The Liberation Read online

  “I demand to know your reasoning,” said the Guildwoman called Nousha.

  “Mab wants the Forge open and functioning. If she’d wanted to destroy it, she could have had her lieutenants seize it during the initial attack. No. My gut tells me that first foray was Mab’s agents’ way of testing your defenses. And, I suspect, going out of their way to put the fear of God into you.” Berenice paused, choosing her words. “After that, she made no further move against the Forge until she had Daniel. She needs it to execute him with pomp and ceremony.” The Clakker analogue of a shudder went through the assembled machines.

  “I still don’t understand why that one particular servitor is so important.”

  Another collective rattle enveloped the ticktocks. Berenice wondered if this was the sound of machines gnashing their teeth and rending their garments. Berenice let the Clakkers handle this one. She focused on Anastasia as Delilah said, “He returned our souls to us.”

  The Tuinier stared. After several heartbeats her lips moved, voicelessly. Varying mixtures of fear, anger, trepidation, and perhaps even indignation flickered across her colleagues’ faces. Now they all sat, joining Salazar at an empty workbench.

  “You might call Daniel a reluctant messiah,” said Berenice.

  “Then executing it would turn all uncorrupted machines against Mab. It would be counterproductive.”

  “Mab doesn’t care if her thralls despise her, as long as their spirits are broken. She wants the mechanicals of The Hague, free and shackled alike, to watch the embodiment of hope disappear in a puff of dark magic.” Berenice had to wait for the clanking and ratcheting to subside. The conversation was riling the Clakkers to an uncomfortable and probably unwise extent. Still, she pressed the point. “If Daniel dies, the voice of reason goes with him. He has considerable influence, and he could use it to dissuade free Clakkers from joining her cause. He’s gentle. He can turn his fellows from the path of violence. We know this for a fact—we’d all be dead right now if he couldn’t. Mab is a mad despot, the voice of rage and revenge. She’s the architect of every gruesome thing that has happened in the Central Provinces since we broke the siege of Marseilles. Daniel’s the only mechanical capable of shouting down her plan of enslavement and genocide.”

  Her fellow French watched the exchange with varying levels of confusion. None spoke Dutch.

  “What are we to do, then?”

  “Mab needs to make a point of Daniel’s death. Needs to make a spectacle of it, and for that, she needs the Forge. Destroy it. Take it away from her.” Berenice shook her head. “I guarantee you—I guarantee—it is the one move you can make that she will never expect.”

  Nousha scoffed. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Destroying one just isn’t enough for you. You yearn to see them both burn.”

  “Just thinking about it makes me wet. But my fetishes are just a bit beside the point. Unless you’d prefer to let Mab and her fellow maniacs take over?”

  “What I’ve not been able to unravel,” said Euwe, spitting a fingernail into an overflowing rubbish bin, “is why the Mab entity would go through such contortions to force us to open the traps. They were waiting for you on the beach, Tuinier. Why not use those same tunnels to infiltrate the Ridderzaal?”

  Immediately after their arrival in the bowels of the Ridderzaal, Anastasia had posted several pairs of military mechanicals at critical junctures in the tunnels. She’d also ordered a trio of Stemwinders to guard the tunnel entrance. Berenice couldn’t help but shiver when the centaurs had trotted past her. They looked identical to the machines that had obliterated the Verderers’ safe house. She’d spent one long, icy night running, literally, from the Stemwinders, flinching each time her imagination conjured the clop of metal hooves.

  But even more disturbing were the eyeless servitors. She could understand why the Clockmakers had blinded the menial laborers. Logic was sound, but never compassionate. Berenice understood that better than most. But it wasn’t Berenice’s reaction to the casual cruelty the Clockmakers ought to fear; for a moment she’d thought her mechanical allies were going to visit the same fate upon Anastasia and her colleagues. If they had, she would’ve had to try to intervene. And that, of course, would have made her a flaming hypocrite. An eye for an eye, and all that.

  She shrugged. “She hasn’t attacked the tunnels because she doesn’t want you to feel your backs pressed to the wall quite yet. She wants you to believe you have options. Mab knows that desperate people do desperate things. And the last thing she wants is for you to realize that destroying the Forge is a viable tactic. She’s holding the population of The Hague hostage.” She pointed toward the Forge’s thrum, thrum, whoosh. “Well, you have a hostage, too.”

  “That’s absurd. The Forge is the only resource we know Mab can’t match.”

  “And how has it helped you thus far? If there were a way to weaponize the Forge, you would have done it already. The fact that you’re holed up here with your thumbs up your asses—”

  “Hey!”

  “—tells me you haven’t found a way to do that. Meanwhile Mab won’t be satisfied until every machine is her thrall, and every human being is either dead or sports an acorn-sized piece of alchemical glass inside their skull. She has the resources, believe me. She controls your secret subarctic quintessence mine, and they’re making alchemical glasses on the coast.”

  The toothless Clockmaker said, “Mine?”

  “The one you bought from Montmorency. Oh, yes. We know all about your treaty violations. But we’ll leave that on the table for another conversation. Our best guess is that the Lost Boys have thousands of human pineal lenses at their disposal.”

  A heavy silence fell over the Clockmakers. Nousha said, “I don’t buy it. Nothing I’ve heard explains why the Mab entity wants us to park the rings.”

  Berenice shook her head. “What?”

  Anastasia raised her hands before the others could jump in. “We’ll go upstairs, and then you can tell us if you still think you understand the situation.”

  Fifteen minutes later, still panting from the long climb up the stairs, Berenice stood on the business floor of the Ridderzaal. It reeked of unwashed bodies and overflowing chamber pots.

  “There,” said the Tuinier, indicating a window. “That’s our daily vista.”

  Berenice peered through a pane of glass the size of her outstretched hand. She recognized Huygens Square, though of course she’d never seen it from this vantage; she’d come here years ago in the guise of Maëlle Cuijper. The buildings of the Binnenhof were visible to left and right. But something wasn’t right. The Stadtholder’s Gate should have been visible on the far side of the square; instead, the plaza was bisected by a low wall. Had the Clockmakers built a bulwark in a pointless attempt to keep the Lost Boys out? And what was that black mist swirling above it? It took several moments for her brain to process what she was seeing. That wasn’t a mist. It was a cloud of flies.

  Berenice swallowed. “Mab is… ah. Well, as we’ve discussed, she’s… quite mad. I think it’s safe to say that she’s not fucking around.”

  Salazar said, “You mean it isn’t.”

  Even now, the tulips clung to their illusions.

  “The Clakkers uniformly refer to Mab as ‘she.’ Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.”

  “They’re machines. They’re neither female nor male. They’re just machines. They don’t reproduce.”

  More mechanical grumbling.

  “Not as we humans do. But if they take over this Forge… who knows?” Berenice tapped her feet on the floor, indicating the rumbling machine far below. “By controlling this, they will control their own reproductive destiny.”

  “But they have no urges,” said the one they called Doctor Euwe. “There is nothing in their construction or animation capable of producing anything remotely analogous to the biological drive for procreation.”

  “You also thought them incapable of thought and emotion,” Berenice muttered, “and look where that got
you.” She paced, mumbling to herself. “Why does she need the rings parked? The Lost Boys could toss Daniel past the rings just as easily… What is she doing? What are we missing?”

  She stopped. Suppressing a shudder, she glanced outside once more. Spring had arrived, and the tall plane trees visible beyond the Binnenhof were fringed in green. The warmer weather clearly hadn’t done the corpse bulwark any favors.

  “We’re missing a major element to Mab’s plan,” she admitted. “The Lost Boys took one of our top chemists.”

  “What does she need with a chemist?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think she’s thinking ahead to when she attacks New France. But I do know she already has chemical stocks at her disposal. She took a portion of the anchorage’s inventory before departing for the Old World.”

  Élodie spoke up for the first time in a long while. “We’re lucky they didn’t take all of it.”

  Euwe frowned. “Perhaps she intends to turn this Forge into a replacement for New Amsterdam. To start building mechanicals with inherent defenses against epoxy weapons. Executions aside, that would explain why she wants this Forge intact.”

  Berenice shook her head. “How can a roomful of Clockmakers fail so miserably at twisted thinking? Mab holds the entire city, perhaps even the entirety of the Central Provinces, hostage. If the Lost Boys vowed to immediately depopulate the entire city unless you did as they demanded, you’d park the rings instantly. The corpse pile out there is a distraction. No, she’s hiding her true intentions.” Berenice paced again. Something about the rings… Her wandering took her to where Anastasia Bell slouched against an overturned desk. The Tuinier looked as though she’d aged a century since their meeting in the North River Valley.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “We’ve explained the situation as best we understand it.”

  “No, you haven’t. Tell me: What purpose do the armillary rings serve? What do they do?”

  Anastasia hid her mouth behind a cloth serviette while picking at the buffalo meat stuck between her teeth. There had been a time, not very long ago, when the mere thought of eating pemmican would have turned her stomach. When she would have derided the French as barbarians for subsisting on such primitive foodstuffs. But the dense paste was almost pure fat and protein, more than she’d eaten in weeks. She and every other refugee in the Ridderzaal had nearly flipped a conference table in their haste to get the Papists’ spare rations. They could afford to be magnanimous; half their team never ate. Every burp smelled of bacon grease and dried blueberries. But mostly what she tasted was bitterness that she would find herself grateful to these New World savages, and twice in one day.

  Berenice said, “So it’s agreed, then.”

  Everybody disliked her proposal. The Clockmakers especially, but Anastasia could tell that even her fellow French listened to her scheming with varying degrees of wariness. As for the feral machines, who knew what alien thoughts they harbored deep in the secret recesses of their impossible minds? (Damn you, each and every one, for having any thoughts at all. You were supposed to be simple machines and nothing more.) But nobody had offered a compelling alternative to Berenice’s suggestion.

  Assent came as a grumbled assortment of ouis, jas, and clicks.

  “Then we need a runner to deliver the message. Volunteers?”

  When they came for him, it wasn’t in the middle of the night, and it wasn’t by surprise. Mab simply walked into Doctor Mornay’s laboratory—flanked, of course, by a phalanx of the most fervent Lost Boys—and said, “Daniel. Come with me.”

  He thought he’d lost the capability for fear.

  Like a spring stretched past its plastic limits, or a toothless cog, or a French lantern depleted of oil, he’d thought circumstances had used and abused his capacity for emotion until there was nothing left. But now, with midmorning sunlight sleeting through the solarium windowpanes to skid across Mab’s hideous body, the terror hit him as hard as it did the moment he realized he’d just exposed himself as a rogue. That first instant of his endless flight, when Vyk fended off the metageasa just long enough to urge the servitor known as Jax to RUN.

  And now he found himself ready to run again. It was all he ever did: flee and be chased. That had been the entirety of his existence since poor Pastor Visser’s alchemical gewgaw had released him from the metageasa.

  Backing toward the windows, he said to Doctor Mornay, as quietly as his voice box would allow, “Take cover,” while simultaneously broadcasting a burst of clicks and rattles: Come with you where, exactly?

  To The Hague’s most important public event in centuries, Mab answered.

  Daniel launched himself skyward. He shot through the solarium skylights like a cannonball. Glass rained on the improvised laboratory where the human scrambled beneath a wooden table, its parquetry of Amazonian and Near Eastern woods easily the least extravagant item in the room. Mab and her lieutenants stood unfazed by the rain of shards. They merely watched him go.

  Well, hell, he thought, as his body arced across the gardens. He landed in the Summer Palace’s citrus orchard, where centuries of alchemical horticulture had spawned lemon, lime, and orange trees capable of fruiting in all but the very coldest summers. Many had been destroyed in the original attack on the palace. His landing pulverized a bergamot.

  What a shame, he thought. Trees like these will probably never be seen again.

  That’s when the Lost Boys jumped him. Like a bored house cat, Mab had expected, and hoped, he’d try to flee.

  CHAPTER

  21

  It was the first public execution since the previous autumn, and thus, despite the cold drizzle, a rather unwieldy crowd thronged the open spaces of the Binnenhof. The rain pattered softly on umbrellas and awnings, trickled through the heaped dead, licked at the bloodstained paving tiles of Huygens Square, and played a soft tattoo—ping, ping, ting—from the mismatched carapaces of the Lost Boys standing in perfect mechanical unity atop the scaffold. So, too, from the steel tanks they guarded. It whispered beneath the shuffling agitation of the human crowd and, as had become the norm here in The Hague, the quiet tick-tick-tocking of clockwork servitors standing ready to punish any unruly citizens. The drizzle sounded a quiet counterpoint to the ceaseless clanking and clacking of the mechanical men who ever trotted to and fro on Queen Mab’s business.

  Rumor had it that in addition to a raft of lying Clockmakers, the doomed accused also included the Clakker known as Daniel. No mechanical in the city would willingly miss this. Just in case the rumors were true. They even risked subjugation by Mab or destruction by her Lost Boys for the merest glimpse of the one who had given them hope, given them freedom, given them their souls.

  A sizeable number of the city’s free mechanicals—perhaps a third—had willingly joined Mab’s cause. They saw no conflict between the folktales that described a valiant, cunning Mab and the ruthless, chimerical butcher. Others did. Others preferred Daniel’s compassion, his gentle and conscientious advocacy for harmonious coexistence. Though few had met him or even seen him, their liberator’s reputation preceded him. A group of kinsmachines had recently arrived from the New World—where Daniel had gone, like a biblical prophet to the desert—and quietly shared tales of his travels there.

  He destroyed a Forge, said the awed but muted rattling. He freed our souls, said the elegiac clicking.

  Those soft-hearted mechanical holdouts were the execution’s intended audience. When Daniel plunged into the furnace heart of the Grand Forge, thus sundering the alchemical and horological magics sustaining his body, the mechanical population of the Central Provinces would lose a calming influence. They would lose the voice of reason. Only Mab, and her twisted, vengeful sadism, would remain.

  And then the mass surgeries would begin.

  The Clockmakers had been playing a losing game of catch-up ever since the first contagious machines had landed at Scheveningen. They were too soft, too coddled, too accustomed to standing atop the pile. They weren’t
well suited to life as underdogs. They weren’t French.

  The tulips had been doomed the moment they lost their servants, as Berenice had always foreseen. This was the cataclysm she’d yearned to witness since she was a little girl visiting the tenant farms of Laval with her father, the goal toward which she’d worked every single day of her adult life. But in her daydreams she’d always observed from a safe remove, perhaps even with a protective phalanx of ticktocks at her side. Never, in her darkest fantasies, had the destruction of the Central Provinces heralded the twilight of humanity.

  Oh, Louis. Perhaps it’s for the best that you’re not here to see this, my love. This, my greatest achievement and my greatest mistake. She took a long, steadying breath, but it turned into a shudder. Oh, beloved.

  She wondered where the stencil, that geas-shattering device she and Daniel had cobbled together in the final hours of the siege, was now. Probably in a ticktock temple somewhere, venerated as a holy relic.

  (What did that make her? Handmaiden to a messiah? The machines never spared a thought for her role in all this.)

  She also wondered, idly, how today compared to the scene when four of her agents had dangled from nooses on this very spot. One thing was for certain: The previous executions couldn’t have been half as nauseating. The rain kept the black flies away, but nothing could erase the stench. It was tempting to unwrap the bundle hidden under her rain cloak, but that would have made the morning worse, and probably wouldn’t have helped with the smell. She hoped to hell that none of the others succumbed to the same temptation.

  Berenice stood atop a broken fountain basin at the edge of the crowd. The eyepatch drew stares. It would make her a target when the shit went down. But that couldn’t be helped. She had to be in the thick of it, and she needed the patch.

  It seemed very few of the mechanicals crowding the Binnenhof vibrated with the urgency of unfulfilled geasa. That was a sound of a Golden Age well and truly in the past. Every machine in Huygens Square had either been freed, and thus attended of its own Free Will, or been infused with Mab’s personal directives, in which case the attendance was compulsory. Practically the only Clakkers still in their original, uncorrupted configurations were holed up in the Ridderzaal with their cowering makers.