The girl paused and glanced at Gregor, her face immaculately inscrutable. “I believe,” she said, in a quiet, even voice, “that that is Captain Gregor Dandolo.”
Gregor frowned at her, surprised. He’d never met this girl in his life. The girl calmly resumed slotting the blocks in and out of the tray.
“Oh,” said Orso. “Ofelia’s boy?” He peered at Gregor. “My God, you’ve gained weight.”
The girl—Gregor suspected she was Orso’s assistant of some kind—cringed ever so slightly.
But Gregor was not insulted. The last time Orso had glimpsed him he’d probably just returned from the wars. “Yes,” said Gregor. “That tends to happen when a person goes from a place that has no food at all to a place that has some.”
“Fascinating,” said Orso. “So. What the hell are you doing down here, Captain?”
“Yes, I—”
“You’re still slumming it down at the waterfront, right?” His eyes suddenly burned with a strange fury. “If there is still a waterfront to slum in, that is.”
“Yes, and in fact I—”
“Well, as you may notice, Captain…” He held his hands out and gestured to the large, dark, empty room. “Our current environs are bereft of waters, as well as fronts of all kinds. Not much for you to do here, it seems. Got plenty of doors, though. Loads of ’em.” Orso turned to examine something behind him. “I advise you scrumming make use of one. Any one, I frankly don’t care.”
Gregor strode forward into the chamber, and said in a slightly louder voice, “I am here to ask you, Hypatus…” Then he stopped, wincing as a headache pulsed through his skull, and rubbed his forehead.
Orso looked at him. “Yes?” he said.
Gregor took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
“Take your time.”
He swallowed and tried to collect himself—but the headache persisted. “Does that…does that go away?”
“No.” Orso was smiling unpleasantly. “Never been near a lexicon before?”
“I have, but this one seems very…”
“Big?”
“Yes. Big. The machine is off, isn’t it? I mean—that’s the problem, correct?”
Orso scoffed and turned to stare at the device behind him. “Right now, it is not ‘off,’ as you put it—the more accurate term is reduced. It’s difficult to turn a lexicon just off—it’s not a damned windmill, it’s a collection of assertions about physics and reality. Turning it off would be like, oh, converting a striper into all the carbon and calcium and nitrogen and whatever else makes it up—conceptually feasible? Sure, why not. Practically possible? Not scrumming likely.”
“I…see,” said Gregor. Though in truth he was nowhere close to seeing.
Orso’s assistant exhaled softly, as if to say—Here he goes again.
Orso grinned at Gregor over his shoulder. “Want to come closer? Take a look?”
Gregor knew Orso was goading him—the closer you got to a lexicon, the more uncomfortable it felt. But Gregor wanted to put Orso’s guard down, however he could—and allowing himself to be toyed with was one option.
Squinting in pain, he walked over to the glass wall and looked in at the lexicon. It resembled a huge metal can lying on its side, only the can had been cut into tiny slivers or discs—thousands of them, or maybe even millions. He knew in vague terms that each disc was full of scriving definitions—the instructions or arguments that convinced scrived devices to work the way they ought to—though he was aware that he understood this to about the same degree that he understood that his brain was what did all his thinking for him.
“I’ve never seen one this close before,” said Gregor.
“Almost no one has,” said Orso. “The stress of all that meaning, forcing reality to comply with so many arguments—it makes the thing hot as hell, and damned difficult to be around. And yet, last night this device—all its assertions about reality—went poof, and turned off. Like blowing out a damned candle. Which, as I have just generously described to you, ought to be impossible.”
“How?” asked Gregor.
“Beats the ever-living shit out of me!” said Orso with savage cheer. He joined the girl at the scriving blocks and watched as she plugged in strings one after the other, the tiny metal cubes flying in and out as her fingers danced over the tray with blinding speed. Each time, a tiny glass at the top of the tiles would glow softly. “Now all kinds of goddamn strings work!” he said. “They work perfectly, implacably, and inarguably! How comforting. It’s like the whole thing never happened.”
“I see,” said Gregor. “And, may I ask—who is this, exactly?” He nodded at the girl.
“Her?” Orso seemed surprised by the question. “She’s my fab.”
Gregor did not know what a “fab” was, and the girl seemed uninterested in answering, ignoring them as she tested string after string of sigils. He decided to move on.
“Was it sabotage?” he asked. “Another merchant house?”
“Again—beats the ever-living shit out of me,” said Orso. “I’ve checked all the infrastructural scrivings that keep the thing afloat, and those strings are all working away, cheery as can be. The lexicon itself doesn’t show any damage. It shows no sign of having been properly or improperly reduced. If the dumb piece of shit who’s in charge of maintenance could confirm the thing’s regularly scheduled checkups, I could rule that out. And the tiles are all arranged in some pretty basic, boring, conventional configurations. Right?”
His assistant nodded. “Correct, sir.” She gestured to the walls behind her. “Manufacturing, security, lighting, and transport. That’s the extent of the wall’s load.”
Gregor looked at the walls and slowly realized what she meant. “The wall” was the industry term for a tremendous wall of thousands of white tiles, covered in sigils, which slid up or down on a short track. Each tile represented a scriving definition: if the tile was in the up position, the definition was inactive, and thus did not work; if it was in the down position, then it did.
This sounded simple, but only a scriver with decades of high-level training could look at a wall and tell exactly what was going on. A lexicon’s wall, of course, was carefully watched and maintained: if someone slid the wrong tile up, and deactivated a crucial definition, it could, say, render all the scrived carriages in the Dandolo campo suddenly unable to stop. Which would be bad.
Or, if someone slid several critical tiles down, and activated some extremely complicated definitions, then it could overload the lexicon, and then…
Well. That would be much, much worse.
Because a lexicon was essentially a giant violation of reality—that was why it was so unpleasant to be close to one. The consequences of a lexicon going haywire were too horrific to contemplate. And this was the chief reason that the city of Tevanne, with all of its power, corruption, and fractious merchant houses, had yet to experience much deliberate turmoil: as the entire city was essentially maintained by a system of huge bombs, that tended to make people cautious.
“How troublesome,” said Gregor.
“Yes. Isn’t it?” Orso peered at him suspiciously. “Doesn’t your mother know all this? I thought I’d been a good boy and properly kept her up to date.”
“I cannot speak to my mother’s knowledge regarding your situation here, Hypatus,” said Gregor. “I’m not here about the blackouts. Rather, I had a question for you regarding the waterfront.”
“The waterfront?” said Orso, irritated. “Why the hell would you bother me about that?”
“I wanted to ask you about the theft that took place.”
“What a waste of time! You can’t expect me to…” He paused. “Wait. Theft? You mean the fire.”
“No, no,” said Gregor politely. “I mean the theft. Our investigations suggest that the fire was set as a distraction to allow a thief to get at our safes.”
“How do you know that?” he demanded.
“Because we have looked in our safes,” said Gregor. “And found something missing.”
Orso blinked, very slowly. “Ah,” he said. He was quiet for a moment. “I…had thought the safes burned down along with the Waterwatch headquarters. I thought they were destroyed.”
“That was nearly the case,” said Gregor. “But when it became clear that the fire would spread, I had all of our safes loaded on carts and removed to safety.”
Again, Orso blinked. “Really.”
“Yes,” said Gregor. “And we found something was stolen. A small, plain, wooden box, from safe 23D.”
Orso and his assistant had gone very, very still. Gregor could not help but feel pleased.
It’s nice to be right, sometimes.
“Odd…” said Orso carefully. “But you said you had a question for me—and I’ve yet to hear a question, Captain.”
“Well, I did some follow-ups in the Commons last night, trying to track down the thief. I located their fence—the person who sells the things a thief steals—and found a note in their belongings referencing the Dandolo hypatus, in relation to this theft, and fire. My question, Hypatus, would be—why do you think that is?”