Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,83

groundbreaking work! It’s some truly genius shit, of a kind I’ve never seen before. Whoever’s made this rig has been keeping their talent a dead secret, it seems.”

At that, Berenice cleared her throat. “There is another unanswered question, sir. Whoever this man is—how did he find out about the Occidental lexicon? About the key? About Captain Dandolo going to capture Sancia, and my following them? How did he know all that?”

“That’s, like, six unanswered questions!” said Orso. “And the answer is simple! There’s a leak, or a mole, or a spy somewhere here on the campo!”

Berenice shook her head. “We only talked about the key to each other, sir. And there was no one around when you told me to follow Captain Dandolo, just today. But there is a commonality, sir.”

“There is?” said Gregor.

“There is. They all took place in the same location—your workshop.”

“So?” said Orso.

Berenice sighed. She then reached into a desk, produced a large sheaf of paper, dipped a pen in some ink, and then drew at least twenty elaborate, complicated, beautiful symbols onto the paper, dazzlingly, dazzlingly fast. It was like a party trick, effortlessly creating these gorgeous designs in the blink of an eye.

Berenice showed the piece of paper to Orso. They had no meaning to Sancia—but he gasped at the sight of it. “No!” he said.

“I think so, sir,” she said.

He turned and stared at his workshop door, his jaw slack. “It couldn’t be…”

“What just happened?” asked Gregor. “What is that you drew there, Berenice?”

“An old scriving problem,” said Berenice. “An incomplete design, created to make students wonder—how do you make a rig that captures sounds of the air?”

“Someone’s solved it,” said Orso faintly. “It’s a rig. A rig! It’s all just a rig, isn’t it?”

“I suspect so, sir,” said Berenice. “A device, a secret one, planted in your workshop that somehow reports our conversations.”

For once, Gregor and Sancia seemed to be on the same side—both of them glanced at each other, bewildered.

“You think a rig is spying on you?” said Sancia.

“Isn’t that impossible?” said Gregor. “I thought scriving mostly moved things around or made them light or heavy.”

“That’s true,” said Berenice. “Scriving is good at big, simple processes, huge exchanges done on a grand scale. It makes things get fast, get hot, get cold. But little things, delicate things, complicated things…those are trickier.”

“Trickier,” said Orso. “But not impossible. A sound rig—one that makes or captures noise—is a favorite theory problem for scrivers to toy with. But no one’s ever actually done it.”

“But if these people have scrived gravity,” said Berenice, looking at the plates on Orso’s desk, “who knows what other barriers they’ve broken?”

“Assuming they could make such a rig—how could they get it in there?” asked Gregor.

“They can fly, asshole,” said Sancia. “And this place has windows.”

“Oh,” said Gregor. “Right.”

“Still,” said Berenice. “This is all just a theory I have. I could be totally wrong.”

“But if my client did put that thing in there,” said Sancia, “now we just go in and get it—right? And then, I don’t know, smash it or something, yeah?”

“Think,” said Orso. “If the rig were obvious, we’d have already spotted the damn thing!”

“We’ve no idea how such a rig would even look,” said Berenice. “It could look like anything. A plate. A pencil. A coin. Or it could be hidden in the walls, or floor, or ceiling.”

“And if we go digging around for it, and they hear us,” said Orso, “then we’ll have given the game away.”

Gregor looked at Sancia. “But Sancia—you can hear scrivings, can’t you?”

The room went quiet.

“Uh,” said Sancia. “Y-yeah.” Of course, it’d been Clef who’d heard the gravity rigs converging on them before. Sancia had just told him a half truth. It was getting hard to keep up with all her lies.

“So you can just go in to the workshop and listen for it, yes?” said Gregor.

“Yes, can’t you?” said Orso, sitting forward. He was looking at her a little too intensely.

“I can try,” said Sancia. “But there’s a lot of noise around here…” This was true. The campo was echoing with whispered commands, muttered scripts, quiet chanting. Every once in a while they would spike, growing loud as some vast, invisible infrastructure performed some task, and her brain could hardly bear it.

“Is there?” demanded Orso. “And how can you hear this noise? How does this process work?”

“It just does. You want my help or not?”

“That depends on whether you can actually give it.”

Sancia didn’t move.

“What’s the problem here?” asked Orso. “You