“It’s bigger than I remember,” said Gregor softly beside her. He looked rattled, his eyes wide and his face stiff. She realized he was reliving what he had done there that night, or what he could remember of what he’d done.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
His expression grew closed and bitter. “How could I even know?” he said. He spoke no more as they drove to the walls.
* * *
—
Sancia flexed her scrived sight as they neared the walls. The walls themselves lit up with scrivings—they’d been convinced to be preternaturally tall and thick—but she was looking for something specific.
Finally she saw it: a small, winding canal—or what was left of one, since the water had dried up to a fetid dribble since the night of the Mountain. Sancia peered closer and saw a scrived metal portcullis below the walls, one that had been built to allow the canal to flow in and out of the enclave.
She looked up at the espringal batteries along the enclave walls, sitting still and hunched like storks along a riverbed. “That way,” she said, pointing toward them.
Gregor turned the carriage. The revelers following their parade carriage were sounding a lot less enthusiastic now. People still didn’t come to this stretch of Tevanne very often since the night of the Mountain.
The carriage drew closer and closer. Sancia kept focusing on the espringal batteries, watching their sleeping commands…and then a few batteries slowly pivoted to target them, sensing their blood, their presence, but unwilling to fire—yet.
“Stop,” said Sancia.
The carriage stopped. The revelers behind them broke out in cheers.
“I’m glad someone is happy, at least,” muttered Orso.
“It’s good cover, though,” said Berenice. “No one’s suspicious about a parade.”
Giovanni opened up the taps to the huge wine cask and the revelers drank and danced and played pipes. Meanwhile, Orso, Gregor, Berenice, and Sancia got ready inside the carriage. They’d brought the usual tools—imprinters, scriving implements, as well as the plates that Gio and Claudia had made for them—but the critical bits were four leather cuirasses.
“How…do these work again?” asked Gregor as he put his on. It was a bit small. “I apologize, I was off getting monkeys from the butchery…”
“See that button on the side of your shoulder?” said Claudia. “No, no, that one’s a fastener for your straps…Right, that one there. Hit that—not now, mind—and it will…well, twin reality the same way Orso’s box worked. But this time it will make reality believe there’s a big metal box around you. Get it?”
Gregor stared at her blankly. “What?”
“It throws up an invisible wall, in other words,” said Berenice gently. “If you saw those big steel boxes back at their workshops—it tricks reality into thinking that box is around you. So if someone shoots a bolt at you…”
“It bounces off an invisible steel wall?” asked Gregor.
“Precisely,” said Claudia. “Just…don’t keep it on all the time. It’ll be hard to get through doors with reality thinking there’s a big steel box around you. And don’t turn it on too close to any walls—you’ll be immobilized, since part of the box wall will be trapped inside of stone. And one more, much more important thing…”
“Oh, God,” sighed Orso.
“Don’t tip over,” said Claudia. “We did a lot of work removing the feeling of weight from the cuirass—you won’t feel like you’re carrying around a big metal box, in other words—but if you tip over, you’ll be stuck.”
“And stuck with your ass exposed at that,” said Gio, “since there’s no bottom to the box.”
“God Almighty…” muttered Orso.
“It’s better than nothing,” said Sancia defensively. “Crasedes can hurl shriekers through the air, rip walls apart…Whatever it takes to buy us time.”
“Speaking of time,” said Gregor, glancing outside, “it’s getting dark faster than I like. We have until midnight, yes?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “That’s when he’ll be strongest. I doubt if he’ll make a move before then.”
“Then we should go now,” said Berenice, “so we have as much time as possible to get this component out of the Mountain.”
“Right,” said Orso. He looked at Claudia. “Time for the monkey blood.”
* * *
—
The Foundrysiders climbed out of the carriage and quietly made toward the dead canal. Sancia kept an eye on the espringal batteries, and held up a hand when the big, bronze chambers snapped up and began tracking their movements. Then she looked back at Claudia and waved.
Sitting atop the carriage, Claudia cut the dozens of little floating lanterns loose. The revelers clapped as they drifted into the air like puff seeds from a powdervine…but though the crowd was by now too drunk to notice, all the lanterns drifted in the same direction—toward the wall—and they also drifted at the same height…which happened to be almost level with the espringal batteries.
Sancia watched with her scrived sight as the lanterns slowly drifted to float before the espringal batteries. The batteries came to life, pivoting to target the lanterns—which, if you knew how the batteries worked, would have seemed unusual: espringal batteries only targeted blood that they didn’t recognize. So why would they target some floating lanterns?
This was perhaps the grisliest aspect of their plan, but it seemed to be working. It was common knowledge that espringal batteries had trouble telling the blood of humans apart from the blood of gray monkeys—which scrivers had figured out pretty quickly when the first versions had quickly loosed their salvos at any nearby monkey nests in the rooftops. Most campo scrivers had clarified their commands so that the espringals would figure it out…but Sancia’d had the clever idea of purchasing monkeys from the butchers in the Greens (where blood pie was something of a delicacy), placing the blood in small vials, adding a drop of her own blood to each vial, and attaching them to the floating lanterns.
And a vial of monkey blood in all of our pockets, she thought as she looked around at them. Just to be extra cautious.
As more and more lanterns clustered around the walls, the batteries only became more bewildered. Were these monkeys? Were they unidentified humans? And which one was the target? There seemed to be far too many of them.
Sancia watched as the espringal batteries pivoted from lantern to lantern, utterly unsure what to do. “Now!” she said. Together they leapt down into the canal and ran toward the metal portcullis below the walls.
Sancia gripped the metal of the portcullis, and instantly the rig spoke in her mind.
<…extruding TEN FEET DOWN, provided the farthest extent of all FRAMING do not directly touch any MATTER, and to rise UP when blockage exerts PRESSURE across ALL FRAMES at MAXIMUM PRESSURE…>
It seemed the portcullis had been scrived to gate off the canal, but still allow water to flow through—unless some huge blockage drifted down from within the inner enclave, striking against it. In that case, the portcullis would then rise, allow the blockage to pass through, and then lower again.
The metrics and levels poured into her mind, chanted in the curious, anxious voice of the portcullis. She listened closely.
It rises when it feels unusual pressure on the face of the portcullis, she thought. But “the face of the portcullis” isn’t defined well. So if it feels any pressure on one specific square inch of the metal, maybe it should feel obliged to rise…
She spoke to it, feeding it her commands. Then she opened her eyes and gave the bars of the portcullis a hard jerk.
With a clink and a groan, the portcullis slowly rose up.
“In,” said Sancia. “Now.”
The four of them slipped inside, sprinting through the
ruined canal, up the stone stairs set in its side, and then on into the innermost circles of the enclave.
Sancia paused to look back. There was a pop from the other side of the enclave walls, and she saw something strange rising into the sky: a large circular green floating lantern, like the ones they used in the campo carnival parades. It rose into the air until it hovered about fifty feet above the walls, surrounded by the flock of smaller floating lanterns. She heard the applause of the revelers from here.
Should be easy to see, thought Sancia. Lighting the way home…
“Lead the way,” said Orso.
Sancia’s heart felt like lead as she tried to remember the path ahead. “How I’d hoped,” she said, “that I’d never have to do this again…”
“I sympathize,” said Gregor.
* * *
—
The strangest thing about moving through the Candiano enclave was how empty it was. Nearly everything was dark—there were no lights, neither in the streets nor in the buildings. The huge twisting spires were totally abandoned. The streets were covered in refuse that had blown into the gutters and the alleys.
“Weird,” said Orso softly. They stared at the countless magnificent, vacant structures around them. “Weird.”
“It seems,” said Gregor, “that the Michiels are not doing much with the space.”
“I’ll scrumming say.” Sancia flexed the muscle in her mind. Although most campo enclaves would have been an eruption of light and logic from all the designs keeping everything going, the Candiano enclave was more like a handful of candles flickering in the dark. “The only scrivings that are active are the ones keeping the buildings up. Everything else is shut down.”
“Then the darkness will be helpful,” said Orso. “Let’s keep moving.”
They continued through the enclave until they emerged onto a main fairway, and the Mountain rose into view. Again, she was awed by the sight of the thing. The Mountain was so incomprehensibly huge, a giant black dome with tiny round windows dotting its surface—and yet now it was also so incomprehensibly damaged.
“Let’s hope they left the front door open,” said Orso.
Together they moved through the side streets around the towers beside the Mountain, Sancia peering up at the scrivings around them, mindful of any movement.
Then she saw a tangle of logic hovering in the building ahead.
She stopped immediately and held up a hand.
“What’s wrong?” asked Gregor.
Sancia narrowed her eyes at the tangle of scrivings. She saw commands for velocity, for durability, for density, and gravity…
“It’s an espringal,” she said.
“What?” said Gregor.
“There in that building.” She pointed. “On the balcony. It’s an espringal, a high-powered one. And it’s moving.”
“A Michiel guard, then?” asked Berenice.
Sancia cocked her head, studying the logic. “No. I don’t think so. This looks like someone else’s work. I think it’s…Dandolo.”
Gregor, Berenice, and Orso looked at one another. “What?” said Orso. “What the hell? I thought the Michiels owned this enclave!”
“It could be a break-in,” said Berenice. “We know Crasedes is after the same thing we are, and we know Ofelia is working with…or for him.”
“We can’t stop here, even if this is a nasty surprise,” said Sancia. “We just…choose another route.” She backed away from the building. “One that’s far away from that.”
But getting closer to the Mountain proved harder than she’d thought. Every time they crept up some thoroughfare or alley, she always spied a scriving closer to the Mountain: an espringal, or a bundle of rapiers, or some other armament that surely belonged to guards keeping watch. And all of them were Dandolo.
“How in the hell have the Dandolos moved a private army into the enclave?” whispered Sancia as they huddled behind a corner. “Surely the Michiels would have noticed all these goddamn assholes!”
Gregor made a pained face. “Unless…my mother, or Crasedes…made them give the whole place up?”
“He couldn’t do that!” scoffed Orso. Then he saw Sancia’s and Gregor’s faces. “Could he do that?”
“The sound of his voice almost made me tell him where Clef was,” said Sancia. “God knows what it could make a regular person do.”
Gregor peered down the alley at the dark, cracked skin of the Mountain. “They’re in there. I’m sure of it. My mother’s probably had Dandolo scrivers in there all day, trying to get at the same components we’re after. And they’ve set up guards everywhere.”
“So…do we walk away?” asked Orso.
“No!” said Sancia. “If we walk away, then not only do we lose Valeria’s protections, but Crasedes will be one step closer to remaking her into something that could tear reality to pieces like a wasp in a beehive! This is our only chance!”
“Then what do you propose we do?” asked Orso.
Berenice suddenly walked farther out from the corner, staring not at the Mountain but rather at the land around its base.
“What the hell are you doing?” whispered Sancia.
“The secret entrance,” said Berenice quietly.
“What?” said Gregor.
“There’s a secret entrance to the Mountain—isn’t there? We used it last time. Could that still be guarded?”
Sancia thought about it. “I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s worth trying.”
They trotted through a string of parks that had been overtaken with monkeys until finally they came to the entrance to Tribuno Candiano’s personal sculpture garden. Sancia studied the balconies and alleys around them, but found them all empty.
“We’re alone,” she whispered. “They don’t know about it!”
“Then let’s see if it still works,” said Gregor.
They entered the garden. It was a powerfully unsettling experience for Sancia: the last time she’d been here the topiaries had been trimmed, the lawns freshly cut, and the statues had been clean and imposing. Now everything was overgrown, the statues and follies were filthy with dust and mold, and the topiaries had grown so thick Gregor had to hack them away with a scrived rapier.
And, she remembered, the last time she’d been here, she’d had Clef with her.
How long ago that seems now, she thought.
She found the bridge with the hidden entrance below, studied the wall with her scrived sight, and placed a bare hand on it.
“I sure as shit hope this works,” she said quietly.
The scrived door had been very well designed—she could tell right away it was Tribuno Candiano’s work—and it took a lot of effort to fool it into letting them through. But she finally triumphed, and a round, smooth plug of white stone rolled away, revealing a set of stairs on the other side.
Orso let out a relieved sigh. “Thank God!”
“We’re not inside yet,” said Sancia. They ran down the stairs together. “This leads to a weird tunnel that takes us right to the fourth floor. Or at least it did. And hopefully before then I’ll be able to confer with the Mountain.”
“You’re going to talk to it? To the whole building?” asked Gregor.
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “And maybe it can tell us what’s going on.” Though she had to admit, knowing that the lexicons of the Mountain essentially ran on the distorted, violated souls of the dead made the prospect of conferring with it a touch more disturbing than it’d normally have been.
People used to say the Mountain was haunted, she thought. They didn’t know how right they were…
They passed through the tunnel, which was now so dark they had to take out scrived lanterns to see the way. Then they came to a set of winding stairs up, which led to the fourth floor of the Mountain. Sancia fooled the doorway there into opening,
and it fell away to reveal…
Berenice gasped. “My God.”
“Shit,” said Orso softly.
The interior atrium of the Mountain was a dripping, dusty, shattered world of sputtering lamps and scattered shadows. Mold bloomed here and there and crawled across the green plaster walls in waves. The air was heavy with a scent of mildew and rot. Daylight spilled in from the cracked ceiling, which had apparently been ripped open when Sancia had turned on the gravity rig, and beams of shifting light danced across the floor as the overcast drifted through the darkening skies.
The oddest thing was how it still resembled her memories of the building it once had been. It still retained the brilliance of its original structure: the concentric walkways lining the atrium’s interior like ribs, stacked one on top of the other, with balconies running all along them so you could stop and look down into the massive chamber from wherever you were. But this was deceptive, she knew, for the Mountain was far bigger than just the atrium: hallways splintered off from the concentric walkways and led to ballrooms, assembly bays, design workshops, cellars, and more.
And yet now all of it had corroded, and degraded. All within just three years.
Sancia studied the giant atrium with her sight, and spied nine Dandolo armaments roving through the walkways above and below them—nine soldiers, five on patrol, four on watch.
And that’s just what I can see here, she thought. God, there’s got to be a small army in here with us…
A crackling, weary, ancient voice whispered in her mind: <…eh? What is this Presence? Who…Who is that?>
“I’ve got it,” she said, tapping the side of her head. “It’s still alive, still active!”
Shorefall Page 19
