The moment was beatific, transcendent, sublime: all four of them, thinking, pondering, solving together, each sensing the others’ strengths and weaknesses and feeding into them, building layers of approach and possibility and probabilities…
Orso began talking.
They stared at one another, somewhat awed at how quickly it had all come together in one epiphanic moment.
They started off.
* * *
—
Orso and Berenice walked the perimeter of the room, applying the construction scriving plates to the stone walls one after another. Orso struggled not to panic as he shuffled through the room, convinced that Crasedes would appear any minute now—but then he began to feel queerly calm and collected as he went about his work.
And then he realized why: he was twinned with Berenice, and she knew exactly what she was doing.
He turned to look at her as she prepared their trap. How confident she seemed, how marvelous, how wonderful.
And how grown, he thought.
Then, to his surprise, he began to cry.
Berenice stared at him, utterly taken aback by this outpouring of emotion. She embraced him.
he said,
She squeezed his hand.
He smiled weakly.
* * *
—
Sancia and Gregor paced across the ballroom floor before the lexicon, trying to estimate where Crasedes might suddenly appear. They found it was somewhat tricky, trying to predict when a hierophant might magically jump out of the back hallways of reality.
They studied the area around them, the imperiat clutched in Sancia’s hand, and wondered what best to do.
“If you are trying to predict where the Maker might appear,” said Valeria’s voice, “I find he prefers to appear about ten feet in front of his lexicon.”
They turned to look at her. She was still seated at the edge of her boundary, watching them impassively.
“In other words,” said Valeria, “if you wish to use the imperiat to stop him—you will want to position it five feet to your right.”
Gregor and Sancia looked at each other.
Sancia grimaced, walked over to where Valeria had indicated, and began to place the imperiat on the floor. Then she paused.
Sancia took the third and final twinned box and turned on the imperiat—but before she placed it inside, she looked up and noticed Valeria watching her very, very carefully.
I don’t like that, she thought. I don’t like that at all…
She put the imperiat in the box, shut it, and activated it.
Again—a quake, a tremble, and a discomfiting pulse in the air as a whole foundry failed somewhere out on the Dandolo campo.
Sancia sat back, her stomach fluttering queerly. Yet as she did, she noticed Valeria’s posture had changed—was it her imagination, or did she suddenly look much more relaxed?
“You may wish to hurry now,” said Valeria. “For I suspect the Maker might return sooner than you expect.”
* * *
—
Another crack-crack-crack as Crasedes ripped through the Dandolo enclave, flexing his sight, peering through walls and buildings, studying the darkness for any sign of movement that could be this Berenice, and the imperiat.
Where are you? How can you hide from me like this again? Where are yo—
Then another quake in the air, another pulse in the wind.
He froze above the dead foundry and turned. Then he watched, horror-struck, as the lights of yet another foundry died out in the enclave, this time farther to his left.
“Another?” he cried. He peered out at this new disaster. “Another one?”
He started to use Clef once more, intending to jump to this third foundry, but then he paused, thinking.
He had built this massive, distributed rig very carefully: there was the main lexicon he’d built in the center, and then five major foundries all around it, connecting its twinning to the greater city beyond, like the cables of a net.
And yet, two of the five were now severed, just after one had been severed and repaired. That meant the majority of his giant, distributed rig had been down at one point in time—dead and unable to enact his commands.
All of his commands.
A dreadful idea began to grow in his mind.
“Ohhh no,” he whispered.
With a crack, he was gone.
* * *
—
Sancia pointed to the floor about four feet away and told Gregor,
/>
Gregor put down the construction scrivings where she’d indicated, and Sancia pushed the middle lever of the imperiat down all the way. The sigils on the smooth plate in the center all vanished, indicating that the rig was now targeting nothing at all.
Sancia pushed the middle lever up, increasing the radius of the rig’s effects bit by bit. She needed to shut off all the scrivings in one area—but she needed it to be a very, very small, tight sphere. The exact sphere that Crasedes would appear in when he returned to this ballroom.
For an agonizingly long while, the plate in the middle of the imperiat remained blank…
But then they emerged: the sigils for adhesion, for surface area, for stability—the exact strings for a construction scriving.
She pressed the button on the side of the rig.
Instantly, the world grew queerly dull and dark and slow to her. It took a moment for her to realize that it had killed the sigils that twinned her with the rest of the Foundrysiders.
She staggered out of the imperiat’s radius. Once she was free, her head filled up with voices:
<…did you go?> asked Berenice anxiously.
* * *
—
With a crack, Crasedes leapt into the lexicon chamber of this last dead foundry and bellowed, “How long?”
The team of scrivers there shrieked in shock at the sight of him, his voice preternaturally loud, the very world trembling with his rage.
“Tell me how long until this device comes back up!” he demanded. “Tell me! NOW!”
“I…it should be ten minutes or so,” sputtered a scriver. “It’s not a critical failure, just a sudden pause in its assertio—”
But Crasedes was not listening anymore. Because now he understood the true threat.
If the chain had been broken too much, and if the construct had escaped…there was only one lexicon that she could possibly escape into right now.
And if she captured that…
And once all the failed lexicons came back up—a process that would take only a matter of minutes…
“No, no, no,” he whispered.
He pulled Clef out and began to insert him into space: but this time he would not leap out into the Dandolo enclave. He would return to the estate, to the ballroom—this time not to fix anything, but to destroy the giant lexicon he had so carefully built.
* * *
—
With a crack, he appeared.
Sancia saw him only for an instant—his black, glinting mask, his three-cornered hat, and Clef in his hand, winking gold—and she saw, with a burst of tremendous satisfaction, that he had appeared just above where the imperiat lay on the ballroom floor.
Crasedes seemed to hang there in space, holding Clef out, hovering above the imperiat.
Then he began to tremble. He looked around, like he’d just forgotten something but could not remember what.
He looked down at the imperiat.
“No!” he cried. “You? What…What have you done!” He drunkenly staggered to the side. “What have you do—”
But he never finished. Because then Gregor, crouched behind the lexicon, sprung their trap and activated the construction scrivings.
Construction scrivings always worked in two parts, with two bits you wanted to stick together. The scrivings essentially said—Hey, you two things? You’re actually one, so be one, right now. And then the two halves would do so.
But Sancia knew very well that they could also be used as locomotion, often rather unwisely.
Orso and Berenice had lined it up as best they could, sticking the construction scriving plates to the thick stone walls on either side of the ballroom in crude circles. And when Gregor activated the trigger, as he did just now, the two massive bits of wall would want to slam together, as fast and as hard as they could.
And, of course, one chunk would pass through the space just above the imperiat.
Crasedes had no time to react as Gregor triggered the trap. He just staggered very slightly to the side—and then, with a dull yet immense pop! two huge, round plugs of stone were ripped from the wall and flew toward him.
The closer one got to Crasedes first, and it slammed into his back like the bow of a galleon.
Sancia watched as a tiny twinkle of gold flew up from Crasedes’s hand and arced down through the air to the ballroom floor.
Ordinarily, the immense plug of stone that had struck Crasedes would have simply stopped when it hit him, since it was entering the imperiat’s dead zone. But such was its momentum that it kept going, proceeding out of the dead zone—and carrying Crasedes with it—until it remembered how all its scrivings worked again, and it continued hurtling across the room to its pair.
Sancia leapt forward as the twinkle of gold fell through the air to her.
Then came an immense crack as the two huge plugs of stone smashed together.
A groan from Crasedes, trapped between the two.
She watched as Clef’s tooth parted the air…and then she snatched him up with her right hand.
There was a long, long silence, broken only by the groans of Crasedes, trapped between the two huge plugs of dark stone.
40
Sancia and Gregor staggered over to where Crasedes lay, trapped between the two immense pieces of stone wall. She knelt and peered inside, and saw the barest glint of his black mask between the stones. It appeared the impact had knocked his hat clean off his head.
She flexed her scrived sight, and saw the boiling red mass that made up his being still there, pulsating below the stone…
…along with his wrappings. The one thing that kept him alive.
“He’s alive?” said Gregor.
She gripped Clef tight in her hand. “But not for long.”
Crasedes shifted his face very slightly to peer out at her from between the stones. “Sancia!” he gasped. His voice was faint and miserable. “Sancia, listen! The construct…She’s…She’s broken free! She’s got control of my lexic—”
She straddled the stone, holding Clef like he was a dagger.
“Sancia!” shouted Crasedes. “Don’t do this! Don’t…Please, don’t let me fail now!”
Sancia ignored him, and stabbed Clef’s head into his palm.
* * *
—
It had been a long time since Sancia had used Clef on a scrived object. She remembered it, of course: the curious sensation of overhearing Clef argue with a string of sigils, refuting their assumptions, undermining their conclusions…
But now, as Clef attempted to undermine and destroy the wrappings and armor of Crasedes Magnus himself…to say that the experience was cosmically overpowering would have been a vast understatement.
Reams and reams of hierophantic commands bellowed in her ears. These were not, she realized quickly, like conventional scrivings that persuaded reality
to do something it normally wouldn’t consider: these were much more powerful, altering reality instantly and permanently. To unravel these bindings was akin to unraveling the sky itself.
Yet this was exactly what Clef set out to do.
Their deafening screaming match filled up her mind, elbowing out all her other thoughts, layers and layers of arguments and commands and information that made her simple mind feel minuscule, worthless, meaningless. She realized that Clef was not presenting an argument that a scriving should reconsider its conception of time or distance or anything so petty—he was making an argument about reality itself, about what existence was, asserting a story of the world that the hierophantic commands couldn’t possibly survive in…
And as he spoke, Sancia listened.
She listened as Clef drew upon a vast store of knowledge that she could scarcely comprehend. She listened as he described the world, the way it worked, the nature of its function: a vast, complex machine that churned away within the planes of existence, levels and layers and strata and fundibular wells of forces and matter and infinity…
And the more he spoke, the more the works of Crasedes Magnus sat spellbound, helplessly listening. Though they were mighty commands, intricately wrought, they could not resist him. He was too strong, too wise, too much.
It all shocked her. She’d never known Clef could do this. Had he known he possessed such impossible knowledge?
And then she wondered something that she’d frequently wondered over the past three years.
Who was this key? To hear him articulate reality so forcefully, so powerfully, to watch him rend through Crasedes’s defenses as if they were no more than dewy cobwebs…She began to worry.
Had Crasedes gifted him with this knowledge, when he’d first made the key? Or had the man whose soul Clef had been made from known this arcana in his mortal life?
* * *
—
Berenice and Orso watched as Sancia stabbed the key into Crasedes’s palm. Almost instantly the hierophant began to cry out, screaming and shrieking in what seemed to be indescribable agony. The sound was unearthly and strangely plaintive, almost like the voice of a child in pain. It made Berenice’s skin crawl.
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