Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,157

tissue in her skull sizzling, and then the guards were beside her, shouting, trying to hold her down, but then…

She fell.

Sancia was falling, falling into a darkness, an endless, rippling black.

She heard a whispering, and she slowly realized: the darkness was filled with thoughts, with impulses, with desires.

She was not passing into emptiness. It was a mind—she was falling into a mind. But the mind of something huge, something incomprehensibly vast and alien…yet fragmented. Broken.

Valeria, she thought. You lied to me. You were no clerk, were you?

Darkness took her.

30

As midnight passed, a small, white boat slipped through the misty canals of the Commons. Seated within the boat were three people: two boatmen, wearing dark, unmarked clothes, and a tall woman, wearing a thick black cloak.

They passed a barge, quiet and dark, and rounded a bend in the canal. The two men slowed the boat and looked to the woman.

“Farther,” said Ofelia Dandolo.

The prow sloshed through the foul, dark waters as the boat beat on. The canals of the Commons were unspeakably filthy, scummed over with waste and rot and slurry. Yet Ofelia Dandolo peered through these waters like a fortune-teller parsing the leaves at the bottom of a teacup.

“Farther still,” she whispered.

The boat beat on, until they finally came to a sharp bend at the corner of the canal. A tiny flock of pale, white moths danced and circled over a patch in the bend—directly over something floating in the water.

She pointed. “There.” The boat sped over to the floating thing, and the two men took out wooden hooks and pulled it close.

It was a man, floating facedown in the water, stiff and still. The two men hauled the body into the boat and laid it in the bottom.

Ofelia Dandolo surveyed the body, her face pinched in an expression that could have been grief, or frustration, or dismay. “Oh dear,” she sighed. Then she glanced at the flock of moths, and she seemed to nod at them. “You were right,” she said.

The moths dispersed, flitting away into the city.

She sat back and gestured to the two men. “Let’s go.”

The boat turned around.

31

Alone, in the dark, for the second time in her life, Sancia slowly remade herself.

It was an agonizing, thoughtless experience, as endless and painful as a chick struggling against the confines of its egg. Slowly, bit by bit, Sancia felt the world around her. She felt the world as the operating table saw it, felt herself lying upon herself…And then, somehow, she felt more.

Or, rather, heard more.

She heard a voice:

Sancia, her eyes shut and her head pounding, furrowed her brow. What the hell? Who’s saying that?

The voice in her ear continued, a warbling, neurotic chant:

Sancia opened her left eye the tiniest crack, and saw the two Candiano guards standing over her. They looked worried.

“Think she’s dead?” said one.

“She’s breathing,” said the other. “I…think.”

“God. She was bleeding out of her eyes. What the hell happened to her?”

“I don’t know. But Ziani said not to hurt her. She was supposed to be in one piece.”

The two shared a nervous glance.

“What do we do?” asked the first.

“We keep a lookout for Ziani,” said the other. “And make sure we tell Ziani the exact same thing.” The two withdrew to the door and started talking quietly.

Yet that other voice, the nervous one, continued mumbling:

Sancia opened her left eye more and looked around without moving her head. She couldn’t see anyone talking. she asked.

Yet Valeria was silent. Perhaps she’d exhausted herself, as she’d said might happen.

Sancia opened her right eye and looked down. And then…

She stared. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

She could see them. She could see the scrivings in the shackles on her wrists and feet—although “seeing” wasn’t quite the right word for it.

It wasn’t like she saw the sigils themselves, like alphabetic instructions written on the objects, but rather like she saw the…the logic behind the devices, blended into their very matter. To her eye, the scrivings looked