There was the sound of footfalls somewhere upstairs.
Sancia took a breath and resumed resting.
Minutes ticked by in the dark. Then there was the sound of a door closing somewhere.
She tried to return to her dozing. This moment alone in the cupboard was invaluable to Sancia, who desperately needed rest, and also frankly needed some time without any stimulation at all: being immersed in so many scrivings was deeply wearying for her.
Clef was doing her a favor, of course, or at least trying to—since the spy would have to be carrying a scrived signal to access the rig, that made it easy for him to identify them. But it didn’t help that he kept telling her all the ones that weren’t the spy.
The sound of footsteps echoed above her.
A door opened somewhere in the basement.
There was a silence, and then the chanting and whispering peaked, and she heard a voice among them: <…I am given rights, given forbearance, because I am chosen, I am allowed, because I am awaited, I am expected, I am NEEDED…>
Sancia reached out and touched the floor with a bare hand. The wooden boards crackled to life in her mind, one by one—and, eventually, she felt someone slowly walking across them.
A woman—Sancia could tell by the size of the feet, the build of the shoe, the gait. Walking very…cautiously.
The woman walked by the broom cupboard—and even tried the knob, though it was locked. Must be checking everything, thought Sancia. Then, finally, she went to the trapdoor to the rig.
Sancia waited, and waited, and waited, one finger pressed to the floor. Then she felt the reverberations in the wood as the trapdoor shut, then footsteps as she came back—and these footsteps were slightly heavier.
Sancia waited until the woman had passed, turned the corner, and started up the stairs. Then she silently unlocked and opened the broom cupboard door, and chased after her.
She caught up with the woman on the main floor of the Hypatus Building, exiting through the lobby. It was late afternoon, and the building was quite busy—though Sancia was wearing Dandolo Chartered colors, so she drew no attention. Sancia spied the woman immediately: she was young, hardly older than Sancia herself, a skinny, dark-skinned thing dressed in formal yellow-and-white robes and bearing a large, leather bag.
She was a secretary or assistant, it seemed—and as such, no one paid any attention at all to her.
Sancia exited the building after the woman and kept her in eyesight, pacing across the Hypatus Building’s front steps and down into the streets. It was dreadfully hot, and foggy and rainy—not the best conditions to be following someone. Most of the streets were too empty for Sancia to feel comfortable making a play for the woman, but when they approached a busy carriage fairway ahead, she saw her chance.
The woman waited along with a small crowd of campo denizens as a train of carriages thundered past. Sancia sidled up, got close, and in a smooth, quick motion that resembled waving away a fly, she dropped the tailing scriving in the woman’s bag.
The carriage train tapered off. The woman, perhaps sensing something, turned to look around, but Sancia was already gone.
Sancia reached into her pocket, grabbed Berenice’s twinned plate, and snapped it in half—her signal that the tag had taken place. Then she pulled out her half of the trailing scriving—a small wooden dowel with a wire tied to it, and a scrived button tied to the end of the wire. The wire was pointing straight at the woman.
* * *
Sancia was following the woman to the south gates when she saw the carriage—unmarked, stationed about twenty feet away from the gates, with a single figure in the front. She walked up to it, keeping an eye as the woman passed through the gates to the Commons.
Berenice nodded at her from the carriage’s front window. The girl’s face was unpainted, but she was, rather frustratingly, still quite pretty. “That’s her,” Sancia said. “Let’s go.”
“We’re not taking this gate,” said Berenice. “We’ll go to the east gate and loop back around.”
“What! Why the hell would we do that? We don’t want to lose her!”
“The rig you put on her should give us a mile range to work with,” said Berenice. “But more to the point—we’re assuming that girl’s employer is the one who paid for all those flying assassins, yes? Well, if she’s as valuable as we think she is, they’ll likely pay to give her a few guardian angels—who will be quite interested in anyone who comes out the gates directly after her.”
“Hurry up and get in,” said Berenice. “Change clothes. And stop arguing.”
Sancia did as she asked, climbing into the back. There was a set of clothes more suitable to the Commons laid there. Sighing—she hated changing clothes—Sancia crouched down and started putting them on.
The carriage took off, speeding down the campo wall to the east gate. “Hold on,” said Berenice, spinning the wheel and sending it hurtling through the gates. Then she took a hard right and sped back toward the south gates.
“Could you scrumming slow down?” shouted Sancia, who’d tumbled over in the back, her head stuck in a light coat.
“No,” said Berenice. She held up the tailing wire, which, rather alarmingly, had gone slack. Then, abruptly, the button shot up and pointed off into the Commons. “There,” she said. “We’re in range.” She brought the carriage skidding to a halt, grabbed a pack from the floor, and jumped out. “Come on, grab the pack of clothes. We’ll go on foot. A carriage would stand out here.”
Sancia was tangled in a set of breeches. “Give me a damn second!” She struggled into the clothes, buttoned them up, and jumped out of the carriage.
The two of them started off into the Commons. “Keep your tailing wire in your breast pocket,” Berenice said quietly. “You can feel it tug in the right direction without having to look at it.” She eyed the streets and the windows. “I assume you can spot someone who means us ill?”
“Yeah, look for someone big and ugly with a knife,” said Sancia.
They closed in on their mark, and found the woman seated in a taverna at the edge of Old Ditch. She’d bought a mug of cane wine, but she wasn’t drinking from it.
Sancia peered at the streets around the taverna. “It’s a handoff. Someone else will take it the rest of the way.”
“What makes
you so sure?”
“Well, I’m not totally sure,” said Sancia. Then she spotted him: a man, standing on the corner dressed as a Commoner. He kept glancing at the woman with the bag with an anxious, wary stare. “But that guy looks like a likely candidate, yeah?”
The man looked around at the street for a while before he finally moved, stalking into the taverna and up to the bar. He ordered and, as he waited, the woman stood and left without a word—leaving the bag behind. When the man got his drink, he walked over to her table, sat, drank his wine in no fewer than five gulps—staring anxiously out at the street—picked up the bag, and left.
He turned east, walking quickly with the bag over his shoulder. Sancia felt the tailing wire twitching in her pocket as he moved. Yet as he walked, Sancia noticed that more people were walking with him, trickling after the man one by one from doorways and alleys. They were all large, and though they were dressed like Commoners, there was an undeniable heft and professionalism to them.
“We’ll keep our distance,” said Berenice quietly.
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “As much of it as we can.”
* * *
The group of men kept going east, through Old Ditch, then through Foundryside, until they came to the Michiel campo walls.
“The Michiels?” said Berenice, surprised. “Really? I didn’t think they had the guts. They’re more artisans, focusing on heat and light and glass and—”
“And they’re not going in,” said Sancia. “They’re still moving. So cut the speculation.”
They kept following, lagging behind a bit to give the men some breathing room. Sancia felt the tailing wire in her pocket twitch as the men moved—and, now that they were away from the campos, she could hear the multitude of mutterings emanating from Berenice’s person, many of them quite powerful, by the sound of it.
Sancia glanced sideways at her and cleared her throat. “So—what’s your relationship to Orso?”
“Our relationship?” said Berenice. “You want to talk about that now?”
“A natural conversation would be a good cover.”
“I suppose that’s so. I’m his fab.”
Sancia had no idea what that was. “So…does that mean you and he are, uh…I mean, you know…”
Berenice looked at her, disgusted. “What? No! God, why does everyone always think a fab is a sex thing when I say it? Plenty of men are fabs and no one ever gets that impression about them!” She sighed. “Fab is short for fabricator.”
“Still not following you.”
She sighed again, deeper. “You know how sigils rely on definitions? Discs of thousands and thousands of other sigils that define what that one new sigil means?”
“Vaguely.”
“A fabricator is the person who makes those definitions. Every elite scriver has one, if not several. It’s like architects and builders—the architect dreams up these vast, grand plans, but they still need an engineer to actually make the damned thing.”
“Sounds complicated. How’d you get into that line of work?”
“I’ve a head for remembering things. My father used to make money off me. I’d memorize all the hundreds and thousands of scivoli moves—the game with the checked board and the beads on strings?—and he’d take me around the city and bet against my opponents. Scivoli is a favorite among fabricators, and it became something of a competition to see which one could beat me. But since they all played among themselves, they all basically had the same moves—so it was pretty easy to memorize their games as I went along. So I won.”
“How’d that get you to working for Orso?”
“Because the hypatus found out his fabricator got beat by a seventeen-year-old-girl,” said Berenice. “And he called me in. Looked at me. Then he fired his old fabricator and hired me on the spot.”
Sancia whistled. “I guess you traded up pretty quick. That’s lucky.”
“It was lucky twice over,” she said. “Not only was I plucked out at random to become a scriver, but women are rarely admitted to scriving academies these days. It’s become a more masculine pursuit, after the wars.”
“What happened to your old man?”
“He was…less lucky. He kept coming around to the office and demanding more money. Then the hypatus sent some people to talk to him, and he never came back.” Her words had a forced lightness to them, as if describing a half-remembered dream. “Whenever I go into the Commons, I wonder if I’ll see him. I never do.”
* * *
The men began walking northeast. Then they turned a corner, and Berenice sucked in a breath. “Ohhh, shit.”
“What’s wrong?” asked Sancia.
“I…think I know where they’re going,” she said.
“And where’s that?”
Then she saw it: five blocks down the muddy fairway from them was a campo gate, lit with flickering torches. Set in the dark stone arch above the gate was a familiar loggotipo: the hammer and the chisel, crossed before the stone. The men appeared to be heading straight for it.
“The Candianos,” sighed Berenice. She watched as the men trickled through the gates. The Candiano house guards nodded to them. “He knew…” she said quietly. “That’s why he talked to her. Because he’d already suspected.”
“What?” said Sancia. “What are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” said Berenice. “You said you can get us in there?”
“Yeah. Come on.” Sancia trotted down the Candiano campo wall until she found a small steel, altered door.
“This is a security door,” said Berenice. “What the guards use when they need to infiltrate the Commons. You really got a key to here?”
Sancia shushed her.
A swell of whispering, and the voice emerged: <…strong and firm and hard and true, I await…I await the key, the key of light and crystal to shine stars within my depths…>
“What are you going to do?”
“Use a stolen key,” said Sancia. She approached the door, and, making sure Clef wasn’t visible and that Berenice’s back was turned, she stuck him into the lock.
She’d expected the exchange from before—the bellowing voice, the dozens of questions—but it didn’t come. Rather, the exchange happened so much…faster. It was more like when Clef had picked the mechanical locks, popping the Miranda Brass in the blink of an eye, only she felt a burst of information exchanged between Clef and the door.
He really is getting stronger. The thought filled her with dread.
She pulled the door open. “Come on,” she said to Berenice. “Hurry!”
Inside, they had to change topclothes again—this time into Candiano colors, the black and the emerald. As they dressed, Sancia glanced sideways at Berenice and caught a glimpse of a smooth, pale shoulder dappled with freckles, and tawny, moist hair clinging to her long n
eck.
Sancia looked away. No, she thought. Stop. Not today.
Berenice pulled on a coat. “Your contacts are good,” she said, “if they were able to get a security key.”
Sancia thought quickly for an excuse. “Something’s up with the Candiano campo,” she said. “They’re mixing up all their security procedures. They even changed over all their sachets. Change makes for a lot of opportunities.” Then she had an idea—because this was all true. “You don’t think that has anything to do with whatever is going on?”
Berenice thought about it, her cool, gray eyes fixed on the Mountain of the Candianos in the distance. “Possibly,” she said.
Once they were changed, they started off into the Candiano campo. And as they walked, Sancia realized something.
She looked at all the houses and streets and shops—these done in a darker shade of moss clay than the rest of the campos she’d seen. And she found none of them familiar.
“I’ve…never worked here before,” she said.
“What?” said Berenice.
“I’ve done jobs on the other campos before,” she said. “Filching this or that. But…never the Candiano campo.”
“You wouldn’t have. You know Company Candiano almost fell apart about ten years ago, right?”
“No. I’ve barely lived here three years, and I’ve mostly been trying to survive, not sharing work gossip.”
“Tribuno Candiano was like a god in this city,” said Berenice, “He was probably the greatest scriver of our era. But then they found out he’d been doctoring the financials, spending fortunes on archaeological digs and supposedly hierophantic artifacts. Then the company came crashing down. They lost a huge amount of talent after that,” said Berenice. “Including the hypatus.”
“You can just call him Orso, you know.”
“Thank you. I am well aware of that. Anyway, nearly everything got bought up by the Ziani family, but not many people stuck around to make sure the ship would still float. That tremendous exodus was a great boon to the other merchant houses, but Company Candiano has never really recovered.”
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