Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

“Yes. Well, then. I see.” She took a breath, nodded, and sat up. “I’m out.”

Orso blinked. “You…you what? Out?”

“Yeah. I’m out.” She stood. “Every time we talk about this it gets more and more preposterous. And no one’s asked me once if I’m game for any of this. I’m not doing this mad shit. I’m not. I’m out.” She walked away.

There was a long, awkward silence.

Orso stared around at everyone, flabbergasted. “Did…did she just say she’s out ?”

“She did,” said Claudia.

“Like — not going to do it?”

“That’s what out generally means,” said Gio.

“But…but she can’t…She can’t just…Oh, son of a bitch !” He chased after Sancia, and caught her just as she was slipping out into the tunnel. “Hey! Come back here!”

“No,” said Sancia.

“We did a hell of a lot of work for you!” snarled Orso. “We worked our goddamn asses off to set this all up! You can’t just walk out now!”

“And yet,” said Sancia, “that’s what I’m doing.”

“But…but this is our only chance! If we don’t steal the imperiat now, then Tomas Ziani could raise an army, and…”

“And what?” spat Sancia, marching up to him. “Do to Tevanne what Tevanne has done to the entire rest of the world?”

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”

“The problem is that I actually do. You’re not the one in the capsule, in the Mountain, the one risking your goddamn neck! You know what this is, what this really is?”

“What?” said Orso, fuming.

“This is a rich man’s fight,” said Sancia. “A rich man’s game. And we’re all just pieces on the board to you. You think you’re different, Orso, but you’re just like all the rest of them!” She put her finger in his face. “My life’s not a hell of a lot better since I escaped the plantation. I still starve a lot and I still get beaten occasionally. But at least now I get to say no when I want to. And I’m saying it now.” She turned and walked out.

Sancia sat on the hilltop next to the Gulf, staring out at the ramshackle tent city, rambling and gray in the watery, late-morning light. She’d felt alone many times since she’d found Clef, but she hadn’t felt truly abandoned until now, burdened with secrets, and surrounded with people all too willing to either kill her or put her in harm’s way.

said Clef.

Sancia watched a group of children playing in the Gulf, running back and forth with sticks. Skinny things, undernourished and filthy. Her childhood had been much the same. Even in the greatest city on earth , she thought, children go hungry, every day.

said Clef.

She buried her face in her hands. “Damn it,” she whispered. “Damn it all…”

said Clef.

she thought.

She watched as his lumbering form emerged from the tall weeds. He did not look at her. He just walked over and sat, about ten feet away.

“Dangerous to be out in the day,” he said.

“It’s dangerous to be in there too,” said Sancia. “Since you people want to get me killed.”

“I don’t want to get you killed, Sancia.”

“You said to me once that you were not afraid to die. You meant it, didn’t you?”

He thought about it, and nodded.

“Yeah. A guy who’s not afraid to die likely isn’t too torn up about getting other people killed. You might not want it, but it’s a responsibility you’re willing to accept, isn’t it?”

“Responsibility…” he echoed. “You know, I talked to my mother yesterday.”

“That’s why you ducked out? Just to chat up your mother?”

“Yes. I asked her about Silicio. And she admitted that, once, Dandolo Chartered had indeed been involved in trying to scrive human beings. In trying to scrive slaves, I mean.”

She glanced at him. His face was fixed in a look of quiet puzzlement. “Really?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Odd thing, to learn of your family’s complicity in such monstrosities. But like you said — it’s not like there weren’t plenty of other tragedies and monstrosities to begin with. That particular one is not especially unusual. So now, today, I think about responsibilities.” He looked out at the cityscape of Tevanne. “It won’t change on its own, will it?”

“What? The city?”

“Yes. I’d hoped to civilize it. To show it the way. But I no longer think it will change of its own accord. It must have change forced upon it.”

“Is this about justice again?” asked Sancia.

“Of course. It’s my responsibility to deliver it.”

“Why you, Captain?”

“Because of what I’ve seen.”

“And what’s that?”

He sat back. “You…you know they call me the Revenant of Dantua, yes?”

She nodded.

“People call me that. But they don’t know what it means. Dantua…It was a Daulo city we took. In the north of the Durazzo. But the Daulos in the city had stockpiles of flash powder,” he said. “I’ve no idea how they’d gotten it. But one day some boy, no older than ten, snuck into our camp with a box of it on his back. And he ran up to our lexicon, and set off the charge. Killed himself. Set fire to the camp. And worse, he damaged the lexicon. So all our rigs failed. So we were just stuck there, with the Daulo armies out beyond. They couldn’t penetrate the fortress, even with us helpless — but they could starve us out.

“So. We starved. For days. For weeks. We knew they’d kill us if we surrendered, so we just starved and hoped someone would come. We ate rats and boiled corncobs and mixed dirt with our rice. I just sat and watched it all happen. I was their commander, but there was nothing I could do. I watched them die. Of starvation. Of suicide. I watched these proud sons turn to anguished skeletons, and I buried them in the meager earth.

“And then, one day…some of the men had meat. I found them cooking it in the camps, sizzling on skillets. It…it did not take me long to realize what kind of meat it was. Carcasses were in high supply in Dantua, after all. I wanted to stop them, but I knew if I tried, they’d mutiny.” He shut his eyes. “Then the men started getting sick. Perhaps as a consequence of what they were doing — consume ill flesh, become ill yourself. Swollen armpits, swollen necks. It spread so fast. We started running out of places to bury corpses. It was no surprise that I caught the plague myself, eventually. I…I remember the fever, the coughing, the taste of blood in my mouth. I remember my men watching me as I lay on my bed, gasping. Then things went dark. And when I awoke…I was in the grave, under the earth.”

“Wait. You…you survived ? They buried you and you woke up inside the grave ?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “It’s extremely rare, but some people do survive the plague. I awoke in the dark. With…with things on top of me. Blood and dirt and filth in my mouth. I couldn’t see anything. Could barely breathe. So…I had to dig my way out. Through the bodies, through all that earth. Through the rot and the piss and the blood and…and…” He fell silent. “I don’t know how I did it. But I did. I clawed until my fingernails were sloughed off and my fingers were broken and hands bloody, but then I saw it, saw the light flickering through the cracks in the corpses above me, and I crawled out, and saw the fire.