Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy, #1)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

The interiors of the huge wooden wheels had writing upon them, a sort of languid, joined-up script that looked to be made of silvery, gleaming metal: “sigillums” or “sigils,” as the Tevanni elite called them. But most just called them scrivings.

That was how scrivings worked: they were instructions written upon mindless objects that convinced them to disobey reality in select ways.

scriving more or less bent reality, or at least confused it.

everything closed wants to open.

But now, in Sancia’s mind, that foundation was beginning to shift, and crack…

There’s nothing before the dark. There’s just the dark. I was always in the dark, as…as far as I can recall.

“Sometimes I admire how you can be so bloodlessly practical,

I always did like the idea of an ocean voyage.>

What resources do I have? What tools are available? Not much, she knew. All she had was a stiletto.

the man’s rapier slashed through the wall like it was made of warm cheese. Though it was dark in the rooms, he could tell that the rapier

He tried not to think of Dantua, with its tattered walls and smoke, its streets echoing with moans, and the sound of the army laying waste to the countryside beyond…

he was no longer convinced that consciousness was the best choice for him. It felt as if some foundryman had swung by, opened up his head, and filled it with smelted metals.

Behind each door, he thought, another world waits. And another and another and another…

To be the descendant of a merchant house founder was to wield an almost incomprehensible degree of wealth, power, and resources in Tevanne.

Each basic sigillum referenced specific things: there were symbols for stone, wind, air, fire, growth, leaves, and even ones for more abstract phenomena, for “change” or “stop” or “start” or “sharp.” There were millions, if not billions, of them. If you knew these symbols—though few did—then there was nothing stopping you from using them. Even in the most primitive settlement out in the middle of nowhere, if you were trying to carve wood into some intricate shape, you could inscribe it with the base

a tray of scriving blocks—an abacus-like device that scrivers used to test scriving strings—and she was popping the blocks in and out with a frightening speed, like a professional scivoli player moving their pieces across the board, creating a steady clackclackclack sound.

the closer you got to a lexicon, the more uncomfortable it felt.

And this was the chief reason that the city of Tevanne, with all of its power, corruption, and fractious merchant houses, had yet to experience much deliberate turmoil: as the entire city was essentially maintained by a system of huge bombs, that tended to make people cautious.

He’d scrived it to sense his blood—a deviously difficult trick—but

that key could change everything, everything we know about scriving. There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t do to get it.

I wish you could see them as I see them. The ones below us are dancing, in a way, seesawing back and forth ever so gently as one hands off heat into a giant block of dense stone, storing it deep in its bones, while another scriving scoops it up and spills the heat across a plate of glass beads, softening them, melting them, until they form a plate of clearest glass…There’s a scrived light on in a bedroom across the street from us. Its light is rosy and soft. Its scrivings stored up all this old candlelight and now they’re slowly letting it leak out a dribble at a time…The

She was glad to have him here. He was a friend when she had none. <I wish you could see them as I do, Sancia,> he whispered. <To me, they’re like stars in my mind…>

No. I never meant for any of this to happen.>

why scrivers so rarely fool with gravity.

“I sure hope this asshole is rich.”

did her utmost not to emote, but her heart was suddenly thrumming. Or maybe she should emote, she thought. She tried her best to look confused.

A big, ancient box. We paid dearly for it, and it vanished between Vialto and here.”

There are all kinds of stories about the hierophants using scrived tools to navigate the barriers of reality—barriers we ourselves barely understand!”

when we inscribe an item with sigillums, we alter its reality, as anyone knows. But if you wipe the sigillums away or move beyond a lexicon, then those alterations vanish.

how do you make a rig that captures sounds of the air?”

“who knows what other barriers they’ve broken?”

The campo was echoing with whispered commands, muttered scripts, quiet chanting.

The hierophants are recorded as believing the world is a machine, wrought by God, and somewhere at its heart it is a chamber which was once His seat.

Crasedes, finding the seat of God vacant, attempted to install a god of his own making in the chamber to oversee the world. This engraving, like so many sources, suggests he was successful. But if he was, it does not explain why his grand empire fell to ash and ruin.

Inside the statue was a device—but a device so tiny, so fragile, it was like it was made of spider webs and mouse bones.

“Is justice such an odd thing to desire?” “Justice is a luxury.” “No,” said Gregor. “It is not. It is a right. And it is a right that has long been denied.”

the more a rig pushes against its boundaries, the more it falls apart.

Midnight, she thought to herself. When the world grinds to a stop, and then restarts.

<I can feel it happening. Me, being sentient…I’m like a tumor inside the key. I grow and I grow, but I’m not what was intended. I’m an error. And it’s breaking the rest of me apart. And the people who could fix me…they’re all dead. They died hundreds if not thousands of years ago.

started trying to engineer the reverse: scriving something so it absorbed light, rather than emitting it, producing a halo of perpetual shadow, even in the day.

Orso had built a career on bad choices.

“I’ve seen cheerier faces in a mausoleum.

Objects have an uncomplicated sense of self, so to speak. People, though, and living things…their sense of self is…complicated. Mutable. It changes. People don’t think of themselves as just a bag of flesh and blood and bones, even if that’s what they basically are.

People can convince themselves to be anything, and because of that, the scrivings you bind them with can’t stay anchored. To try to bind a person is like writing in the ocean.”

but she’d realized then, alone, blind, that she was perhaps becoming something else, like a moth struggling to fight its way out of its pupa.

“I can’t touch people. That’s too much.

“A scrived structure learned, like it had a mind of its own?”

“It’s scrived to sense your blood…Wait. That’s how the Mountain keeps track of everyone inside? It senses every resident’s blood?”

They say the way it feels to be close to a lexicon—the headaches, the nausea—that’s what it was like to draw near to a hierophant.>

This place is old and full of trapped ghosts, kid. Trust me. I used to be one. Maybe I still am.