Berenice peered through the spyglass, watching for Sancia. The girl had abruptly sunk to the ground and fallen out of view—which seemed odd.
What is she doing? Why isn’t she getting out of there?
Then nausea hit her—a familiar sensation for her.
They’re spinning up the lexicon, she thought. Activating more scrivings. And maybe it’s done something to Sancia.
She watched for a moment, then glassed the big, open area beyond the office. She saw glints of metal, and realized guards in scrived armor were walking at a quick pace—not on patrol, then. They were looking for something. And they seemed to be heading straight for Sancia.
“Shit,” she whispered. She looked back at the office. She still couldn’t see Sancia. “Oh, shit.”
* * *
Sancia was no longer in the office, no longer in the foundry or the campo or even in Tevanne. She was gone from that place.
Now she stood atop creamy yellow sand dunes, the pale pink moon hanging fat and heavy in the sky. And standing on the dune across from her was…
A man. Or something man-shaped, facing away from her.
He was wrapped in black cloth, every inch of his body, his neck and face and feet. He wore a short black cloak that went down to about mid-thigh, and his arms and hands were lost in its folds. Next to the man-thing was a curious, ornate golden box, about three feet high and four feet long.
She knew this thing, she knew the box. She recognized them.
I can’t let him see me, she thought.
She heard a sound coming from somewhere in the sky…the sound of so many wings, tiny and delicate, like a giant flock of butterflies.
The man-thing’s head twitched ever so slightly, like he’d heard something. The sound of flapping wings grew louder.
No, she thought. No, no…
Then the man-thing rose up, just a touch, floating a foot above the dunes, and hung there, suspended in the night air.
* * *
Berenice stared through the spyglass as the guards got closer and closer. She had to do something, to warn Sancia or wake her somehow, or at least distract the guards.
She looked around. She had quite a few more rigs on her person, of course—when Berenice Grimaldi prepared, she did so with enthusiasm—but she’d never have imagined preparing for this.
Then she spied a possibility: there was a massive globe light just outside the southwest corner of the foundry, standing on a tall, iron pole, about forty feet high. It probably lit up the main entrance when the foundry was running.
She did some calculations. Then she pulled out her fusing wand and ran over to it.
I scrumming hope this works.
* * *
The man-thing hung in the air above the dunes across from Sancia, silent and still. Then the sands started to swirl around him, undulating in smooth rings as if being whipped about by a storm—but there was no wind, at least not that strong.
Please, no, thought Sancia. Not him. Anyone but him.
The man-thing slowly started to rotate to face her. The sound of flapping wings was deafening now, as if the night sky were thick with invisible butterflies.
Terror filled her, wordless and shrieking and mad. No! No, I can’t! I can’t let him see me, I can’t LET HIM SEE ME!
The thing raised a black hand, fingers extended to the sky. The air quaked, and the sky shuddered.
Then there was a tremendous crack sound, and the vision faded.
* * *
She was back in the office, on her knees. Her stomach was boiling with nausea, and there was vomit on the floor—but she was back in her own body.
He didn’t answer.
“What the hell was that sound?” said a voice beyond the office door.
She froze, listening.
“The damn lamp column fell over outside! It fell over the walls and into the yard!”
Sancia stumbled forward and slipped through the door to the empty adjoining office. She climbed up onto the desk just as she heard a knock. “Miss?” called a voice. “Miss? We need to come in and get something off the desk. Don’t be alarmed, please.”
“Shit,” muttered Sancia. She leapt up, grabbed the window, and hauled herself through the top. Then she slipped out, gripped the edge of the building, and started to climb up to the fourth floor.
She heard a voice cry, “What in hell? What happened here! Wake the girl up, now, now!”
She crawled through the fourth-floor window and started sprinting back toward the maintenance shaft. About halfway there she heard the floor below erupt in shouting.
* * *
Berenice exhaled with relief as she watched Sancia clamber back through the fourth-floor window. The half-melted base of the lamp tower was still glowing a cheerful red before her. She’d never intended to use the wand for this, and scrupulously made a note of this new application.
Then she heard the shouts from over the walls—guards, probably. And soon they’d be coming out to see what had happened.
“Shit,” said Berenice. She ran for the canal.
* * *
Sancia dropped down the lexicon shaft as fast as she could, leaping from rung to rung until she came to the ground floor. Then she staggered back down the passageways, heading to the rubbish room in the basement, where Berenice had so adeptly carved the hole in the wall.
She could hear footsteps in the hallways behind her and above her, men shouting and doors flying open. She ran as fast as she could, but her head felt slow and sluggish. She tasted blood in her mouth and realized her nose was bleeding quite a lot.
I hope I don’t goddamn bleed out before I make it out of here, she thought wearily. Not after all this work.
Then she heard a voice far behind her: “Stop! Stop, you!”
She looked over her shoulder and saw an armored guard standing far down at the end of the passageway behind her. She saw him lift his espringal, and leapt behind a corner just as a scrived bolt shrieked down the hallway, cracking into the wall on the far end. Scrumming terrible place to dodge shots, she thought. But she had no choice: she flung herself back around the corner and sprinted for the door to the rubbish bin.
“She’s here, she’s here!” screamed the guard.
She reached the metal door, threw it open, and leapt into the darkness, slamming the door behind her. She fumbled down the dark steps to the hole in the wall, half-worried she’d fall off the walkway into the piles of scrap metal below. Then there was a harsh crack-crack-crack, and the room filled with weak light. She looked back to see the door behind now had three large holes in it, undoubtedly put there by scrived bolts.
God, they’ll tear through that in a second! she thought.
“Come on!” hissed a voice in the darkness. “Come on!”
She turned and saw a light on the far wall—Berenice’s scrived light, shining through the hole she’d made. Sancia leapt down the steps and threw herself through the breach.
“We won’t run far!” she gasped as she emerged. “They’re right behind me!”
“I am aware of that.” Berenice had her back to her, and she seemed to be fiddling with something in the roof of the tunnel. “There,” she said, stepping back. Sancia saw it was the anchor she’d used to open the grate of the pipe, but now it was attached to the end of a spike that looked like it�
��d been stabbed up into the bricks. “Come on. Now we really need to run.”
Sancia staggered to her feet and limped down the tunnel. There was a faint crackling sound behind them.
“No, faster,” said Berenice, anxious. “Like, much faster.” She grabbed Sancia, threw her arm over her shoulder, and hauled her forward just as the crackling grew to a rumble.
Sancia looked back to see the brick section of the tunnel suddenly collapse, sending a wall of dust flying at them. “Holy hell,” she said.
“I don’t think it should bring down the metal parts of the pipe,” said Berenice as they hobbled up to the grate. “But I would prefer not to find out so—up! Up and out, now!”
Sancia wiped blood from her face, grabbed the rungs, and started to climb.
20
“I …I thought I told you just to follow them!” said Orso, aghast.
“Well, we did that,” croaked Sancia. She spat another mouthful of blood into a bucket. “You didn’t say not to do all the other stuff.”
“To break into a foundry?” he squawked. “And…and to collapse its metallurgical outtake piping? I had thought such things would have easily been beyond the pale of common sense—or am I mad, Berenice?”
He glared at Berenice, who was sitting in the corner of his office, sorting through the notes Sancia had stolen. Gregor leaned over her shoulder, idly reviewing them with his hands clasped behind his back. “I was merely confirming a suspicion you had articulated, sir,” she said.
“And which one was that?”
She looked up. “That it was Tomas Ziani who’s behind all this. That is why you spoke to Estelle at the meeting yesterday—correct, sir?”
Gregor blinked and stood. “Estelle Ziani? Wait—the daughter of Tribuno Candiano? Orso talked to her?”
“You sure are telling a hell of a lot of tales out of school!” Orso snarled at her.
“Why did you suspect Ziani, Orso?” asked Gregor.
Orso scowled at Berenice, then tried to think of what to say. “When I was at the council meeting, with everyone talking about the blackout, none of the house leaders seemed to act odd—except possibly Ziani. He looked at me, at my neck, and he went out of his way to dig at me on the hierophants. There was something to that that just…bothered me. Just a hunch.”
“A good hunch,” said Sancia. She blew her nose into a rag. “I mean, I saw him—all of him. He’s behind this. All of it. And he’s trying to build dozens, if not hundreds, of his own imperiats.”
There was a silence as they all considered this.
“Which means that, if Tomas Ziani figures this process out,” said Gregor quietly, “he can essentially hold the civilized world hostage.”
“I…I still can’t believe it’s Ziani,” said Orso. “I asked Estelle if she would tell me if Ziani was coming after me, and she said she would.”
“You trusted the man’s wife to betray him?” asked Gregor.
“Well, yes? But it sounds like Tomas Ziani is basically keeping her locked in the Mountain, much like her father. So although she might have a reason to betray him, I don’t know how much she could actually know.”
“Uh, I don’t know who this Estelle person is,” said Sancia, “but I just assume it’s someone Orso is scrumming?”
They all stared at her, scandalized.
“Okay,” said Sancia, “someone you were scrumming then?”
Orso’s face worked as he tried to figure out how offended he was. “I was…acquainted with her, once. When I worked for Tribuno Candiano.”
“You were scrumming your boss’s daughter?” said Sancia, impressed. “Wow. Gutsy.”
“As entertaining as Orso’s personal life is,” said Gregor loudly, “we should return to the issue at hand. How can we prevent Tomas Ziani from building up an arsenal of hierophantic weapons?”
“And how does he even plan to make them?” asked Berenice, paging through Tribuno’s notes. “It seems to be going wrong for him somehow…”
“Please, Sancia, go over what Ziani said,” said Orso. “Line by line.”
She did so, describing every word of the conversation she’d heard.
“So,” said Orso when she was finished. “He called it a shell. And described some…some kind of failed exchange?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He also mentioned a ritual. I don’t know why he called it a shell, though—shells have something inside them, usually.”
“And he thought the shell itself was the problem,” said Berenice. “The imperiats they’d made somehow weren’t exactly like the original imperiat.”
“Yeah. That seemed to be it.”
There was a pause. Then Berenice and Orso looked at each other in horror.
“It’s the Occidental alphabet,” Berenice said. “The lingai divina.”
“Yes,” said Orso faintly.
“He’s…he’s missing a piece. A sigil, or more. That’s got to be it!”
“Yes.” Orso heaved a deep sigh. “That’s why he’s been stealing Occidental artifacts. That’s why he stole my scrumming key! Of course. He wants to complete the alphabet. Or at least get enough of it to make a functional imperiat.”
“I’m lost,” said Gregor. “Alphabets?”
“We only have pieces of the Occidental alphabet of sigils,” said Berenice. “A handful here, a handful there. It’s the biggest obstacle to Occidental research. It’s like trying to solve a riddle in a foreign language where you only know the vowels.”
“I see,” said Gregor. “But if you steal enough samples—the bits and pieces and fragments that have the right sigils on them…”
“Then you can complete the alphabet,” said Orso. “You can finally speak the language to command your tools to have hierophantic capabilities. Theoretically. Though it sounds like that greasy bastard Ziani is having a time of it.”
“But he is getting help,” said Berenice. “It is Tribuno Candiano who’s writing the sigil strings to make rigs like the gravity plates, and the listening device. Only he’s doing it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, in his madness.”
“But that still doesn’t hang together for me,” said Orso. “The Tribuno I knew didn’t bother with the usual gravity bullshit so many scrivers wasted their lives on. His interests were far…grander.” He pulled a face, like remembering Tribuno’s interests disturbed him. “I feel like it just can’t be him.”
“The Tribuno you knew was sane,” said Gregor.
“True,” admitted Orso. “Either way, it sounds like Ziani does have all of Tribuno’s Occidental collection—that would be the trove that he’d moved out of the Mountain, right?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He mentioned some other artifacts he’d hidden away somewhere—mostly to hide it from you, Orso.”
Orso smirked. “Well. At least we’ve got the scrummer rattled. I suspect he’s been stealing Occidental artifacts from all kinds of people. He must have quite the hoard. And…there was that last bit…the one I find most confusing. They had to dispose of a body?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He made it sound like they’d been disposing of bodies for some time. Didn’t seem to matter whose bodies they were. I get the impression it had something to do with this ritual—but I don’t understand any of that.”
Gregor held up his hands. “We’re getting off track. Alphabets, hierophants, bodies—yes, all that is troubling. But the core issue is that Tomas Ziani intends to manufacture devices that can annihilate scriving on a mass scale. They would be as bolts in a vast quiver to him and his forces. But his entire strategy rests upon one item—the original imperiat. That’s the key to all of his ambitions.” He looked around at them. “So. If he were to lose that…”
“Then that would be a massive setback,” said Berenice.
“Yes,” said Gregor. “Lose the original, and he’ll have nothing to copy.”
<
br /> “And if Sancia is right, Tomas flat-out said where he was keeping it,” said Orso thoughtfully. He turned in his chair to look out the window.
Sancia followed his gaze. There, huddled in the distant cityscape of Tevanne, was a vast, arching dome, like a smooth, black growth in the center of the city: the Mountain of the Candianos.
“Ah, hell,” she sighed.
* * *
“It’s insane,” said Sancia, pacing. “The damned idea is insane!”
“Breaking into a foundry on a whim was pretty goddamn insane,” said Orso. “But you seemed game about that!”
“We caught them with their hose down,” said Sancia. “In an abandoned foundry in the middle of nowhere. That’s different from trying to break into the scrumming Mountain, maybe the most guarded place in the damned city, if not the world! I doubt if Berenice has some delightful trinket in her pockets that could help us get into there.”
“It is insane,” said Gregor. “But it is, regrettably, our only option. I doubt if Ziani can be lured out of the Mountain with the original imperiat. So we must go in.”
“You mean me,” said Sancia. “I doubt if your dumb asses will be the ones being dropped in there.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Gregor. “But I admit, I’ve no idea how to break into such a place. Orso—did you live there ever?”
“I did once,” said Orso. “When it was freshly built. That was a hell of a long time ago, it seems now.”
“You did?” asked Sancia. “Are the rumors true? Is it really…haunted?”
She half expected Orso to burst out laughing at the notion, but he didn’t. Instead he leaned back in his chair and said, “You know, I’m not sure. It’s…difficult to describe. It’s big, for one thing. The sheer size of the thing is a feat in and of itself. It’s like a city in there. But that wasn’t the oddest thing. The oddest thing about the Mountain was that it remembered.”
Foundryside: A Novel (The Founders Trilogy) Page 31
