reasons why. To begin with, Berenice, Orso, and Sancia had eventually concluded that the imperiat was not designed to work with a normal human being: it was a tool of the hierophants, made by them and for them. A mortal human could pull a few levers and push its buttons, but Sancia suspected there were other, more precise ways to utilize the rig. Some she might be able to figure out—just as Estelle Candiano had, once—but for others, she couldn’t, and never would.
Because she was uninterested in exploring further. Frankly, she was terrified of playing with the thing. The imperiat could easily kill a lexicon if you weren’t careful with it. Burying it under a few feet of concrete had seemed a much wiser choice.
“And we’re sure it would actually sink a galleon?” said Gregor.
“We can set it so that it targets and kills a critical scriving in the lexicon itself,” said Berenice, “triggering all its fail-safes, so it’ll be paused, essentially. It’ll only keep crucial scrivings running—usually construction ones. That’s how most lexicons are designed.”
“That way if I have to trigger the thing while on the galleon,” said Sancia, “the ship itself won’t literally fall apart around us because…Hell, I don’t know, because the construction scrivings forgot how to glue the hull together, or something. Which gives us a chance to get off.”
“So—we get to the galleon,” said Orso. “Sancia gets inside and turns the ship against itself, and then we get the slaves to the escape shallops…There should be enough, right?”
Gregor nodded. “There’s enough shallops for the galleon’s maximal crew, which numbers in the hundreds.”
“Good. We get them off, and we sink the damned thing—and it takes whatever artifact it is they’ve discovered down with it. I don’t care how it gets sunk, whether it’s by Sancia’s fiddlings or because the imperiat reminds it it’s just a hunk of dumb wood and iron. I just want it and all of Ofelia’s devilry on the bottom of the ocean as fast as possible.”
Gregor helped them climb aboard their little fishing boat. “And how shall we get aboard the galleon? I know the routes of this area well enough—if it passed by Ontia, then I should have a good idea of its approach, and we should be able to see the thing from a mile away—but a galleon has a great deal of defenses. A fishing boat such as ours will be no issue for them.”
“I shall let Berenice answer that,” said Orso. He bowed to her, hand extended.
“The Frizettis tried to find a scrived method of purifying water,” said Berenice. “They brought Sancia and myself in to consult and help them find a solution, and we got to keep the sigil strings. They mostly found a very efficient way of boiling water…but that is all we need tonight.”
“Ah,” said Gregor. “Steam—or fog?”
“Fog,” said Berenice. She opened the pack on her back, revealing dozens of small iron-and-wood balls, each about the size of a small melon. “We place this in the ship’s way, and when it gets close, they’ll create a massive fog bank.”
“And I can see the scrivings in the ship itself,” said Sancia. “So we’ll still be able to navigate blindly in the fog, so to speak.”
“And how shall these steam rigs work?” asked Gregor. “We’ll be miles from any lexicon.”
“Not the one in the galleon,” said Berenice. “It was simple enough to adjust the Frizetti works to use Dandolo scriving languages.”
Gregor stared at her. “How much are we paying you, again?”
“Averting the apocalypse is payment enough,” said Berenice. She sat down in the fishing boat. “Speaking of which—I suggest we get on it.”
* * *
—
Exposed in the back of the little fishing boat, Sancia felt a raw, screaming terror when she looked back and saw there was no sign of Tevanne, or indeed land at all. It felt like they were in a tiny bucket with the whole hostile world waiting to swallow them up.
Berenice, however, did not seem to mind at all. As Gregor piloted the ship northeast, she worked on the mast and the boom and the bow, either planting pre-written