Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(9)
“The fact that the doorbook hasn’t brought you to an untimely demise yet is hardly a consolation. I’ve told you before, the very idea of connecting two locations on Earth to each other makes me nervous. It’s unnatural.”
“You have a talent for worrying. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Yes,” he said. “Your mother. Frequently.”
Elsa set down her carpetbags and sat cross-legged beside them. The ground was smooth and flawless like polished stone, but not as hard. Actually, it felt almost supple. She pressed her fingertips into it, and five imprints remained when she pulled her hand away. They slowly disappeared as the material rebounded. “Fascinating, isn’t it? How a world will spontaneously generate properties that weren’t specified in the text.”
“I’m afraid the study of emergent properties has been somewhat out of fashion in recent years,” de Vries said.
“Right. Of course. Because of Jumi.” People were a difficult thing to create—when they were directly scribed into the worldtext, they turned out like puppets, capable of basic call-and-response communication but with no consciousness, no sense of self. The Veldanese were the first successful attempt at scribed people, created as subtext using emergent property theory. Veldana was scribed with cottages and agriculture and drinking water, but the people themselves were not specified in the text; they were merely implied by the existence of human infrastructure.
The Veldanese were considered a major breakthrough in the science of scriptology. But when Jumi had fought back, demanding autonomy for her people, the scientific community had banned the creation of more populated worlds like Veldana.
Elsa sorted through her belt pouches and brought out a fountain pen, a bottle of ink, and the doorbook.
“You’re not going to do that here, while we’re still inside, are you?” de Vries said, aghast. “What next—shall we modify an airship engine while we’re in the air?”
“Relax. I’d have to do something monumentally careless to strand us here forever. How did you ever get to be one of Europe’s preeminent scriptologists with such a cautious attitude?”
Grumpily, he replied, “By living longer than all of the really brilliant ones.”
Bending over the doorbook intently, Elsa copied what she’d written onto a fresh page. She’d been distracted and gotten sloppy, so now she adjusted the syntax and asked de Vries for additional details to flesh out the description. After a few minutes of work, she said, “There. I think that should work now. Shall we give it a try?”
“How sure are you that it’s not going to kill us?”
“Um … ninety-seven percent sure?” Elsa grinned. She handed the book up to him so he could hold it open while the ink dried, then put away her writing supplies and stood.
De Vries harrumphed. “Well, at least you’re smiling about something. Not the thing I would have picked, though.”
Elsa sobered. For a moment there, she’d been too swept up in their adventure to remember her mother was missing. Guilt blossomed in her chest, and she swore to herself: no more smiling until she got Jumi back.
She dialed the new coordinates into her portal device, activated a portal, and tucked the device away again. Then she picked up her luggage and stepped through without turning to see if de Vries would follow.
He did, of course, emerging from the darkness a few seconds behind her. They stood in a broad, grassy square near the right transept of an elaborate cathedral. The facade was an excess of columns and arches carved out of pale stone. To the left, near the front entrance of the cathedral, was a squat, round baptistery built in the same style. On their right, a multitiered bell tower tilted precariously away from the cathedral.
“That,” Elsa observed, “is some poor architecture.”
De Vries tilted his head back to look at it. “The Leaning Tower. It’s famous in part because it’s doomed.”
“How morbid.” She tried to make her tone light, even though there was something chilling about all these old monuments. Elsa told herself the buildings were intentionally designed to inspire awe, and so the feeling in her gut belonged to some long-dead architect’s imagination, not to her. But in truth, there was a part of her that couldn’t help wondering how many centuries the tower had seen, how many people had lived and died and turned to dust in the shadow it cast over the city. The weight and silence of all that history felt like too much for anyone to bear.
It came as a relief when de Vries led the way out of the square and onto a broad street paved with gray cobblestones. Elsa was also glad he seemed confident about which way to go. She could explore off-trail through unfamiliar woods and never get lost, but navigating city streets was not a skill she’d put much effort into developing. Now that she was stranded outside Veldana and Earth was the only inhabited world available, Elsa felt a bit foolish for neglecting to learn it.
“The Kingdom of Sardinia is just one of four independent states ruling different parts of Italy,” de Vries explained as they walked. “We’re lucky to have friends here—the Sardinian government is very forward-thinking and supportive of the sciences.”
“Not so in the other three states, I take it?” said Elsa.
A pained expression crossed his face, as if he had some personal experience with the danger of other governments. He cleared his throat and said, “Not so elsewhere. They exploit mad people when it suits them.”