Foundryside (the Founders Trilogy, #1)

Foundryside is the first book in the Founders Trilogy. The story is set in Tevanne, a city dominated by four merchant houses that control scriving, a magic-like technology in which objects are inscribed with coded commands called sigils that convince them to defy reality. The merchant houses operate walled enclaves called campos with clean water and advanced technology, while everyone else lives in the Commons, a lawless expanse of slums.

Sancia Grado, a young thief living in Foundryside, a Commons neighborhood, infiltrates the heavily guarded Tevanni waterfront to steal a small wooden box from a safe. She possesses a supernatural ability: touching an object with bare skin lets her sense its nature, structure, and recent sensations. A scrived plate surgically implanted in her skull years ago grants this power but causes debilitating pain and sensory overload. Her plan is to use the payment of 20,000 duvots, Tevanne's currency, to pay a black-market surgeon to remove the plate. During her escape, she accidentally sets the waterfront ablaze.

Back in her room, Sancia discovers a golden key inside the box. When she touches it, a voice speaks in her mind: The key identifies itself as Clef, a sentient being who can open any lock instantly and communicate with Sancia through her scrived plate. Clef has no memory of his origins. Sancia takes him to Claudia and Giovanni, two independent scrivers called Scrappers who work illegally in the Commons. Their analysis reveals Clef operates in a scriving language unknown to modern Tevanne. The Scrappers explain that Tevanne's scriving derives from fragmentary records of the Occidental Empire, an ancient civilization led by Crasedes the Great and other beings called hierophants who could alter reality permanently. Clef may be a genuine Occidental artifact.

Captain Gregor Dandolo of the Waterwatch, the waterfront police, investigates the theft. Gregor is the son of Ofelia Dandolo, head of Dandolo Chartered, one of the four merchant houses. He tracks information to Sancia's fence, Sark, and discovers a notebook in Sark's apartment referencing Orso Ignacio, the head of research for Dandolo Chartered. Armed men attack, and Sancia saves Gregor's life before darting him unconscious.

Sancia discovers Sark has been murdered. During the ambush that follows, a campo man activates a golden device that causes every scriving nearby to fail: lanterns crash, buildings collapse, and Sancia's abilities vanish. Gregor later captures Sancia, but nine assassins wearing gravity-defying rigs attack them. These rigs use scrived gravity plates, components that alter effective gravity, allowing the assassins to walk on walls and ceilings. Sancia and Gregor form a reluctant alliance, and Berenice Grimaldi, Orso's fabricator, or chief engineer, rescues them. At Orso's office, Sancia saves Orso from a rooftop assassin.

Orso admits the stolen box contained an Occidental artifact he purchased using embezzled Dandolo funds. Berenice identifies the campo man's device as an "imperiat" from hierophantic texts. Sancia locates a listening device in Orso's workshop, explaining how the enemy has tracked them. When Orso mentions the Silicio Plantation, a site linked to illegal experiments in which scrivers altered enslaved people, Sancia reveals her past: She was enslaved on a plantation, had the plate forcibly implanted, killed her captors, and fled to Tevanne. Orso tells her no surgeon can reverse her condition but offers to study it himself.

Sancia and Berenice track a spy to the Candiano campo and infiltrate the closed Cattaneo Foundry. Inside, Sancia sees Tomas Ziani, chief officer of Company Candiano, examining failed replicas of the imperiat. She recognizes him as the campo man who had Sark killed and caused the blackouts. Ziani is trying to manufacture imperiats using Occidental sigils, aided by notes from the mad Tribuno Candiano, former head of Company Candiano, imprisoned in the Mountain, the massive Candiano headquarters.

The group analyzes Tribuno's stolen notes and reaches a horrifying conclusion: Hierophantic tools were made by ripping a human mind from a living body during a momentary suspension of reality at midnight and transferring it into a vessel. Clef realizes he was once a person. If Ziani perfects this process, he could manufacture divine weapons at the cost of human lives.

The group plans to steal the imperiat from the Mountain. Estelle Candiano, Tribuno's daughter and Ziani's wife, provides her father's blood to serve as a pass key, since the sentient building recognizes residents through their blood. Sancia enters the Mountain, which identifies Clef as possibly the "Hand of Crasedes." She reaches Ziani's office, but Ziani arrives and the imperiat detects the Occidental scrivings in her skull, seizing control of her body.

While captive, Sancia communicates with Valeria, a sentient entity trapped in an ancient box among Tribuno's artifacts. Valeria modifies Sancia's scrived plate, replacing her object empathy with the ability to see and communicate with scrivings directly. When Sancia awakens, she can perceive scrivings as silvery tangles of light.

Estelle arrives posing as a drunken wife and kills Tomas and his guards with concealed scrived devices. She reveals herself as the true mastermind, having designed all the advanced technology while feeding innovations through her father and pretending to be submissive. Estelle plans to become a hierophant at midnight by killing Tribuno with a golden dagger, triggering tampered sachets, the blood-linked identification tokens worn by all Candiano personnel, to transfer their souls into her body. She has also stabbed Gregor and taken Clef.

Sancia frees herself using her new abilities and returns to the group's hidden headquarters, a forgotten burial chamber beneath a flood reservoir. Berenice reverse-engineers the gravity plates, fabricating the missing definition plates, or components carrying the gravity commands. Orso builds a portable twinned chamber that mimics a lexicon, the massive machine storing and projecting scriving definitions. Sancia opens the Candiano gates by convincing each gate's scrivings to reinterpret their commands. Meanwhile, Gregor, left for dead, has been revived by his mother Ofelia, who reveals that he too has a scrived plate in his skull. She equips him with an assassin's lorica, a scrived suit of armor, and sends him to kill Estelle and retrieve Valeria's box.

Sancia launches herself toward the Mountain using the gravity rig. Below, Gregor has slaughtered Estelle's guards and shot Estelle before being frozen by the imperiat. Sancia weaponizes the gravity plates and partially destroys the dome, but Estelle survives using the imperiat's protective field. As midnight strikes, Estelle stabs Tribuno, and people across the campo collapse as the ritual begins.

Gregor, struggling against his programming, hands Clef to Sancia. She uses Clef to open Valeria's box, destroying his remaining consciousness. Inside Clef's mind, she meets Claviedes, the hierophant whose soul powers the key, who warns that freeing Valeria will reignite an ancient war.

Valeria emerges as a towering golden figure, freezes time, neutralizes the dagger's sigils, and halts the ritual. She warns Sancia that an old monster hides in the city, then vanishes. Estelle dies from the wound Gregor inflicted. Sancia takes the imperiat and the silent Clef and helps Gregor escape.

Orso is arrested but reveals that Claudia and Giovanni have incorporated Foundryside Limited as a fifth merchant house, preventing his execution under laws requiring unanimous consent from all active houses. He offers Sancia a position as a founder; she agrees on the condition they take in Gregor and work to restore Clef. In a final scene, Ofelia descends to a hidden cellar where she reports to a figure wrapped in black cloth, implied to be Crasedes the Great himself. The figure declares it is time to stop hiding, signaling that the ancient conflict between the hierophants and their creations will soon engulf Tevanne.