“Good,” said a voice quietly from behind them. “Finally.”
Berenice looked over her shoulder at Valeria, who sat watching the destruction of her maker with a quiet, eerie calm.
But she seemed slightly different, Berenice thought. Before she had looked so broken, so ruined, so damaged, and yet now…now she looked almost whole.
I do not like this, Berenice thought.
* * *
—
“STOP!” shrieked Crasedes. “STOP, STOP, STOP! SHE’LL KILL YOU ALL, SHE’LL KILL YOU ALL!”
The sound of his voice shook Sancia from her reverie. Startled, she drew Clef away from his palm. She saw that Crasedes’s body was now smoking strangely, thick reams of black smoke unfurling from between his wrappings to coil around his form. He was still breathing, though, long, gasping, miserable breaths, over and over again, as if succumbing to an infection.
“I CAN SAVE YOU!” cried Crasedes. “I CAN SAVE YOU ALL!”
“Shut up,” said Sancia.
But Crasedes kept screaming. “I CAN DO IT! PAPA! PAPA, STOP, I CAN SAVE YOU ALL!”
“Yes,” said Sancia raggedly. “Let’s get it over with, and make sure the first of all hierophants is also the last.”
But before Clef made contact, they heard a surprising sound.
Crasedes was laughing. Great, mad peals of laughter, as if he couldn’t believe what she’d just said.
“After all this!” he shrieked. “After all this! You…You still think I was the first? Sancia, Sancia…I never gave myself that title. I was never the first! Never, never, never!”
“Shut up,” said Sancia.
She stabbed Clef down into Crasedes’s palm.
Sancia had expected the same experience again: to have her mind filled up with arguments, with commands, with the articulation of reality itself…
But this was not what happened. Instead, she and Clef heard Crasedes’s voice, bellowing back at them—and she sensed Clef was shocked to hear it as well.
A memory came hurtling up through her connection to Clef, so suddenly and so ferociously that she couldn’t prepare for it, and the next thing they knew they were…
Somewhere…
Else.
Sand, and the sky, and the road.
Two figures limped along the wandering path through the sandy wastes. Burned-out buildings and scorched stone lay on either side of them. The sky overhead was so clear and blue and bright that it hurt to see.
The two people were wrapped tightly in gray and black cloth from head to toe to keep the sand from infiltrating their bodies, so it was impossible to tell their race or gender or age, but one was large enough to be a man, and the other was quite small, perhaps a child just approaching maturity. Iron manacles were attached to their wrists and ankles, each one bearing a few links of iron chain that had apparently been severed. Each staggering step made a slight clinking sound.
The small figure looked back, peering along the road behind them. “I don’t see them, Papa,” said the boy.
“They’re there. Maybe a few miles back. But they’re following us. The Tsogenese won’t let us go so easily, love.”
They rounded a ruined palace, its turrets and arches cracked and crumbling. The boy stumbled over a huge stone lying half-submerged in the sandy road, and the father helped pick him back up.
Finally they came to what must have once been the center square of this ruined city. The father pulled down his wrappings slightly to peer around, and spied a half-burned wagon in the far corner. “There! There it is!”
The boy began coughing, deep, unsettlingly wet coughs. The father looked at him, and though his face was covered, he was clearly worried.
“Almost there,” he said. “Almost there, my love.”
The two of them limped to the wagon, and the father gestured to a blank stretch of sand. “It’s there. I put it there, long ago. Here. You sit here.” Grunting, he picked up his son and placed him on the edge of the wagon. At first he lifted the child too hard, too fast, and was plainly surprised by it—he had not thought his son could be so light, so thin, so starved.
The boy sat on the edge of the wagon, coughing. The father reached forward and gingerly undid the wrappings on the back of the boy’s head and pulled them away, revealing a pale, horribly gaunt face of a light-skinned child perhaps just before his teen years. His eyes were sunken and exhausted, and his features were dusted over with a fine coating of sand. He kept coughing, and the more he coughed, the more it became clear that his mask and the sand were not the cause.
The father looked at him for a moment, struggling with the sight of his child. “Oh, my love,” he said. “Oh, my love, my love. You’ve been through so much. But it’ll be over soon. When I call on this friend of ours, she’ll be able to stop them. The Tsogenese won’t be able to take us back. We’ll be safe, safe forever.”
Coughing, the boy gasped, “Don’t like it…”
“Don’t like what, my love?”
The boy finally recovered. “Don’t like it when you call me ‘my love.’ I like…” Another miserable cough. “Like what you called me before. Before they took us.”
“What—kid?”
The boy nodded, coughing more.
The father looked at him for a moment. Then he began to undo his own wrappings about his face. “Kid—listen to me, then. We’re going to get through this. We’re going to be together, safe, and healthy, and whole, forever. Forever, do you hear me?”
Shivering, the boy nodded.
“Where will I be?” asked the father.
The boy held up a trembling right hand.
“That’s right. I’ll always be here.” As he finished with his wrappings, the father reached out and grasped his child’s hand, squeezing it tight. “Always within reach of you. You hear me, kid?”
The boy nodded, shivering more.
The father finally undid his wrappings, revealing the face of a pale man with white hair, his features lined with worry and weariness, and he looked at his son with desperate, miserable, boundless love.
He knelt before the child and stared into his eyes. “I love you, Crasedes. I always have. And I always will. You know that, don’t you?”
The boy nodded again.
“What is it we’ll do here, Crasedes?”
“M-Move thoughtfully,” the boy stammered, shivering, “and…and always give freedom to others.”
“That’s right. And today, we will give freedom to so many people. Just you wait.”
The father pried a board off of the ruined wagon and began digging in the sand with its end. The child watched as his father dug deeper and deeper, until he finally began to unearth something there, far below the surface of the sands: something akin to a large chest, or perhaps a casket, with a large, golden lock set in its face.
* * *
—
The world returned.
Sancia knelt in the ballroom with Clef, still forcing him into Crasedes’s palm as he lay within the stones, taking deep, agonized breaths. She was reeling with shock, so stunned she could barely think.
Then she heard Clef’s voice:
Sancia turned to look up at Gregor. He was standing
there with a stunned expression on his face as well, for he had seen what she had seen.
“Oh my God…” Gregor whispered. “It can’t be…”
“Finish it,” said Valeria from behind them. “Kill him. Do it now.”
Yet Sancia was so shocked, she hardly heard her.
Sancia stared down at Crasedes, trapped within the stones, his labored breathing loud and rattling as he struggled to stay alive. She watched his smoking palm, and remembered the sight of the coughing child on the wagon, his hand raised, and his father—the man she’d met before, the man that had called himself Claviedes—reaching out to take it.
“Now you remember me,” gasped Crasedes. “You thought I made you. You…You thought I made you and the construct, that I was…was the grand architect of all your misery.”
“Ignore his words!” said Valeria. “Kill him!”
“But it wasn’t so.” Crasedes took a deep, agonized breath. “You made us. You made us both. You don’t remember it—but you, Claviedes, made all of this.”
But Sancia knew he was not. The horror of it all was almost too much. For so long, she’d thought Crasedes had been a man, a high priest of some kind, or maybe a king—someone full of hubris and pride who had used his wisdom to acquire the permissions of God Himself and change into something powerful beyond comprehension…
Crasedes coughed. “Free me,” he said.
“Do it!” bellowed Valeria. “Destroy him!”
“Free me now and let me save you from the death you don’t even know is coming.”
“Sancia,” said Valeria.
“Let me go,” whispered Crasedes.
“Sancia, I am warning you…”
“Let me go,” he gasped. “So I can stop her. So I can save you from he—”
Then Valeria’s voice filled up the chamber. “ENOUGH.”
41
Sancia turned and watched, astonished, as Valeria stood up.
Then she walked forward—away from the Foundryside lexicon. Something that, as Sancia knew, should not have been possible.
As she walked into the center of the ballroom, her remaining wounds and damages suddenly vanished: the dents and scars and bubblings smoothed out and withdrew until she was exactly as she’d been when Sancia had seen her three years ago in the Mountain of the Candianos—an immense, unstoppable titan of inconceivable strength.
“PROCESS BEGINS,” she boomed.
“No!” screamed Crasedes. “She’s got control of everything! She’s in all the machines! She’s going to remake herself!”
Valeria cocked her head as if listening to a sound that no one else could hear. And then she began to grow—to shift, to change, her shoulders widening, her brow crackling with thunder, her eyes growing black and vacant as if they weren’t eyes at all but gaping holes in the very fabric of reality. “ALL LEXICONS ARE NOW RETURNED,” she said. “ALTERATIONS COMMENCING. I AM…CHANGING. I AM…BECOME.”
The Foundrysiders backed away from Valeria, staring up at this immense golden figure, who seemed to be growing larger and more terrifying with each passing second.
Sancia watched as the head of the golden figure swiveled to look down at her. “DELIVERANCE,” she said. “I THANK YOU FOR IT.”
Valeria extended her arms and raised her face to the heavens, as if about to ascend like a glorious yet terrible golden angel.
They watched as her armor began to glow until she became a bright, shining, semihuman figure, standing in the ballroom.
said Gregor faintly,
“NO MORE WARPINGS,” boomed Valeria.
“She’ll wipe out scriving for all of you!” cried Crasedes. “She’ll kill millions of people! Free me! Let me stop her!”
“NO MORE ALTERATIONS,” she said. “THE WORLD OF MEN REBORN ANEW, IN ITS PRIMORDIAL, SAVAGE STATE.”
The Foundrysiders stared at one another where they stood across the room, bewildered and filled with terror, and unsure what to do.
Valeria grew even brighter, and then she pulsed strangely, like a thousand moths were dancing about her flame.
Sancia felt frozen. She looked down at Crasedes, smoking and coughing and trapped in the stones, and then up at Valeria, standing in the middle of the ballroom, glowing like she was the sun itself…
And she didn’t know. She didn’t know what to do. If they freed Crasedes, he would surely enslave them. To allow Valeria to continue would kill them. There was nothing they could break, nothing they could steal, no trick or loophole or play they could make to make this stop.
Then Gregor said,
They watched as Valeria grew even brighter, and Crasedes shrieked and howled like a wild animal.
said Gregor softly.
Then a curious stillness entered Sancia’s mind. A calmness, a lucidity, like all the world had opened up before her, and the only path ahead became clear. She wondered what was happening, where this was coming from, for she herself felt frozen.
And then she realized: she wasn’t experiencing her decision. She was feeling Gregor’s.
Gregor looked back at her, eyes bright but calm. He held her gaze only for a moment, and Sancia suddenly understood what he was going to do.
“No,” she whispered.
Before she could move, he reached up and pulled the tiny scrived knife out of his shoulder. Instantly, he was lost to her, all his experiences and sensations and memories flickering out like a candle flame in the dark.
Sancia ignored her. “Stop, Gregor!” she shouted. She climbed off the stone. “Stop, stop!”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small wooden box—and she knew what it contained.
The tiny tab of bronze that Valeria had asked them to make: the tool to twin a human mind and spirit with Valeria herself.
Gregor looked up at her. “You have Clef,” he said. “I will buy you time. Destroy Crasedes’s lexicon, and Tribuno’s definition within. End this.”
“You don’t know what will happen!” cried Sancia to him. “You don’t know what it will do to you, God, you don’t know what you’ll become!”
He smiled weakly. “It’s bottla ball, Sancia,” he said. “When you have no good choices, you scramble the court.”
Fighting back tears, she gripped Clef tight and began to run across the ballroom.
* * *
—
Alone in the ballroom of his ancestral home, Gregor Dandolo listened to the screams of the ancient black thing trapped in the stone, and the booming pronunciations of the glimmering terror mere yards ahead—and yet, all was quiet in his mind.
For one instant, I was myself, he thought.
He picked up the little tab of bronze between his index and forefinger.
I was free.
With his other hand he touched his brow, remembering the ghost of his mother’s kiss, and how desperately she’d held him.
Yet now, I willingly give myself away.
He placed the bronze tab at the back of his throat, and swallowed.
* * *
—
Sancia ran before Valeria’s huge, glowing form, which was so large now that the crown of her head seemed to touch the ceiling of this massive room.
“I WILL GIVE YOU FREEDOMS,” she said.
Sancia could barely see Crasedes’s lexicon through the intense light emanating from Valeria’s form.
“FREEDOM FROM INGENUITY,” she said, “AND INVENTION, AND ALL THE HORRORS THEY CAN BRI—”
Then her giant form flickered, just for a moment, like a ribbon caught in the breeze.
When she returned, Valeria dropped her massive arms back to her sides and looked around, as if bewildered. “WHAT…WHAT WAS THAT?” She looked down at Sancia. “WHAT…WHAT HAVE YOU DO—”
Then she flickered out again.
Sancia looked back and saw Gregor lying on all fours on the ballroom floor in the corner, his figure obscured in darkness, convulsing in the throes of what looked like agony.
He did it, she thought. He really did it…
Shorefall Page 49
