Nearly a hundred bodies of men, women, and children lay on the floor of the room, all bound in chains and ropes and arranged in overlapping rings around a small, circular space where a single lantern shone. Sancia instantly recognized the bodies as slaves, judging from the spectrum of races, or the brands on their arms, or the hardness of their hands. They were all dead, though none bore any sign of injuries—except for a small, scrived metal marker that had been placed upon their chests.
Sancia dropped her espringal and covered her face. It was too horrible, just too horrible to see…
And the most curious thing was the moths: the floor of the room was covered in dead, tiny, fragile white moths, so many it was almost like a light dusting of snow.
“What did they do?” asked Gregor. “How could they…It’s not midnight yet, is it?” He fumbled for his timepiece and read it. “It’s not even eleven o’clock…”
She shook herself and stood. She studied the little metal markers that lay on the chests of the dead slaves. She saw no silvery tangle of logic, no bundle of commands woven into their reality.
Which means, she thought, that they aren’t rigs…Or they’ve been used in the creation of something else, like a smithy might use a mold…
Fighting the urge to vomit or run or scream, she walked among the rings of bodies on the floor to the space in the center, the little circle with the lamp. As she grew closer she saw countless sigils running along the circle’s edge, a dense, tangled stream of metals and paints.
A stream of blood marred the sigils at one point, breaking whatever binding they’d once laid upon the world here. Sancia saw they were hierophantic commands, but not ones she was familiar with. She pulled out one of the parchments she’d taken from the other room.
“Sancia,” pleaded Gregor. “Sancia, what’s going on?”
“Be quiet,” she said as she read.
“Sancia…it can’t have happened already, can it? He…he cannot be back already…”
“Gregor, be quiet!” she snapped.
She studied the sigils on the parchment carefully, then looked at those written on the floor. Her heart grew cold as she became more convinced of what had happened here.
“They…They scrived time,” said Sancia finally.
“What?”
“These sigils here,” she said, pointing to them. “I’ve never seen them before. But…But I think they convinced reality that the time inside the circle was different from the time outside.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Are you listening, Gregor? They didn’t have to wait for midnight. Not if they could convince the space within that circle that it was always midnight. They…They could do the ritual there, and it would work just fine…wouldn’t it?” She put the parchment back in her pocket. “He knew. He knew Valeria would try to stop them. So he had it ready and waiting for him whenever they found the piece of him they needed.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It is possible. You can convince gravity that up is down, if you want! And there are stories of Crasedes Magnus playing tricks with time! He just had to tell them how to do it. One ritual to scrive time, then another to bring him back. It…It must have taken an inordinate sacrifice to convince time it could be changed, but…” She looked around at the dead slaves lying on the floor, still and ashen and cold.
“So can…can he truly be back?” asked Gregor.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you see him near us?”
She peered up into the ship. “No. I…I still don’t see anything.”
“Could it have failed? Could it have gone wrong? Is that why those men killed themselves? Because it failed, and it did something to them?”
Sancia looked around the room. She spied something on the floor before an open hatch leading up to the next deck, and walked over to it and knelt.
It was a black veil. For some reason it made her think of an empty chrysalis, discarded and left behind by…something.
She remembered her vision of the black-wrapped thing among the columns: how it had reached up, grasped its veil at its face, and slowly pulled it off…
She looked up at the open hatch and thought for a moment.
Something is on this ship with us. Right now.
She grabbed the box with the imperiat, opened it, and slowly, reluctantly pulled out the ancient rig.
Time to prepare for the worst.
She’d never really had the opportunity to handle the imperiat much, and unlike with most scrived devices, she had difficulty engaging with hierophantic rigs. Clef, for example, had been completely immune to all of her efforts after he’d “reset” himself. As she crouched in the darkened room and studied the imperiat in the lamplight, she was reminded that there were an intimidating number of controls to it.
The main set seemed to be three levers on one side. She knew what the largest and smallest ones did—but not the one in the middle.
Bracing herself, she slid the middle lever back, and a small, round, golden panel in the center of the device shifted rapidly, flashing a series of sigils that appeared to have been instantaneously engraved in the metal itself, like it was made out of liquid.
She recognized them—sigils for speed, for gravity, for direction…
I’m seeing the scrivings that are powering the galleon itself.
It was like a lens, she realized—it could be focused, or directed. You could apply the imperiat’s effects to one scriving in the area, or to all of them. It was a curious feeling, knowing she could sink the whole galleon right here and now, if she wished to.
She touched the largest lever—but she made absolutely sure not to move it. She knew what this one did, for she’d seen it in action: it controlled the extent of the imperiat’s effects: you could just dampen the selected scriving a little or kill it outright. Touching this lever at all might cause utter disaster.
The smallest of the three levers was the one she was most interested in now: this one controlled the imperiat’s ability to detect whether a hierophantic scriving was nearby. She knew this, of course, because it had once been able to detect the very hierophantic scrivings on the plate in her head.
“This should tell me if there’s something hierophantic nearby…” She waved the imperiat past her head, and it whined unsettlingly. Then she waved it by Gregor’s head, and it did the same. “It’s working. But…when Valeria was nearby and active, it suddenly screamed. I think the more powerful the scrivings it detects, the louder its alert.”