Shorefall

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Sancia dashed over, lifted Clef like a dagger, and stabbed him down onto the lexicon’s wall.

  Ordinarily it would have taken at least half an hour to safely ramp down a lexicon, even one as bizarre as Crasedes’s. But Clef was no common scriver, and even though a lexicon was considerably more complicated than a door or a gate, he had no issue making the rig’s countless, carefully constructed arguments implode one by one.

  Valeria’s form flashed in and out over Sancia’s shoulder. There was an immense screaming in the room, loud and pained and frightened.

  She wondered what was happening. But she remembered what Valeria had told Gregor, when he’d proposed twinning himself with her:

  We could merge but not separate…If I twinned myself with you, we would become stuck—not quite one thing, not quite the other. Both of our minds reforged into something…else.

  The bright, gleaming figure screamed in the middle of the ballroom and shook like it’d been struck by lightning. Its cries were so loud Sancia was sure she’d go deaf.

  said Clef.

  Sancia pulled Clef away from the wall and quickly stepped back. She watched as the lexicon’s heat casing grew red-hot within the dome of green glass, and then it seemed to boil from the inside out, like lava weaving its way out of the cracks of a volcano.

  she asked.

  said Clef.

  Valeria’s giant figure appeared overhead one final time, bellowing in agony and fear. Then she was gone.

  The sky outside changed once more, no longer the unnatural black of an endless midnight—but a night sky with a bright moon set high in the sky.

  A natural night, bereft of any alterations, and all was silence.

  * * *

  —

  Gregor Dandolo screamed as the experiences flooded into his mind.

  Ancient memories from before the dawn of their civilization. The whole horizon afire, the seas below him boiling, armies of warriors in crude armor charging across the desert flats…

  A girl tossing a doll up and down, and chanting, “Valeria, Valeria, Valeria…”

  cried a voice in his mind, dull and atonal. But it was too late now.

  He felt…structures.

  Objects. Items. Relationships.

  The wheels of a carriage, tearing through the Morsini campo. A ball of iron burning hot. A floating lantern, flitting through the night sky.

  These burst into his thoughts (and how huge his thoughts felt suddenly, how vast his mind was) and he knew somehow that they were not separate things: he was these things, he was the wheel, he was the iron, he was the lantern.

  cried the voice in his mind.

  His thoughts changed, and changed, and changed as they merged, and he grew and he grew until he was not a man, nor a construct, nor a lexicon, nor a rig, but…

  A city.

  * * *

  —

  asked Orso.

  “Sancia,” rasped Crasedes, still trapped in the stones, “what did you do?”

  Sancia ignored them. Gripping Clef tightly in her hand, she walked over to where Gregor lay in the corner, heaving and gasping. As she approached, he slowly climbed to his feet and stood with his back to her, facing the corner.

  “Gregor?” she asked. “Is…Is that you?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Gregor?”

  Then there came a voice. It was slow, and cold, and queerly emotionless—much like how Valeria had spoken, but it was as if she was using Gregor’s mouth to speak.

  “No,” said the voice. “Not Gregor. Not anymore.”

  V

  ALWAYS SOMEONE MIGHTIER

  42

  Across Tevanne, the many scrived rigs that the campo citizens used to live their lives suddenly changed.

  They did not falter or stutter—rather, they abruptly changed course, performing new tasks or operations as if they had minds of their own.

  Doors and gates snapped shut and would not open. Foundries shut down. Carriages stopped or abruptly changed direction, rattling away toward unknown destinations. Espringal batteries suddenly pivoted to point east, across the city.

  And the lanterns…

  The citizens of the campos watched as the floating lanterns suddenly turned and began flying away, all of them flocking to one place like a giant murmuration of glowing starlings…and they seemed to all be gathering at the gardens of the Dandolo estate.

  It was a curious, entrancing sight. Which meant few paid attention when the coastal defenses of the campo started acting very, very strangely.

  The coastal shrieker batteries of the city had been constructed to defend the campos’ access to the bay. As such, they had tremendous range—but they had not been built with any capability of firing inland.

  And yet, as the handful of soldiers looked on in amazement, all the Tevanni shrieker batteries suddenly rotated in perfect unison, grinding against their constraints and smashing through anything that blocked their way, until they finally pointed not just inland—but at the Dandolo estate itself.

  * * *

  —

  Sancia stared in horror as Gregor Dandolo slowly turned around to face her.

  He had changed. The whites of his eyes were blood-red, like he’d burst all the vessels in them, causing massive hemorrhages. His nose was bleeding as well, his upper lip and chin rusty with blood. He did not look at anyone or anything—rather, he stared into the space somewhat close to her, much as a blind man would. He had never made such a face, even when she’d seen him activated.

  There was a crack from behind her. Sancia leapt in surprise, and watched as Crasedes shoved aside the two halves of stone like they were eggshells.

  For a moment he lay on all fours, gasping and coughing. Sancia flexed her scrived sight, and saw he was a fluttering, flickering, strobing mess of blood-red light…yet it was slowly cohering, calcifying, re-forming.

  He’s putting himself back together, she thought. Undoing all the damage Clef did to him…

  Crasedes staggered to his feet, turned to Sancia, and snarled, “What did you do? Where is the construct? What has happened?”

  Sancia said nothing—for, in truth, she didn’t quite know.

  Crasedes looked at Gregor and did a double take. “You’ve…changed, Gregor,” he said. “You’ve changed somehow, but…but it’s difficult for me to perceive ho—”

  “Yes,” said Gregor, still in that toneless voice.

  Crasedes cocked his head. “Who are you? What are you?”

  “I am something new,” said the voice. “Something even you have not ever witnessed. For I am no longer one thing, one man, one construct. I am many things.”

  The entire Dandolo estate quaked suddenly. Crasedes stared about, alarmed.

  “What’s…What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I was put into all lexicons, all at once,” said the voice. “And though I have lost the authorities that allowed me to warp the reality of this world, I still persist in the lexicons—and thus, in all the tools and instruments and creations of this city.” He turned to look at Crasedes, his face dead and slack, his eyes welling over with bloodied tears. “I am Tevanne. And I am made in the image of those who have wrought me.”

  “Huh,” said Crasedes, unimpressed. He rose to float off the floor. “I have to admit, this is…unanticipated. But while I’m not sure who you are, let me tell you—however you think tonight’s going to go, it’s not going to go how you think it’s goi
ng to g—”

  There was a brilliant, white-hot blaze, and a flash of light so bright that Sancia screamed and had to turn her face away. It was like there’d been an explosion in the chamber, and yet she didn’t feel the sting of shrapnel.

  She opened her eyes and looked around as the flash faded. She saw that, somehow—it was impossible, but somehow—a shrieker had punched through all the walls of the Dandolo estate, smashed into Crasedes’s back, and knocked him through the stone wall…

  And the next wall, and the next wall, and the next.

  “I disagree,” said the voice.

  She stared at the smoking hole in the wall, bewildered. She couldn’t understand it. Where had the shrieker come from? Why hadn’t it cracked to pieces on the exterior walls of the estate? How had it gotten in so far?

  Unless something had told the walls to weaken in the exact right parts, thought Sancia, since most of the walls are maintained by scrivings…

  But that would have been impossible. It should have been impossible…unless a very different sort of entity, a different sort of mind, was now controlling all the lexicons in the city with a fine degree of precision, all at once.

  “Holy shit…” said Sancia slowly.

  Gregor—or was it truly Tevanne now?—shambled toward the doors of the ballroom, pausing only to pick up the lifeless body of Ofelia Dandolo. Then he looked back at Sancia.

  “Goodbye, Sancia,” he said. “I am sorry for what is coming.”

  He walked into the darkness with her body.

  * * *

  —

  The thing that called itself Tevanne walked out into the gardens of the Dandolo estate, cradling the body of the dead woman in its arms.

  Or a part of it performed this act: in truth, it was in many places in the city simultaneously—in foundries, in carriages, in walls and doors and locks. But for now, it focused the greatest of its attentions on the body in its arms: her face still and cold, her back soaked in blood.

  It carried the woman’s body to the river that trickled through the trees. Then it climbed down until the cold waters rose up to its waist.

  It watched as the river pulled at her hair, her dress, the streams of blood from her wound.

  So much suffering, it thought. So many dreadful wrongs. All to right a broken world.

  As it looked down on her, thousands and thousands of floating lanterns slowly drifted over the garden walls to circle over them, like a giant, phosphorescent cloud.

  Tevanne stroked her face, remembering a time from its previous life, when it tried to bathe away her many wounds.

  There is no fixing what has been done, it thought. There is no fixing this dreadful world.

  It let her go, and watched as her body sank into the waters.

  What is called for, it thought, are much more ambitious efforts.

  It grew aware of a faint rumbling from somewhere deep in the earth around it. Then there was a crash to its right, and a furious, smoking Crasedes Magnus shot through the walls of the estate mansion and into the sky.

  * * *

  —

  Crasedes trembled in fury as his many tools of perception focused on the bloody form of Gregor Dandolo, half-submerged in the waters of the river below.

  “You,” he growled. “What the hell are you? Where is the construct?”

  Gregor looked up at him with his bloody, emotionless eyes. “There is no construct now,” he said. “There is only me. And I, and my desires, are something very new to this world.”

  “And what are those desires, pray tell?”

  But Gregor did not bother to answer. Instead, the tremendous cloud of lanterns in the sky suddenly shot toward Crasedes.

  In an instant, it was like he was enveloped in a giant glowing cocoon of brightly colored paper, suspended over the Dandolo gardens. Crasedes flexed his scrived sight, trying to peer through the lanterns, but it was like trying to peer ahead into an arctic storm, just a wall of rippling, undulating noise…

  Then he heard a sound—a loud, warbling scream—and he perceived it: some kind of huge metal arrow, flying right at him.

  He reacted just in time, raising his hand, reaching out, altering the gravity just enough. The floating lanterns burst into flame as the giant shrieker approached. It was much, much larger than the one that had struck him in the basements—probably intended for sea craft, he guessed. Just being near the burning projectile made all the paper lanterns curl and crisp—but even though he’d trapped it, the shrieker pushed and pushed against him, worming through his grasp, poking farther into the cocoon of floating lanterns…

  Crasedes watched as the little paper lanterns crackled and burned around him, and for a moment he was allowed a window into the gardens—and he saw that Gregor was now gone.

  The other lanterns shoved themselves closer, indifferent to the flame and the heat. With a grunt, he flicked his hand and snapped the metal arrow in two. He cast the pieces to the ground and smashed through the cocoon of lanterns, crushing dozens, hundreds, thousands of them with but a thought…

  And he looked up just in time to see a dozen more metal arrows rise from the distant Dandolo walls, curve, and fly right at him.

  43

  Sancia staggered over and helped Orso to his feet. He was gasping and panting miserably now, and Sancia and Berenice had to throw his arms across their shoulders.

  he said.

  A burst of terrible shrieking outside, and the rumble of explosions.

  said Sancia.

  The three of them started limping for the door, pausing only to scoop up the imperiat where it lay on the floor.

  asked Orso.

  said Sancia.

  * * *

  —

  Crasedes growled and snarled as he fought his endless war in the skies. He ripped stones from the buildings and hurled them at the shriekers, bursting them apart; he ripped gravel and sand from the earth and used it to shred the countless lanterns, and when the espringal batteries below started firing on him, he smashed them as well; and through it all he kept moving, dodging and tumbling and darting through the city spires, the projectiles slamming into the buildings around him while the night filled up with screams.

  I won’t let it end like this, he thought. Not like this.

  A rumbling to Crasedes’s left. He turned and saw the supports of one spire had somehow collapsed—just perfectly for the whole tower to fall on top of him.

  The very stones, the very buildings of the city were making war on him.

  Crasedes raised a fist and flew up toward the tumbling building, bracing himself.

  This, he thought to himself, is not how I wanted things to go.

  * * *

  —

  Together Sancia, Berenice, and Orso limped out of the gates and through the smoke-filled Dandolo enclave. Everything close to the estate was practically deserted, but the areas close to the enclave walls were in a complete uproar. Campo folk left and right fled their homes as Crasedes screamed and raged and fought above, shrapnel and flames hurtling over their heads.

  But fleeing was no longer as easy as it should have been: none of the scrived doors or gates or carriages were working anymore.

  said Sancia when she saw the screaming crowd at the enclave gate. She watched as the people beat their hands on it, crying for it to open. She looked up and saw the espringal batteries along the top of the walls tracking Crasedes’s movements, peppering him with bolts.

  said Orso. nd more important—where the hell are we going?>

  said Sancia.

  said Orso.

  There was a dull roar in the skies, and they watched as Crasedes smashed a shrieker out of the air before flitting forward and punching through one of the campo towers like it was made of floss candy.

  said Berenice,

  Sancia gritted her teeth, ran to the side of the gate, shut her eyes, and placed her hands on its surface, intending to try to break the gate down as she had many times in her life.

  Instead, she heard a voice in her mind, cold and flat and still:

  She opened her eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

  snarled Sancia. She ripped her hands away.

  said Clef, sounding weak and defeated,

  “Of course,” sighed Sancia. She ripped Clef out of where he hung about her neck and placed him against the gate.

  Instantly, her head rang with a tremendous burst of information—of a shifting sea of commands, and bindings, and arguments and meaning…

  She understood now that scrivings, despite having minds and a weak sentience to them, had always been dead things: they did not change their own meaning or methods of operation in response to outside threats. But Tevanne was clearly different: its scrivings and commands evolved from second to second, finding new arguments, new ways of enforcing its will upon the world…