The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (31 page)

Without taking his eyes from Mab, he vibrated,
Is everybody watching her? Let me know when I’m clear.

I hope the ghost of Huygens haunts you forever and a day,
said Lilith,
because you’re going to get us killed.

To the miners who didn’t win a role in her special task, Mab said, “I imagine that when you haven’t slaved in the mine, some
of you worked to first build and then maintain this house. It’s quite something. Straight out of the Central Provinces! But there’s no need to maintain it.”

Dozens of servitors stampeded into the house. Their enthusiasm tore the door from its hinges and punched Clakker-sized holes in the walls. In moments the structure shook with the sounds of wanton destruction. It was a petty, pointless act. The Guildman’s quest for comfort here in the far north might have gone to excess, but he was alone and isolated thousands of leagues from his home.

Lilith sent a single
click
through her arm:
Clear.

Daniel flexed his ankle joints and uncurled his foot. The alchemical bauble shot up, encased in snow. He plucked it from midair.

What do you hope to achieve?

He tucked the glass in his torso, saying,
We need to get that thing from Mab.

I take back what I said. I hope the ghost of Huygens hauls you down to Hell with him.

Mab told her volunteers, “Take his arms…”

They did. The overseer fliched from their touch, but he was surrounded with nowhere to go but down. Standing to each side of the human, the servitors made bracelets of their brassy fists and locked them around his forearms.

The overseer cried.

Oh, no.
The scene reminded Daniel of the rogue Clakker Adam caught in the grip of the Stemwinders. The parallel sickened him. Heedless of who might be watching, he plucked Samson’s mangled skull from the snowy ground.

Lilith turned on him. She placed a hand on the dead mechanical’s head.
Do not do this.

This is murder. She is going to murder that man.

And where’s the tragedy in that?

This is wrong. He’s not Huygens. He’s not the person who unraveled the secrets of compulsion. He’s not the person who enabled the Clockmakers to enslave us. He’s not the woman who tortured you.

He might as well be. All humans are the same.
Lilith pointed to her head.
Have you forgotten what they did to me? They trapped me and took me apart while I screamed and begged them to stop. My terror meant nothing to them. If their arrogance hadn’t caught up with them before they finished, they wouldn’t have stopped until I was irreversibly inert.

I swear, Lilith, if I had been there, I would have intervened. What they did to you was evil. But so is this.

Fuck that human, and all the others.

The conversation took a fraction of a second.

Mab finished, “… And pull them off.”

The man screamed. “No! Please!”

Daniel’s moment of decision had arrived. He could stay in Neverland, forever free of human influence on his life but also forever an accomplice to this barbarous act of sadistic, pointless vengeance. Or he could do what was right at the cost of the company of fellow rogues. He’d become a mechanical truly without a home: feared and hunted by humans, loathed and outcast by mechanicals.

He remembered the Frenchman he’d accidentally killed. And the majestic airship that had died because of him. And the woman in New Amsterdam to whom he’d shown compassion, contradicting the picture painted by his pursuers, and for which she’d been quietly murdered. They’d all died just so that he could have the privilege of… what?

At the first tug of tension in his bones and sinews, the human whimpered. “Please don’t, please don’t, please, I’m just a bureaucrat, I’m not important…”

To hell with it.
Daniel hurled the dead Clakker’s skull. It’d
be a lonely immortality, but perhaps this would help atone for the Frenchman he’d killed.

Samson’s head streaked through the subarctic night to punch Mab in the torso. It shattered. Mab dropped the birchwood box. Shrapnel of a murdered Lost Boy pelted the Clakkers assembled on the roof. The would-be executioners recoiled. The box hit the roof and tumbled over the edge. The human, momentarily free and apparently deciding he’d rather die the master of his own fate, dove after it.

You fool! I was trying to save you!

How strange that in this moment of decision, this bifurcation in his fate, circumstance would seek to replicate the situation that had initiated his desperate flight for Neverland. Once again he found himself standing in the unique position to play catcher or savior as both a human and an inanimate object fell toward him.

Last time, he’d chosen the human. Not this time.

He plucked the box from midair. Lilith watched impassively as the human’s spine buckled upon impact with the icy earth. He came to rest in a mangled heap like a broken ragdoll. Blood seeped into the snow. Wisps of copper-scented steam wafted from the ice.

Lilith said, “
RUN
, you idiot!”

Daniel did.

B
erenice capped her pen. She stood and stretched her back until it popped. Sighing, she closed her journal. On the floor beside the bed, behind a palisade of dregs-stained wineglasses, sat a platter heaped with soiled crockery. She sniffed. Frowned.

“Whew. That mutton is a day off, or more, if my Gallic nose doesn’t deceive me. Assuming it was good when what’s-her-face delivered it. When was that? Yesterday?” She closed her stinging eye.

She’d doubled down on the transcription work with Huginn after Muninn departed on his mysterious errand. They’d completed a rough cut of a symbol equivalence table for every syntactical element in the modified nautical metageasa, along with a handful of empirical grammar rules. To an uneducated eye her notes were dense with impenetrable arcana. But Berenice now recognized a superficiality to the alchemical signifiers. The true content was much deeper and almost mathematical in its rigor. Here in this second-rate inn in a dilapidated fishing village in her conquered hereditary homeland she’d had her first true glimpse of the calculus of compulsion: the language by which the Clockmakers branded their rules upon the Clakkers.

Huginn stepped around the table. He—
it
, damn it—flipped through the journal. “This is good work.”

“It’s a beginning,” said Berenice. There was so much more to understand. They’d uncovered but a sliver of the grammar and its lexicon. It was as though somebody tried to learn French after picking up a handful of pages strewn about in the wake of a tornado through a library. But it was a start.

The Clakker asked, “What’s the next step?” It didn’t look at her, instead focused on the symbol table. It did, however, sidle closer to Berenice. She pretended not to notice. When it came within an arm’s reach of her, it asked, “What is your plan for building upon this work?”

Ah, yes. I’ve been living on borrowed time, and now you perceive the clock is winding down. So soon?

She sighed, as though merely tired and not frightened. As though unaware her life hung on what she said next. She sat again to conceal the trembling of her knees. She affected speaking through a yawn, too, to disguise the quaver in her voice. The machine couldn’t know she’d divined its intent.
These are my final heartbeats if it doesn’t like my answer. But this could be my life’s work, my life’s legacy…

She drew an unsteady breath and forged ahead with Gallic resolve: “It’s crucial we eliminate the possibility that the symbol table carries a different transcription for you rogues than it would for a regular Clakker. Otherwise this effort will have been wasted and we’ll have to start over.”

A slight syncopation in the
click-tock
rattle of Huginn’s body suggested… surprise? It hadn’t anticipated this. Good. She’d instilled doubt in its plan to murder her then and there. But only a little. It pushed back, asking, “How can we do that?”

“We test the transcriptions on a regular servitor. One still beholden to all the sundry geasa, unlike you lucky ravens. It’d be considerably easier if dear Muninn hadn’t flown away.”

The quaver in her voice became a tickle in her throat. She coughed, both to scratch the itch and, she hoped, conceal her anxiety. The machine had to believe she was blithely ignorant of its ultimate intentions toward her. Otherwise it might decide to move things along.

Deep silence fell over the room. Deep enough that the incessant ticktocking of the Clakker’s body, tinking and plinking like a coin thrown down a well, never hit bottom.

Finally, it said, “You intend to subdue an enslaved machine and test the symbol table on it.”

“Yes,” she lied. “I’ve worn a new groove in my brain trying to think of a less risky path to repeating this experiment.”

“And it’s for me to subdue the subject.”

“Subject.” Interesting choice of words, you crafty little raven. Is that how you see your kin?

“Only if you want our efforts to find success.”

The tintinnabulation of Huginn’s metal body accelerated, echoed. Berenice had taken down the pages of notes and symbol traceries from where they’d been tacked, so the walls were again bare and hard. “It is best if we do the work here,” it said. “The chambermaid can summon another servitor for us to interrogate.”

No good. Berenice’s chances of escaping were far better in the open, in the company of others, human and mechanical alike. It wouldn’t slaughter an entire village just to silence her, would it?

Surely not. Probably not. Probably.

Berenice shook her head. “We’ve already been here too long. We’ve drawn attention to ourselves with our obsessive need to stay inconspicuous. Nobody who can afford a pair of Clakker servants willingly takes a room in a pissant inn in a pissant fishing village and then stays there for weeks on end without coming out. Not unless she’s hiding.” Huginn tilted its head, staring
at her. Bezels spun inside its eye sockets. Could the alchemical magics in its gemstone eyes see her dissemblance? “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’ve had to work harder and harder to fend off that wretched harridan. She’s not hanging around because she loves her job. She’s hanging around because she’s nosy.”

That was certainly true. Berenice had resigned herself to a daily go-away payment. It was getting expensive. The Guild cash from Sparks’s trunk wouldn’t last forever.

“What do you suggest?”

“We buy transport and get out of this village. Go far enough that we’ll be strangers again somewhere else. Then we set up shop and start over again.”

Again the body noise of the ticktock man settled like a blanket over the conversation. She felt a bead of sweat trickle between her breasts. How had the room become so close all of a sudden? It hadn’t seemed so when she was rapt with the unraveling of secrets and riddles. But that was done, and now the room was musty.

“I know you’re hot to follow Muninn’s trail. But this,” she said, tapping the journal, “is pointless if it doesn’t apply to regular mechanicals.”

That swayed him. (
It
, damn it.) “Let us depart, then.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

She’d arrived with little more than the clothes on her back, so packing to leave was a matter of bundling up her notes and replacing the contents of van Breugel’s satchel. In less than a minute they were gone. The chambermaid started when they entered the dining room. She dropped the bundle of table linens she carried.

“Taking the air, madam? Will you be out long? Shall I attend to your room?”

Berenice’s stomach growled. Outside the funk of her own
room, the rest of the inn smelled of apple cider steeped in cloves and cinnamon.

“No need to hurry on my part,” said Berenice. “I won’t be back. Where is Mr. Henry? I wish to settle my account.”

The chambermaid scratched her head. “You’re sure, ma’am?”

“Quite. Now be a dear and fetch your employer.”

The maid took the linens and set off toward the kitchen at a fast walk. The other men and women scattered through the room alone or in twos and threes ignored both the maid and Berenice and continued their discussions. Most had congregated at trestles near the fireplace. A window had been cracked open to admit late-winter air, but the coals in the hearth glowed marigold yellow.

Berenice walked to the sideboard, where the innkeeper had placed a keg of cider and a stack of bowls. Huginn attended her, as naturally a servitor would. “While she’s doing that, go to the stable and procure my transportation.” What relief to be in public again, where Huginn had to adhere to the fiction of subservience.

“Humbly begging your pardon, Mistress.” It could be so polite when need be. Obsequiousness was literally built into the Clakkers by dint of the hierarchical metageasa; Berenice’s journal contained tentative transcriptions of several such clauses. “Your safety is my highest priority. I cannot protect you if you send me away.”

Translation: I’m not letting you out of my sight. Well, it was worth a try.

“Very well. Stand over there until I summon you.”

Huginn took a spot adjacent to the door that opened on the street. From the kitchen came a crash and raised voices. Then silence again.

Berenice ladled cider into a wooden bowl. This she did with her back to the mechanical, in hopes that that would conceal
the trembling of her arm and the slopping of cider. She seated herself at a round table in the corner whence she could watch Huginn as well as eavesdrop on the various conversations of French-tinted Dutch. The murmur of inconsequential conversation and crackling of a cozy fire put her in mind of home. The cider left a trail of apple-scented steam, and this, too, snared her heart in a skein of homesickness. She blew on the bowl before sipping, hoping to hell her trembling wouldn’t send cider down the front of her dress. The cider was refreshingly tart. Better than any food that had appeared on a tray outside her door these past weeks. She wondered who had made it.

The innkeeper emerged from the kitchen, wringing a dish towel in his ropy fingers. Its mate, slung over his shoulder, had received a similar treatment. He moved quickly, with shoulders slightly hunched, like a dog that had just soiled its masters’ favorite rug. Berenice caught his eye and waved him over. He ignored her. He joined a group of fishermen by the hearth, leaned into their conversation, and—after his gaze darted from Berenice in the corner to Huginn by the door—cupped his hands around one man’s ear.

The fisherman straightened. He set down his bowl and stood. His fellows (perhaps the crew of a small fishing boat?) looked content to keep eating, but he barked at them. They followed him outside.

Was it her imagination, or did he flinch ever so slightly when he passed Huginn on his way outside?

The innkeeper moved to another group. These breakfasters soon vacated the room, too. Berenice listened to the floorboards as they returned to their rooms, the scuff of warped doors, the
clunk
of locks thrown in haste.

Oh, you bastard. You know, don’t you? You’re evacuating the inn because you’re afraid of what’s about to happen. And you’re blabbing it all over creation.

That’s what she got for trusting her salvation to a bunch of yokels.

Berenice half raised herself out of her seat. “Sir! Come here a moment, won’t you? I would settle my expenses.”

He started. For a moment she thought the idiot was going to flee. He probably considered it. But he did slink toward her table with all the enthusiasm of a pallbearer. His fingers worked the dish towel hard enough to bleach his knuckles the color of old bones; the expression on his face looked like nothing so much as that of a basset hound expecting his master to whip him. Ratchets clicked when Huginn’s head turned to follow him across the room.

She looked him in the eye. Plastered her best attempt at a congenial if condescending smile on her lips. Said, “I must be off, and wish to settle my tab with you. What does the Guild owe you?”

“I, uh…” He licked his lips. His eyes darted from Berenice to Huginn and back. “I don’t know. I’d have to check the ledger.” As if every innkeeper didn’t count stuivers, kwartjes, and guilders in his sleep.

“No need. I’m sure we can come to an agreement. You’ve been most hospitable, and the Guild can be very generous. Furthermore, if you have a livery stable, I would like to see about buying or hiring transport.” Anything to keep the innkeeper from flitting off again. It seemed to work; he licked his lips again. But still his gaze darted to the Clakker. She continued, “Do you have a livery, sir?”

“My brother-in-law owns the stable here.”

“Excellent! Perhaps you could introduce me? And while I negotiate with him, I could also settle my tab with you.”

That did the trick. It offered the promise of getting paid while also getting away from the mechanical. Or, at least, getting the mechanical out of his establishment.

“YesI’dbequitehappy,” he said, and turned so quickly it seemed
a wonder his heel didn’t bore a hole in the floor. Subtlety wasn’t his forté: He hunched his shoulders when he scuttled past Huginn. The innkeeper set off at a fast walk down the street without a backward glance. The door hung open, inviting a wintry gust to warm itself by the fire.

Berenice sighed, setting aside the bowl of cider to follow him. The anxious idiot was going to get everybody killed. By then the remaining breakfasters had vacated the room, apparently sensing a need to find safety elsewhere.

She told Huginn, “Come along.”

But the servitor closed the door, forcing her to step back. Berenice started.

It said, “These people seem uneasy, mistress. Are you in danger? Is there an imminent threat to your person?” Its voice echoed in the empty room.

“They’re not uneasy. That’s parochial life in a village. It twists people. There is no threat to me.”

Huginn grabbed her by the throat. The satchel tumbled from her fingers.

Oh
, she thought.
That was probably the wrong answer.

The chambermaid’s name was Sigrid. Not a particularly French name, alas, and not without the faint scent of tulip clinging to it, but what could one do? Berenice couldn’t pick and choose the people in whom fate forced her to entrust her life.