“Oh, son of a bitch…”
Sancia felt consciousness flickering somewhere in the hollows of her head. She was lying on something soft, with a pillow under her head. People were talking around her, but she couldn’t make sense of it. The fight on the rooftop was a handful of broken moments scattered through her mind. She picked through each one, trying to fit them together.
There was a man on the roof of a campo building, she thought. About to be killed…
Then she heard them: thousands and thousands and thousands of hushed, chattering voices.
Scrivings. More scrivings than I’ve ever been around. Where the hell am I?
She cracked an eye and saw a ceiling above her. It was an odd thing to think, but it was undoubtedly the most ornate ceiling she’d ever seen in her life, made of tiny green tiles and golden plaster.
She glimpsed movement nearby and shut her eye all the way again. Then she felt a cold rag being pressed against her head. She felt the rag speak to her, the cool swirl of water, the twist of so many fibers…It pained her greatly in her weakened state, but she managed not to flinch.
“She’s got scars,” said a voice nearby—a girl’s. Berenice’s? “Lots of them.”
“She’s a thief,” said a raspy man’s voice. She’d heard it on the rooftop, she remembered—that must be Orso. “Probably a hazard of the damned job.”
“No, sir. This looks more like surgery. On her skull.”
There was a silence.
“She climbed the side of this building like a monkey in the canopies,” said Gregor’s voice quietly. “I’ve never seen anything like it. And she says she can hear scrivings.”
“She said she what?” said Orso. “What rot! That’s like saying you can taste a goddamn sonata! The girl must be a raving loon.”
“Maybe. But she knew where those men in the gravity rigs were. And there was something she did, with one of the rigs…I doubt if even you’ve ever seen anything like it. She made it—”
Sancia realized she needed to stop this line of discussion. Gregor was about to describe Clef’s trick with the gravity plates; and Orso, apparently, was the man who’d owned or at least tried to own Clef, so he might be able to identify what he could do—which meant he might hear Gregor’s story and realize Sancia was still walking around with him.
She sucked in a breath, coughed, and started to sit up.
“She wakes,” said Orso’s voice sourly. “Oh goody.”
Sancia looked around. She was lying on a sofa in a large and dazzlingly sumptuous office: rosy scrived lights flickered along the walls, a huge wooden desk stretched along one half of the room, and every inch of the walls was covered in shelves and books.
Sitting behind the desk was the man she’d saved—Orso—still stained with blood, though his throat was black and blue under the dried gore. He was glaring at her over a glass of bubble rum—an outrageously expensive liquor she’d stolen and sold before, but never tried. The gravity plates from the man who’d exploded on the roof sat on the desk before him, crusted with blood. Gregor Dandolo stood next to him, arms crossed, one forearm wrapped in bandages. And beside her, on the sofa, sat the girl, Berenice, who watched everything with a calm look of detached bemusement, as if this were all a birthday party entertainment gone thoroughly awry.
“Where the hell am I?” asked Sancia.
“You’re in the Dandolo campo inner enclaves,” said Gregor. “In the Hypatus Building. It’s a sort of research buildi—”
“I know what the goddamn hypatus does,” said Sancia. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Mm, no,” said Orso. “Stealing my box was very much an idiot thing to do. That was you, yes? Can we cop to that?”
“I stole a box,” said Sancia. “In a safe. I’m only just now figuring out who you are.”
Orso scoffed. “You’re either ignorant or a liar. So. It’s Sancia, is it?”
“Yeah.”
“Never heard of you. Are you a canal operator?” asked Orso. “What house do you work for?”
“None.”
“An independent, eh?” He poured another glass of bubble rum and tossed it back quickly. “I never did much canal work on other houses, but I understood the independents didn’t last long. About as reusable as a wooden knife. So. You must be good, if you’re still breathing. Who was it? Who hired you to steal from me?”
“She said she doesn’t know,” said Gregor.
“Can’t she speak for herself?” said Orso.
Gregor glanced at Orso, then Sancia. “Let’s find out. Sancia—do you know what was in the box?”
At that, Orso froze. He glanced at Berenice, then stared resolutely at the floor.
“Go on,” said Gregor.
“I already told you,” said Sancia. “My client said not to open the box.”
“That is not an answer,” said Gregor.
“It’s what they said.”
“I don’t doubt that.” He turned back to Orso. “I doubt if you find that odd either, Hypatus. Because these criminals knew, just as you did, that its contents were Occidental—weren’t they?”
Even though he was covered in blood, Sancia could see Orso going pale. “What…What do you mean, Captain?” he asked.
“I will dispense with all pretenses,” said Gregor, sighing. “I’ve neither the time nor the energy for them.” He sat in a chair opposite Orso. “You broke my mother’s ban on the purchase of Occidental items. You tried to buy something valuable. This item was stored at my waterfront, for it could not be stored at the Dandolo campo. While it was there, young Sancia here was hired to steal it. Her partner, Sark, dutifully passed it along to their client—and was murdered for his troubles. And since then, this person has tried to kill anyone who’s had the remotest of interactions with that item—Sancia, you, Berenice, and me. And I suspect that such efforts will not end tonight—because the item must be incredibly important. As Occidental tools generally are. After all, they say Crasedes built his own god out of metals and stones—and a tool that could do that would be beyond value. Yes?”
Orso started rocking back and forth.
“What was in the box, Orso?” asked Gregor. “You need to tell me. It appears our lives depend on it.”
Orso rubbed his mouth, then suddenly turned to Sancia and spat, “Where is it now? What did you do with it, damn you?”
“No,” said Gregor. “First tell me what could be so valuable that it drove someone to try to kill us all tonight.”
Orso grumbled for a moment. Then he said, “It was…It was a key.”
Sancia did her utmost not to emote, but her heart was suddenly thrumming. Or maybe she should emote, she thought. She tried her best to look confused.
Gregor raised an eyebrow. “A key?”
“Yes. A key. Just a key. A golden key.”
“And did this key do anything?” asked Gregor.
“No one knew for certain. Grave robbers tend to lack the proper testing experience, you see. They found it in some giant, musty, collapsed fortress in Vialto. It was one of several Occidental tools they and the pirates and all the rest discovered.”
“You’d already tried to purchase one such tool, hadn’t you?” asked Gregor.
“Yes,” said Orso through gritted teeth. “I assume your mother told you about that. It was something like a lexicon. A big, ancient box. We paid dearly for it, and it vanished between Vialto and here.”
“How dear is dearly?” asked Gregor.
“A lot.”
Gregor rolled his eyes and looked at Berenice.
“Sixty thousand duvots,” said Berenice quietly.
Sancia coughed. “Holy shit.”
“Yes,” said Orso. “Hence Ofelia Dandolo’s frustration. But the key…It was worth trying again. There are all kinds of stories about the hierophants using scrived tools to navigate the barriers of reality—barriers we ourselves barely understand!”
“So you just wanted to make more powerful tools,” said Gregor.
“No,” said Orso. “Not just. Listen—when we inscribe an item with sigillums, we alter its reality, as anyone knows. But if you wipe the sigillums away or move beyond a lexicon, then those alterations vanish. The Occidentals not only developed tools that didn’t need lexicons—when the Occidentals altered reality, it was permanent.”
“Permanent?” said Sancia.
“Yes. So, say you have a scrived hierophantic tool that, oh, can make a stream burble up from the ground. Sure, you’d need sigillums to make the tool—but if you use the tool on the ground, then that water is there forever. It will have edited reality in a direct, instantaneous, and everlasting fashion. Supposedly the wand of Crasedes could unthread reality and tie it all back together again, if the stories are to be believed.”
“Whoa,” said Sancia quietly.
“Whoa is right,” said Orso.
“How is that possible?” asked Gregor.
“That’s one of the giant goddamn mysteries I was trying to solve!” said Orso. “There are some theories. A few hierophantic texts call the basic sigils we use the lingai terrora—the language of the earth, of creation. But the Occidental sigils were the lingai divina—the language of God.”