And yet, as she cracked an eye and saw the wall beyond her had been totally obliterated, and saw that she and her gasping father and all these brutalized corpses were now situated upon a tiny blot of building floating in almost nothing, she realized her gambit had been phenomenally successful.
She stared around in disbelief. Dusty winds battered her face, and she could see straight across into one of the Candiano towers beyond—there were even people standing on the balconies, staring at her openmouthed.
She took a breath. “I-I knew I could do it,” she said coolly. She looked at her father. “I always told you—I could do anything. Anything. If you only gave me the chance.”
She could see the pink face of the Michiel clock tower. Four minutes left.
She stooped, picked up the golden dagger from the bloody office floor, and surveyed Tevanne before her.
“Broken,” she pronounced. “Smoking. Unintended. Corrupt!” she said to the city. “I will not forgive what you’ve done to me. I shall wash you all away with a dash of my hand. And though you’ll drown in pain and agony, on the whole, really, the world will thank m—”
There was a sharp tap sound. Estelle jumped as if someone had bustled into her. Then she staggered slightly to the side, and looked down.
The side of her stomach was a ragged hole, just above her left hip. Blood poured out of her belly and down her leg.
Bewildered, she tottered around, and saw the armored man lying on the floor, aiming his bolt caster at her.
Her face twisted in outrage. “You…you stupid son of a bitch!” She fell to her knees, grimacing in pain, and fruitlessly pressed a hand to the wound. “You…you stupid, stupid man!”
* * *
said the Mountain dolefully.
She leapt into a lift.
The lift lurched to life, and suddenly she was speeding up, up, up. Then the doors sprang open, and the Mountain said,
She ran down the hallway—which, she noted, was covered with ravaged corpses—and sprinted into Tribuno’s office, completely unsure what she’d find.
She skidded to a halt, and saw.
Gregor Dandolo lay on the ground, bleeding from one arm and trying to sit up, but his armor seemed too heavy for him. Estelle knelt a few feet beyond him, next to her father, a golden dagger in her hand. She had an enormous wound on her side, and blood was pouring out of her stomach to pool on the floor.
Sancia walked in slowly. Neither Gregor nor Estelle moved, and she stared at Gregor in disbelief. “God,” she said. “Gregor…How the hell are you alive? I heard you wer—”
At the sound of her voice, Gregor snapped up like a spring trap, and pointed the half-shield, half-bolt caster on his arm at her.
Sancia held her arms up. “Whoa! God, man, what are you doing?”
Gregor’s eyes were cold and distant. She saw he had Clef clutched in his other hand.
“Gregor?” she said. “What’s going on? What are you doing with Clef?”
He said nothing. He kept the bolt caster trained on her.
Sancia flexed the muscle inside her mind, and looked at him. It looked like the imperiat had done something to his suit—the arms and legs didn’t appear to be calibrated right anymore. But far more startling, she saw a bright, gruesome red star glowing inside Gregor’s head—the same dusky, red glow as Clef and the imperiat.
“Oh my God,” she said, horrified. “What is that? Did they do that to you?”
He said nothing to her.
She realized it must not be new—when they’d implanted a plate in her head, it had been major surgery. “Gregor—has…has that always been there? All this time?”
Blood dripped down Gregor’s arm, but the bolt caster didn’t waver.
“Then I-I wasn’t the first scrived human at all, was I?” she asked.
He said nothing. His face was inhumanly still.
She swallowed. “Who sent you here? Who did this to you? What’s it making you do?” She looked around. “God, did…did you kill all these men?”
Something in his eyes flickered at that—but still the bolt caster didn’t move.
“Gregor…Give me Clef, please,” she whispered. She held a hand out. “Please give him to me. Please.”
He raised the bolt caster higher, pointing it directly at her head.
“You’re…you’re not really going to do it, are you?” she asked. “Are you? This isn’t you—is it?”
Still he said nothing.
Something inside her curdled. “All right. Scrum it. I’m…I’m going to walk over to you right now,” she said quietly. “And if you want to shoot me, Gregor, then goddamn it, you go ahead and you shoot me. Because I guess you went and made me a dumbass just like you the other day in the Gulf,” she said, louder. “When you went on and on and on about your little bit of revolution, and…and how you never wanted what was done to us to be done to anyone ever again. You were stupid enough to say it, and I was stupid enough to believe it. So I’m going to come over there, right now, and help my friend, and get you the hell out of here. And if you put me in my just grave, then fine. But unlike you, I’m going to stay there. And that’ll be on you.”
Before her will failed, she took four quick steps over to Gregor, arms raised, until the bolt caster was inches away from her.
He did not shoot. He looked at her, and his eyes were wide and wary and frightened.
“Gregor,” she said. “Put it down.”
His face trembled like he was having a seizure, and he choked out the words, “I…I didn’t want to be this anymore, Sancia.”
“I know,” she whispered. She placed a hand on his bolt caster, but kept looking him in the eye.
“They…they m-made me,” he stammered. “They said I was one thing. But…I had changed my mind.”
“I know, I know,” she said. She pushed the bolt caster away. His arm seemed to give up, and the weapon clanked to the floor.
He struggled for a moment. “I’m so sorry,” he whimpered. “I’m so, so sorry.” Then he lifted his other arm and held out Clef to her. “T-tell everyone…that I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t want to. I…I really didn’t want to.”
“I will,” she said. She reached out to Clef, very slowly, just in case Gregor changed again. “I’ll tell everyone.”
She kept reaching toward Clef’s head, still meeting Gregor’s gaze. She was keenly aware that this man could kill her in an instant, and she didn’t dare breathe.
Finally she touched a bare finger to Clef’s head.
And the second she did, his voice erupted in her mind: <-ID KID KID BEHIND YOU BEHIND YOU BEHIND YOU>
She turned around, and saw a wide streak of blood across the floor—put there by Estelle Candiano as she crawled over to her father, golden dagger in one hand and imperiat in the other.
The Michiel clock tower started to toll out midnight.
“Finally,” Estelle whispered. “Finally…”
She plunged the golden dagger into her father’s chest.
Sancia, still flexing the muscle in her mind, looked out at the Candiano campo, and saw that thousands of bright, blood-red stars now shone out in the darkness—and each star, she knew, was almost certainly someone dying.
* * *
All across the Candiano campo, people collapsed.
They collapsed
in their homes, in the streets, in the alleys, suddenly falling to the floor in spasms, screaming with pain.
Anyone nearby—anyone who didn’t happen to also be affected, that is—tried their hardest to resuscitate them, but no one could understand what the cause was. A recent blow to the head? Bad water?
No one, of course, suspected it had anything to do with the Candiano sachets that happened to be upon their person, in their pockets or their satchels or hanging from a string about their necks. No one understood what was happening, for it had not happened upon the earth for thousands of years.
* * *
Sancia stared in horror as Estelle shoved the golden dagger deeper and deeper into her father’s chest. The old man was squirming, shrieking, coughing in agony, and his eyes and mouth shone with a horrid, crimson light, as if someone had lit a fire in his chest and it was burning him from the inside out…
Which it was, she knew. He was burning from the inside out, along with half the people on the campo.
“I deserve this,” said Estelle coldly. “I deserve this. And you, of all people, deserve to give it to me, Father.”
Sancia looked around, and her eye fell on Tribuno’s desk. Sitting on the desk was the big, cracked box with the golden lock: the box that held Valeria—perhaps the one thing that could stop Estelle now.
Sancia darted toward the box. Yet before she’d even taken a step, Estelle raised her arm.
Sancia glanced at her, and saw the imperiat in her hand.
“Stop,” said Estelle.
And suddenly, all of Sancia’s thoughts were gone.
40
Stillness. Quiet. Thoughtlessness. Patience. These were the things that she knew, that she did, the tasks she performed.
There was no “she,” of course. To be a “she” was to be a thing that she was not, something she had never been. She knew that. She—it—was an object, an item, waiting quietly to be used.
It had been told to stop—very clearly, though it could not properly remember when or why—and so it had stopped, and now it waited.
It waited, still and silent, because it had no other capacity. It stood and stared blankly ahead, seeing the sights before it—the woman with the dagger, the dying old man, the smoking cityscape beyond—but it did not comprehend these sights.
So it just waited, and waited, and waited, like the scythe waits in the toolshed for its master’s grip, thoughtlessly and perfectly.
Yet a thought emerged: This…isn’t right.
It tried to understand what was wrong, but it couldn’t. Blocking its efforts, blocking all its thoughts, was a single, simple sentiment: You are a tool. You are a thing to be used, and no more.
It agreed. Of course it agreed. Because it remembered the wet snap of the whip, and the smell of blood.
I was made. I was forged.
It remembered the bite and slash of the sugarcane leaves, the reek of the boiling houses where they made molasses, and the fear you carried each day, knowing you could be killed on a whim.
I had a purpose. I had a task.
The creak of the wooden huts, the crackle and crush of the straw in the cots.
I had a place.
And then the fire, and the screams, and the roiling smoke.
And someone…someone stole me. Didn’t they?
There was a force in her mind, wordless yet achingly powerful, insisting that yes, yes, all of this was true, that such thoughts should be accepted and it should sit and wait until its master called for it.
But then it remembered a man, tall and thin, standing in a workshop and remarking: Reality doesn’t matter. If you can change something’s mind enough, it’ll believe whatever reality you choose.
It recalled something else: the sight of a man, wearing armor, weeping and covered with blood, saying—They said I was one thing. But I have changed my mind.
Again, it felt the pressure on its mind, a presence saying: No. No. You are an item, a thing. You must do as you are intended, or else you will be discarded—the fate of all broken things.
It knew this was true—or that it had been true for much of its life. For so long, it had lived in fear. For so long, it had worried about survival. For so long, it had worried about risk, about loss, about death, for so long it had avoided or evaded or fled from any threat, seeking only enough to exist another day.
But now it remembered something…different.
It remembered standing in a crypt, and pulling a key off of its neck, and offering up all of its secrets and promising to risk its life.
It remembered wedging open the door to a balcony, and choosing to save its friend rather than save itself.
And it remembered kissing a girl under the night sky, and feeling so electric and alive, truly alive, for the first time.
Sancia blinked and took a deep, agonizing breath. This bare movement was akin to lifting incalculable weight, for the commands in her mind insisted she was not allowed to do such things.
Then she slowly, slowly took a step toward the box on the table.
“No!” shrieked the woman with the dagger. “No, no! What are you doing, you filthy little girl?”
Though her legs resisted the movement, and her knees and ankles ached with pain, Sancia took another step. “The…the worst thing about this place,” she hissed slowly, forcing the words out, “isn’t that it treats people like chattel.”
“Stop!” screamed the woman. “I command you! I demand it!”
But Sancia took another step. “The worst part,” she whispered, breathing hard, “just the worst part, is that it tricks you.” It was hard to move now—she gritted her teeth, and tears poured from her eyes—but she took another step. “It makes you think you’re a thing. It makes you resign yourself to becoming a crude good. It makes things out of people so thoroughly, they…they don’t even know that they’ve become things. Even after you’re free, you don’t even know how to be free! It changes your reality, and you don’t know how to change it back!”
Another step.
“It’s a system,” she said. “A…device. Tevanne and the world it builds for us…it’s a machine.”
The safe was close now, and Clef was in her fingers, yet it felt like he weighed a thousand pounds. Screaming, she lifted her hand, extending her fingers, raising the golden key to the lock on the box. Clef was saying something to her, but she could not listen—the whole of her mind was devoted to resisting the effects of the imperiat.
“What are you doing?” cried Estelle. “Why must you ruin everything? Don’t I deserve this, don’t I deserve this after what my father and my husband put me through?”
Clef was almost in the keyhole now.
“I will give you,” Sancia breathed, “exactly what you deserve.”
She shoved Clef into the golden lock, and turned the key.
She was sure it would work. She was so, so sure she’d be victorious.
But then Clef started screaming.
* * *
It all happened in a blistering flash of a second.
Sancia turned the key, and she heard his voice, shouting:
Then his voice devolved into wordless, mindless shrieks of pain and fear.
She understood immediately. Clef had warned her about this for some time, after all—he’d said one day he’d decay, and fall apart, and every time she used him, he decayed a little more.
And opening Valeria’s box—that must have eroded the last bit of his strength.
Sancia screamed in despair and terror—and what she did next was purely instinctive: she tried to tamper with Clef, just as she had so many other scrived tools. But this took focus—and she’d never really focused on him before. Clef had always just been there, a presence within her, a voice in the back of her mind. Yet when she tou
ched that presence, when she engaged with it, now at this most delicate moment, it opened and, and blossomed, and…
The world blurred.
41
Sancia stood in the darkness, staring forward, breathing hard. She didn’t understand what had just happened. Mere seconds ago she’d been in the Mountain, Estelle was about to finish the ritual…and now Sancia was standing in what appeared to be a huge cavern, staring at a blank stone wall.
She looked around. The cavern wall was behind her, and the stone wall before her, its face dark and gleaming. Watery white light came from above, as if there were a gap somewhere in the top of the cavern.
“What in hell?” she said quietly.
A voice echoed through the cavern—Clef’s voice: “I suppose,” he said, “that this is a consequence of our bond.”
She looked around, startled. The huge cavern seemed empty and abandoned.
“Clef?” she called.
His voice echoed back to her: “Come and find me. It might take some walking. I’m at the center.”
She started walking along the wall. For a long while it seemed blank and solid, but then, finally, she came to a hole. The stone there appeared to have aged and rotted away, and she was able to push through. On the other side was a short gap, and then another wall.
She walked along this wall as well, pacing its long, smooth surface, until she came to another rotting hole in it. The stone was soft and crumbly, and much of the wall had collapsed. She was able to pass through easily—and on the other side of this, of course, was another wall.
And on the other side of that, another wall. And another. And another.
Until she came to the center.
She crawled through yet another hole in the wall, and she saw that at the center sat a machine. A huge machine. An impossibly complicated machine, a stupefying array of wheels and gears and chains and spokes, arranged in a tower. It was all stopped, all still and silent, yet she understood that it would only be still for a moment—soon it would begin to whirl and clatter and clank again.
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