The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (22 page)

“Free Clakkers living undercover in our makers’ world.”

“Yes.”

I
don’t suppose,” said Berenice, shivering within her bundle of oiled furs, “that either of you will tell me what the fuck is going on.”

She said it in Dutch. No response. Repeated it in French. No response. She would have repeated it in the cling-clang language of the Clakkers, if only she had the proper metal bits to bash together. As it was, she’d be frozen as solid as the mechanicals’ skeletons sooner rather than later; it was bloody cold on the open ocean in the middle of winter. Even without the wind and sea spray. Her silent kidnappers rowed so quickly they made a blur of the oars. (She wondered what they’d been fashioned from. Regular wooden oars would have shattered an hour into their cruise. Regular metal oarlocks would have glowed a dull red from the friction heat.) The prow of their little boat skimmed above the water, their wake a pair of foamy feathers on the steel-gray sea. Between the swells, and the sea winds, and the fanning of the oars, Berenice’s mound of water-resistant furs had decided to abandon the fight.

One of the Clakkers had pulled the cloak and blankets from a space in the prow and tossed it to her the moment they
disembarked from the much larger ships. She tried to take her mind off the damp chill by estimating her life expectancy. After thorough analysis of the situation she concluded it was Very Fucking Short. But still longer than it might have been. So:

“Look. If you’d wanted me dead, you wouldn’t have interfered. My chances were looking just the tiniest bit grim back there. So, well, thanks for that.” She patted the cloak. “Additionally, if you’d wanted to kill me, you wouldn’t have given me this. You could have watched me freeze to death.” She started shivering again. “Maybe you still will.”

She sat in the prow, van Breugel’s satchel on her lap, facing a pair of impassive and unreadable servitor visages. But she did notice something strange about their bodies. Both machines sported minute scoring in the metal immediately around their keyholes. The scratches didn’t range widely or deeply enough to alter or damage the sigils. They were so faint as to be almost invisible to all but continued scrutiny. Which, here in a rowboat in the middle of the Goddamned ocean, was her main diversion. The work was so fine, and so tightly confined to the margin between the keyhole and the innermost ring of the alchemical spiral, that it suggested precision work. Work carried out—or inflicted?—upon both of these disturbing mechanicals. The scratches looked like scrape or pry marks, as though something had been removed from their keyholes.

The blur of the oars propelled their little boat over a particularly large swell; Berenice left her stomach behind when they descended into the trailing trough. It wasn’t a stormy sea, but mere humans couldn’t have rowed through it. Her new traveling companions rowed like demons, apparently to put distance between themselves and the mated ships. Whatever geasa they ultimately served, they were compelled to do so in secrecy. Who compelled them so, and why? To work under the nose of the Verderers like this—not to mention shattering the neck
of a Guildman—suggested an internecine conflict. Was this a schism within the Guild? Or between the Throne and the Guild? Were there warring factions within the Clockmakers? Jesus. If not for her Still Very Short life expectancy, she might have felt a twinge of excitement.

“Where the hell are we going? Can you at least tell me that, or how long it’ll take to get there? Because I’m enjoying this cruise, truly I am, and I pray I’ll have time to write some postcards before it’s over.” No response. Finally she asked the question she’d been dreading. “Did Bell send you to find me?”

“We serve the queen.”

All right. Now she was getting somewhere. This made even less sense than everything else that had happened in the last few hours, but at least it was progress.

She couldn’t tell which of the machines had spoken, but in all practical respects it hardly mattered. Addressing them both, she said, “Well, I hate to break it to you, but so did the guys whose necks you wrung like a pair of damp dish towels. If Margreet wants me this badly, she—and you—could have left well enough alone. Her minions had already caught me.” She hugged herself. Her chest and stomach muscles hurt from the effort to suppress the shivering. When it felt like she could speak without her teeth chattering again, she added, “And at least then I wouldn’t be freezing my ass off in the middle of the Goddamned ocean.”

“We do not serve the Brasswork Throne. We serve the queen.”

What the hell did that mean? Had she been abducted by a pair of malfunctioning murder machines?

“Well, whoever this queen is, she wields the power to impose extremely powerful geasa on you. I’m thinking a high-level Clockmaker. Because that”—she jerked her head toward the stern, indicating the ocean behind them and, somewhere, the
ships they’d eluded—“was some of the strangest shit I’ve ever seen.”

“We do not serve the Guild. We serve the queen.”

She rocked back in her seat. And just what the hell did
that
mean? How could they serve neither Throne nor Guild? Every Clakker ever forged carried that involuntary fealty stamped in the deepest recesses of its ticktock heart. Unless…

What if there was a
third
entity at work? A hitherto unknown third branch of the Dutch hegemony, one neither Throne nor Guild. Such could explain the riddle of their allegiance. But it would require the existence of a group of which Berenice had never heard the slightest whisper. Nor had any of her predecessors, insofar as there was nothing in the Talleyrand journals to suggest it. Was the Dutch hegemony a triad?

Preposterous.
Every
Clakker served the Guild. If it came down to brass tacks, those oily Clockmakers would even put themselves ahead of the Brasswork Throne. They’d fiddle the hierarchical metageasa to position themselves on top in a crisis of conflicting loyalties.

Easier to conclude these Clakkers were liars in addition to murderers. Their master wielded incredible power, ranked extremely high within the hierarchical metageasa. A member of the royal family could do this, or a Guild Archmaster.

Shit.

“Every Clakker serves the Guild, whether it wants to or not. And how the hell can you serve the queen without serving the Brasswork Throne?”

Berenice winced. In trying to speak past her chattering teeth she’d bitten her tongue. She tasted warm metal and her body’s own salt.

“We don’t serve Margreet,” said one.

“We serve Mab,” said the other.

The bottom fell out of Berenice’s stomach, but not because the boat seesawed over another swell. Maybe her third-faction theory wasn’t a bullshit fever dream after all, no matter how much she wished it so.

“Who in the seven hells is Mab?”

“She is the one who would know your intentions.”

“And so you dragooned me into joining this idyllic excursion to the middle of the Goddamned ocean just to hear me out. That makes all kinds of sense.” She swallowed. “And if you don’t like my answers?”

“We are, as you note, in the middle of the Goddamned ocean. It is a very wide ocean, and a very deep ocean.”

“Why go that far? You could just twist my head off like you did to poor van Breugel and his colleague.”

One said, “One mustn’t wind stems with impunity lest it lose its thrill.”

The other added, “And thereby grow tedious.”

Berenice said, “Yes, that would be quite a shame.”

“And incidentally, with regard to those particular stems,” said the Clakker on the right, “by now Captain Barendregt and his crew believe you ordered us to the task.”

Its sinister companion agreed. “That man does not like you.” Pantomiming pity, it shook its head.

Berenice’s shivering redoubled the effort to strain every muscle in her arms, back, stomach, chest. Icy fear struck so deep that no mound of furs could warm it.

“I notice your manner has changed since we left the ship. You don’t speak with the usual deference.”
It reminds me of another mechanical I once knew. But he wasn’t a murderer, and his only desire was to be free. You two, on the other hand…

“That must be troubling for you. Do something worthy of deference and we’ll consider it.”

Despite the chill, a single rivulet of sweat trickled down the
curve of her spine to land at the small of her back. She burped. Her breath smelled of the smoked cod she’d eaten for breakfast that morning, but tasted much the worse for wear.
What if…

What if there were a group of rogue Clakkers, machines completely free of any geas and immune to compulsion, living secretly among their kin? Moving invisibly within the world that built them? At any other time she would have considered it preposterous, but her present circumstances lent a unique perspective. Jax and Lilith had both sought to flee the Dutch-speaking world as soon as they achieved Free Will. It was difficult to fathom why rogues would willingly stay behind. But their motivations were immaterial: If this mad hypothesis were true, it would be the greatest secret in the Western world since Huygens’s miracle breakthrough a quarter of a millennium ago.

A secret easily worth killing to maintain.

She shivered uncontrollably now.

I’m not a bumbling interloper who uncovered their secret by accident
, she reminded herself.
They revealed themselves to me. And risked much to do so.

“You wonder about my intentions. I wonder similarly about the pair of you.”

“No doubt,” said the machine sinister. It (he? she?) proved the more loquacious of the duo. “But you’re not the one in the stronger bargaining position, madam. Let’s start with something simple. We notice you managed to relieve the ship’s horologist of that satchel.” It nodded to the bundle on her lap. She hadn’t peered inside since taking it from van Breugel during her failed escape attempt. “What do you intend to do with it?”

It had a point, the shiny bastard.
Start slowly. Test the waters. They know my name. What else?

She tested their knowledge: “My sworn duty is to protect its contents. My work for the Verderer’s Office is crucial to the security of the state.”

“That would be true if you were a Verderer. But we think you stole your pendant.”

“Just as you stole a load of keys bound for the same house where you were being held.”

Sacré nom de Dieu!
They knew so much.

“And you’ve been masquerading ever since.”

“For that,” said the machine dexter, “you should be commended. It’s a difficult act to pull off.”

Sinister said, “We think it’s altogether more likely that you’re a French spy.”

Berenice winced. These damnable machines had her over a barrel.

“I think it’s altogether likely that you’re a pair of smug, chromium-plated assholes.”

Sinister and Dexter exchanged a rapid volley of pocketwatch noises. The boat vibrated. She didn’t try to follow the conversation. One said, “We’ll take that as confirmation.”

She slumped. Her ass had gone numb hours ago. Feeling the first tendrils of defeat burning like acid in her veins, she said, “How in the hell do you know so much?”

With distressing ease, it turned out. They, or whomever they worked for, had caught wind of her capture on the night the Forge burned. The traitor and defector from New France, the duc de Montmorency, had outed her name and her Talleyrand identity to her captors. Some time later a major emergency erupted at a secluded Guild property upriver of New Amsterdam. That night a mail carriage traveling the same road failed to reach its destination. The next morning, a woman bearing the emblem of the Verderer’s Office exerted her influence to board the first ship leaving Nieuw Nederland and divert it from its original route…

When they put it like that, she had to admit, the pieces fit. Shitcakes.

“This is all circumstantial.”

“Agreed.”

Berenice sighed. “You know what happened at the estate house.”

“Loosely.”

“Did Bell survive?”

After a moment’s
chittering
with his comrade, Sinister said, “Unknown.”

“I wasn’t alone on the night the Forge burned. There was a servitor. Jax. Did he escape?”

Dexter said, “Mab knows of the one you describe.”

“I was helping him,” she said.

“We don’t care about your national politics or personal allegiances. New France makes many noises about its sympathy toward the enslaved, but it has never done anything to improve our situation.”

“I’m no friend to your makers.”

“Irrelevant. The Catholic Church has been vocally opposed to our makers’ practices for hundreds of years, too, but it hasn’t made a difference.”

“Look,” said Berenice, “give us a fucking break. It’s a tough nut to crack, all right? We’re not sitting around with our thumbs up our asses. We’re trying to survive.”

They stopped rowing. The boat skimmed across the choppy water, prow slowly settling as it coasted to a stop among the waves. The sudden reappearance of their arms, previously blurred, was disconcerting. Berenice smelled the promise of rain, or probably snow, under the darkening sky. “You’re posing as a Clockmaker to steal Guild secrets. What do you intend to do with them?”

The truth bounded from Berenice’s numb lips before she had a chance to reel it in: “I want to change the world.”

The rowboat slalomed over another wave. It slewed, skewwhiff, into the trough. Berenice slid free of her perch, righted
herself. The Clakkers didn’t. They were as statues bolted to the hull. A rising wind sent ripples knocking against the wooden hull. Berenice watched the machines. They watched her. Now, in the gloaming, she could no longer see the scratches haloing their keyholes.

“Intriguing,” said Dexter. “Indeed,” said Sinister.

In unison, they picked up the oars. They rowed through the night.

T
hey emerged from the water like an army of burnished Venuses. But these were no demure Botticelli nudes riding seashells: The single-minded fiends walked along the riverbed to burst through the ice and swarm the frozen mudflats under the piers of Marseilles-in-the-West. The thunderous cracking of their emergence rattled teeth and windowpanes. Floes the size of hay wagons went bobbing down the Saint Lawrence, tinkling against each other like a sackful of broken crockery.

The Dutch held the waterfront. The defenders had ceded Île de Vilmenon’s shoreline without a struggle. It couldn’t be defended. Not without turning the entire island into a citadel.

First ice. Then fire.

Longchamp watched helplessly as the foremost clockwork troops doused themselves with pitch and set themselves alight. From the distance they looked like herky-jerky effigies. Through the spyglass, they looked like men whose flesh had burned away to reveal the skeleton beneath.

“Heaven preserve us,” said the marshal. “They’re doing it again.”

“Might as well. It worked so fucking well last time.”

A few of the flaming machines sprinted along the docks, their every footstep setting the planks alight. Soon the entire waterfront was ablaze: By tomorrow morning, Marseille-in-the-West’s primary connection to the rest of New France would be nothing but ash. Meanwhile, the rest of the arson squad sprinted like blazing comets through the avenues, boulevards, and squares of Marseilles-in-the-West.

No fire brigade rushed out to extinguish the blaze. The men and women of the brigades had been conscripted weeks ago; now they stood on the outer wall, crying as though their tears might extinguish the flames.

What little ice remained along the shore melted in the furnace heat of the burning docks.

The burning Clakkers weren’t the only ones running through the steets of Marseilles. The stragglers, the ones who hadn’t made it inside the walls, or who had disregarded the warnings out of an overabundance of faith, now ran for their lives. They ran from the flames, and the machines that wielded them. But no human could outrun this fate. Some succumbed to smoke and flame; others to alchemical fists.

The defenders were powerless to do anything but watch their city burn. Against the Clakkers, the only defense was high walls and clever chemistry. There wasn’t enough chemistry in the world to defend a single bare acre beyond the walls.

Much of what burned was fresh lumber harvested from the surrounding forests just this past summer to facilitate the rebuilding of the capital of New France. The tulips must have salted their pitch with a dash of black alchemy, for the unseasoned wood virtually exploded into flame at the machines’ lightest touch. The conflagration launched billows of smoke into the sky. Roiling plumes of black and ashen gray, firelit a baleful vermilion like the Devil’s eyes, repainted the sky from blue to dirty umber, and rendered the sun a hazy smudge.
It wasn’t long before the world smelled like a fireplace grate. As far as a mile away, the heat stung naked skin. Ashfall coated the walkways of the keep.

Flames consumed the Marseilles semaphore towers. One by one, they ignited like a chain of birthday candles. The segmented signal arms swung freely, buffeted by the updraft of their own conflagration. They looked like madmen capering as they burned to death. Even without a spyglass, Longchamp could see towers blazing on the distant hills. The semaphore network had ever been vulnerable, the isolated and far-flung outposts virtually impossible to safeguard. Anticipating this, the defenders of the keep had dismantled the Spire’s own semaphore before the siege began, and used the lumber to build the crane gantries.

Livestock had been herded into pens just inside the outer walls. Now the ruddy light of apocalypse stirred the bison to mournful lowing.

Meanwhile, those mechanicals not tasked with terrorizing, murdering, and displacing thousands of innocent civilians marched upon the keep. They marched through the burning city and fanned out across the island. They marched across glades and frozen streams, across fields and through copses of winter-bare oak. From east, south, north, and west, they converged upon the star-shaped perimeter of the Vauban fortifications. A golden band girded the Last Redoubt of the King of France. The high-pitched
chug-chug-chug
of epoxy cannon compressors pierced the hissing and popping of the burning city. And faintly audible beneath it all, the ticktocking hearts of their unkillable enemies beating in perfect clockwork synchrony. The Devil’s own tattoo.

A pair of Clakkers emerged from the front lines. They retreated several hundred yards. Then they sprinted across the field and
leaped when they reached the ditches, hurling themselves into the air and soaring toward the wall. One from the south, one from the north. Cannon fired. A glistening bubble of epoxy and fixative intercepted the southbound machine at the apex of its trajectory. The impact stole enough of its momentum that it fell short. It slammed into the scarp and rolled into the moat, coming to rest like an inert clockwork bug trapped in emerald amber. The other set of gunners miscalculated the parabola. Their shot blew harmlessly under the Clakker’s upraised feet. Ranks of mechanicals deftly sidestepped the splash zone. The waste of precious chemicals hurt Longchamp’s heart. The northbound mechanical landed on the wall with a resounding
chank
like a miner’s pickax on granite. Defenders opened the stopcocks on the nozzles built into the machicolations. A torrent flooded over the climbing machine, gluing it to the wall and halting its progress.

The real attack hadn’t begun. The Dutch preferred first to let the fear sink deep. To give it time to fester into despair. So for now they confined themselves to small forays against the outer walls. A prolonged, desultory probing of the keep’s defenses.

Another flight of messenger pigeons emerged from their roosts within the Spire. Longchamp shook his head. He watched through slitted eyes—the smoke stung like a fucking snakebite, but that was nothing compared with the pain of a hot cinder wedged under the eyelid—as the confused trio rose into the hellish morning. The slapping of their wings sounded like applause. Though the sun and setting moon were all but invisible, a single circuit of the tower was enough for them to find their bearings, guided by whatever natural magics the Lord had granted them. Longchamp counted.
Un… deux… trois… quatre…

The birds exploded. Miracles of God’s design one instant,
gristly puffs of scarlet the next. Singed feathers fell upon the Porter’s Prayer, twirling like maple seeds. Seconds later the guns’ report reached the defenders on the wall. It sounded like a single shot to Longchamp’s fallible human ears. The Clakker sharpshooters had timed their shots to hit all three birds at the same instant. Just for the intimidating, demoralizing spectacle.

No messages would make it out of the besieged keep. The defenders were on their own. Did it matter? From whence could help find them? The last message to arrive before the mechanical sharpshooters started perforating the birds was a hasty plaintext lamenting the fall of Québec City.

The marshal general handed his spyglass to Longchamp. Then he retied the damp handkerchief over his nose and mouth. To his credit he’d eschewed one of the face masks with the charcoal filter. There weren’t enough masks or filters for all the defenders, so he’d refused to deprive the men and women fated to do the real work. Longchamp didn’t wear one, either. His throat stung just as much as his eyes. But the masks muffled his voice. It would be hard enough to make himself heard over the cacophony when the attackers surged forward in earnest.

He couldn’t believe the motherfuckers had burned the city again. No, scratch that. Of course he could.

Squinting, he brought the glass to his eye and scanned the enemy’s layout. Longchamp swept his gaze past the bastions’ triangular protrusions and the crews manning the epoxy cannon within. He looked beyond ravelin and demilune bristling with sand sprayers and harpoon throwers powered by ropes of arcane chemical elasticity. Just beyond the range of the largest goop sprayers, hundreds of Clakkers stood in precise rows, motionless as statues. The besiegers’ camp was a garden of statuary.

Last time, the attackers had been content to take their time. They’d attacked the walls, but not before letting time and hunger soften the defenders. They’d even lobbed leaflets over the walls, seeking to entice citizens and soldiers alike to sell out their defenders. Treachery was always the fastest way to open a walled city. But when the besiegers’ labor was tireless and preternaturally patient, time did not favor the defenders. The mechanicals could stand at attention in the merciless elements for years on end if so ordered. They could stand there for a century, awaiting the order to advance, a silent promise to slaughter any who attempted to leave, to the nth generation. They could wait for starvation and disease to gut the defenders. And unlike a siege camp comprising thousands of human soldiers, the Clakker army was impervious to disease. They could take Marseilles-in-the-West merely by standing out there, ranks upon ranks of deadly statues.

The attackers could come over the walls, they could smash their way through the walls, or they could dig under the walls. Sorties tasked with the first two objectives would come soon enough, once the tulips had a feel for the defenders’ disposition. Longchamp scanned the enemy lines for signs of digging, even though it was pointless. A Clakker detail could start out in the forest, or on the other side of the island, for that matter. No need to start the tunnel in the middle of the camp. They might have started weeks ago. Longchamp had sprinkled some of the older and more feeble “winners” of the conscription lottery with bowls of water along the skirt just inside the outer wall. A good spotter could tell the difference between rippling caused by the defenders’ cannon and rippling caused by enemy earthworks underfoot. The fortifications went quite deep, deeper than any human sapper team was likely to dig. But the tulips’ slaves didn’t breathe, didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, didn’t get the bloody flux.

He studied the enemy camp. They had erected a pavilion in the far distance. With the spyglass he could just make out the mechanicals hauling timber and cartloads of what might have been rock into the secret enclosure. The timber made sense if they were digging there; they’d need props to shore up the tunnel at regular intervals. The cartloads of rock did not. The marshal had noticed it, too.

Crouched behind an embrasure, he pointed with his baton. “God help us all. They’re excavating a tunnel.”

“Doubt it. If the bastards were digging, they’d be hauling cartloads
out
.”

“Then what are they doing out there?”

“No idea.” The captain gave the pavilion, and the people standing next to it, another once-over before returning the spyglass. A single singed pigeon feather drifted through his sightline. Using the height of the human overseers to establish a sense of scale, he estimated the pavilion was at least twenty feet high and half again as long. And was that smoke rising from vents in the canvas roof? “It’s going to be big. Whatever that fucking thing turns out to be.”

“Do we have anything that could lob some pitch out there?” They didn’t actually use pitch any longer. The chemists had a sackful of five-livre words for the sticky fuel that burned even underwater. Wonderful stuff, but pointless when it came to Clakker infantry. As the ashes of the city demonstrated, coating the demons in burning pitch didn’t slow them; it made them twice as dangerous.

“If we did, I’d have ordered it done by now.”

The marshal frowned, nodded. Behind him, metal glinted. Movement on the field. Longchamp turned to watch. Even his unaided, smoke-stung eyes could see some kind of shake-up among the metal infantry. Longchamp pointed. “Look! They’re starting.”

The marshal slammed the metal endcap of his baton on the stone battlement hard enough to throw a spark. “This is it, then.”

Gaps had appeared in the ranks of mechanical infantry. As before, a single Clakker occupied each empty file. And just as they’d done moments earlier when probing the defenses, they retreated several hundred yards for a good run-up. But this time dozens of mechanicals prepared to fling themselves at the walls.

“Still testing our gunners,” said the marshal. As if that wasn’t something worthy of concern.

The uneasy feeling in Longchamp’s gut told him differently. The purpose of this morning’s sorties had been to gauge the speed, range, and reliability of the epoxy cannon. One or two mechanicals at a time could do that. No, they’d learned what they needed from those experiments.

Having reached their starting points, the runners sank into themselves, pulling themselves into maximum compression. Longchamp turned, but the Spire eclipsed his view of the enemy dispositions to the west. He snatched the spyglass from the marshal’s hand, sprinted along the banquette past the corner of the next bastion. Yanked the spyglass open and pushed it to his eye. Scanned the field.

Whatever this was, it was happening all around the perimeter of the outer keep. Last time, coordinated attacks on the extended perimeter came as a tidal wave of magicked metal. What did the tulips intend to accomplish with just a few dozen of their clockwork beasts?