“But this is a tall goddamn order!” said Sancia. “Sark said he thought our client was founder lineage, just like you, or someone close to it. That means me working in places like this.” She nodded at the city below. “In the enclaves. The places that are basically designed to make sure people like me die the second I step foot in them.”
“I’ll help you. And Orso will too.”
“Why would Orso help me?”
“To get back his key, of course,” said Gregor. “Along with any other Occidental treasures the man’s been hoarding. Our opponent has stolen two items from Orso, and seems to have acquired a third—this imperiat. No doubt there’s more.”
“No doubt.” She suppressed the flicker of anxiety in her belly. She wasn’t sure what seemed harder—delivering founderkin to Gregor, or returning a treasure she wasn’t supposed to have. “So I help you get this…this justice of yours, and then you let me go?”
“In essence.”
She shook her head. “Justice…God. Why are you doing all this? Why are you out here risking your life?”
“Is justice such an odd thing to desire?”
“Justice is a luxury.”
“No,” said Gregor. “It is not. It is a right. And it is a right that has long been denied.” He stared out at the city. “The chance for reform…for real, genuine reform for this city…I would shed every drop of blood in my body for such a thing. And then, of course, there is the fact that if we fail, then a vicious person will possess tools of near-divine power. Which I, personally, would find quite bad.” He took out the key to her bond and held it out. “You can do the honors yourself, I believe.”
“I thought Orso was crazy,” she said, unlocking the bond. “But you’re really crazy.”
“I’d thought you would be more amenable to the idea than others,” he said lightly.
“And why’s that?”
“For the same reason I think wearing that bond irked you so, Sancia,” he said. “And the same reason you conceal the scars on your back.”
She froze and slowly turned to stare at him. “What?” she said softly.
“I am a traveled man, Sancia,” he said. “I know the look of you. I have seen such things before. Though I hope I never will agai—”
She stepped forward, sticking her finger in his face. “No,” she said fiercely. “No.”
He drew back, startled.
“I am not having this conversation with you,” she said. “Not now. Maybe not ever.”
He blinked. “All right.”
She slowly lowered her finger. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me,” she said. Then she walked back indoors.
* * *
She stalked upstairs, found a bedroom, and shut and locked the door. She stood there in the darkened room, breathing hard.
Then a voice spoke up in her mind:
She sat down in the middle of the floor, hauled her boot off, and held him in her bare hands. Then she pummeled him with questions.
He was silent for a long time.
She tried to catch him up as fast as she could.
Clef said nothing for a bit. A flock of floating lanterns trickled through the street below, casting pulsing pink light on the ceiling.
His voice took on a dreamy cadence.
Sancia’s skin crawled.
She didn’t know what to say to that.
There was a pause. And then…she felt it.
Or, rather, she heard it: it was a quiet, rhythmic tap-tap, tap, tap—a soft series of beats and pulses, echoing through her mind. She listened to it, reached out, grasped it, and then…
The beats unfolded, expanded, and enveloped her, filling her thoughts.
And then the memory took her.
Sand. Darkness. Quiet, anxious mutterings from somewhere nearby. She was lying on a stone surface, staring up into the darkness.
Midnight, she thought to herself. When the world grinds to a stop, and then restarts. She knew that—but she didn’t know how she knew it.
Then a flame, bright and hot, molten metal glowing in the shadows. She felt pain, fierce and terrible, piercing her, running her through, and she heard herself cry out—but it wasn’t her, she was someone else, she knew that—and then, suddenly, she felt herself fill this form, this function, this design.
She felt her mind flooding into the shaft, the teeth, the notches, the tip. She became the key, became this thing, this apparatus. Yet she now understood that she was to be much, much more than a key.
A compendium, a compilation. A device filled with so, so much knowledge of scrivings, of sigils, of the language and makeup of the world. A tool, bright and terrible. Just like a blade is meant to part wood or flesh, she was meant to part…
Sancia gasped and the memory released her. It was too much, too much. She was back in the bedroom, yet she was so stunned she nearly collapsed.
asked.
She tried to catch her breath.
More silence. Then:
She sat there for a moment, stunned.
Sancia swallowed. She’d imagined many horrors when it came to Clef—mostly that he might fall into the wrong hands, or she might lose him—but the idea of him dying had never occurred to her.
She sat there, trying to process this.
She hesitated, then walked into the bathing room. It was all marble and metal with a huge porcelain tub, and it had mirrors—something she’d seen only rarely in her life. She looked around for a place to hide Clef in case someone walked in, and settled on a cabinet.
Sancia shut the cabinet.
* * *
Alone in the bathing room, Sancia stripped down. Then she looked at herself in the mirrors.
Her arms and thighs and shoulders, strong and rippling and wiry. Her belly and breasts, covered in rashes and bites and filth.
She turned around, and saw her back. She took a sharp breath in.
She’d thought they’d have gone away by now, or shrunk, but they seemed just as huge as ever, the bright, shiny strips of scars that ran from her shoulders down to her buttocks. She stared at them, transfixed. It had been so long since she’d last seen them, for mirrors were rare in the Commons.
They’d told stories of slaves that had bravely borne countless whippings, stoically taking lash after lash. But the instant she’d been whipped, Sancia had realized it’d all been a lie. The second the lash had touched her, all her pride and fury and hope had been dashed away. It was surprising, how fragile your idea of yourself was.
Sancia stood in the tub, soaked a cloth in hot water, and scrubbed herself clean. As she did, she told herself she was not a slave anymore. She told herself she was free, and strong, that she’d been alone for years, and she’d be alone again one day, and she would, as always, survive. Because surviving was what Sancia did best. And as she scrubbed at her filthy, scarred skin, she tried to tell herself that the drops on her cheeks were just water from the spigots, and nothing more.
II
CAMPO
And so great Crasedes came to the city of Apamea, on the edge of the Sea of Ephios, and though no text survives of what he said to the kings of this city, it is clear from secondhand sources that he brought his usual message: of co-option, of integration into their empire, and urgings of surrender. By now word had spread of the hierophants’ arrival in the region, and many were fearful—but the kings and wealthy landowners of Apamea refused him, and rudely rebuffed great Crasedes.
Crasedes did not respond with any wrath, as some had feared. Instead he simply walked to the city square, where he sat in the dust and began to build a cairn out of gray stones.
The legend goes that Crasedes built the cairn from noon to sunset, and the height of the construct grew to be extraordinary. Exact accounts differ regarding the height—some say a hundred feet tall, others hundreds of feet. However, every version of the story omits two critical parts: if the cairn of stones was extraordinarily tall, how did Crasedes, an average man in height, manage to keep stacking the stones on the top? It was said Crasedes could make many things float, and could fly himself—but this is not noted in this story. So—how?
And secondly, where did all these stones come from?
Some sources suggest that Crasedes had assistance in the construction of the cairn. These renditions claim that before he began, Crasedes took out a small metal box, and opened it—though the box appeared to be empty to onlookers. However, the stories say that the people of Apamea then saw footprints forming in the dust around the cairn, footprints far larger than a person’s. These versions would suggest that Crasedes had held some kind of invisible sprite or entity within the box, which he released to aid him. Yet such tales hew close to some of the more fantastical stories regarding the hierophants—fables of Crasedes making the stars dance with his magic wand, and so on—and thus must be treated with skepticism.
Regardless of the particulars, Crasedes began to build the cairn, and did not stop. And as night fell, and as they watched this curious display, the people of Apamea suddenly grew fearful, and left.
In the morning, when they returned to the city square, Crasedes was seated in the dust, still waiting patiently, and the cairn was gone—as were, the people later discovered, all the kings and wealthy landowners of Apamea, along with their families, old and young, and all their livestock, and the very buildings they’d lived and worked in. All had vanished overnight without a sound—perhaps taken to the place that the cairn had also gone.
The purpose of the cairn remains unknown, as does the final destination of those who resisted Crasedes in Apamea, who are still lost to history. Apamea, of course, no longer resisted Crasedes, and submitted to the rule of the hierophants—though it, like all of the lands of the Occidental Empire, was eventually totally destroyed. As is well documented, it is unknown if a civil war was the source of this conflict, or if, perhaps, the hierophants battled against another, greater force.
Such an idea troubles me—and yet, it must be considered.
—GIANCAMO ADORNI, DEPUTY HYPATUS OF THE HOUSE OF GUARCO, COLLECTED TALES OF THE OCCIDENTAL EMPIRE
16
Orso ground his teeth, rubbed his forehead, and sighed. “I swear,” he murmured, “if I hear one more insipid shitting word…”
“Quiet,” whispered Ofelia Dandolo.
Orso rested his head on the table before him. He was talented at putting abstract concepts together. That
was essentially his entire profession: he wrote essays and arguments that convinced reality to do some new and interesting things.
So if there was one thing he truly despised—one thing that absolutely, positively drove him mad—it was when someone just could not get to the scrumming point. To observe someone fumbling around with words and ideas like a schoolboy trying to navigate a woman’s under-robes was akin to swallowing shards of glass.
“The point is thusly,” said the speaker—a Morsini deputy hypatus, some overdressed asshole whose name Orso couldn’t be bothered to remember. “The point is—is it possible to develop criteria by which we can measure, analyze, and establish the possibility that the Commons blackouts were a natural occurrence—by which I mean some by-product of a storm or meteorological fluctuation in the atmosphere—as opposed to being anthropological—by which I mean, human-caused?”
“Little shit probably just learned the word,” growled Orso. Ofelia Dandolo glanced at him. Orso cleared his throat as if the comment had been a cough.
This was now hour four of this Tevanni council meeting on the blackouts. To his surprise, they’d somehow managed to drag both Eferizo Michiel and Torino Morsini out of their campo cradles. You almost never saw either house head at all, let alone in the same place. Eferizo was trying to sit up and look nobly concerned, whereas Torino was nakedly emanating boredom. Ofelia, as always, comported herself quite well, in Orso’s opinion—but he could see even her stamina was flagging.
Yet Orso was quite alert. He kept looking from face to face, thinking. This room contained some of the most powerful men in the city—and many of them were founder lineage. If anyone acted surprised to see him alive—well. That would be a helpful indication.
Ofelia cleared her throat. “There is no recorded natural occurrence of scriving blackouts,” she said. “Not like a typhoon or some such, anyways—neither in our history, nor that of the Occidentals. So, why don’t we cut to the chase, and simply ask—was this the product of something we did here, in Tevanne?”
Foundryside: A Novel (The Founders Trilogy) Page 24