Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,67

him.

Gregor dove down into the upended carriage. The next thing he knew there were a lot of loud thunks. He shook his head and looked up.

Five espringal bolts were now poking in through the side of the carriage. They had almost punched straight through—and since the walls and floors of this carriage were reinforced, that meant their attackers were using scrived weapons.

More than one of them, he thought. At least five.

“Impossible,” said Gregor. “That can’t be.”

“What?” said the young woman. “What’s out there?”

“There…there was a man standing on the building sides!” said Gregor. “Standing there like gravity doesn’t work at all!”

He looked up through the open window on the side of the carriage, and watched in shock as a figure in black appeared to gracefully float over the carriage like a bizarre cloud. Then he pointed an espringal down, and fired.

Gregor hugged the wall of the carriage as the bolt came hurtling down. The young woman screamed as it thudded into the mud below them.

Gregor and the young woman looked at it, then stared at each other.

“I scrumming hate being right,” she said.

12

The entire theory of scriving relied on the idea that you could convince an object to behave like something that it wasn’t. But the early Tevanni scrivers figured out pretty quick that it was a lot easier to convince an object it was something it was similar to, rather than something it was not similar to at all.

In other words, it would not take much effort to scrive a block of copper into thinking it was a block of iron. However, it would take an impossible amount of effort to convince the block of copper that it was actually, say, a block of ice, or a pile of pudding, or a fish. The more convincing an object needed, the more complicated the scriving definitions became, and the more of a lexicon they’d take up, until finally you were using a whole lexicon or even multiple lexicons to make one scriving work.

The first scrivers hit this wall pretty quickly. Because one of the initial things they tried to alter was an object’s gravity—and gravity proved to be a deeply stubborn bastard that simply could not be convinced to do things it didn’t believe it ought to.

The first efforts to scrive objects to sort of gently, casually step around the laws of gravity were utter disasters—explosions, mutilations, and maimings were common. This had been a great surprise to the scrivers, since they knew from the old stories that the hierophants had been able to make objects float across the room, and some hierophants were recorded as flying nearly all the time. The hierophant Pharnakes was even said to have crushed an entire army with boulders from a mountaintop.

But eventually, after an untold number of deaths, the Tevanni scrivers came up with a somewhat decent solution.

The laws of gravity would not be outright denied. But it was possible to obey the laws of gravity in very unusual ways. Like scrived bolts—they were convinced they were just obeying gravity; they just had some interesting new ideas about where the ground was, and how long they’d been falling for. Or floating lanterns, which believed they contained a sack full of gas that was lighter than air, though they did not. All these designs acknowledged the laws of gravity. They just obeyed the letter of the laws, rather than the spirit.

But despite these successes, the dream stayed alive: Tevanni scrivers kept trying to find ways to truly defy gravity—to make people float, or fly, just like the hierophants of old. Even though such efforts almost always had lethal side effects.

For example, some scrivers accidentally adjusted their gravity so that two different portions of themselves recognized two different directions of pull, causing their limbs to stretch or simply get ripped clean off their bodies. Others accidentally crushed themselves into a bloody, flat disc, or a ball, or a cube, depending on their methodology. Others gravely underestimated the amount of gravity they should have, and they wound up floating away into the ether until they reached the limits of their lexicon, at which point they rather anticlimactically smashed into the surface of the earth.

This was considered a pleasant way to go. You had something to bury that way.

Many of these attempts had coincided with a larger effort to scrive the human body—and these experiments had been far more horrific than tinkering with gravity.

Unimaginably worse. Unspeakably worse.

And so, after they’d cleaned up all the bloodstains from