The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (13 page)

Never in his one hundred and eighteen years had Jax seen their like. They were foreign. Ugly. Obscene.

Mismatched. Misshapen. Misbegotten.

Assembled from unrelated parts. Parts of different eras, different models. An assortment of different Clakkers melded into a single body. They embodied their kind’s deepest and most closely held taboo. One glimpse turned the terror and dread clutching Jax to mindless, violent panic.

Is this what their makers did to the most troublesome of captured rogues? Jax had thought, like all his kin, that execution was the end of it. But perhaps that wasn’t punishment enough for those machines lucky enough to violate the highest law. Perhaps their makers, driven by senseless malice, incinerated Free Will but kept the intellect alive. Perhaps they warped the offending machines’ bodies into grotesque parodies of what was right. Just to mock what Jax and his kind held dear.

The trio converged like a spearhead aimed at Jax’s roost. He focused on the leader. Aimed. His arms streaked forward with such speed that the sharpened tips of his club arms tore the air like a whip. The armful of stones he flung outpaced the sound of their launching. In an instant they closed the distance from Jax to his hunters, who swerved so hard they left scorch marks in the frozen peat.

Most missed, shearing deep furrows into the ground and creating gouts of mud and steam behind the pursuers. One stone
struck the leader in the torso hard enough to ignite vermilion sparks where it sheared the alchemical alloys of his escutcheons. Another glanced from the leader’s forehead. Jax had sought but failed to blind him.

Ho, ho! He’s a fighter, ho ho!

He’s David, with sling in hand!

Jax reloaded. The hunters didn’t swerve to avoid his volley. One projectile entered an eye socket and shattered the crystalline orb within. Another dented a leaf spring in one of the grotesque Clakkers’ legs. But in midstride the machine folded itself into a ball and let its momentum carry it bumping and tearing through the snow.

They were too close. They were too many. Jax couldn’t hope to disable them before they reached him. He leaped from his perch and plunged through drifts of snow, toward the high mountains. He wouldn’t touch the earth’s hunched shoulders before he was caught. He ran for the privilege of existence. Or was it for the amusement of those who chased him? Those who made a game of chittering his name to the sky, the wind, the mountains?

From behind him the three unsettling machines took up another nonsense chant:

Jalyksegethistrovantus runs!

He’s swift, swift as a sparrow!

But we, we are the arrow.

Three other machines, grotesquely mangled things like those giving chase, erupted from beneath the snow. They’d been lying in wait for him.

And we,
we
are the net.

Jax tried to roll, but the snow was too deep. He skidded, bounced, crashed to a halt. The new arrivals, the ones who had sprung the trap, watched him without advancing.

They didn’t leap on him. They didn’t subdue him. They only watched. As if mulling the method of his murder.

Why are you chasing me?
he asked.

Because we want to catch you,
they said.

To take me back.
Jax didn’t make it a question.

Because we were sent to find you
, they said.

To unwrite me? To melt me?

Because we seek our own,
they said,
and the one who was once Jalyksegethistrovantus is one of us.

Jax shuddered. One of these abominations? But then, a centisecond before they said it, the first rays of realization dawned in the ink-black sky of his panicked mind.

In unison they said:
Welcome to Neverland, brother
.

B
erenice’s resolve lasted two days. But with nothing to do but scowl at the crew (to stay in character) and listen to the endless creaking of the sculls, boredom quickly gave rise to temptation. Her better judgment was no match for her damnable curiosity. Three days into her voyage from New Amsterdam to Liverpool, her resolve crumbled.

She’d sped this along by poring over the keys in the chest that had been bound for the Verderers’ house. Such strange gleaming things they were, their teeth and notches splayed around a helical core. Strangely, they weren’t made from alchemical alloys. Or not one she’d ever seen. If she took one from the case and held it to the patchy sunlight streaming through her porthole, it showed no evidence of mysterious refractions wrought by magic worked into the metal. Instead it merely gave the usual glow of burnished brass. The ship swayed in the gray winter seas, and with it Berenice; she watched the key lean back and forth across the cup of her palm. She sniffed it. It carried the scent of a two-livre piece clutched in a sweaty palm on a hot August evening, while waiting in line to buy a
flavored ice before the sun went down and the fireworks started. The scent of a memory from a fourteen-year-old Berenice.

She shook her head. She wouldn’t learn anything reminiscing about days long past.

To Sparks, she said, “Go above. Wait there until I retrieve you or send a crewmember to fetch you.”

“Immediately, mistress.”

There was a ratchety pause while Sparks unfolded from the spot in the corner. Metal footsteps rattled the deck. The door opened and closed a moment later, and then those same footsteps receded down the passageway. It was tempting to try to experiment on Sparks. But he was so damn useful, and she didn’t want to risk drawing more attention to herself by flashing the pendant again to requisition another mechanical. On the lonely road in the middle of the night the risk had been low, but if she wasn’t careful she’d draw the wrong kind of attention. More importantly, she didn’t want Sparks to have any direct knowledge of what transpired here. Let it wonder and surmise all it wanted; its true masters would never deign to ask a mere machine for its opinion.

She waited until she heard Sparks tromping up the ladder to the deck above. Then she emerged from the cabin and went in the opposite direction until she found a mechanical crewmember. It was repainting a metal hatch door, daubing a new coat of robin’s-egg blue around the edges. At the sound of her footsteps—obviously human—its head turned a full half circle to observe her while the rest of its body continued its painting. Its head completed the full circuit without slowing. It halted in midbrushstroke, placed its brush atop the paint can, and turned again to face her fully. All in seconds, and with eerily precise choreography.

It recognized her. Every mechanical on the ship knew
De Pelikaan
carried a member of the Verderer’s Office.

“How may I serve you, mistress?”

Berenice had chosen not to use her most comfortable alias. For one thing, Maëlle Cuijper was well established as an itinerant schoolteacher, not a Guildwoman. And she couldn’t be certain she hadn’t burned the Cuijper identity in New Amsterdam on the day fire consumed the Forge.

“I require assistance. Come to my stateroom when you have finished your current task.”

“Yes, mistress. Right away.” It cocked its head. Berenice couldn’t tell if this machine self-identified as male, female, or as a six-headed hermaphrodite sea horse. The bezels whirred in its eyes. “You have a servitor in your service. Shall I fetch that one for you?”

“No. Find me when you have finished.”

On the short walk back to her cabin she reflected on how easily and quickly she’d fallen into the tulips’ brusque manner of interacting with the mechanicals. It was so damn easy to take their servitude for granted. How soft were the Dutch after two hundred and fifty years of such pampering?

She removed the tray of keys from the trunk and held it in the gunmetal sunlight of the wintery North Atlantic Sea and sky, looking for any outward indication of what made the keys distinct. How in the hell did van Breugel know which key to select when he imposed the nautical metageasa on Sparks? A precise and measured
knock-knock-knock
rattled her cabin door a few minutes later.

“Enter.”

Berenice placed the tray of keys on her bunk. Indicating the decking before the porthole, where the inconstant light was best, she commanded, “Stand there.”

The machine crossed the cabin in two strides. Despite the gentle but random sway of the ship, it stood motionless. The buzzing of the porter’s eyes told her it had noticed the keys.
Casually, as though it weren’t a possibly paranoid afterthought, she also laid the Verderer pendant on the blanket alongside the keys. The rosy cross assumed a dusky coral glow in the patchy daylight.

She hated to lean on the pendant so Goddamned much, but far more she loathed the thought of losing her disguise. So she invoked Anastasia Bell’s stolen jewelry yet again, and did to the porter as she’d done to Sparks: commanding the machine to store no memories of its interactions with Berenice.

A subtle change came over the tempo of its internal clacking. The resyncopated
tock-tick
synchronized with rests in the ever-present but nearly subaudible
thrum
of the galley Clakkers’ secret song. Those machines who labored twenty-four hours per day to row the ship across the roiling sea did so while chanting in the mechanicals’ secret language. A dirge sung openly in a tongue unsuspecting human ears could never recognize as language. No romantic chanson de geste or bawdy sea shanty, this; she’d traveled the Saint Lawrence with the modern-day voyageurs, those men and women who moved their oars to wistful, playful songs of lost France and lost loves. It was too complex for Berenice to translate, though she’d picked up the sense of lamentation soon after the ship left the breakwater of the New Amsterdam pier. And now the porter had joined the conversation.

Sneaky bastard. The porter adhered exactly to her command: It didn’t speak, not in the human sense, while it communed with its kin throughout the ship. Like prisoners of war conversing with each other in coded coughs, sneezes, and fingernail taps.

“When I say our interactions shall be forever unremembered, that encompasses all mechanicals on this vessel. It means you will not communicate about this prior to erasing your own memories. That includes nonvocal communications with your kin.”

The porter froze as though its internal mechanisms had been doused with epoxy. A terrified silence emanated from its body. Amazing, how quiet a Clakker could be when it wasn’t carrying on a covert conversation. Now it was little louder than a true pocketwatch.

A moment’s pique moved her to add, “But is that really what you and your shipmates think of me? Tsk, tsk. I’d hate to hear what you have to say about our charming captain.” Berenice had her own thoughts on him; he was only slightly less charming than a rusty wire brush scraped across the tenderest part of one’s armpits.

The porter’s crystalline eyes followed her. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ve been listening.”

Berenice scrutinized the keyhole in the porter’s forehead, the tip of her nose a hairbreadth from cold metal. The circular hole lay between the eyes, just a bit above where the gap between the eyebrows would be on a human. Clakkers had no brows to furrow, just an alchemical anagram etched in a spiral about the keyhole. When van Breugel used a key in the process of embedding new metageasa on Sparks, the arcane sigils had rotated with each twist of the key.

Regular geasa could be applied verbally. And they were, hundreds of times per day. But metageasa were embedded during the forging process, because these were more fundamental. So… did the keyhole enable modification of the
meta
geasa?

She pulled the porter forward. When the play of light off the sea was just right, she could see the hairline joints where annular plates on the Clakker’s skull could slide against one another. What happened when they did? And what if there was no alchemical glass shining into the machine’s eyes at the same time?

Well. Only one way to find out.

She took the first key from the tray. The ring at the tip just
fit the fleshy pad at the end of her pinky finger. And the porter’s keyhole. Heart racing, wondering if she were about to trigger some unknown defensive geas but unable to stay her own hand, she touched the key to the Clakker’s skull.

It didn’t go in easily. She thought at first that she’d have to try every key in the chest until she found one that fit, if any. But one hearty shove and the metal slid home like a recalcitrant housekey newly copied by an inexpert locksmith and not yet worn. A static shock bit her fingers; she flinched. The machine didn’t sway a hairbreadth. Berenice twisted the key. A series of
clunks
shook the porter’s head. Sigils orbited the keyhole. Those closest to the hole moved most rapidly while those farthest from the key revolved the most slowly, like planets around the sun. But rather than following the fixed law of gravity, they obeyed the secret laws of horology and alchemical grammar.

She licked a salty bead of sweat from her lip. She yearned to ask the machine what effect she’d just wrought. But that risked alerting the machine to the fact that she was an imposter. Her commands would fall by the wayside if she gave the metal demon a strong case for doubting her. And then the standard metageasa pertaining to the protection of Guild secrets would take over. She’d die before she blinked twice, neck twisted around like a wrung-out dishrag.

Sweat trickled from her armpits. Salt stung her eye. She wiped a sleeve across her brow, wondering if the machine registered her body’s traitorous excitement. Perhaps by now it had compiled a catalog of her physiological displays.

But the bezels in its eyes had stopped whirring. Even the ticktocking had subsided. Strange to stand so close to a mechanical without hearing the incessant metronome of its subservience.

“What is your true name, machine?”

It didn’t answer.

“Machine, your true name. I demand you tell me now.”

The machine kept its silence.

She pressed her palms to the Clakker’s skeletal chest and shoved. The machinery of its legs automatically compensated; it neither stumbled nor toppled.

“Machine, count to ten.”

Nothing.

Berenice thought for a moment. “Clockmakers lie,” she said. But even the Dutch translation of the mechanicals’ secret seditious greeting to one another brought no response from the dormant servitor.

A winter wind spritzed the porthole with sea mist. The ship lurched. It dipped into the trough between two particularly tall waves; the sea grew rougher. Spindrift cast a cobweb of shadows across Berenice, the bulkheads, and the porter.

The dormant machine couldn’t be fully inactive: It continued to stand, automatically compensating for the shifting of the deck. Like a person whose heart still beat and lungs still drew breath even while they slept.

So… it was possible to render a Clakker inert without doing violence to the sigils on its head. At least temporarily. It made sense that the machine would have to cease operation while its metageasa changed. Damn interesting. Her fingers itched to record this discovery in the pages of the lost Talleyrand journals.

Could she use this somehow? Berenice wondered if this discovery—confirmation, really—could be weaponized. Hard to see how—getting close enough to a military Clakker to jam a key between its eyes meant getting well within its lethal radius. But what if New France
could
meet the metal tide by rendering the attackers inert? That alone could be a seismic geopolitical drift. Yet it still wasn’t what Berenice had envisioned. Freezing them in their tracks was one thing; rewriting their allegiance and sending them against their former masters, now
that
would be the killing stroke for which she yearned.

She leaned closer to examine the reconfigured sigils. They had unquestionably landed in a different arrangement, though the symbols remained just as opaque to her as ever. The significance of the new pattern, if such existed, continued to elude her.

The ship lurched again. The sea hissed. A cloud crossed the sun, sending the cabin into deep shadow as though the ship had sailed into a solar eclipse.

The porter collapsed in a jangly heap.

Berenice yelped, stumbled backward.

It didn’t topple over like a person fainted or a tree was felled. Instead its every joint went slack at once, as though every spring and cable had lost its tension. It fell straight down like a random assemblage of loosely joined spare parts. Like a human suddenly and inexplicably devoid of her skeleton.

“Jesus wept,” she gasped. Her heartbeat pulsed in her throat, too hard to swallow.

The cacophony of crashing metal reverberated in the tiny space. Berenice thought she could hear the racket ricocheting through the passageway outside. It felt as though the incriminating clamor had assumed a life of its own to tell the entire ship of her unwise, incriminating experiment.

She stared unblinking at the jumbled and still jangling pile of metal at her feet. The porter’s hinges had folded at random when the balance compensators abruptly cut out. Beneath a heap of limbs and flanges, the key still poked from the disabled machine’s forehead; it made the dormant (
Oh, you piece of shit, please don’t be dead!
) machine look like a narwhal about to surface from beneath a sea of scrap metal.

Good Lord.

She nudged the inert Clakker with the toe of her boot. The crystalline eyes didn’t summon the faintest glimmer or glint here in the deep shadows of Berenice’s cabin.

Damn it, damn it, damn it. Goddamn it.

What if she couldn’t reverse the damage? What if she’d somehow permanently disabled the servitor? How could she hide this?

How often did a Clakker go missing from a ship in the middle of the ocean? She supposed that if a mechanical did manage to fall overboard, it would sink without a trace. And the Goddamned thing would reappear years later after it walked, climbed, and trudged hundreds or thousands of miles across the ocean floor back to land. But just how often did the machines take a tumble? It had to be rare even in the most vicious of high seas. Which these were not.