Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

She sat there, trying to process this.

She hesitated, then walked into the bathing room. It was all marble and metal with a huge porcelain tub, and it had mirrors — something she’d seen only rarely in her life. She looked around for a place to hide Clef in case someone walked in, and settled on a cabinet.

said Clef as she set him down.

Sancia shut the cabinet.

Alone in the bathing room, Sancia stripped down. Then she looked at herself in the mirrors.

Her arms and thighs and shoulders, strong and rippling and wiry. Her belly and breasts, covered in rashes and bites and filth.

She turned around, and saw her back. She took a sharp breath in.

She’d thought they’d have gone away by now, or shrunk, but they seemed just as huge as ever, the bright, shiny strips of scars that ran from her shoulders down to her buttocks. She stared at them, transfixed. It had been so long since she’d last seen them, for mirrors were rare in the Commons.

They’d told stories of slaves that had bravely borne countless whippings, stoically taking lash after lash. But the instant she’d been whipped, Sancia had realized it’d all been a lie. The second the lash had touched her, all her pride and fury and hope had been dashed away. It was surprising, how fragile your idea of yourself was.

Sancia stood in the tub, soaked a cloth in hot water, and scrubbed herself clean. As she did, she told herself she was not a slave anymore. She told herself she was free, and strong, that she’d been alone for years, and she’d be alone again one day, and she would, as always, survive. Because surviving was what Sancia did best. And as she scrubbed at her filthy, scarred skin, she tried to tell herself that the drops on her cheeks were just water from the spigots, and nothing more.

Orso ground his teeth, rubbed his forehead, and sighed. “I swear,” he murmured, “if I hear one more insipid shitting word…”

“Quiet,” whispered Ofelia Dandolo.

Orso rested his head on the table before him. He was talented at putting abstract concepts together. That was essentially his entire profession: he wrote essays and arguments that convinced reality to do some new and interesting things.

So if there was one thing he truly despised — one thing that absolutely, positively drove him mad — it was when someone just could not get to the scrumming point. To observe someone fumbling around with words and ideas like a schoolboy trying to navigate a woman’s under-robes was akin to swallowing shards of glass.

“The point is thusly,” said the speaker — a Morsini deputy hypatus, some overdressed asshole whose name Orso couldn’t be bothered to remember. “The point is — is it possible to develop criteria by which we can measure, analyze, and establish the possibility that the Commons blackouts were a natural occurrence — by which I mean some by-product of a storm or meteorological fluctuation in the atmosphere — as opposed to being anthropological —by which I mean, human-caused?”

“Little shit probably just learned the word,” growled Orso. Ofelia Dandolo glanced at him. Orso cleared his throat as if the comment had been a cough.

This was now hour four of this Tevanni council meeting on the blackouts. To his surprise, they’d somehow managed to drag both Eferizo Michiel and Torino Morsini out of their campo cradles. You almost never saw either house head at all, let alone in the same place. Eferizo was trying to sit up and look nobly concerned, whereas Torino was nakedly emanating boredom. Ofelia, as always, comported herself quite well, in Orso’s opinion — but he could see even her stamina was flagging.