“Meaning?” said Sancia.
“Meaning our sigils are the language of reality, of trees and grass and, hell, I don’t know, fish. But Occidental sigils are the language God used to fashion that reality. So—use God’s coded commands, and reality is your plaything. Still, just a theory. The key would have helped me figure out how true all that was.”
<Clef,> said Sancia. <Are you hearing this?> But Clef remained silent, stuffed down the side of her boot. She wondered if his efforts had broken him, just as her own had almost broken her tonight.
“But the key was stolen as well…” said Gregor.
“Well, originally I thought the damned thing had gotten burned to bits in the waterfront fire.” He scowled at Sancia. “But the fire was you as well?”
Sancia shrugged. “Shit got out of hand.”
“I’ll say,” said Orso. “But what happened next? What did you do with it?”
Sancia then reiterated the story she’d told Gregor—bringing it to the fishery, Sark’s death, the fight, the escape.
“So you gave it over,” said Orso.
“I did,” she said.
“And your Sark said he suspected founder lineage behind this.”
“It’s what he said.”
Orso looked at Gregor.
“I might be founder lineage,” said Gregor, “but I think we can count me out, yes?”
“That’s not what I was looking at you for, idiot!” snapped Orso. “Do you believe her or not?”
Gregor thought about it. “No,” he said. “I don’t. Not entirely. I think there’s something she’s not telling us.”
Shit, thought Sancia.
“Have you searched her?” said Orso.
Sancia’s heart leapt in her chest. Shit!
“I’ve not had the time,” said Gregor. “Nor am I, ah, willing to submit a woman to my touch without her conse—”
Orso rolled his eyes. “Oh, for the love of God…Berenice! Would you please search Miss Sancia here for us?”
Berenice hesitated. “Uh. Really, sir?”
“You’ve already been shot at,” said Orso, “so you know this won’t be the worst thing to have happened to you tonight. Just wash your hands well afterwards.” He nodded at Sancia. “Go on. Stand up.”
Sighing, Sancia stood and raised her arms above her head. Berenice quickly patted her down. She was about a head taller than Sancia, so she had to stoop to do it. She paused at Sancia’s hips, and pulled out the last remaining stun bomb, a handful of old lockpicks, and nothing else.
Sancia tried to suppress the relief in her face. Thank God she didn’t make me take my scrumming boots off.
“That’s it,” said Berenice as she stood. The girl turned away quickly, but oddly enough, she was blushing.
Gregor looked at Sancia hard. “Really,” he said.
“Really,” said Sancia with as much defiance as she could muster.
“Terrific,” said Orso. “So we have a thief with a dull story, and no treasure. Is there anything else? Anything else?”
Sancia thought rapidly. She knew there was quite a lot more. The problem was what to keep, and what to give up.
Her current problem was that despite saving Orso’s life, her own still offered no value to these men. One bore the authorities assigned to him by the city, the other carried with him all the privileges of the merchant houses—and she was just a Commons thief who, as far as they were aware, no longer possessed the treasure everyone was seeking. Either one of them could have her killed, if they wished.
But she knew things they didn’t. And that was worth something.
“There’s more,” she said.
“Is there?” asked Gregor. “You omitted something from what you told me?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t tell you the part about how my client is the one who shut down all the scrivings in the Commons.”
* * *
The room fell silent. Everyone stared at her.
“What?” sputtered Orso. “What do you mean?”
“Your client?” said Gregor.
“Yeah,” said Sancia.
“One man did all that?” asked Gregor.
“Yeah,” said Sancia.
“Yeah?” said Orso, exasperated. “You can’t say something like that and then just keep saying yeah!”
“Yes. Please explain yourself,” said Gregor.
She told them about the escape, how she’d fled the fisheries and hidden in the Greens—omitting, of course, the bit about how Clef had helped her—and then she told them about the campo man, and his odd golden pocket watch.
Orso raised his hands, shaking his head. “Stop. Stop! This is insane. You’re telling me your client used one device, just one, and it somehow dampened or negated all the scrivings in the Greens, and Foundryside, and half a dozen other places to boot?”
“Basically,” said Sancia.
“One button, and all the commands and all the bindings and all the etchings just stopped?”
“Basically.”
He laughed. “It’s madness. It’s idiotic! It’s…”
“It’s like the Battle of Armiedes,” said Berenice suddenly.
“Eh?” said Orso. “What? What’s that?”
She cleared her throat. “The Battle of Armiedes, from the Occidental Empire. Long, long ago. There was a giant fleet of scrived ships, threatening to overthrow the empire. The hierophants met the fleet with but one boat—but that boat had a weapon on it, and when this weapon was used, all the ships…”
“Simply sank to the bottom,” said Orso slowly. “That’s right. I remember now. When did you learn about that, Berenice?”
“When you made me read those eighteen tomes of hierophantic history while we were negotiating with our people in Vialto.”
“Ah. Now that I think about it, it seems a bit cruel that I made you do that, Berenice.”
“That is because it was, sir.” She turned, looked at a bookcase behind her, and found one huge tome. She hauled it out, flipped it open, and scanned the lines. “Here’s the passage. ‘…but by focusing the influences of the imperiat, the hierophants were able to wrest control of all the sigillums of their foes, and discard them as if they were chaff among the wheat. And so the king of Cambysius and all his men sank to the bottom of the bay, and drowned, and were never heard from again.’?” She looked around at them. “That description always puzzled me…but if they were describing an actual tool, it might make sense.”
Orso cocked his head and half closed his eyes. “By focusing the influences of the imperiat…Hm.”
“So it doesn’t say if it looked like a big, weird pocket watch?” asked Sancia. “Because what I saw looked like a big, weird pocket watch.”
“It doesn’t,” said Berenice. “But if the key survived, then I suppose other tools could have as well.”
“How does knowing this help us?” asked Gregor.
“It doesn’t,” said Sancia. “But I saw him. I saw his face. And he’s got to be the man running the whole crew, from the men who ambushed me at the fishery to the ones who tried to kill us just tonight. If this gold pocket watch—this imperiat, if that’s the word for it—if it’s anything like the key, he probably spent fortunes getting it. You don’t hand that off to your lieutenant. You keep it in your own damn pocket. So that must have been him.”
“What did he look like, Sancia?” asked Gregor.
“Like campo sort,” said Sancia. “Clean. Clean skin. Clean clothes. Proper clothes. Like you, I guess,” she said, pointing at Berenice. “Not like you,” she said to Orso.
“Hey,” said Orso, offended.
“What else?” said Gregor.
“Tall,” she said. “Curly hair. Stooped posture. An indoor man for indoor work. Measly beard. But he didn’t have a loggotipo, or crest, or anything so simple.”
“That is a vague description,” said Gregor. “I suspect you will now say that if you saw him, you’d recognize him. Which would be useful for you—since we’d then need to look after you.”
“If I had more, I’d tell you more,” said Sancia.
“But it could be anyone!” said Orso. “Any house! Morsini, Michiel, Candiano—or even our own, I suppose! And we’ve no way of winnowing down our options!”
“The gravity rig doesn’t tell you anything, Orso?” asked Gregor.
“No,” said Orso. “Because that thing is some unprecedented, groundbreaking work! It’s some truly genius shit, of a kind I’ve never seen before. Whoever’s made this rig has been keeping their talent a dead secret, it seems.”
At that, Berenice cleared her throat. “There is another unanswered question, sir. Whoever this man is—how did he find out about the Occidental lexicon? About the key? About Captain Dandolo going to capture Sancia, and my following them? How did he know all that?”
“That’s, like, six unanswered questions!” said Orso. “And the answer is simple! There’s a leak, or a mole, or a spy somewhere here on the campo!”
Berenice shook her head. “We only talked about the key to each other, sir. And there was no one around when you told me to follow Captain Dandolo, just today. But there is a commonality, sir.”
“There is?” said Gregor.
“There is. They all took place in the same location—your workshop.”