The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Read online

  Losing the Talleyrand journals hurt like a punch to the gut. They’d been entrusted to her when she assumed the role. Years later, when she was stripped of her titles, she’d broken tradition and stolen the journals, confident that they’d find better use in her hands than in those of her successor. She’d stashed them before attempting to enter the Forge.

  She’d lost the journals, but gained a servant.

  Berenice nudged the curtain aside. Hidden in the shadows, she watched Sparks—watched it? him?—dodge traffic with eerie precision.

  Oh, what perilous creatures, mechanicals. They were dangerous in ways Berenice had never anticipated in all her years devoted to their study. “Dangerous” didn’t cover it.

  Fucking seductive is what they were.

  She’d had servants before, of course. Human servants. Maud, most recently, her chambermaid… hers and Louis’s… back in Marseilles-in-the-West. And Berenice’s final servant, prior to Louis’s murder and her banishment. In her final days in Marseilles, Berenice remembered, she’d taken to excoriating Maud for the warren of dust bunnies under the writing desk and the tarnished mirror. Maud was fortunate. In Amsterdam, the lowliest fishwife could see her servitor stripped down and entirely rebuilt from the hidden personality up if it left a single speck of roe splattered on the counter even once per decade of service.

  A woman could get used to this level of service. The word “superb” came to mind. Exemplary. Unmatched.

  It made the tulips soft as dandelion down. They’d be helpless as blind kittens without the machines. In a fair fight the French could chew them up, spit them out, and whittle fifes from their bones. But Berenice didn’t seek a fair fight. She sought the most obscene mockery of a balanced contest that history had ever witnessed. She sought to turn the mechanicals against their makers, and watch her enemies scream and wail and gnash their teeth. As the Dutch had been doing to the rest of the world for centuries.

  “Mistress.” A metal hand knocked on the door of her carriage.

  Berenice again pulled the curtain aside. New Amsterdam’s seaport mélange of salt, tar, and wrack gusted past her fingers. The wind also carried the faint stink of draft animals. Another reason to get moist when thinking about the Clakkers: They never shat in the street. Or anywhere else.

  Sparks said, “They’re ready for you now.”

  “You’ve explained the situation?”

  “Yes, mistress. Captain Barendregt sails within the hour. Per your directive, he will detour to Liverpool without a stop in Galway before continuing on to Rotterdam. He understands you have urgent business on behalf of the Verderer’s Office, and that he is to make all good speed.”

  “And my cabin?”

  “Your cabin is off-limits to the crew except in case of emergency. It is understood that under no circumstances are you to be disturbed. Shall I show you aboard, mistress?”

  “No. Sell the carriage, then escort my chest aboard. Under no circumstances let it out of your direct control.”

  “As you say, mistress. At once.”

  Sparks didn’t know it wasn’t truly her chest. After her directive took root and initiated the partial reconfiguration of his memory, the poor bastard believed she’d always been his master and that his job had always been to safeguard her and her precious chest.

  Anastasia Bell’s pendant was a fucking marvelous trinket. If Berenice ran the risk of spoiling herself rotten with a single purloined servitor, just how soft were the Goddamned Verderers for whom the flash of a little gold and quartz opened more locked doors than a fairy tale thief?

  Jesus, you cocky bitch. You’re not out of Nieuw Nederland yet. And until you are, you’re nothing but an escaped spy, wanted for the assault of at least one Guild member, and now guilty of impersonating a member of the Verderer’s Office. They’ll wreck you good and proper for just half of that.

  Outside the carriage, metal feet hit the cobbles. A moment later metal fingers clinked against the strap buckles, and then the carriage suspension groaned in relief as Sparks lifted the chest.

  Oh, yes. And don’t forget you’re also a thief.

  Even among the nobles of New France, Berenice had rarely seen so much raw cash collected in one place. The standards of wealth in the French-and Dutch-speaking worlds were so wildly different it beggared belief. Though it wasn’t the lost cash the Clockmakers would bemoan. (None of it newly minted, none of it sequential, all of it foxed and folded and creased: This was laundered money, and laundering always pointed to dirty hands and dirty deeds. Just what were you up to, Bell?) No. It was the tray packed so discretely under those notes and coins that had justified a servitor escort. Sparks wasn’t there to guard the money.

  No. He’d been sent to guard the keys.

  The carriage door opened. The servitor—her servitor—balanced the chest on one shoulder while unfolding the stairs clipped to the carriage door. It (he?) offered his arm to help Berenice down.

  She inhaled. Slow. Steady. Just stroll across the road and board a ship. You’ll be outside for a few minutes at most. Nobody will recognize you. They have their own work to do. She blinked twice to align her glass eye.

  Though there were only three, the carriage stairs were so steep as to be almost a ladder. She was grateful for Sparks’s assistance; she couldn’t stay inconspicuous if she shattered her ankle walking across the street. When she was safely down, standing on a thoroughfare ostensibly cobbled though so thick with churned mud and snow that it was hard to know, she dismissed Sparks.

  The thrum of traffic along the New Amsterdam waterfront reminded her of the docks at Marseilles-in-the-West. She’d met Louis in a place much like this, albeit smaller and on a lesser scale of commerce. Still, the humid smell of open water, the lapping of the water against the hulls of the ships, the low cacophony of human voices, the creak of ropes and wood: These put her back on the Saint Lawrence again. If not for the occasional Clakker laboring to load or unload cargo, and the vast gray ocean beyond the stone breakwater at the mouth of the North River, she might have been home. She sniffed again. The Saint Lawrence wasn’t so salty. But still.

  Berenice stepped into the road still thinking of times past. And found the world spinning around her as a pair of metal hands grasped her under the armpits and deftly placed her on the sidewalk. She yelped. A second later a carriage-and-four charged down the lane, through the space from which she’d just been yanked. Berenice received a gesture from the rapidly receding driver that would have curled an innocent woman’s toes.

  A servitor who wasn’t Sparks said, “Are you hurt, madam? I most humbly and sincerely apologize for touching your person without first soliciting permission. I sensed you were in immediate danger and was compelled to act. I will immediately submit myself for inspection if my calculation was in error.”

  The machine stood before her, palms out and head low in a gesture of supplication. Several passersby had paused to watch. The noise of the mechanical’s body grew steadily louder while it waited for her response. Jax had explained this to her. It was paralyzed by the requirements of the hierarchical metageasa. It hurt, she knew, roasting its hollowed-out soul over ghostly metaphysical fires every instant the geas went unresolved.

  “Your judgment was sound. I commend your leaseholders on their ownership of such a well-maintained machine.”

  The automaton straightened. “May I be of further assistance?” After the slightest pause, barely half a heartbeat, while the bezels in its gemstone eyes clicked, it added, “Your eyesight has been compromised. Shall I escort you to your destination?”

  Oh, you fucking thing. Can’t you just shut up?

  “No. Go about your business.”

  “As you say, madam. Good day, madam.”

  Berenice took more care in her second attempt to cross the road running along the water’s edge. She made it up the ramp of the ship where Sparks had negotiated (well, dictated) the terms of her passage to England. The ramp passed between two enormous sculls poking through the hull. Like
most ships in the Dutch maritime world, De Pelikaan was powered by a complement of galley Clakkers. Though it was quite an odd-looking craft—it resembled its namesake pelican thanks to a strangely flared bow. Plus the scull blades bristled with serrated hooks. She’d never seen such a thing. Were they for chopping firewood or water?

  Berenice concentrated on swanning aboard as though she owned the ship. Her fingers touched the chain at her throat. Several humans stood on deck; to the one with the largest hat and the most frippery on his uniform, she said, “You are the captain.”

  “And you’re the bitch who thinks she commands my boat.”

  As she’d done in so many interminable meetings of the privy council of the Exile King of Fallen France, Berenice chose the simplest riposte. She produced Bell’s pendant and dangled it before the captain. To her considerable pleasure, the sun bolstered her case by choosing that moment to glint from the gold and quartz.

  “And this is the sigil that says I do.” It swung like a pendulum on its long chain. She let it hang for an extra beat before adding, “At least when it comes to matters of the Guild and the Crown. A purview that, I expect you have already divined, encompasses my errand.”

  Behind the captain, one of the officers rolled his eyes. The human crew members exchanged a volley of uneasy looks. One woman, presumably a lieutenant, pursed her lips and turned nonchalantly for the bridge as though suddenly taken with the need to return to work. Another man shook his head, though he didn’t turn away.

  The captain said, “You have got enormous fucking nerve flashing that thing in my face on my boat.”

  Hold on. Who did this cockhole think he was? She’d come to think of the pendant almost as a magic talisman. But human hearts were still human hearts.

  “Captain, you misunderstand your own importance to this endeavor. I have extremely urgent business in England. This ship suits my needs. Your participation in the voyage is superfluous.”

  “If we don’t make Rotterdam on schedule,” he said, lifting his cap and running a hand through his hair, “your colleagues will slap us with so many fines we’ll never sail again.”

  “Of course they won’t.” Berenice assumed they would, but she leaned into the lie. “I will personally guarantee De Pelikaan is not penalized because of my intercession. You may even receive a bonus for exceptional service to the Guild.”

  “Bullshit. I’ve heard too many of your Clockmaker lies to believe anything you sons of bitches say. First your Stemwinders take my son, then you take my boat. I hope that when you die, the devil takes your soul as payment for your dark deeds and darker magics.”

  Well, this was awkward. Had Barendregt’s son been swept up in the anti-Catholic purges during the war? Or had he run afoul of the Guild in some other way? What a perverse pity that Berenice’s disguise demanded her steadfast opposition to the captain. They shared an enemy.

  He spat on the deck at her feet. Walked away. At the door to the bridge, he paused. Over his shoulder, he said, “If your servitor must accompany you, it’ll require subsidiary nautical metageasa before we depart. Even you can’t circumvent that law.”

  Naturally, a vessel of this size would have a horologist among the crew. Those Clakkers leased by the shipping company surely had the nautical-safety metageasa permanently embedded into the rules that governed their every action. Landlubbing Clakkers could be a danger to the ship if they weren’t similarly indoctrinated.

  “I wouldn’t seek to do so. My servitor carries a chest of my personal effects. Will you object if it delivers the chest to my stateroom before reporting to your Guildman?”

  The captain said, “Heaven forfend you should be deprived of your effects a single moment longer than absolutely necessary.”

  She nodded. “I’m so pleased you agree. As soon as he delivers my effects, I shall order Sparks to report to your horologist.”

  At this, the captain turned to face her. Confusion wrinkled his brow. Varying shades of scandal or alarm showed on the faces of the deck officers.

  “And just who in the hell,” he said, scratching his temple, “is Sparks?”

  Damn you, Jax. You changed the way I think about your kind, and ruined my careless disregard for your identities. Goddamn it.

  Berenice had violated a subtle but deep social convention. Particularly among the Clockmakers. Children in the Dutch-speaking world commonly referred to the Clakkers as gendered beings, but outgrew that as they absorbed the mores of their parents. Some leaseholders did refer to their mechanicals by name, though others—those wealthy enough to own multiple servitors, for instance—sometimes never bothered to learn their servants’ names. The indifference to identity scaled with wealth or social status. Members of the Clockmakers’ Guild, the horologists and alchemists who kept the empire ticking along, never acknowledged anything beyond a machine’s true name. Because, after all, Clakkers were merely unthinking machines. Machines could not have personal identities and inner lives.

  So to hear a woman from the Verderer’s Office speak thusly… no wonder they were confused. Berenice had afforded them a peek under her disguise.

  “Sparks is my servitor,” she said. For it was true.

  “So I gather. But I could swear you said, ‘He.’” The captain looked to his officers, perhaps feeling the need for somebody to corroborate something so unseemly.

  Berenice said, “I believe it is common to refer to ships in the feminine. As ‘she’ and ‘her.’ Is it not?”

  One of the scandalized lieutenants chimed in. “But that’s an ancient tradition.”

  “In my line of work it is sometimes necessary to imbue a mechanical with a sense of identity that extends beyond mere appellation. If you can so easily accept that your inanimate ship is a ‘she,’ surely you can comprehend that for the purposes of my errand, my inanimate servitor is, for now, a ‘he.’”

  The captain shook his head, as if hearing something disagreeable. “I can’t begin to imagine how that could further anybody’s purposes.”

  “Do you pry into the Verderers’ business?”

  The captain entered the bridge and slammed the door.

  A lieutenant called up a mechanical crewman to show Berenice to her stateroom. It contained a twin bunk that folded from the bulkhead over a handful of recessed drawers, a shaving mirror, and a white Delft porcelain washbasin still dusted with coppery beard stubble. That left just enough room for her ill-gotten chest and Sparks to guard it, if he—no: it!—folded himself tightly into the corner with the basin. A pair of staggered portholes offered a view of the wintry gray sky above and, below, the tip of a retracted scull just above the waterline. A whiff of shaving cream lingered near the basin. She realized the space had originally been assigned to one of the officers. So somewhere on this boat there paced a displaced and disgruntled lieutenant. It had been her intent to slip aboard rather more quietly, without turning the entire human crew against her. Lovely.

  After locking the cabin door, she folded down the bunk. Flopped on it. Sighed.

  At least she’d slipped on her tongue in front of the human crew rather than Sparks. Her brief association with Jax had given her bad habits when it came to Clakkers. But Jax had been freed of the geasa, and thus not compelled to pounce upon suspicious behavior. Sparks, on the other hand, would be powerless to do anything but take action if she gave him—it, it, IT, Goddamn it!—reason to doubt her identity.

  It also occurred to her that sharp-eyed members of the crew might wonder why she wore the same clothes every day of the voyage when her servitor had hauled a large and heavy chest aboard. She’d replaced her clothing with Cortland’s garb; they were a poor fit, and smelled of his pipe, but at least they weren’t crusted with blood. Perhaps she ought to have ordered Sparks to buy her new clothes. But until they were out of New Amsterdam, haste seemed the wiser course.

  She’d have to keep a low profile. Very well; that fit with her Verderer persona.

  Even here behind the harbor breakwater, snugged to its bollards, the shi
p bobbed. Just a bit, but enough to notice whenever she lay unmoving on the bunk. Berenice closed her eyes. Opened them again, with a start, when Sparks knocked. The machine delivered her chest along with a bit of extra cash obtained for the carriage and horse.

  “Mistress, before the ship departs, I must receive new geasa from the ship’s horologist.” The machine bowed. “I humbly beg your leave.”

  “Yes, yes.” Lying down again, she closed her eyes and waved Sparks off. “The captain and I had a delightful conversation about it.”

  Sparks said, “I shall return immediately.”

  She didn’t hear the door close; she was too preoccupied with the contents of the chest. How could she divine the purpose of those keys? What were they for, and why so many? It was like a hunger, the urge to start experimenting. Were they blanks, requiring a locksmith to cut them? Or were they skeleton keys?

  The hole in Sparks’s forehead made a tempting target for experimentation. But some avenues were dangerous, and some were foolhardy. There were those who argued she’d yet to learn the distinction. (She thought, fleetingly, of a grizzled sergeant back in Marseilles-in-the-West.) She couldn’t anticipate how spinning the lock in Sparks’s head might change the machine. She needed its unswerving loyalty and didn’t dare undermine it.

  The truth was she knew so little about how the Guild did what it did. Few people outside the Clockmakers’ walled garden ever had the chance to witness them at work—

  She sat upright. Leapt from the bunk. Flung the door open. Locked it. Hurried after Sparks.

  The horologist’s laboratory resided in the bowels of the ship, in a passageway clearly marked off-limits to nonessential personnel. The horologist himself was a ruddy fireplug named van Breugel. He recoiled from her pendant as though she’d waved a rabid, slavering bat in his face. He licked his lips.

  “Verderer’s Office. Has there been a problem with my work?”