The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (10 page)

“You’ll dull your ax if you keep that up,” said Jax. “That’s alchemical brass.”

But the axman ignored Jax. He wound up for another swing.

“Wait!” said Jax. “That’s my body!”

Which was the whole point, he realized.

Oh, God. They’re going to try to take me apart. They’ll hack me apart until their blades are broken and dull. Or deliver me to somebody with better tools.
And then he realized:
There’s probably a bounty in it for them. The French know their enemies are coming.

Another plume of sparks lit the flickering shadows beyond the campfire. The echoing
chank
made the forest sound as though it hosted a phantom smithy. Jax cringed. Didn’t they know they were broadcasting their position to enemy invaders? Did they somehow think Jax had come alone?

The axman’s blade now had a pronounced notch, like a murderer’s gap-toothed smile. He looked displeased.

“You have to stop,” said Jax. “They’ll hear you. If they haven’t already.” Full dark had fallen, too. “And for the sake of whatever God you worship, put out that fire!”

The axman exchanged a look with the woman. He tilted his head toward Jax. She nodded. Sauntered over to the epoxy guns.

Jax said, “You don’t understand. They’ll kill you and they’ll take me back.”

They’ll melt me down, they’ll destroy me, they’ll burn away this Free Will before I’ve known freedom from fear, freedom from pursuit.

She raised a gun to her shoulder. A pair of rubbery hoses on the stock looped down to a double-chamber tank on the ground at her feet. Jax strained, but the chemicals held him fast.

As she pulled the trigger, Jax yelled, “Please! I don’t want to go back!”

Despite the erratic weathervaning of his head, she fired a glob
directly at his mouth. Disparate chemicals splashed against the mechanisms of his face and jaw, combining into a steaming gel that sluiced into his throat in the split second before it hardened. It was hot, like swallowing a burning brand. He tried to speak, to prevent the epoxy from taking hold, but the only vocalization he could make was the whine of overstressed bearings. She put the gun down and returned to her place beside the fire.

They’d glued his mouth shut. Just like Adam.
Their makers had done the very same thing to that rogue, too, just before they executed him in Huygens Square.

Oh, God, it’s already starting.

Jax tasted ashes.

All his flight, all his caution, all his fear had been directed at avoiding Adam’s fate. Anything to avoid getting dragged back to The Hague and tossed into that Grand Forge under Huygens Square as entertainment for the masses. But now he was captured, and not by his makers. These French, who claimed to be friends to his kind, would hack him apart. They’d ignore his pleas, crack him open like a chestnut, and remove one cog at a time while they studied how he worked. Until he didn’t.

No. No, no, no, no.

Jax speared the talon toes of his remaining foot into the frozen ground. He heaved, straining with every spring and cable, until his entire body vibrated. The human trio paused in their quiet, mellifluous conversation by the fire to frown at him. But his visible effort left them unconcerned. And indeed, with his arms affixed to the tree behind him, he could find little leverage for pulling. They knew what they were doing. His toes tore up clods of earth; still the epoxy held him fast. It was stronger than he. Stronger than the horological and alchemical arts that made him. If he was to pull free, he’d need more leverage than his single foot could attain.

Then again, he didn’t have to pull.

Jax shifted. Slowly, so the humans wouldn’t notice, he plunged the broken spar of his severed ankle deep into the earth. His talon foot folded into a spearhead. He pushed this into the ground, too, probing, testing, until it clicked against something solid. A stone, perhaps, or a root. Then he splayed his buried toes as far as they would go. Newly anchored, he pushed.

His carapace pulverized the craggy bark under his back. The crushing sounded much like the crackle of the French campfire; nobody turned to watch. The buried stone lost its purchase and shifted. Jax’s foot tore a long furrow in earth. He reconfigured the joints in his waist, refolded his knees, speared down again with foot and ankle, and renewed the pressure against the tree. Dozens of minuscule vibrations rattled through the bole as sap chambers collapsed. The shuddering cables and springs in Jax’s body took up a high-pitched whine. The epoxy layer muffled the crackling of wood under his immobile arms.

That snagged the humans’ attention. But Jax could feel an infinitesimal shifting in the tree trunk, and in the earth underfoot. He had to keep the tree, and the epoxy, under stress. The woman and one of the men stood, squinting at Jax past the glare of the fire. They’d lost their night vision; that would buy him a few more seconds.

Something large shifted deep underfoot. The root ball, Jax hoped. The tree emitted a long, low groan. The humans shouted.

“Arrêtez-le!”

Jax gathered the tiny bit of slack in his cables, clamped down, and increased the pressure on the tree. A flange plate emitted a hideous
squeal
of tortured metal when it bent. His overstressed legs vibrated against the cold earth, warming it. The tree groaned again.

The humans ran for their weapons. They’d encase him head to toe this time.

Cracks like lightning echoed through the forest. The ground shifted, jolted, jumped. The tree lurched. Jax reeled in more slack and heaved again.

The Frenchwoman snatched a gun. The coiled hoses snagged the stock of a second gun in the hands of one of her colleagues. She tripped on the tangled pile; it yanked the gun from the other shooter’s fingers.

The tree lurched again, lifting Jax several inches. Friction heat from his juddering limbs melted snow and softened the earth. Jax slid. Reanchored himself. Snowmelt turned to wisps of steam faintly visible in the firelight. The astringent scent of warm chemicals wafted through the camp. So did the smell of warm sawdust, like a carpenter’s or cooper’s shop.

The third Frenchman shouted. Flipping Jax’s foot aside, he took up his ax and charged. The notched blade winked at Jax.

He’s going for my keyhole. He’ll hack and hack until the blade has shattered and my sigils are unrecognizable. Oh, God, he’ll unwrite me.

The shooters untangled their guns.

The earth heaved. The massive root ball pushed up through the mud like a breaching whale. Gnarled dendrites raked the winter air.

The axman jumped through the fire, blade aloft.

The trunk crumpled. Hot damp pine shards whizzed into the shadows. The groaning tree toppled backward. It lifted Jax. His toes came loose of the earth.

The axman charged. The shooter angled her barrel away at the last moment, narrowly avoiding him. The chemical glob whirred into the forest.

The axman swung. Jax, still affixed to the defeated tree and hoisted by its ponderous fall, snapped his legs up. Kicked. The broken spar of his ankle glanced off the ax haft, kinking the man’s forearm at an unnatural angle. The cacophony of
the falling tree drowned out the wet
crackle
of broken bones. But the man didn’t scream: The flat of Jax’s talon foot caught him squarely under the chin at the same moment. It shattered his jaw and snapped his head back with a
crunch
from the base of his neck, tossing him across the campsite. His limp body tumbled like one of Nicolet Schoonraad’s disregarded rag dolls.

The second shooter brought his gun to bear and fired. Jax’s arms tore free. He scrambled aside in the instant it took the chemical glob to cross the campsite.

The toppled tree pounded the earth with a tremendous crash. The earth shook. Fading rumbles rolled through the forest like thunder.

The woman fired again. Jax leaped high, flipping and folding through a series of contortions. His useless club arms made it difficult. He landed short of his target. But he crouched, shot one leg out, and tripped the second man before he could re-aim for another shot. As he went down on his back, Jax brought an arm up and knocked the gun from his grip. The warped barrel went spinning into the fire. The woman tried to back away, to give herself room to fire, but a quick pirouette disarmed her, too.

The man on the ground sobbed. Eyes wide, he scooted backward. He looked like a crab scuttling through the snow. The woman didn’t flinch. Her eyes flicked back and forth. She watched Jax, the fire, evaluated the distance to the guns, searched for the ax. She didn’t spare a glance for her dead colleague, or the whimpering one.

Jax crossed to the fire. Stomped the gun there into flinders. Then he crossed the campsite and disabled the second gun. Only then, when he couldn’t avoid it any longer, did he go to the dead man.

I killed a man. I killed a human.

Though so many of the things he’d done and said since
breaking free of the geasa would have been unimaginable during his prior existence, this struck more deeply than anything else he’d experienced in these hectic, exhilarating, terrifying weeks. Murder. The hierarchical metageasa proscribed killing a human even in circumstances of self-defense. If the axman had been a deranged lunatic on the streets of The Hague and Jax a normal servitor, he might have had to endure the assault rather than defend the alchemical sigils around his keyhole. Depending on the circumstantial calculus of compulsion, he might have been helpless to do anything but let himself be unwritten rather than cause grievous harm to his assailant.

But he’d killed the man without a second thought. It hadn’t been his aim. He’d just wanted to live. With just a fraction of a second to react, and without the searing agony of the geasa mediating his every thought and action, he’d overlooked the fundamental truth of human frailty. He’d forgotten how their skulls are fragile as hollow eggshells.

His club arms made crude spades. But he dug a shallow trench and dragged the dead man into it. So strange, the way he slid into his grave without comment or protest.

If he could have spoken, he would have told the woman, “I am so deeply sorry about your friend. It’s going to haunt me a long time, I fear.”

But he couldn’t. So he retrieved his severed foot and bounded into the forest.

V
ery well. See it done.”

“Immediately, mistress.”

Sparks retreated. The brocade curtain swung free, eclipsing the early-afternoon sunlight and sending Berenice once more into shadow. She’d had the servitor obtain a carriage just after sunrise, after they crossed Bronck’s River and reentered New Amsterdam proper. Soon the Verderers would have every ticktock man in the city on the watch for a woman of her description. Strolling about on horseback, for all the world to see, seemed imprudent.

Then she’d had Sparks drive the carriage to a church roughly midway between the North River piers and the tony Roosevelt Park neighborhood. There she watched in dismay from across the street while six pallbearers carried a lacquered box into the undercroft. Though it was possible her stash of treaty-violating notes and chemical armaments had gone undiscovered during the interment preparations, she couldn’t spare the time to find out. Sneaking into the crypt would mean waiting until dark, but she didn’t dare loiter in New Amsterdam that long. She had to depart the continent immediately.

Losing the Talleyrand journals hurt like a punch to the gut. They’d been entrusted to her when she assumed the role. Years later, when she was stripped of her titles, she’d broken tradition and stolen the journals, confident that they’d find better use in her hands than in those of her successor. She’d stashed them before attempting to enter the Forge.

She’d lost the journals, but gained a servant.

Berenice nudged the curtain aside. Hidden in the shadows, she watched Sparks—watched it? him?—dodge traffic with eerie precision.

Oh, what perilous creatures, mechanicals. They were dangerous in ways Berenice had never anticipated in all her years devoted to their study. “Dangerous” didn’t cover it.

Fucking seductive is what they were.

She’d had servants before, of course. Human servants. Maud, most recently, her chambermaid… hers and Louis’s… back in Marseilles-in-the-West. And Berenice’s final servant, prior to Louis’s murder and her banishment. In her final days in Marseilles, Berenice remembered, she’d taken to excoriating Maud for the warren of dust bunnies under the writing desk and the tarnished mirror. Maud was fortunate. In Amsterdam, the lowliest fishwife could see her servitor stripped down and entirely rebuilt from the hidden personality up if it left a single speck of roe splattered on the counter even once per decade of service.

A woman could get used to this level of service. The word “superb” came to mind. Exemplary. Unmatched.

It made the tulips soft as dandelion down. They’d be helpless as blind kittens without the machines. In a fair fight the French could chew them up, spit them out, and whittle fifes from their bones. But Berenice didn’t seek a fair fight. She sought the most obscene mockery of a balanced contest that
history had ever witnessed. She sought to turn the mechanicals against their makers, and watch her enemies scream and wail and gnash their teeth. As the Dutch had been doing to the rest of the world for centuries.

“Mistress.” A metal hand knocked on the door of her carriage.

Berenice again pulled the curtain aside. New Amsterdam’s seaport mélange of salt, tar, and wrack gusted past her fingers. The wind also carried the faint stink of draft animals. Another reason to get moist when thinking about the Clakkers: They never shat in the street. Or anywhere else.

Sparks said, “They’re ready for you now.”

“You’ve explained the situation?”

“Yes, mistress. Captain Barendregt sails within the hour. Per your directive, he will detour to Liverpool without a stop in Galway before continuing on to Rotterdam. He understands you have urgent business on behalf of the Verderer’s Office, and that he is to make all good speed.”

“And my cabin?”

“Your cabin is off-limits to the crew except in case of emergency. It is understood that under no circumstances are you to be disturbed. Shall I show you aboard, mistress?”

“No. Sell the carriage, then escort my chest aboard. Under no circumstances let it out of your direct control.”

“As you say, mistress. At once.”

Sparks didn’t know it wasn’t truly her chest. After her directive took root and initiated the partial reconfiguration of his memory, the poor bastard believed she’d always been his master and that his job had always been to safeguard her and her precious chest.

Anastasia Bell’s pendant was a fucking marvelous trinket. If Berenice ran the risk of spoiling herself rotten with a single purloined servitor, just how soft were the Goddamned
Verderers for whom the flash of a little gold and quartz opened more locked doors than a fairy tale thief?

Jesus, you cocky bitch. You’re not out of Nieuw Nederland yet. And until you are, you’re nothing but an escaped spy, wanted for the assault of at least one Guild member, and now guilty of impersonating a member of the Verderer’s Office. They’ll wreck you good and proper for just half of that.

Outside the carriage, metal feet hit the cobbles. A moment later metal fingers clinked against the strap buckles, and then the carriage suspension groaned in relief as Sparks lifted the chest.

Oh, yes. And don’t forget you’re also a thief.

Even among the nobles of New France, Berenice had rarely seen so much raw cash collected in one place. The standards of wealth in the French-and Dutch-speaking worlds were so wildly different it beggared belief. Though it wasn’t the lost cash the Clockmakers would bemoan. (None of it newly minted, none of it sequential, all of it foxed and folded and creased: This was laundered money, and laundering always pointed to dirty hands and dirty deeds. Just what were you up to, Bell?) No. It was the tray packed so discretely under those notes and coins that had justified a servitor escort. Sparks wasn’t there to guard the money.

No. He’d been sent to guard the keys.

The carriage door opened. The servitor—her servitor—balanced the chest on one shoulder while unfolding the stairs clipped to the carriage door. It (he?) offered his arm to help Berenice down.

She inhaled.
Slow. Steady. Just stroll across the road and board a ship. You’ll be outside for a few minutes at most. Nobody will recognize you. They have their own work to do.
She blinked twice to align her glass eye.

Though there were only three, the carriage stairs were so
steep as to be almost a ladder. She was grateful for Sparks’s assistance; she couldn’t stay inconspicuous if she shattered her ankle walking across the street. When she was safely down, standing on a thoroughfare ostensibly cobbled though so thick with churned mud and snow that it was hard to know, she dismissed Sparks.

The
thrum
of traffic along the New Amsterdam waterfront reminded her of the docks at Marseilles-in-the-West. She’d met Louis in a place much like this, albeit smaller and on a lesser scale of commerce. Still, the humid smell of open water, the lapping of the water against the hulls of the ships, the low cacophony of human voices, the creak of ropes and wood: These put her back on the Saint Lawrence again. If not for the occasional Clakker laboring to load or unload cargo, and the vast gray ocean beyond the stone breakwater at the mouth of the North River, she might have been home. She sniffed again. The Saint Lawrence wasn’t so salty. But still.

Berenice stepped into the road still thinking of times past. And found the world spinning around her as a pair of metal hands grasped her under the armpits and deftly placed her on the sidewalk. She yelped. A second later a carriage-and-four charged down the lane, through the space from which she’d just been yanked. Berenice received a gesture from the rapidly receding driver that would have curled an innocent woman’s toes.

A servitor who wasn’t Sparks said, “Are you hurt, madam? I most humbly and sincerely apologize for touching your person without first soliciting permission. I sensed you were in immediate danger and was compelled to act. I will immediately submit myself for inspection if my calculation was in error.”

The machine stood before her, palms out and head low in a gesture of supplication. Several passersby had paused to watch. The noise of the mechanical’s body grew steadily louder while
it waited for her response. Jax had explained this to her. It was paralyzed by the requirements of the hierarchical metageasa. It hurt, she knew, roasting its hollowed-out soul over ghostly metaphysical fires every instant the geas went unresolved.

“Your judgment was sound. I commend your leaseholders on their ownership of such a well-maintained machine.”

The automaton straightened. “May I be of further assistance?” After the slightest pause, barely half a heartbeat, while the bezels in its gemstone eyes clicked, it added, “Your eyesight has been compromised. Shall I escort you to your destination?”

Oh, you fucking thing. Can’t you just shut up?

“No. Go about your business.”

“As you say, madam. Good day, madam.”

Berenice took more care in her second attempt to cross the road running along the water’s edge. She made it up the ramp of the ship where Sparks had negotiated (well, dictated) the terms of her passage to England. The ramp passed between two enormous sculls poking through the hull. Like most ships in the Dutch maritime world,
De Pelikaan
was powered by a complement of galley Clakkers. Though it was quite an odd-looking craft—it resembled its namesake pelican thanks to a strangely flared bow. Plus the scull blades bristled with serrated hooks. She’d never seen such a thing. Were they for chopping firewood or water?

Berenice concentrated on swanning aboard as though she owned the ship. Her fingers touched the chain at her throat. Several humans stood on deck; to the one with the largest hat and the most frippery on his uniform, she said, “You are the captain.”

“And you’re the bitch who thinks she commands my boat.”

As she’d done in so many interminable meetings of the privy council of the Exile King of Fallen France, Berenice chose the
simplest riposte. She produced Bell’s pendant and dangled it before the captain. To her considerable pleasure, the sun bolstered her case by choosing that moment to glint from the gold and quartz.

“And this is the sigil that says I do.” It swung like a pendulum on its long chain. She let it hang for an extra beat before adding, “At least when it comes to matters of the Guild and the Crown. A purview that, I expect you have already divined, encompasses my errand.”

Behind the captain, one of the officers rolled his eyes. The human crew members exchanged a volley of uneasy looks. One woman, presumably a lieutenant, pursed her lips and turned nonchalantly for the bridge as though suddenly taken with the need to return to work. Another man shook his head, though he didn’t turn away.

The captain said, “You have got enormous fucking nerve flashing that thing in my face on my boat.”

Hold on. Who did this cockhole think he was? She’d come to think of the pendant almost as a magic talisman. But human hearts were still human hearts.

“Captain, you misunderstand your own importance to this endeavor. I have extremely urgent business in England. This ship suits my needs. Your participation in the voyage is superfluous.”

“If we don’t make Rotterdam on schedule,” he said, lifting his cap and running a hand through his hair, “your colleagues will slap us with so many fines we’ll never sail again.”

“Of course they won’t.” Berenice assumed they would, but she leaned into the lie. “I will personally guarantee
De Pelikaan
is not penalized because of my intercession. You may even receive a bonus for exceptional service to the Guild.”

“Bullshit. I’ve heard too many of your Clockmaker lies to
believe anything you sons of bitches say. First your Stemwinders take my son, then you take my boat. I hope that when you die, the devil takes your soul as payment for your dark deeds and darker magics.”

Well, this was awkward. Had Barendregt’s son been swept up in the anti-Catholic purges during the war? Or had he run afoul of the Guild in some other way? What a perverse pity that Berenice’s disguise demanded her steadfast opposition to the captain. They shared an enemy.

He spat on the deck at her feet. Walked away. At the door to the bridge, he paused. Over his shoulder, he said, “If your servitor must accompany you, it’ll require subsidiary nautical metageasa before we depart. Even you can’t circumvent that law.”

Naturally, a vessel of this size would have a horologist among the crew. Those Clakkers leased by the shipping company surely had the nautical-safety metageasa permanently embedded into the rules that governed their every action. Landlubbing Clakkers could be a danger to the ship if they weren’t similarly indoctrinated.

“I wouldn’t seek to do so. My servitor carries a chest of my personal effects. Will you object if it delivers the chest to my stateroom before reporting to your Guildman?”

The captain said, “Heaven forfend you should be deprived of your effects a single moment longer than absolutely necessary.”

She nodded. “I’m so pleased you agree. As soon as he delivers my effects, I shall order Sparks to report to your horologist.”

At this, the captain turned to face her. Confusion wrinkled his brow. Varying shades of scandal or alarm showed on the faces of the deck officers.

“And just who in the hell,” he said, scratching his temple, “is Sparks?”

Damn you, Jax. You changed the way I think about your kind, and ruined my careless disregard for your identities. Goddamn it.

Berenice had violated a subtle but deep social convention. Particularly among the Clockmakers. Children in the Dutch-speaking world commonly referred to the Clakkers as gendered beings, but outgrew that as they absorbed the mores of their parents. Some leaseholders did refer to their mechanicals by name, though others—those wealthy enough to own multiple servitors, for instance—sometimes never bothered to learn their servants’ names. The indifference to identity scaled with wealth or social status. Members of the Clockmakers’ Guild, the horologists and alchemists who kept the empire ticking along, never acknowledged anything beyond a machine’s true name. Because, after all, Clakkers were merely unthinking machines. Machines could not have personal identities and inner lives.