There was a sound behind them—many voices talking loudly, crying out in alarm. Participazio turned and saw a crowd was gathering in the street, looking up at the Hypatus Building. Then he glimpsed what they were looking at: there was a man up there, standing on the edge of the roof, his left hand wedged up under his right armpit…
The man in black walked on ahead. “We should get back,” he said. “I have much to do today.”
The crowd behind Participazio screamed. He turned back and saw the man on the roof was gone now, and they were all standing around something in the road.
“I think,” stammered Participazio. “I think he jumped…”
“Did he?” said the man in black lightly. “What a pity.” His three-cornered hat swiveled as he looked at yet another building. “Honestly, what wonderful colors!”
15
As the day wore on into midafternoon, the streets of the Commons and the campos slowly began to fill: with pipers, with parades, with floating lanterns, with casks of wine and tables of food—many of them paltry, given the troubles in the plantations, but you still had to put out your offerings. It was the Monsoon Carnival, after all. Tevanne had few rules that went observed by the whole of the city—but carnival was absolutely one of them.
So it was a little odd that the Foundrysiders were huddled in Giovanni’s spacious workshops with Claudia, readying their work: a scrived carriage that had been refitted to act as a parade vessel, releasing floating lanterns and carrying a giant cask of wine through the streets.
“This feels,” said Giovanni as he adjusted the cask of wine in the carriage, “a little like old times.”
Orso helped him seal up the cask. “I agree.”
“However,” said Giovanni, hopping down, “I hated old times.”
“I agree.”
“Being that I always kept almost dying.”
“Again, I agree.” Orso cocked his head and listened to the piping outside. “Sounds like the day is wearing on. God, how I’d love to just wrap my lips around a jug of wine, and let it have its way with me…but I suppose such days are over. Where are we with our various tools?”
“Almost done!” said Claudia, Sancia, and Berenice simultaneously. None of them sounded particularly pleased.
Orso was not surprised. Claudia and Gio specialized in a refinement of the technique that Orso himself had developed: though he had found a way to convince a box it contained something it actually didn’t, they’d developed a way to discard the box, and use simple metal plates set on the floor. Arrange the plates correctly, and the reality above them would believe it held a wall, or a block of iron, or a heap of coals, and so on. This was a lot more limited than Orso’s closed-container method—neither of them had found a way to duplicate anything besides the presence of dumb, raw materials—and he knew the past few months had been terribly frustrating for them.
He walked over to where they were working on a variety of steel plates, all laid out on the ground around them. At the back of the workshop stood ten huge steel walls, and four large steel boxes. He studied them carefully.
Orso Ignacio had rarely felt very frightened in the past three years. Having lived through the events of the Mountain, and a Tevanni Council capital trial, and starting Foundryside…there just didn’t seem to be much left to feel worried about.
But now, he was worried. He was worried because he didn’t have access to his own workshops. He was worried because they were having to rely on former colleagues who’d split off to develop an iteration on his scriving techniques that, as far as he was aware, was still unproven. And he was especially worried because they were going to have to use these techniques not only to navigate a building he’d helped to nearly destroy three years ago—but they were also going to have to do so while worrying about a hierophant.
And not even a hierophant, he thought. The first of all goddamn hierophants. He shook himself, and tried to remember what to do next.
“You said you were done thirty minutes ago,” said Orso.
“And we meant it thirty minutes ago!” snapped Claudia. “We’ve made some pretty scrumming amazing success, given you just popped in this morning and asked me and Gio if you could use all of our prototypes!”
“I asked for your help,” said Orso, “because I assumed they worked. Yet I still don’t have much evidence that they do.”
Claudia cursed quietly, then grabbed a plate, stood, and tossed it out to the center of the workshop. She picked up a little board at her side, one covered with a number of sliding tabs of wood, and slid one forward.
“It’s working,” said Sancia, looking at it.
“I don’t need you to tell me!” said Claudia irritably. “I know when my own damned stuff works.” Then she looked around, picked up a small iron ingot, and threw it at the air above the plate.
The ingot appeared to bounce off of an invisible wall right above the plate with a clang sound—but the sound did not come from anywhere near the plate on the floor. Rather, it came from the back of the workshop, where the iron walls stood. Orso looked back and forth between the ingot, which was bouncing along the ground, and the iron walls at the back—one of which now had a very small divot in its center…one he was sure hadn’t been there before.
“The plate tricks the reality above it into thinking it holds the iron wall,” said Claudia. “Basically allowing you to put invisible walls anywhere.”
“Your box works with lexicons,” said Gio. “Our plates work with raw materials.”
Orso walked up and felt the air above the plate, and jumped slightly as his fingers met a cold, flat, hard surface that was absolutely invisible. He rapped on it twice, and again the sound of his knuckles on metal did not come from the space in front of him, but rather the walls in the back of the workshops. “I see. In fact…it is amazing.”
Claudia looked surprised. In fact, everyone looked surprised. “Really?” she said.
“Well—yes?” said Orso. “Why is everyone looking so shocked? She took my idea and did something new with it. That’s what scriving’s all about.”
“It’s a bit limited, though,” said Gio. “We can’t trick reality into thinking it contains anything too complicated…”
“Nothing scrived, in other words,” said Claudia. “Like your lexicon trick, Orso. Only raw materials.” She looked at him with a hard, keen gaze. “But if we pull this shit off…we get the Michiel definitions, yeah? Because they’d probably help quite a bit.”
“Yes, yes,” said Orso. “You do. Of course.”