She let out a sigh. This is a lot of risk to get to one damned carriage.
She finished climbing and came to the top of the chimney. The boards there easily gave way to her push. Then she clambered out onto the roof of the building, lay flat, and looked around.
To her surprise, she was right above the carriage fairway—exactly where she needed to be. She watched as one carriage charged down the muddy lane to the loading dock, which was a bright, busy blotch of light in the darkened foundry yards. The foundry proper loomed above the loading dock, a huge, near-windowless brick structure with six fat smokestacks pouring smoke into the night sky.
She crawled to the edge of the roof, took off her glove, and felt the lip of the wall below with a bare hand. The wall blossomed in her mind, every crooked stone and clump of moss—and every good handhold to help her find her way down.
She lowered herself over the edge of the roof and started to descend. Her head was pounding, her hands hurt, and she was covered in all manner of filthy things. I haven’t even done step one yet, and I’ve already nearly got myself killed.
“Twenty thousand,” she whispered to herself as she climbed. “Twenty thousand duvots.”
A king’s ransom, really. Sancia was willing to eat a lot of shit and bleed a decent amount of blood for twenty thousand duvots. More than she had so far, at least.
The soles of her boots touched earth, and she started to run.
* * *
The carriage fairway was poorly lit, but the foundry loading dock was ahead, bright with firebaskets and scrived lanterns. Even at this hour it was swarming with activity as laborers sprinted back and forth, unloading the carriages lined up before it. A handful of guards watched them, bored.
Sancia hugged the wall and crept closer. Then there was a rumbling sound, and she froze and turned her head away, pressing her body to the wall.
Another enormous carriage came thundering down the fairway, splashing her with gray mud. After it passed, she blinked mud out of her eyes and watched it as it rolled away. The carriage appeared to be rolling along of its own accord: it wasn’t pulled by a horse, or a donkey, or any kind of animal at all.
Unfazed, Sancia looked back up the fairway. It’d be a pity, she thought, if I crawled through a river of sewage and a pile of rats, just to get crushed by a scrived carriage like a stray dog.
She continued on, and watched the carriages closely as she neared. Some were horse-drawn, but most weren’t. They came from all over the city of Tevanne—from the canals, from other foundries, or from the waterfront. And it was this last location that Sancia was most interested in.
She sunk down below the lip of the loading dock and crept up to the line of carriages. And as she approached, she heard them whisper in her mind.
Murmurings. Chatterings. Hushed voices. Not from the horse-drawn carriages—those were silent to her—but from the scrived ones.
Then she looked at the wheels of the closest carriage, and saw it.
The interiors of the huge wooden wheels had writing upon them, a sort of languid, joined-up script that looked to be made of silvery, gleaming metal: “sigillums” or “sigils,” as the Tevanni elite called them. But most just called them scrivings.
Sancia had no training in scriving, but the way scrived carriages worked was common knowledge in Tevanne: the commands written upon the wheels convinced them that they were on an incline, and so the wheels, absolutely believing this, would feel obliged to roll downhill—even if there was actually no hill at all, and the carriage was actually just rolling along, say, a perfectly flat (if particularly muddy) canal fairway. The pilot sat in the hatch of the carriage, adjusting the controls, which would tell the wheels something like, “Oh, we’re on a steep hill now, better hurry up,” or, “Wait, no, the hill’s flattening out, let’s slow down,” or, “There’s no hill at all now, actually, so let’s just stop.” And the wheels, thoroughly duped by the scrivings, would happily comply, thus eliminating the need for any horses, or mules, or goats, or whichever other dull creature could be coaxed into hauling people around.
That was how scrivings worked: they were instructions written upon mindless objects that convinced them to disobey reality in select ways. Scrivings had to be carefully thought out, though, and carefully wrought. Sancia had heard stories about how the first scrived carriages didn’t have their wheels calibrated properly, so on one occasion the front wheels thought they were rolling downhill, but the wheels in the back thought they were rolling uphill, which quickly tore the carriage apart, sending the wheels hurtling through the streets of Tevanne at phenomenal speeds, with much mayhem and destruction and death ensuing.
All of which meant that, despite their being highly advanced creations, hanging around a carriage’s wheels was not exactly the brightest of things to do with one’s evening.
Sancia crawled to one wheel. She cringed as the scrivings whispered in her ears, growing louder. This was perhaps the oddest aspect of her talents—she’d certainly never met anyone else who could hear scrivings—but it was tolerable. She ignored the sound and poked her index and middle finger through two slits in the glove on her right hand, baring her fingertips to the moist air. She touched the wheel of the carriage with her fingers, and asked it what it knew.
And, much like the wall in the passageway, the wheel answered.
The wheel told her of ash, of stone, of broiling flame, of sparks and iron.
Sancia thought, Nope. The carriage had probably come from a foundry—and she was not interested in foundries tonight.
She leaned around the back of the carriage, confirmed the guards hadn’t seen her, and slipped down the line to the next one.
She touched the carriage’s wheel with her fingertips, and asked it what it knew.
The wheel knew soft, loamy soil, the acrid smell of dung, the aroma of crushed greenery and vegetation.
A farm, probably. Nope. Not this one either.
She slipped down to the next carriage—this one your average, horse-drawn carriage—touched a wheel, and asked it what it knew.
The wheel knew of ash, and fire, and hot, and the hissing sparks of smelting ore…
This one came from another foundry, she thought. Same as the first. I hope Sark’s source was right. If all of these came from foundries or farmland, the whole plan’s over before it began.
She slipped down to the next carriage, the horse snuffling disapprovingly as she moved. This was the penultimate one in line, so she was running out of options.
She reached out, touched a wheel, and asked it what it knew.
This one spoke of gravel, of salt, of seaweed, of the tang of ocean spray, and wooden beams soaking above the waves…
Sancia nodded, relieved. That’s the one.
She reached into a pouch on her rig and pulled out a curious-looking object: a small bronze plate inscribed with many sigils. She took out a pot of tar, painted the back of the plate with it, and reached up into the carriage and stuck the little bronze plate to the bottom.
She paused, remembering what her black-market contacts had told her.
Stick the guiding plate to the thing you want to go to, and make sure it’s stuck hard. You don’t want it falling off.
So…what happens if it falls off in the street or something? Sancia had then asked.
Well. Then you’ll die. Pretty gruesomely, I expect.
Sancia pressed on the bronze plate harder. Don’t you scrumming get me killed, she thought, glaring at it. This job’s offering enough damned opportunities as it is. Then she slid out, slipped through the other carriages, and returned to the fairway and the foundry yards.
She was more careful this time, and made sure to stay upwind of any guards. She made it to the drainage tunnel quickly. Now she’d have to trudge back through those fetid waters and make straight for the waterfront.
Which was, of course, where the carriage she’d tampered with was also bound, since its wheels had spoken to her of sea spray and gravel and salty air—things a carriage would only encounter at the waterfront. Hopefully the carriage would help her get into that highly controlled site.
Because somewhere on the waterfront was a safe. And someone incomprehensibly wealthy had hired Sancia to steal one specific item inside it in exchange for a simply inconceivable amount of money.
Sancia liked stealing. She was good at it. But after tonight, she might never need to steal again.
“Twenty thousand,” she chanted softly. “Twenty thousand. Twenty thousand lovely, lovely duvots…”
She dropped down into the sewers.
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