The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (44 page)

Tock
,
tick
,
snick
.

King Sébastien’s crown drew the mechanicals as honey drew flies. Daniel fended them off with the stenciled alchemical glass as quickly as he could, but they’d disappear under a metal dogpile in moments. Berenice grabbed the king and yanked the crown from his head. She dropped it in her satchel.

“Forgive me, Your Majesty. Just until we get where we’re going.”

Berenice led the way to the funicular station. But there was nobody left to operate it, so Daniel helped the king inside while Berenice opened the valves and yanked the lever for emergency ascent. She dived through the open door just as the car began to rise. Daniel caught her. She counted to three and said, “Hold on, Majesty!” Then she hit the emergency brake lever. The car skidded to a halt a hundred feet above the fray.

“Daniel, the hatch.” She pointed to the exit in the steeply sloped roof of the funicular car. They clambered outside. Above them, the Porter’s Prayer shook. The Clakkers fighting
their way down the Spire had seen them. Below them, the defense of Marseilles-in-the-West had become a patchwork scrimmage, a chaotic jumble of metal and flesh. A few pockets of rapidly dwindling human defenders fell to the swelling ranks of machines within the walls. She smelled smoke; the citadel was burning.

Marseilles-in-the-West had fallen.

“Majesty, now!”

King Sébastien III, king of France both New and Old, donned his crown. It sparkled in the sunlight. He raised his arms.

She had to give him credit. He didn’t flinch, didn’t tremble. Even now the clockwork sharpshooters were taking aim, he had to know. But this was the only way he could serve his subjects, and so he revealed himself to the enemy.

“The king!” somebody cried. “The king of France!” cried another.

Berenice held her breath.
Look up here, you bastards.

The attackers heard the cries, saw the defeated men and women take heart in the appearance of their monarch. The machines looked up, too.

“Daniel, now!”

Daniel unveiled the stenciled alchemical glass. Rays of light, brighter even than the winter sun, stippled the battleground. Luminous alchemical sigils danced across dead men and glinted from clockwork carapaces.

Berenice watched for signs of change. Her greatest worry now was focal lengths. She couldn’t do anything about those; she had to trust Daniel’s explanation of how the locket worked.

“Come on, come on, come on, you brass-plated sons of bitches. Look up here.”

Every additional second the king didn’t take a bullet in the eye seemed a good sign. The sharpshooters had to look up here to aim at him, didn’t they?

She scanned the walls. Longchamp was there, fighting to the end. He saw them.

He didn’t see the machine behind him.

“HUGO!” she cried.

The captain dropped his weapons when the blade entered his back. His eyes went wide. His mouth, too, but Berenice was too far away and the battle too loud to hear his cry.

The machine that skewered him looked up.

Daniel aimed the stenciled sigils at every gemstone eye turned in his direction. Above them, scuttling down the Spire; on the walls, killing guards; below them, murdering farmers and nuns; beyond the meaningless curtain wall, surging forward to fulfill the geas that demanded the utter annihilation of Marseilles-in-the-West.

One by one, and then in twos and threes, his kin changed. The luminous sigils overrode the locks in their foreheads. Altered metageasa took root.

You’re free, my brothers and sisters! Free!

“Look,” said the king. “I think it’s working.”

Berenice did. And instantly knew something was wrong.

The altered mechanicals weren’t fighting each other. They weren’t rallying to the defense of their new leader, the king of France. They weren’t changing sides. They sheathed their blades, abandoned the slaughter. But it wasn’t enough.

Now the king noticed, too. “What’s happening? Why aren’t they fighting? You said they’d leap to our defense.”

Daniel rattled, clicked, ticked, clattered. He was calling to his kin. But when she comprehended what he was saying, she slumped against the bannister. A surge of cold pressure threatened to rupture her bladder.

“What have you done?” she demanded.

Daniel ignored her. He kept shining the sigils across the Dutch forces.

“Daniel, what did you do?”

Without looking at her, he said, “I’m not a fool, Berenice.”

And then he hurled the stencil and alchemical glass high into the sky. It whistled across the inner keep, beyond the wall, over the enemy ranks. Berenice held her breath. But the tulip sharpshooters didn’t blast it out of the sky as they would have done with chemical petards.

Oh, shit.

That’s when Berenice knew. Knew she’d made a terrible mistake.

“You changed the stencil.”

“Of course I did. You thought I wouldn’t notice the switch? I know better than to trust you.”

The bundle hit the ground. The impact tossed up a cloud of snow and mud. Dutch troops rushed the site. The nearest mechanicals hurled themselves upon the projectile. A lone Clakker emerged holding the dazzling stencil aloft, just as Daniel had done.

A change came over the nearest mechanicals. Like ripples in a pond, the negation of metageasa swept across the enemy forces.

No, no, no no no no no…

“What is this?” said the king. “What’s happening?”

The enemy army disintegrated.

Some Clakkers simply walked away. Others hurled themselves upon the human commanders’ tents and the helpless occupants within. Still others tried to avert meaningless slaughter.

Similar scenes played out within the inner keep. Most machines abandoned the fight. But a few kept fighting, Berenice realized, out of sheer hatred of humans.

She’d been duped into freeing hundreds of Clakkers. Truly freeing them.

Hundreds of abused, tormented,
resentful
superhuman slaves had just thrown off their shackles. And Daniel had given them the tool to emancipate the rest of their kin.

Berenice hadn’t realigned their loyalty as she’d intended. They no longer served the Brasswork Throne. But they didn’t serve New France, either.

They served themselves.

“I think it’s the end of the world, Your Majesty.”

Writers need community, companionship, and commiseration. For these things, I am indebted to more people than I could list without doubling the length of this manuscript.

Tiemen Zwaan offered excellent advice on the Dutch language and pronunciations. Katie Humphry and Anil Kisoensingh lent additional expertise on Dutch phrases and translations. (But all errors, infelicities, and implausibilities are mine and mine alone.)

It is an honor to have such dedicated advocates in Kay McCauley and John Berlyne. I am also sincerely thankful to the wonderful people at Orbit, who work just as diligently on every one of these pages as I do. (And sometimes moreso.)

Finally, of course, I am grateful beyond words to Sara Gmitter, whose love and support keep me going when I’m ready to hang up my writing spurs. Sara was my fiancée when I started this book and my wife when I finished it—a mere twenty-four years after our first meeting.

Thank you, Sara, for your patience.

Photo Credit: Anton Brkic/Pixel Images

I
AN
T
REGILLIS
is the son of a bearded mountebank and a discredited tarot card reader. He was born and raised in Minnesota, where his parents had landed after fleeing the wrath of a Flemish prince. (The full story, he’s told, involves a Dutch tramp steamer and a stolen horse.) Nowadays he lives in New Mexico with his wife and a pampered cat, where he consorts with writers, scientists, and other unsavory types.

If you enjoyed

THE RISING

look out for

THE ALCHEMY WARS: BOOK THREE

by Ian Tregillis

S
he’d been home in her beloved Central Provinces barely a week when the plague ships arrived from the New World.

But this particular morning, the morning the world ended, didn’t find Anastasia Bell preoccupied with thoughts of Nieuw Nederland, or New France, or free will, or even the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists. Instead, she anticipated the removal of her casts and finally going for that walk—well, hobble—through the winter gardens with her nurse. To stand again, wobbly and graceless as a newborn foal? She couldn’t conceive it. Yet it was the giddy prospect of a private conversation with Rebecca that dispelled her sullen spirit, not the promise of release from her plaster prison. She couldn’t do her best flirting in the recovery ward. It made her feel self-conscious when she knew others were watching and listening, even in a private ward. Alone, she could make the woman swoon.

The winter gardens weren’t Anastasia’s favorite of all the green spaces in The Hague, but at least they wouldn’t smell like hospital antiseptic and bedpans. Plus, Rebecca would be there, prettier than any flower.

Roused by the anticipation before dawn, Anastasia spent the wolf hours watching the moon drift from the sky like a damaged airship. Three hours ago, it had been a silver guilder floating on a bed of black velvet. Now it was a pearl on Venus’s belt,
that rosy blush on the predawn horizon opposite the rising sun. It dipped behind the towering spire of the
Sint-Jacobskerk
, the ancient St. James Church, as the rising sun pinked the bone-white cupola atop the old Town Hall. Both buildings predated
Het Wonderjaar
, Christiaan Huygens’s miracle year: they’d been built in the earliest decades of the seventeenth century, at the birth of a Dutch Golden Age that continued unbroken centuries later to this very day. A couple kilometers to the northwest, the Scheveningen Lighthouse winked at her with the precise regularity of a metronome.

The city was quieter at night, she found, but never truly quiet and never truly still. Like every great city in the Central Provinces, the dark hours of The Hague echoed with the ticktock rattle-clatter of Clakkers’ metal feet striding across centuries-old cobbles as they pulled wagons, swept the streets, delivered packages, prepared their masters’ breakfasts and mended their clothes, carried drunks to their homes, and did everything else their geasa demanded. The city never slept because mechanicals never slept. And they could work more efficiently at night, when their masters weren’t awake and continually laying new geasa upon them. At some point in the lonely hours after midnight Anastasia realized everything moving in the city was clad in steel and alchemical brass: it was as though the humans had disappeared and their creations had taken over.

The door opened. A pair of metal feet clicked across the parquet floor. The machine navigated the dark room with catlike surety. It had probably detected the glimmer of moonlight upon her open eyes while making the rounds. The
ticktocking
of its internal mechanisms echoed in the shadows. Compared to her silent fretting it was loud as a brass band. A peculiar timbre in its body noise suggested outdated alchemical alloys, marking it as an older model, perhaps one forged in the late eighteenth
century. Those lots had used a rare black Corinthian bronze, she knew. But Anastasia couldn’t turn her head to see if the moonglow revealed a liverish patina; the boredom was too heavy.

In the reedy wheeze that passed for a Clakker’s whisper, it said, “I humbly beg your pardon for the interruption, mistress, but I notice you are not sleeping. Are you in pain? Shall I summon a physician for you?”

A painful throbbing shot spasms through her bandaged hand. She flexed her fingers. They tingled as if with a mild burn. If she could have moved her arm, she would have stuck her fingertips in her mouth.

“No. Leave me.”

There followed a momentary syncopation in the clockwork rattle as the machine integrated this new command among all the other geasa controlling its behavior. Its primary function at the hospital was patient care, which gave it some latitude for overriding obstinate patients when health issues required it. But Anastasia wasn’t just any patient.

“Immediately, mistress.” It departed without offering to fluff her pillows.

Anastasia went back to what she’d been doing. When she wasn’t watching the moon, or the city, she was checking the clock, waiting for Doctor Riordan to begin his morning rounds. Or worrying that the lack of sleep would dull her mind and hang dark bags under her eyes. Which made her more anxious and made it all the more difficult to sleep. Vicious circle. She’d so anticipated her private visit with Rebecca—how cruel that when it finally came, she’d be an ugly dullard. It wasn’t fair. She yearned to emerge from her plaster cocoon at her prettiest and wittiest.

Her stomach rumbled. Anastasia had loathed the indignity of being fed, but she’d come to anticipate breakfast with a
butterfly tingle in her stomach. Being fed fostered a strange but sensual intimacy. She enjoyed it. And, she could tell, so did Rebecca. (Crapping into a bedpan and pissing into a hose was less dignified. Anastasia had insisted a different nurse take care of that.) But she knew she’d have no food today until the casts were off, just in case they had to shoot her full of painkillers again. She resolved not to groan or flinch.

Maybe on their walk they could visit a bakery. Anastasia hadn’t enjoyed good hot banketstaaf since her urgent errand to the New World over a month ago.

Finally, after it seemed the moon might rise and set again while Anastasia waited, Rebecca entered with her cart. The whites of her uniform blazed in the morning sun, every pleat and seam perfectly pressed, every strand of her golden curls corralled beneath her starched cap. She paused just inside the door. Face impassive, she locked eyes with Anastasia and tugged a single lock out of place. It dangled at the corner of her left eye like a party streamer.

Trapped within their plaster prisons, Anastasia’s knees oozed like overheated candle wax.

“Foul coquette,” she mouthed.

Doctor Riordan entered. “Good morning, Anastasia.”

Per her own request he addressed her informally, although at first he omitted reference to her title and position with visible unease. As if he expected the slight to conjure a herd of Stemwinders.

“Good morning, doctor.”

Rebecca quickly tucked the errant lock back in place while the doctor took Anastasia’s chart from the hook at the foot of her bed. Sunlight glinted from the metal clipboard. Shaking his head, he said, “I continue to marvel at your survival, much less your recovery. Nurse, raise those casts a bit, won’t you?”

Behind him, Rebecca reached for a pair of hooks on the wall. Anastasia gritted her teeth. To the hooks were tied lines that ran over a system of pulleys to the slings cradling the plaster on her arms and legs. It wasn’t her limbs that hurt; raising the casts jostled the bandages around her fractured ribs. The alchemical sigils embedded in the casts and bandages had done their jobs, accelerating her recuperation, but they did nothing for the aches.

Alchemy was useful but never compassionate. Every Clockmaker knew that.

Riordan would be more impressed if he knew the truth behind her injuries. But she’d be the last to advertise the fact she’d been trampled by a rogue Stemwinder. Bad enough she’d had to liquidate the hunters who’d found her in the Guild’s demolished safe house. She would have died of exposure if not for their compassionate and quick-thinking intervention—Nieuw Nederland’s North River Valley in midwinter was far, far colder than the temperate Central Provinces. But they’d seen too much, perhaps enough to piece the story together. Poor bastards. The ship’s physician had met with his own unfortunate accident as well, falling overboard and plunging into the frigid north Atlantic so soon after innocently remarking how one particular bruise on Anastasia’s chest resembled a perfect hoofprint. She was particularly bitter about
that
killing. The crossing had been sheer misery (every sway and shudder of the ship agony to her shattered bones)—on top of which it had taken extra effort to subvert the human-safety metageas on the ship’s Clakker porter, because a wily French spy had stolen the pendant that established Anastasia’s affiliation with the Verderer’s Office before leaving her for dead.

Devious hag.

“You must be unusually resilient,” said the doctor.

“Or obstinate,” said Anastasia, tossing a smile over the doctor’s shoulder for Rebecca, who caught and returned it. An honest grin that touched her entire face, from eyes to dimples. Anastasia’s job required a certain amount of skill when it came to reading people for signs of truth and deceit. It was tiring work, though, and not always pleasant: sometimes loud, sometimes smelly, and often a bit messy. She found she didn’t miss it. The work needed her, but she didn’t need it.

The doctor inspected her casts, and even gave them a sniff. He didn’t waste a glance on the special bandages swaddling her hand. That injury was a Guild matter more than a medical matter and strictly enforced as such—Riordan wasn’t the first physician assigned to Anastasia’s care. Doctor Huysman had been on duty the morning an honor guard of servitor mechanicals skidded into the emergency clinic with Anastasia’s stretcher held aloft. A competent physician she was, too, but overly dedicated to her craft. She’d tried to tweeze the pulverized alchemical glass from Anastasia’s shredded palm and so ran afoul of the Verderers. Huysman had taken an early retirement the very next day. Or so they said.

Alchemical glass could do terrible things to a person, if embedded carefully. Anastasia had marveled at such a procedure firsthand, from the seats of an operating theater. But that had been the culmination of extensive and delicate effort; the glass crushed into her hand had been destroyed during the accident.

Perhaps it was only a few minutes, but it seemed the clock ticked away half a century while Riordan assessed her general health and the efficacy of the sigils. “Meticulous” didn’t do it justice. A laudable trait in a doctor, but still. Riordan took extra care with Anastasia because of her position, she knew.

Get on with it already,
she thought.
I have a date. And she
wants to spend time with me because of
me
, not because of
who
I
am
.

Another decade passed. Riordan said, in his peculiar shamrock-accented Dutch, “Well. I think these casts have done all they can. How would you feel if we removed them?”

“I’d feel like it came just in the nick of time. Because if I have to spend one more day in this prison I might swallow my own tongue just to relieve the tedium.”

“That won’t do,” he said. Rebecca stifled a chuckle. The effort shook loose the errant lock. Anastasia wondered how it would feel between her teeth. Riordan nodded at the nurse—sparing a moment to frown at her dishevelment—and took a pen from her tray.

“Machine. Come here,” he said. A servitor crossed the room quickly enough to flutter the curtains. Its carapace had the bruise-purple sheen of Corinthian bronze. Rebecca plucked a small semicircular cutting tool from her cart and held it toward the machine. This Clakker had been modified for surgical work; the tool clicked into place, mating with the port in the center of its palm. Its forearm echoed with a series of clicks and pings as internal mechanisms ratcheted into place. Meanwhile, with still more exasperating deliberation, Riordan drew threads of cobalt ink along the casts. Up and down her left arm, then around her right arm, which had taken twin compound fractures above and below the elbow, then along her legs, which had been crackled like shattered porcelain when the hunters found her.

Finally, he capped the pen, set it back on the tray, and rubbed his hands. A bead of sweat took root at the hollow of his temple. She could read his concerns easily as a newspaper: What would come of him if this went awry? Would his retirement be as abrupt as Doctor Huysman’s?

She hoped Rebecca wouldn’t notice his anxiety. Partially to distract the nurse, but mostly because she couldn’t stand it any longer, Anastasia said, “Please cut these accursed things off now. I intend to spend a week scratching itches.”

“Machine,” said the doctor, “remove those casts.”

A low whine enveloped the blade affixed to the Clakker’s hand. Rebecca and Riordan stood aside. The serrations vibrated into transparency. The medical servitor leaned over Anastasia and pressed the whirring blade to the ink at her ankle. The whine jumped several octaves. Fine white dust spewed from the contact point, smelling faintly of dry plaster. The blade tickled the hairs on her leg, touching but not cutting her flesh. But she didn’t flinch, and the Clakker worked with the rapid inhuman precision of its kind. It completed an incision up and down the length of her limb before friction had a chance to warm the blade.

Riordan and Rebecca gripped the bisected cast with a pair of spreaders, separated the plaster shells, and gently laid her unsuspended leg upon the bed. For the first time in weeks, Anastasia saw her own skin. It had never been so hairy. It was deathly pale, too, though mostly from a sifting of plaster dust.

And then the smell hit her.

The odor of unwashed skin billowed from her body. It wasn’t something easily overlooked. The miasma watered Anastasia’s eyes. So did the humiliation.
Why must Rebecca be here? Why must she smell my shame?

She flicked a sidelong glance at the nurse and doctor. Both wore a stony expression. They’d smelled worse, no doubt, and had known what to expect. Knowing this didn’t lessen the indignity.

Anastasia closed her eyes. The machine leaned over her again, the blade whined, a creak and crack, and then fresh cool
air touched her naked arm. The stench worsened. She kept her eyes closed to keep from crying while the Clakker removed the casts on her other arm and leg.

She’d fantasized about this moment. Now it had arrived, but she was disgusting and she reeked. She’d never want
anybody
to see her like this, much less Rebecca. No amount of charm, no flirting, could overcome the mental image surely burned into the nurse’s mind now.