The Liberation Read online

She curtseyed in apology. “You did, Majesty. The Dutchmen. Where are they now?”

  Élodie said, “The city jail burned during the siege, so they’ve been taken to the catacombs for now. I’ve put guards on them.”

  “Theirs must have been a precarious journey. The reapers would have torn them apart, had they encountered any. They probably spent the entire trip fearing for their lives. Which speaks to the situation in New Amsterdam. But it also means they were probably carrying medical supplies. Dutch medical supplies.”

  The king caught on. “Alchemical bandages,” he said. She nodded. Seeing this, he called, “Sergeant Chastain! Go immediately to the emissaries from New Amsterdam. Search their traveling kit. Anything of a medical nature is to be given to the physicians. But those caring for Captain Longchamp are to have the first pick.”

  The sergeant departed at a dead sprint. She’d just bolted around the corner, en route to the Porter’s Prayer, when there came a loud oof and the crash of hardened polymers slamming together. It sounded just a bit like plates of body armor in collision.

  A different guard limped into the council chamber a moment later. His nose bled freely, and he favored his ankle. Pinching his nose with one hand, he bowed to the king.

  “Good heavens, man,” said Sébastien. “Did the sergeant tackle you? You deserve combat pay.”

  In a comically nasal voice, the guard said, “There’s been an incident.”

  Reapers? Berenice asked, “Not another attack?”

  The guard shook his bleeding head, oblivious to the charwoman’s scowl as he stippled the rug with crimson droplets. “Down at the orphanage, Your Majesty.”

  “Incident” wasn’t quite the term Berenice would have used. She would have called it “the most ruthless example of mob violence since the goddamned crucifixion.”

  The orphanage had fallen silent. The children, though unaware of exactly what had happened, could sense the anxiety of the adults around them. They stewed in mute fright. The nuns wrapped themselves in voiceless prayer. Even the crowd of hecklers beyond the orphanage gate had fallen silent. These had been penned against the fence by a quartet of guards by the time Berenice arrived. The guards were decked out in full armor and kit: bolas, sledgehammers, picks. And they held their weapons at the ready.

  Not good.

  One of the nuns, Sister Marie something, ushered Berenice inside and led her through the orphanage. They passed a classroom where another sister played a guitar and sang an idiotic ditty about Noah’s Ark, obviously trying to keep the younger children diverted.

  “We sent a runner,” whispered Sister Marie. “We didn’t think this was appropriate for the signal lamps.” Because anyone might see the signal flashes, went the unspoken conclusion.

  Also not good.

  She took Berenice upstairs, to a corner garret. An abattoir stench hit Berenice from halfway down the corridor. She yearned for one of the marquis’s scented handkerchiefs.

  Sister Marie stopped with her hand on a doorknob. “I should warn you… When Berenice shrugged, the nun opened the door to Visser’s garret.

  Berenice caught herself on the doorframe before she went down completely. A moment later, when she recovered the ability to speak, she said, “Fucking hell.” The nun let out a squeak of indignation. And then, for good measure, Berenice added, “Son of a poxy flea-ridden bitch in heat.”

  The battlements of the inner keep hadn’t been splashed with this much blood at the end of the siege. It was hard to believe it all came from a single man. But it did. Probably from the mangled mass of flesh, chipped bone, and cartilage where his neck had been.

  The animals. They’d chopped Visser’s head from his body. No—they’d ripped it apart. A grisly amateurish execution. The cold-blooded motherfuckers had practically minced the poor priest’s body into gristle before breaking through the spine. On the wall beneath the dormer windows, the assailants had smeared the word TRAITOR in Visser’s blood. It had been fresh enough to run down the wall in the moment of the act, stretching the t’s into empty crucifixes, but now the congealed blood appeared black in the shadows. A second phrase was scrawled beneath the first, in a different but equally crude hand. REQUIESCANT IN PACE CLEMENT XI, it said. The assailants had been clever enough to get in undetected, and to carry out their murder quietly, but they were not well educated in Latin.

  My God. You poor man. You didn’t deserve this. Again she remembered how she’d narrowly avoided the ghastly experimentation that Anastasia Bell had inflicted upon Visser. She shivered. This might have been me. Berenice’s next thought was, Who will tell Daniel? followed closely by, Goddamn it. Who else but me?

  So extreme was the carnage that it took Berenice a moment to realize something was missing. But it took additional effort to steady her breathing before she could speak without risk of retching. “Where’s the head?”

  A look of horrified alarm creased the nun’s face, as if the question had dented her resolve. “We… we thought it best to leave things as they are. I assure you nothing has been moved or touched.”

  Berenice could think of only two uses for the poor bastard’s head. So if it didn’t appear on a spike somewhere around town in the next day or two, then Marseilles-in-the-West had another problem. Very few people knew there was anything remarkable about Visser’s skull. Either somebody wanted to study it or they wanted to prevent others from doing so.

  It stank of the Verderer’s Office. And that meant tulip agents. She’d always known there would be at least a few rats hiding in the woodpile. But this…

  The murderers would have been covered in blood, perhaps even carrying a priest’s battered head. Berenice looked to the hallway, but saw no footprints leading away.

  She said, “This was the work of more than one person. They couldn’t have come through the front gate. I’d like to believe they would have been seen, or heard, if they’d come in through the front door as I did.”

  “It’s very quiet here at night,” said Sister Marie. “The children are always in bed, with candles out, after Compline. Those of us who stay engaged in necessary tasks until Matins always do so quietly.”

  Berenice mentally translated the liturgy of the hours from Nun Standard Time to Secret Atheist Ex-Noble Time. Compline: night prayer. Matins: midnight prayer.

  “They must have come in over the roof, then,” said Berenice. She looked more closely at the dormer. Sure enough, the boards were splintered, as if they’d been kicked out and then hastily restored.

  The crowd out front might have been a diversion, seemingly toothless and cowardly, providing distraction while the more ruthless elements stole inside to execute the priest. They’d waited until a nice overnight rain would provide cover and wash away their tracks.

  “Sister, were the malcontents by the fence gate any different yesterday or last night? Louder, perhaps?”

  The nun frowned, shrugged. “I can’t say. I don’t believe they were.”

  She couldn’t stop staring at the mangled body, hacked apart as though it were nothing but a gristly piece of mutton. Nobody deserved that. Especially poor Visser, whose only true crime was to be caught by the Clockmakers and made into their unwilling tool. He’d been a true servant of New France for many years. He deserved honors, not butchery.

  The barbarians who’d done this probably thought of themselves as patriotic vigilantes exacting French justice upon a lackey of the Brasswork Throne. They didn’t know Visser had spent decades in the service of New France, risking his life every single day as a secret Catholic—and, to Berenice’s observation, an exceedingly devout one—in the heart of the Central Provinces. They didn’t realize the man they murdered had clung to his duty even when hope was lost. Would they have butchered him if they’d known how, even as he waited for the Stemwinders to break down his door, the secret priest had gone to great lengths to ensure that one hard-sought piece of Guild technology would find its way to the New World? And that this one courageous action put in motion a sequence of events that would
eventually break the siege that nearly ended New France? Would they have executed him had they known the crucial role he played in their survival?

  The public knew none of these things. But why shouldn’t they? Visser had been the last survivor of Berenice’s network in The Hague. (If his existence as a helpless puppet of Anastasia Bell could be considered survival. Berenice had decidedly mixed feelings about that.) Revealing his role in Talleyrand’s long-secret war against the Clockmakers endangered nobody. And besides, once the rogues started crossing the sea, she suspected the tulips would have more pressing issues on their plates.

  Berenice resolved that Visser’s story would be told. What they knew of it, anyway; Daniel had known him as the pastor of the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague before his terrible downfall, and Berenice knew bits and pieces based on Visser’s ravings. Various priests had attended Visser as confessor, once he’d been freed of the geasa. Perhaps they’d learned of Visser’s early life. (Were the Vatican’s records destroyed when it fell?) They were a small band, but together they could piece together a life story. And she’d make damn certain those butchers outside knew every agonizing detail before they went to the gallows.

  To the nun, she said, “He was a hero of New France. And now a martyr. You know that, I hope.”

  She still couldn’t take her eyes from the carnage. The walls splashed crimson, the broken vertebra sticking from the minced-hamburger neck.

  Sister Marie shuddered.

  “Promise me something, Sister.” That got her attention. She snapped out of her contemplation of death to stare at Berenice, who said, “I want the sisters of Saint Jean-Baptiste to make Pastor Visser’s story known. So promise me that when you’re done praying for him, you’ll take up the man’s cause and lobby for a posthumous Légion d’honneur.”

  She did the math. Estimating the priest’s age had been difficult; guilt, self-hatred, and torment had taken a toll on his body. But if it was true that Visser had gone to the Central Provinces not long after being ordained, as Berenice had pieced together from the ravings, the man had secretly served New France for well over three decades, and maybe four. That was a record of noteworthy service lengthy enough to qualify as a chevalier, as she pointed out to the nun.

  “I suppose we can petition His Majesty.”

  “You can and you will. And when a new bishop of Marseilles rises, you will arrange an audience with His Excellency as soon as possible to personally plead Visser’s case and demand that his martyrdom become a defining issue of the resumed bishopric.”

  “You’re asking for quite a lot on behalf of a man who murdered the pope.”

  “Consider it a test of your faith. And be thankful you’ll never be tested like that poor bastard was.”

  PART II

  THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

  Mr. Peter… after dinner did show us the experiment (which I had heard talk of) of the chymicall glasses1… which is a great mystery to me.

  —FROM THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS, 13 JANUARY 1662

  We know for certain that it is the soul which has sensory awareness, and not the body… It is the soul which sees, not the eye.

  —FROM RENÉ DESCARTES, LA DIOPTRIQUE (1637)

  When ye Caduceus w/ ye 2 serpts are set to putrefy & are dissolved into liquor water & grown sufficiently subtle (wych may be in 3 days or a week) put in ye precipitation of ye scepter of Or better, let a chaos be made of ye four Elemts & quintessentia Ψ…

  —FROM ISAAC NEWTON, UNDATED FRAGMENTARY WORK, TENTATIVELY ASSOCIATED WITH PRAXIS2 (HUME TRANSLATION)

  CHAPTER

  9

  Le Griffon II was a three-masted barque, its mizzen rigged fore-and-aft, its fore and mainmasts rigged square to the keel. Designed for a complement of twenty hands, the crew of this historical voyage numbered over twice that, almost evenly split between humans and ticktocks. The humans included sailors, guards, chemists, two smiths (silver and gold), a tanner, a chocolatier, a physician, a deacon, a married geologist and mineralogist from the Académie des Sciences, and an otherwise odd assortment of women and men with nothing left in Marseilles. The Clakkers on board were almost exclusively servitors but for two military-class machines, whose presence on board caused considerable consternation. The barque’s sails blazed like fresh-fallen snow under the late-winter sun; King Sébastien had insisted the ship be properly outfitted, every square inch of sailcloth replaced whole. A lower deck had been retrofitted with pristine empty steel tanks for storing the spoils of their venture, should it find success. It could have done with a coat of paint, too, but there was no paint to be had. And anyway, the scars gave it character. The ship had disembarked from Grand Marais just as a Dutch raiding party arrived to torch the warehouses there and destroy the fur trade; the captain, a wily Hudson Bay native named Levesque, had braved winter on Ojibwe Gichigami, aka Le Lac Supérieur—the largest of the Great Lakes—always touching land as briefly as possible to avoid the mechanical raiders. They’d made it through the locks, canals, and rivers to arrive in Marseilles-in-the-West with a starving skeleton crew on the brink of surrender. Instead, they received a hero’s welcome for their pointless but valiant defiance of the invaders.

  The Clakkers approved of the vessel. It had no oars.

  Louis, Berenice’s late lamented husband, would have loved it. Her eye teared up when she thought of how he’d have reacted to the sight.

  It was amongst the largest class of vessels that could traverse the maritime thoroughfare stretching from Duluth on the far western end of the Great Lakes all the way to the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. It wasn’t an oceangoing vessel, but sailing the lakes could be like sailing the ocean: so vast the horizon disappeared, so unpredictable that sometimes entire ships did, too. As their voyage would only take them down the trusty Saint Lawrence and up the coast, almost always in sight of land, the vessel was eminently suitable for their venture.

  The tulips, she knew, sometimes sent icebreakers to the secret anchorage, suggesting a northerly destination. When handed a map and pencil, Montmorency had vaguely circled a stretch of coastline well beyond the northernmost French settlement in Acadia. The Griffon wasn’t an icebreaker. But the French expedition had two things on its side: the promise of spring, and dozens of mechanical hands, all itching to unravel the mystery of their own being. They’d break ice with their fists if they had to.

  If not for the fact they sank like a stone, and were slightly too heavy for the smaller yards, the machines could have made ideal sailors. Stronger than the timbers, yards, and lines of the barque itself, they didn’t sleep, didn’t crap, and didn’t eat. It left plenty of room for the humans’ provisions. As long as they didn’t change their clickety-clackety minds and decide to butcher the entire human complement… But Daniel, tetchy as he was, seemed disinclined to condone such a thing, and they would listen to him. If the Clakkers absolutely had to act like the woolly-headed adherents of a reluctant prophet, she decided, they could do much worse than Daniel. He had his faults, but on balance she’d choose his overbearing conscience over another’s bloodlessness.

  Le Griffon’s namesake was the first full-sized vessel to ply the Great Lakes. It had crisscrossed the wild, uncharted waters of New France for a brief six weeks in 1679. It recalled the time of great men like Robert de La Salle, who’d claimed the entire Mississippi basin for New France. News of Huygens’s evil miracle had barely penetrated the hinterlands at that time. The original Griffon had sailed in the last days of the old world, the Golden Age of Old France, an unspoilt Eden devoid of Clockmakers and Verderers, servitors and Stemwinders. A time before the future had been consumed by a clanking maw of cogs and dark magic. It seemed appropriate, then, that this expedition should harken back to those days. After all, that era had been thought lost forever. But depending on how the expedition fared, perhaps it wasn’t.

  Berenice stood amidst a small group of citizens at the stern, watching the Spire recede. The Crown, the Keep, and the Spire: That’s what generations of sailors had seen when plying
the waters around the Île de Vilmenon. But the citadel’s outer wall was gone now, and with it the illusion of the Crown. It would have broken Louis’s heart to see that. Mont Royal would never be the same. Perhaps it was part of the price New France had to pay for outlasting the imperial hegemony of the Brasswork Throne.

  “I wish I could have seen it in its heyday,” said Daniel.

  Berenice replied, “You know what? I can’t help but wonder if New France ever had such a thing.” What glory had there ever been, living in constant fear of the next war? Living penned like cattle behind high walls? Was mere survival a worthy source of pride? Now that the future was so uncertain, and yet so full of promise, the struggles and triumphs of previous generations seemed trite.

  “Perhaps our glory is yet to come,” she said.

  Élodie frowned. A true defender of New France, the sergeant wore her polymer armor breastplate even now. Yet it was strange to see her without an epoxy gun slung over her back or a pick and sledge in her hands. The ship carried dozens of epoxy guns in the hold, but they’d be useless until the expedition reclaimed the illicit chemical stockpiles—assuming they existed—and converted them into munitions.

  The humans eyed the mechanicals with suspicion. But whatever the chandlers’ daughter felt deep in her secret heart of hearts, she kept it to herself. Because that’s what her orders required.

  Berenice beckoned Élodie and Daniel toward the taffrail, drawing them away from the press. She asked the guardswoman, “What’s the mood on the boat right now? Amongst our countrymen, I mean.”

  As a courtesy, Berenice translated for Daniel: “There isn’t a soul on board who’s entirely comfortable with the arrangement.”

  Daniel said, “Soul? I like you Catholics.”

  Berenice rolled her eyes. “It’s a figure of speech, and you know it.” To the sergeant, she said, “Will it be a problem?”