* * *
—
Gregor screamed from within himself, bellowing in rage and horror, unable to govern anything that happened to him anymore, unable to stop thinking about what he’d seen, what he’d felt, what he’d done.
His mother, desperately staring into his face. The kiss upon his brow. And then she on the checked floor, adrift in a sea of blood.
No! I didn’t! I didn’t, did I? Did I?
He screamed again, and fought the bindings that riddled his thoughts, begging his body to lift his sword and drive it into his own breast. But he would not—and then his mind was overruled by the countless commands, and he looked up at the door, fixated on one thing.
The girl there—she had stepped over the threshold, just barely. He could see the toes of her wet shoes, an inch past the frame of the door.
She had entered the room. And Gregor knew what the Maker had told him to do if this occurred.
The commands took over. He stood up and advanced on her, sword in his hand. He saw her face fill with fear, and she stepped back.
But then…
A voice in his mind:
He slowed.
Who…Who was that? What had just spoken to him?
He tried to keep moving forward, yet he struggled to understand this voice.
Why was it familiar? Did he remember it?
He realized he did, as a matter of fact. And he remembered this girl before him, he thought…
Yes. Yes, he was sure of it. He remembered this girl kissing him.
He suddenly remembered how she’d done it: suddenly and abruptly, out of absolutely nowhere, her lips pressed to his, her teeth clicking against his own. He remembered how he’d been so desperate to kiss her at the time, since he was about to embark on a mad enterprise—flitting across the skies of a campo on a thrown-together gravity rig—and he’d thought he was going to die, that he wasn’t going to see tomorrow ever again, and how hungry this made him. Hungry for her, for this luminous creature he’d spent hours next to in workshops and alleys, hungry to snatch a piece of her away for himself, like stealing fire from the gods on the mount…
But he had never imagined she’d thought the same of him: that she’d desired him just as he’d desired her. And her sudden, mad act—a single kiss, given in the streets of the Candiano campo—had stunned him to his core.
Gregor felt himself pause midstep, unsure what to do with this sudden recollection.
This…is not my memory.
He took another step forward.
Yet…whose memory is it?
Then the world changed: he saw himself, standing in the ballroom, right where he was now.
But he was seeing himself from two angles at once. And more, he was seeing himself seeing himself seeing himself…
What is happening to me?
He reeled as he staggered forward. His commands screamed out in his mind, and he stumbled, still intent on raising his sword and hacking this girl to pieces. She took another step back, alarmed.
More memories tumbled into his thoughts.
A house burning in the plantations, and the night filled with screams.
A golden key chattering in his ear, going on and on about a scrived lamp shaking back and forth on a tabletop nearby, and why he thought that meant someone was making love next to it.
Orso Ignacio standing over his shoulder, watching as he scrawled sigil after sigil upon a bronze plate, and muttering, “I ought to break your damned hands, girl. If I don’t, you’ll have my job in a month…”
He struggled to move forward.
These are…not mine. This is not who I am…
Everything seemed to be spinning. It was like he was being torn apart and put back together, over and over and over again.
He felt his left hand ache, and he knew there was a nail buried in its palm. He watched himself staring into his own face, his eyes filled with murderous wrath. He felt the grief and shame and sorrow in his heart at the sight of himself, knowing that he had been unable to fix himself, unable to give to Gregor Dandolo what he had stolen for himself…
What is this?
He took another step, bellowing in rage and confusion.
He knew he had to kill the girl. He had to. Those were his commands.
But his commands were now very…confused. For he began to suspect that, impossibly, he was this person who had stepped into the room. He was her, along with himself.
He screamed aloud as the commands bickered in his mind, unable to resolve who he was, who had entered, who he had to kill…
whispered a woman’s voice in his mind.
He fell to his knees.
His commands howled that no, no, this was not so—he was Gregor Dandolo, he was the child from the wreckage, the boy resurrected, and he bore these commands, and these commands insisted he kill this girl
And then he remembered.
He saw himself. He remembered himself, bound up in a black, bloodied lorica, lying on the floor of a ruined marble office, his bolt caster raised—and yet there were tears in his eyes, and he was whispering, “I didn’t want to be this anymore, Sancia…”
Gregor screamed as he crawled toward the girl at the door.
The memories burst forth.
His mother, weeping where she sat on the floor, her face bloody.
His brother smiling at him, saying—You’re getting pretty tall, little brother!
The furious shouts of his father, echoing through the countless passageways of the estate house.
And then the carriage spinning, and the tinkle of glass, and his brother whimpering in the darkness, saying—Gregor? Gregor, are you near?
The boy’s hand trembling in the dark, reaching for him.
Come to me, please…I love you, I love you, I love you…
And yet he had not. He had recoiled from his brother’s reach, there in the broken carriage.
Gregor screamed as he crawled onward, his sword scraping across the ballroom floor.
I was not there for him, he thought.
He hauled himself forward, one hand red and slick with his mother’s blood.
My brother was alone during his death, he thought, just as I have been for all of mine.
Yet when he looked up at the girl
He growled, trying to summon the will to raise his sword and strike her down.
The commands screamed at him to do it, just do it, to cut her down where she stood.
He extended his arm, his hand clutching the hilt, and he reached forward until its tip touched her left breast.
His commands screamed at him to drive it in, to run her through, to kill her now and fulfill his bindings.
The girl stared into his eyes, her gaze calm and steady.
Why isn’t she running?
But then he realized.
She isn’t running, he thought, because she is me. And
she knows I am not going to do this.
He blinked.
And then, ignoring the commands howling and shrieking in his mind, he opened his fingers, and let the sword fall from his grasp.
The bloody rapier clattered to the ground.
The girl held his gaze, her hand still extended to him. Then he reached forward with his bloody hand, grasped her palm, and squeezed it tight.
The commands went silent in his mind, truly and utterly silent like they never had before.
They were gone.
They were gone, and he was not this thing anymore. He was something new.
He burst into tears.
Berenice knelt and embraced him, her arms tight around his heaving shoulders. And she wept, too, for she knew what he had done. She understood it, for to her it felt as if she had done the same, and she did not condemn him. She just grieved.
“My mother!” he cried. “My mother, my mother, my mother!”
“I know,” she whispered, holding him tight. “I know, I know, I know.”
From the corner of the room, he heard Valeria’s voice say: “I must admit, I…am reluctantly impressed…”
For a moment he simply sobbed, unable to control himself. But then he felt his own thoughts coil about and join with Berenice’s and Sancia’s, their experiences and wills and memories entangling with his own, and he realized the night was far from over.
He sat back and stared into Berenice’s face, smudged with blood and lacquered with tears, and he looked at himself through her eyes for a second.
He looked different. No longer a warrior, a paladin, a grand defender of the helpless. Now he looked, he rather thought, like a free man.
He stood, picked up the body of his mother, and gently laid her in the corner of the ballroom. Then he knelt, gently kissed her on the brow, and stood back up. “Let’s get to work,” he whispered.
“Yes,” said Berenice. She set a wooden box down on the floor, took out the imperiat, pressed its button, and placed it inside. “But first, let’s make sure we have enough time to do it.”
* * *
—
Crasedes labored in the depths of the Dandolo foundry, issuing commands to the lexicon at its heart, cajoling and persuading and nudging it along, barking orders to the team of scrivers to amend this or that definition…
And then, finally, he felt the world around him begin to bend, and change.
“Finally,” he said.
A turn of the key, a crack, and he was floating in the air several hundred feet above the foundry.
For a long while, nothing happened: the facility stayed dark and silent and still.
But then, with a faint, uneven fluttering, the lamps of the foundry came back on, one by one.
Crasedes did not truly need to breathe anymore, so he did not sigh with relief—but instinct was a hard thing to get rid of, even after several millennia, and he attempted to do so now.
It’s back up, he thought. He looked out on the city, and watched as the massive wedge of the night sky slowly darkened back to the unnatural pitch-black of perpetual midnight. So this excised portion of my works is returning…and everything should be saf—
Then another quake in the air, another rumble—and another spot in the sky began rapidly changing, this one about a half mile to his left.
He whirled in the air and watched as a distant foundry complex suddenly went dark.
“No,” he whispered. “No, no!”
He pulled out Clef, and with a crack, he leapt across the skies to the dying lexicon.
39
Orso stumbled to the floor as Gregor and Berenice freed him from his chair. “Son of a bitch,” he said weakly. He coughed wetly, held his injured shoulder, and spat something brownish onto the floor. “I don’t…Friends, I don’t feel particularly good…”
“You’re sick,” said Berenice, kneeling before him. “Your wound is infected.” She reached into her bag. “We can get you a physiquere when this is over, Orso, but for now…” She took out a small wooden box, opened it, and extended it to him.
Orso stared into the box. Lying there on a small linen handkerchief was a tiny metal plate—just like the ones that Sancia and Berenice had swallowed, and probably much like the one that had just been stabbed into Gregor’s shoulder.
“You’re not serious,” said Orso.
“If you want Sancia’s protections against Crasedes,” said Berenice, “you’ll have to. And we’ll need to do it fast.”
“Otherwise,” gasped Sancia, still tied to the table, “he’ll make you dance like a damned puppet again. And I don’t think you enjoyed that much, did you?”
“But…do we even have time for me to, you know…adjust to it?” Orso asked.
Sancia moaned as Gregor pulled the nail free from her hand, undid her bonds, and helped her down. “Berenice and I are getting good at shepherding people through it,” she said. “And if we want to stop this, I…I think it’s going to take all of us thinking together.”
Orso took the little plate and studied it. He smiled weakly. “You should have been a jeweler, girl,” he said. He looked at Gregor. “What’s it like?”
Gregor was kneeling before Berenice’s pack, pulling out what looked like a handful of construction scriving plates—the adhesive ones they used to build walls and buildings and the like. He still looked deeply shaken by all the things he’d gone through, but he absently felt the tiny knife still inserted into his shoulder, and said, “In my opinion…Every human being should feel obliged to try this once.”
“Shit,” said Orso. “I guess that’s a hell of a recommendation.” He gritted his teeth. “Well. Bottoms up, or whatever.” He put the little plate on the back of his tongue and swallowed, hard. It went down very uncomfortably—but almost instantly, he began to feel very, very…different.
Wordlessly, Sancia, Berenice, and Gregor shut their eyes, walked over to him, and placed their hands on him.
“The hell are you doing?” he said.
“Trust us,” said Sancia. “This will make the alignment go faster. Shut your eyes, Orso. Less sensorial overload.”
He did so, though uncertainly—he’d never heard Sancia use words like “alignment” and “sensorial” before—but then he realized.
Sensations and experiences and memories began flashing in his mind. He was feeling himself feeling himself feeling himself, remembering himself remembering himself remembering himself. He felt the ground from so many locations…How many feet did he have? How many hands? How many pairs of lungs? He suddenly wasn’t sure.
Dizzy, he began to fall over—but three sets of hands kept him upright, steadying him, sensing how he was going to fall before he even fell…
And then he understood. What was physically happening now was also mentally happening to him: he was both physically and mentally about to collapse and fall apart, but together the three of them were supporting him, second by second, helping him grow into alignment with the cadence of their minds…
And then oceans of scriving knowledge poured into his thoughts.
This was saying something, since Orso already had plenty of it in his mind to begin with. But he had never actually thought about scriving the way other people thought about scriving—all the nuances to every perspective, all the hidden patterns. And he had especially never witnessed how rigs interacted with the world, or—God Almighty, he thought—conversed with them. And yet Sancia and Berenice had thousands of such memories, memories of observing rigs casually speaking to one another, signaling information, chattering on in the dark…
There has been a whole world out there, under the one I have built, he thought, thunderstruck, and I
have been missing it.
Orso felt himself whispering: “Ohh, holy shit…”
But he heard himself saying it, too—from four different sets of ears.
The hands—hands he felt with, hands he could feel, one of them aching from a terrible wound—withdrew from his shoulders.
Orso Ignacio opened his eyes, and watched himself standing there, awestruck and overcome with the knowledge pouring into his mind.
“We…We should have done this shit years ago!” he said faintly.
There was an awkward silence.
But the instant she framed it not as a tactical problem, but as a scriving problem—a question of loopholes and privileges and access—Orso’s mind kicked into gear.
And as it did, it pulled everyone else’s mind with it.
“Oh shit,” whispered Orso.
Shorefall Page 47
