Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,19

you were just…there. And, considering all the disease and starvation and violence and whatnot, you probably weren’t there for long.

said Clef.

said Sancia, taking a left.

Finally they came to their destination. Up ahead, the wet, rambling rookeries of Foundryside came to a sharp stop at a tall, smooth white wall, about sixty feet high, clean and perfect and unblemished.

said Clef.

That disturbed her. She could tell if a rig was scrived if she got within a few feet of it—she’d start hearing that muttering in her head. But Clef seemed to be able to do it from dozens of feet away.

She walked along the wall until she found it. Set in the face of the wall was a huge, engraved bronze door, intricate and ornate, with a house loggotipo in the middle: the hammer and the chisel.

said Clef.

She approached the door and heard a faint chanting in her head. She stood before the door. It was tall, about ten feet high or so.

he said with surprising relish.

The answer, Sancia knew, was “a lot.” Tampering with anything related to the merchant houses was a great way to lose a hand, or a head. She knew this wasn’t like her, to be walking around the Commons with stolen goods in broad daylight—especially considering this particular stolen good was the most advanced scrived rig she’d ever seen.

It was unprofessional. It was risky. It was stupid.

But that nonchalant comment of Sark’s—They used to own you, you know what they’re like—it echoed in her head. She was surprised to find how much she resented it, and she wasn’t sure why. She’d always known when she was doing work for the merchant houses, and it’d never inspired her to play the job wrong before.

But to have him just come out and say that—it burned her.

begged Clef.

She approached the door, eyeing the scrivings running along its frame. She heard the faint muttering in her head, as she did whenever she was close to anything altered…

Then she knelt and put Clef into the lock, and the muttering turned into a scream.

* * *

Screaming questions poured into her mind, all of them directed at Clef, asking him dozens if not hundreds of questions, trying to figure out what he was. Many of them went by too fast for her to understand, but she caught some of them:

bellowed the door at Clef.

And on and on and on. It all went too fast for Sancia to really understand—and how she was even hearing it was stupefying to her—but she could still catch snatches of the conversation. It sounded like security questions, like the scrived door was expecting a specific key, and it was slowly figuring out that Clef was not that key.

Clef said.

A pause.

Information poured back and forth between Clef and the door. Sancia was still trying