A long, long silence.
“You…You mean,” said Gregor in a weak voice, “we have to go back to…that place?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “We go back to the Mountain, where Tribuno Candiano installed his strangest works.”
“So…we dream up a way to break into the Mountain,” said Berenice, “steal some work of Tribuno’s, and use it to help Valeria…all before midnight?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “And it gets worse.”
“How in hell is that possible?” asked Orso.
“Because Valeria’s not the only one who needs them,” said Sancia. “Crasedes does too.” She let out a long, slow sigh. “And he almost certainly knows we’re coming.”
13
“I thought we were done trying to break into the goddamn Mountain!” said Orso, pacing about a Commons courtyard in Old Ditch. It was already filling up with people wearing paper masks and rolling casks of wine. He had to stop as a crowd of filthy children ran by in a small parade, giggling as they chased a boy with a tiny lantern hanging from a stick. “This is, what, the third scrumming time?”
“I was under the impression it was abandoned,” said Gregor. “Didn’t Sancia essentially break it open on the top?”
“It is abandoned,” said Berenice, “but the Michiels bought almost all of the Candiano enclaves. Mind, they haven’t done a lot with it, since they’ve lost so many scrivers and have had the plantations to bother with. And I don’t think they know what it is, or how it works.”
“Speaking of which,” said Sancia. “Orso—did Tribuno ever tell you how he’d gotten the Mountain to work?”
“Hell no,” said Orso. “It wasn’t until you went there and heard it speak that I learned it had a mind of its own. I’d never have believed conventional scriving could have been capable of such a thing.”
“Yeah,” said Sancia slowly. “That’s because it…isn’t.”
She shut her eyes, remembering the sight of the component Valeria had shown her in her mind: it was like a scriving definition, but rather than being shaped like a disc, this had been shaped like a cone…and it had been very, very different beyond even that.
For starters, it’d had a slightly golden sheen to it—a hue that Sancia had only ever seen in hierophantically altered tools.
She opened her eyes. “Tribuno Candiano was obsessed with hierophantic commands all his life, yeah? Trying to figure out how to duplicate what Crasedes and the rest of his people had accomplished?”
“Yes?” said Berenice.
“Well…I think at some point, he succeeded,” she said. “Somewhat.”
“W-What?” Orso said, astonished. “He…He actually succeeded in making his own hierophantic tools?”
“I don’t think Tribuno Candiano ever figured out how to make a fully developed tool,” she said. “Nothing like Clef, or the imperiat. No hierophantic swords, or shields, or magic wands, or any of that shit. Instead…I think Valeria was trying to tell me he’d made a hierophantic scriving definition—which he could then place in a lexicon of his own devising. A crappy half-measure, in a way.”
Orso stared at her. “That’s…That’s mad! How could that actually work?”
“I think it’d work almost like any other scriving definition,” said Sancia. “Normal ones allow a lexicon to alter reality. This would just grant a lexicon unprecedented authorities to alter its reality. Though, as I can testify, it’s probably still a sight short of what an actual hierophant can do.”
“But…it could be enough to give a building a mind, yes?” said Berenice. “To make it sense all the people that came within its boundaries…and learn from them, and begin to react to them.”
“My God,” said Gregor. “A…A cobbled-together, improvised mimicry of a hierophantic command…But Sancia—would it still require a…”
“A death,” said Sancia grimly. “Yeah. Even this crude version would need it. A person apiece, sacrificed for these primitive attempts at accessing the power of a hierophant…”
Gregor grimaced. “The biggest, most celebrated structure in the city…is actually powered by the deaths of a half dozen people.”
“And you think Crasedes wants this crude imitation that Tribuno made?” asked Berenice.
“Since Crasedes can’t make tools of his own anymore, maybe the Mountain can serve as a cheap substitute.” She looked at Orso, who still seemed stunned. “I know what Valeria needs these definitions for. If we get one and put it in one of our lexicons, it’d give her authorities to the reality all around it, which she’d use to grant us protection. The thing I’m less sure of is—why does Crasedes need it? What’s he actually looking to do with them?”
Orso shook himself and tried to think. “Well…all forms of scriving are a violation of reality, in one way or another. The way we practice it, you have to convince reality to break its own rules, and we go to a lot of tortuous lengths to do so. But a hierophantic command doesn’t need to. The hierophants used a two-step process: they’d interrupt death to make a tremendous violation, and they’d use that violation to trick reality into believing they had access to much, much higher permissions—perhaps the ones that had been used to make the world.”
“The commands of God Himself,” said Gregor.
“If you want to put it that way, yeah,” said Orso. “But what you’re talking about here, Sancia, is some kind of hybrid of the two. A weak hierophantic tool that needs lexicons and the like to truly function.” He thought about it. “If what you’re saying is true, then…it’s like the whole interior of the dome is a bubble of broken reality. Everything in there is mutable, shapeable, unstable. Tribuno just wanted it to act as a mind. But I suppose if you were clever enough…it could function like something else. Like a…a forge, maybe.”
Sancia sat forward. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if what you’re saying is true, that building can affect the reality of everything within its walls,” said Orso. “If it was retooled, it could maybe remake things within it, so that anything that passed through the lexicon’s sphere of influence could be altered, forever.”
It felt like a ball of ice had just formed in the bottom of Sancia’s belly.
“And that’s what he wants to do to Valeria,” she said quietly. “She said as much. He turns the Mountain into a forge…”