* * *
—
Berenice and Sancia stood by the flooded hallway, waiting impatiently.
“What could be taking them so long?” said Sancia.
<There are several guards between their position and the cellars,> said the Mountain. <I am helping them evade notice, but…it is not easy.>
<Shit!> said Sancia. <What time is it?>
<It is nearly eleven o’clock,> said the Mountain.
“Shit!” she said out loud. “It’s almost eleven!”
“Do you really think Crasedes will come at midnight?” asked Berenice.
“Hell, I don’t know. But if he were to come at any time, I’d guess then.”
“And we have no defenses against him?” she asked.
“No. I didn’t even bring the imperiat. Not with us all being, you know, inside a giant scrived structure. It seemed too big of a risk.”
Then the Mountain spoke in Sancia’s mind, in a voice that was very quiet and awed: <When you discuss this, do…do you really mean the true Crasedes Magnus?>
<Huh? Yeah,> said Sancia.
<Are you saying…he may come…here? To me? A hierophant?>
<Yes.>
There was a silence. She suspected she’d just shocked the poor thing. She remembered now how it had wished to be visited by a hierophant—after all, that was why Tribuno had built it in the first place.
<Oh…Oh my goodness,> it whispered.
She began to get an idea. <Supposing you actually did get a hierophant here…What would you do, Mountain?>
<Well! If I were to have one of the Old Ones here within me…why, my Purpose was to show them the works of my maker, of Tribuno! To show them all he had wrought, all the secrets within me that he had made just for them.>
<Where are these secrets?>
<On the third floor, hidden behind a vast mural. I can ope—>
<Is it deep inside? Behind doors and doors and doors?>
<Yes…it was a very protected place.>
<And you still have control over it? You said you had issues with doors and locks…>
<This is my Purpose. I shall always have control over my Purpose until I fade, and am no more.>
<I see. And if he tried to—would you let this hierophant leave?>
There was a long silence.
<I would…I would not want that,> said the Mountain. <After so long…After all I have been through, all the pain, all the silence…I would not wish for my Purpose to abandon me.>
A cold chill filled Sancia’s heart as she knew what she was going to say. <And if…if you had no choice,> she said. <If it were going to leave you—would you want to stay here, Mountain, alone and waiting?>
Another long silence.
<No,> it said. <No, I would not. I would not wish to wait here, without Tribuno, without my Purpose—and without you. I…I would not wish to be alone again, you see. I would rather bring myself down, and fall to rubble, than go back to that.>
“All right, then,” whispered Sancia. “I see. I…I have a proposition for you, Mountain…”
She told it her ideas, and it listened closely.
* * *
—
Gregor crept down the hallway with Orso on his back, following the flickering lanterns set in the walls. Then they looked around one corner and froze.
The hallway stretched on for about four hundred feet before them, broken only by an intersection halfway down. What was most concerning, however, was the half dozen Dandolo guards bearing lamps standing before the doorway at the far end of the hall. All of them looked quite upset, and it was easy to see why: a mangled corpse lay at their feet, so brutalized that it looked like someone had tried to hack the man in half with a pole arm.
“…going to have to get a stretcher,” one guard was saying. “Unless you want to throw poor Pietro over your shoulders, Molinari, and get his mess all over you.”
“But they did not inform us that this task would have so many threats!” said another. “I mean…I thought the Candianos lived here! I didn’t think they’d layered the walls and floors with lethal scrumming booby traps…”
“Sure, but the lexicon chambers would be a different matter,” said Orso quietly. “Tribuno always did take security very seriously…especially later, when he went mad.”
Gregor raised a finger, then pointed. “There. Look.”
A single lantern was flickering very faintly by the corner of the intersection, two hundred feet away. The Mountain was signaling to them that they needed to go down the hallway and take a right—but this would be impossible with the Dandolo guards standing in a crowd just beyond.
“Any bright ideas?” said Orso. “I doubt if we can draw them all away this time. Maybe if we ran down there really quick, we could seal them in with one of Claudia’s invisible walls…though I’m not sure how to do that without getting shot.”
Gregor cocked his head. “That is an idea, Orso.”
“What, getting shot?”
“No.” Gregor began to take out his imprinter espringal. “Hold still, please.”
“Wait. Gregor, what…what are you going to d—”
“Shh,” said Gregor. He set it to an anchoring string and carefully aimed down the hallway at the guards.
“…barely even want to take a shit in the latrine!” one of the guards was saying. “I’m frankly worried that the damned thing will eat me!”
Gregor exhaled slightly, and fired.
The lead slug hurtled down the hallway—but it did not hit any of the soldiers. Instead, it sailed over their heads, through the open doorway at the end of the hall, and struck the far wall with a very loud thwack.
The soldiers jumped, alarmed. “What the hell was that?”
They spun around, pulled out their rapiers, and walked away from the corpse and into the room, peering about.
Gregor lowered the espringal a little, aimed, and fired the second half of the anchoring slug—this one at the corpse of poor Pietro, lying on the floor.
The slug struck the corpse on the hip, this time with a much wetter, far more upsetting thwack. The instant it stuck, the two slugs felt compelled to pull themselves together—which meant the corpse of Pietro suddenly shot through the air, pulled by his trousers, his limbs flailing about wildly, and he smashed into the backs of the soldiers standing in the doorway, knocking them to the ground.