Muttering, the scrivers departed, and the Foundrysiders opened their gates, crossed the courtyard, and piled into the front doors of their offices. Gregor went about locking the door and setting up their defensive wards—windows and walls and floorboards that could suddenly turn quite hostile to the wrong person there at the wrong time—but stopped when Orso took a deep breath, raised both his fists, and gave a rough cry of victory.
“We did it!” he shouted. “We really did it!”
“Mm, mostly Sancia did it,” said Berenice.
“And it is not done yet,” said Gregor. “This will take weeks to finish.”
Orso collapsed onto the floor, legs quaking. “Whatever. Soon we’ll have the entire Michiel campo at our mercy…and the bastards don’t even know it ye—”
There was a knock at the door. Everyone froze.
Gregor took a scrived rapier from beside the front door and peered through the peephole.
“Ah,” he said.
He turned the knob and opened the door to reveal a middle-aged man and a young woman standing on the front step. The man had a graying, unkempt beard, and he wore a set of jerkin and breeches that might have been fashionable a decade ago. The woman was younger, about Berenice’s age, clad in a leather apron with leather gloves, and her arms shone with glistening burn scars.
Gregor nodded to them. “Claudia, Gio. Fancy meeting you here.”
They slipped inside and Gregor shut the door. “We’ve been waiting for you to get back!” said Gio.
“How did it go?” said Claudia. “Did it work?”
“ ’Course it worked,” said Sancia. “Since when have I failed at a job?”
“There was that time you burned down the waterfront,” said Claudia. “Do you remember that time you burned down the waterfront?”
“Yes,” said Gregor flatly.
Giovanni and Claudia were old ex-employees of Foundryside. Both of them had come from the black market, and both had left to start their own scriving firms after the Lamplands had taken off. Orso held only a very minor grudge against them, which Sancia considered a major evolution of his moral character.
“How long will it take for it to be done?” said Gio.
“How long’s a piece of string?” snapped Orso. “As long as it is.”
“So the Michiels aren’t using it now?” asked Claudia.
“No!” said Orso. Then he thought about it. “Well. At least, I don’t think so.”
“Why don’t we go see?” suggested Gregor.
They walked through the foyer and into the central area of their offices. Once this had been corridors and little apartments and chambers, but they’d ripped all the walls down and turned the entire floor into something very different—a library.
But not a normal library. This was a library of scriving procedures, and designs, and sigil strings, and argument definitions, all compiled over the course of three years. A sign hung above the doorway reading: ALL LIBRARY VISITORS MUST SUBMIT ONE (1) SCRIVING DESIGN TO BE REVIEWED FOR APPROVAL AND PAY THE FIFTY (50) DUVOT FEE IN ORDER TO RECEIVE A LIBRARY SACHET.
Claudia and Gio stopped at the front desk. “Uh. We’ll need you to help us out here…”
“Huh?” said Sancia. “Oh, right.” The library’s defenses had been scrived to sense the Foundrysiders’ blood and permit them—but such permissions were denied to Claudia and Giovanni.
Sancia walked to the front desk and pressed a finger to a drawer. The lock popped open, and she pulled the drawer out and rummaged through it for two sachets. She tossed them to the two scrivers. “There. Now come on!”
They walked past the towering bookshelves, and the tables piled up with tomes, and the chests full of definition plates, until finally they came to a small, red door at the back of the library. Orso took out a scrived key, stuffed it into the lock, opened it, and ran down the staircase to the basement as the others followed.
“It will take them time to implement our designs,” he said. “Maybe days, maybe weeks. But I’ve no doubt they’ll try.”
The basement was an unruly, filthy place, filled with stacks of books and blackboards, piles of papers covered in sigils, and boxes of scrived bowls for heating soft metals. Sitting in the middle of the basement floor were two curious contraptions: one was a rather shabby test lexicon, somewhat like the one they’d worked with back at the Michiel campo—it bore a large, sloppy “FS” imprint at the top, indicating it was the property of Foundryside. But the other was a large dome of iron, with a round glass window set in the side. Through the window one could see dozens of round bronze plates hanging on racks within the dome.
Any scriver worth their wine would have been dumbfounded to find this rig sitting here in this musty, crackling basement: it was the cradle of a foundry lexicon, the bit that held all the carefully written arguments that the lexicon would then use to reshape reality, like a campo attorney taking a bunch of legal books to dictate the law.
But this specimen was different in two ways: for one, there was no actual foundry lexicon to go with it; and two, all the definition plates inside were blank.
Orso looked at Sancia. “Is it ready?”
She flexed her scrived sight and studied the lexicon cradle. “Looks ready to me.”
He exhaled, relieved. “Oh, thank God.”
Giovanni walked around the lexicon cradle, nodding very slightly. “So, just to review how this works…When the Michiels begin bringing out an updated definition…”
“They’ll almost certainly use our designs to twin all of their lexicon cradles,” said Berenice. “That way, they only have to write one set of arguments—and then if you put that set in one cradle, reality will think you’re putting it in all their lexicons all over their campo, all at once.”
“Saving a fortune in time, money, resources…” Orso waved a hand. “Everything.”
Claudia nodded. “And what Sancia did at the hypatus offices…That little cube you said you’d made…”
“It’s a relay rig!” said Orso, literally hopping up and down with joy. “Like a red cuckoo sneaking its egg into a nest! Sancia had to get it damned close to the lexicon, but now that she’s done it, it’s tricked their goddamn hypatus lexicon into treating this cradle like it’s on the Michiel campo!”
Giovanni looked faint with amazement. He slowly sat down on the basement floor. “So when they feed all their arguments into their hypatus lexicon…All the proprietary designs and sigil strings they’ve spent thousands of duvots producing over however many years…”