano, brought great ruin to our noble house with his Occidental fascinations.”
Our noble house? thought Orso. You married into it, you little shit!
Tomas nodded at Orso. “An experience that the Dandolo hypatus, of course, is keenly aware of.”
Orso gave him the thinnest of smiles, bowed, and sat.
“It is, of course, preposterous to imagine that any Tevanni merchant house is capable of reproducing any hierophantic effects,” said Tomas Ziani, “let alone one that could have accomplished the blackouts, to say nothing of the moral implications. But I regret to say that Founder Dandolo has not truly cut to the quick of the question — what I think we all want to know is, if we want to find out if any merchant house is behind the blackouts…how shall we institute this authority? What body shall have this oversight? And who shall make up this body?”
The room practically exploded with discontented mutterings.
And with that, Orso thought with a sigh, young Tomas delivers the killing blow to this idiot meeting. For this notion was heresy in Tevanne — the idea of some kind of municipal or governmental authority that could inspect the business of the merchant houses? They would genuinely rather fail and die than submit to that.
Ofelia sighed. A handful of tiny, white moths flitted around her head. “What a waste of time,” she said softly, waving them away.
Orso glanced at Tomas, and found, to his surprise, that the young man was watching him. Specifically, he was looking at Orso’s scarf — very, very hard.
“Maybe not entirely,” he said.
When the meeting closed, Orso and Ofelia held a brief conference in the cloisters. “To confirm,” she said quietly. “You do not think this is sabotage?”
“No, Founder,” he said.
“Why are you so certain?”
Because I have a grubby thief who says she saw it happen, he thought. But he said, “If it was sabotage, they could have done a hell of a better job. Why target the Commons? Why only glancingly affect the campos?”
Ofelia Dandolo nodded.
“Is there a…reason to suspect sabotage, Founder?” he asked.
She gave him a piercing look. “Let’s just say,” she said reluctantly, “that your recent work on light could attract…attention.”
This was interesting to him. Orso had been fooling around with scrived lights for decades, but it was only at Dandolo Chartered, with its superior lexicon architecture, that he’d started trying to engineer the reverse: scriving something so it absorbed light, rather than emitting it, producing a halo of perpetual shadow, even in the day.
So the suggestion that Ofelia Dandolo might worry about other houses fearing this technology…that was curious.
What exactly, he wondered, is she planning to veil in shadow?
“As in all things,” she said, “I expect your secrecy, Orso. But especially there.”
“Certainly, Founder.”
“Now…if you will excuse me, I’ve a meeting shortly.”
“I as well,” he said. “Good day, Founder.”
He watched her go, then turned and swept out to the hallways around the council building, where the legions of attendants and administrators and servants hovered to assist the throngs of great and noble men within. Among them was Berenice, yawning and rubbing her puffy eyes. “Just four hours?” she said. “That was quick, sir.”
“Was it,” said Orso, rushing past her. He walked through the crowd of people dressed in white and yellow — Dandolo Chartered colors — and moved on to the red and blue crowd — Morsini House — and then the purple and gold crowd — which was, of course, Michiel Body Corporate.
“Ah,” said Berenice. “Where are we going, sir?”
“You are going somewhere to sleep,” said Orso. “You’ll need it tonight.”
“And when will you sleep, sir?”
“When do I ever sleep, Berenice?”
“Ah. I see, sir.”
He stopped at the crowd of people dressed in dark green and black — Company Candiano colors. This crowd was much smaller, and much less refined. The effects of the Candiano bankruptcy still lingered, it seemed.
“Uh…what would you be planning to do here, sir?” asked Berenice with a touch of anxiety.
“Ask questions,” he said. He peered through the crowd. At first he wasn’t sure she’d be there and thought himself absurd for even imagining it. But then he saw her: one woman, standing apart from the group, her posture tall and noble.
Orso stared at her, and instantly regretted this idea. The woman wore a bewilderingly complicated dress, with puffs on her upper sleeves and her hair twisted up in an intricate brooch that was covered in pearls and ribbons. Her face was painted white, with the now-fashionable painted blue bar across her eyes.
“My God,” said Orso quietly. “She went in for all that aristocratic fluffery. I can’t believe it.”
Berenice glanced at the woman. Her eyes grew wide, and she stared at Orso in naked terror. “Don’t, sir.”
He flapped a hand at her. “Go home, Berenice.”
“Don’t…Don’t go talk to her. That would be deeply unwise.”
He understood her fear perfectly: the idea of approaching the daughter of the founder of a competing merchant house was mad. Especially if she was also the wife of the chief officer of that same house. But Orso had built a career on bad choices. “Enough,” he said.
“It would be outrageously inappropriate for you to approach her,” she said, “whatever your…”
He looked at her. “Whatever my what?”
Berenice glared at him. “Whatever your history with her, sir.”
“My own affairs,” said Orso, “are just that—my own. And unless you want to get tangled up in them, I suggest you leave now, Berenice.”
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then, sighing, she walked away.
Orso watched her go. He swallowed and tried to compose himself. Am I doing this for good reason, he wondered, or just to talk to her? He decided not to dither on it anymore. He pivoted on his heel and marched up to the woman.
“That dress,” he said, “looks absurd on you.”
The woman did a double take, her mouth open in outrage. Then she saw him, and the surprise evaporated from her face. “Ah. Of course. Good afternoon, Orso.” She glanced around nervously. Many of the Candiano Company servants were either staring or trying hard not to stare. “This is…very inappropriate, you know.”
“I guess I forget what ‘appropriate’ means these days, Estelle.”
“My experience, Orso, suggests you never knew in the first place.”
He grinned. “Does it? It is good to see you, Estelle. Even if you are stuffed into the back halls like a damned valet.”
She smiled back, or at least tried to. It was not the smile he was familiar with. When he’d known her years ago, Estelle Candiano’s eyes had been bright and alive, and her gaze had been sharper than a stiletto. Now there was something…dull to them.
She looked tired. Even though she was still twelve years his junior, Estelle now looked old.
She gestured ahead, and they moved out of earshot from the rest of the group. “Was it you who killed the meeting?” she asked. “Four hours is a little short, yes?”
“Not I. That would have been your husband.”
“Ah. What did Tomas say?”
“Some rather disparaging things about your father.”
“I see.” An awkward pause. “Were they true things, though?”
“Well, yes. But they still pissed me off.”
“Why? I thought you hated him. When you left Company Candiano, Orso, there was a lot of bad blood between you and my father.”
“Bad blood,” he said, “is still blood. How is Tribuno these days?”
“Still dying,” Estelle said curtly. “And still mad. So. About as bad as one can get.”
“I…see,” he said quietly.
She peered at him. “My God,” she said. “My God! Could that be pity crossing the once-handsome face of the infamous Orso Ignacio? Could it be regret? Could it be sorrow? I’d never have believed it!”
“Stop.”
“I never saw this tenderness when you were with us, Orso.”
“That isn’t true,” said Orso sharply.
“I…apologize. I meant tenderness for him.”
“That isn’t true, either.” Orso thought carefully about what to say. “Your father was and probably still is the most brilliant scriver in all the history of Tevanne. He practically built this damned city. A lot of his designs are still keeping everything standing. That means something, even if the man himself changed a lot.”
“Changed…” she said. “Is that the word for it? To watch him decay…To watch him rot, and corrupt himself, chasing after these Occidental vanities, spending hundreds of thousands of duvots on decadent fantasy…I am not sure I’d just call that change. We still haven’t recovered, you know.” She glanced at the crowd behind her. “Look at us. Just a handful of servants, dressed like clerks. We used to practically own the council. We’d walk through these halls like gods and angels. How far we’ve fallen.”
“I know. And you’re not scriving anymore. Are you?”
Estelle seemed to deflate. “N…no. How did you know?”
“Because you were a damn clever scriver back when I knew you.”
They exchanged a look, and both understood there were unspoken words there—Even if your father never recognized it. For though Tribuno Candiano had been a wildly brilliant man, he’d been supremely disinterested in his daughter, and had made it well known that he’d have preferred a son.
And perhaps that was why he’d treated her as he had. For when Tribuno Candiano’s Occidental obsessions had bankrupted his merchant house, he’d essentially auctioned off his daughter’s hand in marriage to pay off his debts — and young Tomas Ziani, scion of the outrageously wealthy Ziani family, had been only too keen to buy the rights.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“If Tomas was letting you work,” said Orso, “you’d have turned Company Candiano around, I bet. You were good. Damned good.”
“That’s not the place of a chief officer’s wife, though.”
“No. Seems like an officer’s wife’s place is here, waiting in the halls, and being seen waiting in the halls, meek and obedient.”
She glared at him. “Why did you come talk to me, Orso? Just to dig your fingers in old wounds?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
He took a breath. “Listen, Estelle…there’s some shit going on.”
“Are you sure you can talk about this? Or will Ofelia Dandolo have your balls braised for it?”
“She probably would,” he said, “but I’m going to say it anyway. Regarding your father’s materials…His Occidental collection, I mean, all that stuff he bought. Are those still at Company Candiano? Or were those auctioned away?”
“Why?” she demanded.
He remembered how Tomas Ziani had looked at him, smirking. “Just curious.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “All of that is under Tomas’s control now. I’m nowhere close to management, Orso.”
He thought about this. Tomas Ziani was sinfully rich, and had a reputation as a cunning merchant — but a scriver he wasn’t. When it came to sigils, he probably couldn’t tell his ass from a hole in the ground. The idea of him making something as powerful as the listening rig or the gravity plates was laughable.
But Tomas had resources, and ambition. What he couldn’t make himself, he could perhaps buy.
And he might still have access, thought Orso, to the smartest scriver in all of Tevanne.
“Does Tomas ever see Tribuno?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” said Estelle, now deeply suspicious.
“Does he talk to him? And, if so, what about?”
“This is now thoroughly out of line,” she said. “What’s going on, Orso?”
“I told you. There’s some shit going on in the city. Estelle…If Tomas was going to…to make a play at me, to come at me — you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you mean, come at you?”
Orso pulled down the edge of his scarf with a finger and allowed her a glimpse of his bruised neck.
Her eyes opened wide. “My God, Orso…Who…who did that to you?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. So. If Tomas was going to make a play like this for me — would you warn me?”
“Do…do you really think Tomas could have done that?”
“I’ve had some civilized and proper people try to kill me over the years. Do you know anything, Estelle? And, again, if you did — would you tell me?”
She stared at him, and a mixture of expressions passed over her face: surprise, anger, resentment, then sadness. “Do I owe you that?”
“I think so,” said Orso. “I never asked you for much.”
She was silent for a long while. “That’s not true,” she said. “You…you did ask me to marry you. But after that…no, you never asked me for anything else again.”
They stood in the hallway, surrounded by servants, not knowing what to say.
Estelle blinked rapidly. “If I thought Tomas was a threat to you, I would tell you, Orso.”
“Even if it betrayed Candiano interests to do so?”
“Even if it did that.”
“Thank you.” He bowed deeply to her. “I…I appreciate your time, Lady Ziani.” He turned and walked away.
He kept his head level and his arms stiff as he moved. Once he was about a few hundred feet down the hall, he ducked beside a column and watched the Company Candiano crowd.
He could tell when Tomas Ziani and the others emerged — the servants all sat up straight, keenly aware that their masters were now here. But not Estelle. She stood seemingly frozen, staring into space. And when her husband came and took her hand and led her away, she barely seemed to notice.
17
Sancia was still asleep when there was a knock at the door. “Sun is setting,” Gregor’s voice said. “Our chariot shall be here soon.”
Sancia groaned, hauled herself off the sheetless bed, and staggered downstairs. All the injuries and scrapes from the past two days felt like they’d grown until her whole body was a bruise. When she saw Gregor she realized he must feel the same way: he was standing crooked, so as to not put pressure on his back, and he had his bandaged arm pulled close to his chest.
After a while, the front door opened and Berenice walked in. She looked at the two of them. “Good God,” she said. “I’ve seen cheerier faces in a mausoleum. Come on. The carriage is ready. I’ll warn you, though — he’s in a foul mood.”
“He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who has good moods,” said Sancia, following her.
“Then this is a worse mood,” said Berenice.
She drove them back to the hypatus department just as the sun slipped behind the clouds.
She tried not to let her concern show in her face.
The hypatus offices were still and dark. They used a back entrance to a small, forgotten staircase, and they climbed until they found Orso waiting at the top, next to his workshop.
“Took you damned long enough!” snapped Orso. “God, I thought I’d die of scrumming old age up here!”
“Good evening, Orso,” said Gregor. “How was the committee meeting?”
“Dull and short,” said Orso. “But not…entirely useless. I had some ideas — and if we can find that damn rig, I can confirm if those ideas are right.” He stood and pointed at Sancia. “You. Are you ready to do this again?”
“Sure,” said Sancia.
“Then please,” he said. “Astound us.”
“All right. Give me a second.” She looked down the stairs. To her, it was all just a sea of noise, of whispers and chanting.
There was a silence. She assumed he was searching, and would answer her after he found something.
But then things…changed.
The murmurings and chanting grew louder, and then the sounds seemed to stretch…And bubble…And blur…
Then words emerged among them — words she could hear.
<…bring heat, bring it up, bubble it up, and store it away, there it goes, keep the heat there, oh, please, how I love to make the tank hot…>
<…will NOT let anyone in, absolutely NO ONE, they CANNOT enter unless they possess KEY, key is VERY IMPORTANT, and I…>
<…rigid form, rigid form, rigid form, pressure at the corners, I am like the stone in the depths of the earth…>
Sancia realized she could hear the scrivings, that she could understand them—without touching them. She nearly fell over from shock. She was fairly sure she’d just heard some kind of water tank, a lock, and a scrived support structure, all from somewhere in the building.
The voices returned to quiet chanting.
She noticed Orso glaring at her impatiently.
think so…>
There was another pause…and then the voices flooded back into her head, an avalanche of words and desires and anxious fears.
Except some of the voices grew louder or softer, rapidly, one after another. It was as if Clef were sorting through a stack of papers, looking at each one before passing on to the next — except it was happening inside her brain. The sensation was profoundly disorienting.
Then one voice arose from the chaos: <…I am a reed in the wind, dancing with my partner, my mate, my love…I dance as they dance, I move as they move, I trace our dance within the clay…>
“I’ve got it, I think,” said Sancia.
“Then lead the way,” said Gregor.
Listening to the whispering device, Sancia wandered through workshops filled with half-built devices, rows of cold furnaces, wall after wall of bookshelves. Clef led her down the stairs, across the mezzanine, and then to a side hall, which then led to another stairway. Then he led her down flight after flight of stairs, to the basement, which seemed to double as a library. Orso, Berenice, and Gregor followed, bearing small, scrived lights, not speaking — but Sancia’s head was filled up with words.
She was still getting used to this. For so long she’d been accustomed to scrivings being nothing more than murmurings in the back of her head. To have Clef clarify them was like having someone wipe away a layer of sand to reveal words written on the path before you.
But if I’m hearing this from him, wondered Sancia, what else am I picking up? And what’s he picking up from me? She wondered if she would start to think like Clef, to act like him, and never even notice it.
They entered the basement. And then, abruptly, the trail ended before a blank wall.
Another pause, and then she heard it, mumbling behind the walls: <…still no dance…still no sounds. Silence. Nothing to dance to, no steps and twirls to scrawl in the clay…>
“More wall, I would assume,” said Orso.
“It’s not. The thing’s back there.”
“You found the rig?” Gregor asked. “You’re sure?”
“Yes. Now we just have to figure out how they access it.” She grimaced, then pulled off her gloves. “Hold on a second.” She took a breath, focused, shut her eyes, and placed her palms against the wall.
Instantly, the wall bloomed inside her mind, all those old, pale stones and layers of plaster leaping into her thoughts. The wall told her of age and pressure, decades spent bearing all the weight of the building above and transferring it to the foundation below. Except…
In one place, the foundation wasn’t there.
A passageway, she thought.
Keeping her eyes shut, she walked along the wall, bare palm pressed to its surface. Finally she came to it — the gap in the foundation was just below her. She opened her eyes, knelt, and pressed her palms to the floor.
The floorboards crackled to life inside of her, creaking and groaning, telling her of thousands of footfalls, leather soles and wooden soles and, sometimes, bare feet. Her skull tickled as termites and ants and other tiny insects roved through her splintering bones.
But one part of the floor was different — it was separate, and it had something screwed into it.
Hinges, thought Sancia. A door. She followed the feeling in her mind until she came to the far corner of a dusty blue rug. She pulled it aside. Underneath was an old and scarred trapdoor.
“A basement?” said Gregor.
“When the hell did we get a basement?” asked Orso.
“The scriving library was renovated years ago,” said Berenice. “Much of the old walls were torn down and built over. Artifacts are still around — doors that go nowhere, things like that.”
“Well, this goes somewhere,” said Sancia. She wedged her fingers underneath it and lifted the trapdoor up.
Below was a short flight of musty stairs, which ended in a small tunnel that ran behind the wall. It was completely dark at the bottom.
“Here,” said Berenice, holding out her light to Sancia.
Sancia put her glove back on — aware, suddenly, of Orso’s careful gaze — and took it from her. “Thanks,” she said, and she dropped down, holding the scrived light.
She touched a bare hand to the wall. The tunnel spoke to her, darkness and dust and cool, stale moisture. She followed its path to a small, rickety ladder, which led to an old crawlspace, an interstitial segment of an older floor plan, walled off and forgotten. And at the far back was…
<…await to trace my path in the pool of clay and wax…When will my mate begin to dance again? When shall we move, when shall we sway?>
She stopped.
She did so.
Again, a voice emerged from the mutterings — but this one was not the recording rig.
<…I wait. I wait for the signal, for the token, for the sign,> said this new rig.
said Clef.
Sancia held the scrived light up, but she couldn’t see that far back into the crawlspace. She thought about it, then pressed a bare hand into the wood.
She felt wood, and nails, and dust, and termites…and she felt the rig back there, or what she thought was the rig. It was some kind of iron stand that was quite heavy — she guessed the roll of wax or clay or whatever it wrote on was big.
But beside it was something else quite heavy. A barrel, she thought…Wooden and round and filled with something…
She smelled the air, and thought she smelled something sulfurous.
She froze.
There was a pause.
Another pause.
She slowly withdrew back down the passageway. she said.
She sighed.
“So we can’t get close to it,” said Gregor. “We’re stuck here.”
“Right,” said Sancia, sitting on the floor in the dark, brushing dust off of her arms and knees.
Orso stood in silence, staring down into the dark passageway. Ever since she’d returned, he hadn’t said a word.
“Surely there must be a way around the device?” said Berenice.
Gregor shook his head. “I’ve dealt with scrived mines in the wars. Unless you have the right signaling device on you, you’ll be pulped.”
“So we can’t get to the listening rig,” said Berenice. “But that can’t be that critical, yes? I mean, we generally know all the things we’ve divulged to these people, right, sir?”
Orso didn’t answer. He just kept staring down into the passageway.
said Clef.
“Uh,” said Berenice, disconcerted. “Well. I meant we could try to look at the rig itself to identify the person who made it — but I’ve been working on the gravity plates all afternoon, and I still have nothing.”
“Then we focus on what we know,” said Sancia. “We know the rig’s down there. We know it’s working. We know everyone got to see Orso at this damn meeting, and they know he’s alive now. So someone will be coming. Soon.”
“And when they come,” said Gregor, “we either capture them or follow them. Following them is my preference — it can reveal so many more things…” He sighed. “But I suppose capturing and questioning them is our only choice. We’ve no idea what campo this agent of theirs would return to, nor which enclave within the campo itself! We’d need sachets and keys and all sorts of credentials…”
“I…I can talk to my black market contacts,” said Sancia. “I can get sachets to get into the campos.”
“You can get that many sachets?” asked Gregor, surprised.
The idea was preposterous. But maybe they didn’t know that. “Yeah.”
“And credentials?” asked Berenice.
“If you pay me enough,” said Sancia, “I can get you into the campos.”
Clef laughed.
“Then I think it’s settled,” said Gregor. “You get your sachets, we set our trap, and wait. Right?”
“Right,” said Berenice.
“Right,” said Sancia.
They all waited, and turned to Orso.
“Sir?” asked Berenice.
Finally, Orso moved, turning to look at Sancia. “That was…quite some performance,” he said quietly.
“Thanks?” she said.
He looked her over. “There’s a simple way to stay alive as a hypatus, you know — never include a scriving in your designs that you don’t completely understand. And, girl…I must admit, I don’t understand you at all.”
“You don’t need to,” said Sancia. “You just need to understand the results I get you.”
“No,” said Orso. “I need a lot more than that. For example — how do I know you’re telling the truth about any of this?”
“Huh?” she said.
“You go into the dark, say you found the rig, but we can’t get close to it. If we go down there and look ourselves, we die. There’s no way to check. That all seems convenient to me.”
“I’ve helped you before,” she said. “I found the damn rig in the statue!”
“But how did you do that? You never told us. You haven’t told us a damned thing!”
“Orso,” said Gregor. “I believe we can trust her.”
“How can we trust her if we don’t know how she’s doing what she’s doing? Finding a rig is one thing, but seeing through walls, finding the trapdoor…I mean, she went straight to it like a dog on the hunt!”
Orso turned to her. “You figured all this out just by listening?”
“Yeah?”
“And touching the walls?”
“Yeah? What of it?”
He stared at her for a long, long time. “Where are you from, Sancia?” he demanded.
“Foundryside,” she said defiantly.
“But where originally?”
“Back east.”
“But where east?”
“Go east enough and you’ll find it.”
“Why are you so evasive?”
“Because it’s none of your damn business.”
“But it is my business. You made yourself my business when you stole my key.” He stepped closer, squinting at her, his eye tracing over the scar on the side of her head. “I don’t need you to tell me,” he said quietly. “I don’t need you to tell me anything. I already know.”
She tensed up. Her heart was beating so fast it felt like a murmur.
“Silicio,” said Orso. “The Silicio Plantation. That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?”
The next thing she knew, Sancia had her hands around his throat.
She hadn’t meant to do it. She’d barely even understood what was happening. One moment, she’d been sitting on the floor. Then Orso spoke that name, and suddenly she smelled the sting of alcohol, heard the whine of flies, and the side of her head was bright with pain — and then she was screaming and throttling a terrified Orso Ignacio, trying to crush his already-bruised windpipe with her bare hands.
She was screaming something, over and over again. It took her a moment to realize she was saying, “Was it you? Was it you? Was it, was it?”
Berenice was suddenly on top of her, trying to haul her off of him, with little success. Then Gregor was there, and since he was two if not three times Sancia’s size, he had much more success.
Gregor Dandolo hugged Sancia tight to his body, his big arms holding her still.
“Let me go!” she screamed. “Let me go, let me go, let me go!”
“Sancia,” said Gregor, surprisingly calm. “Stop. Be still.”
Orso was coughing and gagging and trying to sit up. “What in all the damned world…”
“I’ll kill him!” screamed Sancia. “I’ll kill you, you scrumming bastard!”
“Sancia,” said Gregor. “You are not where you think you are.”
“What’s the matter with her?” said Berenice, terrified.
“She’s having a reaction,” said Gregor. “I’ve seen this among veterans, and experienced it myself.”
“He did it!” shrieked Sancia. She kicked uselessly at Gregor’s legs. “It was him, it was him, it was him!”
“She’s reliving a memory,” he said, grunting slightly. “A bad one.”
“It was him!” she screamed. She felt the blood vessels standing out on her forehead, felt the hot, muggy air on her skin, heard the songs in the fields, the whimpering in the dark. “It was, it was!”
Orso coughed, shook himself, and shouted, “It wasn’t me!”
Sancia struggled against Gregor’s arms. Her back and neck burned with fatigue, but still she struggled.
Sancia slowed as she heard Clef’s words. The many sensations of the plantation retreated from her mind. Then she went limp, exhausted.
Orso sat on the ground, panting, and then said, “It was not me, Sancia. I had nothing to do with Silicio. Nothing! I swear!”
Sancia said nothing. Her breath was ragged, and she was spent.
Gregor slowly lowered her to sit on the floor. Then he cleared his throat like they’d all had a loud disagreement at the breakfast table. “I must ask — what is this Silicio?”
Orso looked at Sancia. Sancia glared back, but did not speak.
“To me, it was no more than a rumor,” said Orso. “A rumor of a slave plantation where…where scrivers practiced the one art we are strictly forbidden to pursue.”
Berenice turned to stare at him, horrified. Gregor said, “You mean…”
“Yes,” said Orso, sighing. “The scriving of human beings. And to look at Sancia…it seems like it worked, at least once.”
“Barely anyone remembers the first days, when they tried scriving humans,” Orso said darkly, sitting at the head of one of the big wooden tables in the scriving library. “Nor would they wish to. I was hardly out of school when they outlawed it. But I saw the cases. I know what happened. I know why they abandoned it.”
Sancia sat silent at the other end of the table, gently rocking back and forth. Gregor and Berenice glanced between her and Orso, waiting to hear more.
“We know how to change an object’s reality,” said Orso carefully. “We speak the language of objects. To speak this language to people, to try to command our bodies with our sigils…It doesn’t work.”
“Why?” asked Gregor.
“On one level, it’s because we’re just not good enough,” said Orso. “It’s kind of like safely scriving gravity, only worse. It would take a huge amount of effort to do — three, four, five lexicons, all to alter one person.”
“But on another level?”
“On another level, it doesn’t work because objects are dumb,” said Orso. “Scriving is all about careful, precise definition, and objects are easy there. Iron is iron. Stone is stone. Wood is wood. Objects have an uncomplicated sense of self, so to speak. People, though, and living things…their sense of self is…complicated. Mutable. It changes. People don’t think of themselves as just a bag of flesh and blood and bones, even if that’s what they basically are. They think of themselves as soldiers, as kings, as wives and husbands and children…People can convince themselves to be anything, and because of that, the scrivings you bind them with can’t stay anchored. To try to bind a person is like writing in the ocean.”
“So what happened to the people the scrivers tried to alter?” asked Gregor.
Orso was quiet for a long while. “Even I won’t speak of such things. Not now. Not ever, if I can help it.”
“Then where did this Silicio come from, sir?” asked Berenice.
“The practice is illegal in Tevanne,” said Orso. “But the laws of Tevanne, as we are all well aware, are weak and restricted. Intentionally so. None of them extend to the plantations. The policy of Tevanne has always been that, provided we get our sugar, coffee, and whatever else on time, we couldn’t care less about what goes on out there. So…if it was communicated to a plantation that, if they accommodated a handful of scrivers from Tevanne, and supplied them with…specimens to experiment on…”
“Then they would receive a bonus, or an amenable contract, or some kind of lucrative reward,” said Gregor dourly, “from one of the merchant houses.”
“On matters completely unrelated to these visiting scrivers,” said Orso. “It all looks aboveboard, from a distance.”
“But why?” said Berenice. “Why experiment on humans at all, sir? We’re successful with our devices — why not focus on those?”
“Think, Berenice,” said Orso. “Imagine if you’d lost an arm, or a leg, or were dying from some plague. Imagine if someone could develop a sigil string that could cure you, or regrow a limb, or…”
“Or keep you alive for much, much longer,” said Berenice softly. “They could scrive you so that you could cheat death itself.”
“Or they could scrive a soldier’s mind,” said Gregor. “Make them fearless. Make it so they don’t value their own lives. Make them do despicable things, and then forget they’d ever done them. Or make them bigger, stronger, faster than all other soldiers…”
“Or scrive slaves to thoughtlessly do their masters’ bidding,” said Berenice, glancing at Sancia.
“The possibilities,” said Orso, “are beyond count.”
“And this is what Silicio was?” asked Gregor. “An experiment run by a merchant house?”
“I’d only heard rumors of it. Some plantation, out in the Durazzo, where people were still attempting the forbidden arts. I heard it moved around, from island to island to make it harder to trace. But a few years ago, news came of a disaster on the island of Silicio. A whole plantation house burned to the ground. All the slaves were running wild. And among those killed in the blaze were a number of Tevanni scrivers, though no one could quite explain what they’d been doing there.”
They looked at Sancia, who was sitting completely still now, her face totally blank of all expression.
“Which house was behind this experiment?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, it probably wasn’t just one merchant house,” said Orso. “If one was trying to scrive humans, they all were. It might still be going on, for all I know. Or perhaps Silicio scared them all off.”
“Even…” Gregor furrowed his brow. “Even Dandolo Chartered?”
“Oh, Captain…How many merchant houses have been doomed because they were too slow to bring a new design to market? How many careers have ended because a competitor found a way to make better wares?”
“But to do that…” said Berenice. “To…to people…”
Suddenly Sancia laughed. “God. God! As if that was any worse! As if that was any worse than the other things happening out there!”
They looked at her, uneasy.
“What do you mean?” asked Berenice.
“Don’t…don’t you understand what the plantations are?” said Sancia. “Think of it. Think of trying to control an island where the slaves outnumber you eight to one. How would you keep them in line? What would you do to keep them docile? What sort of tortures would you apply to those who lashed out? If…If any of you could understand the things I’ve seen…”
“Do they really?” said Berenice. “Then…then why do we allow the plantations to exist?”
Orso shrugged. “Because we’re stupid, and lazy. After the first stage of the Enlightenment Wars — which was what, twenty or thirty years ago? — Tevanne had expanded and exhausted itself. It needed cheap grain, cheap resources, and it had a lot of captives on hand. It was to be a short-term fix — but then we got dependent on it. And it just keeps getting worse and worse.”
Sancia shook her head. “Scriving the human body…those horrors are nothing, nothing, compared to all the other horrors that make the islands run. And if I had the chance, I’d…I’d do it all over again.”
Gregor looked at her. “Sancia…How did Silicio burn?”
She was silent for a long while. “It…it burned,” she said, “because I set it alight.”
She started speaking.
They’d brought her to the big house behind the plantation, then down to the basement, down to where that…place was. She hadn’t even known the word for it. Mortuary? Laboratory? Some cross in between? Sancia hadn’t understood. She’d just smelled the alcohol, looked at the drawings and illustrations on the wall, and all those plates with the strange signs written on them; and she’d remembered the wagon that left the house every morning, reeking and followed by flies; and she’d known in an instant that she wasn’t getting out of there alive.
They’d forced her to drink a sedative — a powerful brandy of some kind, awful and putrid. It’d made her brain muddy and slow, but it didn’t kill the pain that would come later. Not really.
They’d cut off all her hair and shaved her pate with a razor. She remembered blinking blood out of her eyes. Then they’d dropped her down on the table, tied her down, and the one-eyed scriver had wiped her skull with alcohol — how it burned, how it burned—and then…
“Desperate times,” the one-eyed scriver had sighed, picking up a knife, “do call for desperate measures. But don’t we have the right to be unorthodox, my dear?” He’d smiled at her, a simpering expression. “Don’t we?”
And then he’d cut her head open.
Sancia had no words for the sensation. No words for the feeling of having your scalp slashed open and peeled back like the skin of an orange. No words for feeling him measure the bend of your skull, and listening to him tap-tap the plate into shape. No words for suddenly feeling those screws, those horrid screws biting into you, the gritty, grinding feeling as they bored into your skull, and then, and then…
Things had gone black.
She’d died. She’d been sure of it, at the time. There’d been just nothing. But then she’d felt someone…
Someone lying on top of her. Felt their warmth. Felt them bleeding.
It’d taken her a long time to realize she was feeling herself.
She’d been feeling her own body, lying on a dark stone floor. Only she’d been feeling herself from the perspective of the floor. She’d become the floor, just by touching it.
In the dark, alone, young Sancia had awoken and done her best to re-collect her sanity. Her skull had screamed and shrieked with pain — one whole side was swollen and sticky and bristly with stitches — but she’d realized then, alone, blind, that she was perhaps becoming something else, like a moth struggling to fight its way out of its pupa.
There had been chains around her wrists. A lock. And because of what she’d become, she’d felt she was the chains, she was the lock — and so she’d known how to pick it, of course, using a shred of wood she’d pulled off the wall.
They hadn’t intended this, surely. They hadn’t planned for her to become this thing. If they had, they would have tied her up better. And they wouldn’t have sent the one-eyed scriver alone to check on her in the night.
The creak of the door, the spear of light stabbing into the shadows.
“Are you awake, poppet?” he’d called sweetly. “I doubt it…”
He’d probably thought she’d be dead. He certainly hadn’t expected her to be hiding in the corner, lock and chain in hand.
She’d waited until he’d stepped inside. Then she’d sprung.
Oh…Oh, to hear the sound of the thick, heavy lock striking his skull. Oh, to hear him crumple to the ground, gagging, shocked. Then she was on him, wrapping the chain around his throat and pulling it taut, tighter, and tighter, and tighter.
Wild, agonized, and covered in blood, she’d slipped out and roved through the darkened house, feeling the boards beneath her, the walls on either side of her, feeling all these things, feeling everyone in the house all at once…
The house had become her weapon. And she’d used it against them.
She’d locked their bedroom doors, one by one. Locked everything as they slept, except one way out. And then she’d gone downstairs to where they’d kept the alcohol, and the kerosene, and all those reeking fluids, and found a match…
A struck match sounds like a kiss in the dark, sometimes. She remembered thinking that, watching the flame crack to life and then flutter down to the pools of alcohol running across the floor.
No one had made it out. And as she’d sat and watched, she’d realized — master or slave, all screams sounded alike.
Silence filled the library. Nobody moved.
“How did you come to Tevanne?” asked Gregor.
“Snuck aboard a ship,” Sancia said softly. “Easy to stow away when you have the floorboards and the walls to tell you who’s coming and going. When I got off, I stole the name ‘Grado’ from a winery sign I saw, since everyone just expected me to have a last name. Hardest thing was figuring out the limits of what I could do. Touching everything, being everything…it nearly killed me.”
“What’s the nature of your augmentation?” asked Orso.
She tried to describe it — knowing what objects were feeling, what they’d felt, the sheer avalanche of sensation that she constantly fought to keep at bay. “I try to…to touch as few things as possible,” she said. “I can’t touch people. That’s too much. And if the scrivings in my skull get overtaxed, they burn, just burn, like hot lead in my bones. When I first came to Tevanne, I had to wrap myself in rags like a leper. It didn’t take me long to realize that what had been done to me was some kind of scriving. So I tried to find out how to get fixed. How to make me human again. But nothing in Tevanne is cheap.”
“That was why you stole the key?” asked Berenice. “To pay for a physiquere?”
“A physiquere who wouldn’t turn and sell me out to a merchant house,” said Sancia. “Yeah.”
“What?” said Orso, startled. “A what?”
“A…a physiquere,” she said. “One that can fix me.”
“A physiquere…who can fix you?” he said faintly. “Sancia…My God. You are aware that you are probably the only one of your kind alive, yes? I know I’ve never seen a scrumming scrived human in my life, and I’ve seen boatloads of mad shit! The idea of a physiquere who can just, I don’t know, patch you up — it’s preposterous!”
She stared at him. “But…but I’d been told that…that they’d found a physiquere who knew what to do.”
“Then either they were lying,” said Orso, “or being lied to. No one knows how to do what was done to you, let alone reverse it! They were probably going to either take your money and cut your throat, or take your money and sell you to the closest house!”
Sancia was trembling. “So…so what are you saying? Are you saying I’m stuck like this…forever?”
“How should I know?” said Orso. “I told you, I’ve never even seen this before.”
“Sir,” hissed Berenice. “Some…tact? Please?”
Orso looked at her, and then Sancia, who was now white and quivering. “Oh, hell…Listen. After all this, you can stay here. With me, and Berenice. And maaaybe I try to figure out how in the hell they made you, and how to reverse it.”
“Really?” said Gregor. “That’s charitable of you, Orso.”
“It damned well isn’t!” he said. “The girl’s a goddamn marvel, who knows what kind of secrets she’s literally carrying around in her head!”
Gregor rolled his eyes. “Of course.”
“Do you think you could actually figure it out?” said Sancia.
“I think I have a better chance than every other dumb bastard in this city,” said Orso.
Sancia considered it.
“I’ll consider it,” she said.
“Terrific,” said Orso. “But let’s not get too tickled over the idea yet. There’s some devilish asshole out there who wants us all dead. Let’s make sure we’re going to have a future before we start planning for one.”
“Right,” said Sancia. “Do you think you can rig up another tailing scriving?” she asked Berenice. “Like the one you used on Gregor?”
“Of course,” she said. “Those aren’t tricky at all.”
“Good.” She looked at Gregor. “And you — are you able to come with me to follow this bastard?”
To her surprise, Gregor looked uncertain. “Uh…Well. That is…unlikely.”
“Why?”
“Probably for the same reason Orso can’t assist either.” Gregor cleared his throat. “Because I am moderately recognizable.”
“He means he’s famous,” said Orso, “because he’s Ofelia Dandolo’s scrumming son.”
“Yes. And if I were to be seen strolling around the other campos — that would raise alarms.”
“But I’m going to need someone with me,” said Sancia. “I’ve been shot at by these assholes so many times, it’d be nice to have someone to shoot back for a change.”
Gregor and Orso looked at each other, then at Berenice. She sighed deeply. “Ugh. Fine. Fine! I don’t know why I’m always the one following people around the city, but…I suppose I can assist.”
“But…” said Sancia. “I mean, I’m sure Berenice is very organized and helpful, but I was hoping for someone a bit more…robust?”
“Although Captain Dandolo is admirably large of arm,” said Orso, “the nice thing about scriving is that it makes this”—he tapped his head—“a much more tangibly dangerous weapon. And in that regard, young Berenice has little competition. I’ve seen the things she can make. Now. Shut up and get to work.”
18
Sancia sat alone in the library broom cupboard and dozed.
It was not sleep — sleeping now, while she waited for the spy, would be disastrous. Rather, it was a kind of meditation she’d taught herself long ago, slumbering while alert and aware. It was not as restful as actually sleeping — but it didn’t leave her as vulnerable.
There was the sound of footfalls somewhere upstairs.
Sancia took a breath and resumed resting.
Minutes ticked by in the dark. Then there was the sound of a door closing somewhere.
She tried to return to her dozing. This moment alone in the cupboard was invaluable to Sancia, who desperately needed rest, and also frankly needed some time without any stimulation at all: being immersed in so many scrivings was deeply wearying for her.
Clef was doing her a favor, of course, or at least trying to — since the spy would have to be carrying a scrived signal to access the rig, that made it easy for him to identify them. But it didn’t help that he kept telling her all the ones that weren’t the spy.
The sound of footsteps echoed above her.
A door opened somewhere in the basement.
There was a silence, and then the chanting and whispering peaked, and she heard a voice among them: <…I am given rights, given forbearance, because I am chosen, I am allowed, because I am awaited, I am expected, I am NEEDED…>
Sancia reached out and touched the floor with a bare hand. The wooden boards crackled to life in her mind, one by one — and, eventually, she felt someone slowly walking across them.
A woman — Sancia could tell by the size of the feet, the build of the shoe, the gait. Walking very…cautiously.
The woman walked by the broom cupboard — and even tried the knob, though it was locked. Must be checking everything, thought Sancia. Then, finally, she went to the trapdoor to the rig.
Sancia waited, and waited, and waited, one finger pressed to the floor. Then she felt the reverberations in the wood as the trapdoor shut, then footsteps as she came back — and these footsteps were slightly heavier.
Sancia waited until the woman had passed, turned the corner, and started up the stairs. Then she silently unlocked and opened the broom cupboard door, and chased after her.
She caught up with the woman on the main floor of the Hypatus Building, exiting through the lobby. It was late afternoon, and the building was quite busy — though Sancia was wearing Dandolo Chartered colors, so she drew no attention. Sancia spied the woman immediately: she was young, hardly older than Sancia herself, a skinny, dark-skinned thing dressed in formal yellow-and-white robes and bearing a large, leather bag.
She was a secretary or assistant, it seemed — and as such, no one paid any attention at all to her.
Sancia exited the building after the woman and kept her in eyesight, pacing across the Hypatus Building’s front steps and down into the streets. It was dreadfully hot, and foggy and rainy — not the best conditions to be following someone. Most of the streets were too empty for Sancia to feel comfortable making a play for the woman, but when they approached a busy carriage fairway ahead, she saw her chance.
The woman waited along with a small crowd of campo denizens as a train of carriages thundered past. Sancia sidled up, got close, and in a smooth, quick motion that resembled waving away a fly, she dropped the tailing scriving in the woman’s bag.
The carriage train tapered off. The woman, perhaps sensing something, turned to look around, but Sancia was already gone.
Sancia reached into her pocket, grabbed Berenice’s twinned plate, and snapped it in half — her signal that the tag had taken place. Then she pulled out her half of the trailing scriving — a small wooden dowel with a wire tied to it, and a scrived button tied to the end of the wire. The wire was pointing straight at the woman.
Sancia was following the woman to the south gates when she saw the carriage — unmarked, stationed about twenty feet away from the gates, with a single figure in the front. She walked up to it, keeping an eye as the woman passed through the gates to the Commons.
Berenice nodded at her from the carriage’s front window. The girl’s face was unpainted, but she was, rather frustratingly, still quite pretty. “That’s her,” Sancia said. “Let’s go.”
“We’re not taking this gate,” said Berenice. “We’ll go to the east gate and loop back around.”
“What! Why the hell would we do that? We don’t want to lose her!”
“The rig you put on her should give us a mile range to work with,” said Berenice. “But more to the point — we’re assuming that girl’s employer is the one who paid for all those flying assassins, yes? Well, if she’s as valuable as we think she is, they’ll likely pay to give her a few guardian angels — who will be quite interested in anyone who comes out the gates directly after her.”
“Hurry up and get in,” said Berenice. “Change clothes. And stop arguing.”
Sancia did as she asked, climbing into the back. There was a set of clothes more suitable to the Commons laid there. Sighing — she hated changing clothes — Sancia crouched down and started putting them on.
The carriage took off, speeding down the campo wall to the east gate. “Hold on,” said Berenice, spinning the wheel and sending it hurtling through the gates. Then she took a hard right and sped back toward the south gates.
“Could you scrumming slow down?” shouted Sancia, who’d tumbled over in the back, her head stuck in a light coat.
“No,” said Berenice. She held up the tailing wire, which, rather alarmingly, had gone slack. Then, abruptly, the button shot up and pointed off into the Commons. “There,” she said. “We’re in range.” She brought the carriage skidding to a halt, grabbed a pack from the floor, and jumped out. “Come on, grab the pack of clothes. We’ll go on foot. A carriage would stand out here.”
Sancia was tangled in a set of breeches. “Give me a damn second!” She struggled into the clothes, buttoned them up, and jumped out of the carriage.
The two of them started off into the Commons. “Keep your tailing wire in your breast pocket,” Berenice said quietly. “You can feel it tug in the right direction without having to look at it.” She eyed the streets and the windows. “I assume you can spot someone who means us ill?”
“Yeah, look for someone big and ugly with a knife,” said Sancia.
They closed in on their mark, and found the woman seated in a taverna at the edge of Old Ditch. She’d bought a mug of cane wine, but she wasn’t drinking from it.
Sancia peered at the streets around the taverna. “It’s a handoff. Someone else will take it the rest of the way.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Well, I’m not totally sure,” said Sancia. Then she spotted him: a man, standing on the corner dressed as a Commoner. He kept glancing at the woman with the bag with an anxious, wary stare. “But that guy looks like a likely candidate, yeah?”
The man looked around at the street for a while before he finally moved, stalking into the taverna and up to the bar. He ordered and, as he waited, the woman stood and left without a word — leaving the bag behind. When the man got his drink, he walked over to her table, sat, drank his wine in no fewer than five gulps — staring anxiously out at the street — picked up the bag, and left.
He turned east, walking quickly with the bag over his shoulder. Sancia felt the tailing wire twitching in her pocket as he moved. Yet as he walked, Sancia noticed that more people were walking with him, trickling after the man one by one from doorways and alleys. They were all large, and though they were dressed like Commoners, there was an undeniable heft and professionalism to them.
“We’ll keep our distance,” said Berenice quietly.
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “As much of it as we can.”
The group of men kept going east, through Old Ditch, then through Foundryside, until they came to the Michiel campo walls.
“The Michiels?” said Berenice, surprised. “Really? I didn’t think they had the guts. They’re more artisans, focusing on heat and light and glass and—”
“And they’re not going in,” said Sancia. “They’re still moving. So cut the speculation.”
They kept following, lagging behind a bit to give the men some breathing room. Sancia felt the tailing wire in her pocket twitch as the men moved — and, now that they were away from the campos, she could hear the multitude of mutterings emanating from Berenice’s person, many of them quite powerful, by the sound of it.
Sancia glanced sideways at her and cleared her throat. “So — what’s your relationship to Orso?”
“Our relationship?” said Berenice. “You want to talk about that now?”
“A natural conversation would be a good cover.”
“I suppose that’s so. I’m his fab.”
Sancia had no idea what that was. “So…does that mean you and he are, uh…I mean, you know…”
Berenice looked at her, disgusted. “What? No! God, why does everyone always think a fab is a sex thing when I say it? Plenty of men are fabs and no one ever gets that impression about them!” She sighed. “Fab is short for fabricator.”
“Still not following you.”
She sighed again, deeper. “You know how sigils rely on definitions? Discs of thousands and thousands of other sigils that define what that one new sigil means?”
“Vaguely.”
“A fabricator is the person who makes those definitions. Every elite scriver has one, if not several. It’s like architects and builders — the architect dreams up these vast, grand plans, but they still need an engineer to actually make the damned thing.”
“Sounds complicated. How’d you get into that line of work?”
“I’ve a head for remembering things. My father used to make money off me. I’d memorize all the hundreds and thousands of scivoli moves — the game with the checked board and the beads on strings? — and he’d take me around the city and bet against my opponents. Scivoli is a favorite among fabricators, and it became something of a competition to see which one could beat me. But since they all played among themselves, they all basically had the same moves — so it was pretty easy to memorize their games as I went along. So I won.”
“How’d that get you to working for Orso?”
“Because the hypatus found out his fabricator got beat by a seventeen-year-old-girl,” said Berenice. “And he called me in. Looked at me. Then he fired his old fabricator and hired me on the spot.”
Sancia whistled. “I guess you traded up pretty quick. That’s lucky.”
“It was lucky twice over,” she said. “Not only was I plucked out at random to become a scriver, but women are rarely admitted to scriving academies these days. It’s become a more masculine pursuit, after the wars.”
“What happened to your old man?”
“He was…less lucky. He kept coming around to the office and demanding more money. Then the hypatus sent some people to talk to him, and he never came back.” Her words had a forced lightness to them, as if describing a half-remembered dream. “Whenever I go into the Commons, I wonder if I’ll see him. I never do.”
The men began walking northeast. Then they turned a corner, and Berenice sucked in a breath. “Ohhh, shit.”
“What’s wrong?” asked Sancia.
“I…think I know where they’re going,” she said.
“And where’s that?”
Then she saw it: five blocks down the muddy fairway from them was a campo gate, lit with flickering torches. Set in the dark stone arch above the gate was a familiar loggotipo: the hammer and the chisel, crossed before the stone. The men appeared to be heading straight for it.
“The Candianos,” sighed Berenice. She watched as the men trickled through the gates. The Candiano house guards nodded to them. “He knew…” she said quietly. “That’s why he talked to her. Because he’d already suspected.”
“What?” said Sancia. “What are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” said Berenice. “You said you can get us in there?”
“Yeah. Come on.” Sancia trotted down the Candiano campo wall until she found a small steel, altered door.
“This is a security door,” said Berenice. “What the guards use when they need to infiltrate the Commons. You really got a key to here?”
Sancia shushed her.
A swell of whispering, and the voice emerged: <…strong and firm and hard and true, I await…I await the key, the key of light and crystal to shine stars within my depths…>
“What are you going to do?”
“Use a stolen key,” said Sancia. She approached the door, and, making sure Clef wasn’t visible and that Berenice’s back was turned, she stuck him into the lock.
She’d expected the exchange from before — the bellowing voice, the dozens of questions — but it didn’t come. Rather, the exchange happened so much…faster. It was more like when Clef had picked the mechanical locks, popping the Miranda Brass in the blink of an eye, only she felt a burst of information exchanged between Clef and the door.
He really is getting stronger. The thought filled her with dread.
She pulled the door open. “Come on,” she said to Berenice. “Hurry!”
Inside, they had to change topclothes again — this time into Candiano colors, the black and the emerald. As they dressed, Sancia glanced sideways at Berenice and caught a glimpse of a smooth, pale shoulder dappled with freckles, and tawny, moist hair clinging to her long neck.
Sancia looked away. No, she thought. Stop. Not today.
Berenice pulled on a coat. “Your contacts are good,” she said, “if they were able to get a security key.”
Sancia thought quickly for an excuse. “Something’s up with the Candiano campo,” she said. “They’re mixing up all their security procedures. They even changed over all their sachets. Change makes for a lot of opportunities.” Then she had an idea — because this was all true. “You don’t think that has anything to do with whatever is going on?”
Berenice thought about it, her cool, gray eyes fixed on the Mountain of the Candianos in the distance. “Possibly,” she said.
Once they were changed, they started off into the Candiano campo. And as they walked, Sancia realized something.
She looked at all the houses and streets and shops — these done in a darker shade of moss clay than the rest of the campos she’d seen. And she found none of them familiar.
“I’ve…never worked here before,” she said.
“What?” said Berenice.
“I’ve done jobs on the other campos before,” she said. “Filching this or that. But…never the Candiano campo.”
“You wouldn’t have. You know Company Candiano almost fell apart about ten years ago, right?”
“No. I’ve barely lived here three years, and I’ve mostly been trying to survive, not sharing work gossip.”
“Tribuno Candiano was like a god in this city,” said Berenice, “He was probably the greatest scriver of our era. But then they found out he’d been doctoring the financials, spending fortunes on archaeological digs and supposedly hierophantic artifacts. Then the company came crashing down. They lost a huge amount of talent after that,” said Berenice. “Including the hypatus.”
“You can just call him Orso, you know.”
“Thank you. I am well aware of that. Anyway, nearly everything got bought up by the Ziani family, but not many people stuck around to make sure the ship would still float. That tremendous exodus was a great boon to the other merchant houses, but Company Candiano has never really recovered.”
Sancia looked around. There were a lot fewer lights here, no floating lanterns, and almost no scrived carriages. The only impressive thing in sight was the Mountain of the Candianos, which loomed in the distance like a vast whale parting the seas. “No shit.”
Berenice watched the group of men skulking through the streets of the campo. They seemed to be following the outer wall. “Why aren’t they going deeper in? If this is as secretive as it’s supposed to be — why aren’t they headed straight for the Mountain?”
“You either hide secrets close to your heart,” said Sancia, “or out in the hinterlands. It must be somewhere close, though — otherwise they’d have grabbed a carriage, yes?”
They followed the men along the campo wall. Evening was coming on now, and the mist thickened as the sun withdrew. The pale lights of the Candiano campo were a brittle white — not at all the pleasant rosy or yellow hues of the other campos. They looked spectral and strange in the fog.
Then a constellation of lights emerged ahead — a tall, sprawling construct that Sancia had trouble making out. “Is that a…”
“Yes,” said Berenice quietly. “It’s a foundry.”
Finally the man came to the foundry gates. Sancia could read the stone sign above — CATTANEO FOUNDRY. Yet unlike most of the foundries she’d encountered in her life, this one did not seem to be operating: there was no stream of smoke, no quiet roar of equipment, no chatter or cries from the yards beyond.
They watched as the men entered through the gates. The guards out front were heavily armored, and heavily armed — yet they also seemed to be the only people around.
“The Cattaneo Foundry…” said Berenice. “I thought that one was closed when the house went bankrupt. What in hell is going on?”
Sancia spied a tall townhouse next to the foundry walls. “I’ll get a better look.”
“You’ll get a…Wait!” said Berenice.
Sancia trotted over, took off her gloves, and slowly scaled the side of the townhouse. As she climbed, Sancia could hear Berenice fretting down below, muttering, “Oh my God…Oh my God…”
Sancia nimbly pulled herself up onto the slate roof. From here she could see the whole of the foundry yards…and they were empty. Just yards and yards of blank mud or stone. It was a queer sight. Yet she could spy the men in the distance, filing into the foundry main facilities ahead, a huge, fortresslike structure of dark stone, with tiny windows, a copper roof, and dozens and dozens of smokestacks — though only one seemed to be operating, a small one on the west side, which sighed a narrow thread of gray smoke.
So the question is, thought Sancia, what are they making?
She watched the walls and yards of the foundry, and saw that although the facility appeared empty, it was not deserted. There were a handful of men standing along the walls or the ramparts of the foundry, and though it was hard to make out from this distance, she could see the gleam of scrived armor on their shoulders.
Clef sighed.
Sancia carefully climbed back down to the street level, where Berenice stood fuming. “Next time, at least consider asking me before you do that!”
“It’s not shut down,” said Sancia.
“What?”
“The foundry’s not shut down. There’s smoke or steam coming from some of the stacks. So it’s still forging something. Do you have any idea what?”
“Not at all. But the hypatus might. We can go back and consult with him, and then perhaps we can come up with a plan to—”
“No,” said Sancia. “There are twelve guards patrolling the foundry walls tonight. If this bastard listens to the captured sounds from the workshop and gets spooked, there could be fifty tomorrow — or they could move out altogether.”
“So what? Wait…” Berenice stared at her. “You surely aren’t proposing what I think you are — are you?”
“We’ve caught him unawares,” said Sancia. “We take advantage of the opportunity, or we lose it.”
“You want to break into a foundry? Right now? We don’t even know if anything’s going on in there!”
“There is. There are lights on the third floor in the northwest corner.”
Berenice narrowed her eyes. “The third floor…then the administrative offices, possibly?”
“So you know something about foundries. Do you know how to get into a foundry?”
“Well, certainly, but there are countless sachets required,” said Berenice. “But worse, there are only a few ways in, and even a skeleton crew can watch them all, unless you can…” Then she trailed off, staring into the distance.
“Unless you can what?”
Berenice glowered like she’d just had a thought she dearly didn’t want to have.
“Does this have anything to do with all the rigs you’re carrying with you?” asked Sancia.
Her mouth fell open. “How did you know about those?” Then a sheepish look crossed her face. “Oh. Right. You can, uh, hear them. I was going to say — unless you can make your own door somewhere.”
“And…can you do that?”
She squirmed. “I…Well. It’s all, ah…very experimental. And it will depend on finding the right bit of stone wall.”
19
Berenice led Sancia down to the canal running along the foundry. There they came upon a clutch of huge tunnels and pipes sticking out of the canal walls.
“Intake,” muttered Berenice as they reviewed them. “Outtake…Intake, intake, intake…and outtake.”
“These all look like iron,” said Sancia. “Not stone wall.”
“Yes, thank you, that’s clear.” She pointed at one, a huge, gaping iron pipe with a thick grate across its mouth. “That’s it. That’s the one — the metallurgical outtake pipe.”
“What are we going to do about the grate?”
“Go through it,” said Berenice. She walked to the closest tunnel and tried to climb onto its top, but despite her height, she rather pathetically slid back down the side. “Ah — little help?”
Sancia shook her head and gave her a boost. “I guess fabs and scrivers don’t get out much,” she muttered.
Together they crawled across the tunnel tops to the big outtake pipe. Berenice sat and took out a case of what appeared to be a dozen small, scrived components, and many small plates covered with complicated sigils. She selected one component — a slim metal wand whose rounded, bulbous tip looked like molten glass — and looked it over.
“What’s that?” asked Sancia.
“I’d made it to be a small spotlight, but we obviously need something a bit more now. Hmm.” She reviewed her components, selected a rounded handle with a bronze knob on the side, and slid the small end of the wand inside until there was a click. Then she took a long, thin plate, and slotted it into the side of the handle. “There. A heating element. That should do.”
“Do what?”
“Help me down. I’m going to get the grate out of the way.”
Sancia lowered Berenice down until the girl delicately balanced on the lip of the pipe. Then she lifted the wand to one of the big rivets holding up the grate, adjusted the knob on the side, and…
The tip of the wand flared bright hot, like a shooting star had plummeted down to land in the scummy pipe. Sancia cringed and looked away, eyes watering. There was a loud, furious hissing sound. She looked back when it stopped, and saw the rivet was now a glowing blob of smoking, molten metal.
Berenice coughed and waved her hand in front of her face. “I’ll do the sides and the tops, and leave one rivet on the bottom. Then you pull me back up and I’ll attach an anchor to the top — like the one the captain used to weigh you down. This should pry the grate open, and we can slip inside.”
“Shit,” said Sancia. “Why did you bring all this?”
Berenice touched the wand to another rivet. “I got shot at the other night. Rather a lot. I came prepared to prevent such a thing from happening again. A lot of components that can do a lot of different things — when combined the right way, that is.” The wand flared bright.
When Berenice was finished, Sancia hauled her back up. Berenice took out the anchor — a small bronze ball that was covered in shiny brass sigils, with a shiny latch on its side — and chained it to the top of the grate. She slid the latch aside, revealing a wooden button, and touched it. Suddenly the grate groaned and creaked, until it slowly fell open, like a drawbridge.
“Inside,” said Berenice. “Quick.”
They dropped down into the mouth of the pipe and ran into the darkness. Sancia was about to touch a hand to the wall to see, but there was a click, and Berenice’s wand glowed bright again — yet she’d apparently removed whatever component made it capable of burning through iron, and it now only gave out light. “Keep your eyes out for any stone,” she said. She adjusted the light, turning down the brightness.
“Where the hell are we, again?”
“We’re in the metallurgical outtake tunnel of the foundry. Processing so much metal — iron, brass, bronze, lead — it takes a lot of water, which gets tainted and rendered unusable after the forging’s done. So they dump it all out into the canals. It’s a big pipe that runs through a lot of the foundry — and if we see any brick, I should be able to get you in.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell you once we find it.”
They kept walking, and walking, until finally Sancia saw it. “There. On the side.” She pointed. The iron walls of the pipe stopped short about ten feet ahead, and from there on out the walls were stone and brick, like an old sewer.
Berenice reviewed the stone wall and glanced back at the mouth of the tunnel. “Hum. This could work. I think we’re next to the storage bays. But I’m not sure — and I would really prefer to be sure.”
“Why?”
“Well, we could be next to the water reservoirs — which means the tunnel would flood and we’d drown.”
“Crap. Hold on.” Sancia slid off a glove, placed her hand to the bricks, and shut her eyes.
The wall was thick, at least two to three feet. She kept letting it pour into her mind, telling her what it felt, or at least what was on the other side…
She opened her eyes. “It’s just wall,” she said. “Nothing on the other side.”
“Is it thick?”
“Yeah. At least two feet.”
Berenice grimaced. “Well. Maybe it will still work, then…”
“Maybe what will work?”
She didn’t answer. She reached into her pocket and pulled out what looked like four small bronze spheres with sharp steel screws on their ends. She examined the wall, sucked her teeth, and started screwing the bronze spheres into the wall in the shape of a square, with one ball at each corner.
“Can you please just tell me what this is?” asked Sancia impatiently.
“You know about construction scrivings, right?” said Berenice, adjusting the bronze spheres.
“Yeah. They glue bricks together to make them think they’re all one thing instead of separate things.”
“Yes. But lots of foundries use the same kind of stone, or something close to it — which makes it a lot easier to twin.”
“Twin with…what?” asked Sancia.
“With a section of stone wall that’s back in my office,” said Berenice, standing up. “One that has a big hole in the middle.”
Sancia stared at the wall, then at Berenice. “What? Really?”
“Yes,” said Berenice. She scrunched her nose, reviewing her handiwork. “If it works, it should convince this section of wall that it’s the same as the one in my office. That’d then weaken all the Candiano construction scrivings in a circle, and basically carve a hole for you. But…I’ve really never tested this in the field before. Especially not on a wall this thick.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
“Frankly, I don’t have a damned clue what will happen if it goes wrong.” She glanced at Sancia. “Still feeling experimental?”
“I’ve done dumber shit in the past few days.”
Berenice took a breath, and twisted the tops of all four brass spheres, one after another. Then she stepped back and slowly moved away, like she was preparing to run.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the color of the brick changed, ever so slightly, growing just a tiny bit darker. Then came a creaking sound. The bricks shuddered and rippled — and then, suddenly, the wall fractured in the middle in a perfect circle, like someone had carved it with a saw.
“It works,” said Berenice. “It works!”
“Great,” said Sancia. “Now, how the hell do we get that big plug of stone out of the way?”
“Oh. Right.” Berenice pulled out yet another trinket from her pockets: this one appeared to be just a small iron handle with a button on the side. “Just a construction scriving. It’ll stick to the plug’s center.” She placed the handle in the center of the stone plug, confirmed it was stuck, and gave a mighty heave.
Nothing happened. She tugged again, her face turning pink, and stopped, gasping. “Well,” she said. “I didn’t quite anticipate this.”
“Here,” said Sancia. She knelt, gripped the handle, placed one foot against the wall, and pulled.
Slowly, with a low grinding noise, the short stone column slid a few inches out of the wall. Sancia took a breath and pulled again, and it finally fell to the tunnel floor with a plunk, leaving about a two-foot-wide hole in the wall.
“Good,” said Berenice, miffed. “Well done. Can you fit?”
“Keep your voice down. Yeah, I can fit.” She crouched and peered into the hole. The room on the other side was dark. “Do you know what that is over there?” she whispered.
Berenice turned up her scrived light and stuck it through the hole. They glimpsed a wide room with a steel walkway running around the edges, and a huge heap of twisted metals in the center. “It’s the waste bin, essentially — all the castoff bits of metals go here to be melted down and reused.”
“But I’ll really be inside the foundry — yes?”
“Yes?”
She shook her head. “Goddamn. I can’t believe we just broke into a foundry just with some random shit in your pockets.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. But we’re not there yet. This is the basement. The administrative offices are on the third floor. If you want to find out what’s going on here, that’s the place to look.”
“Any advice for how to get up there?”
“No. I’ve no idea what doors will be locked or what passages will be blocked or guarded. You’ll be on your own. I…assume you don’t want me to come with you?”
“Two house-breakers makes for a quick trip to the loop,” said Sancia. “It’d be better if you kept a lookout.”
“Fine with me. I can go back to the streets outside, and if I see something I’ll try to think of some way to warn you.”
Sancia slipped her feet into the hole. “You wouldn’t happen to have any more useful rigs, would you?”
“I do. But they are destructive, and foundries are delicate — meaning if you cut through or break the wrong thing, you would die and probably take a lot of people with you.”
“Great. I sure as shit hope we get something out of this,” said Sancia, sliding forward.
“Me too,” said Berenice. “Good luck.” Then she trotted back down the tunnel.
Sancia slipped through the hole in the wall, stood up, and tried to get her bearings. It was pitch-black in there now, and she was reluctant to use up her talents just to get around a room.
Using Clef, Sancia unlocked door after door as she penetrated the depths of the foundry. She was astounded at the sheer density of the thing, all tiny passageways that led to huge, complicated processing bays, full of giant loomlike devices or cranes that perched over tables or lathes like spiders weaving cocoons about their prey. The heat within the foundry was immense, but there was a constant wind in every hall and passage, carrying the hot air out to — well, somewhere, she assumed. It was like being trapped in the innards of some kind of giant, mindless creature.
Most of it was deserted. Which made sense, since only a portion of it was being used now. But then…
Sancia looked ahead. The passageway ended in a closed wooden door. Presumably there was some kind of hallway being guarded beyond it.
She took off a glove and felt the wall, then the ceiling. The foundry was so alive with scrivings that this felt like walking under a powerful waterfall — the sudden pressure almost knocked her over. But she held on, walking along the walls, her bare fingers trailing over the stone and the metal, until she felt a long, narrow, vertical cavity just ahead…
A hatch. A shaft.
She took her hand away, shook herself, and withdrew back down the hallway until she found a small door. A sign on the front read: LEXICON MAINTENANCE ACCESS. The lock on the front was deeply forbidding.
She took Clef out and stuck him in the keyhole. There was a burst of information, and Clef batted the lock’s defenses away like it was a wall of straw.
Sancia climbed until she came to the third floor. She turned until she was facing the door, and blindly found the handle.
She did as he asked, came to the fourth floor, and opened the hatch. This floor, unlike the others, had windows. Slashes of moonlight lay scattered across the blank stone floor. It looked like this area was mostly storage — lots of boxes, but not much else.
She glanced out a nearby window, got her bearings, and started off toward the administrative offices.
She smiled.
Berenice huddled in a doorway beyond the foundry walls, squinting at the windows through a spyglass. She found it hard to focus. Despite her occasional dabbling in campo intrigue, she was not at all accustomed to such high-stakes trickery. She certainly hadn’t expected anyone to climb any buildings tonight, let alone break into a damned foundry.
Still, it seemed Sancia was right: something was going on, there on the third floor. She could make out a handful of people inside — but they seemed to be slowly gravitating toward the administrative offices.
That’s less than optimal, she thought. How will Sancia manage to get i—
She stopped.
Was that a window opening? There on the dark fourth floor?
She watched, openmouthed, as a small figure in black slipped out of the fourth-floor window and clung to the corner of the building.
“Ohhh my God,” said Berenice.
Sancia hung tight to the corner of the foundry, her fingers digging into the narrow gaps in the stones. She’d held on to trickier places in her time — but not many.
She slipped down inch by inch to the next floor. She found a dark window, which meant no one would be inside, hopefully. She wedged her boots into the stone, then reached out with her stiletto and inserted its tip into the gap at the top of the closed window. She gently pushed the handle of the blade until the window started opening. Once she’d gotten it open a crack, she pulled back until it was wide open. Then she climbed up and lowered herself down into the gap.
Clef said,
She slipped off the desk and got her bearings. This seemed to be a large, empty meeting room, one that hadn’t been used in some time. She walked over to the door opposite the window and squinted through the keyhole. There was some kind of a wide, open area beyond, with four armored Candiano guards standing around, looking bored and tired.
“Whoof,” she said quietly. She stepped back and looked around. There were two other doors on the left and right, presumably leading to adjoining offices.
She walked over to the door on the right and tried the handle. It was unlocked. She silently opened it and looked in. Another office, empty and dark.
She closed it and went to the final door. Yet as she approached…
She stopped.
Sancia got close to the door, knelt, and pressed a hand to the floor. She let the floor pour into her mind — a difficult thing, since there were so many scrivings wearing her stamina thin. Yet soon she felt it…
A bare foot. Just one, the ball of the foot pressed into the floor. And it was pumping, up and down.
Sancia peered through the keyhole. This office was somewhat grand. There were scrived lanterns inside, a long desk covered with old, wrinkled papers, and a set of wooden boxes. There was also a bed in the far corner, and there were two people on the bed, a man and a woman — and they were quite naked and obviously coupling, the man keeping one foot on the floor and his other knee on the bed.
Due to her condition, Sancia did not know a great deal about sex, but she got the impression that this was not particularly good sex. The woman was quite young, about her own age, and terribly pretty, and though her face was fixed in an expression of pleasure there was something anxious and artificial about it, like she was dreading the displeasure of the man more than she was enjoying the experience. And though the man had his back turned to her — his skinny, pale back — there was a mechanical and determined quality to his thrusting, like he’d set his mind to do a job and was hell-bent on doing it.
Sancia watched them, wondering what to do now. She didn’t think she could sneak out and snatch the papers off the desk. The girl kept looking around, anxious and yet bored, like she’d prefer to look at anything else than what was being done to her.
Then there was a knock from somewhere within the office — there must be another door there, she guessed, also leading to the open area beyond.
“Just a minute!” shouted the man, somewhat angrily. He doubled the pace of his thrusting. The girl cringed.
Another knock. “Sir?” said a muffled voice. “Mr. Ziani? It’s done.”
The man continued his endeavors.
“You said to notify you immediately,” said the voice.
The man stopped and bowed his head in frustration. The girl watched him warily.
said Clef.
“Just a second!” shouted the man, louder. Then he turned and dug around on the floor for his clothes.
Sancia’s eyes shot wide. Though it wasn’t particularly bright in the room, she knew that face — the curls, the scraggly beard, the narrow cheeks.
It was her client. The man who’d turned on the imperiat that night in the Greens, and caused the blackouts — and the man who’d almost certainly had Sark killed.
She stared at him, trying not to move.
Ziani pulled on a pair of hose. Then he sighed and barked, “Come in!”
A door opened somewhere in the office, and bright light spilled in. The nude girl in the bed pulled the sheets up to cover herself, glaring at them sullenly.
“Ignore her,” snapped Ziani. “And come in.”
A man entered the room and shut the door behind him. He appeared to be a clerk of some sorts, dressed in Candiano colors, and he carried a small wooden box with him.
“I assume if it was a success,” said Ziani, sitting at the desk, “you’d be looking much happier.”
“Did you expect a success, sir?” said the clerk, surprised.
Ziani impatiently waved a hand. “Just bring it over.”
The clerk approached and held out the box. Ziani took it, glaring at him, and opened it.
Sancia almost gasped. Inside the box was another imperiat — but this one appeared to be made of bronze, not the gleaming gold she’d seen before.
Ziani examined it. “It’s shit,” he said. “It’s shit, is what it is. What happened?”
“The…the same thing that’s always happened, sir,” said the clerk. He was obviously uncomfortable having this conversation with a nude girl in the room. “We forged the device to your specifications. Then we attempted the exchange…and, ah, well. Nothing happened. The device remained as you see it now.”
Ziani sighed and pawed through the notes on the desk. He pulled out one browned, wrinkled sheet of parchment and examined it.
“Perhaps…” said the clerk. Then he stopped.
“Perhaps?” said Ziani.
“Perhaps, sir, since Tribuno has been of such great help on the other devices…Perhaps you could also discuss his notes with him, regarding this subject?”
Ziani tossed the papers back onto the desk. Sancia watched the page fall. Tribuno Candiano’s notes? On what?
“Tribuno is still mad as a tick on a burning hare’s ass,” Ziani said. “And he’s only been somewhat useful. About once a month, we find something scrawled in his cell that, yes, is useful — like the strings for the gravity plates — but it’s not like we can control that. And he’s written shit-all about the hierophants.”
There was a silence. Both the girl and the clerk watched Ziani anxiously, wondering what he’d make them do next.
“The problem is with the shell itself,” said Ziani, looking at the bronze imperiat. “Not the ritual. We’re following the ritual’s instructions exactly. So there must be some sigil we’re missing…Some component of the original we either don’t have or aren’t using right.”
“Do you think we need to reexamine the other artifacts, sir?”
“Absolutely not. It took a lot of work to move the trove out of the Mountain. I wouldn’t want to lead Ignacio or any other of these slippery bastards to it just because I wanted to check notes.” He tapped the bronze imperiat before him. “We’re doing something wrong. Something on these is being made improperly…”
“So…what would you suggest we do, sir?”
“Experiment.” Ziani stood and started getting dressed. “I want a hundred of the shells made before morning and sent to the Mountain,” he said. “Enough for us to experiment on and adjust, comparing it with the original.”
The clerk stared at him. “A hundred? Before morning? But…sir, the Cattaneo’s lexicon is at a reduced state right now. To produce that many, we’d have to spin it up quickly.”
“So?”
“So…the lexicon will spike. It will definitely cause nausea for all of us, I expect.”
Ziani was still. “Do you think I’m stupid?” he asked.
The room grew tense. The girl shrank down below the sheets.
“C-certainly not, sir,” said the clerk.
“Because it feels like you might,” said Ziani. He turned to look at him. “Just because I’m not a scriver. Just because I don’t have as many certifications as you. Because of that—you think I don’t know these things?”
“Sir, I just…”
“It’s a risk,” said Ziani. “And an acceptable one. Do it. I’ll supervise the fabrication.” He pointed at the girl. “You stay there. It’s far too long since I waxed an agreeable cunny, and I won’t have this dull bit of business delay that, either.” He buttoned up his shirt, his face twisted in faint disdain. “I certainly won’t deign to go pawing around Estelle’s musty skirts for a bit of push.”
“And…sir?”
“Yes?” snapped Ziani.
“What should we do with the corpse?”
“The same thing we’ve done with all the others? I mean, why should I know? We have people for that, don’t we?”
Ziani and the clerk left the office and shut the door behind them. The girl slowly shut her eyes, sighing half in relief, half in dismay.
Sancia silently slid out her bamboo pipe and loaded it with a dart.
said Clef.
Sancia waited for a few minutes, making sure they were really gone. Then she silently opened the door a crack, trained the pipe on the girl’s neck, and blew.
The girl made a soft, “Ah!” as the dart struck her neck. She tensed, drunkenly slapped at her neck, fell back, and was still.
Sancia slipped into the room and went to the other office door. She peered through the keyhole and confirmed no one was approaching. Then she looked at the papers and boxes on the desk.
She picked up the thing Ziani had called the “shell”—his term for the bronze imperiat, which apparently did not work. She found he was right: it was little more than a curiosity, a dull, dead hunk of metal. Though it bore many strange sigils, it was not a true scrived device.
hundred imperiats…God, can you scrumming imagine?>
She tried to, and shivered.
She looked at the papers on the desk, and saw most were yellow with age, and written in a strange, spidery hand, like the hand of someone who was either old, infirm, or both.
She looked at the top of one paper:
THEORIES ON THE INTENT OF HIEROPHANTIC TOOLS
The notes of Tribuno Candiano, she thought. The greatest scriver of our age…There were a lot of them, and she understood few at a glance.
But some of the papers were different. They appeared to be wax rubbings of stone engravings or tables or bas-reliefs…But what they depicted was confusing.
Each one showed an altar, always an altar, positioned at the center of each paper. Floating above the altar was the image of a prone, sexless human body — perhaps it was an artistic rendition of someone lying on the altar’s surface. Floating above the human body was always an oversized sword or blade, several times the size of the altar or the person. Written inside the blade were any number of complicated sigils, which varied from engraving to engraving, but all of them had these three things in common: the body, the altar, and the blade.
There was something gruesomely clinical to it all. They did not depict some religious rite, it felt. Instead, they seemed like…
Clef moaned, a sound suggesting both pain and epiphany.
Then her head lit up with agony.
It was like the world was dissolving, like a meteor had struck the earth, like the walls had been turned to ash and cinder…She was still in the office, still standing next to that sleeping girl, but there was a hot coal in her brain, burning it away, scorching the walls of her skull. She opened her mouth in silent pain and was surprised when smoke didn’t come pouring out.
Sancia fell to her knees and vomited. It’s the lexicon spiking, she tried to tell herself. That’s all it is…You’re just…sensitive to it…
Clef cried out joyously:
She felt warmth running down her face, and saw drops of blood on the floor below her.
Images leaked into her mind. The dusty smell of the office faded, and she smelled…
Desert hills. Cool night breezes.
Then she heard the hiss of sand, and the sound of millions of wings, and she was gone.
Berenice peered through the spyglass, watching for Sancia. The girl had abruptly sunk to the ground and fallen out of view — which seemed odd.
What is she doing? Why isn’t she getting out of there?
Then nausea hit her — a familiar sensation for her.
They’re spinning up the lexicon, she thought. Activating more scrivings. And maybe it’s done something to Sancia.
She watched for a moment, then glassed the big, open area beyond the office. She saw glints of metal, and realized guards in scrived armor were walking at a quick pace — not on patrol, then. They were looking for something. And they seemed to be heading straight for Sancia.
“Shit,” she whispered. She looked back at the office. She still couldn’t see Sancia. “Oh, shit.”
Sancia was no longer in the office, no longer in the foundry or the campo or even in Tevanne. She was gone from that place.
Now she stood atop creamy yellow sand dunes, the pale pink moon hanging fat and heavy in the sky. And standing on the dune across from her was…
A man. Or something man-shaped, facing away from her.
He was wrapped in black cloth, every inch of his body, his neck and face and feet. He wore a short black cloak that went down to about mid-thigh, and his arms and hands were lost in its folds. Next to the man-thing was a curious, ornate golden box, about three feet high and four feet long.
She knew this thing, she knew the box. She recognized them.
I can’t let him see me, she thought.
She heard a sound coming from somewhere in the sky…the sound of so many wings, tiny and delicate, like a giant flock of butterflies.
The man-thing’s head twitched ever so slightly, like he’d heard something. The sound of flapping wings grew louder.
No, she thought. No, no…
Then the man-thing rose up, just a touch, floating a foot above the dunes, and hung there, suspended in the night air.
Berenice stared through the spyglass as the guards got closer and closer. She had to do something, to warn Sancia or wake her somehow, or at least distract the guards.
She looked around. She had quite a few more rigs on her person, of course — when Berenice Grimaldi prepared, she did so with enthusiasm — but she’d never have imagined preparing for this.
Then she spied a possibility: there was a massive globe light just outside the southwest corner of the foundry, standing on a tall, iron pole, about forty feet high. It probably lit up the main entrance when the foundry was running.
She did some calculations. Then she pulled out her fusing wand and ran over to it.
I scrumming hope this works.
The man-thing hung in the air above the dunes across from Sancia, silent and still. Then the sands started to swirl around him, undulating in smooth rings as if being whipped about by a storm — but there was no wind, at least not that strong.
Please, no, thought Sancia. Not him. Anyone but him.
The man-thing slowly started to rotate to face her. The sound of flapping wings was deafening now, as if the night sky were thick with invisible butterflies.
Terror filled her, wordless and shrieking and mad. No! No, I can’t! I can’t let him see me, I can’t LET HIM SEE ME!
The thing raised a black hand, fingers extended to the sky. The air quaked, and the sky shuddered.
Then there was a tremendous crack sound, and the vision faded.
She was back in the office, on her knees. Her stomach was boiling with nausea, and there was vomit on the floor — but she was back in her own body.
He didn’t answer.
“What the hell was that sound?” said a voice beyond the office door.
She froze, listening.
“The damn lamp column fell over outside! It fell over the walls and into the yard!”
Sancia stumbled forward and slipped through the door to the empty adjoining office. She climbed up onto the desk just as she heard a knock. “Miss?” called a voice. “Miss? We need to come in and get something off the desk. Don’t be alarmed, please.”
“Shit,” muttered Sancia. She leapt up, grabbed the window, and hauled herself through the top. Then she slipped out, gripped the edge of the building, and started to climb up to the fourth floor.
She heard a voice cry, “What in hell? What happened here! Wake the girl up, now, now!”
She crawled through the fourth-floor window and started sprinting back toward the maintenance shaft. About halfway there she heard the floor below erupt in shouting.
Berenice exhaled with relief as she watched Sancia clamber back through the fourth-floor window. The half-melted base of the lamp tower was still glowing a cheerful red before her. She’d never intended to use the wand for this, and scrupulously made a note of this new application.
Then she heard the shouts from over the walls — guards, probably. And soon they’d be coming out to see what had happened.
“Shit,” said Berenice. She ran for the canal.
Sancia dropped down the lexicon shaft as fast as she could, leaping from rung to rung until she came to the ground floor. Then she staggered back down the passageways, heading to the rubbish room in the basement, where Berenice had so adeptly carved the hole in the wall.
She could hear footsteps in the hallways behind her and above her, men shouting and doors flying open. She ran as fast as she could, but her head felt slow and sluggish. She tasted blood in her mouth and realized her nose was bleeding quite a lot.
I hope I don’t goddamn bleed out before I make it out of here, she thought wearily. Not after all this work.
Then she heard a voice far behind her: “Stop! Stop, you!”
She looked over her shoulder and saw an armored guard standing far down at the end of the passageway behind her. She saw him lift his espringal, and leapt behind a corner just as a scrived bolt shrieked down the hallway, cracking into the wall on the far end. Scrumming terrible place to dodge shots, she thought. But she had no choice: she flung herself back around the corner and sprinted for the door to the rubbish bin.
“She’s here, she’s here!” screamed the guard.
She reached the metal door, threw it open, and leapt into the darkness, slamming the door behind her. She fumbled down the dark steps to the hole in the wall, half-worried she’d fall off the walkway into the piles of scrap metal below. Then there was a harsh crack-crack-crack, and the room filled with weak light. She looked back to see the door behind now had three large holes in it, undoubtedly put there by scrived bolts.
God, they’ll tear through that in a second! she thought.
“Come on!” hissed a voice in the darkness. “Come on!”
She turned and saw a light on the far wall — Berenice’s scrived light, shining through the hole she’d made. Sancia leapt down the steps and threw herself through the breach.
“We won’t run far!” she gasped as she emerged. “They’re right behind me!”
“I am aware of that.” Berenice had her back to her, and she seemed to be fiddling with something in the roof of the tunnel. “There,” she said, stepping back. Sancia saw it was the anchor she’d used to open the grate of the pipe, but now it was attached to the end of a spike that looked like it’d been stabbed up into the bricks. “Come on. Now we really need to run.”
Sancia staggered to her feet and limped down the tunnel. There was a faint crackling sound behind them.
“No, faster,” said Berenice, anxious. “Like, much faster.” She grabbed Sancia, threw her arm over her shoulder, and hauled her forward just as the crackling grew to a rumble.
Sancia looked back to see the brick section of the tunnel suddenly collapse, sending a wall of dust flying at them. “Holy hell,” she said.
“I don’t think it should bring down the metal parts of the pipe,” said Berenice as they hobbled up to the grate. “But I would prefer not to find out so — up! Up and out, now!”
Sancia wiped blood from her face, grabbed the rungs, and started to climb.
20
“I …I thought I told you just to follow them!” said Orso, aghast.
“Well, we did that,” croaked Sancia. She spat another mouthful of blood into a bucket. “You didn’t say not to do all the other stuff.”
“To break into a foundry?” he squawked. “And…and to collapse its metallurgical outtake piping? I had thought such things would have easily been beyond the pale of common sense — or am I mad, Berenice?”
He glared at Berenice, who was sitting in the corner of his office, sorting through the notes Sancia had stolen. Gregor leaned over her shoulder, idly reviewing them with his hands clasped behind his back. “I was merely confirming a suspicion you had articulated, sir,” she said.
“And which one was that?”
She looked up. “That it was Tomas Ziani who’s behind all this. That is why you spoke to Estelle at the meeting yesterday — correct, sir?”
Gregor blinked and stood. “Estelle Ziani? Wait — the daughter of Tribuno Candiano? Orso talked to her?”
“You sure are telling a hell of a lot of tales out of school!” Orso snarled at her.
“Why did you suspect Ziani, Orso?” asked Gregor.
Orso scowled at Berenice, then tried to think of what to say. “When I was at the council meeting, with everyone talking about the blackout, none of the house leaders seemed to act odd — except possibly Ziani. He looked at me, at my neck, and he went out of his way to dig at me on the hierophants. There was something to that that just…bothered me. Just a hunch.”
“A good hunch,” said Sancia. She blew her nose into a rag. “I mean, I saw him—all of him. He’s behind this. All of it. And he’s trying to build dozens, if not hundreds, of his own imperiats.”
There was a silence as they all considered this.
“Which means that, if Tomas Ziani figures this process out,” said Gregor quietly, “he can essentially hold the civilized world hostage.”
“I…I still can’t believe it’s Ziani,” said Orso. “I asked Estelle if she would tell me if Ziani was coming after me, and she said she would.”
“You trusted the man’s wife to betray him?” asked Gregor.
“Well, yes? But it sounds like Tomas Ziani is basically keeping her locked in the Mountain, much like her father. So although she might have a reason to betray him, I don’t know how much she could actually know.”
“Uh, I don’t know who this Estelle person is,” said Sancia, “but I just assume it’s someone Orso is scrumming?”
They all stared at her, scandalized.
“Okay,” said Sancia, “someone you were scrumming then?”
Orso’s face worked as he tried to figure out how offended he was. “I was…acquainted with her, once. When I worked for Tribuno Candiano.”
“You were scrumming your boss’s daughter?” said Sancia, impressed. “Wow. Gutsy.”
“As entertaining as Orso’s personal life is,” said Gregor loudly, “we should return to the issue at hand. How can we prevent Tomas Ziani from building up an arsenal of hierophantic weapons?”
“And how does he even plan to make them?” asked Berenice, paging through Tribuno’s notes. “It seems to be going wrong for him somehow…”
“Please, Sancia, go over what Ziani said,” said Orso. “Line by line.”
She did so, describing every word of the conversation she’d heard.
“So,” said Orso when she was finished. “He called it a shell. And described some…some kind of failed exchange?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He also mentioned a ritual. I don’t know why he called it a shell, though — shells have something inside them, usually.”
“And he thought the shell itself was the problem,” said Berenice. “The imperiats they’d made somehow weren’t exactly like the original imperiat.”
“Yeah. That seemed to be it.”
There was a pause. Then Berenice and Orso looked at each other in horror.
“It’s the Occidental alphabet,” Berenice said. “The lingai divina.”
“Yes,” said Orso faintly.
“He’s…he’s missing a piece. A sigil, or more. That’s got to be it!”
“Yes.” Orso heaved a deep sigh. “That’s why he’s been stealing Occidental artifacts. That’s why he stole my scrumming key! Of course. He wants to complete the alphabet. Or at least get enough of it to make a functional imperiat.”
“I’m lost,” said Gregor. “Alphabets?”
“We only have pieces of the Occidental alphabet of sigils,” said Berenice. “A handful here, a handful there. It’s the biggest obstacle to Occidental research. It’s like trying to solve a riddle in a foreign language where you only know the vowels.”
“I see,” said Gregor. “But if you steal enough samples — the bits and pieces and fragments that have the right sigils on them…”
“Then you can complete the alphabet,” said Orso. “You can finally speak the language to command your tools to have hierophantic capabilities. Theoretically. Though it sounds like that greasy bastard Ziani is having a time of it.”
“But he is getting help,” said Berenice. “It is Tribuno Candiano who’s writing the sigil strings to make rigs like the gravity plates, and the listening device. Only he’s doing it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, in his madness.”
“But that still doesn’t hang together for me,” said Orso. “The Tribuno I knew didn’t bother with the usual gravity bullshit so many scrivers wasted their lives on. His interests were far…grander.” He pulled a face, like remembering Tribuno’s interests disturbed him. “I feel like it just can’t be him.”
“The Tribuno you knew was sane,” said Gregor.
“True,” admitted Orso. “Either way, it sounds like Ziani does have all of Tribuno’s Occidental collection — that would be the trove that he’d moved out of the Mountain, right?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He mentioned some other artifacts he’d hidden away somewhere — mostly to hide it from you, Orso.”
Orso smirked. “Well. At least we’ve got the scrummer rattled. I suspect he’s been stealing Occidental artifacts from all kinds of people. He must have quite the hoard. And…there was that last bit…the one I find most confusing. They had to dispose of a body?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He made it sound like they’d been disposing of bodies for some time. Didn’t seem to matter whose bodies they were. I get the impression it had something to do with this ritual — but I don’t understand any of that.”
Gregor held up his hands. “We’re getting off track. Alphabets, hierophants, bodies — yes, all that is troubling. But the core issue is that Tomas Ziani intends to manufacture devices that can annihilate scriving on a mass scale. They would be as bolts in a vast quiver to him and his forces. But his entire strategy rests upon one item — the original imperiat. That’s the key to all of his ambitions.” He looked around at them. “So. If he were to lose that…”
“Then that would be a massive setback,” said Berenice.
“Yes,” said Gregor. “Lose the original, and he’ll have nothing to copy.”
“And if Sancia is right, Tomas flat-out said where he was keeping it,” said Orso thoughtfully. He turned in his chair to look out the window.
Sancia followed his gaze. There, huddled in the distant cityscape of Tevanne, was a vast, arching dome, like a smooth, black growth in the center of the city: the Mountain of the Candianos.
“Ah, hell,” she sighed.
“It’s insane,” said Sancia, pacing. “The damned idea is insane!”
“Breaking into a foundry on a whim was pretty goddamn insane,” said Orso. “But you seemed game about that!”
“We caught them with their hose down,” said Sancia. “In an abandoned foundry in the middle of nowhere. That’s different from trying to break into the scrumming Mountain, maybe the most guarded place in the damned city, if not the world! I doubt if Berenice has some delightful trinket in her pockets that could help us get into there.”
“It is insane,” said Gregor. “But it is, regrettably, our only option. I doubt if Ziani can be lured out of the Mountain with the original imperiat. So we must go in.”
“You mean me,” said Sancia. “I doubt if your dumb asses will be the ones being dropped in there.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Gregor. “But I admit, I’ve no idea how to break into such a place. Orso — did you live there ever?”
“I did once,” said Orso. “When it was freshly built. That was a hell of a long time ago, it seems now.”
“You did?” asked Sancia. “Are the rumors true? Is it really…haunted?”
She half expected Orso to burst out laughing at the notion, but he didn’t. Instead he leaned back in his chair and said, “You know, I’m not sure. It’s…difficult to describe. It’s big, for one thing. The sheer size of the thing is a feat in and of itself. It’s like a city in there. But that wasn’t the oddest thing. The oddest thing about the Mountain was that it remembered.”
“Remembered what?” asked Sancia.
“What you did,” said Orso. “What you’d done. Who you were. You’d walk into a bathing room at the same time every day and find a bath already drawn for you, piping hot. Or you’d walk down the hall to your lift at the usual time and find it waiting for you. The changes would be subtle, and slow, just incremental adjustments — but, slowly, slowly, people got used to the Mountain knowing what they were doing inside of it, and adjusting for them. They got used to this…this place predicting what they’d do.”
“It learned?” said Gregor. “A scrived structure learned, like it had a mind of its own?”
“That I don’t know. It seemed to. Tribuno designed the thing in his later years, when he’d gotten strange, and he never shared his methods with me. He’d grown hugely secretive by then.”
“How could it know where people were, sir?” asked Berenice.
A guilty look came over Orso’s face. “Okay, well, I did have something to do with that…You know the trick with my workshop door?”
“It’s scrived to sense your blood…Wait. That’s how the Mountain keeps track of everyone inside? It senses every resident’s blood?”
“Essentially,” said Orso. “Every new resident has to log a drop of blood with the Mountain’s core. Otherwise it won’t let them into where they need to go. Your blood is your sachet, getting you in and out. Visitors are either restricted to visitor areas, or they have to carry around sachets of their own.”
“That’s why the Mountain is so secure,” said Sancia quietly. “It knows who’s supposed to be there.”
“How could it do all that?” asked Gregor. “How could a device be so powerful?”
“Hell, I don’t know. But I did once see a specification list for the Mountain’s core — and it included cradles for six full-capacity lexicons.”
Berenice stared at him. “Six lexicons? For one building?”
“Why go to all that effort?” asked Gregor. “Why do all this in secret, and never capitalize on it, never share it?”
“Tribuno’s ambitions were vast,” said Orso. “I don’t think he wanted to mimic the hierophants — he wanted to become one. He grew obsessed with a specific Occidental myth. Probably the most famous one about the most famous hierophant.” He sat back. “Besides his magic wand, what’s the one thing everyone knows about Crasedes the Great?”
“He kept an angel in a box,” said Berenice.
“Or a genie in a bottle,” said Gregor.
“He built his own god,” said Sancia.
“They all amount to the same thing, don’t they?” said Orso. “A…a fabricated entity with unusual powers. An artificial entity with an artificial mind.”
“And so,” Gregor said slowly, “you think that when he made the Mountain…”
“I think it was something of a test case,” said Orso. “An experiment. Could Tribuno Candiano make the ancestral home of the Candianos into an artificial entity? Could it act as a draft effort at an artificial god? It was a theory he’d mentioned to me before. Tribuno believed that the hierophants had once been men—ordinary human beings. They’d just altered themselves in unusual ways.”
“He thought they were people?” said Gregor. “Like us?” This idea was utter nonsense to most Tevannis. To say that the hierophants were once men was akin to saying the sun used to be an orange, grown on a tree.
“Once,” said Orso. “Long ago. But look around you. See how scriving has changed the world in a handful of decades. Now imagine that scriving could also change a person. Imagine how they could change over time. His suspicion, I think, was that their elevation came from this artificial being they’d made. The men built a god, and the god helped them become hierophants. He believed he could walk in their footsteps.”
“Creepy,” said Sancia. “But none of this makes me any more eager to get in there. If we even can.”
Orso sucked his teeth. “It seems insurmountable, but…There’s always a way. A complicated design means more rules, and more rules mean more loopholes. We have a much more immediate problem, though. How fast are you these days, Berenice?”
“How fast, sir? I average thirty-four strings a minute,” she said.
“With successful articulation?”
“Of course.”
“Full strings, or partials?”
“Full. Inclusive up to tier four for all Dandolo language components.”
“Ah,” said Gregor. “What are we, uh, talking about here?”
“If we’re breaking into the Mountain, even Berenice can’t handle all that work. And besides, she’s no canal man. We’d need more scrivers. Or thieves. Or scrivers who are thieves.” Orso sighed. “And we can’t do it here. Not only will Gregor’s mother notice us plotting treason right in her scrumming workshops, but this place isn’t safe from the assassins. We’d need a full crew, and a new place to work. Without those, this whole thing is just a daydream.”
Sancia shook her head. I’m going to regret this. “Orso — I need to know…how rich are you?”
“How rich? What, you want a number or something?”
“What I’m saying is, do you personally have access to large sums of cash you can quickly retrieve without raising eyebrows?”
“Oh. Well. Certainly.”
“Good. All right.” She stood. “Then get up. We’re all taking a trip.”
“Where to?” asked Gregor.
“Into the Commons,” said Sancia. “And we’re going to need to tread lightly.”
“Because there are still thugs out there who want us dead?” asked Berenice.
“There’s that,” said Sancia. “And we’re going to bring a hell of a lot of money with us.”
Four lanterns — three blue, one red, hanging above a warehouse door. Sancia scurried up, looked around, and knocked.
A slot in the door opened and a pair of eyes peeked out. They looked at her and sprang wide. “Oh God! You? Again? I just assumed you were dead.”
“You’re not so lucky,” said Sancia. “I’ve brought you a deal, girl.”
“What? You’re not here to ask for a favor?” said Claudia from the other side of the door.
“Well. A deal and to ask for a favor.”
“Should have known,” said Claudia with a sigh. She opened the door. She was dressed in her usual leather apron and magnifying goggles. “After all, how could you have the resources to offer us a deal?”
“They’re not my resources.” She handed a leather satchel out to Claudia.
Claudia looked at it mistrustfully, then took it and looked inside. She stared. “P-paper duvots?”
“Yeah.”
“This has to be…a thousand, at least!”
“Yeah.”
“What’s it for?” asked Claudia.
“That bit there is to calm you down so you listen. I’ve got a job for you. A big one. And you need to hear me out.”
“What, are you playing at being Sark now?”
“Sark didn’t ask for anything this big,” said Sancia. “I need you and Gio to help on this job specifically, full-time, for a matter of days. And we also need a secure space to work in, and all kinds of scriving materials. If you can get me that, there’s a hell of a lot more money where that came from.”
“That is a big ask.” Claudia turned the leather satchel over in her hands. “So that’s the job bit?”
“That’s the job bit.”
“What’s the favor bit?”
“The favor bit,” said Sancia, looking her hard in the eye, “is you forget everything you ever heard about Clef. Ever. Now. This instant. You’ve never heard of him. I’m just some thief who comes to you to get tools and credentials to get into the campos, and nothing else. You do that, and you get your money.”
“Why?” asked Claudia.
“Never mind why,” said Sancia. “Just erase all of that from your brain, get Gio to do the same, and you’ll both be rich.”
“I’m not so sure I like this, San…”
“I’m going to make a signal now,” said Sancia, “and they’re going to walk up. When they do, don’t start screaming.”
“Start screaming? Why would I…” She stopped as Sancia raised a hand, and Berenice, Gregor, and Orso emerged from the shadows and joined her at the door.
She stared in horror, mostly at Orso, who was cursing after having stepped in a puddle. “Holy…holy shit…” she whispered.
Orso looked up at Claudia and the warehouse. He wrinkled his nose. “Dear God,” he said. “They work here?”
“You had better let us in,” said Sancia.
Orso paced around the Scrappers’ workshop like a farmer buying chickens at a seedy market. He examined their scriving blocks, their sigil strings on the walls, their bubbling cauldrons full of lead or bronze, their air fans strapped to carriage wheels. Claudia had ushered all the other Scrappers out before letting them in, but now she and Giovanni sat there, watching Orso dart around their quarters with terrified looks, like a panther had broken into their home as they slept.
He walked over and looked at the sigils scrawled on a blackboard. “You’re…making a way to control carriages remotely,” he said slowly. It wasn’t a question.
“Uh,” said Giovanni. “Yes?”
Orso nodded. “But it’s not expressing right. Is it, Berenice?”
Berenice stood and joined him. “The orientation’s wrong.”
“Yes,” said Orso.
“Their calibration tools are far too complicated,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The rig probably gets confused, isn’t sure which way it’s facing. So it likely just shuts down after a couple dozen feet or so.”
“Yes.” Orso looked at Giovanni. “Doesn’t it?”
Gio looked at Claudia, who shrugged. “Um. Yes. So far. More or less.”
Orso nodded again. “But just because it doesn’t work…that doesn’t mean it’s bad.”
Claudia and Gio blinked and looked at each other. They slowly realized that Orso Ignacio, legendary hypatus of Dandolo Chartered, had just given them a compliment.
“It’s…something I’ve worked on for a long time,” said Gio.
“Yes,” said Orso. He looked around the room, taking it all in. “Worked on with crude tools, secondhand knowledge, fragments of designs…You’ve improvised fixes to problems no campo scriver’s ever had to deal with. You’ve had to reinvent fire every day.” He looked at Sancia. “You were right.”
“Told you so,” said Sancia.
“Right about what?” said Claudia.
“She said you were good,” said Orso. “And you might be good enough for this. Maybe. What did she tell you about the job?”
Claudia glanced at Sancia, and Sancia thought she could detect a hint of wrath there, which she couldn’t blame her for. “She said you needed us,” said Claudia. “And a workshop of your own. And materials.”
“Good,” said Orso. “Let’s try to keep things that simple.”
“They can’t possibly stay that simple,” said Claudia. “You’re disrupting everything we do here. We’ve got to know more to get on board with this!”
“Fine,” said Orso. “We’re going to break into the Mountain.”
They stared at him, incredulous.
“The Mountain?” Giovanni looked at Sancia. “San, are you mad?”
“Yes,” said Orso. “That’s why we’re here.”
“But…but why?” said Claudia.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Orso. “Just know that someone wants us dead — including, yes, me. The only way for us to stop them is to get into the Mountain. Help us, and you get paid.”
“And what’s the payment?” said Claudia.
“Well, that depends,” said Orso. “Originally I was going to pay you some huge sum of money…but having seen what you’re doing here, some alternate options seem available. You’re working with spotty, secondhand knowledge. So…perhaps some of the third- and fourth-tier sigil strings from Dandolo Chartered and Company Candiano would be more valuable to you.”
Sancia didn’t understand what that meant, but both Claudia’s and Giovanni’s eyes shot wide. They froze, and both seemed to do some rapid calculations.
“We’d want fifth tier too,” said Claudia.
“Absolutely not,” said Orso.
“Half the Dandolo fourth-tier fundamentals are intended to function with fifth-tier strings,” said Giovanni. “They’d be useless without them.”
Orso burst out laughing. “Those combinations are all for massive designs! What are you trying to do, build a bridge across the Durazzo, or a ladder to the moon?”
“Not all of them,” said Giovanni, stung.
“I’ll give you some Candiano fifth-tier strings,” said Orso. “But none from Dandolo.”
“Any Candiano string from you is going to be outdated,” said Claudia. “You haven’t worked there in a decade.”
“Possibly. But it’s all you’re going to get,” said Orso. “Select Candiano fifth-tier strings, and the fifty most-used third- and fourth-tier strings for both Dandolo and Candiano. Plus whatever proprietary knowledge you gain during the planning process, plus a sum to be agreed upon later.”
Claudia and Giovanni exchanged a glance. “Deal,” they said at the same time.
Orso grinned. Sancia found it a distinctly unpleasant sight. “Excellent. Now. Where the hell are we going to be headquartered?”
Most of the canals in Tevanne were either full or close to it most of the time — but not all.
Every fourth year in the Durazzo was a monsoon year, when the warm waters bred monstrous storms, and although Tevanne lacked any central authority, water cared not a whit about which campo it flowed into. So, eventually, the merchant houses had decided they were obliged to do something about it.
Their solution was “the Gulf”—a massive, stone-lined flood reservoir in the north of the city, which could store and dump floodwater into the lower canals as needed. The Gulf was empty most of the time, essentially a mile-wide, artificial desert of gray, molded stone and dotted with drains. Sancia knew it was prone to shantytowns and vagrants and stray dogs, but there were some parts of the Gulf that even they weren’t desperate or stupid enough to inhabit.
Yet, to her concern, Claudia and Giovanni were leading them to exactly one such spot.
Sancia was so surprised she almost leapt into the air.
There was a silence.
Her skin crawled.
She tried to keep the fear out of her face as she listened to this.
“There it is!” said Giovanni, trotting along the west side of the slanted stone walls. He pointed ahead, and though it was now night, they could see he was pointing to a large, dripping tunnel, blocked off with thick, crisscrossing iron bars.
“That is a storm drain,” said Gregor.
“True,” said Gio. “What marvelous eyes, you have, Captain.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Gregor, “but the problem with working out of a storm drain is that, when there is a storm, it tends to fill with water — which I, personally, cannot breathe.”
“Did I say we were going to be working in a storm drain?” said Gio. He led them down a molded stone path to the storm drain and took out a small, thin, scrived strip of iron. He examined the bars, tapped the strip to one section, and then gave the bars a tug. The bottom quarter of the bars swung open, like the gate of a garden fence.
“Clever,” said Orso, peering at the hinges. “It’s a weak door, and a weak lock — but you don’t need it to be strong if no one knows it’s there.”
“Exactly.” Gio bowed and extended an arm. “After you, good sir. Mind the sewage.”
They entered the massive drain. “I have to admit, I’m getting pretty goddamn tired of pipes,” said Sancia.
“Seconded,” said Berenice.
“We won’t be here for long,” said Claudia. She and Giovanni produced a handful of scrived lights, slashing rosy hues across the rippled walls. They walked down the tunnel about three hundred feet or so. Then the two Scrappers started peering around them.
“Oh, goodness,” said Claudia. “I haven’t been here in ages…Where is it?”
Giovanni slapped his forehead. “Damn! I’m being stupid, I forgot. Just a second.” He pulled out a small, scrived bead of metal, and seemed to twist it, like it was two rotating halves. Then he held it up and let go. The bead zipped over to one wall like it had been ripped along by a string. “There!” said Gio.
“That’s right,” said Claudia. “I forgot you’d installed a flag.” She walked over to the bead — which was now stuck to the wall — and held up a light. Right below the bead was a tiny slot that was practically invisible if you didn’t know to look for it. Gio took back out the scrived iron strip he’d used on the drainage bars and stuck it into the slot.
There was the sound of stone groaning on stone. Gio shoved at the wall with his shoulder, and suddenly a large segment pivoted inward, swinging like a large, circular stone door. “Here we are!”
Sancia and the rest all peered into the rounded door. Inside was a long, tall, narrow passageway, with ornately wrought walls that were lined with what appeared to be some kind of cubbyholes, most of which were empty — but not all. In some of the cubbyholes, Sancia spied urns and…
“Skulls,” she said aloud. “A…Uh, a crypt?”
“Precisely,” said Giovanni.
“What in the hell is a crypt doing in the Gulf?” asked Orso.
“Apparently there had been quite a few minor estates here before the merchant houses made the Gulf,” said Claudia, walking inside. “The houses just tore them down and paved over them. No one thought much about what was underneath, until they started digging the tunnels. Most of the crypts and basements have gotten flooded out — but this one is in fairly good condition.”
Sancia followed her in. The crypt was large, with a big, round, central chamber, and several smaller, narrow wings splitting off from it. “How’d you find it?”
“Someone once traded us jewelry for rigs,” said Claudia. “The jewelry was old and branded with a family crest — and one of us realized it’d had to come from a family grave. We went looking, and found this.”
“We hole up here only when we’ve really pissed off a merchant house,” said Gio. “And it sounds like you lot have done exactly that. So — this should work nicely.”
“So…” said Berenice, staring around. “We’re going to be scriving…and working…and, for a while, living…in a crypt. With…bones.”
“Well, if you’re really going to try to break into the Mountain, then you’re probably going to wind up dead anyway,” said Gio. “Maybe this will help you get used to it.”
Orso had found a hole in the vaulted ceiling. “Does this go up to the surface?”
“Yeah,” said Claudia. “To let heat out if you’re doing any minor forging or smelting.”
“Excellent. Then this should work quite well!” said Orso.
Gregor was leaning over a large stone sarcophagus with a caved-in lid. He peered through the gap at the remains below. “Will it,” he said flatly.
“Yes,” said Orso. He rubbed his hands. “Let’s get to work!”
said Clef.
Once they’d gotten the lay of things, Orso waited out in the tunnel, staring out at the shantytowns beyond. Greasy campfires and thick, black smoke crawled across the surface of the Gulf. The smoke turned the starlit sky into a dull smear.
Berenice emerged from the crypt and joined him. “I’ll make the requisitions now, sir,” she said. “We should be able to move in and get everything ready to start work tomorrow night.”
Orso said nothing. He just stared out at the Gulf and the Commons beyond.
“Is something the matter, sir?” she asked.
“I didn’t think it would be like this, you know,” he said. “Twenty, thirty years ago, when I first started working for Tribuno…We all genuinely thought we were going to make the world a better place. End poverty. End slavery. We thought we could rise above all the ugly human things that held the world back, and…and…Well. Here I am. Standing in a sewer, paying a bunch of rogues and renegades to break into the place where I used to live.”
“Might I ask, sir,” said Berenice, “if you could change anything — what would it be?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I suppose if I thought I had a chance, I’d start my own merchant house.”
“Really, sir?” she said.
“Sure. It’s not like there’s any law forbidding it. You just have to file papers with the Tevanni council. But no one bothers anymore. Everyone knows the four prime houses would crush you instantly if you tried. There used to be dozens when I was young…and now, only four, and four forever, it seems.” He sighed. “I’ll be back tomorrow evening, Berenice. If I’m still alive, that is. Good night.”
She watched as he strolled down the tunnel and slipped out the iron grate. Her words echoed faintly after him: “Good night, sir.”
“This is nuts,” whispered Claudia in the dark. “It’s insane. It’s madness, Sancia!”
“It’s lucrative,” said Sancia. “And keep your voice down.”
Claudia peered down the warrens of the crypt, and confirmed they were alone. “You’ve got him on you now, don’t you?” she asked. “Don’t you?”
“I told you to forget about him,” said Sancia.
Claudia miserably rubbed her face. “Even if you didn’t have Clef, this is beyond foolish! How can you trust these people?”
“I don’t,” said Sancia. “Not Orso at least. Berenice is…well, normal, but she reports to Orso. And Gregor…Well, Gregor seems…” She struggled for the right word. She was unused to complimenting men of the law. “Decent.”
“Decent? Decent? Don’t you know who he is? And I don’t mean him being Ofelia’s son!”
“Then what?”
Claudia sighed. “There was a fortress city in the Daulo states, called Dantua. Five years ago a Dandolo house mercenary army captured it — a big victory for the entire region. But something went wrong, and their scrived devices failed. They were helpless, trapped in the fortress. A siege followed, with the Dandolos inside. Things went from bad to worse — starvation and plague and fire. When the Morsinis sailed in to rescue them all, they found only one survivor — just one. Gregor Dandolo.”
Sancia stared at her as she listened to this. “I…I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. I swear to God, it’s true.”
“How? How did he survive?”
“No one knows. But he did. The Revenant of Dantua, they call him. That’s your decent man for you. You’ve gone and surrounded yourself with lunatics, Sancia. I hope you know what you’re doing. Especially because you’ve got us mixed in with them too.”
21
The next night they stared at a map of the Candiano campo and brainstormed.
“You all only need to worry about getting Sancia to and from the Mountain,” said Orso. “I’ve got my own ideas about maneuvering through the thing itself.”
“There are always three ways,” Claudia said. “You can go under, over, or through.”
“Over’s not an option,” said Giovanni. “She can’t fly to the Mountain. To do that, she’d have to plant an anchor or a construction scriving that would pull her to it — and you’d have to get in to plant one.”
“And through is out,” said Gregor. He walked up to the map of the Candiano campo and traced the main road running up to the huge dome. “There are eleven gates from the outer wall to the Mountain. The last two will be under constant watch, and you need all kinds of papers and scrived credentials to get through.”
Everyone stared at the map in silence.
“What’s that?” asked Sancia. She pointed to a long, winding blue streak that led from the shipping channel to the Mountain.
“That’s the delivery canal,” said Orso. “It’s used by barges full of wine and, hell, whatever else they need in the Mountain. It’s got the exact same problem as the roads, though — the last two gates are intensely guarded. Every delivery is stopped and thoroughly searched before it’s allowed to proceed.”
Sancia thought about it. “Could I cling to the side of a barge? Just below the waterline? And you all could give me some way to breathe air?”
They all looked surprised by that idea.
“The canal gates check sachets just like the rest of the walls,” said Orso slowly. “But…I believe they only pass things that go through them. Under them…that might be a different story.”
“I bet the underside of the barge would trigger the check too,” said Claudia. “But if Sancia was walking along the bottom of the canal…”
“Whoa,” said Sancia. “I didn’t say that.”
“How deep are the canals?” asked Gregor.
“Forty, fifty feet?” said Gio. “The walls definitely wouldn’t check that far down.”
“I never suggested anything like this,” said Sancia, now alarmed.
“We can’t scrive a way for a human to breathe air,” said Orso. “That’s impossible.”
Sancia sighed with relief, since it sounded like they were abandoning this train of thought.
“But…” He glanced around, and laid one hand on a sarcophagus. “There are other options.”
Claudia frowned at the sarcophagus for a moment. Then her mouth dropped open. “A vessel. A casket!”
“Yes,” said Orso. “One that’s waterproof, and small, but capable of holding a person. We plant a weak anchor on one of the barges, and it drags the casket along the bottom of the canal behind it. Simple!”
“With…with me in it?” asked Sancia weakly. “You’re saying I’m in this casket? Being dragged along? Under the water?”
Orso waved a hand at her. “Oh, we can make it safe. Probably.”
“Certainly safer than sneaking around the guards or whatever,” said Claudia. “The barge would secret you up the entire length of the canal, and you wouldn’t risk catching a bolt in the face this way.”
“No,” said Sancia. “I’d just risk hitting a rock too hard and drowning.”
“I told you, we can make it safe!” insisted Orso. “Probably!”
“Oh my God,” said Sancia. She buried her face in her hands.
“Is there any other proposed way of getting Sancia to the Mountain?” asked Gregor.
There was a long silence.
“Well,” said Gregor. “It seems this is our choice, for now.”
Sancia sighed. “Can we at least call it something besides a casket, then?”
“This just leaves the issue of the Mountain itself,” said Gregor. “Getting Sancia up to Ziani’s office.”
“I’m working on a way to give her access,” said Orso. “But access doesn’t mean there won’t be obstacles. I haven’t seen the inside of the Mountain in a decade, I’ve no idea what could have changed. And I understand very little about how the thing really works.”
Gregor turned to Berenice. “There’s nothing in Tribuno’s notes about this? Nothing about how he designed the Mountain?”
She shook her head.
“What is in Tribuno Candiano’s notes?” said Giovanni. “I’d be curious to see the writings of our most acclaimed genius and madman.”
“Well,” said Berenice reluctantly, “there’s all these wax rubbings of what looks like human sacrifices — a body on an altar, and a dagger above — but as for Tribuno’s notes…” She cleared her throat, and read aloud: “I again return to the nature of this ritual. The hierophant Seleikos refers to a ‘collection of energies’ or a ‘focusing of minds’ and ‘thoughts all captured.’ The great Pharnakes refers to a ‘transaction’ or ‘deliverance’ or ‘transference’ of sorts that must take place at ‘the world’s newest hour.’ At other times he says it must be at ‘the darkest hour’ or ‘the forgotten minute.’ Does he mean midnight? The winter solstice? Something else?”
Giovanni stared at her blankly. “What the hell is that?”
“Tribuno’s efforts to determine the source of the hierophants’ nature,” said Orso. “In other words, a hell of a bigger problem than what we’re trying to solve here.”
“It’s not as useful as I hoped,” said Berenice. “He just goes on and on about this transaction — the ‘filling of the pitchers’—though it’s pretty clear Tribuno himself doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.”
“But obviously it was of great value to Tomas Ziani,” said Gregor.
“Or he just thought it was of value,” said Orso, “and he’s wasting blood and treasure on nonsense.”
At that comment, Gregor froze. “Ahh,” he said softly.
“Ahh what?” said Sancia.
Gregor stared into the middle distance. “Blood,” he said quietly. A look of horrible revelation entered his face. “Tell me, Orso. Does…does Estelle Ziani ever see her father?”
“Estelle? Why?” asked Orso suspiciously.
“He’s ill, isn’t he?” He looked at Orso and narrowed his eyes. “Surely she oversees his medical attention — yes, Orso?”
Orso was very still. “Uh. Well…”
“The Mountain checks the blood of a person to make sure they’re the right person,” Gregor said. “You’d have to find a way to log your own blood with the Mountain in order to let you in.” He stepped closer to Orso. “But…what if you had access to the blood of a resident? Like Estelle Ziani — or, better yet, her father? The man who made the Mountain itself? That’s what you aim to do — isn’t it, Orso? To use Tribuno Candiano’s blood as a pass key for Sancia?”
Orso glared at him. “Well. Aren’t you a clever bastard, Captain.”
“Wait,” said Sancia. “You’re going to steal Tribuno Candiano’s blood? Really?”
Everyone stared at Orso. Finally he sighed. “I never said steal,” he said huffily. “It would be voluntarily donated. I thought I’d just…you know, ask Estelle for it.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Claudia.
“What?” he said. “It’s an opportunity we can’t pass up! With his blood, the damned thing should open for her like a schoolgirl’s legs! The Mountain’s a kingdom, riddled with scrived guards, and no guard can turn away their king!”
“And, what, I cover myself with his blood?” asked Sancia. She pulled a face. “That’s not exactly stealthy.”
“I’m sure we can make some kind of container for it!” he said, exasperated.
“Assuming Estelle even consents,” said Berenice, “surely the Candianos have rewritten all the permissions so Tribuno no longer has access, yes?”
“That would suggest there’s someone on the Candiano campo who’s a better scriver than Tribuno,” said Orso. “Which is unlikely. If I’d scrived my own massive house, I’d have put in all kinds of permissions and goodies just for me.”
“And Ziani certainly isn’t a scriver,” said Gio. “But all this assumes our boy here can actually get the man’s blood.”
“You really think that Estelle would do that for you, Orso?” asked Sancia.
“She might if I tell her you saw her husband kissing hips with some girl in a rundown foundry,” said Orso. “Or maybe I don’t even need to say that. Everyone knows Ziani is a privileged shit, and from the sound of it, he practically keeps her shackled up in the Mountain. I suspect she wouldn’t turn down a way to stick a knife in Ziani’s ribs.”
“True,” said Berenice. “Maybe it’s not as heavy an ask as we’re all assuming. In a way, you’d be offering her freedom. And people risk many things for that.”
Then a curious thing happened: a deeply guilty look crossed Gregor’s face, and he turned to Sancia and opened his mouth as if to say something. Then he seemed to think better of it, and he shut his mouth and was silent for the rest of the night.
Much later, they slept. And Sancia’s dreams were filled with old memories.
She had never known her parents. Either she or they had been sold before she could know them, and instead she’d become, like so many slave children, a communal burden on the shifting assortment of women all crammed together in the quarters on the plantation. In some ways, Sancia’d had not one mother but thirty, all indistinct.
Except one. Ardita, a Gothian woman. She was a ghost to Sancia now, and all she retained were flashes of the woman’s dark eyes, the wrinkles of her olive-colored skin on her hard, scarred hands, her jet-black ringlets, and the way her smile showed the far back teeth in her wide mouth.
There are many dangers here, child, she’d said once. Many. Many ugly things you’re going to have to do. It will be a great contest for you. And you’re going to think: How do I win? And the answer is — so long as you are alive, you are winning. The only hope you should ever have is to see the next day, and the next. Some here will whisper of liberty — but you can’t be free if you aren’t alive.
And then, one day, Ardita had been gone. It had not been commented upon in the quarters. Perhaps because such things were common and forgettable, or perhaps because nothing needed to be said.
Sometime later, Sancia and the other children had been led to a new field to work, and they’d walked by a tree full of corpses hanging from ropes — slaves who had been executed for any number of crimes. The overseer called out, “Look well, little ones! Look well, and see what’s done to those who disobey.” And Sancia had looked up into the canopy of leaves and seen a woman suspended in the branches, her feet and hands hacked off, and Sancia had thought she’d spied jet-black ringlets on the corpse’s shoulders, and a wide, toothy mouth.
In the darkness of the crypt, Sancia awoke. She heard snores and soft sighs from the others. She stared at the dark stone ceiling, and thought about what these people were proposing she do, the enormous risks they were asking her to take. Is this survival? Is this liberty?
22
Orso stood in front of the closed-down taverna and tried not to sweat. He had many reasons to — for one, he was wearing quite a lot of clothes, in a clumsy attempt to disguise himself. For another, he was on the Candiano campo using a false sachet that Claudia and Giovanni had supplied him with. And for another, there was a significant chance that none of this ploy could work. She might not come — and then they’d have wasted another day.
He turned around and looked at the taverna. It was old and crumbling, its moss clay cracking, its windows broken or gone. The canal it overlooked was not the blossoming, picturesque stream Orso remembered, but a fetid, reeking mire. Nearly all of the balconies were gone, apparently fallen away — but one remained.
Orso stared at the balcony. He remembered how it had looked twenty years ago — the lights around it bright and beautiful, the smell of wine and flowers. And how beautiful she’d looked that night, until he’d spoken his heart.
That’s not true, he thought. She was still beautiful, even after that.
He sighed and leaned against the fence.
She won’t come, he thought. Why would she come to this painful memory? Why am I even here?
Then he heard footsteps in the alley behind.
He turned and saw a woman approaching, dressed like a house servant, wearing a muddy-colored dress and a dull, unadorned wimple that covered most of her face. She walked right up to him, her eyes steady and still.
“The theatrics of youth,” she said, “are unbecoming to aged folk such as we.”
“I’m a hell of a lot more aged than you are,” he said. “I think I have more right to say what’s unbecoming and what isn’t. I’m amazed you’re here. I can’t believe you still had it, that it worked!”
“I kept the hand-harp for lots of reasons, Orso,” said Estelle. “Some sentimental. But also because I made it, and I think I did a good job.” She was referring to the twinned hand-harps she’d scrived, back when she and Orso had been young and attempting to be surreptitious with their relationship. It had been their way of communicating: pluck a certain series of strings, and the other harp would make the same tune. Each note had been a code for where and when they should meet, and this taverna had once been a favorite of theirs.
Orso had always kept his harp, perhaps out of fondness — he’d had no idea he’d need it again one day, certainly not for this.
She peered at the taverna. “So many things have dried up and faded away on the campo,” she said quietly, “that it feels odd to mourn the loss of a single taverna. Yet I do.”
“If I could have gotten a message to you to meet somewhere else,” he said, “I would have.”
“Shall we go inside?” said Estelle.
“Really? It looks like it’s falling apart.”
“You’re the one who started me reliving my memories, Orso, when you plucked the harp. I wish to continue.”
They walked up the steps and through the broken doors. The vaulted ceilings were still intact, as were the tiled floors, but that was about it. The tables were gone, the bar had fallen to pieces, and vines were erupting from the walls.
“I take it,” she said quietly as she walked through the ruins, “that you’re not here to whisk me away, and make me your own.”
“No,” said Orso. “I have something to ask of you.”
“Of course. A sentimental tool, a sentimental place, used for unsentimental ends.”
“I need something from you, Estelle. Something mad.”
“How mad? And why?”
He told her only what she needed to know. She listened quietly.
“So,” she said. “You…think my father was close to figuring out how the hierophants made their tools. And you think my husband is now trying to duplicate his efforts — and has killed many people in the process.”
“Yes.”
She stared out the windows at the one remaining balcony. “And you need my father’s blood. To make it through the Mountain, to steal this device from Tomas, and cripple his efforts.”
“Yes. Will you help us?”
She blinked slowly. “That was the place, wasn’t it?” she whispered.
He looked, and saw she meant the balcony before them. “Yes,” he said. “It was.”
“I want to see it.”
“It looks terribly unsafe.”
“I said see, not stand on.” She walked over to the doors, reached out to open them, and then winced and grabbed her side. “Agh…I’m sorry. Orso — can you…?”
“Certainly,” he said. He walked over to the doors and opened them for her.
“Thank you,” she said. She looked out at the balcony and the dreary sight of the canal below. She sighed, like the sight of it pained her.
“Are you hurt, Estelle?” he said.
“I fell recently. I hurt my elbow, I’m afraid.”
“You fell?”
“Yes. While climbing the stairs.”
He watched her for a long time, looking her over. Was he imagining it, or was she standing somewhat…crooked? As if walking on a ginger knee?
“You didn’t fall, did you,” he said.
She said nothing.
“It was Tomas,” he said. “He did this to you. Didn’t he?”
She was still for a long time. “Why did you leave, Orso? Why did you leave the house? Why did you leave me there, alone, with my father?”
Orso was silent as he thought about how to answer. “I…I asked you to marry me,” he said.
“Yes.”
“On this very balcony.”
“Yes.”
“And…you said no. Because of the inheritance laws on the campo, everything you owned would go to me. You said you wanted to prove to your father that you could be as good as him, that you could be a scriver, a leader, someone who could guide the house. You thought he could change the rules for you. But…I knew he wouldn’t ever do that. Tribuno was a foresighted man in many ways. But he was also terribly…traditional.”
“Traditional,” she echoed. “What a curious word that is. So bland, and yet often so poisonous.”
“He mentioned it to me, once. Asked me why we weren’t engaged yet. I told him you were considering your options. And he said, ‘If you want, Orso — I could just make her.’ As if I would ask for that. As if having you by force was the same as having you. So there I was. Stuck between two people I found increasingly unpleasant or…painful.”
“I see,” she said quietly.
“I’m…sorry,” said Orso. “I’m sorry for all that’s happened to you. If I’d known how things were going to go — if I’d known how deeply in debt Tribuno had gone, I’d…”
“You’d what?”
“Have tried to steal you away, I guess. Flee the city. Go somewhere new, and leave all this behind.”
She laughed quietly. “Oh, Orso…I knew you were still a romantic, down underneath it all. Don’t you see? I’d never have left. I’d have stayed and fought for what I felt I was due.” She grew solemn. “I’ll help you.”
“You…you will?”
“Yes. Father gets bled frequently for his condition. And I know a way into the Mountain. A way designed just for him, one Tomas has never known about.”
“Really?” said Orso, astonished.
“Yes. Father grew secretive in the later years, as you know. When he was buying up all that historical junk, spending thousands of duvots a day. He wanted to move freely, without anyone being aware of it.”
She told him when and where he could expect to receive Tribuno’s blood, and where the secret entrance could be found. “It’ll open up for whoever’s carrying the blood,” she said. “Though you must keep the blood cooled — if it decays too much, it’ll be useless. This means you’ll have a short time period to get this done — you need to do it in three nights, essentially.”
“Three days to prepare?” he said. “God…”
“It gets worse,” said Estelle. “Because the Mountain will probably figure out that the person you’ve sent in is not my father — eventually. I doubt if they’ll be able to leave the way they came in.”
Orso thought about it. “We can fly her out, maybe. Use an anchor somewhere in the city, pull her to it — she’s done such things before.”
“A dangerous flight. But it might be your only option.”
He glanced at her. “And if we pull this off — what happens to you, Estelle?”
She smiled weakly and shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll let me take charge. Maybe I’ll get a moment of freedom before they bring in another ruthless merchant to run things. Or maybe they’ll suspect me immediately, and execute me.”
Orso swallowed. “Please take care of yourself, Estelle.”
“Don’t worry, Orso. I always do.”
23
For the next two days, they worked.
Sancia had seen the Scrappers scrive and alter devices before, but that was nothing compared to this. Berenice brought in raw iron ingots and, using the scrived cauldrons and devices they’d procured, they began to build the capsule from scratch, plate by plate and rib by rib. By the end of the first day it had started to resemble a huge metal seedpod, about six feet long and three feet in diameter, with a small hatch set in the center. But though the sight of Berenice, Claudia, and Giovanni fabricating this thing out of raw metal was amazing, it didn’t exactly make Sancia feel relaxed.
“Doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of breathing room in there,” she said.
“There will be,” said Berenice. “And it will be quite safe. We’ll apply bracing and durability sigils to the entirety of the capsule, along with waterproofing, of course.”
“How in the hell is this thing going to move around?” said Sancia.
“Well. That’s been tricky. But your friends here have come up with a clever idea that might work.”
“Floating lanterns,” said Gio cheerfully.
“What do they have to do with this?” asked Sancia.
“Floating lanterns are scrived to believe they’ve got a big balloon in them,” explained Claudia, “and then, on the campos, they follow guided paths along markers placed on the ground.”
“Only, this marker will be on the barge,” said Gio. “It’ll keep you a set distance below the water.”
“And…how do I get out of the water?”
“You hit this switch here.” Berenice pointed to the interior of the capsule. “This will make the capsule float up and surface.”
“Then you climb out, shut the hatch,” said Gio, pointing to a button on the outside of the capsule, “hit this, and it’ll sink. Then you’re all set. Somewhat. Except for the Mountain bit.”
“Orso’s working on that,” said Berenice testily.
“One would hope,” said Gio.
Sancia stared at the capsule. She imagined being crammed inside the tiny thing. “God. Now I sort of wish I’d let Gregor lock me up.”
“Speaking of which,” said Claudia, looking around, “where is the captain?”
“He said he had business to attend to,” said Berenice. “Back on the campo.”
“What business could possibly be more important than this?” asked Claudia.
Berenice shrugged. “He mentioned putting a matter to rest — something that’d been bothering him. When I saw the look on his face, I didn’t ask more.” She quickly scrawled out a line of sigils. “Now. Let’s make sure this thing is really waterproof.”
Gregor Dandolo was good at waiting. Most of military life was nothing but waiting: waiting for orders, waiting for supplies, waiting for the weather to change, or just trying to out-wait your opponent, baiting them into doing something.
Yet Gregor had been waiting in front of the Dandolo Chartered Vienzi site foundry for three hours now. And, since he had much better things to do that day, and since theoretically Tomas Ziani’s thugs could try to kill him even there, this was really pushing it.
He looked back at the front gates of the Vienzi site foundry. He’d been told this was where he could find his mother, and this did not surprise him: the Vienzi was one of the newest Dandolo foundries, built to perform some of the company’s most complicated production. He’d known that few were allowed inside, but he’d assumed that he, being Ofelia’s son, would be granted entrance. And yet, he’d been simply told to wait.
I wonder what percentage of my life, he thought, has been spent waiting for my mother’s attentions. Five percent? Ten percent? More?
Finally there was a creak from the massive foundry gates, and the giant oak door began to swing open.
Ofelia Dandolo did not wait for the gate to fall completely open. She slipped through the crack, small and white and frail against the huge door, and calmly walked toward him.
“Good morning, Gregor,” she said. “What a pleasure it is to see you so soon again. How is your investigation going? Have you found the perpetrator?”
“I have encountered, how shall I put this…more questions,” said Gregor. “Some of which I’ve been turning over for some time. But I thought it was time to discuss a certain matter with you, personally.”
“A matter,” said Ofelia. “What threateningly bland language. What would you like to talk to me about?”
He took a breath. “I wanted to ask you…about the Silicio Plantation, Mother.”
Ofelia Dandolo slowly raised an eyebrow.
“Do you know…know anything about that, Mother?” asked Gregor. “About what it is? What they did there?”
“What I’ve heard, Gregor,” she said, “are mostly rumors that you’ve been involved, somehow, in some of the violence in the wake of the Foundryside blackout. Armed gangs fighting in the streets. Carriages crashing into walls. And somewhere, among it all, my son. Is this true, Gregor?”
“Please stop trying to change the subject.”
“Rumors of you and some street urchin,” said Ofelia, “being shot at by a team of assassins. That must be fantasy, mustn’t it?”
“Answer me.”
“Why are you asking me this, anyway? Who poured this poison in your ear, Gregor?”
“I will make my question clear beyond doubt,” said Gregor forcefully. “Is Dandolo Chartered — my grandfather’s company, my father’s company, and your company, Mother — is it involved in the gruesome practice of attempting to scrive the human body and soul?”
She looked at him levelly. “No. It is not.”
Gregor nodded. “A second question,” he said. “Was it ever involved in such a practice?”
There was a soft hiss as Ofelia exhaled through her nose. “Yes,” she said softly.
He stared at her. “It was. It was?”
“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “Once.”
Gregor tried to think, yet he found he could not. Orso had said as much, and the comment had slowly worked its way into Gregor’s mind like a needle — yet he’d been unable to believe it. “How could…How could you…”
“I did not know,” she said, shaken, “until after your father died. Until after your accident, Gregor. When I took over the company.”
“You’re saying father was the one involved in it? It was his program?”
“It was a different time, Gregor,” said Ofelia. “The Enlightenment Wars were just beginning. We didn’t understand what we were truly doing, neither as rulers of the Durazzo, nor as scrivers. And all of our competitors were doing the same. If we hadn’t pursued this as well, we might have been ruined.”
“Such excuses,” said Gregor, “all end the same way, Mother. With graves, and heartache.”
“I put a stop to it when I took charge!” she said fiercely. “I killed the project. It was wrong. And we didn’t need it anymore anyway!”
“Why not?”
She paused, as if she hadn’t meant to say that. “Be-because scriving had changed so much by then. Our lexicon technology had given us an impregnable position. The scriving of the body was no longer worth researching. It was impossible anyway.”
Gregor did not say, of course, that he was now acquainted with a living specimen that suggested otherwise. “I…I just so wish that we had one good thing,” he said, “one good thing in Tevanne that was not born from ugliness.”
“Oh, spare me your righteousness,” she snapped. “Your father did what was deemed necessary. He did his duty. And ever since Dantua, you, Gregor, have been fleeing your duties as a rat might a wildfire!”
He stared at her, scandalized. “What…How can you say that? How can you—”
“Shut up,” she said. “And come with me.” She turned and started walking back into the Vienzi site.
Gregor paused for a moment, glowering, then did as she asked.
The guards and operators did double takes as Gregor entered the gates, but they stood down at the sight of Ofelia, jaw set and eyes glittering with fury. Gregor saw that the Vienzi site was indeed far more advanced than any scriving foundry he’d yet been in. Pipes of formulas and waters and reagents rose out of the stone foundation in countless places, and twisted and tangled together before sinking into the walls. Tremendous cauldrons and crucibles glowed with a manic, cheery red light, brimming with molten bronze or tin or copper. Yet Ofelia ignored all of this, and led Gregor to a warehouse in the back of the yard.
This warehouse was heavily guarded. Dandolo officers in scrived armor stood at attention before its doors. They glanced at Gregor, but said nothing.
Gregor walked inside, wondering what on the foundry yard could possibly call for such defenses. And then he saw it.
Or he…thought he saw it.
Sitting in the middle of the warehouse was a shadow, a ball of almost solid darkness. He thought he could identify a shape in the darkness, but…it was difficult to tell. A handful of moths flitted in and out of the shadows, and when they entered that vague line of darkness they almost seemed to disappear.
“What…what is that?” asked Gregor.
Ofelia didn’t answer. She strode across the warehouse to a panel of bronze dials and switches on the walls. She flipped one, and the circle of shadow vanished.
A wooden frame in the outline of a person stood in the exact center of where the ball of darkness had been — and hanging on this frame was a scrived suit of armor.
But it was a tremendously strange suit of armor. Built into one arm was a black, glittering polearm, half massive ax, half giant spear. Built into the other was a huge round shield, and installed behind it a scrived bolt caster. But the strangest thing about it was the curious black plate situated on the front of its cuirass.
“Is this a…a lorica?” asked Gregor.
“No,” said Ofelia. “A lorica is a big, loud, ugly armament of open warfare, a scrived suit intended solely for slaughter. It is also illegal, since it augments gravity in manners that violate our unspoken laws. But this…this is different.” She touched the black plate on its front with a finger. “The rig is fast, graceful — and difficult to see coming. It absorbs light to a phenomenal degree — making it almost impossible to discern with the eyes. Something Orso designed.”
“Orso made this?”
“He made the method. But this method is critical to our house’s survival.”
Gregor frowned at the suit as an uncomfortable idea entered his mind. “This…this is a tool of assassins,” he said.
“You’ve heard the rumors as well as I have,” said Ofelia. “Flying men with espringals, leaping over campo walls. Sieges and bloodshed in the Commons. We enter a dangerous era now, Gregor — an age of escalation and broken promises. The houses have grown complacent, and ambitious men have gained seats of power. It is inevitable — one day, some bright young man will say, ‘We’re quite skilled at waging war abroad — so why not do it here?’ And when that happens, we must be ready to respond.”
Gregor knew she was right — whether she knew it or not, that description perfectly fit Tomas Ziani — but the words filled him with horror. “Respond how?”
She steeled herself, her face serious. A moth flitted around her head in a lazy circle before meandering away. “We must leave them leaderless,” she said, “and unable to respond. A single, quick strike.”
“You’re not serious.”
“If you think the Morsinis or the Michiels or even the Candianos aren’t doing the same, you’re being foolish, Gregor,” she said. “They are. I’ve seen the intelligence reports. And when it happens, Gregor…I want for you to lead our forces.”
His mouth fell open. “What?”
“You have more experience in the field than any living Tevanni,” she said. “You have spent your life in war, as your city asked you to. Your war was harder than others, and I regret that. But now, I ask you, as…as your mother, Gregor. Please. Please, leave all these diversions of yours, and come back to me.”
Gregor swallowed. He looked at his mother, then at the shadowy armor, and thought for a long time.
“I don’t remember Domenico,” he said suddenly. “Did you know that?”
She blinked, surprised. “W-what?”
“I don’t remember my brother. I remember him dying. But that’s all. Of Father, I have nothing. No memory at all. Both of them are lost to me, since the accident.” He turned back to her. “I want to miss them, but I don’t know how. Because I never really knew them. To me, Mother, they are both just creatures in a painting that hangs outside your office. Noble ghosts I can never quite live up to. But do you grieve them? Does their loss wound you, Mother?”
“Gregor…”
“You lost Domenico and Father,” he said, voice shaking. “And you lost me. I nearly died in Dantua. Would you risk me again? Again? Is that how you think of me? As something so expendable?”
“I did not lose you in Dantua,” she said fiercely. “You survived. As I knew you would, Gregor. As I know you always will.”
“Why? Why this certainty?”
Yet his mother could not answer. It seemed, for the first time, like Gregor had deeply wounded her. And curiously, he felt no regrets.
“I have lived my life in war,” he said to her. “I returned to Tevanne to find civilization. It was not as civilized as I liked, Mother. So I shall focus on amending that, and nothing more.” Then he turned and walked away.
24
On the third day, they finished their preparations, hastily crafting each tool and each design. Orso oversaw their efforts, pacing around the capsule, reviewing the chalkboards and scriving blocks, carefully eyeing every string of sigils. He twitched and groaned and huffed, but though the designs were not up to his standards, he felt they would work.
The stone door creaked open and Gregor strode in. “A fine time to pop in!” snapped Orso. “We’ve had some last-minute changes that have thrown everything into goddamn chaos, and we damned sure could’ve used you!”
“I need to talk to you, Orso,” he said. He pulled him aside.
“What the hell’s the matter, Captain?” asked Orso.
Gregor leaned close. “Did you develop some kind of light-absorbing rig for my mother, Orso?”
“What! How the hell did you know about that?”
Gregor told him about the meeting with his mother. Orso was stunned. “She’s making some…some kind of assassin’s lorica?”
“In essence.”
“But…but, my God, Ofelia Dandolo never struck me as the type at all for plots and coups and revolutions!”
“So you knew nothing of this?” asked Gregor.
“Not a word.”
Gregor nodded, his face grave. “It’s nothing I can do much about right now. I’m not even sure what to do, frankly. But it makes me wonder…”
“Wonder what?”
“If her house hypatus had no idea this was happening — what other secrets is she keeping?”
“What’s that?” asked Sancia loudly. She pointed at a rig on the far table.
Orso looked over his shoulder. “Oh, that. We’ll get to that in a minute.”
“It looks like an air-sailing rig,” said Sancia.
“We’ll get to that.”
“And you haven’t mentioned an air-sailing rig yet.”
“I said we’ll get to that!”
They applied the last few finishing touches. Then they regrouped around the map and Orso reviewed the plan, step by step.
“First, we bring the capsule to this part of the Commons,” he said. He pointed at a stretch of canal on the map. “The delivery canal passes through there. Sancia will enter the capsule, it will submerge, and as the barge passes through, Berenice will plant the marker. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” said Berenice.
“The barge then pulls Sancia”—he traced the canal with a finger—“right up to the Mountain’s dock. It’s a big dock, and well guarded — which is why the marker will put a hundred feet between the capsule and the barge. That should give Sancia enough distance to safely surface and slip out without anyone noticing. Yes?”
Sancia said nothing.
“Sancia then goes to here.” He pointed at a spot outside the Mountain. “The sculpture gardens. That’s where Tribuno’s secret entrance is hidden. It’s apparently been cleverly concealed underneath a small white stone bridge — it’s literally invisible unless you have this.” He pointed at a small, bronze box on the table. The smooth metal was covered in condensation. “It’s a cooling casket — and inside is a vial of Tribuno’s blood. Procured by his daughter.”
Everyone stared at the bronze box. Gregor wrinkled his nose.
“The secret entrance will react to Tribuno’s blood, and open up for Sancia,” said Orso. “She then enters, goes through the passageway — and then she’ll be in the Mountain.”
Sancia cleared her throat and said, “Where in the Mountain, exactly?”
“On the fourth floor,” said Orso.
“Where on the fourth floor?”
“That I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“No. But you’ll need to get up to the thirty-fifth floor. That’s where Ziani’s office is. And that’s where the imperiat almost certainly is as well.”
“What’s the process for getting to the thirty-fifth floor?” asked Sancia.
Orso considered what to say.
“You don’t know,” said Sancia.
“No,” he said honestly. “I don’t. But whatever’s in your way, Tribuno’s blood should trump it. It’ll be a candle in the dark for you, girl.”
Sancia took a slow breath in. “And…once I have the imperiat, I just walk out — yes?”
Orso hesitated. Claudia, Berenice, and Gio suddenly looked tense. “Well…We’ve had some change of plans there.”
“Have you,” said Sancia.
“Yes. Because there’s a good chance the Mountain will eventually figure out you’re not Tribuno. Which means getting out might be a lot trickier than getting in. Hence the, ah, the sailing rig.”
Sancia stared at them. “You…you want me to fly off the side of the Mountain?”
“There’s a balcony in Tribuno’s office,” said Orso. “You grab the imperiat, hop out, tear off this bronze tab here”—he pointed on the rig—“and off you go. The parachute activates, and you’re pulled to safety. There’s also a hardened cask secured to the rig — you can put the imperiat in there to make sure it doesn’t see any harm.”
“And you can’t make a hardened cask that could hold me?”
“Ah. Well. No. That would be heavy. Now, we can’t fabricate an anchor with the range to pull you completely out of the campo, but…we can get someone onto the Candiano campo to create a sort of landing zone close to one of the gates.” He looked at Gregor. “Are you amenable to this task, Captain?”
Gregor considered it. “So…I just take the anchor onto the campo, plant it somewhere in range, and catch Sancia as she lands?”
“Basically. Then you both make a mad dash off the campo into the safety of the Commons.”
Sancia cleared her throat again. “So…to review,” she said slowly, “I am floating up the canal…”
“Yes,” said Orso.
“In a submerged capsule you all have built in three days…”
“Yes.”
“And using Tribuno’s blood to enter the Mountain…”
“Yes.”
“And I am then navigating a completely unknown set of obstacles to get to the thirty-fifth floor, where I am then stealing the imperiat…”
“Yes.”
“And then I hop off the Mountain and fly to Gregor. Because the Mountain will probably figure out something’s wrong, and try to trap me.”
“Ahh…”
“And once I land, we run off the campo while probably being chased by some armed people who noticed me flying through the sky like a bird.”
“Uh. Probably. Yes.”
“And then I give the imperiat to you, and you…”
“Take down Tomas,” said Orso. He coughed. “And possibly use it to reinvent the nature of scriving as we know it.”
“Yes. Well, then. I see.” She took a breath, nodded, and sat up. “I’m out.”
Orso blinked. “You…you what? Out?”
“Yeah. I’m out.” She stood. “Every time we talk about this it gets more and more preposterous. And no one’s asked me once if I’m game for any of this. I’m not doing this mad shit. I’m not. I’m out.” She walked away.
There was a long, awkward silence.
Orso stared around at everyone, flabbergasted. “Did…did she just say she’s out?”
“She did,” said Claudia.
“Like — not going to do it?”
“That’s what out generally means,” said Gio.
“But…but she can’t…She can’t just…Oh, son of a bitch!” He chased after Sancia, and caught her just as she was slipping out into the tunnel. “Hey! Come back here!”
“No,” said Sancia.
“We did a hell of a lot of work for you!” snarled Orso. “We worked our goddamn asses off to set this all up! You can’t just walk out now!”
“And yet,” said Sancia, “that’s what I’m doing.”
“But…but this is our only chance! If we don’t steal the imperiat now, then Tomas Ziani could raise an army, and…”
“And what?” spat Sancia, marching up to him. “Do to Tevanne what Tevanne has done to the entire rest of the world?”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”
“The problem is that I actually do. You’re not the one in the capsule, in the Mountain, the one risking your goddamn neck! You know what this is, what this really is?”
“What?” said Orso, fuming.
“This is a rich man’s fight,” said Sancia. “A rich man’s game. And we’re all just pieces on the board to you. You think you’re different, Orso, but you’re just like all the rest of them!” She put her finger in his face. “My life’s not a hell of a lot better since I escaped the plantation. I still starve a lot and I still get beaten occasionally. But at least now I get to say no when I want to. And I’m saying it now.” She turned and walked out.
25
Sancia sat on the hilltop next to the Gulf, staring out at the ramshackle tent city, rambling and gray in the watery, late-morning light. She’d felt alone many times since she’d found Clef, but she hadn’t felt truly abandoned until now, burdened with secrets, and surrounded with people all too willing to either kill her or put her in harm’s way.
Sancia watched a group of children playing in the Gulf, running back and forth with sticks. Skinny things, undernourished and filthy. Her childhood had been much the same. Even in the greatest city on earth, she thought, children go hungry, every day.
said Clef.
She buried her face in her hands. “Damn it,” she whispered. “Damn it all…”
She watched as his lumbering form emerged from the tall weeds. He did not look at her. He just walked over and sat, about ten feet away.
“Dangerous to be out in the day,” he said.
“It’s dangerous to be in there too,” said Sancia. “Since you people want to get me killed.”
“I don’t want to get you killed, Sancia.”
“You said to me once that you were not afraid to die. You meant it, didn’t you?”
He thought about it, and nodded.
“Yeah. A guy who’s not afraid to die likely isn’t too torn up about getting other people killed. You might not want it, but it’s a responsibility you’re willing to accept, isn’t it?”
“Responsibility…” he echoed. “You know, I talked to my mother yesterday.”
“That’s why you ducked out? Just to chat up your mother?”
“Yes. I asked her about Silicio. And she admitted that, once, Dandolo Chartered had indeed been involved in trying to scrive human beings. In trying to scrive slaves, I mean.”
She glanced at him. His face was fixed in a look of quiet puzzlement. “Really?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Odd thing, to learn of your family’s complicity in such monstrosities. But like you said — it’s not like there weren’t plenty of other tragedies and monstrosities to begin with. That particular one is not especially unusual. So now, today, I think about responsibilities.” He looked out at the cityscape of Tevanne. “It won’t change on its own, will it?”
“What? The city?”
“Yes. I’d hoped to civilize it. To show it the way. But I no longer think it will change of its own accord. It must have change forced upon it.”
“Is this about justice again?” asked Sancia.
“Of course. It’s my responsibility to deliver it.”
“Why you, Captain?”
“Because of what I’ve seen.”
“And what’s that?”
He sat back. “You…you know they call me the Revenant of Dantua, yes?”
She nodded.
“People call me that. But they don’t know what it means. Dantua…It was a Daulo city we took. In the north of the Durazzo. But the Daulos in the city had stockpiles of flash powder,” he said. “I’ve no idea how they’d gotten it. But one day some boy, no older than ten, snuck into our camp with a box of it on his back. And he ran up to our lexicon, and set off the charge. Killed himself. Set fire to the camp. And worse, he damaged the lexicon. So all our rigs failed. So we were just stuck there, with the Daulo armies out beyond. They couldn’t penetrate the fortress, even with us helpless — but they could starve us out.
“So. We starved. For days. For weeks. We knew they’d kill us if we surrendered, so we just starved and hoped someone would come. We ate rats and boiled corncobs and mixed dirt with our rice. I just sat and watched it all happen. I was their commander, but there was nothing I could do. I watched them die. Of starvation. Of suicide. I watched these proud sons turn to anguished skeletons, and I buried them in the meager earth.
“And then, one day…some of the men had meat. I found them cooking it in the camps, sizzling on skillets. It…it did not take me long to realize what kind of meat it was. Carcasses were in high supply in Dantua, after all. I wanted to stop them, but I knew if I tried, they’d mutiny.” He shut his eyes. “Then the men started getting sick. Perhaps as a consequence of what they were doing — consume ill flesh, become ill yourself. Swollen armpits, swollen necks. It spread so fast. We started running out of places to bury corpses. It was no surprise that I caught the plague myself, eventually. I…I remember the fever, the coughing, the taste of blood in my mouth. I remember my men watching me as I lay on my bed, gasping. Then things went dark. And when I awoke…I was in the grave, under the earth.”
“Wait. You…you survived? They buried you and you woke up inside the grave?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It’s extremely rare, but some people do survive the plague. I awoke in the dark. With…with things on top of me. Blood and dirt and filth in my mouth. I couldn’t see anything. Could barely breathe. So…I had to dig my way out. Through the bodies, through all that earth. Through the rot and the piss and the blood and…and…” He fell silent. “I don’t know how I did it. But I did. I clawed until my fingernails were sloughed off and my fingers were broken and hands bloody, but then I saw it, saw the light flickering through the cracks in the corpses above me, and I crawled out, and saw the fire.
“The Morsinis had gotten to Dantua. They’d attacked. The Daulos had broken in through the walls in desperation, and somehow they’d set the city alight. And some Morsini sergeant saw me clawing my way out of the mass grave, covered in blood and mud and screaming…He thought I was a monster. And by that point, perhaps I was. The Revenant of Dantua.”
They were silent. The tall grasses danced in the wind around them.
“I’ve seen a lot of death, Sancia,” he said. “My father and brother died in a carriage accident when I was young. One I nearly died in myself. I joined the military to bring honor to their name, but instead I got so many young men killed — and, again, I survived. I keep surviving, it seems. It’s taught me many things. After Dantua…it was like a magic spell had been lifted from my eyes. We are making these horrors. We are doing this to ourselves. We have to change. We must change.”
“This is just what people are,” said Sancia. “We’re animals. We only care about survival.”
“But don’t you see?” he said. “Don’t you see that’s a bond they’ve placed upon you? Why did you work the fields as a slave, why did you sleep in miserable quarters and silently bear your suffering? Because if you didn’t, you’d be killed. Sancia…so long as you think only of survival, only of living to see the next day, you will always bear their chains. You will not be free. You’ll always remain a sla—”
“Shut your mouth!” she snarled.
“I will not.”
“You think because you’ve suffered, you know? You think you know what it’s like to live in fear?”
“I think I know what it’s like to die,” said Gregor. “It makes things so terribly clear once you stop worrying about survival, Sancia. If these people succeed — if these rich, vain fools do as they wish — then they will make slaves of the whole of the world. All men and women alive, and all generations after, will live in fear just as you did. I am willing to fight and die to free them. Are you?”
“How can you say that?” she said. “You, a Dandolo? You know more than anyone that this is what all merchant houses do.”
He stood, furious. “Then help me cast them down!” he cried.
She stared at him. “You…you would overthrow the merchant houses?” she asked. “Even your own?”
“Sometimes you need a little revolution to make a lot of good. Look at this place!” He gestured at the Gulf. “How can these people fix the world if they can’t fix their own city?” He bowed his head. “And look at us,” he said quietly. “Look at what they’ve made of us.”
“You’d really die for this?”
“Yes. I’d give away all that I value, Sancia, all, to ensure no one ever has to go through what you or I have ever again.”
She looked down at her wrists, at the scars there, where they’d bound her up before they’d lashed her.
She bowed her head, nodded, and stood. “Fine then. Let’s go.”
She marched down the hillside to the drainage tunnel, then into the crypt, with Gregor behind her. They all went silent as she walked in.
She stood in the crypt before a sarcophagus, her heart hammering like mad, not moving.
She reached up, grabbed the string around her neck, ripped Clef off, and placed him on the sarcophagus. “This is Clef,” she said aloud. “He’s my friend. He’s been helping me. Maybe now he can help you.”
Everyone stared at her.
Orso slowly stepped forward, mouth open. “Well, bend me over and scrum me blue,” he whispered. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”
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