Foundryside: A Novel (The Founders Trilogy) Read online

  Because another thing that the campos had that the Commons did not was laws.

  Each campo had its own rules and law enforcement, all of which fully applied within their rambling, crooked boundaries. But because each campo’s individuality was considered sacrosanct, this meant there was no defined set of citywide laws, nor was there any real citywide law enforcement, or judicial system, or even prisons—to establish such things, the Tevanni elite had decided, would be to suggest that the power of Tevanne superseded the powers of the campos.

  So if you were part of a merchant house, and resided on a campo, you had such things.

  If you didn’t, and you lived in the Commons, then you were just…there. And, considering all the disease and starvation and violence and whatnot, you probably weren’t there for long.

  said Clef.

  said Sancia, taking a left.

  Finally they came to their destination. Up ahead, the wet, rambling rookeries of Foundryside came to a sharp stop at a tall, smooth white wall, about sixty feet high, clean and perfect and unblemished.

  said Clef.

 

 

  That disturbed her. She could tell if a rig was scrived if she got within a few feet of it—she’d start hearing that muttering in her head. But Clef seemed to be able to do it from dozens of feet away.

  She walked along the wall until she found it. Set in the face of the wall was a huge, engraved bronze door, intricate and ornate, with a house loggotipo in the middle: the hammer and the chisel.

  said Clef.

 

 

 

 

  She approached the door and heard a faint chanting in her head. She stood before the door. It was tall, about ten feet high or so.

  he said with surprising relish.

 

 

  The answer, Sancia knew, was “a lot.” Tampering with anything related to the merchant houses was a great way to lose a hand, or a head. She knew this wasn’t like her, to be walking around the Commons with stolen goods in broad daylight—especially considering this particular stolen good was the most advanced scrived rig she’d ever seen.

  It was unprofessional. It was risky. It was stupid.

  But that nonchalant comment of Sark’s—They used to own you, you know what they’re like—it echoed in her head. She was surprised to find how much she resented it, and she wasn’t sure why. She’d always known when she was doing work for the merchant houses, and it’d never inspired her to play the job wrong before.

  But to have him just come out and say that—it burned her.

  begged Clef.

  She approached the door, eyeing the scrivings running along its frame. She heard the faint muttering in her head, as she did whenever she was close to anything altered…

  Then she knelt and put Clef into the lock, and the muttering turned into a scream.

  * * *

  Screaming questions poured into her mind, all of them directed at Clef, asking him dozens if not hundreds of questions, trying to figure out what he was. Many of them went by too fast for her to understand, but she caught some of them:

  bellowed the door at Clef.

 

 

 

 

 

  And on and on and on. It all went too fast for Sancia to really understand—and how she was even hearing it was stupefying to her—but she could still catch snatches of the conversation. It sounded like security questions, like the scrived door was expecting a specific key, and it was slowly figuring out that Clef was not that key.

 

  Clef said.

  A pause.

 

 

 

 

  Information poured back and forth between Clef and the door. Sancia was still trying to catch her breath—it was like trying to swallow an ocean all at once. She suspected that, as long as she was touching Clef, she could hear whatever he heard as well.

  But all she could think was: That’s what a scrived device is? That? It’s…like, a mind? They think?

  She’d never have expected this. Certainly, she was used to hearing a faint muttering when she was close to scrived items—but she’d still assumed they were just things, just objects.

  said Clef.

  said the door, now uncertain,

  asked Clef.

 

 

 

  More messages poured back and forth between the door and Clef. She began to understand: when the proper scrived key was inserted into the door, it would send a signal to the door, which would tell it to withdraw its bolts and pivot outward. But Clef was confusing it, somehow, asking it too many questions about which direction it was supposed to pivot, and how fast or hard.

  Clef said to the door.

 

 

 

 

  A massive amount of information coursed through the two entities. Sancia couldn’t understand a bit of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Silence.

  Then the door started quivering. And then…

  There was a loud crack, and the door opened. But it opened inward, and astonishingly hard—so hard that, since she was still holding Clef, and Clef was still in the lock, she was almost jerked off her feet.

  Clef popped out as the door fell backward, its bronze face falling away…and then she saw the streets of the Candiano campo within.

  Sancia stared down an empty Candiano street, alarmed, terrifie
d, and bewildered. It was a totally different world on the other side of the wall: clean cobblestone streets, tall buildings with sculpted facades of white moss clay, colorful banners and flags hanging from cords running over the paths, and…

  Water. Fountains with just water in them, real, clear, running water. She could see three of them, even from here.

  Even though she was stunned and terrified, she couldn’t help but think: They use water—clean water—as decoration? Clean water was impossibly rare in the Commons, and most people drank weak cane wine instead. To just have it bubbling away in the streets for no reason was incomprehensible.

  She came to her wits. She stared at the door, and saw a ragged hole in the wall beside it. She realized the door had never retracted its bolts—it had just swung backward so hard that the shafts had torn right through the wall.

  “Holy…Holy shit!” whispered Sancia.

  She turned and ran. Fast.

  said Clef in her head.

  she thought, running.

 

 

  said Clef. He sounded relaxed, even drunk. She got the mad idea that cracking a scrived device gave Clef something akin to a powerful sexual release.

  She dashed around a corner, then leaned up against the wall, panting.

 

  Sancia then quickly attempted to explain that a scrum hole on a ship referred to the vents that allowed waves to wash out the fecal matter in the latrines. But some matter inevitably built up in the scrum hole, so crewmen would have to shove poles down into the holes to clear it out, which, sailors being somewhat filthy-minded people, inevitably became slang for the sexual practice of…

  said Clef.

  she asked.

  said Clef.

 

  There was a long pause. he said, and he sounded somewhat unsettled.

 

 

 

  Another long silence. asked Clef quietly.

  Sancia took that as a no.

  he said,

  Sancia froze.

  said Clef.

  she demanded.

 

 

 

 

  Clef said, now sounding confused again.

  Sancia slowly leaned back against the wall. The world felt wobbly and distant to her as she tried to process all of this.

  To begin with, it now seemed abundantly clear that Clef was suffering from some kind of memory loss. It felt odd to diagnose a key with a mental affliction, given that Sancia still didn’t understand how or even if he possessed something resembling a mind. But if he did have a mind, that long time spent trapped in the dark—decades, if not centuries—would have been more than enough to break it.

  Perhaps Clef was damaged. Either way, it seemed Clef did not know his own potential—and that was troubling, since Clef already seemed stupefyingly powerful.

  Because though few understood how scriving worked, everyone in the world understood that it was both powerful and reliable. When merchant house ships—scrived to part the waters with incredible ease, and sporting altered sails that always billowed with the perfect breeze at the perfect angle—pulled up in front of your city and pointed their vast, scrived weaponry at you, you understood that all those weapons would work perfectly well, and you’d promptly surrender.

  The alternative—the idea that those ships might malfunction, or fail—was inconceivable.

  But it wasn’t anymore. Not to Sancia, clutching Clef in her hand.

  Scriving formed the foundation of the Tevanni empire. It had won countless cities, built up an army of slaves, and sent them to work in the plantation isles. But now, in Sancia’s mind, that foundation was beginning to shift, and crack…

  Then her skin went cold. If I were a merchant house, she thought to herself, I’d do everything in my power to destroy Clef, and make sure no one ever, ever knew he’d existed.

  said Clef cheerily.

  She was wondering that herself.

 

 

 

  She rubbed her mouth. Then she stood up, hung Clef back around her neck, and started off.

  6

  Sancia slipped down alleys and passageways and crossed the carriage fairways of Foundryside until she came to the next Commons neighborhood—Old Ditch. Foundryside might have been unpleasant to live in because of the residents—the neighborhood was notorious for its dense concentration of criminals—but Old Ditch was unpleasant due to its environment: since it was situated next to the Tevanni tanneries, the whole area smelled like death and rot.

  Sancia did not mind such odors, however, and she wandered down a meandering alley, peering through the staggered rookeries and wooden shacks. The alley ended in a small, bland door, but hanging above it were four lit colored lanterns—three red, one blue.

  Not here, she thought.

  She returned to the main street, then walked around a block until she came to a basement door. Four lanterns hung outside—again, three red, one blue.

  Not here, either. She walked back to the main thoroughfare.

  asked Clef.

  she said.

 

 

 

 

  She peered through a leaning iron fence at a crumbling stone courtyard. At the very back was a long stairwell down, and hanging above it were four lanterns—yet unlike the others, these were three blue, one red.

/>   Sancia hopped the fence and crossed the courtyard. She walked down the dark stairwell to a thick wooden door and knocked three times.

  A slot in the door opened. A pair of eyes peered out, narrowed in suspicion. Then they saw Sancia and crinkled into a smile. “Back so soon?” said a woman’s voice.

  “Not by choice,” said Sancia.

  The door fell open and Sancia walked in. Instantly, the murmuring of hundreds of scrived objects filled up her ears.

  said Clef.

 

  The basement within was long, low, and strangely lit. Most of the luminescence came from the ten or so scrived glass lights that had been carelessly laid down on the stone floor. The corners were stuffed with books and piles of paper, all of them covered with instructions and diagrams. In between the lights were rolling carts that would, to the untrained eye, appear to be covered with rubbish: ingots of metals, loops of leather bands, strips of wood, and so on.

  The room was also incredibly hot, thanks to the large scrived bowls at the back that heated copper and bronze and other metals into a broiling liquid, though someone had set up a fan to circulate the hot air out—cleverly powered, Sancia saw, by stolen carriage wheels, which ran and ran in place, operating the fans. About a half dozen people sat around the bowls of molten metals, plucking at the metals with long, stylus-like tools, which they then used to paint symbols on…Well. All kinds of things. Small, bronze balls. Wooden boards. Shoes. Shirt collars. Carriage wheels. Hammers. Knives. Anything and everything.

  The door shut behind Sancia, revealing a tall, thin, dark-skinned woman with a pair of magnifying goggles on top of her head. “If you’re looking for a custom job, San, you’ll have to wait,” she said. “We’ve got a rush order.”