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October 12 - October 13, 2024
One day, thought Sancia, I will be a person who has a girlfriend all the time and a job when I have to, rather than someone with a job all the time and a girlfriend whenever time allows.
<…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
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When she’d looked at Clef and the other hierophantic rigs with her scrived sight, they had always looked like little bloody red stars that glimmered unpleasantly—but this thing before her was most certainly not a star. It was like a giant, whirling, crimson maelstrom, a massive, bloody thumbprint hanging in the center of the aperture, a violation so tremendous it was like reality itself was bleeding.
She looked at him, her eyes wide and untroubled. She still seemed to be in shock. “The world is broken. It is unbalanced. It is a design, poorly planned, and poorly wrought. You know that, don’t you?”
“I would rather risk a life of damnation,” said Gregor, “and save her, than abandon her and stay with those who first damned me.”
What am I doing? What the hell am I doing? Then another thought struck her—Maybe the first of all hierophants doesn’t just have power over the gravity of objects. Maybe he also has control over the gravity of thoughts.
Crasedes watched her, his visage implacable, unreadable. She started to think that he was not a person but rather a totem or a token that was being moved about in the world by something…else. Something perhaps on the other side of reality—if that even made sense.
“I promised you that I would return your son to you, Ofelia, in exchange for all your labors. And I do not break promises. But it is a regrettable thing that in order to fix a monstrous world, one must become a little monstrous in one’s own right.”
“I’ve got a heap of nightmares and problems to deal with,” snapped Sancia. “I don’t need your goddamn warmongering right now, of all times.” “Maybe if you’d made war earlier,” said Polina, “you wouldn’t be where you are this morning, and all those people would still be alive.”
<The Maker injured me,> said Valeria. <But I injured the Maker.> Sancia thought she heard a note of wicked glee in her words. <Cannot complete the ritual himself anymore. I tore those designs from his mind, and made him blind to them. He cannot learn what has been unlearned. Cannot acquire new privileges or invest them in other tools, nor can he teach others his methods. That is why it took so long for him to return—he had to wait for these methods to be discovered. And even though he is now restored, he is still limited.>
Then there was a set of doors before him, tall and black, their handles and hinges wrought of shining gold. And yet as Sancia looked at the doors, she found she couldn’t quite understand the scale of them. Were they huge, bigger than the sky itself? Or tinier than a wildflower seed? It made her head hurt to look at them, and the more she looked, the stranger they seemed in ways she found difficult to describe: they seemed both thin and heavy, vibrant and faint. There was just something wrong about them, as if they were incompatible with reality itself. But curiously, the doors did have a lock.
“Oh, I’m many things, Armand,” said the man in black. “But I am not a liar. Maybe it’s not your fault. Maybe you, like so many of this city, believe that all the world should be your servant because you haven’t ever learned what it’s like to be powerless.”
“I thought that would have been quite obvious. I am doing this, Armand, because I want you to know what it’s like for someone to know you. And though you’re not a particularly unique specimen in this city…Well. I don’t see why you should go unpunished.” Moretti shut his eyes and wept. “This is what it is, Armand,” whispered the voice of the man in black. “To be a slave. To be owned. To be a thing. Do you wish it to stop?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” the man in black said gently. “That wouldn’t do at all. It’s so much better when you learn yourself, isn’t it?” “Learn what?” said Moretti, choking back tears. “Learn what your city has forgotten,” he said. “What men of power have forgotten time and time again, throughout history—that there is always, always something mightier.”
“Yeah,” said Sancia. “And maybe it can tell us what’s going on.” Though she had to admit, knowing that the lexicons of the Mountain essentially ran on the distorted, violated souls of the dead made the prospect of conferring with it a touch more disturbing than it’d normally have been.
“I should ask the same of you,” he said finally. “Being as you’re trespassing on my property.” He looked down at all the bodies around them. “And getting blood and…bits everywhere. Is this what passes for civility in Tevanne?” Crasedes walked forward with the casual air of a man returning to his home after work. The Michiel soldiers backed away from him. Orso found he couldn’t blame them: Even if you lacked Sancia’s scrived vision, something about him made your eyes water. Just from a glance, you somehow knew that this being’s very existence was torturing reality.
“Well,” said Crasedes pleasantly, “someone came to Plenia who was willing to fight with something besides laws or spears. And now all of Brassitus’s glorious armies, and his enlightened despotism…That is all gone.” He leaned forward, and his voice grew queerly, disturbingly deep. “Wiped away. Like raindrops from a leaf…”
“I think it is damned strange to hear the person who created the biggest empire of all time saying he has a problem with empires, yeah.”
“There is no innovation that will ever spring from the minds of men that will not eventually be used for slaughter and control. So when I made my empire, I thought, if we’re going to have kings, well…We might as well have them on my terms, and force them to conduct themselves decently—to innovate and build without the inevitable shift into savagery.”
“Just remember—a scriver makes something from nothing. Perhaps you attempt the same here. But eventually, eventually, the magic always stops, and all the illusions vanish.”
You are likely familiar with the belief that reality is a device, built by the Creator—a complicated artifice with countless facets and features and structures and substructures, all powered by commands. By sigils.” “The world as a scrived rig,” murmured Berenice.
The Maker said he believed it to be an umbilical point behind or below reality. Much as an apple has a stem, perhaps our reality might still retain some vestige of where it came from, or how it was made—the place within our reality that had known the last touch of God Himself, one that extended to all of creation.”
“I understand perfectly. You wished to take an innovation and use it to foment revolution to fashion a more peaceful, equitable nation-state. True?” Orso looked around at the other Foundrysiders. “Well. Yeah?” “True. I have seen this many times. And I have seen it fail far more often than I have ever seen it succeed. An emperor’s hunger for control will always outlast a moralist’s desire for equality and idealism. And even if you succeed, you will have done so using some advantage that will then be used to shape new hierarchies, new elites, new empires.”
“Then…that is your assessment of all humanity?” said Berenice. “That humankind will always invent, but the powers of these inventions will always eventually accrue to the most powerful, and they will use them for conquest and slaughter?”
“So—if I give you the base commands for this act,” said Valeria, “then…you should be able to combine it with the technique of twinning reality—to assert that two separate individuals are the same. It would allow two living creatures to share thoughts, experiences, perspectives, memories. Including the knowledge of sigils, and the permissions of an editor.”
But the line between life and death is always blurred. To live is to die, just very, very slowly.”
Sancia sent a thought back: <this is extremely bad, I also do not like this> An answering thought: <HOW LONG BADNESS LAST> She didn’t know, so together they just lay on the floor and moaned miserably.
Sancia and Berenice shook themselves in unison. Then they both simultaneously said, “Yes. I’m fine.”
“Yes. Of course you do. And sometimes I find it takes a lot of treachery and death to make a moral world. That is simply the way of things.”
“This was not the city you were raised in,” whispered Crasedes. “Not the house you wished to rule over. Not the world you wished to birth. You saw a future being written that you did not wish to live in. And when you tried to take your house back, he made sure you knew how powerless you were. So you did what was right. You did what was necessary. But the consequences…the consequences are something you struggle to live with every day. Aren’t they?” “I didn’t want this,” she whispered. “No,” said Crasedes. “You didn’t.”
“Conflict and factionalism and treachery…Where does it end? Why play the same game again and again and expect different results?”
“I’m going to chance it,” said Sancia. “But if I start screaming or something—” “Run like hell,” said Orso. “Got it.” “No, I meant come and get me, asshole!” said Sancia. “God!”
The far side of the room was all massive bay windows, which looked out on the swirling sprawl of Tevanne, slashed through with canals, clutching tight to the harbor—and, now, smoking and rampaging and sputtering as dawn kept nosing its way through its towers.
good prose
and as she did, she got the deeply unnerving feeling of Sancia’s mind within her own, scanning what she saw and reading things Berenice herself didn’t see, and all those little revelations and patterns of thought leaking into her own consciousness…
I can barely remember if we were two people, or if we’ve always been one… The stars were so close now, the surface just above. That’s it, isn’t it? We aren’t individuals anymore. Not anymore. There’s no going back. Not from this.
Their legs shaking, their whole body exhausted, they sat down on the edge of the old well and stared up at the star-ridden sky—not two minds within one body, as they’d thought previously, but one mind in two bodies. They did not have to give voice to their awe, their amazement, their wonder—for it was their own. They knew their own mind. They knew what they felt. And then, very slowly, they separated: they disentangled piece by piece, falling out of alignment, becoming two minds, two bodies, closely linked across miles and miles…
“True,” she said. “I know the hearts of men. I know that so long as humankind possesses a power, they will always, always use it to rule the powerless. And there is no alteration, no scriving, no command that either I or the Maker could ever wield that would burn this impulse out of you. Better to destroy what power you have.” She turned her face back to look down at Crasedes where he floated. “You should not be capable of such things. This shouldn’t exist. None of this should exist. I shouldn’t exist.”
He remembered how he’d been so desperate to kiss her at the time, since he was about to embark on a mad enterprise—flitting across the skies of a campo on a thrown-together gravity rig—and he’d thought he was going to die, that he wasn’t going to see tomorrow ever again, and how hungry this made him. Hungry for her, for this luminous creature he’d spent hours next to in workshops and alleys, hungry to snatch a piece of her away for himself, like stealing fire from the gods on the mount…
<I…I want…I want to eat up the world!> he said, frenzied. <I want to build and rebuild and design and…and dance! I want to dance! Oh God, there’s so much to work with in all of you! There’s so much material there, there’s so mu—>
Alone in the ballroom of his ancestral home, Gregor Dandolo listened to the screams of the ancient black thing trapped in the stone, and the booming pronunciations of the glimmering terror mere yards ahead—and yet, all was quiet in his mind. For one instant, I was myself, he thought. He picked up the little tab of bronze between his index and forefinger. I was free. With his other hand he touched his brow, remembering the ghost of his mother’s kiss, and how desperately she’d held him. Yet now, I willingly give myself away. He placed the bronze tab at the back of his throat, and swallowed.
