The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (5 page)

Good
, thought Berenice. But then she pictured Louis again, shuddering much the same way as he drew his final breaths. If she was going to leave the woman for dead, she didn’t have to be
quite
so cruel about it.

“Oh, damn it.”

Berenice could at least do something about the cold. Physically carrying Tuinier Bell was out of the question, not only because Berenice lacked the strength but also because Bell’s body was little more than a loose sack of broken bones and that amount of jostling would surely hasten her demise. So Berenice hooked her hands under the other woman’s shoulders and physically dragged her across the room. Bell whimpered and cried out. Berenice had worked up a good sweat by the time she’d pulled Bell out of the room. She deposited the dying woman in the corridor, out of the wind. Then she took the coverings from the bed, wrapped Bell as best she could, and closed the door.

Berenice considered searching the house. If the Guild had been using this property for a long time, it might be a storehouse of useful information. But the thunderous crashing of Clakkers at war with each other reminded Berenice that she couldn’t spare the time.

She escaped through the hole in the wall. The wintry air felt like an ice cube rubbed along the empty socket of her eye. She stood atop the porte cochère. The Clakkers’ passage had wiped it clear of snow. She clambered over the edge and fell into a snow bank.

The clanging and squealing of tortured alloys echoed from behind the house. Berenice crept along the drive. She glimpsed flashes and sparks in the shadows of the carriage house. Well,
if there were any horses left on the property, she wasn’t getting to them.

She turned around. Bell’s carriage had pressed deep ruts into the snow; Berenice followed those now, jogging down the long gravel drive. Soon the tulips would scour every inch of the countryside in their search for a one-eyed woman. She couldn’t do anything about the blood matted into her clothes, but she could do something about the missing eye. So while running she again retrieved the leather pouch that hung from the cord around her neck. It contained her real glass eye, the gift from Longchamp, returned in the first days of her incarceration. The
crunch
of snow beneath her stolen boots drowned out the wet squelch as the eye slid into place. Longchamp’s gift was a much better fit than Jax’s prism.

The pineal glass was destroyed. Her best opportunity for breaking the Dutch hegemony: lost.

Well. At least it got her out of Bell’s hands. And for that Berenice was extremely grateful.

Thank you, Jax, wherever you are.

T
he machines, dozens of them, could have sprinted for weeks upon end without tiring. Alchemically magicked clockworks imbued them with perpetual impetus and inhuman stamina and strength. But humans—soft creatures of meat and bone—tired easily. And so the machines had marched for merely a day, a night, and another day when their human commanders ordered a halt. In that time they never deviated from the North River, from its mouth in New Amsterdam through the canals to the icy shores of the lake the French called Champlain. They’d covered three hundred miles on their march almost due north from the Atlantic tip of New Amsterdam.

Winter’s arrival had stripped the river valley of its color. Gone were the rolling hills of robin’s-breast orange, marigold yellow, and cherry red. The fallen leaves now lay beneath a deep white blanket, and the naked stone of the umber river bluffs now sported silver rime. Gone, too, was the rustle of wind through autumnal boughs, the earthy smell of freshly harvested fields.

The broken servitor, the one with the weathervaning head who claimed to be called Glastrepovithistrovantus—Glass for
short—had seen and heard and smelled these things from the air. He’d flown above the river, and crawled its bed, but until this march he’d never walked alongside it. His footprints in the silty mud, headed south instead of north, had long since been erased by the restless current. He never mentioned this. And he never suggested any relationship between himself and the multiple dredges and locks that had recently been installed on the river. Lying by omission was easy; he was getting the hang of that. Far more difficult was hiding his trepidation when the march took them past Fort Orange, a river outpost originally intended as a hub for the beaver pelt trade but later turned into a military hardpoint. He had fallen from the sky over Fort Orange, launched from the fireball demise of a sentient airship. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.

Dozens of Clakkers, servitors like himself dragged from the smoldering wreckage of the Grand Forge, had been conscripted by the army in those first few hours when their makers’ rage and indignation blazed white-hot. Hotter even than an unfulfilled geas.

So hot that they didn’t wait to assemble a proper army of military-class Clakkers for this first foray into New France. Lowly servitors could do in a pinch, especially once the horologists annulled their human-safety metageasa. A few mechanicals of the military design—machines
designed
to scythe through humans—filled out the ranks. And though they did not know it, they kept the imposter servitor, the one they called Glass, from fleeing.

The humans believed his weathervane head and missing flange plates were damages incurred during the fiery destruction of the Grand Forge. They weren’t. But it was convenient to let the humans believe so.

Many humans had died in the conflagration. Leaving many
Clakkers who emerged from the ruins without well-defined owners. Clakker leases always contained provisions for dealing with the demise or incapacitation of the primary leaseholder, but unraveling so many legalistic knots would have taken weeks. Thus the Brasswork Throne (acting through the colonial governor of Nieuw Nederland) had exercised its power of eminent domain to conscript the orphaned Clakkers. Not that anybody felt compelled to thoroughly investigate the leaseholders and track down possible heirs; and anyway, all Clakkers, everywhere, were officially property of the Throne.

Knowing he shared this excursion with fellow mechanicals who had also been present for the Forge’s collapse filled him with dread. He’d been fighting his own kind atop the rings of a vast armillary sphere orbiting the blazing heart of the Forge when the alchemical sun collapsed, pulling the rest of the building into the blaze like so much kindling. He wondered how many of the Clakkers on this march had been there. If even one recognized him as the fugitive rogue…

He’d tried and failed to cross the border on his own. He’d tried to reach the
ondergrondse grachten
, the so-called underground canals run by Catholics and French sympathizers intended to ferry free Clakkers out of Nieuw Nederland. But that had failed, too, with the canalmasters’ murder. Now he would try again to enter New France, and this time he would do it at the vanguard of invasion. It could work, as long as nobody recognized him and he never revealed to his fellow mechanicals how the agony of geasa did not touch him, that their makers’ words held no sway over him.

Glass, whose real name had been Jalyksegethistrovantus—Jax for short—hefted an oven from the bed of the wagon he’d been pulling for the past eighty miles. A bulky thing of iron and ceramic, it might have been at home in an Amsterdam
bakery. No piddling camp stove would suffice for the leaders of this excursion: One could not prepare a feast on a camp stove. Jax’s fellow yokemate unpacked an additional stove while other servitors constructed tents, made beds, collected fuel. Their human masters saw no need to deprive themselves on a forced march into enemy territory; just because they were marching to war was no reason to accept a lessened standard of living. So it was with soft creatures of blood and flesh.

The appeltaart had just achieved a golden-brown crust, its filling wafting the scent of apples across the campsite—the commander of this march believed in healthful desserts for his staff, hence the fruit—and the bacon on the stove filled the tent with the white-noise sizzle of hot grease when shouts and yelling pierced the quiet rhythms of the campsite. It happened from time to time, when humans found their slaves’ efforts lacking. But this wasn’t a master excoriating his servant. Somebody was cursing in French.

Jax had heard more than his share of French profanity thanks entirely to the one-eyed woman who’d talked their way inside the Forge. For a moment he thought perhaps Berenice had followed the column and now been caught. But that was absurd. He didn’t know if she’d departed prior to the fire, and if she hadn’t, whether she’d survived. All he knew was that she’d gone in with malice aforethought.

And anyway, this was a man’s voice. Made shrill with rage. Or was that mortal terror? By now the oven had made the tent warmer than humans found comfortable, so he tied the flap back, which allowed cooler air to enter and conveniently allowed him to see what had transpired.

A military scout held a man by the forearm with a grip that was just shy of crunching bone. The fellow wore leather trousers and gloves the color of moldering leaves, a wool coat the color of dirty snow, fur-lined boots, and a hat made from a
raccoon pelt (complete with tail); a hand ax dangled from a belt loop. Veiny sclera limned the irises of his widened eyes. He looked like a caged animal. Backed into a corner, terrified, bearing its teeth at the world. Jax had once seen a New World wolverine at the Amsterdam zoological gardens. The Frenchman reminded him now of that animal’s combination of terror and fury.

He might have been a forest runner, one of the original coureurs de bois transported unchanged across the centuries to the modern day from a time long ago when France’s European enemies in the New World spoke English. But the mechanical scout held in its other hand the glistening gel membrane of an epoxy grenade, and that was a modern weapon. Not something one could whittle from birch bark or catch in a snare.

An avalanche of French poured from the terrified man’s mouth only to pile at his feet, dusty and disregarded like so much unwanted talus. The language sounded to Jax as though the man wrapped each word in silk and tied it with a bow before letting it float past his lips. French was the language of the Catholics, who believed mechanical men were thinking beings capable of Free Will, and that their unswerving bondage indicated something evil, something unholy, had been done to their souls. It was the language of those who would see the end of Clakker slavery.

It was also the language of the doomed. And that saddened Jax.

Several servitors like him (
Well, not exactly like me
, he thought) found ways to carry out their duties while watching the human captive. One such mechanical, the filigree on whose escutcheons and flange plates suggested she had been forged about half a century after Jax, making her a young sixty or seventy, rattled the gear train along her spine in a way that inquired,
What’s he saying?

He’s wetting himself with fear
, said another via the muted twang of a leaf spring and click of overly loosened ratchets.

No
, said a passing servitor who carried several hundred pounds of firewood, absorbing the swaying of the uneven load through the carefully timed bobbing of its backward knees. The machine paused, listening to the torrent of anxious French before adding,
He’s a brave one. He demands to know our destination and our purpose.

The military Clakker said,
He’d have to be blind and stupid not to know already.

The entire conversation took a few seconds.

If any of their human masters had bothered to notice the exchange, it would have seemed nothing more than the characteristic cacophony of clockworks. Humans were deaf to the language of Clakkers because they didn’t believe it could exist in the first place: Unthinking, unfeeling machines could not converse. Language was the province of human beings, a gift from God to Adam that he might praise his Creator and bestow names upon everything in His garden.

Jax retreated into the shadows of the cooking tent, his head and heart filled with unease. The captive kept up his protests, shouting to any who would listen, like a minister without a flock. He looked around the camp, from one Clakker to the next, as though addressing them. The human captain overseeing their advance ambled through the camp. The Frenchman saw the crowd of Clakkers parting like the sea before a biblical prophet and spoke more rapidly, as though he saw his doom approach.

His gaze flitted across Jax’s cooking tent. The look on his face reminded Jax of the rogue servitor Adam, formerly Perjumbellagostrivantus, whose execution in Huygens Square he had witnessed in the autumn. Adam’s face had betrayed no
fear, no terror, for mechanical bodies were incapable of expression in the human mode. But he’d had Free Will, and maybe even a soul, and surely feared the snuffing out of his candle just as this man did now. Just as Jax had feared every moment since he went on the run.

Now he’s saying that New France is a friend to our kind. That we should throw off our shackles and join with those who would stand firm against our oppressors. He says, oh, this is good, he says there’s a network of secret canals just ready and waiting to whisk us to freedom.
The servitor carrying the firewood stalked off again, its talon toes stabbing the frozen earth like accusations.
In other words, the usual lies.

Moderately incensed, Jax said,
They’re not lies
.

And then realized, in the silence that fell upon the conversation among his kin, that he’d just drawn attention to himself. They waited now for him to explain. Perhaps he knew something about the
ondergrondse grachten
?

It was through miscalculations like this, he knew from bitter experience, that rogues gave themselves away.

They can’t be lies,
he improvised.
They believe in us, otherwise why would the French have stood against our makers for hundreds of years?

The nearest Clakkers rattled with mechanical laughter. One of his kin said,
Do you honestly believe that if our inventor had been a Frenchman, things would be any different today?

Perhaps they would be
, said Jax.

The soldier said,
Humans are the same all over the world. Doesn’t matter who’s on top of the pile and who’s crushed at the bottom.

They affect enlightenment because it’s politically expedient
, said another.
It gives them the aura of moral rectitude, of inhabiting some mythical ethical high ground.

(
But they’ve harbored rogues
, Jax wanted to say.
I’ve spoken with Catholic sympathizers and canalmasters of the
ondergrondse grachten.
I’ve worked with a former advisor to the king of France himself. They want to change the world!
)

Instead he said,
What about Queen Mab? They say she lives in the northern reaches, among the white bears and seals. That’s French land, isn’t it? They must have granted it to her.

First, that’s Inuit land, not French. Second, that’s a fairy tale! Have you taken damage to your head? And anyway. Even if she were real, they couldn’t stop her if they wanted to.

Still the Frenchman kept up the stream of patter. The dry winter air rasped his throat. His gaze drifted to the officer. Still wide-eyed, his expression changed. The terror became something else. Jax had seen something similar on Berenice’s face at the moment their ploy to enter the Forge had worked: triumph.

Jax launched himself from the tent at the same moment.

The Frenchman’s free hand darted to the tomahawk at his belt. The weapon was out and spinning toward the officer faster than Jax thought possible for a human.

The officer’s personal army of Clakkers was, naturally, faster still. They leaped to intercept the ax, to shield the officer, to pull him aside. But though many were closer to the action, Jax had the advantage of a full two seconds over them, having been focused on the captive’s eyes at just the right moment. And to a being of metal and magic, two seconds were but an eternity: two hundred centiseconds, two thousand milliseconds. In two seconds a servitor could transform itself from a statue to a missile.

Jax’s wake sculpted snow, dirt, and moldering leaves into twisting vortices.

A glancing collision with a fellow Clakker ignited a shower of white-hot sparks.

Slow human nerves and sinews caught up with the sequence of events. The officer started to flinch.

The tomahawk handle clanked against Jax’s chest. He wrapped himself in a ball, enveloping the weapon.

The first mechanical reached the officer. It started to pull him aside but had to do so gently, ineffectually, owing to the fragility of human bones.