Sancia continued across the walkway to the door. She slipped through it and found herself in some kind of maintenance shaft.
She walked down the shaft, found yet another door, and opened it onto another marble hallway.
She stopped.
Sancia continued on until she found a lift that went all the way up, to the fortieth floor. She took a breath, relieved, and set the dial to the thirty-fifth floor.
said the Mountain.
The lift opened. Sancia stepped out onto the thirty-fifth floor. This was a floor of offices, and they were different from what she’d seen so far. For one, they were huge, nearly two stories in height. They also featured lots of sumptuous, complicated wallpapers, huge stone and metal doors, and lavish waiting areas.
said the Mountain.
<…Yes.>
Sancia walked ahead until she found it—a large, black door with a stone frame. And beside the frame was a nameplate reading:
TOMAS ZIANI
PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OFFICER
She tried the door. It gave way easily—presumably because of the blood she carried. She slipped inside.
She stopped and stared. Ziani’s office was…unusual. Everything was built of huge dark, heavy stone, towering and forbidding and looming, even the desk. She saw none of the artful designs or colorful materials from the other rooms. Besides the side door leading to the balcony, there was nothing conventional about this place.
Yet it also looked familiar, she realized. Hadn’t she seen a place just like this before?
Yes, she had—the room beyond looked almost exactly like that chamber depicted in the engraving with Crasedes the Great, the one she’d glimpsed in Orso’s workshops, where the hierophants stood before the casket, and from it emerged the form of…something.
“The chamber at the center of the world,” she whispered. That could be the only explanation for the huge, strange stone plinths, and giant, arched windows…
Then she remembered. Because this used to be Tribuno’s office.
Sancia looked around, wondering where in the hell Ziani could have hidden the imperiat. There weren’t many shelves here—only the big stone desk in the middle. She walked over to it and started ripping through the drawers. All of them were full of conventional things, like papers and pens and inkwells. “Come on, come on,” she whispered.
said the Mountain.
Sancia stopped.
“What?” she shouted out loud.
* * *
Sancia stood in the office, dumbstruck. “Clef…” she whispered. “What’s he talking about?”
Clef was silent for a long, long time. he said quietly.
Sancia felt dizzy. She slowly sat down on the ground. “Clef…are you…”
he said, frustrated.
“But you…You could be…”
She sat there, unnerved. She’d heard so many tales of how Crasedes the Great had tapped a stone with his wand, and made it dance, or tapped the seas with its tip, and parted the waters…to imagine this had not been some silly magic stick, but her friend, the person who’d saved her time and time again…
“Yes!” said Sancia.
“A trapdoor!” said Sancia. “Brilliant!” She sprang and ran over to the desk.
She stopped. “What? Where is it?>
Her heart plummeted. “He…he took it out into the campo? It’s gone? We did all this for nothing?”
Sancia stood completely still as she listened to this.
“He what?” she whispered.
Sancia swallowed. “How many?” she croaked. “And are they armed?”
Everything felt distant and faint. “Oh God,” she whispered. “My God, my God…It…It’s a trap. It was a trap, a trap all along!”
She ran to the balcony door and heaved at the knob, but it wouldn’t budge. “It’s locked!” she cried. “Why won’t it open?”
“Open it!” she screamed. “Open it now, now!”
She grabbed him and did so. But the door did not spring open as she’d expected. It moved—but only barely.
said the Mountain.
said the Mountain.
The door inched open just a little more, and a little more…
Sancia tried to think of something to do, anything. She couldn’t be caught in here, especially not with Clef, not with the thing Tomas Ziani needed to complete his imperiat—and especially now that she knew he might be the one and only wand of Crasedes.
She looked at the door, and thought.
It was barely open more than a crack. But it might be enough.
She grabbed the flask of Tribuno Candiano’s blood and wedged it in the door, keeping it open. Then she took Clef away, grabbed the hardened cask attached to the air-sailing rig, and popped it open.
With a snap, the air-sailing rig deployed. The thing hurtled out of her hands. She watched as the black parachute drifted out over the Candiano campo, rocketing off to what she hoped was safety.
Then the side of her head lit up with pain.
She wanted to scream. She had to scream, the agony was so fierce, so terrible. Yet she couldn’t—not because the pain was overwhelming, but because suddenly she couldn’t move at all. She couldn’t even blink, or breathe—she felt her body rapidly running out of oxygen.
Something was changing in her mind. The plate in her skull was like hissing acid in her bones—but she felt something invading her thoughts, taking them over. It was like when Clef had used her body to speak to Orso, but…so much worse.
She took a breath—yet it was not a voluntary gesture. It was as if her body had become a puppet, and her controller had realized her needs and forced as much oxygen into her lungs as possible. She could no longer control her own organs.
She watched, helpless, as her body was forced to turn around. Then she walked, stiffly and strangely, over to the door out to the hallway. She lifted a hand, slapped at the knob, opened the door, and awkwardly staggered out.
A dozen Candiano guards stood around her in the hallway, all armed, all armored, all ready to attack her if need be. Standing behind them was a young man, tall and stoop-shouldered, with curly hair and a scraggly beard—Tomas Ziani. He held a strange device in his hands—it looked like an oversized pocket watch, yet it was made of gold, and it was whining slightly as he manipulated it…
“It works!” he said, delighted. “I wasn’t sure it would. It started whining in my pocket the instant you walked into the office, just as it had in the Greens.”
Sancia, of course, said nothing—she was as still as a statue. Yet inside, in her mind, she was screaming and spitting and ranting in rage. She wanted nothing more than to fall on this young man and tear him to pieces, clawing and biting at him—but she was forced to be still.
Tomas Ziani seemed to remember himself. He walked through the throng of soldiers and looked her over. “Now…” He examined her belt. “Ah. That’s what I was looking for. Our informants said you were fond of these…”
She couldn’t see what he was doing, but she felt him slip out one of her dolorspina darts. “This ought to do the trick, I think…” he said.
Then she felt a pain in her arm, and she knew nothing more.
* * *
Gregor Dandolo stood huddled in the shadows, watching the streets. Then he jumped when he heard the clank.
He looked at the anchoring plate. He’d secured it to the campo streets pretty well, he’d thought, but the thing had just leapt in the air…
Perhaps she’s turned on the air-sailing rig, he thought. He peered into the night sky, watching the Mountain.
Then he saw it—a single black dot, rapidly approaching.
“Thank God,” he said.
He watched as the air-sailing rig flew close, then twirled around twice as it made its descent. Yet he saw that something was wrong.
Sancia was not in the air-sailing rig. It appeared to be just the parachute.
He watched as the rig descended. He snatched it out of the air as it fell and saw something was attached to it—the cask for the imperiat.
Inside was her golden key—Clef. There was no imperiat, and no message.
He stared at the key, then looked back at the Mountain.
“Sancia…” he whispered. “Oh no…”
He waited for a moment more, madly believing there was some chance she might somehow still appear. But nothing came.
I have to get to Orso. I have to tell him everything’s gone wrong.
He put the key in his pocket, turned, and walked quickly for the southern gates to the Commons. He tried to maintain his posture and demeanor, but he couldn’t help but feel like he was shambling forward in a daze. Was she captured? Was she dead? He didn’t know.
But though his mind was spinning, some small voice inside him spoke up—Did you just see movement? There, out of the corner of your eye? Is someone following you?
He ignored it. He just needed to get out, to get out.
He turned a corner toward one of the canal bridges, and promptly bumped into someone. He caught a glimpse of them—a woman, elegantly dressed, right in front of him like she’d been waiting for him—before his stomach suddenly lit up with pain.
Gregor stopped still, gasped, and looked down. The woman held a dagger in her hand, and she had put almost the entire blade into Gregor’s stomach.
He stared at it. “What…” he mumbled. He looked up. The woman was staring into his face with an icy calm. “Wh-who?”
She stepped forward, and thrust the dagger in deeper. He gagged, trembled, and tried to walk away toward the canal bridge, but suddenly his knees felt weak. He collapsed, blood pouring from his stomach.
The woman walked around him, bent low, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out the golden key. She examined it carefully with a quiet “Hm.”
Gregor reached a hand out, trying to take it back. He dumbly saw his hand was covered with blood.
There was the sound of footsteps from the road he took—more than one set.
A trap. I…I have to get out. I have to escape. He started trying to crawl away.
He heard a man’s voice say, “Any issues, ma’am?”
“N
one,” said the woman. She looked at the golden key. “But—this I did not expect. The imperiat, yes…but not this. No one else flew off the Mountain?”
“No, ma’am. The only thing carried by the air-sailing rig was that.”
“I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Tomas must have snatched her up. But no matter. That is why one ought to prepare for every possible eventuality.”
“Yes, Mrs. Ziani.”
Gregor stopped crawling away. He swallowed and looked over his shoulder. Mrs. Ziani? Does he mean…Estelle? Is that Orso’s Estelle?
“What do we do with this one, ma’am?” asked the man.
She surveyed Gregor coolly, then nodded at the canal.
“Yes, ma’am.” The man walked forward and grabbed Gregor by the back of the coat. Gregor tried to struggle, but found he didn’t have the strength—his arms and feet felt so cold, so distant, so numb. He couldn’t even cry out as he was flung down toward the water, and then he knew only dark swirls and twists of bubbles, and the world left him.
28
Sancia awoke and regretted it.
Her mind was full of nails and thorns and brambles, and her mouth was so dry it hurt. She cracked open an eye, and even though the room she was in was fairly dark, even the slightest hint of light hurt her mind.
Dolorspina venom, she thought, groaning. So that’s what that feels like…
She patted herself down. She appeared to be uninjured, though all of her gear was gone. She was in a cell of some kind. Four blank stone walls, with an iron door at the far end. There was a tiny slit of a window at the top of one wall, allowing in a faint dribbling of pale light. Besides that, there was nothing.
She started to sit up, cursing and moaning. This wasn’t the first time she’d been held captive in her life, and she was well accustomed to getting into and out of secure places, even ones as hostile as this. Hopefully she could figure a way out and get to Orso fast enough.
Then she saw she was not alone.
There was a woman in the room with her. A woman made of gold.
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