A hatch. A shaft.
She took her hand away, shook herself, and withdrew back down the hallway until she found a small door. A sign on the front read: LEXICON MAINTENANCE ACCESS. The lock on the front was deeply forbidding.
She took Clef out and stuck him in the keyhole. There was a burst of information, and Clef batted the lock’s defenses away like it was a wall of straw.
Sancia climbed until she came to the third floor. She turned until she was facing the door, and blindly found the handle.
She did as he asked, came to the fourth floor, and opened the hatch. This floor, unlike the others, had windows. Slashes of moonlight lay scattered across the blank stone floor. It looked like this area was mostly storage—lots of boxes, but not much else.
She glanced out a nearby window, got her bearings, and started off toward the administrative offices.
She smiled.
* * *
Berenice huddled in a doorway beyond the foundry walls, squinting at the windows through a spyglass. She found it hard to focus. Despite her occasional dabbling in campo intrigue, she was not at all accustomed to such high-stakes trickery. She certainly hadn’t expected anyone to climb any buildings tonight, let alone break into a damned foundry.
Still, it seemed Sancia was right: something was going on, there on the third floor. She could make out a handful of people inside—but they seemed to be slowly gravitating toward the administrative offices.
That’s less than optimal, she thought. How will Sancia manage to get i—
She stopped.
Was that a window opening? There on the dark fourth floor?
She watched, openmouthed, as a small figure in black slipped out of the fourth-floor window and clung to the corner of the building.
“Ohhh my God,” said Berenice.
* * *
Sancia hung tight to the corner of the foundry, her fingers digging into the narrow gaps in the stones. She’d held on to trickier places in her time—but not many.
She slipped down inch by inch to the next floor. She found a dark window, which meant no one would be inside, hopefully. She wedged her boots into the stone, then reached out with her stiletto and inserted its tip into the gap at the top of the closed window. She gently pushed the handle of the blade until the window started opening. Once she’d gotten it open a crack, she pulled back until it was wide open. Then she climbed up and lowered herself down into the gap.
Clef said,
She slipped off the desk and got her bearings. This seemed to be a large, empty meeting room, one that hadn’t been used in some time. She walked over to the door opposite the window and squinted through the keyhole. There was some kind of a wide, open area beyond, with four armored Candiano guards standing around, looking bored and tired.
“Whoof,” she said quietly. She stepped back and looked around. There were two other doors on the left and right, presumably leading to adjoining offices.
She walked over to the door on the right and tried the handle. It was unlocked. She silently opened it and looked in. Another office, empty and dark.
She closed it and went to the final door. Yet as she approached…
She stopped.
Sancia got close to the door, knelt, and pressed a hand to the floor. She let the floor pour into her mind—a difficult thing, since there were so many scrivings wearing her stamina thin. Yet soon she felt it…
A bare foot. Just one, the ball of the foot pressed into the floor. And it was pumping, up and down.
Sancia peered through the keyhole. This office was somewhat grand. There were scrived lanterns inside, a long desk covered with old, wrinkled papers, and a set of wooden boxes. There was also a bed in the far corner, and there were two people on the bed, a man and a woman—and they were quite naked and obviously coupling, the man keeping one foot on the floor and his other knee on the bed.
Due to her condition, Sancia did not know a great deal about sex, but she got the impression that this was not particularly good sex. The woman was quite young, about her own age, and terribly pretty, and though her face was fixed in an expression of pleasure there was something anxious and artificial about it, like she was dreading the displeasure of the man more than she was enjoying the experience. And though the man had his back turned to her—his skinny, pale back—there was a mechanical and determined quality to his thrusting, like he’d set his mind to do a job and was hell-bent on doing it.
Sancia watched them, wondering what to do now. She didn’t think she could sneak out and snatch the papers off the desk. The girl kept looking around, anxious and yet bored, like she’d prefer to look at anything else than what was being done to her.
Then there was a knock from somewhere within the office—there must be another door there, she guessed, also leading to the open area beyond.
“Just a minute!” shouted the man, somewhat angrily. He doubled the pace of his thrusting. The girl cringed.
Another knock. “Sir?” said a muffled voice. “Mr. Ziani? It’s done.”
The man continued his endeavors.
“You said to notify you immediately,” said the voice.
The man stopped and bowed his head in frustration. The girl watched him warily.
said Clef.
“Just a second!” shouted the man, louder. Then he turned and dug around on the floor for his clothes.
Sancia’s eyes shot wide. Though it wasn’t particularly bright in the room, she knew that face—the curls, the scraggly beard, the narrow cheeks.
It was her client. The man who’d turned on the imperiat that night in the Greens, and caused the blackouts—and the man who’d almost certainly had Sark killed.
* * *
She stared at him, trying not to move.
used and sexually frustrated. But then she remembered the guards mere feet away from them, and thought better of it.
Ziani pulled on a pair of hose. Then he sighed and barked, “Come in!”
A door opened somewhere in the office, and bright light spilled in. The nude girl in the bed pulled the sheets up to cover herself, glaring at them sullenly.
“Ignore her,” snapped Ziani. “And come in.”
A man entered the room and shut the door behind him. He appeared to be a clerk of some sorts, dressed in Candiano colors, and he carried a small wooden box with him.
“I assume if it was a success,” said Ziani, sitting at the desk, “you’d be looking much happier.”
“Did you expect a success, sir?” said the clerk, surprised.
Ziani impatiently waved a hand. “Just bring it over.”
The clerk approached and held out the box. Ziani took it, glaring at him, and opened it.
Sancia almost gasped. Inside the box was another imperiat—but this one appeared to be made of bronze, not the gleaming gold she’d seen before.
Ziani examined it. “It’s shit,” he said. “It’s shit, is what it is. What happened?”
“The…the same thing that’s always happened, sir,” said the clerk. He was obviously uncomfortable having this conversation with a nude girl in the room. “We forged the device to your specifications. Then we attempted the exchange…and, ah, well. Nothing happened. The device remained as you see it now.”
Ziani sighed and pawed through the notes on the desk. He pulled out one browned, wrinkled sheet of parchment and examined it.
“Perhaps…” said the clerk. Then he stopped.
“Perhaps?” said Ziani.
“Perhaps, sir, since Tribuno has been of such great help on the other devices…Perhaps you could also discuss his notes with him, regarding this subject?”
Ziani tossed the papers back onto the desk. Sancia watched the page fall. Tribuno Candiano’s notes? On what?
“Tribuno is still mad as a tick on a burning hare’s ass,” Ziani said. “And he’s only been somewhat useful. About once a month, we find something scrawled in his cell that, yes, is useful—like the strings for the gravity plates—but it’s not like we can control that. And he’s written shit-all about the hierophants.”
There was a silence. Both the girl and the clerk watched Ziani anxiously, wondering what he’d make them do next.
“The problem is with the shell itself,” said Ziani, looking at the bronze imperiat. “Not the ritual. We’re following the ritual’s instructions exactly. So there must be some sigil we’re missing…Some component of the original we either don’t have or aren’t using right.”
“Do you think we need to reexamine the other artifacts, sir?”
“Absolutely not. It took a lot of work to move the trove out of the Mountain. I wouldn’t want to lead Ignacio or any other of these slippery bastards to it just because I wanted to check notes.” He tapped the bronze imperiat before him. “We’re doing something wrong. Something on these is being made improperly…”
“So…what would you suggest we do, sir?”
“Experiment.” Ziani stood and started getting dressed. “I want a hundred of the shells made before morning and sent to the Mountain,” he said. “Enough for us to experiment on and adjust, comparing it with the original.”
The clerk stared at him. “A hundred? Before morning? But…sir, the Cattaneo’s lexicon is at a reduced state right now. To produce that many, we’d have to spin it up quickly.”
“So?”
“So…the lexicon will spike. It will definitely cause nausea for all of us, I expect.”
Ziani was still. “Do you think I’m stupid?” he asked.
The room grew tense. The girl shrank down below the sheets.
“C-certainly not, sir,” said the clerk.
“Because it feels like you might,” said Ziani. He turned to look at him. “Just because I’m not a scriver. Just because I don’t have as many certifications as you. Because of that—you think I don’t know these things?”
“Sir, I just…”
“It’s a risk,” said Ziani. “And an acceptable one. Do it. I’ll supervise the fabrication.” He pointed at the girl. “You stay there. It’s far too long since I waxed an agreeable cunny, and I won’t have this dull bit of business delay that, either.” He buttoned up his shirt, his face twisted in faint disdain. “I certainly won’t deign to go pawing around Estelle’s musty skirts for a bit of push.”
“And…sir?”
“Yes?” snapped Ziani.
“What should we do with the corpse?”
“The same thing we’ve done with all the others? I mean, why should I know? We have people for that, don’t we?”
Ziani and the clerk left the office and shut the door behind them. The girl slowly shut her eyes, sighing half in relief, half in dismay.
Sancia silently slid out her bamboo pipe and loaded it with a dart.
said Clef.
Sancia waited for a few minutes, making sure they were really gone. Then she silently opened the door a crack, trained the pipe on the girl’s neck, and blew.
The girl made a soft, “Ah!” as the dart struck her neck. She tensed, drunkenly slapped at her neck, fell back, and was still.
Sancia slipped into the room and went to the other office door. She peered through the keyhole and confirmed no one was approaching. Then she looked at the papers and boxes on the desk.
She picked up the thing Ziani had called the “shell”—his term for the bronze imperiat, which apparently did not work. She found he was right: it was little more than a curiosity, a dull, dead hunk of metal. Though it bore many strange sigils, it was not a true scrived device.
She tried to, and shivered.
She looked at the papers on the desk, and saw most were yellow with age, and written in a strange, spidery hand, like the hand of someone who was either old, infirm, or both.
She looked at the top of one paper:
THEORIES ON THE INTENT OF HIEROPHANTIC TOOLS
The notes of Tribuno Candiano, she thought. The greatest scriver of our age…There were a lot of them, and she understood few at a glance.
But some of the papers were different. They appeared to be wax rubbings of stone engravings or tables or bas-reliefs…But what they depicted was confusing.
Each one showed an altar, always an altar, positioned at the center of each paper. Floating above the altar was the image of a prone, sexless human body—perhaps it was an artistic rendition of someone lying on the altar’s surface. Floating above the human body was always an oversized sword or blade, several times the size of the altar or the person. Written inside the blade were any number of complicated sigils, which varied from engraving to engraving, but all of them had these three things in common: the body, the altar, and the blade.
There was something gruesomely clinical to it all. They did not depict some religious rite, it felt. Instead, they seemed like…
Clef moaned, a sound suggesting both pain and epiphany.
Then her head lit up with agony.
* * *
It was like the world was dissolving, like a meteor had struck the earth, like the walls had been turned to ash and cinder…She was still in the office, still standing next to that sleeping girl, but there was a hot coal in her brain, burning it away, scorching the walls of her skull. She opened her mouth in silent pain and was surprised when smoke didn’t come pouring out.
Sancia fell to her knees and vomited. It’s the lexicon spiking, she tried to tell herself. That’s all it is…You’re just…sensitive to it…
Clef cried out joyously:
She felt warmth running down her face, and saw drops of blood on the floor below her.
Images leaked into her mind. The dusty smell of the office faded, and she smelled…
Desert hills. Cool night breezes.
Then she heard the hiss of sand, and the sound of millions of wings, and she was gone.
* * *
Berenice peered through the spyglass, watching for Sancia. The girl had abruptly sunk to the ground and fallen out of view—which seemed odd.
Foundryside Page 30
