Sancia dropped down the lexicon shaft as fast as she could, leaping from rung to rung until she came to the ground floor. Then she staggered back down the passageways, heading to the rubbish room in the basement, where Berenice had so adeptly carved the hole in the wall.
She could hear footsteps in the hallways behind her and above her, men shouting and doors flying open. She ran as fast as she could, but her head felt slow and sluggish. She tasted blood in her mouth and realized her nose was bleeding quite a lot.
I hope I don’t goddamn bleed out before I make it out of here, she thought wearily. Not after all this work.
Then she heard a voice far behind her: “Stop! Stop, you!”
She looked over her shoulder and saw an armored guard standing far down at the end of the passageway behind her. She saw him lift his espringal, and leapt behind a corner just as a scrived bolt shrieked down the hallway, cracking into the wall on the far end. Scrumming terrible place to dodge shots, she thought. But she had no choice: she flung herself back around the corner and sprinted for the door to the rubbish bin.
“She’s here, she’s here!” screamed the guard.
She reached the metal door, threw it open, and leapt into the darkness, slamming the door behind her. She fumbled down the dark steps to the hole in the wall, half-worried she’d fall off the walkway into the piles of scrap metal below. Then there was a harsh crack-crack-crack, and the room filled with weak light. She looked back to see the door behind now had three large holes in it, undoubtedly put there by scrived bolts.
God, they’ll tear through that in a second! she thought.
“Come on!” hissed a voice in the darkness. “Come on!”
She turned and saw a light on the far wall — Berenice’s scrived light, shining through the hole she’d made. Sancia leapt down the steps and threw herself through the breach.
“We won’t run far!” she gasped as she emerged. “They’re right behind me!”
“I am aware of that.” Berenice had her back to her, and she seemed to be fiddling with something in the roof of the tunnel. “There,” she said, stepping back. Sancia saw it was the anchor she’d used to open the grate of the pipe, but now it was attached to the end of a spike that looked like it’d been stabbed up into the bricks. “Come on. Now we really need to run.”
Sancia staggered to her feet and limped down the tunnel. There was a faint crackling sound behind them.
“No, faster,” said Berenice, anxious. “Like, much faster.” She grabbed Sancia, threw her arm over her shoulder, and hauled her forward just as the crackling grew to a rumble.
Sancia looked back to see the brick section of the tunnel suddenly collapse, sending a wall of dust flying at them. “Holy hell,” she said.
“I don’t think it should bring down the metal parts of the pipe,” said Berenice as they hobbled up to the grate. “But I would prefer not to find out so — up! Up and out, now!”
Sancia wiped blood from her face, grabbed the rungs, and started to climb.
20
“I …I thought I told you just to follow them!” said Orso, aghast.
“Well, we did that,” croaked Sancia. She spat another mouthful of blood into a bucket. “You didn’t say not to do all the other stuff.”
“To break into a foundry?” he squawked. “And…and to collapse its metallurgical outtake piping? I had thought such things would have easily been beyond the pale of common sense — or am I mad, Berenice?”
He glared at Berenice, who was sitting in the corner of his office, sorting through the notes Sancia had stolen. Gregor leaned over her shoulder, idly reviewing them with his hands clasped behind his back. “I was merely confirming a suspicion you had articulated, sir,” she said.
“And which one was that?”
She looked up. “That it was Tomas Ziani who’s behind all this. That is why you spoke to Estelle at the meeting yesterday — correct, sir?”
Gregor blinked and stood. “Estelle Ziani? Wait — the daughter of Tribuno Candiano? Orso talked to her?”
“You sure are telling a hell of a lot of tales out of school!” Orso snarled at her.
“Why did you suspect Ziani, Orso?” asked Gregor.
Orso scowled at Berenice, then tried to think of what to say. “When I was at the council meeting, with everyone talking about the blackout, none of the house leaders seemed to act odd — except possibly Ziani. He looked at me, at my neck, and he went out of his way to dig at me on the hierophants. There was something to that that just…bothered me. Just a hunch.”
“A good hunch,” said Sancia. She blew her nose into a rag. “I mean, I saw him—all of him. He’s behind this. All of it. And he’s trying to build dozens, if not hundreds, of his own imperiats.”
There was a silence as they all considered this.
“Which means that, if Tomas Ziani figures this process out,” said Gregor quietly, “he can essentially hold the civilized world hostage.”
“I…I still can’t believe it’s Ziani,” said Orso. “I asked Estelle if she would tell me if Ziani was coming after me, and she said she would.”
“You trusted the man’s wife to betray him?” asked Gregor.
“Well, yes? But it sounds like Tomas Ziani is basically keeping her locked in the Mountain, much like her father. So although she might have a reason to betray him, I don’t know how much she could actually know.”
“Uh, I don’t know who this Estelle person is,” said Sancia, “but I just assume it’s someone Orso is scrumming?”
They all stared at her, scandalized.
“Okay,” said Sancia, “someone you were scrumming then?”
Orso’s face worked as he tried to figure out how offended he was. “I was…acquainted with her, once. When I worked for Tribuno Candiano.”
“You were scrumming your boss’s daughter?” said Sancia, impressed. “Wow. Gutsy.”
“As entertaining as Orso’s personal life is,” said Gregor loudly, “we should return to the issue at hand. How can we prevent Tomas Ziani from building up an arsenal of hierophantic weapons?”
“And how does he even plan to make them?” asked Berenice, paging through Tribuno’s notes. “It seems to be going wrong for him somehow…”
“Please, Sancia, go over what Ziani said,” said Orso. “Line by line.”
She did so, describing every word of the conversation she’d heard.
“So,” said Orso when she was finished. “He called it a shell. And described some…some kind of failed exchange?”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “He also mentioned a ritual. I don’t know why he called it a shell, though — shells have something inside them, usually.”
“And he thought the shell itself was the problem,” said Berenice. “The imperiats they’d made somehow weren’t exactly like the original imperiat.”
“Yeah. That seemed to be it.”
There was a pause. Then Berenice and Orso looked at each other in horror.
“It’s the Occidental alphabet,” Berenice said. “The lingai divina.”
“Yes,” said Orso faintly.
“He’s…he’s missing a piece. A sigil, or more. That’s got to be it!”
“Yes.” Orso heaved a deep sigh. “That’s why he’s been stealing Occidental artifacts. That’s why he stole my scrumming key! Of course. He wants to complete the alphabet. Or at least get enough of it to make a functional imperiat.”