This was not illegal — as there were no laws in the Commons, it couldn’t be. But it was also not illegal for the merchant houses to organize raids to kick down your door, destroy everything you’d made, and also maybe break your fingers or your face in the process.
So you had to stay quiet. Stay underground. And keep moving.
<Not bad stuff,> Clef said in Sancia’s ear as they walked through the messy workshop. <Some of it’s trash, but some of it’s pretty ingenious. Like the carriage wheels. They’ve figured out all kinds of uses for those.>
<The foundries did that first,> said Sancia. <Apparently that was where they first experimented with gravity, just so they could get all their machines to move around and work better.>
<Clever stuff.>
<Kind of. I hear it didn’t go totally flawlessly at the start, and a few scrivers accidentally quintupled their gravity or something.>
<Meaning?>
<Meaning they got crushed into a vaguely flesh-like object about as thick as an iron pan.>
<Okay, maybe not so clever.>
Claudia led Sancia to the back of the room, where Giovanni, a veteran Scrapper, was seated before a small desk and was carefully painting sigils onto a wooden button. He glanced up from his work, ever so briefly. “Evening, San.” He smiled at her, his graying beard crinkling. He’d been a venerated scriver before he’d washed out of Morsini House, and the other Scrappers tended to defer to him. “How’d the goods hold up? You seem all in one piece.”
“Somewhat.”
“Somewhat what?”
Sancia walked around and, with an air of quaint civility, moved his desk aside. Then she sat down in front of him and smiled into his face, her muddy eye squinting unpleasantly. “They somewhat worked. Right up until your goddamn sailing rig nearly fell apart, and dumped me over the waterfront bridge.”
“It what?”
“Yeah. If it were anyone else, Gio, anyone else, I’d gut you stern to crotch for what happened out there.”
Giovanni blinked, then smiled. “Discount next time? Twenty percent?”
“Fifty.”
“Twenty-five.”
“Fifty.”
“Thirty?”
“Fifty.”
“All right, all right! Fifty it is…”
“Good,” said Sancia. “Get stronger material for the parachute next time. And you overdid it on the flashbox.”
Giovanni’s eyebrows rose. “Oh. Oh. So that’s what caused the waterfront fire?”
“Too much magnesium in the box,” said Claudia. She tsked. “I told you so, Gio.”
“Duly noted,” he said. “And…my apologies, dear Sancia. I shall correct the formulas accordingly for future rigs.” He moved his desk back and returned to the wooden button.
Sancia watched. “So, what’s going on? Your customers need new sachets that quick?”
“Yes,” said Claudia. “Apparently the Candiano campo is…an unusually promiscuous one.”
“Promiscuous.”
“Yes. There is, how shall I say, a strong appetite there for discreet arrangements.”
“Ahh,” said Sancia, understanding. “Night ladies, then.”
“And men,” added Giovanni.
“Yes,” said Claudia. “Them too.”
This was well-trodden ground for Sancia. Merchant-house walls were scrived so that the entrances only allowed in people with specific identifying markers called sachets — wooden buttons with scrived permissions on them. If you walked through the wrong door with the wrong sachet or no sachet at all, you’d get accosted by guards, or even killed by them; or, in some of the inner walls of the campos, where the richest, most protected people lived, rumor had it you could spontaneously explode.
As someone who frequently needed illegitimate access to the campos, Sancia usually had to go to the Scrappers for forged sachets. But their biggest customers were undoubtedly prostitutes, who just wanted to go where the money was — though the Scrappers could usually only get you past the first wall or two. It was a lot harder to steal or forge the more elite credentials.
“Why’d the Candianos change up their sachets?” she asked. “Did someone spook them?”
“No idea,” said Claudia. “Rumor has it mad old Tribuno Candiano is finally about to pull up the eternal blanket and begin his final sleep.”
Giovanni clucked his tongue. “The Conqueror himself, about to be conquered by old age. How tragic.”
“Maybe it’s that,” said Claudia. “Elite deaths often cause some campo shuffling. If so, with everything in flux, there’s probably a lot of easy targets on the Candiano campo…If you were willing to take a side job, we’d pay.”
“Not market rates,” said Giovanni pointedly. “But we’d pay.”
“Not this time,” Sancia said. “I’ve got some pressing matters. I need you to look at something.”
“Like I said,” Claudia told her, “we’ve got a rush job here.”
“I don’t need you to copy the scrivings,” said Sancia. “And I’m not sure you can. I just need…advice.”
Claudia and Giovanni exchanged a glance. “What do you mean, we can’t copy the scrivings?” asked Claudia.
“And since when do you ever ask for advice?” asked Giovanni.
<Ah,> said Clef in her ear. <So. This is when I make my grand entrance?>
“Neat,” said Claudia. She peered at Clef over the scrived lights, her pale eyes huge and enlarged by her magnifying goggles. “But also…very weird.”
Giovanni looked over her shoulder. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Never, in all my days.”
Claudia glanced sideways at Sancia. “You say it…talks to you?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia.
“And it’s not your…” She tapped the side of her head.
“I think that’s why I can hear him — when I’m touching him, that is,” said Sancia. Besides Sark, Claudia and Giovanni were the only people who knew that Sancia was a scrived human. They’d had to know, since they were the ones who’d put her in touch with the black-market physiqueres. But she trusted them. Mostly because the Scrappers were just as hated and hunted by the merchant houses as she herself would be, if they ever found out what she was. If the Scrappers gave her up, she could give them up in turn.
“What does it say?” asked Giovanni.
“Mostly he asks what all of our swears mean. Have you ever heard of anything like this?”
“I’ve seen scrived keys before,” said Claudia. “I tinkered with a few myself. Yet these etchings, these sigils…They’re totally unfamiliar to me.” She looked up at Giovanni. “Sieve?”
Giovanni nodded. “Sieve.”
“Huh?” said Sancia. She watched as Giovanni unrolled what appeared to be a largish sheet of leather. She saw it had buttons sewn into the corners, brass ones, with faint, complicated sigils on their faces. He picked up Clef as if the key were a small, dying bird, and gently placed him in the center of the leather.
“Whatever this is…this isn’t going to hurt him, is it?” asked Sancia.
Giovanni blinked at her through his spectacles. “Him? You’re suddenly sounding very attached to this object, San.”
“That object is worth a whole harpering heap of money,” she said, feeling suddenly defensive about Clef.
“One of Sark’s jobs?” asked Giovanni.