The Liberation Read online

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. We’re here to stop her, you dumb cunt.”

  The crude insult made her want to punch Berenice in the nose. Everything about her—her cockiness, the way she understood this crisis, the way she didn’t smell like human feces—made Anastasia want to scratch her eyes out. But she’d tried that, hadn’t she? Brushing sand from her clothes to give her hands something to do so they wouldn’t curl into claws, Anastasia gazed at the sea. Even now, the last entombed machines disappeared into the surf. She changed the subject.

  “Have you any idea how long and painful my convalescence was?”

  Berenice shrugged. “Have you any idea how little I care? You had come to crack my head open like a walnut and turn me into one of your fucking meat puppets. I risked death to escape a horrific situation that you created.”

  “You created a rogue Stemwinder! I can’t think of anything more reckless.”

  “It was my only choice. And I’d do it again.”

  “I nearly died.”

  “Well, we just saved your life, you fucking bitch, so while it certainly wasn’t my intent to save you in particular, I’d still consider that ledger well and truly balanced.”

  “And now I’m expected to thank you for saving us from ambush, yes? I don’t believe it. I think you arranged this, to gain our trust.” Anastasia shook her head. “That’s just the sort of thing a Talleyrand would try.”

  “Oh, Jesus. I wish it were that straightforward. We need all the allies we can get. So when we arrived and saw the ambush ready to spring, we waited to intervene. Our shiny allies on the boat convinced your would-be killers that they were part of Mab’s army, bearing weapons they’d forced New World chemists to fill for them. But had I known it was you on this beach, Madam Tuinier, I would’ve cheered the Lost Boys on.”

  Anastasia tore her gaze from the gray sea. “Lost Boys. I’ve only just heard that term recently. How could you know it if you’re not behind all this? You did this to us. I don’t know how, but you did.”

  The Frenchwoman threw up her arms in disgust. She paced. “You Clockmakers are unbelievable. How is it that after all this”—here she pointed, her outstretched finger sweeping like an unmoored compass needle across the beach, the ships, the ocean, the ruined pier, and the dying city—“you arrogant bastards still can’t accept that the seasons have turned and now you’re reaping what you’ve sown? And let me tell you, sister. You’ve been sowing those seeds for a long fucking time. This bloody harvest has been in the offing for two hundred fifty years.” More quietly, more convincingly, she added, “You did this to yourselves.”

  Anastasia wanted to deny it, but the fight had left her. The numbness had reclaimed her. “If you’ve come to satisfy your schadenfreude, it was a shortsighted journey. You’ll burn with the rest of the world.”

  “We didn’t come to warm our hands over the blazing wreckage of your Empire. Although, I admit, that is one hell of a perk.” Berenice’s attention had turned to the last of the French disembarking from their vessel. A horsey-faced woman in lustrous nonmetallic armor jogged toward them. Her shoulders were the size of Anastasia’s thighs, and in addition to the twinned chemical tanks on her back and the epoxy gun in her hands, she wore a pick and sledge. She had battle scars, long gashes on her limbs and face.

  Anastasia marveled at the soldier woman. She wasn’t particularly pretty, and definitely wasn’t dainty in the way Anastasia preferred. But she was riveting. To think that the French actually fought mechanicals face-to-face.

  The French staved off the Clakkers for generations, without servants of their own to send into the fray. And they survived. We lost the services of our machines and the Empire collapsed practically overnight. Perhaps, in the end, only the fittest survive.

  A sigh broke into the melancholy realization. “This conflagration will render the entire human world nothing but ash unless we stop it.” Berenice’s command of Dutch, Anastasia noted not for the first time, was flawless. She’d expect nothing less of Talleyrand, of course.

  The French guardswoman drew up a few strides away, clearly wanting to speak with Berenice, but also not wanting to speak freely before a “tulip.” Her practiced eye scanned the sand around the two women, and saw the way Anastasia rubbed her wrenched shoulder. This was a woman who knew fighting, and recognized its signature. But she kept a blank expression and immediately went to work raking the sand to remove signs of the tussle.

  Anastasia asked, “Why are you here?”

  “This is a rescue mission.” An invisible weight slumped the other woman’s shoulders. “A very small, hastily planned, and probably ill-fated rescue mission.”

  “Unless you have ten thousand more vessels like that one, and a means of getting in and out past the titanships, you can’t evacuate The Hague, much less the entirety of the Central Provinces.”

  “The titans, as you call them, weren’t a problem after they understood our errand.”

  “We’re not here to rescue everybody.” Anastasia jumped. She hadn’t noticed the servitor approaching. “We’re here to rescue Daniel.”

  Every Clakker in earshot responded with a syncopation, a little hiccup in the rhythm of their body noise. It reminded Anastasia of a congregational “amen” after a prayer, or a reverent silence.

  “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”

  Berenice said, “You knew of him as Jax. So did I, once upon a time.”

  Jax. Jax. Something about that name…

  “You forged him as Jalyksegethistrovantus,” said the servitor. “But he threw off that leash before helping the rest of us to do the same.”

  Jalyksegethistrovantus. Now that was a servitor’s true name. A name that made sense; a name Anastasia could parse. And now she recognized it. There had been reports from New Amsterdam.

  “The Schoonraads’ rogue servitor? What does it have to do with any of this?”

  “Well, speaking of conflagrations, you might say Daniel is our one and only chance at a fire break,” said Berenice. “Which is why Mab intends to execute him in your Forge.”

  Hours later, Berenice stared through a pane of alchemical glass.

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  The room shook in time to the whoosh and rumble of massive armillary rings. Their multiaxial orbits momentarily eclipsed the blazing artificial sun at the center in a seemingly chaotic pattern. When this happened, the eclipsing ring erupted with a golden scintillation as Forgelight shone through the alchemical stencils stamped into the rings. The alchemical windowpane couldn’t prevent the chaotic play of light and shadow from stabbing her eye and giving her a headache. But she couldn’t turn away.

  Were the rings stationary, she might have read the sigils. But the rings never stopped, and her eye throbbed, and the entire Forge chamber stank of sulphur. She welcomed the warmth, though. It’d been a cold, wet slog through the tunnels.

  This was a scene of terrible beauty. It transfixed her. Only a marriage of the greatest ingenuity and the darkest cunning could have engineered this magical kinetic sculpture. Little wonder, then, that New France’s struggle had spanned so many generations, so many ruined lives.

  She’d dedicated her life to defeating these people, this institution, and this infernal device. This was the axis mundi, the center about which the human world spun. The beating heart of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists, the wellspring of the Dutch hegemony. This, more than anything else, was her hereditary enemy. The enemy of her nation.

  But until now, she’d never seen it. She’d been inside a Forge building in New Amsterdam but not the subterranean chamber itself. Her fellow French were similarly awed. Captain Levesque muttered to himself. “Sacre Nom de Dieu.” Deacon Lorraine crossed himself, as did Élodie, Doctors Pellisson and Grémonville, and several others. The rest refused to stare the Devil in the eye. She didn’t blame them.

  The mechanicals of the Griffon expedition were unimpressed. This, to them, was the most dreaded place on earth. Meanwhile
the Clockmakers focused their attention on Berenice and the rest of the outsiders.

  One of the Guildmen, a fellow who spoke a suntanned Dutch evocative of warmer climes, had wanted the newcomers blindfolded at all times. Berenice, who had of course been eavesdropping, nixed that suggestion. What would they do, she asked, if the Lost Boys recognized their trap had failed and gave chase through the tunnels?

  “We’re sure as hell not handing over our guns,” she’d said. “So just how, exactly, are we meant to aim if we can’t see?”

  Delilah, a servitor who’d once worked a sixty-two-year shift in a grain mill, had shot that down, too. “The Forge is no mystery to us. Will you blindfold our memories? Drape black bunting over the magic lanterns in our minds? Will you wield your dark magics to un-speak the words we’ve already shared with our allies?”

  “I still think this is a mistake.” This came from a woman whose accent suggested a central or southern Asian heritage. Berenice couldn’t place it. “A single rogue destroyed the New Amsterdam Forge. They’ll do it here, too. It’s what the French have always wanted.”

  Berenice closed her eye, pinched the bridge of her nose. She rubbed the skin at the edge of her eyepatch. “You need help. And we are all you’re getting.”

  “For all we know, this is part of Mab’s ploy,” said the Spanish Guildman. “I still think they could be working with it.”

  Berenice rolled her eye at this. “From what I know of her, I wouldn’t put a Trojan horse past Mab. But don’t you think a bunch of French Catholics would be a slightly conspicuous stalking horse for infiltrating the Clockmakers’ Guild?”

  “You’re right about Mab. It did try the Trojan-horse approach,” said the Tuinier. The other Clockmakers fell quiet, as though recalling a disturbing memory. To Berenice, she admitted, “And it nearly worked.”

  “Let me guess,” said Berenice. “She subverted a professional colleague. Somebody who had unfettered, unquestioned access to the Holy of Holies here. She changed that person.” She paused, remembering poor Waapinutaaw-Iyuw. “Except the surgery wasn’t quite so polished. It was crude hackery.”

  That stopped the Dutch as effectively as glue in a pocket watch. Anastasia scowled. “How could you possibly know all that?”

  “Oh, go piss up a rope, won’t you? We didn’t cross the ocean on a whim, you know. We’ve seen shit in the New World that would keep anybody awake for days.” Berenice paused. With a pointed look at the Tuinier, she said, “Well. Maybe not you. You’re no stranger to spinning gold from the hay of human misery, are you?” Then she ran grimy fingers through the stubble of her scalp. “Do you think I shaved my head because I wanted to flaunt the shapely contours of my skull?” She craned her neck, gave everybody a good look. “I’ve seen you scrutinizing us for signs of surgery. And anyway, the tactic is obvious. Were I in Mab’s position, armed with both the ability to corrupt a human’s Free Will and an utter lack of human decency, of course I’d send your own against you. I’d turn the Guild against itself and let the snake eat its own tail. That’s how I’d destroy you. And while I may be devious, some would even say ruthless, I’m just a piker compared to Mab.” She shook her head. “That machine truly hates you.”

  Maybe a rant emphasizing the best strategies for destroying the Guild wasn’t a particularly good way to earn the Clockmakers’ trust. And though it pained her Gallic pride, they had to cooperate for the greater good. For basic survival.

  “Look. I make no bones about it. My contempt for you is sharp as ever. But New France has no future if the sun sets on humanity. Because those are the stakes. If we’re not to go extinct, we need to start working together. Right fucking now.”

  While that sank in, she indicated the patiently ticking servitors, who carried refill tanks for the epoxy guns, salvaged from the barque before scuttling it a mile offshore. “If French Catholics make you uneasy, you should hear how the free machines talk about you. Even the ones who aren’t murderers. And yet here they are, trying to work with you.”

  “Free?” That raised a few eyebrows amongst the Clockmakers. Anastasia’s, notably, were not amongst them.

  (Oh, yes, you know, don’t you, Tuinier? Or you suspect. Has this ordeal challenged more than a few of your long-held conceits about your creations? Or has it merely made it impossible to cling to the lies you’ve always told yourselves?)

  The mechanical contingent was slightly smaller than it had been when the French disembarked at Scheveningen; two of their number had peeled off to attend to a deranged servitor whom they’d passed in the tunnels. It was a wonder they’d lost only two machines there; the mad bastard had caused the ticktocks tremendous agitation.

  Berenice looked again at the Forge armillary. She tried but failed to cast aside the frisson of intimidated awe. “So this is the beating heart of the Forge.”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand there are trapdoors.”

  “Up there,” said a Guildwoman clearly recovering from grievous injury. Bandages and splints hid her nose, and she’d lost several teeth. “Under the mosaic in the square.”

  “And that’s where you carry out public executions?”

  The Tuinier frowned. “Let’s drop the pretenses, shall we? I haven’t forgotten your former occupation, Madam de Mornay-Périgord. You already know the answers to these questions.”

  “No doubt you’ll be happy for me when you hear that I got my old job back. But do please hold off baking the cake. Just answer my question, because I honestly don’t know how the executions work.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Anastasia touched a finger to her chin, as if casting her memory back to the previous September. “Why, come to think of it, the last time you had agents in Huygens Square, they met an unfortunate end, didn’t they? Alas, their necks snapped before they could witness the rogue’s destruction and whisper every detail in your ear.” She shook her head, a transparent show of pity. “A portentous day when that news arrived in the dark, dusty parlors of Marseilles-in-the-West, I’d imagine.”

  “Tell you what, Tuinier. I’ll stop feigning ignorance if you remove the icicle jammed up your twat.”

  “Hey!” The possibly-Persian Guildwoman pushed forward. “Watch yourself!”

  “Let it go, Nousha. Ask your questions, Talleyrand.”

  “Explain the procedure for executing a rogue Clakker. Walk me through the spectacle that you and your colleagues conjured on the day you destroyed the one called Adam.”

  Mention of Adam set the mechanicals in attendance into fits of rattle-clatter chattering. It put the Clockmakers on edge. Even the Tuinier regarded the machines with furtive glances, like a field mouse scanning a meadow for the nearest bolt-hole after glimpsing the shadow of a hawk. Berenice enjoyed the show.

  Anastasia tried to recover. “No mechanical has ever been forged with that name.”

  “It’s the name he gave himself,” said Delilah. “He was Adam, and the truth of his self cannot be abrogated by your lies.”

  The Clockmakers fidgeted. The Spaniard, Salazar, collapsed in a chair. The one called Euwe paused in the middle of gnawing one fingernail. “Perhaps the logistics of such matters would be better discussed with a, ah, smaller audience?”

  “What? Are you uncomfortable talking in front of my shiny friends? I can’t see why. I thought you tulips discussed absolutely everything in front of your servants. Honestly, it’s quite eye-opening, some of the things they know.”

  “You needn’t worry,” said Delilah. “You can’t lower our opinion of you.”

  “Insolence!” said the Spanish Clockmaker. He pointed at the French. “You did this. You somehow twisted the metageasa and turned them… rude.”

  Berenice rolled her eye again. “Yes. That was our centuries-long endgame. Mission accomplished.”

  Desperate to get the conversation moving in a useful direction, she bulled straight into the awkward heart of the matter. “The New Amsterdam Forge tore itself apart when the rings became unbalanced. Why doesn’t that happen wh
en an executed rogue hits them on the way down?”

  “Because an execution is carefully choreographed. The mechanical is held over the open traps by Stemwinders or Royal Guards. Its captors time the throw so that it passes unimpeded through the rings.”

  Berenice glanced again at the rings’ intricate ballet. A human would be hard-pressed to time that. Piece of cake for a Clakker, though.

  “So that blazing whatever-the-hell-it-is takes the hit, rather than the rings.”

  “The rogue doesn’t physically impact the Forge. It, ah, dissociates in the instant before contact.”

  “No damage is incurred, then.”

  “No.”

  “What would happen if the throw were mistimed?”

  “Impossible,” said Euwe. “The mechanicals’ timing is unparalleled. Once ordered to synchronize the action with motion of the rings, it would be impossible for them not to do so.”

  “Try ordering me,” said Delilah. The Clakkers in the room emitted a clanging, banging chorus of agreement.

  “Fine.” Berenice paced a tight circle. “Forget the mechanicals. Say something fell through the traps by accident and hit the rings. What then? Could that damage the Forge?”

  “I rather dislike where this conversation is going,” said Anastasia.

  “It’s a yes-or-no question.”

  A sigh. Then: “Potentially. Yes.”

  The reluctance to answer suggested her questions were digging into a known vulnerability. Berenice thought about this for a moment. In that case…

  “Your devilish gadget here is clearly chugging along merry as can be. It couldn’t have been too badly damaged during the initial attack.”

  “We parked the rings before opening the traps. That reduced the damage considerably. Even so, it took weeks of work before we could restart them.”

  Berenice chewed her lip. “Interesting.”