shot through your skull, reality unable to decide which is which.”
“Okay,” said Sancia. “That does sound, uh, very bad.”
“I will make sure that the effect is very weak,” said Berenice quickly.
She finished copying down the commands, which were at least several hundred sigils long. “You will need to place this string on something small enough that both people can swallow it,” said Valeria. “A tiny plate, or bead, perhaps. I do not know.”
“Orso is normally the best at such small work…” Berenice looked at him, sitting slumped in the chair with his shoulder wrapped in an unpleasantly brown bandage.
“I’m not doing shit in this condition,” rasped Orso. He blinked for a moment, and then he looked at her, his gaze steely. “You’re going to have to.”
“I’m…better at theoretical work,” she said. “Fabrication and whatnot. This is an actual rig, a—”
“You’re going to have to get used to it,” said Orso. “Because we don’t have a damned choice. And I know you can. So stop quibbling.”
Berenice frowned for a moment. Then, with a sigh, she fitted her most powerful loupe into her eye, affixed a tiny bronze plate no larger than three grains of rice in a frame, and set to work, carefully writing out sigils in lines thinner than an eyelash or a spider’s web.
They waited in the doorway, to give her time and space.
“Got to be pretty weird,” said Orso, “opening up your head and letting another person into all your memories. I’d hate if someone was walking around knowing the last time I’d accidentally pissed on my hand at the trough or something.”
“That is unartfully put,” said Gregor, “but the point holds true. This may be a serious violation of privacy. Even for people as close as Sancia and Berenice.”
“You fail to apprehend what twinning is,” said Valeria. “It would be unlikely that you could hold contempt for the failings of one you were twinned with—because, upon being twinned, those failings would also be yours, to an extent. You would not feel revulsion upon knowing these things, because you would already know them.”
“God Almighty,” said Orso. “This is some wild shit.”
“What about pain?” asked Sancia. “Or discomfort?”
“I suspect that, if one of you were injured,” said Valeria, “the other would feel a ghost of the pain. You would also receive echoes of thoughts, memories, ideas, realizations…”
“No more surprise parties, then,” said Orso.
“This sounds quite powerful,” said Gregor. “Why is it that implanting a hierophantic command in a living being doesn’t need the ritual?”
“Permissions can be attained when the lines between life and death are blurred,” said Valeria. “For higher commands, they must be blurred greatly. For lower ones, they only need to be blurred a little. But the line between life and death is always blurred. To live is to die, just very, very slowly.”
Sancia found herself suddenly troubled by this last sentence. What was it Crasedes had said?
…she’s sacrificing you, at this very moment. Just very, very slowly.
Her skin broke out in a cold sweat. It’s a coincidence. It’s got to be a coinci—
“Done,” said Berenice. She removed the two plates from her frame, blew on them, and nodded. “I don’t know if you can check my work, Valeria, but—”
“I can. It is sufficient. Will perform the necessary functions.”
“So…now what?” said Orso. He grunted as he shifted his arm in its sling. “They just swallow them?”
“True. Will take some time for calibration—not a simple thing, for two minds to align. Once this calibration is complete, they should be able to engage with the commands within Gregor—and then the true work will begin.”
Sancia and Berenice each took a tiny plate and poured themselves a cup of wine. Sancia herself was not exactly excited about this, but she wasn’t terrified: she’d had her mind altered enough by scrivings over the years that she knew what it was like. But as Berenice stared into her palm at the little plate, and then into her cup of cane wine, she suddenly looked like she was