Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy, #1)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

A hypatus was a merchant house officer who acted as something akin to a head of research, experimenting with sigillums to dream up new methods, techniques, and tools. Most hypati were madder than a speared striper, mostly because they often didn’t survive long—experimental scrivings had a tendency to inflict gruesome death on anyone involved with them.

A foundry lexicon was an intricate, bafflingly complicated, and stupendously expensive device that essentially made all scrived devices work on the campo.

The basic sigillums were symbols that naturally occurred within the world. No one knew exactly where the base sigils came from. Some said the Occidentals had invented them. Others said that the symbols were written into the world by the Creator, by God Himself, that He had defined reality by encoding it with these sigillums, forging the world much as the foundries forged scrived rigs. No one was sure.

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 sigil for “clay” or “mud,” and this tiny alteration would make the wood slightly, slightly more malleable.

After that discovery, much more complicated scriving commands were suddenly possible—yet even this was still quite limited. For one thing, you had to stay close to whichever slate of iron had the commands written on it. If you walked too far away, then the ax blade essentially forgot what that new sigil was supposed to mean, and it stopped working. It no longer had a reference point, in a way. The other problem was that if you wrote too many complicated scriving definitions on one slate of metal, it had a tendency to burst into flames. A common object such as an iron plate, it seemed, could only bear so much meaning.

Lexicons were huge, complicated, durable machines built to store and maintain thousands and thousands of incredibly complex scriving definitions, and bear the burden of all of that concentrated meaning. With a lexicon, you didn’t have to worry about wandering a dozen feet too far and suddenly having all your scrived devices fail on you: lexicons could amplify and project the meaning of those definitions for great distances in all directions—enough to cover part of a campo, if not more. The closer you were to a lexicon, though, the better your scrivings worked—which was why a lexicon was always the beating heart of any foundry. You wanted all of your biggest, most intricate rigs to work at peak efficiency.

“The wall” was the industry term for a tremendous wall of thousands of white tiles, covered in sigils, which slid up or down on a short track. Each tile represented a scriving definition: if the tile was in the up position, the definition was inactive, and thus did not work; if it was in the down position, then it did.

The engraving depicted a group of men standing in a hall. They looked like monks, wearing plain robes, though each robe bore a curious insignia—perhaps

the outline of a butterfly, she couldn’t quite tell. She found she did not like the sight of the hall: it was a massive, ornate stone chamber, huge and blocky with angles in all the wrong places. It felt like light bent in the wrong ways in that room. At the end of the hall was a box, like a giant casket or treasure chest. The group looked on as one man stood before the box, raised his hands, and seemed to open it by will alone. Emerging from this open box was… Something. A person, perhaps. Perhaps a woman, or perhaps a statue, though there was something indistinct about the figure, like the artist had not been sure what they were depicting. Sancia looked at the print at the bottom of the engraving. It read: CRASEDES THE GREAT IN THE CHAMBER AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD: The hierophants are recorded as believing the world

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. B...

She stepped forward, sticking her finger in his face. “No,” she said fiercely. “No.” He drew back, startled. “I am not having this conversation with you,” she said. “Not now. Maybe not ever.” He blinked. “All right.” She slowly lowered her finger. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me,” she said. Then she walked back indoors.

<Don’t hate Captain Dandolo,> said Clef as she set him down. <I think he’s broken, just like you and me. He’s just trying to fix the world because it’s the only way he knows to fix himself.>

people dressed in white and yellow—Dandolo Chartered colors—and moved on to the red and blue crowd—Morsini House—and then the purple and gold crowd—which was, of course, Michiel Body Corporate.

people dressed in dark green and black—Company Candiano colors.

The notes of Tribuno Candiano, she thought. The greatest scriver of our age…There were a lot of them, and she understood few at a glance. But some of the papers were different. They appeared to be wax rubbings of stone engravings or tables or bas-reliefs…But what they depicted was confusing. Each one showed an altar, always an altar, positioned at the center of each paper. Floating above the altar was the image of a prone, sexless human body—perhaps it was an artistic rendition of someone lying on the altar’s surface. Floating above the human body was always an oversized sword or blade, several times the size of the altar or the person. Written inside the blade were any number of complicated sigils, which varied from engraving to engraving, but all of them had these three things in common: the body, the altar, and the blade.

There are many dangers here, child, she’d said once. Many. Many ugly things you’re going to have to do. It will be a great contest for you. And you’re going to think: How do I win? And the answer is—so long as you are alive, you are winning. The only hope you should ever have is to see the next day, and the next. Some here will whisper of liberty—but you can’t be free if you aren’t alive.

“Traditional,” she echoed. “What a curious word that is. So bland, and yet often so poisonous.”

S

“Occidental sigils—the sigillums of God Himself—can’t be used by anything that has been born or shall die. So what do you do? You take a person and turn them into something deathless—something that is not really born, and never will truly die. You do it during the world’s lost hour, when the rules aren’t enforced. That gives you access to untold permissions and privileges! Reality will happily follow the instructions of the tool

you’ve created—because, in a way, it genuinely believes the tool is God Himself!”

“The hierophants made themselves the same way they made their devices,” said Estelle. “They took the minds and souls of others—and invested them in their very bodies.”

“A single human form!” cried Estelle, triumphant. “Yet within it, dozens, hundreds, thousands of minds and thoughts…A person brimming over with vitality, with meaning, with power, swirling reality around themselves, able to not just patch over reality but change it with a whim…”

Reality doesn’t matter. If you can change something’s mind enough, it’ll believe whatever reality you choose.”

I enjoy this

Valeria is more like a complicated command that was given to reality—a command that reality must change itself. She is still in the process of fulfilling all the requirements of that command—or at least, she’s trying to. She is not a god, in other words—she is a process. A sequence. It just didn’t go as anticipated.”

“A debt is still owed to you,” said Valeria’s voice. “One day we shall decide how it will be repaid in full. For now—tread carefully, little bird. An old monster has been hiding in your city. And tonight, you have made an enemy of him. He will not forgive you for this. So, as I said—tread carefully.”

Any given innovation that empowers the individual will inevitably come to empower the powerful much, much more.

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