Sancia sat on her building’s rooftop and stared out at the crooked Foundryside streets below. She came up here only occasionally, usually to make sure she wasn’t being watched. And tonight, she needed to be sure, since tonight was her night to meet Sark at the fishery and tell him they needed to get the hell out of Tevanne.
She wondered how she’d explain Clef to him. Despite all the Scrappers had told her, she still didn’t know much about him—about what he really was, or could do, or why. And Clef had not spoken to her since that night. She almost wondered if she’d imagined their conversations.
She looked out at the city. All of Tevanne was smeared with starlit smoke and steam, a ghostly cityscape sinking into the fog. The huge white campo walls surfaced among the ramble of the Commons like the bones of a beached whale. Behind them stood the towers of the campos, which glowed with soft, colorful luminescence. Among them was the Michiel clock tower, its face a bright, cheery pink, and beyond that was the Mountain of the Candianos, the biggest structure in all of Tevanne, a huge dome that reminded her of a fat, swollen tick, sitting in the center of the Candiano campo.
She felt lonely, and small. Sancia had always been alone. But feeling lonely was different from just being alone.
<Kid?>
Sancia sat up. <Clef? You’re talking again?>
<Yeah. Obviously.> He sounded sullen.
<What happened to you? Where did you go?>
<I’ve always been right here. I’ve just been…thinking.>
<Thinking.>
<Yeah. About what those people said. About me being a…>
<A tool of the hierophants.>
<Yeah. That.> There was a pause. <Can I ask you something, kid?>
<Yes.>
<Wine tastes…sweet, right?>
<Huh?>
<Wine. It tastes sharp and yet sweet on your tongue—doesn’t it?>
<I guess. I don’t really drink.>
<It tastes like that. I’m sure it does. I…I remember that sensation, that feeling of cool wine on a hot day.>
<Really? How?>
<I don’t know. How can I know that? How can I remember that if I’m just a key? And, more, a key that was made to break things open, to break open scrivings and locks and doors? I mean…It’s not just the idea of being a tool—it’s the idea of being a tool and not knowing it. Of having things built into you by someone else, things you can’t resist obeying or doing. Like when you put me in that lock in that door, I just…started. Instantly. And it felt good. It felt so good, kid.>
<I could tell. Do you remember anything more? About being…I don’t know, some artifact?>
<No. Nothing. I just have the dark, and nothing else. But it bothers me.>
They sat in silence.
<I’m dangerous for you, aren’t I?> he said quietly.
<Well. My client either wants to destroy you, or take you apart and use what they discover to destroy everybody else. And I’m willing to bet they want to kill everyone who knows about you. Which includes me. So—that’s a yes.>
<Shit. But tonight’s when you make a run for it, right?>
<Yeah. I meet Sark in two hours. Then I either convince him to jump on a ship with me, or I beat him into submission and drag him to the piers. I’d rather have him cooperate—Sark has all kinds of forged documents that can get us out of Tevanne fast. But one way or another, you and I are gone. To where, I don’t know yet. But gone.>
<Well.> Clef sighed. <I always did like the idea of an ocean voyage.>
* * *
She moved from Foundryside to Old Ditch, and then on to the Greens, which earned its name due to a curious fungus that merrily feasted on all the wood in this neighborhood, turning it a dull lime color. The Greens ran along the Anafesto, one of the main shipping channels, and the area had once been the thriving heart of Tevanne’s fishing industry. But then the merchant houses had built up a surplus of scrived ships for the wars, and they’d started to use them to fish instead, which drove everyone else out of business, since they were about a hundred times more efficient. The Greens looked a lot like Foundryside—lots of rookeries, lots of low-slung slums and shops—but rather than being constrained by the campo walls, all the housing came to a sharp stop at the decaying industrial ramble running beside the channel.
Sancia walked along the Anafesto, eyeing the dark, decrepit fisheries ahead. She kept looking to her left, toward the lanes of the Greens. This area was a lot quieter than Foundryside, but she took no chances. Every time she spied someone, she stopped and watched their movements, sensitive to any suggestion that they might be there looking for her, and she didn’t move on until satisfied.
She was anxious because she had Clef, of course, and knew all the threats that invited. But she also had her life savings in the pack on her back—three thousand duvots, almost entirely in coinage. She’d need every penny of it to get out of Tevanne, provided she even got that far. And though she carried her usual thieving kit, this offered little in the way of defense beyond her stiletto. It would be darkly funny if, after all she’d been through, she wound up getting mugged in the Greens by the luckiest street urchin of all time.
Once she got close enough she took the back way to the fishery, crawling across crumbling stone foundations and rusting pipes until she approached it from a narrow, shadowy passage. Probably no one thought she’d approach from this angle, including Sark. The fishery was a two-story moldy stone structure, a place so rotted and decayed it was hard to tell its original purpose anymore. Sark was waiting on the second floor, she knew, and the first floor would be riddled with traps—his usual “insurance.”
She looked at the dark windows, thinking. How in hell am I going to convince Sark to run?
<This place is a shithole,> said Clef.
<Yeah. But it’s our shithole. Me and Sark have done a lot of business here. It’s as safe as we’re going to get.> She started toward it, feeling somewhat comfortable for the first time that night.
She silently crept around the corner, then past the big iron doors—which she knew she shouldn’t use, since Sark had trapped them—and slipped through a broken window. She landed softly, took off her gloves, and touched her bare hands to the stone floor and the wall beside her.
Bones, blood, and viscera flooded her mind. The fishery had been the site of so much fish gutting that it almost always bowled her over every time, all the accumulated sensations of so much gore. There were still piles of fish bones here and there throughout the first floor, delicate tangles of tiny, translucent skeletons, and the scent still lingered, of course.
Sancia concentrated, and soon the traps lit up in her mind like fireworks, three trip wires running across the room to three hidden espringals that were almost certainly loaded up with fléchettes: paper packets of razor blades that would turn into a lethal cloud when fired.
She sighed in relief. <Good.>
<All these traps make you feel better?> said Clef.
<Yes. Because they mean Sark’s here. So he must be alive, and safe.>
<You have a weird relationship with your colleagues. I’ll just say that.>
She moved forward to delicately step over the first trip wire…
Then she stopped.
She thought for a moment, and peered throughout the darkness of the room. She thought she could spy the trip wires in the dim light—tiny, dark filaments stretching across the shadows.
One, she counted. Two. Three…
She frowned. Then she knelt to touch the floor and wall again with her bare hands.
<Something wrong?> asked Clef.
<Yes,> said Sancia. She waited until her talents confirmed it once more. <There are three trip wires.>
<So?>
<Sark always uses four traps. Not three.>
<Oh? Maybe…he forgot one?>
She didn’t answer. She looked around the first floor again. It was dark, but she couldn’t see anything unusual.
She looked out the windows at the building fronts beyond. No movement, nothing strange.
She cocked her head and listened. She could hear the lapping of waves, the sigh of the wind, the creaking and crackling as the building flexed in the breeze—but nothing else.
Perhaps he’s forgotten it, she thought. Perhaps he overlooked it, just this one time.
But that was not like Sark. After his torture at the hands of the Morsinis, he’d become wildly paranoid and cautious. It was not in his nature to forget a safeguard.
She looked around again, just to be sure…
Then she spied something.
Was that a glint of metal, there in the wooden beam across the room? She narrowed her eyes, and thought it was.
A fléchette? Buried there in the wood?
She stared at it, and felt her heart beating faster.
She knelt again and touched her hands to the floor for a third time.
Again, the stone told her of bones and blood and viscera, as they always did. Yet now she focused to find out…
Was any of that blood new?
And she found it was. There was a big splotch of new blood just a few feet from her. It was almost impossible to see with the naked eye, since its stain blended in with the much older, larger stain of ancient fish blood. And her talents hadn’t initially spotted it, as it’d been lost in the larger memory of so much gore.