Sancia slipped down alleys and passageways and crossed the carriage fairways of Foundryside until she came to the next Commons neighborhood—Old Ditch. Foundryside might have been unpleasant to live in because of the residents—the neighborhood was notorious for its dense concentration of criminals—but Old Ditch was unpleasant due to its environment: since it was situated next to the Tevanni tanneries, the whole area smelled like death and rot.
Sancia did not mind such odors, however, and she wandered down a meandering alley, peering through the staggered rookeries and wooden shacks. The alley ended in a small, bland door, but hanging above it were four lit colored lanterns—three red, one blue.
Not here, she thought.
She returned to the main street, then walked around a block until she came to a basement door. Four lanterns hung outside—again, three red, one blue.
Not here, either. She walked back to the main thoroughfare.
<Are you lost?> asked Clef.
<No,> she said. <The people I want to see…They’re kind of mobile.> <What, like gypsies or something?>
<In a way. They move around a lot to avoid raids.> <Raids from who?>
<The campos. The merchant houses.>
She peered through a leaning iron fence at a crumbling stone courtyard. At the very back was a long stairwell down, and hanging above it were four lanterns—yet unlike the others, these were three blue, one red.
<Here we are.> Sancia hopped the fence and crossed the courtyard. She walked down the dark stairwell to a thick wooden door and knocked three times.
A slot in the door opened. A pair of eyes peered out, narrowed in suspicion. Then they saw Sancia and crinkled into a smile. “Back so soon?” said a woman’s voice.
“Not by choice,” said Sancia.
The door fell open and Sancia walked in. Instantly, the murmuring of hundreds of scrived objects filled up her ears.
<Ah,> said Clef. <The merchant houses don’t like your friends having quite so many toys?> <Exactly.>
The basement within was long, low, and strangely lit. Most of the luminescence came from the ten or so scrived glass lights that had been carelessly laid down on the stone floor. The corners were stuffed with books and piles of paper, all of them covered with instructions and diagrams. In between the lights were rolling carts that would, to the untrained eye, appear to be covered with rubbish: ingots of metals, loops of leather bands, strips of wood, and so on.
The room was also incredibly hot, thanks to the large scrived bowls at the back that heated copper and bronze and other metals into a broiling liquid, though someone had set up a fan to circulate the hot air out—cleverly powered, Sancia saw, by stolen carriage wheels, which ran and ran in place, operating the fans. About a half dozen people sat around the bowls of molten metals, plucking at the metals with long, stylus-like tools, which they then used to paint symbols on…Well. All kinds of things. Small, bronze balls. Wooden boards. Shoes. Shirt collars. Carriage wheels. Hammers. Knives. Anything and everything.
The door shut behind Sancia, revealing a tall, thin, dark-skinned woman with a pair of magnifying goggles on top of her head. “If you’re looking for a custom job, San, you’ll have to wait,” she said. “We’ve got a rush order.”
“What’s happening?” asked Sancia.
“The Candianos are mixing up their sachet procedures,” said the woman. “Totally redoing everything. So a lot of our clients are desperate.”
“When are your clients ever not desperate?” asked Sancia.
She smiled, but Claudia was always smiling a little. This mystified Sancia, since in her own estimation Claudia didn’t have much to smile about: scriving in such circumstances—hot, dark, and cramped—was not only uncomfortable, but also incredibly dangerous. Claudia’s fingers and forearms, for instance, were spotted with shiny, bubbly burn scars.
But that was what the Scrappers had to do. To do their work in open environs would be to invite violence, if not death.
Scriving was a difficult practice. Painting dozens and hundreds of sigillums upon objects, all carefully forming commands and logic that would reshape that object’s reality, required not only years of study but also a mind both calculating and creative. Lots of scrivers failed to secure employment at a merchant house campo, and many others washed out. And there’d been recent changes in the scriving culture that had made it suddenly quite difficult for a woman to find employment on the campos. Most merchant-house applicants who didn’t make it went to other Tevanni fealty states to do undignified, dull work out in the backwaters.
But not all. Some moved to the Tevanni Commons and went independent: forging, adjusting, and stealing the designs of the four prime merchant houses.
This wasn’t easy—but everyone had their contacts. Some were corrupt campo officials who could pass along the right designs and strings. Others were thieves like Sancia, who could steal merchant house instructions on how to make a sigil just right. But bit by bit, people had begun to share knowledge, until a small, nebulous group of dilettantes, ex-campo employees, and frustrated scrivers had built up a library of information in the Commons, and trade had flourished.
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.
This was not illegal—as there were no laws in the Commons, it couldn’t be. But it was also not illegal for the merchant houses to organize raids to kick down your door, destroy everything you’d made, and also maybe break your fingers or your face in the process.
So you had to stay quiet. Stay underground. And keep moving.
<Not bad stuff,> Clef said in Sancia’s ear as they walked through the messy workshop. <Some of it’s trash, but some of it’s pretty ingenious. Like the carriage wheels. They’ve figured out all kinds of uses for those.> <The foundries did that first,> said Sancia. <Apparently that was where they first experimented with gravity, just so they could get all their machines to move around and work better.> <Clever stuff.>
<Kind of. I hear it didn’t go totally flawlessly at the start, and a few scrivers accidentally quintupled their gravity or something.> <Meaning?>
<Meaning they got crushed into a vaguely flesh-like object about as thick as an iron pan.> <Okay, maybe not so clever.>
Claudia led Sancia to the back of the room, where Giovanni, a veteran Scrapper, was seated before a small desk and was carefully painting sigils onto a wooden button. He glanced up from his work, ever so briefly. “Evening, San.” He smiled at her, his graying beard crinkling. He’d been a venerated scriver before he’d washed out of Morsini House, and the other Scrappers tended to defer to him. “How’d the goods hold up? You seem all in one piece.”
“Somewhat.”
“Somewhat what?”
Sancia walked around and, with an air of quaint civility, moved his desk aside. Then she sat down in front of him and smiled into his face, her muddy eye squinting unpleasantly. “They somewhat worked. Right up until your goddamn sailing rig nearly fell apart, and dumped me over the waterfront bridge.”
“It what?”
“Yeah. If it were anyone else, Gio, anyone else, I’d gut you stern to crotch for what happened out there.”
Giovanni blinked, then smiled. “Discount next time? Twenty percent?”
“Fifty.”
“Twenty-five.”
“Fifty.”
“Thirty?”
“Fifty.”
“All right, all right! Fifty it is…”
“Good,” said Sancia. “Get stronger material for the parachute next time. And you overdid it on the flashbox.”
Giovanni’s eyebrows rose. “Oh. Oh. So that’s what caused the waterfront fire?”
“Too much magnesium in the box,” said Claudia. She tsked. “I told you so, Gio.”
“Duly noted,” he said. “And…my apologies, dear Sancia. I shall correct the formulas accordingly for future rigs.” He moved his desk back and returned to the wooden button.
Sancia watched. “So, what’s going on? Your customers need new sachets that quick?”
“Yes,” said Claudia. “Apparently the Candiano campo is…an unusually promiscuous one.”
“Promiscuous.”
“Yes. There is, how shall I say, a strong appetite there for discreet arrangements.”
“Ahh,” said Sancia, understanding. “Night ladies, then.”
“And men,” added Giovanni.
“Yes,” said Claudia. “Them too.”