“I’m lost,” said Gregor. “Alphabets?”
“We only have pieces of the Occidental alphabet of sigils,” said Berenice. “A handful here, a handful there. It’s the biggest obstacle to Occidental research. It’s like trying to solve a riddle in a foreign language where you only know the vowels.”
“I see,” said Gregor. “But if you steal enough samples — the bits and pieces and fragments that have the right sigils on them…”
“Then you can complete the alphabet,” said Orso. “You can finally speak the language to command your tools to have hierophantic capabilities. Theoretically. Though it sounds like that greasy bastard Ziani is having a time of it.”
“But he is getting help,” said Berenice. “It is Tribuno Candiano who’s writing the sigil strings to make rigs like the gravity plates, and the listening device. Only he’s doing it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, in his madness.”
“But that still doesn’t hang together for me,” said Orso. “The Tribuno I knew didn’t bother with the usual gravity bullshit so many scrivers wasted their lives on. His interests were far…grander.” He pulled a face, like remembering Tribuno’s interests disturbed him. “I feel like it just can’t be him.”
“The Tribuno you knew was sane,” said Gregor.
“True,” admitted Orso. “Either way, it sounds like Ziani does have all of Tribuno’s Occidental collection — that would be the trove that he’d moved out of the Mountain, right?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He mentioned some other artifacts he’d hidden away somewhere — mostly to hide it from you, Orso.”
Orso smirked. “Well. At least we’ve got the scrummer rattled. I suspect he’s been stealing Occidental artifacts from all kinds of people. He must have quite the hoard. And…there was that last bit…the one I find most confusing. They had to dispose of a body?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He made it sound like they’d been disposing of bodies for some time. Didn’t seem to matter whose bodies they were. I get the impression it had something to do with this ritual — but I don’t understand any of that.”
Gregor held up his hands. “We’re getting off track. Alphabets, hierophants, bodies — yes, all that is troubling. But the core issue is that Tomas Ziani intends to manufacture devices that can annihilate scriving on a mass scale. They would be as bolts in a vast quiver to him and his forces. But his entire strategy rests upon one item — the original imperiat. That’s the key to all of his ambitions.” He looked around at them. “So. If he were to lose that…”
“Then that would be a massive setback,” said Berenice.
“Yes,” said Gregor. “Lose the original, and he’ll have nothing to copy.”
“And if Sancia is right, Tomas flat-out said where he was keeping it,” said Orso thoughtfully. He turned in his chair to look out the window.
Sancia followed his gaze. There, huddled in the distant cityscape of Tevanne, was a vast, arching dome, like a smooth, black growth in the center of the city: the Mountain of the Candianos.
“Ah, hell,” she sighed.
“It’s insane,” said Sancia, pacing. “The damned idea is insane!”
“Breaking into a foundry on a whim was pretty goddamn insane,” said Orso. “But you seemed game about that!”
“We caught them with their hose down,” said Sancia. “In an abandoned foundry in the middle of nowhere. That’s different from trying to break into the scrumming Mountain, maybe the most guarded place in the damned city, if not the world! I doubt if Berenice has some delightful trinket in her pockets that could help us get into there.”
“It is insane,” said Gregor. “But it is, regrettably, our only option. I doubt if Ziani can be lured out of the Mountain with the original imperiat. So we must go in.”
“You mean me,” said Sancia. “I doubt if your dumb asses will be the ones being dropped in there.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Gregor. “But I admit, I’ve no idea how to break into such a place. Orso — did you live there ever?”
“I did once,” said Orso. “When it was freshly built. That was a hell of a long time ago, it seems now.”
“You did?” asked Sancia. “Are the rumors true? Is it really…haunted?”
She half expected Orso to burst out laughing at the notion, but he didn’t. Instead he leaned back in his chair and said, “You know, I’m not sure. It’s…difficult to describe. It’s big, for one thing. The sheer size of the thing is a feat in and of itself. It’s like a city in there. But that wasn’t the oddest thing. The oddest thing about the Mountain was that it remembered.”
“Remembered what?” asked Sancia.
“What you did,” said Orso. “What you’d done. Who you were. You’d walk into a bathing room at the same time every day and find a bath already drawn for you, piping hot. Or you’d walk down the hall to your lift at the usual time and find it waiting for you. The changes would be subtle, and slow, just incremental adjustments — but, slowly, slowly, people got used to the Mountain knowing what they were doing inside of it, and adjusting for them. They got used to this…this place predicting what they’d do.”
“It learned?” said Gregor. “A scrived structure learned, like it had a mind of its own?”
“That I don’t know. It seemed to. Tribuno designed the thing in his later years, when he’d gotten strange, and he never shared his methods with me. He’d grown hugely secretive by then.”
“How could it know where people were, sir?” asked Berenice.
A guilty look came over Orso’s face. “Okay, well, I did have something to do with that…You know the trick with my workshop door?”
“It’s scrived to sense your blood…Wait. That’s how the Mountain keeps track of everyone inside? It senses every resident’s blood?”
“Essentially,” said Orso. “Every new resident has to log a drop of blood with the Mountain’s core. Otherwise it won’t let them into where they need to go. Your blood is your sachet, getting you in and out. Visitors are either restricted to visitor areas, or they have to carry around sachets of their own.”
“That’s why the Mountain is so secure,” said Sancia quietly. “It knows who’s supposed to be there.”
“How could it do all that?” asked Gregor. “How could a device be so powerful?”
“Hell, I don’t know. But I did once see a specification list for the Mountain’s core — and it included cradles for six full-capacity lexicons.”
Berenice stared at him. “Six lexicons? For one building?”
“Why go to all that effort?” asked Gregor. “Why do all this in secret, and never capitalize on it, never share it?”
“Tribuno’s ambitions were vast,” said Orso. “I don’t think he wanted to mimic the hierophants — he wanted to become one. He grew obsessed with a specific Occidental myth. Probably the most famous one about the most famous hierophant.” He sat back. “Besides his magic wand, what’s the one thing everyone knows about Crasedes the Great?”
“He kept an angel in a box,” said Berenice.
“Or a genie in a bottle,” said Gregor.
“He built his own god,” said Sancia.
“They all amount to the same thing, don’t they?” said Orso. “A…a fabricated entity with unusual powers. An artificial entity with an artificial mind.”