The Liberation Page 28

  “Which there haven’t been in quite some time.” Euwe shook his head. “For all we know, there are no such machines in The Hague any longer. They’ve moved on.”

  “God help us all.”

  Anastasia laid her uninjured hand on the table, lightly. She shook her head. “Hold your prayers until you hear the rest of the news.”

  They had to know about the attack on the manor house, and what it meant. But that meant having a conversation about what the Verderer’s Office had been doing. The years of human experimentation. Who here would see the work in its proper context while languishing in the crucible? They wouldn’t see a grisly but crucial effort to safeguard their secrets and the security of the Empire. They’d see a reckless experiment run by a madwoman with no foresight. And which now posed an existential threat to each and every human being in the city and, eventually, beyond.

  Anastasia asked, “How many mechanicals would it take to lure out a contagious machine?”

  “As many as possible. The most we can muster.”

  She shook her head. “Not a chance. On the Utrecht Road they destroyed an uncorrupted machine they couldn’t immediately convert, just to deprive us of labor. We don’t dare risk exposing our remaining workforce to that logic. We could find ourselves completely without servants.” She looked up and down the table: frowns all around. “We do need to study the contagious machines. But luring them out won’t do. Come up with a different plan.”

  A servitor knocked on the door. Tove crossed the room, opened it, and spoke in a whisper with the machine. It turned into a rapid exchange.

  Looking excited, she said, “If I may interrupt for a moment with some good news?” She smiled as she spoke, though she raised the back of her hand to her nose, as if to wave away something unwelcome. “One of our lost lamented colleagues has returned to us. Malcolm Dijkstra has arrived at the Ridderzaal.”

  Malcolm—last seen on the Utrecht Road—stepped around Tove. Anastasia recognized him despite the bandages wrapped about his head like a turban.

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  Malcolm was a Verderer, after all, and a senior Clockmaker. Of course he would have been ushered straight into this meeting.

  Euwe’s eyes met Anastasia’s. He knew. But the others didn’t. They leapt to their feet, ready to welcome one of their own back into the fold.

  “Wait!” But her warning was drowned under the cheers of welcome.

  I should have told them sooner. Euwe and I were fools to cling to the old secrecy.

  Nousha put her arms around Malcolm but paused in midembrace, frowning. Others covered their noses as Tove had done, trying and failing to do it discreetly. The smell even hit Anastasia halfway across the room. Ruprecht took in Malcom’s injuries again. As if only now wondering how the man could be on his feet when still recovering from something so grievous. Or why his face showed no joy at reunion. Only anguish.

  “Get away from him!” Anastasia cried, fumbling for the chain about her neck. The silver whistle chilled her lips.

  Puzzlement came over the others, too. Their lost lamented brother trembled violently. The roomful of experts didn’t recognize the tremors, though they saw their like a dozen times every single day: the steadily mounting compulsion of an urgent geas. They mistook it for relief, or lingering injury.

  “Dear God, get away from him!”

  A rictus twisted his face. “Get help,” he croaked.

  “Be at peace,” said Salazar. “You’re safe now.”

  “Nobody is safe,” Malcolm said. And then he pushed the others away with more strength than any man’s body should exhibit. They tumbled like autumn leaves. Too slowly, Tove tried to jump clear. Ruprecht smashed through the writing desk like a boulder hurled by a pagan god. They landed in a heap amidst ink and flinders. Nousha’s head cracked the bookcase. The impact sent books cascading to the floor.

  Malcolm looked at Anastasia. Reached under his shirt. Produced a hatchet. Leaped. A single bound took him halfway across the room to land upon the table. Anastasia scrambled backward.

  “Run,” he said, through a jaw clenched so tightly the teeth had to be cracked.

  Her hand tingled. The glass embedded in her flesh glimmered, shimmered, flared. It burned like a miniature Forge; fear was its fuel. Fear and anger.

  She raised her fist as if rearing back to hit him with a handful of light. She opened her fingers to release a brilliance greater than she’d ever seen. It shrank his pupils and turned his violated skin the sickly color of an unripe chestnut. He cocked his head like a mechanical servitor assessing an unfamiliar situation. She strained, willing the glass in her flesh to become the instrument of her intent. The light speared her eyes. For a split second she glimpsed what appeared to be the silhouette of her own finger bones through her flesh.

  “Stop!” she cried.

  Malcolm blinked. He shook like a wet dog shrugging off a summer rainstorm. And then he pounced. Together they tumbled to the floor. She flailed. Tried to kick him away, tried to scramble free of his reach, tried to distance herself from the hatchet, tried to flee her own secret work turned against her. But he was too heavy, too strong. Rusty bloodstains stippled his bandages. Other stains were yellow, some tinged with green, suggesting seepage from an infected wound. She pressed her blazing hand against his face. His geas-strengthened fingers snapped around her wrist like a manacle tight enough to coax a creak from her bones. He slammed her hand to the floor.

  “Malcolm, don’t do this!” she gasped. “Please!”

  But his geas had no room for right and wrong: only punishment for noncompliance. And the geas demanded he take her hand.

  He raised the hatchet. Its steel blade reflected the cadaverous green of a corrupted sunrise.

  Tove leapt on him. She hooked her elbows under his arms and heaved. It eased the weight crushing Anastasia; her ribs groaned in relief. The Norwegian woman managed to lift him almost an inch before he smashed the wooden handle into her face. She slumped to the floor, screaming and clutching the mass of blood and splintered cartilage that used to be her nose.

  Anastasia’s ribs took his full weight again. She couldn’t breathe. He redoubled his grip on her wrist and hefted the blade again. The former Verderer might have been a farmer poised to butcher a rooster. He wept blood. The fetor of gangrene made her eyes water. The machines that had opened his head weren’t worried about his longevity.

  “I’m sorry,” he croaked.

  She screamed. No words came out. Just terror.

  A blur. A whirr. A tick and a tock. A weight lifted. A hatchet bounced across the floor to land in an empty hearth.

  “Are you hurt, mistress?”

  Malcolm struggled in an alchemical alloy cage, pinned in the grip of the servitor that had tackled him. His arms didn’t move as they ought. The geas had imbued his muscles with magical purpose, but in the competition between mere human bone and Clakker metallurgy, metal had triumphed over minerals. Malcolm thrashed like a caged animal, heedless of his broken shoulders.

  “No.” She spoke through tears. “I’m not hurt.”

  Additional servitors crouched over the men and women scattered around the room, their medical metageasa rising to the fore, assessing injuries and triaging where necessary.

  Anastasia wobbled to her feet. She rubbed her wrist, imagining her arm ending in a stump, and shuddered. Then she pointed at Malcolm. “Lock him in a cell. It must be guarded at all times. And keep him in restraints. He is an enemy of the Guild.”

  The machine didn’t move. Malcolm writhed in its grasp. Its frozen grasp.

  Oh, no. Her heart still raced; the glass in her hand still shone. She’d inadvertently deactivated Malcolm’s captor.

  Alarm coaxed the glass in her hand to flare brighter still, brighter than summer noon. Forge bright. He broke free of the deactivated machine. He lunged for the hatchet.

  She clenched her fist and stuffed it under her blouse. An emerald glow suffused the cotton.

  “Stop him!”
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  Malcolm reached the hearth. But there were four still-functioning servitors between him and Anastasia. This time the restraint was more abrupt, more violent. He slumped in the arms of a servitor, concussed and possibly dead.

  Stupid. Stupid. You call yourself Tuinier?

  “Take him to a laboratory. If he’s still breathing, chain him down.”

  We need to study your head, Malcolm, and examine how the invaders changed you. But how could they compare his ordeal to the work on Visser? The notes were gone.

  And then a new thought struck her with the force of a hammer. Why would their enemies send a single Trojan Clockmaker into their midst, when they might have several at their disposal? And why now? Why today?

  Malcolm Dijkstra had returned to them. But he wasn’t the only Clockmaker who’d gone missing while carrying out Guild work. What had become of Teresa van de Kieboom, who’d valiantly driven the decoy carriage on the night they tried—and failed—to smuggle Queen Margreet out of the Central Provinces? Who’d done her patriotic duty fully aware it was a death sentence. And who had been missing, presumed dead, ever since that night.

  Teresa wasn’t a Verderer. She wouldn’t have been sent to a meeting of the surviving Guild leadership. If she’d arrived with Malcolm, she was even now loose at large inside the Ridderzaal. Where would her masters send her? Into the heart of the newly resurrected Forge.

  Anastasia addressed the other machines. “Leave them,” she said, indicating her fellows. Tove still writhed on the floor, weeping in pain. “Teresa van de Kieboom is an enemy of the Guild. Search the building for her. If found, use all necessary force to restrain her immediately. Nothing else matters.”

  Air whistled through gaps in the servitors’ bodies. The wake of their abrupt departure shredded pages from the tumbled volumes and sent the scraps fluttering about the room. They left nothing behind but the moaning of the injured. Anastasia was the only person left standing. She followed the mechanicals, hoping she wasn’t leaving her colleagues to die.

  The business floor was devoid of mechanicals. A clattering came from the entrance to the tunnels and the Forge chamber.

  She sprinted across the business floor, past bewildered civilian refugees—“Get out of my way! Move!”—toward the Forge chamber. She burst through the doors, slowing just enough to grip the handrail before the heels of her boots slid free of the polished marble. She corkscrewed down the spiral stairwell, half tumbling and half running. Toward the grinding of enormous gears.

  Whoever or whatever the “MAB” entity might have been, it was a tactician. In its war against the Guild, it deployed its resources with devastating ingenuity. Having stolen the Verderers’ most deeply guarded secret—the secret to creating human agents of unswerving loyalty and unsurpassed capability in service of the Guild: the final brick in the garden wall, the long-sought perfection of the Verderers’ bulwark—it now turned that capability against the Guild. What could you do with a pair of corrupted Guild members? Especially if, like Malcolm, one was a Verderer? Send one against the leaders; send another against the technology.

  When the gate is open, the pigs will run into the corn.

  She emerged in the uppermost ring tunnel. Here the conical Forge chamber was widest. The cantilevered workshops on this level looked down upon the entire facility. They sported the smallest and thickest windows, however, to fend off the relentless heat rising from the artificial sun. So she eschewed the workshops and went straight to the nearest access spur. She emerged on a crowded gantry inside the chamber itself. Sweat instantly dampened her skin. The hellish updraft teased her hair and fluttered the hem of her dress. A sulphurous gale accompanied each passage of the outermost ring.

  So many Guildpeople and mechanicals stood on the gantry that she wondered, fleetingly, about weight limits. The humans stared, pointed, jabbered at one another.

  “Who is that?”

  “What is she doing?”

  “She must be overseeing an adjustment.”

  “It looks like van de Kieboom.”

  “Is there something wrong with the rings?”

  “But she’s doing it herself!” This, more than anything else, evinced confusion and even a hint of scandal from the onlookers. “Those niches are designed for servitors.”

  Meanwhile, the nearby mechanicals vibrated hard and fast enough to blur their outlines. Their bodies, and the gantry upon which they stood, emitted a racket audible even over the whooshing of the armillary sphere.

  Indecision on this scale was, to Anastasia’s knowledge, unprecedented. Yet these Clakkers were caught between metageasa: the compulsion to protect the Forge, and the compulsion to protect a Guild member. And that was the dark genius of their unknown enemy, to send a Guildwoman against the Forge itself. The human-safety metageas carried special weight in the case of Guild personnel, just as it did for the queen and other crucial functionaries. And that metaphysical weight now threatened to counterbalance the entire machinery as effectively as a rogue servitor dancing on the rings.

  “How shall I serve the Guild, mistress?” The nearest servitor’s voice carried an urgent rattle, like an overheated teakettle.

  Anastasia squinted. The spinning rings repeatedly occluded her line of sight, but after a moment she made out Teresa van de Kieboom perched on a small maintenance gantry wedged into a niche in the chamber wall. It gave her access to one of the enormous gimbals supporting the armillary sphere. Together the constant updraft of superheated air and the turbulence created by passing rings had undone her bandages. Gauze streamers fluttered behind her head like a bloody comet tail. She was busy. An opened panel obscured Anastasia’s view of Teresa’s hands, but whatever she did, it sent firefly sparks eddying into the chamber. A mechanical groan accompanied each puff.

  Doubtless she’d used her magically augmented strength to bend or break the handle on the access hatch, thereby denying entry to others. Worse yet, the maintenance niche sheltered her from any mechanicals that might have tried to subdue her. Any machine attempting to join her would have to use its toes and fingers as pitons as it scaled the chamber wall, and that ran the risk of throwing debris into the Forge machinery. Collateral damage to the Forge was unacceptable. But so was standing idly by while somebody sabotaged it. And so was harming a Guild member; any servitor could have torn away the mangled access hatch, but that ran the risk of knocking Teresa from the ledge.

  The metageasa hadn’t been written with this scenario in mind. Nobody had ever considered the possibility of a Guild member turned unwilling enemy.

  Light bloomed in the hollow of Anastasia’s hand. She clenched her fist and kept it jammed under her blouse lest any light leak away and compromise the nearby servitors.

  “Teresa! Stop!”

  The helpless Guildwoman looked up. Tears trickled from her eyes; rivulets of saltwater shone in the Forgelight. A rictus of agony sculpted her face into an inhuman mask.

  Help me, she mouthed before returning to her task. Nausea wrung Anastasia’s stomach as though it were a damp dishtowel.

  The innermost ring jerked, shuddered, screeched. The grinding dissipated in seconds, and then the armillary sphere kept turning as if nothing had happened. It took but an instant for the tension to slosh through Anastasia, and the alchemical glass crushed into her flesh supped on it. Blistering heat consumed her hand. She groaned.

  Proximity to the Forge, she realized. The shattered remains of the Spinoza Lens were hypersensitive here.

  Anastasia turned to the nearest servitor. “I am Tuinier Anastasia Bell, and I assert the Verderer’s Prerogative!” It felt strange, perhaps even pointless, declaiming the Prerogative without brandishing the rosy cross, but she did so anyway. She pointed to the distant figure, several stories down and forty yards across the chamber.

  Pitching her voice so every machine on the gantry would hear, she declared, “Teresa van de Kieboom is no longer a member of the Guild. She holds no claim to the aegis of Huygens. She is a dire enemy of Guild, Crown, and Empire.r />
  “Kill her.”

  The directive instantly silenced the rattling of indecision. But a collective gasp came out of the mortified men and women standing on the gantry.

  The nearest man turned. “But, Tuinier… He pointed across the chamber. “She’s one of us, isn’t she?”

  “Human, you mean? No, she isn’t. Not any longer.”

  They’d all hear the news soon enough. And then the whispering would start. Any cachet that still clung to Anastasia for the way she ended the battle in Huygens Square would disappear when word spread of the doom she’d unleashed. The doom that was coming for all of them. Teresa and Malcolm were merely the precursors.

  On a battlefield, it would have been an easy kill. Every infantry unit carried at least one rifle and a mechanical sharpshooter to wield it. A Clakker could easily have timed a shot through the revolving bands of metal to put a bullet in Teresa’s ear. But the Ridderzaal had no guns. Why use such antiquated weaponry when one had Stemwinders? (Besides, who would be foolish enough to attack the Guild?) But the workshops were full of potential projectiles: gears, pinions, screws, springs, and the tools to install them.

  Anastasia’s order spread through the other machines in the chamber. The blurring indecision disappeared as they triangulated the best angle of attack.

  The killing throw came so quickly that it was over before Anastasia realized the machines had acted.

  One instant, Teresa huddled over the machinery. The next, the top of her head erupted in a chunky scarlet mist. The throw must have come from below because the impact physically lifted her upright, as if her geas had suddenly commanded her to hop. She teetered backward. For a split second before a passing ring obscured the view, Anastasia saw that her former colleague’s face sported a meaty puncture just below her left cheekbone.

  A passing ring snagged the long, fluttering bandages. The dead woman’s head snapped sideways. Her body tumbled over the ledge. Anastasia held her breath. But Teresa’s body bounced down the chamber wall without hitting the rings and came to a mangled rest several stories below.