Shorefall
Page 34
“Then…could we ever win?” Gregor said. “Is this just a dance we do over and over? Will everything we build turn to nothing but ugliness?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, her face strangely wistful. “You know…if you’d asked me that five years ago when I’d just come to this city, working as a thief in the gutters…I’d have said yes. Anything that has to do with scriving, with power, with the houses—I’d have said all that could only turn into nothing but ugliness.”
“But today?”
“But…today, right now, I’m sharing my mind, my thoughts, my very self with the person I love most of all in this world. And that’s thanks to this innovation, this art. We did make something beautiful out of all this. And I can’t imagine going back now. I just can’t.”
“You’re still…connected?” he asked. “Scrived? Twinned?”
“Whatever the word is, yes.”
“What’s it like?”
She considered it. “It’s like…It is rather like wearing someone’s mindset as a cloak about you, wrapping yourself up in all their memories and thoughts, and it’s not quite that you see things as they see them—but you understand that we are all glimpsing the world from different angles, and each of us sees only a tiny, fleeting bit of it.”
He watched her, feeling disturbed and slightly awed. That was not Sancia talking, he knew—Sancia had many virtues, but florid articulation was certainly not one of them.
Does she even know that this thought, that those words, are actually Berenice’s? Or is there any difference between the two anymore?
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “I feel everyone should try it. To not just walk a mile in someone else’s boots, but to be them, truly, if only for a moment. Is it insane to say that?”
He lay there for a moment. “No,” he said hoarsely. “In fact, I…I can think of nothing lovelier.”
“Really? Why?”
He shrugged. “I would love to be someone else, Sancia. If only for a little while.”
She sat forward. “Then why not do it, then?”
“Do what?”
“Twin yourself with me and Berenice?”
“What? I mean…Would it even work with three people?”
“I don’t know why it wouldn’t. We would all be a…a part of one another, a little bit. Maybe this could help you, Gregor. Or maybe you could help us.”
He considered it. The idea suddenly seemed tantalizing to him—not just because he would become someone else, but because he realized how lonely he’d felt for so long, like a diseased sheep kept separate from the herd.
Yet he shook his head. “No. I would not risk that.”
“It wouldn’t harm you. Trust me, I—”
“I am not worried about me. I’m worried about you.” He looked at her. “Crasedes did something to me. He and my mother can control my thoughts, my actions, my memories. I would not want that control to extend to you both.” He started to sit up. “I would wish to keep what you have safe.”
She helped him stand. “You don’t always have to play at being a goddamned watchman, you know. For once, you could do something to help you.”
Gregor paused, thinking. “I do have a question.”
“Yeah?”
“If…If you think it could work with three people—could it work with more? Like, say, an army?”
“Huh? You want an army of people with their minds all twinned together?”
“I’m not proposing anything. But…I am suddenly imagining an army of people, of all these different perspectives, sharing themselves…Or perhaps a nation. A nation of people, truly, deeply united…” He shook his head. “But now is not the time for dreams. We have enough great works to do today—do we not?”
She sighed deeply, reached into her pocket, and pulled out the long, golden key with the curious tooth. “Yeah. We do.”
* * *
—
“The solution is complete,” said Valeria as they entered the basement. “I have confirmed that the commands we obtained from Gregor will work.”
Sancia glanced at the creation sitting on the table before Valeria’s lexicon. It looked like a small, copper sphere that split in half, opening on a hinge, with each side carefully and artfully engraved. She knew what this device was, and how it worked—one of the benefits of being twinned with Berenice, who’d made it. She also understood that it was one of the most impossibly advanced creations that had ever been made in Foundryside—if not Tevanne.
“You will have to place the key within the sphere,” said Valeria. “And activate it. Then I can utilize the permissions to warp the time within the sphere so it would be as if the key experiences one, or several, millennia. At this point, the key should be usable again.”
“It’s as simple as that?” said Orso.
“Not simple. I will not simply bathe him in endless years while he is in the vessel. That would return him to the state he was at before—which would not be useful. As I said, just opening my casket almost destroyed him.”
“Then what are you going to do?” asked Sancia.
“What I will do with time within that vessel,” said Valeria, “would be the difference between a stone being dropped within a pool of melted iron, and a stone being expertly carved with an iron chisel. When I am finished, he should not only be usable to us, but he will be more powerful than he was before. But it will be terribly, terribly difficult…And it will strain me to my limits…”
“No sacrifices?” said Gregor.
“I am thousands of sacrifices,” said Valeria coldly. “Whatever sacrifices might be necessary have already been made.”
Despite such grisly discussion, Sancia couldn’t help but feel a thrill of excitement.
said Berenice.
“And…will there be any side effects?” said Gregor. “Having just had my own time manipulated, I am somewhat anxious about how this might go.”
“On this, I am…uncertain,” said Valeria. “But if you are anxious about such effects, I recommend relocating to a safe space—perhaps five to ten thousand feet away.”
Orso shook his head and sat down on the floor. “I don’t have time for this shit. Sancia—I say you stick the key in, shut the damned ball, and be done with it. We’ve been through hell trying to get Clef back up and running. I wish to see it finished.”
Sancia pulled Clef out of her pocket and looked down at him. It still hurt to this day to see him in such a state: a dead, dull, useless object, his voice and mind silenced and lost.
“No one deserves this,” she said quietly. “No one deserves to be locked away like this.” She looked up at them. “I’m going to do it.”
“Then do it away,” said Orso, gesturing with a wine bottle.
Sancia walked over to the little bronze orb and gently placed Clef within, as if he were not a golden key but rather an injured mouse. Then she gingerly shut the orb, her fingers running over its many scrivings—the very commands that time itself must change within its walls.
Sancia shut the orb and quickly stepped back.
“You will need to turn the switch on the top of the device as well,” said Valeria crossly. “It is most crude…”
“Oh,” said Sancia. “Right.” She stepped forward, turned the switch, and quickly stepped back again.
> “Please wait,” said Valeria. “asserting these commands will…take…some time…”
Everyone stared at the little orb, waiting. Sancia wondered what it would look like—a flash of light, or a shimmering in the air, or would the bronze orb crumble to pieces from the sheer weight of so much time?
But this did not happen.
Rather, nothing seemed to happen. The orb simply sat there.
“Are you…doing it?” asked Gregor.
“Yes,” said Valeria in a queerly calm voice. “The alteration is…contained…So far…”
“It’s really working?” asked Orso. “How much time has passed in there now?”
“Currently…about four hundred years…”
Orso whistled lowly. “Well, if this doesn’t work, then we have a pretty damned easy way of aging wine on our han—”
And then things finally did change. Because time went flat.
* * *
—
To say that Sancia sat frozen in time, staring at the little bronze orb in the basement, would have been incorrect. “Frozen” would suggest that she was standing still, and time kept moving around her. And this was not what happened.
Nor would it have been correct to say that time stopped around her. For this would imply that time was like gravity, perpetually plummeting in one direction and pulling you with it. And she found that this was not correct either.
Rather, Sancia suddenly became intensely, overpoweringly aware that she was trapped within an instance of time—a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second—but she had yet to move to the next. Instead she hung there, trapped between two instances of time like someone trying to step out of one rowboat and into the next, but never quite getting one’s footing exactly right to make the jump—and it felt as if she hung there forever.
And ever.
And ever…
She screamed internally, and the scream felt like it lasted both an eternity and no time at all.
And then she began to understand.
Seconds did not flow into one another like a river into the sea. Rather, every second that had ever happened to her—and thus to every other human being or living creature in the history of existence—was an isolated, separate instance, and each and every one was still happening, somewhere, somehow, in some manner she’d never been aware of before now.
Time itself—the experience of moving from second to second—was not real. Rather, it was something her mind invented as she passed from instance to temporal instance.
And right now, she was not moving forward—so her mind had no ability to interpret what was happening to her.
She struggled to hold herself together. She felt her whole consciousness fraying, unraveling, splitting at the edges, dissolving from the outside in…
I can’t…I can’t…I can’t think, I can’t…
And then something changed.
Something was bending and contorting around her. She imagined all the instances of time that had not yet occurred as a row of huge glass plates, set up on their ends, trailing away…but something was expanding in the row ahead of her, swelling like a tumor, swelling so fast that it was speeding toward her.
It’s Clef, she thought. He’s coming. He’s being…ripped backward through time…
But as he came, he shattered countless instances of time in the future. And as they fell apart, she suddenly glimpsed tiny…
Fragments.
* * *
—
A group of people, standing on the shore in a circle, holding hands. The sun, bright and clear. The air, bitterly cold. They stood with their heads bowed, their eyes shut, not speaking, barely moving.
But then…
The sand at their feet in the center of their circle started to bubble, like it was melting. It boiled and churned, and something began to rise up out of its depths—a door, wrought of brown stone.
The people stood around the door, heads bowed, eyes shut. The people were calling it forward. They were asking it to be, and it was complying.
Sancia realized the people were not alone: there was someone else there, watching them.
A woman, terribly old, her face lined and aged by long exposure to the sun.
The old woman knelt in the sand, watching the people call the door forward, and she wept, though Sancia could not tell if they were tears of joy or sorrow.
And then, slowly, the door began to open.
* * *
—
Sancia gasped and fell forward. She heard the others do the same around her, crying out or groaning or whimpering as whatever bending of reality finally finished.
She tried to make reality feel real to her again. She greedily felt out the cold stone floor under her fingertips, she sucked in air and held it in her lungs, she swallowed and exulted in the feeling of saliva coursing down her throat—anything to assert that this was normal, that everything was working as it should, that her experience of the world had not been…been…
“My God!” cried Orso. “What I’d do to erase that from my brain! I didn’t want to know that, I…I didn’t want to know!”
“Almost finished!” said Valeria. She sounded pained and miserable, like the effort was akin to extracting a huge thorn from her flesh. “We…We are almost there…”
“What the hell was that,” panted Sancia. “What was that?”
“I think…I think time went very wonky just now,” said Berenice weakly.
“Well, no shit!” said Orso.
“But…I think because of all the wonkiness,” said Berenice, “we might have glimpsed bits of time that hadn’t quite…happened yet?”
There was a moment of stunned silence as everyone absorbed this.
“The future?” said Sancia. “Really?”
Gregor looked around at them, his face haggard and sweaty. “It made no sense to me. Did…Did you see the door as well?”
“You saw it too?” Sancia and Berenice both asked.
Gregor nodded, his face grim. “It was the strangest thing. I…I saw it, just for a moment. Huge, and black, and all afire. The doors hung in the sky, and swung forward on golden hinges…”
“No, no,” said Berenice. “That wasn’t what I saw. I saw people standing on the beach, and they bowed their heads, and a door rose up out of the sand…”
“That’s what I saw,” said Sancia.
“You did?” asked Berenice. “Or…Or did you simply see what I saw…because we’re twinned?”
Sancia frowned. That hadn’t occurred to her.
“I didn’t see shit,” said Orso flatly. “Perhaps it was all just some goddamned hallucination you had. Let’s focus on what’s really happening, if you plea—”
Then there was a snap, and cracks shot through the stone floor at their feet.
“Difficult,” said Valeria’s voice. “Difficult to contain…”
“Valeria?” said Gregor. “What’s going on?”
“Being dislodged from my…location,” she said. “Anchoring is…difficult to maintain under these…conditions…”
The cracks spread outward, until they met the walls, which they promptly danced up and then into the ceiling…
“Advise…your relocation,” whispered Valeria.
“Get out!” shouted Sancia. “Go, go!”
They ran up the stairs out of the basement, but Sancia paused to look back at the little bronze orb on the table. She considered sprinting over and snatching it, but reflected that since Valeria was currently altering its time, that would be very unwise: perhaps just touching it would cause her to age a thousand years.
The ceiling shook. Dust danced down from its many cracks.
Sancia turned and ran up the steps.
* * *
The Foundrysiders crouched in the library as the basement creaked and cracked and moaned. The air everywhere seemed to pulse with invisible energy as Valeria wrestled with the final stages of the alteration. Sancia was half-convinced the earth might open up and swallow the neighborhood whole.
“Away from the basement!” said Orso. “Get away and get to the front!”
They ran to the front door of the firm and paused there, listening to the crackling, ready to sprint out into the courtyard and the street if need be. Then there was a tremendous crash from below, and the crackling and creaking went silent.
They heard Valeria quietly gasp, “Done! Done! Done at last, done, done…”
They looked back at the basement door. Dust was pouring out of its edges, almost like smoke.
“Does…Does that look safe to you?” said Orso.
They waited. There were no further cracks or groans.
“I’m going to chance it,” said Sancia. “But if I start screaming or something—”
“Run like hell,” said Orso. “Got it.”
“No, I meant come and get me, asshole!” said Sancia. “God!”
She walked over to the basement door and tried to open it, but the wall must have shifted so it was stuck in the frame. She heaved at it, and with a crunch it finally fell open.
The basement within was roiling with dust. She reached around in her pocket for a little scrived lantern, pulled it out, switched it on, and peered through the gloom.
The floor of the basement looked like a merchant house galleon had fallen upon it: it’d been completely pulverized, including the table, which had been crushed into matchsticks.
Yet the bronze orb was still there, still whole, sitting atop the bundle of broken wood and glinting in the low light of the lamp in her hand.
Sancia picked her way down the wooden stairs, many of which were now crooked and leaning. She had to jump past the final few, and the soles of her boots thudded into the broken face of the fragmented basement floor.
“The things I do,” whimpered Valeria. “The things I do…to fix this world of ours…”