It was an aging structure—her favorite kind, as it offered plenty of good handholds and niches to stuff her toes into. She crawled down its side slowly and awkwardly, since she’d lost her ability to sense the walls at a touch, then leapt into the muddy alley below and started running north, away from the Anafesto channel, away from the Greens, away from the Commons and the fisheries and the smell of rot and the hissing bolts…
Screams echoed in the distance. Maybe another building had fallen down.
Again, she thought about the dead lanterns, Clef’s slurred words, and how all the world was dead to her touch—and, again, the mad idea returned to her.
But it was impossible. Just impossible.
No one could just turn scrivings off. No one could just hit a switch or a button and make every rig in a whole neighborhood just stop.
But though it might be impossible, thought Sancia, so is a key that can open anything…
She remembered the wink of gold as the man played with his contraption…
What if he already had something like Clef? Something that could do…something else?
Smokestacks soared into the sky ahead of her like a cindery forest—the Michiel campo foundries. She had a sachet, but most of the entryways would be closed and locked by now, since it was well after nightfall.
Then she realized she had an easy solution.
She ran along the smooth, white campo wall until she came to a large iron door, tall and thick and elaborately decorated with the Michiel loggotipo. She took Clef out and was about to stuff him into the lock when suddenly things…changed.
There was a scrived lantern just on the other side of the wall. She hadn’t been able to see it before, because it’d been dark. Yet it had just come back on, flickering to life.
A whispering filled her mind. Sancia looked at the iron door. She reached out with her bare hand and touched it. The whispering filled her mind, as did a thousand other things about the door.
“Scriving’s back on,” she said out loud. “It’s back.”
It seemed as if the effects of…well, of whatever the campo man had done back there were fading. This was both good and bad. Good, because both she and Clef now had their abilities back. But also bad, because that meant the scrived lock in this door would now also be fully functional—and though she didn’t know how long it’d take for Clef to pick it, she could tell from the calls and shouts behind her that she didn’t have much time before her pursuers found her.
She didn’t let him finish the question. She slid Clef into the lock.
Just like with the Candiano door, a thousand questions and thoughts poured into her mind, all of them directed at Clef.
Sancia glanced down the alley as she listened. She somewhat understood this: apparently after nightfall, only someone with a specific scrived key—one with an important seventeenth tooth—was allowed to unlock and open the door.
A huge exchange of information took place between Clef and the door. The distant sounds of shouts were drifting toward her. “Come on,” she whispered. “Come on…”
Silence. Then there was a click, and the door opened. Sancia slipped through and slowly shut it behind her. She crouched behind the wall, listening. Her ankles ached, her feet ached, her hands ached, her back ached—but at least for once her head didn’t hurt much.
She heard footsteps on the other side, someone walking, slowing down…and then they tried the handle of the iron door.
Sancia stared at the handle, fervently praying that the handle didn’t keep moving—but it didn’t. It moved just a tiny, tiny bit—and then it stopped.
The person on the other side grunted. Then they walked away.
Sancia waited for a long time. Then she let out a slow breath, and turned to face the gray spires and domes and smokestacks of the Michiel campo.
Sancia rubbed her eyes. She had to get out of the city, but this presented a familiar problem.
She needed money. She always needed money. Money to bribe someone, money to buy tools to get more money, money to get a safe place to store her damned money. Life was cheap, and cash, as ever, remained dauntingly expensive.
Her normal source of money had been Sark. But Sark wasn’t an option anymore.
Then she had an idea, and slowly cocked her head. But his house—that might be a different case.
She sighed and rubbed her eyes.
Sancia tried to think about how to phrase these words, as they were essentially incomprehensible to any Tevanni.
Sancia grimaced.
She glanced to the east, where the giant cloud of dust was drifting toward the moon.
* * *
Sancia kept to the rooftops as she made her way through Foundryside to Old Ditch. Her hands hurt like hell and her head wasn’t much better, but she had to make do. Every once in a while she’d peer down into the warrens and spy someone who looked large, well fed, well armed, and quite mean—and she’d know she wasn’t out of danger yet.
She briefly stopped in Old Ditch to hit up a once-favorite stop of hers: the Bibbona Wine Brewery. Everyone said the cane wine made there was atrocious, but they still did a brisk business—brisk enough to be worth her robbing the place every once in a while, back in the day. But then some clever bastard had not only installed a reinforced door in the brewery, but they’d also rigged up a timing system: three Miranda Brass locks that had to be unlocked within twenty seconds of each other—otherwise, they’d all re-lock. Even with Sancia’s talents, the hassle hadn’t been worth the payout.
But with Clef, it was easy—one, two, three, and suddenly she had two hundred duvots in her pocket.
asked Clef as she crept away.
She quickly scaled the side of a rookery and scrambled onto the rooftop.
Luckily, the Scrappers were in the first place she looked—an abandoned loft in Old Ditch. To her surprise, they weren’t in their workshop, but were instead standing on the balcony, staring out at the distant chaos in Foundryside. Sancia peered over the rooftop at them, then carefully started climbing down.
Giovanni screamed in surprise and fell backward into the other Scrappers as Sancia dropped down to the balcony. “For the love of God!” she said, standing. “Could you keep it down!”
“San?” said Claudia. “What the hell are you doing here?” She looked up along the wall. “Why were you on the roof?”
“I’m here to buy,” said Sancia. “And buy fast. And I had to take a safe route.” She glanced at the street below. “Can we go indoors?”
“No,” said Claudia. “All our lights are off. Nothing works, that’s why we’re out here.”
“Have you checked recently?” asked Sancia.
“Why?” said Giovanni suspiciously.
“We haven’t,” said Claudia. “Because the second we came outside, some scrumming buildings started falling down! The whole neighborhood’s gone mad!”
“Oh,” said Sancia. She coughed. “Ah. Very strange, that. But—can we, uh, light a candle, and go inside anyway?
Giovanni narrowed his eyes at her. “Sancia…I suddenly feel that your arrival, and all these disasters, seems terribly coincidental.”
Sancia spied someone in a steel cap walking down the alley below. “Can we please just go inside?” she begged.
Claudia and Giovanni exchanged a glance. Then Claudia said to the rest of the Scrappers, “Stay out here. Let me know if anything…I don’t know, explodes or something.”
Inside, Sancia quickly told them what had happened—or tried to. The more she talked, the madder it all felt. As she spoke, she washed her hands in the candlelight and wrapped her palms and wrists in chalk cloth. She didn’t like it much—she didn’t like any new clothing—but she knew she had to do a lot more climbing soon.
Claudia stared at her in disbelief. “You’ve got a whole goddamn campo army out looking for you?”
“Pretty much,” said Sancia.
“And…and Sark’s dead?” asked Giovanni.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Almost certainly.”
“And…” Claudia looked at her, frightened. “You say some campo lordling is running around…with some rig that can turn scrivings off?”
“It all happened fast,” said Sancia. “So I’m not positive. But…that seems to be what I saw. He hit a button, and everything just stopped. I’m guessing those buildings fell down because they were being supported by scrivings, in some fashion or another. And his soldiers expected it—that was why they switched to regular espringals, rather than scrived ones.”
“Shit,” said Claudia weakly.
“You really think this was all about your key?” said Giovanni.
“That I’m sure of.”
“Where did you hide it?” he asked. “Did you bury it, or put it in a safe drop, or just throw it away?”
Sancia thought about what to say. “Ah…”
Giovanni went white. “You don’t still have it, do you? You didn’t bring it here?”
Sancia’s hand guiltily crept up to her chest, where Clef was hanging from her neck. “At this point, bringing Clef here isn’t any more dangerous than my being here.”
“Oh my Lord,” whispered Giovanni.
“Goddamn it, Sancia!” said Claudia, furious. “I…I told you to stop taking house jobs! You’re going to get us all killed just by our knowing you!”
“Then get me out of here fast,” said Sancia. “I need to get to Sark’s and grab his emergency kit. I get that, and I can get out of Tevanne, and you’ll never know me again.” She took what she’d stolen from the brewery and dropped it on the table. “There’s two hundred here. You said I’d get a fifty percent discount next time. I’m calling it in. Now.”
Claudia and Giovanni looked at each other. Then Claudia sighed deeply, took the candle to a cupboard, and started pulling out a box. “You want dolorspina darts again—yes?”
“Yeah. These are trained soldiers. A one-shot stop would be damned handy. But do you have anything else? I need any fight to be as unfair as it can get.”
“There’s…something new I cooked up,” said Giovanni. “But it’s not totally ready yet.” He opened a drawer and pulled out what looked like a small black wooden ball.
Sancia tried to ignore him. “What is it?”
“I rigged it up so it uses multiple lighting scrivings from the four houses,” he said. “In other words, you hit the button, throw it, and it makes an ungodly amount of light, flashing bright. Enough to blind someone. Then…”
“Then what?” said Sancia.
“Well, this is the part I’m not so sure about,” said Giovanni. “There’s a charge inside—no more than a firecracker. But I’ve made its chamber sensitive to vibrations so it feels like it’s playing host to a much, much larger combustion. It amplifies the noise, in other words…”
“So it makes a really, really loud bang,” said Claudia.
“That,” said Giovanni, “or it might actually explode. It’s hard to test things like this. So I’m not sure yet.”
said Clef.
“I’ll take as many of those as I can buy,” she said.
Giovanni took out three more of the black balls and popped them in a sack for her. “Sancia…you ought to know that Sark’s apartments likely aren’t safe, either.”
“I know that,” she said. “That’s why I’m here!”
“No, listen,” said Claudia. “Some big thug walked into the Perch and Lark just a handful of hours ago and beat every single one of Antonin di Nove’s men half to death—as well as Antonin himself—all while asking for information about the waterfront job.”
Sancia stared at her. “One guy? One guy fought all of Antonin’s crew, single-handedly, and won?”
“Yes,” said Claudia. “I’ve no doubt Antonin told him everything he knew about Sark—which was probably a lot. Seems you’ve called all kinds of devils out of the dark with your antics.”
“And now you, Sancia Grado,” said Giovanni, tying up the sack, “at all of five foot no inches, and a hundred and n
othing pounds, are going to take them all on.” He held it out to her, grinning. “Good luck.”
9
Gregor Dandolo stood below the Selvo Building and looked up. It was large, dark, and crumbling—in other words, it looked much like the sort of place where a thief’s fence would reside. Each room had a short balcony, though few looked sturdy.
He glanced back at the plume of dust rising from Foundryside. Something bad had happened back there—likely a building had collapsed, if not several. Every instinct of his told him to run to the site and help, but he realized that his previous actions tonight made that unwise. There was now an entire criminal organization that wanted him dead, and this Sark would surely soon catch word that Gregor was looking for him, and go to ground.
The one night I have business in the Commons, he thought to himself, is, of course, the one night the entire place falls apart.
He checked to make sure Whip was working. His weapon seemed to be all in order—he had no idea what that odd bit of business had been about back there. Grimacing, he walked inside the Selvo and found a few residents anxiously wandering the halls, wondering what the crash was.
Sark’s door was easy to find—it was the one with eight locks on it. He listened for a bit but heard nothing inside. He walked down the rooms on Sark’s side of the building and quietly tried all the doorknobs. One was open on the very far end. The room within was empty—for sale or abandoned, he supposed.
Gregor stumbled through the dark room. He fumbled with the door on the far end and walked out onto the balcony that dangled on the side of the building. Then he looked down the face of the building at all the balconies, all lined up close together.
An idea occurred to him. I must try my hardest, he thought, straddling the baluster, not to look down.
With slow, careful movements, Gregor Dandolo vaulted from balcony to balcony toward Sark’s rooms. There wasn’t much of a gap between the balconies, only about three feet or so, so his primary concern was that the balconies might not be able to support his weight. But despite a few creaks and cracks, they held.
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