Shorefall

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “This is it, right?” Orso asked. He shook it. “I remember it being bigger than this…”

  “For God’s sake!” said Sancia. “Don’t shake the scrumming thing, you stupid bastard!”

  He set the box down on the floor before him. “If I recall…we scrived this lock so it needed to sense the blood of two Foundryside founders to open. That way one of us couldn’t go mad, dig it up, and use it for ourselves. So get over here.”

  Sancia put the pickax down and knelt with Orso on the floor. They exchanged a nervous look, then each placed a hand on the iron box.

  “Ready?” said Orso.

  “One,” said Sancia. “Two. Three…”

  They swung the lid back. Both of them recoiled at the sight of what lay within.

  To the average eye, the thing would have looked somewhat unusual, but not terribly upsetting. It appeared to be a large, curious golden pocket watch, with many levers, buttons, and dials on its face. Most curious was the smooth golden plate in the center, which was covered in countless tiny sigils, all etched in a cold, precise hand.

  “Goddamn,” muttered Sancia. “How I wished I’d never have to lay eyes on this scrumming thing again.”

  Then she braced herself, and picked up the imperiat.

  8

  It was late afternoon when they got to the piers. The sky was fat with clouds, growing dark and mutinous where they met the horizon. They found Gregor standing before a dingy old fishing boat that looked like it’d seen better days maybe a decade ago, if not more.

  “This is our ship?” said Orso, his face fixed in a pained cringe.

  “It is what I can acquire with almost no notice whatsoever,” said Gregor. “I did a lot of haggling, but…I will spare you the details on cost.”

  “Shit,” said Orso faintly.

  “You sure you know how to pilot that thing?” asked Sancia.

  “I am.” He looked at her, and then at the iron box hanging from her neck by a strap. “And are you sure you know how to operate that thing?”

  Sancia’s belly squirmed unpleasantly. “Kind of,” she said. “But mostly no.”

  Which was an honest answer. The imperiat was a hierophantic tool that could dampen or kill any scriving within about a quarter mile. It strengthened reality, in a way, making it easier for the world to listen to countless scrived commands and say—Hmm, no, I’d rather not, really. Sancia had also seen it control or manipulate scrivings, dominating them from afar—the plate in her head had been one such example—but she’d never figured out how to do that.

  And there were multiple reasons why. To begin with, Berenice, Orso, and Sancia had eventually concluded that the imperiat was not designed to work with a normal human being: it was a tool of the hierophants, made by them and for them. A mortal human could pull a few levers and push its buttons, but Sancia suspected there were other, more precise ways to utilize the rig. Some she might be able to figure out—just as Estelle Candiano had, once—but for others, she couldn’t, and never would.

  Because she was uninterested in exploring further. Frankly, she was terrified of playing with the thing. The imperiat could easily kill a lexicon if you weren’t careful with it. Burying it under a few feet of concrete had seemed a much wiser choice.

  “And we’re sure it would actually sink a galleon?” said Gregor.

  “We can set it so that it targets and kills a critical scriving in the lexicon itself,” said Berenice, “triggering all its fail-safes, so it’ll be paused, essentially. It’ll only keep crucial scrivings running—usually construction ones. That’s how most lexicons are designed.”

  “That way if I have to trigger the thing while on the galleon,” said Sancia, “the ship itself won’t literally fall apart around us because…Hell, I don’t know, because the construction scrivings forgot how to glue the hull together, or something. Which gives us a chance to get off.”

  “So—we get to the galleon,” said Orso. “Sancia gets inside and turns the ship against itself, and then we get the slaves to the escape shallops…There should be enough, right?”

  Gregor nodded. “There’s enough shallops for the galleon’s maximal crew, which numbers in the hundreds.”

  “Good. We get them off, and we sink the damned thing—and it takes whatever artifact it is they’ve discovered down with it. I don’t care how it gets sunk, whether it’s by Sancia’s fiddlings or because the imperiat reminds it it’s just a hunk of dumb wood and iron. I just want it and all of Ofelia’s devilry on the bottom of the ocean as fast as possible.”

  Gregor helped them climb aboard their little fishing boat. “And how shall we get aboard the galleon? I know the routes of this area well enough—if it passed by Ontia, then I should have a good idea of its approach, and we should be able to see the thing from a mile away—but a galleon has a great deal of defenses. A fishing boat such as ours will be no issue for them.”

  “I shall let Berenice answer that,” said Orso. He bowed to her, hand extended.

  “The Frizettis tried to find a scrived method of purifying water,” said Berenice. “They brought Sancia and myself in to consult and help them find a solution, and we got to keep the sigil strings. They mostly found a very efficient way of boiling water…but that is all we need tonight.”

  “Ah,” said Gregor. “Steam—or fog?”

  “Fog,” said Berenice. She opened the pack on her back, revealing dozens of small iron-and-wood balls, each about the size of a small melon. “We place this in the ship’s way, and when it gets close, they’ll create a massive fog bank.”

  “And I can see the scrivings in the ship itself,” said Sancia. “So we’ll still be able to navigate blindly in the fog, so to speak.”

  “And how shall these steam rigs work?” asked Gregor. “We’ll be miles from any lexicon.”

  “Not the one in the galleon,” said Berenice. “It was simple enough to adjust the Frizetti works to use Dandolo scriving languages.”

  Gregor stared at her. “How much are we paying you, again?”

  “Averting the apocalypse is payment enough,” said Berenice. She sat down in the fishing boat. “Speaking of which—I suggest we get on it.”

  * * *

  —

  Exposed in the back of the little fishing boat, Sancia felt a raw, screaming terror when she looked back and saw there was no sign of Tevanne, or indeed land at all. It felt like they were in a tiny bucket with the whole hostile world waiting to swallow them up.

  Berenice, however, did not seem to mind at all. As Gregor piloted the ship northeast, she worked on the mast and the boom and the bow, either planting pre-written sigil plates on their surfaces or writing out strings of sigils herself. “These are Dandolo strings designed for sailing,” she called down to Gregor as he worked away in the cockpit. “Not much use here, but…when we’re close to the galleon, they should make us much faster and more agile.”

  “Excellent!” said Gregor. And for once, he sounded genuinely joyful. Perhaps being back at sea was good for him.

  When she was done, she sat back down next to Sancia. “Still feeling anxious?” she asked.

  “How can I not? There’s a big goddamn world of water around me!”

  “I see. Well. It could be worse for you.”

  “How?”

  “You could be like me.” She crossed her legs. “I don’t know how to swim.”

  Sancia stared. “You…You don’t know how to swim? And you’re not worried?”

  “Oh, I’m worried. I’m just managing that worry. After all, we’re not in the water. We’re on a boat, in the water. Which is very different. Now. I have some things to reflect on…but I’ll be here if you need me, love.”

  Then she shut her eyes, put her hands in her lap, and began to meditate. Sancia glared at her, but before she could get too angry the boat lurched to the side again, and her stomach
flipped, and she did her best not to squeak out loud.

  Night fell on them quickly. The gray sea and gray clouds were full of weak, watery light—and then, suddenly, they weren’t, and it felt as though the ship were drifting atop a wide, black chasm, the sky a smear of dark blue above.

  “Time?” asked Gregor.

  Orso—his face white with seasickness—consulted his mechanical timepiece. “It’s past eight in the evening,” he said.

  “How much past?”

  “I don’t know, this scrumming thing’s crude as hell. I’d say half past.”

  Gregor nodded grimly. Then he began to scout.

  He cut the ship this way and that, carving through the wind and waters with a grace Sancia would have found admirable, had she not been aboard the boat with him. She and Orso both vomited over the side of the boat once, twice, and then they lost count.

  “Trying to see as much of the ocean as I can,” Gregor explained. “We cannot let this ship slip by us.”

  “How can you see anything at all?” said Orso.

  “The art of spying ships at night,” said Gregor, “is about spotting lights and silhouettes and forms on the horizon. And spotting the galleon should be relatively simple, because it will be extremely bi…Uhh. Hm.” He leaned forward.

  Berenice stood up. “What is it?”

  Gregor pulled out his field glass and peered at the horizon. “I…see it.”

  Sancia wrenched herself away from the side of the boat. “Are you sure?”

  “I am positive,” he said. There was an unnerving calmness to his words. As Berenice joined him in the cockpit, he handed her his spyglass.

  She peered through it and gasped. “Oh. Oh, my…”

  Sancia staggered over to them—but then stopped when she realized she didn’t need the spyglass at all.

  Something big and blocky sat on the horizon. She wasn’t sure how far away it was…but she suspected it was very, very far. It looked like a giant wooden triangle clutching the horizon, as big as two if not three campo blocks. It was obviously, obviously not something that should ever actually float on the water—not unless there were a lot of rules and arguments convincing reality that it should.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “Is that…it?”

  “Yes,” said Gregor, still in that unnervingly calm voice. “That is a merchant house galleon.” He turned the wheel and pointed their ship at it. After a minute or so their boat suddenly lurched forward and sped up.

  Berenice looked at the sails. “The scrivings have kicked in. We’re close.”

  Sancia felt a slow leak of dread in her stomach as the giant blocky shadow on the horizon grew bigger and bigger.

  “Great,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  When they were about a quarter mile in front of the giant ship, Gregor turned the wheel and began sailing away from it, like the galleon was chasing them. Berenice started dropping the little water rigs into the sea behind them, one after another. There had to be at least fifty of them.

  “It’s working,” said Orso, peering behind them. “Look.”

  Sancia studied the dark horizon behind them. It now looked vaguely muddy, or misty. She couldn’t tell where sky started and sea began.

  “Done,” said Berenice.

  Again, Gregor turned the wheel, and the ship sliced through the water. “Now the tricky part,” he said. “We must come alongside the ship, and we must do so in the fog. Hopefully the fog will make the galleon slow.”

  “To make it easier to catch up to?” asked Orso.

  “There’s that. But if it churns up the water too much, then…Well. We will get capsized, and then chewed to pieces.”

  Orso swallowed. “I see.”

  “Yes,” said Gregor. “So, Sancia—please join me in the cockpit. I must know how fast or slow we need to go, and where the ship is.”

  Sancia stood beside Gregor, one hand on the wall to steady herself. He brought the ship around in a giant loop until they approached the growing fog bank from the back end.

  “Get ready,” he said. “And once we are in the fog, we must stay quiet. The crew will be on deck to watch for any obstacles, so they will be able to hear us.”

  Sancia took a breath as they entered the wall of roiling mist. It was unpleasantly hot, not at all the cool mist she was used to. They sailed deeper and deeper in, and Sancia flexed her scrived sight, peering forward. For a while they saw nothing—her sight had its limitations—but then suddenly a giant, bright coil of silver erupted on the horizon, so huge and so intense the sight of it made her gasp.

  “You see it?” whispered Gregor. “Point to it.”

  She did so, sticking out her arm.

  “Point to its bow, the front end,” he whispered. “Like your arm is a compass pointing north. I must know how fast it’s going.”

  She did so. He adjusted his course, sailing alongside it, trying to match its speed. She whispered “Faster,” or “Slower!” and helped him adjust.

  The giant ship grew closer, and closer. They felt and heard the galleon long before they saw it: the water around them began to pitch about, rattling their boat, and there was an immense sloshing of water from somewhere, like an island was rising from the depths of the sea.

  “God, it’s big,” whispered Orso. “Holy scrumming shit, it’s big…”

  Gregor piloted the little fishing boat closer to the galleon, Orso and Berenice gripping their seats tight as they rocked and shook in the waves. Then it emerged from the fog, a huge, towering, gleaming wooden wall that surged up like a building rising from the ocean…

  “Imprinter ready,” he whispered back to Berenice.

  Berenice stood, knelt, and shakily pulled out a very curious-looking espringal—an “imprinter,” an invention of hers and Sancia’s. And Sancia dearly hoped it would work well tonight.

  The imprinter was like an espringal, but rather than shooting bolts, it fired slugs of lead that instantly adhered to whichever surface they struck. This in its own right was not particularly useful—but Sancia had engineered the weapon so it could engrave the slugs with sigils of your choosing just before you fired them, like a printing rig applying type for a book, which meant you could control the effects from shot to shot.

  The greatest use they’d found so far had been anchoring strings: you fired one lead slug at one surface and a second at another. The slugs would stick and, upon being stuck, pull both objects together, usually very violently. And it was this last setting that Berenice was to use tonight.

  She pointed her imprinter down and fired one slug into the port hull of their fishing boat. The slug adhered with a snap.

  Sancia listened hard for a shout or a cry from the galleon, but there was nothing. Gregor turned the wheel and fought to keep the ship steady as a tremendous wave of seawater doused them. He nudged the boat closer, and closer, until they were nearly ten feet away from the galleon.

  “Now!” he whispered.

  Berenice planted her imprinter level on the hull of the fishing boat and fired at the galleon. The slug smacked into the hull and stuck fast.

  For a moment nothing happened—and then, with a terrifying jerk, the scrivings sprang to life, and they were ripped across the waters until the two hulls kissed.

  Sancia had to fight not to scream. She was sure that Berenice had fired a little high or low, and they were going to be tipped backward or forward and tossed from the boat—but they were not. Their ship creaked a little unpleasantly, but everything held together. They were adhered to the side of the galleon like a bloodfish stuck to the belly of a shark.

  Gregor let go of the wheel and cautiously stepped away. The ship held fast. Then he and Sancia crouched and began to assemble their gear: espringals, imprinters, stunning bombs, lights, scrived rapiers, and adhesion plates.

  “We will sc
ale the ship,” Gregor whispered to them. He pointed up into the fog. “There should be a hatch over there that Sancia can break open. Once we’re in, you lot break away and trail behind us until the job is done. Got it?”

  Berenice and Orso nodded, though both of them were plainly terrified.

  “Good,” said Gregor. “When we’re finished, Sancia and I will use our air-sailing rigs to escape the ship and come to you.”

  “Provided the foundry lexicon in the ship is still working,” said Berenice. “If not, they won’t work.”

  “Then we will attempt to board shallops,” said Gregor. “Is that clear?”

  “They nodded.”

  “Good. Then we’ll begin.” He and Sancia fitted the adhesion plates over their hands.

  “Good luck,” said Berenice. She reached out and squeezed Sancia’s shoulder. Sancia nodded, afraid that if she opened her mouth she might vomit.

  Then she and Gregor approached the hull, activated their plates, and began to scale the side of the ship like builder ants crawling up a wall. Though the going was not exactly easy, she found herself wishing she’d had tools like this back in her thieving days: she couldn’t count how many times she’d worn her hands bloody trying to scale this or that wall.

  Once they were about twenty feet up, she flexed her scrived sight and peered into the fog until she saw a tangle of locking logic floating in the gloom. She gestured to Gregor, and he followed her across the hull until they came to the hatch. She had to slide her hand out of one plate so she essentially dangled from the hull one-handed—she was intensely aware of the wide, churning ocean below her—but then she grabbed the hatch’s handle, and listened, and spoke to it.

  The hatch’s locking logic was quite simple—obviously this entry point had not been considered a vulnerability—and soon she’d popped it open. She slipped through, gasping with exhaustion and terror, and slid over to allow Gregor to do the same. Then he shut the hatch behind them, and they were inside.

  9

  This deck of the ship—whichever deck it was, Sancia had no idea, or even if the idea of decks was applicable on a vessel of this size—was almost completely dark. She assumed this was just ordinary naval protocol, but then Gregor whispered, “Why are the lights off?”