Valeria’s casket?
She forgot about this when she realized why the man was weeping: he was crying in front of the bed—but she hadn’t realized there was someone in the bed.
A boy of about thirteen lay wrapped in the tattered blankets there, his face pale, his eyes shut, his lips bluish. The child was terribly gaunt—his cheeks were sunken, his arms little more than sticks lying at angles in the bed—but most notable to Sancia were the scars on his wrists, running in lines around them: the scars of manacles, or shackles, or restraints. She was familiar with them, of course, because she had the very same on her wrists.
The boy coughed. He was still breathing, but his breaths were ragged and wheezing.
The wrapped man reached out and stroked the boy’s face with one finger. “Please,” he sobbed. “Please…you must help me.”
<I cannot,> said a voice from the chest—Valeria’s voice.
“You must,” said the man. “You have to save him. You can do so much.”
<I can do many things. But I cannot stop this. My permissions are not versatile enough. It is beyond my control.>
The man buried his wrapped face in his hands, and he wept. He inched forward and laid his forehead against the face of his child, moaning softly.
<There is only one way to save him,> said Valeria.
“No!” said the man.
<It is the only choice.>
“No! I won’t! It’s not a solution! Look at you, look what it did to you! Look what it did to you!” he screamed at her.
There was a long silence in the cave, broken only by the rattling, wheezing breaths of the boy on the bed.
<It is the only choice,> said Valeria.
Then things changed again.
* * *
—
Evening skies, dark and purple. Desert cliffs towered around her. And before her…something was happening.
She saw Crasedes, black-wrapped and mummified, floating among a peristyle, its columns white and pure around him. In one hand, he held Valeria’s casket—Sancia recognized it from before. In the other, he held a small, golden key…
Clef?
Crasedes reached out with Clef, and the air seemed to tremble, and shiver, and then…
Then there was a set of doors before him, tall and black, their handles and hinges wrought of shining gold. And yet as Sancia looked at the doors, she found she couldn’t quite understand the scale of them. Were they huge, bigger than the sky itself? Or tinier than a wildflower seed? It made her head hurt to look at them, and the more she looked, the stranger they seemed in ways she found difficult to describe: they seemed both thin and heavy, vibrant and faint. There was just something wrong about them, as if they were incompatible with reality itself.
But curiously, the doors did have a lock.
Crasedes reached out with Clef, and slowly slid his tooth into the lock…
And then the doors began to open.
Sancia could see something behind them. Not light, but…but the opposite of light, somehow. She suddenly filled with panic, overcome with the awareness that whatever this was, she was not meant to see it.
She struggled and tried to turn away from the vision. And as she did, she noticed that there was something out beyond the borders of the peristyle—objects dotting the sand dunes and cliffs and the steppes all around them.
They were people. Thousands of them, if not millions of them.
And all of them were dead.
She started screaming.
* * *
—
Sancia awoke and gasped, sucking in air as hard as she could. She saw blue skies framed by Commons rookeries, felt cold mud around her neck and back, and blinked hard as she tried to focus on the faces before her, one of which was old, craggy, and had wild pale eyes.
“Did you see her?” demanded Orso. “Did it work?”
“Someone get me up!” gasped Sancia.
Berenice and Gregor helped her sit up. Sancia kept panting, terrified, her hands shooting out to feel everything around her—Gregor’s arms, Berenice’s knee, the mud in the alleyway, just wanting to make sure that the world was real, that it was really real.
“You saw her, didn’t you?” said Orso.
“I saw her,” she croaked. “And…And I saw something else.”
“What did she say? What did she say?”
Sancia wiped mud from her face, and whispered, “I need something to drink, please.”
They got her to her feet and crowded into a corner taverna. Sancia quaffed a glass of weak cane wine and told them what she had seen and heard.
But she did not tell them about the vision she’d had—the dying boy, and Crasedes, and the doors. She didn’t want to discuss that aloud. Just remembering it seemed to drive her a little mad.
“So he’s like…some kind of fairy-tale ghoul,” said Orso when she’d finished. “Only capable of rising from his grave at midnight! Somewhat fortunate, for us.”
Sancia shook her head. “No. He’s awake and alive during the day—he just gains access to more permissions and powers closer to midnight.”
“She said she could grant us protections?” asked Berenice. “Just as she’d given them to you?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia darkly. She drained the rest of her cane wine. “But…you aren’t going to like this.”
“By this point,” said Gregor, “I would be doubly surprised to discover I liked anything about this.”
“Orso said a foundry lexicon might be like a puddle in a desert to her,” said Sancia. “And he was right. But in order for her to protect us…we’re going to need to give her a whole damn ocean, so to speak.”
“You mean we’re going to need to find something more powerful than a foundry lexicon?” said Orso, outraged.
“If we want to survive past midnight,” said Sancia, “yes.”
“But…such a thing doesn’t exist,” said Berenice. “The houses have made incremental improvements on foundry lexicons—various efficiencies here and there—but nothing extraordinary. Nothing on the scale you’re suggesting.”
“No,” said Sancia dully. “Someone did figure it out. Someone tried something very, very radical. And we all know who.” She turned to look at Orso. “There’s a place in Tevanne where a building is like a mind. One that’s powered by six full-scale lexicons. But what they’re doing is extraordinary…because, as it turns out, they’re not normal lexicons.”