They pierced the surface and gasped, their lungs rejoicing at the feel of air. They grasped the edge of the well in the courtyard, lifted themselves up, glanced around ever so briefly to confirm that they weren’t being watched, and hauled themselves free of the waters.
Their legs shaking, their whole body exhausted, they sat down on the edge of the old well and stared up at the star-ridden sky—not two minds within one body, as they’d thought previously, but one mind in two bodies. They did not have to give voice to their awe, their amazement, their wonder—for it was their own. They knew their own mind. They knew what they felt.
And then, very slowly, they separated: they disentangled piece by piece, falling out of alignment, becoming two minds, two bodies, closely linked across miles and miles…
Berenice stared up at the stars, and somewhere, very far away, Sancia stared up at the darkness of her blindfold. Berenice let out a breath, regretting for a moment that it was only her mouth, her throat, her body that did so.
They sat in awed silence as they tried to recover.
Dripping wet, she slipped off into the streets of the Dandolo campo—a place she’d known for many years, one that should have been deeply familiar to her; and yet now she passed through the streets under strange skies, peering out through alien eyes.
* * *
—
Between Berenice’s knowledge of the campo and Sancia’s scrived sight and thieving instincts, there was no door or boundary or barrier that could hold them back, no soldier or guard who spied anything more of them than a hint of shadow or a wet footprint. Within minutes they’d acquired four scrived keys, two sachets, one scrived dagger, and one fire starter, and then they were shooting through the veins and capillaries of the campo like a blot of poison speeding toward a beating heart.
Berenice knew where she was going. She knew all the scriving workshops on the Dandolo campo, but only one would do for her work tonight: the Hypatus Building. The place where she and Orso had labored for years, dreaming up mad solutions to impossible problems.
She quietly slipped through the inner enclave gates, the guards barely paying attention to her: her sachet worked, after all, and the black skies made it hard to care about a wet girl in rather shabby Commons clothes.
No dreaming up solutions tonight, thought Berenice as she wove through the alleys. She spied the peaked roofs of the Hypatus Building just ahead. I know what I need to make. How fast I shall have to work…
She approached the Hypatus Building. She did not know much about scaling walls, but as she peered at the building with Sancia’s sight the knowledge blossomed in her mind, and she knew the second floor had the least defensive wards prepared against intruders.
She approached the wall, placed a hand against its stone, and all of Sancia’s experiences about infiltration and evasion poured into her thoughts.
Berenice grabbed the edge of the first-floor window and hauled herself up, her toes expertly parsing the gaps in the bricks, her fear of heights suddenly vanishing.
She clambered up, ignoring the pain in her fingers and the webbing of her hand, and placed her palm to the window. Its scrived wards were nothing to her will, to her knowledge of their logic, and she batted them away like they were moss, opened the window, and slipped inside.
She studied the floors around her, reading the scriving—their logic, their placement, their interrelationships. She spied the workshop within seconds, and then the stairs down to it, and she started off, weaving through the darkened halls of the Hypatus Building…
whispered Sancia’s voice,
Berenice smirked as she penetrated deeper into the floors of the building, growing closer and closer to the workshop. Finally she came to the shop doors, and she crouched and cracked the door open slowly, peering through.
High, rounded windows, the faint starlight streaming through. Tables and bowls and lenses and shelves full of designs.
She opened the door, slipped inside, and shut it behind her.
She slowly turned around, her eyes dancing over all the components and modules and half-finished rigs that lay scattered about the workshop. They’d labored in Foundryside for so long, with such small budgets and such a paucity of resources, that to see this was like stumbling across a golden hoard in the street.
Berenice picked up a stylus.
Berenice rapidly assembled her workstation—the plating, metals, bowls, styli, and components she’d need to create her masterwork tonight. Then she turned on a scrived lamp, put on her magnifying goggles, and set to work on the first and perhaps most critical of tools.
A small knife, its blade hardly bigger than a coin. Yet engraved upon it, in the tiniest print possible, would be the very commands that had turned Sancia’s and Berenice’s minds into one.
But soon, Berenice thought as she began, we will be three.
* * *
—
As she worked, and designed, and built, and labored over each set of sigils and strings—most of which were simply an implausible number of construction scriving plates—Berenice found her mind turning to Clef. To the way his tooth felt in her hand, to the tiny hierophantic commands engraved on his shaft, to the way his voice had whispered merrily in her ear as she worked…
Then she realized. These were not her thoughts.
The moment flashed in Berenice’s mind, even though she hadn’t been there to witness it: Crasedes holding Clef high, his body fixed in a posture of indescribable joy…
Another memory flashed in Berenice’s mind: the one of Valeria’s that Sancia had caught when she’d first found her hiding in the lexicon. The vision of the man wrapped in black, and the boy dying on the bed, while Valeria looked on…
Valeria’s voice whispering to the weeping man: There is only one way to save him.
And him shrieking back: Look what it did to you!
How anguished he’d sounded, how devastated.
Berenice paused in her work and slowly pu
t down her stylus.
There was a long silence.
Berenice considered this for a moment, horrified.
There was the sound of a crack from nearby. Berenice jumped and whirled about, eyes scanning the workshop…
But she was alone. The room was dark. No one had come.
Then she realized.
She heard a low, rich, smooth voice uncoiling in her ear, “Ahh…Sancia. You’re awake. Very good!”
“Oh shit,” whispered Berenice.
* * *
—
Sancia heard Orso moan in pain, and then felt the nausea in her stomach rise to a boil as Crasedes drew close.
“It gives me no joy to see you like this, you know,” said his voice quietly. “I was telling you the truth. I wished to have you by my side, Sancia.”
“God Almighty,” said Sancia. “Why not just finish your awful magics and make me, when you control all my choices?”
“You know just as well as I do that a command is not the same as a choice,” said Crasedes. There was a twitch at the side of her face, like a moth fluttering at her cheek, and she felt her skin stretch curiously, all of the flesh there slowly shifting…
He’s bending the gravity right next to my goddamn face.
The blindfold fell away. She looked up, squinting, the weak light of a nearby lantern as bright as the sun in her eyes—and then she saw him, sitting cross-legged in the air, hands on his knees, the eyes of his black mask fixed on her.
He really has turned the world to midnight, she thought, watching him. So now he’s at his most powerful, all the time…
“But there are still choices before you, Sancia,” said Crasedes.
“Think you can torture me into telling you where the imperiat is?” said Sancia. “I told you, asshole, I don’t know.”
“Oh, I don’t think I need to torture you,” said Crasedes. “You simply don’t understand all the nuances of your situation. When that becomes clear…I’ve no doubt I’ll win your favor.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, you piece of shi—”
“Yes, yes.” Crasedes crooked his finger. There was a crunk sound as the table she was strapped to apparently separated from its base, and her belly swooped uncomfortably as the whole apparatus rose up to float in the air.
“Ordinarily, I’d just use Clef to take you there,” he said with a sigh. “But since the construct has altered you so…that simply isn’t an option. In this case, I resort to less elegant solutions.” He looked over his shoulder. “You too, Orso. You’d better come as well.”
Sancia still couldn’t turn her head to see, but she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Then a large wooden chair floated up into the air beside her, and sitting in it was Orso, a ball of rags stuffed and tied into his mouth.
Yet he looked so different. So pale, so sweaty, so miserable.
Her eye fell on the browning bandages at his shoulder, and the way his chest heaved with each breath…
She felt Berenice gasp at the sight.
The table pivoted in the air, then floated after Crasedes as he turned and drifted out the door. “After me, children,” he said.
Sancia suppressed an involuntary scream of fright as they rose over the Dandolo gardens. Yet as they did, she finally got to see what had happened to the city since her capture.
A sprawling ramble of towers and walls, white and ghostly in the queer starlight from the black skies. All the floating lanterns were like tiny, warm campfires scattered among a vast, dark forest. And there was so much smoke, so much dust, for so many of the warrens and campo neighborhoods appeared to be aflame, and the night sky was bright and ringing with countless screams…
The city has been driven mad, she thought. The city is a body, and he its disease—and soon it will die.
She watched as the face of the Dandolo estate swam up to her, the doors of the upper balcony open and waiting for them.
She felt an immense dread well up within her as they approached the open balcony.
* * *
—
Berenice slipped out the side door of the Hypatus Building and turned the corner, hugging close to the side of the building. With every step she took, the pack of gear on her back clinked and clanked and rattled.
So much made so quickly, she thought. I hope it works.
But she knew it would. Most of them were just construction scriving plates, along with a trigger she’d made for them. Those would be useful—because if all went correctly tonight, then soon construction scrivings would be the only ones that would work at all in the Dandolo enclave.
The rest, of course, were quite more complicated. But it didn’t matter. When she and Sancia worked together, their rigs were practically flawless. The real problem was going to be getting it all where it needed to be in time.
She walked along the carriage stalls situated next to the Hypatus Building, studying each one. She had checked out the hypatus carriages a number of times in her former life here—mostly to ferry Orso about—and she knew the system quite well. Well enough that she’d remembered where the safe full of carriage sachets was kept, and how to break into it.
She found her carriage, climbed into the cockpit, and gently adjusted the acceleration lever, the wood worn smooth by the grip of countless scrivers before her.
The old carriage creaked to life. She carefully backed out of the stall, turned the wheel, and rattled off into the pitch-black streets of the inner Dandolo enclave.
35
Gregor Dandolo watched himself from a place far behind his eyes.
He was standing in a darkened room that was quite familiar to him: he remembered the maps on the walls, the old threadbare bedspread, the bear rug that someone had gifted to him after a trip to the north…
His old room. He remembered now. How many nights had he slept here, staring up at the ceiling? And then he remembered Domenico—one of the few solid memories he still had of him—his brother sitting on his bed, reading a book of poetry, and saying aloud: You ought to be the warrior, Gregor. I much prefer words to weapons…
How his hands had gripped the narrow tome. Soft hands with long fingers, the hands of a boy.
The hand extending from the shadows, bloodied and trembli
ng.
Gregor? Gregor, are you near?
“I kept it just the way you’d left it,” said his mother’s voice from beside him. “I kept it just the way it was, in case you ever came back.”
Gregor stood there, staring out at his room, not moving, not speaking. After all, she had not given him any command.
His mother came into view, still wearing the same clothes from the night before. She looked very old, and very tired, and it was clear she’d been crying.
“I remember how you’d hide under the covers of your bed when your father and I fought,” she said weakly. “I’d come up after a row with him and find you shivering under the blankets. I doubt if you remember that now. He said you’d lose some memories when we…When…” She trailed off and sighed. “Do you remember this place, Gregor?” she asked.
He said nothing.
“I…I command you to answer. Tell me the truth. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” he whispered. To speak aloud felt like he had to dig every syllable from the depths of his belly.
She swallowed, staring hungrily into his face. “Gregor, my love…are…are you happy to be back?”
Another whisper: “No.”
She looked away, her breath whistling in her nostrils. “If only you knew…I mean, do you realize what I did to bring you back, Gregor? Do you know what I had to do? Do you know what I’ve done?”
Another whisper: “Yes.”
She looked back at him, surprised. Clearly she had not expected a response. “You do?”
“Yes.”
“You…You can’t. What do you think you know, Gregor?”
“I…know that…you killed my father,” he whispered, staring into space. He felt tears running down his cheeks, felt his fingernails biting into the palms of his hands. “I know…the carriage crash was…your sabotage. And I know that…that you did not intend for…Domenico or me to be on board, but…you killed us. You killed us both. You…killed your children.”
“No!” she cried. “I…I didn’t! I fought to save you, I did so much to secure your life! Don’t you realize that?”
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