But then Sancia realized. They were not snowflakes.
They were moths. And the air was filled with the sound of their wings.
It’s him, thought Sancia. He’s here. He’s come. This is when Crasedes arrived.
“What are all these butterflies here?” whispered the boy.
“They’re…They’re here to help me,” said Ofelia’s voice, sniffing. “The moths came in through the window. They came to me while I slept. And…I think they are a miracle, my love. They can save you.”
The boy looked around through drooping eyelids. “Save me from what?”
Then there was another flicker in the air, and Sancia saw her: an echo of Ofelia Dandolo, bending over the broken little boy in the bed.
She leaned down to kiss him on the brow. “From what I did to you, my love,” she whispered. “And…And I am so sorry…”
Then another burst of sigils tore into them.
Both of them screamed as the sigils flashed in their minds, twisting them, contorting them, bending their bodies, their souls, their spirits. Sancia felt themselves dissolving, all these moments contracting, dwindling, diminishing, as if the past minutes of their lives were being boiled down to nothing but residue, to be replaced by instances of time just a few minutes previously…
She felt the realization crack through Berenice’s mind.
Sancia barely understood Berenice’s understanding. Part of it was that the concept was too complex for her—but the other obstacle was that she could not think, for she was sure she was going to die.
Then the body under her fingertips surged forward, and suddenly the world was nothing but screaming.
The sigils and the visions and the alterations snapped away. Berenice and Sancia opened their eyes and stumbled back in horror as Gregor popped up, his eyes wild and mad. He was screaming, bellowing, roaring at them, every vein in his head visible, every ligament in his neck stretched to the point of breaking.
Berenice screamed and tumbled to the ground as she fell back, and Sancia barely stayed standing. She watched as her friend heaved and strained at the bonds around his arms and chest and legs. The chair creaked and wrenched below him.
“Oh God!” screamed Orso’s voice somewhere. “Holy shit!”
“Were sigils retained?” demanded Valeria. “Was process successful?”
Sancia was too terrified to respond. She just watched in mute fear as her friend snarled and growled like a wild boar, straining at the ropes, rocking back and forth in a mad, furious, helpless struggle…
And then he stopped and glared at her. He bent forward, and flexed with his legs…
There was a loud pop from the chair as something stretched to the point of breaking.
“Orso!” screamed Sancia. “Dart him now, dart him now!”
Orso fumbled for the dolorspina dart one-handed. Gregor leaned forward, growling, his eyes leaking tears and strings of drool hanging from his mouth from exertion, and there was another sharp, twangy pop from within the chair.
“Do it!” shrieked Sancia. “He’s going to break fre—”
Orso cried out, leapt forward, and planted a dolorspina dart in the back of Gregor’s shoulder. Gregor ripped to the side, snapping his teeth, and nearly bit off one of Orso’s fingers.
“Scrumming hell!” shouted Orso.
Gregor heaved and heaved at the ropes, panting loudly, but each effort was weaker and weaker. It was clear the dart was having an effect: his eyes became unfocused, and each of his movements grew a little drunker and less coordinated. Finally his head drooped on his chest and he exhaled mightily, spraying drool from his lips and down his beard, and he glared at Sancia, half-conscious but helpless. Then he went still.
“Holy shit,” said Orso. “Holy shit.”
There was a silence as they stared at Gregor’s body twitching in the chair.
“Were sigils retained?” asked Valeria quietly.
Berenice nodded and wiped tears from her eyes. Her whole body appeared to be shaking. “I have them. Someone get me a piece of paper so I can copy them down while they’re still fresh.”
Sancia eyed Gregor’s tattered restraints. “Do we want to cut him free first?”
“Hell no,” said Orso. “I half want to make new knots for him. But I’m not getting close to that mad bastard now.”
Sancia studied Gregor for a moment longer, remembering the sight of the wounded boy lying on the bed, whispering to his mother.
said Berenice,
27
Ofelia stood at the windows of her massive ballroom in her estate house, staring out at the cityscape before her, the warm, honey-colored sun radiating off of the rooftops of the Dandolo campo.
Just afternoon now. But it felt so late, as if time was slipping by her faster and faster.
Why is it, she thought, that I feel as if the second I called him back into this world, I turned over an hourglass, and all the world is watching the grains tumble down, and waiting?
She ignored the scrivers and laborers behind her, hauling in crate after tremendous crate.
Where are you, Gregor? Her eye fell on the Lamplands, all the floating lanterns bobbing and swaying. And will you come back to me, before time runs out?
Then one laborer approached her, and asked, “Are you sure you want this all here, Founder?”
She studied him coldly. “Why would I not?”
“I mean, far be it from me to doubt you, Founder, but you seem to be planning to…well, to build your own lexicon here in your ballrooms. And such things require protections, and wards, and cooling waters, and…”
“Those won’t be an issue,” said a rich, plummy voice.
Ofelia and the laborer turned as Crasedes emerged from the shadows of a hallway.
“I shall see to all that,” said Crasedes. He approached them. She noted he was carrying a slim wooden case in his hands, which seemed unusual to her.
The laborer looked uncertainly at him, then glanced back at Ofelia. “You…you’re going to build a lexicon, sir? All by yourself?”
Crasedes’s blank, black eyes stared into the man. “Are all the parts here?” he asked.
“What? Y-Yes, they a—”
“Then you can go,” said Crasedes. “You and all the rest of your men.”
Ofelia and Crasedes waited as the men filed away, their footsteps echoing throughout her giant, empty estate house.
“You truly think you can put it all together here, My Prophet?” she asked.
“Well, for starters, I do not intend to build a normal lexicon,” he said, pacing around the crates. “But more so…I find that once you’ve gone to the trouble of making a whole nation disappear once or twice in your life, all other tasks suddenly seem rather manageable.”
Ofelia joined him among the crates. “And once it’s built…”
“Yes,” he said. “We must send an envoy to the Morsinis. I suspect they’ll be expecting us—no doubt they believe we’ll be desperate for an alliance with them, against the Michiels. And I must be among this envoy. So—I have quite a lot to do before evening. Especially since I’ve had other tasks today.”
He slid open the case in his hands, revealing a scriving definition plate seated on the velvet interior within. Ofelia was not a scriver, but she recognized right away that this definition plate featured sigi
ls and commands she was certain she’d never seen used before—and they were all written in such tight, unnaturally clean handwriting…
“You…You made this plate in one day, My Prophet?” she asked.
“Mm,” he said. “More like an afternoon. Or part of an afternoon, I suppose. When we pair this definition with Tribuno’s in our own lexicon, the construct will have nowhere to escape. She will be trapped within whatever device she currently resides in, like a roach hiding from lamplight under a dresser. And then I can begin retooling her, so to speak.”
Ofelia’s eyes danced over the many curling lines of sigils. “But…the construct is quite adept at…how shall I put this—hopping in and out of lexicons, yes?”
“True enough.”
“Then…won’t it be quite catastrophic if she was to hop into yours and take control of it?”
“That won’t be an issue,” he said. “If we have enough copies of Tribuno’s definition, stacking its authorities again and again and again, she will be quite helpless.” He slid the case shut. “And after the party at the Morsinis’…we should have all the copies we need.”
Ofelia went very still. She walked away from him, stood at the windows, and shut her eyes.
She remembered the plan he had vaguely described so far: the sheer scale of soldiers and coordination that would be necessary—not to mention the number of people who would die.
Not die, she thought. Not as if they fell ill. They will be murdered—by him.
“And there’s no other way?” she asked quietly.
“Ofelia…” said his voice. “You wish to make a moral world, do you not? A just, equitable, sane world?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Yes. Of course you do. And sometimes I find it takes a lot of treachery and death to make a moral world. That is simply the way of things.” Then, suddenly, his voice came from right beside her. “You’ve always known this, Ofelia.”
She jumped, and found him standing at her side, watching her. “W-What, My Prophet?”
“You know all this,” he said. “You know what it requires. You knew it over thirty years ago—when you orchestrated your husband’s death.”
She turned away, unable to speak.
“I was watching, remember,” said Crasedes. “I watched your story so closely. You were the daughter of the founder of your house. And though Ottaviano had seemed a decent man when you first married him…how quickly he turned your house’s efforts to the same things that all the others pursued—to empires, and armies, and little fealty kingdoms all across the Durazzo…”
Ofelia Dandolo shut her eyes again and swallowed.
“This was not the city you were raised in,” whispered Crasedes. “Not the house you wished to rule over. Not the world you wished to birth. You saw a future being written that you did not wish to live in. And when you tried to take your house back, he made sure you knew how powerless you were. So you did what was right. You did what was necessary. But the consequences…the consequences are something you struggle to live with every day. Aren’t they?”
“I didn’t want this,” she whispered.
“No,” said Crasedes. “You didn’t.”
“There is some rot to this place,” she said. “Something…Something that warps and distorts our thoughts…”
“It is power, Ofelia,” he whispered. “Supremacy scrives the spirit far greater than any command I could ever invent. And that is what I intend to end in this city, tonight.”
She bowed her head, faced the city, and wept.
“Listen to me, Ofelia,” he said. “Listen now, and listen close.”
She looked up, surprised by the solemnity of his voice.
“I will return your son to you,” he said. “Whole, and healthy, and restored. Unburdened by the bindings we once placed upon him. Because your predicament has a personal meaning to me. You are not the first parent to use the arts to try to save their child. Nor are you the first to suffer the unintended consequences of that choice. But I will make sure that you are reunited.”
“Why?” asked Ofelia. “Why would you try so, My Prophet?”
“Because unlike others…Gregor is not yet lost,” said Crasedes. “I have changed reality in many ways, but in my long life, I have come to know that some things truly cannot be restored.” He looked down at his right hand, and he seemed to be remembering the feel of something held in his palm. “And these we must value most of all. For without them, we are nothing.”
28
Light from tall windows split through the dark.
The flicker and dance of candle flame; the dreamy spin of floating lanterns; passageways of marble and vaulted ceilings and ornate doors.
A tall, well-dressed boy emerged from the whirl of images, handsome but thin and fragile, a faint fuzz about his upper lip, his eyes dark and sensitive.
He smiled at him. You’re getting big, little brother!
Then the crunch of wood, the tinkle of glass, and Domenico was gone.
Silence.
A dribble of water, a shuffling, and a whimpering in the darkness.
Light again, filtering through the fractured glass of the carriage windows. A bloody form slumped in the cockpit.
Then a voice: Gregor? Gregor are…are you near?
He looked back. A bloody hand emerged from the shadows of the backseat. It quaked and trembled, and yet it kept reaching, desperate to feel something, to be grasped, as if to confirm it was not alone.
Come to me, please, pleaded the voice, terrified and anguished, the voice of a child approaching death, experiencing something he was still too young to even fathom. I love you. I…I need to…I love you, I love you…
A bright, vicious scream burst forth from Gregor’s lips, and he kicked away from the grasping hand, so desperate, so frightened…
I was not there, he thought. I was not there, when my brother needed me most. At his last moments.
Then it was gone.
* * *
—
Gregor Dandolo awoke upon his bed and gasped. He stared at the ceiling for a moment, trying to remember how he’d come to be here.
Something had changed. He knew that—but he did not know what.
Is today the day? Shall I finally wake up someone different than when I went to sleep?
But then his head began to pound with a very familiar ache, and he remembered.
Dolorspina poison…God. The scriving. Did I really…
“You’re awake,” said Sancia’s voice from nearby.
He blinked and looked to the side. She was sitting in a chair next to him, red-eyed and exhausted.
“Sancia?” he said. His voice was little more than a croak.
“Hey, Gregor.”
He looked around. His body throbbed like he’d strained half the muscles in his back and legs. “Did…Did I…”
“It worked, yeah,” she said. “We got it. Berenice and Orso are putting it together right now. We should be able to have Clef back very soon.”
“Oh.” Though this, of course, was not what he had been about to ask, but rather—Did I really die? But he knew the answer.
“I…I want to tell you something,” said Sancia.
He lay on the bed and listened as Sancia described the unearthly, terrifying experience of activating the scriving and witnessing flashes of a night nearly thirty years ago now, when he’d been a child lying on a bed below a cloud of moths, and his mother had rewritten his reality. And he listened especially closely as Sancia told him what she’d heard his mother say, words decades old, but how raw and horrible they felt today.
When she finished she just sat there watching him, her eyes wide and anxious.
“She did it,” he said finally, his voice still a croak. “She…She killed my father.”
“I think so.”
>
“But…she did not expect Domenico and me to be in the carriage with him when…when it happened.”
“I…I think maybe,” she said quietly. “Yeah.”
“No. Not maybe. It is so.”
“You knew?”
“Not exactly.” The memory of his mother shot through his mind, her face beaten and bruised and bloody—What a city you and I shall make. “But I find it’s something I can easily believe.”
They sat for a long time, not saying anything.
Then he asked, “Did she cry? In the moments you saw, did she cry?”
“Yes.”
“And…it seemed genuine?”
“Yes. It did.”
He shut his eyes. “It changes how I think of her.”
“I figured it would.”
“But perhaps not as you expect. She saw her city making the wrong choices, and struck to try to stop them. We have tried to do the same ourselves. But I suddenly doubt if we would have been any more successful.” He sighed. “Conflict and factionalism and treachery…Where does it end? Why play the same game again and again and expect different results?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did.”
He looked at her for a moment, thinking. “If you could wave a magic wand,” he said, “and make this all go away—would you?”
“All what? There’s a lot of shit I’d like to go away. Do you mean Valeria? Crasedes? The houses?”
“No,” he said. “Scriving.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Scriving is the root of all these problems. Polina quite literally calls it an evil magic. And after what I just went through…I find it hard to argue. I am forced to wonder—would it be better if…if we just didn’t have it?”
Sancia thought about it. “If it wasn’t scriving,” she said finally, “it’d be something else. Land. Money. Iron. Or, hell, even beans, if Crasedes told me the truth. People are inventive. And anything they invent they can use to raise themselves up over everyone else.”
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