“Oh my God,” she panted. “Oh my God, I don’t want to do that again.”
“Sancia!” shouted Orso. “Get off your damn ass and help us!”
His voice came from within the giant wine cask set on the back of the carriage. Groaning, Sancia scrambled up and vaulted over the top of the cask to review the state of the situation.
The wine cask’s lid had been pried off and tossed away, revealing a small, waterproof chamber in the center of it, a small cask inside this larger one—and placed inside this smaller cask was the small lexicon from Claudia and Gio’s workshop.
This had been the final step of Gregor’s plan—Why wait to bring Valeria back at Foundryside, he’d proposed, when we can summon her protections just outside the enclave walls?
It was a genius stroke—provided it worked, of course.
“It’s not ramping!” shouted Orso.
“No!” said Berenice. “It’s ramping, it just needs time!”
Orso looked up at Sancia. “Can you, I don’t know, hurry the goddamn thing along?”
“Shit,” muttered Sancia. She started to crawl down into the giant wine cask—but as she did she noticed something odd happening to the giant floating lamps all across Tevanne.
Many were dying out. No, that wasn’t quite it—they were being smashed, one after another. And they were being smashed in a straight line, as if a dark projectile were hurtling out of the Mountain, and right at their carriage.
Crasedes, she thought. He’s coming for us.
She dropped down into the walled-off core of the wine cask, placed a hand against the lexicon’s casing, and listened.
Listening to its voice was agonizingly slow. Usually it took only ten to twenty minutes for a lexicon to ramp up—to assert all of its basic supporting arguments in a certain sequence so it could then assert which scriving strings were true, and thus bend reality into knots. But this one was struggling.
Sancia realized what she was going to have to do. “Berenice!” she shouted. “I…I need you to read off the basic ramping sequence in my ear!”
“What?” she said, boggled.
“I need to hurry this thing along! And I…I can’t remember them all! Just help me, please!”
Berenice crawled down to her. “Well…first is the assertion of distance, so the lexicon can know what’s close and what isn’t…”
Sancia remembered. Rapidly, she recalled the commands for this assertion and forced them onto the lexicon. It felt like hurrying an elderly campo domestic officer through a wedding rite—Yes, yes, now the ointments, and the reading of oaths, and the binding of hands…
“What’s next?” shouted Sancia.
Berenice’s eyes went blank, and Sancia knew that she’d gone somewhere deep inside of herself, to some secret place where she’d memorized countless facts and facets. “Next is the assertion of the cradle,” said Berenice, “as the heart of meaning for the lexicon!”
Shit, said Sancia, remembering it. That’s a tricky one…
She started forcing the argument on the lexicon—but then there was the sound of something hurtling through the air overhead, and a crack from nearby, followed by a burst of screaming.
“Shit!” screamed Gio from the pilot’s cockpit. “Something just fell out of the sky in front of us!”
But Sancia knew that whatever it was, it had not fallen—it had been thrown.
She stood and looked over the edge of the wine cask, and saw him flitting through the night sky far behind them—a figure in black, still seated in that curiously meditative, cross-legged position…
She watched as something dark hurtled up toward him, orbited him twice, and then flew straight at them.
“Watch out!” she cried.
A stone plowed into the muddy street just to the side of the carriage, and Gio swerved to avoid it. Their carriage creaked and groaned, and Berenice cursed within the depths of the wine cask.
“Do you have it?” asked Orso. “Do you have it, girl?”
“I’m going, I’m going!” snarled Sancia. “What’s next?”
“Next is the definition of the plates!” cried Berenice. “How to read them, and what order they go through!”
Sancia shut her eyes as she goosed the lexicon through this bit as well. I sure as shit wish, she thought, that I had paid attention to Orso more when he prattled on and on about lexicons…
Another stone cracked through the air and smashed into a rookery. It collapsed like it was made of playing cards.
“We’re almost to Foundryside!” said Claudia. “We…We don’t have much more room to run!”
“What’s next now?” shouted Sancia.
“Final one is the command to start enforcing the arguments on the plates!” cried Berenice. “But…that one takes the longe—”
Then there was a crack, and something bit through the wood, and Orso screamed and fell to the side.
It took Sancia a moment to understand what had happened. There was a hole in the side of the wine cask, one that definitely hadn’t been there before. Orso was gripping his shoulder and screaming, his whole body wracked with painful spasms, and blood was pouring out between his fingers. Berenice was shrieking as she kneeled beside him, unsure what to do.
Sancia looked through the hole in the cask, and saw Crasedes hurtling down the fairway after them, his posture queerly placid, his robe and hat not even flying in the wind.
“You son of a bitch!” snarled Sancia. “You rotten, worthless cowa—”
She shook herself, remembering her task, and placed her hand on the lexicon.
She heard Gio shouting in alarm. The scrived carriage took a sharp turn around a corner—a corner she knew, one close to Foundryside—and they slid in the mud a bit, but they stayed upright…
Berenice was sitting in the wine cask, her hands and arms covered in blood while she pressed on Orso’s wound, sobbing hysterically as she tried to stanch the bleeding.
But the lexicon would not answer—and then there was a snap from under the carriage, and everything leapt around them.
Sancia cried out as they were jostled about within the wine cask. The lexicon, which had been expertly prepared for such a disturbance, didn’t seem to move much, but Orso shrieked in pain, and she heard Claudia and Gio crying out, and the carriage slowly rolled to a stop.
“Snapped a wheel…” panted Sancia. “Snapped a…a goddamn wheel…”
She stood up and looked over the top of the wine cask. Foundryside was just a few hundred yards away, but it wasn’t like that mattered. Not now.
She felt a thrumming nausea in her belly, and she slowly turned her head to look behind them.
“No,” she whispered.
He floated around the corner so calmly, so casually, like a boat being piloted on a smooth, gentle river. He turned to face them, hands on his crossed legs, not a fleck of dust or stone on his person—despite having just personally destroyed the Mountain of the Candianos, and a half dozen Commons rookeries on top of that.
“Well,” Crasedes said in his deep, rumbling voice. “I had not really wis
hed for things to come to this, you know.”
The ground beneath him trembled, and a dozen large stones emerged from the muddy fairway like tadpoles hatching from a riverbank. They rose and began to orbit him as if they were little dripping planets.
“Claudia, Gio!” screamed Sancia. “Get out of here, get out of here!”
“But…” he said contemplatively. “Now I just feel obliged to…”
The stones whipped around him, and flew straight for their carriage. Sancia dove forward into the wine cask and hugged Berenice tight, her face buried in the base of her neck, one hand on Orso’s chest.
Not like this, she thought. Not like this…
She braced herself for the impact, for the sound of stone on wood and bone, for the bleary madness as her damaged brain tried to interpret the world it was seeing as it failed in her skull, for the sight of Berenice’s empty eyes as she died just a few paces from their home…
And yet—it did not come.
Sancia slowly released Berenice. Both still sobbing, they looked at each other, confused. Then they looked over the top of the wine cask.
The dozen stones were hovering in the air about twenty feet from the carriage. They were trembling with some kind of pent-up energy, like a fish trying to escape a line. For a moment Sancia wondered if Crasedes had been overcome with second thoughts—but she saw he had balled his fists and was leaning forward slightly, as if concentrating very hard, and the air was pulsing with a discomfiting energy, one that made her ears and eyes ache queerly.
“No…” he whispered. “No!”
The stones slid forward very slightly—just a few inches more—but stopped again.
Then Sancia heard her voice in her mind: a curious, fluting, artificial voice, like pipes being used to mimic human speech.
And then Sancia saw her, very briefly, just a flicker—a huge, hulking golden figure standing about twenty feet away from their cart, facing Crasedes.
“I will not permit you,” said Crasedes. His fists were trembling. “I will not.”
Then the stones stopped trembling—and all of them shot backward with blinding speed, all trained on Crasedes.
They struck him with a tremendous crash, and the end of the street filled with dust. Sancia and Berenice both recoiled and sank down into the wine cask, then slowly stood back up as the dust cleared.
Crasedes still sat in midair at the end of the street, one palm extended to them, the mud below him covered with rubble, the buildings about him shredded to pieces. The stones did not appear to have marked him any—but he did not seem terribly pleased.
He slowly cocked his head. “I see,” he said finally. “That it does. But…it will come again, will it not?”
And with that, he turned and slowly drifted away, back into the dusty, smoky skies above Tevanne.
III
THE LAST PROBLEM
20
The next moments were sheer chaos: people running out of their homes shrieking hysterically, all streaming past their tumbledown cart; Orso, sweaty and moaning, gripping his bloodied shoulder with one hand as Berenice and Sancia helped him down; Claudia and Giovanni laboring like mad to get a new wheel onto the carriage so it could make it the few final feet back to the Foundryside front gates; and always in the distance the sound of screaming and riots as the fallout from the Mountain’s collapse continued.
responded Valeria’s voice, but it sounded faint and weak.
Berenice and Sancia rushed to pull Tribuno’s definition from the lexicon in the carriage and install it in the one in the Foundryside library’s basement. Sancia’s hands shook as she delicately placed the little engraved cone inside their lexicon’s cradle. She felt sure Crasedes would take advantage of their moment of weakness—he always seemed to know when they’d be vulnerable, always—but she never felt any pang of nausea, nor heard his low, deep voice from the darkness outside.
I wish Orso were doing this, she thought as she worked. He would be faster. He would be better.
Once the cradle was prepped, Berenice and Sancia started ramping the lexicon. Neither had any doubt that it would work this time. They just stood in their paper-strewn basement and waited, staring at their shabby old lexicon with the messy “FS” imprinted on the top.
Then Sancia heard her voice.
“Is this being received?” she said.
Sancia jumped—but to her surprise, Berenice jumped as well.
“Oh my God,” said Berenice. “Did…did you hear that?”
“I will interpret this reaction,” said Valeria’s voice, “as indication the answer is true.”
“You can hear it too, Ber?” said Sancia.
Berenice looked like she might faint. She rubbed at the side of her head, as if trying to discover exactly how the words had been delivered to her mind. “I hear…something. It’s like I’m hearing it without hearing the sounds…”
“With Tribuno’s definition,” said Valeria, “I am able to alter reality much more directly. Not restricted to talking just to Sancia, with her plate.”
“Then you should be able to help us,” said Sancia. “We got you out, Valeria. We gave you shelter. Now what?”
“Now I have granted you protections. The Maker cannot come close to this area, nor can he affect it. The more I calibrate what permissions I have, the more I can assist you. Give me time to get…settled? True? Upon discovering more of my own situation, I can then know more what to do next.”
Sancia and Berenice exchanged a glance. “Wait,” said Sancia. “Exactly…what are you going to be doing in our basement, again?”
“Are you unaware of our predicament?” said Valeria. “Maker knows where we are. Knows our location, our resources. Though we have protections, we are not truly safe. We can never truly be safe from the Maker—not until he is banished to the death I made for him.” There was a flicker in the air, and Sancia glimpsed her, just for a second—a giant hulking figure wrought of gold, standing behind the lexicon, staring out at them. “We are now under siege, Sancia. We must prepare ourselves.”
* * *
—
Exhausted and shaken, Sancia and Berenice limped out of the basement, Sancia with a large, heavy case in her hand. They found Gio and Claudia kneeling over Orso on a pallet in the center of the library. He looked terrible: discolored, shrunken, sweaty, not like the Orso they knew at all, but a reduced version of him. His shoulder was a mass of red bandages, many of them unsettlingly dark.
“He looks bad,” said Claudia. Her face looked tired and stretched. “The wound is deep. What happened back there?”
“I think Crasedes clipped him with a stone,” said Sancia. “He shot it right through the wine cask like a bolt of lightning.”
“Will he be all right?” asked Berenice.
“Depends on if there’s any stone still in the wound,” said Gio. “If there is…”
There was a silence.
“You need a physiquere,” said Claudia. “We can do a lot of things, but we can’t clean wounds or do surgery.”
“We…We can walk with you to go get one,” said Gio anxiously, “but…”
Sancia could tell where this was going. “But you’ve done enough,” she said.
Claudia and Gio went very still, and she knew she was right: they wanted out, and fast.
; “You didn’t ask for this,” said Sancia, sighing with weariness. “You didn’t ask for hierophants and gods and stones hurtling through the air like shooting stars. This is not your fight.” She placed the heavy case on the ground before them. “There.”
“What’s that?” asked Gio.
“Your payment,” said Berenice. “All the Michiel definitions.”
Claudia stared. “All of them?”
“All the ones we have, yeah,” said Sancia.
“I…I thought you would want to keep some, at least,” said Gio.
Sancia shook her head. “Fight’s changed. All of this has changed. The Mountain’s gone, the houses are likely at war, and Crasedes and Valeria are circling one another like duelists. The fight has changed, and we’ve got to change with it.”
* * *
—
Sancia walked Claudia and Gio to the front door. She found Gregor waiting for them, pacing before the windows with a rapier at his side and an espringal over his shoulder. He seemed more like his normal self, but Sancia could tell there was something missing in his eyes…a light, or a spark, or some capacity of attention.
As they approached, he said, “Not this way. Not the front door.”
“Eh?” said Gio. “We can’t go out the front gate?”
He shook his head. “Many saw us enter our compound through that entrance. We’re being watched.”
“Already?” said Sancia.
“I’ve seen them. I recommend you take the back exit.”
“The back exit?” said Claudia. “But…doesn’t that mean we’d have to wade through the shit ditch? Where everyone dumps their latrines?”
“They built a little bridge,” said Gregor. “Over part of it, at least. Would you rather have shit on your shoes or your guts in your lap?”
“Fine, fine…” grumbled Gio. “We know the way. We’ll see ourselves out.” They departed, the case of definitions swinging from Gio’s shoulder.
Sancia joined Gregor at the window. “Who’s watching us?”
“I don’t know. Could be Michiels, or Dandolos. Or it could be simple gawkers, intrigued by what just transpired in the streets.” He pointed at one doorway. “Two men there. And there was a woman, but she’s gone now.”
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