Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,170

with a bronze dial in the center…And they looked like they were crusted over with blood.

“Is that…” said Claudia.

“They’re gravity plates,” said Berenice, excited. “Made by Estelle Candiano herself! Assassins were able to jump over walls and buildings with them!”

“And more than that,” said Sancia. “They could basically fly with the damn things!”

“Well, then,” said Claudia. “Holy shit.”

“So it’s simple!” said Giovanni. “You just use the plates to fly to the Mountain. Or, say, jump from roof to roof to the Mountain.”

Sancia looked at the gravity plates. She tensed the muscle in her mind, opened the floodgates, and looked…

She’d expected the plates to glimmer and shine brightly, as any powerfully scrived item did. But they did not—rather, they looked like a patchwork of silver, shining in some spots but not in others.

She shook her head. “No. They’re not working right,” she said. “Some of the scriving commands are operating, but not all of them—so the whole rig is nonfunctional.”

“You can tell that just by looking at it?” said Orso, stunned.

“Yeah,” said Sancia. “And I can talk to it.”

“You can talk to i—”

“Shut up, and let me see here…”

She shut her eyes, placed her bare hands on the plates, and listened.

<…location…location of MASS?> said the plates.

She shook her head. “It’s…weird. It’s like listening to someone with a head injury muttering in their sleep. It’s not making sense.” She opened her eyes. “It’s like they’re broken.”

Claudia clucked her tongue. “You said Estelle Candiano made these?”

“Yeah?” said Sancia. “Why?”

“Well, if I were her, and if I knew there was a chance my enemies had stolen my toys…I’d just turn off the scriving definitions at my lexicon. It’d make them useless, or broken—just like this rig.”

“Of course!” said Orso. “That’s why the plates can’t talk! Estelle has taken away some critical pillar in its logic, so the whole thing has collapsed!”

“Which means it won’t work,” said Claudia. “So we’re scrummed.”

“I guess we can’t make our own definition plates that could make these run?” sighed Gio.

“Estelle has basically achieved the impossible with this rig,” said Orso. “No one’s ever exhibited such fine control over gravity short of a hierophant. Remaking the impossible in a day is quite out of the question.”

There was a silence as everyone thought about this.

Berenice sat forward. “But…but we don’t have to remake all of it,” she said.

“We don’t?” said Sancia.

“No! Estelle’s probably just deactivated a few critical scrivings—but the rest still work. If you’ve got a hole in a wall, you don’t tear it down and make a whole new wall—you just cut a piece of stone to fit the hole.”

“Wait,” said Orso. “Are…are you saying we should fabricate the missing definitions ourselves?”

“Not we,” said Berenice. “Me. I’m faster than you, sir.”

Orso blinked, taken aback. Then he gathered himself. “Fine. But your metaphor is shit! This isn’t just filling in a goddamn hole in a wall! This is some complicated scrumming scriving, girl!”

“Good thing we’ve got someone who can talk to rigs, then,” said Berenice. She slid into a seat across from Sancia and pulled out a sheet of paper and a quill. “Go on. Tell me everything the plates are saying.”

“But it’s gibberish!” protested Sancia.

“Then tell me all the damned gibberish, then!”

She started talking.

She described how the plate plaintively asked for the location of this “mass,” begging for someone to tell it where the mass was, and the density of this mass, and so on and so on. She kept hoping Berenice would tell her to stop, but she didn’t. She just kept writing down everything Sancia said—until, finally, she held up a finger.

Berenice slowly sat back in her chair, staring at the sheet of paper before her. Half of it looked to be notes. The other half was covered in sigils and strings of symbols. She turned to look at Orso. “I…I am starting to believe everyone’s been trying to scrive gravity wrong, sir. And only Estelle Candiano has ever really figured it out.”

Orso leaned forward and examined what she’d written. “It’s mad…but I think you’re right. Keep talking.”

“You all could make sense of that?” said Claudia.

“Not entirely,” said Berenice. “But there’s a common theme. There’s this subject of mass—and the device is trying to figure out where this mass should be, and how big the mass is.”

“So?” said Sancia. “What’s that got to do with floating and flying?”

“Well,” said Berenice. “I’m not sure if I’m