Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

“Ah, hell,” she sighed.

“It’s insane,” said Sancia, pacing. “The damned idea is insane!”

“Breaking into a foundry on a whim was pretty goddamn insane,” said Orso. “But you seemed game about that!”

“We caught them with their hose down,” said Sancia. “In an abandoned foundry in the middle of nowhere. That’s different from trying to break into the scrumming Mountain, maybe the most guarded place in the damned city, if not the world! I doubt if Berenice has some delightful trinket in her pockets that could help us get into there.”

“It is insane,” said Gregor. “But it is, regrettably, our only option. I doubt if Ziani can be lured out of the Mountain with the original imperiat. So we must go in.”

“You mean me ,” said Sancia. “I doubt if your dumb asses will be the ones being dropped in there.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Gregor. “But I admit, I’ve no idea how to break into such a place. Orso — did you live there ever?”

“I did once,” said Orso. “When it was freshly built. That was a hell of a long time ago, it seems now.”

“You did?” asked Sancia. “Are the rumors true? Is it really…haunted?”

She half expected Orso to burst out laughing at the notion, but he didn’t. Instead he leaned back in his chair and said, “You know, I’m not sure. It’s…difficult to describe. It’s big, for one thing. The sheer size of the thing is a feat in and of itself. It’s like a city in there. But that wasn’t the oddest thing. The oddest thing about the Mountain was that it remembered .”

“Remembered what?” asked Sancia.

“What you did,” said Orso. “What you’d done. Who you were. You’d walk into a bathing room at the same time every day and find a bath already drawn for you, piping hot. Or you’d walk down the hall to your lift at the usual time and find it waiting for you. The changes would be subtle, and slow, just incremental adjustments — but, slowly, slowly, people got used to the Mountain knowing what they were doing inside of it, and adjusting for them. They got used to this…this place predicting what they’d do.”

“It learned?” said Gregor. “A scrived structure learned , like it had a mind of its own?”

“That I don’t know. It seemed to. Tribuno designed the thing in his later years, when he’d gotten strange, and he never shared his methods with me. He’d grown hugely secretive by then.”

“How could it know where people were, sir?” asked Berenice.

A guilty look came over Orso’s face. “Okay, well, I did have something to do with that…You know the trick with my workshop door?”

“It’s scrived to sense your blood…Wait. That’s how the Mountain keeps track of everyone inside? It senses every resident’s blood?”

“Essentially,” said Orso. “Every new resident has to log a drop of blood with the Mountain’s core. Otherwise it won’t let them into where they need to go. Your blood is your sachet, getting you in and out. Visitors are either restricted to visitor areas, or they have to carry around sachets of their own.”

“That’s why the Mountain is so secure,” said Sancia quietly. “It knows who’s supposed to be there.”

“How could it do all that?” asked Gregor. “How could a device be so powerful?”

“Hell, I don’t know. But I did once see a specification list for the Mountain’s core — and it included cradles for six full-capacity lexicons.”

Berenice stared at him. “ Six lexicons? For one building?”

“Why go to all that effort?” asked Gregor. “Why do all this in secret, and never capitalize on it, never share it?”

“Tribuno’s ambitions were vast,” said Orso. “I don’t think he wanted to mimic the hierophants — he wanted to become one. He grew obsessed with a specific Occidental myth. Probably the most famous one about the most famous hierophant.” He sat back. “Besides his magic wand, what’s the one thing everyone knows about Crasedes the Great?”

“He kept an angel in a box,” said Berenice.

“Or a genie in a bottle,” said Gregor.

“He built his own god,” said Sancia.

“They all amount to the same thing, don’t they?” said Orso. “A…a fabricated entity with unusual powers. An artificial entity with an artificial mind .”

“And so,” Gregor said slowly, “you think that when he made the Mountain…”

“I think it was something of a test case,” said Orso. “An experiment. Could Tribuno Candiano make the ancestral home of the Candianos into an artificial entity? Could it act as a draft effort at an artificial god? It was a theory he’d mentioned to me before. Tribuno believed that the hierophants had once been men —ordinary human beings. They’d just altered themselves in unusual ways.”

“He thought they were people?” said Gregor. “Like us ?” This idea was utter nonsense to most Tevannis. To say that the hierophants were once men was akin to saying the sun used to be an orange, grown on a tree.

“Once,” said Orso. “Long ago. But look around you. See how scriving has changed the world in a handful of decades. Now imagine that scriving could also change a person . Imagine how they could change over time. His suspicion, I think, was that their elevation came from this artificial being they’d made. The men built a god, and the god helped them become hierophants. He believed he could walk in their footsteps.”

“Creepy,” said Sancia. “But none of this makes me any more eager to get in there. If we even can.”

Orso sucked his teeth. “It seems insurmountable, but…There’s always a way. A complicated design means more rules, and more rules mean more loopholes. We have a much more immediate problem, though. How fast are you these days, Berenice?”

“How fast, sir? I average thirty-four strings a minute,” she said.

“With successful articulation?”

“Of course.”

“Full strings, or partials?”

“Full. Inclusive up to tier four for all Dandolo language components.”

“Ah,” said Gregor. “What are we, uh, talking about here?”

“If we’re breaking into the Mountain, even Berenice can’t handle all that work. And besides, she’s no canal man. We’d need more scrivers. Or thieves. Or scrivers who are thieves.” Orso sighed. “And we can’t do it here. Not only will Gregor’s mother notice us plotting treason right in her scrumming workshops, but this place isn’t safe from the assassins. We’d need a full crew, and a new place to work. Without those, this whole thing is just a daydream.”

Sancia shook her head. I’m going to regret this. “Orso — I need to know…how rich are you?”

“How rich ? What, you want a number or something?”

“What I’m saying is, do you personally have access to large sums of cash you can quickly retrieve without raising eyebrows?”

“Oh. Well. Certainly.”

“Good. All right.” She stood. “Then get up. We’re all taking a trip.”

“Where to?” asked Gregor.

“Into the Commons,” said Sancia. “And we’re going to need to tread lightly.”