She walked along the corridor, peering in rooms until she found his bedchamber—she suspected that was what it was by the unusual amount of warm, glowing scrived lights placed around what she assumed was his bed. And though she hadn’t known Mr. Moretti for long, she felt she’d gotten a pretty decent bead on his character…
Aha, she thought. There was a rig hidden in the wall next to his bedchamber, one that looked a lot like a door—probably for allowing lovers to slip in and out, unseen.
She walked up to it, placed her hand on the wall, and listened.
She wrinkled her nose. She much preferred tinkering with Orso’s scrivings. They could be a bit grumpy, but at least they were a lot less touchy-feely.
She overpowered the door, slipped into his chambers, and found the biggest scrived pot of chocolate available. She looked around, grabbed a big bottle of grapeseed oil, and dumped it in. Then placed her hand on the side of the pot, and listened.
<…just slightly warmer than the human body,> said the pot in tones of quiet contentment.
She rapidly convinced the scrived pot that human flesh was several times hotter than what it’d been originally told—or it would be, in about one minute. And then it should believe that for exactly one minute after that; otherwise if it kept believing it should be so terribly hot it might set the whole building on fire.
The scrived pot emphatically agreed. Sancia slipped back out the secret door and huddled in the workshop with the adhesive plates once more. Then she licked her finger, reached down, and applied the finger to the heel of her boot.
Instantly, the heel of her boot recognized her saliva and popped off, revealing a small hollow within. Sancia picked up her heel and peered inside.
No one in their right mind would have ever imagined someone would scrive the heel of their boot. That had been Berenice’s idea. But they’d needed a way to get this final component into the campo—for even Sancia wouldn’t have been able to make this on the fly.
It looked like a small, square metal plate. But as Sancia touched it with her bare skin and spoke to it with her talent, it suddenly popped up like a paper sculpture, and became a small cube.
She cradled the tiny cube in her hands, studying it, observing the countless scrivings and arguments etched into its surface in microscopic writing. She and Berenice and Orso had worked on this for better than a half a year, and all of it had come to this moment. Otherwise they’d just sold Orso’s greatest idea and mightily empowered a merchant house for nothing.
She looked through the walls in front of her and spied the scrived pot. She saw its arguments had suddenly changed, and now its temperature was leaping up, up, up…
Here goes.
She moved her gaze to study the three guards outside Moretti’s chambers. For a moment nothing happened. Then one guard whirled about, and there was a cry of “Smoke! Smoke! Fire!”
She watched as the three guards charged into the chambers. When they were far enough away, Sancia darted out into the chamber with the hatch to the water pipe.
The room was already full of smoke—apparently grapeseed oil smoked up like the devil—but she spied the hatch in the corner of the chamber. She darted over and quietly pulled it open.
She studied the scrivings in the pipe below. There was a small valve in the side, but she couldn’t just open it—then water would come spraying out.
Once you get to the water pipes, Orso had told her, you’re going to have to find a way to convince them to stop piping in water. Then you can open the pipes, drop in the cube, and be done. But it’s dangerous. You’ll only have about fifteen seconds before you have to resume the flow. I think. I really don’t know.
She’d asked—Why is that?
Because no one has ever tested shutting down the flow of cooling water to a lexicon. They need a lot of water to stay cool, and if they don’t get it, well…A lexicon is just a giant pile of scrivings and arguments that make reality weak and confused. If the lexicon unravels, and everything gets too confused…That would be very bad for not only us, but everyone who lives within about a mile of the Hypatus Building. So let’s be conservative and say you only have ten seconds to drop the cube in.
Sancia stared at the pipes in the floor.
Ten seconds. Great.
“Son of a bitch!” cried the guards in the smoking room. “What in hell did he put in this pot?”
She started unscrewing the valve, very, very slowly.
If I get this wrong…Well. At least Orso won’t be able to scream at me.
She kept unscrewing it until it had only a few threads left. Then she placed a bare hand to the side of the pipe, and listened.
She winced. She wasn’t surprised to find that the arguments within the pipe were unusually powerful—this was a critical part of the lexicon, after all—but this meant it’d take time to convince them…and then, worse, more time to restore them to their original arguments, and allow the water to resume flowing.
She took a breath. Scrivings have trouble with distance, direction, and time, she told herself. These are always the doors. These are always the way you can unlock them.
she told it,
It responded.
“Ugh,” said one of the guards. “It’s smoked up the ceiling…Should we get a mop?”
said the pipes after they’d listened.
Sancia swallowed as she watched the pipes begin to force water away from the valve…which meant that, as of right now, the lexicon far below her would start to unravel.
She started counting.
One.
She fumbled with the valve, unscrewing it as fast as she could.
Two.
The valve came loose, and she almost dropped it—which would have alerted the guards to her presence. She snatched it, and carefully laid it on the floor, one bare hand still applied to the pipe.
Three.
She fumbled for the little metal cube in her pocket, and pulled it out.
“Just put the pot out!” cried one of the guards. “You know we’re not allowed in here anyway!”
Four.
She flexed her scrived sight. The lexicon below her was beginning to burn a strangely bright, unsettling shade of white…
She stuffed the little cube into the pipe and delicately picked the valve top back up.
Five.
She started screwing it in, one turn, then another, then another—just far enough.
Six.
The lexicon below her was now a disturbing pink.
“The damned thing’s still burning hot!” screamed one of the guards.
She
forced her arguments upon the pipes, one after the other.
Seven.
“Shit, shit, shit,” whispered Sancia. She focused as hard as she could, telling the pipes what water was, how it worked, how it felt, how to recognize it, activating its bindings one after another.
Eight…
“No, no, no!” shouted a guard. “Don’t drop the pot on his damned bed!”
She heard the slosh of water within the pipes, and a loud, oddly pleasing gurgling. She looked down at the lexicon far below her.
For a moment it did nothing—the pink just intensified unpleasantly, and she felt her belly blossom with utter terror…
Well. I did it. I killed a lexicon. And now we’re all going to scrumming die.
But then the pinkness faded, very slowly, bit by bit…until it had returned to the usual bright white.
She almost sighed, overwhelmed with relief. But then she remembered the little cube.
She looked back down, and saw she could track its passage through the pipes of the lexicon: it was a bright little star of white-hot scrivings, swooping and tumbling about in the flow of the waters—until it grew close to the massive rig.
At this point, the little cube’s density scrivings were activated, and it dropped like a stone, sticking to the bottom of the pipe and refusing to budge in the rush of the water. It was practically right in the belly of the thing. It held fast.
I did it. Holy shit, I did it…
“And just how are we going to explain to the hypatus that we set his bed on fire!” screamed a guard inside Moretti’s chambers.
Sancia shut the hatch and slipped away.
* * *
—
Two floors above, Sancia opened the locked door and was met by the sight of a half dozen Michiel scrivers lying on the floor, groaning and moaning, their faces and bodies covered in bright-red welts.
“Is it over?” she asked. “Sorry, I got hit by a few and I just…I just ducked in and hid in that office there…”
The Michiel scrivers glared at her and pulled themselves to their feet, not bothering to respond.
“Did the box work?” she asked. “Do we need to do any more testing?”
“No!” snapped Moretti, whose face paint and hair were now an absolute mess. There were even holes in his robes from where the little glass beads had shot through. “What the devil were you doing in there?”
“I told you, sheltering from th—”
“Search her! Now!”
Two Michiel guards approached her, their armor covered in tiny dents from the lamps. She sighed and put her arms up, and they searched her rather invasively.
“Nothing,” said one when they’d finished.
“Son of a bitch,” spat Moretti. “Orso! At the very least, reprimand this horrid little girl for her impertinence!”
Sancia tried to suppress a grin. But then she heard a voice hissing behind her: “Hid in that office there…You just…You just hid in that office there, eh?”
She turned to find Orso Ignacio glaring at her murderously, his face trembling with fury—his welt-covered, bruised, pockmarked face.
3
Moretti did not apologize for the accident with the sun cloud. He seemed to take it as a natural risk that one might get pummeled by tiny glass beads at any moment when in a hypatus building. Instead, he and Orso—both bruised and furious—sat at the table before the piles and piles of paperwork, nearly all of which was intended to satisfy the other authorities on the Michiel campo.
“Sign there,” said Moretti. He winced as he touched the side of his face. “And there. And there…”
Finally it was done. The Michiels packed up all the tools the Foundrysiders had brought—the plates, the tomes—and took them away, leaving only the chest of duvots beside the table.
Moretti stood and tried to smile, but apparently even this was too painful. “Congratulations, Orso. You will forgive me if I do not shake hands. Or bow. Or discuss this further.” One hand touched his left buttock, and he made an unpleasant grunt of pain. “I have…some pressing issues I need to attend to…Please, go in peace.”
He departed. Two Michiel guards approached, and one said, “We’ll escort you back to your transportation.”
“Thank you,” said Gregor. He picked up the chest of duvots and they followed them out.
Berenice gave Sancia an intense look. Sancia nodded, very slightly. A giant grin blossomed on Berenice’s face—an unusual show of enthusiasm, since she was often preternaturally controlled—and Sancia had to fight from kissing her right then and there.
They trooped out to the Michiel carriage in silence, and rode back to their own shabby carriage in silence, and then drove it away from the campo in silence, until finally they were through the outer gates, and back into the Commons—the muddy, steaming, shambling, messy Commons.
“I am going to keep driving,” said Gregor, his voice shaking with either excitement or anxiety, Sancia couldn’t tell. “They are certainly still watching. We need to maintain until we get back to our firm, out of eyesigh—”
“Did you do it?” blurted Orso. “Did it work?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia.
“It…It did?”
“Yeah.”
“It really did, Sancia?” said Gregor from the cockpit.
“Yeah.”
“For once,” said Berenice with a sigh, “you could answer with more than one word…”
Orso nearly began crying with joy. “Yes. Yes! Oh my scrumming God, yes!”
“You aren’t mad about your face?” said Sancia.
“My face? Who the hell cares about my face? I’d have cut the damned thing off to do what we did back there! Oh, we’ll have a merry old carnival this year, now won’t we! Let’s get home, as fast as we can!”
* * *
—
Their carriage bumped and trundled through the Commons as evening fell. Sancia gripped Berenice’s hand tight and kept staring out the window, praying and hoping that they wouldn’t see any Michiel assassins or guards pursuing them. So far she hadn’t seen anything besides the chattering gray monkeys, which nested in the building rooftops of the Commons.
“Still nothing?” asked Gregor from the pilot’s cockpit.
“Nothing,” said Sancia. And she knew she was right. Not only did her scrived sight give her an edge, it was hard to sneak through the Commons these days. There were too many lamps now, thanks to the changes Orso and Foundryside had wrought in the past three years.
After Orso had started his own scriving firm out in the Commons, no one had been sure how the merchant houses would react. Would they just kill him outright? Blow up the building with shrieker bolts? Either had seemed very likely.
Yet within days, their decision was made for them—for soon dozens and dozens of merchant house scrivers, some of them the geniuses of the campos, had followed in his footsteps: they’d abandoned the merchant houses, set up shop in the Commons, and started their own miniature merchant houses.
Now there were walled-off blocks here and there among the rookeries, tiny compounds that the other new scriving firms had built into their own headquarters. These firms operated miniature foundries and manufacturing bays within those walls, tinkering and experimenting day and night. Since the Commons was so poorly designed, resembling a rabbit’s warren more than a civilized neighborhood, the new firms had resorted to giant, stationary floating lanterns that hovered above their new compounds, with the words “FRIZETTI” and “BALDANO” stitched on the side
s so people could find them. Within months, the nebulous, half-pejorative term “Lamplands” came into use, and all who labored in such neighborhoods were Lamplanders.
The merchant houses, and the Tevanni Council, had been utterly perplexed as to how to respond to all this. Between a slave rebellion abroad and a scriver rebellion at home, they’d been utterly paralyzed. Which suited Foundryside just fine.
Orso sat forward as they finally approached their own headquarters. “We’re finally there. Holy shit, we’re almost home free.”
The carriage trundled up to the Diestro Building—the lopsided, improvised, and shabby headquarters of Foundryside Limited—and the rambling iron wall that sealed it off from the streets. Even though it was almost night, a queue of Lamplands scrivers was waiting at the gates for them.
“We’ve been here all day!” one scriver complained as they got out. “You’re holding up our work, Orso!”
“Not open for business today!” snarled Orso as he pushed past them. “Scrum off!”
“What!” said another. “You can’t do that. You didn’t even put out a sign!”
“A consulting firm had damned well better consult!” said yet a third.
“Well, it’s damned well not going to today!” Orso shot a thumb over his shoulder. “Hit the road! Come back tomorrow! Or don’t, I don’t care!”
Muttering, the scrivers departed, and the Foundrysiders opened their gates, crossed the courtyard, and piled into the front doors of their offices. Gregor went about locking the door and setting up their defensive wards—windows and walls and floorboards that could suddenly turn quite hostile to the wrong person there at the wrong time—but stopped when Orso took a deep breath, raised both his fists, and gave a rough cry of victory.
“We did it!” he shouted. “We really did it!”
“Mm, mostly Sancia did it,” said Berenice.
“And it is not done yet,” said Gregor. “This will take weeks to finish.”
Shorefall Page 4
