Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

Tomas Ziani seemed to remember himself. He walked through the throng of soldiers and looked her over. “Now…” He examined her belt. “Ah. That’s what I was looking for. Our informants said you were fond of these…”

She couldn’t see what he was doing, but she felt him slip out one of her dolorspina darts. “This ought to do the trick, I think…” he said.

Then she felt a pain in her arm, and she knew nothing more.

Gregor Dandolo stood huddled in the shadows, watching the streets. Then he jumped when he heard the clank .

He looked at the anchoring plate. He’d secured it to the campo streets pretty well, he’d thought, but the thing had just leapt in the air…

Perhaps she’s turned on the air-sailing rig , he thought. He peered into the night sky, watching the Mountain.

Then he saw it — a single black dot, rapidly approaching.

“Thank God,” he said.

He watched as the air-sailing rig flew close, then twirled around twice as it made its descent. Yet he saw that something was wrong.

Sancia was not in the air-sailing rig. It appeared to be just the parachute.

He watched as the rig descended. He snatched it out of the air as it fell and saw something was attached to it — the cask for the imperiat.

Inside was her golden key — Clef. There was no imperiat, and no message.

He stared at the key, then looked back at the Mountain.

“Sancia…” he whispered. “Oh no…”

He waited for a moment more, madly believing there was some chance she might somehow still appear. But nothing came.

I have to get to Orso. I have to tell him everything’s gone wrong.

He put the key in his pocket, turned, and walked quickly for the southern gates to the Commons. He tried to maintain his posture and demeanor, but he couldn’t help but feel like he was shambling forward in a daze. Was she captured? Was she dead? He didn’t know.

But though his mind was spinning, some small voice inside him spoke up— Did you just see movement? There, out of the corner of your eye? Is someone following you?

He ignored it. He just needed to get out, to get out .

He turned a corner toward one of the canal bridges, and promptly bumped into someone. He caught a glimpse of them — a woman, elegantly dressed, right in front of him like she’d been waiting for him — before his stomach suddenly lit up with pain.

Gregor stopped still, gasped, and looked down. The woman held a dagger in her hand, and she had put almost the entire blade into Gregor’s stomach.

He stared at it. “What…” he mumbled. He looked up. The woman was staring into his face with an icy calm. “Wh-who?”

She stepped forward, and thrust the dagger in deeper. He gagged, trembled, and tried to walk away toward the canal bridge, but suddenly his knees felt weak. He collapsed, blood pouring from his stomach.

The woman walked around him, bent low, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out the golden key. She examined it carefully with a quiet “Hm.”

Gregor reached a hand out, trying to take it back. He dumbly saw his hand was covered with blood.

There was the sound of footsteps from the road he took — more than one set.

A trap. I…I have to get out. I have to escape. He started trying to crawl away.

He heard a man’s voice say, “Any issues, ma’am?”

“None,” said the woman. She looked at the golden key. “But— this I did not expect. The imperiat, yes…but not this. No one else flew off the Mountain?”

“No, ma’am. The only thing carried by the air-sailing rig was that.”

“I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Tomas must have snatched her up. But no matter. That is why one ought to prepare for every possible eventuality.”

“Yes, Mrs. Ziani.”

Gregor stopped crawling away. He swallowed and looked over his shoulder. Mrs. Ziani? Does he mean…Estelle? Is that Orso’s Estelle?

“What do we do with this one, ma’am?” asked the man.

She surveyed Gregor coolly, then nodded at the canal.

“Yes, ma’am.” The man walked forward and grabbed Gregor by the back of the coat. Gregor tried to struggle, but found he didn’t have the strength — his arms and feet felt so cold, so distant, so numb. He couldn’t even cry out as he was flung down toward the water, and then he knew only dark swirls and twists of bubbles, and the world left him.

Sancia awoke and regretted it.

Her mind was full of nails and thorns and brambles, and her mouth was so dry it hurt. She cracked open an eye, and even though the room she was in was fairly dark, even the slightest hint of light hurt her mind.

Dolorspina venom , she thought, groaning. So that’s what that feels like…

She patted herself down. She appeared to be uninjured, though all of her gear was gone. She was in a cell of some kind. Four blank stone walls, with an iron door at the far end. There was a tiny slit of a window at the top of one wall, allowing in a faint dribbling of pale light. Besides that, there was nothing.

She started to sit up, cursing and moaning. This wasn’t the first time she’d been held captive in her life, and she was well accustomed to getting into and out of secure places, even ones as hostile as this. Hopefully she could figure a way out and get to Orso fast enough.

Then she saw she was not alone.

There was a woman in the room with her. A woman made of gold.

Sancia stared at her. The woman stood in the corner of the dark cell, tall and queerly motionless. Sancia had no idea where the woman had come from, since she’d looked around when she’d awoken and seen — she was sure of it — no one. Yet there she was.

What the hell , she thought. What else weird could happen tonight?

The woman was nude, but somehow every bit of her was made of gold, even her eyes, which sat blank and still like stones in her skull, watching her. Sancia would have normally thought the woman was not a person at all, but a statue; yet she could not help but feel a tremendous, powerful intelligence in those blank, golden eyes, a mind that watched her with a disturbing indifference, like Sancia were no more than a raindrop wriggling its way down a windowpane…

The woman stepped forward and looked down at her. The side of Sancia’s head grew warm.

The woman said, “When you awake, get him to leave. Then I will tell you how to save yourself.” Her manner of speech was powerfully odd, like she knew the words but had never heard anyone speak out loud before.

Sancia, still lying on the stone floor, stared up at the woman, confused. She tried to say, “But I am awake.”

Yet then, somehow, she realized she wasn’t.

Sancia awoke with a start, snorting and reaching out. She stared around herself.