Foundryside: A Novel (The Founders Trilogy)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

She couldn’t see any of the dangers underneath her, but Clef could. he said.

  she said as she blindly leapt from one rafter to another,

  She kept going, hopping from rafter to rafter, beam to beam, until she felt like she was getting close. she asked.

 

 

 

  She did so, and found he was right. And as she touched the wall, she felt him.

  A tight, warm bundle of a person, pressed up in the crevice between the wall and the ceiling, like a bat in its roost. Waiting for his vision to return, probably. But the second she felt him…

  He moved. Fast. Speeding down.

  He must have felt me coming! she thought. I hit the damned rafter too hard!

  But she still felt what the wall felt—and the wall had felt him push off, including how hard and which direction he was going.

  Sancia gauged his likely position and blindly jumped into open space.

  For a moment she just fell, and she was sure she’d cocked it up, sure she’d missed him, sure she would just plummet three stories down into the vagrants’ nest, where she’d break a leg, or her skull, and then she’d just die there.

  But then she hit him. Hard.

  Sancia instinctively threw her arms around the man and clung tightly to him. Her hearing was coming back, and she heard him scream in surprise and anger. They were still falling, but as someone who was somewhat used to falling in space, the way they were falling was so strange: they suddenly, rapidly decelerated to a curiously steady rate, like they were trapped in a floating bubble, twisting through the air.

  Until they hit the ground. Then the man shoved off, hard, and they went rocketing throughout the old paper mill.

  The man smashed Sancia into walls, into rafters, and, once, into what she guessed was his floating, unconscious comrade. He hurtled back and forth throughout the building, trying to shake her off and struggling with her grasp.

  But Sancia was strong, and she held fast. The world was tumbling and twirling about them, the vagrants were screaming and shrieking, and her sight was slowly, slowly coming back to her…

  She saw the fourth-floor windows flying at them, and realized what was going to happen.

  “Ah, shit!” she cried.

  They crashed through a pair of shutters, and then they were outside, flying through the open night air, still tumbling over and over and over. Now he could fly up a mile and dump her off, or have one of his comrades pry her off and slit her throat, or…

  Clef shouted at her.

  Sancia clung tighter to him, gritted her teeth, and started swatting at the man’s stomach with her hand, clawing and tearing at anything she could find there.

  Then her hand felt a small wheel—which she managed to turn.

  They froze, hanging in midair.

  “No!” screamed the man.

  And then he seemed to explode.

  It was as if someone had filled a huge water skin with hot blood and jumped on it. The spray of gore was unspeakably tremendous, and totally shocking to Sancia.

  More concerning, though, was that the man she’d leapt on was no longer…well, there. It was as if he’d simply disappeared, leaving only the scrived gravity device behind.

  Which meant Sancia was now falling.

  She tried to grab at something, anything. The only thing to hold on to was the dead man’s device, which was covered in blood. She grabbed it purely out of instinct, yet this did nothing. Everything seemed to slow down as she fell to the fairway below.

  cried Clef.

  Sancia had no mind to answer. The world was sliding by her, every ripple of the bedsheets and twist of the undergarments frozen in space…

  And then Gregor Dandolo was there, beneath her.

  He cried out in pain as Sancia landed in his arms. Sancia herself was still dumbfounded, her mind reeling as she tried to understand what had just happened. Then he dumped her in the mud, cursing and rubbing his lower vertebrae.

  “You…you caught me?” she said aloud, still stunned.

  He groaned and fell to his knees. “My scrumming back…Consider my debt repaid,” he snarled.

  She looked at herself. She was trembling, absolutely covered in blood, and she still clutched the gravity device in her hands. It looked like two plates connected with cloth bands—one for your belly, one for your back—and one plate had a series of little dials on it.

  She stammered out, “I…I…”

  “You must have sabotaged the device he was using to float,” said Gregor. He looked up at the bedsheets above, which were all spattered with gore. “Causing his gravity to collapse, crushing him. Somewhere in the street is probably a fleshy marble that was once the whole of that man’s body.” He looked around. “Help me up. Now!”

  “Why? That’s all of them, right?”

  “No, that was just seven! There were nine in tota—”

  Gregor never got the chance to finish. Because then the remaining two attackers crested the peaks of the roofs on one side of the street, and fired.

  * * *

  Sancia’s adrenaline was still running strong, so the world still seemed terribly slow and clear, every second sliding by like the slice of a razor.

  She watched the two men take positions on the roof, her eyes catching every gesture and movement. She knew there was no running from them, no shelter, no trick up her sleeve. She and Gregor were exposed in the alley, unarmed, with nowhere to run.

  Clef’s voice roared in her ear:

  Sancia didn’t stop to think. She ripped Clef off the string around her neck and stabbed him down to the bloody plates in her lap.

  Their attackers loosed their bolts. She watched helplessly as the scrived bolts leapt forth from their espringal pockets like fish jumping out of the water to catch an unsuspecting fly.

  She felt metal strike metal as Clef touched the gravity plate. And then…

  A curious pressure fell across Sancia’s body, and her stomach fluttered unpleasantly, like she was falling again—but she was standing still. Wasn’t she?

  But then, everything seemed to be standing still. The bolts weren’t flying forward anymore—they hung limply in the air. The attackers were like statues stuck to the walls. The hanging clothes were barely rippling anymore—a curl of a bedsheet hanging above the alley almost perfectly still, like icing on a cake.

  Sancia looked around at the drifting world, dazed. “What the hell…”

  She was still touching Clef, and he was still stuck to the gravity plate, and she heard his voice whispering, speaking, chanting. She couldn’t understand what he was saying, but she could tell he was doing…something to the device.

  Then she and Gregor slowly started to float off the ground, rising up as if they had no weight at all.

  She heard Gregor crying out, “What the devil?”

  Clef’s chanting filled her ears. She dimly realized he was making the rig work for him, making it do something it was not meant to do, something it should have never been able to do.

  Because from what she’d seen that night, these gravity rigs only affected the gravity of the person wearing them—yet Clef was now somehow using this rig to control the gravity of everything around them.

  Other objects began to float into the air, barrels and bags and firebaskets and the body of one of their attackers, festooned with laundry. The two attackers on the walls began screaming in terror as they helplessly floated off the building fronts, slowly turning end over end.

  Clef’s voic
e overpowered her thoughts, filling her mind. His strange chanting grew louder.

  How is he doing this? she thought. How can he possibly be doing this?

  Then her scar grew hot, and she heard something, smelled something, saw something…

  A vision.

  * * *

  A vast, sandy plain. Tiny stars twinkling above. The sky at dusk, dark and purpled at the horizon.

  There was a man on the plain, wearing robes. And in his hand, a wink of gold.

  He raised the golden thing, and then…

  The stars began dying, one by one. Snuffed out as if they were but candle flames.

  Darkness fell.

  * * *

  Sancia heard herself screaming in terror. The vision bled out of her mind and the world returned to her, with Gregor and all the random objects floating in the muddy fairway, the barrels and the firebaskets and the bolts.

  She watched as the two bolts slowly, slowly flipped in midair, changing direction so they pointed not at Sancia and Gregor but rather at the men who had fired them.

  The bolts trembled with pent-up energy. The men, realizing what was about to happen, shrieked in naked terror.

  Clef said a single word, and the bolts hurtled forward. They flew so fast they almost fell apart in the air. When the bolts struck the men, they punched through their bodies as if their ribs and stomachs were made of soft gelatin, shredding them effortlessly, like scythes parting soft, green grasses.

  Clef’s chanting halted. Instantly, Gregor, Sancia, the floating corpses, and all the other levitating things in the fairway crashed to the ground.

  For a moment they just lay there. Then Gregor sat up and peered at the bodies lying in the mud.

  “They’re…They’re dead.” He looked at Sancia. “How…How did you do that?”

  Sancia’s mind was still whirling, but she had wit enough to slip Clef up her sleeve before Gregor could see him. she asked him.

  Clef was silent.

 

  Nothing. She looked at the gravity plates, and saw the device was now melted and smeared, like Clef’s manipulations had burned the thing out.

  “How did you do that?” demanded Gregor again. For once, the captain looked genuinely shaken.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No!” she shouted. “No, no! I don’t even know if I did do that!”

  She sat there in the fairway, bewildered and exhausted. Gregor watched her, wary.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said wearily. “There could be more of them. Last time they called in a whole damn army! There could b—”

  She stopped talking as a black, unmarked carriage rattled into the fairway.

  “Shit,” she sighed.

  Gregor scrambled through the mud, grabbed his espringal, and pointed it at the carriage—but then he lowered it, surprised.

  The carriage pulled up in front of them. A young, rather pretty girl wearing gold-and-yellow robes peered out of the cockpit window. “Get in, Captain,” she said. “Now.” She looked at Sancia. “You too.”

  “Miss Berenice?” said the captain, astonished.

  “Now means now,” she said.

  The captain hobbled around and started climbing in on the other side of the cockpit. “I’m not going to have to make you get in this thing, am I?” he asked Sancia.

  Sancia briefly calculated the risks. She had absolutely no idea who in the hell this girl was. But with the captain’s bond still on her ankle, Clef suddenly dead and silent, and the whole of the Commons suddenly deeply unsafe for her, she had few choices.

  She climbed in the back, and the carriage took off toward the Dandolo Chartered campo.

  13

  Sancia sat huddled in the passenger seat, gripping her wrist where she’d hidden Clef. She stayed quiet. Her skull was pounding terribly, and she had no idea what in hell was going on. For all she knew this girl was the queen of Tevanne, and could have her head lopped off with but a word.

  She tugged at the bond on her ankle. It held fast, of course. She’d considered using Clef to undo it during the fight—but that would have tipped off the captain to the fact that she possessed something that could break scrived locks, so she’d refrained. She bitterly regretted the choice now.

  Gregor sat in the cockpit with the girl, wrapping up his injured arm. He peered up at the rooftops outside. “You saw them?” he asked. “The flying men?”

  “I saw them,” said the girl. Her voice was oddly calm.

  “They have spies everywhere,” he said. “Eyes everywhere.” Then he sat up. “Did…Did you check this carriage? They put this thing on mine, this scrived button so they could follow me! You should pull over, now, and we should—”

  “That won’t be necessary, Captain,” she said.

  “I am deadly serious, Miss Berenice!” said Gregor. “We should pull over now and look over every inch of this carriage!”

  “That is not necessary, Captain,” she said again. “Please calm down.”

  Gregor slowly turned to look at her. “Why?”

  She said nothing.

  “How…How did you happen upon us, anyway?” he asked, suspicious.

  Silence.

  “They weren’t the ones who put that button on my carriage at all, were they?” he asked. “It was you. You put it there.”

  She glanced at him as she piloted the carriage through the Dandolo southern gates. “Yes,” she said reluctantly.

  “Orso sent you to follow me,” he said. “As I went to catch the thief.”

  The girl took a long breath in, and let it out. “It has been,” she said with a touch of fatigue, “a very eventful evening.”

  Sancia listened closely. She still didn’t understand what the hell they were talking about, but now it seemed to involve her. That was bad.

  She considered her options. she said. But Clef was silent. If he was awake, she could pop the bond off her ankle and jump out of the carriage the first chance she got. She supposed she could dart Dandolo, or both of them, and steal the key to the bond. But she’d been in an out-of-control carriage once tonight, and had no desire to repeat the experience. And either way, both options left her abandoned on the Dandolo campo—and without Clef, her life there wasn’t worth a copper duvot.

  So she stayed put, and waited. An opportunity would present itself eventually. Provided they all stayed alive.

  “So it was Orso’s box,” he said, triumphant. “Wasn’t it? I was right! He had you ship it into my waterfront, under your name, didn’t he? And he…” He stopped. “Wait. So if you put the scrived button on my carriage instead of our attackers…how did our attackers find us at all?”

  “That’s simple,” said the girl. “They found you because they were following me.”

  He stared at her. “You, Miss Berenice? What makes you say that?”

  She pointed up. Gregor and Sancia slowly looked up at the ceiling. “Oh,” said Gregor quietly.

  The roof of the carriage sported three large, ragged holes, and one bolt point was lodged in it as well. “I assume you wondered why two of them split off from the main attack force,” said Berenice. “They chased me for a block or so, but left when they heard the screaming.” She glanced backward at Sancia. “There was a lot of screaming, it seemed.”

  “What makes you so sure they were following you?” said Gregor.

  “They certainly knew which carriage to shoot at,” said Berenice.

  “I see. But how did they know to follow you to begin with? Certainly they couldn’t have followed you all the way from the inner Dandolo enclaves.”

  “I’m not sure yet,” said Berenice. “But this was planned. They intended to kill all of us at once, I suspect.
Everyone involved…” She trailed off.

  “Involved with me,” said Sancia quietly. “With the box.”

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone involved…” said Gregor. “Orso’s back at the campo?”

  “Yes,” said the girl. “So he should be safe.”

  Gregor peered out the window. “But if you go high enough over a campo wall,” he said, “you don’t trigger any of its warding scrivings—do you?” He looked back at Sancia. “That’s what you did at the waterfront, correct?”

  She shrugged. “Basically?”

  He looked at Berenice. “So if you have a rig that can allow you to fly, you can sail right over all the campo walls—and no one would ever know you’d done it.”

  “Damn,” Berenice said quietly. She pressed the accelerating lever farther forward. The carriage sped up. Then she cleared her throat. “You back there,” she said.

  “Me?” said Sancia.

  “Yes. There’s a bag at your feet. Inside is a strip of metal with two tabs at the ends. Let me know when you find it.”

  Sancia rummaged around in the satchel in the passenger seat. She found the strip of metal quickly, and recognized a few of the sigils on the back.

  “Got it,” she said. “It’s twinned, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” said Berenice.

  “How’d you know that?” asked Gregor.

  “I, uh, used a scriving like this to blow up your waterfront,” said Sancia.

  Gregor scowled and shook his head.

  “I need you to tear off both tabs,” said the girl. “And then I need you to scratch a word on the back of it—not the side with the scrivings, that’ll ruin the rig.”

  Sancia tore the tabs off. “Scratch something in it? With, like, a knife?”

  “Yes,” said Berenice.

  Gregor handed Sancia his stiletto. “What word?” he asked.

  “Run.”

  * * *

  Alone in his workshop, Orso Ignacio reviewed the ledger page he’d hidden among his scriving materials.