Orso collapsed onto the floor, legs quaking. “Whatever. Soon we’ll have the entire Michiel campo at our mercy…and the bastards don’t even know it ye—”
There was a knock at the door. Everyone froze.
Gregor took a scrived rapier from beside the front door and peered through the peephole.
“Ah,” he said.
He turned the knob and opened the door to reveal a middle-aged man and a young woman standing on the front step. The man had a graying, unkempt beard, and he wore a set of jerkin and breeches that might have been fashionable a decade ago. The woman was younger, about Berenice’s age, clad in a leather apron with leather gloves, and her arms shone with glistening burn scars.
Gregor nodded to them. “Claudia, Gio. Fancy meeting you here.”
They slipped inside and Gregor shut the door. “We’ve been waiting for you to get back!” said Gio.
“How did it go?” said Claudia. “Did it work?”
“ ’Course it worked,” said Sancia. “Since when have I failed at a job?”
“There was that time you burned down the waterfront,” said Claudia. “Do you remember that time you burned down the waterfront?”
“Yes,” said Gregor flatly.
Giovanni and Claudia were old ex-employees of Foundryside. Both of them had come from the black market, and both had left to start their own scriving firms after the Lamplands had taken off. Orso held only a very minor grudge against them, which Sancia considered a major evolution of his moral character.
“How long will it take for it to be done?” said Gio.
“How long’s a piece of string?” snapped Orso. “As long as it is.”
“So the Michiels aren’t using it now?” asked Claudia.
“No!” said Orso. Then he thought about it. “Well. At least, I don’t think so.”
“Why don’t we go see?” suggested Gregor.
They walked through the foyer and into the central area of their offices. Once this had been corridors and little apartments and chambers, but they’d ripped all the walls down and turned the entire floor into something very different—a library.
But not a normal library. This was a library of scriving procedures, and designs, and sigil strings, and argument definitions, all compiled over the course of three years. A sign hung above the doorway reading: ALL LIBRARY VISITORS MUST SUBMIT ONE (1) SCRIVING DESIGN TO BE REVIEWED FOR APPROVAL AND PAY THE FIFTY (50) DUVOT FEE IN ORDER TO RECEIVE A LIBRARY SACHET.
Claudia and Gio stopped at the front desk. “Uh. We’ll need you to help us out here…”
“Huh?” said Sancia. “Oh, right.” The library’s defenses had been scrived to sense the Foundrysiders’ blood and permit them—but such permissions were denied to Claudia and Giovanni.
Sancia walked to the front desk and pressed a finger to a drawer. The lock popped open, and she pulled the drawer out and rummaged through it for two sachets. She tossed them to the two scrivers. “There. Now come on!”
They walked past the towering bookshelves, and the tables piled up with tomes, and the chests full of definition plates, until finally they came to a small, red door at the back of the library. Orso took out a scrived key, stuffed it into the lock, opened it, and ran down the staircase to the basement as the others followed.
“It will take them time to implement our designs,” he said. “Maybe days, maybe weeks. But I’ve no doubt they’ll try.”
The basement was an unruly, filthy place, filled with stacks of books and blackboards, piles of papers covered in sigils, and boxes of scrived bowls for heating soft metals. Sitting in the middle of the basement floor were two curious contraptions: one was a rather shabby test lexicon, somewhat like the one they’d worked with back at the Michiel campo—it bore a large, sloppy “FS” imprint at the top, indicating it was the property of Foundryside. But the other was a large dome of iron, with a round glass window set in the side. Through the window one could see dozens of round bronze plates hanging on racks within the dome.
Any scriver worth their wine would have been dumbfounded to find this rig sitting here in this musty, crackling basement: it was the cradle of a foundry lexicon, the bit that held all the carefully written arguments that the lexicon would then use to reshape reality, like a campo attorney taking a bunch of legal books to dictate the law.
But this specimen was different in two ways: for one, there was no actual foundry lexicon to go with it; and two, all the definition plates inside were blank.
Orso looked at Sancia. “Is it ready?”
She flexed her scrived sight and studied the lexicon cradle. “Looks ready to me.”
He exhaled, relieved. “Oh, thank God.”
Giovanni walked around the lexicon cradle, nodding very slightly. “So, just to review how this works…When the Michiels begin bringing out an updated definition…”
“They’ll almost certainly use our designs to twin all of their lexicon cradles,” said Berenice. “That way, they only have to write one set of arguments—and then if you put that set in one cradle, reality will think you’re putting it in all their lexicons all over their campo, all at once.”
“Saving a fortune in time, money, resources…” Orso waved a hand. “Everything.”
Claudia nodded. “And what Sancia did at the hypatus offices…That little cube you said you’d made…”
“It’s a relay rig!” said Orso, literally hopping up and down with joy. “Like a red cuckoo sneaking its egg into a nest! Sancia had to get it damned close to the lexicon, but now that she’s done it, it’s tricked their goddamn hypatus lexicon into treating this cradle like it’s on the Michiel campo!”
Giovanni looked faint with amazement. He slowly sat down on the basement floor. “So when they feed all their arguments into their hypatus lexicon…All the proprietary designs and sigil strings they’ve spent thousands of duvots producing over however many years…”
“Then these blank plates here will fill up with those very same designs!” cried Orso, bouncing around the room. “All those incredibly valuable arguments that can convince reality to tie itself in scrumming knots will literally be written out on our blank plates! Everything that makes the goddamn Michiels so high and so mighty is going to pass through my goddamn basement in a matter of days, or even hours!”
“Holy shit,” said Claudia. “You really think you’ve done it?”
Berenice heaved a huge, slow sigh. “I think so, yes. We should be able to steal every single scriving definition the Michiels have ever made.”
“And make their whole house irrelevant overnight,” said Sancia.
There was a long silence.
“You all seem very merry,” said Gregor. “But I think my job as chief of security is going to get very, very difficult very soon. The second they find out, they’ll want our heads for this, Orso. Though they might want other bits of our anatomy first.”
“We have some time to relax,” said Orso. “It’s not like they’re going to twin the chamber and start feeding in their definitions tonight or something. We have time enough to get our house in order, set up the necessary protocols, an—”
There was a snap from the cradle.
They all jumped and stared at one another.
Another silence—this one much, much longer.
Sancia peered into the cradle. “It…looks like the plates have changed.”
“Already?” said Berenice, aghast. “They implemented our techniques already?”
“You’re joking…” said Gregor.
“Perhaps…” said Orso hoarsely. “Perhaps I did not give Moretti enough credit…”
He walked over to the test lexicon and turned it off. Then with one last look at everyone, he opened the door to the chamber, reached inside, and slid a bronze plate out.
The plate was no longer blank. Now it was covered wit
h thousands and thousands of sigils—and though Sancia wasn’t sure, she suspected these sigils were in the handwriting of Armand Moretti himself.
Orso looked up at them with tears in his eyes. “We did it. We’ve stolen the jewels out from under the sleeping dragon. And no one in Tevanne even knows it yet.”
4
Sancia tipped back the glass of wine and felt a thrill of warmth as it slipped down her throat and into her belly. She wiped her mouth with a relish that bordered on extravagant. “That,” she said, “is exactly what I needed.”
Gregor watched her over the brim of his cup of weak tea, his face fixed in an expression of morbid fascination. “You know you’re not supposed to drink the dregs, yes? All the bits of sugarcane settle down there?”
“She knows.” Berenice sighed. “It is difficult to get someone who’s grown up eating nothing but rice and beans to understand how to appreciate wine.”
“I eat a lot more than rice and beans these days,” said Sancia, grinning at her.
Berenice froze, and Gregor tactfully turned away. “That is enough,” Berenice said quietly. But she smiled.
Sancia extended her glass to her. “The hell with Pasqual’s giraffe puppets,” she said. “I’d rather be here than anywhere in the world.”
They were all crowded into their usual corner table at the neighborhood taverna, the Cracked Crucible. Though the plaster walls were cracking, the pipe smoke noxious, and the wine unsettlingly viscous, it was considered a critical gathering spot for the Lamplands cognoscenti. Mostly because it was the taverna that Orso preferred—and where Orso went, other scrivers tended to follow.
“You’re not worried the Michiels will figure it out?” said Claudia.
“Having met these gentlemen,” said Gregor, “I am not.”
“A slow leak of information,” said Orso, his eyes glittering. “They’ve been stabbed in an artery and don’t even know they’re dying yet.”
“And what are you going to do with their definitions once you have them all?” asked Gio.
He grinned evilly. “The same thing we already do,” he said. “Give them away.”
Claudia stared at him. “You’re not serious.”
“Once we have all their most powerful arguments,” said Orso grandly, “we shall make copies of the plates, bundle them up, and leave them on the doorstep of every firm in the Lamplands. They will all wake up to a very pleasant Monsoon Carnival gift, I should think. And maybe we’ll toss a few to the black markets, and let them go overseas. And may they spread, and spread, and spread.”
“You don’t want to sell them first?” said Gio. “You could make a damned fortune, man. I know my firm would be the first to buy.”
Claudia nodded fervently. She and Gio had left Foundryside to start their own firms, but they were having their fair share of issues. Sancia wasn’t surprised to hear they might be interested in looking at merchant house definitions for inspiration.
“Gio, lad,” said Orso, “I’d trade every duvot in every campo’s coffers just to piss down their necks for a hot minute. This was not, and shall not ever be, about the money.” He sat up straight and assumed a dignified, regal pose. “This was about our principles.”
“Piss and principles,” said Claudia. “What natural bedmates.”
“I still fail to see your strategy, Orso,” said Gio with a sigh.
Orso thought about it. “Have you ever seen a drunk play bottla ball when everyone else is sober?”
“I have both seen, and been, that particular drunk,” said Gio.
“What are you talking about now, Orso?” said Sancia.
“Well, if the drunk isn’t coordinated enough to actually win the game—to really make good choices,” said Orso, “then he just tosses his ball into the clusters of his opponents’ and sends them rocketing all over the place. Not strategic throws with specific ends—but a play at scrambling the whole court, and ruining everyone else’s game.”
“So—in this metaphor,” said Gio, “you’re a drunk throwing balls?”
“I am saying that when one has no good choices,” said Orso, “the smartest choice is to scramble the court. And that is what we shall do.”
They toasted their success, once, twice, more, and shared bowls of coconut rice and shrimp. But then one droopy young man sidled up to their table and leaned over Claudia’s shoulder to talk to them.
“I wanted to ask you,” the young man mumbled, “about that density fix you gave me.”
“Not tonight, Otto,” sighed Sancia.
“I know you fixed it,” said Otto, “but I can’t duplicate what you did.”
“We can discuss this at the library tomorrow,” Berenice told him. “During a scheduled appointment.”
“I’m under a deadline,” said Otto. “If…If there could be just something you could show me…”
Sancia and Berenice dutifully ignored him.
“Please,” he said. “My position is at risk…”
“Ugh!” said Sancia. She slopped down more wine, grabbed a knife, and began scrawling sigils in the tabletop. “Sit down and shut up. Because I’m only going to do this once.”
The young man watched as Sancia drew out a simple set of sigil strings that governed density and started to walk him through the process. A few Crucible patrons stood to observe as well.
“You are giving away our services!” Orso hissed.
“I’ll haul the goddamn table back to the library if I have to!” said Sancia.
Claudia and Giovanni laughed. “It’s your fault for starting a damned scriving charity, Orso,” said Gio. “Everyone expects your help now.”
“The library is not a charity,” Orso said. “Foundryside is a private interest pooling public, communal goods.”
Which was true. After founding Foundryside, Orso had been faced with a dilemma: he’d created a brand-new twinning technique, but there’d been absolutely no market for it. Only merchant houses had the resources to use it, and the merchant houses wouldn’t touch him with a ten-thousand-foot pole—unless they could shove it through his throat.
But then the other scrivers had moved into the Commons and started their own firms, and Orso had realized he had another valuable resource on his hands: Sancia. Specifically, the plate in her head that allowed her to engage with scrivings. That, combined with his and Berenice’s depth of knowledge, meant they were experts in an industry that suddenly needed a lot of help.
So they’d pivoted, and made Foundryside a consulting firm. If you had a design or a rig or a string that you just couldn’t get to work, you took it to Foundryside, and they’d help you fix it, for a fee. The Lamplands even came up with a nickname for Sancia and Berenice: they were “the Muses,” bringing brilliance down from upon high.
But there was a catch: whatever design they helped you fix went into their library. And their library could be perused by anyone who’d also donated a design to it, and paid the fee.
It was a terrifying concept for most scrivers, who came from the campos, where the question of intellectual property was something that regularly got people imprisoned or murdered every month. Sharing scriving designs? Building some kind of library that could be browsed by almost anyone? It seemed mad.
But eventually the scrivers realized: they were not on the campos anymore. And they needed help. “In order to gain,” Orso told them, “you must first give.” And finally, they did.
At first, Sancia had been reluctant to put her talents to such use. But Orso had told her his bet: “Whatever we do to empower the Lamplands will eventually undermine the merchant houses. By making the Lamplands strong, we will make the houses and their empires weak.”
And that was all Sancia had ever been interested in.
She finished scrawling out the strings on the table. “See now?” she said. “See how it works?”
Ott
o blinked. “I…think so…”
“I do not think he actually does,” said Gregor quietly into his tankard.
Orso clapped his hands. “Otto, you are in luck. If you pop by the offices tomorrow, we will schedule a remedial consultation for you, and give you the low discount of only twice our regular fees.”
“How can it be low,” said Otto, “if it’s also twice as mu—”
“Good day!” snarled Orso, and he pointed a finger at the door. Otto turned and slumped away.
“I so cherish helping out our Lamplands brothers,” said Orso, sitting back. “But I do wish some of them weren’t such dull-witted, brainless bastards.”
Sancia and Berenice exchanged a smile, exulting in the moment, in their success, in the feeling that they were finally starting something new. Sancia tossed back more wine.
“Slow down,” said Berenice. Her fingers trailed down Sancia’s back. “It’s early.”
“I’ve earned it,” said Sancia. “Haven’t we all earned it?”
“We have,” said Orso. He raised his glass again. “Tonight we have saved this city. We have saved scriving itself. And no one even knows it. We are all keepers of a secret flame, lighting the way forward.” He drank—or tried to, as a good bit of it wound up spilling down his chin.
They toasted again, but Gregor’s face was quiet and closed as he drank his tea.
“Something wrong?” asked Sancia.
“Not a flame, I think,” he said. “A spark. We intend to start an inferno.” He looked out the greasy window at the foggy lanes outside. “Yet fires do not care about who they burn.”
* * *
—
Together they wobbled home through the lanes of the Commons. To Sancia’s eyes the sky-bound lamps were smears of yellow and orange and purple on the dark canvas of the night sky. Though the Monsoon Carnival was still days away, a few people were already in costumes. Sancia had a slight scare when someone ran past her wearing the classic Papa Monsoon costume: the black cloak, black mask, and black three-cornered hat of the mythical man who brought the storms and death every six years.
Shorefall Page 5
