<Up to the ceiling in most cases.>
Shit, she thought. So—really scrumming bad, then.
<Is there a way to get the water out?> asked Sancia.
<Hmm. There…could be,> said the Mountain. <If you punctured the wall in the southwest dry-storage rooms…This would release the waters and lower the levels in the lexicon chamber. But that wall is quite far away from the lexicon…>
<It’ll have to do,> said Sancia.
She shook herself and said, “We’re going to have to split into two groups.”
“All right,” said Gregor. “What is the plan?”
“One half needs to go to the basement dry-storage rooms, in the southwest area,” said Sancia. She pointed down into the atrium. “There’s a wall there that we need to break open…” She cocked her head, and listened to the Mountain. “The Mountain says it can actually flash lights over the wall, so we can find it.”
“Helpful,” said Berenice.
“Scrumming creepy,” muttered Orso.
“Breaking open the wall will let out a lot of the water in the lexicon chambers,” said Sancia. She shifted her finger to point to its location. “Once that’s down, the other team enters the lexicon chamber and gets the component out. Then we regroup here, and we go out the way we came in.”
Gregor nodded, though his face was concerned. “I assume Sancia and I will go to this wall, while Orso and Berenice deal with the lexicon?”
Sancia began to agree, but Orso shook his head and said, “No.”
“What?” said Sancia. “Why not?”
“I mean…I am not the best scriver to accompany Berenice.” Orso thought in silence for a moment. Then he looked at her sternly. “You are.”
“What?” said Berenice.
“What?” said Sancia. “You…You were Tribuno Candiano’s star scrumming pupil! And you know more about lexicons than anyone in Tevanne!”
“Obviously I don’t know anything about these,” said Orso. “Together, you and Berenice can do this faster. I’m better with Gregor—I actually lived here; I know how to get around.” He wrinkled his nose at the moldering walls. “Or I used to…It doesn’t matter. The faster you two get the component,” he said as Berenice opened her mouth to argue, “the faster we get out alive. Got it?”
There was an awkward pause.
“Fine,” said Sancia. “I’ll go with Berenice. You two break the wall.”
“How many soldiers are in here with us?” asked Gregor.
“I can count nine here, but…if they’re after the lexicons, they’ll be in the cellars, far from me, so I can’t see them.” She shrugged. “I’d guess thirty or fifty or so.”
“Damn,” said Gregor quietly. He looked away into the atrium, his face haggard and haunted.
Sancia knew what he was worried about: it wasn’t dying that scared Gregor, but killing.
“You’ll be fine,” she said. “Just avoid them as best you can. But you’ll need to hurry.” She looked up at the sky through the cracked ceiling. It had taken them so long to get here that it was already night. “Crasedes might wait for midnight to come see how progress is going…but he might not.”
“And what do we do if we’re still here by then?” asked Orso.
“Plug up your ears,” said Sancia. “And run like hell.”
* * *
—
Orso and Gregor crept off into the darkened hallways of the Mountain. Orso personally found it a surreal and disturbing experience. He hadn’t been back here in—what, fifteen, twenty years?—and yet he could remember these ceilings, these doors, the way the doorknobs felt when you gripped them…except now they were muddy, or stained from old floodwaters, and everywhere felt empty and abandoned. It was dispiriting to see the halls of his youth so utterly changed. The golden age of scriving was well and truly dead.
But we’re remaking it anew, he tried to remember. We won’t make the same mistakes that Tribuno made…They passed a crumbling fresco depicting two scrivers altering the fundament of the world, engraving sigils on the gears and machinery that supported reality itself. That I made, when I was young.
As they walked, they noticed that the lamps and lanterns in the walls around them kept springing on as they came close. It took Orso a moment to realize that the lights were being switched off as the two of them walked away.
“Is…it just me,” whispered Gregor, “or…”
“Or is the Mountain giving us light to see?” said Orso. “Yeah. I think so.”
Gregor watched as a light flicked on around the corner up ahead. “And it’s showing us the way. That is…most disturbing to me.”
“It goddamn gives me the screaming meemies, I’ll tell you that. I feel like a fairy-tale traveler following spirit lamps into a bog. To think I lived here all those years, unaware of what this place actually was…”
They continued down a set of cracked stairs, into a meeting room with crystal goblets lying here and there on the floor, then on into a mirrored hall so filthy it looked like their reflections were walking through a curling fog.
Then the light went out above them. They paused, standing in the total darkness.
“Why do you think it did that?” whispered Orso.
“I’m not—”
A light flicked on far, far down the hallway—and they saw a Dandolo guard walking their way, espringal out and ready. The guard stopped and looked at the scrived lantern above him, perplexed as to why it had just come on.
Because it’s showing us a threat, Orso realized.
Before Orso could think, Gregor grabbed him and hauled him into what seemed to be a dark, soggy bedroom. Together they huddled in the shadows, listening as the footsteps came closer.
Orso didn’t dare breathe. He reached for the button on his cuirass, but Gregor shook his head, pointing to the walls around them. Orso remembered Claudia’s warning: Don’t turn it on too close to walls—you’ll be immobilized.
The guard’s steps slowed as he neared the doorway to the bedroom. Orso couldn’t understand what had made him suspicious. The man evidently hadn’t seen them, otherwise he would have just shot them dead in the hall—but how could he know exactly where they were now?
Gregor gently pushed Orso up against the wall in the corner. Then he flattened his back to the wall by the doorway—but he did not arm himself.