She quickly scaled the side of a rookery and scrambled onto the rooftop. <Something like that.>
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.
<Neat!> said Clef in her head. <It’s…I don’t know, it’s like some kind of screwed-up lamp that pops…>
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.”
<I am,> said Clef. <And it won’t.>
“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 nothing 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.
Finally he came to Sark’s rooms. The door leading in was locked, but this lock was far weaker than the ones in the front door. He wedged the bottom of Whip’s handle into the crack and tugged at it. The lock popped free easily.
He was about to go in when he paused…He thought for just one moment, just a split second, that he’d seen someone on the rooftop across the alley. But now that he looked there didn’t seem to be anyone. He grunted and slipped inside.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Gregor took out a match, struck it, and lit a candle.
Now. What’s to find here?