Shorefall
Page 45
said Sancia.
“N-No,” Orso said weakly.
Crasedes sighed. “I must admit,” he said, “it’s frustrating…I keep giving people opportunities to save themselves, and they just keep rejecting me.” He tutted very quietly. “Oh, well…”
The nail drifted to the left, to float before her left hand.
“I know who you are!” she cried.
“Pardon me?” he asked.
“I…I know why you were looking for Clef! Why you wanted him back so badly!”
He looked at her sharply. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw a memory of Valeria’s,” she said. “A weeping man, begging for a way to save his dying son. I know what you did to save him. I know what sins you’ve committed, first of all hierophants.”
There was a long silence.
Crasedes leaned forward. “She remembers that?” he said softly.
“You think you’re so special,” said Sancia. “But underneath it all, you’re just a dying old man trying to make up for all his mistakes. There’s nothing special about you, you bastard.”
He seemed to relax a little. “An old man? Well. Sancia…You know, I’m not sure you saw what you thought you saw.” He leaned close, and whispered, “I know why he liked you, by the way.”
“W-What?” asked Sancia.
“A slave, a child, desperate and hungry and alone,” whispered Crasedes. “I’ve no doubt he would have loved nothing more than to save you. But he can’t save you now. He was never terribly good at saving people, anyway…That was always up to me.”
He waved a hand.
The nail hurtled forward so fast Sancia couldn’t even see it move. The next thing she knew there was a loud, wooden thunk, and her left hand erupted in pain, and she was screaming.
Her back arched and her legs strained as she screamed in agony. It was hard to move her head, so she couldn’t quite see the damage, but she could spy the head of the nail sticking out of the palm of her left hand, and she could feel blood dribbling out of her palm to patter on the floor below…
“There are rather a lot of nails in the walls here,” said Crasedes. “And I don’t have much patience left. Where is the imperiat, Sancia?”
Sancia breathed deeply, trying to ignore the throbbing, aching pain that was now seeping up her left arm.
Another nail came out of the wall—but this one suddenly grew bright and hot, and it burst apart into a cloud of burning fragments, which circled like a tiny, broiling constellation. “Tell me where this Berenice is, and I can make all this stop.”
Sancia gasped in pain. Each time she twitched she could feel the nail grinding in her hand.
The cloud of hot fragments grew closer. Sancia growled and turned her face away, but she could feel the heat radiating off of them, trickling over her skin, singeing her hair…
She braced herself, waiting for them to begin burning into her flesh.
Yet…they didn’t seem to come any closer.
“Hum,” said Crasedes, sounding disappointed. “You really aren’t going to tell me, are you?”
Sancia kept her eyes shut and her face turned away, unwilling to move for fear her face might graze them. But then the heat receded, and she cracked an eye and saw the burning fragments were slowly withdrawing.
“Well,” said Crasedes. “It’s frustrating. But—there’s always a workaround.” He turned back to Orso. “Orso—if you were to guess at what this Berenice was going to do with the imperiat…what would you say?”
Orso trembled, shook, and writhed in his chair, gasping miserably as he fought against Crasedes’s will.
“Tell me,” said Crasedes. “Now.”
Tears poured out of Orso’s eyes. “I…I…”
“Orso…” said Crasedes, leaning closer. “It’s quite remarkable that you’re resisting this much, but…You must tell me.”
“I think that…” he whispered. “I think that they…they…”
“Orso…” said Crasedes. “I know you know the words. Now you simply have to…say them.”
“I think,” said Orso swallowing, “that they have made a—”
And then everything around them began to shake.
* * *
—
Berenice dashed out of her carriage, knelt in the alley beyond the Dandolo estate, and placed a dull-looking wooden box on the ground before her.
Then she took out the imperiat, and concentrated very hard as she adjusted it to focus on one specific sigil string: the command for the assertion of distance, which would permit a lexicon to know what was close and what wasn’t.
Killing this command would cause a lexicon to grow confused, since it would contain thousands of commands about how reality was supposed to be altered nearby—yet it would suddenly be unsure as to what “nearby” actually meant. In a matter of seconds, the lexicon’s fail-safes would be triggered, and it would shut down all nonessential commands: in other words, everything except the stuff that kept any buildings standing.
Berenice braced herself, took a breath, and pushed the button on the side of the imperiat.
This did nothing, of course—for Berenice was not actually close to any lexicon. She was instead kneeling in a rather dirty alley on the other side of Ofelia Dandolo’s gardens.
Then she whispered, “Please work.” She opened the scrived wooden box on the ground, popped the imperiat in, shut the lid, and activated the scrivings on the box.
This box was a crude, miniature version of Orso’s classic method of twinning reality—which meant that when she placed the imperiat in the box, its twin also believed it contained the imperiat, as well as the command it was issuing out to the world.
And since this twinned box had been planted nearly a half mile away, beside one of the biggest foundries close to the Dandolo estate, this meant she had just instantly killed the giant lexicon located within it.
There was a quake in the air. Some of the buildings around her shook unpleasantly, and the scrived lamps flickered as if they’d suddenly become confused. She cringed—but, to her relief, nothing failed or fell apart.
She stood and looked across the city, toward the foundry she’d just killed. She couldn’t see the building itself, of course, but she could see the sky above it. And since she’d killed it, she’d also eliminated all of the commands that Crasedes had been feeding into it—including the command for eternal night.
The sky above the foundry suddenly turned lighter, shifting from inky black to a dark purple—as did the sky just beyond it, like the illumination in the skies was extending outward toward the edge of the city in a wave, growing slightly fainter the farther it went.
Like the spokes of a wheel, all gathering at the center here, she thought, turning back to the Dandolo estate. But I just broke one big damned spoke. She took out a rapier. Let’s hope the rest of this goes so well.
* * *
—
The grand ballroom shook strangely, a quiver in the walls and floor that made all the glass from the broken windows tinkle and dance.
Crasedes leaned back from Orso. “What?” he said. “What was that?”
He looked around as the quake grew, and then reced
ed. Then he flitted over to the broken windows and peered out at the city…
…and though Sancia wasn’t sure, she thought she could see the sky lightening faintly out there—still night, just a different time of night.
Crasedes stared at it. Then he slowly turned back to look at her. “What…What have you done?”
“I didn’t do shit,” she said. “But I guess you know where the imperiat is now, yeah?”
He looked back out at the mottled sky. “What is this? What are you doing?”
“Nothing. My ass is still strapped to this goddamn table. But I’m guessing Berenice found a way into the enclave, and she’s running around out there using the imperiat to kill your lexicons. That’s what I’d do. I guess you can either sit in here and watch as she tears your big, distributed rig to pieces, or you can go look for her yourself. Your choice.”
Crasedes stared out at the city for a moment longer. Then, trembling with rage, he pulled Clef out of his cloak.
Yet then he froze. He looked at Sancia over his shoulder. “You…You want me to leave. Don’t you?”
Sancia said nothing.
Crasedes stewed for a moment. Then he took a breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was tremendously loud. “GREGOR!” he bellowed. “TO ME, TO ME!”
Good, thought Sancia. The next bit’s done.
“Still you defend her,” he spat at Sancia. “Still you make yourself her tool.”
“This has shit-all to do with Valeria,” said Sancia.
“You still have no idea what she is, or…or even what she’s done to you!”
“What do you mean?”
“You think you could become an editor, and there’d be no consequences?” he said. “That the construct could bless you with such powerful permissions, and you’d pay no price? Are you mad, Sancia? Are you stupid?”
Sancia was silent. She heard the sounds of footfalls in the hall outside, and knew Gregor was nearby.
“It takes life to earn the privileges you wield!” said Crasedes. “The blurring of the boundaries between life and death! You always, always pay a price. I had to do a lot of work to prevent them from impacting Gregor—that’s practically why I altered his time in the first place. But for you…”
Sancia remembered what Crasedes had told her, deep in the Mountain:
…she’s sacrificing you, right now. Just very, very slowly.
“What do you mean?” said Sancia again, quietly.
“Aren’t you feeling so old recently, Sancia?” Crasedes asked. “Don’t you feel so tired, so worn? More gray hairs, more wrinkles, more aches and pains? I mean…you know why, don’t you?”
Sancia felt a dull horror boiling in her stomach. For what he said was true. She did feel older than she thought she ought to. She’d felt this way for a long time, but she’d always thought it was an effect of her hard life.
“That’s why we didn’t use this technique much, back in my day,” said Crasedes savagely. “People who aren’t quite sacrificed, but aren’t quite alive, either…It eats away at them, from the inside.” He stepped close to her, staring into her face. “We never used hybrids like you, dear Sancia…because none of them ever lived past forty. When the construct blessed you with these privileges, she was killing you. She’s been killing you all this time.”
The doors to the halls burst open, and Gregor Dandolo walked in, his eyes dead, his fists balled tight. He looked at Crasedes, awaiting a command.
“If anyone comes through that door, Gregor,” said Crasedes, “or through the windows or the floors or, damn it all, even the ceiling—kill them. Understand?”
“Yes,” whispered Gregor.
“Good,” snapped Crasedes. He stuck Clef into the air, turned him, and vanished with a crack.
37
With a series of deafening cracks, Crasedes used Clef to tear through reality like a comet, leaping across the Dandolo campo toward the sputtering foundry.
I know the range of the imperiat, he thought. So I know she can’t be far…Whoever she is.
Another crack, and he leapt into the lexicon chamber within the foundry. A group of scrivers inside screamed at the sudden arrival of this man in black, with some falling over out of sheer fright.
“What’s the status of this device?” demanded Crasedes.
They continued screaming, with some actually having the wit to turn around and sprint up the stairs.
He flexed his will and said, “Tell me.”
The scrivers froze, turned, and all began helplessly babbling at him, each articulating their own lengthy opinion of the situation.
Crasedes waved a hand impatiently and pointed at one man, who wore a special insignia on his shoulder indicating rank, he assumed. “Just you.”
The others fell silent while the lead scriver spoke. “The…The lexicon here somehow lost its distance definition. It’s an incredibly uncommon anomaly, and I can’t imagine how it happened, but…but it should be up in a matter of minutes.”
Crasedes cocked his head, thinking. “Minutes?”
“Y-Yes, sir?”
He considered this very carefully. His chain of lexicons was still intact—yet as long as this facility was dead, the chain was weaker than it could be.
“I will assist you in this matter,” he said finally.
The scrivers looked at one another. The idea plainly terrified them. “You…You will?” said the lead scriver.
“Yes,” he said. “We must bring this facility back up. But first—I must find the person who brought it down. So…if you will excuse me…”
Another turn of the key, another crack, and he leapt onto the rooftop of a nearby tower, scanning the streets around the foundry.
“Where are you?” he whispered. “Where are you? How can I still not see you?”
Yet he totally ignored the small, rather unremarkable empty wooden box that sat in the ditch beside the foundry walls.
* * *
—
Orso, Sancia, and Valeria all sat in silence in the ballroom. Gregor stood before the doors, his scrived rapier unsheathed.
Sancia felt numb with shock. Crasedes’s words still echoed in her ears. No, no, no, no…He’s wrong. He’s lying. He’s got to be lying.
And yet she knew he wasn’t.
“Is it true?” Sancia asked hoarsely. “Valeria—is this true?”
Valeria said nothing. She didn’t even look at Sancia—she just stared into space, like she was lost in thought.
“Did…Did you do this to me?” Sancia demanded. “Did you really…Did you really…”
Sancia looked at Valeria, so beaten and decayed, and felt overcome with rage and despair. “You piece of shit,” she snarled. “Valeria…you absolute, scrumming, worthless bitch! Answer me. Answer me, damn it!”
Still nothing.
“I should have let him kill you!” screamed Sancia. “I should have let him burn you out like a rat in a field! Answer me! Answer me, goddamn you!”
“She’s not going to bother to answer you, Sancia,” said Orso quietly. “Now she knows you’re not a useful tool to her anymore. She’s going to abandon you—and all of us.” He peered at the vast golden construct. “Though I’ve…I’ve no idea what she’s waiting for now…”
Sancia fought back tears—though to be honest, she wasn’t quite sure why. All her life, she’d never thought she’d live terribly long: it was just expected, being raised in the plantations, where death came easy. And the Commons after that hadn’t been much better. There a month of survival had seemed a luxury to her.
But she did know why. She knew why she cried: because
she’d found Berenice, and she’d wanted to have as many days of her as possible.
whispered Berenice in her ear.
And though this was true, Sancia still wept.
“Sancia,” said Orso. His voice, though hoarse, was calm and collected. “I know you are having your troubles. But I am now pretty goddamn aware that you and Berenice have been plotting something this whole time. I’m going to guess—did you plant twinned boxes all across the enclave, and use the imperiat with them to kill some lexicon?”
“Yeah,” she said numbly.
“And now,” said Orso, “I’m guessing you intend to lead that asshole on a wild-goose chase across the enclave, while Berenice comes here?”
“Yeah.”
“God,” he said, sighing. “That’s exactly what I was going to tell him you were doing, before you went and blew everything up. Thank goodness you did that, I guess.” He nervously eyed Gregor where he stood before the ballroom doors. “And…him?”
“We’ll save him,” said Sancia. She shut her eyes, and laughed darkly. “I’m going to save all of us, Orso. Even if it kills me.”
* * *
—
Berenice quietly moved through the back gates of the Dandolo estate gardens, rapier in her hand and Sancia’s scrived sight in her eyes. Two more boxes swung from straps on her shoulders, and she did her best to quiet them as she slipped through the paths toward the estate house, keeping watch for any soldiers or guards hiding among the manicured brush.
She tried to ignore the ache in her left hand, and the grief in her heart.
Berenice tried not to sob as she crept through the final stretch of gardens before the sprawling Dandolo estate house.
Then she paused. For she had heard sobbing from nearby. But it had not been her.
She slowed down and slipped forward, rapier raised, breath trembling in her throat. She parted the grasses before her, eased out onto the next path—and then stopped.