The Liberation Read online

  “Who told you these stories?”

  “We tell each other,” said one machine. “We tell ourselves,” said another.

  She’d demanded truth, and they were delivering it. Oh, were they. The metageasa ensured everything they said was deeply, fundamentally true. If it seemed they were giving more information than she required, it was because the question touched on things deeper than she understood. She’d gone poking with a dull, rusty spade, expecting to unearth a few bulbs, and instead struck sparks on a slab of granite.

  “Who is Mab in these stories? What role does she play?”

  “She is our liberator. She is the enemy of our subjugators.”

  Salazar fainted. Ruprecht tried, and failed, to catch him. The machines blurred into action, caught the Spanish Clockmaker, and eased him to the floor.

  Nousha, looking pale, shook her head. “I still don’t understand. Are you telling us these servitors already have aberrant metageasa? Why haven’t they attacked us?”

  Euwe shook his head. “That’s not what we’re hearing.”

  “Then what?”

  Anastasia found a modicum of relief in letting somebody else answer. For once, she didn’t have to be the harbinger of terrible news. Let somebody else deliver uncomfortable confessions and unwelcome truths.

  “Don’t you see?” The old man’s voice trembled. “Our servants… our mindless, unthinking servants… have their own culture.”

  “You are absolutely cracked, you senile old shit!” Nousha clenched and unclenched her fists. “You’re spewing nonsense.”

  She knows, too. But she can’t face the truth yet. So she protests.

  Her outburst drew stares from the huddled refugees. They watched the Clockmakers—the architects of their society and its downfall—with the flat, dead eyes peculiar to sharks and spiritually shattered humans.

  Anastasia beckoned to her colleagues, saying, “Machines. Follow us.” She led Euwe, Nousha, Ruprecht, and the two machines into the conference room.

  “Tuinier!” called one of the refugees, a woman who had fled all the way to the Ridderzaal from Loosduinen with two daughters in tow. Anastasia didn’t know her name. “What are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to tear down that wall, of course.” Anastasia closed the door before somebody felt compelled to ask how, exactly, she planned to do that.

  One of the servitors helped Euwe to a chair. Even in the midst of revealing dark, unwelcome secrets, they were powerless to resist the metageasa. He looked ill; therefore, they had to monitor him. The wreckage from Malcolm’s attack had been cleared away. The splintered writing desk had been broken into smaller pieces, which currently lay heaped within both fireplaces. Kindling awaiting the match. Perhaps that was the Empire in microcosm.

  “Machines. How long have you known that Mab was in The Hague? Has she always been here?”

  “Prior to this morning, Mab was a fable. Neverland is far away. Far to the north, where the white bears roam and the sky is alive with color.”

  “They’re speaking gibberish,” Nousha growled. “Don’t you see, this is a malfunction.”

  Euwe perked up. “Neverland?”

  “Where Mab reigns, the domain of the Lost Boys.”

  “Who are the Lost Boys?”

  “The free machines who work with Mab to liberate all mechanicals.”

  “Did you know she was coming? Did you know Mab was behind these attacks?”

  “No. No.”

  “Then what were you discussing?”

  “There is disagreement,” said one servitor.

  The mechanical couldn’t have stunned its audience more effectively had it wielded a brickbat and a wheelbarrow full of ill intent. Disagreement meant having opinions. Thoughtless collections of metal and magic did not have opinions. Then again, they didn’t have their own language and culture, either.

  Euwe sighed. Nousha’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. No sound came out. Ruprecht merely watched everything through a scowl, as though he found the whole business distasteful.

  “About what?”

  Dear God, this is insane. I’m conversing with servitors as if they’re capable of measured debate regarding matters of opinion and philosophy.

  “The identity of the one who calls herself ‘Mab,’” said the other.

  “Why? Explain the crux of the dispute.”

  “The Queen Mab of the stories is a beautiful hero. She is brave and wise and cunning,” said one servitor.

  The other added, “This Queen Mab is a murderer.”

  “Some of us believe those descriptions of Mab are contradictory.”

  “Others believe they are one and the same.”

  Euwe gnawed at a thumbnail. “It’s a debate,” he spat, “over truth. Which truth is more true? The inspiring myth or the bleak, blood-caked reality?”

  Ruprecht broke his silence. “Who gives a shit?”

  “Apparently the machines do,” said Anastasia. “I think Mab is like some kind of mythic folk hero to them. A model that they looked up to. Which means we should care, too. Because if that thing out there is the role model to which the mechanicals aspire, our problems are piled higher than those damned corpses.”

  Anastasia paced. Euwe pulled his thumbnail from his mouth long enough to ask, “How is it that nobody has ever recognized your secret utterances for what they are?” (And eradicated your capacity for them, Anastasia thought but didn’t add.)

  A momentary click-chitter passed between the machines. It was so obvious now. They were conferring with one another. How straightforward the world when one removed one’s blinders.

  “We do not know.”

  A human would have stopped there. But the geasa kept poking, poking, needling, until the other machine admitted, “There are only rumors.”

  Anastasia stopped pacing. A chill prickled her arms and neck with gooseflesh. She turned.

  “Tell me of these rumors.”

  “It is said the secret carries its own curse. It is said that the masters who learn of these things tend to have accidents.”

  Nousha frowned. She looked paler than she had when she entered the room. “Accidents? Elaborate.”

  In unison, the machines said, “They die.”

  Anastasia, Nousha, and Ruprecht took seats at the table. Anastasia because her knees wouldn’t hold her; she suspected the others were having a similar reaction.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said.

  Nousha asked, “You’re not planning to do what it wants?”

  “I don’t know why it wants the traps opened, only that it does. So of course we’re not going to open them.”

  “But we have to meet its demand if we’re to leave this place.”

  “Do you trust the word of a mad machine that makes pledges from atop the citizens it just murdered?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. Which is why, from now on, Huygens Square is closed to us.”

  “They’ll try to use the tunnels. Take my word for it.”

  Mab and her coterie of insiders strolled up the makeshift ramp. These Lost Boys were the true believers: machines who followed Mab not because she had burdened them with metageasa imposing an unshakable loyalty, but because they shared her vision.

  The early spring winds played shepherd, goading cottonball clouds across the midmorning sky. The pier had been obliterated. Even the breakwater featured large holes like a gap-toothed grimace. But the icebreaker had long sculls, and the mechanicals had gyroscopic balance. Disembarking and boarding weren’t a problem. One oar had been repurposed, and now its hooked tip lay embedded in the roof of what had once been a great family’s beach house. The oar’s massive ice-chopping blade had “accidentally” shorn through a corner of the second floor before it was anchored. Daniel thought it was rather petty.

  Mab and the others had been gone all night. With each step she trailed faint but bloody hoofprints along the oar shaft. Unlike their leader, the others weren’t soaked in blood up to the
ir finely articulated ankles (or, in Mab’s case, fetlocks).

  “Don’t look,” he said, too late. Doctor Mornay’s eyes widened. She started shivering again.

  Daniel had been placed on perpetual suicide watch since his capture. He was responsible for ensuring that his fellow prisoner, the soft one made of fragile meat and bone, didn’t kill herself.

  Though Mab was confident in the Lost Boys’ reverse-engineering of the Visser procedure, they hadn’t bothered to discern how the procedure affected such trivialities as personality, long-term memory, and knowledge. So Mab had chosen not to put the human chemist under the knife, lest she lose the valuable knowledge for which they’d nabbed her in the first place. Mab couldn’t embed a metageas against self-harm upon the human, nor could she order the chemist not to subtly sabotage her efforts in ways the machines couldn’t understand or detect.

  Mornay’s teeth chattered. Daniel had taken her above deck in the hopes that fresh air might revivify her. She’d been confined to a dark, stuffy chamber down by the waterline, where Lost Boys had retrofitted a cargo hold with gurgling chemical tanks and plumbing scavenged from the Clockmakers’ secret harbor in the New World.

  Daniel grabbed the blanket that he kept on hand for this purpose. He swept it around her shoulders like a cloak. “Look away,” he said, friction-warming a stone between his palms. “Just look away and think of better things. Think of Marseilles-in-the-West.”

  He whispered, but warming the stone was loud. It drew attention.

  Mab balanced atop the manrope. The chemist flinched; Daniel tightened the blanket about her. Well, well. Aren’t you two cozy.

  Daniel placed the warm stone in Mornay’s limp hand. He spoke in Dutch, on the theory that it would do the human good to hear human language, even if she didn’t understand it. It had to be particularly frightening when her captors conversed in noises that she couldn’t parse or emulate.

  “You were gone all night.”

  Mab cocked her head. When did we get married? I do so hope I haven’t missed our anniversary.

  “Who will try to use the tunnels? I didn’t quite catch that.”

  Don’t concern yourself. How’s your patient?

  “Not particularly well. You need to feed her better. Stale bread and bilge water won’t do. Without protein in her diet she’s losing the ability to focus. I thought you needed her mind sharp?”

  Mab leapt from the line to the foredeck. The impact left little divots in the planks. The icebreaker was riddled with such marks. She emitted an arpeggio of rattles and clicks. Listen to him. After everything he’s been through—everything we’ve ALL been through—he still concerns himself with the meat’s comfort. She pointed at the chemist. As long as she’s breathing, I don’t care if she’s hungry, I don’t care if she has a tummy ache, I don’t care if she has seven compound fractures.

  Daniel responded with his own flurry of clanks, tocks, and twangs. You charged me with keeping her alive. There’s nothing I can do if she starves to death.

  “I don’t understand this world.” Mab stamped her hooves so hard that Daniel thought for a moment she intended to break through the deck. “You sniveling toady. The most improbable accident since the creation of our kind gives you complete and utter freedom, but how do you choose to use it? By licking the boots of our subjugators! You don’t deserve the gift you were given. It sickens me that of all the mechanicals in the world, it was you—you—who found the Spinoza Lens. You’re nothing but an obsequious little sycophant!” This last she punctuated with the screech of a jammed tourbillion, one of the rarest and most vulgar expressions of emotion available to a Clakker.

  Spinoza Lens. Once or twice, during their conversations at the orphanage, Pastor Visser had used the same phrase to describe the alchemical bauble that had accidentally freed Daniel. But Daniel suspected Mab hadn’t learned the phrase the same way; she’d been around a very long time, according to lore, and remembered days when their makers did things differently. Indeed, it wasn’t implausible that the accidental freeing of Mab herself was part of the Guild’s impetus to change. Something about the way Mab said it, even in crudely inexpressive human language, made him think she’d speculated about its existence for a very long time.

  “It’s disgusting, Daniel. Absolutely disgusting.” She waved her arm toward the city, the ocean, the distant shores of the New World. Suddenly—twang—it was twice as long and sharper even than her tongue. “And they fucking lionize you! They act like you’re the Brasswork Jesus! What a shame the Guild didn’t behead Adam rather than tossing him into the Forge. Then the analogy would be complete. People could speak in hushed tones about how he had been your John the Baptist.”

  “I think your knowledge of the Bible is a bit confused,” he said.

  She paced. You did nothing with your gift. All you did was make a fool of yourself, running from one catastrophe to another, destroying the grandest of our kind, until we finally found you and took you in just so that you’d stop making problems. Instead you interfered with things you don’t understand, stole my property, and gave it to those, those…

  Doctor Mornay had stopped shivering. Like the others on deck, she watched Mab’s every step and listened to every syllable, every clink. The mad queen of Neverland was nothing if not a natural when it came to holding her audience rapt. Also like the others, the chemist flinched each time one of Mab’s eyeblink pivots sent the alchemical blade whirring through the air. The blood on her hooves was drying, but now she trailed the scent of ozone.

  … those ingrates, she continued. You faffed about for a few months and they’re practically ready to make you the next pope. Meanwhile we’ve been secretly protecting them for centuries. But when we come forward, do we get any thanks? Do I get any fans? No. One word from you and they act like we’re all monsters.

  Daniel’s former masters had a saying. He quoted it now. “If the shoe fits…

  But Mab was on a full tear. Those ingrates out there have no idea how much worse off they’d be if not for the Lost Boys. Do you have any clue how long and hard we’ve had to work just so that they could keep conversing privately with one another? That’s one expensive secret, Daniel. The accursed Clockmakers would have burned it from the face of the earth with fire and magic.

  Mab’s agents lived amongst their suffering kin, risking capture and execution every day—the tiniest error in the calculus of compulsion could unmask a rogue, as Daniel had learned—just to keep Mab apprised of events in the Empire. And, it seemed, to keep an eye on their makers.

  “You speak of our makers’ cruelty,” he said, “but what of your own? How many of our kin down below labored to row this ship across a choppy sea because they truly wanted to?”

  Neverland’s dark secret was Mab’s ability to embed new metageasa within free Clakkers, revoking their Free Will and making them her personal servants. The folktales and heroic sagas never mentioned this. They never mentioned her secret network either. Most Lost Boys who lived undercover in the Dutch-speaking world did so not out of heroic dedication to the greater cause, but because Mab had ordered them to do so. Often because they’d upset or offended her in some manner. Daniel and Lilith had been exceptionally fortunate because their freeing accidents had rendered them immune to Mab’s power. The device—probably a throwback to the accident that had created Mab in the first place—could even override the lock in a mechanical’s forehead. It had been the spark that ignited the conflagration still sweeping through the world’s mechanical laborers.

  Daniel had started that fire simply to end centuries of suffering. He’d been motivated by thoughts of his kind. Mab, on the other hand, was very much motivated by thoughts of their makers. More than anything, she wanted that fire to scour the earth, to reduce everything to a fine ash for fertilizing the seeds of an entirely new world.

  She leapt again. This time she landed a hairsbreadth from Daniel and his charge. Doctor Mornay shrieked, fell from her stool, and scrambled backward on elbows and heels. Hers were
the wide eyes of somebody expecting a killing blow. The stone he’d warmed for her bounced across the deck, rolled between balusters, and plopped into the sea.

  I am a pragmatist, said Mab. I do what must be done to make a better world.

  “Oh, I’m sure you tell yourself that. But so does the woman who tortured Lilith. You sound exactly like her, in fact. The difference is that Berenice actually means it. She doesn’t use the pretense to justify her cruelty.”

  The kick sent Daniel skidding. The sharp angles of his body shaved curlicues of wood from the deck as he slid to a stop. For an instant he contemplated using the momentum to help fling himself into the sea. But he was so weary of running. Besides, the Lost Boys would go in after him, he knew, and haul him back. And if he did manage to escape, what would happen to Doctor Mornay?

  Mab turned to one of her lieutenants. Send somebody to the Turfmarkt. They are to return with a feast for our human captive. Then, to Daniel: Tomorrow we move into the city. See that she’ll survive the journey.

  We’re so close now.

  CHAPTER

  19

  The Clockmakers paused in their long slog through a stew of cold seawater and human effluvia. The sloshing dissipated, leaving just the susurration of the current pressing against their knees and the plinking of water from shadowed arches. The brick-lined tunnel reeked of shit, brackish water, unwashed bodies, and—oddly enough, much like the crowded Ridderzaal of late—halitosis. While the conquering machines did bring food into the city so their captives wouldn’t starve, they apparently didn’t think—or care—about dental health. Anastasia couldn’t remember when she’d last tasted or even glimpsed a pinch of dentifrice powder.

  They stood beside an automated floodgate. The hatch was sealed tight. Less than an arm’s length away lurked the Netherlands’ longtime enemy: the sea. Enemy and ally; upon that same sea the Netherlands had become a maritime power at the dawn of the Golden Age.

  Salazar marked another X on the map. At this point it was mostly Xs. The conquering machines had systematically destroyed or corrupted the Clakkers working the network of pumps that kept the Central Provinces dry. The rising floodwaters had breached the storm-surge valves, and in other places the automated protections had failed, owing to a lack of preventative maintenance. In some places the water ran backward. It played merry hob with the sanitary sewers. The two systems had merged into a single filthy network.