She considered it. A handful of moths flitted down out of the ceiling to rotate around her head in a drunken halo. She waved a hand at them. “Shoo, now. Damn things…We can’t even keep our offices clean.” She glared at Gregor. “Fine. I will initiate the proceedings — but the blackout takes precedence. Once that’s resolved, we will move on to your Waterwatches and your thieves and scoundrels. All right?”
“And…how long will that take?”
“How in the hell should I know, Gregor?” she snapped. “We don’t even know what happened, let alone what to do next!”
“I see,” he said.
“Are you satisfied?” she asked, picking up her quill.
“Almost,” he said. “I had one last request…”
She sighed and put her quill back down.
“Would it be possible for me to consult with the Dandolo hypatus?” he said. “I had some questions I wanted to ask him.”
She stared at him. “With…with Orso?” she said, incredulous. “Whatever do you want to do that for?”
“I had some scriving questions related to the theft.”
“But…but you could go to any scriver for that!”
“I could go to ten different scrivers and get ten different answers,” said Gregor. “Or I could go to the smartest scriver in Tevanne and get the right one.”
“At the moment, I doubt if he could give it to you,” said Ofelia. “Not only is he occupied with the blackout, but I’ve recently come to wonder if he’s even more insane than I’d previously thought.”
That piqued Gregor’s interest. “Oh? Why would that be, Mother?”
She seemed to debate whether to answer, then sighed. “Because he’s screwed up. Considerably. When they found the ruins in Vialto, Orso lobbied me heavily to try to secure some of the items before they were snatched up by our competitors. I consented — reluctantly — and Orso did his utmost to acquire one curious relic. It was an old, cracked stone box, but it had some similarities to a lexicon. Orso spent a fortune getting it — but then, while in transit between Vialto and here, it…vanished.”
“It was lost at sea?” said Gregor. “Or was it stolen?”
“No one can say,” said Ofelia. “But the loss was significant. I have seen the numbers in the balance books. They are large, and not positive. I forbade any future efforts. He didn’t take it well.”
So…Orso Ignacio might have been robbed before, thought Gregor. He made a note of it.
“If you really want to talk to Orso Ignacio,” she said, “you’ll need to go to the Spinola Foundry — the one bordering the Greens. That’s where the lexicon failed — so that, of course, is where Orso is, trying to figure out what the hell happened.” She looked at him sharply. Gregor suppressed a wince at the sight of it. “I know I can’t tell you what to do, Gregor. You’ve always made that clear. But I strongly suggest you consider going elsewhere with your questions. Orso is not someone to trifle with — and after the blackouts, I’ve no doubt he’ll be in the foulest of foul moods.”
He smiled politely. “I have dealt with worse people,” he said. “I believe I can handle myself, Mother.”
She smiled. “I’m sure you think so.”
“Son of a scrumming bitch!” echoed the voice up the stairs. “Son of a worthless, toothless, shitting whore!”
Gregor paused at the top of the Spinola Foundry stairs and glanced at the foundry guard, who gave him a nervous shrug. The voice continued screaming.
“What do you mean, you think the records are accurate? How do you shitting think records are accurate? Accuracy is a binary scrumming state — they either are accurate, or they ARE! NOT!” These last two words were screamed so loud, they genuinely hurt Gregor’s ears, even from here. “Are you married, man? Do you have children? If so, I’m stunned, I’m just flummoxed, because I’d have thought you were so damned stupid you wouldn’t know how to stick your candle in your wife! Maybe check around and see if there are any other slack-jawed idiots about with a strong resemblance to your grubby spawn! I swear to God, if you aren’t back here in one hour with records that are genuinely, unimpeachably, undeniably accurate, I’ll personally paint your balls with fig jelly and toss you stark naked into a hog pit! Now, get out of my goddamn sight!”
There was the sound of frantic footfalls below. Then silence.
“It’s been like that all morning,” said the foundry guard quietly. “I’d have thought his voice would’ve given out by now.”
“I see,” said Gregor. “Thank you.” He started off down the stairs to the lexicon chamber below.
The stairs went down, and down, and down, into the dark.
As Gregor descended, things began to feel…different.
They felt heavier. Slower. Denser. Like he was walking not through dank, musty air but was instead at the bottom of the sea, with miles and miles of water pressing down on him.
How I hate getting near lexicons, thought Gregor.
Like most people, Gregor did not understand the mechanics of scriving. He could not tell one sigillum from another. In fact, he couldn’t even differentiate one house’s scriving language from another, which was even more fundamental. But he knew how scriving worked, in broad terms.
The basic sigillums were symbols that naturally occurred within the world. No one knew exactly where the base sigils came from. Some said the Occidentals had invented them. Others said that the symbols were written into the world by the Creator, by God Himself, that He had defined reality by encoding it with these sigillums, forging the world much as the foundries forged scrived rigs. No one was sure.
Each basic sigillum referenced specific things: there were symbols for stone, wind, air, fire, growth, leaves, and even ones for more abstract phenomena, for “change” or “stop” or “start” or “sharp.” There were millions, if not billions, of them. If you knew these symbols — though few did — then there was nothing stopping you from using them. Even in the most primitive settlement out in the middle of nowhere, if you were trying to carve wood into some intricate shape, you could inscribe it with the base sigil for “clay” or “mud,” and this tiny alteration would make the wood slightly, slightly more malleable.
But despite all the legends around its origins, basic scriving was very restricted. To start with, its effects were minor, no more than a slight nudge. But worse, if you wanted to tell an ax, “You are very durable, very sharp, very light, and you part the wood of the cedar tree as if it were water”—something much more complicated than just “sharp” or “hard,” in other words — such a command would be fifty or sixty sigils long. You’d run out of room on the ax blade — and you’d also have to get the sigil logic just right so the ax blade would understand what it was supposed to be. You had to be specific, and definite — and this was hard.
But then the city of Tevanne had discovered an old cache of Occidental records in a cave down the coast. And in those records they’d discovered something crucial.
The sigil for “meaning.” And then some cunning Tevanni had gotten a brilliant idea.
They’d figured out that you could take a blank slate of iron, write out that extensive, complicated scriving command; but then, you could follow it with the sigil for “meaning,” and next write a completely new sigil, one you yourself just made up. Then that new sigil would essentially mean “You are very durable, very sharp, very light, and you part the wood of the cedar tree as if it were water”—and then you’d just have to write that one sigil on your ax blade.