“So?” said Orso.
Berenice sighed. She then reached into a desk, produced a large sheaf of paper, dipped a pen in some ink, and then drew at least twenty elaborate, complicated, beautiful symbols onto the paper, dazzlingly, dazzlingly fast. It was like a party trick, effortlessly creating these gorgeous designs in the blink of an eye.
Berenice showed the piece of paper to Orso. They had no meaning to Sancia—but he gasped at the sight of it. “No!” he said.
“I think so, sir,” she said.
He turned and stared at his workshop door, his jaw slack. “It couldn’t be…”
“What just happened?” asked Gregor. “What is that you drew there, Berenice?”
“An old scriving problem,” said Berenice. “An incomplete design, created to make students wonder—how do you make a rig that captures sounds of the air?”
“Someone’s solved it,” said Orso faintly. “It’s a rig. A rig! It’s all just a rig, isn’t it?”
“I suspect so, sir,” said Berenice. “A device, a secret one, planted in your workshop that somehow reports our conversations.”
For once, Gregor and Sancia seemed to be on the same side—both of them glanced at each other, bewildered.
“You think a rig is spying on you?” said Sancia.
“Isn’t that impossible?” said Gregor. “I thought scriving mostly moved things around or made them light or heavy.”
“That’s true,” said Berenice. “Scriving is good at big, simple processes, huge exchanges done on a grand scale. It makes things get fast, get hot, get cold. But little things, delicate things, complicated things…those are trickier.”
“Trickier,” said Orso. “But not impossible. A sound rig—one that makes or captures noise—is a favorite theory problem for scrivers to toy with. But no one’s ever actually done it.”
“But if these people have scrived gravity,” said Berenice, looking at the plates on Orso’s desk, “who knows what other barriers they’ve broken?”
“Assuming they could make such a rig—how could they get it in there?” asked Gregor.
“They can fly, asshole,” said Sancia. “And this place has windows.”
“Oh,” said Gregor. “Right.”
“Still,” said Berenice. “This is all just a theory I have. I could be totally wrong.”
“But if my client did put that thing in there,” said Sancia, “now we just go in and get it—right? And then, I don’t know, smash it or something, yeah?”
“Think,” said Orso. “If the rig were obvious, we’d have already spotted the damn thing!”
“We’ve no idea how such a rig would even look,” said Berenice. “It could look like anything. A plate. A pencil. A coin. Or it could be hidden in the walls, or floor, or ceiling.”
“And if we go digging around for it, and they hear us,” said Orso, “then we’ll have given the game away.”
Gregor looked at Sancia. “But Sancia—you can hear scrivings, can’t you?”
The room went quiet.
“Uh,” said Sancia. “Y-yeah.” Of course, it’d been Clef who’d heard the gravity rigs converging on them before. Sancia had just told him a half truth. It was getting hard to keep up with all her lies.
“So you can just go in to the workshop and listen for it, yes?” said Gregor.
“Yes, can’t you?” said Orso, sitting forward. He was looking at her a little too intensely.
“I can try,” said Sancia. “But there’s a lot of noise around here…” This was true. The campo was echoing with whispered commands, muttered scripts, quiet chanting. Every once in a while they would spike, growing loud as some vast, invisible infrastructure performed some task, and her brain could hardly bear it.
“Is there?” demanded Orso. “And how can you hear this noise? How does this process work?”
“It just does. You want my help or not?”
“That depends on whether you can actually give it.”
Sancia didn’t move.
“What’s the problem here?” asked Orso. “You go look, you find, that’s it, right?”
Sancia looked around at them. “If I do this…I’m not going to do it for free.”
“Ohh, fine,” said Orso dismissively. “You want money? I’m sure we can work out some kind of arrangement. Especially because I’m convinced you’ll fail.”
“No,” said Gregor. “Orso can promise you money all he likes. But he is not the person you are bargaining with. That would be me.” He held up the key to her bond.
“Son of a bitch,” snapped Sancia. “I’m not your hostage! I’m not doing this for nothing!”
“You would be doing it because you owe it to me. And for the good of the city.”
“It’s not my damned city! It’s yours! I just live here, or try to! But you people are making it goddamn hard!”
He looked surprised by her ferocity. He considered it. “Find the rig, if you can,” he said. “Then we’ll talk. I am not unreasonable when it comes to these things.”
“Could have scrumming fooled me,” said Sancia. She stood, opened the door to the workshop, and walked inside.
“Hey,” Orso called after her. “Hey—don’t touch anything in there, all right?”
* * *
Walking into Orso Ignacio’s workshop would have been startling to anyone. The amount of stuff—the sheer, ungodly avalanche of so many things—was awe-inspiring.
The workshop was a large, long room, containing six long tables piled up with bowls of cooled metals, as well as styli, wooden buttons, and dozens and dozens of machines, devices, contraptions—or parts of them. Some of the rigs were moving, twirling ever so slowly or arrhythmically clunking away. Where the walls weren’t covered with bookcases, they were covered with papers, drawings, engravings, sigil strings, and maps. The oddest device sat in the back, some kind of giant metal can full of discs covered in scrivings. It sat on rails that would slide it back into what appeared to be some kind of oven set in the wall, like the one they made pies in at the Greens. She supposed it was a test lexicon—a tiny version of the real thing. She’d heard of them from the Scrappers, but she’d certainly never seen one before.
It was a lot to see. But to Sancia, it was deafening.
The room echoed and swarmed with quiet chanting, all these scrived devices muttering like a rookery of uneasy crows. Sancia’s mind was still weak after saving Orso, so it was like rubbing sand on a sunburn.
One thing’s for sure, she thought. These people are doing a hell of a lot more than the Scrappers ever were.
She started stalking through the room, listening carefully. She walked past the innards of some component, dissected and laid out on a piece of linen; then a set of bizarre, scrived tools, which all seemed to be vibrating softly; then rows and rows of blank black boxes that were curiously veiled in shadow, as if they sucked up light itself.
If something in here is a traitor, she thought, I don’t know how I’m going to identify it. She wished Clef were awake. He’d sniff it out right away.
Then she glimpsed something on the wall, and stopped.
Hanging on the wall between two bookcases was a large charcoal sketch of Clef. It wasn’t perfect—the tooth was all wrong—but the head, with its odd butterfly-shaped hole, was perfect.
Sancia walked closer to it, and saw there was a handwritten note scrawled at the bottom:
What could it open? For what grand lock was this designed??
This guy has been thinking about Clef for a lot longer than I have, she thought. Maybe he knows more than he’s letting on—just as I do.
Then she saw there was a smudge at the bottom of the sketch, at the bottom, where the paper was crinkled. Someone must have pinched the paper there repeatedly.
She reached out, grabbed the paper, and lifted it—and saw there was something behind the sketch of Clef.
It was a large engraving. And the sight disturbed her.
The engraving depicted a group of men standing in a hall. They looked like monks, wearing plain robes, though each robe bore a curious insignia—perhaps the outline of a butterfly, she couldn’t quite tell. She found she did not like the sight of the hall: it was a massive, ornate stone chamber, huge and blocky with angles in all the wrong places. It felt like light bent in the wrong ways in that room.
At the end of the hall was a box, like a giant casket or treasure chest. The group looked on as one man stood before the box, raised his hands, and seemed to open it by will alone. Emerging from this open box was…
Something. A person, perhaps. Perhaps a woman, or perhaps a statue, though there was something indistinct about the figure, like the artist had not been sure what they were depicting.
Sancia looked at the print at the bottom of the engraving. It read:
CRASEDES THE GREAT IN THE CHAMBER AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD: The hierophants are recorded as believing the world is a machine, wrought by God, and somewhere at its heart it is a chamber which was once His seat. Crasedes, finding the seat of God vacant, attempted to install a god of his own making in the chamber to oversee the world. This engraving, like so many sources, suggests he was successful. But if he was, it does not explain why his grand empire fell to ash and ruin.