She told them. When she was finished, she said, “He…talks more than I thought he would.”
“What does that mean?” asked Orso.
“I mean, he’s…compelling. He has immense power over gravity, which we all knew. But his voice…his voice might be the most dangerous thing about him. The more I listened to it, the more I believed everything he was saying. I think the only reason I could resist was because…well, apparently Valeria gave me some kind of protections against him.”
“Yes,” said Orso, grimacing. “Very proactive of her. I expect it’s like how we scrive objects to reject a certain person, telling a door, ‘If this person with this blood comes about, don’t open.’ Only she did it to your goddamn head, and told it to reject the first of all scrumming hierophants.” He laughed miserably. “I’m sorry, this is just the maddest conversation I’ve ever had…”
“But I think the thing in black…” said Sancia. “I’m not sure that’s actually him. I think he’s wearing a living body as a suit, or using it as a totem, puppeteering it about. They just tricked the world into thinking the live body is him, by scriving his wrappings and putting the little bone in the body’s hand.”
“You mean you think it was a living person once?” said Berenice, horrified.
“Probably, yeah. Maybe a slave’s. I think the body is like a, a focal point for his presence, and his permissions. If we destroy the wrappings, or cut the bone out of him…maybe it will disperse, and he’ll go back to being…whatever the hell he was before. Not dead, but close to it.”
“I am unsure how that could be attempted,” said Gregor. “He handled a broadside of shriekers quite well—and I couldn’t get close to him with my rapier.”
“Maybe Valeria knows,” said Sancia. “If I can find a way to get her to talk to me again.”
Orso stopped pacing and narrowed his eyes, thinking. “Has anyone found it funny that Valeria only made her appearance the night before Crasedes’s ship came in?”
“I have not found it funny,” said Gregor. “In fact, I have found it decidedly unfunny.”
“No, I mean—that ship was at sea for days. They must have found the…the…what was it?”
“A piece of Crasedes’s original bones,” said Sancia. “I guess.”
“Ugh. Right. That. They must have found it days or weeks ago. And obviously she knew about it, somehow—sensed it, or something. So why wait until the last minute to tell us?” He pivoted on his heel like a dancer, his face shining with excitement. “Unless something had changed. Not with Crasedes—but with Valeria, and her ability to access Sancia.”
Berenice rubbed her chin with the tip of her ring finger. “The twinned lexicons…”
“Exactly!” said Orso. “What else?”
“I can think of many things else,” said Gregor impatiently. “Please explain.”
“Valeria is like…like a giant scriving, yes?” said Orso. “From what Clef told Sancia, she’s like a huge command issued to reality, telling it to change. Once she was capable of changing…hell, I don’t know, all kinds of shit. Doesn’t matter. But you said the other day that she’d seemed damaged when she spoke to you in the dream…”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “She said she was too weak to face him by herself.”
“So, if you were a damaged scriving who wanted to flee all that reality closing in on you, asserting that you were not true and that it didn’t have to listen to you—where would you go?”
“To…where reality was weakest?” said Gregor.
“And where would that be?” said Orso, so smug it was almost intolerable. “Why, near a lexicon, of course! Where thousands of arguments are all compiled, making reality very thin and pliant! To something like Valeria, a lexicon must be like a puddle in a desert. And when the Michiels used our techniques to twin all the cradles in all the lexicons together…”
“Then if she’d been near a Michiel lexicon, she’d suddenly be capable of…of moving,” said Sancia. “She could jump from lexicon to lexicon. And at Foundryside…God, it must have been like we’d opened a goddamn door in our basement for her!”
“And then she slipped out at night,” said Orso, “and whispered in your ear as you slept. Just in time, too. If we’d been a day later in robbing the Michiels, Crasedes could have showed up hale and hearty, and killed us all without us even raising a hand against him. Not that we can, you know, raise much of a hand against him now.”
“So…we need to get close to Foundryside to be able to talk to her?” said Berenice. “I’m not sure that’s wise. Even if no one’s broken in yet, they must know to watch there.”
“No,” said Orso. “We just need to get close to a Michiel foundry. I very much believe that Valeria is in one—which means she must be in all of them, due to them using our damned twinning technique! It might be as simple as getting Sancia close to the right stretch of Michiel campo wall, knocking her on the head, and sending her off to scrumming dreamland!”
“Except my head is too goddamn valuable,” said Sancia.
“We could use dolorspina venom to put you out for an hour or so, though,” said Berenice. “That…might work.”
“Then let’s go!” said Orso, “hopefully before a damned hierophant starts tearing the city to pieces.”
* * *
—
Gregor sought out Polina before they left. He found her standing by the camp’s exits, watching her smugglers carry their goods out for the day—in carts, in baskets, in packs on their backs. She counted every bag, every bottle, every sack, and every crate. Nothing escaped her keen eye.
What a quartermaster she would make, he thought, were she to go to war. Though he reflected that she was at war, in her own way.
“Polina,” he said. “You should not send them out today.”
She looked at him over her shoulder. “What?”
“Your sellers, your merchants. You should not send them out today.”
“Gregor…could we perhaps have one conversation without your cryptic bullshit?”
He struggled for a moment. “Something dreadful has come to this city. My mother has brought it here. I do not know what is coming, but…it cannot be good. You should withdraw your people. They will be of more use at home now.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, then looked at the smuggler before her, counted his wares, and gave him a curt nod. “Dangerous, eh?”