“We don’t even know where we want to attack,” said Giovanni.
“Yes, we do,” said Sancia. She looked at Orso. “And you do too. Estelle needs to start her ritual with the death of one person—just one. She hated Tomas—but there’s someone else she hates even more. Someone who’s still alive. And I can think of only one place she’d choose for her transformation.”
Orso frowned at her for a moment. Then he went white and said, “Oh my God…”
* * *
“Is this where you want him, ma’am?” asked the attendant.
Estelle Candiano stared around her father’s office. It was as she’d remembered it, all grim gray stone, all walls with far too many angles. A huge window on the far side stared out at the city of Tevanne, and a second small circular window stared up at the sky—these were the only reminder that this large room existed in any semblance of reality.
She remembered being here, once. As a child, when her father had first built it—she’d played before his desk, drawing on the stone floor with chalk. She’d been a child then, but when she’d gotten older, and become a woman, she’d been disinvited from such places, where powerful men made powerful decisions. Women, she’d understood, were unfit for inclusion among those ranks.
“Ma’am?” asked the attendant again.
“Mm?” said Estelle. “What?”
“Do you want him there?” asked the attendant. “By the wall?”
“Yes. Yes, that will do.”
“All right. They should have him here shortly.”
“Good. And the rest of my things—from the abandoned foundry—they’re on the way, yes?”
“I believe so, ma’am.”
“Good.”
She looked around at the office again. My workshop, she thought. Mine. And soon, I shall have the tools here to make wonders the world cannot imagine…
Estelle looked at her left hand. Within a few hours the skin there, as well as the skin on her wrist, her arm, her shoulder and breast, would all be marked with delicately drawn sigils, a chain leading from her palm—which would be holding the dagger, of course—to her heart. Ancient sigils of containment, of transference, capable of directing huge amounts of energies into her body, her soul.
There was the sound of squeaking, rattling wheels in the hall outside.
Estelle Candiano considered that she was likely the only person alive who knew of those ancient sigils, and how to use them.
The sound of squeaking wheels grew closer.
She was the only one, she thought—except possibly the person being wheeled to her right now.
Estelle turned to face the door as the two attendants directed the rolling bed into the office. She looked at the shrunken, frail figure nestled in its sheets, face covered in sores, eyes tiny and bleary and red and thoughtless.
She smiled. “Hello, Father.”
34
“Is a direct attack even possible?” said Claudia. “If you all are right about this imperiat thing, couldn’t Estelle shut down any assault?”
“The imperiat isn’t all-powerful,” said Sancia. “It has a limited range, and I don’t think it’s easy to operate. If Estelle screws it up, it could kill all the scrivings in the Mountain—which would send the whole place down on her head. I think she knows that. She’ll be cautious.”
“So a quick strike,” said Gio. “Fast, before she can prepare.”
“Right, but fast is a problem,” said Sancia. “I don’t see how we get to the Mountain without a fight. There’s hundreds of soldiers between us and them.”
“Direct confrontation, though…” said Claudia. “I always advise against it.”
“Like we say, you’ve always got three options,” said Gio. “Across, under, or over. No tunnels to go under. No way across through all those mercenaries. And I doubt if we can go over. You’d have to plant an anchor to make an air-sailing rig go—and that means getting to the Mountain, which is kind of our problem.”
“It’s mad to ask, but can we develop a way to fly without an anchor?” said Claudia.
Berenice, Orso, and Sancia grew still. They slowly looked at one another.
“What?” said Claudia.
“We’ve seen people fly,” said Berenice.
“And do it scrumming well!” said Orso. “Brilliant!”
Claudia stared at them. “Uh, you have?”
Berenice leapt up and ran to a large trunk in the corner. She opened it, hauled something out, and brought it back to the table.
It looked like two iron plates, tied together with fine, strong ropes, with a bronze dial in the center…And they looked like they were crusted over with blood.
“Is that…” said Claudia.
“They’re gravity plates,” said Berenice, excited. “Made by Estelle Candiano herself! Assassins were able to jump over walls and buildings with them!”
“And more than that,” said Sancia. “They could basically fly with the damn things!”
“Well, then,” said Claudia. “Holy shit.”
“So it’s simple!” said Giovanni. “You just use the plates to fly to the Mountain. Or, say, jump from roof to roof to the Mountain.”
Sancia looked at the gravity plates. She tensed the muscle in her mind, opened the floodgates, and looked…
She’d expected the plates to glimmer and shine brightly, as any powerfully scrived item did. But they did not—rather, they looked like a patchwork of silver, shining in some spots but not in others.
She shook her head. “No. They’re not working right,” she said. “Some of the scriving commands are operating, but not all of them—so the whole rig is nonfunctional.”
“You can tell that just by looking at it?” said Orso, stunned.
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “And I can talk to it.”
“You can talk to i—”
“Shut up, and let me see here…”
She shut her eyes, placed her bare hands on the plates, and listened.
<…location…location of MASS?> said the plates. <Cannot…compilation incomplete…MASS, MASS, MASS. Lacking all directionality…MASS? Need density of MASS? Location of MASS. Mass…orientation critical to activate sequence for…for…>
She shook her head. “It’s…weird. It’s like listening to someone with a head injury muttering in their sleep. It’s not making sense.” She opened her eyes. “It’s like they’re broken.”
Claudia clucked her tongue. “You said Estelle Candiano made these?”
“Yeah?” said Sancia. “Why?”
“Well, if I were her, and if I knew there was a chance my enemies had stolen my toys…I’d just turn off the scriving definitions at my lexicon. It’d make them useless, or broken—just like this rig.”
“Of course!” said Orso. “That’s why the plates can’t talk! Estelle has taken away some critical pillar in its logic, so the whole thing has collapsed!”
“Which means it won’t work,” said Claudia. “So we’re scrummed.”
“I guess we can’t make our own definition plates that could make these run?” sighed Gio.
“Estelle has basically achieved the impossible with this rig,” said Orso. “No one’s ever exhibited such fine control over gravity short of a hierophant. Remaking the impossible in a day is quite out of the question.”
There was a silence as everyone thought about this.
Berenice sat forward. “But…but we don’t have to remake all of it,” she said.
“We don’t?” said Sancia.
“No! Estelle’s probably just deactivated a few critical scrivings—but the rest still work. If you’ve got a hole in a wall, you don’t tear it down and make a whole new wall—you just cut a piece of stone to fit the hole.”
“Wait,” said Orso. “Are…are you saying we should fabricate the missing definitions ourselves?”
“Not we,” said Berenice. “Me. I’m faster than you, sir.”
Orso blinked, taken aback. Then he gathered himself. “Fine. But your metaphor is shit! This isn’t just filling in a goddamn hole in a wall! This is some complicated scrumming scriving, girl!”
“Good thing we’ve got someone who can talk to rigs, then,” said Berenice. She slid into a seat across from Sancia and pulled out a sheet of paper and a quill. “Go on. Tell me everything the plates are saying.”
“But it’s gibberish!” protested Sancia.
“Then tell me all the damned gibberish, then!”
She started talking.
She described how the plate plaintively asked for the location of this “mass,” begging for someone to tell it where the mass was, and the density of this mass, and so on and so on. She kept hoping Berenice would tell her to stop, but she didn’t. She just kept writing down everything Sancia said—until, finally, she held up a finger.
Berenice slowly sat back in her chair, staring at the sheet of paper before her. Half of it looked to be notes. The other half was covered in sigils and strings of symbols. She turned to look at Orso. “I…I am starting to believe everyone’s been trying to scrive gravity wrong, sir. And only Estelle Candiano has ever really figured it out.”
Orso leaned forward and examined what she’d written. “It’s mad…but I think you’re right. Keep talking.”
“You all could make sense of that?” said Claudia.