Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,151

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