The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (39 page)

She didn’t know the young priest. Did Beauharnois know her history? If so, he kept his opinions to himself.

She asked Longchamp, “No guard posted?”

“For a while, early on,” he said. “But we can’t spare the bodies.”

The crypts went deep under Mont Royal. But they’d imprisoned Visser in the first chamber to obviate long trips back and forth to feed and question him.

The priest found the proper key. It slid home without a sound; the lock had been oiled recently. He started to pull the door, but hesitated. To Berenice, he said, “You may find this disturbing, madam. This poor man… He’s in the thrall of the Dark One. Father Chevalier, our acting prelate, has done what
he can, but… Under different circumstances we’d entreat the Vatican to send an exorcist, but that avenue is closed to us.”

Berenice raised her eyebrows.
Exorcist?
She glanced at Longchamp, who shrugged. “Somebody did a real job on the poor son of a bitch. Sorry, Father.”

“We’ve tried to keep his body comfortable even if we can’t free his soul,” said Beauharnois. He crossed himself before heaving on the door. The hinges didn’t creak. They’d been oiled, too.

She’d expected the crypt to be lightless, but it wasn’t. It was warmer than the passage, too. The priests had set up chemical lamps for the prisoner. She squinted against the glare.

Something rattled. The priest stepped through and moved to the left of the door. Longchamp followed and ducked to the right. Berenice stepped between the men, torch held uselessly aloft.

The chains were forged of the same steel used in the cables for the guards’ bolas, though here the links were thicker than a grown woman’s thumb. They went around Visser’s arms from wrist to shoulder, and around his legs from ankle to midthigh. It made him look as though he’d donned a suit of armor but neglected his breastplate. The chains went to massive pitons driven into the stone vault, giving him just enough slack to lie on the cot that had been installed in an empty ossuary niche. His hands were bandaged, as was his head. His head and neck were free to move, and that they did. He fixed his attention on Berenice; the men were familiar to him.

So this was the man who had inadvertently set Jax free. And who later murdered her canalmasters. And who, later still, came to Marseilles-in-the-West and tried to reach the king’s apartments. He looked like an unkempt madman. The wildness in his eyes was of a purity she’d never seen. He looked more pathetic than frightening. The chains might have been
excessive, but if Longchamp deemed them necessary, they weren’t. And that chilled her. She didn’t believe in demons and possession. So what had befallen this man?

Questions aplenty. But no time to ask them all.

“Hello, Pastor Visser. My friends here tell me something terrible was done to you. Is that so?”

The prisoner thrashed. His chains clattered. The noises that came from his throat were barely human. A yowling, growling, gurgling keening, as though he were trying to speak but fighting his own body. Bulging tendons corded his neck and jaw. His eyes rolled. Foam flecked the corners of his mouth. Of the anguished noises coming from the man, Berenice recognized only two words: “Help me.”

Father Beauharnois crossed himself again and launched into a Latin recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

“Can you tell me what happened to you?”

Apparently not: Visser redoubled his thrashing. His vocalizations choked off, as though his own throat threatened to strangle him. He looked very much like somebody struggling against a geas, an inviolable injunction against describing the ordeal.

A cold frisson ricocheted up and down her spine.
Bell was going to do this to me
. She hugged herself.

Berenice pointed at Visser’s head. She asked the captain and priest, “Can we unwrap those bandages?”

“He’s been badly injured,” Beauharnois said.

“No doubt. But I need to see his forehead.”

Longchamp made short work of it. He wasn’t gentle, but the priest’s thrashing gave him little choice.

His scalp, visible through the patchy tufts of hair, was a mass of scars. Somebody had operated on this man’s head, perhaps repeatedly. But: no obvious keyholes. It didn’t mean there wasn’t a similar safeguard against altering his metageasa
implanted elsewhere, but she didn’t have the time or expertise to give him a physical.

Longchamp tugged on her arm. He nodded at the door. “A word?”

They went a few yards up the passage. He pulled the crypt door mostly closed, and even then he insisted on whispering directly into her ear. Whatever he’d seen of Visser in action, it had made an impression. “What exactly is the plan here?”

“If I’m right, they implanted in him something akin to the mechanicals’ hierarchical metageasa. He’s powerless to disobey. The metageasa are expressed in a special alphabet and grammar. I can replicate it. We might be able to rewrite his geasa.”

“So he wipes King Sébastien’s ass instead of the bitch queen’s? A huge fucking help that’ll be.”

“No, Hugo. We could change not just his loyalty but his priorities. The parameters of his obedience. Then we can give him new orders. Orders that tell him to go out and accost every mechanical he sees. We arm him with these.” She reached into her boot, fished out her stolen pendant, and brandished it along with the key ring. “If he wields this and claims to be the Guild’s representative, he can override the machines’ orders. Their geasa. He can order them to stand still while he uses the keys on them—they’ll go inert when he does.”

“Thereby reducing the overwhelming forces arrayed against us by one or two at a time. That’ll make a tremendous Goddamned difference.”

“Just listen, won’t you? We can write a clause into the new geasa, requiring the appropriated mechanicals to round up their colleagues and bring several to Visser before they themselves succumb to the keys. We design it like a disease, so it spreads geometrically. Given enough time, it could at least lessen the odds against us.”

“‘It should work.’ I’ve heard that shit from you before, you know,” he said. “At best it’ll work until the tulips wise up to
what he’s doing, at which point they’ll chop his fucking head off and reset the ticktocks.”

“Probably.”

“I can’t spare a single body to help you. You’ll have to lean on the dog collars for what you need.”

“I will. Don’t worry about that.”

Longchamp stared at her. His practiced eyes noticed the bruises on her neck. She adjusted her scarf, saying, “It’s a long story.”

“I imagine you’ve seen some shit. It took a brass-plated pair for you to return. I’m glad you did, even if it means you’ll die with the rest of us.” He shook his head.

She smiled. She’d once told some of his men that the fearsome sergeant—such was Longchamp’s rank back then—was soft as a kitten at heart. It hadn’t been such an exaggeration.

“Captain!” The passage echoed with a woman’s voice. “Captain Longchamp!” A guard came jogging through the cavern. She skidded to a stop before Longchamp and saluted. She didn’t spare a glance for Berenice.

“Let me guess,” he said. “They’re on the move.”

She hunched over, hands on knees while she caught her breath. “They’ve fired again. The squads up top report another mechanical has landed on the Spire.”

“Reinforcements are impossible.”

“No, sir. They’re not requesting reinforcements.”

“Then what?”

“They, uh, they say you need to see this for yourself.”

Longchamp closed his eyes. Again he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he muttered. “I don’t have time for this bullshit.”

“They’re insistent, sir. They say it’s urgent.”

Berenice squeezed his arm. “Go. I’ve got what I need here.”

He set off after the messenger. As Berenice reached the crypt
door, his voice came echoing down the passage to her. “Try not to fuck up this time.”

Easier said than done.

Longchamp rode the funicular as high as it would go. As he disembarked to ascend the final revolutions of the Porter’s Prayer on foot, he realized what a relief it would be when the clockwork horde finally breached the walls and killed him. At least then he’d be assured of never having to climb these fucking stairs again.

He hoped that if the Blessed Virgin interceded on his behalf, and he was allowed to join the Lord, he wouldn’t have to climb all the way to Heaven. It was enough to make a man hope for damnation; at least those stairs led down. Maybe he could slide along the bannister like he used to do, when he foolishly thought the nuns weren’t watching.

The climb gave him a view of the battlefield. The tulips had fired their Clakker cannon again, as expected, and hit their target again, also as expected, but the forces arrayed around the citadel hadn’t moved. Strange, that. He’d assumed the tulips planned to unleash their dogs the moment they landed a few squads upon the Spire and inside the walls, to keep the weary defenders busy fighting on two fronts. It’s what he would have done, and he didn’t have the twisted black heart of a Clockmaker. Why fire once and then stop?

This reeked of a tulip ploy. Carefully, quietly, he slid the pick and hammer from the loops on his back. He let the hafts slide through his grip until his fingers found their spots. Then he crept forward two stairs at a time.

Anaïs was waiting for him. She stood outside the door to the privy council chamber. She didn’t hold her weapon at the ready; the barrel of her epoxy gun was slung into the holster on her back, between the twinned chemical tanks. She sure as hell
didn’t look like somebody who’d just fended off another foray from the mechanicals.

“All right. I’m here. And you’re in the shit up to your scalp right now. I see nothing to justify summoning me when the final battle is about to start.”

“We sent for the marshal general, too. This is, um… it’s outside our training. This is officer stuff.”

She said that as if she actually believed in the wisdom and experience of her superiors. Poor moon-eyed lamb; the siege should have beaten that out of her by now.

“Very well. What’s the problem?”

“That’s just it. We don’t know if this is a problem.”

She opened the door.

A single servitor Clakker sat on the floor in the center of the room, surrounded by men and women with goop guns, hammers, and bolas. It was motionless, though the dreaded ticktocking instantly raised the hair on Longchamp’s nape. Instinctively he tightened the grip on his weapons. The machine was functional. Yet it appeared docile as a newborn fawn: legs splayed before it, mechanical hands raised in a gesture of appeasement. A faint metallic ratcheting filled the chamber as its eyes focused on him and tracked his entry. He hadn’t known what to expect, but it sure as hell hadn’t been this.

“All right, I’m here. Somebody tell me what the hell is going on.”

The machine spoke a few words of Dutch.

“What did it say?”

Anaïs cleared her throat. “It, uh, it said, ‘I’m here to help.’”

One of the humans translated the Dutch, somewhat haltingly, into French for the others, and vice versa. Meanwhile Daniel and Captain Longchamp studied each other.

The captain’s glare carried the weight of a hammer blow. He addressed the guards with fervor. The translator did her best.

“It’s the tulips make a trick, you brain-not-having excrements. Make it wet now.”

The guards raised their guns. Daniel raised his arms.

“Please! Wait!” he yelled.

The guards hesitated.

Longchamp wrested the gun barrel from one of them. He got his finger through the trigger guard and trained it on Daniel, though the hose still stretched to the metal tanks on another man’s back.

Daniel said, “Please, Captain. Before you fire, I have something that can help you. Take it before it’s permanently encased with me.”

He watched the humans while they listened to the French translation. Calculation unfolded behind the captain’s eyes.

Come on
, thought Daniel.
One little gesture of trust. That’s all I’m asking for. One moment of détente, and we can end this war.

Longchamp kept his eyes on Daniel as he issued orders. The translation came a moment later: “Judith, Gaspard, to the windows. Tell me what you see.” He kept the gun on Daniel while a man and woman surveyed the scene around the Spire. The view from up here was grand, Daniel knew; he’d admired it during the seconds he traversed the long parabola from cannon to Spire. It reminded him of the view from the leviathan airship. The memory came, as it always did, with a pang of guilt.