Shorefall

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Now,” said the man in black, “you are going to take the knife, Armand—and you’re going to use it to cut off your left thumb.”

  “No!” cried Moretti.

  But his right hand and the knife were already moving.

  “You will have to wedge the blade between your knuckles,” said the man in black.

  “Stop!”

  “I mean, I doubt if you’re strong enough to sever a bone…”

  Moretti watched in horror as he placed the edge of the blade against the knuckle of his left thumb, right beside the webbing of his palm, and began to press.

  He screamed as he began to draw the blade back and forth across his flesh. Bright-red blood came welling out of his knuckle, and he felt the movements of the blade in the bones of his hand, felt the metal sawing through the joint, felt the ligaments in his thumb snapping and rolling up within his skin, felt the nerves in his thumb suddenly go dead…

  “And now,” whispered the man in black, “you are almost through.”

  And then he had sawed halfway through his thumb until there was only the barest bit of bone resisting him, and with a wet crunch the blade bit through and his thumb was off, lying there detached on the table, the severed joint pouring dark blood onto the wood. The blood pooled around his wrist and his fingers and dripped onto the floor around his feet, and all he could do was helplessly watch, staring at the raw, dark-red wound where his thumb used to be.

  He shrieked in pain, in horror, in misery. And then the man spoke again.

  “Where should the blade travel next, Armand?” said the man in black cheerily. “Perhaps an eye? Your ear? Your nose? Or should I have you part your organs of generation from your crotch, and feast upon them as you once did that pie?”

  “No!” cried Moretti. “Please! I…I don’t understand…”

  “Understand what?”

  “Understand why you’re doing this to me…”

  “Really?” he said. “I thought that would have been quite obvious. I am doing this, Armand, because I want you to know what it’s like for someone to know you. And though you’re not a particularly unique specimen in this city…Well. I don’t see why you should go unpunished.”

  Moretti shut his eyes and wept.

  “This is what it is, Armand,” whispered the voice of the man in black. “To be a slave. To be owned. To be a thing. Do you wish it to stop?”

  “Yes!” screamed Moretti.

  “Then you know what you must do. Sign the paper. Give me the Mountain. Give it to me now, Armand, and I will grant you a reprieve from this fate—for a moment, at least.”

  Moretti opened his eyes and stared at the negotiations parchment before him. He knew that if he signed this he would likely be murdered for it. A hypatus was allowed tremendous purchasing powers, with little direct supervision, but even a founderkin—someone related to the founding family—would probably get their throat slit over something like this.

  “If I do this,” said Moretti, “I’ll die.”

  “You know,” said the man in black, “I had thought as much…”

  “Then—why not make me do it?” he said. “You could just compel me, just like…” He shut his eyes as his severed thumb squirted blood down his hand again. “Just like this…”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” the man in black said gently. “That wouldn’t do at all. It’s so much better when you learn yourself, isn’t it?”

  “Learn what?” said Moretti, choking back tears.

  “Learn what your city has forgotten,” he said. “What men of power have forgotten time and time again, throughout history—that there is always, always something mightier.”

  * * *

  —

  Afterward, when it was done, young Alfredo Participazio walked through the streets of the Michiel enclave next to the man in black, who strolled along with an air of cheerful curiosity.

  “My, my,” he said, studying the glass towers and shimmering halls and its many carnival banners rippling in the breeze. “Such a lovely place. Such a lovely, lovely place.”

  Participazio wasn’t sure why he, a first-level clerk, had been ripped out of his bed in the middle of the night on Founder Dandolo’s orders. He wasn’t sure why Founder Dandolo had ordered him to put together the paperwork for this bizarre purchase, and escort this very strange man into the Michiel enclave. And he especially wasn’t sure how the purchase had gone through—or, even more, why it had been done at all.

  Or why there had been all that screaming.

  “Such wonderful colors,” said the man in black as he watched a wall shimmer and change as the wind flowed through the streets. “Do you come here often, boy?”

  “Ah…no, sir. I don’t.”

  “Hmm. Maybe you should.”

  “Sir…may I ask something?”

  The man in black shrugged.

  “What was the purpose of our visit here today?”

  He considered the question. “Have you heard, pray tell, of Hantiochia, boy?”

  “Ah…no, sir.”

  “Vhosian emperor. Very charismatic man, very resourceful. This would have been, oh, about two thousand years ago. Wanted to make sure his people believed that he not only wielded power, but that he was power. Had a lot of sculptures and shrines made. Made a giant slave army toil and fashion thousands of clay statues to watch over him in his tomb, protecting him in the afterlife from his many enemies. Hantiochia intended, you see, to retain his power even in death. To rule his folk from beyond the grave.” The man in black stopped speaking, suddenly entranced with a street sculpture that hummed quietly with the wind.

  “And then what happened sir?”

  “Mm? Ah, yes. Well…” There was a cruel glee in his words. “He never got to sit in his pretty tomb, or even see it finished. For someone else came along, and they destroyed everything he’d ever built. Wiped every scrap of stone or bronze with his likeness upon it from the face of this earth. All those hours of labor, all those works, all lost…And now…almost no one knows the name of old Hantiochia.”

  There was a sound behind them—many voices talking loudly, crying out in alarm. Participazio turned and saw a crowd was gathering in the street, looking up at the Hypatus Building. Then he glimpsed what they were looking at: there was a man up there, standing on the edge of the roof, his left hand wedged up under his right armpit…

  The man in black walked on ahead. “We should get back,” he said. “I have much to do today.”

  The crowd behind Participazio screamed. He turned back and saw the man on the roof was gone now, and they were all standing around something in the road.

  “I think,” stammered Participazio. “I think he jumped…”

  “Did he?” said the man in black lightly. “What a pity.” His three-cornered hat swiveled as he looked at yet another building. “Honestly, what wonderful colors!”

  15

  As the day wore on into midafternoon, the streets of the Commons and the campos slowly began to fill: with pipers, with parades, with floating lanterns, with casks of wine and tables of food—many of them paltry, given the troubles in the plantations, but you still had to put out your offerings. It was the Monsoon Carnival, after all. Tevanne had few rules that went observed by the whole of the city—but carnival was absolutely one of them.

  So it was a little odd that the Foundrysiders were huddled in Giovanni’s spacious workshops with Claudia, readying their work: a scrived carriage that had been refitted to act as a parade vessel, releasing floating lanterns and carrying a giant cask of wine through the streets.

  “This feels,” said Giovanni as he adjusted the cask of wine in the carriage, “a little like old times.”

  Orso helped him seal up the cask. “I agree.”

  “However,” said Giovanni, hopping down, “I hated old times.”

  “I agree.�
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  “Being that I always kept almost dying.”

  “Again, I agree.” Orso cocked his head and listened to the piping outside. “Sounds like the day is wearing on. God, how I’d love to just wrap my lips around a jug of wine, and let it have its way with me…but I suppose such days are over. Where are we with our various tools?”

  “Almost done!” said Claudia, Sancia, and Berenice simultaneously. None of them sounded particularly pleased.

  Orso was not surprised. Claudia and Gio specialized in a refinement of the technique that Orso himself had developed: though he had found a way to convince a box it contained something it actually didn’t, they’d developed a way to discard the box, and use simple metal plates set on the floor. Arrange the plates correctly, and the reality above them would believe it held a wall, or a block of iron, or a heap of coals, and so on. This was a lot more limited than Orso’s closed-container method—neither of them had found a way to duplicate anything besides the presence of dumb, raw materials—and he knew the past few months had been terribly frustrating for them.

  He walked over to where they were working on a variety of steel plates, all laid out on the ground around them. At the back of the workshop stood ten huge steel walls, and four large steel boxes. He studied them carefully.

  Orso Ignacio had rarely felt very frightened in the past three years. Having lived through the events of the Mountain, and a Tevanni Council capital trial, and starting Foundryside…there just didn’t seem to be much left to feel worried about.

  But now, he was worried. He was worried because he didn’t have access to his own workshops. He was worried because they were having to rely on former colleagues who’d split off to develop an iteration on his scriving techniques that, as far as he was aware, was still unproven. And he was especially worried because they were going to have to use these techniques not only to navigate a building he’d helped to nearly destroy three years ago—but they were also going to have to do so while worrying about a hierophant.

  And not even a hierophant, he thought. The first of all goddamn hierophants. He shook himself, and tried to remember what to do next.

  “You said you were done thirty minutes ago,” said Orso.

  “And we meant it thirty minutes ago!” snapped Claudia. “We’ve made some pretty scrumming amazing success, given you just popped in this morning and asked me and Gio if you could use all of our prototypes!”

  “I asked for your help,” said Orso, “because I assumed they worked. Yet I still don’t have much evidence that they do.”

  Claudia cursed quietly, then grabbed a plate, stood, and tossed it out to the center of the workshop. She picked up a little board at her side, one covered with a number of sliding tabs of wood, and slid one forward.

  “It’s working,” said Sancia, looking at it.

  “I don’t need you to tell me!” said Claudia irritably. “I know when my own damned stuff works.” Then she looked around, picked up a small iron ingot, and threw it at the air above the plate.

  The ingot appeared to bounce off of an invisible wall right above the plate with a clang sound—but the sound did not come from anywhere near the plate on the floor. Rather, it came from the back of the workshop, where the iron walls stood. Orso looked back and forth between the ingot, which was bouncing along the ground, and the iron walls at the back—one of which now had a very small divot in its center…one he was sure hadn’t been there before.

  “The plate tricks the reality above it into thinking it holds the iron wall,” said Claudia. “Basically allowing you to put invisible walls anywhere.”

  “Your box works with lexicons,” said Gio. “Our plates work with raw materials.”

  Orso walked up and felt the air above the plate, and jumped slightly as his fingers met a cold, flat, hard surface that was absolutely invisible. He rapped on it twice, and again the sound of his knuckles on metal did not come from the space in front of him, but rather the walls in the back of the workshops. “I see. In fact…it is amazing.”

  Claudia looked surprised. In fact, everyone looked surprised. “Really?” she said.

  “Well—yes?” said Orso. “Why is everyone looking so shocked? She took my idea and did something new with it. That’s what scriving’s all about.”

  “It’s a bit limited, though,” said Gio. “We can’t trick reality into thinking it contains anything too complicated…”

  “Nothing scrived, in other words,” said Claudia. “Like your lexicon trick, Orso. Only raw materials.” She looked at him with a hard, keen gaze. “But if we pull this shit off…we get the Michiel definitions, yeah? Because they’d probably help quite a bit.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Orso. “You do. Of course.”

  “A lot of this would be easier if we had access to the Foundryside library, in fact,” said Berenice, wiping sweat from her face. “I can think of at least forty designs that would make all this easier. Recovering access to it is critical.”

  “Which we can’t do now,” said Orso, “since I’ve no doubt Ofelia’s spies would go whisper in Crasedes’s ear the second we stroll through the door.”

  “We’ll get it back,” said Sancia. “After tonight.”

  “Yeah, and…then me and Gio are out,” said Claudia.

  “I did not enjoy my brief contact with the hierophantic before,” said Gio, “and if any of what you’re claiming is true, I definitely wouldn’t enjoy it this time.”

  As they finished their work, Orso slowly realized he was doing little more than supervising. In the space of three short years, all of his people—Claudia and Gio, Sancia and Berenice—had turned into magnificent scrivers. They barely needed his help.

  Even though he was worried, terrified, and anxious about tonight, he couldn’t help but feel a queer sort of elation as he watched them put the finishing touches on everything and load it into the carriage. It took him a while to realize it was pride.

  This is what scriving is supposed to be like, he thought. This is what Tevanne is supposed to be like. His heart sank a little. And it’s what it was going to be…until all this happened…

  His eye strayed to Sancia and Berenice, and a familiar worry crept up his back. Both of them had flourished, but…but Sancia looked strangely old these days, and worn. He told himself it was because of her old life—growing up in the plantations wore out your body before you’d even had much of a chance to use it—but still, he worried.

  Have I stolen her youth? Or is it something…else?

  Then the door of the workshop burst open and Gregor walked in, holding a large leather sack that smelled quite gamy. “I have brought the butchered monkey corpses,” he said.

  “That’s the last bit!” Orso clapped his hands, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a paper mask resembling the head of a lamb. He stuffed it on his face. “Let’s have us a goddamn parade, folks.”

  16

  Masked and wearing a few gestures at costumes, the Foundrysiders, Gio, and Claudia piled onto their carriage and rode off through the streets of the Commons, which were already filling up with revelers. The partygoers quickly saw their parade carriage—and the giant cask of wine situated in the back—and the people cried out, clapped their hands, and began to follow.

  “I do hope,” said Gregor as he nosed the carriage through the crowded streets, “that we don’t put any of these people in danger.”

  “Carnival’s always dangerous,” said Orso. “Any Tevanni worth their wine knows that. Pass out in your own sick, and bang, dead. Dangerous!”

  Sancia peered out at the skies. It was close to sunset now.

  “Do let us know,” said Gio from the back of the carriage, “if you see any hierophants about.”

  She glanced at the crowd, and saw at least a dozen Papa Monsoons dancing behind them. “That might be harder than you think.”

  They passed through the
Foundryside neighborhoods, and the Lamplands—whose celebrations were especially jovial, since they were quite a bit richer than everywhere else—and then they finally saw the crumbling outer walls of what had once been the Candiano campo. Now it was little more than masonry and rubble about ten feet high. Commoners had apparently started using the stacks of stones as seats for plays and performances, like a long, endless amphitheater, and a few jugglers and pipe bands were dancing and playing for them.

  Sancia felt a curious despair at the sight of the walls. Did I do that? Did I really?

  They wound farther into what had once been the outer reaches of the campo, followed by a train of people clapping, singing, dancing—and following their wine.

  “I believe now would be a good time for the lanterns,” shouted Gregor.

  “Got it,” said Berenice. She reached into the depths of the back of the carriage and pulled a handle.

  Instantly, dozens of small floating lanterns popped into shape and lit up with bright, colored lights, pink and orange and purple. They drifted into the skies for a few dozen feet until finally the lines attaching them to the back of the carriage pulled them taut, and they followed the carriage through the streets like a school of luminescent fish. The crowd oohed and aahed, though Sancia frankly wasn’t sure why. Plenty of parade carriages did this. She guessed they were pretty drunk already.

  Then she saw the enclave walls ahead, leading to the abandoned Candiano campo core—and behind that, the Mountain.

  Sancia’s heart skipped at the sight of it. She actually hadn’t been able to see it much from where their offices were located. Once it had been the grandest, biggest building in all of Tevanne, but now it looked like a giant black apple that someone had taken a bite out of and left to rot. She could still see exposed floors and supports and struts and beams from here. The memory of that night, and all its wild chaos and terror, made her break out in a sweat.

  And then she felt strangely sad. The Mountain, after all, had been a massive rig of its own—one Tribuno Candiano had engineered to act as an artificial mind to lure in any hierophants he thought might be hiding in the world. She and Clef had spoken to the thing, and it had seemed desperate and lonely to her. A poor fate, she thought, to be damaged in such a way, and left to stand empty for years and years, possibly still sentient, still waiting.