11
<So now what?> asked Clef.
Seated on the edge of a Michiel rooftop, just downwind from the foundries, Sancia tried to shrug, and found she didn’t have the spirit. <I don’t know. Survive, I suppose. Maybe steal some food out of a campo’s trash for dinner.>
<You’d eat out of the trash?>
<Yeah. Have before. Probably will again.>
<The jungles to the west look very tropical. Maybe you could hide out there for a while?>
<There are wild pigs as tall as a man’s eye. Apparently they enjoy killing people for sport. Not sure a magic key could be of much help there.>
<Okay, but…but this is a giant city, right? You can’t find anywhere to hide? Anywhere?>
<Foundryside and the Greens aren’t safe. Maybe I could go to the Commons in the north, away from the channel. But the Commons only occupies about a tenth of Tevanne’s land. The rest of the city is campo — and it’s damn hard to hide there.>
<We’re pulling it off now,> said Clef.
<For now. On a rooftop. Yes. But this isn’t exactly a sustainable arrangement.>
<Okay…so what? What’s the plan?>
Sancia thought about it. <Claudia and Giovanni mentioned that the Candianos changed up their sachets…>
<The who?>
<The Candianos. One of the four merchant houses.> She pointed north. <See that big dome out there?>
<Like, the really, really, really big one?>
<Yes. That’s the Mountain of the Candianos. They used to be the most powerful merchant house in the world, until Tribuno Candiano went insane.>
<Oh yeah, you mentioned him. They locked him in a tower, right?>
<Supposedly. Anyways, Claudia said they changed their entire sachets up overnight, and no one does that unless something’s gone really wrong. It means chaos and confusion somewhere on the campo, and it’s easiest to steal things during chaos and confusion.> She sighed. <But it’d need to be something big to get us the cash we need.>
<Why not rob that Mountain place? It looks like it’s full of valuable stuff.>
She laughed lowly. <Yeah, no. No one — and I mean no one—has ever broken into the Mountain. You couldn’t break into that place even if you had the wand of Crasedes himself. I hear weird rumors about the Mountain — that it’s haunted or…well. Something worse.>
<So what are you going to do?>
<Figure it out. However I can.> She yawned, stretched out, and lay down on the flat stone roof. <We have a few hours until sunset. I’m going to rest until then.>
<What, you’re going to sleep on a stone roof?>
<Yeah? What’s wrong with that?>
Clef paused. <I get the sense, kid, that you’ve lived in some rough places.>
Sancia lay on the roof, staring up at the sky. She thought about Sark, about her apartment — which, as barren as it was, now seemed like a paradise to her.
<Talk to me, Clef,> she said.
<Huh? About what?>
<Anything. Anything besides what’s going on right now.>
<I see.> He thought about it. <Hmm. Well. There are thirty-seven scrivings currently active within a thousand-foot radius of us. Fourteen of those are interrelated, actively engaged with each other, feeding information or heat or energy back and forth.> His voice grew soft, and a singsong cadence crept into it. <I wish you could see them as I see them. The ones below us are dancing, in a way, seesawing back and forth ever so gently as one hands off heat into a giant block of dense stone, storing it deep in its bones, while another scriving scoops it up and spills the heat across a plate of glass beads, softening them, melting them, until they form a plate of clearest glass…There’s a scrived light on in a bedroom across the street from us. Its light is rosy and soft. Its scrivings stored up all this old candlelight and now they’re slowly letting it leak out a dribble at a time…The light is bouncing, very softly, something’s jostling it. I think a couple is making love on a nearby bed, perhaps…Imagine it — these people sharing their love in light that could be days, weeks, even years old…It’s like making love under starlight, isn’t it?>
Sancia listened to his voice, her eyelids growing heavy.
She was glad to have him here. He was a friend when she had none.
<I wish you could see them as I do, Sancia,> he whispered. <To me, they’re like stars in my mind…>
She slept.
Sancia did not dream anymore, after the operation. Yet sometimes when she slept her memories returned to her, like bones bubbling up from the depths of a tar pit.
There on the roof, Sancia slept, and remembered.
She remembered the hot sun of the plantations, the bite and slash of the sugarcane leaves. She remembered the taste of old bread and the swarms of stinging flies and the tiny, hard cots in the shoddy huts.
She remembered the smell of shit and urine, festering in an open pit mere yards from where they slept. The sound of whimpering and weeping at night. The panicked cries from the woods as the guards hauled away a woman, or sometimes a man, and did as they pleased with them.
And she remembered the house on the hill, behind the plantation house, where the fancy men from Tevanne had worked.
She remembered the wagon that had trundled away from the house on the hill every day at dusk. And she remembered how the flies had followed that wagon so closely, its contents hidden beneath a thick tarp.
It hadn’t taken long for everyone to realize what was happening. One night, a slave would simply vanish — the next day, the wagon would trundle away from the house on the hill, a horrid reek following it.
Some had whispered that the missing slaves had escaped, but everyone had known this was a lie. Everyone had understood what was happening. Everyone knew about the screams they heard from the house on the hill, always at midnight. Always, always, always at midnight, every night.
Yet they’d been voiceless and helpless. Though they’d outnumbered the Tevannis eight to one on the island, the Tevannis bore armaments of terrifying power. They’d seen what happened when a slave raised a hand against their master, and wanted no part of it.
One night she’d tried to run away. They’d caught her easily. And perhaps because she’d tried to run away, they’d decided that she would be next.
Sancia remembered how the house had smelled. Alcohol and preservatives and putrefaction.
She remembered the white marble table in the middle of the basement, its shackles for her wrists and ankles. The thin, metal plates on the walls, covered with strange symbols, and the bright, sharp screws paired with them.