Shorefall (The Founders Trilogy #2) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,110

The next moments were sheer chaos: people running out of their homes shrieking hysterically, all streaming past their tumbledown cart; Orso, sweaty and moaning, gripping his bloodied shoulder with one hand as Berenice and Sancia helped him down; Claudia and Giovanni laboring like mad to get a new wheel onto the carriage so it could make it the few final feet back to the Foundryside front gates; and always in the distance the sound of screaming and riots as the fallout from the Mountain’s collapse continued.

Sancia asked as they helped Orso up into the offices.

responded Valeria’s voice, but it sounded faint and weak.

Berenice and Sancia rushed to pull Tribuno’s definition from the lexicon in the carriage and install it in the one in the Foundryside library’s basement. Sancia’s hands shook as she delicately placed the little engraved cone inside their lexicon’s cradle. She felt sure Crasedes would take advantage of their moment of weakness—he always seemed to know when they’d be vulnerable, always—but she never felt any pang of nausea, nor heard his low, deep voice from the darkness outside.

I wish Orso were doing this, she thought as she worked. He would be faster. He would be better.

Once the cradle was prepped, Berenice and Sancia started ramping the lexicon. Neither had any doubt that it would work this time. They just stood in their paper-strewn basement and waited, staring at their shabby old lexicon with the messy “FS” imprinted on the top.

Then Sancia heard her voice.

“Is this being received?” she said.

Sancia jumped—but to her surprise, Berenice jumped as well.

“Oh my God,” said Berenice. “Did…did you hear that?”

“I will interpret this reaction,” said Valeria’s voice, “as indication the answer is true.”

“You can hear it too, Ber?” said Sancia.

Berenice looked like she might faint. She rubbed at the side of her head, as if trying to discover exactly how the words had been delivered to her mind. “I hear…something. It’s like I’m hearing it without hearing the sounds…”

“With Tribuno’s definition,” said Valeria, “I am able to alter reality much more directly. Not restricted to talking just to Sancia, with her plate.”

“Then you should be able to help us,” said Sancia. “We got you out, Valeria. We gave you shelter. Now what?”

“Now I have granted you protections. The Maker cannot come close to this area, nor can he affect it. The more I calibrate what permissions I have, the more I can assist you. Give me time to get…settled? True? Upon discovering more of my own situation, I can then know more what to do next.”

Sancia and Berenice exchanged a glance. “Wait,” said Sancia. “Exactly…what are you going to be doing in our basement, again?”

“Are you unaware of our predicament?” said Valeria. “Maker knows where we are. Knows our location, our resources. Though we have protections, we are not truly safe. We can never truly be safe from the Maker—not until he is banished to the death I made for him.” There was a flicker in the air, and Sancia glimpsed her, just for a second—a giant hulking figure wrought of gold, standing behind the lexicon, staring out at them. “We are now under siege, Sancia. We must prepare ourselves.”

* * *

—

Exhausted and shaken, Sancia and Berenice limped out of the basement, Sancia with a large, heavy case in her hand. They found Gio and Claudia kneeling over Orso on a pallet in the center of the library. He looked terrible: discolored, shrunken, sweaty, not like the Orso they knew at all, but a reduced version of him. His shoulder was a mass of red bandages, many of them unsettlingly dark.

“He looks bad,” said Claudia. Her face looked tired and stretched. “The wound is deep. What happened back there?”

“I think Crasedes clipped him with a stone,” said Sancia. “He shot it right through the wine cask like a bolt of lightning.”