Shit, thought Sancia. God, I hope Gregor got out…
“Tell me now,” said Tomas, “and I might let you live. For a while.”
“The other houses aren’t going to let you get away with this,” said Sancia.
“Sure they will,” he said.
“They’ll rise up against you.”
“No, they won’t.” He laughed. “You want to know why? Because they’re old. All the other houses were raised on traditions, and norms, and rules, and manners. ‘You can do what you like out on the Durazzo,’ their grand old daddies said, ‘but in Tevanne, you conduct yourself with respect.’ Oh, they have their spy games here and there, but it’s all so polite and orderly, really. Like all incumbents, they got old, and fat, and slow, and complacent.” He sat back, sighing thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s the scriving thing — always thinking up rules…But victory belongs to those who move as fast as possible, and break all the rules they need. Me? I don’t give a shit about traditions. I’m more honest about it. I’m a businessman. If I’m making an investment, the only thing I care about is the highest possible yield.”
“You don’t know shit,” said Sancia.
“Oh, some Foundryside whore is going to lecture me on economic philosophy?” He laughed again. “I needed some entertainment.”
“No. Dumbass, I’m from the goddamn plantations,” she said. She grinned at him. “I’ve seen more horrors and torture than your dull little mind could ever dream up. You think you’re going to beat me into submission? With those frail arms, and those delicate wrists? I highly scrumming doubt it.”
He made to strike her again, but again, she didn’t flinch. He glared at her for a moment, then sighed and said, “If he didn’t think you were valuable…” Then he turned to one of his guards. “Go and get Enrico. I guess we’re going to have to hurry this shit along.”
The guard left. Tomas walked over to a cupboard, opened a bottle of bubble rum, and sulkily drank from it. Sancia was reminded of a child who’d had his favorite toy taken away from him. “You’re lucky, you know,” said Tomas. “Enrico thinks you’re a potential resource. Probably because he’s a scriver, and most scrivers seem to be idiots. Awkward, ugly little people who’d prefer strings of sigils to the press of warm flesh…But he did say he wanted to get a look at you before I had my fun.”
“Great,” she muttered. Her eye fell on the table of Occidental treasures.
“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” said Tomas. “All this old garbage. I paid a fortune to steal this box from Orso.” He patted the cracked, lexicon-looking thing. “Had to hire a bunch of pirates to intercept it. But we can’t even get the damned thing open. Scrivers seem to know everything — except the value of money.”
She looked at the box for a moment longer. She started to think she knew why it looked familiar.
I’ve seen it before, she thought. In Clef’s vision, in the Cattaneo…there was that thing, wrapped in black, standing on the dunes…and beside it, a box…
There was the echo of footsteps. Then a rumpled, pale, puffy-eyed clerk in Candiano colors emerged from a hallway. Sancia recognized him as the clerk from the Cattaneo foundry, the one Tomas had addressed in the room with the nude girl. He was a bit pudgy and soft-faced, like an overgrown boy. “Y-yes, sir?” he said. Then he saw Sancia. “Uh. Is that one of your…ah, companions?”
“Don’t be insulting, Enrico,” said Tomas. He nodded at the imperiat. “You were right. I turned it on. It told me where she was.”
“You…you did?” he said, astonished. “That’s her?” He laughed and ran to the imperiat. “How…how amazing!” He did the same thing Tomas had done earlier, waving the imperiat next to her head and listening to it whine. “My God. My God…A scrived human being!”
“Enrico is the most talented scriver on the campo,” said Tomas. He said this sullenly, as if he resented the very idea. “He’s been neck deep in Tribuno’s shit for years. He’s probably sporting a stiffer candle right now than when he caught his mother bathing.”
Enrico turned bright pink, and he turned the imperiat down until it was a low whine. “A scrived human…Does she know where the key is?”
“She hasn’t said so yet,” said Tomas. “But I’ve been soft with her. I thought I’d let you take a look at her before I started cutting off her toes and asking her hard questions.”
A chill ran through Sancia’s body. I’ve got to get away from this sadistic little shit.
“So, she’s scrived,” said Tomas. “So what? How does that make her different? And how does that help us make imperiats, like you said?”
“Well, I don’t know if it will,” said Enrico. “But it’s an interesting acquisition.”
“Why?” demanded Tomas. “You said we needed Occidental items to complete the alphabet. That only then could we start making our own imperiats. What does this grubby slut have to do with it?”
“Yes, sir, yes. But…well. Here.” Enrico looked at her, his face slightly ashamed, like he’d caught her undressed. “Which…which plantation was the procedure done on?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. She could tell she frightened him.
“Answer him,” said Tomas.
“Silicio,” she said reluctantly.
“I thought as much,” said Enrico. “I thought so! That was one of Tribuno’s personal plantations! He went there quite a lot himself, at the start of things. So the experiments being done out there were likely orchestrated by him.”
“So?” said Tomas, impatient.
“Well…we’ve theorized so far that the imperiat was a hierophantic weapon. A tool to use against other hierophants or other scrivers during some kind of Occidental civil war, to detect and control and suppress their rigs.”
“And?” said Tomas.
“My suspicion is that the imperiat doesn’t identify normal scrivings,” said Enrico. “Otherwise it would have been wailing the second we got close to Tevanne. It only identifies scrivings that it feels could be a threat — in other words…it only identifies Occidental scrivings. So…do you see?”
Tomas stared at him, then at Sancia. “Wait. So you’re saying…”
“Yes, sir.” Enrico wiped sweat from his brow. “I think she is an anomaly in two manners, and they must be interrelated. She is the only scrived human we have ever seen. And written inside her body…the very things that power her, that make her work, are Occidental sigils — the language of the hierophants.”
“What?” said Tomas.
“Huh?” said Sancia.
Enrico put back down the imperiat. “Well. That is my suspicion, I believe, from reading Tribuno’s notes.”
“That doesn’t make any damned sense!” said Tomas. “No one — and I note to my frustration that this also includes us—has ever been able to duplicate anything the hierophants have ever done! Why would it work here, in a damned human being? Why would not one, but two incredibly unlikely things be achieved at once?”
“Well,” said Enrico, “we know that the hierophants were able to produce devices using the, ah, spiritual transference.”
“Human sacrifice,” said Sancia.
“Shut up!” snapped Tomas. “Go on.”
“That method is a zero-sum exchange,” said Enrico. “The entirety of the spirit is transferred to the vessel. But within this, ah, person before us, the relationship is symbiotic. The scrivings do not sap their host entirely, but rather borrow from her spirit, altering it, becoming a part of it.”