“And then, one day…some of the men had meat. I found them cooking it in the camps, sizzling on skillets. It…it did not take me long to realize what kind of meat it was. Carcasses were in high supply in Dantua, after all. I wanted to stop them, but I knew if I tried, they’d mutiny.” He shut his eyes. “Then the men started getting sick. Perhaps as a consequence of what they were doing—consume ill flesh, become ill yourself. Swollen armpits, swollen necks. It spread so fast. We started running out of places to bury corpses. It was no surprise that I caught the plague myself, eventually. I…I remember the fever, the coughing, the taste of blood in my mouth. I remember my men watching me as I lay on my bed, gasping. Then things went dark. And when I awoke…I was in the grave, under the earth.”
“Wait. You…you survived? They buried you and you woke up inside the grave?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It’s extremely rare, but some people do survive the plague. I awoke in the dark. With…with things on top of me. Blood and dirt and filth in my mouth. I couldn’t see anything. Could barely breathe. So…I had to dig my way out. Through the bodies, through all that earth. Through the rot and the piss and the blood and…and…” He fell silent. “I don’t know how I did it. But I did. I clawed until my fingernails were sloughed off and my fingers were broken and hands bloody, but then I saw it, saw the light flickering through the cracks in the corpses above me, and I crawled out, and saw the fire.
“The Morsinis had gotten to Dantua. They’d attacked. The Daulos had broken in through the walls in desperation, and somehow they’d set the city alight. And some Morsini sergeant saw me clawing my way out of the mass grave, covered in blood and mud and screaming…He thought I was a monster. And by that point, perhaps I was. The Revenant of Dantua.”
They were silent. The tall grasses danced in the wind around them.
“I’ve seen a lot of death, Sancia,” he said. “My father and brother died in a carriage accident when I was young. One I nearly died in myself. I joined the military to bring honor to their name, but instead I got so many young men killed—and, again, I survived. I keep surviving, it seems. It’s taught me many things. After Dantua…it was like a magic spell had been lifted from my eyes. We are making these horrors. We are doing this to ourselves. We have to change. We must change.”
“This is just what people are,” said Sancia. “We’re animals. We only care about survival.”
“But don’t you see?” he said. “Don’t you see that’s a bond they’ve placed upon you? Why did you work the fields as a slave, why did you sleep in miserable quarters and silently bear your suffering? Because if you didn’t, you’d be killed. Sancia…so long as you think only of survival, only of living to see the next day, you will always bear their chains. You will not be free. You’ll always remain a sla—”
“Shut your mouth!” she snarled.
“I will not.”
“You think because you’ve suffered, you know? You think you know what it’s like to live in fear?”
“I think I know what it’s like to die,” said Gregor. “It makes things so terribly clear once you stop worrying about survival, Sancia. If these people succeed—if these rich, vain fools do as they wish—then they will make slaves of the whole of the world. All men and women alive, and all generations after, will live in fear just as you did. I am willing to fight and die to free them. Are you?”
“How can you say that?” she said. “You, a Dandolo? You know more than anyone that this is what all merchant houses do.”
He stood, furious. “Then help me cast them down!” he cried.
She stared at him. “You…you would overthrow the merchant houses?” she asked. “Even your own?”
“Sometimes you need a little revolution to make a lot of good. Look at this place!” He gestured at the Gulf. “How can these people fix the world if they can’t fix their own city?” He bowed his head. “And look at us,” he said quietly. “Look at what they’ve made of us.”
“You’d really die for this?”
“Yes. I’d give away all that I value, Sancia, all, to ensure no one ever has to go through what you or I have ever again.”
She looked down at her wrists, at the scars there, where they’d bound her up before they’d lashed her.
She bowed her head, nodded, and stood. “Fine then. Let’s go.”
She marched down the hillside to the drainage tunnel, then into the crypt, with Gregor behind her. They all went silent as she walked in.
She stood in the crypt before a sarcophagus, her heart hammering like mad, not moving.
She reached up, grabbed the string around her neck, ripped Clef off, and placed him on the sarcophagus. “This is Clef,” she said aloud. “He’s my friend. He’s been helping me. Maybe now he can help you.”
Everyone stared at her.
Orso slowly stepped forward, mouth open. “Well, bend me over and scrum me blue,” he whispered. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”
III
THE MOUNTAIN
Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation. This is simply the life cycle of how human ingenuity manifests in the material world.
What goes forgotten, though, is that those who partake in this system undergo a similar transformation: people begin as comrades and fellow citizens, then become labor resources and assets, and then, as their utility shifts or degrades, transmute into liabilities, and thus must be appropriately managed.
This is a fact of nature just as much as the currents of the winds and the seas. The flow of force and matter is a system, with laws and maturation patterns. We should harbor no guilt for complying with those laws—even if they sometimes require a little inhumanity.
—TRIBUNO CANDIANO, LETTER TO THE COMPANY CANDIANO CHIEF OFFICER’S ASSEMBLY
26
“You’ve…you’ve lied to me!” Orso shouted. “You’ve been lying to me this whole time!”
“Well, yeah,” said Sancia. “I heard you telling Gregor to dump my unconscious body in a ditch. That doesn’t exactly inspire trust.”
“That’s not the point!” snapped Orso. “You’ve put everything at risk by lying to us!”
“I don’t recall your ass sneaking onto a foundry,” said Sancia, “or getting up to hop in an underwater coffin. Seems this risk hasn’t been distributed fairly.”
So she did. And he was right: every fact that she’d been taking as a regular part of her life for the past few days sent Orso and Berenice careening off the walls in shock.
“He can sense scrived devices?” Orso said, boggled. “He can see what they are, what they do, at a distance?”
“And he can change them?” said Berenice. “He can change scrivings?”
“Not change,” said Sancia. “Just…make them reinterpret their instructions. Somewhat.”
“How is that any different from change!” cried Orso.
“I’m still hung up on this thing being a ‘he,’ ” said Gregor. “It…it is a key, yes? The key says it’s a him? Is that right?”
“Can we not bother with the dumb shit, please?” said Sancia.
She kept answering questions as best she could, but this proved difficult since she was essentially acting as a go-between in a conversation among six people. She kept asking everyone to slow down, slow down, and everyone kept saying, “Who was that answer for?” or “What? What’s that about, again?”
Sancia looked around. Orso was still screaming questions at her, and it seemed like she’d missed two or three of them in just the past few seconds.
There was a warmth in the side of her head, a slight ache, and then suddenly her body felt far away, like it was not something she lived in every second of every day but was rather some curious extension she didn’t fully control.
Her jaw worked, a cough burbled up from within her chest, and her voice said, “All right. Can you guys, like, hear me?”
It was her voice—but not her words.
Everyone blinked, confused. Sancia felt no less confused than they—the experience was deeply disorienting. It was like watching yourself doing things in a dream, unable to stop.
“What!” said Orso. “Of course we can hear you! Are you being ridiculous?”
“Okay,” said Sancia’s voice. “Wow. Weird.” She cleared her throat again. “So weird.”
“Why weird?” asked Claudia. “What’s weird?”
“This isn’t Sancia,” said her voice. “This is the key, Clef. Uh, talking right now.”
They stared at each other.
“The poor girl’s gone insane,” said Gio. “She’s starking mad.”
“Prove it,” said Orso.
“Uh, okay,” said her voice. “Let’s see here. Right now, Orso is carrying two scrived lights and…what I expect is some kind of lexicon tool. It’s a wand that, when touched to certain scrivings, dupes them into going in a loop, essentially pausing them, which allows him to extract the plate and reintegrate it with another command, but it has to have domain over similar metallurgical transitions, because the tool he’s got seems to be really sensitive to bronze and other alloys, and especially tin when it’s present in a ratio of twelve to o—”
“Okay, yeah,” said Claudia. “That’s not Sancia.”
“How are you doing this?” said Berenice, awed. “How are you…Clef…talking with her voice?”
“The girl’s got a plate in her head that gives her…I don’t know the word for it, something like object empathy,” said Clef. “I doubt if it’s intended. I think they scrummed up something when they installed it. Anyways, it’s a connection point between items—only, most items aren’t sentient. I am. So it’s kind of a two-way street.” Clef coughed with her body. “So…how can I help? What do you guys want to know?”
“What are you?” said Orso.
“Who made you?” asked Berenice.
“Will stealing the imperiat really stop Tomas Ziani?” asked Gregor.
“What the hell is Ziani even doing?” asked Claudia.
“Oh, boy. So—everything,” sighed Clef. “Listen, I’m going to try to have to summarize the stuff that Sancia and I have been discussing for days, so just…just sit down and be quiet for a moment, okay?”
And Clef talked.
As he spoke, Sancia began to…well, not quite doze as much as drop out of herself. It was like sitting on the back of a horse and hugging the person who held the reins and slowly falling asleep with the beast’s movements—except the beast was her, her body, her voice and her throat, moving from word to word and thought to thought.
She drifted.
* * *
Slowly, Sancia drifted back in.
Orso was pacing around the crypt like he’d drunk all the coffee in the Durazzo, and he was positively ranting: “So Marduri’s Theorem is true! Scrivings, even small ones, are violations of reality itself, like a run in a hose, all the…the fabric piling up and getting tangled, except it’s a run that accomplishes something very specific!”
“Uh, sure,” said Clef. “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”
“That’s what you perceive!” cried Orso. “That’s what you sense! These…these violations in reality! And when you alter them, you’re just…just fiddling with the tangle!”
“They’re more like errors,” Clef said. “Intentional errors, with intentional effects.”
“The question is what composes the fabric,” said Berenice. “Marduri believed there was reality and a world under it that made reality function. Could scrivings be a tangling of these tw—”
Sancia drifted back out again.
* * *
Again, she awoke.
“…guess I’m not understanding the question,” Clef was saying.
Orso was still pacing the crypt. Berenice, Claudia, and Giovanni sat around Sancia, staring at her with wide eyes like she was a village soothsayer.
“I am saying,” Orso said, “that you’re in an unusual position—you can review all of the scrivings of all of Tevanne and see how all of them work, and how well they work.”
“So?”
“So where are we weak? Where are we strong? Are we…Are we good?”
“Huh,” said Clef. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it. I think the problem comes down to the difference between complicated and interesting. And…well, most of the stuff I’ve seen in Tevanne is more complicated than it is interesting.”
Orso stopped pacing. He looked crestfallen. “R-really?”
“It’s not your fault,” said Clef. “You’re like a tribe that’s just invented the paintbrush. Right now you’re just putting paint everywhere. One thing I do think is pretty innovative, though, is twinning.”
“Twinning?” said Berenice. “Really?”
“Yes! You’re essentially duplicating a physical piece of reality!” said Clef. “You could duplicate all kinds of things if you tried.”
“Like what?” said Orso.
“Well,” said Clef. “Like a lexicon.”
The scrivers’ jaws all went slack at that.
“You can’t twin a lexicon!” said Orso.
“Why not?” said Clef.
“It’s…it’s too complicated!” said Giovanni.
“Then why not try to twin a simpler lexicon?” said Clef. “Imagine a bunch of small lexicons, all twinned, all able to project scrivings…well. Anywh—”
Gregor coughed. “As interesting as all this scriving theory is…might we focus on the more lethal issues at hand? We are attempting to sabotage Tomas Ziani—but we still only half-understand what he’s even doing. Will stealing back the imperiat actually stop his efforts?”
“Right,” said Berenice, though she sounded a touch disappointed. “Let’s look back at Tribuno’s notes and see if Mr. Clef has anything to say on tha—”
Again, things faded out.
* * *
The world returned. Sancia was seated in front of a sarcophagus that was covered in Tribuno’s notes. The wax rubbings of the bas-reliefs were situated in front of her.
“…that is human sacrifice if I ever saw it,” said Gregor. He pointed to the engravings of the bodies on the altar, and the blades above. “And if Tomas Ziani is handling bodies, then it stands to reason he’s attempting human sacrifice.”
“But that’s not at all what Tribuno Candiano’s notes say,” said Berenice. She
picked up a sheaf of paper, and read, “The hierophant Seleikos refers to a ‘collection of energies’ or a ‘focusing of minds’ and ‘thoughts all captured.’ That would suggest the ritual does not involve death, or killing, or murder, or sacrifice. Just…something being gathered or pooled. The hierophants were describing an act that we simply lack the context to understand. And it seems Mr. Clef here also lacks that necessary perspective.”
“Again—could you please not call me that?” said Clef.
“Then can we gain the proper context from the rest of the notes?” asked Orso. He pointed at one particular paragraph. “Here…‘The hierophant Pharnakes never called them tools, or devices, or rigs. He specifically called them ‘urns’ and ‘vessels’ and ‘urcerus’—which means ‘pitcher,’ like water.’ Surely that has some relation to why Tomas Ziani called his failed imperiat a shell, yes?”
“True,” said Berenice. “And Pharnakes goes on to directly describe the ritual here—he refers to a ‘transaction’ or ‘deliverance’ or ‘transference’ of sorts that must take place at ‘the lost moment, the world’s newest hour.’ Though I’ve no idea what that means.”
“I think that bit’s clear, actually,” said Orso. “The hierophants believed the world was a vast machine, made by God. At midnight, the world essentially changed over, like a big clock. They believed there was a ‘lost moment’ during which the normal rules were suspended. Apparently that’s when the forging of hierophantic tools must take place—when the universe has its back turned, in a way.”
“In that moment, something fills the pitcher,” said Giovanni. “The shell.”
“Meaning what?” said Clef, frustrated.
Silence.
“I’m not sure this is progress,” said Clef.
“What else is in these damned notes?” said Orso. He flipped through the pages rapidly.
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