Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

The lights behind her died, and then there was a terrific pop!

The walls were twenty feet away. The last few strides felt like they took an agonizingly long time — but then she made it, quietly sliding to a stop against their massive stone face.

She heard a voice above, from the guards’ tower: “What the hell was that?”

She waited. She heard murmuring, but little more.

Praise God , she thought to herself. Then she carefully, carefully crept along the walls toward the gates.

She slid up to them and flexed that odd muscle in her mind. The huge, bronze gates erupted with light, two vast, rippling panes of white luminescence, hanging in space.

She looked at them carefully. She could see a hint of their commands within them, their nature, their restrictions. I sure as shit hope I’m right about this , she thought.

She took a breath, and placed a bare hand on the door.

<���…TALL AND STRONG AND RESOLUTE, WE STAND VIGILANT AND WATCHFUL, AWAITING THE MESSAGES, AWAITING THE SIGNS, AWAITING THE CALL TO BEGIN FULL PIVOT INWARDS, OUR HIDES AS HARD AND DENSE AS COLD IRON…>

She flinched at the enormous sound of it. The campo gates were undoubtedly the biggest thing she’d attempted to fool yet. Yet she persisted, and asked,

bellowed the gates.

said Sancia to the gates.

There was a long silence.

asked the gates.

said the gates.

She told it what to do. It listened, and agreed. And then she crept away, down the walls to the next set of gates.

And the next, and the next.

Giovanni and Claudia crouched in the alley and watched as the tiny dot of shadow silently slipped along the base of the Candiano walls.

“Did…did she do anything?” said Giovanni, baffled.

Claudia pulled out a spyglass and examined the gates. “I don’t see anything.”

“Did we just risk our necks for that damned girl to do nothing ? I’ll be pissed as hell if that’s the case!”

“We didn’t risk our necks, Gio. We just shot a firework into the damned air. Sancia’s the one literally running along the watchtowers.” She peered along the walls as Sancia stopped at the next gates, paused, and continued on. “Though I honestly have no idea what she’s doing.”

Gio sighed. “To think of all the mad shit we’ve had to eat to get to here. We could have left Tevanne ages ago, Claudia! We could have been on board a ship right now, headed toward some remote island paradise! A ship full of sailors. Sailors, Claudia! Young, sun-darkened men with thick, rippling shoulders from heaving huge ropes around all da—”

Then there was a sharp, warbling scream.

Claudia took the spyglass away from her eye. “What the hell was that?” She looked around, but couldn’t see anything. “Gio, do you see any—”

Then another scream, one of pure, naked terror. The screams seemed to be coming from the Candiano gates just ahead of them.

“Is…is this part of Sancia’s doing?” asked Gio. He leaned forward. “Wait! Oh my God…Someone’s up there, Claudia…”

She lifted her spyglass and looked at the Candiano gates.

Her mouth fell open. “Holy shit.”

A man was standing atop the gate towers of the Candiano gates, his boots perched on the edge of the wall. He was wearing some kind of contraption, like a black suit of armor, except one arm had been modified to be a large, rounded shield, and the other arm had been modified to hold some kind of massive, retractable polearm…Yet it was difficult to see him clearly, for every movement he made was obscured in darkness. The only reason she could see him at all was because there was a bright scrived light hanging just below him on the wall.

It took her a moment to realize what she was looking at. She’d only ever read about such things, a type of particularly notorious shock weapon deployed abroad in the wars.

“A lorica ?” she said aloud, astonished.

“Who the shit is that ?” Gio asked. “Did we tell him to be there?”

Claudia stared at the man, huge and gleaming in the dark metal contraption. She saw there was a dead body lying on the walls before him, horribly mangled — presumably this had been the screamer, whom she now thought had had plenty of reasons to scream.

It can’t be , she thought. What the hell is going on?

She watched as the man leapt forward, his body flying up five, ten, fifteen feet— Definitely a real lorica , Claudia thought — and then he crashed down, his polearm licking out like a glittering black whip…

She hadn’t even noticed that there were guards up on the gate towers with him. Yet then there was a massive splash of blood, and she realized that the man had used his polearm to almost completely vivisect a Candiano guard who’d been sprinting at him, rapier in hand.

Three more Candiano guards poured out of the tower onto the gate pathway before the man, espringals raised. The man in the lorica flicked his shield up just in time to catch the volley of bolts, and he started moving forward, perfectly crouched behind his shield, inching forward toward the three men pouring bolts into him.

He stopped, seeming to sense that the men needed to reload. Then he swung his shield arm out, and something…happened.

It was hard to see. There was just a burst of glimmering metal in the air, the Candiano guards shuddered as if struck by lightning, and they fell. But Claudia saw that their bodies were now curiously rent and torn…

She focused on the man in the lorica as he stood up, and saw that his shield was not just a shield: it had been modified so that the back half was also a scrived bolt caster. Probably not accurate over long distances — but nasty up close.

Giovanni stared, horrified. “What do we do?”

She thought about it, and watched as the man leapt off the top of the Candiano gates into the campo.

“Hell,” she said. “He’s not our problem! So just sit tight, I guess!”

Berenice and Orso huddled in the scrived carriage, staring at the immense Candiano gates ahead. The streets around them were abandoned, like there was a curfew on.

“Everything’s…quiet,” said Berenice.

“Yes,” said Orso. “Scrumming creepy as hell, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” said Berenice in a small voice. She craned her head forward, peering at the walls. “I do hope Sancia’s all right.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” said Orso. “Maybe.”

Berenice said nothing.

Orso glanced at her out of the side of his eye. “You and she seem to get along all right.”

“Ah. Thank you, sir?”

“You do great things together,” said Orso. “Crack the Cattaneo. Fabricate whole new scriving definitions in hours. That’s…That’s something.”

She hesitated. “Thank you, sir.”

He sniffed and looked around. “It’s dumb as hell, all this,” he said. “I keep thinking this could have been avoided. I could have stopped it. If I’d told Tribuno what I thought about his dumb shit. If I’d…I’d been more diligent in my pursuits of Estelle. I let my pride get wounded when she turned me down. Pride…it’s so often an excuse for people to be weak.” He coughed, and said, “Anyways…if a young person were to ask me advice of a…a personal nature, I’d advise they not sit and passively watch opportunities go by. That’s what I’d say — if, mind, if a young person were to ask me advice, of a personal nature.”