The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 3

  Her glass eye, an exquisite gift from her friend Hugo Longchamp, matched her real eye rather well. But it was a mere ornament. She hadn’t worn it since the Stemwinders returned it, a day or two after her capture.

  The whole world had lost its texture the day Louis died. The mangled eye was just a detail compared with the devastation wrought upon her heart by her husband’s death. Guilt cut more deeply than any knife.

  Berenice blew her nose on the tablecloth and forcibly changed the direction of her thoughts. Based on the duration of the carriage ride on the night of her capture, she estimated this estate lay sixty or seventy miles upriver from New Amsterdam. She’d traveled the same river valley en route to the capital of Nieuw Nederland not long before she’d infiltrated the Forge, and this landscape looked familiar. A sentient airship had crashed along the river north of here, near Fort Orange; it had been shot down by its fellow mechanicals. There’d been a single survivor. She wondered, idly, what had happened to Jax, and whether he’d escaped the destruction of the Forge.

  Doubtful. She’d heard the ear-shredding Rogue Clakker alarm before the building fell. Meaning they’d discovered him. She wondered if, in his dying moments, Jax had regretted the serendipitous series of accidents that had granted him Free Will.

  Today had dawned cloudless, giving Berenice her first glimpse of a blue sky since her capture. Bare boughs of sugar maple, red oak, and hickory crosshatched her view of the hills like the withered hands of a crone waving her away. (Too late, she thought.) The snows of recent weeks still coated the countryside like a thick and exceptionally clean woolen blanket. A sheen of sparkling white caked the windward boles, suggesting steady winds from the northwest. Berenice made note of such information as she could glean from her picture window. The collecting of information had been her stock-in-trade; a habit etched into a woman’s bones wouldn’t succumb to the mere fact that she’d been banished, supplanted, and was now in the custody of her enemies.

  The winter landscape was barren as the future of New France in the coming war. The war she had started. Well, she and Jax. She had to assume he was responsible for the Forge’s destruction; she’d been busy cutting out a traitor’s eye, making her displeasure known to the man she had tracked from Marseilles-in-the-West across the border to New Amsterdam.

  The view from her window also encompassed a long gravel drive. A carriage appeared there now, pulled by two Stemwinders galloping in perfect synchrony. Berenice glimpsed a crest on the lacquered blackwood: the rose-colored cross of the Clockmakers’ Guild.

  She took another sip, seeing now not the landscape but a calendar. The timing was about right. She’d been sequestered here in the countryside for over two weeks since the Stemwinders caught her dulling her blade in the duc de Montmorency’s eye socket. He’d revealed her identity as Talleyrand to the tulips. So: say a week to get an urgent message across the Atlantic to the Central Provinces; several days while the rulers of the Dutch Empire decided what to do with their windfall; and another week for somebody important to make the trek to the New World. The timing worked if they commandeered the most advanced ships and airships in the world. Which is exactly what they’d do for a chance to get in a room with a former Talleyrand.

  Berenice wondered, not for the first time, what they had planned for her. She’d spent the first few days of her incarceration waiting with nauseating dread for the knives and hooks, the hot coals and devilish machinery, to appear. But her captors had treated her no worse than they might a royal princess confined to the grounds of a single estate for some trifling transgression of the byzantine social order. They fed her, clothed her, bathed her, did everything they could to ensure her comfort. For what purpose she couldn’t begin to guess. But the Stemwinders were fanatical about her comfort. The food was excellent. If the tulips thought they could win her cooperation with honey rather than vinegar… well, so much the better. Why waste all that delicious honey?

  But all good things did eventually find their end. Berenice took it on faith that the appearance of the black carriage signaled the end of her enforced holiday. She wondered if her hosts intended a hard end, complete with white-hot flensing blades and broken bones.

  She sighed and set down her cup. An ache took root in her eye socket like the moaning ghost of her body’s integrity. From the leather pouch hanging between her breasts, Berenice gently removed a glass marble. She swished it around in her mouth, then flinched when it popped into her eye socket with a wet squelch. It wasn’t fitted to the socket; she’d have the world’s worst sinus headache if she kept it in long. Her tongue tingled.

  The black carriage appeared again. It emerged from the snow-blown shadows of the house, passing through the porte cochère beneath her window to roll to a stop before what she assumed was the front door, though she could not see it from her vantage. The rumbling of the carriage wheels along the drive shook loose a cornice of windblown snow from the corbels over the porte, leading to a heavy wet thump accompanied by a man’s yelp.

  Berenice turned her chair so that she faced the door rather than the window. These accommodations were smaller than the apartments she and Louis had shared within the keep of Marseilles-in-the-West as members of the court of King Sébastien III. It was just a single room with a locked door and unbreakable glass, plus a private lavatory, but the mattress was soft, the goose down warmer than a widow’s bed had any right to be, and the furniture handsome.

  A Stemwinder entered a moment later. It didn’t knock. There followed a woman, a man, and a second Stemwinder. She’d expected the humans. But the sight of the additional centaur caused Berenice’s confidence to collapse like a fragile cornice of wind-sculpted snow. She hadn’t accounted for two monsters.

  Christ on a blood-smeared cross, you tulip bastards just had to throw another wrench at my head, didn’t you?

  The second Clakker carried a chair upholstered in button-tufted chintz matching the one Berenice occupied. The man wore a topcoat of gray twill. He held a somewhat wet and battered top hat and the sour expression of a man much put-upon by the world; he brushed snow from the former and muttered to himself, which did nothing to dispel the latter. The woman was dressed as though she’d been invited to a sleigh ride at the premiere winter ball of the season. The brim of her own hat was just narrower than the door through which she entered; the peacock feather in the brim had been dyed a ghastly shade of lavender that matched her gloves. Beneath the hat she wore a head scarf mottled in a jacquard pattern. Sunlight evinced a lustrous sheen in the voluminous fur stole that threatened to swallow her, suggesting a petite woman wrapped in ermine or mink.

  The second Stemwinder placed the chair across the table from Berenice. Then it extended its arms, allowing the newcomers to use the centaur like a coatrack. They draped it with hats, coats, and stoles. The machine retreated into a corner while the other stood motionless beside the door. The man went to the window, where he squinted at the glare of sunlit snow. The woman seated herself and peered at Berenice across the remains of her breakfast of fruit, toast, roasted potatoes, and chicken sausage. Her leather boots dripped snowmelt on the rug, but the corners of her smile dripped something much colder. Sunlight glinted from the rosy-cross pendant on the fine silver chain around her neck. Nestled in one corner of the cross was a tiny inlaid v denoting the Verderer’s Office.

  Clearly this was the person for whom Berenice had been waiting. So who was this tarty bitch from the Clockmakers’ Guild? Somebody with the clout to commandeer ships of the sea and ships of the air. But not so high up the ladder as to score her own retinue of Royal Guards. Not royalty, then, but somebody high in the Guild.

  Berenice concluded the woman now settling across the table was the Tuinier: Anastasia Bell. The woman who ran the Stemwinders.

  It seemed a solid guess. But as for the fellow who plodded along like a piece of flotsam caught in her wake, Berenice hadn’t a Goddamned clue. If Bell had come to question Berenice, she had her own skills and the Stemwinders to apply to the problem.
Anybody else was superfluous. Unless questioning wasn’t what they had in mind. They could have questioned Berenice and ripped the answers from her broken body several times since her capture. The fact they hadn’t suggested a different aim.

  A name fluttered to the forefront of Berenice’s mind. Like a scrap of paper caught in an errant breeze, it snagged in the bramble of her thoughts. Visser.

  A pastor from The Hague. Who had, whether intentionally or inadvertently, given Jax the errand that led to his emancipation from the geasa. Visser had known things only a French agent should have known. But, according to the mechanical, when they met again in New Amsterdam, he’d seemed an entirely different person. The previously pious and compassionate man had become a murderer. It was as though he’d been caught and… altered.

  Berenice tried, with middling success, to sever the tendrils of fear now twining themselves around her stomach and spine. Not wanting her enemies to sense her anxiety, and hoping to set them off-balance, she said, “I assume you intend to change me as you did the pastor.”

  She knew instantly that her stab in the dark had found a target because it cut the supercilious smile from the other woman’s face. She blinked. She cocked her head as if reassessing. It reminded Berenice of Jax.

  “Yes.”

  Nauseating dread sloshed in the pit of Berenice’s stomach. Being right wasn’t much comfort when faced with the impending ministrations of the Verderer’s Office. Berenice willed herself to outward calm.

  “How?”

  The woman removed her gloves and reassumed her composure. “Oh, I couldn’t explain it if I tried. My colleague here, Dr. Vega, is the expert. A pioneer, if truth be told. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

  The man snorted. His breath frosted the glass.

  A doctor. That wasn’t a good sign.

  Berenice said, “You’re a medical doctor?” Now both newcomers looked at her. “Perhaps later you can inspect my wound,” she said, pointing to her eye. “It’s giving me a bit of trouble.”

  “We certainly can’t have that,” said the other woman. “It’s very important to me—to us—that your comfort is completely uncompromised.”

  “So I’ve noticed. You must be Anastasia Bell.”

  “I am.” Again that unctuous smile. “The duke was right about you.”

  “He survived? That’s a shame.”

  “Yes, though you did him no favors. I’ll admit I appreciate your notion of poetic justice more than he does,” said Bell, pointing to one of her own eyes. “Since you admit to knowing Henri, I assume you also admit to being the one known as Talleyrand.”

  “It brings me great pain to have to tell you, Mademoiselle Bell, that our mutual friend’s information is outdated. I no longer carry that title.”

  “It’s not the first instance of Henri being mistaken. He told us you were dead.”

  “Very nearly.” Berenice paused to rub her eye. “Don’t fault him for a lack of effort. He really did fuck us.”

  Bell’s laughter was like that of a noblewoman caught unawares by the blunt pronouncements of a longshoreman. It carried just a hint of scandal, of thrill in taking momentary enjoyment of something untoward.

  She said, “Oh, well. Doubtless even a disgraced spymaster carries all manner of fascinating information in her head.” Berenice tensed without intending to; Bell saw this. “But don’t worry. We won’t have to be crude about extracting it.”

  Berenice groaned, rubbing her eye again. “In that case, I wonder why my comfort is so important. Gratifying as it is, one assumes this is a bit out of character for you.”

  The head of the Guild’s secret police force waved off the question as if shooing away a bothersome housefly. “Oh, again, that’s something more suited to Vega’s expertise than my own.”

  “I see.” Berenice plucked the glass from her eye socket. “Damn this thing,” she muttered. She blew on it, as if clearing away dust.

  “Hmmm. I’d heard about your eye,” said Bell. “It’s a shame you couldn’t find something that matches. But I think it’s safe to say that once you’re working for us—”

  Berenice snorted. “And people accuse me of overconfidence.”

  “—we’ll have no trouble at all outfitting you with something slightly less conspicuous. No need to call attention to your wound, after all. I’m sure we can give you a better and more comfortable fit as well.”

  The tendrils of unease twined through her insides gave Berenice a firm cold squeeze. Turning somebody was long, hard, delicate work. Frequently painstaking—best suited to the patience of a craftswoman. So the matter-of-fact way Bell took it for granted that she could and would turn Berenice… The temptation was to discount her as a loon, and she would have, if not for what Jax had told her about Pastor Visser.

  “Good with glassworks, are you?” Berenice asked.

  “As with so many things,” said Bell, “our skill in that arena is without equal.”

  “The Chinese make better porcelain. I’d bet their glassmaking is likewise superior.”

  At this, Bell shook her head. Smirking, she added, “Nobody makes glass like we do.”

  You’re telling me. Berenice knew well the strange bauble that Jax had shown her, the lens or prism that had somehow broken his bonds and imbued him with Free Will. Thus turning him into a rogue and leading, somewhat indirectly, to Berenice’s current predicament.

  Inspecting the piece from her eye for dust and scratches, she said, “This’ll scrape the inside of my head raw if it isn’t clean as a newborn’s conscience.”

  She popped the glass in her mouth. It coated her tongue with the faintly metallic taste of blood. The doctor made a little grunt of disapproval. Bell was unmoved; surely she had witnessed far more unpleasant things as Tuinier. But she did frown.

  “If you’re trying to choke yourself,” she said, “it won’t work. You wouldn’t even reach unconsciousness before the Stemwinders and Dr. Vega unclogged your throat.”

  Berenice swished the bauble around her mouth, as though giving it a good tongue scrub. She wedged it to one side of her mouth. It was difficult to speak around the thing without running the risk of swallowing it, but she managed to say, “If I wanted to kill myself, I’d be dead already.” Her tongue shepherded the bauble across her mouth.

  The Tuinier continued to affect an amiable sangfroid. “Perhaps it would be better to have the cleaning done professionally. That doesn’t seem terribly sanitary.”

  “Oh, this isn’t as bad as it looks.” Swish, slurp, swish. Berenice used the table cloth to wipe spittle from the corner of her mouth. It gave her a chance to turn her head back and forth without obviously gauging the distance to the mechanical sentries. Too far. Again speaking around the glass in her mouth, she said, “Look, if we’re going to fence, I’d at least like some more of your coffee. It’s better than the shit we get in Marseilles.”

  “I sense in you a civilized kindred spirit,” Bell said. Berenice assumed this came with a hefty dose of sarcasm, as at that particular moment she was finding it rather difficult not to drool with the bauble stuffed in her mouth. “I have a feeling that, given time, I’ll come to feel sadness that an accident of birth made us heirs of opposing ideologies. Perhaps if history had unfolded differently we might have been sisters, eh?”

  Berenice rolled the glass around in her mouth. It clicked against her teeth. “I doubt it.”

  Bell addressed the Stemwinder that wasn’t doing a passable imitation of a coatrack. “More coffee, now.”

  Somewhere inside the clockwork centaur, Berenice knew, a new geas sprang to life. A burning ember of compulsion, the first flames of a searing fire that could not be extinguished by anything other than unswerving obedience. The Stemwinder had no choice but to obey Bell because, unlike the humans in the room, it had no Free Will.

  The hulking machine crossed the room in two steps. It reached for the coffee service. It loomed over both women. Bell showed no concern for the deadly limbs just inches from their throats. Berenice to
ok a deep, steadying breath.

  And used it to launch the alchemical bauble across the table.

  Bell recoiled from the spray of glass and spittle. She raised an arm to shield her face. For a heart-piercing moment Berenice thought she had missed. But then Jax’s prism glanced from the Stemwinder’s outstretched arm with a quiet tink. The alchemical glass made a louder clunk when it fell to the silver coffee service, where it rolled to a slimy stop. But for the creak of Bell’s chair, the room fell still. Even the Stemwinder now stood frozen in midreach.

  Bell wiped beads of spittle from her sleeves. The veneer of jocund civility dissolved. “I spoke much too soon. You’re just another jack-pine savage, like all your countrymen. How dare you spit on me?”

  Berenice ignored her. Instead she addressed the Stemwinder, which still hadn’t moved. She met its strange, impassive eyes. Suppressing a shudder, she said, “You’re welcome. Have fun.”

  A frown pulled Bell’s eyebrows low over her eyes. An instant later she saw the bauble on the coffee service. Her eyes widened as comprehension dawned. Indignation became abject terror.

  Berenice had just granted Free Will to a Stemwinder.

  “You—”

  Whatever Bell intended to say, it was cut off by the high-pitched whir of machinery. The freed Stemwinder’s torso spun like a dervish, its equine body motionless while the rest of it rotated to face its companion. One limb clipped Bell hard enough to knock her to the floor. The other Stemwinder, untouched by Berenice’s trick, flung the hats and coats aside as it leaped to Bell’s defense.

  Two of the rogue Stemwinder’s arms extended faster than Berenice’s eye could follow. The deafening squeal of tortured metal accompanied an explosion of violet sparks, and then one of the other Stemwinder’s limbs clattered to the floor in a spray of cogs and shrapnel.

  Dr. Vega took just a few seconds to assess the situation. He sprinted for the door. He’d managed two strides before the rogue extended another limb, piercing his throat and momentarily pinning him to the wall. Red arterial spray fountained from his neck as he slumped to the floor, twitching.