The Liberation Read online

  orbitbooks.net

  orbitshortfiction.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART I: SERVANTS AND MASTERS Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART II: THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART III: CLOCKMAKERS LIE Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Extras

  Meet the Author

  A Preview of Wake of Vultures

  By Ian Tregillis

  Orbit Newsletter

  Copyright

  In memory of Jeanie Davis Pullen. We miss you, Jeanie, and wish you could see us now.

  PART I

  SERVANTS AND MASTERS

  One has to be servant before one can be master.

  —FROM THE LETTERS OF KILIAEN VAN RENSSELAER, A FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY, 10 MAY 1638

  This day a good pretty maid was sent my wife by Mary Bowyer, whom my wife has hired.

  —FROM THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS, 22 NOVEMBER 1661

  So home and to read, I being troubled to hear my wife rate though not without cause at her mayd [sic] Nell, who is a lazy slut.

  —FROM THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS, 12 JANUARY 1662

  CHAPTER

  1

  She’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 strolling—well, hobbling—through the winter gardens with her nurse. 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 sink from the sky like a damaged airship. 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 mile or so to the northwest, the Scheveningen Lighthouse winked at her with metronomic regularity.

  The city was calm 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 bodies as they loaded and unloaded wagons, swept the streets, delivered packages, prepared their masters’ breakfasts and mended their clothes, carried drunks to their homes, monitored the citywide network of flood control dikes and pumps, hauled freight along the tow canals, and did everything else their geasa demanded. The city never slept, because mechanicals never slept. 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.

  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 mid-eighteenth century. Those lots had used a rare black Corinthian bronze, she knew. But Anastasia couldn’t turn her head to see if 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 throb of pain shot through her bandaged hand. She flexed her fingers. They tingled as if mildly burned. 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 amongst 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.

  When not 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 heightened her anxiety, thus making it all the more difficult to sleep. She’d so anticipated her private visit with Rebecca—how cruel that when it finally came, she’d be an ugly dullard. She yearned to emerge from her plaster cocoon at her prettiest wittiest.

  Her stomach rumbled. 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 before her errand to the New World.

  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’d omitted reference to her title only with visible unease. As if he expected the slight to conjure a herd of Stemwinders.

  “Good morning, Doctor.”

  Rebecca quickly tucked the errant lock in place while the doctor took Anastasia’s chart from the hook at the foot of her bed. He shook his head. “I continue to marvel at your survival, much less your recovery.” Injuries requiring alchemical bandages were quite rare in the Central Provinces; Anastasia was probably his first opportunity to observe firsthand this cutting edge of the medical arts. “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. (Legs that, she’d later learned from the ship’s physician, had crackled like shattered porcelain when the hunters found her.) But it wasn’t her limbs that hurt; raising the casts jostled her aching ribs. The sigils embedded in the casts and bandages had fueled her recuperation, but they’d done nothing for the pain.

  Alchemy was usef
ul 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 admit she’d been trampled by a 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 between her injuries and the barely functional Stemwinder attempting to keep her alive, 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 not long 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. A wily French spy had stolen the pendant that established Anastasia’s affiliation with the Verderer’s Office before leaving her for dead.

  She tossed a smile over the doctor’s shoulder. Rebecca 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 honesty and deceit. Tiring work, and not always pleasant: sometimes loud, sometimes smelly, and often a bit messy. What a pleasant change, that the truth of a woman’s heart could be given so freely.

  The doctor inspected her casts, and even gave them a sniff. He ignored the special bandages swaddling her hand. That injury was a Guild matter more than a medical matter and strictly enforced as such. 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 implanted carefully. Anastasia had overseen one such procedure from the observation gallery of an operating theatre. But that had been the culmination of extensive and delicate effort; this glass had been crushed into her hand during a moment of deadly chaos.

  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. He 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 you’d spared yourself a great deal of trouble. One more day in this prison and I’ll order a machine to break your legs.”

  “That won’t do,” he said, paling. Rebecca, who thought Anastasia was kidding, 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. Sure enough, its carapace had the bruise-purple sheen of hepatizon: black bronze. A bead of sweat took root at the hollow of Riordan’s temple. She could read his concerns as easily as a newspaper: What would come of him if this went awry? Would his retirement be as abrupt as Doctor Huysman’s? After Rebecca affixed a cutting tool to a socket in the servitor’s palm, the doctor ordered it: “Remove those casts.”

  A low whine enveloped the blade. The medical servitor worked with the inhuman speed and precision of its kind, bisecting the cast on her left leg before the first puffs of ground plaster dusted the floor.

  Riordan and Rebecca gripped the 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. Her pedicured and brightly painted toenails—Rebecca’s work, again—were a question mark punctuating the ineloquent sentence of her leg.

  And then the smell hit her. The odor of unwashed skin billowed from her body. It 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 soften 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 other leg, her naked arms. The stench worsened with every limb. No amount of charm, no flirtation, could overcome the mental image surely burned into the nurse’s mind now.

  Doctor Riordan turned his back to preserve Anastasia’s modesty while Rebecca and the medical Clakker unwrapped the bandages around her torso. He asked, “How do you feel?”

  “I want a bath,” she said, in a voice that couldn’t have been her own. Her voice hadn’t been so small since she was a girl poling punts along the rustic canals of Giethoorn.

  “Don’t take too long,” said the nurse. “I have plans for a walk in the gardens this afternoon.”

  Somehow this smile, too, was genuine.

  The Clakker returned bearing a pair of canes. Riordan said, “You’re weaker than you think. Let’s make certain you won’t re-break your arms and legs, eh?”

  Physical therapy, Anastasia decided, was a mild form of torture. And she knew a thing or two about torture.

  But after pain came the luxury of a steamy bath. She dashed off a few sketches in colored pencil and dispatched a servitor on a shopping mission; it carried a long list of her current measurements (all the best shops in the city had her on file, but weeks of forced indolence had done her body no favors) and detailed descriptions of her new apparel. Next she shaved and scrubbed her skin until it tingled and the gray pallor became a pink glow. Then, after another Clakker replaced her bath water, she shampooed her hair twice. When she wiped condensation from the mirror, she didn’t recognize herself. Her face was somehow both rounder and yet more gaunt than it had been before she’d sailed to the New World to question the French spy. But she brushed her hair and teeth, and perfumed herself with lavender oil, and soon her first new clothes in months arrived.

  She emerged from the steamy bath like a newborn, without shame or self-consciousness, and let the machines dress her. The haberdasher, milliner, cordwainer, and dressmaker (or, rather, their Clakkers, which had crafted the clothing in less than an hour) had met Anastasia’s every specification. The fit wasn’t ideal, as she hadn’t been present for final adjustments, but it was suitable. The boots squeezed her feet and would need a cobbler, but not today. She’d devoted days of thought to what she’d wear and how she’d wear it. Every fold.

  To the blank canvas of her body they applied crimson silk undergarments; black stockings; a dark-gray woolen blouse with burgundy piping; a velvet skirt of matching burgundy that reached just below her knees; low-heeled boots of supple gray leather that reached just below the skirt hem; elbow-length gloves and a belt of the same leather; a black choker ribbon at her throat threaded with silver and adorned with a polished garnet; and matching garnet earrings. Silver buckles on the boot cuffs glinted to match the buckle on her belt and what she hoped would be an impish sparkle in her eyes. She put her hair up, and used an extra handful of pins to keep the milliner’s work in place. A cartwheel hat girded with a burgundy ribbon, it rested on her head at an angle just on the flirty side of careless. For fending off the late-winter damp she donned a cashmere cape lined with crown sable fur. The hood sl
ouched between her shoulders with just the right air of insouciance.

  In the old days she would have slimmed herself with a corset, but the belt was painful enough. The slightest tug caused her ribs to groan like rusty hinges.

  Rebecca met her in the south vestibule, a humble tweed cloak slung over her uniform. Her eyes widened.

  “Goodness,” she said. “I barely recognize you. You’ve cast off your plaster chrysalis and become a butterfly. And what wings you have!”

  “What, these rags?” Grinning made Anastasia’s cheeks ache. “I couldn’t resist treating myself just a bit.”

  “I hadn’t realized a walk in the gardens could be… The nurse examined herself. “I’m underdressed, I fear.”

  “Nonsense. You’re exquisite.”

  Rebecca blushed. With a quick glance over her shoulder to ensure the doctors and head nurse wouldn’t see, she reached under the brim of her cap to again tug loose a single curl. It bobbed beside her temple. Anastasia’s heart hurried to match its rhythm.

  “Shall we?”

  A medical servitor shadowed the pair, ready to leap forward should Anastasia stumble, but per her command it lagged several paces behind. Frailty gave her an excuse to take the nurse’s arm, to lean close and catch her scent.

  The south vestibule opened on the hospital’s own garden, which was small but abutted the Paviljoensgracht, the old Pavilion Canal, directly across from the winter gardens. A strong sea breeze sent clouds scudding through a sky unusually bright for late winter. Patchwork shadows mottled the gardens. Gravel crunched underfoot. The humid smell of the nearby canal enveloped them, as did the usual city sounds: the rumble of traffic, the tolling of church bells, the lapping of water in the canals, the creak of oarlocks, the cumulative hum of ten thousand clockwork men dedicated to their owners’ every whim. It must have been a race day; the din of raised voices from Scheveningen was audible even here, over a mile away.