“Y-you made the gravity plates?” asked Sancia, surprised.
“I made it all,” said Estelle, eyes locked on Tomas’s. “I did everything for him. Through hints and nudges, over years and years, I led him to my father’s Occidental collection. I used my father to feed him my scriving innovations—listening rigs, gravity plates, and much, much more. I got him to do everything I could not, everything that I was not allowed to do.” She leaned close to Tomas’s frozen face. “I have done more than you, so much more than you, with you acting as an obstacle every step of the way. With you castigating me, and ignoring me, and grabbing me and…and…”
She paused, and swallowed.
This Sancia understood well. “He thought you his property,” she said.
“A regrettable heirloom, perhaps,” said Estelle quietly. “But no matter. I took that and made an advantage of it as best I could. I’ve rarely had the luxury of pride. So perhaps it didn’t hurt quite as much as it should have.”
Sancia looked at Tomas, and saw he was now strangely bent in places. He was like an iron drum that had been crinkled and crumpled after a few years of hard use.
“What…what the hell are you doing to him?” asked Sancia.
“I am subjecting him to the same thing he and my father subjected me to,” said Estelle. “Pressure.”
Sancia pulled a face, watching as Tomas appeared to…retract. Just ever so slightly. “So his gravity…”
“Every thirty seconds, it increases by a tenth,” said Estelle. “So as it accelerates, its acceleration accelerates…”
“And he still feels…”
“Everything,” said Estelle softly.
“Oh my God,” said Sancia, appalled.
“Why do you react with such horror? Don’t you wish this man dead for what he did to you? For capturing you, for beating you, for slashing your head open?”
“Sure I do,” said Sancia. “Man’s a shit. But that doesn’t mean you’re decent. I mean, even though I might sympathize with you, that doesn’t mean you’re going to let me go, does it? I’d ruin your chance to get at all that money.”
“For money?” said Estelle. “Oh, girl…This isn’t for money.”
“Besides that and killing Tomas, what could it have been about? Or…is a Candiano a Candiano? You think you can make Occidental tools? You’ll succeed where your father failed?”
Estelle smiled coldly. “Forget Occidental tools. What no one knows is—who were the hierophants? How did they get to be what they were? The answer was there in front of my father’s face, the whole time. And I’d solved it ages ago. He never listened to me. And I knew Tomas wouldn’t. Yet I needed the resources to prove it.” She paced around Tomas again. “A collection of energies. All thoughts captured in one person’s being. And the grand privileges of the lingai divina—these are reserved for the deathless, for those who take and give life.” She grinned and looked at Sancia. “Don’t you see? Don’t you understand?”
Sancia’s skin crawled. “You…you mean…”
“The hierophants made themselves the same way they made their devices,” said Estelle. “They took the minds and souls of others—and invested them in their very bodies.”
Sancia watched, sickened, as Tomas’s form began to shudder, as if it were being liquefied. Then his eyes began to fill with blood. “Oh God…”
“A single human form!” cried Estelle, triumphant. “Yet within it, dozens, hundreds, thousands of minds and thoughts…A person brimming over with vitality, with meaning, with power, swirling reality around themselves, able to not just patch over reality but change it with a whim…”
Tomas’s body crumpled inward, collapsing in on itself, his shattering arms and chest erupting with blood that then, in full defiance of physics, shrank back into his body, forced in by his unnatural gravity.
“You’re scrumming insane,” Sancia said.
“No!” Estelle laughed. “I’m just well read. I waited for so long for Tomas to collect all the tools and resources I need, all the ancient sigils. I was so patient. But then old Orso presented a wonderful opportunity. And, as they say, you never turn down an opportunity…” She reached into her robes and took out something glimmering and gold—a long, oddly-toothed key.
Sancia stared. “Clef…”
“Clef?” said Estelle. “You have a name for it? That’s rather pathetic, isn’t it?”
“You…you scrumming bitch!” said Sancia, furious. “How did you get him? How did you…” Then she stopped. “Where’s…Where’s Gregor?”
Estelle turned to look at her husband.
“What did you do?” demanded Sancia. “What did you do to Gregor? What did you do to him?”
“I did what was necessary,” said Estelle, “to gain my freedom. Wouldn’t you?”
Sancia stared, disgusted and terrified, as Tomas’s body slowly lost form and shape, turning into a boiling ball of blood and viscera, which shrank, and shrank, and shrank…
“If you hurt him,” said Sancia. “If you hurt him, you, you…”
“It could have been worse.” She gestured at the monstrous sight before her. “I could have put him through this.”
Tomas’s body was now about the size of a small cannonball. It was shuddering slightly in the air, as if it could no longer bear the pressure.
Estelle stood up tall, and despite her mussed hair and her smeared makeup, her eyes were bright and hard and commanding, and suddenly Sancia understood why people had thought Tribuno Candiano a king. “Tomorrow I shall do what my father always dreamt of, but never accomplished. And at the same time, I will take away all he valued, and all you valued as well, husband. I will become Company Candiano. And then I will collect all that I have been denied!”
And then the small, red ball that had once been Tomas Ziani simply…popped.
* * *
There was a loud, curious coughing sound, and the room instantly filled with a fine, swirling red mist. Sancia shut her eyes and turned her head away as she felt warm drops stippling her face and neck.
She heard Estelle sputtering and spitting somewhere in the room. “Ugh. Ugh! I suppose I hadn’t thought of that…But every design does have its limit.”
Sancia tried not to shake. She tried not to think of Clef in Estelle’s hands, of what she could have done to poor Gregor. Focus. What can I do now? How can I get out of this?
Estelle spat some more, coughed, and called out, “It’s done!”
The red mist continued to settle. There was the sound of footsteps in the hallway beyond. Two Candiano soldiers walked in. They did not seem surprised by the sight of all these corpses, or the whole room coated in a thin layer of blood.
“Shall we burn them as discussed, ma’am?” asked one.
“Yes, Captain,” said Estelle. She was now red from head to foot, and she cradled the imperiat and Clef in her hands like twin infants. “I am quite eager to finally play with these on my own, but…Have we seen any movements from the Dandolos?”
“Not yet, ma’am.”
“Good. Arrange for my escort to the Mountain, and mobilize our forces,” said Estelle. “The entire Candiano campo must be locked down and patrolled from now until midnight. Issue orders suggesting Tomas has gone missing—and we suspect foul play.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Sancia listened closely. And that word—“orders”—suddenly gave her an idea.
She took a breath, focused on the shackles again—and realized she’d been thinking of them wrong.
She’d been focused purely on the shackles, on the bands of steel, and what they expected or wanted—but she hadn’t realized there might be more to the system.
What’s breath but not a breath?
There were the restraints for her ankles and wrists, yes. But now that she searched them, she realized the shackles were eagerly awai
ting a signal from another part of the rig—one she’d totally missed, set on the end of the operating table.
She looked down, and saw this component was small, set on the edge of the stone surface. She reviewed its commands, and saw it was constructed similarly to how Orso had described the aural relay device: a thin, delicate needle, trapped in a cage, that moved with vibrations of sound…only, it needed to move in a specific fashion.
Of course, thought Sancia. Of course!
She nearly sighed with triumph. It must be like a safe word—someone could say the right phrase aloud, and the needle would move in just the right way, and then the shackles would pop open…
This was frustrating. She wondered how Clef would have figured this out. He always phrased and rephrased questions or ideas until they didn’t break the rules, in essence—so how to do that here?
She got an idea.
A long pause. Then the shackles said,
She swallowed, relieved. Of course, she thought. Because asking about phonetics, not words, doesn’t break the rules.
<…Yes,> said the shackles.
She took a breath. So the password starts with an “m.” Now I just need to keep guessing—as fast as I can.
“And the girl?” said the guard.
“Dispose of her,” said Estelle. “However you like. She is of no consequence.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He saluted as Estelle turned and left, leaving him alone in the room with Sancia.
Shit! thought Sancia. She started guessing, faster and faster—and she realized then that she could communicate faster with rigs than she could with people. Just like when there’d been a sudden, impenetrable burst of messages between Clef and a rig, she could focus her thoughts and ask dozens if not hundreds of questions at once.
Her mind became a chorus of noes with the occasional yes. And slowly, steadily, she assembled the password in her mind.
The guard walked over and looked down at her. His eyes were small and watery and deep set. He looked her over with the air of a man reviewing a meal and wrinkled his nose. “Hm. Not really my type…”
“Uh-huh,” said Sancia. She shut her eyes, ignored him, and focused on her restraints.
“You praying, girl?”
“No,” said Sancia. She opened her eyes.
“You going to make any noise?” he asked. He thoughtlessly pinched the fabric of his trousers, just next to his crotch, and started kneading it back and forth. “I don’t mind that, honestly. But it’d be a bit inconvenient, with the boys in the hall…”
“The only noise I’m going to make,” she said, “is mango.”
“Is wha—”
With a pop! all of Sancia’s shackles swung open.
The guard stared, and said, “What in the h—”
Sancia sat up, snatched his hand, stuffed his wrist into the shackles, and snapped them shut.
Stunned, the guard stared at his hand and heaved at it. It didn’t budge. “You…You…”
Sancia jumped off the table and smashed the listening needle in the cage. “There. Now you’ll stay put.”
“Clemente!” he bellowed. “She’s loose, she’s loose! Send everyone, everyone!”
Sancia punched the guard in the side of the head as hard as she could. He staggered and slipped, his hand still stuck in the shackles. Before he could react, she knelt and unsheathed his scrived rapier.
She looked at the blade, alight with commands. She could see it was made to amplify gravity, to believe it’d been hurled through the air with inhuman force.
Then there were footsteps in the hallway—lots of them. Sancia took stock of the situation. The hallway beyond was the only exit, and it was rapidly filling up with guards, from the sound of it. She had just the sword on her—and, given her new talents, that gave her a considerable advantage. But probably not enough to take on a dozen men with espringals and the like.
She looked around the room. The far wall was made of stone, and her talents allowed her to glimpse the commands on the other side. These were fainter and more difficult to read, probably due to the distance—but she could see that one rig was scrived to be unnaturally dense, almost unbreakable, a thin, rectangular plate seemingly set in the wall…
A foundry window, she thought. And she’d had recent experience with those.
She addressed the rapier:
The guards were close now. Sancia put the sword on the ground and stood on it with both feet. Then she picked it back up, took a few steps away from the far wall, and lifted the blade.
She aimed carefully. Then she hurled the sword forward, dropped to the floor behind the table, and covered her head.
It had been a stupefyingly easy thing to do, really. The sword’s weight had been essentially undefined, so she’d just stood on the blade and told it that this new weight it was experiencing was the sword’s actual weight.
But this definition only mattered when its scrivings were activated—specifically, when it was swung at the proper speed. Which included being thrown.
Now when the sword activated its scrivings, it did not think it was as heavy as twenty six-pound rapiers, but rather twenty hundred-and-sixteen-pound rapiers. And then, of course, it amplified its gravity, which made the effect even more extreme.
When the rapier hit the far stone wall, it was like it’d been struck by a boulder falling off the side of a mountain. There was a tremendous crash, shrapnel and debris rained throughout the room, and dust filled the air.
Sancia lay on the ground, covering her head and neck with her hands as the pebbles and rocks rained down on her. Then she stood and dashed through the hole in the wall to the window on the far side of the room.
She barely had time to look out—she was about sixty feet up above the Candiano campo. Like a lot of the Candiano campo, this area was deserted, but there was a wide canal just below the wall. She jumped up and shoved the window open. Then she lifted herself up, through, and over, and then she hung on the window of the foundry, reviewing her options to descend.
She heard the sounds of shouts within, and looked up through the window to see seven Candiano soldiers charge in. They stared at her, hanging there on the window, and raised their espringals.
For a moment, she debated what to do. She knew the window was scrived to be unnaturally durable. But she knew at a glance that the soldiers’ espringals were quite advanced.
The hell with it, she thought. She turned and leapt off the window, arms outstretched for the canal below.
She tumbled, end over end. She heard the window explode above her, and she opened her eyes. And then she saw.
Even though she had no mind for it, she nearly cried, “Oh my God!” as she fell. Yet not out of fear, or dismay—but rather wonder.
For she was still seeing the scrivings around her. And as she fell, she did something more, something she had no idea she could do: it was like there was a floodgate in her mind, and out of fear or wonder or instinct, it opened up just as she opened her eyes…
Sancia saw the nightscape of Tevanne below her, suddenly rendered in the juddering, jangly tangles of silver scrivings, thousands and thousands and thousands of them, like a dark mountain range covered in tiny candles. She watched in wonder as the scrived bolts hissed through the air above her, glittering like falling stars as they sped out over the city, a city that swarmed with minds and thoughts and desires like a forest full of fireflies.
It’s like the night sky, she thought as she fell. No, it’s even more beautiful than that…
The canal waters rose up to her, and she crashed through.
* * *
Sancia swam through unspeakable filth, through rot and flotsam and jetsam, through scum and industrial slurry. She swam until her body was as overwhelmed as her mind, until her shoulders were like fire and her legs like lead, until she finally crawled onto the muddy channel shores below the white Dandolo walls, exhausted and trembling.
Slowly, she stood. Then, filthy, reeking, and bloody, she turned and faced the sight of smoky, foggy, starlit Tevanne, stretched out beneath the skies.
She focused, and opened the floodgates inside of her. She saw Tevanne alight with thought and words and commands, all faint and flickering, like spectral candles burning under the purple morning skies.
Foundryside: A Novel (The Founders Trilogy) Page 44
