“I’ve done dumber shit in the past few days.”
Berenice took a breath, and twisted the tops of all four brass spheres, one after another. Then she stepped back and slowly moved away, like she was preparing to run.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the color of the brick changed, ever so slightly, growing just a tiny bit darker. Then came a creaking sound. The bricks shuddered and rippled — and then, suddenly, the wall fractured in the middle in a perfect circle, like someone had carved it with a saw.
“It works,” said Berenice. “It works!”
“Great,” said Sancia. “Now, how the hell do we get that big plug of stone out of the way?”
“Oh. Right.” Berenice pulled out yet another trinket from her pockets: this one appeared to be just a small iron handle with a button on the side. “Just a construction scriving. It’ll stick to the plug’s center.” She placed the handle in the center of the stone plug, confirmed it was stuck, and gave a mighty heave.
Nothing happened. She tugged again, her face turning pink, and stopped, gasping. “Well,” she said. “I didn’t quite anticipate this.”
“Here,” said Sancia. She knelt, gripped the handle, placed one foot against the wall, and pulled.
Slowly, with a low grinding noise, the short stone column slid a few inches out of the wall. Sancia took a breath and pulled again, and it finally fell to the tunnel floor with a plunk, leaving about a two-foot-wide hole in the wall.
“Good,” said Berenice, miffed. “Well done. Can you fit?”
“Keep your voice down. Yeah, I can fit.” She crouched and peered into the hole. The room on the other side was dark. “Do you know what that is over there?” she whispered.
Berenice turned up her scrived light and stuck it through the hole. They glimpsed a wide room with a steel walkway running around the edges, and a huge heap of twisted metals in the center. “It’s the waste bin, essentially — all the castoff bits of metals go here to be melted down and reused.”
“But I’ll really be inside the foundry — yes?”
“Yes?”
She shook her head. “Goddamn. I can’t believe we just broke into a foundry just with some random shit in your pockets.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. But we’re not there yet. This is the basement. The administrative offices are on the third floor. If you want to find out what’s going on here, that’s the place to look.”
“Any advice for how to get up there?”
“No. I’ve no idea what doors will be locked or what passages will be blocked or guarded. You’ll be on your own. I…assume you don’t want me to come with you?”
“Two house-breakers makes for a quick trip to the loop,” said Sancia. “It’d be better if you kept a lookout.”
“Fine with me. I can go back to the streets outside, and if I see something I’ll try to think of some way to warn you.”
Sancia slipped her feet into the hole. “You wouldn’t happen to have any more useful rigs, would you?”
“I do. But they are destructive, and foundries are delicate — meaning if you cut through or break the wrong thing, you would die and probably take a lot of people with you.”
“Great. I sure as shit hope we get something out of this,” said Sancia, sliding forward.
“Me too,” said Berenice. “Good luck.” Then she trotted back down the tunnel.
Sancia slipped through the hole in the wall, stood up, and tried to get her bearings. It was pitch-black in there now, and she was reluctant to use up her talents just to get around a room.
<Scrived lock on the door on your left,> said Clef. <Up the steps. I can sense it. All the pipes and walls are crawling with sigils. The entire place is a device that makes other devices…Wow.>
<And it’s a headache to be inside it,> said Sancia, stumbling over to the door. She fumbled for the lock, stuffed Clef inside, and opened it. She was relieved to see weak light filtering through the hallway on the other side,
Using Clef, Sancia unlocked door after door as she penetrated the depths of the foundry. She was astounded at the sheer density of the thing, all tiny passageways that led to huge, complicated processing bays, full of giant loomlike devices or cranes that perched over tables or lathes like spiders weaving cocoons about their prey. The heat within the foundry was immense, but there was a constant wind in every hall and passage, carrying the hot air out to — well, somewhere, she assumed. It was like being trapped in the innards of some kind of giant, mindless creature.
Most of it was deserted. Which made sense, since only a portion of it was being used now. But then…
<Three guards up ahead,> said Clef. <Heavily armed.>
Sancia looked ahead. The passageway ended in a closed wooden door. Presumably there was some kind of hallway being guarded beyond it.
<What floor are we on?> she asked.
<Still on the ground floor, I think.>
<Ugh.>
She took off a glove and felt the wall, then the ceiling. The foundry was so alive with scrivings that this felt like walking under a powerful waterfall — the sudden pressure almost knocked her over. But she held on, walking along the walls, her bare fingers trailing over the stone and the metal, until she felt a long, narrow, vertical cavity just ahead…
A hatch. A shaft.
She took her hand away, shook herself, and withdrew back down the hallway until she found a small door. A sign on the front read: LEXICON MAINTENANCE ACCESS. The lock on the front was deeply forbidding.
She took Clef out and stuck him in the keyhole. There was a burst of information, and Clef batted the lock’s defenses away like it was a wall of straw.
<That seemed easy,> she said, opening the door. The shaft within was narrow and ran perfectly straight, up and down, with ladder bars on the opposite side. It was dark within, so she couldn’t see what was above or below.
<It was. But…>
<But what?>
<There’s…something down there.>
<Yeah. The lexicon.> She reached out and started climbing up.
<Right. But it feels…familiar.>
<How do you mean?>
<I don’t know. It’s like…if you smelled the perfume of someone you hadn’t smelled in a long, long time. It’s weird. I’m not sure why.>
Sancia climbed until she came to the third floor. She turned until she was facing the door, and blindly found the handle. <Anyone out there?>
<Oh, hell yeah. This place is crawling with armed men. Go to the fourth floor. It’s deserted.>
She did as he asked, came to the fourth floor, and opened the hatch. This floor, unlike the others, had windows. Slashes of moonlight lay scattered across the blank stone floor. It looked like this area was mostly storage — lots of boxes, but not much else.
She glanced out a nearby window, got her bearings, and started off toward the administrative offices. <I’m guessing there aren’t any other unguarded passageways down to the next floor.>
<None.>
<Great. How secure are the windows?>
<Well…They’re basically scrived to be unbreakable, so no one, you know, tries to shoot bolts into the foundry. But it looks like they do swing open, at the tops, to let out heat or smoke.> There was a pause. <Uh, before you ask, they do open wide enough to let you in or out, probably.>