are sending emissaries to the Morsinis as we speak! We’ll be outnumbered, fighting off two houses at once!”
“Meanwhile,” said Ofelia, “we still toil away upon your designs. We are distracted and divided. We cannot fight a war with two houses at once.”
Crasedes sighed. This was all very troublesome, he found. But if there was one thing he’d gotten very good at over the years, it was taking an obstacle and turning it into an opportunity.
Then he had an idea.
“The Morsinis,” he said. “They possess many lexicons of their own, do they not?”
“What?” said a scriver. “Well—yes? That’s what every house campo is built on, really.”
Crasedes thought for a moment. “I would like to see,” he said finally, “a map of this city.”
“A…A map?” said a second scriver.
“Yes,” he said. “A map of all of the various territories here…as well as all the sites of the lexicons in this city. Every single one.”
* * *
—
Crasedes studied the map that lay across the table. It was immense, nearly ten feet on every side, but it had to be to capture all the features of Tevanne: the way the city was wedged in between the jungle mountains, the way the bay shot into its belly like a pale blue dagger, the way it seeped down the shoreline on either side of the waters…
And there, stuffed around the waters and the streams, were four little nations, four crooked little city-states—all dotted with small, carefully placed black blots.
“These are the locations of all the lexicons in the city?” asked Crasedes.
“It’s the location of the foundries,” said Ofelia. “The sites on our campo and the Candiano campo are confirmed. For the Michiels and the Morsinis, we’ve paid informants and done our own espionage to estimate their locations. We can’t be sure which site is actually in use, or how they might be in use—but we’re reasonably certain that’s where they are.”
Crasedes slowly walked around the table, studying the map. His gaze danced from black dot to black dot, which marched around the city in a drunken, staggered line…
Not a perfect periphery. But it should do.
“You may go,” he said to the scrivers. “Ofelia—a word.”
The scrivers departed, leaving Crasedes and Ofelia alone in the chamber.
“My Prophet, before we proceed, I must ask,” she said. “Why not simply let us retake the Tribuno’s definition, and be done with it?”
“Because even if we did so, it would not be enough,” he said. “You understand what I came here to do—don’t you, Ofelia?”
“I do. You wished to turn the Mountain into some kind of…of giant rig…to remake the construct.”
“A forge, Sancia called it,” he said. “An apt way of putting it…” He stopped circling the table. “In order to access the privileges necessary to issue such a command, you need a very big violation. I had hoped to use the Mountain as a substitute. It was, in its own way, a massive violation of reality—the authorities of the definitions stacked upon one another again and again in one space by the building’s lexicons…And yet that is lost to me now.” He extended a black-wrapped finger, and traced the outline of the lexicons on the map. “So…we’ll have to find yet another substitute. The Mountain was a nice, concise perimeter, which is useful when going about these things…but when you lack elegance, you have to make up for it in raw power.”
He rapidly counted the number of lexicons on the map. There had to be well over three hundred.
“And I,” he said, “am seeing quite a lot of raw power here. Let me tell you what we shall do.”
23
“So what the hell do we do now?” asked Sancia. “Crasedes has a damned merchant house on his side. We can’t just sit and wait for him to move.”
“That is so,” said Gregor. “And then there is the task of killing a hierophant. Something that is apparently impossible…”
“True,” said Valeria. “But the Maker is more vulnerable than he seems. He is bound together by an improvised solution.