The man in black was going to show his face. And Participazio and the Dandolo scrivers were not meant to see.
Participazio gestured to the rest of the deputation, and they hurried to stuff on their masks. He gasped as its leather interior swallowed his eyes and his ears, and he just barely heard the man in black speak once more.
“I am judgment,” said his voice. “And I have been a long time coming.”
Participazio clutched the mask to his head and sat, staring into the blank interior.
And then the muffled sounds…changed.
There was a scream—muted to Participazio’s blocked ears, but most definitely a scream.
And then there were more, and more, and more.
* * *
—
Berenice and Sancia stared at each other in absolute horror.
“Something’s gone very wrong,” said Gregor again.
Shaking, Sancia turned to Valeria.
There was a silence that seemed to go on forever.
Then, very quietly, Valeria said,
“Oh…Oh my God,” whispered Sancia and Berenice at once.
“Goddamn it!” said Orso. “What’s happened? What’s gone wrong?”
“Valeria…has engineered some kind of back door into Sancia’s head,” said Berenice faintly. “So that she could twin herself with her, and…and take over her body…”
“She what?” said Gregor. “She wants to…to merge with Sancia?”
“Wanted,” said Valeria quickly. “Do not want, not anymo—”
“No!” said Orso. “No, that’s…That’s insane! A person can’t…what, twin themselves with a living bit of scriving, with some…some artificial god that Crasedes cooked up!”
“But you built this into her head?” said Gregor. “I mean…My God! Why would you want that?”
“Complicated,” said Valeria. She sounded harassed and defensive. “Not first option. Not preferable.”
“I’ll goddamn say,” said Sancia angrily. “Since it’s my goddamned head! I mean…what would this have done to me? Would it have killed me? Wiped away the mind behind my eyes?”
“No. Would not have.”
“How can we possibly know that?” said Gregor.
“Valeria,” said Berenice. “You need to explain what it is you’ve done to Sancia now.”
“We do not have time,” she said.
“Oh, horseshit,” said Orso.
“The day grows short,” she said. “The Maker will move soon, if he has not already.”
“I’m not doing a damned thing more,” said Sancia. “Until you tell me what you’ve done.”
There was a tense silence.
Then, finally, Valeria whispered, “All right.”
Another long pause.
“When…When I first altered Sancia,” she said, “I assessed that in order to…to escape my bindings…I might need to do what the Maker did to escape death. Just as he twinned himself with another creature to evade mortal destruction, I would need to twin myself with a creature to absolve myself of the commands he’d placed upon me.”
“So you would become Sancia,” said Berenice, disgusted. “That was your way out of the set of rules.”
“…True. Somewhat.”
“You’re just like Crasedes,” said Sancia. “I don’t know why we should listen to you. You made me a tool, your…your vessel.”
“Not vessel,” said Valeria. “A…conduit, a conductor. I knew if the Maker refashioned me, I would be the cause of indescribable suffering. If I needed to hide from him within the mind of a girl to avoid such a fate, I would do so. I made my choice.”
“You piece of shit,” said Sancia. “You made your choice? And you think it sounds so simple?”
“Imagine,” said Valeria. “Imagine the whole horizon burning. Imagine hills dotted with corpses. Imagine streets running red with blood. Imagine children and families devouring one another like wild dogs. Imagine these horrors—and know that I do not have to imagine them. For I have seen them. I retain fragments of these sights, mementos of civilizations the Maker broke upon his knee because they displeased him. You say I have wronged you, and that may be so. But until you understand the scale of devastation the Maker can wreak with his arts, you cannot understand the weight of my choic—”
Then there came a banging from the front of the firm, loud enough that Berenice jumped and squeaked.
They all froze, looked at one another, and realized someone was pounding on the firm’s front door.
“Sancia!” came a muffled voice from the library. “Orso? Someone? Please…are you there?”
“Is that Claudia?” said Orso, surprised.
“Something’s…Something’s happened!” shouted Claudia. She sounded terrified. “Help! Help, please!”
“Perhaps…I do not need to ask you to imagine such sights,” said Valeria quietly. “Perhaps the Maker has already visited his wrath upon your city.”
For a moment the Foundrysiders just stood there, confused. Then Claudia pounded on the door again, and cried, “Are you there? God, please be there…”
Sancia fixed Valeria in a glare and said, “I’m not done with you. You still owe me a real scrumming explanation, you hear me?”
“Then I will give it,” she said. “Provided we are all still alive to listen.”
The Foundrysiders climbed out of the basement, crossed the library, and approached the front door. Gregor checked the window and confirmed it was just Claudia.
“But…there are also people running in the streets,” he said quietly. “And…I think I hear screaming. Something is indeed wrong.”
They opened the door for her. “Oh, thank God,” said Claudia. “Thank God, thank God…I came the second that I heard…But it’s got to be him, Sancia, he’s got to have something to do with all this.”
“What’s wrong?” asked Sancia. “What’s going on?”
Claudia was trembling with terror. “People are saying that…that something’s happened on the Morsini campo.”
“The Morsinis now?” said Orso. “What are they up to? My God, they’re not going to make their own play for power, are they?”
“I don’t think so,” said Claudia in a small, frightened voice. “I…I saw people flooding out of the campo gates, into the Commons, and the things they were saying…”
“What was it?” said Berenice. “What were they saying?”
Claudia swallowed and whispered, “That Shorefall Night has come early to Morsini House.”
* * *
—
The floors of Hall Morsini shook as people tried to stampede away, and something—tables or chairs, possibly—clattered to the ground. And though the mask blocked his face, Participazio soon smelled something bright and coppery: the smell of blood, he thought, and lots of it.
>
Then he heard the man in black speaking: “Look upon me.”
Without thinking, Participazio lifted his hands and grabbed the side of his mask, ready to pull it from his face to do as the man said: to look upon him.
He stopped himself just in time, and pressed his ears into the side of his head. He moaned and wept, and these sounds drowned out the man in black’s commands, though now Participazio knew what they were:
“Look upon me. Look. Those of you who spend your lives in thoughtless extravagance—look upon me now.”
And then…
Then it was over.
The screams tapered off into a whimpering, and the commands ceased. Participazio cautiously lifted his head.
Then he felt two hands grip his shoulders, and he almost screamed.
“Boy,” whispered the man in black in his ear. “Can you hear me, boy?”
“Y-Yes,” stammered Participazio.
“In a moment,” whispered his voice, “you may all remove your masks. Do not do it yet! Give me time to leave this place. Then you may remove your masks, and go to work. But do not look outside. Do you understand me?”
Participazio nodded.
“Good.”
“But…” said Participazio.
“Yes?”
“Where are you going, sir?”
“I? I will go out into the streets of this place. For many more deserve what I have to give than those I found here tonight…”
The hands released his shoulders.
Participazio began counting to sixty—very, very slowly.
When he got to sixty, he cautiously removed his mask—and then he saw what lay before him, and he screamed.
The Hall Morsini was full of ravaged bodies—and yet all of them seemed to have been ravaged by themselves: eyes cut out with forks, faces mangled with butter knives, wrists slashed open with shards of glass, and everywhere, everywhere, was blood, turned an unpleasant purple in the lights of the blue and red lanterns.
Trembling, Participazio watched as the lake of blood approached him. Yet he noticed someone had walked through it recently: there were bloody footprints leading away from the pile of bodies out to the door of the hall.
He stared at it. Then he heard the screams from the streets outside.
IV
SHOREFALL NIGHT
30
Claudia and the Foundrysiders crowded up onto the roof of their offices. Gregor pulled out his spyglass and studied the Morsini campo. “I can hardly see anything in this light,” he said quietly. “But…I can see the gates to the inner enclave are open. Yet people are flooding through. Something…Something has definitely hap—”
He stopped short.
“What is it?” asked Sancia.
“There…There are people jumping out of the windows,” he said quietly. “I see them…They’re jumping out of the windows in one of the towers. I…I mean, they’re killing themselv—”
Sancia realized what was happening, and snatched the spyglass away.
“Stop!” she shouted. “Stop looking! Turn away! Don’t try and see!”
“Why not?” asked Orso.
“When’s the last time we saw a bunch of people suddenly kill themselves?” she asked.
“Oh God,” said Gregor softly. “The scrivers on the galleon…”
“It must be that,” said Sancia. “There’s something…something wrong with how Crasedes was restored, the way he was brought back to life. You can’t look at him. It’s a distortion in reality that drives you mad.”
They all turned away from the nightscape of the campos, shielding their eyes. “You think he, what, he took off his mask?” asked Orso. “And he’s…He’s just walking around the enclave?”
“Yes! During what must have been their carnival celebrations! He’s beheading the entire goddamn Morsini campo in one night, without firing a single bolt!”
Gregor listened to the screams, eyes half-closed. “Bottla ball,” he said quietly. “That’s what this is, isn’t it? Just as Orso said.”
“Said what?” said Orso.
“That sometimes in bottla ball, when you have no good plays,” said Gregor, “the only play is to toss your ball to hit as many as you can, ruin everyone else’s strategy, and scramble the court. And…I would say the court of Tevanne has just been pretty well scrambled, to me…”
“Why?” said Claudia. “Why is he doing this?”
“I don’t know,” said Sancia. “I don’t know why he’d pick the Morsinis at all, since it was the Michiels that were moving against Dandolo Chartered. The Morsinis have been pretty quiet this whole time. Valeria—any ideas?”
They heard her disembodied voice, though it was much fainter up here on the roof: “Unknown. What might these Morsinis possess that the Maker would desire?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Orso.
“Nor I,” said Berenice. “I thought they mostly just made ships and weapons. Brute strength as opposed to…well, any other virtue.”
said Clef.
said Clef.
said Berenice.
“Everyone,” said Sancia. “Listen—besides Clef and the imperiat, what actually has any kind of effect on Crasedes?”
They thought about it, trying to ignore the distant sounds of screaming and cries from the Morsini campo.
“The only thing that I have ever seen work on Crasedes,” said Gregor, “is Valeria herself.”
“True,” said Valeria. “When I altered the Maker, and stole from him the ability to access the high permissions, I had to lure him into a place that I had prepared against him. One that would nullify his privileges.”
Orso narrowe
d his eyes. “Like the firm is currently?”
“True. The firm and the areas around it.”
Orso half shut his eyes, and his lips started silently moving. Sancia recognized this behavior: whenever Orso got a really ambitious idea he started reading the sigil logic to himself, making sure it all assembled properly in his head.
“What is it, Orso?” asked Berenice.
“Eh?” He turned to Claudia. “Claude—remind me how those scrived steel boxes of yours work, again.”
“Huh?” she said. “We, uh, twinned reality. Just like you always do.”
“Yes, yes, yes, but tell me the specifics of how it worked!”
“You…You put on the cuirass, and…and when you turned it on, the cuirass would convince the reality around it that it was really the reality back at our firm, with the big steel box around it.”
Orso went very, very still. “Does it have to be a cuirass? Could it be, say…a lead slug?”
“Why would you wish for a lead slug to believe it was surrounded by a steel box?” asked Gregor.
But then Berenice cried, “Oh!”
Sancia looked at her, confused, and then gasped as the revelation emerged in her own mind, indistinguishable from her other thoughts. “Ohhh!”
“You…You don’t care about the box, do you?” said Berenice.
“I don’t,” said Orso, his face grim and closed. “I care about the reality inside it. Because what if a lead slug can convince the world that the reality around it…is the reality here, at the firm?”
“Where Valeria is affecting everything,” said Gregor slowly. “And Crasedes’s permissions are nullified…”
“You shoot Crasedes with this lead slug,” said Sancia, “and when it hits him and gets activated, it convinces the space around it that it’s the same as the space here where his permissions won’t work.”
“And he falls out of the sky,” said Orso. “Dead and dormant—and vulnerable.”
Shorefall Page 36