“What is it?” asked Berenice.
“The Mountain is telling me a message from Orso,” she said, her head cocked, eyes half-closed. “The Dandolo guards have…some kind of blood-detection rig. To spot people who don’t have the right sachets.” Her face darkened. “To find us.”
Berenice stared at her. “Crasedes knew Valeria would send us here, then.”
“Yeah. Just like he knew we’d be at the ship. The bastard’s been ahead of us at every turn.” She looked back down the flooded hallways. “I don’t think we’ll encounter any troops down here. But I bet it’s going to be a devil of a time for Orso and Gregor. I think the lexicon is just ahead.”
They came to an immense bronze door with multiple locks, all of them attuned to sense the blood of Tribuno Candiano or his elite scrivers. Sancia quickly realized this door was beyond the controls of the Mountain: Tribuno had not been so foolish as to give his rig power over whether he could access its controls.
“This means I’ll have to do this the hard way…” Sancia said, and she placed her bare hand to the door and began to converse with it.
Ever since blood-sensing techniques had become wildly popular in the city, Sancia had built up a good bit of experience with these—yet this door proved to be a particularly thorny example. Though she tried many attempts, it remained unpersuadable: it would not be fooled into opening.
“Tribuno designed the hell out of this thing,” she said, her hand pressed to the door and her eyes shut. “It’s not budging on the definition of blood.”
“Or warmth?” asked Berenice, pacing the flooded hallway behind her.
“No.”
“What about distance? Can you convince it that it needs to sense far beyond its usual range? Maybe that can confuse it.”
Sancia tried this tactic, but the door refused to give:
“Shit,” said Sancia. “Tribuno even made sure to protect this against anyone walking around with his severed arm or something. Impressive, since he must have designed this thing thirty years ago—way before blood sensing was commonplace.”
Berenice screwed up her mouth. “Hold on a second. I need to remember something…” She shut her eyes and her face went slack, like she’d just fallen into an incredibly deep sleep. She stayed like that for one second, then two, then three—and then she opened her eyes. “What about time?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“Can you find out if a permitted scriver used this door previously? Maybe you can convince it that the man’s hand is still pressed to the door. Or make it think that it doesn’t matter when the contact happened—just that it happened.”
“That can’t possibly work. It can’t be that easy.”
“Orso makes a mess of time definitions very frequently. It’s his biggest weakness. I assume he learned it from someone. Why not Tribuno himself?”
Sancia took a breath, pressed her hand to the door, shut her eyes, and battered the door’s definitions of time—making it doubt what a second was, a minute, an hour, a day…It wasn’t easy, but she could tell she was making progress when she tricked it into thinking a year was actually a half a minute.
said the door.
The door thought for a moment.
Another pause. Then a click, and the door swung backward, permitting them entry.
“See?” said Sancia. “There’s smart, and then there’s smart. You should have this damned plate in your head. You’d be far better at it than I would.”
“Oh, enough,” said Berenice. She was grinning, even though she was filthy and wet. “Either of us alone would have been stuck in the hallway. Together, we are unstoppable.”
They sloshed forward into the tunnel until they came to the stairs down—which were completely submerged under the waters.
“Now we wait for Orso and Gregor to do their bit,” said Sancia. “Right?”
“I suppose so. I just hope we don’t have to wait long.”
* * *
—
Grunting and groaning, Gregor carried Orso down through the levels of the Mountain, always following a dimly lit lantern or light as the Mountain showed them the way. “Please try and keep quiet!” whispered Orso as Gregor staggered down the stairs. “And please don’t jostle me so much! Every time I separate from you, the little light in this rig flickers!”
“Any other orders?” grunted Gregor, hobbling along through the halls.
“We’re almost to the main floor. So—pretty soon you’ll have to keep low too.”
Gregor let out a long, low hiss.
Finally they crept down the last staircase and skirted the walls of the massive atrium. Orso’s skin broke out in gooseflesh as they walked in the shadows of the balconies. It was so eerie to be within this enormous chamber, listening to the patter of distant waters and the echoes of footfalls and the occasional cheeps of a gray monkey who must be nesting in the rafters. Some of the patrolling Dandolo troops bore lanterns, the warm light contrasting sharply with the darks and the blues of the atrium, which was mostly lit by moonlight now. Orso was reminded of crypt keepers walking amidst the catacombs, their lights held high in the gloom.
I fought for years to live here, he thought. Now I’d fight like hell to get out.
“Mountain,” whispered Gregor, “please flash a light within the hallway we need to use.”
They squatted in the shadows studying their surroundings. Then they saw a light flickering in a hallway far, far away, on the other side of the atrium.
Gregor sighed with frustration. “That has to be at least a thousand feet away…”
“It’s not my cup of tea either!” whispered Orso. “I’m chafing like mad in spots I’d much prefer didn’t chafe.”
Gregor looked around, thinking. “Six soldiers down here,” he said quietly. Then he cocked his head. “Orso—you’re going to hop off my back in a bit, all right?”
“What! I am?”
“Yes. Not for long. Hop off when I tell you, and back on when I tell you again, and keep quiet. Understand?”
“I…well. Fine, I suppose.”
Crouching low, Gregor carried Orso across the atrium to where the massive lifting room lay in rubble across the cracked marble floor. Gregor kneeled behind it, poked his head up, and watched the patrols. When they were all roughly aligned with the hallway they needed to use, he whispered, “Off! Now!”
Grunting, Orso delicately stepped off of his back. Instantly, a half dozen little twinkling lights lit up at the guards’ belts.
They stopped patrolling.
“Do…Do you have this?” one guard asked, looking at his people finder.
There was a muttered agreement. The guards looked in Orso and Gregor’s direction and started slowly moving their way, craning their heads curiously.
“Think one of the damned scrivers dropped their sachet again?” asked another voice in the darkness.
“Maybe,” said another. “Thought they’d be a lot more careful about what they put where after that last trap nearly cut that scriver in half…”
“Back on!” whispered Gregor. “Now!”
Orso quickly hopped onto Gregor’s back. Gregor turned and, still staying low, crept away from the ruined lifting room to the shelter of a stairwell at the edge of the atrium.
A voice echoed through the atrium: “It’s gone. What the hell?”
“Maybe it came in and out of range…”
“Or maybe this rig is a piece of shit. Didn’t they have all kinds of hell trying to get
these to stop detecting monkeys?”
The guards gathered around the rubble of the lifting room, lanterns held high. A few peered at the edge of the atrium—not at Gregor and Orso, but rather in a straight line with where they’d been hiding.
Gregor edged closer into the shadows that clung about one hallway entrance. He whispered, “Off again.”
“Again?”
“Yes!”
Orso slid off his back. Again, the little twinkling lights sprang on at the soldiers’ hips.
They looked down and fumbled with the little metal balls. “Again? Now it’s over there!” said one, pointing at Gregor and Orso. The guards turned and started moving their way.
“Back on,” whispered Gregor. “Now. Now!”
Grimacing, Orso clung to Gregor’s back again, and he crept off into the shadows, slinking along the walls of the atrium as fast as he could.
“And now it’s gone,” said a guard. “Think there’s an intruder about?”
Orso couldn’t hear the response, but all the guards kept moving toward their last position. He realized what Gregor had accomplished: he’d drawn all the guards away from the entrance they needed to get to the cellars. Though it obviously caused Gregor a great deal of discomfort, he was able to slip along the walls and into the hallway while the guards on the main floor kept fruitlessly searching the far side of the atrium.
Once they were safe, Gregor leaned back and pressed Orso into the wall for support, and then he just sat there, panting.
“Well done!” said Orso.
“Shut up,” gasped Gregor.
Orso looked around. “Hey, I know this hallway.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. I used to come down here when it was first built to nick food. And…” His heart sank. “And if I recall, this is where one of the Mountain’s lexicons is located too…”
Gregor stopped panting. “What!”
“Uh…yes.”
“You mean…You mean that another one of the lexicons is going to be located down here?”
“Yes.”
“Near the cellar we need to get to?”
“Yes.”
“The lexicons that the Dandolos are trying to break into as well?”
“Yes.”
“So…that means we’ll have even more guards to deal with as we get closer?”
“Uh, probably, yes.”
Gregor cursed for a moment, then glared at Orso over his shoulder. “I always thought you were skinny,” he said as he fought to his feet with Orso on his back. “But now I’m not so sure.”
* * *
—
Berenice and Sancia stood by the flooded hallway, waiting impatiently.
“What could be taking them so long?” said Sancia.
“Shit!” she said out loud. “It’s almost eleven!”
“Do you really think Crasedes will come at midnight?” asked Berenice.
“Hell, I don’t know. But if he were to come at any time, I’d guess then.”
“And we have no defenses against him?” she asked.
“No. I didn’t even bring the imperiat. Not with us all being, you know, inside a giant scrived structure. It seemed too big of a risk.”
Then the Mountain spoke in Sancia’s mind, in a voice that was very quiet and awed:
There was a silence. She suspected she’d just shocked the poor thing. She remembered now how it had wished to be visited by a hierophant—after all, that was why Tribuno had built it in the first place.
She began to get an idea.
There was a long silence.
said the Mountain.
A cold chill filled Sancia’s heart as she knew what she was going to say.
Another long silence.
“All right, then,” whispered Sancia. “I see. I…I have a proposition for you, Mountain…”
She told it her ideas, and it listened closely.
* * *
—
Gregor crept down the hallway with Orso on his back, following the flickering lanterns set in the walls. Then they looked around one corner and froze.
The hallway stretched on for about four hundred feet before them, broken only by an intersection halfway down. What was most concerning, however, was the half dozen Dandolo guards bearing lamps standing before the doorway at the far end of the hall. All of them looked quite upset, and it was easy to see why: a mangled corpse lay at their feet, so brutalized that it looked like someone had tried to hack the man in half with a pole arm.
“…going to have to get a stretcher,” one guard was saying. “Unless you want to throw poor Pietro over your shoulders, Molinari, and get his mess all over you.”
“But they did not inform us that this task would have so many threats!” said another. “I mean…I thought the Candianos lived here! I didn’t think they’d layered the walls and floors with lethal scrumming booby traps…”
“Sure, but the lexicon chambers would be a different matter,” said Orso quietly. “Tribuno always did take security very seriously…especially later, when he went mad.”
Gregor raised a finger, then pointed. “There. Look.”
A single lantern was flickering very faintly by the corner of the intersection, two hundred feet away. The Mountain was signaling to them that they needed to go down the hallway and take a right—but this would be impossible with the Dandolo guards standing in a crowd just beyond.
“Any bright ideas?” said Orso. “I doubt if we can draw them all away this time. Maybe if we ran down there really quick, we could seal them in with one of Claudia’s invisible walls…though I’m not sure how to do that without getting shot.”
Gregor cocked his head. “That is an idea, Orso.”
“What, getting shot?”
“No.” Gregor began to take out his imprinter espringal. “Hold still, please.”
“Wait. Gregor, what…what are you going to d—”
“Shh
,” said Gregor. He set it to an anchoring string and carefully aimed down the hallway at the guards.
“…barely even want to take a shit in the latrine!” one of the guards was saying. “I’m frankly worried that the damned thing will eat me!”
Gregor exhaled slightly, and fired.
The lead slug hurtled down the hallway—but it did not hit any of the soldiers. Instead, it sailed over their heads, through the open doorway at the end of the hall, and struck the far wall with a very loud thwack.
The soldiers jumped, alarmed. “What the hell was that?”
They spun around, pulled out their rapiers, and walked away from the corpse and into the room, peering about.
Gregor lowered the espringal a little, aimed, and fired the second half of the anchoring slug—this one at the corpse of poor Pietro, lying on the floor.
The slug struck the corpse on the hip, this time with a much wetter, far more upsetting thwack. The instant it stuck, the two slugs felt compelled to pull themselves together—which meant the corpse of Pietro suddenly shot through the air, pulled by his trousers, his limbs flailing about wildly, and he smashed into the backs of the soldiers standing in the doorway, knocking them to the ground.
There was an eruption of confused and horrified screams. Gregor ran down the hallway with Orso on his back, pulled out one of Claudia’s plates, and tossed it down behind him and turned it on. He rapped the invisible air with his knuckles, and it made a metallic tap tap.
“Good,” he said. Then he shook Orso off, and they turned and dashed down the hallway and down a flight of stairs. “If rather grisly…But it won’t hold them for long.”
“We’re close now!” said Orso, but he hardly needed to say it. The walls were getting more utilitarian and much less ornate.
Finally they came to the cellars. Orso saw a single lamp lit over a door just a few yards away.
“There!” he said. “That one!”
They scrambled inside. The room was dark and reeking, full of bags and crates of ancient, spoiled food—but a lantern was flashing frantically on the far wall.
“I believe that’s it,” said Gregor. He pulled out his rapier. “Let’s do this fast before anyone notices us…”
Shorefall Page 21
