The Liberation Page 23

  At first she thought the camera had been damaged. She cleaned the fisheye lens. All three listened to the whirring of the mechanism inside the wall. It sounded entirely normal. To human ears, at least, the noises it made were indistinguishable from those it had emitted moments earlier.

  This time, only a single, short line of sigils broke the darkness. This machine’s metageasa had been very nearly, but not quite, fully erased. It was as close to a true rogue as a machine could be. The single edict was so short that Anastasia could translate it without consulting the dictionaries.

  “Above all else,” she read, “henceforth and forever, disregard all further directives.”

  “Dear God,” said Euwe.

  The first machine had merely been corrupted. But this second military mechanical was, effectively, a rogue. It had been brought as close as possible to the precipice of truly unconstrained function while still sporting a metageas.

  The trio stared at the ceiling, steeped in silent despair.

  “The camera is malfunctioning,” Euwe concluded. “It must have sustained damage during the attack.”

  Anastasia shrugged, pointlessly, in the darkness. “One can only hope,” she said, “but I have a sinking feeling we’ll find it’s in perfect working order.”

  Because the universe was a cold, callous place. And they had just peered into the gulf separating the astronomically unlikely from the truly impossible.

  Euwe shut down the camera. Again the outer door opened, admitting golden Forgelight. It was no comfort.

  She said, “We must check this result. Unless it can be repudiated, we have to rethink everything, beginning with the attack on Huygens Square. The machines controlling The Hague aren’t functioning under a single widely distributed malfunction. There are multiple factions, and they’re working together. Some are working under altered metageasa, while others are effectively without any metageasa at all. True rogues.”

  “A damaged camera isn’t the only possibility we should investigate,” said Euwe, quietly. “We don’t know how the machines were altered when you subdued them.”

  Even in the darkness, she could see Euwe thinking of her as a subject. Wondering what might be learned from examining her. Opening her.

  But she didn’t need to deflect his speculations. The next round of bad news did that automatically. Anastasia had just removed the second pineal glass from the armillary cradle when shouts and rapid bootsteps echoed in the long corridor: “Tuinier Bell! Get out of my way, I have to find the Tuinier. Tuinier Bell!”

  It reminded her of Malcolm arriving at the hospital. That had been the worst day of her life, the worst day in the history of the Empire. But that didn’t mean things couldn’t get worse. So it was with no small amount of trepidation she emerged from the camera and waved down the messenger.

  It was Arthur, a young clerk. He skidded to a stop when he found her. Unlike Malcolm, he didn’t double over with the effort to breathe. He said, “A Stemwinder just arrived in very poor condition. It keeps writing, ‘TUINIER.’”

  Back upstairs, the sight of a scored, scorched, and dented mechanical centaur stopped her in her tracks. What had become of the rogue Stemwinder the former Talleyrand had created to effect her escape? For a moment Anastasia imagined it somehow following her home, all the way across the sea. She indulged in a momentary shiver.

  She’d never seen a Stemwinder in such a state. Its carapace sported more punctures than a colander. One hoof was missing completely, and two appeared locked in position as though the ankle and knee joints had failed. One eye was shattered. Three of its arms were frozen in the middle of various reconfigurations; it looked like the centaur had been using spears and hammers.

  It seemed a miracle the machine still functioned. Had the damage landed differently, the scoring might have defaced the sigils imbuing the Stemwinder with the perpetual impetus that wound its mainspring heart.

  Its one remaining eye swiveled toward her. Ratchets clicked as the iris widened. It saw her.

  “Show me,” she ordered.

  Arthur swept his desk clear and draped a sheet of butcher’s paper across it. With much screeching and grinding, the centaur managed to dip a pen in the inkwell. Its one functioning arm blurred into motion. Flecks of ink spattered the bystanders. The crackle of broken cogs echoed from the high rafters. It stopped as abruptly as it started, then stepped aside.

  The Stemwinder had drawn in three-quarters perspective the central wing of a sprawling manor built in the style of an Afrikaaner plantation house. Anastasia counted the gables: eight. She knew this place. It was a Guild property situated on the edge of Old Prussia, surrounded by sprawling gardens and tall privacy hedges modeled after those of the Summer Palace. Though not as grand as that, it was secluded. She’d paid a few visits there late last autumn.

  Tove said, “What is that place? I don’t recognize it.”

  Naturally. It was used strictly by the Verderers, and known to few even within that office. Euwe and Anastasia shared a glance. The centaur faced Anastasia again and pointed to its left eye.

  “My God,” said Euwe. “I can’t remember the last time I saw a visual record.”

  Anastasia rolled up the sketch. Ink dribbled through her fingers. She told Euwe, “You’d better come with me.” To Arthur and Tove, she said, “We’ll be in the camera, if anybody else comes looking for us.” Finally, to the battered Stemwinder, she said, “Come.”

  They didn’t return straight to the camera. First, they stopped in a laboratory, where Euwe and Anastasia together disassembled the Stemwinder’s head. It wasn’t a full deconstruction down to the pineal glass, as with the soldiers; they just needed to pry out the centaur’s one good eye. They left the blind machine standing in the laboratory, awaiting refurbishment.

  By design the Cartesian Camera could accommodate a Clakker’s eye just as easily as its pineal glass. In modern times the chamber was rarely used this way, but in bygone centuries it had proved crucial to the perfection of the metageasa. Anastasia slotted the crystal orb into the cradle, levered the chamber shut, and took a seat while the miniature rings spun up for the third time that afternoon. The camera rarely saw that much use in a year.

  Images, rather than sigils, flickered across the camera dome. They bounced, defocused, refocused, blinked, and morphed so quickly it hurt her eyes. But the stream of pictures stabilized as the rings achieved their cruising speed. It revealed a large kitchen with several iceboxes and spotless Delftware tile on the walls and everywhere underfoot.

  Correction: underhoof. They were seeing the world through the eye of a Stemwinder. And it burst with color and detail more vibrant than the greatest work of the Old Masters. But this was greater than any still life. For this was a painting that moved. A living picture.

  Over the centuries more than one accountant had argued the Guild could amass unimaginable mountains of cash, if only it would develop and license an offshoot of the magical technology for audience viewings in symphony halls and theatres. But every time the suggestion resurfaced, the Verderer’s Office was there to punch it full of holes until it sank again. For to do as the coin pushers suggested would have encouraged investigation and innovation. It would have fostered the spread of proprietary technologies.

  But that resistance had been for naught, hadn’t it? Because somebody, somewhere, had imposed their own metageasa upon the Guild’s creations.

  The sedate image of the kitchen persisted for just an instant before the room spun about them and the Stemwinder charged into an adjoining corridor, where others of its kind were already fighting a horde of servitors. There were gaping holes in the windows and walls where they’d burst into the building. Glass shards and broken mullions still rained, suggesting the attack had begun just moments earlier. Several attackers sported matte metal plates over their keyholes, or grotesque modifications to their skulls, similar to the contagious machines she’d witnessed in Huygens Square. Beyond the shattered windows crude furrows ruined the gardens’ precise lan
dscaping. Attackers charged the estate house at great speed, their feet churning the manicured walkways and punching postholes in the loam.

  It was as if she’d ridden a Stemwinder into battle. The experience was nauseating.

  A corrupted servitor leapt at them, its mutilated head looming large. For a split second the play of wintery sunlight on its alchemical plating, the glinting of every hairline scratch and nick, the spin of gears and vibration of cables within its torso, were as real and detailed as if she were in the room with the deadly machine. Anastasia flinched.

  A spear streaked into the frame from somewhere beyond her peripheral vision. It impaled the servitor just below the head, its tip bursting through the back of its neck in a spray of black sparks and shattered alloys. Another rogue leapt upon the Stemwinder as the first fell. It wasn’t a horde: This was a swarm. And not just servitors; she glimpsed a few military models in the mix. Rebellious machines overran the estate and the Stemwinders staffing it. Here and there an aquamarine shimmer presaged the fall of another Stemwinder to the corruption.

  Chaos filled Anastasia’s entire field of view. Whirling, galloping, coursing chaos. Every time the centaur spun or leapt, her stomach lurched as if left behind. It was a remarkable and discomfiting illusion.

  Euwe leaned over an armrest and emptied his stomach.

  The battle ranged through the house. The grappling combatants rolled through walls and windows, their weight pulverized oaken furniture, and their diamond-hard fingers scored marble as though it were butter. At one point their host hurled itself upon a soldier with enough force to shatter the firebricks of the grand hearth. The Stemwinder and its enemy assaulted each other with blows and parries faster than human eyes could follow, while thousands of bricks rained upon them.

  Eerie silence accompanied the record. She knew how it sounded when mechanicals fought. Without the clash and clang of metal bashing against metal, the grinding of gears, the whipcrack of snapped cables, the violence assumed an almost surreal quality. Her eyes had ridden to war, yet her ears were at peace.

  Their host vanquished the soldier. It immediately scanned its surroundings for the next enemy to subdue. But the chaos of combat had taken it deep into the house, away from the main force of invaders. Anastasia had just an instant to realize what she was seeing before the Stemwinder leapt into a gallop: the floorboards of a staircase, chipped and broken, its risers dented and punctured with the imprints of talon toes.

  The Stemwinder couldn’t move quite as quickly now. And there was a shudder to the field of view, as though various stabilizer mechanisms had begun to fail. The rhythm of its hooves on the long staircase gave the scene a boatlike bob and sway. Euwe gurgled again in the corner. She squirmed against the cloy touch of queasiness.

  But the machine followed the invaders’ trail, and thus so did she. When it reached the landing, she realized the overwhelming attack downstairs had been a diversion. While the Stemwinders were busy repelling the attack, other machines had slipped upstairs to loot the rest of the manor. They had gone through every corridor, every nook and cranny, systematically ripping the doors from the hinges. Linen closets and water closets, bedrooms and laundry chutes—nothing had remained untouched.

  Not even the office. Here the invaders hadn’t stopped at tearing down the door. They’d rummaged the desk, too. Splintered drawers lay on the floor, yet their contents had not been strewn across the floor. The files were missing. So, too, the diagrams that had been pinned to the walls the last time Anastasia had stood in this room. The touch of queasiness became full-blown nausea.

  Euwe coughed. “Wanton destruction. Why? What’s driving this behavior?”

  He hadn’t noticed the conspicuous absence of paper amidst the wreckage. And before she could point to the discrepancy, their host was on the move again, hunting other intruders. It went upstairs again. Here the missing doors opened on a private bathroom and other accommodations. Anastasia recognized the room where they had kept Visser during his long convalescence. She also recognized the operating theatre where, over the course of several procedures, surgeons had implanted a custom piece of alchemical glass into the secret Papist’s brain, and thus excised the illusion of Free Will from his mind.

  The floor shook. Tilted. The Stemwinder cantered sideways, compensating. The building was becoming unstable.

  Then it was on the move again. The centaur galloped down a long corridor lined with lancet windows. Dusty beams of sunlight streamed through the shattered panes, strobing Anastasia’s eyes. The corridor ended with gaping holes above and below, and chimney bricks strewn everywhere. The floor had a pronounced tilt; the building shook with silent combat.

  But the centaur didn’t rejoin the fray. It looked outside. For the broken lancets looked upon the gardens, where, in the distance, dozens of servitors labored. With shovels.

  “Oh no,” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” said Euwe. “What are they doing?”

  “That’s where we buried the failed test subjects.” She pressed her hands to her stomach. “Everybody prior to Visser.”

  “But.” He coughed, wetly, into his sleeve again. “What use could they have for decomposed human bodies?”

  What use could they have for the files?

  “They don’t care about the bodies. It’s what those bodies contain.” What we implanted in their heads, before the complications killed them.

  Above them, on the dome, the field of view momentarily became that of a bird as the Stemwinder leapt, bursting through a dormer. Anastasia’s queasy stomach did a somersault; sour gorge stung the back of her throat. She clenched her eyes. When she risked another glance, the centaur was on firm ground again, charging the shovel-wielding servitors.

  Dizzy, she staggered to her feet and deactivated the camera. Euwe objected. His voice was phlegmy, as though he’d fought to stalemate another urge to vomit. “There’s more.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve seen enough.”

  Then she sat in a recliner and closed her eyes again, willing the nausea to recede. But this was a futile gesture. For it wasn’t motion sickness she felt, but dread. Profound, back-breaking dread.

  Please let me be wrong. Please let me be wrong.

  “I have a theory about why they’re keeping us here. About why they’re feeding us.”

  Euwe wasn’t a complete fool. He’d put the pieces together, too. He said, “How did the attackers know about this research? We kept it so tightly compartmented.”

  “Compartmented from our fellow women and men. But how many mechanicals assisted in the procedures over the years? Or in the subsidiary work required for every experiment?” Anastasia mused. “And how many of those machines have been corrupted by now?”

  He sighed like a deflated airship. “Oh, God.”

  “Still believe this is ‘folded hands,’ Doctor?”

  He fell silent for a moment. Then: “No.” But a moment later he affected a minuscule brightening. “It’s all academic. They may know about the theory. But the bodies only give them examples of failures. And the procedure requires precisely customized and calibrated glass. As long as we control this Forge, the rogues will never have a means of creating that.”

  “We’d be fools not to worry about this,” she said.

  “This is deeply, terribly worrying,” he said. “But it’s a dead end for the rogues.”

  Perhaps. But Anastasia didn’t sleep that night. She lay awake until dawn, envisioning an entire city filled with men and women weeping like Pastor Visser.

  CHAPTER

  15

  So… You’re looking well,” Berenice said.

  She tried to push herself deeper into the shingle, to melt and disappear. But the cold, damp stones would not yield. They tinkled like glass bells when she shifted her weight, incongruously serene against the chaos engulfing the secret harbor.

  “Because I’ve been eating well and getting regular exercise?” Lilith stepped closer. “Or is it because I’m not begging for a me
rciful death while stuck in a glue trap staring in horror at pieces of my own disassembled body?”

  As with all her kind, Lilith spoke innately the language of her makers. But unlike most, Lilith was also fluent in French. She’d chosen to live in Marseilles-in-the-West for many years after escaping Nieuw Nederland. There she’d taken up the arts, studying both the violin and oil painting. Lilith was a success story of the ondergrondse grachten. But she’d renounced her association with humans after Berenice’s downfall.

  “Well. Now that you mention it.”

  Berenice glanced left and right, along the dark shoreline. They were in the shadows. But she wasn’t the only one headed to the docks. Any moment another expedition member would come along and see her.

  The angry machine said, “Nobody’s coming. They’re all very busy right now. I wanted some time alone with you.”

  In that instant, Berenice solved a riddle that had bothered her for weeks. “That terse note. ‘Quintessentia.’ You wrote it.”

  “Not a particularly subtle gambit, I admit. But it didn’t need to be.”

  Berenice had no cards to play. No contingency plan. Her hands were empty.

  “Please don’t murder the others just because of your issues with me.”

  Lilith’s body emitted a noise that Berenice was fairly certain she’d never heard from a ticktock. The part of her always seeking to better understand the Clakkers’ secret language filed this under, “Mechanical analogue to a snort of disgust.” She’d never have a chance to use the insight, but she couldn’t help it.

  “‘Issues.’ What a smooth talker you are.”

  “I am. They’re here because they made the mistake of listening to me. You know what that’s like. So please take pity on them. Just let them go home.”

  “But that would be silly and wasteful,” said Lilith. The servitor stepped forward, grabbed the lapels of Berenice’s coat, and heaved her aloft. Berenice’s feet dangled above the icy water.