The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Read online

  A metal foot kicked the door so hard that the handle shot across the room. It shattered against the hull before the door spun through its arc to smash against the hinge stops and snap them in half. Two servitors and a human stood in the passageway.

  “Jesus Christ!” she said. “What if I’d been changing?”

  (Clockmakers lie, said Sparks. Clockmakers lie, replied the other machines, almost inaudible over the crackling of the crumpled door.)

  The human had the face of a young man, the pince-nez and receding hairline of a middle-aged man, and the rosy-cross pendant of a Guild flunky. He said, “This ship is carrying a dangerous fugitive. She is carrying property stolen from the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists. We are recovering it.”

  “Goodness,” said Berenice, trying to swallow her thundering heart before it burst through her throat. “Not one for preambles, are you?”

  The Guildman’s gaze swept over the tiny cabin. It bounced twice on the disabled servitor on the floor—he quirked an eyebrow at this—before landing on the open porthole. A wintry ocean breeze chose that moment to gust the scent of sea salt into the stateroom.

  “Chilly day for an open porthole, isn’t it?”

  Berenice suppressed a shiver; why did the sea wind have to be so Goddamned cold just then?

  “Well, as you can see, all I have are the clothes on my back and this clattering bucket of rust. I’d hate to keep you from terrorizing the other passengers.”

  He pointed at the inert Clakker. “What happened here?”

  “Catastrophic malfunction. Damnedest thing,” she said, knowing how weak it sounded. Damn it, damn it, damn it. She was nauseatingly unprepared for this. She didn’t have a legend at her fingertips. Her contingency plans hadn’t included a titanship running them down in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Oh, for an epoxy grenade.

  The servitors in the passageway hadn’t moved an inch since kicking down the door. They stood rooted to the deck, an impassable barricade of clockwork magic. Stemwinders were probably too bulky to navigate the close confines of the ship’s lower decks. But it wouldn’t surprise her if they prowled the titanship.

  “We believe the fugitive may be impersonating a Guild member.” Next, the Guildman addressed Sparks. “Machine. Whom do you serve?”

  “I serve exclusively the Verderer’s Office of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists, via my secondment to the service of Mistress de Jong.”

  Under her breath, Berenice said, “I hope you rust, you teakettle traitor.”

  The Guildman looked at Berenice again. His mouth assumed a moue of irritation akin to that of a bank teller frowning at mismatched tallies. “The Verderer’s Office out of New Amsterdam, I presume? Oddly, I don’t recognize you.”

  “I’ve spent the past—” How long? Oh, Christ, she was down to free improvisation now. “—seven years living incognito among the jack-pine savages.”

  From behind her came a metronomic ticktocking. Berenice’s heart gave a little lurch. A bit more loudly, she added, “No need to worry about the Frenchies. I found no evidence of realistic or dedicated efforts to unravel our work. As detailed in my report.”

  She’d gone so far off script she’d begun to babble. This turd-muncher had her dead to rights; the best she could hope for was to squeeze out a few more seconds.

  The Guildman spoke another command at Sparks. “Describe the circumstances of your…”

  The ticking grew disruptively loud. The Guildman trailed off. In unison, he and Berenice looked to the porter. The servitor unfolded, ratcheting upright while the sigils swirled around its keyhole like the uncoiling of a wrung-out dishcloth. She’d twisted the key clockwise and the etchings along with it, but now the fine marks orbited counterclockwise about the keyhole.

  The machines in the passageway straightened. Stiffened. So did Sparks. A subtle change altered their ticktock cacophony; if it was linguistic, the meaning slipped past Berenice. Three machines and two humans watched the heretofore inert servitor.

  The ratcheting tapered off. It settled into the standard servitor stance, jouncing slightly on its backward knees to compensate for the swaying of the ship. Bezels hummed like a beehive as the crystalline eyes surveyed the scene. Its head pivoted through a full circle. Sweat trickled from Berenice’s armpits. The machine was resetting. Recalibrating. It appeared the removal of the key had returned the machine to full function.

  But what of its metageasa? Were those still intact? Or had they been warped, even erased? If she’d believed in God at that moment, she would have prayed for it to be so. Hard to be an unrepentant atheist with months of harsh interrogation standing just a few seconds away…

  To Sparks, she said, “Fetch my valise.”

  Then she looked at the porter. Pointing a thumb over her shoulder, she said, “They’re here to disassemble you.”

  For one pregnant instant all she could hear was the rush of blood in her ears, the lapping of waves against the hulls of the two ships, the thrum of the lines strung between them, the creak of stowed sculls.

  Seven kinds of hell broke loose all at once.

  Sparks tackled Berenice. He wrapped his body in a protective shell about her as he hurled her to the deck. Still falling, she watched as—

  —the porter spun so quickly its feet etched scorch marks in the planking. The scent of singed sawdust filled the cabin as it dived for the porthole, its body ratcheting into a javelin, while—

  —the Guild servitors pushed their master aside—

  —(His yelp became the gasp of wind knocked from his lungs.)—

  —and flung themselves after the porter. Still caught in that half second of freefall, Berenice felt the hurricane wind of their passage ruffle her hair as the duo blurred across the cabin just a fraction of an inch over Sparks.

  All the breath whooshed out of Berenice’s lungs. Then she was spinning, tumbling inside a brass cage, away from a shower of embers and the deafening squeal of overstressed metal. Sparks and Berenice rolled to a stop in the passageway.

  Three days earlier, the ship had just passed the breakwater. The galley Clakkers rowed it into the choppy gray sea beyond the harbor. The almost imperceptible sway of the deck became a gentle but irregular rocking. The New Amsterdam harborfront slid past the porthole. Ahead lay countless leagues of trackless sea and, eventually, England. Behind lay Nieuw Nederland, and enemies too plentiful to count.

  Not for the first time, she cursed the loss of her last epoxy grenade. Lacking any defense against the mechanicals that would eventually—inevitably—come for her, she had to formulate a new contingency plan.

  To Sparks, standing folded in the corner, she said, “I am chasing particularly dangerous people, and it is likely they will attempt to do me violence.” The tiniest of lies. The danger of violence to her person was entirely true; she dissembled only in the matter of who chased whom. “If I feel I am in imminent danger of bodily harm, I will tell you to ‘fetch my valise,’ in those exact words. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, mistress. If you say ‘fetch my valise,’ I shall immediately undertake whatever actions are necessary to safeguard your person.”

  “It will become your highest priority, superseding all other geasa,” she said, knowing this wasn’t possible. Not as long as she couldn’t erase or alter the hierarchical metageasa embedded in Sparks’s construction. But it was better than nothing, and the Verderer’s pendant imbued her edicts with considerable metaphysical heft.

  Better still, she thought, would be never putting her contingency plan to the test.

  Berenice scrambled free before she was trapped in Sparks’s protective embrace.

  There was a jagged gash in the hull where the neat round porthole had been. The torn metal had been peeled outward as though an explosion had blown it out. The porter had hurled itself through the porthole, using its preternatural strength to shred the mundane steel of the hull. Berenice’s cabin lay above the waterline, so unless the ship began to roll in
very high seas, the breach posed no danger to the ship. The crew would patch it quickly enough.

  The porter had taken her warning about capture to heart. And whatever her experiment with the key had done to the beast, it clearly no longer heeded the nautical metageasa. Else it wouldn’t have shredded the hull. The keys somehow put the Clakkers into a mode where the fundamental hierarchy of obedience could be altered, making them receptive to a reshuffling of priorities. It prepared them to receive altered metageasa shone straight into their eyes—imposed optically. But when the titanship cast a shadow, disrupting the process, all its metageasa—the very foundation of its subservience—were corrupted…

  Fuck me sideways. Have I just found a glitch in the system?

  A fraction of an instant later, the Guild servitors had recognized the porter was operating with severely compromised hierarchical metageasa, perhaps to the point of being a full-blown rogue. And in that split second their own metageasa had overtaken them, rending them slaves to the highest law in the empire: that malfunctioning machines must be subdued. If Sparks hadn’t already been in motion tackling her, it would have seen what they did and joined the chase.

  A deafening tocsin erupted from the other mechanicals on both vessels: the Rogue Clakker alarm. Sparks’s jaw hinged open. Still crouched, he froze in place and joined the shrieking chorus. The noise coming out of his torso had to be alchemically augmented; it couldn’t possibly be the product of the Clakker voicebox alone.

  The galley Clakkers joined the chorus. The sound became a physical force that battered Berenice to her knees. It was louder, more piercing, than she’d remembered. Berenice clapped her palms over her ears before the shrill ruptured her eardrums. The sound threatened to vibrate her remaining eye into jelly. Her mind, too.

  Somebody had decided the compromised porter was a full-blown rogue.

  She knew, based on what she’d witnessed at the Forge in New Amsterdam, that the Rogue alarm would momentarily paralyze all the Clakkers within earshot. That was also consistent with what Jax had described. Berenice glanced through the ruptured hull. Even the titanship’s tentacular oars had frozen in midthrash.

  The frozen Clakkers would buy her a bit of time. And she’d disarmed the Verderer. Temporarily. But she could do better. Spread more chaos.

  Eyes wide and chest heaving, he staggered to his feet. His lips moved, but whether there was voice behind them she couldn’t say. Berenice kicked him in the groin. He doubled over. Next she grabbed him by the collar and hauled him through the ruined door into her cabin. Her hands left crimson smears on his coat—blood from her own ears, she knew. Halfway to the ruptured hull he understood her intent and fought back. Still doubled in pain, he tried to drive an elbow into her stomach. She twisted aside. His fist smacked against her temple. He spun to keep his balance. Berenice kicked him in the stomach. He stumbled backward. His heels banged against the hull. His arms flailed, churning the cold sea air like the props on the great airships, but he found no purchase. The Guildman tumbled through the rupture to splash into the North Atlantic.

  Berenice ran to the hull. Saw him thrashing in the wintery waters. The sea between the two ships was strangely calm, unafflicted by the choppy waves of the open sea.

  As a precaution in case somebody witnessed her looking down at the flailing man, she cupped her hands to her mouth.

  “Man overboard!” she yelled, as though she cared.

  But she might as well have been mouthing the words and nothing more: Adding sound to the cacophony was as pointless as irrigating the ocean. She yelled again for good measure.

  A shadow flitted through the gap between the ships. The rogue porter leaped into the sea. It had no choice if it wanted to escape.

  Berenice ducked back inside. She slid her stolen Guild pendant and the key into her boot. Then she stumbled past Sparks—still frozen—through passageways filled with crippling noise, past motionless mechanicals. To van Breugel’s office. It was locked.

  The ship’s horologist probably had orders to safeguard any Guild technology in case of emergency. Or even—oh, hell—to scuttle it in case there was imminent danger of it falling into the wrong hands. Like Berenice’s.

  She pounded her fists against the door. Pointless. She kicked at the handle. Once. Twice. A stab of pain shot through her leg, jolting her hip. Gritting her teeth past the pain, she kicked again and again. She needed van Breugel’s equipment and she needed him.

  Perhaps he saw the door rattling in its frame, perhaps he’d decided to chance a peek outside, but the door opened. Berenice and van Breugel blinked at each other. Mouthed at each other. Berenice shoved the horologist inside and slammed the door.

  He shrugged. Moved his lips again. It was easy to read his lips when she knew exactly what he was trying to ask.

  She rummaged his desk for scrap paper. He pushed a pen into her hands. She’d been thinking about Jax, and that gave shape to the lie she scribbled.

  It was masquerading among the galley Clakkers. Next she wrote, Are your materials safe? He nodded. Gather them and come with me. I’m getting you out of here.

  He nodded again. Van Breugel believed that Berenice, a Verderer, was duty-bound to physically protect him and the Guild secrets he carried for the duration of the crisis that kept their Clakkers occupied. In truth he was her disguise, her escape, or her hostage, depending on what they encountered en route to the lifeboats.

  The deck stopped vibrating. She could only assume the alarm had ended: The piercing noise in her ears made it impossible to know. Berenice had heard tales of opera sopranos shattering wineglasses with the power of their voices; she didn’t doubt her own tinnitus could do the same.

  The real horologist again opened the cabinet containing the key ring and the leather valise. Everything unfolded as though Berenice were watching through a thick pane of glass, for even the key ring jangled silently. Berenice dropped the key ring and book of tables into the valise as well. The satchel had an elaborate lock. He activated it.

  Together they crept into the passageway. The search for the sunken rogue, if it was still ongoing, unfolded elsewhere. Berenice motioned at the ship’s horologist to lock his office door; this busied his hands for a moment and gave her an excuse to relieve him of the satchel. They headed for the lifeboats. This was tricky: She had to appear as though she was in the lead, watching for dangers as she escorted van Breugel, but she didn’t know exactly where to go. Presumably the boats hung from davits on the main deck, so she headed up. As they climbed to the upper decks, Berenice was alarmed to see and hear how rapidly the chaos of the chase was dissipating.

  She tried to hurry the horologist along. They couldn’t very well abandon the ship without the convenient excuse of a crisis. But when they gained the deck, she saw they were too late: The situation was indeed under control. Captain Barendregt and his officers stood in a clump, peering across—and up—to the deck of the titanship. Where a servitor writhed in the four-handed embrace of a Stemwinder. The mechanical centaur dwarfed the struggling machine, holding it aloft with one brassy fist clenched around each of its wrists and ankles.

  How did they fish that poor bastard from the drink? Berenice wondered. It should have sunk straight to Neptune’s realm while the others were paralyzed. But then she glimpsed again the titanship’s writhing tentacular oars. She imagined them stretching, growing thinner and thinner as they lanced the sea… She shuddered.

  The ships had drifted still closer together, nearly to the point of touching. She looked into the sea between the ships. The Clakkers on both ships had returned to normal function. Somebody had heard or seen the man who’d gone overboard; even now he was scooped, blue and shuddering, into a bosun’s chair that hung from a davit alongside the lifeboats. He was still conscious.

  Shit, shit, shit. He’d finger Berenice the moment he was halfway warm enough to speak, or point.

  She looked up just in time to see the porter’s limbs torn free of its torso in a spray of cogs, springs, and shattered alloys. Th
e Stemwinder crushed its head like a soft-boiled egg before hurling the remains of the dismembered rogue into the sea.

  Her mouth soured. She swallowed. I did that.

  Rogues were supposed to be executed in the Grand Forge, she thought. Apparently they did things differently on the high seas.

  A porter servitor swung the bosun’s chair over the deck. The Verderer’s head lolled as if the frigid waters had dissolved his spine. Another Clakker came forward with blankets and friction-heated ceramic. While the machines swaddled him, the Verderer tried to point at Berenice. The brush with hypothermia left him incomprehensible, but the captain’s preexisting doubts about Berenice did the rest.

  “That’s it.” Barendregt addressed his human deck officers. It sounded like his voice came from ten leagues away. “Until we have a solid picture of just what the hell is going on, and until we can establish everybody’s bona fides, I want all Guild representatives confined. That includes him,” he added, pointing to the wet, shivering man. A pair of mechanical porters rounded up the three alleged Clockmakers. One handled the man still recovering from his dip in the icy sea, while the other took both Berenice and van Breugel by the arm.

  The ship’s real horologist objected. “Captain! I’ve sailed with you for years.” He looked at Berenice as if to see if she were as scandalized as he. “Can he do this?”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “Yes he can.”

  But van Breugel persisted. “I protest most strongly!”

  “Oh, just stow it,” she said. “This will all get sorted soon enough.”

  Their escorts frog-marched the trio belowdecks. Berenice stumbled alongside van Breugel. The other Guildman followed, half supported by the second machine. She didn’t struggle. The Clakker’s fingers formed a circlet about her wrist stronger than steel. Strangely, it didn’t relieve her of the satchel. But then, what good would it do her now?

  She’d been captured again. Berenice’s almost-victim would soon recover from his hypothermia enough to unravel the situation for the captain. She’d be back in the custody of the Verderer’s Office.