Foundryside: A Novel (The Founders Trilogy)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Walk around to the back of your carriage and look for something. It’ll be stuck on the bottom right. Looks like a button, one that shouldn’t be there.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “What kind of ploy is this?”

  “It’s not a ploy at all. Go on,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

  He looked at her for a moment. Then he reached down and pulled at her ropes, confirming they were secure. Satisfied, he opened the door again and climbed out.

  She listened to the crunch of his feet outside. He stopped somewhere behind the carriage.

  said Clef.

  Gregor walked around and looked through the back passenger window at her. “What’s this?” he asked, slightly outraged. He held it up—it looked like a big brass tack. “It’s scrived, on the bottom. What is this?”

  “It’s like a construction scriving,” said Sancia. “It pulls at its twin, like a magnet.”

  “And why,” he said, “would someone want to stick a construction scriving to my carriage?”

  “Think for a second,” said Sancia. “They stick one half to your carriage. Then they tie another to a string. Then the string will act like a needle in a compass, always pointing to you like you’re true north.”

  He stared at her. Then he looked around, peering at the streets behind him.

  “Now you’re figuring it out,” asked Sancia. “See anyone?”

  He was silent. Then he thrust his head back through the window. “How did you know it was there?” he demanded. “How did you know what it was?”

  “Intuition,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “Did you put it there?”

  “When could I have done that? When I was sleeping on the roof, or tied up with your ropes? You need to let me go, Captain. They didn’t put it on there to track you—they put it on there to find me. They’re coming for me. They figured out you knew where I was, so they just followed you. And now you’re right here in it with me. Let me go, and maybe you can survive this.”

  He was quiet for a while. It strangely pleased her—for so long it’d seemed like the captain had ice in his veins, so it was nice to see him sweat.

  “Hm. No,” he said finally.

  “What?” she said, surprised. “No?”

  He dropped the button on the ground and stomped on it. “No.” He climbed back into the cockpit.

  “Just…Just no?”

  “Just no.” The carriage started off again.

  “You…You goddamn fool!” she shouted at him. “You’re going to get us both killed!”

  “You have damaged lives and careers through your actions,” said the captain. “Not just mine, but those of my officers. You harm those around you without reflection or compunction. I am obligated to amend that. And I will not permit any threat, any lie, or any attack to dissuade me from my path.”

  Sancia stared at the ceiling, stunned. “You…You smug idiot!” she said. “What right do you have to speak such flowery words with the Dandolo name hanging over you?”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Harming people, using people, damaging lives—that’s all the merchant houses ever do!” she said. “You people are every bit as dirty as I am!”

  “That may be so,” said Dandolo with infuriating serenity. “This place has a tainted heart. That I’ve seen up-close. But I have also seen horrors out in the world, young lady. I learned to tame some of them. And I have come home to bring to this city the very thing I am delivering you to.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Justice,” he said simply.

  Her mouth fell open. “What? Are you serious?”

  “As serious,” he said as the carriage turned, “as the grave.”

  Sancia laughed, incredulous. “Oh, as simple as that? Just like dropping off a package? ‘Here, friends—have some justice!’ That’s the dumbest damned thing I ever heard!”

  “All great things must start somewhere,” he said. “I started with the waterfront. Which you burned down. By capturing you, I can continue.”

  She kept laughing. “You know, I almost believe you, you and your holy-crusade talk. But if you really are as noble and honest as you sound, Captain Dandolo, you won’t live long. If there’s one thing this city can’t tolerate, it’s honesty.”

  “Let them try,” he said. “Many already have. I nearly died once. I can afford to do so agai—”

  But he never finished his statement. Because then the carriage went careening out of control.

  * * *

  Gregor Dandolo had piloted scrived carriages many times before, so he was well acquainted with how to maneuver such a vehicle—but he had never piloted one that suddenly had only one front wheel.

  And that seemed to have been what had happened, in the blink of an eye: at first they’d been rolling along—and then, suddenly the driver’s front wheel had simply exploded.

  He shoved down the deceleration lever while also spinning the pilot wheel away from the damaged carriage wheel—but this proved unwise, because then the carriage jumped a wooden walkway, which snapped the other front wheel—which meant he no longer had any control over the carriage’s direction at all as it hurtled across the muddy lanes.

  The world was rattling and quaking around him, but Gregor had sense enough to decipher where the carriage was now headed—and he saw that that space was occupied by a tall, stone building. One that looked well built.

  “Oh dear,” he said. He leapt through into the back of the carriage, where the girl was stuck to the floor.

  “What did you do, you big idiot?” she cried at him.

  Gregor grabbed his espringal and turned the density of her bonds down—otherwise they could fly around throughout the carriage and crush him, and certainly her. “Hold on, please,” he said. “We’re about t—”

  Then the world leapt around them, and Gregor Dandolo remembered.

  * * *

  He remembered the carriage crash from long ago. The way the vehicle tipped, the way the world tumbled, the sprinkle of glass and the creak of wood.

  And he remembered the whimpering in the dark and the glimmer of torchlight from outside. How the light caught the ruined form of Gregor’s father, crumpled in the seat, and the face of the young man beside him in the ruined carriage, weeping as his blood poured out of his body.

  Domenico. He’d died terrified and whimpering in the dark for their mother. The way many young men in this world died, Gregor would later find.

  Gregor heard whimpering again, and had to tell himself—No. No. That is the past. That all happened long ago.

  Then his mother’s voice in his ear: Wake up, my love…

  The muddy world congealed around him, and reality returned.

  * * *

  Gregor groaned and looked up. It seemed the carriage had flipped over, so one passenger window was now pointed at the sky while the other was stuck in the mud. The young woman lay in a heap next to him. “Are you alive?” he asked.

  She coughed. “Why do you give a damn?”

  “I am not in the business of killing captured people, even accidentally.”

  “Are you so sure that was an accident?” she said, her voice rasping. “I told you. They followed you. They’re coming for me.”

  Gregor glared at her, then pulled out Whip and climbed up through the cab of the carriage. He crawled out the window of the passenger door, which now looked out on the night sky.

  He sat on the edge of the tipped-over carriage and looked at the front axle. A large, thick, metal espringal bolt was sticking out of it right where the wheel had been.

  It must have gone right through the spokes of the wheel—and as the wheel spun around it, it shredded the damned thing…

  It was an impressive shot
. He looked around, but he could see no assailants. They were in one of the larger fairways in Foundryside, but the street was empty—after the building collapse and the shriekers last night, odds were the residents thought if they poked their heads out to see what the commotion was, they’d lose them.

  The young woman cried: “Ah, shit. Shit! Hey, Captain!”

  “What now?” sighed Gregor.

  “I’m going to say something else you’re not going to believe. But I’m still going to say it.”

  “You are, of course, free to say what you like, miss.”

  She hesitated. “I…I can hear scrivings.”

  “You…You what?”

  “I can hear scrivings,” she said again. “That’s how I knew about the thing on your carriage.”

  He tried to understand what she was implying. “That’s impossible!” he said. “No one can jus—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said the young woman. “But listen—you need to know this because right now, right now, a number of very loud scrived rigs are converging on us. I know because I can hear them. And if they’re really loud, that means they must be really powerful.”

  He scoffed. “I know you think I’m stupid—after all, you have said so both loudly and repeatedly—but it is biologically impossible that someone could be stupid enough to believe that.” He looked around. “I don’t see anyone walking down the street toward us carrying, say, a shrieker.”

  “I don’t hear them on the street. Look up. They’re above us.”

  Rolling his eyes, Gregor looked up. And then he froze.

  On the side of the building façade above him, four stories up, was a masked person, dressed all in black. They were standing on the building façade as if it were not the side of a building but was actually the floor—in full defiance of all known laws of physics—and they were pointing an espringal at him.

  Gregor dove down into the upended carriage. The next thing he knew there were a lot of loud thunks. He shook his head and looked up.

  Five espringal bolts were now poking in through the side of the carriage. They had almost punched straight through—and since the walls and floors of this carriage were reinforced, that meant their attackers were using scrived weapons.

  More than one of them, he thought. At least five.

  “Impossible,” said Gregor. “That can’t be.”

  “What?” said the young woman. “What’s out there?”

  “There…there was a man standing on the building sides!” said Gregor. “Standing there like gravity doesn’t work at all!”

  He looked up through the open window on the side of the carriage, and watched in shock as a figure in black appeared to gracefully float over the carriage like a bizarre cloud. Then he pointed an espringal down, and fired.

  Gregor hugged the wall of the carriage as the bolt came hurtling down. The young woman screamed as it thudded into the mud below them.

  Gregor and the young woman looked at it, then stared at each other.

  “I scrumming hate being right,” she said.

  12

  The entire theory of scriving relied on the idea that you could convince an object to behave like something that it wasn’t. But the early Tevanni scrivers figured out pretty quick that it was a lot easier to convince an object it was something it was similar to, rather than something it was not similar to at all.

  In other words, it would not take much effort to scrive a block of copper into thinking it was a block of iron. However, it would take an impossible amount of effort to convince the block of copper that it was actually, say, a block of ice, or a pile of pudding, or a fish. The more convincing an object needed, the more complicated the scriving definitions became, and the more of a lexicon they’d take up, until finally you were using a whole lexicon or even multiple lexicons to make one scriving work.

  The first scrivers hit this wall pretty quickly. Because one of the initial things they tried to alter was an object’s gravity—and gravity proved to be a deeply stubborn bastard that simply could not be convinced to do things it didn’t believe it ought to.

  The first efforts to scrive objects to sort of gently, casually step around the laws of gravity were utter disasters—explosions, mutilations, and maimings were common. This had been a great surprise to the scrivers, since they knew from the old stories that the hierophants had been able to make objects float across the room, and some hierophants were recorded as flying nearly all the time. The hierophant Pharnakes was even said to have crushed an entire army with boulders from a mountaintop.

  But eventually, after an untold number of deaths, the Tevanni scrivers came up with a somewhat decent solution.

  The laws of gravity would not be outright denied. But it was possible to obey the laws of gravity in very unusual ways. Like scrived bolts—they were convinced they were just obeying gravity; they just had some interesting new ideas about where the ground was, and how long they’d been falling for. Or floating lanterns, which believed they contained a sack full of gas that was lighter than air, though they did not. All these designs acknowledged the laws of gravity. They just obeyed the letter of the laws, rather than the spirit.

  But despite these successes, the dream stayed alive: Tevanni scrivers kept trying to find ways to truly defy gravity—to make people float, or fly, just like the hierophants of old. Even though such efforts almost always had lethal side effects.

  For example, some scrivers accidentally adjusted their gravity so that two different portions of themselves recognized two different directions of pull, causing their limbs to stretch or simply get ripped clean off their bodies. Others accidentally crushed themselves into a bloody, flat disc, or a ball, or a cube, depending on their methodology. Others gravely underestimated the amount of gravity they should have, and they wound up floating away into the ether until they reached the limits of their lexicon, at which point they rather anticlimactically smashed into the surface of the earth.

  This was considered a pleasant way to go. You had something to bury that way.

  Many of these attempts had coincided with a larger effort to scrive the human body—and these experiments had been far more horrific than tinkering with gravity.

  Unimaginably worse. Unspeakably worse.

  And so, after they’d cleaned up all the bloodstains from the umpteenth disaster, the merchant houses had made a rare, diplomatic agreement: they’d all decided that trying to scrive a body or its gravity was to be banned, and never trifled with. Humans had enough danger just handling altered items—they didn’t need to worry about their own limbs or torsos going haywire on them too.

  And that was why Gregor Dandolo simply could not believe what he was seeing as he peeked out the top of the carriage: nine men, all dressed in black, running across the building faces with impossibly balletic grace. Some even ran upside down along the overhangs of roofs.

  Such a thing was not only illegal, as much as anything could be in Tevanne—it was also, as far as he was aware, technologically impossible.

  Three of the men stopped and pointed their espringals at him. Gregor ducked back down as bolts punched into the carriage just where he’d been peeking out.

  “They’re good shots too,” he muttered. “Of course.” He considered what to do—but there was little he could accomplish, being stuck in a box in the middle of the road.

  “Do you want to live?” asked the girl.

  “What?” he said, irritated.

  “Do you want to live?” she said again. “Because if you do, you should let me go.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I can help you get out of this.”

  “If I let you go, you’ll run off the first second you can get! Or you’ll stab me in the back and leave me to get shot full of bolts.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But they’re here for me, not you. It wouldn’t hurt my f
eelings if you put those bastards in the ground, Captain. I’d be happy to help you do that.”

  “And what could you do to help me?”

  “Something. Which is better than nothing. Besides, Captain, you owe me one—I saved your life, remember?”

  Scowling, Gregor rubbed his mouth. He hated this. He’d worked ceaselessly to get here, to capture this girl who’d been the source of all his problems, and now he was either going to die for having her, or have to let her go.

  But then, slowly, Gregor’s priorities shifted.

  The men flying around up there almost certainly worked for a merchant house—only a house could have outfitted them with such rigs.

  A merchant house is trying to kill me to get the girl, he thought. So they almost certainly also commissioned the theft, of course.

  And it was one thing to catch a grubby thief and make a show of her as the cause of great evils in Tevanne—but it was quite another to expose massive misconduct, conspiracy, and death being perpetrated by a merchant house faction right here in the city. The merchant houses did conduct espionage and sabotage against one another, everyone knew that—but there was a bright, unspoken line they did not cross.

  They did not make war upon one another. War in Tevanne would be disastrous, everyone knew that.

  But a bunch of flying assassins, Gregor thought, certainly looks a lot like war.

  He reached into the front seat, rummaged around, and brought back a thick metal cord. He quickly fastened it to the girl’s left foot with a small, scrived key, which had a dial on the head.

  “I said to let me go!” she said. “Not tie me up more.”

  “This thing works the same way as the cords on you right now.” He held up the key and pointed to it. “I turn up the dial, and it gets heavier, and heavier. You try to run or kill me, and you’ll find yourself stuck in one spot out in the open. Or it could crush your foot. So I recommend you behave.”

  To his frustration, this didn’t seem to intimidate her much. “Yeah, yeah. Just get the rest of these things off me, all right?”