Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,12

it, opened her false floor, and took the box out.

She looked at it for a long time. It was unadorned pine, with a brass clasp. She took off her gloves and felt it with her bare hands.

Again, the box’s form and shape bled into her mind—a large cavity, full of papers. Again, she sensed the box’s false bottom, with the linen-wrapped item beneath. Nothing else—and no way for someone to know she’d opened the box, then.

Sancia took a breath and opened it.

She felt sure the papers would be covered in sigil strings, which would have been as good as a death warrant for her—but they were not. They were elaborate-looking sketches of what looked like old carved stones with writing on them.

Someone had written notes on the bottom of a sketch. Sancia was only a little better than literate, but she tried her best, and read:

Artifacts of the Occidental Empire

It is common knowledge that the hierophants of the old empire utilized a number of astounding tools in their works, but their methods remain unclear to us. While our modern-day scriving persuades objects that their reality is something that it is not, the Occidental hierophants were apparently able to use scriving to alter reality directly, commanding the world itself to instantly and permanently change. Many have theorized about how this was possible—but none have conclusive answers.

More questions arise when we study the stories of Crasedes the Great himself, first of the Occidental hierophants. There are many tales and legends of Crasedes utilizing some kind of invisible assistant—sometimes a sprite, or spirit, or entity, often kept in a jar or box that he could open at his discretion—to help him in his labors.

Was this entity another alteration that the hierophants had made to reality? Or did it exist at all? We do not know—but there seems to be some connection to the greatest and most mysterious of the tales of Crasedes the Great: that he built his own artificial god to govern the whole of the world.

If Crasedes was in possession of some kind of invisible entity, perhaps it was but a rough prototype for this last and greatest iteration.

Sancia put the paper down. She understood absolutely none of this. She’d heard something once about the Occidentals during her time in Tevanne—some kind of fairy story about ancient giants, or maybe angels—but no one had ever claimed the hierophants were real. Yet whoever had written these notes—perhaps the owner of the box—certainly seemed to think so.

But she knew these papers weren’t the real treasure. She dumped them out and set them aside.

She reached into the box, touched two fingers to the bottom, and slid the false bottom away. Below was the small item, wrapped in linen, about as long as your hand.

Sancia reached for it, but paused.

She couldn’t afford to screw up this payout. She needed to get the money together to pay a physiquere who could fix the scar on her head, fix what was wrong with her, make her somewhat…normal. Or close to it.

She rubbed the scar on the side of her head as she looked inside the box. She knew that somewhere under her scalp, screwed into her skull, was a fairly large metal plate, and on that plate were some complicated sigils. She didn’t know anything about the commands there, but she knew that they were almost certainly the source of her talents.

She also knew that the fact that the plate had been forcibly implanted inside her would not matter one whit to the merchant houses: a scrived human was somewhere between an abomination and a rare, invaluable specimen, and they’d treat her accordingly.

Which was why her operation would be so expensive: Sancia would have to pay a black-market physiquere more than the merchant houses were willing to reward them for handing her in—and the merchant houses were willing to pay a lot.

She looked at the linen-wrapped item in her hand. She had no idea what it was. But despite Sark’s warnings, the risks of not knowing were just too high.

She put the box down, took out the item, and began unwrapping it. As she did so, she caught a glint of gold…

Just a gold piece? A piece of gold jewelry?

But then she pulled the cloth away, and saw it was not jewelry.

She looked at the item lying on the linen in the palm of her hand.

It was a key. A large, long key made of gold, with an intricate, terribly strange tooth, and