“That…could possibly work,” said Valeria. “Is fabrication of such a tool possible?”
“It’s your designs,” said Berenice to Claudia. “What do you think?”
Claudia pulled a face and cocked her head. “I guess. It’d take work, but—I don’t see why not.”
“Then we need to get to it,” said Orso. Another peal of screams rang through the dark skies. “We we’ve got, what, three hours until midnight? That’s when he’s strongest, so I bet that’s when he’ll show up. I’ve no idea what he’s playing at out in the city, but…I don’t want to see it actually come to pass.”
“I…will commit to helping you in this,” said Valeria.
“Well, I mean—of course you would, yeah?” said Orso. “You want to see Crasedes dead and gone just as much as we do.”
“True. But…I insist we consider a backup option. The alteration I have given to Sancia.”
“The…The one where you merge with me?” asked Sancia, outraged.
“True,” said Valeria. “It is not a significant process. I need only the slightest connection. We would not even need a sacrifice, or to wait for midnight. Would be much as Berenice and Sancia twinned themselves—a plate that Sancia would swallow, and then a second plate placed within this lexicon I inhabit, asserting we were the same. In this place, within her, I can become something new. But the access point needs a host to…function.”
“You mean a living being,” said Gregor. “Just like how our plates in our own heads need to be in a living being to function.”
“…True.”
“So it’s like a…a tiny door to a place you can hide, and remake yourself,” said Sancia. “And you need to twin yourself with me to access it, because…”
“Because Valeria is not allowed to create tools that can free herself from bondage,” she said, sounding exhausted. “So I made this door for someone not Valeria. Which is what I would become, if we were to twin, however briefly.”
There was a long silence. Gregor and Sancia stared at each other, unsure what to say.
“If it is any consolation,” Valeria said, now sounding somewhat bitter, “the experience would be deeply unpleasant for me—like a stoat with its paw in a trap, forced to gnaw off its own foot.”
But Sancia was having none of it. “I still can’t get over this…” she said. “You did all this to me, and you never even asked me. You never even told me. I would have never even known, if not for Clef!”
“I intended to tell you,” said Valeria. “Before we began our final assault upon the Maker.”
“Why wait?” said Orso.
“Because…if our attack does not work…then this will need to be our last resort. We must make this, since we know it will work. We must consider it as an alternative before we confront the Maker.”
Everyone exchanged an uncomfortable look, except Claudia, who understandably seemed completely bewildered by all this.
“Does it have to be Sancia?” said Gregor. “I also carry hierophantic designs within me…If the moment truly came, could I not bear this burden?”
“We could merge,” said Valeria, sighing, “but not separate. I did not build the mechanism for remaking myself into you, and I cannot do so now. If I twinned myself with you, we would become stuck—not quite one thing, not quite the other. Both of our minds reforged into something…else.”
Orso wrinkled his nose. “Not…preferable then.”
“True. Not at all.”
“So it’s me,” said Sancia harshly. “I risk all this—I risk putting a goddamn hierophantic god inside my head—or it’s no one.”
“True. That is correct. It is a final resort. But it must be one we commit to.”
“Show us what we need to do,” said Sancia aloud.
“Sancia,” said Orso, taken aback. “Really?”
“Really,” said Sancia. “We’re talking about the deaths of thousands. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“Sensible,” said Valeria—a little too eagerly for Sancia’s liking. “I will show you the proper sigils. It should not be difficult for you to complete.”
“And if we’re wrong,” said Gregor, “and if he’s able to part through Valeria’s permissions like they’re not there?”
“Then we reexamine putting Clef on a goddamn bolt,” said Orso. “Come on.”
31
Gregor watched the smoke rising from the Morsini campo. Occasionally he heard a boom or a bang—sounds he didn’t think were being caused by Crasedes.
“Strange to be here now,” said Claudia softly, sitting on the roof at his feet. “Gio and I’d come up here to pace and rant and blow off steam after being given some deadline by Orso. To think I’d miss those days, and see such sights from this place…”
“Yes,” said Gregor. Another boom. “I…I feel as if we’ve slept on a volcano all this time, but now…Now it’s finally erupted. Finally, it is truly war.”
Claudia let out a tiny, crushed sigh. “What are we going to do?”
“The same thing all peoples do in war,” said Gregor. “Try to survive.”
He wondered: how many times had he been here before, looking out on devastation, and planning how best to navigate it? He imagined versions of himself through the years: a soldier first sailing out upon the Durazzo, eager to capture and conquer; a refugee, emerging from the mud of Dantua, mad and frenzied; a captain, patrolling the waterfront with Whip by his side. A lifetime spent walking in circles, it seemed, reliving the same moment over and over again.
All the versions of myself are soldiers, he thought. And…when the scriving rules me—I am still a soldier. It just gives me a different set of targets and orders.
Had this compulsion to live as a soldier come naturally, he wondered. Or had it been implanted within him long, long ago, while countless moths circled overhead…
Has my whole life been but a dream? And when will I awake?
He shook himself and looked at her. “You should go, Claudia. It won’t be safe for you here very soon.”
She laughed miserably. “Go where? Back to me and Gio’s workshops? That’s not going to be much safer if the first of all hierophants decides to really flex his muscles.”
Gregor thought about it. “True. In that case…you should go to the Slopes.”
“The Slopes? Why?”
“There’s an encampment there. A rather shabby one, where you can buy all manner o—”
“The Givans, yeah,” said Claudia. “The slaves. I buy wine from them there all the time. Why should I go there?”
“Because they have ships,” said Gregor, “and they are leaving. There will be a woman waiting there named Polina Carbonari. Tell her I sent you. If things go poorly, tell her to wait for us. If things go really, quite very poorly, get on a ship and go, and do not look back.”
Claudia looked terrified. “You? You think we should leave the city? I thought you of all people would stay until the fight was over.”
“The fight,” said Gregor, “has changed. So we must change with it.” He looked back at the smoking Morsini campo. “If you see Polina…tell her that now would be a very good time to get a lot of scrivers on her side. It would be wise to consider which Lamplands firms you admire and trust, Claudia, and whether they might serve as good allies in whatever might be coming next—and whether they would come to the Slopes as well.”
Her eyes had grown quite wide now. “You’re not talking
about just leaving. You’re talking about evacuating.”
“Something must be salvaged from this city, if the worst comes to pass. If you go,” said Gregor, “and if you see Polina and you tell her I sent you…please also tell her I said she was right. That she was right about everything. But I still would have done everything the same.”
“All right, Gregor. I will.”
They embraced. Gregor wasn’t quite sure why—Claudia had been a colleague at Foundryside only for about a year, and they’d maintained a professional, respectful distance. But it suddenly seemed proper to embrace now, with the skies full of smoke and screams, and the dawn so terribly distant.
Then she turned and left, running down the stairs, and he watched her as she crossed the Foundryside courtyard, still wearing her leather apron and her magnifying goggles. He watched her until she entered the muddy streets beyond, and then she was gone.
* * *
—
An hour into their labors upon Orso’s hierophant-killing bullet, Sancia decided that never in the history of all of Tevanne had so much work gone into altering one little ball of lead.
she said to Berenice as she scrawled out a few sigil strings on a blackboard,
Berenice said,
Which was true. Clef had not always been skilled at designing scrivings. Three years ago, he’d claimed he could only tinker with a finished product, and no more—but now he seemed different. He spoke up, directly commenting on their plans, saying,
She thought about this.
said Valeria,
Sancia’s hand slowly crept up to where Clef hung from her neck by a string.
There was a long silence.
Then Sancia remembered. There had been something Crasedes had said to her within the Mountain…
You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone, and know their life meant absolutely nothing in the face of some greater conflict.
Could he have been telling the truth in their first encounter, when he said that Clef was his friend?
As she worked, she kept thinking of Crasedes’s voice, echoing through the darkness, and she wondered how it had sounded and what words it had spoken nearly four thousand years ago.
* * *
—
Ofelia Dandolo stared as the smoke and dust rose from the Morsini campo, and quietly thanked God her estate was too far away for her to hear any screams.
For now, she thought. For war has a discomfiting way of spilling over many boundaries…
She turned away from the window and faced the thing that had been built in the center of her grand ballroom. The sight of it disturbed her even more than the smoke from the Morsini enclave.
She was not quite sure what it was, or what to call it. It appeared to be a half lexicon, or perhaps even less than that, built right on top of her checked tiles and set behind a tremendous dome of green protective glass.
The idea of someone building a foundry lexicon—even a half of one—right in the middle of someone’s ballroom was mad.
The idea of someone doing it in a matter of hours was even more mad.
But then, Ofelia thought, he is capable of so much more than I’d ever imagined…
As if she had summoned him with her thoughts, she heard his voice: “It should all be ready.”
She jumped and looked up, and saw a blot of shadow passing through the open window at the top of the ballroom, though she lost it in the darkness of the ceiling.
Nausea thrummed throughout her stomach. “My…My Prophet?” she said. “I-I thought you were at the Morsini enclave.”
“I was.” His voice now came from beside the green dome of the lexicon. She saw his mask watching her through the glass, his still features distorted in its curves. “But I gain permissions as this city nears midnight. My own gravity grows easy to manipulate.”
She looked at the giant rig sitting hunched in her ballroom. “Is it…safe?”
“Safe enough,” he said. “Like myself, the lexicon is weak now, but…soon it will be powerful.” His mask warped and stretched as he drifted along the side of the dome. “The center of reality. A god of this city, in a way.” He stopped. “In a few moments, I will bring the construct here. When that happens, you must be ready. Prepare every defense you have. Nothing must touch this place. Am I clear?”
“Yes, My Prophet.”
“Good.” She watched as he rose up behind the bubble of green glass and merged with the shadows at the ceiling. “I go now to fetch her—and many other things, of course.”
“But…how shall you do this?” she asked. “How shall you acquire so many things, all at once?”
“Oh, that is simple,” he said. His voice echoed from the distant corner of the room. “First I shall simply ask, and hope they see reason. And i
f not…Well. All things are possible, with but the turn of a key.”
Then the shadows trembled, and he was gone.
* * *
—
They finished Valeria’s plate and her definition first. Sancia felt ill as she took the tiny tab of bronze in her hand, which was hardly bigger than a grain of rice, and placed it in a small, velvet-lined box.
This tiny thing could kill me or remake my brain or open up the gates of hell, for all I know, she thought. I barely want to touch it to my skin…
Sancia snapped the little box shut and stuffed it in her pocket. But as she removed her hand, she suddenly felt it—a sudden pang of nausea deep in her belly. And due to their connection, Sancia knew Berenice felt it too.
“Ah shit,” said Sancia. “No, no, no…”
“Oh, God,” said Orso faintly. He looked up at the ceiling. “You don’t…You don’t feel that, do you?”
“We do,” said Sancia. She looked back at the scrived timepiece on the wall. It was only eleven. “But…if he’s really here, then he’s here damned early…That can’t be right. It can’t be, can it?”
They heard shouts and running feet above them.
“It is,” said Valeria. She sounded terrified. “The Maker has come.”
“Sancia!” shouted Gregor. “Sancia, he’s here!”
Sancia left Orso and Berenice to their work and ran up to the roof. She found Gregor standing at the edge, pointing to the southwest of their firm.
She narrowed her eyes, peered through the shadows, and spied the form of a man apparently sitting on thin air about twenty feet beyond the Foundryside gates.
“Shit,” she said quietly.
He slowly drifted forward until he fell beneath the errant light of a floating lantern. His hands were clasped at his waist in a queerly peaceful and quaint pose, like a schoolchild awaiting their teacher’s return.
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