The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Read online

  Berenice had salted her tale for Sigrid with mention of an Archmaster. Thank all the fates she had—else the machine fighting Huginn would have sounded the alarm without first saving her life. Few human lives outweighed the Rogue Clakker metageasa.

  The piercing shriek cracked windows up and down the street. It knocked loose the last shards of glass still seated in the mullions of the ruined dining room windows. Berenice gritted her teeth—flinching, because even this wrenched her throat—and forced herself forward while the rest of the village was paralyzed.

  These yokels surely hadn’t experienced the Rogue Clakker alarm in living memory. It would be foreign, terrifying, incapacitating. It sure as hell knocked Berenice on her ass the first time she heard it, the night the newly completed Grand Forge of New Amsterdam became a smoking crater. But by now she was an old hand at suffering through the ear-shattering warble. Not so the citizens of Honfleur, who writhed on the ground with hands clamped over their ears and blood streaming through their fingers.

  Honfleur was a small village. The noise dissipated even as Berenice ducked around the corner. Stumble-sprinting to the livery, she saw another mechanical join the fray. This one burst through the upper windows of what appeared to be the postal office. Huginn was outnumbered. It punched through the masonry of a house abutting the postal office, strode inside, and reemerged with a balding man in its grasp. The rogue had taken a hostage.

  Poor bastard. She wondered who he was, and whether he held a station in the village that would preserve his life.

  She dashed into the livery. Like every stable she’d ever known, it stank with the mélange of manure, hay, and horse. There were only two horses. The first was a roan nag, the other a bay that had to be at least sixteen hands. Both were rearing and neighing, upset by the alarm. Poor things were probably half deafened by the cacophony. Christ knew she was; the ringing in her ears was worse than it had ever been. The livery man lay in a fetal curl amid wet hay and shit. She knelt beside him.

  At first he thought she’d come to check on him, and so was confused when she rifled the pockets of his leather apron. She pulled out a handful of sugar cubes. He frowned, still not realizing she intended to steal one of the beasts in his charge. He leaned onto one elbow to watch her approach the stalls. The nag she disregarded immediately. If pursuit came, she’d need everything the bay could give her, and probably more. She worried that it would have a temperament to match its size, but it calmed considerably after finding the sugar in her palm. The livery man lurched to his unsteady feet when she started to saddle the horse. His lips moved, but the ringing in her ears drowned out his voice.

  Berenice tried to say, “I’m so sorry, truly,” but it felt as though she’d eaten a pulverized wine bottle.

  She swung the saddle with all her strength, hitting him in the face and sending him to sprawl in the muck. He touched a hand to the blood trickling from his nose and cried. But he didn’t get up.

  Meanwhile, on the street outside, Clakkers fought. She felt the concussions through the soles of her feet more than she heard them with her ringing ears. The livery shook with an impact when one machine threw another against the siding. The horses didn’t like this.

  But she managed to saddle the bay, and gave it another sugar cube for good measure. Almost as an afterthought she also grabbed a pair of saddlebags. Into one she put a bunch of carrots, and into the other she poured all the money she could find. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

  Thank Christ for good-natured beasts. The bay put up little resistance when she mounted it. For this it received the last of the sugar. The livery keeper rolled over, grabbed a pitchfork, and staggered to his feet. She kicked him aside.

  “Verderer’s Office!” she rasped by way of apology, before charging from the stable on her stolen horse.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Margreet the Second, Queen of the Netherlands, Princess of Nassau-Orange and the Central Provinces, Blessed Sovereign of Europe, Protector of the New World, Light of Civilization and Benevolent Ruler of the Dutch Empire, Rightful Monarch Upon the Brasswork Throne, wishes peace upon the stout hearts of Marseilles-in-the-West. As a show of magnanimity toward those victims of circumstance helplessly caught within this needless conflict, she offers the following bounties:

  100 ƒ for the head of any officer, lieutenant or below

  500 ƒ for the head of any officer, captain or above

  1,000 ƒ for the head of any noble, vicomte or below

  5,000 ƒ for the head of any noble, marquis or above

  50,000 ƒ for the head of King Sébastien III.

  All bounties shall be paid on the spot, and shall instantly bestow full citizenship within the Central Provinces with all due privileges and comforts, plus a waiver worth five years’ lease of one mechanical servitor of modern construction.

  Longchamp crumpled the handbill and tossed it into a brazier. He didn’t feel as though he was five times the soldier he’d been in the last war. But, then, he felt little of anything these days. Numbness had claimed him inside and out, flesh and feelings alike.

  The leaflets arced over the walls in bales launched by Clakker-powered trebuchets. In rare quiet moments, one could hear the wind whickering through the loose edges of the leaflet bales and the tocktocktock-tick of its release mechanism. They fluttered into the keep like autumn leaves, each promising deliverance, acclaim, gold. They landed on defenders and huddled refugees, lowing bison and praying nuns, runny-nosed orphans and soldiers who had been on their feet a day or more.

  The tulips understood that once the fatigue and fear of a siege set in, evil thoughts within the walls were just as dangerous as violence without. The enemies of New France already lurked inside the walls, hidden in the seditious thoughts of those who could be tempted to buy their own safety at the expense of their country.

  At times, the propaganda rained so thick the paper threatened to clog the sewers. The children of Marseilles had been pressed into service as street sweepers. They raked the leaflets into a heap taller than they were.

  Longchamp’s eyes stung like they’d been doused with acid from the moats; he could smell himself. The children (a few wearing mittens of his own make, a realization that took several moments to percolate through the thicket of his blurry mind) shoveled the windblown handbills into the basin of the shattered fountain. The debris from the fight with Pastor Visser had been cleared away and taken to the walls. There the broken masonry found use as projectiles or emergency patches to battlements sundered by inhuman strength. Alan’s body, which had broken the fountain and left bloodstains in the marble, had been taken to the crypts under the basilica. Along with those of too many others.

  Sometimes instead of leaflets the tulips lobbed mechanicals over the walls. They came over like brassy cannonballs, smashing granite corbels before unfurling arms, legs, and blades. And sometimes the mechanicals came from below, having tunneled under the walls. The lightning guns proved a decent defense for this: The crackling energy ricocheted from one metallic body to the next, even around corners and doglegs intended to foil traditional projectiles.

  Grenadiers strove to lob petards upon the siege engines. But clockwork snipers often shot the explosive payloads in midflight. Even when the grenadiers found their targets, nobody cheered. The tulips could rebuild the engines almost as fast as dwindling French chemistry could obliterate them.

  A nun came forward with a torch. The propaganda went up with a fiery whoosh. A welcome wave of heat washed across the courtyard. Civvies surged forward with outstretched hands, desperate for any respite from the cold, no matter how fleeting. There was no fuel for fireplaces and cookstoves; every drop of anything that could so much as tarnish a ticktock had gone to the walls.

  How tempting it was to stand there asleep on his feet while the warmth soaked into his bones. But he ceded his spot at the basin to a woman carrying an infant on her hip.

  “Bonjour, Captain Longchamp,” she said.

  He
was too tired to respond.

  He’d just passed through the single open gate from the inner keep to the outer keep, en route to a barracks for a mouthful of pemmican and a nap, when a breathless corporal came skidding around the corner, shouting his name.

  “Captain Longchamp! Captain Longchamp!”

  Longchamp sighed. “What is it?”

  “Captain, sir, they’ve—” She paused to pant.

  “Jesus Christ, don’t kill me with suspense. That’s not the noble warrior’s death I envision for myself.”

  She hunched over, hands on her knees, panting. “The tulips, they’ve unveiled their new weapon. That thing they’ve been building far behind the lines? It’s finished.”

  “What is it?”

  “Looks like a cannon, sir.”

  In fact it was the largest Goddamned cannon Longchamp had ever seen. It was exactly what he’d feared.

  The bore had to be two yards across if it was the width of a baby’s nose hair. Big enough to lob mechanicals clear over the keep from far beyond the range of the most powerful steam harpoons in Marseilles. The gunners had tried again and again to hit the construction site, but despite the technicians’ best efforts, the boilers simply couldn’t produce enough pressure to send a projectile beyond the tulip lines. More than one gunnery crew had gone to the infirmary with second-and third-degree steam burns when their overtaxed boilers ruptured.

  Up and down the banquette, weary defenders turned fearful eyes from the enemy’s latest devilry to Longchamp, their leader, the man who would tell them what to do. He held the spyglass long after he’d seen everything he needed to see. They waited for him to tell them everything was going to be all right. That this had been anticipated. That there was a plan. That the marshal general and the privy council and the king were ready to meet this new challenge without delay.

  One good lie, thought Longchamp. Give them just one more show of confidence to raise their spirits so they can fight for a few more hours.

  He drew a blank.

  The longer he stared through the spyglass without comment, he knew, the more it would seem the tulips had taken the wind from his sails. But he was so tired and the mantle of affected bravado so Goddamned heavy. It took energy not to flinch when the hangman’s noose brushed one’s neck. And that’s what this cannon was: their executioner. They stood upon the scaffold trapdoor even now.

  Longchamp snapped the spyglass shut, then tossed it to the corporal. (Her name started with an H. Héloïse? Henriette?)

  “Looks to me,” he said to everybody within earshot yet nobody in particular, “like the tulips have tired of grinding themselves down against these walls. I think our friends have decided to fight an enemy better matched to their efforts. They’ve taken up duck hunting!”

  Forcing out a desultory laugh in that moment was the hardest thing he’d ever done. His transparent effort at levity garnered a few halfhearted chuckles in return, but nothing with a hint of life. As a desperate and bald-faced effort to maintain some lingering shreds of morale, it was piss-poor. There were no ducks to hunt this deep into winter. He lacked the strength to lift the defenders’ leaden spirits. And everybody saw it.

  How could he raise his sledge and pick in defense of the king when he couldn’t raise morale? How could he hope to lead men and women into battle when he couldn’t lead them through a round of laughter?

  But the new cannon was so Goddamned large. And he was so Goddamned tired.

  He shook his head. If the tulips were going to overrun them, they wouldn’t find Hugo Longchamp gazing at his navel when they did. They’d find him doing his job and making life hell for those who didn’t.

  He snatched the spyglass away from the corporal (Hetty? Hyacinthe? Hélène?) and cast his gaze across the battlefield. Here and there a smashed wicker basket and wind-ruffled shreds of canopy marked the crash site of a French balloon. Smoking craters speckled with mechanical detritus marked the spots where an explosive payload had caught one or more mechanicals by surprise. So, too, the exotic, flowerlike splash patterns of solidified epoxy, many of which contained Clakkers, just like the Christmas-cake raisins he hated so fucking much.

  Consequently, the mechanicals no longer stood in neat ranks; instead, they had excavated an extensive array of trenches that zigzagged back and forth across the meadows and into the surrounding forest. The trenches had appeared as the French gunners perfected their aim and the technicians learned how to maximize the range of the epoxy cannon and steam harpoon. The oblique angles of the trenches made it possible for the Clakkers to approach the walls without affording the gunners a clear or easy shot. Some trenches reached all the way to the base of the southern glacis; these had been clogged with epoxy and broken masonry. Sunlight glinted from the arm of a Clakker caught inside one of these heaps.

  The trenches had motivated the marshal general to petition the king to issue a royal decree conscripting more spotters. Those children who weren’t already street sweepers, message runners, or munitions monkeys were stationed throughout the inner and outer keeps, watching bowls of water, waiting for another incursion from below.

  The banquette shook underfoot in time to the juddering of a boiler ensconced within a nearby bastion. Longchamp slewed the spyglass back and forth until he found the likely target: A trio of mechanicals had emerged from a trench and blurred through a landscape pocked with petard craters and glassy fountains of solid epoxy. The spotter, peering through a narrow slit in the merlon, called directions to the gunner—once, twice, while the Clakkers halved the distance and halved it again. The lead mechanical hurled something at the merlon just as the spotter opened his mouth to yell, “FIRE!”

  But the firing order never came. A javelin thrown with inhuman precision streaked through the gap in the granite battlements and the roof of the spotter’s mouth. It exploded through the back of his head and pinned him, twitching, to the inner wall of the bastion. His heels kicked a silent tattoo against the wall as he died, silent under the cacophony of juddering steam boilers, thunderous explosions, and the cries of human soldiers. The gunner, dependent upon the spotter to tell her when to fire, did nothing while the trio of Clakkers made the curtain wall. Only when the neighboring bastions opened fire with steam-driven harpoons and precious epoxy did she realize what had happened. Too late. The delay was nearly catastrophic.

  A sergeant on the adjoining stretch of wall dispatched a squad with bolas, picks, and sledges to the spot. The dead spotter got in their way. They couldn’t dislodge the corpse delicately, for the javelin—really more of a flechette—protruding from the man’s skull was embedded too deeply in the granite. They knocked it down with two blows of a sledgehammer, sending the dead man to tumble from the banquette. The adjacent gunners incapacitated two of the incoming mechanicals before they reached the top. The squad was ready for the third when it arrived, though three more soldiers died unwriting it.

  Longchamp turned his attention back to the tulips’ new cannon. He squinted. The sun was higher in the sky now, making it slightly easier to peer through the battlefield haze of smoke and ash. Several human commanders of the Dutch army oversaw the readying of the cannon. They strolled about on French land as if they already owned it, secure in the knowledge that they stood well beyond the range of the French guns. A hatch opened atop the barrel. A quartet of Clakkers—soldiers, too, by the way they towered over the humans—leaped into the breech.

  “Magdalene’s handjobs,” Longchamp muttered. Before he could raise his voice, he had to gather his strength. Everything was an effort now. More loudly, he said, “We’re going to have incoming any second! I say again, incoming metal! Ready the teams on the Spire!”

  The corporal sprinted to the nearest signal-lamp station and there turned Longchamp’s orders into a rapid sequence of flashes. He craned his neck, squinting against the glare of sunlight on the broken funicular tracks to stare at the Spire. He couldn’t see the confirmation flashes from the uppermost heliograph station. But, then, he didn’t need t
o; he knew what they’d say. And he also knew what the tulips were about to do. But Longchamp’s people weren’t ready for an assault directly on the Spire. It had never happened before.

  Repairs to the funicular had been glacial, owing to clockwork snipers picking off the repair crews. Cars hadn’t run the full height of the Spire since the confrontation with Visser. Consequently, construction of the new weapon platform had fallen behind schedule. Longchamp wondered if his failure to catch Visser quickly and cleanly had tolled the knell for Marseilles, and they simply hadn’t heard it at the time.

  The chemists liked to boast the Spire was strong enough to withstand fire from the largest Dutch cannon ever fielded. But the tulips had just unveiled something that rendered the old artillery a rusty flintlock pistol by comparison.

  Longchamp sprinted to the lamp station. Men and women jumped out of his way. “Jesus Christ, they’re out of time! We have to take out that cannon NOW!”

  The corporal said, “Last update said another day until there’s a working weapon platform, sir.”

  Goddamn it.

  “New orders. I want four more squads up there yesterday Goddamned morning. Defend the installation. Nothing else matters!”

  The heliograph operator went to work. The staccato tapping of the shutter sounded like chattering teeth just barely audible under the din of war. Flashes of light ricocheted from one ground station to the next, flitting around the outer keep like a curse. Sixteen men and women stumble-sprinted toward the base of the Spire. They carried tools of last resort. The funicular dropped in a hell-bent emergency descent, slowing at the last moment with a toe-curling screech as the brakes threw a shower of sparks from the rails. The weary defenders piled in. The car ascended less hectically, owing to the weight, but still got them to the top faster than they would have managed sprinting up the entire height of the Porter’s Prayer by foot. They’d only have to sprint part of the way, but that was more than enough to steal the breath from anybody lugging a full loadout.