“Vhosian emperor. Very charismatic man, very resourceful. This would have been, oh, about two thousand years ago. Wanted to make sure his people believed that he not only wielded power, but that he was power. Had a lot of sculptures and shrines made. Made a giant slave army toil and fashion thousands of clay statues to watch over him in his tomb, protecting him in the afterlife from his many enemies. Hantiochia intended, you see, to retain his power even in death. To rule his folk from beyond the grave.” The man in black stopped speaking, suddenly entranced with a street sculpture that hummed quietly with the wind.
“And then what happened sir?”
“Mm? Ah, yes. Well…” There was a cruel glee in his words. “He never got to sit in his pretty tomb, or even see it finished. For someone else came along, and they destroyed everything he’d ever built. Wiped every scrap of stone or bronze with his likeness upon it from the face of this earth. All those hours of labor, all those works, all lost…And now…almost no one knows the name of old Hantiochia.”
There was a sound behind them—many voices talking loudly, crying out in alarm. Participazio turned and saw a crowd was gathering in the street, looking up at the Hypatus Building. Then he glimpsed what they were looking at: there was a man up there, standing on the edge of the roof, his left hand wedged up under his right armpit…
The man in black walked on ahead. “We should get back,” he said. “I have much to do today.”
The crowd behind Participazio screamed. He turned back and saw the man on the roof was gone now, and they were all standing around something in the road.
“I think,” stammered Participazio. “I think he jumped…”
“Did he?” said the man in black lightly. “What a pity.” His three-cornered hat swiveled as he looked at yet another building. “Honestly, what wonderful colors!”
15
As the day wore on into midafternoon, the streets of the Commons and the campos slowly began to fill: with pipers, with parades, with floating lanterns, with casks of wine and tables of food—many of them paltry, given the troubles in the plantations, but you still had to put out your offerings. It was the Monsoon Carnival, after all. Tevanne had few rules that went observed by the whole of the city—but carnival was absolutely one of them.
So it was a little odd that the Foundrysiders were huddled in Giovanni’s spacious workshops with Claudia, readying their work: a scrived carriage that had been refitted to act as a parade vessel, releasing floating lanterns and carrying a giant cask of wine through the streets.
“This feels,” said Giovanni as he adjusted the cask of wine in the carriage, “a little like old times.”
Orso helped him seal up the cask. “I agree.”
“However,” said Giovanni, hopping down, “I hated old times.”
“I agree.”
“Being that I always kept almost dying.”
“Again, I agree.” Orso cocked his head and listened to the piping outside. “Sounds like the day is wearing on. God, how I’d love to just wrap my lips around a jug of wine, and let it have its way with me…but I suppose such days are over. Where are we with our various tools?”
“Almost done!” said Claudia, Sancia, and Berenice simultaneously. None of them sounded particularly pleased.
Orso was not surprised. Claudia and Gio specialized in a refinement of the technique that Orso himself had developed: though he had found a way to convince a box it contained something it actually didn’t, they’d developed a way to discard the box, and use simple metal plates set on the floor. Arrange the plates correctly, and the reality above them would believe it held a wall, or a block of iron, or a heap of coals, and so on. This was a lot more limited than Orso’s closed-container method—neither of them had found a way to duplicate anything besides the presence of dumb, raw materials—and he knew the past few months had been terribly frustrating for them.
He walked over to where they were working on a variety of steel plates, all laid out on the ground around them. At