And yet, though Tevanne was indeed powerful, Sancia also got the impression that it was very new at this. Balancing its attentions seemed quite difficult—especially because Sancia got the impression that it was quite distracted at the moment.
It’s doing something big, she thought. It’s doing something really big, somewhere out in the city…
Then Clef cried,
The gates cracked open, then fell forward. The crowd surged ahead, and Sancia had to fight to get to Orso and Berenice.
* * *
—
The thing that called itself Tevanne watched the campos fail and burn through a thousand eyes—through rigs built to sense heat, or blood, or weight, or movement. It ignored Crasedes, thrashing and screaming in the skies. It knew Crasedes would grow weak and irrelevant soon enough as midnight faded from this city.
Tevanne instead turned its attentions to the task at hand. It felt its hundreds of lexicons exert meaning onto the raw sigils embedded through the city much like one might feel their own limbs. The vast confluence of experiences, knowledge, momentum, and interrelations all poured through its thoughts, a million sensations every millionth of a second. And Tevanne rejoiced in it.
But it knew this was not enough. It was too vulnerable here, all of its lexicons and meaning and control bundled up in one city.
Instantly, a dozen foundries came to life. They had been built to fabricate many wonderful creations, though they’d always needed the skills of countless people to make the foundry tools work.
But not anymore. Tevanne told the tools what to make, how to scrive them, and what their many complicated sigils meant.
To redeem creation, it thought to itself, perhaps I must call upon that which made it.
It awoke carriages throughout the city and sent them speeding into the foundry bays, and there they filled themselves with precious cargo and departed, rumbling for the docks, and the many galleons waiting there.
It was a grand symphony of movement and intelligence. But Tevanne knew it was still not enough.
Tevanne had come to think of its mortal body as a vestigial appendage—a crude device of frail flesh and blood, poorly calibrated for enforcing meaning upon the world. But the body was useful for delicate processes, so Tevanne set it to work fabricating another set of definition plates.
I shall be as spores pouring forth from a mushroom cap, thought Tevanne.
It watched through Gregor Dandolo’s eyes as its fingers carved sigil after sigil on the face of the plate.
Filtering across the world to bring my works to all the continents.
* * *
—
Sancia, Berenice, and Orso found the Slopes in complete disarray when they arrived. People were charging back and forth, screaming and begging for a seat on a ship, for some way to get out of the city, just to get out.
Sancia ignored them. Instead she searched the crowd and spied a woman standing at the edge of the canal, arms crossed, watching it all unfold with a grim, steely expression, as though none of this surprised her.
“Polina!” Sancia cried. They staggered forward together. “Polina, over here!”
Polina turned and saw them, and her grim expression changed to one of horrified shock. “My God, girl…I was hoping you might come, but what in hell happened to you all?”
“Nothing good,” she said.
Polina looked behind them. “And Gregor?”
Sancia and Berenice shook their heads.
Her face tightened very slightly. “Goddamn it all. I told him. I told him.” She looked at them. “If you’re coming, you need to come now. The next set of ships leaves very soon, as I’m sure you can understand.”
“How will we get to them?” asked Berenice.
Polina led them to a tunnel below a bridge, where she’d hidden a narrow shallop.
“Is it scrived?” asked Sancia. “If it is, it might try to goddamn drown us.”
“I would not trust my life to your horrid magics,” said Polina. “For this, we’ll depend on the currents and our own oars.”
They climbed in. Polina shoved the shallop out of the tunnel, stroked a handful of times until they’d caught the current of the canal, and then they were speeding along.
It was a short, gruesome voyage. People screamed at them, “Take me! Take me!” and some leapt into the waters to swim after them. Sancia and Berenice stared at them, struggling and crying out for help in the filthy, brackish canals.
“We’ve taken enough,” said Polina flatly. “Your friends, the man and the woman in the apron…They arranged for quite the little exodus. I worried once that Giva would never have enough scrivers to fight Tevanne. Now I worry we’ll have far too many.”
Then the Bay of Tevanne opened up before them, occasionally lit bright as the Dandolo shrieker batteries along the coast fired again and again at Crasedes. The bay was swarming with ships, all of them fleeing in a line as they tried to escape the madness.
“Privately owned ships, from the look of it,” said Polina. “As always, the powerful are the first to escape the problems that they’ve caused.”
Sancia and Berenice sat in the shallop holding hands and bowed low as the cinders of the burning city danced around them.
* * *
—
The little shallop approached a clutch of ships moored in a place that was greatly familiar to Sancia: the waterfront. Polina pulled the shallop alongside a much taller caravel. A voice cried from the darkness: “Are we ready?”
“Ready as we’ll ever be!” Polina shouted back. She helped the Foundrysiders out of the little shallop and onto a rope ladder, and they scrambled onto the deck of the caravel.
“Sancia!” cried a voice.
She looked around and saw Claudia and Gio running forward to kneel beside her. “God Almighty, San,” said Gio. “What’s happened? What happened to you? What happened to the city?”
“I barely know myself,” said Sancia, exhausted.
“Get ready to set sail now!” bellowed Polina to the crew. She looked across the bay at the ships stacking up to flee the city. “I know I don’t want to have too many of them ahead of us to slow us dow—”
Then they all jumped as there was a sudden eruption of shriekers from all the coastal batteries around the bay.
They watched in silence as the shriekers arced across the night sky, and then plunged down into the line of ships fleeing Tevanne, shredding the vessels one by one.
“What on earth?” said Polina. “Why…Why are the coastal batteries targeting civilian ships?”
But Sancia already knew. “It’s Tevanne,” she said quietly.
“It’s what?” said Polina.
“Tevanne. It’s taken over all the lexicons in the entire city. It can control the city now. And I don’t think it wants anyone escaping.”
Polina paled. Then she looked at Orso. “Is…Is this possible?”
Orso nodded, his breath crackling in his lungs as he fought to stay conscious. “It sure as hell seems to b—”
Then there was a burst of movement from the west side of the bay, and three Dandolo galleons poured out of the campo docks, moving at full speed as they charged through the waters. Their size and their velocity were so great that they made the waves buckle and jump even at the waterfront.
“Where are they going?” asked Claudia. “That’s practically a fleet!”
“It’s Tevanne again,” said Berenice. “Galleons have their own lexicons. It must have captured them…It’s escaping, and it doesn’t want anyone to follow.”
The Foundrysiders and the Givans watched in horrified silence as the galleons left the bay. A handful of ships tried
to escape with them, but between the coastal batteries on either side of the bay’s entrance, there was no place to hide.
Again, the roar of the shriekers. Again, the vessels burst apart like toy ships wrought of straw. They watched as the bay filled up with burning flotsam and jetsam.
* * *
—
Orso Ignacio watched as the city of Tevanne burned.
He watched as the shriekers gracefully arced through the air, the white-hot lances of metal bursting into bright flashes of shrapnel as they struck ships, or towers, or buildings, or streets.
He watched the waters lapping at the side of the caravel below him, dotted with ash and cinder.
He watched Crasedes Magnus charging through the skies, ripping up buildings and hurling them about like toys.
It’s not going to make it, he thought. Nothing is. It’s over.
He listened to the screams from Foundryside as people surged out of their rookeries and shacks and stuffed themselves into boats. Some people leapt into the water, as if hoping to swim away.
Claudia was crying beside him. He looked down and saw a shape floating in the water—a body, perhaps a man, facedown, arms askew.
How I wished to save this place, he thought.
He watched as the Dandolo Illustris Building quaked and trembled in the distance, and finally collapsed.
But soon there will be nothing left to save.
Another bellow of wrath as Crasedes waged war on the city.
Orso looked around. The world was a blur of fire and smoke on the black of the night sky.
What can I do? What is there to do?
His eye fell on the main Dandolo canal, the narrow channel of water that led to all the foundries and production yards and docks. It was the most protected of all the Dandolo holdings, since it was the artery that fed the entire campo. Two giant shrieker batteries stood on either side of it. He watched as they rotated back and forth with an eerie, precise grace, spitting hot metal into the skies.
He remembered designing components of those weapons. How mad it seemed now that they should turn on the city, when he had been the one to lay out their fabrication plates years ago, and place them into the lexicons…
He thought—The lexicons.
He rummaged in his pockets and pulled out the imperiat. The golden tool winked maliciously in the light of the flames, and the smooth golden circle in its center rippled with sigils, telling him what alterations were near, and what they did.
He looked back over the side of the caravel at the little shallop they’d just arrived on.
An idea slowly began to blossom in his mind.
Orso stared at the shallop, breathing hard. Then he looked back at Sancia and Berenice, standing on the deck of the caravel, holding each other, eyes wide and fearful as the city burned and the air shook with the sounds of war.
He studied their faces. They seemed so lined and so weary.
Trembling, Orso put the imperiat back into his pocket. He slowly turned and walked over to them.
he said quietly.
He did not answer. He placed his hands on Berenice’s shoulders. Then he looked into her eyes.
So pale and so calm. Brimming with intelligence, and so, so much promise.
“You have done great works,” he said aloud to her. He kissed her on the brow. “Go forth, and do many more.”
Then Orso turned, ran to the side of the caravel, and shot down the ladder into the little shallop. Before he could stop himself, he unmoored the little vessel, unfurled its sails, and started steering the boat across the bay, toward the Dandolo canal.
* * *
—
Sancia stared as Orso piloted the shallop away. She felt Berenice’s confusion churning beside her.
But Sancia had started to realize Orso’s plan. And when she realized it, Berenice knew it as well.
“No!” screamed Berenice. “No, no, no! Come back! Stop, stop, come back!”
She ran to the edge of the caravel, but Sancia held her back.
“I won’t let you!” sobbed Berenice. “No! Come back, come back, come back!”
“What’s the matter with her?” asked Polina.
Sancia hugged Berenice tight to her chest. “Tell your crews to get the ships ready,” she said. “Tell everyone to get ready. Because Orso is about to open up the door.”
44
Orso focused as the little shallop sped across the bay to the Dandolo canal. He tried to drink in all these sensations, even as his shoulder ached and his fever beat upon his brain: the water on his face, the blasts of heat from the burning city, the dance of the cinders in the air before him.
How marvelous, he thought.
The shriekers tracing dreadful lines of fire across the smoky night. The vast devices shifting and circling on the shore ahead.
What a marvelous thing, to be alive.
And though his connection to Sancia and Berenice was weakening the farther he got from them, he could feel Berenice’s misery, her despair, and Sancia comforting her, and his heart broke for them.
What a wondrous thing, to share my life, and be loved.
He was halfway across the bay now. The shrieker batteries had spied him. He watched as they ponderously turned on their columns and tracked his tiny craft, inching across the black waters.
Here it comes.
Orso stood, turned, and joyfully waved to the ships behind him, far across the bay.
Perhaps they could see him. Perhaps not. It didn’t matter.
He heard the shriekers rip into the skies behind him. Without looking, he pulled out the imperiat and turned its powers up all the way.
He watched as the shriekers came close—and then, about a thousand feet from him, they died out, suddenly remembering how heavy they really were, and tumbled into the waters with a splash, steam hissing all around them.
“Come at me, you bastard,” said Orso, one hand gripping the mainsheet line. He’d always been rather crap at sailing, but this was only a short ways. His shoulder screamed but he managed to turn the rudder, and his little craft inched closer to the Dandolo canal.
He watched as shrieker after shrieker died in the air around him like moths passing too close to a candle flame. Espringal batteries fired shot after shot at him, but the bolts harmlessly tumbled to the waters, like a tree shedding twigs in a storm.
He passed near one Dandolo battery, and the massive weapon fell silent.
How he wished he could kill all of them with the imperiat—but there was no way to do that from across the bay.
But he did have other options.
Orso crouched low as he piloted the shallop up the main Dandolo canal.
* * *
—
Tevanne felt the scrivings die like one might feel a limb going numb. Having completed its primary task, it had contented itself with trying to destroy Crasedes, but this new sensation…This was concerning.
It felt the scrivings die in the coastal batteries…and then those along the canal, leading to the foundries.
Instantly, it realized what was going to happen.
* * *
—
Crasedes heaved and shrieked and screamed as he dashed the shriekers and bolts from the sky.
He wondered how long he could last. Soon the s
un would rise, and his powers, however great they were now, would begin to wane.
But then, the flow of shriekers and bolts suddenly…stopped.
Crasedes slowed, looking below warily. Unless he was mistaken, all the weapons in the city were now trying to train their fire on the Dandolo campo.
Specifically a small canal, just where the foundries begin.
Crasedes flew closer, and spied a small sailboat weaving up the canal.
A man stood at the prow of the boat. There was a wink of something golden in his hand.
Horror flooded Crasedes’s ancient mind.
I believe that now, he thought, would be an excellent time to leave.
He turned and flitted away, over the city and past the campo walls, as far and as fast as he could manage.
* * *
—
Orso piloted his craft closer and closer to the foundries. The Dandolo campo was unrecognizable now, a burning, blackened ruin of the world Orso had labored in for so many years.
He thought of Foundryside, and Gregor, and Sancia and Berenice. What a wonderful thing it had been to work with them, to labor in their tiny shops, swirling through frustration and anxiety and elation, to mix their sweat and souls and thoughts with raw matter in their dank little rooms and, bit by bit, piece by piece, build a better world.
A better world, thought Orso.
He watched as the scrivings rippled across the face of the imperiat, and quickly spied the one he was looking for: the cooling scriving from a foundry lexicon—the one that kept the entire vast machine stable.
Killing this string, he knew, would have catastrophic consequences. Consequences that would destabilize every other lexicon on the campo, as well.
Shorefall Page 51
