Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

“Well, we did that,” croaked Sancia. She spat another mouthful of blood into a bucket. “You didn’t say not to do all the other stuff.”

“To break into a foundry?” he squawked. “And…and to collapse its metallurgical outtake piping? I had thought such things would have easily been beyond the pale of common sense — or am I mad, Berenice?”

He glared at Berenice, who was sitting in the corner of his office, sorting through the notes Sancia had stolen. Gregor leaned over her shoulder, idly reviewing them with his hands clasped behind his back. “I was merely confirming a suspicion you had articulated, sir,” she said.

“And which one was that?”

She looked up. “That it was Tomas Ziani who’s behind all this. That is why you spoke to Estelle at the meeting yesterday — correct, sir?”

Gregor blinked and stood. “Estelle Ziani? Wait — the daughter of Tribuno Candiano? Orso talked to her ?”

“You sure are telling a hell of a lot of tales out of school!” Orso snarled at her.

“Why did you suspect Ziani, Orso?” asked Gregor.

Orso scowled at Berenice, then tried to think of what to say. “When I was at the council meeting, with everyone talking about the blackout, none of the house leaders seemed to act odd — except possibly Ziani. He looked at me, at my neck, and he went out of his way to dig at me on the hierophants. There was something to that that just…bothered me. Just a hunch.”

“A good hunch,” said Sancia. She blew her nose into a rag. “I mean, I saw him— all of him. He’s behind this. All of it. And he’s trying to build dozens, if not hundreds, of his own imperiats.”

There was a silence as they all considered this.

“Which means that, if Tomas Ziani figures this process out,” said Gregor quietly, “he can essentially hold the civilized world hostage.”

“I…I still can’t believe it’s Ziani,” said Orso. “I asked Estelle if she would tell me if Ziani was coming after me, and she said she would.”

“You trusted the man’s wife to betray him?” asked Gregor.

“Well, yes? But it sounds like Tomas Ziani is basically keeping her locked in the Mountain, much like her father. So although she might have a reason to betray him, I don’t know how much she could actually know.”

“Uh, I don’t know who this Estelle person is,” said Sancia, “but I just assume it’s someone Orso is scrumming?”

They all stared at her, scandalized.

“Okay,” said Sancia, “someone you were scrumming then?”

Orso’s face worked as he tried to figure out how offended he was. “I was… acquainted with her, once. When I worked for Tribuno Candiano.”

“You were scrumming your boss’s daughter?” said Sancia, impressed. “Wow. Gutsy.”

“As entertaining as Orso’s personal life is,” said Gregor loudly, “we should return to the issue at hand. How can we prevent Tomas Ziani from building up an arsenal of hierophantic weapons?”

“And how does he even plan to make them?” asked Berenice, paging through Tribuno’s notes. “It seems to be going wrong for him somehow…”

“Please, Sancia, go over what Ziani said,” said Orso. “Line by line.”

She did so, describing every word of the conversation she’d heard.

“So,” said Orso when she was finished. “He called it a shell. And described some…some kind of failed exchange?”

“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He also mentioned a ritual. I don’t know why he called it a shell , though — shells have something inside them, usually.”

“And he thought the shell itself was the problem,” said Berenice. “The imperiats they’d made somehow weren’t exactly like the original imperiat.”

“Yeah. That seemed to be it.”

There was a pause. Then Berenice and Orso looked at each other in horror.

“It’s the Occidental alphabet,” Berenice said. “The lingai divina .”

“Yes,” said Orso faintly.

“He’s…he’s missing a piece. A sigil, or more. That’s got to be it!”

“Yes.” Orso heaved a deep sigh. “That’s why he’s been stealing Occidental artifacts. That’s why he stole my scrumming key! Of course. He wants to complete the alphabet. Or at least get enough of it to make a functional imperiat.”

“I’m lost,” said Gregor. “Alphabets?”

“We only have pieces of the Occidental alphabet of sigils,” said Berenice. “A handful here, a handful there. It’s the biggest obstacle to Occidental research. It’s like trying to solve a riddle in a foreign language where you only know the vowels.”

“I see,” said Gregor. “But if you steal enough samples — the bits and pieces and fragments that have the right sigils on them…”

“Then you can complete the alphabet,” said Orso. “You can finally speak the language to command your tools to have hierophantic capabilities. Theoretically. Though it sounds like that greasy bastard Ziani is having a time of it.”

“But he is getting help,” said Berenice. “It is Tribuno Candiano who’s writing the sigil strings to make rigs like the gravity plates, and the listening device. Only he’s doing it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, in his madness.”

“But that still doesn’t hang together for me,” said Orso. “The Tribuno I knew didn’t bother with the usual gravity bullshit so many scrivers wasted their lives on. His interests were far…grander.” He pulled a face, like remembering Tribuno’s interests disturbed him. “I feel like it just can’t be him.”

“The Tribuno you knew was sane,” said Gregor.

“True,” admitted Orso. “Either way, it sounds like Ziani does have all of Tribuno’s Occidental collection — that would be the trove that he’d moved out of the Mountain, right?”

“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He mentioned some other artifacts he’d hidden away somewhere — mostly to hide it from you, Orso.”

Orso smirked. “Well. At least we’ve got the scrummer rattled. I suspect he’s been stealing Occidental artifacts from all kinds of people. He must have quite the hoard. And…there was that last bit…the one I find most confusing. They had to dispose of a body ?”

“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He made it sound like they’d been disposing of bodies for some time. Didn’t seem to matter whose bodies they were. I get the impression it had something to do with this ritual — but I don’t understand any of that.”

Gregor held up his hands. “We’re getting off track. Alphabets, hierophants, bodies — yes, all that is troubling. But the core issue is that Tomas Ziani intends to manufacture devices that can annihilate scriving on a mass scale . They would be as bolts in a vast quiver to him and his forces. But his entire strategy rests upon one item — the original imperiat. That’s the key to all of his ambitions.” He looked around at them. “So. If he were to lose that…”

“Then that would be a massive setback,” said Berenice.

“Yes,” said Gregor. “Lose the original, and he’ll have nothing to copy.”

“And if Sancia is right, Tomas flat-out said where he was keeping it,” said Orso thoughtfully. He turned in his chair to look out the window.

Sancia followed his gaze. There, huddled in the distant cityscape of Tevanne, was a vast, arching dome, like a smooth, black growth in the center of the city: the Mountain of the Candianos.