Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

Nothing happened. She tugged again, her face turning pink, and stopped, gasping. “Well,” she said. “I didn’t quite anticipate this.”

“Here,” said Sancia. She knelt, gripped the handle, placed one foot against the wall, and pulled.

Slowly, with a low grinding noise, the short stone column slid a few inches out of the wall. Sancia took a breath and pulled again, and it finally fell to the tunnel floor with a plunk , leaving about a two-foot-wide hole in the wall.

“Good,” said Berenice, miffed. “Well done. Can you fit?”

“Keep your voice down. Yeah, I can fit.” She crouched and peered into the hole. The room on the other side was dark. “Do you know what that is over there?” she whispered.

Berenice turned up her scrived light and stuck it through the hole. They glimpsed a wide room with a steel walkway running around the edges, and a huge heap of twisted metals in the center. “It’s the waste bin, essentially — all the castoff bits of metals go here to be melted down and reused.”

“But I’ll really be inside the foundry — yes?”

“Yes?”

She shook her head. “Goddamn. I can’t believe we just broke into a foundry just with some random shit in your pockets.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. But we’re not there yet. This is the basement. The administrative offices are on the third floor. If you want to find out what’s going on here, that’s the place to look.”

“Any advice for how to get up there?”

“No. I’ve no idea what doors will be locked or what passages will be blocked or guarded. You’ll be on your own. I…assume you don’t want me to come with you?”

“Two house-breakers makes for a quick trip to the loop,” said Sancia. “It’d be better if you kept a lookout.”

“Fine with me. I can go back to the streets outside, and if I see something I’ll try to think of some way to warn you.”

Sancia slipped her feet into the hole. “You wouldn’t happen to have any more useful rigs, would you?”

“I do. But they are destructive, and foundries are delicate — meaning if you cut through or break the wrong thing, you would die and probably take a lot of people with you.”

“Great. I sure as shit hope we get something out of this,” said Sancia, sliding forward.

“Me too,” said Berenice. “Good luck.” Then she trotted back down the tunnel.

Sancia slipped through the hole in the wall, stood up, and tried to get her bearings. It was pitch-black in there now, and she was reluctant to use up her talents just to get around a room.

said Clef.

said Sancia, stumbling over to the door. She fumbled for the lock, stuffed Clef inside, and opened it. She was relieved to see weak light filtering through the hallway on the other side,

Using Clef, Sancia unlocked door after door as she penetrated the depths of the foundry. She was astounded at the sheer density of the thing, all tiny passageways that led to huge, complicated processing bays, full of giant loomlike devices or cranes that perched over tables or lathes like spiders weaving cocoons about their prey. The heat within the foundry was immense, but there was a constant wind in every hall and passage, carrying the hot air out to — well, somewhere, she assumed. It was like being trapped in the innards of some kind of giant, mindless creature.

Most of it was deserted. Which made sense, since only a portion of it was being used now. But then…

said Clef.

Sancia looked ahead. The passageway ended in a closed wooden door. Presumably there was some kind of hallway being guarded beyond it.

she asked.

She took off a glove and felt the wall, then the ceiling. The foundry was so alive with scrivings that this felt like walking under a powerful waterfall — the sudden pressure almost knocked her over. But she held on, walking along the walls, her bare fingers trailing over the stone and the metal, until she felt a long, narrow, vertical cavity just ahead…

A hatch. A shaft.

She took her hand away, shook herself, and withdrew back down the hallway until she found a small door. A sign on the front read: LEXICON MAINTENANCE ACCESS. The lock on the front was deeply forbidding.

She took Clef out and stuck him in the keyhole. There was a burst of information, and Clef batted the lock’s defenses away like it was a wall of straw.

she said, opening the door. The shaft within was narrow and ran perfectly straight, up and down, with ladder bars on the opposite side. It was dark within, so she couldn’t see what was above or below.

She reached out and started climbing up.

Sancia climbed until she came to the third floor. She turned until she was facing the door, and blindly found the handle.

She did as he asked, came to the fourth floor, and opened the hatch. This floor, unlike the others, had windows. Slashes of moonlight lay scattered across the blank stone floor. It looked like this area was mostly storage — lots of boxes, but not much else.

She glanced out a nearby window, got her bearings, and started off toward the administrative offices.

There was a pause.

She smiled.

Berenice huddled in a doorway beyond the foundry walls, squinting at the windows through a spyglass. She found it hard to focus. Despite her occasional dabbling in campo intrigue, she was not at all accustomed to such high-stakes trickery. She certainly hadn’t expected anyone to climb any buildings tonight, let alone break into a damned foundry.

Still, it seemed Sancia was right: something was going on, there on the third floor. She could make out a handful of people inside — but they seemed to be slowly gravitating toward the administrative offices.

That’s less than optimal , she thought. How will Sancia manage to get i—

She stopped.

Was that a window opening? There on the dark fourth floor?

She watched, openmouthed, as a small figure in black slipped out of the fourth-floor window and clung to the corner of the building.

“Ohhh my God,” said Berenice.

Sancia hung tight to the corner of the foundry, her fingers digging into the narrow gaps in the stones. She’d held on to trickier places in her time — but not many.

She slipped down inch by inch to the next floor. She found a dark window, which meant no one would be inside, hopefully. She wedged her boots into the stone, then reached out with her stiletto and inserted its tip into the gap at the top of the closed window. She gently pushed the handle of the blade until the window started opening. Once she’d gotten it open a crack, she pulled back until it was wide open. Then she climbed up and lowered herself down into the gap.

Clef said,

She was hanging by the inside lip of the window — she suddenly felt grateful about them being unbreakable — and she lowered herself until she stood on a desk.