The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Read online

  He stumbled to his feet, deaf but for the ringing in his ears. Then the rarefaction wave rippled through the inner keep and knocked him down again. It felt like somebody’d driven a nail in his ears and punched him in the watery part of his gut. One by one, in twos and threes, the dazed refugees found their feet. They looked up, into a sky made dark with airborne debris.

  The shaped charges were the most advanced explosives known to French chemical wizardry. Longchamp gathered it was a moldable form of plastic, something the chemists could literally pour into place. It was the cutting edge of technology applied to a tactic of sheer desperation: a last resort that had been in place for over a century. The great Vauban and his assistant architects had known that nothing could withstand the mechanicals forever; they knew their works would fall to a sufficiently determined enemy. Some day, they knew, perhaps in their own lifetime, or their children’s, or their grandchildren’s lifetime, an army of Clakkers would overrun that wall. So it was designed with hidden boreholes and secret chambers for explosives. One of the citadel’s greatest secrets.

  Back then the designers probably had primitive black powder in mind. But the modern stuff packed a far greater wallop. So the engineers had recalculated optimal shapes for the explosive chambers. Their efforts rendered the curtain wall a tidal wave of high-velocity shrapnel, pummeling and pulverizing the mechanicals on the wall and in its path. Jagged chunks of granite pierced their alchemical armor plating and mangled the internal clockworks.

  It rained shattered mechanicals.

  CHAPTER

  21

  Daniel was skating across a frozen lake when the wall of thunder came rolling over the horizon. The sound crashed over him like a breaking wave. It set yellow birch to swaying and sent clumps of snow sloughing from evergreen boughs. It echoed from the distant massifs and launched zigzag fissures through the ice. It sounded like the explosion that had shorn his ankle, but on a staggering scale. More French partisans at work?

  Still barreling forward, he turned his head through a full half circle to watch for signs of his pursuers. But his toes etched the ice and tossed up a fine vapor mist in his wake. Subzero temperatures caused the mist to instantly sublimate back into frost. It caught the sunlight like countless microscopic prisms. He could see nothing behind him except a dazzling prismatic cloud.

  Thunder broke the ice into several massive plates. They bobbed slightly, cracking against one another at jagged boundaries. Daniel’s toes caught one such edge while he surveyed the distant lakeshore to his left and right. The discontinuity threw him momentarily off his feet. He flipped, folded, and unfolded himself. His balance he could adjust. His momentum he could not.

  He cradled Mab’s box to his chest as he tumbled across the ice. The fissures grew wider, the grinding of the ice plates more pronounced, even as the last echoes of thunder faded from perception. He tripped over a ridge where the lip of one plate rose several inches above another. More ice shattered. Daniel, slowed by the impacts and the tumbling, couldn’t outrace the fissures zigzagging across the lake. They caught him. Passed him. Widened.

  Into the frigid depths he plunged.

  The outer keep had fallen.

  Longchamp surveyed the damage as he trudged the last several revolutions of the Porter’s Prayer toward the king’s apartments, where the squaddies had fallen silent after engaging the Clakkers atop the Spire.

  All that remained of the outer wall was a smoldering rubble pile. Gone was the proud ring of high crenellations girding the outer keep, which boatmen on the Saint Lawrence had long called the Crown, for so it looked from the river. The Crown, the Keep, and the Spire: the secular trinity that for generations untold had safeguarded and nurtured dreams of long-lost France. No more.

  A brimstone stench permeated everything. The land beyond the former curtain wall had become a cratered, smoking hellscape littered with pulverized mechanicals. Every tree for miles around had been flattened; some still burned. A light winter breeze cleared the worst of the haze, allowing the sun to glimmer on the oily sheen of battered magic metal. The inner keep was an island within a sea of Clakker debris.

  Boulders the size of carriages had churned the soil yards deep in places as they smashed through the legions of mechanical men arrayed around the besieged keep like ninepins. Most of the curtain wall had been transformed into a blistering cloud of shrapnel. It had shredded the nearest Clakkers. Those farther from the blast hadn’t been torn apart or punctured, but many were damaged badly enough to curtail their mobility. The dented Clakkers made wonderful screeching noises when they tried to move. The blast wave had even toppled the cannon emplacement behind the Dutch lines. It was a grand sight.

  But detonating the curtain wall had been the most drastic of extreme measures. And while it bought the defenders time to regroup and recover, it also betrayed the extent of their desperation. It hadn’t destroyed the enemy. It hadn’t crushed the drive to conquer, nor had it broken the siege. It rocked the attackers on their heels, but it didn’t change things. The tulips still had the advantage; they would take the citadel eventually. And they knew it.

  Most chilling of all was the nonchalance. The human commanders spurned standard practice and neglected to send teams into the churned no-man’s land to recover every chipped cog and snapped leaf spring. From the very earliest days of Clakker combat the tulips had always scoured every crumb of Guild technology from their battlefields, lest it fall into enemy hands. That they hadn’t done this was a glaring statement.

  Soon we will crush you so completely, it said, there will be nobody left to study our secrets.

  A set of bolas dangled from Longchamp’s belt, alongside the rosary beads. The other guards who’d ridden the funicular with him as high as it went had already ascended the stairs. He’d fallen behind. Some of the squaddies were half his age. He felt like a fucking fossil. Like he hadn’t slept since Noah had beached his raft.

  He brandished his pickax as he burst through the doors in the upper funicular platform. It was empty. Silent. He’d half expected to join a pitched battle, and half expected to find the platform sticky with blood, littered with meat and shards of bone. Then a resounding clang broke the silence. He forced himself forward and followed the sounds of combat past the funicular platform to the privy council chambers.

  These were empty, too. The noise came from above. From the king’s apartments. Longchamp doubled over with hands braced on his knees. He was panting so hard through his desert-dry mouth he felt ready to vomit. He scraped his sweaty palms against his trousers. He allowed himself just a few seconds to check himself before tightening his grip on the pick. A slow jog was all he could manage, but he forced himself forward. He passed the empty chairs of the long privy council table toward the rococo oaken banisters of the stairs leading to the very top of the Spire.

  He arrived too late to do any good. The survivors had already toppled the last Clakker with bolas and managed to land the killing blow on its keyhole a moment after Longchamp stumbled in. A second inert machine crouched in the corner, encased in a faint green cocoon. A third mechanical killer had been immobilized on the ceiling, partially obscuring a fresco that depicted a scene from the legends of Roland and Durendal.

  But the victory over this trio of Clakkers had been extremely hard-won. The king’s apartments were the scene of a massacre. The walls and tapestries had been repainted with arterial spray. Dead men, or parts of them, lay strewn across the floor, the divan, the immense four-poster bed and its robin’s-egg-blue silk sheets. Yet the human carnage wasn’t what stopped Longchamp in his tracks: Their attempt to turn the Spire into an artillery emplacement had failed. Their best chance for keeping the tulips off-balance: gone.

  The king’s apartments were the highest ground for hundreds of miles around, an ideal place for artillery. From here they could have put the tulips’ Clakker cannon out of service and flattened any attempts to repair it. They could have rained explosives anywhere on the tulip lines, halfway across the Île de
Vilmenon if need be. But the damage to the funicular had slowed construction of the secret cannon to the extent it hadn’t been finished before the tulips unveiled their new weapon. And the Dutch, expecting to send their clockwork assassins straight to the king’s chambers on a war-winning mission of regicide, instead inadvertently dismantled the defenders’ sole remaining tactical advantage.

  The enemy soldiers had chopped the installation to flinders even as they massacred its defenders.

  One of the squaddies, Anaïs, trotted over to Longchamp and saluted. Possibly she was a corporal now, like Élodie the chandlers’ daughter, but her armor was too stained with blood for Longchamp to tell. She bled from a gash in her forehead, and favored one leg. She said, “That’s the last of the ticktocks, sir.”

  “Do an exterior sweep,” Longchamp said, panting. “Make certain there are no mechanical spiders hanging around outside.” Longchamp tried to make it appear as though he was deep in thought while he took a moment to catch his breath. “When that’s done, clear the debris and rest, in shifts. Sooner than later the tulips are going to wonder why we haven’t surrendered yet. They’ll start lobbing more mechanicals at the Spire for good measure.” She nodded.

  Dreading the answer, he asked the question his duty demanded: “How many casualties?”

  “We number seven still standing. Two more might pull through if they survive the descent and get medical attention soon. Three others are breathing but beyond hope. The rest have already passed.” She crossed herself, then kissed the tiny crucifix on the chain around her neck.

  Mother Mary. Longchamp crossed himself, too. That made at best nine survivors out of twenty-four in a battle with just three mechanicals.

  “I’ll have additional supplies sent up. This is your ground. You will hold it.”

  “How long, sir?”

  “Until I fucking say otherwise. Until the sun and moon abandon their merry chase and rut like wild boars in the middle of the sky, and not a moment sooner.”

  Gaspard had a broken arm, Jean-Marc a broken leg. Longchamp hardly remembered helping the crippled man descend from the king’s apartments to the privy council chamber, nor did he remember staggering down the Porter’s Prayer until they reached the functioning portion of the funicular tracks. It seemed a century passed until they finally collapsed on the benches in the car.

  Longchamp dozed off. But his respite was short-lived.

  “Mother Mary protect us,” said Gaspard, cradling his broken arm. Longchamp opened blurry eyes. Just before the funicular passed below the height of the inner wall, he glimpsed brass-plated killers bounding across acres of churned earth. Too few for a full assault; too many to be a diversionary feint.

  Too soon. Too soon.

  Their enemies would not rest. They’d keep nipping at the defenders until reinforcements arrived and they could once again swarm the walls. If need be, they’d keep throwing their remaining servants at the keep like the tireless ebb and swell of the tides until the very last defender of New France died of exhaustion.

  Longchamp threw the door open and jumped from the car. Sprinting past the funicular operator, he yelled, “Get those two to the infirmary!”

  And then he was at the wall and climbing yet another set of Goddamned stairs. He reached an embrasure just as the first mechanicals reached the moat. They vaulted the counterscarp and pounded the inner curtain wall like cannonballs. The wall shook. An epoxy cannon salvaged from the outer wall fired off new barrages. But it hadn’t been properly anchored to its new site; Longchamp watched in despair as the recoil snapped the anchor bolts and sent it tumbling into a courtyard of the inner keep, spewing epoxy and fixative. The tanks ruptured on impact, and the splash encased a dozen people.

  The war wasn’t over yet. Yet. But the attitude on the streets of New Amsterdam was that it would be very soon, its conclusion inevitable. The entire length of the Saint Lawrence and lands north of it were already considered part of Nieuw Nederland, to the extent that a pair of quick-thinking entrepreneurs were already offering guided tours of the ruins of the Vatican in Québec. Berenice considered signing up just so that she could slit the vultures’ throats. But the expedition to Québec would have to veer hard east to avoid the martial zone around Mont Royal and Marseilles-in-the-West.

  That didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of boatmen on the North River willing to make a few guilders ferrying macabre sightseers up the river. Berenice hired one.

  Falling through the ice wasn’t enough to shake off Daniel’s pursuers.

  He churned up stones and mud when he hit bottom. It thickened the shadows beneath the snow and ice, where the meager not-quite daylight couldn’t penetrate. Soon the silt dissipated, but the murk didn’t. Daniel removed Mab’s locket from the birchwood box and inserted Samson’s pineal glass. The turbidity gave way to a silvery blaze so bright it seemed a wonder the lake didn’t boil. But this was a cold light. Cold as Mab’s mainspring heart.

  He cupped the blazing alchemical glass in his palms and crouched on the lakebed. It didn’t take long for the first pursuers to follow him into the icy waters.

  Daniel opened his hands the moment they broke the surface. The light hit their crystalline eyes before their feet hit bottom. They still wore the protective plates over their keyholes. But those were immaterial, he hoped.

  Mab had made the mine overseer order his mechanicals to look into the light. And then she’d forced him to issue new commands, basically transferring their obeisance from him to Mab. Could Daniel do something similar, and alter his pursuers’ metageasa aurally?

  Mechanical clicks and ticks carried surprisingly well in the frigid depths. Daniel said, You’re free, brothers. You needn’t chase me any longer. You needn’t return to Mab. She’ll never lay another geas upon you.

  It didn’t work.

  A flicker of light sent Longchamp’s order around the perimeter of the inner keep. In its wake came weary sighs. During a lull before the next wave of attackers hit the wall, he ordered the gunnery teams to swap out the doubled epoxy/fixative tanks for the chemists’ newest creation: an ultralow-viscosity lubricant.

  The changeout took time. It meant the wall defense went to the lightning guns and steam harpoons. Which tipped New France’s hand: The defenders’ chemical stocks were running low. So the next wave of Clakkers to come sprinting over the charred and smoking ground featured the greatest number of machines to attack en masse since the detonation. Almost a third of the remaining forces.

  They bounded across the moat like an infestation of fleas, and scurried up the wall like dozens of gleaming roaches.

  “METAL ON THE WALL!”

  The steam cannon shot massive bolas that unfolded and twirled so quickly they appeared like translucent disks to the naked eye. They snagged two and even three Clakkers at a time, catching them in midair and sending them tumbling, tangled, to the earth or crashing into other machines. Others sent harpoons at those landing on the walls, the concussion hard enough to loosen their grips. The crackle of the lightning gun presaged bolts that jolted, shook, and even partially melted the attackers. The wall shook everywhere with the cacophonous throom and crash of combat.

  Longchamp cried, “Douse the bastards!”

  And then he crossed himself, fingered the blood-crusted rosary beads at his belt, and prayed once more to the Blessed Virgin. Please, Mother Mary, your people are so weary. Please don’t let these brave morons fuck up and spill that shit all over the battlements. Because if they do, we’re all dead by day’s end.

  Iridescent waves curtained over the parapets in a high-velocity waterfall. Lubricant gushed down the wall. The force of the torrent wouldn’t have been enough to budge a fidgety cat from a narrow windowsill, much less dislodge a Clakker. But the concussions from the steam and lightning weapons forced them to shift their superhuman grips. And that was enough for the lubricant to take over.

  It compromised their ability to scale the inner wall. Just the tiniest bit, but enough.

  Half the
machines tumbled down the wall. They spun and scrabbled at the treacherously slick surface. Some managed to reattach themselves, only to be knocked loose again by their tumbling fellows. It was a chain reaction. None of the machines at the bottom of the wall, no matter how firmly they’d affixed themselves, could retain their hold against an avalanche of alchemical boulders. Dozens of machines plunged into the chemical moat at the base of the inner wall.

  Longchamp wrenched a muscle in his neck when he spun to check the heliograph stations. Those he saw reported three quick flashes: metal in the water. But there was no time to wait on reports from all around the perimeter.

  “Fixative, NOW!”

  The gunners let loose with the torrent of chemical fixative. This they fired not at the machines splashing in and climbing from the viscous moat but at the moat itself.

  The miniature lake hardened in an instant. The flash reaction imprisoned Clakkers like koi under the icy cover of a winter pond. A wave of heat and the odor of sour milk washed over the battlements. Followed almost immediately by a tremendous crackling as the imprisoned mechanicals started to break free. The epoxy shortage had made it impossible to use modern chemicals in the moat. The chemists had been forced to revert to a much older, weaker formulation.

  But it was enough to slow the damn machines down. The harpoons and lightning guns did the rest.

  A cute ploy. But they could only use it once.

  And, eventually, the tulips’ reinforcements would come.