And she left everything more or less as she’d found it. The Michiels would have no idea she’d ever even been here.
Within a handful of minutes, she’d arrived at the office with the dumbwaiter, and she crammed herself inside.
She was familiar with the techniques they’d used to scrive the dumbwaiter—basically an amplified version of the argument they used to make the floating lanterns float—so within seconds she’d convinced the thing to let her descend into the belly of the Hypatus Building, closer to the water pipes leading to the lexicon.
The dumbwaiter brought her lower, and lower.
I’m doing good, she thought as she fell. I’m doing really good! It’s good to be back at it.
Her hand thoughtlessly crept to her chest as if feeling for a necklace, expecting to feel the cool metal pressing against her skin. But there was nothing there.
The smile faded.
This was her first effort at any real thieving since the Mountain—and still, it wasn’t the same.
The dumbwaiter came to a stop. She slid the hatch open and saw she was in yet another workshop—this one full of adhesive plates that were built to stick to walls—and crawled out.
The water pipes will be accessible closer to the lexicon itself, Orso had told her. But there’ll be more security down there. The more important you are, the closer your office is to the lexicon—which means more guards, more defenses, and more wards.
She crept to the workshop door, gazing forward with her scrived sight. She cracked the door open and peeked out. On the other side of the door was another corridor—and just a few feet to the left and down the corridor was a chamber where she could access the water pipes for the lexicon, probably below some kind of maintenance hatch in the floor.
Yet in the room with this hatch were three Michiel guards, all very armed, all standing at attention. She quickly realized why: there was an office next door with far more defensive wardings than all the other ones…which made her suspect the chambers belonged to Armand Moretti himself.
Shit. Now what?
Crouching in the corridor, she studied the room. Moretti’s chambers were exactly as she might have expected: lots of ridiculous, overindulgent displays of light and glass…
But there were a lot of scrived pots. Probably for keeping his damned chocolates warm. And while the guards were stationed before the front doors to his chamber, that didn’t mean there wasn’t another way in.
She walked along the corridor, peering in rooms until she found his bedchamber—she suspected that was what it was by the unusual amount of warm, glowing scrived lights placed around what she assumed was his bed. And though she hadn’t known Mr. Moretti for long, she felt she’d gotten a pretty decent bead on his character…
Aha, she thought. There was a rig hidden in the wall next to his bedchamber, one that looked a lot like a door—probably for allowing lovers to slip in and out, unseen.
She walked up to it, placed her hand on the wall, and listened.
<I await the sachet of my master…the sigils arranged just so, and pressed against the warmth of my skin, filling me with light, filling me with meaning, filling me with purpose…>
She wrinkled her nose. She much preferred tinkering with Orso’s scrivings. They could be a bit grumpy, but at least they were a lot less touchy-feely.
She overpowered the door, slipped into his chambers, and found the biggest scrived pot of chocolate available. She looked around, grabbed a big bottle of grapeseed oil, and dumped it in. Then placed her hand on the side of the pot, and listened.
<…just slightly warmer than the human body,> said the pot in tones of quiet contentment. <Not too hot. Not boiling hot. Just…warm. Just as warm as flesh, flesh on a summer day, flesh under the bright light of the sun…>
<Hey, I got news for you about flesh,> she said to the pot.
<Mm? Really?>
She rapidly convinced the scrived pot that human flesh was several times hotter than what it’d been originally told—or it would be, in about one minute. And then it should believe that for exactly one minute after that; otherwise if it kept believing it should be so terribly hot it might set the whole building on fire.
<That’s terribly interesting!> said the pot. <I’ve been doing this wrong all this time!>
<Yeah, you sure have,> she said. <So—try doing it the right way in a bit, okay?>
The scrived pot emphatically agreed. Sancia slipped back out the secret door and huddled in the workshop with the adhesive plates once more. Then she licked her finger, reached down, and applied the finger to the heel of her boot.
Instantly, the heel of her boot recognized her saliva and popped off, revealing a small hollow within. Sancia picked up her heel and peered inside.
No one in their right mind would have ever imagined someone would scrive the heel of their boot. That had been Berenice’s idea. But they’d needed a way to get this final component into the campo—for even Sancia wouldn’t have been able to make this on the fly.
It looked like a small, square metal plate. But as Sancia touched it with her bare skin and spoke to it with her talent, it suddenly popped up like a paper sculpture, and became a small cube.
She cradled the tiny cube in her hands, studying it, observing the countless scrivings and arguments etched into its surface in microscopic writing. She and Berenice and Orso had worked on this for better than a half a year, and all of it had come to this moment. Otherwise they’d just sold Orso’s greatest idea and mightily empowered a merchant house for nothing.
She looked through the walls in front of her and spied the scrived pot. She saw its arguments had suddenly changed, and now its temperature was leaping up, up, up…
Here goes.
She moved her gaze to study the three guards outside Moretti’s chambers. For a moment nothing happened. Then one guard whirled about, and there was a cry of “Smoke! Smoke! Fire!”
She watched as the three guards charged into the chambers. When they were far enough away, Sancia darted out into the chamber with the hatch to the water pipe.
The room was already full of smoke—apparently grapeseed oil smoked up like the devil—but she spied the hatch in the corner of the chamber. She darted over and quietly pulled it open.
She studied the scrivings in the pipe below. There was a small valve in the side, but she couldn’t just open it—then water would come spraying out.
Once you get to the water pipes, Orso had told her, you’re going to have to find a way to convince them to stop piping in water. Then you can open the pipes, drop in the cube, and be done. But it’s dangerous. You’ll only have about fifteen seconds before you have to resume the flow. I think. I really don’t know.