“Took you damned long enough!” snapped Orso. “God, I thought I’d die of scrumming old age up here!”
“Good evening, Orso,” said Gregor. “How was the committee meeting?”
“Dull and short,” said Orso. “But not…entirely useless. I had some ideas—and if we can find that damn rig, I can confirm if those ideas are right.” He stood and pointed at Sancia. “You. Are you ready to do this again?”
“Sure,” said Sancia.
“Then please,” he said. “Astound us.”
“All right. Give me a second.” She looked down the stairs. To her, it was all just a sea of noise, of whispers and chanting.
There was a silence. She assumed he was searching, and would answer her after he found something.
But then things…changed.
The murmurings and chanting grew louder, and then the sounds seemed to stretch…And bubble…And blur…
Then words emerged among them—words she could hear.
<…bring heat, bring it up, bubble it up, and store it away, there it goes, keep the heat there, oh, please, how I love to make the tank hot…>
<…will NOT let anyone in, absolutely NO ONE, they CANNOT enter unless they possess KEY, key is VERY IMPORTANT, and I…>
<…rigid form, rigid form, rigid form, pressure at the corners, I am like the stone in the depths of the earth…>
Sancia realized she could hear the scrivings, that she could understand them—without touching them. She nearly fell over from shock. She was fairly sure she’d just heard some kind of water tank, a lock, and a scrived support structure, all from somewhere in the building.
The voices returned to quiet chanting.
She noticed Orso glaring at her impatiently.
There was another pause…and then the voices flooded back into her head, an avalanche of words and desires and anxious fears.
Except some of the voices grew louder or softer, rapidly, one after another. It was as if Clef were sorting through a stack of papers, looking at each one before passing on to the next—except it was happening inside her brain. The sensation was profoundly disorienting.
Then one voice arose from the chaos: <…I am a reed in the wind, dancing with my partner, my mate, my love…I dance as they dance, I move as they move, I trace our dance within the clay…>
“I’ve got it, I think,” said Sancia.
“Then lead the way,” said Gregor.
Listening to the whispering device, Sancia wandered through workshops filled with half-built devices, rows of cold furnaces, wall after wall of bookshelves. Clef led her down the stairs, across the mezzanine, and then to a side hall, which then led to another stairway. Then he led her down flight after flight of stairs, to the basement, which seemed to double as a library. Orso, Berenice, and Gregor followed, bearing small, scrived lights, not speaking—but Sancia’s head was filled up with words.
She was still getting used to this. For so long she’d been accustomed to scrivings being nothing more than murmurings in the back of her head. To have Clef clarify them was like having someone wipe away a layer of sand to reveal words written on the path before you.
But if I’m hearing this from him, wondered Sancia, what else am I picking up? And what’s he picking up from me? She wondered if she would start to think like Clef, to act like him, and never even notice it.
They entered the basement. And then, abruptly, the trail ended before a blank wall.
Another pause, and then she heard it, mumbling behind the walls: <…still no dance…still no sounds. Silence. Nothing to dance to, no steps and twirls to scrawl in the clay…>
“More wall, I would assume,” said Orso.
“It’s not. The thing’s back there.”
“You found the rig?” Gregor asked. “You’re sure?”
“Yes. Now we just have to figure out how they access it.” She grimaced, then pulled off her gloves. “Hold on a second.” She took a breath, focused, shut her eyes, and placed her palms against the wall.
Instantly, the wall bloomed inside her mind, all those old, pale stones and layers of plaster leaping into her thoughts. The wall told her of age and pressure, decades spent bearing all the weight of the building above and transferring it to the foundation below. Except…
In one place, the foundation wasn’t there.
A passageway, she thought.
Keeping her eyes shut, she walked along the wall, bare palm pressed to its surface. Finally she came to it—the gap in the foundation was just below her. She opened her eyes, knelt, and pressed her palms to the floor.
The floorboards crackled to life inside of her, creaking and groaning, telling her of thousands of footfalls, leather soles and wooden soles and, sometimes, bare feet. Her skull tickled as termites and ants and other tiny insects roved through her splintering bones.
But one part of the floor was different—it was separate, and it had something screwed into it.
Hinges, thought Sancia. A door. She followed the feeling in her mind until she came to the far corner of a dusty blue rug. She pulled it aside. Underneath was an old and scarred trapdoor.
“A basement?” said Gregor.
“When the hell did we get a basement?” asked Orso.
“The scriving library was renovated years ago,” said Berenice. “Much of the old walls were torn down and built over. Artifacts are still around—doors that go nowhere, things like that.”
“Well, this goes somewhere,” said Sancia. She wedged her fingers underneath it and lifted the trapdoor up.
Below was a short flight of musty stairs, which ended in a small tunnel that ran behind the wall. It was completely dark at the bottom.
“Here,” said Berenice, holding out her light to Sancia.
Sancia put her glove back on—aware,
suddenly, of Orso’s careful gaze—and took it from her. “Thanks,” she said, and she dropped down, holding the scrived light.
She touched a bare hand to the wall. The tunnel spoke to her, darkness and dust and cool, stale moisture. She followed its path to a small, rickety ladder, which led to an old crawlspace, an interstitial segment of an older floor plan, walled off and forgotten. And at the far back was…
<…await to trace my path in the pool of clay and wax…When will my mate begin to dance again? When shall we move, when shall we sway?>
She stopped.
She did so.
Again, a voice emerged from the mutterings—but this one was not the recording rig.
<…I wait. I wait for the signal, for the token, for the sign,> said this new rig.
said Clef.
Sancia held the scrived light up, but she couldn’t see that far back into the crawlspace. She thought about it, then pressed a bare hand into the wood.
She felt wood, and nails, and dust, and termites…and she felt the rig back there, or what she thought was the rig. It was some kind of iron stand that was quite heavy—she guessed the roll of wax or clay or whatever it wrote on was big.
But beside it was something else quite heavy. A barrel, she thought…Wooden and round and filled with something…
She smelled the air, and thought she smelled something sulfurous.
She froze.
There was a pause.
Another pause.
She slowly withdrew back down the passageway. she said.
She sighed.
* * *
“So we can’t get close to it,” said Gregor. “We’re stuck here.”
“Right,” said Sancia, sitting on the floor in the dark, brushing dust off of her arms and knees.
Orso stood in silence, staring down into the dark passageway. Ever since she’d returned, he hadn’t said a word.
“Surely there must be a way around the device?” said Berenice.
Gregor shook his head. “I’ve dealt with scrived mines in the wars. Unless you have the right signaling device on you, you’ll be pulped.”
“So we can’t get to the listening rig,” said Berenice. “But that can’t be that critical, yes? I mean, we generally know all the things we’ve divulged to these people, right, sir?”
Orso didn’t answer. He just kept staring down into the passageway.
said Clef.
“Uh,” said Berenice, disconcerted. “Well. I meant we could try to look at the rig itself to identify the person who made it—but I’ve been working on the gravity plates all afternoon, and I still have nothing.”
“Then we focus on what we know,” said Sancia. “We know the rig’s down there. We know it’s working. We know everyone got to see Orso at this damn meeting, and they know he’s alive now. So someone will be coming. Soon.”
“And when they come,” said Gregor, “we either capture them or follow them. Following them is my preference—it can reveal so many more things…” He sighed. “But I suppose capturing and questioning them is our only choice. We’ve no idea what campo this agent of theirs would return to, nor which enclave within the campo itself! We’d need sachets and keys and all sorts of credentials…”
“I…I can talk to my black market contacts,” said Sancia. “I can get sachets to get into the campos.”
“You can get that many sachets?” asked Gregor, surprised.
The idea was preposterous. But maybe they didn’t know that. “Yeah.”
“And credentials?” asked Berenice.
“If you pay me enough,” said Sancia, “I can get you into the campos.”
Clef laughed.
“Then I think it’s settled,” said Gregor. “You get your sachets, we set our trap, and wait. Right?”
“Right,” said Berenice.
“Right,” said Sancia.
They all waited, and turned to Orso.
“Sir?” asked Berenice.
Finally, Orso moved, turning to look at Sancia. “That was…quite some performance,” he said quietly.
“Thanks?” she said.
He looked her over. “There’s a simple way to stay alive as a hypatus, you know—never include a scriving in your designs that you don’t completely understand. And, girl…I must admit, I don’t understand you at all.”
“You don’t need to,” said Sancia. “You just need to understand the results I get you.”
“No,” said Orso. “I need a lot more than that. For example—how do I know you’re telling the truth about any of this?”
“Huh?” she said.
“You go into the dark, say you found the rig, but we can’t get close to it. If we go down there and look ourselves, we die. There’s no way to check. That all seems convenient to me.”
“I’ve helped you before,” she said. “I found the damn rig in the statue!”
“But how did you do that? You never told us. You haven’t told us a damned thing!”
“Orso,” said Gregor. “I believe we can trust her.”
“How can we trust her if we don’t know how she’s doing what she’s doing? Finding a rig is one thing, but seeing through walls, finding the trapdoor…I mean, she went straight to it like a dog on the hunt!”
Orso turned to her. “You figured all this out just by listening?”
“Yeah?”
“And touching the walls?”
“Yeah? What of it?”
He stared at her for a long, long time. “Where are you from, Sancia?” he demanded.
“Foundryside,” she said defiantly.
“But where originally?”
“Back east.”
“But where east?”
“Go east enough and you’ll find it.”
“Why are you so evasive?”
“Because it’s none of your damn business.”
“But it is my business
. You made yourself my business when you stole my key.” He stepped closer, squinting at her, his eye tracing over the scar on the side of her head. “I don’t need you to tell me,” he said quietly. “I don’t need you to tell me anything. I already know.”
She tensed up. Her heart was beating so fast it felt like a murmur.
“Silicio,” said Orso. “The Silicio Plantation. That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?”
The next thing she knew, Sancia had her hands around his throat.
* * *
She hadn’t meant to do it. She’d barely even understood what was happening. One moment, she’d been sitting on the floor. Then Orso spoke that name, and suddenly she smelled the sting of alcohol, heard the whine of flies, and the side of her head was bright with pain—and then she was screaming and throttling a terrified Orso Ignacio, trying to crush his already-bruised windpipe with her bare hands.
She was screaming something, over and over again. It took her a moment to realize she was saying, “Was it you? Was it you? Was it, was it?”
Berenice was suddenly on top of her, trying to haul her off of him, with little success. Then Gregor was there, and since he was two if not three times Sancia’s size, he had much more success.
Gregor Dandolo hugged Sancia tight to his body, his big arms holding her still.
“Let me go!” she screamed. “Let me go, let me go, let me go!”
“Sancia,” said Gregor, surprisingly calm. “Stop. Be still.”
Orso was coughing and gagging and trying to sit up. “What in all the damned world…”
“I’ll kill him!” screamed Sancia. “I’ll kill you, you scrumming bastard!”
“Sancia,” said Gregor. “You are not where you think you are.”
“What’s the matter with her?” said Berenice, terrified.
“She’s having a reaction,” said Gregor. “I’ve seen this among veterans, and experienced it myself.”
“He did it!” shrieked Sancia. She kicked uselessly at Gregor’s legs. “It was him, it was him, it was him!”
“She’s reliving a memory,” he said, grunting slightly. “A bad one.”
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