The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Read online

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Longchamp’s mind raced. Turned inward, the sprayers on the outer walls could hit the lower reaches of the Spire. But it would be a tricky shot from so far away, and Visser would probably be too high and out of range before they could attempt it. What of the new steam harpoons? Rickety things with an unknown, untested maximum range.

  Élodie and the other guards looked to him. “Sir?”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her toward the heliograph station. He sent another guard to the inner wall. “Run! I want sprayers and harpoons trained on the Spire fucking yesterday. Free firing!”

  Just don’t hit the gantries… If those came down, they’d never have time to rebuild before the siege began.

  Visser emerged from behind the Spire. He’d already made two revolutions of the Porter’s Prayer and was beginning a third. He hadn’t slowed.

  The nearest suitable weapons were hundreds of feet overhead: the stash of anti-Clakker ordnance kept in reserve as the king’s very last line of defense if the metal horde swarmed the inner keep and ascended the Spire. They had to get ahead of Visser.

  He sprinted for the funicular. Sergeant Chrétien fell in alongside him. Longchamp wrenched the door open so hard he thought for a moment he’d warped the hinges. The steel floor of the car rang like an abused bell under the tromping of their boots. Chrétien elbowed the glass case for the emergency release. Glass tinkled to the floor. He wrenched the lever. Somewhere under them, a pump shunted water from the ballast tanks. The car shook like a hotblooded racehorse waiting for the gate to spring open.

  The chuff-chuff of a goop thrower boomed across the inner keep. Longchamp wrenched his neck, turning too quickly to watch a glistening glob undulate through the empty space between the wall and the Spire. It disappeared overhead. He hoped to hell the gunners weren’t about to paralyze the keep with shit aim. Bad enough if they coated half the Spire—

  A piercing steam whistle sliced through his worries.

  “Hold on!” said Chrétien.

  He yanked the emergency brake lever upright again. Élodie leaped into the car. It shot up before she landed, catching her off-balance and slamming her face against the floor. Longchamp hauled her to her feet. Her nose bled.

  The scarlet twists of the Porter’s Prayer fell away like autumn leaves. A flash of fire and steam atop the inner wall launched a harpoon at them. What first looked like a sliver they would outrun swelled into four feet of black iron traveling faster than their car. He couldn’t see where the harpoon hit the Spire, but they felt it. The tracks shook; outside, the stairs bounced like a spring.

  The shadow of a gantry crane flashed over them. Chrétien jerked his chin at Longchamp’s pick and hammer, still dangling from his pack. The captain was the only one of the trio carrying weapons: an awkward fact that couldn’t be overlooked in the confines of the car. Aside from hurting Visser’s feelings, just what in the hell could they do to the rampaging whatever-the-hell he was?

  The quaver in Chrétien’s voice betrayed his attempt at nonchalance when he said, “The king will probably make you a baron this time, if you can do it again.”

  Longchamp shook his head. “We take Visser alive if at all possible. I want to know what he knows.”

  The Spire shook again. Another impact, this one close enough to knock them off their feet. The sergeant looked up, at the oncoming track. “Oh, shit—”

  The funicular slammed into the harpoon that had just pierced the Spire. The car tried to wrap itself around the iron spear. The sudden deceleration launched all three occupants against the ceiling. And then to the floor, where they landed in a heap.

  The hammer tried to knock a new hole in Longchamp’s head. It was a miracle the pick didn’t impale him. Chrétien’s head slammed against the floor; he stopped moving. Élodie moaned. All three of them had been lacerated by flying glass. Blood slicked the canted floor, and ran in rivulets toward the door swaying like an unlatched gate over a two-hundred-foot drop.

  Somewhere nearby, metal groaned. A shudder, and then the car dropped a double handspan. A talus crash echoed from below, followed a moment later by the clang-bong of an iron harpoon striking hard earth: The impact had levered stones from the Spire. And probably wrenched the tracks loose.

  The car shuddered again. The funicular threatened to tear free of the tracks, and the tracks free of the Spire.

  Longchamp mounted the ladder affixed to the uphill end of the car and opened the emergency exit hatch. The car vibrated; metal squealed. Longchamp climbed out. He scanned the naked stone of the Spire, the wildly jouncing spiral of the cloister stairs, the shattered stone and warped steel rails of the funicular tracks. They were near the top, several turns of the stair above the pigeon roosts. The guns had fallen silent. The lower stretches of the Spire were coated in random patches of lime-green epoxy. Above that, the Spire bristled with harpoons. Each marked a spot where the gunners had missed their target.

  Where was that Goddamned priest? Below or above?

  No time. Longchamp hooked a knee around the safety rail and leaned inside. “Get him up to me.”

  Élodie stood, levering the concussed sergeant to his feet.

  “I can stand,” he said, sounding drunk. He blinked and squinted, as though unable to focus his eyes.

  “You can’t climb, and I don’t have time to be gentle.”

  Together Longchamp and Élodie got him balanced atop the car, just across a narrow gap from the Porter’s Prayer. He lost consciousness halfway through the transfer.

  An icy wind whickered through Longchamp’s beard. It numbed his face, his fingers. It was frequently windier atop the Spire than at ground level, and now the wintry air buffeted them while they perched precariously on icy metal and slick polymers. It turned every motion, every shift of weight, into a measured gamble. Longchamp couldn’t remember the last time somebody had used the emergency exit hatch to climb from the funicular to the stair. Nobody had ever done it while hauling an unconscious casualty across.

  A harpoon streaked through the empty space between the wall and the Spire. It flashed through Longchamp’s peripheral vision for an instant before impacting the Spire several twists below them. The tower shook like a quaking aspen in the throes of autumn. Longchamp slipped. His boots slid toward the edge of the Porter’s Prayer and the long drop to the courtyard below. The bottom fell out of his stomach; his bowels turned to water. Impelled by muscle memory and fear, he grabbed the pick dangling from his rucksack, detached it, and brought the diamond tip down at the brise-soleil with all the strength of his outstretched arm. Longchamp’s heart tried to climb up his throat, but then the pick pierced the polymer sheath and arrested his slide with a hard jerk to his shoulder. A moment later the teakettle whoosh of a steam harpoon gave them belated warning of the incoming shot. Longchamp lost his grip on Chrétien. The limp sergeant slid toward the drop. Élodie, ankle hooked around the rungs of the funicular’s escape ladder, caught him.

  The shot had hit below them. Was the priest down there, or was it a fucking terrible shot? Somebody was firing wildly—or else they wouldn’t have derailed the funicular. A blind, palsied baboon with a crooked dick could piss with better aim than those brainless idiots.

  Another shot, another impact, this one a bit below them but hidden behind the Spire. Connect the dots: Something was climbing the helical stair below them but ascending terribly quickly.

  Longchamp hauled on Chrétien’s collar. Held him fast while Élodie escaped the compromised funicular. Together they pulled the unconscious soldier atop the brise-soleil, pushed him across, then dropped him through the gap between Spire and stair. The sergeant landed in a boneless heap on the stairs, pale and injured but temporarily safe. A tortured moan came from Chrétien’s lips, like the lamentation of a revenant emerging from a crypt.

  Visser came charging around the bend just as they dropped the sergeant onto the stairs. The priest paused for a split second, reassessing his path through Longchamp and Élodie.

&nbs
p; “Oh, no,” he moaned. “Please, please, please, Lord. Please preserve me from this…” A ceaseless litany fell from his lips. It sounded like a mumbled, tortured version of the Lord’s Prayer.

  Strange: The priest cried while he assessed the fastest way to murder them.

  Longchamp grabbed the woman by the shoulders and heaved her after Chrétien. She yelled in protest and landed with a dull thud. But he needed room to reanchor himself.

  The priest could easily jump past him. He’d demonstrated that below. But Longchamp crouched uphill of Visser, close to where, from the priest’s vantage, the curving staircase disappeared around the Spire. It’d require a high leap, but the underside of the next twist of the helical stairwell, above them, prevented that. So the priest had to bull straight through the captain. And he would. Longchamp could see the calculation unfolding across Visser’s face and in his eyes.

  Well, thought Longchamp. At least he’s lost the element of surprise. We’ve spiked his plan to approach the king like a humble petitioner.

  He said, “You’re desperate to get to the top, Father. What happens when you get there?”

  Visser thrashed, as though fighting himself. He took a step forward. Halted.

  “Why are you doing this, Father? How could the Lord’s purpose be served by evil intent?”

  Visser started to speak, perhaps even to answer, but his breath caught in his throat. His teary eyes bulged, rolled back in his head. He thrashed like a man in blinding agony. Like a man possessed. Was he?

  That gave Longchamp a thought. He had to shout to make himself heard over the rising wind. The words came out slurred owing to the numbness of his face. “I can see you don’t want to do this, Father. Who’s making you? How are they forcing you?”

  Visser only shook his head. “I can’t—” Again his voice broke into a strangled choking as though his own throat were trying to silence him.

  Winter wind howled around the Spire, tugging at Longchamp’s beard, flicking icy fingers at his boots’ precarious grip on the smooth extruded polymers of the brise-soleil. The wind carried the stink of a New France battlefield: the astringent chemical odor of quick-set epoxy—slightly lemony but ruined by the undercurrent of skunk musk—blended with the threat of snow. Warped metal rails creaked, groaned. Longchamp inched toward the center of the ramp and tried to make himself as large as possible. Willed himself to become an immovable object. An insurmountable obstacle.

  “This isn’t the Lord’s work. It’s somebody else’s.”

  It was difficult to keep one hand on the haft of the pick anchoring him atop the Porter’s Prayer, another easing nonchalantly toward the hammer on his back, and still maintain a conversational tone with the priest. But he tried. What was it the nuns used to say?

  “Greater is He who is in you, than he who is in the world.”

  “I used to believe that, too,” said Visser. “I’m sorry,” he said. And then he charged.

  Anticipating the attack wasn’t enough. The priest halved the distance between them before Longchamp could loose the hammer from its loop on his back. One stubbornly undisciplined corner of his mind wondered—How does a half-mad gray-haired priest move so quickly?—while the soldier in him, the part that could identify a hammer or a pick by the feel of the haft’s wood grain against the calluses of his palm, swung the weapon.

  A backhand swing, so that dodging would move Visser toward the edge.

  Visser didn’t dodge. He charged into the swing, straight into the whistling hammerhead. Caught it with his mangled hand—a broken purple swollen thing that should have had any man gibbering in agony—and deflected the blow as easily as though it were a scrap of silk on the wind. He spun, forcibly extending the arc of Longchamp’s blow. Longchamp had to release the hammer before the priest yanked him off-balance. It streaked over the inner keep like a piston blown from the overstoked boiler of an experimental steam harpoon.

  He fought for balance. Teetered at the edge of the ramp. Steadied himself just in time to take the spinning priest’s roundhouse in the gut.

  Stronger than a mule’s kick, it bent Longchamp in half. He tasted bile and a smoky hint of the fish he’d had for breakfast. It knocked him toward the long drop to the quadrangle below.

  Longchamp felt his bootheel snap over the lip of the ramp. Felt the terrifying sensation of his own weight betraying him as gravity took over and slid the arch of his foot over the threshold. Visser passed him, ascending.

  Already falling, Longchamp brought the pickax around in a white-knuckled grip fueled by desperation and pissing-himself fear. Lodged three inches of metal in the priest’s lower back. Anchored himself to the would-be assassin.

  The blow merely slowed Visser. But Longchamp’s falling weight jerked the priest off his feet and dragged him toward the edge of the brise-soleil. With one arm the priest scrabbled at his back, ineffectually trying to dislodge the pick, even while grasping for a hold to arrest his slide. Through it all he showed no sign of pain, of agony, no recognition that he’d been impaled.

  Visser slid over the edge: feet, shins, thighs, waist, chest—

  —The bottom fell out of Longchamp’s stomach as he entered freefall, still clutching the pick with both hands—

  Visser’s better hand clamped onto the edge of the brise-soleil. The high-tensile polymer crumpled like an egg beneath an ox’s hoof. Arrested their slide. The pick embedded in his back gave a vicious jerk but didn’t pop loose.

  Longchamp dangled hundreds of feet over the central courtyard of the inner keep. He hung from the haft of the pickax embedded in the priest’s back. The priest hung by one hand from the edge of the Porter’s Prayer. Blood sheeted from the wound in his back and dribbled down the haft of the pick. It lubricated Longchamp’s numb fingers.

  He wouldn’t have thought himself capable of surprise or revelation at that moment—terror left little room for rumination, as did the certain knowledge these were his last few earthly breaths—and yet he marveled at the blood. For it meant that Visser truly was a living being. Incomprehensibly altered, but alive.

  Visser reached over his shoulder, mangled fingers grasping for the pick. He might have been a man trying to scratch an unreachable itch between his shoulder blades. The wriggling jostled the pick and loosened Longchamp’s grip. He squeezed harder, squeezed with all the strength he had remaining, squeezed until his hand went numb, but still the wood grain slid through his calluses.

  He grabbed Visser’s trouser belt. He clutched a handful of leather and tucked his fist between the taut belt and the small of Visser’s waist. Instantly the priest’s arm snaked around. Longchamp gritted his teeth, anticipating the grinding pain of crushed bones. With a grip like a blacksmith’s vise, Visser tried to wrest Longchamp’s hand away. They struggled. A crack like lightning shot through the brise-soleil; plastic flakes drifted on the icy wind and pattered Longchamp’s face. Another pop rent the polymer sheath. Visser released Longchamp’s hand.

  Longchamp wanted to cross himself, but didn’t dare lessen his grip on the pick haft or Visser. He didn’t dare breathe. In his final moments, he prayed. Breathlessly.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, our Lord is with thee—

  Visser switched hands. He grasped the brise-soleil with his previously free hand and tried for the pick with the hand that had crumpled the polymer. Both men now hung from the priest’s broken hand. The pain of his wounds had to be indescribable.

  —Blessed art thou, among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.—

  Visser abandoned his attempt to reach and dislodge Longchamp’s weapon. Like a man reluctantly accepting an inevitable annoyance, he grabbed the edge of the Porter’s Prayer with both hands.

  —Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.—

  Using his impossible, inhuman strength, Visser curled his outstretched arms to lift his head level with the sunshade. Longchamp tried to reanchor himself to the crumbling polymer sheath. But when he wrenched the pick
from Visser’s back—one hand still tucked tightly on the priest’s belt—the haft slipped through his numb blood-slick fingers. The pick spun through the wintry air.

  Longchamp made the mistake of watching it. It drew his gaze down past the toes of his dangling boots. Hundreds of feet below them. Hot gorge percolated up to burn his throat.

  Visser jammed a hand into the widening fissure. For a split second it felt like they’d gone into freefall again. Icy sweat burst from Longchamp’s every pore. It slicked the leather and again loosened his grip. Longchamp could smell himself, the odor of his own fear.

  He wished he’d paid the nuns more heed.

  Another split second of terror, another hand wedged into the broken brise-soleil. Visser no longer hung from the very edge of the sunshade, but from fractures in the glassy plastic. Slowly, a few inches at a time, he pulled himself atop the shade, and Longchamp along with him.

  But the instant Visser gained solid purchase, he’d knock Longchamp loose. Longchamp had no way to fend off the killing blow. He’d lost his weapons. He’d splatter—

  A rope uncoiled, hit him in the face. It took a moment’s concentration and all the courage he had left to unclamp one hand from Visser’s belt and give the rope a tug. It seemed solid. He wrapped several loops around his wrist.

  And then he rose, ascending like Christ, or a well-meaning sinner given a second chance.

  Élodie and Chrétien together hauled Longchamp atop the sunshade. They weren’t alone, he saw. Four others monitored the spot where the priest was pulling himself upright. Judith and Anaïs wore double-chambered metal backpacks attached to the guns in their hands. Alan held a hammer and pick at the ready. The fourth guard, Gaspard, spun a set of bolas.

  Visser saw he was surrounded. Through clenched teeth he groaned, “Please, oh God, please help me.”

  His leg moved faster than Longchamp could follow. The kick collapsed Alan’s chest and sent the man plummeting into the cold, thin air over the inner keep. Visser launched himself through the opening he’d created. He’d almost made it around the bend when a pair of bolas tangled his legs. Two blasts from the epoxy guns slammed into his legs an instant later, gluing him to the spot.