by Robert Jackson Bennett
Sancia’s heart jumped.
said Valeria.
There was a long silence.
asked Sancia.
said Valeria.
Sancia sat there, stupefied.
Sancia realized what she meant. Her insides turned to jelly, and she was so overcome with emotion she could hardly respond.
Sancia swallowed.
said Valeria.
Sancia closed her eyes, and tears ran down her face.
said Valeria.
Clicks. More clicks.
More clicks—and these were harsh.
A cold disgust filled Sancia.
A series of clicks so fast, they were almost a blur.
A rapid series of clicks. Click.
Sancia listened with a sense of mounting outrage.
Click.
She struggled to find the words.
screamed Sancia at her. She shut her eyes.
asked Valeria.
Tears streamed down her face. The guards looked at her curiously. said Sancia.
Valeria was silent. Sancia lay there, weeping.
said Valeria. Then, in a soft, slightly darker tone:
Sancia swallowed and tried to blink the tears away.
Valeria said nothing.
said Sancia.
Click.
said Valeria.
Sancia wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear more—the more she learned about what Valeria could do, the more she terrified her.
Her stomach fluttered.
Sancia was breathing hard. She knew she needed every advantage she could get. But she wanted to ask more: to ask exactly what Valeria could do, what they’d made her to do, and how the Makers had made her to begin with.
Yet Valeria said,
Sancia gritted her teeth.
For a second, there was nothing. But then she heard it.
It was almost exactly like that time in Orso’s house, with Clef: there was a quiet, rhythmic tap-tap, tap, tap—a soft pulse, echoing through her mind.
Again, she listened to it, reached out, grasped it, and then…
The beats unfolded, expanded, and enveloped her, filling her thoughts.
And then Sancia was filled with pain.
She felt herself screaming. Felt her skull burn hot with fire, felt every tissue in her skull sizzling, and then the guards were beside her, shouting, trying to hold her down, but then…
She fell.
Sancia was falling, falling into a darkness, an endless, rippling black.
She heard a whispering, and she slowly realized: the darkness was filled with thoughts, with impulses, with desires.
She was not passing into emptiness. It was a mind—she was falling into a mind. But the mind of something huge, something incomprehensibly vast and alien…yet fragmented. Broken.
Valeria, she thought. You lied to me. You were no clerk, were you?
Darkness took her.
30
As midnight passed, a small, white boat slipped through the misty canals of the Commons. Seated within the boat were three people: two boatmen, wearing dark, unmarked clothes, and a tall woman, wearing a thick black cloak.
They passed a barge, quiet and dark, and rounded a bend in the canal. The two men slowed the boat and looked to the woman.
“Farther,” said Ofelia Dandolo.
The prow sloshed through the foul, dark waters as the boat beat on. The canals of the Commons were unspeakably filthy, scummed over with waste and rot and slurry. Yet Ofelia Dandolo peered through these waters like a fortune-teller parsing the leaves at the bottom of a teacup.
“Farther still,” she whispered.
The boat beat on, until they finally came to a sharp bend at the corner of the canal. A tiny flock of pale, white moths danced and circled over a patch in the bend—directly over something floating in the water.
She pointed. “There.” The boat sped over to the floating thing, and the two men took out wooden hooks and pulled it close.
It was a man, floating facedown in the water, stiff and still. The two men hauled the body into the boat and laid it in the bottom.
Ofelia Dandolo surveyed the body, her face pinched in an expression that could have been grief, or frustration, or dismay. “Oh dear,” she sighed. Then she glanced at the flock of moths, and she seemed to nod at them. “You were right,” she said.
The moths dispersed, flitting away into the city.
She sat back and gestured to the two men. “Let’s go.”
The boat turned around.
31
Alone, in the dark, for the second time in her life, Sancia slowly remade herself.
It was an agonizing, thoughtless experience, as endless and painful as a chick struggling against the confines of its egg. Slowly, bit by bit, Sancia felt the world around her. She felt the world as the operating table saw it, felt herself lying upon herself…And then, somehow, she felt more.
Or, rather, heard more.
She heard a voice:
Sancia, her eyes shut and her head pounding, furrowed her brow. What the hell? Who’s saying that?
The voice in her ear continued, a warbling, neurotic chant:
Sancia opened her left eye the tiniest crack, and saw the two Candiano guards standing over her. They looked worried.
“Think she’s dead?” said one.
“She’s breathing,” said the other. “I…think.”
“God. She was bleeding out of her eyes. What the hell happened to her?”
“I don’t know. But Ziani said not to hurt her. She was supposed to be in one piece.”
The two shared a nervous glance.
“What do we do?” asked the first.
“We keep a lookout for Ziani,” said the other. “And make sure we tell Ziani the exact same thing.” The two withdrew to the door and started talking quietly.
Yet that other voice, the nervous one, continued mumbling:
Sancia opened her left eye more and looked around without moving her head. She couldn’t see anyone talking. she asked.
Yet Valeria was silent. Perhaps she’d exhausted herself, as she’d said might happen.
Sancia opened her right eye and looked down. And then…
She stared. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
She could see them. She could see the scrivings in the shackles on her wrists and feet—although “seeing” wasn’t quite the right word for it.
It wasn’t like she saw the sigils themselves, like alphabetic instructions written on the objects, but rather like she saw the…the logic behind the devices, blended into their very matter. To her eye, the scrivings looked like tiny tangles of silvery light, like hot bundles of stars in distant constellations, and with a glance she could take in their color, their movement, or their shape, and understand what they did or what they wished to do.
Blinking, she analyzed what she was seeing. Each set of shackles was two half-circles of steel that were scrived to desire to hold each other, to embrace each other, and never let go. They dreaded being parted; they feared and detested the idea. The only way to break them up was to sate that anxious, fervent desire to be complete, to be held—and the only way to do that was to touch them with the right key. The key would, in a way, calm the scrivings down, placating their need like a sip of opium tea might quell a sailor’s thirsts.
It was like when Clef had allowed her to hear a scriving—but this time she was looking for herself. And there was so much more to it, so much nuance and meaning behind these compulsions. All of this information poured into her mind instantly, like a drop of blood spreading through a glass of water.
One thing she noticed, however, is that though she could now engage with the scrivings, she couldn’t hear much more: she could not feel what the table felt, and know instantly all of its cracks and crevices and nuances. It seemed that Valeria had shorn away her “object empathy,” as Clef had put it, and instead replaced it with…this. Whatever it was.
Can I see things just as Clef did? Did…did she make me like him?
She looked around the room surreptitiously, and stared in awe. She could see all the scrivings, all the augmentations, all the silvery little commands and arguments woven into the objects around her, demanding that these things be different, that they defy physics and reality in these specific ways. Some scrivings were gorgeous and delicate, some were harsh and ugly, others dull and monotonous. She could understand the overall nature of these things at a glance: what made light, what made heat, what made things hard or soft…
It was all right there, right there, written into the stones and the wood and the interstitial bits of the world. She’d once met a dockworker who’d claimed that certain sounds made him see colors and smell things, and she’d never understood that—though now she thought she did.
She couldn’t see forever, though—it wasn’t like she could see all the scrivings in Tevanne. She could only see the sigils in this one room, and perhaps the next one—through the walls, apparently. It seemed that, whatever extrasensory abilities Valeria had given her, they were only slightly less limited as common sight and sound.
For a moment she was too overcome to think. Then she remembered what Valeria had said: she’d be able to turn this ability off, and she’d be able to engage with scrivings herself, to argue with them just as Clef did.
Sancia sucked her teeth, wondering how in the hell to do either of these things.
She blinked hard, but the scrivings didn’t go away—her second sight (a stupid term, she thought, but she had no better one at the moment), it seemed, was not activated or deactivated by a physical movement.
Then she realized she felt a tautness in the side of her head, like that curious, slight displeasure you get when someone holds a finger close to your ear. She focused, trying to smooth it out, like relaxing an oft-forgotten muscle in your back…
The scrivings faded from view, and the world went totally, blessedly silent.
Sancia almost burst out laughing.
I can do it! I can turn it off! I can finally, finally, finally turn it all off!
Which was all well and good, but she was still trapped here.
She focused, and tensed that strange, abstract muscle in her mind. The silvery tangles of scrivings came back, and she heard the voice in her ear, whispering:
Sancia turned her attention to the shackles. She looked at the scrivings closely, or as closely as she could, since she was still pinned to the table. She had no idea what it was like to actually engage with scrivings. Perhaps it was like talking to Clef.
So she said to the shackles:
Immediately the shackles responded, with shockin
g fervor:
Sancia almost recoiled at the strength of the response. It was like hearing a roomful of children explode with frustrated screams at the announcement that bedtime was imminent. said Sancia.
Sancia wrinkled her nose. This was like being seated too close to two lovers kissing deeply.
She focused, calmed her mind, and looked at the shackles, letting her thoughts sink into them. Without even knowing the words for what she was doing, she examined their argument—what they did, and why they did it—and targeted the part of their argument about how they could become calm, growing sated at the touch of the key, and part.
She paused as she searched their argument for the right definition. <…key-calm?>
said the shackles immediately.
Shit, Sancia thought. This is harder than I thought it’d be.
She thought rapidly, then asked:
A short pause. Then:
Pause.
Sancia blinked.
said the shackles.