Claudia frowned at him. “You’ve got work tonight, Gio.”
He sniffed. “Makes my hands steadier.”
“That’s not what the Morsinis said when they tossed you out on your ass.”
“They misunderstood the nature of my genius,” he said airily. He slurped down cane wine. Claudia rolled her eyes. “Anyways. Apparently Tevanne was far-flung enough that when the Occidental Empire collapsed, and all the hierophants died out, it escaped the damage.”
“And it just stuck around,” said Claudia. “Until about eighty years ago, when some Tevanni found a hidden cache of Occidental records in the cliffs east of here, detailing in vague terms the art of scriving.”
“And that,” said Giovanni with a theatrical flourish, “is how the Tevanne of today was born!”
There was a moment of silence as this sank in.
“Wait…what?” said Sancia. “Really? You’re saying that what the merchant houses do today is based on some notes from some ancient, dead civilization?”
“Not even good notes,” said Giovanni. “Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”
“It boggles a whole hell of a lot more than that,” said Claudia. “Because the merchant houses today can do a lot of stuff with scriving—but they don’t hold a scrumming candle to what the hierophants could do. Like fly or make things float.”
“Or walk on water,” said Giovanni.
“Make a door in the sky,” said Claudia.
“Crasedes the Great would point his magic wand…”—Giovanni mimed the action—“and—poof!—the seas themselves would part.”
“They say Crasedes even kept a genie in a basket at his waist,” said Claudia. “He’d open it up and let it out and it’d build a castle for him, or tear down walls, or…You get the idea.”
Suddenly Sancia recalled a passage from the note she’d found in the box with Clef: If Crasedes was in possession of some kind of invisible entity, perhaps it was but a rough prototype for this last and greatest iteration…
“No one knows how the hierophants did what they did,” said Claudia. “But the merchant houses are desperately, desperately searching for ways to figure it out.”
“To graduate from making scrived toilets,” said Giovanni, “to making tools and devices that can, say, smash mountains or drain the sea—maybe.”
“No one’s gotten close. Until recently.”
“What’s happened recently?” asked Sancia.
“About a year ago, a band of pirates stumbled across a tiny island in the western Durazzo,” said Giovanni, “and found it covered with Occidental ruins.”
“The nearby town of Vialto went absolutely barking mad with treasure hunters,” said Claudia.
“Agents of the merchant houses,” said Giovanni, “or anyone who wanted to be a merchant house.”
“Because if you can find more records, more notes…” said Claudia.
“Or, better yet, a real, whole, functional Occidental tool…” said Giovanni.
“Well, then,” said Claudia quietly. “You’d change the future of scriving forever. You’d make the merchant houses themselves obsolete.”
“You’d make our whole damn civilization obsolete,” said Giovanni.
Sancia felt nauseous. She suddenly remembered Clef saying: There’s nothing before the dark. There’s just the dark. I was always in the dark, as…as far as I can recall.
And it would, after all, be very dark in an ancient ruin.
“And…” she said slowly. “And you think Clef…”
“I…I think Clef doesn’t use any language that the houses use,” said Claudia. “And if what you say is true, he can do some pretty amazing things. And I think if you nabbed him from the waterfront…Which would be, of course, where people would ship in anything from Vialto…” She trailed off.
“Then you might be walking around with a million-duvot key hanging from your neck,” said Giovanni. “Feel heavy?”
Sancia stood there, totally still. <Clef,> she said. <Is…is any of this true?> But Clef was silent.
* * *
They said nothing for a while. Then there was a knock at the door—another Scrapper, asking for Giovanni’s assistance. He apologized and departed, leaving Claudia and Sancia alone in the back office.
“You…seem to be dealing with this well,” said Claudia.
Sancia said nothing. She’d barely moved.
“Most people…they would have had an absolute nervous breakdown if—”
“I don’t have time for nervous breakdowns,” said Sancia, quietly and coldly. She looked away, rubbing the side of her head. “Damn it. I was going to get this payout, and then…”
“Get yourself fixed?”
“Yeah. But I don’t see that happening now.”
Claudia absently fingered a scar on her forearm. “Do I need to say that you shouldn’t have taken the job?”
Sancia glared at her. “Claudia. Not now.”
“I warned you about merchant house work. I told you they’d scrum you in the end.”
“Enough.”
“But you kept doing it.”
Sancia went silent.
“Why don’t you hate them?” said Claudia, frustrated. “Why don’t you despise them, for what they did to you?” There was a brittle fury in her eyes. Claudia was an immensely talented scriver, but after the house academies had stopped accepting women, all her prospects had vanished. She’d been forced to join the Scrappers and spend her days working in dank basements and abandoned lofts. Despite her cheerful demeanor, she’d never been able to forgive the merchant houses for that.
“Grudges,” said Sancia, “are a privilege I can’t afford.”
Claudia sank back in her chair and scoffed. “Sometimes I admire how you can be so bloodlessly practical, Sancia,” she said. “But then I remember that it doesn’t look very pleasant.”
Sancia said nothing.
“Does Sark know?” asked Claudia.
She shook her head. “Don’t think so.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Tell Sark when I go to debrief with him in two days. Then we skip town. Grab the first boat out of here and go somewhere far, far away.”
“Really?”
Sancia nodded. “I don’t see another way around it. Not if Clef is what you say he is.”
“And you’re taking him with you?”
“I’m not leaving him behind. I’m not going to be the asshole who lets the merchant houses assume godlike powers out of sheer scrumming negligence.”
“You can’t get to Sark earlier?”
“I know one of his apartments, but Sark’s even more paranoid than I am. Getting tortured has that effect on you. He vanishes after I’ve done a job for him. Even I don’t know where he goes.”
“Well—not to make your options any more complicated—but leaving Tevanne might not be quite as easy as you think.”
Sancia raised an eyebrow.
“There’s all the stuff with Clef,” said Claudia. “That’s one thing. But…there’s also the fact that you burned down the waterfront, Sancia. Or at least a lot of it. I have no doubt that some powerful people are looking for you right now. And if they find out who you are…no ship’s captain in Tevanne is going to take you anywhere. Not for all the cane wine and roses on this earth.”
7
Captain Gregor Dandolo of the Tevanni Waterwatch held his head high as he walked through the throngs of Foundryside. He did not really know another way to walk: his posture was, at all times, absolutely pristine, back arched and shoulders thrown back. Between this, his large size, and his Waterwatch sash, everyone in the Commons tended to get out of his way. They didn’t know what he was here for, but they wanted no part of it.
Gregor knew it was odd to feel so jaunty. He was a thoroughly disgraced man, having allowed nearly half the waterfront to burn down under his watch, and he was now facing suspension from the Waterwatch, if not outright expulsion.
Yet this was a situation that Gregor was quite comfortable with: a wrong had been done, and he intended to set it right. As quickly and as efficiently as possible.
A musty wine-bar door opened on his right up ahead, and a soused woman with smeared face paint staggered out onto the creaky wooden walkway in front of him.
He stopped, bowed, and extended an arm. “After you, ma’am.”
The drunken woman stared at him like he was mad. “After what?”
“Ah. You, ma’am. After you.”
“Oh. I see.” She blinked drunkenly, but did not move.
Gregor, realizing she had no idea what the phrase meant, sighed slightly. “You may walk ahead of me,” he said gently.
“Oh. Oh! Well, then. Thanks to you.”
“Certainly, ma’am.” Again, he bowed.
She tottered ahead of him. Gregor walked up beside her, and the wooden walkway bent slightly under his sizeable bulk, which made her stumble. “Pardon me,” he said, “but I had a question.”
She looked him over. “I’m off duty,” she said. “Least till I find someplace quiet to spew up a bit and dab my nose.”
“I see. But no. I wanted to ask—would the taverna the Perch and Lark be somewhere nearby?”
She gaped at him. “The Perch and Lark?”
“Indeed, ma’am.”
“You want to go there?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well. S’up thataway.” She pointed down a filthy alley.