“You…what? The dark? You’re from the dark?”
<Yeah. Someplace dark. Very dark.>
“Where is this dark place?”
<How should I know? I don’t have much frame of reference here, kid. All I know is that between it and here is a whole lot of water.>
“So they shipped you over the ocean. Yeah. I figured that. Who shipped you over here?”
<Some guys. Dirty. Smelly. Jabbered a lot. I expect you’d have gotten on pretty well with them.>
“Where were you before the dark?”
<There’s nothing before the dark. There’s just the dark. I was always in the dark, as…as far as I can recall.> There was a note of anxiety in his voice at that.
“What was with you in the dark?” asked Sancia.
<Nothing. There was just me, and the dark, and nothing else. For…> He paused.
“For how long?”
Clef laughed miserably. <Think of a long time. Then multiply that times ten. Then multiply that times a hundred. Then a thousand. That still doesn’t come close to how long I was there, in the dark, alone.>
Sancia was silent. That sounded like something akin to hell to her — and it sounded like Clef was still shaken by it.
<Still, not sure if this place is an improvement,> said Clef. <What is this, a prison? Who’d you kill? It must have been someone really great to be punished like this.>
“This is my apartment.”
<You live this way voluntarily? What, you can’t get yourself even, like, one picture?>
Sancia decided to cut to it. “Clef…You know I stole you — right?”
<Ah — no. You…stole me? From who?>
“I don’t know. From a safe.”
<Ah, now who’s got the shitty, unsatisfying answers? How’s it feel? I guess that’s why you’re acting so damned panicked.>
“I’m panicked,” said Sancia, “because to get you, I had to do a ton of things that could get me harpered in a blink.”
<Harpered? What’s that?>
Sighing, Sancia quickly tried to tell Clef that “harpering” referred to a method of public torture and execution in Tevanne: the subject was placed in a stockade, and the harper — a long, thin piece of extremely strong wire, attached to a small, scrived device — was placed in a loop around their neck, or perhaps their hands or feet or delicates. The scrived device would then, much to the subject’s distress, begin cheerily retracting the wire, tightening the loop inch by inch, until finally the wire bit into and completely amputated the chosen extremity.
It was an extremely popular spectacle in Tevanne, but Sancia had never attended a harpering. Mostly because she knew that, in her line of work, there was a not-insignificant chance it could be her bits in the loop.
<Oh. Well. I can see how that makes this all pretty urgent.>
“Right. So. You don’t know who owned you, do you?”
<Nope.>
“Or who made you.”
<That presumes I was made, which is something I’m not sure of yet.>
“That’s insane, someone had to have made you!”
<Why?>
She couldn’t come up with a good answer to that. She was mainly trying to figure out exactly how much danger she was in. Clef was obviously, undoubtedly the most advanced scrived device she’d ever seen — and she was pretty sure he was a scrived device — but she wasn’t sure why someone would be willing to pay forty fortunes for him. A key that did little more than insult you in your mind would have pretty low value to the merchant houses.
Then she realized there was an obvious question she hadn’t asked yet.
“Clef,” she said, “since you’re a key and all…what exactly do you ope—”
<You know you don’t have to talk out loud, right? I can hear your thoughts.>
Sancia dropped the key and backed away to the corner of her room.
She stared at Clef, thinking rapidly. She did not like the idea of a scrived item reading her mind, not one damned bit. She tried to remember all the things she’d thought since she’d started talking to him. Had she given away any secrets? Could Clef even hear the thoughts she hadn’t known she’d been thinking?
If there’s risk in exposing yourself to him, she thought, it’s a risk you’ve already taken.
Glowering, she walked back over, knelt, touched a digit to the key, and demanded, “What the hell do you mean, hear my thoughts?”
<Okay, wait, sorry. Poor phrasing. I can hear some of your thoughts. I can hear them if — if! — you think them hard enough.>
She picked him up. “What does that mean, think them hard enough?”
<Why not try thinking something hard, and I’ll let you know?>
Sancia thought something very hard at Clef.
<Very funny,> said Clef. <Obviously I can’t do as you suggest, as I don’t have the necessary orifices.>
<Wait,> thought Sancia. <You can really hear this?>
<Yeah.>
<You can hear what I’m thinking right now?>
<Yeah.>
<Every single word?>
<No, I’m just saying “yeah” for no reason. Yes, yes, I can hear you!>
She wasn’t sure how she felt about this. It was as if Clef had moved into a room upstairs inside her mind, and was whispering to her through a hole in the ceiling. She struggled to remember what she’d been talking to him about.
<What do you open, Clef?> she asked him.
<What do I open?>
<You’re a key, right? So that means you open something. Unless you don’t remember that, either.>
<Oh. No, no, I remember that.>
<So…what do you open?>
<Anything.>
There was a silence.
<Huh?> said Sancia.
<Huh what?> asked Clef.
<You open anything?>
<Yes.>
<What do you mean, anything?>
<I mean what I said. Anything. I open anything that has a lock, and even a few things that don’t.>
<What? Bullshit.>
<It’s true.>
<Bullshit, it’s true.>
<You don’t believe me? Why not try it out?>
Sancia considered it, and had an idea. She walked over to her open closet. Sitting in the corner was her collection of practice locks, specimens she’d ripped out of doors or stolen from mechanists’ shops, which she labored over every other night, refining her skills.
<If you’re lying,> she said, <you’ve picked the exact wrong person to lie to.>
<Watch,> said Clef. <And observe.>
Sancia picked up one of the locks, a Miranda Brass, which was generally considered to be one of the more formidable conventional locks — meaning not scrived — in Tevanne. Sancia herself, with all her talents, usually took about three to five minutes to pick it.