Still, Sancia was reluctant. She had permitted Valeria access to her mind once before. And at that time, Valeria had apparently done a lot more work in there than they’d initially agreed upon.
Valeria surveyed her for a second. Then the walls of the bubble shook again, and Sancia felt her body tremble.
The walls of the bubble shook once more.
The walls quaked again, and the queer pressure in Sancia’s chest tripled.
Valeria studied her with her cold yellow eyes.
Sancia gritted her teeth.
Valeria reached out with her massive index finger and gently, gently tapped Sancia’s forehead…
Images and concepts flooded into Sancia’s mind, one after another, like someone injecting blood into the center of her skull.
She saw a dark room, a vast chamber, and a huge rig within—a lexicon—and nestled in its cradle was a tiny, golden metal cone…
She screamed in pain, unable to bear it any longer.
And then she saw…something.
Or perhaps someone.
* * *
—
There was a man, wrapped in strips of black cloth, and he was kneeling on the ground, and he was weeping.
Sancia stared at him in surprise. She wasn’t sure what was happening, or what she was seeing. Yet somehow she knew that this moment had been transferred to her mind when Valeria had touched her—though she quickly suspected that this had not been intended.
She studied the man. His wrappings were similar to those that Crasedes wore, concealing his hands and face, but his were dusty and frayed, like he’d worn them while walking through a forest fire. He was sobbing as if overwhelmed with grief, a man totally broken by sorrow, and as she watched him the rest of the scene came into focus.
The man was kneeling in a cave. She could see a glimmer of daylight at the cave’s mouth, but it was obscured by thick, curling clouds of black smoke. The cave had evidently been an improvised living space for some time—the man was weeping in front of a bed, but there was also a washing bucket, and a crude stove, and a chest Sancia found distinctly familiar: huge and thick, with a complicated, golden lock…
Valeria’s casket?
She forgot about this when she realized why the man was weeping: he was crying in front of the bed—but she hadn’t realized there was someone in the bed.
A boy of about thirteen lay wrapped in the tattered blankets there, his face pale, his eyes shut, his lips bluish. The child was terribly gaunt—his cheeks were sunken, his arms little more than sticks lying at angles in the bed—but most notable to Sancia were the scars on his wrists, running in lines around them: the scars of manacles, or shackles, or restraints. She was familiar with them, of course, because she had the very same on her wrists.
The boy coughed. He was still breathing, but his breaths were ragged and wheezing.
The wrapped man reached out and stroked the boy’s face with one finger. “Please,” he sobbed. “Please…you must help me.”
said a voice from the chest—Valeria’s voice.
“You must,” said the man. “You have to save him. You can do so much.”
The man buried his wrapped face in his hands, and he wept. He inched forward and laid his forehead against the face of his child, moaning softly.
“No!” said the man.
“No! I won’t! It’s not a solution! Look at you, look what it did to you! Look what it did to you!” he screamed at her.
There was a long silence in the cave, broken only by the rattling, wheezing breaths of the boy on the bed.
Then things changed again.
* * *
—
Evening skies, dark and purple. Desert cliffs towered around her. And before her…something was happening.
She saw Crasedes, black-wrapped and mummified, floating among a peristyle, its columns white and pure around him. In one hand, he held Valeria’s casket—Sancia recognized it from before. In the other, he held a small, golden key…
Clef?
Crasedes reached out with Clef, and the air seemed to tremble, and shiver, and then…
Then there was a set of doors before him, tall and black, their handles and hinges wrought of shining gold. And yet as Sancia looked at the doors, she found she couldn’t quite understand the scale of them. Were they huge, bigger than the sky itself? Or tinier than a wildflower seed? It made her head hurt to look at them, and the more she looked, the stranger they seemed in ways she found difficult to describe: they seemed both thin and heavy, vibrant and faint. There was just something wrong about them, as if they were incompatible with reality itself.
But curiously, the doors did have a lock.
Crasedes reached out with Clef, and slowly slid his tooth into the lock…
And then the doors began to open.
Sancia could see something behind them. Not light, but…but the opposite of light, somehow. She suddenly filled with panic, overcome with the awareness that whatever this was, she was not meant to see it.
She struggled and tried to turn away from the vision. And as she did, she noticed that there was something out beyond the borders of the peristyle—objects dotting the sand dunes and cliffs and the steppes all around them.
They were people. Thousands of them, if not millions of them.
And all of them were dead.
She started screaming.
* * *
—
Sancia awoke and gasped, sucking in air as hard as she could. She saw blue skies framed by Commons rookeries, felt cold mud around her neck and back, and blinked hard as she tried to focus on the faces before her, one of which was old, craggy, and had wild pale eyes.
“Did you see her?” demanded Orso. “Did it work?”
“Someone get me up!” gasped Sancia.
Berenice and Gregor helped her sit up. Sancia kept panting, terrified, her hands shooting out to feel everything around her—Gregor’s arms, Berenice’s knee, the mud in the alleyway, just wanting to make sure that the world was real, that it was really real.
“You saw her, didn’t you?” said Orso.
“I saw her,” she croaked. “And…And I saw something else.”
“What did she say? What did she
say?”
Sancia wiped mud from her face, and whispered, “I need something to drink, please.”
They got her to her feet and crowded into a corner taverna. Sancia quaffed a glass of weak cane wine and told them what she had seen and heard.
But she did not tell them about the vision she’d had—the dying boy, and Crasedes, and the doors. She didn’t want to discuss that aloud. Just remembering it seemed to drive her a little mad.
“So he’s like…some kind of fairy-tale ghoul,” said Orso when she’d finished. “Only capable of rising from his grave at midnight! Somewhat fortunate, for us.”
Sancia shook her head. “No. He’s awake and alive during the day—he just gains access to more permissions and powers closer to midnight.”
“She said she could grant us protections?” asked Berenice. “Just as she’d given them to you?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia darkly. She drained the rest of her cane wine. “But…you aren’t going to like this.”
“By this point,” said Gregor, “I would be doubly surprised to discover I liked anything about this.”
“Orso said a foundry lexicon might be like a puddle in a desert to her,” said Sancia. “And he was right. But in order for her to protect us…we’re going to need to give her a whole damn ocean, so to speak.”
“You mean we’re going to need to find something more powerful than a foundry lexicon?” said Orso, outraged.
“If we want to survive past midnight,” said Sancia, “yes.”
“But…such a thing doesn’t exist,” said Berenice. “The houses have made incremental improvements on foundry lexicons—various efficiencies here and there—but nothing extraordinary. Nothing on the scale you’re suggesting.”
“No,” said Sancia dully. “Someone did figure it out. Someone tried something very, very radical. And we all know who.” She turned to look at Orso. “There’s a place in Tevanne where a building is like a mind. One that’s powered by six full-scale lexicons. But what they’re doing is extraordinary…because, as it turns out, they’re not normal lexicons.”
A long, long silence.
“You…You mean,” said Gregor in a weak voice, “we have to go back to…that place?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “We go back to the Mountain, where Tribuno Candiano installed his strangest works.”
“So…we dream up a way to break into the Mountain,” said Berenice, “steal some work of Tribuno’s, and use it to help Valeria…all before midnight?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “And it gets worse.”
“How in hell is that possible?” asked Orso.
“Because Valeria’s not the only one who needs them,” said Sancia. “Crasedes does too.” She let out a long, slow sigh. “And he almost certainly knows we’re coming.”
13
“I thought we were done trying to break into the goddamn Mountain!” said Orso, pacing about a Commons courtyard in Old Ditch. It was already filling up with people wearing paper masks and rolling casks of wine. He had to stop as a crowd of filthy children ran by in a small parade, giggling as they chased a boy with a tiny lantern hanging from a stick. “This is, what, the third scrumming time?”
“I was under the impression it was abandoned,” said Gregor. “Didn’t Sancia essentially break it open on the top?”
“It is abandoned,” said Berenice, “but the Michiels bought almost all of the Candiano enclaves. Mind, they haven’t done a lot with it, since they’ve lost so many scrivers and have had the plantations to bother with. And I don’t think they know what it is, or how it works.”
“Speaking of which,” said Sancia. “Orso—did Tribuno ever tell you how he’d gotten the Mountain to work?”
“Hell no,” said Orso. “It wasn’t until you went there and heard it speak that I learned it had a mind of its own. I’d never have believed conventional scriving could have been capable of such a thing.”
“Yeah,” said Sancia slowly. “That’s because it…isn’t.”
She shut her eyes, remembering the sight of the component Valeria had shown her in her mind: it was like a scriving definition, but rather than being shaped like a disc, this had been shaped like a cone…and it had been very, very different beyond even that.
For starters, it’d had a slightly golden sheen to it—a hue that Sancia had only ever seen in hierophantically altered tools.
She opened her eyes. “Tribuno Candiano was obsessed with hierophantic commands all his life, yeah? Trying to figure out how to duplicate what Crasedes and the rest of his people had accomplished?”
“Yes?” said Berenice.
“Well…I think at some point, he succeeded,” she said. “Somewhat.”
“W-What?” Orso said, astonished. “He…He actually succeeded in making his own hierophantic tools?”
“I don’t think Tribuno Candiano ever figured out how to make a fully developed tool,” she said. “Nothing like Clef, or the imperiat. No hierophantic swords, or shields, or magic wands, or any of that shit. Instead…I think Valeria was trying to tell me he’d made a hierophantic scriving definition—which he could then place in a lexicon of his own devising. A crappy half-measure, in a way.”
Orso stared at her. “That’s…That’s mad! How could that actually work?”
“I think it’d work almost like any other scriving definition,” said Sancia. “Normal ones allow a lexicon to alter reality. This would just grant a lexicon unprecedented authorities to alter its reality. Though, as I can testify, it’s probably still a sight short of what an actual hierophant can do.”
“But…it could be enough to give a building a mind, yes?” said Berenice. “To make it sense all the people that came within its boundaries…and learn from them, and begin to react to them.”
“My God,” said Gregor. “A…A cobbled-together, improvised mimicry of a hierophantic command…But Sancia—would it still require a…”
“A death,” said Sancia grimly. “Yeah. Even this crude version would need it. A person apiece, sacrificed for these primitive attempts at accessing the power of a hierophant…”
Gregor grimaced. “The biggest, most celebrated structure in the city…is actually powered by the deaths of a half dozen people.”
“And you think Crasedes wants this crude imitation that Tribuno made?” asked Berenice.
“Since Crasedes can’t make tools of his own anymore, maybe the Mountain can serve as a cheap substitute.” She looked at Orso, who still seemed stunned. “I know what Valeria needs these definitions for. If we get one and put it in one of our lexicons, it’d give her authorities to the reality all around it, which she’d use to grant us protection. The thing I’m less sure of is—why does Crasedes need it? What’s he actually looking to do with them?”
Orso shook himself and tried to think. “Well…all forms of scriving are a violation of reality, in one way or another. The way we practice it, you have to convince reality to break its own rules, and we go to a lot of tortuous lengths to do so. But a hierophantic command doesn’t need to. The hierophants used a two-step process: they’d interrupt death to make a tremendous violation, and they’d use that violation to trick reality into believing they had access to much, much higher permissions—perhaps the ones that had been used to make the world.”
“The commands of God Himself,” said Gregor.
“If you want to put it that way, yeah,” said Orso. “But what you’re talking about here, Sancia, is some kind of hybrid of the two. A weak hierophantic tool that needs lexicons and the like to truly function.” He thought about it. “If what you’re saying is true, then…it’s like the whole interior of the dome is a bubble of broken reality. Everything in there is mutable, shapeable, unstable. Tribuno just wanted it to act as a mind. But I suppose if you were clever enough…it could function like something else. Like a…a forge, maybe.”
San
cia sat forward. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if what you’re saying is true, that building can affect the reality of everything within its walls,” said Orso. “If it was retooled, it could maybe remake things within it, so that anything that passed through the lexicon’s sphere of influence could be altered, forever.”
It felt like a ball of ice had just formed in the bottom of Sancia’s belly.
“And that’s what he wants to do to Valeria,” she said quietly. “She said as much. He turns the Mountain into a forge…”
“And there,” said Gregor, “he’ll remake Sancia’s golden friend into what is, in essence, a doomsday weapon…Is that the general shape of things?”
There was a long silence.
“We…We have to get to those definitions first,” said Berenice faintly.
“Agreed,” said Orso.
“Getting to the Mountain, though…” said Gregor. “It won’t be easy.”
“Not at all,” said Sancia. “The property is owned by Michiel Body Corporate—and I’m sure they’ve got it very protected.”
“Let’s assume the enclave walls will be difficult to get past,” said Gregor. “But once we’re in, we’re inside what’s essentially an abandoned, empty enclave. Then we’d need to get in and out of the Mountain without Crasedes showing up and murdering us. And let’s assume that, this being Crasedes, this will be very difficult to do.”
“We could bring the imperiat again,” Sancia said, “but having been on board a galleon with it, it won’t be any fun if we turn it on inside the Mountain.”
“I agree,” said Orso. “The damned thing will come down on our heads before we get this component out.”
But Gregor was watching several men and children rolling a cask of wine through the streets. “So…the enclaves are going to be hostile territory,” he said. “But…what about the areas around them? The ones that were owned by Candiano, but were relegated for the less important campo citizens? Aren’t people living there?”
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