Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

She touched the dome of the Mountain with a finger.

said the Mountain’s voice in her mind.

said Sancia.

She took her hand away, pulled off the gravity plates, and shut her eyes.

said the plates.

There was a pause.

said the plates.

said the plates.

She opened her eyes as the plates began softly vibrating. Then she slammed the plates down on the window.

She locked eyes with Estelle Candiano, grinned, and waved good-bye. Then she pulled out her thin cord of rope, looped it around the neck of a gargoyle, and started rappelling down the side of the Mountain.

Estelle stared up at the device sitting just above her on the opposite side of the window. She recognized it immediately, of course. She had coaxed Tomas into designing the damned thing over years, after all.

She watched as the gravity plates started vibrating faster and faster, like a cymbal being struck again and again…and then it began to glow a soft, blue light.

The building around her began to groan. Clouds of dust floated down as the vaulted ceiling shuddered and moaned.

“Shit,” said Estelle. She staggered off the armored man’s chest and dove for the imperiat. She’d not exactly had a lot of time to acquaint herself with the device — but she’d have to make do now.

On the streets outside the Candiano campo wall, Orso and Berenice took turns peering through a spyglass at the Mountain. It looked like someone had turned on a new light, shining on its surface — a blue one, glowing with a queerly fluttering light.

Orso peered at it. “What the hell is tha—”

He stopped — because then, with a pop that they could hear even from where they stood, huge cracks shot across the dome of the Candianos…and then they started spreading. Fast.

The cracks flowed in a curious pattern, she noticed: it was like a spiraled spider web, with all the cracks and lines rotating around the blue star.

Then the splinters and fragments of the dome began to retract inward, toward the star.

“Oh my God,” said Berenice.

The skin of the building popped, quaked, shuddered, and then…

Orso expected it to start collapsing; but no, that didn’t quite describe what occurred then — the exterior of the dome was actually falling in , imploding slowly and steadily, nearly a fifth of the huge stone structure rippling and collapsing toward the bright-blue star situated on its side.

“Oh hell,” said Orso, astonished.

They jumped as there was another tremendous crack , and the side of the dome around the blue star began to cave in more, and more.

He swallowed. “Okay,” he said. “Well. I didn’t know she was going to do that .”

Sancia screamed as she let the rope slide through her hands, speeding down the side of the Mountain as the giant structure fell apart above her. She noticed that her descent was slowing, bit by bit, which was deeply upsetting to her.

I’m not out of range of the rig , she thought. It’s going to suck me in and collapse us into an ugly little brick just like what it’s doing to the dome!

She slowed further, and further, and she felt herself slipping back up — up toward the crumbling dome above.

“Scrum this!” she bellowed. She let go of the rope, gripped the side of the dome, and began springing and sprinting away from the maelstrom of gravity above, running sideways along the building’s face. It was, perhaps, the most absurd moment of the night so far, if not her life — but she had no mind to reflect upon it, since rocks and other debris were hurtling up past her to join the crackling dome.

But at some point, she finally went past the range of the gravity rig — and then she stopped running, and instead started falling down the side of the building.

She screamed, terrified, and watched as quoins and other architectural features flew by her.

She saw a stone balcony hurtling up at her, and flicked her hands out…

Her shoulders and back lit up with pain as her fingers made contact with the railing and gripped it tight. Then she swung down and her torso crashed into the bottom of the balcony, knocking the wind from her.

Breathing hard, she looked up and saw the destruction she had wrought above her. “Oh crap,” she said.

A significant portion of the top of the giant dome was now gone, imploding toward the gravity plates, forming what appeared to be a ball of pure blackness, as if folding in all these materials — stone, wood, and probably people — robbed them of their colors. It was hard to see how much of the dome was gone by now, as the gravity plates had created a giant spinning sphere of dust and debris, all circling that ball of blackness.

The ball grew and grew, a perfect sphere of impossible density…

There was a soft boom from somewhere out in the campo.

Sounds like Orso’s magic empty box just gave up , thought Sancia.

Then, abruptly, the air went still.

The dome stopped collapsing.

The huge ball of black hung in the air, and then…

The ball plummeted down, and struck the ground with a dense, bone-shaking thump — and it just kept falling, penetrating down, down, down into the earth.

Finally the crumbling and cracking ended — either the black ball had stopped falling, or it had fallen so far that it was now beyond earshot.

Sancia let out a gasp and hauled herself up over the balcony. She breathed there for a moment, then looked up at the ruins of the Mountain.

She froze. “No,” she whispered.

A decent chunk of the dome was simply gone, like someone had taken a vast spoon and carved out a bite from the top, much like one might a bowl of pudding — but not all of it.

Hanging in the air, suspended by a handful of pillars and supports in the exact place that damned well should have gotten collapsed into the gravity well first, and thus been totally annihilated, was a tiny island of tile and stone…

And standing in its middle, holding aloft something that looked like a complicated golden pocket watch, was Estelle Candiano.

“Shit!” screamed Sancia. She started to climb.

Every part of Estelle Candiano trembled. She had never been to war, never seen someone die, never witnessed any kind of genuine catastrophe or disaster in all of her life — so she had been somewhat unprepared for the maelstrom of cracking and crashing and dust that had unfolded mere feet above her head.

But not totally unprepared. Estelle had always been a quick thinker.

She hadn’t been sure it would work. She’d done her research, and had known that the hierophants’ imperiat could single out a specific scrived effect and control or kill it within any given space — and while she’d managed to kill the scrivings in that assassin’s lorica, acting as a breaker against a full-scale gravity-rig collapse was something else entirely.