Gregor hugged the wall of the carriage as the bolt came hurtling down. The young woman screamed as it thudded into the mud below them.
Gregor and the young woman looked at it, then stared at each other.
“I scrumming hate being right,” she said.
12
The entire theory of scriving relied on the idea that you could convince an object to behave like something that it wasn’t. But the early Tevanni scrivers figured out pretty quick that it was a lot easier to convince an object it was something it was similar to, rather than something it was not similar to at all.
In other words, it would not take much effort to scrive a block of copper into thinking it was a block of iron. However, it would take an impossible amount of effort to convince the block of copper that it was actually, say, a block of ice, or a pile of pudding, or a fish. The more convincing an object needed, the more complicated the scriving definitions became, and the more of a lexicon they’d take up, until finally you were using a whole lexicon or even multiple lexicons to make one scriving work.
The first scrivers hit this wall pretty quickly. Because one of the initial things they tried to alter was an object’s gravity — and gravity proved to be a deeply stubborn bastard that simply could not be convinced to do things it didn’t believe it ought to.
The first efforts to scrive objects to sort of gently, casually step around the laws of gravity were utter disasters — explosions, mutilations, and maimings were common. This had been a great surprise to the scrivers, since they knew from the old stories that the hierophants had been able to make objects float across the room, and some hierophants were recorded as flying nearly all the time. The hierophant Pharnakes was even said to have crushed an entire army with boulders from a mountaintop.
But eventually, after an untold number of deaths, the Tevanni scrivers came up with a somewhat decent solution.
The laws of gravity would not be outright denied. But it was possible to obey the laws of gravity in very unusual ways. Like scrived bolts — they were convinced they were just obeying gravity; they just had some interesting new ideas about where the ground was, and how long they’d been falling for. Or floating lanterns, which believed they contained a sack full of gas that was lighter than air, though they did not. All these designs acknowledged the laws of gravity. They just obeyed the letter of the laws, rather than the spirit.
But despite these successes, the dream stayed alive: Tevanni scrivers kept trying to find ways to truly defy gravity — to make people float, or fly, just like the hierophants of old. Even though such efforts almost always had lethal side effects.
For example, some scrivers accidentally adjusted their gravity so that two different portions of themselves recognized two different directions of pull, causing their limbs to stretch or simply get ripped clean off their bodies. Others accidentally crushed themselves into a bloody, flat disc, or a ball, or a cube, depending on their methodology. Others gravely underestimated the amount of gravity they should have, and they wound up floating away into the ether until they reached the limits of their lexicon, at which point they rather anticlimactically smashed into the surface of the earth.
This was considered a pleasant way to go. You had something to bury that way.
Many of these attempts had coincided with a larger effort to scrive the human body — and these experiments had been far more horrific than tinkering with gravity.
Unimaginably worse. Unspeakably worse.
And so, after they’d cleaned up all the bloodstains from the umpteenth disaster, the merchant houses had made a rare, diplomatic agreement: they’d all decided that trying to scrive a body or its gravity was to be banned, and never trifled with. Humans had enough danger just handling altered items — they didn’t need to worry about their own limbs or torsos going haywire on them too.
And that was why Gregor Dandolo simply could not believe what he was seeing as he peeked out the top of the carriage: nine men, all dressed in black, running across the building faces with impossibly balletic grace. Some even ran upside down along the overhangs of roofs.
Such a thing was not only illegal, as much as anything could be in Tevanne — it was also, as far as he was aware, technologically impossible.
Three of the men stopped and pointed their espringals at him. Gregor ducked back down as bolts punched into the carriage just where he’d been peeking out.
“They’re good shots too,” he muttered. “Of course.” He considered what to do — but there was little he could accomplish, being stuck in a box in the middle of the road.
“Do you want to live?” asked the girl.
“What?” he said, irritated.
“Do you want to live?” she said again. “Because if you do, you should let me go.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I can help you get out of this.”
“If I let you go, you’ll run off the first second you can get! Or you’ll stab me in the back and leave me to get shot full of bolts.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But they’re here for me, not you. It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you put those bastards in the ground, Captain. I’d be happy to help you do that.”
“And what could you do to help me?”
“Something. Which is better than nothing. Besides, Captain, you owe me one — I saved your life, remember?”
Scowling, Gregor rubbed his mouth. He hated this. He’d worked ceaselessly to get here, to capture this girl who’d been the source of all his problems, and now he was either going to die for having her, or have to let her go.
But then, slowly, Gregor’s priorities shifted.
The men flying around up there almost certainly worked for a merchant house — only a house could have outfitted them with such rigs.
A merchant house is trying to kill me to get the girl, he thought. So they almost certainly also commissioned the theft, of course.
And it was one thing to catch a grubby thief and make a show of her as the cause of great evils in Tevanne — but it was quite another to expose massive misconduct, conspiracy, and death being perpetrated by a merchant house faction right here in the city. The merchant houses did conduct espionage and sabotage against one another, everyone knew that — but there was a bright, unspoken line they did not cross.
They did not make war upon one another. War in Tevanne would be disastrous, everyone knew that.
But a bunch of flying assassins, Gregor thought, certainly looks a lot like war.
He reached into the front seat, rummaged around, and brought back a thick metal cord. He quickly fastened it to the girl’s left foot with a small, scrived key, which had a dial on the head.
“I said to let me go!” she said. “Not tie me up more.”
“This thing works the same way as the cords on you right now.” He held up the key and pointed to it. “I turn up the dial, and it gets heavier, and heavier. You try to run or kill me, and you’ll find yourself stuck in one spot out in the open. Or it could crush your foot. So I recommend you behave.”
To his frustration, this didn’t seem to intimidate her much. “Yeah, yeah. Just get the rest of these things off me, all right?”
Gregor glared at her. Then he pulled the release key out of the stock of his espringal and used it to free her. “I assume you haven’t ever dealt with assailants such as this before,” he said as she shook off the cords.