Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,56

nothing stopping you from using them. Even in the most primitive settlement out in the middle of nowhere, if you were trying to carve wood into some intricate shape, you could inscribe it with the base sigil for “clay” or “mud,” and this tiny alteration would make the wood slightly, slightly more malleable.

But despite all the legends around its origins, basic scriving was very restricted. To start with, its effects were minor, no more than a slight nudge. But worse, if you wanted to tell an ax, “You are very durable, very sharp, very light, and you part the wood of the cedar tree as if it were water”—something much more complicated than just “sharp” or “hard,” in other words—such a command would be fifty or sixty sigils long. You’d run out of room on the ax blade—and you’d also have to get the sigil logic just right so the ax blade would understand what it was supposed to be. You had to be specific, and definite—and this was hard.

But then the city of Tevanne had discovered an old cache of Occidental records in a cave down the coast. And in those records they’d discovered something crucial.

The sigil for “meaning.” And then some cunning Tevanni had gotten a brilliant idea.

They’d figured out that you could take a blank slate of iron, write out that extensive, complicated scriving command; but then, you could follow it with the sigil for “meaning,” and next write a completely new sigil, one you yourself just made up. Then that new sigil would essentially mean “You are very durable, very sharp, very light, and you part the wood of the cedar tree as if it were water”—and then you’d just have to write that one sigil on your ax blade.

Or on a dozen blades. Or a thousand. It didn’t matter. Every blade would do the same thing.

After that discovery, much more complicated scriving commands were suddenly possible—yet even this was still quite limited.

For one thing, you had to stay close to whichever slate of iron had the commands written on it. If you walked too far away, then the ax blade essentially forgot what that new sigil was supposed to mean, and it stopped working. It no longer had a reference point, in a way.

The other problem was that if you wrote too many complicated scriving definitions on one slate of metal, it had a tendency to burst into flames. A common object such as an iron plate, it seemed, could only bear so much meaning.

So the city of Tevanne, and its many nascent scriving houses, then had a problem to solve: how were they to house all the definitions and meanings for these complicated scrivings without having everything burst into flames and melt?

Which was why they’d invented lexicons.

Lexicons were huge, complicated, durable machines built to store and maintain thousands and thousands of incredibly complex scriving definitions, and bear the burden of all of that concentrated meaning. With a lexicon, you didn’t have to worry about wandering a dozen feet too far and suddenly having all your scrived devices fail on you: lexicons could amplify and project the meaning of those definitions for great distances in all directions—enough to cover part of a campo, if not more. The closer you were to a lexicon, though, the better your scrivings worked—which was why a lexicon was always the beating heart of any foundry. You wanted all of your biggest, most intricate rigs to work at peak efficiency.

And since lexicons were the beating heart of foundries, they were, in effect, the beating heart of all of Tevanne.

But they were complicated. Incredibly complicated. Astoundingly complicated. Only geniuses and madmen, everyone agreed, could truly understand a lexicon, and the difference between the two was almost nil.

So it probably said something that out of all the hypati in the entire history of Tevanne, Orso Ignacio understood lexicons better than anybody. After all, Orso had been the one to invent the combat lexicon—a smaller version of the regular kind, which ships and teams of oxen could haul around. That device was still quite large, complicated, and improbably expensive, and it could only manage to power a cohort’s armaments—but without that contribution, Tevanne would have never captured the Durazzo Sea, and all the cities around it.

Gregor knew quite a bit about combat lexicons. He’d had one at the siege of Dantua—right up until he didn’t. So he also knew quite a bit about what it was like to lose a lexicon.