The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 16

  She wondered if Anastasia Bell had survived her injuries, and what the Clockmakers would do to her this time. She’d learned something useful in this escapade, but it was all for naught. Knowing this quickened the nauseated churning in her gut. Thoughts of torture sent rivulets of sweat trickling between her breasts.

  They transited a passageway populated with a handful of mechanicals bent to their tasks as if nothing unusual had happened (one had already taken up the painting that had gone abandoned when Berenice called the ill-fated porter into her cabin), then descended again. Berenice thought they’d be taken to the galley. The ship didn’t have a brig; probably they’d be chained to some hefty piece of the ship’s infrastructure, such as one of the massive spars that drove the ship across the sea.

  But instead their escorts pulled them to a halt next to a hatch in the outer bulkhead. An emergency egress, probably, in case the mechanicals needed to get out on the hull at or near the waterline. Her hearing had rallied; she could hear the chattering of the recovering Clockmaker’s teeth.

  He said, “Wh-wh-why have we stopped? Where are we g-g-go—”

  A quiet crack interrupted him. At the same instant, the Clakker released her wrist. New terror shot down her spine like a lightning bolt.

  She turned just in time to see her escort clamp its hands on either side of van Breugel’s head. His neck made the same disconcertingly gentle crack as the machine twisted his head half off. The dead man slumped to the deck like a sack of turnips. There he joined the Verderer, who no longer shivered.

  —Oh God oh God oh God oh God—

  Berenice tried to back away, but only pinned herself to the bulkhead. The Clakker that murdered van Breugel reached for her. She flinched from the touch of its cold fingers. It pulled her close and peered at her face. Bezels rotated behind its gemstone eyes while it scrutinized her every crow’s-foot and freckle.

  It said, “Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord?”

  Too frightened to breathe, too surprised to blink, she said nothing. Meanwhile the other Clakker spun the wheel and opened the emergency exit. Cold wind and salty mist gusted into the passage. They stood just a bit above the waterline. A dory rested against the hull. The small rowboat, oars and all, could have balanced upon just one of the Pelikaan’s scull blades.

  The Clakker didn’t wait for an answer. “Come with us,” it said, and carried her through the hatch into the boat.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Immediately after the privy council audience, Longchamp relented and rode the funicular down with Sergeant Chrétien. Not out of sloth, but because it was one of the faster ways down. (Falling was the fastest, but also the most permanent.) The captain and the sergeant cast their eyes over the line of petitioners, but none of the assembled hopefuls drew particular attention. The captain asked Simon to point out the fellow whom he’d addressed as “Father.” Simon knew exactly whom Longchamp meant, but the agitated petitioner priest had already quit the queue.

  “He sticks out in the memory because he’d worked himself into a good lather about seeing the king. Practically vibrating, if you can believe it.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “Never knew it. Come on, sir. The petitioners’ line isn’t a meet-and-greet. You taught us that.”

  Damn it, but the man was right.

  “Do you remember his face?”

  “No. But I remember his bandages.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Had the look of a fellow who’d seen a fair bit of nastiness, sir. Wore a hat, on account of the weather, but under the brim you could see wrappings that went all the way around. Yellowed, maybe not changed in a while? And his fingers… He grabbed my arm at one point. I think they’d been broken, sir, and not set properly.”

  Chrétien said, “The tulips did a number on him.”

  Longchamp asked, “Was he French?”

  Simon looked down, frowning. Finally, he shrugged. “Well, his French had an odd scrape in it. Like it’d been stowed away a long time and he hadn’t finished knocking off all the rust. Faint, though.”

  The captain and sergeant shared a look. Then Chrétien asked, “Could it have been a provincial accent? Acadian, perhaps?” The French lands along the Atlantic coast had begun as a settlement separate from New France, and over the centuries their speech had taken on the tang of the sea. “Or points west?” The French who lived on the far edges of the Great Lakes lived in close proximity to a variety of native tribes, giving rise to a bewildering amount of linguistic cross-pollination.

  “I know how the cod-eaters and the woods runners sound, sir. He wasn’t either.”

  Longchamp said, “You called him ‘Father.’ How did you know he was a priest? Did he tell you?”

  “Well, I drew my own conclusions based on his dog collar.”

  “Ah. Nice work of deduction, that.”

  “I’ve learned from your example, sir.”

  “Haven’t we all,” said Chrétien.

  Simon added, “Speaking of the dog collar, he said something a bit strange at one point. He asked where he could find the bishop’s residence.”

  “He planned to visit the bishop of Marseilles?”

  Simon shrugged. “I pointed to the basilica and told him the bishop slept in a marble sarcophagus.”

  “What kind of a priest,” said Chrétien, “doesn’t know his bishop has been dead for months?”

  Longchamp kneaded his beard. “We have to find that holy turd-licker.”

  Simon crossed himself. “What’s he done, anyway?”

  The captain thought back over Berenice’s cryptic letter. What did she believe? What did he believe? Longchamp honestly didn’t know. But her instincts told her to keep an eye on this Visser bastard, and Longchamp’s instincts told him to trust her instincts.

  “Maybe nothing. But he’s an interesting stranger. And a walled citadel preparing for a long siege by implacable enemies needs interesting strangers less than it needs plague, panic, and rats in the granary.”

  Sergeant Chrétien said, “Shouldn’t be hard to find him with those bandages. I’ll set up an extra patrol. And I’ll spread word at the gatehouses, too. He might be staying outside the walls.”

  “Fine, but keep it quiet. Let’s not spook him. If he wants to see the king so damn badly, he’ll be back. Keep an extra man or two in the vicinity when the petitioners are gathered here.” Longchamp turned to leave, paused, turned again. “And tell them not to wear their fucking uniforms.”

  The next day, another pigeon from Trois-Rivières carried news that balloon-borne spotters reported metal on the move. It was the last pigeon to arrive from Trois-Rivières. The day after that, Brigit Lafayette reported no pigeons had arrived from Saint Agnes. Nor Saint Hénédine. The sky had swallowed them whole, she said, chewed them up, and spat out nothing. Not even feathers.

  The semaphore towers fell silent, too. The tulips were systematically burning the towers as they advanced up the Saint Lawrence toward Marseilles-in-the-West.

  A pigeon did arrive from Québec, carrying tidings even worse than the uncertainty of silence. The machines had entered the holy city, and the conclave of cardinals assembled to elect a successor to murdered Pope Clement XI had fallen under siege. The Swiss Guard requested immediate reinforcements.

  The approach of an enemy force wasn’t the kind of thing that one could keep quiet; news of each silenced village or hamlet spread through the city outside the keep walls almost as soon as it reached the Spire. The population inside the walls grew steadily as citizens flooded the outer keep for a chance at crowded safety before the Clakkers arrived and the king sealed the gates. There wasn’t room for a fraction of the people who wanted to feel safe. Longchamp refused to call them refugees when the city hadn’t burned yet. It would, sooner than later. Everybody and their dimwitted half sister knew it. Which led to the current scene at the North Gate.

  Longchamp join
ed a dozen guards whom he sent to keep the line orderly. Among them went Élodie Chastain, the chandlers’ daughter.

  By the time the gate opened at sunrise, the line already stretched for a quarter of a mile and it continued to grow. It was a writhing serpent made animate by fear and selfishness. Its hiss was the creak of wagons and laments of children; its scent the tang of sweat and stink of horseshit; the rippling of its scales the hunch of aching shoulders under heavy packs and the shuffling of numb feet.

  Many of those lucky enough to own a cart or wagon and draft animals to haul it had loaded their belongings. Those lucky enough to have belongings worth saving from the ravages of the tulips but not fortunate enough to have beasts of burden trudged across the frozen mud with great bundles upon their backs, or dragged sledges across the ground, straining against their forehead straps like voyageurs of old. Few brought forage for their animals. Apparently they thought the keep was a magical land.

  The keep couldn’t accommodate a fraction of the arrivals. Even sleeping on the ground—and most of those lucky enough to get inside would be doing just that—they’d be penned together like livestock. Longchamp no longer saw individuals trying to eke out a living from troubled times; he saw mouths poised to deplete food stores, and assholes to tax the plumbing and befoul the cisterns. And that was a Goddamned fairy tale compared with what would happen if the Clakkers breached the outer wall. In that case the outer yard would become a charnel house, those penned inside nothing but lowing cattle assembled for butchery. And the panicked, stampeding throng would prevent the defenders from engaging the machines.

  A single military Clakker had turned the waters of a fountain red with its victims’ lives in the space of a few minutes. What would happen when a horde came over the wall and found victims crammed shoulder-to-shoulder? The bloodshed would be unimaginable. Biblical.

  Longchamp wasn’t the only person to see this. The line was peppered with loony-eyed God-botherers exhorting the throng to repent, to cast off their worldly attachments, to accept the coming of the metal tide as the Lord’s punishment for the sins and decadence of New France. Decadence? Longchamp wondered how New France was more decadent than the Central Provinces, where everybody had two mechanicals to wipe his ass and a third to feed him bonbons while he sat on the shitter.

  Most of the arrivals tried to ignore the Bible-thumpers, or openly mocked them, or told them to shut up. But still, a handful wondered if there might be a grain of truth in the exhortations. A handful was all it took before despair took root. It could run through a besieged population faster than the bloody flux. And kill just as thoroughly.

  One such prophet stopped before a man and a woman trying to handle a wheelbarrow and two squalling infants. The placard he shook in their faces read: LE MIRACLE DE HUYGENS EST LA COLÈRE DE DIEU.

  He wound up for another foam-flecked tirade. “Our sins have brought—”

  Longchamp wrapped one fist around the knot of hair that hung behind the bastard’s shoulders and gave it a solid yank. His teeth clicked together hard enough to make the husband wince, though his wife didn’t bother to hide her grateful smirk. The placard tumbled into the churned mud of the verge. Longchamp spun the man around.

  And reeled. The greasy God-botherer reeked as if he hadn’t bathed in a month of Christmases. So he’s one of those. Wonderful.

  He spat tobacco into the verge. Breathing through his mouth, Longchamp said, “Let’s take a prayerful moment together, friend.”

  “It’s too late for us! We turned our backs on the Risen Christ and now even the Blessed Virgin turns a deaf ear to our—”

  Longchamp tugged on the greasy hair again. This wasn’t quite a savage yank, but it was close enough that they shared a fence and traded gossip while hanging the laundry. “I meant just the two of us. And it wasn’t a request.”

  He frogmarched the smelly fellow a few yards away, far enough that they wouldn’t obstruct the flow of traffic.

  “I know your type,” he said. “Spent enough time around orphanages and nuns and other godly institutions to know all the ways a shifty fuck like you can turn piety into a source of income without taking vows or doing anything that resembles an honest day’s work.”

  “I am doing the Lord’s work by delivering His message!”

  “Friend, your Lord and my Lord are not the same. You know why? Because my God would look upon this line and see decent, hardworking, reverent souls trying to make the very best of a landslide of shit. My God would look on you, spreading fear and doubt and despair, and recognize the Devil’s work.” This received a smattering of applause. “I think He would also see a mean little man using the promise of difficult times for self-aggrandizement. Thing of it is? We already have more grandees than we can handle.” Longchamp used his fistful of the man’s hair to pull his head back. He pointed at the Spire. “Up there.” Then tipped the false prophet’s head back down so they could make eye contact. “Down here, folks like you and me have to deal with the messy realities of day-to-day life. And your day-to-day life, friend, is going to come up short on ‘days’ but long on ‘messy’ if I see or hear or smell you peddling your eschatological snake oil anywhere near these walls.”

  Longchamp released the other man and gave him a gentle nudge in the direction of town. This received another smattering of applause. The false prophet turned, tried to scuttle around Longchamp as he reached for the placard. But the captain stepped on the narrow wooden haft. It appeared to have been fashioned from a fence slat. “We’re taking donations for siege supplies. Marseilles-in-the-West thanks you for the generous donation of this firewood.”

  The God-botherer strode toward town, picking up the flinders of his dignity.

  Just then the great bourdon bell of the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Jean-Baptiste rang Sext, the noontime Divine Office. That meant the petitioners’ line would be reopened soon. Time to move inside and watch for Berenice’s mystery man.

  Longchamp begged the use of a rope merchant’s cart. A few children in the line whispered to each other as they pointed to the pick and hammer affixed to the captain’s pack. He knew some of the adults did, too, and it soured his stomach. An exaggerated folktale wouldn’t save these people when the machines arrived. He climbed aboard the cart and scanned the line. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and gave a piercing whistle (yet another thing he’d learned from the nuns). The babble of human voices fell into a hush, but the braying of donkeys and nervous shuffling of horses took up the slack. He caught Sergeant Chrétien’s eye and motioned to a few of the other guards, including Élodie.

  She reached him before the others and snapped off a sharp salute. She’d taken to her stint with the city guard without complaint or prevarication. Unlike her father, who, according to all the scuttlebutt in the barracks, continued to gripe about the institutionalized evil of the conscription lottery. She rode well, he noted; took her training seriously, too, by all accounts. He had half a hope that she might actually be useful, unlike two-thirds of the fucking pathetic parade that passed through the conscription lottery. Too early to tell if she’d be any use when the shit came raining down, but for now she wore armor and carried a truncheon. In a civvy’s eyes that made her a real guard, and that belief did half of a guard’s work for her.

  “All right, lass. Let’s see if we can make you into a real guardswoman today.” He pointed at the truncheon. “Have they taught you how to use that thing yet, or is it just for show?”

  “Yes, sir. No, sir. Not for show, sir.”

  The guards at the gate forced a gap in the line so Longchamp and his entourage could reenter the walls. The gap closed as soon as they trotted through the gate. They passed a clump of stonemasons and chemists excavating a narrow borehole in the curtain wall with a water-powered auger. It was but one of many such teams; the cumulative screech of their tools could have raised the dead.

  Longchamp led his group through the outer keep at a canter. He reined up when they approached the inner keep. The others followed his
example to doff their forage caps and replace them with the inconspicuous knit caps that he produced from his sack. From a barrel under a rainspout, he pulled a mismatched assortment of cloaks and coats. While the guards covered their uniforms and armor, Longchamp gave orders.

  He sent Sergeant Chrétien and two others through the inner wall first, with orders to take the long way around and approach the funicular station from the south. Longchamp, along with Corporal Simon and lowly conscript Élodie, would take a more direct path from the north. Both groups were to dismount before entering the square. Then they were to mingle with the crowds around the fountain. He repeated the description of the man they sought.

  “And for the love of the Virgin Mary,” he summarized, “stay as inconspicuous as the warts on a toad’s ass.”

  Two trios rode through the inner wall, then split. Though the day had dawned bright and still, the cloudless sky made for a frigid morning. The high walls of the inner keep trapped the smoke of a hundred chimneys. They rode through a miasma. It smelled like a campfire built with wet green wood by the world’s most inexperienced voyageurs.

  Élodie kept flicking sidelong glances in Longchamp’s direction. The third time it happened, he snorted.

  “A question, sir?”

  “That is a question. But I’m feeling magnanimous today, so out with it.”

  “You stressed that we should stay inconspicuous. But you… Um.” She faltered.

  Simon nodded. He mimed running a hand across his chin, as though stroking a beard. “She has a point.”

  “It’s not just the beard. Everybody knows you.” She risked a nascent smile. “I mean, you’re the Hero of—”

  “Don’t fucking say it.”

  The smile died in its crib. She swallowed.

  He said, “We think our new friend is recently arrived in town. So he might not know me on sight. But if he does, and the sight of me makes him nervous, well, that’s something useful, too.”