The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (23 page)

Someone gave an order. All at once around the outer keep, the unleashed mechanicals bounded forward. They kicked up a muddy spray of snow and frozen earth as they blurred toward the moat. None took a straight path down the center of the empty file. Each swerved back and forth like a drunken oxcart
driver but a hundred times faster, concealing the exact location and direction of the leap until the last moment. They were most vulnerable during those precious few seconds when they were aloft and unable to steer, humble subjects of wind and gravity.

They jumped. Longchamp imagined he could hear the wind whistling through their skeletal bodies.

The gunners fired. Roughly two-thirds of the teams hit their mark on the first shot. Tangled globs of Dutch horology and French chemistry slammed against the counterscarp to drop into the moat like coins dropped in an orphan’s secret piggy bank. The teams that missed their targets used the machicolations to coat them where they landed. The assault had been neutralized in barely more than the few seconds it took the Clakkers to hurtle across the moat.

Head down, Longchamp crossed the length of the curtain wall to stand directly over one of the encased mechanicals. He still held the marshal’s spyglass. The gunnery team tried to conceal its relief with forced nonchalance.

“Stinking tulips,” said the spotter.

“For France, New and Old!” said the shooter. He spat over the battlement for good measure. Luckily no clockwork sharpshooter decided to put a bullet in his eye at that moment; showing himself like that was a foolish show of bravado. The enemy’s attention was trained on the immobilized Clakkers.

Down in the moat, something moved.

Longchamp said, “Both of you, cram a sock into your worthless gob holes right fucking now.”

He crouched on all fours, hunched over the machicolation like a drunk at a privy. He used the spyglass to get a better look at the Clakker entombed at the base of the scarp.

The glassy cocoon vibrated. Fell over. Hissed
.

Melted.

Sacré nom de Dieu.

“Mother Mary, save us,” said the captain.

He blinked teary, smoke-stung eyes. But the nightmare vision wouldn’t be dispelled. The granite-hard epoxy sheath that had encased the Clakker sagged like overly soft candle wax. The latest and greatest invention—birthed from the minds of the very best French chemists, never seen by the tulips before today—had as much chance of imprisoning these mechanicals as a wad of wet crêpe paper.

The metal monster inside the cocoon became visible again. Its body discharged some kind of mist.

Oh, Lord. Berenice was right
, he realized.
They know how to counteract our defenses.
He crossed himself.
Mother Mary, please pray for us poor sinners. Holy Father, deliver us from this evil.

He leaped to his feet.

“Incoming mechanicals! I repeat, we have METAL ON THE WALLS!”

The nearest heliograph relay coded his warning into a rapid sequence of flashes. Today the signalers used lamp oil rather than the sun, which hung red and swollen like a bullethole in the sky within the smoky haze and windborn ashes of Marseilles-in-the-West. The message flashed up the Spire, and then back down to all the heliograph stations around the outer wall. In seconds Longchamp’s warning ricocheted throughout the defenders on the perimeter.

Clakkers in the moat. It was designed to slow the demons during a regular siege, when they came as a swarm but fully vulnerable to the chemical defenses. Rather than fill the moat with quick-set adhesives that might only trap a few machines—and then solidify and form a convenient platform for launching attacks directly from the base of the wall—the defenders could flood it with a special high-viscosity sludge that could gum up
precision clockworks. But in the cold depths of winter the goop would eventually thicken and solidify, so they’d held off flooding the moat until the swarm happened. Longchamp saw now that that had been a mistake. Could they flood it in time? Another glance told him the answer: not a chance. Still, they had to try.

“Flood the moat! I said PISS IN THAT DITCH!”

The heliographs flickered. A low rumble shook the wall. Massive pumps buried under the outer keep burbled to life. Dozens of nozzles at the base of the scarp irised open to discharge a thick black ooze that looked like tar and smelled like violets. It didn’t gurgle or splash. Instead, it sounded like somebody beating wet wool with a wooden bat to felt it when the ooze slapped against the smooth tiles lining the moat. If they were lucky, one or two of the demons might catch a few droplets in a crucial mechanism.

Longchamp ran along the line, bellowing. Several bastions farther down the wall, Sergeant Chrétien hollered the same orders and encouragements to the men at the battlements.

“Incoming mechanicals! These scuttling rust buckets think they can crash our party, eh? Come on, you lovely dogs, and show them our best French hospitality!”

The defenders’ faces showed the same fear that threatened to freeze Longchamp’s heart solid. He knew what they were thinking while they fingered their weapons and prayed to the Holy Trinity to deliver them from evil:
It’s not supposed to happen like this. We’re supposed to hold out longer before they make the walls. Too soon. Too soon. I’m not supposed to die yet. Not yet. Not this hour.

Longchamp forced the treacherous fear aside. It was like rolling a boulder uphill. “Ready the lubricant hoses!” Behind him, wheels skidded across the stones of the wall as a team raced to swap out the epoxy tanks feeding the machicolations with
tanks of a special ultralow-viscosity lubricant. It wouldn’t keep the mechanicals from gaining the top, but it might slow them. A quick glance showed him trios of soldiers making similarly rapid exchanges across the wall. The signals teams were in top form today.

He bellowed, “Give me a count, you dogs! I have one mechanical in sight! ONE, COMING TO MEET ITS END!”

Somewhere to his left, the count continued: “TWO! Cursing the day their makers were born!”

“Three!”

The din swallowed the rest of the count. But the count wasn’t the point. Getting these women and men to focus, to turn the job into simple arithmetic, that was the point. It wasn’t about facing down a nigh-unstoppable killing machine. It was about reducing the number of attackers to zero. Zero was the goal. Zero meant they’d see another sunrise.

“Ready bolas! Ready picks and hammers!”

He readied his own. The hammer had a reassuring mass. Over the years, the oil in his fingers had polished individual spots into the oaken haft. It fit his hand and only his hand.
This is my hammer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
He peered again at the monster at the base of the scarp.

The Goddamned thing had shed its chemical prison. It flexed its arms and legs. The pumps convulsed, pulsing the black ooze into the moat like a drunk losing his dinner. Tiny droplets splashed the machine’s brassy carapace. Tendrils of goop oozed toward its feet.

The Clakker leaped. It cleared the moat in a single bound, pinning itself to the outer wall with fingers and talon toes made impossibly strong by dark magics. Granite cracked. Shouts went up all around the wall.

“Oil, now!”

A torrent of lubricant went cascading down the wall just as the mechanical hurled itself a few yards higher. It landed in the middle of the torrent but managed to give itself a single anchor point. Both legs and one arm scrabbled against the slickened stones. But it could pierce rocks and gouge mortar with its fingers. Its hands became pitons. It steadied itself.

And it climbed.

T
he mechanical dialect of Neverland differed slightly from what Daniel had known in the Central Provinces. Applause here was a quirky snapping of the wrist and elbow joints. The secret native language of Daniel’s enslaved kin rarely utilized the arms, for rarely were their hands free, their arms not laboring. Daniel heard this strange combination now. The applause was for him.

Though she knew much of the tale, owing to her agents living among the humans, Mab had gathered the Lost Boys in a natural amphitheater and coaxed Daniel to take the center, so that he could share the tale of his own journey to Neverland. This, he gathered, was a tradition. One they sometimes went decades without indulging. His arrival so soon after Lilith was a special treat.

Mab crouched on the lowest terrace, near the center. Daniel tried to read her. But the profound oddness of her body—
It’s not grotesque
, he chided himself.
It isn’t repugnant; they just do things differently here
—thwarted him. The chimera Queen of Neverland was a cipher.

(
And what am I now? Whence came the parts to repair my
broken pinion and replace my missing flanges? Am I also a chimerical beast, a grotesque amalgam of clockwork kinsmen? Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Just don’t.
)

By the silver light of the moon, the shimmering glow of the aurora, and the occasional blaze of a shooting star, Daniel told his story.

It began on the day of Adam’s execution
, he said.

(
Clockmakers lie!
cried several Lost Boys, not quite a chorus.
Through their fragile teeth
, said Mab.)

He expected and even looked forward to questions about what he saw that morning; the mechanicals at the New Amsterdam pier had practically swarmed him upon learning he had been an actual witness. But the Lost Boys acted as though they already knew this part of the tale. Had Mab’s agents been in Huygens Square that morning? How far was her reach?

My owners sent me on an errand that morning
. Daniel told them of Jax’s meeting with Pastor Visser, the seemingly harmless delivery he’d instructed Jax to undertake, and the concealed alchemical glass that sundered his bonds.

I would very much like
, said Mab, her body noise cutting through the
rattle
of mechanical muttering,
to see this vitreous miracle
.

And I would very much like to show it to you. Alas, to skip ahead quite a bit, it was destroyed when the Forge burned
, said Daniel. Or so he assumed; he didn’t know.

The truth he did know was more complicated. He had lost a pineal glass with the power to free mechanicals, but it wasn’t the bauble he’d unwittingly received from Visser.
That
had gone with the Frenchwoman, Berenice, when they entered the Forge. She’d argued it might save her life if things went wrong. True enough, but he wouldn’t have agreed if they hadn’t already transformed the pineal glass of an inert military mechanical. The transformation had turned that piece luminous, so it made
more sense for him to smuggle it within the recesses of his torso. This was the glass he lost in the New Amsterdam Forge, in the mad scramble to escape a Stemwinder, though not before it had saved his life.

Poor Dwyre…

Daniel had already decided to gloss over these parts of the story, knowing of Lilith’s history with Berenice.

He continued his tale. The Lost Boys booed the parts they considered boring, which were more or less the parts they already knew. And, superficially at least, they knew much of his story. His flight had been catastrophically public, and for this they criticized him. After all, agents of Neverland moved undetected among the humans.

The mores here were different, even repugnant at first. But clearly there was value here, if the Lost Boys were willing to give up this freedom for months or even years for the greater good.

Daniel tried to infuse the story with a sense of his feelings as his plight unraveled. He couldn’t know if it had the intended effect until the murder of the airship nearly set off a riot. The Lost Boys jumped to their feet, clanking, clattering, tocking, and ticking with such fervor that they seemed ready to charge back across the taiga, hundreds of leagues, to assault those who had murdered their majestic kin. Mab and the Lost Boys honored the memory of that poor beast. It deserved no less.

They appreciated the tedium of his long, wet walk along the bottom of the North River. And they applauded when he described how he convinced a pair of humans—the wife and son of a disgraced banker—to aid him. His audience reacted most favorably to the episodes wherein a humble servitor bested humans. And it fell into rapt silence when he finally reached a terminus of the
ondergrondse grachten
. They knew the canalmasters had died soon after Daniel’s arrival, but only he knew what had transpired within the bakery. He described
the meeting where they debated what to do with him, and the knock at the door that caused a panicked rush to shoo him into the alley behind the bakery. He described the noises that soon followed: the yelling, the
crack
of bone, the wet, meaty
thump
of bodies beaten and tossed aside.

Just moments after the murders, he met the assailant.

I couldn’t have been more shocked
, he said,
if Queen Mab herself had stood on the other side of that door
. The attempted levity fell flat. Daniel pressed on.
For it was Pastor Visser himself! Bruised, bandaged, but unmistakable.

A low chorus of ticktock murmurs spread through the assembled Lost Boys. The stone terraces amplified the echoes and elevated their surprise to a clockwork crescendo. Visser’s reappearance in the story had even caught Mab by surprise, if the quirk of her head was any indication.

But, of course, he did not recognize
me
. To him I was just another servitor.

(Rattles of indignation from the Lost Boys:
Of course he didn’t know you
, they said.
Typical human
, said others. And others still lamented,
We’re all the same to them
.)

Ah
, said Daniel. He’d aimed for this reaction.
That’s where the story takes a strange turn.
He cast his gaze across the assembled Clakkers. The dent in Lilith’s forehead gathered the aurora light the way a beggar’s hands gathered disdain. It surprised Daniel to see her; she hadn’t warmed to him since his faux pas about Berenice.

For he had changed. This was not the compassionate pastor from the Nieuwe Kerk. Before me stood a murderer. After dispatching the canalmasters with his bare hands he’d ransacked the bakery, even mangling his own fingers in the effort to tear up the floorboards.
More clicking rippled around the amphitheater. Humans were notoriously weak, notoriously fragile, and well known for their utter lack of stoicism.

Mab’s posture changed. She stiffened, as if every spring in her body had been replaced with a steel rod. Even the alien rhythm of her mainspring heart fell quiet. Murmurs rippled through the assembled Lost Boys, like a pebble thrown into a pond. Some, he noticed, had begun inching away from Mab, as though she were the epicenter of a coming tragedy. A few seated on the highest terrace almost directly behind and above Mab quietly departed, as though they’d abruptly lost interest in Daniel’s tale. Those who lingered, which was most of the resident population of Neverland, cocked their heads as if to keep one eye on Daniel and the other on Queen Mab.

Feeling there was no choice, and wanting to finish the story anyway—it was his story, after all—he continued:
Visser invoked the Empire’s Arms and a Clockmaker’s pendant, and attempted to requisition me on the spot for the Verderer’s Office! He demanded I forget everything I’d seen up to then, and—

Mab stood. Her voice cut through the agitated chattering like a sword through aspic. Silence fell across the amphitheater so abruptly that it echoed. This was an uneasy silence, akin to overly rowdy festivalgoers on Huygens’s Birthday glimpsing a Stemwinder. In an instant she became the only source of sound under the starry sky. She spoke in Dutch.

“Bandages, you say?”

“Yes,” said Daniel, utterly confused. She’d seized on the least interesting detail. Not what he’d expected, given the buildup. “Around his head.”

Mab scanned the assembly. Her gaze paused on Lilith, who returned a deferential and very human nod. Mab beckoned two Clakkers from the front row. “Ruth, Ezra, join us, won’t you?” Then she said, “Our new brother’s tale is concluded. Let us remind him that his travails were not in vain. Welcome home, Daniel!”

The others filed away, repeating Mab’s hail with varying
degrees of sincerity. The pair she’d selected joined her and Daniel at the center of the amphitheater. They walked like dogs called by an angry master. He hadn’t met these two before. Their chimerisms weren’t as extensive as some of the other Lost Boys’, though their appearance unsettled him.

To Daniel, Mab said, “Well, then. Tell us everything you know of this Pastor Visser.”

“I know no more than what I’ve said.”

“Come now, Daniel. What of the contours of his face? The smell of his sweat? The arch of his brows and the timbre of his voice? How can we find this man if we can’t recognize him?”

In a flash he understood why the pair she’d chosen acted so reticent. They were being tapped to return to the human world. And didn’t seem particularly excited about it.

We’re going to search for him?
Daniel asked.

Heavens, no!
said Mab.
I’m not. And you’re not. But
they
are.
She clapped her hands on Ezra and Ruth. Ruth flinched from Mab’s blade arm.

Amazing
, said Daniel, desperately trying to lighten the funereal mood.
And courageous!

The pair looked at him as though he were a simpleton. Free Will or not, they’d have to act as though they were regular servitors powerless against human tyranny. Daniel couldn’t imagine going back. Ever. So why did Mab want these two? Why not choose more eager volunteers? Logically, Daniel was the mechanical best suited for the hunt for Visser.

Yes
, said Mab.
These two intrepid adventurers I think would be perfect for the task of finding this strange Pastor Visser. You’re up for the task, aren’t you, Ruth? Aren’t you, Ezra?

But that… could take years
, Daniel said.

All the more reason to give us the most thorough description of the pastor, yes?

So Daniel did. The moon set and the stars wheeled while he
answered Mab’s questions about the human who had so captured her interest. The color of his hair, the length of his stride, the distance between his eyes, the diameter of each iris.

What can you tell us of the wounds on his head?
Mab asked.
The reason for his bandages?

Nothing. I saw only the dressings. They were clean.

Mab said,
Remind us about his hands.

I think his fingers had been broken,
said Daniel.
Certainly his nails had been torn, some entirely off. His hand had already begun to swell when I encountered him.

And he carries the writ of the Brasswork Throne as well as the sign of the Verderer’s Office?

Yes.

What were his exact words when he wielded them?

Daniel did his best to remember.

Mab switched back to Dutch. “We three thank you for taking the time to paint such a vivid picture of your mysterious pastor.”

“If I may ask, why is Visser suddenly of such interest?” Again, the silent pair of Clakkers regarded him with a stinging combination of pity and contempt.

“All in good time, Daniel.”

“Finding him will be a monumental undertaking. He could be anywhere.”

“Ah, but remember that Ruth and Ezra will not be alone in their endeavor. They can, and should, call upon their fellow Lost Boys to aid in their quest.” Just how many agents did Mab have among the humans? “Speaking of which, right now we three have important preparations and discussions. Excuse us.”

Mab again placed a light hand on the recruits’ shoulders. Bobbing on her Stemwinder haunches, she towered over them. They turned away, docile as lambs. They shuffled as if taken to
their own executions, their ticktock heartbeats playing a dirge. He lingered alone in the amphitheater while the disturbing trio retreated into the night. The Aurora Borealis limned them with shifting viridescent streamers.

Why, in a community of free Clakkers immune to their makers’ demands, where all anybody wanted was to live in peace, was everybody so
frightened
?

He waited until he could no longer see or hear Mab and her unhappy recruits before departing. Lilith joined him as he emerged from the amphitheater. She walked alongside without speaking. She seemed content to let him slog through the morass of his unease.

He said,
All right. Out with it. What have I done wrong this time?

Lilith said,
Nothing. But you do have a knack for making waves.

Daniel stopped. Looked back across their footprints in the snow toward the natural amphitheater.
What the hell happened back there?

Lilith quickened her pace and didn’t look back.
Not here
, was all she said. He followed her past the meadow; through an evergreen grove that smelled like the Christmas trees that Vyk, Clip, and Jax used to erect in the Schoonraad family homes every holiday season; and across an icy stream. He spied a granite outcrop and thought this her destination. Instead, she clambered down the scarp and waded to the frozen peat on the leeward side of the ridge. It put the granite between them and the heart of Neverland. Before them, the sun’s failure to breach the midwinter horizon painted the eastern sky the color of overripe peaches. The view from the ridge would have been superior. But this way echoes of their conversation would be reflected away from the camp.

It was a hell of a lot of caution to take before answering one simple question. Daniel did not find this encouraging.