It was an extremely popular spectacle in Tevanne, but Sancia had never attended a harpering. Mostly because she knew that, in her line of work, there was a not-insignificant chance it could be her bits in the loop.
<Oh. Well. I can see how that makes this all pretty urgent.>
“Right. So. You don’t know who owned you, do you?”
<Nope.>
“Or who made you.”
<That presumes I was made, which is something I’m not sure of yet.>
“That’s insane, someone had to have made you!”
<Why?>
She couldn’t come up with a good answer to that. She was mainly trying to figure out exactly how much danger she was in. Clef was obviously, undoubtedly the most advanced scrived device she’d ever seen—and she was pretty sure he was a scrived device—but she wasn’t sure why someone would be willing to pay forty fortunes for him. A key that did little more than insult you in your mind would have pretty low value to the merchant houses.
Then she realized there was an obvious question she hadn’t asked yet.
“Clef,” she said, “since you’re a key and all…what exactly do you ope—”
<You know you don’t have to talk out loud, right? I can hear your thoughts.>
Sancia dropped the key and backed away to the corner of her room.
She stared at Clef, thinking rapidly. She did not like the idea of a scrived item reading her mind, not one damned bit. She tried to remember all the things she’d thought since she’d started talking to him. Had she given away any secrets? Could Clef even hear the thoughts she hadn’t known she’d been thinking?
If there’s risk in exposing yourself to him, she thought, it’s a risk you’ve already taken.
Glowering, she walked back over, knelt, touched a digit to the key, and demanded, “What the hell do you mean, hear my thoughts?”
<Okay, wait, sorry. Poor phrasing. I can hear some of your thoughts. I can hear them if—if!—you think them hard enough.>
She picked him up. “What does that mean, think them hard enough?”
<Why not try thinking something hard, and I’ll let you know?>
Sancia thought something very hard at Clef.
<Very funny,> said Clef. <Obviously I can’t do as you suggest, as I don’t have the necessary orifices.>
<Wait,> thought Sancia. <You can really hear this?>
<Yeah.>
<You can hear what I’m thinking right now?>
<Yeah.>
<Every single word?>
<No, I’m just saying “yeah” for no reason. Yes, yes, I can hear you!>
She wasn’t sure how she felt about this. It was as if Clef had moved into a room upstairs inside her mind, and was whispering to her through a hole in the ceiling. She struggled to remember what she’d been talking to him about.
<What do you open, Clef?> she asked him.
<What do I open?>
<You’re a key, right? So that means you open something. Unless you don’t remember that, either.>
<Oh. No, no, I remember that.>
<So…what do you open?>
<Anything.>
There was a silence.
<Huh?> said Sancia.
<Huh what?> asked Clef.
<You open anything?>
<Yes.>
<What do you mean, anything?>
<I mean what I said. Anything. I open anything that has a lock, and even a few things that don’t.>
<What? Bullshit.>
<It’s true.>
<Bullshit, it’s true.>
<You don’t believe me? Why not try it out?>
Sancia considered it, and had an idea. She walked over to her open closet. Sitting in the corner was her collection of practice locks, specimens she’d ripped out of doors or stolen from mechanists’ shops, which she labored over every other night, refining her skills.
<If you’re lying,> she said, <you’ve picked the exact wrong person to lie to.>
<Watch,> said Clef. <And observe.>
Sancia picked up one of the locks, a Miranda Brass, which was generally considered to be one of the more formidable conventional locks—meaning not scrived—in Tevanne. Sancia herself, with all her talents, usually took about three to five minutes to pick it.
<What do I do?> she asked. <Just put you in the keyhole?>
<What else would you do with a key?>
Sancia lined Clef up, gave him a mistrustful glance, and slid the golden key into the lock.
Instantly, there was a loud click, and the Miranda Brass sprang open.
Sancia stared.
“Holy shit,” she whispered.
<Believe me now?> said Clef.
Sancia dropped the Miranda Brass, picked up another—this one a Genzetti, not as durable as a Miranda, but more complicated—and popped Clef in.
Click.
“Oh my God,” said Sancia. “What in all harpering hell…how are you doing that?”
<Oh, it’s easy. All closed things wish to open. They’re made to open. They’re just made to be really reluctant about it. It’s a matter of asking them from the right way, from inside themselves.>
<So…you’re just a polite lockpick?>
<That’s a really reductive way of thinking about it, but sure, yeah, whatever.>
They went through the rest of the locks, one by one. Every time, the second Clef penetrated the keyhole, the lock sprang open.
<I…I don’t believe it,> said Sancia.
<This is what I am, girl,> said Clef. <This is what I do.>
She stared into space, thinking. And an inevitable idea quickly captured her thoughts.
With Clef in her hands, she could rob the Commons absolutely blind, build up the savings to pay the black-market physiqueres to make her normal again, and skip town. Maybe she didn’t even need the twenty thousand her client was dangling in front of her.
But Sancia was pretty sure her client was from one of the four merchant houses, since that was who dealt in scrived items. And she couldn’t exactly use a lockpick to fend off a dozen bounty hunters all looking to lop her to pieces, and that was precisely what the houses would send her way. Sancia was good at running, and with Clef in her hand, she could maybe run quite far—but outrunning the merchant houses was difficult to ponder.
<Well, that was boring,> said Clef. <You don’t have any better locks than that?>
Sancia snapped out of her reverie. <Huh? No.>
<Really? None?>
<No mechanist has ever dreamed up anything stronger than a Miranda Brass. There’s no need to, not with scrived locks available for the really rich people.>
<Huh. Scrived locks? What do you mean?>
Sancia pulled a face and wondered how in the hell to explain scriving. <Okay. Well. There’s these things called sigils—it’s some kind of angelic alphabet that the scrivers discovered, or something. Anyways, when you write the right sigils on things, you can make them…different. Like, if you write the sigil for “stone” on a piece of wood, it becomes more like stone—a little stronger, a little more waterproof. It…I don’t know, it convinces the wood to be something it isn’t.>
<Sounds tedious. What’s this got to do with locks?>
<Hell…I don’t know how to put this. The scrivers figured out a way to combine sigils to make a bunch of new languages. Ones that are more specific, more powerful—ones that can convince items to be really, really different. So they can make locks that only open for one key in the whole world, and they’re completely unpickable. It’s not a matter of pressing and pulling on the right lever, or something—the lock knows there’s only one key it’s supposed to open for.>
<Huh,> said Clef. <Interesting. You got any of those lying around?>
<What? Hell no, I don’t have a scrived lock! If I w
as rich enough to afford a scrived lock, I wouldn’t be living in a rookery where the latrine is just a bucket and a window!>
<Yeesh, I didn’t want to know that!> said Clef, disgusted.
<It’s impossible to pick scrived locks, anyways. Everyone knows that.>
<Eh, no. I told you, everything closed wants to open.>
Sancia had never heard of a rig that was capable of picking scrived locks—but then, she’d never heard of one that could see and talk either. <You really think you can pick scrived locks?>
<’Course I can. You want me to prove that too?> he said, smug. <Think of the biggest, meanest scrived lock you can, and I’ll bust it down like it was made of straw.>
Sancia looked out her window. It was almost dawn, the sun crawling over the edge of the distant campo walls and spilling across the leaning rooftops of the Commons.
<I’ll think about it,> she said. She put him in her false floor, shut the door, and lay on her bed.
* * *
Alone in her room, Sancia thought back to her last meeting with Sark, at the abandoned fishery building on the Anafesto Channel.
She remembered navigating all the tripwires and traps that Sark had set for her—“insurance,” Sark had called it, since he’d known that Sancia, with all her talents, would be the only one who could safely circumvent them. As she’d gingerly stepped over the last tripwire and trotted upstairs, she’d glimpsed his gnarled, scarred face emerging from the shadows of the reeking building—and to her surprise, he’d been grinning.
I’ve got a corker for you, San, he’d rasped. I’ve got a big fish on the line and no mistake.
Marino Sarccolini, her fence, agent, and the closest thing she had to a friend in this world. Though few would have thought to befriend Sark—for he was one of the most disfigured people Sancia had ever seen.
Sark had one foot, no ears, no nose, and he was missing every other finger on his hands. Sometimes it seemed about half his body was scar tissue. It took him hours to get around the city, especially if he had to take any stairs—but his mind was still quick and cunning. He was a former “canal man” for Company Candiano, an officer who’d organized theft, espionage, and sabotage against the other three merchant houses. The position was called such because the work, like Tevanne’s canals, was filthy. But then the founder of Company Candiano had gone mysteriously mad, the company had almost collapsed, and nearly everyone had gotten fired except for the most valuable scrivers. Suddenly all kinds of people who’d been used to campo life found themselves living in the Commons.
And there, Sark had tried to keep doing what he’d always done: thieving, sabotaging, and spying on the four main merchant houses.
Except in the Commons he hadn’t had the protection of a merchant house. So when he’d finally gotten sniffed out by agents of Morsini House after one daring raid, they’d taken him and ruined him beyond repair.
Such were the rules of life in the Commons.
When she finally saw him that day in the fishery, Sancia had been taken aback by the look on Sark’s face—for she’d never seen him…delighted. A person like Sark had little to be delighted about. It was unsettling.
He’d started talking. He’d vaguely described the job. She’d listened. When he’d told her the price tag, she’d scoffed and told him that the whole thing had to be a scam—no one was going to pay them that much.
At that, he’d tossed her a leather envelope. She’d glanced in it, and gasped.
Inside had been nearly three thousand in paper duvots—an absurd rarity in the Commons.
An advance, said Sark.
What! We never get advances.
I know.
Especially not in…in paper money!
I know.
She’d looked at him, wary. Is this a design job, Sark? I don’t deal in scriving designs, you know that. That shit will get us both harpered.
And that’s not what this is, if you can believe it. The job is just a box. A small box. And since scriving designs are usually dozens of pages long, if not hundreds, then I think we can rule that out.
Then what is in the box?
We don’t know.
And who owns the box?
We don’t know.
And who wants the box?
Someone with twenty thousand duvots.
She’d considered it. This hadn’t been terribly unusual for their line of work—usually it was better for all parties involved to know as little as possible about one another.
So, she’d said. How are we supposed to get the box?
He’d grinned wider, flashing crooked teeth. I’m glad you asked…
And they’d sat and hashed it all out right then and there.
Afterward, though—after the glee of planning it out, preparing it, discussing it there in the dark of the fishery—a queer dread had seeped into Sancia’s stomach. There anything I should be worried about here, Sark?
Anything I know? No.
Okay. Then anything you suspect?
I think it’s house work, he’d said. That’s the only people who could toss around three thousand in paper. But we’ve done work for the houses before, when they need deniability. So in some ways, it’s familiar—do as they ask, and they’ll pay well, and let you keep your guts where they are.
So why is this different?
He’d thought for a moment, and said, With this price tag…well, it’s got to be coming from the top, yeah? A founder, or a founderkin. People who live behind walls and walls and walls. And the higher you go in the houses, the richer and madder and stupider these people get. We could be stealing some princeling’s plaything. Or we could be stealing the wand of Crasedes the Great himself, for all I know.
Yeah. So we need to play this right, Sancia.
I always play it right.
I know. You’re a professional. But if this is coming from the echelons, we need to be extra cautious. He’d held out his arms. I mean, look at me. You can see what happens when you cross them. And you…
She’d looked at him, eyes hard. And me?
Well. They used to own you. So you know what they can be like.
* * *
Sancia slowly sat up in bed. She was achingly tired, but she still couldn’t sleep.
That comment—They used to own you—it had bothered her then, and it bothered her now.
The scar on the side of her head prickled. So did the scars on her back—and she had a lot more there.
They don’t own me still, she insisted to herself. My days are free now.
But this, she knew, was not entirely true.
She opened the closet, opened the false floor, and picked Clef up.
<Let’s go,> she said.
<Finally!> Clef said, excited.
5
Sancia ran a string through Clef’s head and hung him around her neck, hidden in her jerkin. Then she walked down her rookery stairs and slipped out the side door. She scanned the muddy fairway for any watchful eyes, and started off.
By now the streets of Foundryside were filling up with people, tottering or skulking over the wooden sidewalks. Most were laborers, staggering off to work with their heads still aching from too much cane wine the night before. The air was hazy and humid, and the mountains rose in the distance, steaming and dark. Sancia had never been in the uplands beyond Tevanne. Most Tevannis hadn’t. Living in Tevanne might be rough, but the mountainous jungles were a lot worse.
Sancia turned a corner and spotted a body lying in the fairway up ahead, its clothes dark with blood. She crossed the street to avoid it.
<Holy shit,> said Clef.
<What?>
<Was that guy dead?>
<How can you see, Clef? You don’t have eyes.>
<Do you know how your eyes work?>
<�
�that’s a good point, I guess.>
<Right. And…and you did see that, right? That guy was dead?>
She looked back and observed how much of the man’s throat was missing. <For his sake, I sure hope so.>
<Whoa. Is…Is anyone going to do something about it?>
<Like what?>
<Like…I don’t know, take care of the body?>
<Eh, maybe. I’ve heard there’s a market for human bones in the Commons north of here. Never found out exactly what they wanted them for, though.>
<No, I mean—is anyone going to try to catch the killer? Don’t you have any authorities who try to make sure that stuff doesn’t happen?>
<Oh,> said Sancia. <No.>
And she explained.
Since it was the merchant houses that made Tevanne great, it was probably inevitable that most city property would wind up being owned by them. But the houses were also all competitors who jealously protected their scriving designs; for as everyone knew, intellectual property is the easiest kind to steal.
This meant that all the land the houses owned was fiercely guarded, hidden behind walls and gates and checkpoints, inaccessible to all except those who possessed the proper markers. The house lands were so restricted and controlled they were practically different countries—which the city of Tevanne more or less acknowledged.
Four walled-off little city-states, all crammed into Tevanne, all wildly different regions with their own schools, their own living quarters, their own marketplaces, their own cultures. These merchant house enclaves—the campos—took up about 80 percent of Tevanne.
But if you didn’t work for a house, or weren’t affiliated with them—in other words, if you were poor, lame, uneducated, or just the wrong sort of person—then you lived in the remaining 20 percent of Tevanne: a wandering, crooked ribbon of streets and city squares and in-between places—the Commons.
There were a lot of differences between the Commons and the campos. The campos, for instance, had waste systems, fresh water, well-maintained roads, and their buildings tended to stay standing, which wasn’t always the case in the Commons. The campos also had a plethora of scrived devices to make their lives easier, which the Commons certainly did not. Walk into the Commons showing off a fancy scrived trinket, and you’d have your throat slit and your treasure snatched in an instant.