The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 13

  Jogging through the trees, vision slewing back and forth with every bob of his disobedient head, he almost didn’t notice the abrupt end to the forest until he breached the brambles to emerge from a sentry-like row of aspens. And found himself at cliff’s edge atop a sheer wall of jagged granite. Thousands of acres of red spruce spread before him. Snow clung to their boughs, making them appear like Christmastime Speculaas cookies sprinkled with powdered sugar. He also spied hemlock and larch, the latter naked for winter but recognizable for the smattering of purple cones about their bases. A river snaked through the valley like a silver ribbon draped through the forest. A herd of bison picked at the snow along the banks. Beyond the shallow bowl of the valley the earth rose in a series of gentle undulations that swelled first into foothills and then…

  Mountains!

  He’d never seen such a thing before, only their renderings. The Old World was lousy with them, he knew; he’d come from a place crisscrossed with Alps and Pyrenees and Carpathians. His imagination had fallen short. He’d never imagined they could be so…

  Transfixing.

  Mountains! It was as though some vast chthonic forces deep within the earth had frozen in midshrug to leave a great jagged sawtooth stretched across the horizon. The bare peaks were shrouded in snow so pure the glare of sunlight triggered filters in his eyes. Farther down the distant slopes the color and shading of the mountains shifted between purples and umbers to a deep kelly green. When he zoomed his eyesight to the diffraction limit, the altered shading became a timberline, an altitude beyond which even the quaking aspens wouldn’t grow.

  The sun inched across the sky while he absorbed every detail of the vista. The play of light and shadow as clouds scudded across the sky; the curlicues of snow torn from the distant peaks as wind whipped across the summits; the whisper of running water; the loamy, piney scent of the forest. He’d never imagined such beauty.

  Mountains! The sun traversed a quarter of the sky before Jax moved again.

  The cliff offered no obvious route down. He could have climbed had he two feet and the use of his arms. But he didn’t, so he jumped. The snow-shrouded boughs of balsam fir trees cushioned his cannonball descent. He landed in a snowdrift, pelted by a rain of the firs’ cigar-shaped cones. Needles and cone scales clung to him, affixed by a drizzling of fragrant pine resin.

  The descent to the valley floor brought him to the frozen bank of a wide river. He stopped there. The current still ran unsheathed by ice where the flow was fastest, but a skin of muddy ice clung to both banks. Here and there fragments of ice the size of dinner plates bobbed along in the current, glistening silver like the scales of a giant fish. Tendrils of mist clung to the river.

  He crossed his club arms across his chest, pinning his loose foot as tightly as he could manage. Then he crouched on the frozen mudbank, balanced on his good leg. Gears chattered, quickly at first, then more slowly, as he compressed every spring and cable in his ankle, knee, leg, hip, waist, and back. He strained until there came a faint thrum from the cables of alchemical steel that threaded his body like human sinews.

  He leaped. The wind of his passage pulled long streamers of mist from the river, like ghostly fingers grasping at him. He cleaved the air and left the dopplered twang of unspooled cables in his wake. He splayed his talon toes. Stretched.

  His heel pierced ice and gouged a furrow through the earth. The crack reverberated through the forest like a gunshot. The impact liquefied the frozen mud; he sank to his ankle. It squelched when he worked himself free. The broken gimbals of his shattered ankle clattered like a sackful of broken crockery. But he hadn’t fallen, and he hadn’t dropped his broken foot. The broken-mirror crash of his landing continued to echo, as though the noise had been rejuvenated in some distant corner—

  Jax paused. Listened.

  Another crash, another echo.

  And then, more faintly than the rest: another twang.

  That wasn’t him. That was something else. Something no more than half a mile downstream. Something that could, like him, leap across the river.

  He wasn’t alone. Other Clakkers roamed this wilderness. And they were following him.

  Jax wanted to scream. Not with the artificially amplified noises of his mechanical voicebox, not with the catgut-and-reeds approximation of a human voice. Scream as the humans could do, by forcing a lungful of breath through sloppy wet biology. To express, explosively, the quivering outrage of it all.

  Hundreds of miles he’d run through forest, field, and swamp but still the bastards chased him. They didn’t care if he no longer threatened to contradict the foundations of their society. Jax was a limping refutation of the dogma of the Crown, Cross, and Guild. This wasn’t about what he might do. They despised what he’d become. Hated it so much they would pursue him around the world to destroy it. They abhorred his existence. So they sent their own mechanicals, Jax’s kin, to see it eradicated.

  He was so weary of running.

  Is that what happened to most rogues? Did they flee for years until they couldn’t bear to take another stride? Until even the abject terror of capture and execution couldn’t energize them? Did his pursuers know this? Did they rely upon existential despair to run him down?

  Well, as Berenice might have said, Fuck them. He’d stop running when his legs shattered, and not a moment sooner. Jax launched into a sprint.

  An answering jangle-clatter arose a mile or two behind him. And then another from atop the rolling foothills across the valley. The second pursuer threatened to cut him off where he’d emerge from the valley. Jax changed course.

  He’d spent enough time atop the cliff ledge, enjoying the view, that the river’s every oxbow was imprinted on the magic lantern of his mind’s eye. Jax changed course again without slowing. Yes. The river. He couldn’t feel cold, and he didn’t need to breathe; hypothermia and drowning were human concerns. He only hoped it was deep enough to hide him.

  The forest snow muffled sounds, though his own body sounded loud enough to be heard all the way to Europe. He crashed through brush, knocking down low branches, and pulverizing hidden stones with his inhuman tread. Sometimes as he ran, the alchemical alloys in his broken ankle joint scraped against rocks, creating a shower of sparks and sending a piercing shriek through the woods. Stealth was impossible. His only hope lay in reckless speed.

  He smashed his encased arms against trees, boulders, the ground, anything within flailing distance. He startled an immense owl, which took to the air. If he could break the chemical sheaths on his arms and regain the use of his hands, he had half a chance. He could fight.

  He plunged into a loop of the river. Just as he was about to duck under and start crawling along the riverbed, sunlight glinted from a stand of larch on a hillock inside the crook of the river bend less than a mile away. The glint carried an oily shimmer. Jax knew it as he knew his own body: alchemical alloys.

  Damn it. The hunter on the hill had surely seen him. Jax cannoned out of the water. He hit the frozen ground running. He aimed for a break in the trees, where the ground was flatter.

  A sheen of water froze to his body. It crackled between his joints and cogs while he sprinted. The crunch of ice obscured the crashing of his pursuers across the same frozen taiga, but he knew they were nearby. He knew because they called to him. In the hypercompressed telegraphy of clicks and ticks, rattles and tocks, intelligible only to their kind, they called.

  From the wilds to his west: Jalyksegethistrovantus.

  From the wilds to his east: Jalyksegethistrovantus.

  From the south: Ho, ho, he’s a runner!

  His true name. Oh, God, they shouted his true name to the heavens. They taunted Jax with knowledge of his former self, of the identity stamped upon his soul on the day he was forged. They knew he was no longer that machine, no longer beholden to the magics woven into that string of syllables. But they’d come to take him back to that world. Back to his death.

  North he went, knowing they herded him like wolves arou
nd a frantic fawn. He charged across a frozen marsh, the toes of his foot churning up sods of peat. His broken ankle punched divots in the frozen earth like a posthole digger. The marsh abutted another bend of the meandering river. He hurled himself across it. From the peak of his trajectory he saw flashes of metal moving across the frozen earth, swift as a trio of arrows.

  Ho, ho, he’s a leaper!

  Jax wasn’t new to running for his life. But the taunting was a new and particularly cruel twist. What would inspire their makers to install such a wicked geas?

  These Clakkers were different. Were they some hitherto secret model? Something unleashed on the world only when necessary to hunt down the most far-flung rogues?

  He plunged into a stand of evergreens. It lay inside a shallow bowl of granite. At the lip he scrabbled for purchase on icy stone. It crunched under his toes, the reports like cannon shots announcing his every move. He ascended a cleft in the granite outcrop.

  There he rubbed his encased arms against the stone, faster and faster until he wore a ridge in the granite. The chemical sheaths were more stubborn than the bones of the earth, but Jax worked a rudimentary shape into them. A rough point, for stabbing, and a depression like a shallow cup. When the ridge in the granite grew sufficiently deep, he studied the crystal pattern in the stone. Reared back. Kicked. Shards and pebbles went bounding down the slope.

  Clumsy, like a human toddler, he struggled to pick up the pieces. He had to use his arms like enormous awkward pincers. Then he rotated his extended arms behind him.

  Jax could see the other Clakkers now. Squinting at them through the river haze, fighting the stubborn swaying of his weathervane head, he studied them. He wanted a sense of these cruel hunters, these fellow mechanicals who would in mere moments succeed where so many others had failed. And who chose to make a game of it.

  Never in his one hundred and eighteen years had Jax seen their like. They were foreign. Ugly. Obscene.

  Mismatched. Misshapen. Misbegotten.

  Assembled from unrelated parts. Parts of different eras, different models. An assortment of different Clakkers melded into a single body. They embodied their kind’s deepest and most closely held taboo. One glimpse turned the terror and dread clutching Jax to mindless, violent panic.

  Is this what their makers did to the most troublesome of captured rogues? Jax had thought, like all his kin, that execution was the end of it. But perhaps that wasn’t punishment enough for those machines lucky enough to violate the highest law. Perhaps their makers, driven by senseless malice, incinerated Free Will but kept the intellect alive. Perhaps they warped the offending machines’ bodies into grotesque parodies of what was right. Just to mock what Jax and his kind held dear.

  The trio converged like a spearhead aimed at Jax’s roost. He focused on the leader. Aimed. His arms streaked forward with such speed that the sharpened tips of his club arms tore the air like a whip. The armful of stones he flung outpaced the sound of their launching. In an instant they closed the distance from Jax to his hunters, who swerved so hard they left scorch marks in the frozen peat.

  Most missed, shearing deep furrows into the ground and creating gouts of mud and steam behind the pursuers. One stone struck the leader in the torso hard enough to ignite vermilion sparks where it sheared the alchemical alloys of his escutcheons. Another glanced from the leader’s forehead. Jax had sought but failed to blind him.

  Ho, ho! He’s a fighter, ho ho!

  He’s David, with sling in hand!

  Jax reloaded. The hunters didn’t swerve to avoid his volley. One projectile entered an eye socket and shattered the crystalline orb within. Another dented a leaf spring in one of the grotesque Clakkers’ legs. But in midstride the machine folded itself into a ball and let its momentum carry it bumping and tearing through the snow.

  They were too close. They were too many. Jax couldn’t hope to disable them before they reached him. He leaped from his perch and plunged through drifts of snow, toward the high mountains. He wouldn’t touch the earth’s hunched shoulders before he was caught. He ran for the privilege of existence. Or was it for the amusement of those who chased him? Those who made a game of chittering his name to the sky, the wind, the mountains?

  From behind him the three unsettling machines took up another nonsense chant:

  Jalyksegethistrovantus runs!

  He’s swift, swift as a sparrow!

  But we, we are the arrow.

  Three other machines, grotesquely mangled things like those giving chase, erupted from beneath the snow. They’d been lying in wait for him.

  And we, we are the net.

  Jax tried to roll, but the snow was too deep. He skidded, bounced, crashed to a halt. The new arrivals, the ones who had sprung the trap, watched him without advancing.

  They didn’t leap on him. They didn’t subdue him. They only watched. As if mulling the method of his murder.

  Why are you chasing me? he asked.

  Because we want to catch you, they said.

  To take me back. Jax didn’t make it a question.

  Because we were sent to find you, they said.

  To unwrite me? To melt me?

  Because we seek our own, they said, and the one who was once Jalyksegethistrovantus is one of us.

  Jax shuddered. One of these abominations? But then, a centisecond before they said it, the first rays of realization dawned in the ink-black sky of his panicked mind.

  In unison they said: Welcome to Neverland, brother.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Berenice’s resolve lasted two days. But with nothing to do but scowl at the crew (to stay in character) and listen to the endless creaking of the sculls, boredom quickly gave rise to temptation. Her better judgment was no match for her damnable curiosity. Three days into her voyage from New Amsterdam to Liverpool, her resolve crumbled.

  She’d sped this along by poring over the keys in the chest that had been bound for the Verderers’ house. Such strange gleaming things they were, their teeth and notches splayed around a helical core. Strangely, they weren’t made from alchemical alloys. Or not one she’d ever seen. If she took one from the case and held it to the patchy sunlight streaming through her porthole, it showed no evidence of mysterious refractions wrought by magic worked into the metal. Instead it merely gave the usual glow of burnished brass. The ship swayed in the gray winter seas, and with it Berenice; she watched the key lean back and forth across the cup of her palm. She sniffed it. It carried the scent of a two-livre piece clutched in a sweaty palm on a hot August evening, while waiting in line to buy a flavored ice before the sun went down and the fireworks started. The scent of a memory from a fourteen-year-old Berenice.

  She shook her head. She wouldn’t learn anything reminiscing about days long past.

  To Sparks, she said, “Go above. Wait there until I retrieve you or send a crewmember to fetch you.”

  “Immediately, mistress.”

  There was a ratchety pause while Sparks unfolded from the spot in the corner. Metal footsteps rattled the deck. The door opened and closed a moment later, and then those same footsteps receded down the passageway. It was tempting to try to experiment on Sparks. But he was so damn useful, and she didn’t want to risk drawing more attention to herself by flashing the pendant again to requisition another mechanical. On the lonely road in the middle of the night the risk had been low, but if she wasn’t careful she’d draw the wrong kind of attention. More importantly, she didn’t want Sparks to have any direct knowledge of what transpired here. Let it wonder and surmise all it wanted; its true masters would never deign to ask a mere machine for its opinion.

  She waited until she heard Sparks tromping up the ladder to the deck above. Then she emerged from the cabin and went in the opposite direction until she found a mechanical crewmember. It was repainting a metal hatch door, daubing a new coat of robin’s-egg blue around the edges. At the sound of her footsteps—obviously human—its head turned a full half circle to observe her while the re
st of its body continued its painting. Its head completed the full circuit without slowing. It halted in midbrushstroke, placed its brush atop the paint can, and turned again to face her fully. All in seconds, and with eerily precise choreography.

  It recognized her. Every mechanical on the ship knew De Pelikaan carried a member of the Verderer’s Office.

  “How may I serve you, mistress?”

  Berenice had chosen not to use her most comfortable alias. For one thing, Maëlle Cuijper was well established as an itinerant schoolteacher, not a Guildwoman. And she couldn’t be certain she hadn’t burned the Cuijper identity in New Amsterdam on the day fire consumed the Forge.

  “I require assistance. Come to my stateroom when you have finished your current task.”

  “Yes, mistress. Right away.” It cocked its head. Berenice couldn’t tell if this machine self-identified as male, female, or as a six-headed hermaphrodite sea horse. The bezels whirred in its eyes. “You have a servitor in your service. Shall I fetch that one for you?”

  “No. Find me when you have finished.”

  On the short walk back to her cabin she reflected on how easily and quickly she’d fallen into the tulips’ brusque manner of interacting with the mechanicals. It was so damn easy to take their servitude for granted. How soft were the Dutch after two hundred and fifty years of such pampering?

  She removed the tray of keys from the trunk and held it in the gunmetal sunlight of the wintery North Atlantic Sea and sky, looking for any outward indication of what made the keys distinct. How in the hell did van Breugel know which key to select when he imposed the nautical metageasa on Sparks? A precise and measured knock-knock-knock rattled her cabin door a few minutes later.