to work fabricating another set of definition plates.
I shall be as spores pouring forth from a mushroom cap, thought Tevanne.
It watched through Gregor Dandolo’s eyes as its fingers carved sigil after sigil on the face of the plate.
Filtering across the world to bring my works to all the continents.
* * *
—
Sancia, Berenice, and Orso found the Slopes in complete disarray when they arrived. People were charging back and forth, screaming and begging for a seat on a ship, for some way to get out of the city, just to get out.
Sancia ignored them. Instead she searched the crowd and spied a woman standing at the edge of the canal, arms crossed, watching it all unfold with a grim, steely expression, as though none of this surprised her.
“Polina!” Sancia cried. They staggered forward together. “Polina, over here!”
Polina turned and saw them, and her grim expression changed to one of horrified shock. “My God, girl…I was hoping you might come, but what in hell happened to you all?”
“Nothing good,” she said.
Polina looked behind them. “And Gregor?”
Sancia and Berenice shook their heads.
Her face tightened very slightly. “Goddamn it all. I told him. I told him.” She looked at them. “If you’re coming, you need to come now. The next set of ships leaves very soon, as I’m sure you can understand.”
“How will we get to them?” asked Berenice.
Polina led them to a tunnel below a bridge, where she’d hidden a narrow shallop.
“Is it scrived?” asked Sancia. “If it is, it might try to goddamn drown us.”
“I would not trust my life to your horrid magics,” said Polina. “For this, we’ll depend on the currents and our own oars.”
They climbed in. Polina shoved the shallop out of the tunnel, stroked a handful of times until they’d caught the current of the canal, and then they were speeding along.
It was a short, gruesome voyage. People screamed at them, “Take me! Take me!” and some leapt into the waters to swim after them. Sancia and Berenice stared at them, struggling and crying out for help in the filthy, brackish canals.
“We’ve taken enough,” said Polina flatly. “Your friends, the man and the woman in the apron…They arranged for quite the little exodus. I worried once that Giva would never have enough scrivers to fight Tevanne. Now I worry we’ll have far too many.”
Then the Bay of Tevanne opened up before them, occasionally lit bright as the Dandolo shrieker batteries along the coast fired again and again at Crasedes. The bay was swarming with ships, all of them fleeing in a line as they tried to escape the madness.
“Privately owned ships, from the look of it,” said Polina. “As always, the powerful are the first to escape the problems that they’ve caused.”
Sancia and Berenice sat in the shallop holding hands and bowed low as the cinders of the burning city danced around them.
* * *
—
The little shallop approached a clutch of ships moored in a place that was greatly familiar to Sancia: the waterfront. Polina pulled the shallop alongside a much taller caravel. A voice cried from the darkness: “Are we ready?”
“Ready as we’ll ever be!” Polina shouted back. She helped the Foundrysiders out of the little shallop and onto a rope ladder, and they scrambled onto the deck of the caravel.
“Sancia!” cried a voice.
She looked around and saw Claudia and Gio running forward to kneel beside her. “God Almighty, San,” said Gio. “What’s happened? What happened to you? What happened to the city?”
“I barely know myself,” said Sancia, exhausted.
“Get ready to set sail now!” bellowed Polina to the crew. She looked across the bay at the ships stacking up to flee the city. “I know I don’t want to have too many of them ahead of us to slow us dow—”
Then they all jumped as there was a sudden eruption of shriekers from all the coastal batteries around the bay.
They watched in