Foundryside: A Novel (The Founders Trilogy)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “She’s reliving a memory,” he said, grunting slightly. “A bad one.”

  “It was him!” she screamed. She felt the blood vessels standing out on her forehead, felt the hot, muggy air on her skin, heard the songs in the fields, the whimpering in the dark. “It was, it was!”

  Orso coughed, shook himself, and shouted, “It wasn’t me!”

  Sancia struggled against Gregor’s arms. Her back and neck burned with fatigue, but still she struggled.

  said Clef in her ear.

  Sancia slowed as she heard Clef’s words. The many sensations of the plantation retreated from her mind. Then she went limp, exhausted.

  Orso sat on the ground, panting, and then said, “It was not me, Sancia. I had nothing to do with Silicio. Nothing! I swear!”

  Sancia said nothing. Her breath was ragged, and she was spent.

  Gregor slowly lowered her to sit on the floor. Then he cleared his throat like they’d all had a loud disagreement at the breakfast table. “I must ask—what is this Silicio?”

  Orso looked at Sancia. Sancia glared back, but did not speak.

  “To me, it was no more than a rumor,” said Orso. “A rumor of a slave plantation where…where scrivers practiced the one art we are strictly forbidden to pursue.”

  Berenice turned to stare at him, horrified. Gregor said, “You mean…”

  “Yes,” said Orso, sighing. “The scriving of human beings. And to look at Sancia…it seems like it worked, at least once.”

  * * *

  “Barely anyone remembers the first days, when they tried scriving humans,” Orso said darkly, sitting at the head of one of the big wooden tables in the scriving library. “Nor would they wish to. I was hardly out of school when they outlawed it. But I saw the cases. I know what happened. I know why they abandoned it.”

  Sancia sat silent at the other end of the table, gently rocking back and forth. Gregor and Berenice glanced between her and Orso, waiting to hear more.

  “We know how to change an object’s reality,” said Orso carefully. “We speak the language of objects. To speak this language to people, to try to command our bodies with our sigils…It doesn’t work.”

  “Why?” asked Gregor.

  “On one level, it’s because we’re just not good enough,” said Orso. “It’s kind of like safely scriving gravity, only worse. It would take a huge amount of effort to do—three, four, five lexicons, all to alter one person.”

  “But on another level?”

  “On another level, it doesn’t work because objects are dumb,” said Orso. “Scriving is all about careful, precise definition, and objects are easy there. Iron is iron. Stone is stone. Wood is wood. Objects have an uncomplicated sense of self, so to speak. People, though, and living things…their sense of self is…complicated. Mutable. It changes. People don’t think of themselves as just a bag of flesh and blood and bones, even if that’s what they basically are. They think of themselves as soldiers, as kings, as wives and husbands and children…People can convince themselves to be anything, and because of that, the scrivings you bind them with can’t stay anchored. To try to bind a person is like writing in the ocean.”

  “So what happened to the people the scrivers tried to alter?” asked Gregor.

  Orso was quiet for a long while. “Even I won’t speak of such things. Not now. Not ever, if I can help it.”

  “Then where did this Silicio come from, sir?” asked Berenice.

  “The practice is illegal in Tevanne,” said Orso. “But the laws of Tevanne, as we are all well aware, are weak and restricted. Intentionally so. None of them extend to the plantations. The policy of Tevanne has always been that, provided we get our sugar, coffee, and whatever else on time, we couldn’t care less about what goes on out there. So…if it was communicated to a plantation that, if they accommodated a handful of scrivers from Tevanne, and supplied them with…specimens to experiment on…”

  “Then they would receive a bonus, or an amenable contract, or some kind of lucrative reward,” said Gregor dourly, “from one of the merchant houses.”

  “On matters completely unrelated to these visiting scrivers,” said Orso. “It all looks aboveboard, from a distance.”

  “But why?” said Berenice. “Why experiment on humans at all, sir? We’re successful with our devices—why not focus on those?”

  “Think, Berenice,” said Orso. “Imagine if you’d lost an arm, or a leg, or were dying from some plague. Imagine if someone could develop a sigil string that could cure you, or regrow a limb, or…”

  “Or keep you alive for much, much longer,” said Berenice softly. “They could scrive you so that you could cheat death itself.”

  “Or they could scrive a soldier’s mind,” said Gregor. “Make them fearless. Make it so they don’t value their own lives. Make them do despicable things, and then forget they’d ever done them. Or make them bigger, stronger, faster than all other soldiers…”

  “Or scrive slaves to thoughtlessly do their masters’ bidding,” said Berenice, glancing at Sancia.

  “The possibilities,” said Orso, “are beyond count.”

  “And this is what Silicio was?” asked Gregor. “An experiment run by a merchant house?”

  “I’d only heard rumors of it. Some plantation, out in the Durazzo, where people were still attempting the forbidden arts. I heard it moved around, from island to island to make it harder to trace. But a few years ago, news came of a disaster on the island of Silicio. A whole plantation house burned to the ground. All the slaves were running wild. And among those killed in the blaze were a number of Tevanni scrivers, though no one could quite explain what they’d been doing there.”

  They looked at Sancia, who was sitting completely still now, her face totally blank of all expression.

  “Which house was behind this experiment?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, it probably wasn’t just one merchant house,” said Orso. “If one was trying to scrive humans, they all were. It might still be going on, for all I know. Or perhaps Silicio scared them all off.”

  “Even…” Gregor furrowed his brow. “Even Dandolo Chartered?”

  “Oh, Captain…How many merchant houses have been doomed because they were too slow to bring a new design to market? How many careers have ended because a competitor found a way to make better wares?”

  “But to do that…” said Berenice. “To…to people…”

  Suddenly Sancia laughed. “God. God! As if that was any worse! As if that was any worse than the other things happening out there!”

  They looked at her, uneasy.

  “What do you mean?” asked Berenice.

  “Don’t…don’t you understand what the plantations are?” said Sancia. “Think of it. Think of trying to control an island where the slaves outnumber you eight to one. How would you keep them in line? What would you do to keep them docile? What sort of tortures would you apply to those who lashed out? If…If any of you could understand the things I’ve seen…”

  “Do they really?” said Berenice. “Then…then why do we allow the plantations to exist?”

  Orso shrugged. “Because we’re stupid, and lazy. After the first stage of the Enlightenment Wars—which was what, twenty or thirty years ago?—Tevanne had expanded and exhausted itself. It needed cheap grain, cheap resources, and it had a lot of captives on hand. It was to be a short-term fix—but then we got dependent on it. And it just keeps getting worse and worse.”

  Sancia shook her head. “Scriving the human body…those horrors are nothing, nothing, compared to all the other horrors that make the islands run. And if I had the chance, I’d…I’d do it all over again.”

  Gregor looked at her. “Sancia…How did Silicio burn?”

  She was silent for a
long while. “It…it burned,” she said, “because I set it alight.”

  * * *

  She started speaking.

  They’d brought her to the big house behind the plantation, then down to the basement, down to where that…place was. She hadn’t even known the word for it. Mortuary? Laboratory? Some cross in between? Sancia hadn’t understood. She’d just smelled the alcohol, looked at the drawings and illustrations on the wall, and all those plates with the strange signs written on them; and she’d remembered the wagon that left the house every morning, reeking and followed by flies; and she’d known in an instant that she wasn’t getting out of there alive.

  They’d forced her to drink a sedative—a powerful brandy of some kind, awful and putrid. It’d made her brain muddy and slow, but it didn’t kill the pain that would come later. Not really.

  They’d cut off all her hair and shaved her pate with a razor. She remembered blinking blood out of her eyes. Then they’d dropped her down on the table, tied her down, and the one-eyed scriver had wiped her skull with alcohol—how it burned, how it burned—and then…

  “Desperate times,” the one-eyed scriver had sighed, picking up a knife, “do call for desperate measures. But don’t we have the right to be unorthodox, my dear?” He’d smiled at her, a simpering expression. “Don’t we?”

  And then he’d cut her head open.

  Sancia had no words for the sensation. No words for the feeling of having your scalp slashed open and peeled back like the skin of an orange. No words for feeling him measure the bend of your skull, and listening to him tap-tap the plate into shape. No words for suddenly feeling those screws, those horrid screws biting into you, the gritty, grinding feeling as they bored into your skull, and then, and then…

  Things had gone black.

  She’d died. She’d been sure of it, at the time. There’d been just nothing. But then she’d felt someone…

  Someone lying on top of her. Felt their warmth. Felt them bleeding.

  It’d taken her a long time to realize she was feeling herself.

  She’d been feeling her own body, lying on a dark stone floor. Only she’d been feeling herself from the perspective of the floor. She’d become the floor, just by touching it.

  In the dark, alone, young Sancia had awoken and done her best to re-collect her sanity. Her skull had screamed and shrieked with pain—one whole side was swollen and sticky and bristly with stitches—but she’d realized then, alone, blind, that she was perhaps becoming something else, like a moth struggling to fight its way out of its pupa.

  There had been chains around her wrists. A lock. And because of what she’d become, she’d felt she was the chains, she was the lock—and so she’d known how to pick it, of course, using a shred of wood she’d pulled off the wall.

  They hadn’t intended this, surely. They hadn’t planned for her to become this thing. If they had, they would have tied her up better. And they wouldn’t have sent the one-eyed scriver alone to check on her in the night.

  The creak of the door, the spear of light stabbing into the shadows.

  “Are you awake, poppet?” he’d called sweetly. “I doubt it…”

  He’d probably thought she’d be dead. He certainly hadn’t expected her to be hiding in the corner, lock and chain in hand.

  She’d waited until he’d stepped inside. Then she’d sprung.

  Oh…Oh, to hear the sound of the thick, heavy lock striking his skull. Oh, to hear him crumple to the ground, gagging, shocked. Then she was on him, wrapping the chain around his throat and pulling it taut, tighter, and tighter, and tighter.

  Wild, agonized, and covered in blood, she’d slipped out and roved through the darkened house, feeling the boards beneath her, the walls on either side of her, feeling all these things, feeling everyone in the house all at once…

  The house had become her weapon. And she’d used it against them.

  She’d locked their bedroom doors, one by one. Locked everything as they slept, except one way out. And then she’d gone downstairs to where they’d kept the alcohol, and the kerosene, and all those reeking fluids, and found a match…

  A struck match sounds like a kiss in the dark, sometimes. She remembered thinking that, watching the flame crack to life and then flutter down to the pools of alcohol running across the floor.

  No one had made it out. And as she’d sat and watched, she’d realized—master or slave, all screams sounded alike.

  * * *

  Silence filled the library. Nobody moved.

  “How did you come to Tevanne?” asked Gregor.

  “Snuck aboard a ship,” Sancia said softly. “Easy to stow away when you have the floorboards and the walls to tell you who’s coming and going. When I got off, I stole the name ‘Grado’ from a winery sign I saw, since everyone just expected me to have a last name. Hardest thing was figuring out the limits of what I could do. Touching everything, being everything…it nearly killed me.”

  “What’s the nature of your augmentation?” asked Orso.

  She tried to describe it—knowing what objects were feeling, what they’d felt, the sheer avalanche of sensation that she constantly fought to keep at bay. “I try to…to touch as few things as possible,” she said. “I can’t touch people. That’s too much. And if the scrivings in my skull get overtaxed, they burn, just burn, like hot lead in my bones. When I first came to Tevanne, I had to wrap myself in rags like a leper. It didn’t take me long to realize that what had been done to me was some kind of scriving. So I tried to find out how to get fixed. How to make me human again. But nothing in Tevanne is cheap.”

  “That was why you stole the key?” asked Berenice. “To pay for a physiquere?”

  “A physiquere who wouldn’t turn and sell me out to a merchant house,” said Sancia. “Yeah.”

  “What?” said Orso, startled. “A what?”

  “A…a physiquere,” she said. “One that can fix me.”

  “A physiquere…who can fix you?” he said faintly. “Sancia…My God. You are aware that you are probably the only one of your kind alive, yes? I know I’ve never seen a scrumming scrived human in my life, and I’ve seen boatloads of mad shit! The idea of a physiquere who can just, I don’t know, patch you up—it’s preposterous!”

  She stared at him. “But…but I’d been told that…that they’d found a physiquere who knew what to do.”

  “Then either they were lying,” said Orso, “or being lied to. No one knows how to do what was done to you, let alone reverse it! They were probably going to either take your money and cut your throat, or take your money and sell you to the closest house!”

  said Clef, dismayed.

  Sancia was trembling. “So…so what are you saying? Are you saying I’m stuck like this…forever?”

  “How should I know?” said Orso. “I told you, I’ve never even seen this before.”

  “Sir,” hissed Berenice. “Some…tact? Please?”

  Orso looked at her, and then Sancia, who was now white and quivering. “Oh, hell…Listen. After all this, you can stay here. With me, and Berenice. And maaaybe I try to figure out how in the hell they made you, and how to reverse it.”

  “Really?” said Gregor. “That’s charitable of you, Orso.”

  “It damned well isn’t!” he said. “The girl’s a goddamn marvel, who knows what kind of secrets she’s literally carrying around in her head!”

  Gregor rolled his eyes. “Of course.”

  “Do you think you could actually figure it out?” said Sancia.

  “I think I have a better chance than every other dumb bastard in this city,” said Orso.

  Sancia considered it.

 

  “I’ll consider it,” sh
e said.

  “Terrific,” said Orso. “But let’s not get too tickled over the idea yet. There’s some devilish asshole out there who wants us all dead. Let’s make sure we’re going to have a future before we start planning for one.”

  “Right,” said Sancia. “Do you think you can rig up another tailing scriving?” she asked Berenice. “Like the one you used on Gregor?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Those aren’t tricky at all.”

  “Good.” She looked at Gregor. “And you—are you able to come with me to follow this bastard?”

  To her surprise, Gregor looked uncertain. “Uh…Well. That is…unlikely.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably for the same reason Orso can’t assist either.” Gregor cleared his throat. “Because I am moderately recognizable.”

  “He means he’s famous,” said Orso, “because he’s Ofelia Dandolo’s scrumming son.”

  “Yes. And if I were to be seen strolling around the other campos—that would raise alarms.”

  “But I’m going to need someone with me,” said Sancia. “I’ve been shot at by these assholes so many times, it’d be nice to have someone to shoot back for a change.”

  Gregor and Orso looked at each other, then at Berenice. She sighed deeply. “Ugh. Fine. Fine! I don’t know why I’m always the one following people around the city, but…I suppose I can assist.”

  “But…” said Sancia. “I mean, I’m sure Berenice is very organized and helpful, but I was hoping for someone a bit more…robust?”

  “Although Captain Dandolo is admirably large of arm,” said Orso, “the nice thing about scriving is that it makes this”—he tapped his head—“a much more tangibly dangerous weapon. And in that regard, young Berenice has little competition. I’ve seen the things she can make. Now. Shut up and get to work.”

  18

  Sancia sat alone in the library broom cupboard and dozed.

  It was not sleep—sleeping now, while she waited for the spy, would be disastrous. Rather, it was a kind of meditation she’d taught herself long ago, slumbering while alert and aware. It was not as restful as actually sleeping—but it didn’t leave her as vulnerable.