“Then ask it what the hell is going on!” said Orso.
said Sancia.
“The Dandolos are working on five out of six of the lexicons,” said Sancia aloud. “They haven’t successfully gotten the definition out of any of them yet—but they’re close.”
“What’s happening with the sixth lexicon?” asked Orso. “Is anyone guarding it?”
“No,” said Sancia. “Because it’s flooded.”
“Shit!” he said.
Sancia thought hard. This wasn’t at all how they’d wanted this to go: they’d planned to get to the Mountain first, use Gio and Claudia’s invisible barricades to seal up access to one lexicon, extract the component, and then get out. They hadn’t planned on soldiers and flooded basements. But she knew they had no choice.
Shit, she thought. So—really scrumming bad, then.
She shook herself and said, “We’re going to have to split into two groups.”
“All right,” said Gregor. “What is the plan?”
“One half needs to go to the basement dry-storage rooms, in the southwest area,” said Sancia. She pointed down into the atrium. “There’s a wall there that we need to break open…” She cocked her head, and listened to the Mountain. “The Mountain says it can actually flash lights over the wall, so we can find it.”
“Helpful,” said Berenice.
“Scrumming creepy,” muttered Orso.
“Breaking open the wall will let out a lot of the water in the lexicon chambers,” said Sancia. She shifted her finger to point to its location. “Once that’s down, the other team enters the lexicon chamber and gets the component out. Then we regroup here, and we go out the way we came in.”
Gregor nodded, though his face was concerned. “I assume Sancia and I will go to this wall, while Orso and Berenice deal with the lexicon?”
Sancia began to agree, but Orso shook his head and said, “No.”
“What?” said Sancia. “Why not?”
“I mean…I am not the best scriver to accompany Berenice.” Orso thought in silence for a moment. Then he looked at her sternly. “You are.”
“What?” said Berenice.
“What?” said Sancia. “You…You were Tribuno Candiano’s star scrumming pupil! And you know more about lexicons than anyone in Tevanne!”
“Obviously I don’t know anything about these,” said Orso. “Together, you and Berenice can do this faster. I’m better with Gregor—I actually lived here; I know how to get around.” He wrinkled his nose at the moldering walls. “Or I used to…It doesn’t matter. The faster you two get the component,” he said as Berenice opened her mouth to argue, “the faster we get out alive. Got it?”
There was an awkward pause.
“Fine,” said Sancia. “I’ll go with Berenice. You two break the wall.”
“How many soldiers are in here with us?” asked Gregor.
“I can count nine here, but…if they’re after the lexicons, they’ll be in the cellars, far from me, so I can’t see them.” She shrugged. “I’d guess thirty or fifty or so.”
“Damn,” said Gregor quietly. He looked away into the atrium, his face haggard and haunted.
Sancia knew what he was worried about: it wasn’t dying that scared Gregor, but killing.
“You’ll be fine,” she said. “Just avoid them as best you can. But you’ll need to hurry.” She looked up at the sky through the cracked ceiling. It had taken them so long to get here that it was already night. “Crasedes might wait for midnight to come see how progress is going…but he might not.”
“And what do we do if we’re still here by then?” asked Orso.
“Plug up your ears,” said Sancia. “And run like hell.”
* * *
—
Orso and Gregor crept off into the darkened hallways of the Mountain. Orso personally found it a surreal and disturbing experience. He hadn’t been back here in—what, fifteen, twenty years?—and yet he could remember these ceilings, these doors, the way the doorknobs felt when you gripped them…except now they were muddy, or stained from old floodwaters, and everywhere felt empty and abandoned. It was dispiriting to see the halls of his youth so utterly changed. The golden age of scriving was well and truly dead.
But we’re remaking it anew, he tried to remember. We won’t make the same mistakes that Tribuno made…They passed a crumbling fresco depicting two scrivers altering the fundament of the world, engraving sigils on the gears and machinery that supported reality itself. That I made, when I was young.
As they walked, they noticed that the lamps and lanterns in the walls around them kept springing on as they came close. It took Orso a moment to realize that the lights were being switched off as the two of them walked away.
“Is…it just me,” whispered Gregor, “or…”
“Or is the Mountain giving us light to see?” said Orso. “Yeah. I think so.”
Gregor watched as a light flicked on around the corner up ahead. “And it’s showing us the way. That is…most disturbing to me.”
“It goddamn gives me the screaming meemies, I’ll tell you that. I feel like a fairy-tale traveler following spirit lamps i
nto a bog. To think I lived here all those years, unaware of what this place actually was…”
They continued down a set of cracked stairs, into a meeting room with crystal goblets lying here and there on the floor, then on into a mirrored hall so filthy it looked like their reflections were walking through a curling fog.
Then the light went out above them. They paused, standing in the total darkness.
“Why do you think it did that?” whispered Orso.
“I’m not—”
A light flicked on far, far down the hallway—and they saw a Dandolo guard walking their way, espringal out and ready. The guard stopped and looked at the scrived lantern above him, perplexed as to why it had just come on.
Because it’s showing us a threat, Orso realized.
Before Orso could think, Gregor grabbed him and hauled him into what seemed to be a dark, soggy bedroom. Together they huddled in the shadows, listening as the footsteps came closer.
Orso didn’t dare breathe. He reached for the button on his cuirass, but Gregor shook his head, pointing to the walls around them. Orso remembered Claudia’s warning: Don’t turn it on too close to walls—you’ll be immobilized.
The guard’s steps slowed as he neared the doorway to the bedroom. Orso couldn’t understand what had made him suspicious. The man evidently hadn’t seen them, otherwise he would have just shot them dead in the hall—but how could he know exactly where they were now?
Gregor gently pushed Orso up against the wall in the corner. Then he flattened his back to the wall by the doorway—but he did not arm himself.
Why doesn’t he have his espringal out? Why doesn’t he just shoot the stupid bastard?
There was a long silence. Then the tip of the scrived espringal slowly poked its way through the door.
Gregor pounced.
Orso had never seen Gregor fight, so he was astonished at how fast a man of his size could move. In a flash, Gregor had grabbed the espringal, wrenched it up, and then he’d head-butted the guard soundly in the face. The guard cried out, and a scrived bolt cracked off the ceiling, sending shrapnel flying through the room. Orso felt one large fragment thud into the wall just next to his head.
Gregor heaved the guard into the room and smashed his fist into the man’s face. But the guard was clearly trained as well, and though he was stunned, he was prepared for the next blow: he brought his forearm up to block Gregor’s strike, and then he stepped forward and shoved his elbow into Gregor’s neck. Gregor gagged and bent double as the guard reached for his rapier. Before he could draw it, Gregor charged forward, put his shoulder into the man’s gut, and slammed him into the stone wall behind him.
Though the guard wore a helmet, the way his head cracked into the wall clearly hurt. He slid down the wall, still feebly fighting Gregor, who pinned him down with his left hand as he fumbled for something on his belt with his right. The guard kept struggling and trying to scream for help, so Gregor shoved his left hand into the guard’s mouth, which he then bit—hard.
Gregor growled, pulled something from his belt—a dolorspina dart, Orso thought—and stabbed the man in the neck with it. The guard gasped and fell back. Then his eyes rolled up into his head, and he was still.
Gregor pulled out a handkerchief and wrapped his hand, which was bleeding freely. Then he knelt and searched the man. “A sachet,” he said, taking it. “I wonder what permissions it grants…”
Orso slowly stood, still trembling with fright. “For…For the love of God, man!”
“What?”
“Did you really need to enter into some kind of street brawl with him? I mean…he could have killed you, or me, or raised the alarm! Next time just stab the bastard, or cut his throat, and be done with it, all right?”
Gregor looked at Orso for a moment, his face curiously closed. Then he stood and said, “No.”
“No to what?”
“No. I will not kill these men unless I have no other choice.”
“But…goddamn it, Gregor, we don’t have time for your honor, or your scrumming morali—”
Gregor whirled on him. “This is not just about my moralities!” he spat. “And it is most certainly not about my honor!”
Orso drew back, surprised by his viciousness—especially since Gregor was usually so taciturn. “What?”
“This isn’t about…about mercy or cruelty, or…or any such useless twaddle! It’s…” Gregor’s fury changed to sorrow and despair. “It’s about this!” He pointed at the right side of his head, where the plate was still installed.
“What about it?”
He struggled to explain it. “The less I think myself a killer, then…then the less control it has over me.” He shut his eyes and said, “Because I have changed my mind about what I am. I have changed. My. Mind.” He spoke the words as if they were an inner mantra he’d been repeating for the past three years. Then he opened his eyes and looked at Orso pleadingly. “Do not ask me to be a murderer. Not even now. I do not wish to be the thing I was anymore. And if I slip back, then it will be easier for…for those who made me to command me to murder you. All right?”
“I…all right. All right.”
Gregor looked back down at the guard. “Wait. He’s got some kind of…of glowing light on his belt. What is that?”
Orso looked and saw he was right: there was a tiny, twinkling light on the guard’s side. He bent and unhooked the object from his belt.
It looked like a wire mesh ball, but there were tiny, tiny lights embedded where the wires wrapped around one another, so it was effectively covered in them. Only one little light was glowing, on the side facing him.
“Huh,” said Orso, and he turned it over in his hands—but as he did, the lights changed: whichever one was facing him always stayed lit, while the others stayed dark.
He began to get a dreadful idea.
“Gregor,” he said, “take that sachet you got out of your pocket and toss it away.”
Gregor did so. Instantly, a second light sprang on, this one facing Gregor.
“Walk around the room,” said Orso.
Gregor walked in a circle around the room. The light moved with him, always pointing at his position, while the second light pointed to Orso.
“Shit,” said Orso.
“It’s…It’s some kind of detection rig, isn’t it?” asked Gregor.
“Yes,” said Orso grimly. “I think it senses blood that isn’t paired with the right sachet—just like the espringal batteries on the walls. That’s how the bastard found us.”
“Crasedes knew we’d be coming,” he said.
“It seems so.”
“We’ve got to warn Sancia. But…she and Berenice must be almost to the basements by now.”
“I’m a little more worried about us, to be frank, but…” Orso thought for a second. Then he cleared his voice, and said aloud, “Mountain—can you hear me?”
The light in the room blinked on and off.
“Please tell Sancia what we’ve discovered here, if you’d be so kind.”
The light blinked on and off again.
“I suppose it is useful,” said Gregor, “to have the very building on your side…”
“But the building won’t matter worth shit if they can detect us through scrumming walls.” Orso thought for a moment. “Gregor—pick up that sachet again, please.”
He stooped and did so. “Now what?”
“Now turn around and let me climb on your back.”
Gregor stared at him blankly. “What?”
“Just do it before they detect us!”
Muttering, Gregor turned around and bent his knees slightly while Orso clambered up onto his back.
“There,” he grunted as he grasped Gregor’s neck. “That should do. And now let’s see if this worked…”
He pulled the little people find
er back out. Just as he suspected, the lights were all off.
“Hah!” he said. “The thing can’t figure out who the sachet applies to when we’re so close together! So it just assumes we both have it.”
“Yes, but…Orso, are you proposing I carry you all the way down to the main floor of the Mountain?”
“Well. I can’t think of another solution currently. So—get a move on, I suppose.”
* * *
—
Sancia and Berenice wound their way down through the bowels of the Mountain, but did not encounter any patrols or guards. It didn’t take them long to realize why: soon the hallways were filled with water that rose to their ankles, and they had to kick and slosh through the chambers. Sancia wasn’t bothered—she’d crawled through worse in her time—but she could tell Berenice wasn’t pleased.
“Just…keep an eye out for snakes,” said Berenice.
“The Mountain tells me there are no snakes in this wing of his basements,” said Sancia. “He says there’s a pretty big nest of rats in one of his rooms here, though.”
“His? He?”
“Or its, or whatever.”
They sloshed along through a records hall. The surface of the waters was covered in a skin of ancient, decayed parchments, and the giant filing cabinets towered over them. Sancia was reminded of columns in some massive temple.
“I wish I could hear the things you hear,” said Berenice, “and see the things you see.”
“You always say that.”
“But I especially feel it now, San. When there’s a building whispering secrets in your ear.”
“It’s just…I don’t know. Information.”
“And you always say that.”
“It is. It’s like learning a different language. Just knowing the words doesn’t mean you grasp what they’re actually saying. You still have to be smart.” They turned right and exited the filing rooms. “That’s where you outpace me,” she grumbled.
“You are quite smart, San.”
“There’s quite smart, and then there’s you. You know more about scriving than Orso, even. And I…” She paused as the Mountain suddenly whispered to her.
Shorefall Page 20
