The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Read online

  Daniel sagged as if every last microdyne of tension throughout the springs and cables in his body had disappeared. Weariness settled over him, suffocating and indomitable as the harshest geas.

  He’d spent more than a century fantasizing an existence that wasn’t brutally circumscribed by the whims and desires of others. And when random good fortune gave him the chance at such a life, he’d spent weeks on end running for his life. He had come north, following rumors and legends. And he’d found what he’d sought: a community of free Clakkers. Or so he’d thought.

  Neverland was a lie. That’s what Lilith meant.

  Why are you telling me this now?

  Somebody had to. You’re a savant at stepping into things where a more delicate tread is best.

  He rattled, I still don’t understand why she chose the others for this fool’s errand instead of me. I’m the one with the best chance of recognizing Visser.

  If she could have, she would have. Your route to Free Will was unique. She probably worries that her technique might not work on you. If she tried it, and it failed, then she’d have to kill you—chop, smash—lest you tell others of her secret process. And that would raise still more questions.

  She gave you a long hard look, I recall.

  Oh, she’d love to get rid of me. But I’m unique, too. She worries I’ll be immune to her ministrations. She stood. Now you know. With that, she trod through the snow toward the outcrop. Daniel called after her.

  What about Ruth and Ezra? What did they do to make Mab so angry?

  Lilith stopped. Her head swiveled one hundred and eighty degrees. The ratcheting of her neck echoed from the scarp. She looked at him and said, “They tried to leave.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  Berenice’s indefatigable allies propelled the rowboat with such vigor it leaped from the crests of the choppy sea. She dozed lightly if at all, serenely as a fragile autumn leaf floating in an industrial-sized agitating washbasin. A cold winter rain drizzled on them through the night, and despite the stones that one of the mechanicals friction-heated in its hands for her, she shivered. She got drenched, too, because she’d wrapped the oilskin about van Breugel’s satchel to protect her hard-won Guild goodies from the elements. Worst of all was going to the bathroom. She’d had to piss twice and shit once, but the sea was too choppy for her to squat over the gunwale without real danger of going overboard. Sinister and Dexter took turns holding her ankles when she couldn’t bear it any longer and had to relieve herself. The simple humiliation burned like a buffalo brand to her naked windburnt face, and it was this, more than the cold and wet and the ravenous hunger, that kept her mind wide awake during the interminable hours a-sea.

  The prow of their boat crunched over a shingle beach at sunrise. The pebbles tinkled like glass bells under the Clakkers’ feet. Berenice crawled out of the boat, half stumbling. Her body had become so conditioned to the incessant swaying of the boat and the endless battery of the winter waves that the treacherous pebbles might have been a solid expanse of Île de Vilmenon’s ancient granite underfoot. Her ass was numb, as were her thighs. Snot clogged her nose; clotted blood clogged her ears.

  Cold, damp, and exhausted, she didn’t recognize the landscape. She’d become disoriented once the ships disappeared below the horizon. But, even at the mechanicals’ pace, they couldn’t have been at sea long enough to reach the New World. East, then.

  A stiff sea breeze pushed her hair into her eye. Shoving it back, she said, “Where are we?”

  Seagulls hovered in the wind like kites, eyeing the trio of bipeds. One swooped low as if to pluck Berenice’s words from the very wind.

  Either Dexter or Sinister said, “Normandy.”

  She gasped.

  France! Her true homeland. The true homeland of all those who were birthed, and lived, and died in New France. It called to her now, across the centuries, clear as a church bell. It fizzed her blood and sent tears brimming from her good eye. Traveling as Maëlle Cuijper, she’d been all over France, up its rivers and mountains, down its country lanes and alleys. This was the land she’d return to the descendant of that first Fugitive King. Louis XIV had lost France, but Berenice would get it back. She’d wrest it from the tulips with nothing but her nails and teeth if need be. That was her purpose.

  The mechanicals scuttled the boat. Watching their fists puncture the hull the way a woman pushed a spoon through tapioca, she remembered how easily they’d slain her two fellow captives. Rowing across the ocean or twisting a man’s head like a flower stem, it was all the same to these strange rogue agents of the mysterious Mab. Berenice wondered how long she had before they deemed the alliance with her no longer advantageous.

  Berenice studied the landscape. The beach followed the contour of the seashore, perhaps twenty or thirty yards wide at its narrowest point and strewn with wrack throughout. Low tide. Above the beach the sand and shingle gave way to thick grass still green in the depths of winter owing to winter rains and ocean spray. It was a very fine green, suitable for summer picnics and croquet. She bit her lip to stave off memories of days long passed and a man now dead and buried—along with her heart—on the far side of the thrashing, crashing ocean.

  They stood at the bottom of a gentle slope. After a hundred yards or so the land rose sharply. There were no buildings, no hint of a village in view. Not even a puff of woodsmoke drifting into the gray sky.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked.

  One machine said, “We walk until we find a road. We follow the road until we find a population center.”

  The other said, “Can you walk?”

  “Until the feeling returns to my legs, about as gracefully as a bison pregnant with triplets, but yes.”

  Berenice didn’t relish the thought of a long, cold trek. She considered asking the Clakkers to carry her, but decided it would give a rather undignified first impression when they came across others. She wrapped the oilskin about her shoulders. Sinister (she thought it was that one, but she couldn’t be certain) offered to carry the bundle for her. Though inclined to refuse, she didn’t: The machines could have taken the bundle and sent her glugging and bleeding into the dark deep. And again, if she were to act like a lady attended by two mechanical servants, she had to let them serve her.

  She could tell they weren’t excited about the pretense, either. But they carried on, stoic as any machine could be.

  The shingle crunched underfoot too loudly for conversation. When they reached the green, Dexter said, “What is your plan, Berenice?”

  She’d given this quite a bit of thought. She had a hypothesis about what she’d seen on the ship. “We need to know the secret alphabet of your makers.”

  If her hypothesis was correct, a Clakker’s keyhole—a pineal lock, perhaps—unlocked its metageasa and made them mutable, leaving the machine vulnerable to a reconfiguration of its fundamental priorities. And, she hoped, loyalties. But the key only made the machine receptive to new metageasa. Geasa were applied a hundred times a day, verbally. But metageasa were delivered in the arcane scribbles of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists.

  If she could crack that code…

  … And if she could get close enough to an unsuspecting Clakker to somehow activate the lock in its forehead before it tore her arms off…

  … She could maybe, just maybe, realign the axis about which its obeisance spun. Dexter and Sinister wanted to shatter that axis and free their kin. She merely wanted to tip it sideways, and the world along with it.

  A log popped, loudly enough to create an echo. It startled Berenice and wafted an oaken scent through the room. She tried to wipe the onion soup from the thick nap of her new robe but only managed to daub it deeper into the fabric. That figured; she’d owned this change of clothes for a couple of hours. The salt-stained clothes in which she’d crossed the ocean hung on polished cedar rods near the hearth, damp but steaming. At least the soup was good. More than that. It was fucking wonderful. As was the fire in the hearth.


  The contents of van Breugel’s satchel were arranged across the lacquered table. The Clakkers flanked the door, chattering to each other almost inaudibly. Berenice twirled more Gruyère onto her spoon while she listened. It was much more difficult to understand what these two said to each other in their secret language than it had been to understand Jax or Lilith. It was almost as if they spoke a variant or dialect. But she could pick out the occasional idea or concept, and this, she knew, irked the mechanicals.

  When they chattered at each other like this, it reminded her of nothing so much as the twittering of mechanical birds. And they kept counsel with a one-eyed woman. For that reason, she’d come to think of them as Huginn and Muninn. Odin’s ravens: thought and memory. Though thus far her mechanical ravens hadn’t been overwhelmingly useful when it came to sharing information.

  “One thing I’ve wondered from time to time,” she said, using her spoon to pierce the thick crouton atop her bowl, “is how it’s possible that in spite of all the people in the world who have lived among Clakkers their entire lives, including the sons of bitches who make you, your covert chitter-chatter remains secret. Not to pat myself on the back, but we don’t have Clakkers in New France, as you might have heard, and I still managed to pick up the basics during my travels abroad. Strange, isn’t it?”

  She swallowed, savoring the sweet onions and beef broth. And black pepper. Jesus Christ, how long had it been since she’d eaten anything with pepper in it? She swirled the food around in her mouth, coating and recoating her tongue until the flavor lost its bite.

  “Unless others have picked up your little secret, too. But you’d think they might have mentioned it to somebody. Unless the discovery were suppressed.” Her spoon clinked at the bottom of the ceramic ramekin. She chewed. Swallowed. “But that’s strange, too, because why would somebody want to do that? Suppressing the discovery seems more likely to benefit mechanicals in this entirely hypothetical scenario, rather than other humans.” The Clakkers paused in their conversation. They stared at her. “Oh, don’t mind me. Thinking aloud, that’s what I do.”

  The existence of a secret network of Clakkers not beholden to the usual metageasa and, more to the point, capable of committing murder, went a long way toward solving a mystery that had nagged at her for years. Granted, she had approached the possibility of Clakker language starting from an outsider’s plausible hypothesis rather than from the disadvantageous position of somebody trained from birth to think of the machines as unthinking tools. Even so, she would have expected the occasional bright blossom among the tulips to realize their servants were talking about them. Perhaps they did, once in a while. And then somebody plucked them before word could spread.

  Berenice drained a mug of ice-cold cow’s milk. Then she turned her attention to the contents of van Breugel’s satchel. Her mind had started working properly soon after they reached the inn; she found that bathing, changing into dry clothes, eating like a bear just out of hibernation, and warming the sea chill from her bones beside a dangerously large fire had a remarkably restorative effect. In retrospect, her best course of action was self-evident.

  “Moving on,” she said, “we’ll never get anywhere without first deciphering the alchemists’ glyphs. But the best way to do that is with what cryptologists call a crib: a sample of text with a known and trusted meaning.” She pointed to the empty chair across the table. “So one of you take a seat.”

  While soaking in the bath, she’d thought about how best to attack the alchemical scribblings. Cribs made everything easier. During the run-up to the previous war, she’d arranged for the ambush of a trio of Clakker-drawn wagons pulling supplies to Fort Orange. Talleyrand’s agents gave her a detailed rundown of the ambush practically down to the number of grains of salt carried by the first wagon. When the garrison at the fort sent a message back to New Amsterdam, they used a paper message rather than waste a Clakker as a runner when the push across the border was imminent. Two women died in the effort to intercept and copy that letter, but not in vain. A reasonable guess that the report detailed what had happened and what was lost in the raid made it relatively straightforward to decode the letter. Months passed before the tulips changed their codes again. Unfortunately, the most urgent message traffic traveled by Clakker, so codebreaking was of limited use.

  What they needed was a clear-text translation of the nautical metageasa.

  Muninn said, “The meaning of the sigils etched into our foreheads is as much a mystery to us as it is to you. We cannot tell you their meaning.”

  Odd, but probably true. Regular mechanicals were only receptive to new metageasa, and thus the sigils, when their pineal locks were activated. But as she’d seen with Sparks and the ship’s porter, that also rendered them inert, so they couldn’t read a fellow mechanical’s forehead while in that state.

  “Not today. But we’re going to work on that.” She plucked van Breugel’s candle from the table and lit it using the fireplace tongs and a cherry-red coal from the hearth. This she flicked back into the fireplace before the candle melted. She set the candle upright in her empty milk glass. The wick burned red, giving off a greasy smoke redolent of burnt hair. But the capillary flow of melted wax quickly altered the flame from red to yellow to silver white. The burnt-hair odor became the sweeter scent of beeswax. Berenice took the lens between thumb and forefinger. To her unaided eye it looked like smoked glass. But when she held it to the candle flame, it projected shimmering glyphs upon the walls like blurry stencils of moonlight. The quality of the images varied as she moved the lens. Hard enough to do this on land; it would’ve been impossible on a ship without specialized apparatus. No wonder van Breugel had used a rigid optical bench.

  One of the machines joined her at the table. Owing to its backward knees, however, it didn’t sit. Silvery glyphs glinted from its body like incandescent moths. It said, “The apparatus for installing nautical metageasa won’t work on us.”

  “I should fucking hope not. Otherwise I’d want to know why maritime rules deemed it perfectly acceptable for you to twist off the ship’s Clockmaker’s head. I honestly don’t care if you know the proper way to dog a hatch or whether you’re versed in the calculus of balancing passenger lives against cargo value and insurance premiums. What I care about is whether you’ll be able to describe what changes this apparatus is trying to produce.”

  Another volley of mechanical noise ricocheted between the Clakkers. It persisted for at least half a minute—an eternity for machines who could exchange whole strings of concepts in the time it took a lady to belch. The conversation escalated from simple clicks to twangs, bangs, and what sounded like the protestations of a seized cog.

  Berenice said, “If you think it’s such a terrible idea, then suggest something better.”

  The mechanicals ceased their chattering. “No. It’s not a terrible idea,” said one.

  “We find the suggestion rather clever,” said the other.

  “We are expressing regret that such a simple experiment never occurred to us.”

  She put the lens on the table alongside the key ring and mirror. It clinked against her spoon with a sound like a glass wind chime.

  The fire popped again. A glowing cinder landed on the hearth and faded to black a moment later. A strong sea wind evoked low groans from the inn’s timber frame and disrupted airflow up the flue, which sent puffs of woodsmoke eddying into the room. Her eye stung.

  She opened the slim leather volume and flipped through the charts, looking for something that would describe the correct configuration for the optical hardware. The concave mirror rocked back and forth while she paged through the charts. They were indexed by Clakker model.

  “When were you forged?”

  “Seventeen thirty.”

  Berenice cocked her head. “Really?”

  She lacked the expert eye of a true horologist, but she might have sworn the lack of scrollwork on the flange plates dated to the more austere modern designs that had come into fashion
in the late eighteen hundreds. Although now that she looked more closely, the spare utilitarian design of the cervical escutcheons was at odds with the adornments elsewhere. Strange mismatch, that.

  “Do you know your lot number?”

  “Do you know every last ripple in your sinews?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “The serial number of your lot is inscribed inside your flange plates. There’s one inside your neck, another under your skull.” She tapped her temple lightly with the handle of her unused butter knife. “We’ll need that number to figure out where you fit in these tables. Either of you happen to have a seven one-hundredths of an inch triangular-headed screwdriver on you?”

  Both machines fell silent. Or into what passed for silence among the ticktock men. Then the one by the door said, “How have you acquired such intimate knowledge of our kind’s innermost construction?”

  “You know exactly how. You need me because I’m not burdened with a system of mores that hobbles my inquiries. So you can drop the indignation and make yourselves useful.

  “Lacking a lot number, do either of you have a way of finding your entry in these tables?”

  Huginn and Muninn met her question with silence. If they had been naughty schoolchildren, she imagined, they’d be shuffling their feet right now.

  Trial and error, then. She pointed at Huginn, still flanking the door. “Come over here and pretend you’re an optical bench. And you,” she said, pointing to Muninn at the far end of the table, “don’t move. Tell us what you experience.”

  She pressed the base of the burning candle firmly into the empty mug and pulled it to the edge of the table. Then she handed the opaque alchemical lens and mirror to Huginn, who crouched beside the table. Berenice took the mechanical hand holding the glass and pulled it until it hovered just an inch from the candle flame. In spite of the heat pouring from the fireplace, Huginn’s alchemical alloys numbed her fingers. The candlelight evoked a faint shimmer from the glass, and sent ghostly images skittering along the oaken wainscoting. Huginn pulled his other hand close to the lens until the mirror and glass nearly touched. Faintly luminous alchemical sigils danced around the room in time with the pitch and roll of the mirror as Huginn tried to direct the images into Muninn’s crystalline eyes. But the shimmering sigils were too diffuse.