Moretti poured himself a fresh glass of wine with a flourish. “You have my approval to proceed.” He drained it and grinned at them. “Astonish me, please.”
* * *
—
“To do the demonstration,” said Orso, “we will need a single box, preferably iron or steel. Bronze is a little flimsy. And it will need to be of about the same size as the test lexicon here.”
Moretti sashayed over to a giant cushion. He flicked his hand at a young boy and said, “Please fetch one for him.” The young boy fled, and Moretti flopped down on the cushion. The other scrivers followed suit, draping themselves over the couches and the chairs. Moretti dipped a plum deep into a pot of chocolate, and noisily ate it as he watched Sancia and Berenice go to work on the test lexicon.
The art of scriving was almost always a two-step process. The first step seemed very simple: a scriver placed a small, imprinted plate on the object that they wished to alter, often somewhere inside it—mostly to keep the printings from being marred. This plate was stamped with a handful of sigils, usually anywhere from about six to ten, and once the plate had been adhered to the object, these sigils would begin convincing it to disobey reality in very unusual ways—hence why this component was called the persuasion plate.
But a persuasion plate only seemed simple. In reality, each of its six to ten sigils was supported by the second component: a definition plate, stored back at a nearby lexicon. And that was where the real work was done, for a definition plate was composed of thousands of thousands of handwritten sigil strings, all forming very complicated arguments that were strong enough to force some portion of the world to defy reality. The persuasion plate’s sigils simply indicated what those arguments should apply to.
Creating a definition plate required weeks of testing and analysis. Such experimentation sounded tedious to most—and it was—but it was the sort of experimentation that, when not done properly, could make your head or torso suddenly implode. As such, any definition plate for a successful scriving was worth a fortune in Tevanne.
And this was what Berenice and Sancia gingerly lifted out of their box and placed within the little lexicon on the table: a definition plate they had personally made that would make reality do something the Michiels would find very, very valuable.
“And so,” said the older scriver with a lisp, “your people are building a way to…duplicate reality?”
“Not quite,” said Orso as the Michiel servant boy returned with an iron box on a rolling cart. “What they will be doing is convincing both chambers that the reality within them is the same. The world will be unable to tell if the test lexicon in the heating chamber is actually in the heating chamber, or in the iron box you have brought here, or both.”
Moretti narrowed his eyes. “Which means…”
“Which means that when the two chambers are twinned, you can take this empty box on this cart anywhere you like,” said Orso, tapping the iron box while Sancia and Berenice began to work on it, “and bring a lexicon’s definitions with it.”
The Michiel scrivers were not eating or drinking anymore. Sancia couldn’t blame them—for Orso had just casually suggested a solution to some of the greatest limitations to scriving.
Lexicons housed the thousands and thousands of carefully composed definitions and arguments that convinced reality to do things it normally tried very hard not to do. They were giant, complicated, and horrendously expensive, which meant they were an absolute bastard to build, and harder still to transport.
Yet scrived rigs—like bolts, and carriages, and lanterns—could only work within a mile or two of a foundry lexicon. Get too far away, and reality would grow more certain about what it was or wasn’t, and thus would ignore the persuasion plate on your rig, no matter how carefully its sigils had been written.
In short, it was a hell of a lot cheaper to take a basic iron box and convince it that it held a lexicon rather than go about building another lexicon. Unimaginably cheaper. It was the difference between digging miles of irrigation ditches and tapping the ground with a magic wand and summoning up a bubbling spring of water.
“What are the limitations?” asked Moretti. He sounded a lot less plummy now.
“Well, originally the reality within the duplicated box would grow quite unstable the longer it went on,” said Orso. “Meaning it would, ah, eventually explode.”
“But we have resolved this issue,” said Berenice quickly.
“Yes. Took a lot of work, but…the instability has been eliminated,” said Orso.
“Show me the definition, please,” said Moretti.
“We’ve already loaded it in,” said Berenice.
“I know. But I would like to see it.”
Frowning, Orso slipped the definition plate back out of the lexicon to show him. It was a large, bronze disc, about a foot and a half wide, and it was covered with thousands and thousands of tiny engraved sigils—all done in Berenice’s careful handwriting.
Moretti stood, walked over, and leaned in close to study the plate. Then he nodded and stepped back. “I see,” he said. “Fascinating.”
“Can the technique be applied to a larger scale?” said the scriver with the lisp—obviously thinking of foundry lexicons.
“It could,” said Orso. He replaced it within the little lexicon. “But being as Foundryside Limited has no foundry lexicons to experiment with in the Commons, I cannot give a definitive answer.”
The Michiel scrivers exchanged simpering smirks at that.
“We did, however, look at the second-biggest problem with lexicons,” said Orso. “For while constructing a lexicon is difficult and expensive, it’s a one-time cost. But constantly updating all the existing lexicons on your campo with all the latest scriving definitions…That gets pretty expensive, yes?”
The smirks vanished. All eyes were fixed on Orso, while Sancia and Berenice silently toiled away on the iron box like stage assistants before a conjuring trick.
“What do you mean?” said Moretti quickly.
“Well, as a former hypatus myself, I know that it takes days, weeks, or even months to fabricate a scriving definition,” said Orso. He tapped the lexicon holding the one he’d just shown them. “Having to carefully write each sigil of the argument perfectly on a bronze plate before placing it in the cradle of a foundry lexicon…And you can’t mass-produce them, since one sigil even slightly out of place in an active lexicon could cause absolute havoc. So you have to hand-make them all…Which means it can take more than a year for just one new definition to be fully implemented throughout a campo.”
“Yes,” said Moretti, impatient. “And?”