Gregor paused at the top of the Spinola Foundry stairs and glanced at the foundry guard, who gave him a nervous shrug. The voice continued screaming.
“What do you mean, you think the records are accurate? How do you shitting think records are accurate? Accuracy is a binary scrumming state—they either are accurate, or they ARE! NOT!” These last two words were screamed so loud, they genuinely hurt Gregor’s ears, even from here. “Are you married, man? Do you have children? If so, I’m stunned, I’m just flummoxed, because I’d have thought you were so damned stupid you wouldn’t know how to stick your candle in your wife! Maybe check around and see if there are any other slack-jawed idiots about with a strong resemblance to your grubby spawn! I swear to God, if you aren’t back here in one hour with records that are genuinely, unimpeachably, undeniably accurate, I’ll personally paint your balls with fig jelly and toss you stark naked into a hog pit! Now, get out of my goddamn sight!”
There was the sound of frantic footfalls below. Then silence.
“It’s been like that all morning,” said the foundry guard quietly. “I’d have thought his voice would’ve given out by now.”
“I see,” said Gregor. “Thank you.” He started off down the stairs to the lexicon chamber below.
The stairs went down, and down, and down, into the dark.
As Gregor descended, things began to feel…different.
They felt heavier. Slower. Denser. Like he was walking not through dank, musty air but was instead at the bottom of the sea, with miles and miles of water pressing down on him.
How I hate getting near lexicons, thought Gregor.
Like most people, Gregor did not understand the mechanics of scriving. He could not tell one sigillum from another. In fact, he couldn’t even differentiate one house’s scriving language from another, which was even more fundamental. But he knew how scriving worked, in broad terms.
The basic sigillums were symbols that naturally occurred within the world. No one knew exactly where the base sigils came from. Some said the Occidentals had invented them. Others said that the symbols were written into the world by the Creator, by God Himself, that He had defined reality by encoding it with these sigillums, forging the world much as the foundries forged scrived rigs. No one was sure.
Each basic sigillum referenced specific things: there were symbols for stone, wind, air, fire, growth, leaves, and even ones for more abstract phenomena, for “change” or “stop” or “start” or “sharp.” There were millions, if not billions, of them. If you knew these symbols—though few did—then there was nothing stopping you from using them. Even in the most primitive settlement out in the middle of nowhere, if you were trying to carve wood into some intricate shape, you could inscribe it with the base sigil for “clay” or “mud,” and this tiny alteration would make the wood slightly, slightly more malleable.
But despite all the legends around its origins, basic scriving was very restricted. To start with, its effects were minor, no more than a slight nudge. But worse, if you wanted to tell an ax, “You are very durable, very sharp, very light, and you part the wood of the cedar tree as if it were water”—something much more complicated than just “sharp” or “hard,” in other words—such a command would be fifty or sixty sigils long. You’d run out of room on the ax blade—and you’d also have to get the sigil logic just right so the ax blade would understand what it was supposed to be. You had to be specific, and definite—and this was hard.
But then the city of Tevanne had discovered an old cache of Occidental records in a cave down the coast. And in those records they’d discovered something crucial.
The sigil for “meaning.” And then some cunning Tevanni had gotten a brilliant idea.
They’d figured out that you could take a blank slate of iron, write out that extensive, complicated scriving command; but then, you could follow it with the sigil for “meaning,” and next write a completely new sigil, one you yourself just made up. Then that new sigil would essentially mean “You are very durable, very sharp, very light, and you part the wood of the cedar tree as if it were water”—and then you’d just have to write that one sigil on your ax blade.
Or on a dozen blades. Or a thousand. It didn’t matter. Every blade would do the same thing.
After that discovery, much more complicated scriving commands were suddenly possible—yet even this was still quite limited.
For one thing, you had to stay close to whichever slate of iron had the commands written on it. If you walked too far away, then the ax blade essentially forgot what that new sigil was supposed to mean, and it stopped working. It no longer had a reference point, in a way.
The other problem was that if you wrote too many complicated scriving definitions on one slate of metal, it had a tendency to burst into flames. A common object such as an iron plate, it seemed, could only bear so much meaning.
So the city of Tevanne, and its many nascent scriving houses, then had a problem to solve: how were they to house all the definitions and meanings for these complicated scrivings without having everything burst into flames and melt?
Which was why they’d invented lexicons.
Lexicons were huge, complicated, durable machines built to store and maintain thousands and thousands of incredibly complex scriving definitions, and bear the burden of all of that concentrated meaning. With a lexicon, you didn’t have to worry about wandering a dozen feet too far and suddenly having all your scrived devices fail on you: lexicons could amplify and project the meaning of those definitions for great distances in all directions—enough to cover part of a campo, if not more. The closer you were to a lexicon, though, the better your scrivings worked—which was why a lexicon was always the beating heart of any foundry. You wanted all of your biggest, most intricate rigs to work at peak efficiency.
And since lexicons were the beating heart of foundries, they were, in effect, the beating heart of all of Tevanne.
But they were complicated. Incredibly complicated. Astoundingly complicated. Only geniuses and madmen, everyone agreed, could truly understand a lexicon, and the difference between the two was almost nil.
So it probably said something that out of all the hypati in the entire history of Tevanne, Orso Ignacio understood lexicons better than anybody. After all, Orso had been the one to invent the combat lexicon—a smaller version of the regular kind, which ships and teams of oxen could haul around. That device was still quite large, complicated, and improbably expensive, and it could only manage to power a cohort’s armaments—but without that contribution, Tevanne would have never captured the Durazzo Sea, and all the cities around it.
Gregor knew quite a bit about combat lexicons. He’d had one at the siege of Dantua—right up until he didn’t. So he also knew quite a bit about what it was like to lose a lexicon. And he thought he could understand how Orso Ignacio felt right now. Perhaps he would be able to work the man from that angle.
He found himself promptly disabused of these notions when he entered the lexicon chamber and instantly heard the words, “Who the shit are you?”
Gregor blinked in the dim light while his eyes adjusted. The lexicon chamber was wide, dark, and mostly empty. There was a thick glass wall at the back with an open door set in its center, and a tall, thin man stood in the doorway, staring at Gregor. He wore a thick apron, thick gloves, and a pair of thick, dark goggles. He held in his hands a threatening-looking tool, some kind of bendy, looped metal wand with a lot of sharp teeth.
“P-pardon?” said Gregor.
The man tossed the wand away, lifted his goggles, and a pair of pale, deep-set, harsh eyes stared at him. “I said, who. The shit. Are you?” asked Orso Ignacio, this time much louder.
Orso had the look of an artist or sculptor who’d just stepped away from his studio, wearing a stained, beige shirt and off-white hose under his apron, and his beaked shoes—customary for the highest echelons—were ratty and had holes in the toes. His white hair rose up in a wild, unkempt shock, and his once-handsome face was dark and lined and skeletally thin, as if the man had sat for too long in a fish curer’s shed.
Gregor cleared his throat. “I apologize. Good morning, Hypatus. I’m terribly sorry to interrupt you during this most diffic—”
Orso rolled his eyes and looked across the room. “Who is he?”
Gregor peered through the shadows, and saw that there was someone else at the back of the room, someone he’d missed: a tall, rather pretty girl with a still, closed face. She was sitting on the floor before a tray of scriving blocks—an abacus-like device that scrivers used to test scriving strings—and she was popping the blocks in and out with a frightening speed, like a professional scivoli player moving their pieces across the board, creating a steady clackclackclack sound.