“Why?” said Sancia. “Why do you need Clef?”
“Why?” said Crasedes. He sounded bemused. “For the same reason I made him. To fix the worl—”
Before he could finish, Sancia reached into the box with the imperiat, found the lever that controlled all the scrivings around them, and shoved it as far as it could go—hopefully killing Crasedes’s influence, if not Crasedes himself, since he was basically just a giant scriving.
As she did so, though, she realized it would also kill everything that made the galleon float.
Instantly the whole ship shook. Crasedes staggered back like he’d been punched in the stomach, then collapsed onto the deck. Gregor plummeted out of the air and slammed into the wood. The red maelstrom that marked Crasedes in her scrived sight faded until it was an evil crimson flicker.
“An imperiat?” said Crasedes. He sounded immensely displeased—which made whatever part of Sancia’s mind that wasn’t mad with fear feel very, very happy.
But he was not dead, she saw. He was wounded, or stunned—but he was still moving.
“You thought it would kill me, didn’t you?” he said, still in that silky, even voice. “Oh, Sancia—didn’t you know that I designed that very tool?”
The entire ship shifted to the right, and they slid down and struck the wall behind her. For a moment Sancia wondered if Crasedes was still doing something to the gravity, but then she realized: since the imperiat had just turned off all the scrivings that made the galleon function, it wasn’t sure how to be a ship anymore. Which meant it was probably now leaning in the ocean…and perhaps it would capsize at any moment.
And though she didn’t mind the idea of trapping Crasedes Magnus at the bottom of the sea, she preferred to not be trapped with him.
She scrambled forward, grabbed Gregor, and hauled him to his feet. “Come on, dumbass!” she screamed at him.
They sprinted into a hallway at random, fleeing into the guts of the ship—all of which were quite dark now, since Sancia had just turned out the lights. She felt the incline below her feet increasing far too quickly for her liking. It was one of the most disorienting things she’d ever experienced in her life, clawing her way through this giant ship as the gravity heaved this way and that.
“Sancia,” called Crasedes lazily after her, “just so you know, this really isn’t how I would’ve preferred things to go…”
Sancia tried to ignore him—and to ignore the immense groaning, cracking, and shuddering that was echoing through the ship.
The incline changed again—were they plunging into the sea?—but she kept feeling forward along the wall, then the railing of a stairway, fumbling through a door…
She peered forward with her scrived sight for the hatch, but there was nothing—but of course there’d be nothing: she’d just turned off all the scrivings on this ship. There was nothing to see.
Shit. I’m going to have to turn off the imperiat to find our goddamn way out of here!
She clenched her teeth and stared back into the darkness. If she turned the scrivings back on, then Crasedes could pursue them, catch them, kill them…
Then there was a snap from something in the depths of the ship, followed by a great sloshing sound, and suddenly Sancia’s feet and ankles felt very cold and very wet.
“Sancia!” screamed Gregor. “Turn this damned ship back on!”
“Shit,” said Sancia. She delicately felt for the imperiat and pushed the lever back down.
Instantly, Gregor’s lantern turned back on. They were standing in water pouring in from the hallway behind them. Something shrieked and moaned and wailed in the innards of the vessel—the galleon apparently did not much like being turned off and turned on again.
And Sancia guessed that the lexicon was struggling too. Lexicons had to go through a specific “ramping” sequence of arguments before applying the more complicated ones that let you actually bend the rules of reality. Orso always said it was a bit like plotting a sea course—before you did that, you had to agree on basic things, like what water was, and currents, and how