Foundryside: A Novel (The Founders Trilogy)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Which means it won’t work,” said Claudia. “So we’re scrummed.”

  “I guess we can’t make our own definition plates that could make these run?” sighed Gio.

  “Estelle has basically achieved the impossible with this rig,” said Orso. “No one’s ever exhibited such fine control over gravity short of a hierophant. Remaking the impossible in a day is quite out of the question.”

  There was a silence as everyone thought about this.

  Berenice sat forward. “But…but we don’t have to remake all of it,” she said.

  “We don’t?” said Sancia.

  “No! Estelle’s probably just deactivated a few critical scrivings—but the rest still work. If you’ve got a hole in a wall, you don’t tear it down and make a whole new wall—you just cut a piece of stone to fit the hole.”

  “Wait,” said Orso. “Are…are you saying we should fabricate the missing definitions ourselves?”

  “Not we,” said Berenice. “Me. I’m faster than you, sir.”

  Orso blinked, taken aback. Then he gathered himself. “Fine. But your metaphor is shit! This isn’t just filling in a goddamn hole in a wall! This is some complicated scrumming scriving, girl!”

  “Good thing we’ve got someone who can talk to rigs, then,” said Berenice. She slid into a seat across from Sancia and pulled out a sheet of paper and a quill. “Go on. Tell me everything the plates are saying.”

  “But it’s gibberish!” protested Sancia.

  “Then tell me all the damned gibberish, then!”

  She started talking.

  She described how the plate plaintively asked for the location of this “mass,” begging for someone to tell it where the mass was, and the density of this mass, and so on and so on. She kept hoping Berenice would tell her to stop, but she didn’t. She just kept writing down everything Sancia said—until, finally, she held up a finger.

  Berenice slowly sat back in her chair, staring at the sheet of paper before her. Half of it looked to be notes. The other half was covered in sigils and strings of symbols. She turned to look at Orso. “I…I am starting to believe everyone’s been trying to scrive gravity wrong, sir. And only Estelle Candiano has ever really figured it out.”

  Orso leaned forward and examined what she’d written. “It’s mad…but I think you’re right. Keep talking.”

  “You all could make sense of that?” said Claudia.

  “Not entirely,” said Berenice. “But there’s a common theme. There’s this subject of mass—and the device is trying to figure out where this mass should be, and how big the mass is.”

  “So?” said Sancia. “What’s that got to do with floating and flying?”

  “Well,” said Berenice. “I’m not sure if I’m right here…But every scriver before us has assumed that gravity only worked one way—down, and to the earth. But Estelle’s designs seem to suggest that…that everything has gravity. Everything pulls everything else to it. It’s just that some things have a strong pull, and others have a weak pull.”

  “What!” said Giovanni. “What rot!”

  “It sounds mad, but that’s how this rig works. Estelle’s designs don’t defy gravity—the rig convinces what it’s touching that, say, there’s a whole scrumming world just above it with a gravity equal to the Earth’s, so the Earth’s gravity is canceled out, and the thing just…floats. The designs just…reorient gravity, counterbalance it—almost perfectly.”

  “Is that possible?” said Claudia.

  “The hell with what’s possible!” said Orso. “Can you figure out what’s missing? Can you fabricate the definitions to get the damned thing working, Berenice?”

  “I could probably do it all, if I had a month,” she said. “But I don’t think we need it all. We don’t need all the crucial calibrations or control strings.”

  “We don’t?” said Sancia nervously.

  “No.” She looked at her. “Not if you can just talk to the damned thing. All I need to fabricate is some definitions that can give the rig some impression of the location and density of this mass. And it would have to match these sigils etched on the rig, of course.”

  Orso licked his lips. “How many definitions?”

  Berenice did some calculations on the corner of her paper. “I think…four should do.”

  He stared. “You think you can fabricate four definitions? In a handful of hours? Most fabricators can barely manage one in a week!”

  “I’ve been neck-deep in Candiano shit for the past days,” said Berenice. “I’ve been looking at all their strings, their designs, their methodology. I…I think I can make it work. But there’s another problem—we’ll still need to put these definitions in a lexicon to actually make them effectual. We can’t just walk into one of the Dandolo foundries and slip these in there—the guards wouldn’t even let you do that, sir.”

  “Could they work in a combat lexicon?” asked Claudia. “Like the portable ones they use in the wars?”

  “Those are pretty limited to powering weaponry,” said Berenice. “And they’re hard to get ahold of, as anything having to do with the wars often is.”

  “And the test lexicon back at my workshop can’t cast far enough,” said Orso. “It only extends a mile and a half or so—not nearly enough to fly Sancia to the Mountain.”

  “We can’t take it with us, either,” said Berenice. “Not only is it stuck on tracks in the workshop, but it weighs close to a thousand pounds itself.”

  “Right,” said Orso. “Shit!” He fell into silence, glowering into the wall.

  “So…are we scrummed here?” said Sancia.

  “Sounds like we’re scrummed,” said Gio.

  “No!” Orso held up a finger. A wild, mad gleam crept into his eye. He looked at Claudia and Giovanni, and the two Scrappers recoiled slightly. “You two—you do much work with twinning?”

  Claudia shrugged. “Uh…as much as any scriver worth their salt does?”

  “That’ll do,” said Orso. “All of you—get up. We’re going to my workshops. Berenice is going to need a lot of space and the proper tools to do her bit. And that’s where we’ll get to work as well,” he said, nodding at Claudia and Gio.

  “On what?” said Claudia.

  “I’ll figure it out along the way!” he snapped.

  They trooped out of the drainage tunnel into the Gulf, then started up the hill. They moved quickly, filing through the Commons with the air of refugees or fugitives. Orso seemed filled with a mad energy, muttering to himself excitedly, but it wasn’t until they approached the Dandolo walls that Sancia glanced at him, and saw his cheeks were wet with tears.

  “Orso?” she said quietly. “Uh—you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. He wiped his eyes. “I’m fine. Just…God, what a waste!”

  “A waste?”

  “Estelle,” he said. “The girl figured out how goddamn gravity works. She figured out how to make a listening rig. All while being trapped in some hole in the Mountain!” He paused for a moment, and seemed too stricken for words. “Imagine what wonders she could have made for us all, if she’d only had a chance! And now she’s become too dangerous to be free. What a waste. What a scrumming waste!”

  * * *

  When they got to the workshops, Sancia sat at a table with her hands on the plates while Berenice set up scriving blocks, parchment papers, and, of course, dozens of definition plates and molten bronze and styli to do the actual fabrication. Orso brought Claudia and Giovanni to the back of the workshop, where his test lexicon sat on rails that slid back into an ovenlike chamber in the wall, with a thick iron door.

  “God,” said Gio, looking at it. “How I’d love to get my hands on one of these…Something that could actually, genuinely allow you to toy around with definitions!”

  Claudia examined the iron door and the chamber. “Pretty
massive heat resistance commands in this,” she said. “It’s a tiny lexicon, relatively speaking, but it still throws out a huge amount of temperature. If your idea is for us to build a test lexicon to carry around, that’s a giant task.”

  “I don’t want you to build a lexicon,” said Orso. “I just want you to build a box. Specifically, a box shaped like that.” He pointed at the chamber.

  “Huh?” said Claudia. “You just want us to build a heat chamber?”

  “Yes. I want you to duplicate the one in the wall, and twin them—but we’ll need a switch to activate and deactivate the twinning designs. Get me?”

  The Scrappers exchanged a glance. “I guess?” said Claudia.

  “Good,” said Orso. “Then do it.”

  This was a familiar job for the Scrappers, who Orso knew were a deft hand at construction, and his workshops offered far finer tools than what they’d used in the crypt. Within less than three hours they had the basic raw structure ready, and they started scriving the twinning sigils on its frame.

  Claudia looked at Orso, who had half his body stuck in the chamber in the wall as he did his own delicate work. “What’s going in this box, exactly?” she asked him.

  “Technically?” said Orso. “Nothing.”

  “Why are we building a box that’ll hold nothing?” said Gio.

  “Because,” said Orso, “it’s what the box will think it holds that matters.”

  “Since we’ve got a serious scrumming deadline here,” said Claudia, “can you cut to the point?”

  “I had the idea when we talked to Sancia’s key—Clef, or whatever,” said Orso. He popped out of the chamber, dashed to a blackboard covered in sigils, and made a few adjustments. “He talked about how impressive twinning was, and later I realized—Tribuno Candiano had developed a way to scrive reality. I mean, the Mountain is basically a big box that’s sensitive to all the changes that take place inside it! It’s aware of its contents, in other words. It’s something Tribuno and I toyed with back in the day, but it required too much effort to manage. But…what if you could build a box that was somewhat aware of its contents, and then twin the box? Then if you put something into one box, the other box thinks it holds that exact same thing as well!”

  Claudia stared at him, her mouth open as she understood. “So…so your idea is to duplicate the heat chamber here in your workshops, twin it…and we’ll take the empty double into the Candiano campo.”

  “Right,” said Orso cheerfully.

  “And because the first chamber will know it holds a test lexicon, then the double will also think it holds a test lexicon…so the empty one will project the necessary definitions far enough for Sancia’s rig to work? Is that it?”

  “That’s the theory!” said Orso. He grinned wide enough that they saw all of his teeth. “We’re essentially twinning a chunk of reality! Only, this particular chunk happens to hold a small lexicon loaded with the definitions we need to do the shit we need to do! Make sense?”

  “This…this is tying my brain in knots,” said Gio faintly. “You’re scriving something to believe it’s scrived, in other words?”

  “In essence,” said Orso. “But that’s what scriving is. Reality doesn’t matter. If you can change something’s mind enough, it’ll believe whatever reality you choose.”

  “How are we supposed to do this, exactly?” said Claudia.

  “Well, you two aren’t doing shit, really,” snapped Orso. “I’m doing the hard bit, where I make the heat chamber in the wall aware of what it holds! Then you’re just doing your basic twinning designs. So could we stop talking, and let me get back to goddamn work?”

  They worked for a few hours more, the Scrappers and Orso sprinting back and forth and crawling in and out of the heat chamber, placing their sigils and strings in just the right places. Eventually the Scrappers were done, and they just sat there looking at Orso’s legs sticking out of the chamber as he finished up.

  Finally he slid out. “I…believe I am finished,” he said quietly, wiping sweat from his brow.

  “How do we test it?” asked Claudia.

  “Good question. Let’s see…” Orso walked over to his shelves and took out something that looked like a small iron can. “A heating rig,” he said. “We use it to make sure the lexicon chambers are insulated properly.” He hit a switch on the side, tossed the can into the chamber in the wall, and shut and locked the door. “Should get up to some pretty incredible temperatures in there quick.”

  “So, now we…?” said Gio.

  Orso looked around, grabbed a wooden paint box from one of his tables, dumped the paint cans out, and tossed it into the newly built chamber. “Help me get this thing on the floor,” he said, “and turn it on.”

  He and Gio lifted the box off the table and, grunting, carefully placed it on the floor. Then they shut and locked the big iron doors and turned on the twinning scrivings by twisting a bronze dial on the side.

  Suddenly the box creaked, like someone had just placed a substantial load on it.

  “Good sign,” said Orso. “Test lexicons are heavy as hell. If it thinks it holds one then theoretically the thing itself would abruptly gain weight.”

  They waited a moment. Then Orso said, “All right. Turn it off.”

  Gio turned back the dial. Orso shoved the latch on the door up, and opened the chamber.

  An immense cloud of hot black smoke came billowing out. They all coughed and waved the smoke away from their faces, then peered into the heating chamber. As the smoke dissipated, the small, shriveled form of a burned box emerged.

  Orso cackled with delight. “Looks like it scrumming works to me! The double believed it held the same heating rig as the first!”

  “It works?” said Gio faintly. “I can’t believe it really works…”

  “Yes! Now we just put this thing on wheels, and we’ve basically got a light, mobile lexicon on our hands! Of a sort, I mean.”

  They finished the job, mounting the empty chamber on a wooden cart and making sure the whole thing was secure. Once they were done, they sat back and marveled at their work.

  “Doesn’t look like much,” said Gio.

  “Could do with a paint job, yeah,” said Orso.

  “But it’s still probably the biggest damned thing I’ve ever done,” said Gio.

  “Orso…” said Claudia. “You realize what you’ve done here, right? Scriving’s always been localized—you’ve got to stay close to one big, expensive piece of equipment for it to work. But you’ve essentially come up with a cheap, easy way to cover a whole region without having to build forty lexicons or whatever!”

  Orso blinked, surprised. “Have I? Well…it’s still restricted, mind…but I suppose you’re right.”

  “If we all live through this thing,” said Claudia, “this would be an incredibly valuable technique.”

  “Speaking of living through this thing,” said Gio, “how do we plan on surviving after? Like, we are talking about attacking the heart of a merchant house and killing a scion of the industry.”

  Orso stared at the heating chamber on the cart, and slowly cocked his head. “Claudia,” he said softly. “How many Scrappers are there in total?”

  “How many? I don’t know. Fifty or so.”

  “And how many would follow you faithfully? A dozen, at least?”

  “Yeah, thereabout. Why?”

  Orso grinned deliriously and tapped the side of his head. “I don’t know what it is about mortal panic,” he said, “but it keeps giving me the best scrumming ideas. We’re just going to need to file some paperwork. And maybe buy some property.”

  The Scrappers exchanged a glance. “Oh boy,” said Gio quietly.

  * * *

  Sancia sat opposite Berenice, watching as the girl dashed from blackboard to parchment to scriving blocks, writing strings of sigils on any surface she
could find with a mesmerizing, liquid grace. She’d finished two definition plates so far. The plates themselves were about two feet in diameter, wrought of steel, and they were covered in looping spirals of impossibly delicate bronze sigils—all put there by Berenice’s flowing stylus.

  Berenice looked up from her work, a strand of hair clinging to her sweaty forehead. She seemed to glow with a happy energy—and Sancia could not look away.

  “Ask it if it says anything about elevation,” Berenice said breathlessly.

  Sancia blinked, startled. “Huh? What?”

  “Ask the rig if it needs anything about elevation!”

  “I told you, it doesn’t respond well to my questi—”

  “Just do it!”

  Sancia did so. She shut her eyes, then opened them and said, “It doesn’t seem to know what elevation even is.”

  “Perfect!” cried Berenice.

  “Is it?” asked Sancia.

  “It’s one less hole I need to fill,” said Berenice, scribbling away.

  Orso walked up and looked over Sancia’s shoulder. “We’ve done our part. Where are we here?”

  Berenice peered through a massive magnifying lens at the third definition plate. She wrote one last string in her tiny script, then set the plate aside and picked up the fourth empty one. She said, “Three done. One left.”

  “Good,” said Orso. “I’ll load them into the test lexicon.”

  He took the definition plates away. Sancia kept her eyes and her hands on the gravity rig—but as she heard Orso clinking and clanking away behind her, the rig suddenly glowed brighter, and brighter…and then it started talking to her.

  said the rig with a mad cheer.

  “Oh my God,” she said lowly. “It’s working.”

  “Excellent,” said Berenice. “What’s it asking for now?”

  “I think it wants to know how dense the mass is. In other words, it wants to know how much of a force to effect on the item touching the plates.” She swallowed. “Which will be my body.”