“He’s just…been sitting there,” said Gregor hoarsely. “Waiting. Doing nothing.”
His masked face swiveled up to see her, standing on the Foundryside roof. He waved.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said.
“What’s he doing here?” asked Gregor.
“I have no idea.”
“Is the shot ready?”
“No.”
“How much longer?”
“I don’t scrumming know.”
“Then…what do we do? Do we just ignore him?”
Sancia thought about it. “I feel like that’s going to piss him off, and provoke him into doing something really bad.”
“Then…we can’t go out there. He’s not stupid enough to come in. What do we do?”
Sancia gritted her teeth, then popped the vertebrae in her neck. “Well. He’s always seemed to like a conversation.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am. Maybe I talk to him, and stall him. The instant that slug is ready…” She glanced at him sidelong. “Just take the shot when you can, Gregor.”
“I will.”
“And don’t miss.”
He looked at her, his eyes bright and anguished. “Please be careful,” he said.
“I will.” She released him, then said to Berenice,
* * *
—
Sancia felt her stomach rumble unpleasantly as she walked across the courtyard to the Foundryside gates. Foundryside had never had especially tall compound walls—plenty of other Lamplands firms had bigger ones—but tonight they seemed especially tiny.
She peered through the gates as she approached, searching the shadows on the other side. She could see Crasedes’s mask catching the low light of the floating lamps, and she felt like he was not one person but rather a wall of black fog, pressing in on their firm…
She stopped at the gates and waited. He slowly drifted closer, his body stiff and still, seated upright on nothing but air in a cross-legged position.
said Sancia.
Crasedes stopped about five feet from the gates. There was a long silence. For a long time he did not move—but then, finally, he cocked his head.
“Good evening, Sancia,” he said merrily. “How are you doing tonight?”
“What do you want, you bastard?” she snapped.
“To talk, of course.”
“About what? I can’t think of a single goddamned thing I want to hear from you.”
“Oh, Sancia, I am surprised…I’d have thought your manner would be a little more conciliatory tonight.”
“And why is that?”
“Well, I just did you a favor, didn’t I? Haven’t you all worked to overthrow your merchant houses for years? And now…Now I’ve gone and gotten rid of one in a single night.”
She stared at him in horror. “You mean…You mean the Morsinis are really…”
“Oh, not all of them are dead,” he said. “It would have taken a few hours for me to walk all the way throughout the campo, and I simply don’t have the time for that. But the founders, the house officers, the elites, the entrenched families…At least they died fashionably, given that it was carnival.”
“How…How could you…”
“How could I put to the blade the very same people who once lived by it? The very same people who used their advantages to raid, to seize, to oppress the peoples of this world? I’m surprised you even need to ask the question.”
“Not everyone is as merciless as you.”
“That’s true. But they were. As all slavers are.” He studied her for a moment. “You know this, for you were a slave once, weren’t you?”
“What, you know the look because you’ve owned so many?”
“No,” he said gently. “Because I was one, Sancia.”
She stared at him, dumbfounded. He waited patiently for her to respond.
“Y-You were a slave?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Once. A very, very, very long time ago.” He looked away, toward the glittering lanterns of the Lamplands. “I knew the art when they first captured me,” he said quietly. “Myself and my family. I pushed it to its limits to win my freedom, but…win it I did.”
“You’re lying,” she said. But she remembered Valeria’s memory: the wrapped man in the cave, and the boy dying on the bed—and how scarred his wrists had been, just like her own, ravaged from years of being restrained.
“I am not,” he said politely. “After I freed myself, I worked to learn all the secrets of this world to understand what had happened to me, and why. I went to places no living human has ever gone before. I glimpsed the infrastructure that makes this reality possible. I saw the fingerprints of God, still impressed in the bones of creation. And I began my long labors to ensure that the atrocity that had befallen me would never happen to anyone else.” He raised his hands. “But be honest now—do you think I have succeeded?”
Sancia was silent.
“You don’t need to answer. Just look around.” He slowly rotated, turning to stare out at the sprawl of towers around them. “I have done this for over four thousand years. Time and time and time again, I have tried to give humanity what it needs to better itself. And time and time and time again, they choose factionalism, war, and slavery. Wait a few decades, or a century—not much time at all, really—and things degrade into manacles, and cells, and chains, and choicelessness.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
He looked at her. “Because I am tired of it. And because you need to hear it. You think you’ve changed things now with your little revolution, but you don’t know. You have not solved the last problem. You cannot trust people to use their innovations compassionately. You cannot give them the choice of morality. You must force them.”
“And that’s what you want to do?” asked Sancia. “Reforge Valeria, and have her, what, rewrite human nature?”
“She would grant me control,” said Crasedes. “Control over the boundaries of human morality, and actions, and deeds…” He raised his face to the sky. “I would ensure that there would be no more slaves. No more empires. Not ever, ever again.”
“You…You want to do that to all of humanity?” she said, horrified. “To make us all slaves to your will?”
“If the children of men cannot rid themselves of their predilection for slavery,” said Crasedes, “then the children of men shall be made slaves themselves. If they cannot make the right choice, then it’s better to just remove the choice entirely.” He cocked his head. “A permission, a privilege that I would simply…revoke. It’s better than the world your merchant houses would
build. And it’s certainly better than what the construct wants.”
Sancia felt a flicker of fear at that—for Valeria had claimed her contradictory commands meant she’d be forced to destroy herself.
Unless, she thought, she lied about that too…
“It wouldn’t be so bad,” he said. “You’d get to keep the best bits of your civilization—the ability to innovate, to progress, to build and remake the world…It would simply all be subject to my review. I would act as the conscience of our species—something we’ve been missing for a very long time, I think…”
“You just killed hundreds of people!” shouted Sancia. “You made them kill themselves! God! How in the hell could you be our conscience?”
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “Perhaps I do need to have a check on my powers. So—why not help me? You could help guide me, help me check my worst impulses. You could help me build this world anew.”
Sancia stared at him, stunned. She’d expected to hear many unusual things from him tonight, but not this.
Yet as she stared at him, she suddenly wasn’t so sure. Could he actually mean it? Could he genuinely be making this offer?
Sancia glanced to the side, at the Michiel clock tower. Still just a little past eleven.
She shook herself. “I barely understand what you and Valeria are. How could I help you?”
“Well, you are aware I can’t reforge the construct all by myself,” said Crasedes.
“You need Tribuno’s definition,” said Sancia.
“Yes,” said Crasedes. “Yet you’ve unwisely given it to the construct. And she has rearranged the nature of reality here”—he leaned back slightly, as if surveying some invisible architecture—“so that I cannot approach her. But…I believe you still possess a solution to this particular problem?”
He cocked his head. “You do still have Clef, yes?”
“Why would he help you here?” asked Sancia. “It’s not like Valeria’s put a big locked door between you and her.”
“Hmm,” said Crasedes. “To put it in terms you might understand—the construct has created a wall. But Clef would give me permissions to slip through your reality like a minnow through river reeds—and ignore the alterations of the construct.” He raised his right hand. “Permissions that he can only access with my touch.”
Sancia stared at his hand with her scrived sight, her gaze fixed on the bright little red star buried in his palm—the hidden bone that allowed him to persist in this world…
“He belongs with me,” said Crasedes. “So do you. So do all slaves. And then you and I can reforge not only the construct, but the whole of human civilization. For the better.”
She glared at him. Then, to Berenice:
“This is all bullshit,” said Sancia. “I know you need multiple copies of the definition to make the commands work, and there’s only just the one now. And I know you can’t copy it, because Valeria stole the ritual from your goddamned head.”
He nodded politely. “This is true.”
“And more, even if you did have multiple copies of the definition, the Mountain’s gone. You don’t have any specialized lexicons or structure or rig that could actually use them.”
“Oh, well, that’s not quite correct,” said Crasedes. “Isn’t this city a structure in its own right? I mean—think of your lexicons as a giant chain of constructs, riddled throughout your streets and canals, all contorting reality to and fro. None of them on their own could compare to the works Tribuno wrought in the Mountain, but…if there was a way to coordinate them, to synchronize them…Well. Then the whole of this city would be akin to one giant rig, yes?”
Sancia blinked in surprise, and felt her skin break out in gooseflesh.
Oh no.
She swallowed. “You…You didn’t kill the Morsinis out of some moral obligation, did you?” she asked.
He did not move or speak.
“I couldn’t imagine they had anything you wanted,” she said. “But they did. They had a hundred lexicons, maybe more. And if…if you wanted to turn the whole city into a giant goddamn forge capable of remaking Valeria, you’d need as many as possible—wouldn’t you?”
“That is true!” he said cheerfully.
“Any one of them wouldn’t be useful,” she said. She felt like her whole body was quaking now. “But…if you had a way of twinning them all together—all the lexicons in the entire city made into one huge, distributed, synchronized rig—you could…you…”
“You could control all the reality of this city,” said Crasedes, “as though you were its own God. Why certainly. Certainly, you could.”
* * *
—
Gregor stood on the rooftop, clutching his imprinter espringal, his heart fluttering in his chest as he watched Sancia stand at the closed gates and whisper to the thing in the shadows.
You made me this, he thought, watching the glinting mask seesaw back and forth as they talked. You…You took myself away from me. You and my mother.
And then Crasedes did something unusual: he suddenly looked away from Sancia and turned to the Foundryside roof, as if he spied Gregor hunched there.
A flash of a memory: the air full of moths, fluttering and wheeling and flickering in the darkness.
Then a voice, low and deep and soft, from just beside his ear: Gregor Dandolo…
For a moment, Gregor had the overpowering sense that someone was standing just behind him—someone wrapped in black, watching him…
He whirled around to look. Yet there was nothing there but shadows.
Gregor’s skin began to crawl. He…He said something to me. I remember now. Didn’t he? He whispered something in my ear, in the Mountain…
“Gregor?” said a voice. “Gregor!”
He turned back around, and saw Berenice standing at the top of the stairs with Orso, holding a small wooden box in her hand.
“W-What?” he said. “What’s going on?”
“It’s ready!” said Berenice. She held the box out to him.
He took it, and opened it. He stared at the little lead slug within, covered with cramped, intricate sigils.
“Shoot the bastard!” said Orso. “Do it now, do it now!”
* * *
—
Sancia tried to rally her thoughts. “We…We did it all for you, didn’t we,” she whispered.
“You did,” Crasedes said. “I just need a sample of your technique. But that can be found in your firm, right over there, yes? And now the Morsinis are in disarray, headless and bewildered, everyone fleeing the campo…I imagine it’d be a simple thing to get a small group of Dandolo forces together to make straight for the Morsini foundries and perform the necessary adjustments for implementation…”
Sancia felt herself reeling, and she struggled to think.
“And I don’t need to do anything with the Michiels, do I?” he said. “You’ve already deceived them into twinning their foundries…You know, you seem to mistrust control so much, Sancia, yet you’ve granted yourself a great deal of control over so much of the city…”
Then she heard Berenice in her head:
* * *
—
Gregor slotted the little lead slug into the espringal, lifted it to his shoulder, and peered down the sights.
His fingers tightened on the release plate. How he wished to fire, to release this little piece of lead and bring that thing to the ground and watch as Sancia and Clef cut him to ribbons…
But then he remembered. He finally remembered what Crasedes had whispered to him last night in the Mountain, just before he’d slaughtered all those troops:
Gregor Dandolo. Do not forget—your mother’s debt is still unpaid.
He froze.
* * *
—
Sancia stood in the courtyard, waiting.
The shot never came.
She looked back at the rooftop, overwhelmed with panic. She couldn’t understand why Gregor hadn’t fired already, why the little lead slug hadn’t hurtled out of the darkness, why Crasedes hadn’t gone dead and dormant right before her eyes…
“You still haven’t answered me,” said Crasedes quietly.
“About what?” snapped Sancia.
“About my offer to you,” he said. “I don’t have to have you on my side.”
Come on, Gregor, she thought. Come on, come on…
“I know, for example, that you are about to try to attack me.”
Sancia stopped moving. She felt her pulse pounding in her ears. “W-What?” she asked.
“I knew you’d try,” he said. “You are resourceful and impetuous. But it isn’t going to work. Just like everything you’ve done to bring freedom to this city has not worked—nor could it ever.”
She took a step back from the gates.
“No help is coming to you now,” said Crasedes. “I know that feeling very well…To endlessly wait for someone, anyone, to come and save you. And yet, they never do.” He extended his hand. “Give me Clef, and I will spare your friends.”
Sancia stared at his hand.
Shorefall Page 38
