The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (12 page)

At the marshal’s residence, Longchamp leaned against a dry
fountain, scratching his beard, while Sergeant Chrétien gave the bellpull a discreet yank. The chiming of the bells came through clearly enough, but no footsteps. The sergeant yanked the bell cord with one hand and knocked with the other. Quick learner: He put his fucking wrist into it.

The marshal’s attendant opened the door. He wore a robe with more dignity than many could muster in their Sunday best. Not recognizing the sergeant, he twisted his face into a scowl that might have sent lesser men packing.

“Sir!” he said, in something between a stage whisper and a shout. “The comte and comtesse de Turenne do not take visitors at this hour.”

“I apologize for the early hour. I’d like to speak with the marshal, if it’s possible,” said the sergeant.

“As would a great many people. But the comte is not inclined to favor those who can’t observe basic courtesies.”

Longchamp watched this unfold for a minute or so, until he decided to let the sergeant off the hook. He cleared his throat and spat into the fountain basin, which contained snow and crumbled leaves.

“Oh, for fucking serious, Richard. You and I both know you’re going to let us in, because you and I both know I wouldn’t bother the marshal unless the sky was falling and the dead were rising.”

“Captain. I’ll wake the marshal at once.” The attendant ushered both men inside as if he hadn’t just pitched a fit.

Chrétien whispered, “Thank you, sir.”

Longchamp said, sotto voce, “Try acting like you belong in that Goddamned uniform. Because that was one of the saddest displays I’ve ever seen.” He snorted. “You’d
like
to speak with the marshal? If it’s
possible
? Jesus. I’d love to watch you haggle with the fishwives down in Saint Agnes. You’d come away naked, married, and in debt.”

Richard saw them to the parlor and made to stoke the glowing ashes in the hearth. Longchamp growled. “The sergeant will take care of that.”

Chrétien, hearing his cue, set about resurrecting the fire.

“Very good, Captain. Shall I ask Sabine to warm something for you? There is coffee.”

“Thank you, no. But if you could fetch your master’s martial wisdom before the sun sets tonight, that would be grand.”

He did, in short order. Longchamp and Chrétien saluted the marshal, who entered the parlor looking old, and rumpled, and bleary. But he rallied impressively. And he didn’t carry his ceremonial baton of office; Longchamp pictured the man sleeping with it under his pillow.

“Captain Longchamp. When the bell rang, I had a premonition that I’d be seeing you this morning.” He blinked at the sergeant. “I don’t know you.”

“I’m sorry about the hour. This is Sergeant Chrétien.”

“Ah.” The marshal took a seat. “You’re the one promoted in his wake,” he said, jerking a thumb at the captain.

“Yes, sir.”

“Big shoes to fill.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I hear he’s a bit of a bastard to work for.”

The sergeant cleared his throat. Turning red, he said, “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

The marshal turned to Longchamp. “He needs to learn how to lie better.”

“I’m working on that.”

“All right.” The marshal slapped his knees. “You’re here. I’m up. It’s dark outside. What bad news have you come to deliver?” He cocked his head, as if listening to the city. “I don’t hear screaming. The tulips aren’t already at the walls?”

“Not yet, thank the Blessed Virgin,” Longchamp said. All
three men crossed themselves. “But this is about the siege preparations.” Longchamp explained the situation with the chemical inventories. He took care not to mention Berenice’s letter.

“Surely there are reserves for manufacturing more.”

Chrétien cast a sideways glance at Longchamp. The young sergeant’s eyes had assumed the white-limned panic of a rabbit in a snare.

“That raises another issue.” He relayed the news about the dodgy chemical shipments. “As you pointed out, we might be surrounded by metal men before long. It’s crucial that we can arm all the epoxy cannons and keep them armed.”

The marshal closed his eyes. His head drooped, slightly, but his breaths came more rapidly. He kneaded the arms of his chair. When he reopened his eyes, he’d sunk into himself. The comte de Turenne, Longchamp reminded himself, had not been a career military man. He’d become the marshal general through politics.

“What do we do?”

And in that moment, the young sergeant discovered that his leaders were just old men with feet of clay. It hurt Longchamp’s heart, the look on the boy’s face. But it was a necessary lesson.

“I think,” said Longchamp, feeling a bit out of place in the attempt to be gentle, “the king should know about this. And then I think we should pray.”

“Yes. Right.” The marshal slapped his knees again. “Since you’re in charge of the defenses, Captain, he’ll want the report directly from you. He may want to assemble the privy council for this.” He stood. “Richard! Lay out my clothes, I’m going to the Spire. Sabine! Coffee!”

By the time Longchamp and his shadow reached the Spire on foot, the marshal had already dismounted. A guard attended
the marshal’s horse while, overhead, a pair of funicular cars passed each other. The ascending car contained the marshal; its empty twin came to a gentle stop at the base of the tracks.

Despite the hour, a small crowd of petitioners had already gathered at the funicular station. Mere rumors of war made people edgy, but when they saw siege preparations going into effect, no matter how surreptitiously, they tended to lose their minds. They’d been a common sight around the Spire, these past few weeks. Dozens waited in line, sometimes for an entire day, for a chance to present a case to the king. Usually it was civvies wanting an exemption from the conscription lottery, or businessmen trying to profit on the inevitable hostilities with Nieuw Nederland. Even in peacetime the petitioners occasionally included the old-timers, who believed the king could heal with a touch.

A slightly rowdy bunch for this time of the morning, but a pair of guards kept the line in order. As they neared the crowd, Simon, one of Longchamp’s men, pointed at the rising tram car and said, “Because he’s the marshal general, that’s why. You could ride the funicular, too, if you had urgent affairs of state to discuss with His Majesty. But since you don’t, Father, you can wait for the tram to start running at its regular time. The very same goes for the rest of you.”

The guards saluted Longchamp as he passed. Chrétien frowned.

Lamplight and the first hints of sunrise shimmered on the windowpanes of the funicular cars, more tempting than the wink from any seductress. They might as well have been sirens from the old stories: Some day Longchamp’s resolve would falter, and rather than endure the long climb up the Porter’s Prayer he’d submit to the shortcut. There had been a time when he’d pounce on the stairs without a second thought. Nowadays thoughts of ascending the Spire the hard way came in tandem with a mental grimace. It was a long damn climb on rickety knees.

Were he alone, he might have chanced it. But given time a cut corner could become a self-justification that could become a habit. He couldn’t risk the pernicious undermining of his strength and stamina. Which is why Longchamp grabbed Chrétien by the collar when the sergeant headed for the funicular.

“Not a chance. We go up the old way. You’re too young to get lazy, and I’m too grizzled to change my ways. And besides,” he added, “not only will it look better to the marshal general, it will give the marshal time to speak with the king in private before we arrive. They need to work themselves into a lather.”

At least the sergeant had the self-discipline not to groan. “Yes, sir.”

They mounted the stairs. From behind them again came the voices of the guards on crowd-control duty. “See? Even the captain of the guard takes the stairs.” Somebody raised a voice in reply, to which Simon said, “Because they’re on official business. The king doesn’t see petitioners at the crack of dawn.”

This caused more raised voices, but by then the curvature of the Spire had put the argument just enough out of earshot that Longchamp couldn’t make out the words. Chrétien looked preoccupied, as though still listening; Longchamp wondered how far around the spiral those younger ears could track the argument.

Perhaps because of this, Longchamp pushed himself through the long, cold climb. Before they’d made it halfway up, they saw two pigeons arrive and one depart in the space of about ten minutes. The birds were little more than flapping silhouettes in the brightening sky, but they cast a shadow on Longchamp’s heart. He called a stop at the pigeon roosts. Not because he needed a break, he told himself, and not because the sight of Brigit’s friendly face would have cheered him, but to get wind of the latest news.

Brigit wasn’t up at that hour. But Lord knew the pigeons
were. They’d been working all night to bring all the news from the far corners of New France.

More incursions along the border. Spotters in a balloon tethered a thousand feet above Trois-Rivières had caught glints of light moving through the nearby marshes. Meanwhile, more than a hundred leagues to the south, Clakkers had stormed the bridges at Niagara Falls; the Dutch now controlled the crossing there.

Every hour, the metal tide inched higher.

And the keep’s chemical defenses were understocked.

Cold wind made Longchamp’s eyes water. Both men sweat despite the wind. The sergeant’s frown, the same one he’d donned at the base of the Spire, etched itself deeper into his face with every circuit of the spiral staircase.

“Sir,” he said.

Longchamp grunted, trying not to sound like he was panting too heavily. “Hmmm.”

“Did you hear what Simon said? To the petitioners?”

“I heard him making it clear that despite many a tale to the contrary, His Holiness is not hiding in the Spire,” Longchamp puffed, “and that the king could not cure the afflicted with a touch, and…” The captain climbed a few more stairs, caught the ragged edge of his breath. “… And that on no account would people be allowed to bring their goats to petition the king, no matter how lame the wretched beasts.”

“I don’t mean that. There was a fellow near the back of the line. Simon called him, ‘Father.’”

“Good ears, Sergeant.”

“You told us to keep our eyes open for any men of the cloth recently arrived to Marseilles.”

Longchamp stopped.
So I did. Son of a bitch.

“Good memory, Sergeant. Was he making a fuss?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at him.” Chrétien peered over the outer balustrade of the Porter’s Prayer. “Damn.”

The limb of the sun had breached the eastern horizon by the time the breathless, sweaty captain and sergeant gained the rounded bead atop the Spire. Here lay the privy council chamber and, above that, the king’s apartments.

Longchamp had to catch his breath before saying, “Go back down and get the details. And if he’s not still in line, have Simon draw up a sketch. Then get it copied and pass it around to the rest of the men. Quietly.”

I
t wasn’t easy to sprint through a winter forest with two useless arms and one severed foot clutched to his chest. Jax’s weathervane head swayed in herky-jerky time to the awkward loping stride he’d adopted, reluctantly, to accommodate the shattered stump of his ankle joint. It meant that he couldn’t keep his eyes fixed on the ground ahead of him. And it was treacherous country, this taiga: sometimes swampy, sometimes choked with underbrush, sometimes so thick with conifers as to be impassable, and everywhere blanketed with snow. Sometimes the wind of his passage kicked up a rooster tail of loose flakes when he crossed a field. Sometimes the trees he brushed would hurl icicles in protest, glassy fléchettes that shattered against his body.

Back in The Hague, he easily could have run thrice as fast along the old veerkaden, the tow-canal paths. But back then he’d had two feet, two useful arms, and a head that moved as he commanded.

The mutilation caused him no pain. Not as a Clakker understood pain, anyway. A human who’d lost his foot as Jax had
done would probably go blind from the agony before bleeding out.

Perhaps Jax’s kin and their human makers were destined never to find common ground.

Meanwhile, Jax had discovered a new kind of torment. Not the magical pain inflicted upon the Clakkers as a matter of course, but the self-inflicted spiritual anguish of the sinner. The indelible guilt of the murderer. Jax would carry that mantle to the end of his days. Though he was ultimately responsible for the murder of a leviathan airship—another guilty burden—he had tried to save the machine’s life. His pursuers in the city had killed a human witness to spin the story of a crazed murder machine. A fellow servitor, Dwyre, had even sacrificed himself for Jax. But this was worse.

Was there a God who punished murderers? And if so, did He punish rogue mechanicals like Jax, or only soulful humans? And what of his soldier kin, those who would be powerless to do anything but kill Frenchmen—were they sinners? Had Jax somehow retrieved his own soul when he attained freedom from the geasa? Or was he still just a hollow shell hated by his creators, disregarded by their Creator, and exempt from the bonds of human social conventions? Perhaps. But if that were the case, why did the weight of his remorse threaten to flatten him?

And assuming there was a God to listen, did He answer prayers? All prayers, or only the prayers of the devout? Would He listen to the penitent whispers of a poor pathetic machine? Some humans believed their God could know their hearts and minds. Did He concern Himself with the inner lives of Clakkers? The Calvinists’ God had put all things into motion at the beginning of time, like a celestial Clockmaker winding a pocketwatch, including the infinitely twisting braided paths of His
creations’ lives. Did that extend to Clakkers, too? Were they predestined to lives of interminable servitude?

Had Jax been predestined to meet Pastor Visser, and Berenice, and the man he killed in the forest?

The forest smelled better than The Hague, and Amsterdam, and even Delft. No faint stagnation of the canal waters here. Just the cold crisp snow, the evergreens, and occasional scents of the animals he startled—elk musk, rabbit scat. He imagined this was bear territory, and wondered if he’d see one, though he understood they slept through the winter. Late the previous night he’d heard a growl from something apparently rather large.

He remembered a storyteller at Pieter Schoonraad’s seventh birthday party, decades ago when Jax had belonged to Pieter’s father and his final leaseholder had been just a little boy younger than his daughter, Nicolet, was now. He’d entertained the children with fanciful stories of New World animals punctuated with snorts and barks and whinnies. Little Piet had wet his pants when the man described the fearsome mountain lion.

Jogging through the trees, vision slewing back and forth with every bob of his disobedient head, he almost didn’t notice the abrupt end to the forest until he breached the brambles to emerge from a sentry-like row of aspens. And found himself at cliff’s edge atop a sheer wall of jagged granite. Thousands of acres of red spruce spread before him. Snow clung to their boughs, making them appear like Christmastime Speculaas cookies sprinkled with powdered sugar. He also spied hemlock and larch, the latter naked for winter but recognizable for the smattering of purple cones about their bases. A river snaked through the valley like a silver ribbon draped through the forest. A herd of bison picked at the snow along the banks. Beyond the shallow bowl of the valley the earth rose in a series of gentle undulations that swelled first into foothills and then…

Mountains!

He’d never seen such a thing before, only their renderings. The Old World was lousy with them, he knew; he’d come from a place crisscrossed with Alps and Pyrenees and Carpathians. His imagination had fallen short. He’d never imagined they could be so…

Transfixing.

Mountains! It was as though some vast chthonic forces deep within the earth had frozen in midshrug to leave a great jagged sawtooth stretched across the horizon. The bare peaks were shrouded in snow so pure the glare of sunlight triggered filters in his eyes. Farther down the distant slopes the color and shading of the mountains shifted between purples and umbers to a deep kelly green. When he zoomed his eyesight to the diffraction limit, the altered shading became a timberline, an altitude beyond which even the quaking aspens wouldn’t grow.

The sun inched across the sky while he absorbed every detail of the vista. The play of light and shadow as clouds scudded across the sky; the curlicues of snow torn from the distant peaks as wind whipped across the summits; the whisper of running water; the loamy, piney scent of the forest. He’d never imagined such beauty.

Mountains! The sun traversed a quarter of the sky before Jax moved again.

The cliff offered no obvious route down. He could have climbed had he two feet and the use of his arms. But he didn’t, so he jumped. The snow-shrouded boughs of balsam fir trees cushioned his cannonball descent. He landed in a snowdrift, pelted by a rain of the firs’ cigar-shaped cones. Needles and cone scales clung to him, affixed by a drizzling of fragrant pine resin.

The descent to the valley floor brought him to the frozen bank of a wide river. He stopped there. The current still
ran unsheathed by ice where the flow was fastest, but a skin of muddy ice clung to both banks. Here and there fragments of ice the size of dinner plates bobbed along in the current, glistening silver like the scales of a giant fish. Tendrils of mist clung to the river.

He crossed his club arms across his chest, pinning his loose foot as tightly as he could manage. Then he crouched on the frozen mudbank, balanced on his good leg. Gears chattered, quickly at first, then more slowly, as he compressed every spring and cable in his ankle, knee, leg, hip, waist, and back. He strained until there came a faint
thrum
from the cables of alchemical steel that threaded his body like human sinews.

He leaped. The wind of his passage pulled long streamers of mist from the river, like ghostly fingers grasping at him. He cleaved the air and left the dopplered twang of unspooled cables in his wake. He splayed his talon toes. Stretched.

His heel pierced ice and gouged a furrow through the earth. The
crack
reverberated through the forest like a gunshot. The impact liquefied the frozen mud; he sank to his ankle. It squelched when he worked himself free. The broken gimbals of his shattered ankle clattered like a sackful of broken crockery. But he hadn’t fallen, and he hadn’t dropped his broken foot. The broken-mirror crash of his landing continued to echo, as though the noise had been rejuvenated in some distant corner—

Jax paused. Listened.

Another crash, another echo.

And then, more faintly than the rest: another twang.

That wasn’t him. That was something else. Something no more than half a mile downstream. Something that could, like him, leap across the river.

He wasn’t alone. Other Clakkers roamed this wilderness. And they were following him.

Jax wanted to scream. Not with the artificially amplified noises of his mechanical voicebox, not with the catgut-and-reeds approximation of a human voice. Scream as the humans could do, by forcing a lungful of breath through sloppy wet biology. To express, explosively, the quivering outrage of it all.

Hundreds of miles he’d run through forest, field, and swamp but still the bastards chased him. They didn’t care if he no longer threatened to contradict the foundations of their society. Jax was a limping refutation of the dogma of the Crown, Cross, and Guild. This wasn’t about what he might
do
. They despised what he’d
become
. Hated it so much they would pursue him around the world to destroy it. They abhorred his existence. So they sent their own mechanicals, Jax’s kin, to see it eradicated.

He was so weary of running.

Is that what happened to most rogues? Did they flee for years until they couldn’t bear to take another stride? Until even the abject terror of capture and execution couldn’t energize them? Did his pursuers know this? Did they rely upon existential despair to run him down?

Well, as Berenice might have said,
Fuck them
. He’d stop running when his legs shattered, and not a moment sooner. Jax launched into a sprint.

An answering
jangle-clatter
arose a mile or two behind him. And then another from atop the rolling foothills across the valley. The second pursuer threatened to cut him off where he’d emerge from the valley. Jax changed course.

He’d spent enough time atop the cliff ledge, enjoying the view, that the river’s every oxbow was imprinted on the magic lantern of his mind’s eye. Jax changed course again without slowing. Yes. The river. He couldn’t feel cold, and he didn’t
need to breathe; hypothermia and drowning were human concerns. He only hoped it was deep enough to hide him.

The forest snow muffled sounds, though his own body sounded loud enough to be heard all the way to Europe. He crashed through brush, knocking down low branches, and pulverizing hidden stones with his inhuman tread. Sometimes as he ran, the alchemical alloys in his broken ankle joint scraped against rocks, creating a shower of sparks and sending a piercing shriek through the woods. Stealth was impossible. His only hope lay in reckless speed.

He smashed his encased arms against trees, boulders, the ground, anything within flailing distance. He startled an immense owl, which took to the air. If he could break the chemical sheaths on his arms and regain the use of his hands, he had half a chance. He could fight.

He plunged into a loop of the river. Just as he was about to duck under and start crawling along the riverbed, sunlight glinted from a stand of larch on a hillock inside the crook of the river bend less than a mile away. The glint carried an oily shimmer. Jax knew it as he knew his own body: alchemical alloys.

Damn it.
The hunter on the hill had surely seen him. Jax cannoned out of the water. He hit the frozen ground running. He aimed for a break in the trees, where the ground was flatter.

A sheen of water froze to his body. It crackled between his joints and cogs while he sprinted. The
crunch
of ice obscured the crashing of his pursuers across the same frozen taiga, but he knew they were nearby. He knew because they called to him. In the hypercompressed telegraphy of
clicks
and
ticks
,
rattles
and
tocks,
intelligible only to their kind, they called.

From the wilds to his west:
Jalyksegethistrovantus
.

From the wilds to his east:
Jalyksegethistrovantus
.

From the south:
Ho, ho, he’s a runner!

His true name. Oh, God, they shouted his true name to the
heavens. They taunted Jax with knowledge of his former self, of the identity stamped upon his soul on the day he was forged. They knew he was no longer that machine, no longer beholden to the magics woven into that string of syllables. But they’d come to take him back to that world. Back to his death.

North he went, knowing they herded him like wolves around a frantic fawn. He charged across a frozen marsh, the toes of his foot churning up sods of peat. His broken ankle punched divots in the frozen earth like a posthole digger. The marsh abutted another bend of the meandering river. He hurled himself across it. From the peak of his trajectory he saw flashes of metal moving across the frozen earth, swift as a trio of arrows.

Ho, ho, he’s a leaper!

Jax wasn’t new to running for his life. But the taunting was a new and particularly cruel twist. What would inspire their makers to install such a wicked geas?

These Clakkers were different. Were they some hitherto secret model? Something unleashed on the world only when necessary to hunt down the most far-flung rogues?

He plunged into a stand of evergreens. It lay inside a shallow bowl of granite. At the lip he scrabbled for purchase on icy stone. It crunched under his toes, the reports like cannon shots announcing his every move. He ascended a cleft in the granite outcrop.

There he rubbed his encased arms against the stone, faster and faster until he wore a ridge in the granite. The chemical sheaths were more stubborn than the bones of the earth, but Jax worked a rudimentary shape into them. A rough point, for stabbing, and a depression like a shallow cup. When the ridge in the granite grew sufficiently deep, he studied the crystal pattern in the stone. Reared back. Kicked. Shards and pebbles went bounding down the slope.

Clumsy, like a human toddler, he struggled to pick up the
pieces. He had to use his arms like enormous awkward pincers. Then he rotated his extended arms behind him.

Jax could see the other Clakkers now. Squinting at them through the river haze, fighting the stubborn swaying of his weathervane head, he studied them. He wanted a sense of these cruel hunters, these fellow mechanicals who would in mere moments succeed where so many others had failed. And who chose to make a game of it.