<Tribuno?> she asked. <He came here?>
<Yes. Made this place. He would come and be situated before Obelisk, to…reflect,> said the Mountain. <Think. And speak. I listened. I listened to all he said. And learned to mimic his words.>
<Why did Tribuno Candiano make you?> asked Sancia.
<To attract a hierophant,> said the Mountain.
<What!> said Clef. <That’s insane! The hierophants are all dead!>
<Untrue,> said the Mountain. <Death cannot be the state of hierophants. This was determined, per Tribuno’s research. Look upon Obelisk. Do so.>
She did as the Mountain asked. Nothing about the obelisk looked familiar at first, but…
On one side was a carven visage. An old man’s face, stern and high-cheekboned, and below it, a single hand, grasping a short shaft — a wand, perhaps. Below that was a familiar symbol to Sancia — the butterfly, or the moth. She’d seen it on Clef’s head, and in the engraving of the hierophants in Orso’s workshop.
“Crasedes the Great,” said Sancia.
<Yes,> said the Mountain. <Changed himself. Altered by his practices to become deathless. The Magnus cannot die. He and his kin cannot enter into a death state. They persist in some other fashion, wandering the world. Tribuno built me to attract them, like a moth to flame…>
She found the door and opened it. She started to walk out — but then screamed and fell back.
The door opened on a short, railed balcony, almost at the top of the huge hollow space she’d originally seen — she was hundreds of feet above the ground. If she’d run forward, she could have stumbled over the railing and fallen to her death.
“You could have told me that was there!” she said aloud.
<I would not have permitted death,> said the Mountain, somewhat apologetically.
She returned to the balcony, and saw there was a short walkway that clung to the curving wall around the top of the giant hollow hall. A door was at the far end, and she started to walk to it.
<God,> she said. <This place is huge.>
<Yes,> said the Mountain. <I am vast. He built me to be such. I needed to be, to achieve my Purpose.>
<Did he build you to be a god?> asked Sancia.
<A god? Like the one wrought by Crasedes Magnus?> It sounded amused. <No. But a mind, yes. Yet — how to make a mind? How to make thoughts? How to do speech? Difficult. Must have examples. Many, many, many, many, many examples. Thousands. Millions. Billions. So he…broadened my Purpose.>
<What do you mean?> said Sancia. <How could he broaden your purpose?>
<Many believe I am but walls,> said the Mountain. <And floors. And lifts and doors. But Tribuno wove sigils into my boundaries, my bones…and when he finished I became something…more.>
<Oh!> cried Clef, suddenly. <I…I think I see! I think I see what you are! But, my God, it’s hard to believe it…>
<What do you mean, Clef?> asked Sancia.
<I told you I felt us cross a boundary in the tunnel,> said Clef. <And I felt the pressure in this place, like I was deep under the sea…And I can only converse with an item when it’s touching me, right? But what if, whenever you’re in the Mountain’s boundaries, you are touching it?>
<You mean…>
<Yes. The Mountain isn’t the building — it’s the building and everything inside of it. He’s basically scrived a chunk of reality to act like a device!>
<What! That’s scrumming impossible!> said Sancia. <You can’t scrive reality as you might a button or a plate!>
<Sure you can,> said Clef. <Scrivings already change an object’s reality, right? So why not just make the object really, really big — like a big bubble, or a dome? Then you design it to be sensitive to all the changes and transactions and fluctuations taking place within it. You teach it to notice the changes, to record them — and then, slowly, you teach it to learn.>
<But scriving can’t just do that!> said Sancia. <Scriving can change physical reality, it…can’t make a mind.>
<Maybe it can get close, though,> said Clef. <With enough power behind the designs. And Tribuno got close, didn’t he? Powered by six scrumming lexicons, all specifically designed by Candiano himself toward this one purpose?>
<Yes,> said the Mountain. <I am this place. All that is within it is within me. Yet I do not exert total control. Just as people do not have control over their heart, their bones. I can merely…nudge. Redirect. Delay. Like you said — supply pressure. And I listen. Watch. Learn. A child watches adults to learn what it is to be alive. I have seen such phenomena — I have observed children being born and grow or die within me, thousands and thousands of times. And I have been as a child. I have learned. I have Made myself from Nothing.>
Sancia looked out on the rings and rings of floors below her. <He…he wanted to prove it, didn’t he?> she asked. <Tribuno thought the hierophants were still alive, watching the world. He wanted to show off to them, prove he could do things that they could do — produce a mind of artifice. And then, maybe, they’d come talk to him.>
<Yes.>
<All this,> said Clef. <All this made like a weaverbird weaves its nest, trying to attract its mate…>
Sancia continued across the walkway to the door. She slipped through it and found herself in some kind of maintenance shaft. <It didn’t work, though,> said Sancia. <You said you had yet to fulfill your purpose. No hierophants came.>
<Yes,> said the Mountain.
She walked down the shaft, found yet another door, and opened it onto another marble hallway.
<But maybe not,> the Mountain whispered.
She stopped. <What do you mean, maybe not?> she asked.
<You mean you got close to a hierophant?> asked Clef.
<It is…possible,> said the Mountain.
Sancia continued on until she found a lift that went all the way up, to the fortieth floor. She took a breath, relieved, and set the dial to the thirty-fifth floor.
<You don’t know if you met a hierophant or not?> asked Clef.
<I once contained…something,> said the Mountain. <Men brought it here…The new man.>