Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

Then she saw them — there, along the edge of the key, and curling around the tooth: etchings. The key was scrived, but the commands were so slender, so delicate, so complex …They were like nothing she’d ever seen before.

But what was stranger still — if this key was scrived, why couldn’t she hear it? Why didn’t it murmur in the back of her mind like every other scrived device she’d ever encountered?

This doesn’t make any sense , she thought.

She touched a single bare finger to the gold key.

And the second she did, she heard a voice in her mind — not the usual avalanche of sensations, but a real, actual voice , so clear it sounded like someone was standing right next to her, speaking rapidly in a bored tone:

Sancia let out a gasp and dropped the key. It fell to the floor, and she jumped back from it like it was a rabid mouse.

The key just sat there, much as any key would.

She stared around herself. She was — as she knew full well — completely alone in this room.

She crouched down and looked at the key. Then she reached down and carefully touched it…

Instantly, the voice sprang to life in her ear.

<���…can’t have heard me. It’s impossible! But ah yeeaaahh she’s definitely looking at me like she heard me, and…Okay. Now she’s touching me again. Yeah. Yeah. This is probably bad.>

Sancia took her finger away like it had been burned. She looked around herself again, wondering if she were going mad.

“This is impossible ,” she muttered.

Then, throwing caution to the wind, she picked up the key.

Nothing. Silence. Maybe she’d imagined it.

Then the voice said:

Sancia’s eyes shot wide.

can hear me, can’t you?>

She blinked, wondering what to do. She said aloud, “Uh. Yes.”

hear me? I haven’t met anyone who could hear me in…Hell, I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time. Then again, I can’t really remember all that much, truth be to—>

“This is impossible,” said Sancia for the second time.

said the voice.

“You’re a…a…”

“A…” She swallowed. “A key.”

“Right, but a…a talking key.”

said the voice in her ear. I’m the normal one here.>

Sancia laughed madly. “This is insane. It’s insane. That’s got to be it. I’ve gone insane.”

The voice cleared his throat.

Sancia put the key back in the false floor in her closet, slammed it shut, and then slammed the closet door closed.

She stared at the closet for a moment, breathing hard. Then she walked over to her apartment door, unlocked the six locks, and peered out into her hallway.

Empty. Which made sense, since it was probably three in the morning by now.

She shut the door, locked it, went to the shutters, unlocked them, and looked outside, panic fluttering in her rib cage like a trapped moth. Again, no movement in the street.

She didn’t know why she was doing this. Perhaps it was sheer compulsion: to have something so wild, so insane, so unbelievable happen to her had to invite danger.

Yet she could see none coming — not yet, at least.

She closed her shutters and locked them. Then she sat on her bed, holding her stiletto. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it — stab the key? — but it felt better to be holding it.

She stood, walked back to her closet door, and said, “I’m…I’m going to open the door and take you out now — all right?”

Silence.

She let out a shuddering breath. What the hell did we get mixed up in? She was used to scrived devices muttering things, sure, but to have one directly address her like an overcaffeinated street vendor…

She opened the closet door, opened the false floor, and looked at the key. Then she gritted her teeth, stiletto still in her left hand, and picked it up with her right.

Silence. Perhaps she’d dreamed it, or imagined it.

Then the voice spoke up in her mind:

Sancia flinched. “I don’t think so,” she said. “If my chair starts talking to me, it’s going out the goddamn window. What the hell are you?”

“I don’t need to tell a damn object my name!” said Sancia angrily. “I’m also not going to introduce myself to the doorknob!”

“What merchant house made you?” she demanded.

“What merchant house made you? Dandolo? Candiano? Morsini, Michiel? Which one of them made this…this thing you are, whatever it is?”

“A scrived device!” she said, exasperated. “Altered, augmented, elevated, whatever damn term the campo people use! You’re a rig, aren’t you?”

Clef was silent for a long while. Then he said,

“You don’t know what scriving is? It’s the…it’s the symbols that are drawn on you, these things that make you who you are, what you are!” She looked closer at his tooth. She didn’t know much about scriving — as far as she was aware, it took about a thousand certifications and degrees to do it — but she hadn’t ever seen sigils like these. “Where did you come from?”

that question I can answer!> said Clef.

“Okay. Then tell me.”

He said the word with palpable contempt. something resembling decent treatment, here.>

Sancia hesitated. She wasn’t sure why she was so reluctant to tell Clef her name — perhaps it felt like something out of a children’s story, the foolish girl who gives her name away to the wicked demon. But finally she relented, and said, “Sancia.”

He said the word like it was the name of a grotesque dish.

“Yes. My name is Sancia.”

said Clef.

“And where did you come from, Clef?” she said, frustrated.

said Clef.

“You…what? The dark? You’re from the dark?”

“Where is this dark place?”

“So they shipped you over the ocean. Yeah. I figured that. Who shipped you over here?”

“Where were you before the dark?”

There was a note of anxiety in his voice at that.

“What was with you in the dark?” asked Sancia.

He paused.

“For how long?”

Clef laughed miserably. that times a hundred. Then a thousand. That still doesn’t come close to how long I was there, in the dark, alone.>

Sancia was silent. That sounded like something akin to hell to her — and it sounded like Clef was still shaken by it.

said Clef.

“This is my apartment.”

voluntarily ? What, you can’t get yourself even, like, one picture?>

Sancia decided to cut to it. “Clef…You know I stole you — right?”

“I don’t know. From a safe.”

“I’m panicked,” said Sancia, “because to get you, I had to do a ton of things that could get me harpered in a blink.”

Sighing, Sancia quickly tried to tell Clef that “harpering” referred to a method of public torture and execution in Tevanne: the subject was placed in a stockade, and the harper — a long, thin piece of extremely strong wire, attached to a small, scrived device — was placed in a loop around their neck, or perhaps their hands or feet or delicates. The scrived device would then, much to the subject’s distress, begin cheerily retracting the wire, tightening the loop inch by inch, until finally the wire bit into and completely amputated the chosen extremity.