stuck in a loop: “No, no, no…Please, please, God…No, no, no…”
Sancia looked at Berenice, wide-eyed and terrified. Berenice made a gesture in front of her mouth, like she was sewing her mouth shut. But as Sancia nodded, they suddenly felt it.
A pressure. A presence. They felt overcome with the feeling of being examined, like glancing out the window and seeing a shape in the alleys, staring back up at you.
Oh shit, thought Sancia. She looked at the empty air around them, as if expecting to see Crasedes himself there, staring back. It’s looking for us. It’s really looking for us…
said the voice of Crasedes, though it sounded somewhat suspicious.
And then many things began to change around them.
Sancia felt a breeze rush over her skin, like there was an open window. She looked to the side, suddenly sure she would see a tall set of windows there, open to the sprawling, lamplit nightscape of Tevanne, but she saw nothing but the crumbling brick wall of the basement.
Yet when she looked back…
Suddenly there was a bed across from them, on the other side of Gregor’s chair, one that definitely had not been there before. It had crisp white sheets and a rich, silk cover, done in white and yellow.
But the cover was stained with dark blood—for on the far side of the bed lay the body of a man, horribly mangled, lit with moonlight.
Sancia and Berenice both screamed in horror at the sight of him, the right side of his face crumpled in, his eye spilling from the ruined socket, his cheekbone glinting through the pink flesh. His right arm and especially his hand had been almost totally destroyed, the limb dissolving into an unrecognizable mess about halfway down his forearm, veins and bone and limp stretches of ligaments clearly visible in the faint light. His fine yellow robes and hosiery were torn and covered with mud, and yet they sparkled strangely—and then Sancia realized his whole body was dotted with tiny shards, fragments of glass studding his face, his shoulders, his hands, little rose-blooms of blood seeping from where they were embedded in him.
But the worst thing was how much he looked like Gregor. He looked exactly like the man passed out in the chair before them, but younger, somehow, and a touch fatter and softer, as if he’d lived a comfortable civilian life.
Sancia did not recognize him—but Berenice did. She’d seen his face in countless paintings back on the Dandolo campo, and the instant she recognized him, that same knowledge manifested in Sancia’s mind.
“It’s Ottaviano Dandolo!” Berenice screamed.
“W-What?” said Orso, astonished. He looked down at where the mangled man lay, but he clearly didn’t see anything. “What do you mean?”
“It’s Ottaviano Dandolo!” she cried again, sobbing. “He’s lying right there on the bed and he’s dead, oh God, he’s dead!”
“Bed?” said Orso. “Dead? What?”
“She is witnessing something from when the plate was first installed,” said Valeria. “We cannot experience it, for the scriving does not apply to us.”
Sancia shut her eyes.
Berenice did so, weeping softly. The sound of the soft, fluttering wings surged in their ears.
Then she felt it: she felt the first string of scrivings begin to be applied, slowly beginning to warp Gregor’s time, to sense out how far back he needed to shift, and what would change…
And then it happened.
Usually when Sancia closely communed with a scrived object, she would begin to get a creeping feeling of the sigils on its persuasion plate, the many strings of the commands altering its reality, convincing it to be different. It was a curious but mild sensation, like watching an insect climb up your arm, its tiny legs picking over the hairs on your skin.
But Gregor’s scriving was not like that.
Suddenly the sigils struck her like a lightning bolt, command after command seared into her mind like a burning brand, the bright, hot bindings rippling through her—and she felt them, each and every one of them,