Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,41

edge of the roof biting into her feet, her ass dangling over the alley below.

Then momentum, that oh-so-fickle friend of hers, carried her forward just a little, until…

Sancia found her equilibrium, and stood up.

Her body was still. She’d made it.

A voice in the alley below shouted, “Shoot! Shoot her!”

She started running as the bolts thudded into the wall below her, up from the alley—they must have surrounded the clothier’s warehouse. She leapt forward and skidded along the slimy stone roof until she came to a small raised hatch, leading down.

The hatch was locked. She fumbled for Clef again, but screamed as a bolt slammed into the roof right beside her shoulder.

“She’s over there!” cried the man from the rookeries. She peeked over the hatch and saw him signaling to someone below as he reloaded, cranking his espringal once, twice. “On the roof, on the other roof!”

She finally pulled Clef out and jammed him into the lock in the hatch.

said Clef.

Another bolt came hurtling down, this one a handful of feet away.

she said.

A sharp click. Sancia wrenched the hatch open and leapt down the dark stairs to the floor below, flying from floor to floor.

But she wasn’t alone. Sancia could hear footsteps below.

She came to the second floor. She glimpsed someone running up the stairwell just below her—a woman’s face, a dagger in her hand. She screamed, “Stop! Stop, you!”

“Not a harpering chance,” whispered Sancia.

She leapt herself through the door to the second floor, then slammed it shut behind her.

said Clef drunkenly.

Sancia threw her shoulder against it as she ripped Clef off the string around her neck. She tried to slip him into the lock, but then…

Bang. Someone on the other side hit the door hard, almost knocking Sancia to the ground. She gritted her teeth, threw herself against the door again, and wriggled Clef into the lock…

Click.

Someone slammed into the door again. But this time, because it was locked, it didn’t move. A voice on the other side moaned in surprise and pain.

She ran down the hallway as people poked their heads out their doors. She took a left, kicked down one door, and ran into the room.

The apartment was small and filthy. A young couple was lying on a pallet, quite nude, and Sancia could not see much of the man’s face, as most of it was obscured by the woman’s thighs. Both of them screamed in abject terror as Sancia darted inside.

“Pardon,” she said. She ran through the apartment, kicked open the wooden shutters, climbed up onto the window, and jumped across the alley to the next building.

It was an aging structure—her favorite kind, as it offered plenty of good handholds and niches to stuff her toes into. She crawled down its side slowly and awkwardly, since she’d lost her ability to sense the walls at a touch, then leapt into the muddy alley below and started running north, away from the Anafesto channel, away from the Greens, away from the Commons and the fisheries and the smell of rot and the hissing bolts…

Screams echoed in the distance. Maybe another building had fallen down.

Again, she thought about the dead lanterns, Clef’s slurred words, and how all the world was dead to her touch—and, again, the mad idea returned to her.

But it was impossible. Just impossible.

No one could just turn scrivings off. No one could just hit a switch or a button and make every rig in a whole neighborhood just stop.

But though it might be impossible, thought Sancia, so is a key that can open anything…

She remembered the wink of gold as the man played with his contraption…

What if he already had something like Clef? Something that could do…something else?

Smokestacks soared into the sky ahead of her like a cindery forest—the Michiel campo foundries. She had a sachet, but most of the entryways would be closed and locked by now, since it was well after nightfall.

Then she realized she had an easy solution.

said Clef.

She ran along the smooth, white campo wall until she came to a large iron door, tall and thick and elaborately decorated with the Michiel loggotipo. She took Clef out and was about to stuff him into the lock when suddenly things…changed.

There was a scrived lantern just on the other side of the wall. She hadn’t been able to see it before, because it’d been dark.