Orso shook his head and brought the pickax down once more. “There are stories of Crasedes dying dozens of times and bringing himself back one way or another. Pleasant trickster tales where he pulls one over on Papa Monsoon, or whichever personification of death you prefer. If those are true, then whatever they’re about to attempt now seems different.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s taken him a thousand years to come back?” Another ting! of the pickax. “Death wasn’t a problem for the Crasedes of the old stories. This sure seems like it’s been a hell of a problem for him.” Ting! “I assume it has something to do with your golden friend…You say they fought a war—maybe she injured him.”
She thought of how Valeria had flickered in the dark. “And maybe he injured her too.”
“Two damaged titans.” Ting! “And it’s the hurt ones that are the most dangerous. A monkey with a broken leg’s more likely to bite you than a hale and hearty one.” He set down the pickax, wiped sweat from his brow, and studied the shallow hole at his feet. “How many strokes are we at for you?”
“One hundred and seventy-four.”
“And for me?”
“Thirty-nine.”
Orso moaned. “The damned ship will get here before we’re done…”
“Oh, get out of the way!” said Sancia. She stood, took the pickax from him, and began hammering away at several times the speed, the tooth of the pickax biting deeper and deeper.
“Show-off,” muttered Orso. He drank greedily from the flagon.
She brought the pickax down again and there was a curious crunch sound. They looked at each other, then knelt and peered into the hole.
“It’s there!” said Orso. “I can see it!”
“Move while I clear the rest of the stone,” said Sancia.
A dozen strokes later and the cement crumbled away. Orso reached down and pulled something from the depths of the hole.
It appeared to be a small iron box, about large enough to contain one shoe.
“This is it, right?” Orso asked. He shook it. “I remember it being bigger than this…”
“For God’s sake!” said Sancia. “Don’t shake the scrumming thing, you stupid bastard!”
He set the box down on the floor before him. “If I recall…we scrived this lock so it needed to sense the blood of two Foundryside founders to open. That way one of us couldn’t go mad, dig it up, and use it for ourselves. So get over here.”
Sancia put the pickax down and knelt with Orso on the floor. They exchanged a nervous look, then each placed a hand on the iron box.
“Ready?” said Orso.
“One,” said Sancia. “Two. Three…”
They swung the lid back. Both of them recoiled at the sight of what lay within.
To the average eye, the thing would have looked somewhat unusual, but not terribly upsetting. It appeared to be a large, curious golden pocket watch, with many levers, buttons, and dials on its face. Most curious was the smooth golden plate in the center, which was covered in countless tiny sigils, all etched in a cold, precise hand.
“Goddamn,” muttered Sancia. “How I wished I’d never have to lay eyes on this scrumming thing again.”
Then she braced herself, and picked up the imperiat.
8
It was late afternoon when they got to the piers. The sky was fat with clouds, growing dark and mutinous where they met the horizon. They found Gregor standing before a dingy old fishing boat that looked like it’d seen better days maybe a decade ago, if not more.
“This is our ship?” said Orso, his face fixed in a pained cringe.
“It is what I can acquire with almost no notice whatsoever,” said Gregor. “I did a lot of haggling, but…I will spare you the details on cost.”
“Shit,” said Orso faintly.
“You sure you know how to pilot that thing?” asked Sancia.
“I am.” He looked at her, and then at the iron box hanging from her neck by a strap. “And are you sure you know how to operate that thing?”
Sancia’s belly squirmed unpleasantly. “Kind of,” she said. “But mostly no.”
Which was an honest answer. The imperiat was a hierophantic tool that could dampen or kill any scriving within about a quarter mile. It strengthened reality, in a way, making it easier for the world to listen to countless scrived commands and say—Hmm, no, I’d rather not, really. Sancia had also seen it control or manipulate scrivings, dominating them from afar—the plate in her head had been one such example—but she’d never figured out how to do that.
And there were multiple reasons why. To begin with, Berenice, Orso, and Sancia had eventually concluded that the imperiat was not designed to work with a normal human being: it was a tool of the hierophants, made by them and for them. A mortal human could pull a few levers and push its buttons, but Sancia suspected there were other, more precise ways to utilize the rig. Some she might be able to figure out—just as Estelle Candiano had, once—but for others, she couldn’t, and never would.
Because she was uninterested in exploring further. Frankly, she was terrified of playing with the thing. The imperiat could easily kill a lexicon if you weren’t careful with it. Burying it under a few feet of concrete had seemed a much wiser choice.
“And we’re sure it would actually sink a galleon?” said Gregor.
“We can set it so that it targets and kills a critical scriving in the lexicon itself,” said Berenice, “triggering all its fail-safes, so it’ll be paused, essentially. It’ll only keep crucial scrivings running—usually construction ones. That’s how most lexicons are designed.”
“That way if I have to trigger the thing while on the galleon,” said Sancia, “the ship itself won’t literally fall apart around us because…Hell, I don’t know, because the construction scrivings forgot how to glue the hull together, or something. Which gives us a chance to get off.”
“So—we get to the galleon,” said Orso. “Sancia gets inside and turns the ship against itself, and then we get the slaves to the escape shallops…There should be enough, right?”
Gregor nodded. “There’s enough shallops for the galleon’s maximal crew, which numbers in the hundreds.”
“Good. We get them off, and we sink the damned thing—and it takes whatever artifact it is they’ve discovered down with it. I don’t care how it gets sunk, whether it’s by Sancia’s fiddlings or because the imperiat reminds it it’s just a hunk of dumb wood and iron. I just want it and all of Ofelia’s devilry on the bottom of the ocean as fast as possible.”