“Oh God…” she said. “Come here, my love, come here…” She embraced him. “I just…I had a moment, that’s all. That’s all, love.”
“You’re hurt, Momma.”
She sniffed and smiled valiantly. “Oh, it’s not terribly bad. It’s just a few bruises, that’s all.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he knelt before her and picked up the rag. “Can I help you?”
She smiled at him, her eyes sad and desperate. “All right. If you want.”
She sat still while young Gregor dabbed at her cuts and her bruises with the rag, washing the blood away.
She smiled—this one quite genuine. “When you were little,” she said as he worked, “you used to help me put on my paints. You loved taking the little brushes and putting my lines on, and you did it to yourself, too, painting yourself up. It was part of our routine.”
“I remember.” He watched as the cut in her lip welled up with blood again. “What happened, Momma?”
She sighed. “I tried what so many of our scrivers do. I tried to convince the world it was something it wasn’t. Or it isn’t anymore, at least. And some people…some people got very angry at me.”
He looked at his mother, sitting with her head bowed, blood trickling down her chin from myriad tiny injuries. How ashamed she looked, how humiliated.
“I will stop them,” he said suddenly.
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll stop them. I’ll…I’ll take their houses and cast them down and burn them and…and…”
She watched him, pityingly. Then she smiled. “Oh, my brave little knight…My proud warrior. What a thing it is, to see you shot through with such a thread of nobility.” She reached up and stroked his face. “I remember when you were born. How eager you were to come to this world. Not like Domenico, who took hours and hours. You were so hungry to throw yourself into all the turmoil of this broken world of ours.”
The memory flickered. His vision began to fade, and the world grew dark.
Something is happening, thought Gregor. I am going…away…
The memory grew dark at the edges, flowing in. The last thing he saw was his mother’s battered, bruised face, beaming up at him.
“Oh, Gregor. If I ever take my house back,” her voice whispered to him, “what a city you and I shall make, my love…”
This is it, isn’t it, he thought as his mind drowned in darkness. It’s coming. Yes. Yes, I think it might b—
Then silence.
Then nothing.
26
They stood around Gregor, watching him without moving.
“When will we hear the scriving?” asked Berenice quietly.
“I don’t know,” said Sancia.
“The scriving should become active upon death,” said Valeria, “and he has not completed the death process yet. But…soon. Then all should proceed as planned.”
They stood there in the basement, Sancia’s hand pressed to the forehead of their dying friend, and she wondered for a moment if she felt his flesh was cooling under her palm.
“I’m not hearing anything,” said Sancia.
“It will come.”
“He’s dead now, isn’t he? He is. I can tell.”
“The process is still finishi—”
“He’s still dying? God, how long does this take!”
“Upon death,” said Valeria again, “the scriving should activate.” Then she added, “Or…soon enough after.”
“ ‘Soon enough after’?” said Berenice. “What does that mean?”
“I made it clear I was unfamiliar with how this would proceed. It could be immediately after death. It could be five minutes after. Or ten, or an hour.”
Sancia’s skin went cold. “You…You mean to tell me,” she said, her words shaking with rage, “that you expect us to stand down here in the basement with our hands touching the corpse of our friend, until we hear something? But you don’t know when that is?”
“It is the only option.”
“And you’re sure we’ll hear something?” said Sancia. “You’re sure it’ll bring him back?”
Valeria hesitated. “I am almost certain.”
“Oh God,” said Orso, dismayed. “Almost? Almost? So there’s some room for error here?”
“It will work,” said Valeria.
“I wish you sounded half as confident as your goddamn words were!” said Sancia. “Because right now, I’m not feeling very confident at al—”
Then she heard it: a quiet, hushed muttering, like the room was full of rustling leaves.
Sancia jumped and whirled around, staring about the basement, one hand still touching Gregor’s forehead. “What…What the hell?” she said.
“What is it?” asked Orso.
Sancia kept staring around, the muttering, whispering sound rising and falling in her ears.
And she realized Berenice was right: the sound was too rhythmic, a gentle, soft fluttering that waxed and waned like the surf at the beach. She felt as if she were standing in a storm of tiny fluttering creatures, perhaps bats or butterflies or…
Then another sound joined it, one much more unsettling than the first: the sound of a woman sobbing hysterically from just nearby, anguished and agonized.
“Holy shit,” said Sancia. She stared around the basement, feeling certain that the wailing woman was just next to her, or perhaps next to Gregor, but there was no one there. Yet the sobbing continued, this disembodied voice crying on and on in the room next to them.
“Oh my God…” whispered Berenice. “What…who is that? What’s going on?”
“What’s wrong, girl?” said Orso.
“Ber—I take it you hear that as well, right?” asked Sancia.
“Y-Yes,” she said stiffly. “There is an invisible woman crying nearby. But I cannot see her.”
“Valeria,” said Sancia. “Can you hear that?”
“I cannot.”
The invisible woman shrieked in what sounded like agonized grief.
“Then what the hell is going on?” shouted Sancia.
“Uncertain,” said Valeria. “It is possible that…that what you are experiencing is a consequence of the scriving being activated.”
The sobs grew even louder.
“And why the hell does that mean I’m hearing shrieking women in our goddamn basement?” shouted Sancia over the sound of the cries.
“Uncertain. However…I suspect it is like most scrivings, in that in order for it to know how far or how much to alter Gregor’s time, it must first have an instance of time defined. In order to tell it to restore him to an instance thirty seconds ago, for example, you must first tell it what a second is.”
“We know all that!” cried Berenice. “That’s basic scriving theory!”
“True. But I suspect that this concept of time was defined when the scriving was first placed upon him. So…each time that it activates, it must refer back to that first instance.”
Sancia’s heart felt like it’d been shot through with ice. “You mean…we’re reliving the night of his carriage accident? When his brother and father died?”
“You are perhaps catching ghosts of when the scriving was first applied to him. Fading impressions. I can guess no more than that.”
The voice of the woman began wailing openly now, and Sancia and Berenice both jumped.
“Shit,” said Sancia. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Must stay calm now, Sancia,” said Valeria. “Must not probe, must not ask questions. This is a creation of the Maker. Observe—but do no more.”
“Easy for you to say!” said Sancia.
The woman continued: “I didn’t want it to happen to you…I…I didn’t want it to happen to either of you, my loves, my loves…”
The sound of the tiny wings rose and fell, and rose and fell.
She felt a thrill of fear run through Berenice.
And then they heard it—the voice of the scriving, suddenly speaking as if it were standing shoulder to shoulder with them, surveying Gregor’s corpse with a cold, dispassionate eye.
And its voice…that they both knew quite well too.
Sancia and Berenice froze as the voice thundered through their ears.
They both went totally still. This seemed impossible—no scriving Sancia had ever tampered with had ever cared if she was tampering with it—but then, she’d never really tampered with a hierophantic scriving…especially one that’d been made by Crasedes himself.
There was a long, tense silence, broken only by the sound of the sobs, over and over and over again, as if they were stuck in a loop: “No, no, no…Please, please, God…No, no, no…”
Sancia looked at Berenice, wide-eyed and terrified. Berenice made a gesture in front of her mouth, like she was sewing her mouth shut. But as Sancia nodded, they suddenly felt it.
A pressure. A presence. They felt overcome with the feeling of being examined, like glancing out the window and seeing a shape in the alleys, staring back up at you.
Oh shit, thought Sancia. She looked at the empty air around them, as if expecting to see Crasedes himself there, staring back. It’s looking for us. It’s really looking for us…
And then many things began to change around them.
Sancia felt a breeze rush over her skin, like there was an open window. She looked to the side, suddenly sure she would see a tall set of windows there, open to the sprawling, lamplit nightscape of Tevanne, but she saw nothing but the crumbling brick wall of the basement.
Yet when she looked back…
Suddenly there was a bed across from them, on the other side of Gregor’s chair, one that definitely had not been there before. It had crisp white sheets and a rich, silk cover, done in white and yellow.
But the cover was stained with dark blood—for on the far side of the bed lay the body of a man, horribly mangled, lit with moonlight.
Sancia and Berenice both screamed in horror at the sight of him, the right side of his face crumpled in, his eye spilling from the ruined socket, his cheekbone glinting through the pink flesh. His right arm and especially his hand had been almost totally destroyed, the limb dissolving into an unrecognizable mess about halfway down his forearm, veins and bone and limp stretches of ligaments clearly visible in the faint light. His fine yellow robes and hosiery were torn and covered with mud, and yet they sparkled strangely—and then Sancia realized his whole body was dotted with tiny shards, fragments of glass studding his face, his shoulders, his hands, little rose-blooms of blood seeping from where they were embedded in him.
But the worst thing was how much he looked like Gregor. He looked exactly like the man passed out in the chair before them, but younger, somehow, and a touch fatter and softer, as if he’d lived a comfortable civilian life.
Sancia did not recognize him—but Berenice did. She’d seen his face in countless paintings back on the Dandolo campo, and the instant she recognized him, that same knowledge manifested in Sancia’s mind.
“It’s Ottaviano Dandolo!” Berenice screamed.
“W-What?” said Orso, astonished. He looked down at where the mangled man lay, but he clearly didn’t see anything. “What do you mean?”
“It’s Ottaviano Dandolo!” she cried again, sobbing. “He’s lying right there on the bed and he’s dead, oh God, he’s dead!”
“Bed?” said Orso. “Dead? What?”
“She is witnessing something from when the plate was first installed,” said Valeria. “We cannot experience it, for the scriving does not apply to us.”
Sancia shut her eyes.
Berenice did so, weeping softly. The sound of the soft, fluttering wings surged in their ears.
Then she felt it: she felt the first string of scrivings begin to be applied, slowly beginning to warp Gregor’s time, to sense out how far back he needed to shift, and what would change…
And then it happened.
Usually when Sancia closely communed with a scrived object, she would begin to get a creeping feeling of the sigils on its persuasion plate, the many strings of the commands altering its reality, convincing it to be different. It was a curious but mild sensation, like watching an insect climb up your arm, its tiny legs picking over the hairs on your skin.
But Gregor’s scriving was not like that.
Suddenly the sigils struck her like a lightning bolt, command after command seared into her mind like a burning brand, the bright, hot bindings rippling through her—and she felt them, each and every one of them, dozens of them sizzling into her being, rewriting her very existence in an instant…
She nearly shrieked in agony. She’d always known hierophantic commands were different. But she’d never had any idea how different.
She heard Berenice screaming in pain.
“Do not break away!” warned Valeria. “Must maintain!”
“I can’t!” cried Berenice. “To have this done to me…it hurts!”
“Maintain!” said Valeria.
Another string of sigils—perhaps a dozen, perhaps a hundred, Sancia didn’t know. The burning characters unscrolled upon her being, and she felt them changing her very reality like her body and mind were clay to be lopped off or re-formed at a whim…
If this is just an echo of the scriving, she thought through the agony, then God…God, what must it actually be like to be part of a hierophantic command?
Berenice screamed again in pain. Not thinking, Sancia opened her eyes.
And then she saw her.
A woman of about thirty was sitting in the middle of the basement, covered in blood and sobbing hysterically. Cradled in her lap was a boy of around eleven or twelve years old, and he was very clearly dead. The back of his head bore a tremendous wound, an unsettlingly dark, viscous purple cavity just behind his right ear.
Sancia realized she knew this woman. She had met her just days ago, weeping and trembling in the depths of the galleon: Ofelia Dandolo, though the specter she saw now was thirty or forty years younger than the woman she’d met.
Ofelia shook the child in her lap, as if trying to wake him. His head rolled to the side, and Sancia saw his face.
The sight took her breath away. His face was set in the angelic, untroubled expression all children assumed when sleeping, spoiled only by the slow creep of blood on the side of his head. But most of all, he looked so much like Gregor, but so young, so delicate…
And yet, she somehow knew it was not Gregor. This boy was too skinny, too frail, and his eyes were too far apart.
Domenico Dandolo?
“Come back to me!” screamed Ofelia. She shook him violently, and blood began to spill from the
boy’s mouth. “Come back to me, please, please!”
Sancia shut her eyes again, and she and Berenice both moaned in terror.
“It must almost be complete!” said Valeria. “Do not break away now! Maintain connection!”
“Berenice,” said Sancia. “Please tell me you’re remembering all these goddamn sigils!”
“How could I forget them?” sobbed Berenice.
Another burst of sigils, this time the most yet, the flashes of characters pouring into Sancia’s mind again and again.
It was almost too much. She felt her own sense of time growing soft, flattening out, dissolving. It was one thing to have your reality rewritten, but another to have a command attempt to shift your time back to an instance that, for you, did not exist—for she and Berenice, after all, could not be skipped back to a past instance in Gregor’s time.
It was all wrong. It was like being fed through a vast, malfunctioning machine, its pistons and gears tearing into your flesh…
“Berenice!” she cried. “Stay with me!”
“I’m here! But…Sancia…I can’t take this for much longe—”
Then they heard a voice before them, husky and cracked: “M-Momma?”
Sancia and Berenice opened their eyes.
Gregor was gone. The chair was gone.
In their place was a small boy of about seven, lying on a bed, his face streaked with mud, his leg badly broken. Sancia’s hand was pressed to his forehead, and when he blinked and looked at them she gasped and nearly drew it away.
The boy whispered, “Momma? What’s…What’s happened, Momma?”
“Ohh, what the hell,” said Sancia.
The voice of Ofelia Dandolo came floating through, as if from some distant hallway: “Hush, darling…Hush. We’ve given you a draught. Just…sleep.”
“Where’s Papa? Where’s Domenico? What happened?” The child blinked and looked around the basement.
“Your father is…gone,” whispered her voice. “And Domenico…” Then came a sob.
Another flicker in the air, and then it seemed as if the boy were surrounded by a snowfall, little dots of flickering white wheeling and curling about them…
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