Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,79

hard she blinked, she couldn’t focus on it.

She realized her vision was blurred, like a drunk’s. The man—Orso—seemed to be saying something to her, but she couldn’t understand it.

This startled her. She knew she was doing bad, but not that bad.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “My head…It…My head really…”

She felt herself listing to the side, and knew that she needed to get the man away from one of the peaks—because she was about to collapse.

She got him to a decently flat part, then let go of him and knelt to the ground. She knew she didn’t have long.

She fumbled for Clef, slipped him out of her sleeve, and stuffed him deep into her boot.

Maybe they wouldn’t think to look there. Maybe.

Then she leaned forward until her forehead touched the roof. Things went dark.

14

“…Say we just haul her out and dump her somewhere. She might have done us all a favor and up and died.”

“She’s not dead. And she saved your life.”

“So what! She also robbed me and burned down your damned waterfront! God, I’d never have imagined the fabled lone survivor of Dantua could be so soft.”

“She is the only person who could possibly know who’s behind all this. I doubt if you know much, Orso. From the looks of things, you’ve just been up here panicking.”

“I don’t need this shit. She’s a blood-spattered, grimy girl in my office! I could have the house guard come in and arrest her if I wanted!”

“If that happened, then they would ask me questions. And I would be obliged to answer them, Hypatus.”

“Oh, son of a bitch…”

Sancia felt consciousness flickering somewhere in the hollows of her head. She was lying on something soft, with a pillow under her head. People were talking around her, but she couldn’t make sense of it. The fight on the rooftop was a handful of broken moments scattered through her mind. She picked through each one, trying to fit them together.

There was a man on the roof of a campo building, she thought. About to be killed…

Then she heard them: thousands and thousands and thousands of hushed, chattering voices.

Scrivings. More scrivings than I’ve ever been around. Where the hell am I?

She cracked an eye and saw a ceiling above her. It was an odd thing to think, but it was undoubtedly the most ornate ceiling she’d ever seen in her life, made of tiny green tiles and golden plaster.

She glimpsed movement nearby and shut her eye all the way again. Then she felt a cold rag being pressed against her head. She felt the rag speak to her, the cool swirl of water, the twist of so many fibers…It pained her greatly in her weakened state, but she managed not to flinch.

“She’s got scars,” said a voice nearby—a girl’s. Berenice’s? “Lots of them.”

“She’s a thief,” said a raspy man’s voice. She’d heard it on the rooftop, she remembered—that must be Orso. “Probably a hazard of the damned job.”

“No, sir. This looks more like surgery. On her skull.”

There was a silence.

“She climbed the side of this building like a monkey in the canopies,” said Gregor’s voice quietly. “I’ve never seen anything like it. And she says she can hear scrivings.”

“She said she what?” said Orso. “What rot! That’s like saying you can taste a goddamn sonata! The girl must be a raving loon.”

“Maybe. But she knew where those men in the gravity rigs were. And there was something she did, with one of the rigs…I doubt if even you’ve ever seen anything like it. She made it—”

Sancia realized she needed to stop this line of discussion. Gregor was about to describe Clef’s trick with the gravity plates; and Orso, apparently, was the man who’d owned or at least tried to own Clef, so he might be able to identify what he could do—which meant he might hear Gregor’s story and realize Sancia was still walking around with him.

She sucked in a breath, coughed, and started to sit up.

“She wakes,” said Orso’s voice sourly. “Oh goody.”

Sancia looked around. She was lying on a sofa in a large and dazzlingly sumptuous office: rosy scrived lights flickered along the walls, a huge wooden desk stretched along one half of the room, and every inch of the walls was covered in shelves and books.

Sitting behind the desk was the man she’d saved—Orso—still stained with blood, though his throat was black and blue under the dried gore. He was glaring at her over a glass of bubble rum—an outrageously expensive liquor she’d