The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Read online

  That was sixteen bodies no longer manning the wall. Sixteen gaps they couldn’t fill and couldn’t afford. Longchamp ordered a redeployment to fill the worst of the gaps, and a sergeant—Chrétien’s replacement—to call up the last dregs of the reserves. And they were dregs. The weak, the undisciplined, the untrained, the untrainable. Longchamp recognized one of them: the merchant in the fur coat who had so badly panicked and failed his first gunnery-training session.

  The ground shook. Several seconds later the low roar of thunder reverberated across the battleground and turned the outer keep into an echo chamber. He spun to peer through an embrasure just in time to see wisps of smoke rising from the barrel of the tulips’ massive cannon. Four gleaming projectiles streaked high across the sky. Three flew wide of the Spire; the fourth attempted to anchor itself with the projectile spikes from its ankles, but succeeded only in scoring a deep gash in the nacreous coating of the royal apartments before tumbling out of control beyond the outer wall on the far side of the keep. A weary cheer went up from the terrified civilian spectators, and even a few of the defenders, who ought to have known better. Stupid optimism, that was.

  “Stop cheering, you daft sons of bi—”

  They did. Instead, the defenders manning the north bastion took up a hoarse cry. “Incoming! Incoming metal!”

  It was taken up by their comrades to the northeast and northwest. “Incoming metal! Mechanicals inbound!”

  And like a row of toppling dominoes, the cry circled the charred and smoldering earth around the keep before the funicular coasted to a halt in the sky. At every point along the outer wall, the defenders announced a metal tide:

  “Metal on the wall! We have METAL ON THE WALL!”

  “Inbound mechanicals!”

  “Incoming!”

  The tulips had finally opened the floodgates.

  Thunder shook the keep again. The Clakker cannon lofted more killers toward the Spire. The Dutch gunners’ aim was much improved.

  Daniel’s pursuers were tireless. But, then, so was he.

  He was no stranger to running for his life.

  They gained on him when he slowed to kick shards of granite from a knifelike outcrop. He caught several on the run, then reaccelerated into a dead sprint. He discarded the smallest pieces but retained the largest, sharpest pieces. These he rammed against his forehead while he ran, chiseling the metal plate from his keyhole.

  He dashed across the snowy taiga, trailing churned-up snow along with alchemical sparks and fragments of hot stone. Several heavy snowfalls had changed the lay of the land. The snowpack hid treacherous gullies, depressions, even hot springs that kept marshes mushy rather than letting them freeze over. Daniel dodged or vaulted some hazards, but others he discovered by charging straight into them. The Lost Boys giving chase avoided the same pitfalls by watching Daniel, or reading the signs of his passage.

  In spite of the snow he was faster now than he’d been on the flight north. He was whole now. Still a chimera, still contaminated with the abominable mixture of pieces from others’ bodies, and that couldn’t stand forever. But at least he wasn’t a broken wreck with a weathervane head and carrying one severed foot in useless club arms.

  He was free. Freer even than the Lost Boys who sprinted after him, slowly catching up as he and they traversed league upon trackless league. They chased him by dint of the geasa imposed by Queen Mab, tasked with recovering the anchor of their loyalty. Daniel had stolen the seat of her power, the source of the Lost Boys’ fealty. Without it she’d never impose her wishes on another mechanical ever again.

  He’d destroy it, scuttle it, clutch it to his chest and throw himself into the depths of Hudson Bay before it returned to her. Into the Grand Forge itself if need be. But he could think of a better use for it. It didn’t have to be a tool of evil. Perhaps it could do some good, too.

  If he could ever get the damn plate from his forehead. His chimerism was subtle enough he could count on humans not to notice it; the plate was the problem. But the French adhesives Mab had obtained from the Inuit were incredibly stubborn. He punched another stone chisel from a boulder. It slowed him just a bit, enabling the Lost Boys to draw closer.

  Where were the French partisans when he needed them? Or the natives of the snowy north? What would the Inuit make of a lone mechanical chased by a dozen of its kin? They’d know better than to get involved.

  He hurled himself from the lip of a ravine.

  The hardest part was convincing herself that a deadly machine wasn’t drawing closer with every beat of her hammering heart.

  Even if Mab’s agent somehow vanquished its attackers, the combat Berenice had witnessed on the streets of Honfleur ensured the rogue could no longer pass as a heavily used Clakker whose owner was guilty of the usual peccadillo of deferred minor maintenance. On rare occasions, one might see a working servitor with small dings, scratches, or even a tiny dent in a brassy carapace—particularly near factories, shipwrights, and other places of extremely heavy labor. But one never saw on the streets a servitor that had been bashed to hell and back. A Clakker subjected to that much damage would automatically cease operations and bring itself to the nearest Guild representative.

  So even if the brassy bastard prevailed, Huginn would be hard pressed to follow her without conspicuously violating the hierarchical metageasa.

  Still, just to be safe, she sought the company of as many mechanicals as possible. So she’d ridden her stolen horse (apologizing to the poor beast, under her breath, the entire way) until foam dripped from the bit. And then pushed it still farther, until the foam turned red and she reached a city with an actual harbor and an appreciable population of mechanicals.

  All the while hoping to hell she no longer matched the description of a fugitive French agent distributed throughout the entire Dutch-speaking world. Perhaps the Verderers’ agents still watched for a one-eyed woman fleeing from the New World. Not to it. A thin thread upon which to hang her hopes, but there it was. Berenice had swung like a spider from one gossamer thread to the next ever since her foolishness had killed Louis and she’d been cast from Marseilles-in-the-West.

  The thought made her wonder if there was anything left of the Crown, Keep, and Spire aside from smoke and ash drifting on a winter breeze. Was there anything left of Marseilles? Acadia? The Vatican? Or was she running headlong to a desolate expanse of smoldering salted earth?

  She’d never imagined how utterly ignorant she could be. It seemed a century since she’d last had reliable news from north of the Saint Lawrence.

  On a lane of dark-blue pavers leading to the docks stood a woman roasting chestnuts on a grate over a fire. She did a steady turn of business selling little paper cones of hot chestnuts to hungry passersby for a kwartje. Berenice’s stomach growled. She wished she’d had time to eat a proper meal before the rogue Clakker attempted to murder her.

  Berenice negotiated. It took considerable effort to make herself understood, owing to her bruises, and even more effort to keep each utterance from becoming a howl of pain. But in return for a blown horse and all its tack she received a bulging sack of raw and roasted chestnuts. She hugged the burlap, absorbing welcome warmth. She even pressed her numb face to the sack. Christ it felt good. Then she thanked the woman and headed for the docks at a fast walk. Either she’d parlay the food into more money and a spot aboard a westbound ship, or she’d eat the Goddamned things. Or maybe—Christ, who knew chestnuts could be so heavy?—she’d brain a passing sailor with the sack and take his place.

  But the nuts were secondary: The vendor fashioned her paper cones from old newspapers.

  Hours later, fending off rats in the cramped hold of a rust-bucket cargo ship en route to New Amsterdam, Berenice fished out the newspaper fragments. Most lacked a masthead, so it wasn’t possible to sort them into chronological order. And many contained nothing of close interest: classified ads, agony columns, financial news. By the murky mustard light of a single dingy porthole, she read it all.

  A
nd wept.

  It rained dead men.

  Another guard fell screaming from the Spire. Streamers of blood and viscera trailed in his wake like the tail of a malign comet. His cries died along with the rest of him when he slammed into the sunshade of the Porter’s Prayer hard enough to crack the chemical resins. He bounced, slid, and tumbled the rest of the way down like a ragdoll. Longchamp didn’t see where he landed. That useless bastard made corpse number three. Even if the others weren’t already lying dead on the floor of the king’s apartments. But moon-headed optimism had no place here.

  The tulips’ new cannon had landed a trio of military Clakkers atop the Spire. But Longchamp could do fuck-all about that because he, along with all the defenders on the wall, was neck-deep in their own flood of black alchemy. He bellowed orders until his voice was hoarse, trying to make himself heard over the endless chugging of compressors and boilers, the gurgling of epoxy cannon, the whoosh of steam harpoons, the occasional chank of a pick or sledge against ruthless metal, cries of alarm and sorrow and anger, pleas for reinforcements that never arrived. Wreathed within the miasma of pitched battle, the slightly sour burnt-toast smell of spent explosives stinging his eyes and filling his head with every breath he took, he fought for just a few seconds’ respite. For just enough time to survey the situation.

  Clakkers swarmed the walls. Too many at a time to repel them manually. That was too slow. But he didn’t dare lay down his weapons. Captain Longchamp’s Pick and Sledge? They were a symbol.

  A symbol he currently used to dent the skull of a metal demon scuttling over the northeast bastion. A lucky blow that rang like a gong and brought flares of pain to Longchamp’s wrists. Thank the Lord for that twinge of pain—if he’d missed, the sweat-slick haft would have slid through his weary fingers and the sledge would have gone winging over the wall. The concussion dislodged the clockwork soldier. The mechanical fell, spinning backward through two full revolutions before reanchoring itself to the wall ten yards farther down. But another killer took its place before it scuttled to the top.

  Longchamp swung again. Missed. “Get your hands off your useless dicks and fix that fucking thing right Goddamned now!”

  Back to back with Corporal Élodie Chastain, he strove to fend off a pair of mechanicals just long enough for the gunnery team to clear the blockage in their epoxy cannon. From behind him came the clang of a diamond-tipped pickax on alchemical steel. A blade hummed through the crenel. Longchamp’s parry created a cloud of incandescent sparks. The return swing came faster than he could recover. He leaped back, crashing into Élodie. She grunted. The sleeve of his shirt fell open where a scarlet paper-thin seam in his flesh bled from shoulder to elbow. It hurt.

  “GET DOWN!” screamed the gunner.

  Longchamp tackled Élodie to the banquette. Another alchemical blade sheared through the empty space over their heads; tufts of hair fluttered in its wake. A valve clicked open. Longchamp shielded his face behind the crook of his elbow. Chemicals convulsed through the modified gun hard enough to make the bastion shudder. The gun vomited. A sticky mist rained into Longchamp’s hair, turned the back of his blood-and sweat-soaked shirt into a rigid shell. He rolled aside before the backsplash glued his weapons in place.

  “NOW!” cried the gunner over the k-chank of metal talons on granite. The mechanicals weren’t immobilized.

  But they were temporarily sightless. Blinding the machines consumed fewer chemical resources than immobilizing them. Both machines had taken an opaque layer of turquoise-blue lacquer in the face. Each became a flurry of blades and fists, trying to fend off assault while also trying to clear the chemicals from multifaceted eyes. Still deadly as cancer, the motherfuckers, but slightly less fearsome, slightly more vulnerable. Élodie landed the tip of her pickax square in one machine’s keyhole, and Longchamp drove it home with his sledge. The blow scored the Clakker’s sigils. Its perpetual impetus evaporated in an explosion of black sparks. She had her bolas out before Longchamp called for them. He ducked again; they whirled overhead and tangled themselves in the second Clakker’s legs. It fell to the banquette, blind and thrashing. Together they vaulted over the inert machine and dispatched the second one before it could clear the goop from its eyes or sever the steel cables twined about its legs.

  A high-pitched whine pierced the din of battle. Longchamp’s beard crackled; the hairs on his arms and scalp stood on end. A metallic tang filled his mouth. He gritted his teeth. The world flashed blue and white as lightning rained from the adjacent bastion with a deafening zap and crackle. It burned purple afterimages into Longchamp’s eyes and the pervasive stink of ozone into his nose.

  The discharge from the lightning gun melted the carapace of one mechanical even as the streamers of wild energy hopped to the machine beside it. And to another, and another, and another, momentarily freezing in place the machines it chained together. It also snagged a pair of unlucky defenders; they convulsed as though possessed by the Holy Spirit. The discharge stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving the sunlit world momentarily dark as dusk in comparison. A squad rushed in, past their stricken comrades-in-arms, who fell smoking from the wall and smelling of charred pork. The first mechanical, the one that had taken the brunt of the lightning, tried to fend them off, but it moved too slowly, its every hinge and spring giving the squeal of fused metal. The mechanical beside it atop the wall was similarly vulnerable, moving only slightly faster. The Clakker at the end of the lightning chain was barely fazed by the discharge.

  Farther along the outer wall, two squaddies wheeled a hydraulic ram into place while the third worked the pressure crank for all she was worth. Somebody had trained them well. They anchored the ram in a crenellation just as a clockwork assailant reached the top of the wall. The hydraulic piston lashed out. It took a chunk out of the wall but also sent the machine’s head soaring toward the river, over the smoldering ashes of Marseilles-in-the-West.

  All around him, up and down the wall, defenders fought the clockwork tide with epoxy, lightning, hydraulics, bolas, picks, sledgehammers. It wasn’t enough. For every machine they disabled or knocked from the wall, two more took its place. And every inert machine left a trail of human bodies in its wake. A line of mechanicals topped the battlements, scissoring through beleaguered defenders as though they were ripe autumn wheat.

  They were losing. They had too much wall, too few defenders.

  Longchamp clutched Élodie’s shoulder. “Are they through? Find out if the civvies are through!” Then he shoved her toward the signal station and waded into the fray, pick and sledge held aloft for all to see, shouting encouragements and curses in equal measure. His head spun; runnels of blood trickled down his lacerated arm, making him dizzier with every drop. He couldn’t spare the time for a bandage. He’d already tried to hold the outer wall too long. They’d be fully overrun in moments.

  Élodie exchanged terse words with the heliograph operator, then gave Longchamp a thumbs-up.

  The last civilians had made it through to the inner keep. It wouldn’t prove much of a refuge if the mechanicals on the Spire fought their way down, but it was all they had. Longchamp gathered his strength for one more bellow. “FALL BACK! FALL BACK! EVERYONE THROUGH THE INNER WALL NOW!”

  This, too, became a series of flashes, blinks that shot from one heliograph to the next around the faltering defensive perimeter.

  “Everybody off the wall! CLEAR THE WALL NOW!”

  The defenders of the Last Redoubt of the Exile King of France abandoned the outer wall.

  The gunnery teams affixed crane hooks to iron hoops on their weapons and fired the explosive bolts that anchored the heavy weapons to the wall. Lift teams stationed on the armored gantries affixed to the Spire heaved, swinging the weapons and their operators across the gap between the outer and inner walls. A few machines leaped upon the weapons, attacking gunnery teams even as they retreated. Every man and woman still able to run, walk, or crawl fled the battlements. They sprinted down ramps, tumbled down ladders, sli
d down poles, limped across catwalks over chemical moats toward posterns in the curtain wall of the inner keep. The sight of their battered and bloody defenders in full retreat evoked a wail of despair from the civilians.

  A sea of magicked metal swelled forward to fill the vacuum. It crested the outer wall like a burnished tide.

  Longchamp stopped outside a postern. He stood aside, waving and shoving the last stragglers through the gate while an army of Clakkers occupied the outer keep. A few men and women were too slow fleeing the battlements, and now they ran for their lives.

  If he waited just a few more moments, they could make it to safety.

  If he waited just a few more moments, the inner keep would fall before the sun rose tomorrow.

  He dove through the postern and slammed it shut. He hoped to hell the other posterns were already shut, and wondered how many of their own they were leaving to the nonexistent mercy of the mechanicals. As a quartet of hydraulically driven steel braces slammed into place, he looked up to the heliograph operator atop the inner wall. Longchamp caught the woman’s eye and gave the signal: He made a slicing motion across his own throat. Then he hunkered down with hands over his ears.

  The signal flash reached the demolitions station. Somebody lit a fuse. Two dozen braided chemical cords had been threaded through dedicated pipes beneath the high inner wall and across the keep to spots drilled at regular intervals around the curtain wall like the points of a deadly compass rose. Fire sizzled down each line so quickly it left a whip-like crack in its wake. In a fraction of a second the fuses funneled their payload to the shaped charges embedded in the outer wall.

  Hundreds of Clakkers stood atop the fallen defensive perimeter, with countless more scurrying up the sheer stone face of the outer keep, when the curtain wall detonated. So loud was the thunder it shook the bones of the earth and rattled the heavens. Longchamp’s ears popped. It knocked everyone from their feet, even those expecting it, and pulverized every jewel-colored windowpane in the basilica. It slapped Longchamp to the rumbling ground, which, still convulsing in the aftershock, hurled him back into the air. He slammed against the postern gate hard enough to lose a tooth. A shadow fell over the sun.