“Search her! Now!”
Two Michiel guards approached her, their armor covered in tiny dents from the lamps. She sighed and put her arms up, and they searched her rather invasively.
“Nothing,” said one when they’d finished.
“Son of a bitch,” spat Moretti. “Orso! At the very least, reprimand this horrid little girl for her impertinence!”
Sancia tried to suppress a grin. But then she heard a voice hissing behind her: “Hid in that office there…You just…You just hid in that office there, eh?”
She turned to find Orso Ignacio glaring at her murderously, his face trembling with fury—his welt-covered, bruised, pockmarked face.
3
Moretti did not apologize for the accident with the sun cloud. He seemed to take it as a natural risk that one might get pummeled by tiny glass beads at any moment when in a hypatus building. Instead, he and Orso—both bruised and furious—sat at the table before the piles and piles of paperwork, nearly all of which was intended to satisfy the other authorities on the Michiel campo.
“Sign there,” said Moretti. He winced as he touched the side of his face. “And there. And there…”
Finally it was done. The Michiels packed up all the tools the Foundrysiders had brought—the plates, the tomes—and took them away, leaving only the chest of duvots beside the table.
Moretti stood and tried to smile, but apparently even this was too painful. “Congratulations, Orso. You will forgive me if I do not shake hands. Or bow. Or discuss this further.” One hand touched his left buttock, and he made an unpleasant grunt of pain. “I have…some pressing issues I need to attend to…Please, go in peace.”
He departed. Two Michiel guards approached, and one said, “We’ll escort you back to your transportation.”
“Thank you,” said Gregor. He picked up the chest of duvots and they followed them out.
Berenice gave Sancia an intense look. Sancia nodded, very slightly. A giant grin blossomed on Berenice’s face—an unusual show of enthusiasm, since she was often preternaturally controlled—and Sancia had to fight from kissing her right then and there.
They trooped out to the Michiel carriage in silence, and rode back to their own shabby carriage in silence, and then drove it away from the campo in silence, until finally they were through the outer gates, and back into the Commons—the muddy, steaming, shambling, messy Commons.
“I am going to keep driving,” said Gregor, his voice shaking with either excitement or anxiety, Sancia couldn’t tell. “They are certainly still watching. We need to maintain until we get back to our firm, out of eyesigh—”
“Did you do it?” blurted Orso. “Did it work?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia.
“It…It did?”
“Yeah.”
“It really did, Sancia?” said Gregor from the cockpit.
“Yeah.”
“For once,” said Berenice with a sigh, “you could answer with more than one word…”
Orso nearly began crying with joy. “Yes. Yes! Oh my scrumming God, yes!”
“You aren’t mad about your face?” said Sancia.
“My face? Who the hell cares about my face? I’d have cut the damned thing off to do what we did back there! Oh, we’ll have a merry old carnival this year, now won’t we! Let’s get home, as fast as we can!”
* * *
—
Their carriage bumped and trundled through the Commons as evening fell. Sancia gripped Berenice’s hand tight and kept staring out the window, praying and hoping that they wouldn’t see any Michiel assassins or guards pursuing them. So far she hadn’t seen anything besides the chattering gray monkeys, which nested in the building rooftops of the Commons.
“Still nothing?” asked Gregor from the pilot’s cockpit.
“Nothing,” said Sancia. And she knew she was right. Not only did her scrived sight give her an edge, it was hard to sneak through the Commons these days. There were too many lamps now, thanks to the changes Orso and Foundryside had wrought in the past three years.
After Orso had started his own scriving firm out in the Commons, no one had been sure how the merchant houses would react. Would they just kill him outright? Blow up the building with shrieker bolts? Either had seemed very likely.
Yet within days, their decision was made for them—for soon dozens and dozens of merchant house scrivers, some of them the geniuses of the campos, had followed in his footsteps: they’d abandoned the merchant houses, set up shop in the Commons, and started their own miniature merchant houses.
Now there were walled-off blocks here and there among the rookeries, tiny compounds that the other new scriving firms had built into their own headquarters. These firms operated miniature foundries and manufacturing bays within those walls, tinkering and experimenting day and night. Since the Commons was so poorly designed, resembling a rabbit’s warren more than a civilized neighborhood, the new firms had resorted to giant, stationary floating lanterns that hovered above their new compounds, with the words “FRIZETTI” and “BALDANO” stitched on the sides so people could find them. Within months, the nebulous, half-pejorative term “Lamplands” came into use, and all who labored in such neighborhoods were Lamplanders.
The merchant houses, and the Tevanni Council, had been utterly perplexed as to how to respond to all this. Between a slave rebellion abroad and a scriver rebellion at home, they’d been utterly paralyzed. Which suited Foundryside just fine.
Orso sat forward as they finally approached their own headquarters. “We’re finally there. Holy shit, we’re almost home free.”
The carriage trundled up to the Diestro Building—the lopsided, improvised, and shabby headquarters of Foundryside Limited—and the rambling iron wall that sealed it off from the streets. Even though it was almost night, a queue of Lamplands scrivers was waiting at the gates for them.
“We’ve been here all day!” one scriver complained as they got out. “You’re holding up our work, Orso!”
“Not open for business today!” snarled Orso as he pushed past them. “Scrum off!”
“What!” said another. “You can’t do that. You didn’t even put out a sign!”
“A consulting firm had damned well better consult!” said yet a third.
“Well, it’s damned well not going to today!” Orso shot a thumb over his shoulder. “Hit the road! Come back tomorrow! Or don’t, I don’t care!”