Then the doors burst open, and a rich, plummy voice cried, “Orso Ignacio! It has been a dog’s age, hasn’t it!”
The Foundrysiders turned to see about twenty richly dressed men pouring into the room. They all looked carefully arranged, not a hair out of place nor a wrinkle in their robes. Many had their faces painted in intricate lines and patterns—a common affectation of the city’s elite. Even the ones who had affected a fashionably disheveled look had clearly done so with great care and deliberation.
The foremost was a tall, thin man who positively radiated smug satisfaction. His white-painted face featured gold rings around his eyes, and his robes were open down to his navel, showing a taut, sculpted torso that was dark and curiously oiled.
“Armand Moretti,” said Orso in tones of false cheer. “It’s so good to see you…”
Orso walked up, hand extended. It was like watching him approach some kind of bizarre mirror: on one side was Orso, tall and unkempt with mad eyes and unruly hair, every inch of him bony and spindly like he sometimes forgot he had a body he needed to take care of; and on the other side was Armand Moretti, hypatus of Michiel Body Corporate, who was about the same size and age, but he looked like the sort of man who occasionally bathed in milks to keep his skin in good condition.
“So good of you to come, Orso!” Moretti said, shaking Orso’s hand. “And so happy that I could help you out. How long has it been since you started your firm? One year? Two?”
“Almost three, actually,” said Orso.
“Really? Has it been that long? I’d have thought from your state of things it’d been less. Well, I’m always eager to extend a supportive hand to those of us from the older days, yes?”
“Ah—yes,” said Orso, who was clearly trying to manage this naked condescension.
Moretti glanced at the rest of them, and did a double-take when he saw Berenice. With a twirl of his robes, he approached her. “Ah! And…who is this beguiling creature you’ve somehow tricked into laboring for you?”
“This is Berenice Grimaldi,” said Orso flatly. “Our chief of operations.”
“Is she? I must say, she is far more pleasant to look at than our chief of operations…”
“It is an honor to meet the famous and renowned Armand Moretti of Michiel Body Corporate,” Berenice said, bowing.
“And polite too,” said Moretti, reaching out to touch the side of her face. “I assure you, the pleasure is all mine.”
Sancia had stayed quite still until this point, but she found all this a little much. She walked up behind Berenice, her hands in fists—but Berenice waved her off, her hands clasped behind her back.
Sancia exchanged a look with Orso. We need to get this show on the road, she thought, before I lose my temper and stomp this dumb asshole’s head into pudding.
Moretti’s eyes moved to Sancia, and he paused, taken aback. She wasn’t surprised by his reaction. Short, scarred, with a nearly shaven head and drab brown clothing, she knew she resembled something like a rogue monk—and she definitely didn’t look like anyone Moretti ever had to meet.
She watched as his face worked. “And…” he said. “And…this is…”
This is why I prefer thieving instead of confidence games, thought Sancia. When thieving, they don’t get to look at you.
Gregor stepped forward. “This is Sancia Grado, our chief of innovation. And I am Gregor Dandolo, chief of security.” He bowed.
“Ah, yes!” said Moretti. “The famous Revenant of Dantua. Such a catch, to have you working out in the Commons for Orso’s little shop. It’s so delightfully transgressive, I’m sure your mother must be tearing her hair out.”
Gregor allowed a tight, contained smile and bowed once more.
Moretti clapped his hands. “And today we shall see your famous strata box, yes? Your new lexicon technique?”
“Yes,” said Orso, unlocking the chest and throwing it open. He pulled out a giant, thick tome and set it on the table. “We have all the scriving definitions and protocols here for you to review. These we will hand over after the demonstration. Most of them will make better sense when you’ve seen how they’re actually used.”
An older Michiel scriver with a thick lisp—something Sancia thought was an affectation—said, “And this is the technique you used during the night of the Mountain? The one that allowed you to use the gravity tool, and attack the Candianos?”
Orso paused, clearly unsure what to say. Though it was true that this technique had allowed them to effectively destroy one of the four merchant houses of Tevanne, the Foundrysiders had just assumed this would be a rather sensitive subject among the remaining three, and decided to avoid it.
And yet…the Michiel scrivers didn’t seem bothered at all. They watched Orso with expressions of mild interest, like awaiting news of whether or not someone’s cousin was getting married.
“Uh, yes,” said Orso with a cough. “That is correct. Though it is a more refined version.”
“Fantastic,” said the scriver, nodding. “Fascinating.”
“You mustn’t think you can’t talk candidly here, Orso,” said Moretti. “They were a competitor of ours, after all. Thanks to you, we were able to acquire much of the Candiano enclaves for a song.” He poured a glass of wine and raised it to them. “Including the Mountain.”
“Oh,” said Orso, flustered. “Then…we will proceed with our wo—”
“Don’t you wish to confirm the payment first?” asked Moretti.
Orso froze, and Sancia instantly knew why: he had forgotten about the money altogether, and was wondering if this had given the game away.
“Uh, of course,” Orso said. He bowed. “I did not wish to impose.”
Moretti grinned, drank his wine, and snapped his fingers. A servant boy walked forward with a small wooden chest. “Don’t be concerned. Sixty thousand duvots is no imposition at all.”
The servant boy opened the chest. The Foundrysiders stared at the piles of golden and silver duvots within.
Scrumming hell, thought Sancia. That is the most money I have ever seen in my goddamn life.
But she remembered what Orso had told her—The hell with the money. If we do this right, we’ll walk away with something more valuable than every gold candlestick and scriving rig in the Hypatus Building put together.
Yet it looked like Orso was having trouble remembering this too. “Very good,” he said in a strangled voice. “Thank you, Armand…”
“Certainly,” said Moretti, clearly pleased to see his effects at work. The servant boy shut the chest with a snap and took it away to the corner.
Moretti poured himself a fresh glass of wine with a flourish. “You have my approval to proceed.” He drained it and grinned at them. “Astonish me, please.”
* * *
—
“To do the demonstration,” said Orso, “we will need a single box, preferably iron or steel. Bronze is a little flimsy. And it will need to be of about the same size as the test lexicon here.”
Moretti sashayed over to a giant cushion. He flicked his hand at a young boy and said, “Please fetch one for him.” The young boy fled, and Moretti flopped down on the cushion. The other scrivers followed suit, draping themselves over the couches and the chairs. Moretti dipped a plum deep into a pot of chocolate, and noisily ate it as he watched Sancia and Berenice go to work on the test lexicon.
The art of scriving was almost always a two-step process. The first step seemed very simple: a scriver placed a small, imprinted plate on the object that they wished to alter, often somewhere inside it—mostly to keep the printings from being marred. This plate was stamped with a handful of sigils, usually anywhere from about six to ten, and once the plate had been adhered to the object, these sigils would begin convincing it to disobey reality in very unusual ways—hence why this component was called the persuasion plate.
But a persuasion plate only seemed simple. In reality, each of its six to ten sigils was supported by the second component: a definition plate, stored back at a nearby lexicon. And that was where the real work was done, for a definition plate was composed of thousands of thousands of handwritten sigil strings, all forming very complicated arguments that were strong enough to force some portion of the world to defy reality. The persuasion plate’s sigils simply indicated what those arguments should apply to.
Creating a definition plate required weeks of testing and analysis. Such experimentation sounded tedious to most—and it was—but it was the sort of experimentation that, when not done properly, could make your head or torso suddenly implode. As such, any definition plate for a successful scriving was worth a fortune in Tevanne.
And this was what Berenice and Sancia gingerly lifted out of their box and placed within the little lexicon on the table: a definition plate they had personally made that would make reality do something the Michiels would find very, very valuable.
“And so,” said the older scriver with a lisp, “your people are building a way to…duplicate reality?”
“Not quite,” said Orso as the Michiel servant boy returned with an iron box on a rolling cart. “What they will be doing is convincing both chambers that the reality within them is the same. The world will be unable to tell if the test lexicon in the heating chamber is actually in the heating chamber, or in the iron box you have brought here, or both.”
Moretti narrowed his eyes. “Which means…”
“Which means that when the two chambers are twinned, you can take this empty box on this cart anywhere you like,” said Orso, tapping the iron box while Sancia and Berenice began to work on it, “and bring a lexicon’s definitions with it.”
The Michiel scrivers were not eating or drinking anymore. Sancia couldn’t blame them—for Orso had just casually suggested a solution to some of the greatest limitations to scriving.
Lexicons housed the thousands and thousands of carefully composed definitions and arguments that convinced reality to do things it normally tried very hard not to do. They were giant, complicated, and horrendously expensive, which meant they were an absolute bastard to build, and harder still to transport.
Yet scrived rigs—like bolts, and carriages, and lanterns—could only work within a mile or two of a foundry lexicon. Get too far away, and reality would grow more certain about what it was or wasn’t, and thus would ignore the persuasion plate on your rig, no matter how carefully its sigils had been written.
In short, it was a hell of a lot cheaper to take a basic iron box and convince it that it held a lexicon rather than go about building another lexicon. Unimaginably cheaper. It was the difference between digging miles of irrigation ditches and tapping the ground with a magic wand and summoning up a bubbling spring of water.
“What are the limitations?” asked Moretti. He sounded a lot less plummy now.
“Well, originally the reality within the duplicated box would grow quite unstable the longer it went on,” said Orso. “Meaning it would, ah, eventually explode.”
“But we have resolved this issue,” said Berenice quickly.
“Yes. Took a lot of work, but…the instability has been eliminated,” said Orso.
“Show me the definition, please,” said Moretti.
“We’ve already loaded it in,” said Berenice.
“I know. But I would like to see it.”
Frowning, Orso slipped the definition plate back out of the lexicon to show him. It was a large, bronze disc, about a foot and a half wide, and it was covered with thousands and thousands of tiny engraved sigils—all done in Berenice’s careful handwriting.
Moretti stood, walked over, and leaned in close to study the plate. Then he nodded and stepped back. “I see,” he said. “Fascinating.”
“Can the technique be applied to a larger scale?” said the scriver with the lisp—obviously thinking of foundry lexicons.
“It could,” said Orso. He replaced it within the little lexicon. “But being as Foundryside Limited has no foundry lexicons to experiment with in the Commons, I cannot give a definitive answer.”
The Michiel scrivers exchanged simpering smirks at that.
“We did, however, look at the second-biggest problem with lexicons,” said Orso. “For while constructing a lexicon is difficult and expensive, it’s a one-time cost. But constantly updating all the existing lexicons on your campo with all the latest scriving definitions…That gets pretty expensive, yes?”
The smirks vanished. All eyes were fixed on Orso, while Sancia and Berenice silently toiled away on the iron box like stage assistants before a conjuring trick.
“What do you mean?” said Moretti quickly.
“Well, as a former hypatus myself, I know that it takes days, weeks, or even months to fabricate a scriving definition,” said Orso. He tapped the lexicon holding the one he’d just shown them. “Having to carefully write each sigil of the argument perfectly on a bronze plate before placing it in the cradle of a foundry lexicon…And you can’t mass-produce them, since one sigil even slightly out of place in an active lexicon could cause absolute havoc. So you have to hand-make them all…Which means it can take more than a year for just one new definition to be fully implemented throughout a campo.”
“Yes,” said Moretti, impatient. “And?”
“Well, we found the cradle within a foundry lexicon…the bit that holds all the definitions…” Orso thoughtfully tapped his chin. Sancia thought he was milking it a bit much. “We found that could be twinned quite easily.”
The Michiel scrivers looked at one another.
“Are you saying that instead of writing out several hundred definition plates by hand,” said Moretti, glancing at the velvet-lined box, “for our several hundred foundries…”
“Yes?” said Orso.
“We…We could use your technique to twin all the cradles within our foundry lexicons…”
“Yes.”
“And then if you fed just one set of definition plates into one foundry lexicon…then all of them would just believe they contained those arguments?”
“Yes.”
“And then all the arguments that we’d written out…would apply everywhere?” asked Moretti.
Orso nodded like the idea had entirely been Moretti’s, rather than his. “That could definitely work, yes.”
The Michiel scrivers were not slouching in their chairs anymore. Most were sitting up, or sitting forward—and some were even standing.
Sancia could see the math taking place in their heads: the hours they’d save in sheer labor, and the efficiencies they’d gain, campo-wide. And it would also eliminate a whole host of security concerns, for scriving definitions were easily the most valuable things a campo owned: lexicons might be the heart of a campo, but the definitions were the blood. Even this small-scale application of Orso’s technique would be revolutionary for them.
“And it’s all here,” said Orso, placing a hand on the giant tome on the table. “I’ve no doubt such advanced minds as yours will make quick work of this…”
“After the demonstration,” said Moretti sharply. “I will want to make sure it works.”
Orso bowed. “Of course.”
Berenice and Sancia continued their work, carefully applying the appropriate markers on the iron box. Within half an hour, they were done.
“Finished,” said Berenice, stepping back and wiping sweat from her brow.
The Michiel scrivers rose, approached the stage, and studied the alterations they’d made to the test lexicon and its heating chamber, as well as the iron box. Their work was deceptively simple—no more than a bit of bronze, a few plates, and a few hand-wrought sigils, carefully etched.
“It’s not working now, is it?” said the scriver with the lisp warily.
Orso g
ave him a thin smile. “No. It won’t work until the lexicon is ramped up and turned on. Only then will we have successfully twinned reality.”
“But how shall you prove that it works?” asked the scriver with the lisp.
“Well,” said Orso, “there are several ways we coul—”
“No. We shall see to that,” said Moretti. He waved to one of the scrivers at the back of the room, who trotted forward with a box of their own—though this one was silver and bronze, as opposed to Orso’s dull wood.
Moretti opened the box. Inside was yet another definition plate, along with a small scrived lantern. He turned to Orso with a wide smile on his face. “While it sounds like your demonstration might actually measure up to your initial pitch, rather than seeing you put on a show with your tools, I’d prefer to see how your technique would work with ours. This definition here will argue that this lantern will turn on…but only within a foot of whichever lexicon supports it.”
Orso nodded slowly. “So…you mean to turn on the test lexicon, put the little lantern on top of the iron box, and…wheel the iron box out of this room to see if the lantern keeps working?”
“Precisely,” said Moretti. “To a part of the campo that I know you have never seen before. You or your employees.”
The Michiel scrivers looked at Orso—but he simply shrugged and said, “Certainly.”
Moretti’s smile dimmed a little. “Proceed,” he said, nodding at his team.
The Michiel scrivers carefully placed this second scriving definition inside of the test lexicon. Then they shut it, sealed it, and turned it on.
About half the Michiel scrivers backed away, worried that it might explode. But it did not: there was just a squeak from the cart that the iron box sat on, as if a three-hundred-pound weight had been placed on it…
Which, Sancia knew, was true. Test lexicons weighed hundreds of pounds. If the iron box believed it now contained one, then it would have just grown incredibly heavy.
Orso waved to the lantern. Moretti held it up, and turned it on. At first it did nothing—but when he set it on top of the iron box, the lantern suddenly glowed with a bright and steady luminescence.
Shorefall Page 2
