Once this was done, she hurried away down the street, pausing twice to confirm she’d not been followed. She took a turn, then another. Soon the huge merchant house walls swelled up on either side of her, white and towering and indifferent—Michiel on the left, Dandolo on the right. Behind those walls were the merchant house enclaves—commonly called “campos”—where the merchant houses ran their clutch of neighborhoods like their own little kingdoms.
Clinging to the bases of the walls was a tall, rambling stretch of ramshackle wooden tenements and rookery buildings and crooked chimneys, an improvised, makeshift, smoky tangle of soaking warrens stuffed between the two campo walls like a raft trapped between two converging ships.
Foundryside. The closest thing Sancia had to a home.
She passed through an alley, and was greeted by a familiar scene. Firebaskets sparked and hissed at the street corners ahead. A taverna on her left was still thriving even at this hour, its old yellow windows glimmering with candlelight, cackles and curses spilling through the drapes across the entrance. Weeds and vines and rogue nut trees tumbled out of the flooded alleys as if launching an ambush. Three old women on a balcony above watched her passage, all picking at a wooden plate, upon which sat the remains of a striper—a large, ugly water bug that turned a rather pretty, striped violet pattern when boiled.
The scene was familiar, but it didn’t make her any more relaxed. The Tevanni Commons were Sancia’s home, but her neighbors were just as ruthless and dangerous as any merchant house guard.
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.
She unlocked all six of the locks on the door, walked in, and locked it again. Then she crouched and listened, her bare index finger stuck to the floorboards.
She waited ten minutes. The throbbing in her head slowly returned. But she had to be sure.
When nothing came, she lit a candle—she was tired of using her talents to see—crossed her room, and opened the shutters of her windows, just a crack. Then she stood there and watched the streets.
* * *
For two hours, Sancia stared out the tiny crack at the street below. She knew she had good reason to be paranoid—she’d not only just pulled off a twenty-thousand-duvot job, she’d also just burned down the damned Tevanni waterfront. She wasn’t sure which was worse.
If someone had happened to look up at Sancia’s window and catch a glimpse of her, they likely would’ve been struck by the sight. She was a young girl, barely older than twenty, but she’d already lived more than most people ever would, and you could see it in her face. Her dark skin was weather-beaten and hard, the face of someone for whom starvation was a frequent occurrence. She was short but muscular, with bulky shoulders and thighs, and her hands were calloused and hard as iron—all consequences of her occupation. She sported a lopsided, self-applied haircut, and a lurid, jagged scar ran along her right temple, approaching close to her right eye, whose whites were slightly muddier than those of the left.
People did not like it when Sancia looked at them too hard. It made them nervous.
After two hours of watching, Sancia felt satisfied. She closed her shutters, locked them, and went to her closet and removed the false floor. It always discomfited her to open up the floor there—the Commons had no banks or treasuries, so the whole of her life’s savings was squirreled away in that dank niche.
She took the pine box out of her thieving rig, held it in her bare hands, and looked at it.
Now that she’d had some time to recover—the screaming pain in her skull had subsided into a dull ache—she could tell right away what was odd about the box, and it bloomed clear in her mind, the shape and space of the box congealing in her thoughts like wax chambers in a beehive.
The box had a false bottom in it—a secret compartment. And inside the false bottom, Sancia’s talents told her, was something small and wrapped in linen.
She paused, thinking about this.
Twenty thousand duvots? For this thing?
But then, it was not for her to think about. Her purpose had been to get the box, and nothing more. Sark had been very clear about that. And Sancia was well favored by their clients because she always did as she was asked—no more, no less. In three days, she’d hand the box off to Sark, and then she’d never think about it again.
She put the box in the false floor, closed the floor, and shut the closet.
She confirmed that her door and shutters were secure. Then she walked over to her bed, sat, placed her stiletto on the floor beside her, and breathed deep.
Home, she thought. And safe.
But her room did not look much like a home. If anyone had happened to peer inside, they’d have thought Sancia lived like the most ascetic of monks: she had only a plain chair, a bucket, an unadorned table, and a bare bed—no sheets, no pillows.
Yet this was how she was forced to live. She preferred sleeping in her own clothes to sleeping in sheets: not only was it difficult to adjust to lying in yet more cloth, but bedsheets were prone to lice and fleas and other vermin, and the feeling of their many tiny legs picking their way across her skin drove her absolutely mad. And when her scar burned hot, she couldn’t bear to have any of her other senses overloaded either—too much light and too many colors was like having nails in her skull.
Food was even worse. Eating meat was out of the question—blood and fat did not taste delicious to her, but instead carried an overpowering sensation of rot, decay, and putrefaction. All those muscle fibers and tendons remembered being part of a living creature, of being connected, whole, bright with life. To taste meat was to know, instantly and profoundly, that she was gnawing on a hunk of a corpse.
It made her gag. Sancia lived almost entirely off of plain rice mixed with beans, and weak cane wine. She did not touch strong alcohol—she needed total control over her senses just to function. And any water found in the Commons, of course, was not to be trusted.
Sancia sat on her bed, bent forward, rocking back and forth with anxiety. She felt small and alone, as she often did after a job, and she missed the one creature comfort she desired the most: human company.
Sancia was the only person who’d ever been in her room, or in her bed, for touching people was unbearable: it wasn’t quite like she heard their thoughts, because people’s thoughts, despite what most believed, were not a smooth, linear narration. They were more like a giant, hot cloud of bellowing impulses and neuroses, and when she touched a person’s skin, that hot cloud filled up her skull.
The press of flesh, the touch of warm skin—these sensations were perhaps the most intolerable of all for her.
But perhaps it was better, to be solitary. There was less risk that way.
She breathed deep for a moment, trying to calm her mind.
You’re safe, she said to herself. And alone. And free. For another day.
Then she pulled her hood over her head, tied it tight, lay down, and shut her eyes.
* * *
But sleep never came.
After an hour of lying there, she sat up, took off her hood, lit a candle, looked at her closed closet door, and thought.
This…bothers me, she thought. A lot.
The problem, she decided, was a matter of risks.
Sancia lived her life very carefully—or at least as carefully as one could while making a living climbing towers and breaking into places full of dangerous, armed men—and she always sought to minimize any potential hazards.
And the more she thought about it, possessing something small that was worth the nigh-inconceivable sum of twenty thousand duvots while not knowing what that thing actually was…
Well. It now felt mad. Especially if she was going to hold on to it for three scrumming days.
Because the most valuable things in the city of Tevanne were undoubtedly scriving designs: the strings of sigils that made scrived rigs work. Scriving designs took a great deal of effort and talent to compose, and were the most protected property of any merchant house. Get the right scriving design and you could instantly start making all kinds of augmented devices at a foundry—devices that could easily be worth a fortune. Though Sancia had often been offered work to go after merchant house designs, she and Sark always turned it down, since house-breakers who ran such jobs often wound up pale, cold, and bobbing in a canal.
And though Sark had assured her that this job had not been about scriving designs—twenty thousand duvots could make anyone too stupid for their own good.
She sighed, trying to quell the dread in her stomach. She walked over to the closet, opened it, opened her false floor, and took the box out.
She looked at it for a long time. It was unadorned pine, with a brass clasp. She took off her gloves and felt it with her bare hands.
Again, the box’s form and shape bled into her mind—a large cavity, full of papers. Again, she sensed the box’s false bottom, with the linen-wrapped item beneath. Nothing else—and no way for someone to know she’d opened the box, then.