There was a crack from the hallway behind them. Then a scream.
The parade of scrivers stopped. Everyone looked back.
Ah, thought Sancia. Here we go…
“What was that?” said the scriver with a lisp.
But then came another sound, like hail on a metal roof.
Moretti’s eyes grew wide as a tiny, intensely bright ball of light came hurtling down the hallway, quickly followed by dozens more. “Oh shit!” he cried.
Instantly, they were inundated by tiny beads of bright light that caromed off of every surface with a high-pitched clanking, shooting about with a blinding speed. There had to be hundreds of them, if not thousands, and the scrivers reacted like they were a swarm of hornets—because they did hurt, Sancia found: she felt several slam into her back like they’d been fired from a slingshot, and knew she’d have some bruises soon.
“Son of a bitch!” screamed Moretti. “Which damned fool turned on the sun clouds?”
Everything descended into chaos as the scrivers covered their heads and faces, and sought shelter from the flood of ricocheting balls of blinding light.
I think I did too good of a job, thought Sancia, convincing those little balls to fly around too fast…
But she didn’t have time to worry about that. She took three steps down the hall, found a locked door to an empty workshop, and placed her hand against it.
<I await the signals,> the door said to her. <I am as a wall of stone without the signal, I am—>
<When was the last time a key was used on you?> she asked.
<Oh? Ah. About…two hours ago…>
<And what is the window of time that a key must be applied for you to unlock?>
<That would be…ten seconds?>
<And how long is a second?>
It struggled there. Time and space, she knew, were very tricky things for scrived items to understand. How would you describe a second to something that had no concept of time? Scrivers always struggled with it.
<You’ve got it all wrong,> said Sancia. <Let me explain how long a second really is…>
Sancia worked away on the door, convincing it that a second was actually an improbably long period of time, and thus the last key used would still apply now, and the door should open. And as she worked, she began to feel the sigils seeping into her mind, as she always did.
The better Sancia had gotten at communing with scrivings, the more she began to sense and feel and eventually even see the sigils on their persuasion plates as she spoke to them. She thought she understood why: in broad strokes, she was feeling what the object was feeling, experiencing the arguments someone else had placed upon it, what they did and how they worked.
To commune with a scrived item was, in a way, to feel its scrivings and bindings placed upon you. And every time, Sancia worried a little that whenever she broke away, she was a little more altered than she’d been before.
Finally there was a click.
The door opened.
Sancia darted inside, shut the door, and convinced it to lock again. Then she turned to the workshop behind her, flexing her scrived sight.
She darted forward, remembering what Orso had told her when they’d first started planning this job: We won’t need to bring any weapons or tricks with us at all, of course.
She’d asked—Why is that?
Because every hypatus building is full of mad shit, he’d said. Why bother making weapons when we can just get you inside, set you loose, and turn the whole place into a weapon?
* * *
—
Sancia dashed through the workshops, listening to the clanking, clattering, and cries behind her. She figured she had about ten minutes before they managed to resolve the situation and noticed she was gone.
She flexed her scrived sight and peered down through the walls and floors of the building. That bright, hot tangle of scrivings was four stories below. Now she needed to find the way to access it.
The lexicon itself will be too well guarded, she remembered Orso telling her. There’s no way you can get to it. But there is, how shall I say, infrastructure available…
She walked down one hallway, flexing her scrived sight as hard as she could. She passed through workshops full of countless panes of glass—the Michiels were getting very good at creating glass that imitated daylight, she saw—and glowing floor tiles, and hanging chandeliers that created a curiously calming fluting sound, and mirrors that shone with a curiously intense, haunting luminescence.
Crap, crap, crap, she thought.
She kept moving, glancing about for a way to her target, listening to the screams and commotion from the corridors behind her. Even with her scrived sight, it was hard to keep her bearings in this building. It seemed honeycombed with workshops and rooms, and many had windows that had somehow been scrived so they appeared to face the outside, further scrambling her sense of direction.
Suddenly she saw a bundle of scrivings running toward her—rapier, espringal, armor—recognized what it was, and calmly moved to hide behind an open door.
She waited. Finally a Michiel guard charged past, muttering, “I swear to God, every day it’s something new in this place…”
She listened until he was gone, then continued farther into the building, one corridor, then another, until she spied what she’d been looking for: a long, thick line of scrivings, running horizontally about two floors below her, all arguing something about the pressure of water…
Water pipes, she thought. To keep the lexicon cool…
But she’d need to find a way down to them. The stairs were not an option, she’d be too exposed there. The windows might be an option. But perhaps there was a better one…
She looked around, and spied something running vertically throughout the building: some kind of chimney with a plate in it that was absolutely loaded up with scrivings about gravity…
Did they really put a goddamn dumbwaiter in their hypatus building?
What was she saying? Of course the Michiels would.
She started off toward it.
If you had told Sancia three years ago that one day she’d not only break into the Michiel Hypatus Building in the middle of the day but navigate through its countless chambers and guard posts and checkpoints with ease, she would have thought you mad. And yet with her scrived sight, she was able to winnow her way through the building like a hot knife through eel fat: she danced about the guards and scrivers, spying the rigs in their pockets as they moved and ducking behind doors or behind corners just at the perfect moment; she tore through locks and sachet checks and scrived doors like they’d been built to expect her passage; she even managed to hide in plain sight once, standing behind a new type of scrived lamp and convincing it to glow unnaturally bright so that the scriver who wandered by just squinted at it angrily before continuing on, grousing, “What damned fool thought that’d be a good idea…”