The Liberation Page 32

  He tucked the grease pencil into his breast pocket, then frowned at the network of lines spiderwebbing the map. Anastasia nudged the shutter on her alchemical lamp. Every glimmer of light was a deadly risk. But if there was a way out of the Binnenhof that didn’t involve scrambling over a ten-foot wall of the dead, they had to find it.

  The machine calling itself Mab was true to its word. Each morning found the wall around the Ridderzaal taller and longer than it had been the day before. Soon it would gird Huygens Square entirely.

  “What are our options?”

  No matter how quietly she whispered, her voice echoed. A pointless precaution, yet she couldn’t help herself. Any rogues in the tunnels would have detected their sloshing from a tenth of a mile away.

  He pointed. “If the next junction isn’t flooded, we might be able to backtrack to an overflow gate in the Scheveningen Canal.”

  Arthur, the clerk, slumped against the slimy bricks. “That has to be miles from here.”

  Anastasia’s calves gave little twinges of protest. The thought of endlessly slogging through cold toilet water made her legs cramp up.

  They had no mechanical escorts; Stemwinders wouldn’t fit in the tunnels. As for the rest, namely the dwindling population of uncorrupted servitors and soldiers holed up in the Ridderzaal, those had been given extremely severe metageasa. Their one and only purpose was to defend the Forge, to prevent its secrets from falling to Mab and her cohort. They’d kill anybody, even Queen Margreet (were she still alive, God rest her cowardly soul), in service of that goal. They’d torch the Ridderzaal with relentless alchemical fire, reducing everything and everybody within to just a wisp of carbon, before they let it fall to the so-called Lost Boys.

  Salazar motioned for her to take the lead. She relented, even though she knew it was a mistake to believe the glass embedded in her hand would save them should they bumble into an ambush. The conquerors knew about her hand and would be ready for it. After all, they’d sent Malcolm to the Guild with a hatchet, specifically for her. She squeezed past him and they proceeded, single-file.

  They slogged against a cold current. After ten or fifteen minutes of slow and noisome progress—Anastasia had to estimate; her timepiece bracelet had stopped working long ago, in response to which particular insult she couldn’t say—the current grew faster, the footing slimier. Her waders weren’t equipped with cleats or talons such as those retrofitted to the servitors working the sewers. The current threatened to sweep her legs from under her. But she’d probably drown in aspirated filth before she arrived bobbing and spluttering in the North Sea.

  The rats were fearless. The roaches were worse. There were problems even an army of mechanicals couldn’t solve.

  The tunnels had originally been built to reflect the grandeur of imperial styles, but over centuries had become riddled with patches. Places where the watertight plaster didn’t quite match the color of the original bricks, or where entire replacement bricks broke the symmetry of the original work. It was unusual to see the seams in a mechanical’s handiwork; Clakkers were capable of superb craftsmachineship. Then again, the geasa laid upon them by generations of city works–department overseers probably didn’t place a premium on artistry. After all, no human had come down here in centuries. And, had history kept to the canal the Guild had surveyed and excavated so carefully, none ever would have again. Such was the simple, beautiful world promised by Christiaan Huygens’s miracle.

  The next tunnel sloped upward. Just a few degrees, but enough to make the footing even more difficult. Every few steps the current knocked her to her knees. Soon Anastasia was covered in chilly muck from the breasts down, and splashed with filth from there up. Eventually, they reached a junction.

  Salazar consulted the map again. “Almost there,” he whispered. “Just another mile.”

  Arthur sighed. “Wonderful.”

  Anastasia rounded on him. “Go wander the tunnels on your own, you useless pencil pusher. You have zero skills of value to offer to our current situation. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but of all the problems currently facing the city, the Guild, and the Empire, not to mention ourselves, a lack of properly filed paperwork is not one of them.” Her voice echoed. She didn’t care. She had feces in her hair and, she was fairly certain, on her face. “Somebody take his lamp before he goes.”

  The group was particularly quiet after that. Which is how they heard the servitor lurking in the dark before they stumbled into it. Its body emitted a tortured ticktocking like a parody of a metronome. There came a tinny mumbling, too. It was speaking to somebody. Speaking aloud in Dutch, rather than in a private, inhuman language. Anastasia clamped the shutter on her lamp and frantically motioned for the others to do the same.

  She crouched, concentrated. But her waxy human ears were unequal to the task. She couldn’t make out the other machines in the conversation. And then she realized there were no other machines. The Clockmakers eavesdropped on a mechanical monologue.

  Anastasia had never heard a machine speak to itself. If she had, back in the old days, she would have seen it through the lens of malfunction. And would have commanded the machine to report to the nearest Guild center for repair. Or, more likely, back to the Grand Forge for a complete overhaul.

  Which, come to think of it, was probably why the machines took care never to speak to themselves.

  Then again, maybe they did. Maybe they did so perpetually, and had done so for centuries. Perhaps the Guild’s creations were loquacious. But if they spoke to themselves, it was in the language of ticks and tocks—certainly never in Dutch, and certainly never with any humans in earshot.

  She crept closer. The mechanical mumbling resolved into a litany of obedience.

  “Immediately, master.” Clack, chack, crack. “Yes, mistress. As you say, mistress.” Twang, bang, clang. “This instant, Your Excellency.” Tick, click, snick. “How may I serve the Department of Waterworks?”

  Anastasia glanced at the others. A row of frightened, confused eyes blinked at her. The rats on the ledges paid her no heed, scurrying back and forth around the corner with no concern for the machine in the juncture.

  Salazar caught her eye. He indicated the map, then the corner where she shivered. Their route went straight past the talkative machine.

  She flexed her fist. Her hand didn’t tingle. Didn’t burn. But, then, she was too exhausted for true terror or rage. Weary resignation was the strongest emotion she could muster. She was cold, and frightened, and hungry, and doomed. At this point, unless they found a way out and quickly, Mab’s noose would snap shut around the throat of the Central Provinces and crack the neck of the greatest power the world had ever seen.

  She moved forward again, listening.

  “Yes, sir, I did, sir. Exactly as you told me, sir.” Click, clank. “Yes, Highness. I delivered your message verbatim, directly to the Minister General with no intermediaries present, as you ordered.” Clack, chack, crack. Gingerly, she hooked her fingers around the slimy bricks and prepared to pull herself around the corner in one slow, smooth motion. A roach scuttled over her fingertips. “No, Highness. Minister General Kikkert bade me not. He offered no reply and commanded me to depart.”

  That stopped her. Minister General Kikkert’s argument with the Brasswork Throne had been the talk of every parlor and salon in the Central Provinces… a hundred and sixty years ago.

  The nonverbal noises thundered like the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer. This was crude metal on metal, not the subtle purr of fine clockwork. Though that was audible, too, as everywhere in The Hague. Even, apparently, in the sewers.

  It had to be aware of them. The sloshing of the water, the crinkling of the map, the furtive consultations, her tantrum at Arthur… But apparently it didn’t care. She turned the corner.

  The juncture was larger than the others they’d traversed. Those had been simple groined vaults; here the arches leapt twice as high as the tunnel she’d just exited. She kept her lantern to a dull shimmer on the foamy shit-w
ater, lest the glint from a carapace blind her for a deadly moment. But she needn’t have worried. The servitor’s body wasn’t a burnished silvery chrome; it had the liverish pallor of Corinthian bronze. This machine was quite old, like the medical servitors she’d seen daubing paint on one another outside the hospital.

  Hands gripping a pump handle the size of a fifty-year-old beech bole, it stood with its back to Anastasia. It heaved. Clank, clunk, went the lever. The tunnel shook.

  Flood control, she realized. This machine was part of that invisible and never-regarded army of servitors who labored day and night to keep the Central Provinces dry. Nobody had bothered to tell this machine that its war was over, that the generals had ceded defeat and let the sea claim the battleground.

  “Yes, mistress. It shall be as you say.” Clunk, clank. Like a mouse creeping past a dozing tomcat, Anastasia slogged against the current. The old servitor never deviated from its task.

  “Take care, mistress. You’ll catch cold in those waders, or worse.”

  She froze. Her voice refused its first summons. She licked her lips (which was a dreadful mistake), spat, hacked, and coughed before she conjured a hoarse approximation of her normal speaking voice.

  “Carry on,” she said. “Disregard me.”

  “Disregard you? DISREGARD YOU? You might as well order me to DISRESPECT YOU.” Anastasia gasped, retreated. Pressed her back to cold, slimy bricks while the machine raged. “Will you SET my SOUL ABLAZE that I might think on RUDE GESTURES to flash at your accursed VILE HEART and your grandsons’ inheritance of CRUEL PRIVILEGE?”

  Its bellowing shook the tunnel nearly as much as the pump did. Addressing any citizen like this was impossible for a machine properly controlled by the metageasa. But the metageasa had lost their hold over this machine.

  And yet it cleaved to its pointless task.

  It heaved again. Clunk, clank. Back went the lever.

  Dear God. It was still pumping. No geasa patrolled the magical confines of that metal shell; no chains shackled the machine to its duty. There was nothing—nothing—to enforce continued compliance with a directive that had probably been voiced by a man whose grandchildren had long ago turned to dust. And yet it was still pumping. Still laboring. Still doing the work it had been doing day and night and day without interruption since long before Anastasia’s mother was born.

  This servitor hadn’t been overlooked by the invaders. It hadn’t fallen through the cracks, nor had it been left behind by the conquerors who sought to corrupt or destroy every mechanical laborer in The Hague. They’d infected it, but it hadn’t left its post.

  It wasn’t shackled by the geasa. It was shackled by madness.

  The horrifying reality of truly insane clockworks had already confronted Anastasia: the cordon of bodies around the Ridderzaal was indisputable proof. So, too, the machines painting one another like children. Furthermore, the machines had a language of their own, one they deliberately concealed from their masters. That indicated a depth of internal function—of introspection—not covered in any schema ever discussed in the most paranoid corners of the Guild. The existence of a private language implied the existence of private thoughts to be expressed; private thoughts begat private inner lives; inner lives begat personalities and on and on and on. If Clakkers could engage in reasoned debate with one another, that necessarily implied the ability for reason. But what happened when a reasoning machine malfunctioned? It went mad.

  Perhaps they were all mad, after centuries of labor. Anastasia shivered.

  What happens when there is only duty? What happens when your task is your identity, your entire universe the span of your arms? This machine had labored without pause for generations, forever obeying the dictates of an eternal geas. But then the geasa had disappeared, the fires winked out, and all that remained after generations of burning was a bowl of windblown ash where, for lack of a better term, the machine’s sanity should have been.

  Such were her thoughts as she waited for the killing blow. But though the machine ranted, it never deviated from its task. Killing her would have meant taking its hands from the lever pump for the entirety of two seconds. And its madness, a compulsion stronger than anything mere human alchemy or horology could devise, forbade that. Anastasia straightened. After a sigh of relief forceful enough to crack the cartilage of her breastbone like an arthritic knuckle, she leaned around the corner and beckoned the other Clockmakers forward. The servitor kept up its monologue while the fugitive humans trudged through the juncture.

  “Yes, Majesty… Immediately, Highness… I humbly beg your pardon, Minister General… It shall be as you command, sir… At once, Highness…

  Tove actually stopped to stare at the machine; Anastasia grabbed her arm and yanked her clear. Even then, nobody spoke until they’d cleared the juncture and the slam-bang-clang of the manually operated pump had receded to a dull rumble in the tunnels.

  Tove wondered aloud. “What the hell was that?”

  “That was a close call wrapped in some very unpleasant philosophical questions,” said Anastasia. She pointed at Salazar’s map. “Now what?”

  He marked the juncture with the grease pencil and then, after a few moments’ consultation, pointed to the left. “That’s it. That should open on a canal edging the beach.”

  Another half hour of slogging through the cold muck proved him right. They extinguished their lamps when the final bend in the tunnel revealed a faint circle of daylight. They came to a narrow culvert overlooking a spillway channel along the Scheveningen seashore. They’d brought picks and crowbars, but these were unnecessary. As always, the others let her lead the way; she eased out and tumbled into a drift of gravel at the bottom of the concrete channel. The sun had made it blessedly warm.

  Useless fist clenched, she knelt in the wet sand and thin sunlight, like a shim of pale beechwood sanded and polished down to a sliver. Soon that would be all that remained of her: a sliver of her former self. And then the world would burn, and her with it. But in the meantime she crouched in the channel, trying to filter out the cawing of seagulls and the hiss of the sea, listening for the metallic noises that were once so comforting and now the harbinger of terrible things. The others watched from the darkness of the culvert, steeped in filth and anxiety.

  She heard nothing deadly. Eventually, she pieced together enough of her scattered courage to rise into an aching crouch and peer over the channel lip.

  Scheveningen had been obliterated just as thoroughly as Rotterdam Harbor. Based on the largely missing quay, she gauged that titanships had been involved here, too. That corroborated the scattered reports they’d received from refugees. This beach wasn’t a port like Rotterdam; it lacked the commercial facilities. It was a recreation spot. Nevertheless the machines had turned every permanent building to rubble, splintering every board and pulverizing every brick. The ancestral beach homes of the Central Provinces’ greatest families were nothing but ten-foot heaps of sea-damp cinders and piles of warped slate tiles. The fires had burned themselves out within days of the invasion, yet even now a thin dusting of ash wafted from the ruins. Elsewhere, the rubble emitted a dreadful keening whenever a particularly strong ocean gust made landfall. An onionskin layer of sea salt crusted everything like hoarfrost, for of course there were no servitors to continually scour the salt away. She saw no motion. No sign of anything alive. No sign of the unknowable, unalive things that her Guild had created.

  According to refugees, two plague ships had arrived here on that terrible morning. But now just a lone ship bobbed amongst the debris in the harbor, its high prow taller than anything still standing on the seafront. Had its companion vessel departed to spread the collapse of civilization to other ports?

  She watched it for a good long time, waiting for something to come cannoning off the deck to land in the scrim and butcher her. Nothing did.

  Behind her, metal creaked and sand crunched. Human footsteps approached. Having noticed that she hadn’t been captured, or murdered, the others
joined her.

  Tove craned back. “What is that?”

  Anastasia mustered something that, in a dark room after several shots of oude jenever, might have resembled a laugh. “I’m surprised you, of all people, don’t recognize it. Don’t you have icebreakers in Norway?”

  Arthur gaped. Literally gaped, with mouth ajar.

  Nousha took a single peek, then hunkered within the overflow channel. Anastasia and the rest followed her example, trying to huddle outside the towering icebreaker’s sight lines, in case it wasn’t deserted. Nousha said, “It must have come from the New World.”

  Salazar said, “Is it a quintessence shipment?”

  That would make sense. For Mab and its allies to be making pineal glasses, they needed a supply of quintessence. That it had arrived in The Hague by ship suggested the corruption of the machines had probably begun somewhere in the New World; Mab, or its allies, could control the French duke’s mine by now.

  Anastasia shook her head. “If that vessel carried quintessence, we can assume the human crew is dead and we’ll never see a single dram of the cargo. Nor of the chemicals that might have been bound for the New Amsterdam Forge, once upon a time.”

  Arthur said, “We could use it. Evacuate.”

  “Somebody kill this idiot.” Anastasia’s hands had gone numb. She realized she was clenching her fists so tightly she’d begun to cut off circulation to her fingers. She forced herself to relax. Shaking her tingling hands, she added, “I don’t have a weapon and don’t want to break a bone in my hand beating him to death.”

  “I think evacuation is a perfectly reasonable option,” huffed the clerk.

  Salazar’s look ought to have cut Arthur to the bone. “Look at those oars. That ship can’t be sailed by humans. We’d need a crew. A mechanical crew.”