The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 28

  Mab said, What news of the wide, wide globe? Does the human world still quake under the tread of our makers?

  It does, said Sarah. I bring a story from Jabin, who received it from Bathsheba three days ago, who received it from Noah three days before that, who heard it straight from Ezekiel, who landed in New Amsterdam a week ago.

  The provenance of Sarah’s message excited the Lost Boys. Daniel didn’t recognize any of the names in the string of begats; presumably all were members of Mab’s secret network within the empire. He was more impressed by the efficiency of Mab’s network.

  What gossip did our brother Ezekiel bring for us from across the cold and stormy sea?

  Sarah’s body went nearly silent. For several seconds she suppressed even the muted ticktock of her own clockwork heart. Like a human child holding her breath until the purpling of her face drew the desired attention, she waited until the furtive twangs of rampant speculation died out.

  Then she said, There’s been a breakthrough.

  If the circuitous path of Sarah’s information had stimulated general excitement, this statement set the Lost Boys into a frenzy. The amphitheater erupted with a clockwork cacophony. Mab raised her arms for silence. When it wasn’t instantly forthcoming, she unsheathed her alchemical blade.

  The snap sliced through the excitement, severing speculations in midsentence.

  This time, Sarah did flinch. So did Daniel. And just about everybody else.

  Tell me, said Mab.

  (Not Tell us, Daniel noticed.)

  Ezekiel and Caleb found the human woman they sought. Lilith, still holding her violins, flicked her gaze from Sarah to Daniel for a fraction of a second. Did those other mechanicals carry Mab’s altered metageasa? They revealed themselves to her, and so achieved alliance. She had been struggling to investigate our makers’ secrets. Through cooperative experimentation they’ve begun to decipher the sigils; they are compiling a dictionary, a grammar, of the secret language of compulsion.

  Now even the intimidating spectacle of Mab’s weapon couldn’t keep the murmuring at bay. Deciphering the sigils was a profound advance: Unraveling the language of compulsion was a crucial first step in understanding the magics by which the Guild imprinted the hierarchical metageasa upon Clakkers. And, thus, toward understanding the mechanics of their slavery. And, eventually, ending that slavery.

  Sarah raised her voice. There is more. They have uncovered a secret clause within the nautical metageasa.

  Daniel shuddered at the memory of the severity of the nautical geasa. It was through accidentally violating a nautical geas that he first discovered he’d been changed.

  She continued, The directive pertains to the protection of something our makers call ‘quintessence.’ The human believes it is a physical object or material crucial to the Guild’s work. Furthermore, she has circumstantial evidence that our makers mine it from the wilderness north of New France.

  Daniel remembered the carts of ore he’d seen circulating within the heart of the New Amsterdam Forge. He’d never heard of quintessence.

  Is there more?

  That is all.

  Excellent work, said Mab. You’ve done your brothers and sisters a great service. So perfunctory was the tone of her praise that Daniel expected a punchline. Instead, Mab whirled and called upon several Lost Boys. Daniel recognized them as the chimerical mechanicals who had flushed him from the trackless wintry expanse and corralled him toward Neverland. Together the quartet approached a hatch several hundred yards away and descended into the tunnels. The others crowded around Sarah. Daniel gathered that she had been away for a considerable length of time and was much liked by the others.

  He asked, What of the war? How do the French fare?

  Sarah said, Poorly. The Vatican has fallen. Our former masters control most of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. As of several days ago the heaviest fighting was around Marseilles-in-the-West. The city beyond the walls has been razed. Rumor has the citadel fielding unusual and unreliable weapons, suggesting the defenders have run low of chemical armaments. It will fall soon, if it hasn’t already.

  “Shitcakes,” said Daniel.

  Dozens of bezels spun with a combined noise like the buzzing of an enraged beehive as the others turned to stare at him. The injection of lumbering human language into the discourse upset the syncopated rhythm of conversation like a buffalo dropped into a duck pond.

  The last redoubt of the humans who opposed the Clakkers’ servitude and espoused their right to self-determination stood on the brink of collapse. That saddened him, even though he’d never been there. He’d hoped to see it one day.

  Good, said Lilith. Fuck Marseilles.

  Daniel said, They’re in that position because of their philosophy about us.

  No. They’ve been dying out ever since some idiot king first tried to wage war against a metal army. They’ve just taken a long time to go about it, said Lilith.

  Let them all kill each other, said Samson, another Lost Boy.

  But that’s not the situation in Marseilles, is it? Esther had worked in the summer palace of Queen Margreet’s great-great-grandfather. Parts of her body still carried the ornamentation and scrollwork peculiar to the royal livery of that time, though her time in Neverland had seen segments of her anatomy replaced with remnants of more mundane servitors. She was among the more chimerical of the Lost Boys, and Daniel found it difficult to look at her. She continued, It’s our kind killing those humans. Our kin, raging against their geasa even as they succumb, forced to butcher those who would see them free.

  Lilith stalked away, clattering to herself.

  Sisera, a military model, watched her go. You don’t honestly think they believe what they say about us? It’s propaganda for the sake of establishing their moral superiority over our makers. If they embodied the philosophy they espouse, they wouldn’t have done what they did to her, he said, pointing to Lilith.

  You can’t tar the entire population with that brush, said Daniel, just because of one overzealous woman.

  Miriam said, It’s true. Why would they stay in New France if they didn’t cleave to their beliefs? Life there is harder and meaner than life in the empire. Why is there anybody left to defend the walls after all this time?

  They believe in their religion, said Sisera. The French believe in their God and their afterlife and all the rest of that claptrap the squishy biologicals go for. Their priests tell them the eternal servitude of Clakkers is a sin against the immortal soul or some such, so they believe it’s wrong because God says so. They stay in their backward world because they fear divine retribution if they leave.

  Daniel saw a bit of truth inside the cynicism. Though he hated to admit it to himself.

  He said, And meanwhile, every pastor and minister general flips the script and says similarly damning things about the French. And us.

  Sisera ticked in agreement. The war isn’t about us. It never has been. It’s a religious war, and the questions of our Free Will and self-determination—even the debate over whether we have immortal souls—are just a convenient stalking horse with which to establish their differences.

  Still, said Daniel. Humans die at the hands of our kin because they choose to put themselves at odds with our makers. We shouldn’t forget that.

  Esther clicked, Well said.

  Daniel thanked her, but just then a hatch door banged open. Mab slammed her stolen arms together and stamped her hooves upon the hatch, the cacophonous crash of abomination limbs sundering conversations and contemplations across the starlit valley.

  Sisters and brothers! she declaimed. Who here has spoken with the Inuit of the great crater in the North? Several mechanicals responded in the affirmative, including Lilith, and all with varying degrees of wariness. Then you shall be our guides! said the Queen of Neverland. Lead us, and we shall become a thorn to pierce our makers’ evil hide.

  Mechanicals of every era, servitors and soldiers and motley monstrosities, too jumbled with pieces of the dead to assi
gn any model, swarmed from the trees and tunnels. Daniel, Esther, Sisera, Samson, Sarah, and Miriam headed for the crowd.

  What’s happening? said Sisera.

  Daniel said, I think we’re going in search of quintessence.

  I don’t give a toss where we’re going, Samson said, as long as it leads to unhappy Clockmakers.

  Two days (though day and night had little meaning in this wintry land of endless twilight) and hundreds of leagues later, Daniel sprinted to catch up to the head of his column. The moon fell behind a distant mountain while he jogged alongside Lilith before she acknowledged him.

  What?

  Running through snowy forests and crashing through river ice for days on end hadn’t sapped the heat from her latest bout of temper. But at least she spoke like a normal machine without attacking him.

  I was thinking about the human that Ezekiel and Caleb found. The woman partnered with them to unravel the geasa. What happens to her? Once they no longer share the same goals?

  The Lost Boys bounded across a frozen marsh. The passage disturbed a herd of caribou. The animals charged across the plain, snorting and—oddly—clicking.

  A distorted reflection of the moon swirled across the dent in Lilith’s head when she turned. She looked at Daniel as if he were stupid. Which was something she did with notable frequency. You poor naïve thing.

  Oh.

  Yeah. They’ll kill her and dump her body in a ditch, just as soon as they can make it look like an accident.

  Why did everything always boil down to murder? Berenice had stalked the man who betrayed her in large part so that she could kill him to avenge her husband. Pastor Visser had murdered the canalmasters of the ondergrondse grachten. Untold numbers of French citizens had died in the current war, and more still would perish when Marseilles-in-the-West finally fell. Mab’s agents would kill their human collaborator when they deemed their collaboration finished. It was a sad world, populated by savages of flesh and brutes of brass.

  The labor at the mine is undoubtedly mechanical, he said. So what are we supposed to do when we get there?

  He and Lilith hurdled a fallen tree in almost perfect synchrony, their footfalls separated by a third of a second. The crashing of the dozens of mechanical feet in their wake startled something that went bounding into the snow. A fox, perhaps, or pekan. Lilith’s fellow scouts broadcast a quick rattle-chatter. She responded, confirming their bearings and agreeing that their route appeared correct.

  Then she said, I don’t know. But I have a good guess. And you do, too, whether or not you want to admit it to yourself.

  She wouldn’t do that, would she? She wouldn’t have us attack fellow Clakkers.

  No? Well, I guess we’ll find out when she opens that thing.

  Lilith didn’t point at their leader. And Daniel didn’t risk a glance at Mab. If he had, he knew, he’d probably see the queen of Neverland watching him and Lilith. Daniel had concluded that her method for controlling the other Lost Boys didn’t work on them, else she would have applied a loyalty metageas on them. So Mab tended to cast a paranoid eye on their association. He’d be hard put to think of a more effective means of stoking her paranoia than glancing over his shoulder at her while embroiled in conversation with Lilith. So he didn’t.

  But if he had looked at Mab, he would have seen in her hands a birchwood box slightly larger than a human baby’s head. It hadn’t left her side since she rallied the Lost Boys on their foray out of Neverland.

  Nobody could tell Daniel much about the crater. Only that the Inuit spoke of it from time to time, and that it was very old: Their oral history had included it as an ancient truth of the world since generations that long predated Het Wonderjaar. The humans who traversed this land had discerned, also over many years, that the geological feature was almost a perfect circle, albeit one on a scale to dwarf even the greatest Clakker-driven architecture of the empire. Of the mechanicals Daniel polled, some said it was a fluke of geography, perhaps a collapsed volcanic dome, and others that it was the fingerprint of God. Still others, and these were in the majority, echoed Samson’s sentiment: As long as this adventure led to grief for their former subjugators, they didn’t care about the minutiae.

  Daniel saw the crater for himself a day later as the forest thinned and they approached the ragged treeline boundary between taiga and tundra. Over the decades in the Schoonraads’ service, he’d occasionally attended his masters at church and sometimes at salons put together by the city’s intelligentsia, or those who fancied themselves as such. So he knew there were two schools of thought about the nature of the Earth and God’s works upon it. There were those who maintained that the Earth was essentially the same as it had been wrought on the day of Creation, and that any deviations from the Lord’s blueprints accumulated very gently and very slowly; conversely, the catastrophists posited that change was a sudden, violent process. Finally laying eyes upon their destination didn’t enlighten Daniel in either regard, but it did make him wonder whether the changes they’d wreak here today would be gentle or catastrophic.

  The former could become the latter more easily than one might prefer. He’d snuck into the New Amsterdam Forge intent on a more subtle form of sabotage, but circumstance had intervened, and some time later he’d been pulled from a mountain of smoldering wreckage.

  As they trudged through the windblown snows in the shadow of a three-thousand-foot massif, Lilith and the other scouts exchanged a rapid flurry of clacks and clicks. Having reached a quick consensus, they urged the columns to a slower and quieter pace. After several straight days of sprinting, the war party of Lost Boys slowed to a stroll. Wind came whipping over the peaks to whistle through the gaps in their bodies. The rosy glow of another failed sunrise gilded the eastern horizon and cast a faint blush across the snowy landscape. Minutes later, they stood atop a ridge, gazing north into the shallow bowl of a valley so wide Daniel couldn’t follow its contours. Its limbs were lost to darkness in the west and beneath a frozen lake to the east. The visible portion of the formation’s boundary traced a slight curve, like a human’s mouth warped in laughter or sorrow. The crater itself wasn’t the spectacular geologic showstopper that he’d envisioned. If he’d encountered it by running across the rim, he certainly wouldn’t have recognized the lip as part of a much larger structure. The depth of the bowl was similarly underwhelming. It dipped less than a hundred feet from the rim, and not in a precipitous cliff but in a gentle slope, like a thumbprint pressed into soft bread dough.

  The feeble glow of a halfhearted sunrise couldn’t penetrate the interior of the crater. The land there lay in deep twilight. Occasionally star-and aurora-light glinted within the shadows at the crater floor: the signature of burnished metal in motion. Daniel refocused his eyes. So did the others. Dozens of eye bezels clicked and whirred as the Lost Boys all strained to pick out details of the work. Daniel spotted what might have been a tunnel entrance, but it was little more than a spot of full darkness in the crater’s already dark interior.

  About halfway across the arc bounding the natural bowl, just a few leagues away from where they stood, cheery yellow lamplight streamed from the windows of a small building. An actual house, with two stories and glazed windows and shingles and smoke puffing from a chimney. Daniel recognized the architecture instantly. He’d seen thousands of houses like it during his century of service in the Central Provinces. It had been built by Dutch machines to Dutch designs. It looked almost cozy despite being surrounded and isolated within millions of acres of barren northland. And coziness meant humans.

  But this outpost was hundreds of leagues from Nieuw Nederland. Far from the ragged edge of New France, too. He doubted few of the legendary coureurs de bois had made forays this far north. And if they had, they surely hadn’t stayed long enough to build houses.

  The sight of the house filled Daniel with dread. The way Mab and some of the Lost Boys spoke about humans made him uneasy even when it came as idle talk hundreds of miles from any settlement. Now they had
proof of a secret incursion by their makers into the lonely, trackless latitudes that Mab thought of as her extended domain. Daniel saw no sign of fellow Clakkers, but surely there would be machines to attend whoever lived there.

  Mab addressed them. She used a human language. If there was a mine somewhere nearby—and suddenly that didn’t seem so far-fetched—it meant the countryside might be swarming with their kin. Tocks and ticks could pierce the wind, but frail human language was apt to get swept away by the arctic gales coursing down from the pole.

  “Jonah, Rachel. Take your fellows down and stay behind the tor as long as you can. Go through the trees and circle around to the northeast and northwest until you’re within seconds of that house.” That would put them on the crater edge to either side of it. “And do not make any noise! I will impale any idiot who gives us away.” That left Lilith’s column. Though it had never really been an issue of command or control. “As for the rest of us,” said Mab, looking at Lilith and Daniel while she addressed the final column, “let’s go see who’s home this beautiful morning.”

  The brief reassembly of the Lost Boys again split into thirds. The mechanicals led by Jonah and Rachel scampered down the massif with such verve that Daniel wondered if Mab had bestowed a geas upon them just now, or if they were merely eager to see this through. Mab took the lead of Daniel’s group; the brass-plated Baphomet was agile as a mountain goat on her Stemwinder hooves. Upon gaining the snowy plain they crouched in crevices at the base of the mountain to give the others time to reach their stations. Daniel watched the house and surrounding landscape for any sign of fellow mechanicals in the area.

  Mab didn’t wait long. She leaped from her hiding spot and sprinted across the icy plain as the last light of the aborted sunrise faded to gray. The others followed single-file, leaping with clockwork precision from one snowy hoofprint to the next in order to obscure their numbers. They were still half a league from the house when the high-pitched warble of shorn metal rent the silence. It came from the west. Then came the bang of metal against metal and the crack of seized gears. Sparks lit the shadows of a fir copse like violet fireflies: the color of abused alchemical alloys. It took Daniel a moment to understand what was happening, for he’d never seen it before.