The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (34 page)

The corporal sprinted to the nearest signal-lamp station and there turned Longchamp’s orders into a rapid sequence of flashes. He craned his neck, squinting against the glare of sunlight on the broken funicular tracks to stare at the Spire. He couldn’t see the confirmation flashes from the uppermost heliograph station. But, then, he didn’t need to; he knew what they’d say. And he also knew what the tulips were about to do. But Longchamp’s people weren’t ready for an assault directly on the Spire. It had never happened before.

Repairs to the funicular had been glacial, owing to clockwork snipers picking off the repair crews. Cars hadn’t run the full height of the Spire since the confrontation with Visser. Consequently, construction of the new weapon platform had fallen behind schedule. Longchamp wondered if his failure to catch Visser quickly and cleanly had tolled the knell for Marseilles, and they simply hadn’t heard it at the time.

The chemists liked to boast the Spire was strong enough to withstand fire from the largest Dutch cannon ever fielded. But the tulips had just unveiled something that rendered the old artillery a rusty flintlock pistol by comparison.

Longchamp sprinted to the lamp station. Men and women jumped out of his way. “Jesus Christ, they’re out of time! We have to take out that cannon NOW!”

The corporal said, “Last update said another day until there’s a working weapon platform, sir.”

Goddamn it.

“New orders. I want four more squads up there yesterday Goddamned morning. Defend the installation. Nothing else matters!”

The heliograph operator went to work. The staccato tapping of the shutter sounded like chattering teeth just barely audible under the din of war. Flashes of light ricocheted from one ground station to the next, flitting around the outer keep like a curse. Sixteen men and women stumble-sprinted toward the base of the Spire. They carried tools of last resort. The funicular dropped in a hell-bent emergency descent, slowing at the last moment with a toe-curling
screech
as the brakes threw a shower of sparks from the rails. The weary defenders piled in. The car ascended less hectically, owing to the weight, but still got them to the top faster than they would have managed sprinting up the entire height of the Porter’s Prayer by foot. They’d only have to sprint part of the way, but that was more than enough to steal the breath from anybody lugging a full loadout.

That was sixteen bodies no longer manning the wall. Sixteen gaps they couldn’t fill and couldn’t afford. Longchamp ordered a redeployment to fill the worst of the gaps, and a sergeant—Chrétien’s replacement—to call up the last dregs of the reserves. And they were dregs. The weak, the undisciplined, the untrained, the untrainable. Longchamp recognized one of them: the merchant in the fur coat who had so badly panicked and failed his first gunnery-training session.

The ground shook. Several seconds later the low roar of thunder reverberated across the battleground and turned the outer keep into an echo chamber. He spun to peer through an embrasure just in time to see wisps of smoke rising from the barrel of the tulips’ massive cannon. Four gleaming projectiles streaked high across the sky. Three flew wide of the Spire; the fourth attempted to anchor itself with the projectile spikes
from its ankles, but succeeded only in scoring a deep gash in the nacreous coating of the royal apartments before tumbling out of control beyond the outer wall on the far side of the keep. A weary cheer went up from the terrified civilian spectators, and even a few of the defenders, who ought to have known better. Stupid optimism, that was.

“Stop cheering, you daft sons of bi—”

They did. Instead, the defenders manning the north bastion took up a hoarse cry. “Incoming! Incoming metal!”

It was taken up by their comrades to the northeast and northwest. “Incoming metal! Mechanicals inbound!”

And like a row of toppling dominoes, the cry circled the charred and smoldering earth around the keep before the funicular coasted to a halt in the sky. At every point along the outer wall, the defenders announced a metal tide:

“Metal on the wall! We have METAL ON THE WALL!”

“Inbound mechanicals!”

“Incoming!”

The tulips had finally opened the floodgates.

Thunder shook the keep again. The Clakker cannon lofted more killers toward the Spire. The Dutch gunners’ aim was much improved.

Daniel’s pursuers were tireless. But, then, so was he.

He was no stranger to running for his life.

They gained on him when he slowed to kick shards of granite from a knifelike outcrop. He caught several on the run, then reaccelerated into a dead sprint. He discarded the smallest pieces but retained the largest, sharpest pieces. These he rammed against his forehead while he ran, chiseling the metal plate from his keyhole.

He dashed across the snowy taiga, trailing churned-up snow along with alchemical sparks and fragments of hot stone.
Several heavy snowfalls had changed the lay of the land. The snowpack hid treacherous gullies, depressions, even hot springs that kept marshes mushy rather than letting them freeze over. Daniel dodged or vaulted some hazards, but others he discovered by charging straight into them. The Lost Boys giving chase avoided the same pitfalls by watching Daniel, or reading the signs of his passage.

In spite of the snow he was faster now than he’d been on the flight north. He was whole now. Still a chimera, still contaminated with the abominable mixture of pieces from others’ bodies, and that couldn’t stand forever. But at least he wasn’t a broken wreck with a weathervane head and carrying one severed foot in useless club arms.

He was free. Freer even than the Lost Boys who sprinted after him, slowly catching up as he and they traversed league upon trackless league. They chased him by dint of the geasa imposed by Queen Mab, tasked with recovering the anchor of their loyalty. Daniel had stolen the seat of her power, the source of the Lost Boys’ fealty. Without it she’d never impose her wishes on another mechanical ever again.

He’d destroy it, scuttle it, clutch it to his chest and throw himself into the depths of Hudson Bay before it returned to her. Into the Grand Forge itself if need be. But he could think of a better use for it. It didn’t
have
to be a tool of evil. Perhaps it could do some good, too.

If he could ever get the damn plate from his forehead. His chimerism was subtle enough he could count on humans not to notice it; the plate was the problem. But the French adhesives Mab had obtained from the Inuit were incredibly stubborn. He punched another stone chisel from a boulder. It slowed him just a bit, enabling the Lost Boys to draw closer.

Where were the French partisans when he needed them? Or the natives of the snowy north? What would the Inuit make of
a lone mechanical chased by a dozen of its kin? They’d know better than to get involved.

He hurled himself from the lip of a ravine.

The hardest part was convincing herself that a deadly machine wasn’t drawing closer with every beat of her hammering heart.

Even if Mab’s agent somehow vanquished its attackers, the combat Berenice had witnessed on the streets of Honfleur ensured the rogue could no longer pass as a heavily used Clakker whose owner was guilty of the usual peccadillo of deferred minor maintenance. On rare occasions, one might see a working servitor with small dings, scratches, or even a tiny dent in a brassy carapace—particularly near factories, shipwrights, and other places of extremely heavy labor. But one never saw on the streets a servitor that had been bashed to hell and back. A Clakker subjected to that much damage would automatically cease operations and bring itself to the nearest Guild representative.

So even if the brassy bastard prevailed, Huginn would be hard pressed to follow her without conspicuously violating the hierarchical metageasa.

Still, just to be safe, she sought the company of as many mechanicals as possible. So she’d ridden her stolen horse (apologizing to the poor beast, under her breath, the entire way) until foam dripped from the bit. And then pushed it still farther, until the foam turned red and she reached a city with an actual harbor and an appreciable population of mechanicals.

All the while hoping to hell she no longer matched the description of a fugitive French agent distributed throughout the entire Dutch-speaking world. Perhaps the Verderers’ agents still watched for a one-eyed woman fleeing from the New World. Not to it. A thin thread upon which to hang her hopes,
but there it was. Berenice had swung like a spider from one gossamer thread to the next ever since her foolishness had killed Louis and she’d been cast from Marseilles-in-the-West.

The thought made her wonder if there was anything left of the Crown, Keep, and Spire aside from smoke and ash drifting on a winter breeze. Was there anything left of Marseilles? Acadia? The Vatican? Or was she running headlong to a desolate expanse of smoldering salted earth?

She’d never imagined how utterly ignorant she could be. It seemed a century since she’d last had reliable news from north of the Saint Lawrence.

On a lane of dark-blue pavers leading to the docks stood a woman roasting chestnuts on a grate over a fire. She did a steady turn of business selling little paper cones of hot chestnuts to hungry passersby for a kwartje. Berenice’s stomach growled. She wished she’d had time to eat a proper meal before the rogue Clakker attempted to murder her.

Berenice negotiated. It took considerable effort to make herself understood, owing to her bruises, and even more effort to keep each utterance from becoming a howl of pain. But in return for a blown horse and all its tack she received a bulging sack of raw and roasted chestnuts. She hugged the burlap, absorbing welcome warmth. She even pressed her numb face to the sack. Christ it felt good. Then she thanked the woman and headed for the docks at a fast walk. Either she’d parlay the food into more money and a spot aboard a westbound ship, or she’d eat the Goddamned things. Or maybe—Christ, who knew chestnuts could be so heavy?—she’d brain a passing sailor with the sack and take his place.

But the nuts were secondary: The vendor fashioned her paper cones from old newspapers.

Hours later, fending off rats in the cramped hold of a rust-bucket cargo ship en route to New Amsterdam, Berenice fished
out the newspaper fragments. Most lacked a masthead, so it wasn’t possible to sort them into chronological order. And many contained nothing of close interest: classified ads, agony columns, financial news. By the murky mustard light of a single dingy porthole, she read it all.

And wept.

It rained dead men.

Another guard fell screaming from the Spire. Streamers of blood and viscera trailed in his wake like the tail of a malign comet. His cries died along with the rest of him when he slammed into the sunshade of the Porter’s Prayer hard enough to crack the chemical resins. He bounced, slid, and tumbled the rest of the way down like a ragdoll. Longchamp didn’t see where he landed. That useless bastard made corpse number three. Even if the others weren’t already lying dead on the floor of the king’s apartments. But moon-headed optimism had no place here.

The tulips’ new cannon had landed a trio of military Clakkers atop the Spire. But Longchamp could do fuck-all about that because he, along with all the defenders on the wall, was neck-deep in their own flood of black alchemy. He bellowed orders until his voice was hoarse, trying to make himself heard over the endless chugging of compressors and boilers, the gurgling of epoxy cannon, the
whoosh
of steam harpoons, the occasional
chank
of a pick or sledge against ruthless metal, cries of alarm and sorrow and anger, pleas for reinforcements that never arrived. Wreathed within the miasma of pitched battle, the slightly sour burnt-toast smell of spent explosives stinging his eyes and filling his head with every breath he took, he fought for just a few seconds’ respite. For just enough time to survey the situation.