The scriver with the lisp gasped. Moretti stared at the lantern, eyes still narrow.
Orso pointed to the door. “If you would like to take the box beyond,” he said, “myself and my chief of innovation would be happy to walk with you to answer any questions”—he gestured to Sancia, who stepped forward—“while Berenice and Gregor stay behind to ensure nothing goes wrong here.”
Moretti gave Sancia a lingering glare of disgust. “And…why must I have this creature walking through my Hypatus Building?” He glanced at Berenice. “Why not her?”
“Ahh,” said Orso. “Well. Berenice is quite competent. I always find it works well to pair the competent people with the people who are, uh, less so.”
Sancia and Gregor exchanged a look—How charming.
Moretti smiled, slapped on a tremendously false grin, and said, “Of course. That makes perfect sense, then.”
Two Michiel scrivers took the cart and began to wheel it out the door. Moretti and the rest paraded out after them, with Orso and Sancia among them.
Sancia took a long, deep breath. Time to go to work.
2
Sancia, Orso, and the Michiel scrivers plodded through the corridors of the Hypatus Building in near silence. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the little glowing lantern sitting atop the iron box, waiting for it to flicker and go out—though Sancia knew it wouldn’t. They had not fooled them. The box really did believe it contained the test lexicon, and all the definitions it asserted about reality.
“Exactly how far do we plan to go, Armand?” said Orso. “Purely out of curiosity, of course…”
“Until my curiosity is sated, Orso,” said Moretti.
They took a left, then a right, roving through the halls, deeper and deeper into the workshops and assembly rooms and libraries. Sancia knew that, like nearly every hypatus building on the campo, many wild and dangerous experiments could be found here.
Or at least, she hoped so.
Here we go.
She narrowed her eyes, took a breath…and flexed.
That was the only word for it, really. She knew the human brain didn’t have anything resembling muscles, yet when she wanted to use her scrived sight, it always felt like she was flexing something in her skull, tensing some ligament or tendon or muscle that would then open up…Well. Everything.
The world before her lit up with shimmering tangles of silver, seemingly woven into the walls, the doors, the lanterns, everything: the scrivings that were altering the individual realities of all the objects around her. Each time she looked at a tangle she saw its logic—the arguments and commands that were convincing these objects to disobey physics in very select ways. To see these knots of bindings was to see the hidden rules of the world itself.
Or that was how she’d come to think of it, at least. It was a bizarre thing, being able to literally see scrivings—even through walls, and the floor and ceiling, for her scrived sight wasn’t nearly as limited by physical obstacles as normal sight—but the really hard bit was describing it. How could she begin to describe the extrasensory? Since there was no one else alive with her talent—purely the result of the scrived plate installed in the side of her head—she had no one to discuss it with.
She glanced from scriving to scriving, peering closely. She saw many mad experiments and designs working away within the Hypatus Building around her, some quite astonishing.
The question was—which one was right for the moment?
Moretti led them down a long corridor, past a group of Michiel laborers pushing a cart full of boxes containing hundreds of tiny glass beads—but as Sancia studied them with her scrived sight, she saw they were actually miniature suns, like the ones she’d seen outside, and she instantly understood that this was a tiny, experimental version that would float throughout a room or a street in a cloud.
Ah. You’ll do nicely…
She studied the rigs as the cart approached. The crowd of scrivers stepped to the side for the cart of little suns, while the laborers muttered, “ ’Scuse us…Pardon…”
But Sancia waited a little longer than most. The cart slowed, and she had to push herself aside to make way…and as she did so, she placed a bare hand against the box.
The instant she made physical contact with the box of rigs, her mind lit up with a sea of tiny voices:
Sancia listened as the tiny scrivings spoke to her in unison. It all happened in a flash—she was getting very good at conversing with rigs these days—but she knew she still didn’t have much time.
She listened to the burst of information. The little orbs, it seemed, had been convinced to glow, and float—and to follow, like dogs on a leash. In the final version, you’d probably carry around some kind of signal—a ring, or a necklace—and the cloud of tiny orbs would float behind you, or around you. A spectacular effect, really. This had all been defined pretty well, but the scrivers who’d designed them had clearly struggled to define how the little suns should float: at what speed, and at what position, and so on.
<…speed?>
A short silence.
Sancia suppressed a grin. It wasn’t surprising that this rig’s scrivers hadn’t defined something so critical—it was a brand-new design, after all—but it was damned useful for her right now.
Rapidly, Sancia argued with the little lamps, disputing their concept of distance, asserting that a foot was actually a fraction of an inch. This would mean that when the lamps exited the box, they’d hurtle toward their “marker” at top speed, constantly trying to be ever-closer—but in doing so, they’d inevitably hit a wall, which would cause them to massively overcorrect their float positions.
Really, it was all almost too easy. But she’d gotten very, very good at this in the past three years.
<…and that’s how that works, got it?> she finished.
She took her hand away. The voices went silent, and everyone continued on their way.
She exhaled. In real time, the entire exchange had lasted no more than two or three seconds. No one had noticed a thing.
Moretti took a left, then a right, then another left. “I would like to take this to the courtyard, Orso,” he said. “Just to see if it will work out of doors.”
“Of course.”
“Is there any issue with rain, or moisture?”
“I haven’t fully tested that…but I’ve no reason to imagine there would be…”
Sancia, still flexing her scrived sight, peered through the floors of the Hypatus Building, examin
ing the scrivings behind the walls or under the floors.
Then she saw it—a giant, bright ball of glowing tangles several floors below her, one so intense it made her head hurt to see it…
The hypatus lexicon. The rig that housed all the experimental arguments the Michiels had ever made.
And there it is. That’s my target.
“You have quite the impressive installation here, Armand,” said Orso. “A lot cheerier than Ofelia’s.”
“Mm? Oh, yes,” said Moretti. “I can’t imagine what the Dandolo Hypatus Building is like. Probably papers and ink all over the place…and everyone in drab little roo—”
There was a crack from the hallway behind them. Then a scream.
The parade of scrivers stopped. Everyone looked back.
Ah, thought Sancia. Here we go…
“What was that?” said the scriver with a lisp.
But then came another sound, like hail on a metal roof.
Moretti’s eyes grew wide as a tiny, intensely bright ball of light came hurtling down the hallway, quickly followed by dozens more. “Oh shit!” he cried.
Instantly, they were inundated by tiny beads of bright light that caromed off of every surface with a high-pitched clanking, shooting about with a blinding speed. There had to be hundreds of them, if not thousands, and the scrivers reacted like they were a swarm of hornets—because they did hurt, Sancia found: she felt several slam into her back like they’d been fired from a slingshot, and knew she’d have some bruises soon.
“Son of a bitch!” screamed Moretti. “Which damned fool turned on the sun clouds?”
Everything descended into chaos as the scrivers covered their heads and faces, and sought shelter from the flood of ricocheting balls of blinding light.
I think I did too good of a job, thought Sancia, convincing those little balls to fly around too fast…
But she didn’t have time to worry about that. She took three steps down the hall, found a locked door to an empty workshop, and placed her hand against it.
the door said to her.
It struggled there. Time and space, she knew, were very tricky things for scrived items to understand. How would you describe a second to something that had no concept of time? Scrivers always struggled with it.
Sancia worked away on the door, convincing it that a second was actually an improbably long period of time, and thus the last key used would still apply now, and the door should open. And as she worked, she began to feel the sigils seeping into her mind, as she always did.
The better Sancia had gotten at communing with scrivings, the more she began to sense and feel and eventually even see the sigils on their persuasion plates as she spoke to them. She thought she understood why: in broad strokes, she was feeling what the object was feeling, experiencing the arguments someone else had placed upon it, what they did and how they worked.
To commune with a scrived item was, in a way, to feel its scrivings and bindings placed upon you. And every time, Sancia worried a little that whenever she broke away, she was a little more altered than she’d been before.
Finally there was a click.
The door opened.
Sancia darted inside, shut the door, and convinced it to lock again. Then she turned to the workshop behind her, flexing her scrived sight.
She darted forward, remembering what Orso had told her when they’d first started planning this job: We won’t need to bring any weapons or tricks with us at all, of course.
She’d asked—Why is that?
Because every hypatus building is full of mad shit, he’d said. Why bother making weapons when we can just get you inside, set you loose, and turn the whole place into a weapon?
* * *
—
Sancia dashed through the workshops, listening to the clanking, clattering, and cries behind her. She figured she had about ten minutes before they managed to resolve the situation and noticed she was gone.
She flexed her scrived sight and peered down through the walls and floors of the building. That bright, hot tangle of scrivings was four stories below. Now she needed to find the way to access it.
The lexicon itself will be too well guarded, she remembered Orso telling her. There’s no way you can get to it. But there is, how shall I say, infrastructure available…
She walked down one hallway, flexing her scrived sight as hard as she could. She passed through workshops full of countless panes of glass—the Michiels were getting very good at creating glass that imitated daylight, she saw—and glowing floor tiles, and hanging chandeliers that created a curiously calming fluting sound, and mirrors that shone with a curiously intense, haunting luminescence.
Crap, crap, crap, she thought.
She kept moving, glancing about for a way to her target, listening to the screams and commotion from the corridors behind her. Even with her scrived sight, it was hard to keep her bearings in this building. It seemed honeycombed with workshops and rooms, and many had windows that had somehow been scrived so they appeared to face the outside, further scrambling her sense of direction.
Suddenly she saw a bundle of scrivings running toward her—rapier, espringal, armor—recognized what it was, and calmly moved to hide behind an open door.
She waited. Finally a Michiel guard charged past, muttering, “I swear to God, every day it’s something new in this place…”
She listened until he was gone, then continued farther into the building, one corridor, then another, until she spied what she’d been looking for: a long, thick line of scrivings, running horizontally about two floors below her, all arguing something about the pressure of water…
Water pipes, she thought. To keep the lexicon cool…
But she’d need to find a way down to them. The stairs were not an option, she’d be too exposed there. The windows might be an option. But perhaps there was a better one…
She looked around, and spied something running vertically throughout the building: some kind of chimney with a plate in it that was absolutely loaded up with scrivings about gravity…
Did they really put a goddamn dumbwaiter in their hypatus building?
What was she saying? Of course the Michiels would.
She started off toward it.
If you had told Sancia three years ago that one day she’d not only break into the Michiel Hypatus Building in the middle of the day but navigate through its countless chambers and guard posts and checkpoints with ease, she would have thought you mad. And yet with her scrived sight, she was able to winnow her way through the building like a hot knife through eel fat: she danced about the guards and scrivers, spying the rigs in their pockets as they moved and ducking behind doors or behind corners just at the perfect moment; she tore through locks and sachet checks and scrived doors like they’d been built to expect her passage; she even managed to hide in plain sight once, standing behind a new type of scrived lamp and convincing it to glow unnaturally bright so that the scriver who wandered by just squinted at it angrily before continuing on, grousing, “What damned fool thought that’d be a good idea…”
And she left everything more or less as she’d found it. The Michiels would have no idea she’d ever even been here.
Within a handful of minutes, she’d arrived at the office with the dumbwaiter, and she crammed herself inside.
She was familiar with the techniques they�
��d used to scrive the dumbwaiter—basically an amplified version of the argument they used to make the floating lanterns float—so within seconds she’d convinced the thing to let her descend into the belly of the Hypatus Building, closer to the water pipes leading to the lexicon.
The dumbwaiter brought her lower, and lower.
I’m doing good, she thought as she fell. I’m doing really good! It’s good to be back at it.
Her hand thoughtlessly crept to her chest as if feeling for a necklace, expecting to feel the cool metal pressing against her skin. But there was nothing there.
The smile faded.
This was her first effort at any real thieving since the Mountain—and still, it wasn’t the same.
The dumbwaiter came to a stop. She slid the hatch open and saw she was in yet another workshop—this one full of adhesive plates that were built to stick to walls—and crawled out.
The water pipes will be accessible closer to the lexicon itself, Orso had told her. But there’ll be more security down there. The more important you are, the closer your office is to the lexicon—which means more guards, more defenses, and more wards.
She crept to the workshop door, gazing forward with her scrived sight. She cracked the door open and peeked out. On the other side of the door was another corridor—and just a few feet to the left and down the corridor was a chamber where she could access the water pipes for the lexicon, probably below some kind of maintenance hatch in the floor.
Yet in the room with this hatch were three Michiel guards, all very armed, all standing at attention. She quickly realized why: there was an office next door with far more defensive wardings than all the other ones…which made her suspect the chambers belonged to Armand Moretti himself.
Shit. Now what?
Crouching in the corridor, she studied the room. Moretti’s chambers were exactly as she might have expected: lots of ridiculous, overindulgent displays of light and glass…
But there were a lot of scrived pots. Probably for keeping his damned chocolates warm. And while the guards were stationed before the front doors to his chamber, that didn’t mean there wasn’t another way in.
Shorefall Page 3
