“You all need rest,” said Polina. “I can let you sleep for a time, while my people keep watch. But then we will go.” She stood and looked at Sancia. “Just remember—a scriver makes something from nothing. Perhaps you attempt the same here. But eventually, eventually, the magic always stops, and all the illusions vanish.”
* * *
—
Sancia and Berenice wearily staggered upstairs. When they came to their rooms, Sancia made straight for their closet, fumbled in the dark, and pressed her hand to the hidden switch.
The wall popped open, and Sancia felt inside. Her heart leapt when her fingers closed around the cold metal inside.
“Thank God,” she whispered. “Thank God…”
She took Clef out and studied him, watching how his curious tooth glimmered in the low light.
“He’s here,” said Berenice. “And he’s safe. We need to get rest while we can. Because this is nowhere close to being finished yet.”
“I know.” Then Sancia looked at her. “Ber. There’s something you should know.”
“Yes?”
“I saw something when I first talked to Valeria. A…A vision, perhaps, or a memory. I saw it when she pressed the image of the component into my head. I…I don’t think she meant for me to see it. I’ve wanted to tell you, but we’ve had so much to do.”
She described the vision she’d had—of the man in dusty wrappings weeping before the dying child, and then Crasedes in the peristyle, wielding Clef and opening the black doors.
Berenice listened, her eyes growing wide. “You…You think these were her memories of Crasedes?”
“I think so. He said something curious tonight—about how I’d never know what it was like to lose someone and know it didn’t matter…Do you think he meant this?” She looked at Clef, cradled in her hands, winking gold. “Did…Did Crasedes Magnus lose his child, thousands of years ago? And is that why he’s trying to put the world all aright?”
21
Sancia woke to see the ceiling of her attic, and felt Berenice beside her. She ached in countless places. My body, she thought, is not as young as it once was.
But as she slowly awoke, she realized that something else was wrong.
The room felt wrong. The shadows seemed to lie at slightly wrong angles. The air itself felt wrong when she breathed in. Everything felt just a touch off, like someone had taken a weak magnifying glass and laid it over everything she saw.
Either I’ve taken a blow to the head, thought Sancia, which is entirely possible…or something’s just wrong here.
She began to get a very bad idea.
She hobbled downstairs to the basement to check on Valeria. She opened the door and stared—for it seemed Valeria had been up to quite a bit.
The walls and floor of the basement had completely changed. A few things were still there—the lexicon, of course, and a few pieces of old furniture—but the moldering stone and creaky wood walls were gone, and had somehow been transformed into a curiously cold, flat, gleaming marble of a very dark greenish-black.
“What the hell…” whispered Sancia.
As she stared at the walls, she realized they were so shiny that she could see her reflection in them—but then she got the crawling sense that she was seeing too many reflections, like the walls and floors were reflecting other reflective walls and floors that she herself couldn’t see. The experience was like being inside of a black diamond, or some bizarrely fractal crystal, and the longer she looked at the glassy walls, the more reflections she glimpsed at angles that really shouldn’t be possible…
The room keeps going, she thought. It keeps going in, and in, and in…
She shook herself and looked away, but made sure to avoid actually entering this strange room, since she couldn’t understand what it was or where it’d come from. “What the hell,” she whispered.
said Valeria’s voice.
Sancia jumped at the sound, and looked around. She expected to see the huge golden figure towering over her—but instead she saw Valeria’s visage emerge from one