The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Read online

  The lightning gunner cried, “Recharge!”

  A pair of conscripts grabbed the handle to either side of the gunner’s mount. They heaved against the crank. It resisted them, but creaked forward with the sound of brushes scraping against a belt. The noise rose in pitch as they strained, turning the cranks faster and faster. A faint glow enveloped the spindles at the tip of the muzzle. Again the hair on Longchamp’s arms tingled.

  The military Clakker landed stiffly atop a merlon in a half crouch, blade arms opened wide like deadly scissors. The leg that took the bolt glowed a dull apple red and its joints emitted black wisps of vapor, yet it acted as though unfazed by the jolt. The knee and ankle joints of the stricken leg didn’t flex quite as far as their counterparts. The deadly machine paused to survey the scene, calculating a path for optimal casualties.

  At the same time, new noise joined the cacophony of the battle: the pop and crackle of gunfire. Clockwork fusiliers in the distant darkness, covering the machine on the wall. The fusillade forced the defenders to crouch behind the battlements or risk taking a bullet in the face like the previous King Sébastien.

  Like a stone thrown into a duck pond, the Clakker’s landing atop the wall sent ripples through the defenders. Guards retreated to either side of the merlon, pushing against each other in the scramble to put distance between themselves and the killer. They hefted their weapons—each a last resort—in quaking hands. One guard lost his footing and slipped from the banquette. He tumbled off the ramparts to thump against the cobbles of the outer keep.

  This was the worst-case scenario, the one from which he’d wanted to preserve these younglings. Green conscripts like these had no hope against a rampant military Clakker. But they were the last line of defense.

  The Clakker pounced on the lightning gun. Lamplight limned the alchemical blades with a baleful glow. The gunnery team abandoned the embrasure, hurling themselves free of the gun. The machine shredded the weapon as easily as though it were made of gold foil and candyfloss. The terrible shriek of shorn metal pierced Longchamp’s ears and sent the defenders to their knees. Another zap-crack strobed the night with artificial lightning and sent more guards sprawling. The flash planted spots at the center of Longchamp’s vision, but when he looked away, he saw the Clakker struggling. One of its blades had been spot-welded to a chunk of the ruined gun.

  It was encumbered and hesitating. And still the green recruits edged away from it. Longchamp, still sprawled on the rampart and trying to disentangle himself from the pick and sledge strapped to his back, yelled, “Hold your ground! HOLD YOUR GROUND, YOU SHIT-EATING COWARDS AND KILL THAT COG-FUCKER !”

  The Clakker saw him. Somewhere in the cogs and black magic of its mind it understood that eviscerating an officer was more destructive to enemy morale than perforating a grunt. With a heave that would have shamed the three strongest men in New France it raised its bladed arm—along with the wine barrel–sized chunk of the lightning gun welded to it—and smashed it against the crenellations. Stone cracked; puffs of dust wafted from the mortar. A trio of guards rushed forward with pick and sledge, just as Longchamp would have done, counting on the encumbrance to slow its response. The first went down in a spray of blood and brain matter, his head punctured by a clockwork sniper somewhere in the darkness. The second braved the gauntlet and planted the point of her pick square in the demon’s forehead. Her partner’s sledge whistled forward for the killing blow. But the machine was faster. It smashed the remains of the artillery on them like a fishwife wielding a flyswatter. The blow crushed its attackers and broke the weld. Fragments of the destroyed gun flew over the parapet into the night.

  Then the machine hopped lightly to the banquette, unconcerned by the mass of men and women wielding sledges, bolas, and diamond-tipped pickaxes. The machine bounded forward like a lame racehorse given the reins and a heavy dose of the whip. It moved stiffly on its compromised joints, but still its blades sliced through the panicked defenders like scythes through autumn wheat as it carved a path to Longchamp. The banquette turned slick with blood. A meaty rain fell upon the outer keep and splattered the parapet. The stink of shit and copper washed over the trembling defenders.

  Longchamp scooted backward. He reached over his shoulder for the haft of his sledge, anything that he could use to deflect a blade, but his weight pinned it down and he couldn’t wrench it free. He couldn’t climb to his feet without momentarily taking his eyes from the deadly machine.

  Wondering if this would be the moment his luck gave out, he spun and rolled to his knees.

  “Bolas, NOW!”

  Somebody tackled him. Mortar and stone tore a furrow in Longchamp’s face. Something thin and fast whipped through the space he’d occupied an instant earlier.

  Sergeant Chrétien panted. “Just a moment, Captain, if you please.”

  “I’m busy, so make it quick,” said Longchamp. He tasted blood.

  There was a click, and then the bolas spun up through the registers to end at a tinny squeak. The Clakker tumbled to the banquette a few feet short of Longchamp and Chrétien, its legs tangled in coils of high-tensile steel cable. Together the captain and sergeant leaped to their feet. Longchamp unlimbered his pick and sledge, as did Chrétien. But they couldn’t get close enough to gouge the forehead sigils around its keyhole and unwrite the golem—its arms were still free. It bounced and writhed, blades flashing as it struggled to sever the cable.

  “Bolas! Glue! Somebody immobilize this demon NOW!”

  Longchamp heaved the sledge at the writhing Clakker. It caught the blow on the flat of a blade. The concussion wrenched his arms and chattered his teeth. Chrétien aimed the tip of his pick at the machine’s keyhole while it deflected Longchamp’s blow. Its free blade snicked through the sergeant’s weapon and etched a fine scarlet line down his arm before the men felt the wind of its passage. The pickax head bounded along the banquette to tumble into the outer keep.

  Longchamp heard the thrum of bolas as somebody else prepared for another throw. Meanwhile, behind the military Clakker, Élodie and another guard, Jean-Marc, bounded up the stairs, both wearing double-barreled backpacks.

  Longchamp yelled, “Ready bolas!” In case this didn’t work.

  Chrétien yelled, “Make that bastard sticky!”

  They fired in unison. A fucking heartbreaking waste of precious chemicals, it was, but they doused the son of a bitch. In seconds the defanged military Clakker posed a new problem because its chemical cocoon, solidly affixed to the parapet, was about as convenient as having a dead moose on the battlements. A work detail, two women and two men, sprinted up the stairs. They set forth with picks, hammers, and crowbars, working in a frenzy to pry the encased machine free of the stones.

  Longchamp turned to the sergeant. Chrétien wiped a cuff across his brow. Both men panted. Their breath steamed in the wintery night. The siege had put thoughts of the season out of Longchamp’s mind, but now the postadrenal crash left him shivering. He surveyed the scene along the curtain wall. Most of the spots of activity he’d identified during his rapid descent had once again fallen to stalemate. But men screamed and metal flashed, impossibly fast, a hundred yards away. Another machine had made the parapet.

  Chrétien saw it at the same moment. “Reinforcements to bastion six! Now!”

  In seconds the signal lamps turned his raspy order into pulses of lamplight flickering across the outer keep like thoughts flitting through the brain of Marseilles. Head down, Élodie trotted toward the commotion, heedless of the bullets pinging from the stone battlements. The bulbous chromium-plated tanks on her back swayed back and forth in time to her stride. The soldiers she passed on the banquette lurched aside and grabbed merlons, or used their picks to find purchase in the embrasures, lest she knock them from the ramparts. She nodded, panting, as she passed Longchamp. Jesus and the saints bless her, the courageous little fool.

  He grabbed her arm, spun her around. “No, you stay. They almost broke through here. That means they’ll be tempted to try
again.” Farther down the curtain wall, a pair of soldiers wearing gear like Élodie’s sprinted up the stairs to join the battle to contain the Clakker in bastion six. The machine lunged into an embrasure with both blade arms, skewering an entire gunnery team in one go. The reinforcements fired before they’d cleared the stairs, catching the military Clakker in midair as it came at them. It crashed immobilized to the banquette, teetered at the edge, then bounced to the hard ground of the outer keep. Élodie watched it all with the wide eyes of somebody in the throes of adrenaline and fear.

  Longchamp sighed. The end had been postponed a few moments longer.

  “See,” he said to the chandlers’ daughter, “they’ve—”

  Just then a massive crash, like the shattering of every mirror in Longchamp’s favorite house of ill repute, shook the ramparts. A hailstorm of debris pummeled the merlons and the soldiers crouching behind them. An instant later, metal talons pounded atop the rampart. A ticktocking machine loomed over them. It shook off the last fragments of its smoking chemical prison. Glassy shards of hardened epoxy pattered on the stones and went winging into the defenders, knocking several guards from their feet. Longchamp flinched, involuntarily, having known a woman who took such a shard in the eye. It didn’t kill her, though he reckoned she often wished it had.

  The debris was melted and charred in places. The lightning ricochet had disrupted the solidification of the chemicals that had snared this Clakker. The extra dose of heat and energy must have compromised the cocoon or its chemical reactions in a way that enabled the machine to struggle free. Nobody noticed, because they were all busy fighting, and falling to, its counterpart, at which the lightning gun had been aimed.

  With a quiet snick its forearms doubled in length as they released their blades. Longchamp shoved Élodie back at the same moment the machine leaped at them. The haft of his sledge tangled in the hose feeding the double-barreled epoxy gun in her hands. They went down in a tangled heap. Falling, he struggled but failed to free his weapons, and his bulk prevented Élodie from bringing her own weapon to bear. He clenched his eyes shut, waiting for the excruciating moment when two feet of alchemical razor split his spine and sent his innards spilling over the poor girl.

  What an undignified death. So unbecoming to her, he thought. To die skewered by a metal demon while covered in the steaming guts of a grizzled veteran. Where’s the value in that? he wondered, vaguely disappointed that his mind and emotions could be so undisciplined in their final moments.

  They hit the rampart. Élodie’s breath came out in an anguished gasp when Longchamp landed atop her.

  “Captain!”

  Clang. Longchamp flinched, but no blade impaled him.

  He rolled to his feet. Ripped his sledge free of the tangle in Élodie’s hands. Turned to find the tip of the machine’s blade not three inches short of its target.

  The Clakker spun. It tore the pick from Chrétien’s hands. The sergeant had hooked the blade over the machine’s shoulder, catching it short as it went for the killing lunge. The maneuver had saved them.

  But it also put Chrétien inside the lethal radius.

  “Paul!”

  Longchamp swung. Arms fully extended, he put all his weight behind the sledge. It connected with a resounding crash. The impact dented the Clakker’s armor. Blue-and-orange sparks cascaded from the impact. The machine’s talon feet skidded across the parapet, etching the stones. A true blow, square and hard. Hard enough to take the machine by surprise, true enough to shove it off-balance.

  Slow enough to let the sergeant die.

  The sprawling machine flicked a blade as it went down. A hot mist stippled Longchamp’s face, and then Chrétien’s face ended at his molars. Blood curtained down the front of his uniform in a scarlet torrent. Teeth and bone clattered to the banquette.

  Longchamp howled. A mindless, meaningless bellow passed his lips, loud enough to turn heads halfway around the curtain wall. Heedless of anything but the sheer purity of his hatred of the mechanicals, he twisted with the momentum of rebound and brought the sledge around for another blow. The Clakker parried. The shattered alloys sounded for all the world like church bells when its blade snapped and went spinning over the wall.

  Chrétien’s body slumped against a merlon, still fountaining blood. It slicked the ramparts and streamed between the stones. Longchamp slipped.

  The machine brought its other blade to bear.

  Élodie emptied her gun on the damaged mechanical. She glued it to the ramparts, like a memorial stone marking the spot where Sergeant Paul Chrétien had fallen.

  CHAPTER

  18

  The Lost Boys used the natural amphitheater for more than storytelling. Sometimes there were concerts.

  A few of Mab’s subjects had learned to play musical instruments while serving human masters. Daniel had known mechanicals in The Hague whose owners liked to flaunt their wealth by leasing extra Clakkers for the sole purpose of sending them to every musical recital and orchestral performance within miles. In that way their servants could recall and re-create the music at home any time their masters desired. (Minister General Hendriks was somewhat notorious for this.) Other denizens of Neverland had taken up music after escaping. As a conscious choice. As a means of demonstrating, to themselves and the world, the reality of their hard-earned Free Will.

  Lilith played a mean violin. Actually, at the moment she played two violins in an original composition she’d written in a thirteen/thirty-one time signature. Daniel knew little about music—the very little he’d heard in his century-plus of life had been random snatches of sound while running errands in the vicinity of performance venues—but it sounded nice. Truer, somehow, than the music humans wrote for each other. The snow and the aurora together made a spectacular backdrop for Lilith’s performance. He wondered if it was difficult to maintain musical instruments in this environment.

  Situated near the top, abreast of the stage, he had a clear view of Mab, front and center. He watched her and stewed. How could any Clakker impose new metageasa upon her free kin? Daniel knew it happened inside the Guild from time to time; a mechanical working directly for the horologists might be dispatched to direct other mechanicals. But that was different. When a slave interacted with other slaves, nobody had a choice in the matter and nobody was free. But what Mab had done was beyond appalling. It was anathema. Revoking their Free Will? Obliterating that most hard-sought and precious of treasures?

  Bad enough that she’d turned Daniel into a chimera, like herself. Was shame another of Mab’s tools for keeping the Lost Boys in Neverland?

  When he couldn’t bear to look at Mab any longer—no matter how he tried, his gaze couldn’t bore through her skull, couldn’t deface the sigils on her forehead—his gaze swept across the assembled Lost Boys in the amphitheater. How many carried Mab’s secret metageasa? How many yearned to leave Neverland but couldn’t? How many were Mab’s true adherents? Did she have believers who saw her sins as pardonable evils in support of a noble goal? Humans, he’d observed, tended to accumulate power for its own sake. Perhaps the subtle domination of previously free Clakkers was the chit with which Mab tallied her mark on the world. Daniel saw nothing redeemable in what she’d done.

  With a single touch of Visser’s alchemical glass he could have severed any geasa that Mab had laid upon the Lost Boys. He wondered how fast she could move on her Stemwinder legs. Could he run through the crowd, patting them on shoulders, skulls, feet—click, tink, click—and undo all her work before she caught him?

  The mechanical beside him abruptly cranked her neck through a full half circle until her head faced backward. From her vantage atop the amphitheater she scanned the surrounding tundra. Her neck ratcheted still farther; she turned an ear toward the distant forest. Daniel heard it a moment later: a frenetic, high-speed chatter-clatter of metal on metal.

  Somebody inbound. Moving fast. Raving.

  The noise of the approach percolated through Lilith’s wall of sound to trickle down th
e terraces. Attention turned away from Lilith one row at a time. But she played on, enrapt by the sheer joy of artistic creation, until Mab snatched the bows from Lilith’s hands in the gulf between two one-hundred-twenty-fourth notes. The music faded away. The aurora didn’t.

  Nor did the incoherent noise from the approaching runner. Standing atop the amphitheater, and not down in the bowl where the echoes were more devious, Daniel was able to extract some sense from the hypertelegraphy before the runner emerged from the treeline.

  It sounded like she was talking about “quintessence.” Whatever that meant.

  The messenger burst from the forest. She streaked across the meadow trailing a silvery comet tail of moonlit snow. The runner sped along a long arc that skirted the deepest snows of the meadow. She was familiar with the landscape, then. Another of Mab’s sleeper agents?

  The messenger skidded to a halt inside the amphitheater. Her talon feet etched the rocky stage and tossed a shower of sparks. Steam wafted from her body. She stood amid her kin and looked straight at Mab.

  Welcome back, said the tyrant queen of Neverland. She tossed the bows back to Lilith. Starlight glinted like lightning from the serrations of her recessed blade. It’s good to have you back, Sarah.

  She clapped the new arrival on the shoulder. Daniel admired Sarah for the way she resisted flinching. The clang of contact echoed like thunder.

  On cue, the Lost Boys chanted, Welcome, Sarah.