and her legs strained as she screamed in agony. It was hard to move her head, so she couldn’t quite see the damage, but she could spy the head of the nail sticking out of the palm of her left hand, and she could feel blood dribbling out of her palm to patter on the floor below…
cried Berenice in her mind.
she shouted back, gritting her teeth.
“There are rather a lot of nails in the walls here,” said Crasedes. “And I don’t have much patience left. Where is the imperiat, Sancia?”
Sancia breathed deeply, trying to ignore the throbbing, aching pain that was now seeping up her left arm.
Another nail came out of the wall—but this one suddenly grew bright and hot, and it burst apart into a cloud of burning fragments, which circled like a tiny, broiling constellation. “Tell me where this Berenice is, and I can make all this stop.”
Sancia gasped in pain. Each time she twitched she could feel the nail grinding in her hand.
said Berenice.
The cloud of hot fragments grew closer. Sancia growled and turned her face away, but she could feel the heat radiating off of them, trickling over her skin, singeing her hair…
She braced herself, waiting for them to begin burning into her flesh.
Yet…they didn’t seem to come any closer.
“Hum,” said Crasedes, sounding disappointed. “You really aren’t going to tell me, are you?”
Sancia kept her eyes shut and her face turned away, unwilling to move for fear her face might graze them. But then the heat receded, and she cracked an eye and saw the burning fragments were slowly withdrawing.
“Well,” said Crasedes. “It’s frustrating. But—there’s always a workaround.” He turned back to Orso. “Orso—if you were to guess at what this Berenice was going to do with the imperiat…what would you say?”
said Sancia.
cried Berenice.
Orso trembled, shook, and writhed in his chair, gasping miserably as he fought against Crasedes’s will.
“Tell me,” said Crasedes. “Now.”
Tears poured out of Orso’s eyes. “I…I…”
“Orso…” said Crasedes, leaning closer. “It’s quite remarkable that you’re resisting this much, but…You must tell me.”
“I think that…” he whispered. “I think that they…they…”
screamed Sancia at Berenice.
cried Berenice.
“Orso…” said Crasedes. “I know you know the words. Now you simply have to…say them.”
“I think,” said Orso swallowing, “that they have made a—”
screamed Berenice.
And then everything around them began to shake.
* * *
—
Berenice dashed out of her carriage, knelt in the alley beyond the Dandolo estate, and placed a dull-looking wooden box on the ground before her.
Then she took out the imperiat, and concentrated very hard as she adjusted it to focus on one specific sigil string: the command for the assertion of distance, which would permit a lexicon to know what was close and what wasn’t.
Killing this command would cause a lexicon to grow confused, since it would contain thousands of commands about how reality was supposed to be altered nearby—yet it would suddenly be unsure as to what “nearby” actually meant. In a matter of seconds, the lexicon’s fail-safes would be triggered, and it would shut down all nonessential commands: in other words, everything except the stuff that kept any buildings standing.
Berenice braced herself, took a breath, and pushed the button on the side of the imperiat.
This did nothing, of course—for Berenice was not actually close to any lexicon. She was instead kneeling in a rather dirty alley on the other side of Ofelia Dandolo’s gardens.
Then she whispered, “Please work.” She opened the scrived wooden box on the ground, popped the imperiat in, shut the lid, and activated the scrivings on the box.