“ ’Magine it,” belched Orso as they stepped over the creaking wooden sidewalks. “Imagine it as it used to be. Hundreds of firms, thinking, working, collaborating…That was as it was.” He stopped and looked down one alley. The wind rippled through the evening sky and all the lanterns danced, the names and colors intermixing, and for a moment it looked like Orso’s head was afire with flames of many hues. “It can be that way again. We can bring it back. Think of all the soldiers, all the scrivers, all the people waiting for a better way of living…All of this, all of it can change.”
“Let’s not get maudlin,” said Gregor. “Let us get home instead.”
Sancia looked at Gregor, and saw he did not look drunk, or happy, or cheerful. Rather, he wore the same expression that he so often did: a look of troubled, quiet loneliness, like a man still puzzling over a bad dream.
“Come, come,” he said, shepherding them on. “Come on. Off to bed with all of you.”
“I’m sorry, Gregor,” said Sancia.
“For what?” he asked.
Because I couldn’t fix you, she wished to say. But then there was a blare of piping from the corner, and reeling laughter, and the moment was gone.
* * *
—
Berenice helped her up the stairs a step at a time. “Just because you can finally drink,” she said, “it doesn’t mean you should do so with quite so much enthusiasm.”
“Kiss me,” said Sancia.
“I have. Repeatedly. Despite the taste of Crucible wine on your lips.”
“We did it. We really pulled it off, Ber.”
“I know we did.”
“But the hell of it was…it wasn’t even all that hard,” said Sancia.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Well, not for me, anyways. If you could get me to the Morsinis, or the Dandolos…We could wipe out the lot of them.”
“You can hardly handle these stairs. Let’s manage our aspirations accordingly.”
They turned on the next landing and started up the next flight.
“Can we tell him?” asked Sancia.
“Tell who?” Then she realized. “Oh. Yes. Of course.”
They walked up the steps to the Foundryside attic, where they lived together. Berenice unlocked their door—which had been scrived to demand both the presence of their blood and their saliva—and Sancia staggered in and made for the closet.
“Would you let me do that?” said Berenice, locking the door. “You’ll make such a mess of things…”
But Sancia ignored her. She stumbled to the closet and pawed through their clothes and books until she’d revealed a small panel in the back. She pressed her hand to it, and there was a pop.
“Locks and locks and locks,” she muttered, pulling the panel away. She reached inside. “And yet all I want is…ah.”
She felt her fingers close over the metal—over his head, so curiously butterfly-shaped, and his tooth, strange and rippled.
As always, she waited for a moment—to hear his voice, his chatter, his mad running commentary on everything. But there was nothing.
She sighed sadly and pulled him out, his gold glinting in the light of the scrived lanterns.
“Hello, Clef,” she whispered to him.
The key, of course, said nothing back. Or rather, the mind imprisoned within it—the man once named Claviedes, his personality and memories warped by the designs of the key—did not. When the tool had been aging and run-down, Clef had been able to converse with Sancia directly, whispering in her ear like a songbird in a fairy tale—until he’d been forced to reset himself, and restore all the boundaries within the device. He’d been silent ever since.
Sancia believed he was still in there, a mind trapped within all the invisible machinery inside the key, silent but sentient, and lonely.
“Bring him out here, if you’re doing it,” said Berenice. “I daresay he’s sick of the dark.”
Sancia pulled out the little golden key, shakily stood, and walked over and sat by Berenice on the foot of their bed. She held him up to her lips and whispered to him, “We did it, Clef. We did what you said.”
Berenice sat quietly, allowing Sancia this moment.
“Move thoughtfully,” she said. “And bring freedom to others. And…I think we’re going to. The houses are weak, and they know they’re weak. They’ve lost scrivers. Lost money. They can’t keep control of their plantations—the slaves there are rebelling left and right. And…and if we just give them a push, we can…”
Sancia fell silent, and a sudden swell of guilt bloomed in her.
“Don’t,” said Berenice.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t start beating yourself up.”
“You always say that.”
“You are doing what you can. Freeing who you can. And just because you couldn’t free Clef, or…or Gregor, it doesn’t take away the rest of what we’ve done.”
Sancia shut her eyes wistfully. “I cracked that hypatus building like it was nothing. You’d think…You’d think I’d be able to do more.”
Berenice gently took Clef from her fingers. “Whoever made Clef was a sight better than you, or Orso, or the both of you put together.”
“And Gregor?”
Berenice was silent. The subject of Gregor loomed over all of them like a shadow—for he, like Sancia, was a scrived human being, bearing a command plate in his head that could alter his thoughts, his abilities…and perhaps more.
So the question was—who had done that to him? Who had made him what he was, a specimen that far outstripped anything Foundryside had ever made? And why? Despite all their work and research, they still didn’t know.
“Perhaps Valeria could have fixed him,” said Sancia bitterly, “if she hadn’t gone and vanished on us.”
“The less you talk about Valeria,” said Berenice, “the better I sleep.”
“Don’t little children pray to angels to watch over them as they slumber?”
“Valeria was many things. But I think ‘angel’ is definitely far afield.”
Sancia went to their washing basin and splashed cold water on her face. She stared at her reflection in the dimly lit waters, and studied the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, the lines around her mouth, and the silvery sprinkles in her closely cropped hair.
She returned to the bed and sat. When did I get so old? She flopped back. When did I get so scrumming old?
Berenice replaced the key in the secret panel in their closet and sat next to her.
“Is this going to cut it?” asked Sancia.
“Is what going to cut what?” asked Berenice.
“What we’re doing. Orso’s grand plan. It feels clever enough, bringing down another merchant house. I just worry it’s another move in the same old game.” She gave a bleak shrug. “Candiano, Morsini, Dandolo, Michiel…even the hierophants, however long ago they were. I feel like they’re all links in a chain, binding us up. But every time we break a link, another gets forged to replace it. When does it stop?”
“For now, stop thinking about it,” Berenice said.
“I can’t,” Sancia said. “How can I?”
Sancia looked up as Berenice slid closer to her.
“Ah,” said Sancia, smiling. “I see.”
* * *
—
Gregor Dandolo lay on his cot in his tiny room, trying to sleep. He shut his eyes, and opened them, and shut them and opened them again.
It had been a wonderful night. A triumphant night. He should feel happy, he knew. He should feel satisfied with the culmination of months of dangerous and daring work. So why couldn’t he sleep?
Because though Foundryside might have changed things, he thought, you still remain the same.
He listened to the pipers outside, to the shouts and the calls from
the early Monsoon Carnival revelers, to the chattering of gray monkeys as they feuded over which rooftop belonged to which tribe. Finally he could bear it no more, and he stood up and peered through his window at the city beyond.
He stared out at the sea of giant floating lanterns. His gaze followed a familiar path, shifting across the luminous ramble of the Lamplands to something that looked like a huge, black wave rising out of the sprawl of the city.
The Dandolo campo walls. The tops of the walls had been fitted with spotlight lanterns, which flashed and swiveled at random, sensing blood, or movement, or heat, or whatever other phenomena you could convince a rig to detect. Ever since Sancia had almost single-handedly destroyed the Candiano walls, all the campos had started investing a lot of research in identifying threats. Gregor wasn’t sure how many of those new systems accidentally eliminated innocent people—say, a drunk who got too close to the walls, or someone who brought the wrong sachet on the wrong day—but he was sure it was more than zero.
He watched the Dandolo spotlights dance, slashing through the steam and the smoke unfurling from the foundry stacks.
Are you there, Mother?
The spotlights whirled again.
What are you making within those walls? His right hand rose and massaged the side of his head. I wonder—are you making someone like me?
He lay back down, but did not sleep. Ever since the night of the Mountain—the night when the scrivings on his mind had been activated, and he’d waged war upon the Candianos, slaughtering dozens—Gregor Dandolo found he did not much like sleep. He always worried that he might wake up a different person.
Worse still were the dreams, which he’d been having for the past year or so: dreams of sandy beaches, and the moon reflected on the sea; of fire, and screaming, and the smell of earth and old stone; of a room full of moths, white and frail and fluttering, and his mother’s face, pale and gleaming in the dark; and finally the feeling of some kind of presence, a man or something man-shaped, perhaps, wrapped in black and standing over his shoulder, just out of sight…And with these dreams came the intense, overwhelming compulsion that he was supposed to be looking for someone, trying to find them, to seek out where they had hidden themselves away.
He suspected that these dreams were flashes of memories of what his mother had made him do: missions and murders and conspiracies she’d set him on in his hypnotized state, possibly out in the plantations, or all across the Durazzo Sea.
He did not know. Nor did he know what he had done, or to whom. But he wished the dreams would stop.
He rubbed the side of his head again. What a thing, to wish to be unmade, he thought. To yearn to open up one’s skull and allow all the bindings there to come unspooling out like lengths of wire…
Though they had tried to fix him, once. And only once.
His memory of the attempt was still clear in his mind: he, lying down on a pallet in the basement; then Sancia, kneeling beside him and placing her bare fingers to the side of his head, just as his mother had so many times; and then there was her voice, loud and jumbled and furious in his thoughts, and then the flashes of so many memories—steel and screams and corridors of stone, the splash of hot blood and cries of pleas for mercy—and then it’d been like he’d had a cold blanket placed upon his mind, and he was wandering in a dark room with no walls, and then…
And then he’d awoken. He’d awoken to find himself standing in a wrecked room, all the furniture smashed to pieces, and bookshelves turned over and Berenice weeping—and before him was Sancia, face red and eyes full of tears, screaming and shouting at him and clawing at his hands, which were clamped tight around her throat.
Gregor shut his eyes. I am not a rig. I am not.
5
Sancia lay in the covers, lost in the depths of drunken sleep.
“Sancia,” whispered a voice nearby.
She felt around in the bed with one hand. Berenice was not there.
She blearily opened her eyes and looked around. She was alone in their room, naked on the bed, the ceiling strobing with yellow and orange as the lanterns outside drifted and twirled.
She shut her eyes again and tried to return to sleep.
She cracked an eye.
I know that voice.
She turned her head, and saw now there was someone in the room with her—someone enormous, a giant, hulking shadow of a figure that nearly reached the ceiling, its shoulders gleaming gold and its eyes two tiny flecks of cold yellow light burning in the darkness…
Sancia opened her mouth to scream. But then the world blurred, and she was gone.
* * *
—
First a darkness, and a feeling of age, of years, of millennia, the horrible, crushing, obliterating feeling of all that time weighing down upon her…
She saw the horizon afire, the sky filled with smoke, and all the world burning—and somewhere in the sky above she thought she saw a human form, cloaked in black, floating in the air, his legs crossed in a curiously meditative position…
She saw a tomb, deep below the earth, and a sarcophagus of black stone, and sitting in the sarcophagus was a single tiny bone, like that of a knuckle. She felt an awareness of a location somehow emerge in her mind, like it was an old memory she’d forgotten until just now.
This place…this is in the plantations, in the islands across the Durazzo. I know it is…
A flash of water, of the open ocean, a horizon without a hint of land—except there was something approaching, a small dot parting the waters until it grew, and grew…
A ship?
She saw desert hills, and a white stone peristyle sitting atop the sand dunes, the stars and the velvet purple sky visible through its columns.
There was someone in the peristyle. A man, or a man-shaped figure, cloaked in black…
It was floating in the air.
She drew closer to the peristyle, and saw the thing in black seemed to be sitting on thin air, legs crossed, hands on its knees.
The thing in black twitched, like it had heard her approach. And then it slowly began to turn around.
I’ve seen this before, she thought. I’ve seen this thing before.
The thing in black slowly, slowly rotated in the air.
In Clef’s memories…a black-wrapped thing, and a golden box, and the sound of thousands of moths in the air…
The wind drifted across the dunes, and the black veil covering the man-shaped thing danced and rippled.
The black-clad figure kept turning toward her.
said Valeria’s voice.
The thing in black had turned to her now, its face hidden behind the veil. But she felt its gaze, felt its awareness, felt an immense pressure all over her body, like she was being gripped in the hands of a giant…
A horrible, high-pitched shrieking sound filled the sky, and the stars began to quake—and then one by one, they vanished.
The thing in black lifted its hand, gripped the black veil at its face, and began to pull it away.
The veil fell to the ground.
Sancia saw what lay underneath, and her mind crawled with madness, and she began screaming.
* * *
—
Her face lit up with pain. She heard Berenice’s voice nearby: “For the love
of God, Sancia, please wake up!”
Sancia sat up in bed, sobbing with fright. She whirled around, mad and drunk and disoriented, and she would have fallen off the bed had a hand not grabbed her by the arm.
“Sancia! My God, what’s wrong?” said Berenice’s voice again.
The flashes of the vision faded from her mind, and the world grew small and manageable again. Berenice was kneeling on the bed before her, holding her steady. But still the screams echoed in her mind, along with the vision of the thing in black, and the peristyle, and the dying stars above.
She felt tears running down her cheeks. “I…I saw her,” she whispered.
“What?” said Berenice.
“She…was here. In the room with me.” She looked around, but the room was empty. “And she spoke.”
“Who? Who was here?”
“Valeria.”
Berenice stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“I saw her,” whispered Sancia through her tears. “And…And she took me someplace. Someplace far away. And she…she showed me something. Or someone.”
“Sancia…are you…”
“He’s coming,” said Sancia. “That’s what she wanted to tell me. They’re trying to bring him back.”
“Who?”
Sancia swallowed, and worked to find the breath for her words. “The man who made her.”
6
Sancia sat in the Foundryside meeting room, hugging her knees and staring straight ahead. It was sometime just before dawn. Orso and Gregor sat at the table watching her warily, unsure what to say, while Berenice held her left hand tight.
“Either I’m still drunk,” said Orso, “or this is all a bad dream, or both.”
“It happened,” said Sancia sullenly. “I know it sounds mad. But it did.”
“Yes, but…but what happened?” said Orso. “You saw Valeria in your damned room, standing over you? How does that even make sense? And keep in mind, none of us have ever actually seen this thing.”
“Are you suggesting that I’m crazy?” asked Sancia.
Shorefall Page 6
