“I can’t,” Sancia said. “How can I?”
Sancia looked up as Berenice slid closer to her.
“Ah,” said Sancia, smiling. “I see.”
* * *
—
Gregor Dandolo lay on his cot in his tiny room, trying to sleep. He shut his eyes, and opened them, and shut them and opened them again.
It had been a wonderful night. A triumphant night. He should feel happy, he knew. He should feel satisfied with the culmination of months of dangerous and daring work. So why couldn’t he sleep?
Because though Foundryside might have changed things, he thought, you still remain the same.
He listened to the pipers outside, to the shouts and the calls from the early Monsoon Carnival revelers, to the chattering of gray monkeys as they feuded over which rooftop belonged to which tribe. Finally he could bear it no more, and he stood up and peered through his window at the city beyond.
He stared out at the sea of giant floating lanterns. His gaze followed a familiar path, shifting across the luminous ramble of the Lamplands to something that looked like a huge, black wave rising out of the sprawl of the city.
The Dandolo campo walls. The tops of the walls had been fitted with spotlight lanterns, which flashed and swiveled at random, sensing blood, or movement, or heat, or whatever other phenomena you could convince a rig to detect. Ever since Sancia had almost single-handedly destroyed the Candiano walls, all the campos had started investing a lot of research in identifying threats. Gregor wasn’t sure how many of those new systems accidentally eliminated innocent people—say, a drunk who got too close to the walls, or someone who brought the wrong sachet on the wrong day—but he was sure it was more than zero.
He watched the Dandolo spotlights dance, slashing through the steam and the smoke unfurling from the foundry stacks.
Are you there, Mother?
The spotlights whirled again.
What are you making within those walls? His right hand rose and massaged the side of his head. I wonder—are you making someone like me?
He lay back down, but did not sleep. Ever since the night of the Mountain—the night when the scrivings on his mind had been activated, and he’d waged war upon the Candianos, slaughtering dozens—Gregor Dandolo found he did not much like sleep. He always worried that he might wake up a different person.
Worse still were the dreams, which he’d been having for the past year or so: dreams of sandy beaches, and the moon reflected on the sea; of fire, and screaming, and the smell of earth and old stone; of a room full of moths, white and frail and fluttering, and his mother’s face, pale and gleaming in the dark; and finally the feeling of some kind of presence, a man or something man-shaped, perhaps, wrapped in black and standing over his shoulder, just out of sight…And with these dreams came the intense, overwhelming compulsion that he was supposed to be looking for someone, trying to find them, to seek out where they had hidden themselves away.
He suspected that these dreams were flashes of memories of what his mother had made him do: missions and murders and conspiracies she’d set him on in his hypnotized state, possibly out in the plantations, or all across the Durazzo Sea.
He did not know. Nor did he know what he had done, or to whom. But he wished the dreams would stop.
He rubbed the side of his head again. What a thing, to wish to be unmade, he thought. To yearn to open up one’s skull and allow all the bindings there to come unspooling out like lengths of wire…
Though they had tried to fix him, once. And only once.
His memory of the attempt was still clear in his mind: he, lying down on a pallet in the basement; then Sancia, kneeling beside him and placing her bare fingers to the side of his head, just as his mother had so many times; and then there was her voice, loud and jumbled and furious in his thoughts, and then the flashes of so many memories—steel and screams and corridors of stone, the splash of hot blood and cries of pleas for mercy—and then it’d been like he’d had a cold blanket placed upon his mind, and he was wandering in a dark room with no walls, and then…
And then he’d awoken. He’d awoken to find himself standing in a wrecked room, all the furniture smashed to pieces, and bookshelves turned over and Berenice weeping—and before him was Sancia, face red and eyes full of tears, screaming and shouting at him and clawing at his hands, which were clamped tight around her throat.
Gregor shut his eyes. I am not a rig. I am not.
5
Sancia lay in the covers, lost in the depths of drunken sleep.
“Sancia,” whispered a voice nearby.
She felt around in the bed with one hand. Berenice was not there.
She blearily opened her eyes and looked around. She was alone in their room, naked on the bed, the ceiling strobing with yellow and orange as the lanterns outside drifted and twirled.
She shut her eyes again and tried to return to sleep.
<Sancia. Awake.>
She cracked an eye.
I know that voice.
She turned her head, and saw now there was someone in the room with her—someone enormous, a giant, hulking shadow of a figure that nearly reached the ceiling, its shoulders gleaming gold and its eyes two tiny flecks of cold yellow light burning in the darkness…
<SANCIA,> roared Valeria’s voice in her mind. <HE IS COMING.>
Sancia opened her mouth to scream. But then the world blurred, and she was gone.
* * *
—
First a darkness, and a feeling of age, of years, of millennia, the horrible, crushing, obliterating feeling of all that time weighing down upon her…
She saw the horizon afire, the sky filled with smoke, and all the world burning—and somewhere in the sky above she thought she saw a human form, cloaked in black, floating in the air, his legs crossed in a curiously meditative position…
<THEY HAVE FOUND HIM. THEY HAVE FOUND HIM AND THEY WILL BRING HIM HERE AND THEY WILL BRING HIM BACK.>
She saw a tomb, deep below the earth, and a sarcophagus of black stone, and sitting in the sarcophagus was a single tiny bone, like that of a knuckle. She felt an awareness of a location somehow emerge in her mind, like it was an old memory she’d forgotten until just now.
This place…this is in the plantations, in the islands across the Durazzo. I know it is…
A flash of water, of the open ocean, a horizon without a hint of land—except there was something approaching, a small dot parting the waters until it grew, and grew…
A ship?
She saw desert hills, and a white stone peristyle sitting atop the sand dunes, the stars and the velvet purple sky visible through its columns.