“Exactly. And to do that, we need the Quinta and the Luminoso to return to their original purpose.”
Mota came out of the Red House, leading a group of perhaps a dozen men and older boys. He waved his sword at Iliana and Thiego, perhaps indicating the building had been cleared of likely recruits.
Iliana turned back to Thiego, anxious for a resolution to this conversation before Mercado’s man arrived. “Leaving aside everything we don’t know and don’t have, and that the artifact is going to kill us if we get even the slightest detail wrong, there’s one other problem with your scheme. You’re not the true power of the Luminoso.”
He shook his head, expression grim. “No, I’m not. That would be Naila Roja. And she has other priorities.”
Chapter Ten
Naila waited until Thiego left the temple before going down to the Sacred Vaults. She’d put the idea into his head in the first place, pointing out that with the judicious use of his artifacts, he could double the speed of the recruitment. What’s more, assisting the process, he would aid the reconciliation between the Quinta and the Luminoso.
Reconciliation was a goal that seemed to motivate the young Guardian of Secrets, though Naila had no interest, except insofar as she could achieve it by forcing the Quinta lords to conform to her will. Meanwhile, she needed to reassert control over her fellow cabalists, who were exerting too much independence without the cunning, spider-like figure of Salvatore to frighten them into submission.
Salvatore. The thought made Naila grit her teeth as she worked her way through the ribbed stone corridors on her way down to the vaults. How had the old fool so easily controlled the Luminoso? She’d always assumed that it was through the even more shadowy figure of the Master of Whispers, but had since learned that no such figure had existed. Not until she’d claimed the position for herself.
There were others in the city, other hidden cabalists whose identities Naila had not yet sussed out. Perhaps he’d relied on a network of spies and assassins to do his work. That must be it. When this current business was over, she’d double her efforts to find them and bring them under her command.
She was surprised to find the iron door to one of the vaults wide open and a pair of geometers inside. The older one, Kara, wore a heavy set of keys at her belt. She was bent over a plywood box that had been pried open, while the second geometer, a woman named Maralisa, sat at a small desk and dipped her quill into an inkpot before scribbling down something Kara was telling her. There were boxes shifted about up and down the niches in the barrel-shaped vault, and it seemed that they’d been at work for some time.
“How did you get in here?” Naila demanded.
Kara looked up with an irritated frown that faded quickly when she saw who had interrupted their work. Her expression took on an appropriate level of deference, but Naila didn’t forget the initial insolence, and that made her even angrier.
Kara jangled the keys at her belt. “The master loaned me this.”
“The master? You mean Thiego? By what right would he do such a thing?”
The other two women glanced at each other, looking genuinely puzzled. “By right of him being the Guardian of Secrets, of course,” Kara said. “He can allow anyone he wishes to enter.”
“That’s rubbish. May as well let any old fool from the dumbre have a look around. Well, don’t just stare at me, gaping like idiots. Explain yourselves. What the hell are you doing anyway?”
Maralisa set down her quill and rubbed ink-stained fingers on a dirty cloth. She held up her notebook. “We’re cataloging the items in the vault. Trying to make sense of what they are based on their appearance, their position relative to other artifacts, their general—”
“No! That’s . . . that’s . . . you can’t do that. What if something were to happen to the book? What if it fell into the wrong hands? The Quinta might get it, or a Basdeenian spy or even . . . I don’t know, some junior cabalist who didn’t understand the gravity of what he was looking at. Like the pair of you, in fact.”
“Thiego has been unable to find Salvatore’s old catalog, and—” Kara began.
“That’s because he didn’t have one. It’s the master’s job to go through and understand the artifacts piece by piece. And then to keep it in his head, to share with a select few. That’s the entire point of being the Guardian of Secrets. He’s not called the Sharer of General Knowledge, you idiots.”
The two women looked defiant, and it was obvious that if Naila left right now, they’d be back at it.
“Out, both of you. And give me those keys.”
“I can’t give you the keys,” Kara said.
“I am your master, and I am Thiego’s master, as well. Give me the keys, or you will be guilty of blasphemy, and I will see that the appropriate punishments are carried out.”
Kara seemed on the verge of resisting, but finally unclasped her belt and slid off the heavy iron ring with its keys, each the size of her hand. Naila snatched the ring and pointed to the door.
“Now go. I have work to do.”
When they were gone, Naila twisted the keys in her hands, still furious about what she’d just witnessed, and wishing she’d taken the book and torn it to shreds instead of letting the two women make off with it. It was then that she noticed that the keys were shiny and freshly cut.
“The bastard has changed the locks.”
The words came out of her mouth before she had a chance to consider them, and realize that one of the women might have pilfered an artifact similar to the illusion egg that Naila kept on her person at all times. She pulled the door shut and turned up the gaslight. It was cool and quiet inside, with the only sounds her own breath and the sputtering flame that cast shadows across the walls.
Freshly cut or not, she had a set of working keys now, and had no intention of giving them up, but who was to say Thiego wouldn’t try to lock her out of the Sacred Vaults again? The time had come to maneuver him aside.
Killing him would be problematic; she’d allowed him too much leeway, and he knew too many cabalists. Even if he died in an accident, there would be chaos if he fell. Better would be to find someone to raise to a new position as master cabalist with duties that cut Thiego off from his growing power.
Meanwhile, she meant to take advantage of Thiego’s absence to look for what she needed without him peering over her shoulder, telling her what she could or could not take for herself. She started with the most recently opened box, and found that it contained something that looked like a trio of coiled springs, each about the size of her fist, connected by thin copper wires. When she reached her hand toward it, they buzzed audibly, and an astringent odor filled the air.
Naila closed the box back up. She had no idea what it could be, but it wasn’t what she was looking for, and she was not possessed of the same sort of idle curiosity that seemed to have afflicted Thiego and his fellow geometers.
There was another box in a smaller niche next to it that was moving about as if it had something living inside. She picked up the box and it shrieked so loudly that she dropped it to her feet and looked behind her, thinking at first that someone else was inside the vault. Nobody was there.
When she turned around, the box was sliding across the floor, leaving something like a snail’s trail as it moved toward the door. She snatched it up, ignored a second shriek, and put it back in the niche, where it settled down.
Another box seemed to be smoking, but when she touched it, it was cold, like touching a metal railing after a frost. That didn’t seem promising, either, so she left it be.
Another box was marked with two red triangles, which was intriguing, so she used the crowbar left by Thiego and Kara to pry it open. It contained ten or twelve flat, rectangular objects that seemed to have a sheet of black glass on one side and a shell like a turtle’s carapace on the other. They were ringed on the narrower edge with buttons that reminded her of the ones on the object Salvatore had used to try to control the artifact in the mine.
Each
was about the size of her palm, and she played with one of them for a minute, pressing buttons, sticking the object against the wall or rubbing it vigorously, like she might do with an underworld bracelet. She couldn’t raise any sort of response, and finally returned the object with the others and nailed the box shut again.
Yet another box made a humming sound as she approached, but in her mind, rather than audibly. Whispers in strange, barbarian tongues. When she picked up the box and made to pry it open, a roar sounded in her head like wind sweeping through the Rift before a storm. It was enough to drive her crazy, so she shoved the box back into its niche and moved on.
The problem was, she didn’t know what she was looking for. Some of these things were surely useful, but how could she tell? Mostly, you had to try something out, experimenting at length. That’s how she’d learned the strengths of the glove that she’d used to choke Lord Torre to death and to tear off the gate to Lord Carbón’s estate. That sort of experimentation took time, and presented many dangers.
The only other option was to have someone explain an artifact’s use. She might have to call Thiego back and put pressure on him until he told her what he knew. He’d surely figured out some of these things on his own or been told by other keepers of the vaults.
Near the back of the room was a niche with what looked like a drape of velvet covering it. She drew back the velvet, which was really two pieces that had been sewn together, front to back, and something heavy between them that felt like a lead sheet. That made her wary—lead was one of the protectors against witherers and lemures—and she stood back a pace instead of sticking her head up too close to the opening.
There was another piece of velvet on the bottom of the niche, with a paper-thin sheet of hammered gold stretched across it, the metal so thin that the edges fluttered in the draft she’d caused by moving the velvet drape. Sitting on top of the gold was a round metal ball about the size of an apricot, with a dull gray appearance.
Not entirely round, actually. It was as if someone had taken a piece of dough and rolled it on their palms until they got the rough shape of it, rather than pouring it into a round mold.
Without thinking, Naila picked up the ball, expecting it to be heavy like lead, but while it felt smooth and metallic, it was lighter than any metal that she’d ever held. She rolled it across her palm, and it grew warm and slightly slippery. There was a feeling of pressure on her palm, and when she held the object up to the lamp, she was surprised to see that the bottom part of the ball seemed to be disappearing.
In fact, the whole thing was vanishing, and the sense of pressure increasing, almost as if—
Suddenly, the bottom part appeared on the underside of her hand, and she realized in shock what was happening. She turned in alarm toward the niche, just as the ball plopped straight through her hand and fell toward the floor. For a single, bizarre moment, she saw straight through her flesh, blood pulsing, her bones and tendons light gray and translucent.
After flowing through her hand, the ball hit the floor and rolled two or three feet, leaving a deep groove scoured in the flagstones where it had passed. As soon as the ball came to a stop, it began to sink into the stone.
There wasn’t a moment to lose. Naila snatched the hammered gold sheet from the niche and grabbed for the metal object. It came up reluctantly from the stone floor, and there was a deep, ball-shaped hole left behind when she got it out. The hole gradually filled in, as if it were mud and someone had pressed the heel of his palm into it, only to have it rebound after the fact. The groove where the artifact had rolled across the floor was already gone.
Naila stared at the floor, stared at her hand. It was uninjured. Then she looked at her other hand, which had crumpled the sheet of hammered gold around the object. If she hadn’t suddenly realized the point of the gold, the blasted artifact would have sunk straight through the floor. Maybe dropped all the way to the fiery pit that was said to be in the center of the earth.
She turned the artifact over and peeled open the gold sheet, careful not to touch the object, though direct contact the first time hadn’t injured her in any way. She saw now she’d left the imprints of her fingers on the surface when she’d snatched it up with the gold leaf; the artifact was apparently made of a malleable substance.
Curious, Naila squeezed it through the gold. It was like squeezing especially stiff dough, not like metal at all. She looked at her hand, at the floor. Unchanged. Somehow, the artifact could pass through other solid objects without damaging them, and it could also be shaped.
A possibility occurred to her, and her heart began to thump with excitement. She pulled at the corners of the object, more concerned about tearing the gold sheet than the artifact, which she presumed could be squeezed back together and then rolled up into a ball again. As she stretched the artifact, it held its shape without breaking, even while she pulled it thinner and thinner.
The gold leaf was the problem; it wasn’t big enough to stretch the artifact as wide as she wanted. Never mind, this was enough to test. She peeled back the edge of the gold sheet and revealed the object, which had been flattened into something that looked like the edge of a misshapen lead plate.
She squatted and touched the exposed edge of the object against the stone floor. There was a brief pause, and then it began to sink into the stone as she pushed. She forced it down several inches and then pulled it out again.
There was a gap in the flagstone exactly the size and shape of the artifact’s edge, right down to the imprint of her fingers where she’d formed the object. It was as if an artisan had carefully made an exact mold in the floor. The hole in the stone held for a second or two and then began to rebound. Moments later, it had filled, and there was no sign that anything had changed.
Naila touched her finger gingerly to the exposed edge of the artifact. It was warm, and a tingle passed through her flesh where it touched. As she pushed, her fingertip went right through it, and when it came out the other side, it seemed to be gone, as if severed. Then gradually, it reappeared. How bizarre. And how thrilling.
This was it. This was how she would do it.
Chapter Eleven
An hour later, Naila was in the small stone room where she and Thiego had used a sounder glove and the mentabacus to reveal a secret chamber behind the wall. She wore gloves that gleamed as if made of pure gold, but in reality she’d only torn the gold leaf into strips and carefully wrapped them around the cloth to provide a surface that could shape the artifact without passing through it.
In addition, she’d collected a lead-lined tapestry of the sort used to shield the temple walls against witherers, and now spread it across the floor. She stepped to the middle and put the object, which she’d rolled back into a ball for ease of transportation, on top of it.
After discovering the artifact’s true nature, Naila had retreated to her room, holding it in the gold leaf, wondering about the lead-lined velvet blocking the entrance to the niche and placed below the gold.
Lead was even denser than gold, and also significantly more common, so if it could be used in the same way, that would be easier than messing around with gold leaf. Some experimentation showed that lead could stop the movement of the artifact through otherwise solid surfaces, but if she tried to use it to mold the artifact, the object remained hard and rigid.
Lead was useful as a shield, she decided. Gold could block the artifact’s effects, but also allow her to modify its shape. As a result, she’d brought one of the heavy lead tapestries to use as a work surface, but needed to conserve the gold leaf if she were to put the artifact to use.
The thing had no name that she knew of, and so she tried out a few while she stood observing it. A burrower, maybe? Or an excavator? A little better, but still too mundane; the word sounded like a tool from one of Carbón’s mines. Anyway, it wasn’t exactly excavating, as there was no stone or flesh pushed aside. It was as if the solid object in question simply didn’t exist where the artifact touched it, as if it had been
temporarily removed to some other realm of existence. It was opening a space somewhere.
“It’s a portal shifter,” she said aloud. “A malleable portal shifter.”
She liked the sound of it, although that made assumptions about how it worked, which she really didn’t understand. Nor did she intend to try. It was a magical device; there was no understanding of the how, only the what.
Naila sat cross-legged on the lead tapestry in front of the object and set to work with her gold-leaf-covered gloves. She pulled and stretched, pleased to find it even more malleable than she’d thought: she could bend and flatten as much as she wanted without breaking it or having it rebound into its previous shape.
Once, she was so busy with her work that her forearm touched the edge of the portal shifter and she only noticed when it seemed to pass through both the artifact and the lead tapestry beneath it, then seemed to be sinking into the stone floor itself. She realized what was happening, and jerked her arm out with a gasp. It came reluctantly, like dragging it out of the mud.
She was unharmed, and there wasn’t any visible change to the tapestry or the floor when she lifted up the heavy lead cloth to look. How was that possible? How could the lead hold the portal shifter and simultaneously let her elbow pass through it and into the stone floor? There was something even stranger going on here than what she’d worked out earlier.
Never mind. She didn’t need to know the nuances to put it to use.
Naila worked until she’d stretched the artifact into something shaped like a short door, about three feet high. After giving it some more thought, she twisted at a part midway up on the left side until she’d formed a sort of doorknob. Then she laid the portal shifter flat on the lead tapestry and stood up to think carefully about how she’d place it against the wall.
The carved stone figures of flying devices and strange machines no longer seemed out of place to her. This had once been part of a larger room before the space to the rear had been sealed off with freshly cut stone. Someone had wanted to hide whatever it contained from the rest of the Luminoso. But what? Maybe it was nothing more than a cache of gold coins, gemstones, and similar treasures laid away during a period of upheaval, but she had other guesses.
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