The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 11

  “Heavens, no.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. He flinched. “I merely want to watch. Pretend I’m not here.”

  Van Breugel glanced at Sparks. He shrugged. “Despite the, uh, details, this is basically just a bog-standard graft. Nothing you haven’t seen a thousand times.” He didn’t meet Berenice’s eyes when he looked at her. “If you have particular requirements,” he mumbled, clearly hoping this wasn’t the case, “variances must be put in writing.”

  Berenice strove for the most amiable tone she could muster. “I understand. I have no such needs.”

  Berenice had no idea what he was going on about, but he didn’t seem to pick up on that.

  He opened a cabinet. After a bit of rummaging, he produced a leather case and a key ring.

  “Do you enjoy this post? Seems like it must get a bit boring now and then.”

  Without hesitation, he said, “Though I am but a single cog in the mechanism of the empire, mine is crucial work. It’s a privilege to serve the Brasswork Throne by bringing the Guild’s craft to the sea.”

  Berenice shook her head. “I’m not investigating you,” she said. “I’m making conversation. Honestly.”

  “Oh.” Van Breugel paused, as though taking in her question for the first time. She wondered how long it had been since anybody had shown interest in his work. “Yes, it’s frequently dull. But it gives me time to read.”

  The valise shed eddies of dust when he opened it. A peppery whiff of candle soot tickled her nose. There was a staleness to the scent, as though van Breugel didn’t open the valise for every voyage. From the valise he produced a candle, a concave mirror, and something wrapped in cloth. The candle and mirror he set on his desk. Then he unfolded the bundle in his palm as gingerly as though it were a freshly hatched chick on Easter morning.

  What she saw quickened her pulse: In his palm lay an opaque lens, murky as though crafted from inferior glass. It might have been part of a pair with the bauble she’d used to free the Stemwinder at the Verderers’ safe house. After Jax had shown it to her, she’d come to think of it as a pineal glass, for she had seen something similar inside the head of another rogue that she had deceived, subdued, and disassembled.

  To Sparks, van Breugel said, “Machine. Recite your true name to me.”

  “Sir, I am called Sparthikulothistrodantus.”

  The horologist pointed to a mark on the deck. “Stand there, facing me.”

  Sparks crossed the cabin. From the bulkhead van Breugel swiveled a hinged rod. He adjusted it until it hung at roughly the machine’s eye level. The rod held three clamps. Into one he placed the candle, the mirror into another, then between them he placed the murky lens.

  Berenice couldn’t hide her fascination. She tried to absorb every detail of the procedure. Van Breugel snuck glances at her. Perhaps the scrutiny lay too boldly on her face, for what he saw caused him to frown.

  To distract him from her obvious interest in a routine procedure, she asked, “Tell me something. Why does everybody cower from my shadow as though I’m the seven-headed beast of Revelations? I’m not, you know.”

  “You’ll never convince Captain Barendregt of that.”

  Berenice said, “His son.” The Guildman nodded, warily. She asked, “What happened?”

  Van Breugel shrugged. “Nobody knows. It was years ago. The captain was a lieutenant then. He’d been a-sea then, making the long loop to the central and southern New World.”

  “Chocolate and parrots.”

  “That’s the one. The lore says the boy ran afoul of the Stemwinders not long after his father departed Rotterdam. He would’ve been in his midtwenties around that time. The boy, I mean. By the time his father returned, they’d let him go, but he wasn’t the same.”

  “How so?”

  “I haven’t seen fit to ask.”

  “What did the boy do?”

  Something flashed behind van Breugel’s eyes when he chanced to meet her gaze. Fleeting, gone between heartbeats, yet caustic enough to tarnish silver. “Something terrible, I’m sure. Your office always has its reasons.”

  Keys jangled together when the real horologist flipped through the pieces on the ring. They didn’t appear obviously different from the keys in Berenice’s stolen chest, though she hadn’t yet had ample opportunity to study those. Both sets had a peculiar spiral pattern to the teeth arrayed around a cylindrical core, matching the circular keyhole found on every Clakker brow. They didn’t emit the peculiar chime of alchemical alloys when they knocked against one another. Twice he glanced at Sparks, noting particular features of the machine’s construction and design. Berenice assumed van Breugel combined a knowledge of Sparks’s polysyllabic true name with observations of its body plan to deduce a particular model. He might have been a bored landlord sorting the keys to all the flats in his building. He didn’t act like a man who held the keys to the very foundations of the modern world in his grasp.

  Having found the key he sought, he pulled a slim leather-bound volume from the same cabinet. Fine silver filigree stamped into the leather cover stated the book was property of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists. It came with a tiny clasp and keyhole, like a schoolgirl’s diary, but this apparently was unused or broken, for van Breugel flipped the catalog open without touching its lock. That didn’t seem in keeping with the Guild’s psychotic dedication to secrecy.

  Partially just for the hell of it, and partially playing on a hunch, Berenice cleared her throat.

  He paused in the midst of flipping through the pages. He coughed, awkwardly. “Ah,” he said. “I, ah, have been meaning to fix that.”

  She said, “I have every confidence that’s so.”

  Berenice couldn’t read over his shoulder without crowding him and further stimulating his distrust. But she could see the pages were filled with tables. Indexed by model? She couldn’t tell. But van Breugel found the page he sought, ran his thumb along one row, and then squinted at the rod. He jostled the mirror, candle, and lens back and forth until their clamps aligned with specific notches.

  The strange procedure reminded Berenice of a doctor gauging the quality of a patient’s vision to deduce the correct eyeglass prescription. Clearly, the printed tables told him where to situate the optical elements.

  Focal length? What’s the crucial element here?

  The horologist lit the candle. It smelled of nothing more exotic than beeswax, and the light it gave seemed perfectly ordinary. The murky glass responded with a faint shimmer. Though it seemed too opaque to transmit anything, the mirror cast a flickering halo on the bulkhead behind Sparks. What first appeared to be the blurry images of dust motes became, after a moment’s closer scrutiny, arcane alchemical sigils.

  “Do not move,” said the horologist.

  He shoved the key straight into Sparks’s head and gave it a vicious twist. The servitor stood eerily motionless in spite of the screeching and ratcheting that reverberated from deep within its skull. The alchemical sigils etched into a spiral around the machine’s keyhole rotated with each twist of the key. Van Breugel turned the key through several complete revolutions until Sparks’s head emitted an alarming thunk. The horologist went back to the rod. He left the key stuck in Sparks’s forehead, which made the servitor look just a bit like a unicorn.

  Van Breugel swiveled the mirror mount. The shimmering halo grew smaller on the bulkhead as it neared Sparks. The horologist aimed the refracted and reflected candlelight at Sparks’s eyes. It glinted from the crystalline orbs. He continued to make small adjustments until the machine lurched. The key spun widdershins, reversing the sigils’ orbit over the machine’s brow. Van Breugel removed the key and snuffed out the candle.

  He seemed to expect some sort of reaction from Berenice, so she gave a noncommittal, “Hmmmph.”

  He took that to mean she was unimpressed. “I warned you it wasn’t anything you hadn’t seen countless times before.”

  “So you did,” she said.

  But he was wrong. He’d just demon
strated the Clockmakers’ secret procedure for altering the metageasa in a functioning mechanical.

  CHAPTER

  8

  The lump in Longchamp’s stomach, the one that had formed when Sergeant Chrétien shook him awake in the wolf hours before sunrise, froze solid. It was colder even than the steel tank upon which he lay.

  The captain sprawled on a deer hide with his head and arm crammed through the dismantled assay valve of a chemical storage tank. Dim lantern light gleamed silver from the burnished walls of the containment vessel. It was one of several built to hold chemicals used in the glue cannons, their primary means of defense against the Clakkers.

  The inventory listed the tank as full. But for a few lungfuls of caustic fumes, the tank was empty. Just as the former vicomtesse had warned in her letter.

  Yesterday morning an overnight dispatch from Acadia, that strange part of New France along the Atlantic coast where people spoke a waterlogged and salt-stained French, reported that a force of several hundred Clakkers had rowed longboats across the Strait of Belle Isle. Closer to Marseilles-in-the-West, meanwhile, there were reports of an explosion in the forest northeast of Mont-Laurier, and at least one coureur de bois, a woods runner, had died by Clakker action. Exploratory forays, Longchamp knew. More would follow, and soon.

  The metal tide was rising.

  But where there ought to have been thousands of gallons of chemical reagents there was only air, and the echoes of Longchamp’s voice. He launched a long stream of curses reverberating through the chromium-plated tank. Even after he pulled his head from the valve to escape the fumes, it still sounded like the tank contained a choir of sailors chanting their bluest epithets in a sacrilegious call-and-response. His head spun. It took several lungfuls of chilly air before he could think clearly. The winter air swept the sting from his eyes, too, though they insisted on watering, the traitorous bastards.

  And speaking of traitors.

  Longchamp stood. To the pair of chemists standing alongside the open valve, he said, “Close it. I’ve seen enough.”

  Chrétien said, “There’s nothing to see.”

  “Then I’ve seen plenty of nothing for a day that’s still night, for fuck’s sake.”

  Longchamp decided against risking a slide down the side of the cylindrical tank. It was only ten feet in diameter, so he didn’t stand so far off the ground. If it wasn’t so dark and his knees so old, he even might have jumped down. But he was cold and stiff and didn’t want to make an ass of himself in front of God, his men, and these civilians. Instead he put his effort into descending the ladder without signaling his stiffness and discomfort to the men. Their morale had just taken a body blow—so had his: It was all he could do to resist pulling out the rosary—and the last thing they needed was to see their respected CO begging for holy intercession like somebody’s constipated grandfather.

  This news would get out sooner than later. If the civvies saw their defenders wailing and gnashing their teeth, soon the entire town would talk itself into rolling over to present its belly to the invaders before the fighting even started. They had to look confident. In order to look confident, they had to feel confident. And the best thing Longchamp could do to help that along was to project his own confidence. Or at least hide the shock that currently wanted to liquefy his bowels.

  Back on the ground, he stomped his feet to ward off a creeping chill. It didn’t help; the chill came from inside himself.

  “All right. I’m as awake as I’m ever likely to be. Tell me the story.”

  The night was quiet but for the soldiers’ footsteps and the occasional grunt or bellow from the nearby stockade. Smelly beasts; the smell wafting from the enclosure wasn’t markedly better than that from inside the chemical reservoir. Another bellow. Longchamp lifted his lamp. It sparkled from the snow dusting the shaggy bison and, behind them, the smooth stonework of the outer keep wall. No sign of disturbance there; just enormous stupid animals doing whatever they did best. That the ancient plains dwellers had built enclosures for the beasts without the benefit of modern materials beggared belief.

  Sergeant Chrétien spoke in a low voice, as though he didn’t want to spook the animals. Good instincts, but it was the civvies they had to worry about.

  He said, “Chemists have been working their way around the keep. Inventorying, topping off the storage tanks, the usual siege preparations. Strict visual inspection, per your instructions. They got to this guy—” Chrétien rapped the tank with his knuckle. It rang like a Chinese gong. “—And promptly shit themselves. They came running to us—”

  “—And you came running to me,” Longchamp said.

  “That’s about the shape of it.”

  A woman stepped into the light. Longchamp could always spot the chemists in a crowd of civvies; when they remembered to remove their work aprons, their clothing underneath frequently bore stains or even burns from unpronounceable chemicals, and the eyes behind their glasses frequently carried the hint of a glaze, as though intense concentration was never far away.

  “This is a reservoir for one of the epoxy precursors.”

  “Dumb it down for me,” Longchamp said. “Pretend you’re talking to men who earn their pay by providing live fencing practice for mechanical devils. So. The stuff that holds the ticktocks at bay. It’s a mixture.”

  “Yes. The solidification is a chemical reaction derived from rapid copolymerization—”

  “Uh-huh. And whatever was in here—”

  “A triethylenetetramine derivative salted with—”

  “Whatever goop was in here is something we need for the epoxy guns. That sound about right?”

  She sighed. “Yes.”

  “And now we don’t have it.”

  “Yes.”

  “How much do we not have?”

  The sergeant squinted through the glare of lamplight on bare metal to read a label on the tank. “About twenty-five thousand pinte, sir.”

  “Again,” said Longchamp, “because I lack the mental capacity to live a life of the mind, unlike you and your educated cohort, Doctor, I’m going to simplify things. I admit I don’t know my units very well, though in truth one can’t fault the good nuns of Saint Jean-Baptiste for not trying to cram some basic knowledge into my thick and obstreperous skull, but for the purposes of the rest of this conversation I’m going to assume that twenty-five thousand pinte is a fucking shit-ton.” The chemist tensed. Her slouch disappeared. “Because it sounds like a fucking shit-ton. Doesn’t it, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir. At least one, sir. Possibly more.”

  “Good lad. Now shut your gob so the good doctor can enlighten us. She was about to give us her professional opinion on just how long that fucking shit-ton of goop has been AWOL.”

  She crossed her arms. The shawl wrapped over her head tugged loose. “It’s impossible to know. We don’t—”

  “I’ll put it another way,” said Longchamp. “How long has it been since the last time somebody from your cohort actually checked this tank?”

  She closed her eyes. “Potentially months.”

  Chrétien whistled. He shook his head, stretching his arms as though preparing to witness an assault.

  Longchamp let the obviously inadequate answer writhe in the silence for a beat. Then he said, “Seems to me, though as I’ve said I’m just an uneducated knuckle-dragger, that is a bit less than ideal. Because, and maybe you haven’t received the news on this, we’re preparing for another siege. And what’s the first thing we do when preparing for a siege, Sergeant?”

  “We inventory our stocks, sir. Know your resources, that’s siege discipline one-oh-one.”

  To the chemist, Longchamp said, “That lad’s going to make captain someday. I’m sorry to say that your own grasp of the basics is lacking. One might go so far as to say it’s a fucking insult to those of us who dedicate our simple knuckle-dragging lives to defending your worthless flabby shitholes. Because I seem to recall the marshal general saying some time ago that he wanted us
all to draw up a picture of our resources.”

  “We’re a little behind,” she said.

  “For true? You don’t say?”

  The chemist said, “Look! We’ve also been building new storage facilities inside the keep, and pumping down the exterior cisterns as quickly as the new capacity allows. But inventorying the chemical stocks isn’t that straightforward!”

  “Really? Because if it were me, I’d pop open that valve on the top, plunk a dipstick into the stuff, and read off the level. But then I’m just a soldier, not a doctor of higgledy-piggledy. So how do the experts do it?”

  “We, ah, use a dipstick.” Longchamp rolled his eyes. She hastened to add, “But we have to be extremely careful not to introduce pollutants! The copolymerization is highly exothermic, and even trace impurities can degrade the reaction, retarding or even preventing it.”

  “So it’s the excruciating and exacting procedural standards that have kept you from a timely inventory. Not the fact that nobody wants to trek outside to kneel on comfy ice-cold iron in the dead of winter.”

  “That could have been part of it,” she conceded.

  Faintly audible over the shuffling and lowing of bison, the bells of the basilica chimed. Lauds, the call to dawn prayer. Christ, but it was going to be a long day.

  As the tintinnabulation faded, Longchamp asked, “What happened to it?” He aimed his lantern at the ground beneath the tank. The snow cover was much thinner there, but that told him nothing.

  “It wasn’t a leak. The tank is sound.” She pointed at the bison in their pen. “Otherwise we’d have some very sick animals.”

  “Then where did it go?”

  “My guess is that it was pumped out. Deliberately.”

  “Is that the educated way of saying ‘stolen’?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  Longchamp remembered the letter from Berenice. Her warning had proven accurate. Her suspicions about Montmorency looked more and more plausible in the gray predawn light; the duke had stood at the center of New France’s chemical enterprise.