“Why did you suspect Ziani, Orso?” asked Gregor.
Orso scowled at Berenice, then tried to think of what to say. “When I was at the council meeting, with everyone talking about the blackout, none of the house leaders seemed to act odd—except possibly Ziani. He looked at me, at my neck, and he went out of his way to dig at me on the hierophants. There was something to that that just…bothered me. Just a hunch.”
“A good hunch,” said Sancia. She blew her nose into a rag. “I mean, I saw him—all of him. He’s behind this. All of it. And he’s trying to build dozens, if not hundreds, of his own imperiats.”
There was a silence as they all considered this.
“Which means that, if Tomas Ziani figures this process out,” said Gregor quietly, “he can essentially hold the civilized world hostage.”
“I…I still can’t believe it’s Ziani,” said Orso. “I asked Estelle if she would tell me if Ziani was coming after me, and she said she would.”
“You trusted the man’s wife to betray him?” asked Gregor.
“Well, yes? But it sounds like Tomas Ziani is basically keeping her locked in the Mountain, much like her father. So although she might have a reason to betray him, I don’t know how much she could actually know.”
“Uh, I don’t know who this Estelle person is,” said Sancia, “but I just assume it’s someone Orso is scrumming?”
They all stared at her, scandalized.
“Okay,” said Sancia, “someone you were scrumming then?”
Orso’s face worked as he tried to figure out how offended he was. “I was…acquainted with her, once. When I worked for Tribuno Candiano.”
“You were scrumming your boss’s daughter?” said Sancia, impressed. “Wow. Gutsy.”
“As entertaining as Orso’s personal life is,” said Gregor loudly, “we should return to the issue at hand. How can we prevent Tomas Ziani from building up an arsenal of hierophantic weapons?”
“And how does he even plan to make them?” asked Berenice, paging through Tribuno’s notes. “It seems to be going wrong for him somehow…”
“Please, Sancia, go over what Ziani said,” said Orso. “Line by line.”
She did so, describing every word of the conversation she’d heard.
“So,” said Orso when she was finished. “He called it a shell. And described some…some kind of failed exchange?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He also mentioned a ritual. I don’t know why he called it a shell, though—shells have something inside them, usually.”
“And he thought the shell itself was the problem,” said Berenice. “The imperiats they’d made somehow weren’t exactly like the original imperiat.”
“Yeah. That seemed to be it.”
There was a pause. Then Berenice and Orso looked at each other in horror.
“It’s the Occidental alphabet,” Berenice said. “The lingai divina.”
“Yes,” said Orso faintly.
“He’s…he’s missing a piece. A sigil, or more. That’s got to be it!”
“Yes.” Orso heaved a deep sigh. “That’s why he’s been stealing Occidental artifacts. That’s why he stole my scrumming key! Of course. He wants to complete the alphabet. Or at least get enough of it to make a functional imperiat.”
“I’m lost,” said Gregor. “Alphabets?”
“We only have pieces of the Occidental alphabet of sigils,” said Berenice. “A handful here, a handful there. It’s the biggest obstacle to Occidental research. It’s like trying to solve a riddle in a foreign language where you only know the vowels.”
“I see,” said Gregor. “But if you steal enough samples—the bits and pieces and fragments that have the right sigils on them…”
“Then you can complete the alphabet,” said Orso. “You can finally speak the language to command your tools to have hierophantic capabilities. Theoretically. Though it sounds like that greasy bastard Ziani is having a time of it.”
“But he is getting help,” said Berenice. “It is Tribuno Candiano who’s writing the sigil strings to make rigs like the gravity plates, and the listening device. Only he’s doing it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, in his madness.”
“But that still doesn’t hang together for me,” said Orso. “The Tribuno I knew didn’t bother with the usual gravity bullshit so many scrivers wasted their lives on. His interests were far…grander.” He pulled a face, like remembering Tribuno’s interests disturbed him. “I feel like it just can’t be him.”
“The Tribuno you knew was sane,” said Gregor.
“True,” admitted Orso. “Either way, it sounds like Ziani does have all of Tribuno’s Occidental collection—that would be the trove that he’d moved out of the Mountain, right?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He mentioned some other artifacts he’d hidden away somewhere—mostly to hide it from you, Orso.”
Orso smirked. “Well. At least we’ve got the scrummer rattled. I suspect he’s been stealing Occidental artifacts from all kinds of people. He must have quite the hoard. And…there was that last bit…the one I find most confusing. They had to dispose of a body?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He made it sound like they’d been disposing of bodies for some time. Didn’t seem to matter whose bodies they were. I get the impression it had something to do with this ritual—but I don’t understand any of that.”
Gregor held up his hands. “We’re getting off track. Alphabets, hierophants, bodies—yes, all that is troubling. But the core issue is that Tomas Ziani intends to manufacture devices that can annihilate scriving on a mass scale. They would be as bolts in a vast quiver to him and his forces. But his entire strategy rests upon one item—the original imperiat. That’s the key to all of his ambitions.” He looked around at them. “So. If he were to lose that…”
“Then that would be a massive setback,” said Berenice.
“Yes,” said Gregor. “Lose the original, and he’ll have nothing to copy.”
“And if Sancia is right, Tomas flat-out said where he was keeping it,” said Orso thoughtfully. He turned in his chair to look out the window.
Sancia followed his gaze. There, huddled in the distant cityscape of Tevanne, was a vast, arching dome, like a smooth, black growth in the center of the city: the Mountain of the Candianos.
“Ah, hell,” she sighed.
* * *
“It’s insane,” said Sancia, pacing. “The damned idea is insane!”
“Breaking into a foundry on a whim was pretty goddamn insane,” said Orso. “But you seemed game about that!”
“We caught them with their hose down,” said Sancia. “In an abandoned foundry in the middle of nowhere. That’s different from trying to break into the scrumming Mountain, maybe the most guarded place in the damned city, if not the world! I doubt if Berenice has some delightful trinket in her pockets that could help us get into there.”
“It is insane,” said Gregor. “But it is, regrettably, our only option. I doubt if Ziani can be lured out of the Mountain with the original imperiat. So we must go in.”
“You mean me,” said Sancia. “I doubt if your dumb asses will be the ones being dropped in there.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Gregor. “But I admit, I’ve no idea how to break into such a place. Orso—did you live there ever?”
“I did once,” said Orso. “When it was freshly built. That was a hell of a long time ago, it seems now.”
“You did?” asked Sancia. “Are the rumors true? Is it really…haunted?”
She half expected Orso to burst out laughing at the notion, but he didn’t. Instead he leaned back in his chair and said, “You know, I’m not sure. It’s…difficult to describe. It’s big, for one thing. The sheer size of the thing is a feat in and of itself. It’s like a city in there. But that wasn’t the oddest thing. The oddest thing about the Mountain was that it remembered.”
“Remembered what?” asked Sancia.
“What you did,” said Orso. “What you’d done. Who you were. You’d walk into a bathing room at the same time every day and find a bath already drawn for you, piping hot. Or you’d walk down the hall to your lift at the usual time and find it waiting for you. The changes would be subtle, and slow, just incremental adjustments—but, slowly, slowly, people got used to the Mountain knowing what they were doing inside of it, and adjusting for them. They got used to this…this place predicting what they’d do.”
“It learned?” said Gregor. “A scrived structure learned, like it had a mind of its own?”
“That I don’t know. It seemed to. Tribuno designed the thing in his later years, when he’d gotten strange, and he never shared his methods with me. He’d grown hugely secretive by then.”
“How could it know where people were, sir?” asked Berenice.
A guilty look came over Orso’s face. “Okay, well, I did have something to do with that…You know the trick with my workshop door?”