Shorefall (The Founders Trilogy, #2)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

How long has it been since you started your firm? One year? Two?” “Almost three, actually,” said Orso.

all these young men—even in the Lamplands, female scrivers were extraordinarily rare—quietly

Just as in the real-world computer industry.

“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.”

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.

Seconds did not flow into one another like a river into the sea. Rather, every second that had ever happened to her—and thus to every other human being or living creature in the history of existence—was an isolated, separate instance, and each and every one was still happening, somewhere, somehow, in some manner she’d never been aware of before now.

The Einstein picture of spacetime.

<This is the scriver’s life, San—when crisis occurs, you don’t pull out your sword or take to the streets. You sit in a small, windowless room and crunch sigils.

He had many sights available, permissions of perception he’d crafted for himself many centuries ago—and

Berenice, even when separated from her, was capable of sharing her rights and permissions…

“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.”

Who was this key?

Central question of the series: What or Who is Clef?