Chapter 19

At the canal beside Cattaneo Foundry, Berenice identifies the metallurgical outtake pipe and uses modular scrived rigs: a fusing wand to melt grate rivets and an anchor to hinge the grate. Inside, she installs twinning nodes on a brick section and maps it to a pre-cut wall in her office, carving a circular plug that Sancia pulls free to enter a basement scrap bay.

Sancia, guided by Clef, unlocks interior doors and navigates dense, hot process halls. Avoiding guards on the third floor, she climbs a lexicon maintenance shaft to the fourth, then descends the exterior wall to a dark third-floor office. Through an adjoining door she spies Tomas Ziani mid-tryst. A clerk delivers a failed bronze “imperiat shell.” Ziani rejects it, mentions Tribuno Candiano’s sporadically useful notes (e.g., gravity strings), a trove moved from “the Mountain,” and orders a hundred shells before morning despite nausea from spinning up the lexicon.

After Ziani departs, Sancia tranquilizes the girl, confirms the shell is inert, and pockets Tribuno’s aged notes and rubbings depicting an altar, a body, and a sigiled blade. Clef realizes they’re attempting to replicate imperiats and fears the power it would give Ziani. A lexicon spike slams Sancia with agony and a vision from Clef: desert dunes, a black-wrapped figure levitating beside a golden box as a storm of wings gathers—until a loud crack breaks the trance.

Berenice, seeing guards converge, melts the base of a tall exterior lamp to topple it as a distraction. Sancia, bleeding and nauseated, scrambles back to the fourth floor, drops down the shaft, and races for the basement breach while guards fire scrived bolts. Berenice guides her through the hole, then triggers an anchored spike to collapse the twinned brick section, sealing pursuit as they climb out through the canal grate.