Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy, #1)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

It had worked, she supposed—the drainage tunnel had allowed her to slink below all the interior gates and walls and get close to the Michiel foundry—but her informants had neglected to mention the tunnel’s abundance of centipedes, mud adders, and shit, of both the human and equine variety.

One of the things I wonder when reading about fantasy cities is—where did they put their poop? Seriously. Urban areas were reeking cesspools before 1800 or so. Did Minas Tirith have sewers? As such, I decided to tackle this subject on page one. I know my readers will thank me for it.

She took back passageways to her rookery building, and slipped in through a side door. She walked down the hallway to her rooms, felt the door with a bare index finger, then the floorboards. They told her nothing unusual—it seemed things hadn’t been tampered with.

Interesting historical fact: stair height was not standardized until the Victorian era. This meant houses had sometimes randomly tall or short steps, leading to countless falls, injuries, and deaths. When I think of the rookeries, I think of that: buildings so cheap, even the stairs are hostile.

Finally they came to their destination. Up ahead, the wet, rambling rookeries of Foundryside came to a sharp stop at a tall, smooth white wall, about sixty feet high, clean and perfect and unblemished. <We’re coming up on something big and scrived, aren’t we?> said Clef. <How can you tell?> <I just can.>

Clef is essentially a classic bad trope: the hacker talking to the hero through an earpiece. It’s that, plus magic, plus Bugs Bunny, in essence.

That was how the Scrappers got started. If you needed a lock fixed, or a door reinforced, or a blade altered, or if you just wanted light or clean water, the Scrappers would sell you rigs that could do that—for a fee, of course. And that fee was usually pretty high. But it was the only way for a Commoner to get the tools and creature comforts reserved for the campos—though the quality was never totally reliable.

It always bothered me that the wizards in Harry Potter never had an intellectual property system. This is the logical endpoint of that: a bunch of punk, underground hacker/wizards who are trying to reverse-engineer spells.

He liked to imagine he was accustomed to such horrors, but sometimes the futility of it all overwhelmed him. No matter how I try, Tevanne remains Tevanne.

Gregor Dandolo always tries to be a gentleman and do good. It never works out.

Sancia walked along the Anafesto, eyeing the dark, decrepit fisheries ahead. She kept looking to her left, toward the lanes of the Greens. This area was a lot quieter than Foundryside, but she took no chances. Every time she spied someone, she stopped and watched their movements, sensitive to any suggestion that they might be there looking for her, and she didn’t move on until satisfied.

Sometimes characters have to be stupid for plot purposes. And I hate it. It is a joy to write smart ones. Sancia is not brash and foolish: she is slow, cautious, and careful. Seeing how she thinks her way out of tight spots is a pleasure.

So the city of Tevanne, and its many nascent scriving houses, then had a problem to solve: how were they to house all the definitions and meanings for these complicated scrivings without having everything burst into flames and melt? Which was why they’d invented lexicons. 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.

“The magic is scripts of code that are housed on giant magic databases” is something that makes intuitive sense, but is hard to articulate organically.

And he thought he could understand how Orso Ignacio felt right now. Perhaps he would be able to work the man from that angle. He found himself promptly disabused of these notions when he entered the lexicon chamber and instantly heard the words, “Who the shit are you?”

I wrote about five different versions of Orso’s entrance, through the rewrites. In everyone, he was apoplectic with rage. I had a ball.

“We don’t have time to amend your dogshit educations!” said Orso.

“Dogshit educations" remains my favorite joke in the book.