This was well-trodden ground for Sancia. Merchant-house walls were scrived so that the entrances only allowed in people with specific identifying markers called sachets—wooden buttons with scrived permissions on them. If you walked through the wrong door with the wrong sachet or no sachet at all, you’d get accosted by guards, or even killed by them; or, in some of the inner walls of the campos, where the richest, most protected people lived, rumor had it you could spontaneously explode.
As someone who frequently needed illegitimate access to the campos, Sancia usually had to go to the Scrappers for forged sachets. But their biggest customers were undoubtedly prostitutes, who just wanted to go where the money was—though the Scrappers could usually only get you past the first wall or two. It was a lot harder to steal or forge the more elite credentials.
“Why’d the Candianos change up their sachets?” she asked. “Did someone spook them?”
“No idea,” said Claudia. “Rumor has it mad old Tribuno Candiano is finally about to pull up the eternal blanket and begin his final sleep.”
Giovanni clucked his tongue. “The Conqueror himself, about to be conquered by old age. How tragic.”
“Maybe it’s that,” said Claudia. “Elite deaths often cause some campo shuffling. If so, with everything in flux, there’s probably a lot of easy targets on the Candiano campo…If you were willing to take a side job, we’d pay.”
“Not market rates,” said Giovanni pointedly. “But we’d pay.”
“Not this time,” Sancia said. “I’ve got some pressing matters. I need you to look at something.”
“Like I said,” Claudia told her, “we’ve got a rush job here.”
“I don’t need you to copy the scrivings,” said Sancia. “And I’m not sure you can. I just need…advice.”
Claudia and Giovanni exchanged a glance. “What do you mean, we can’t copy the scrivings?” asked Claudia.
“And since when do you ever ask for advice?” asked Giovanni.
<Ah,> said Clef in her ear. <So. This is when I make my grand entrance?>
* * *
“Neat,” said Claudia. She peered at Clef over the scrived lights, her pale eyes huge and enlarged by her magnifying goggles. “But also…very weird.”
Giovanni looked over her shoulder. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Never, in all my days.”
Claudia glanced sideways at Sancia. “You say it…talks to you?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia.
“And it’s not your…” She tapped the side of her head.
“I think that’s why I can hear him—when I’m touching him, that is,” said Sancia. Besides Sark, Claudia and Giovanni were the only people who knew that Sancia was a scrived human. They’d had to know, since they were the ones who’d put her in touch with the black-market physiqueres. But she trusted them. Mostly because the Scrappers were just as hated and hunted by the merchant houses as she herself would be, if they ever found out what she was. If the Scrappers gave her up, she could give them up in turn.
“What does it say?” asked Giovanni.
“Mostly he asks what all of our swears mean. Have you ever heard of anything like this?”
“I’ve seen scrived keys before,” said Claudia. “I tinkered with a few myself. Yet these etchings, these sigils…They’re totally unfamiliar to me.” She looked up at Giovanni. “Sieve?”
Giovanni nodded. “Sieve.”
“Huh?” said Sancia. She watched as Giovanni unrolled what appeared to be a largish sheet of leather. She saw it had buttons sewn into the corners, brass ones, with faint, complicated sigils on their faces. He picked up Clef as if the key were a small, dying bird, and gently placed him in the center of the leather.
“Whatever this is…this isn’t going to hurt him, is it?” asked Sancia.
Giovanni blinked at her through his spectacles. “Him? You’re suddenly sounding very attached to this object, San.”
“That object is worth a whole harpering heap of money,” she said, feeling suddenly defensive about Clef.
“One of Sark’s jobs?” asked Giovanni.
Sancia said nothing.
“Stoic little San,” he said. He began slowly folding up the leather around Clef. “Our grim, tiny specter of the night. One day I will get a smile out of you.”
“What is this thing?” Sancia asked.
“A scriving sieve,” said Claudia. “Place the object within it, and it’ll identify some—but usually not all—of the major sigils being used to shape the object’s nature.”
“Why not all?” said Sancia.
Giovanni laughed as he placed a thick plate of iron on top of the wrapped-up leather. “One of these days, San, I will teach you something about the tiers of scriving. It’s not one language, so it’s not like you can just translate each sigillum individually. Rather, each sigil is its own command—which calls up a whole string of other sigils on the nearby lexico—”
“Yeah, I didn’t ask you to give me a degree in this stuff,” said Sancia.
Giovanni paused, miffed. “One might imagine, Sancia, that you’d show more interest in the languages that power everything around y—”
“One also might imagine my ass getting to bed at a reasonable time.”
Grumbling, Giovanni grabbed a pinch of iron filings from a small cup and sprinkled them over the face of the plate. “Now, let’s see what we’ve got…”
They sat there, watching.
And watching. Nothing seemed to be happening.
“Did you do it right?” asked Sancia.
“Of course I damned well did it right!” snapped Giovanni.
“So what should we be seeing?” asked Sancia.
“The filings should be rearranging themselves into the shapes of the primary commands being used in the object,” said Claudia. “But—if we are to believe this—it’d imply there are none.”
“Which, unless I’m mistaken,” said Giovanni, “is impossible…”
Giovanni and Claudia looked at the iron plate for a while before turning to stare at each other, bewildered.
“So, uh, right,” said Claudia. She cleared her throat, then knelt and began wiping the plate clean. “So…it seems like there are, somehow, no sigils or commands on Clef that our methods can identify. Like, none.”
“Meaning what?” asked Sancia.
“Meaning we don’t know what the hell it—or he, or whatever—really is,” said Giovanni. “His sigils are talking a language we don’t know, in other words.”
“Would a merchant house be interested in this?” said Sancia.
“Oh, holy monkeys, yes,” said Claudia. “If there’s a whole new scriving language out there, and they get ahold of it, they…they…” She trailed off. Then she looked at Giovanni, troubled.
“What?” said Sancia.
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Giovanni to her quietly.
“What?” said Sancia. “Thinking what?”
The two of them sat in silence, staring at each other and occasionally glancing at Sancia.
“Thinking what?” she demanded.
Claudia glanced nervously around the workshop. “Let’s…take this somewhere private.”
* * *
Sancia followed Claudia and Giovanni into the back office, stuffing Clef back down her jerkin as she did so. The back office was filled with tomes and books of sigil strings and scriving commands, reams and reams and reams of papers covered in symbols that made no sense to Sancia.
She watched as Claudia shut the door behind them and locked it.
<That…doesn’t seem good,> said Clef.
<No. No, it doesn’t.>
Giovanni pulled out a bottle of a potent, noxious cane wine, poured three glasses, and picked up two. “Drink?” he said, extending one to Sancia.
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Yes,” she said testily.
“You never have fun, San. You deserve some. Especially now.”
“Fun is a luxury. What I deserve is to know how big of a pot of shit I’m in.”
“How long have you lived in Tevanne now?” asked Giovanni.
“A bit over three years. Why?”
“Mm…Well.” Giovanni tossed one glass back, then the other. “This will take some explaining, then.”
Claudia took a seat behind a stack of tomes. “Ever heard of the Occidentals, Sancia?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “The fairy giants. They built the ruins across the Durazzo, in the Daulo countries. Aqueducts and the like. Right?”
“Hm. Kind of,” said Giovanni. “To put it plainly, they were the people who invented scriving, long, long, long ago. Though no one’s even sure if they really were people. Some say they were angels, or something a lot like angels. They were also called hierophants, and in most of the old stories they’re regarded as priests or monks or prophets. The first of them—the most notable of them—was Crasedes the Great. They weren’t giants, though. They just used their scriving to do some very, very big things.”
“Like what?” asked Sancia.
“Like move mountains,” said Claudia. “Carve out oceans. And annihilate cities, and build a massive, massive empire.”
“Really?” said Sancia.
“Yes,” said Giovanni. “One that makes the merchant house empire we’ve got today look like a piddling pile of shit.”
“This was a long time ago, mind,” said Claudia. “A thousand years or so.”
“What happened to this empire?” she asked.
“It all fell apart,” said Claudia. “Nobody knows how, or why. But when it fell, it fell hard. Almost nothing survived. No one even knows the real name of the empire. We just call it the Occidental Empire because it was to the west. Like, everything to the west. The hierophants owned all of it.”
“Supposedly Tevanne was just a backwater jungle port for this empire, ages and ages and ages ago,” said Giovanni, pouring himself another drink.