The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (14 page)

But if she couldn’t reactivate the Clakker, her choices were limited. Either she had to conspire to heave the dead machine overboard, which would require Sparks’s assistance, or she could lean on her fake Guild credentials yet again and brashly refuse to explain, apologize, or make amends. Both amounted to a pile of shit. The chances of nobody witnessing them hauling a dormant Clakker topside were almost nonexistent. And even the most pompous Guild member would at least be required to make recompense to the shipping company for damaging a legally leased Clakker. Berenice had hurled herself between Scylla and Charybdis. Fucking wonderful.

By now the noise had dissipated. If anything, the ship seemed even quieter than it had before the porter collapsed. Even the faint shudder and creak of the deck had subsided. Vibrations from the enormous sculls that drove the ship had been the ceaseless background noise of the last several days. The unaccustomed silence put Berenice on edge. She frowned. Peered through the porthole.

Stumbled. Tried to catch herself. Knocked the tray of Clakker keys crashing to the deck, where they skittered under the bunk and underfoot.

“Oh, shit,” she breathed. “Bugger me with a rusty crucifixion nail.”

The pulse hammering in her throat threatened to choke her; the soft candle wax of her knees threatened to dump her on the deck like an inert Clakker. She sagged against the hull, still staring outside.

Her cabin hadn’t gone dark because a line of storm clouds had obscured the sun. The light was eclipsed by the massive ship that had pulled alongside the
Pelikaan
. It towered over Berenice’s vessel. Crouching, craning her neck, she could not see the uppermost deck of the leviathan. But it was the sculls that gave her pause and sent beads of cool sweat to collect at the small of her back and between her breasts.

The oars of the titan ship writhed like tentacles. The newcomer was fringed with them, dangling just above the waterline like Medusa’s bangs. Some hung limp; others flailed at the air like whips. Still others stirred the sea into a hissing froth. They twisted organically, unlike the rigid choreography of a typical Clakker. She opened the porthole and heard the rippling of the oar scales shifting across each other. Each oar must have comprised dozens of individual segments.

She had heard of these leviathans. New designs based on the concept that rather than build vessels on traditional lines and then staff them with mechanical servants, one could use Clakker technology to make the entire vessel a single servant. There were airships along the same lines.

The oceangoing Clakkerships were the fastest things on the sea. Somebody wanted desperately to catch Berenice’s ship. She could imagine who that somebody might be. The midoceanic rendezvous had a grim whiff of deliberation about it.

Nowhere to go. Nowhere to run.

But how had they found the
Pelikaan
? By now it had to be hundreds of leagues off its usual course, owing to her detour.
They couldn’t have caught up unless they knew where to look—unless they knew of the altered destination.

Barendregt, you elk-buggering bastard. You notified the harbormaster before we departed New Amsterdam.

She looked again to the heap of disabled servitor at her feet. It slid toward the door as the ship listed over bow waves shed by the leviathan.
Fuck, fuck, fuck
. The porthole was too small; she couldn’t possibly dispose of the porter that way. It would require disassembly but she hadn’t the time nor the tools.

A heavy
clunk
shook the ship. She crouched again and looked up; a gangplank had been extended from the massive ship. Lines, too. A bevy of servitors sprinted across the swaying mooring lines before they’d even been snugged to the bollards, dancing across the choppy sea with their preternatural balance.

Sparks—she had to find Sparks.

She ran to the door. A knock sounded a half second before it opened. If Sparks made note of the tangled heap of porter on the floor, he gave no sign. He closed the door, vibrating so rapidly that his outline was a blur. His feet hummed against the deck. Bad sign: Sparks was laboring under several urgent geasa at once.

Wow. These buffalo-fuckers didn’t waste any time.

“Mistress. Please forgive the intrusion. I apologize most humbly for returning before I was summoned. I have been compelled to notify you that we have been boarded by your colleagues in the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists. Captain Barendregt requests your immediate presence on the bridge.”

“I’ll bet he does. How many came aboard, what is their disposition, and what the hell do they want?”

The incipient delay forced Sparks’s vibrations to shift to a higher frequency. Nevertheless, he answered her questions. “Before I came to find you, visitors from the other ship included
two Guild members, like yourself, three servitor Clakkers, like me, and one soldier Clakker. More may have boarded this ship in the intervening time. I do not know their purpose. Captain Barendregt requests your immediate presence on the bridge.”

Shit, shit, shit
. Cornered like a rat.

Resources. Resources. What do I have on hand?

Sparks. (For the moment, anyway.)

One possibly dead servitor. (Penalty for conducting unsanctioned experimentation on a Clakker: execution.)

Dozens of Clakker keys. (Penalty for stealing Guild property: heavy prison time, probably interspersed with generous bouts of torture.)

A Verderer’s pendant. (Penalty for impersonating a member of the Guild: the sickest, most devious shit one human being could devise to inflict upon another.)

It was a lousy fucking list. And not particularly conducive to her long-term prospects, “long-term” meaning beyond the next ten minutes or so. Berenice jabbed a finger at the keys strewn across the small cabin.

“Toss those out the porthole. Quickly! Then smash the chest and jettison those pieces.”

Sparks bent to the task, though now he rattled so urgently that it sounded like somebody was throwing all the silver for a twenty-person, five-course meal down the Porter’s Prayer. “Captain Barendregt requests—”

“Shut up and work.”

Berenice crouched over the inert porter and struggled to yank the key from its forehead.

Van Breugel had used a key to modify Sparks’s metageasa, but—

Light. He’d used light and a lens.

She glanced out the porthole again. The titanic Clakkership still blotted out the sun.

A shadow had fallen… and, a moment later, so had the vulnerable porter.

The stomp of metal feet shook the passageway outside the cabin, and the decking overhead. Raised voices filtered through the porthole, faintly audible over Sparks’s death rattle. Somewhere nearby a metal fist or foot smashed a cabin door to flinders. Berenice flinched. She lost her grip on the key and landed on her ass while her heart tried to chisel through her breastbone. Now the shouting was easily audible, and grew moreso with every smashed cabin door. Sparks flung the last of the spilled keys out the porthole. He went to work on the incriminating chest. It shattered under his metal fist.

The noises from the passageway grew louder. Shouts and smashes and
clangs
, audible even over Sparks’s hasty demolitions. A peculiar stomping, too, like a peglegged pirate striding the deck.

Berenice flung herself at the inert porter. She gave the key another savage twist, recoiling the alchemical anagram. The hard edges of the key bit her hand. Through clenched teeth, she muttered, “Come on, you piece of shit, come on…”

“I don’t understand, mi—”

“Shut up and keep working!”

Another yank. This time the circular blade screeched free. The porter’s head rattled as though something fine had come loose, sifting through the interstices of its skull like windblown sand. She slipped the key onto the chain of her stolen pendant, which hung beneath her shirt. She yelped when it touched her breast. It was
hot
.

Somebody knocked. Berenice looked at Sparks. Her purloined servitor tossed the last fragments of the incriminating chest through the porthole.

Sweetly as she could manage, oblivious as Maëlle Cuijper had ever been, she called, “Who is it?”

Another knock, this one hard enough to rattle the hinges on the flimsy cabin door. Berenice looked at the Clakker crumpled on the deck like a broken doll.

But the worthless scrap heap wasn’t moving.

“Yes, yes,” she called, “one moment, please—”

A metal foot kicked the door so hard that the handle shot across the room. It shattered against the hull before the door spun through its arc to smash against the hinge stops and snap them in half. Two servitors and a human stood in the passageway.

“Jesus Christ!” she said. “What if I’d been changing?”

(
Clockmakers lie
, said Sparks.
Clockmakers lie
, replied the other machines, almost inaudible over the crackling of the crumpled door.)

The human had the face of a young man, the pince-nez and receding hairline of a middle-aged man, and the rosy-cross pendant of a Guild flunky. He said, “This ship is carrying a dangerous fugitive. She is carrying property stolen from the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists. We are recovering it.”

“Goodness,” said Berenice, trying to swallow her thundering heart before it burst through her throat. “Not one for preambles, are you?”

The Guildman’s gaze swept over the tiny cabin. It bounced twice on the disabled servitor on the floor—he quirked an eyebrow at this—before landing on the open porthole. A wintry ocean breeze chose that moment to gust the scent of sea salt into the stateroom.

“Chilly day for an open porthole, isn’t it?”

Berenice suppressed a shiver; why did the sea wind have to be so Goddamned
cold
just then?

“Well, as you can see, all I have are the clothes on my back and this clattering bucket of rust. I’d hate to keep you from terrorizing the other passengers.”

He pointed at the inert Clakker. “What happened here?”

“Catastrophic malfunction. Damnedest thing,” she said, knowing how weak it sounded.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
She was nauseatingly unprepared for this. She didn’t have a legend at her fingertips. Her contingency plans hadn’t included a titanship running them down
in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
.

Oh, for an epoxy grenade.

The servitors in the passageway hadn’t moved an inch since kicking down the door. They stood rooted to the deck, an impassable barricade of clockwork magic. Stemwinders were probably too bulky to navigate the close confines of the ship’s lower decks. But it wouldn’t surprise her if they prowled the titanship.

“We believe the fugitive may be impersonating a Guild member.” Next, the Guildman addressed Sparks. “Machine. Whom do you serve?”

“I serve exclusively the Verderer’s Office of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists, via my secondment to the service of Mistress de Jong.”

Under her breath, Berenice said, “I hope you rust, you teakettle traitor.”

The Guildman looked at Berenice again. His mouth assumed a moue of irritation akin to that of a bank teller frowning at mismatched tallies. “The Verderer’s Office out of New Amsterdam, I presume? Oddly, I don’t recognize you.”

“I’ve spent the past—”
How long? Oh, Christ, she was down to free improvisation now.
“—seven years living incognito among the jack-pine savages.”

From behind her came a metronomic ticktocking. Berenice’s heart gave a little lurch. A bit more loudly, she added, “No need to worry about the Frenchies. I found no evidence of realistic or dedicated efforts to unravel our work. As detailed in my report.”

She’d gone so far off script she’d begun to babble. This turd-muncher had her dead to rights; the best she could hope for was to squeeze out a few more seconds.

The Guildman spoke another command at Sparks. “Describe the circumstances of your…”

The ticking grew disruptively loud. The Guildman trailed off. In unison, he and Berenice looked to the porter. The servitor unfolded, ratcheting upright while the sigils swirled around its keyhole like the uncoiling of a wrung-out dishcloth. She’d twisted the key clockwise and the etchings along with it, but now the fine marks orbited counterclockwise about the keyhole.

The machines in the passageway straightened. Stiffened. So did Sparks. A subtle change altered their ticktock cacophony; if it was linguistic, the meaning slipped past Berenice. Three machines and two humans watched the heretofore inert servitor.

The ratcheting tapered off. It settled into the standard servitor stance, jouncing slightly on its backward knees to compensate for the swaying of the ship. Bezels hummed like a beehive as the crystalline eyes surveyed the scene. Its head pivoted through a full circle. Sweat trickled from Berenice’s armpits. The machine was resetting. Recalibrating. It appeared the removal of the key had returned the machine to full function.

But what of its metageasa? Were those still intact? Or had they been warped, even erased? If she’d believed in God at that moment, she would have prayed for it to be so. Hard to be an unrepentant atheist with months of harsh interrogation standing just a few seconds away…

To Sparks, she said, “Fetch my valise.”

Then she looked at the porter. Pointing a thumb over her shoulder, she said, “They’re here to disassemble you.”

For one pregnant instant all she could hear was the rush of blood in her ears, the lapping of waves against the hulls of the two ships, the thrum of the lines strung between them, the creak of stowed sculls.

Seven kinds of hell broke loose all at once.

Sparks tackled Berenice. He wrapped his body in a protective shell about her as he hurled her to the deck. Still falling, she watched as—

—the porter spun so quickly its feet etched scorch marks in the planking. The scent of singed sawdust filled the cabin as it dived for the porthole, its body ratcheting into a javelin, while—

—the Guild servitors pushed their master aside—

—(His yelp became the gasp of wind knocked from his lungs.)—

—and flung themselves after the porter. Still caught in that half second of freefall, Berenice felt the hurricane wind of their passage ruffle her hair as the duo blurred across the cabin just a fraction of an inch over Sparks.