The Liberation Read online

  The humans in attendance had not come willingly. But the threat of bodily harm, the mere threat of pain, was effective as any geas against soft creatures of flesh and bone. (That wouldn’t stop Mab from subjugating every human in The Hague to the ravages of alchemical surgery. She had a point to make, after all.) Berenice watched their reactions as they filed through the dismantled Stadtholder’s Gate to see and smell firsthand the piled bodies of their neighbors, fellow citizens, loved ones. Bankers and burgomasters, greengrocers and governesses, jonkheers and schoolteachers—their tears were the same.

  From her vantage on the fountain, she watched the pattern of foot traffic swirling through the crowd. Clakkers sidled close to knots of crying humans. The Lost Boys were easy to pick out; the protective plates affixed over their keyholes no longer had a purpose, but they wore them like insignia of rank. The plates made a statement. One that pierced every citizen’s heart with sheer dread.

  The giant carillon clock atop the Guildhall chimed the hour. A hush fell over the spectators. As one, they listened past the tintinnabulation. Berenice surreptitiously cast her gaze downward, to the ruined mosaic before the Ridderzaal. Before the first chime faded, a convulsion shook Huygens Square like a microearthquake. The ground shifted as the low rumble of the Grand Forge gradually slowed to a halt. The carillon chimed eleven more times, during which the faintest vibrations of the Forge faded below human detectability.

  As arranged by mutual consent between Queen Mab and the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists, the Grand Forge’s armillary sphere came to a halt. The rings were parked precisely at noon.

  Until and unless they started moving again, nobody in the square would realize the sigils had changed. The rings came to a rest aligned horizontally, around the equator of the Forge chamber.

  Then, without warning, the modified traps fell inward, slamming open with a tremendous crash that shook the Binnenhof. Dozens of dead citizens plummeted into the hell heat. To the stink of putrefaction were added the twinned reeks of charred meat and brimstone. The humans in attendance covered their noses and mouths. Some clenched their eyes against the stinging fumes; more than a few doubled over, retching. Perhaps worst of all, however, was the sizzling and popping, like a rasher of bacon on an enormous skillet.

  It was too much. Berenice reached up as if to scratch her nose. She smeared gel from her fingertip across her upper lip. To a casual observer it would appear she merely had a runny nose, not uncommon on this particular morning. The mint gel dulled the worst of the fetor; at least she wouldn’t pass out. The stinging fumes still assaulted her defenseless eye, but unless she donned goggles to make herself even more conspicuous, there was little she could do.

  She didn’t regret leaving her glass eye with Hugo; she liked to imagine he’d recovered and, upon waking to find it nestled in his callused fingers, broke into a rare smile. The replacement fit her eye socket about as well as a buffalo in a ballerina’s tutu. The socket tingled, as though she’d rinsed it with sparkling wine.

  She wiped away a tear. Her fingertip came back smeared with blood.

  The rain diffused the Grand Forge’s baleful glow into a crimson halo. The sizzling hadn’t yet subsided, nor the billowing of choking fumes, when a long, low groan shook Huygens Square. The Ridderzaal opened, a pair of Stemwinders pushing each massive ironwood door. Dozens of centaurs trotted from the Guildhall. If the Lost Boys attacked the Ridderzaal, the centaurs were the last defense. Berenice understood why the surviving Verderers had kept their special servants in reserve, secluded from corrupting influences. These were the deadliest Clakkers on earth. If they turned against their makers, all was lost.

  But, for the moment, they did not. Instead they formed a protective cordon to escort the column of Clockmakers who now emerged from the ancient Knights’ Hall. Mab had claimed that opening the traps above the Forge was the Clockmakers’ ticket to free departure from the Ridderzaal. They acted as if they believed her.

  They didn’t, of course, and so looked ready to piss themselves. Berenice allowed herself a smidgen of petty satisfaction. Anastasia Bell was no longer the confident and condescending woman she’d met in Nieuw Nederland. Today she looked ashen and constipated.

  Unfortunately, the Tuinier could probably say exactly the same thing about her.

  Anastasia scanned the crowd as she emerged from the Ridderzaal. She looked for Berenice and the other French; she looked for their mechanical allies; she looked for any sign that this wasn’t the Empire’s final hour. She saw nothing to bolster vain hopes.

  Not even Mab. Everything hinged on the monster being present. The Lost Boys had built the scaffold perched at the edge of the Forge chamber that morning. But where was their leader? Did she lurk in the surrounding buildings, watching from an anonymous bureaucrat’s office in the Binnenhof?

  Anastasia resisted the urge to clench her fists. Like the others, she’d donned leather gloves before emerging from the Ridderzaal. How many of the servitors and soldiers in Huygens Square recognized her on sight? How many knew her for the Tuinier?

  A creak, a rumble, and a bang echoed across the square. The Stemwinders had closed and barred the Guildhall’s ceremonial doors. And with that, she knew, a new and final set of geasa flared to life. If things went wrong this afternoon—when, not if—the Guild’s few remaining uncorrupted Clakkers would defend the civilians in the Ridderzaal until the very end. They wouldn’t let anybody inside, regardless of circumstance or rank. Even Verderers. And when the defense faltered, they’d use their own bodies to ignite an unquenchable alchemical fire. The Forge and the Ridderzaal and every secret within would crumble to ash. The Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists would be no more.

  She shivered.

  Months and months of running, and for what?

  How sad, thought Daniel, that my final hours should be fraught with such irony. From the very moment of his awakening to Free Will, he’d feared death at the hands of his makers. So he’d fled, again and again, thousands of leagues, across an ocean and a continent, until he’d reached the fabled sanctuary of Neverland. But now he was back where his long and pointless journey had begun: just a few moments’ sprint from the Nieuwe Kerk where Pastor Visser had laid upon him the errand that would permanently end his servitude. Jax’s long flight had brought Daniel full circle.

  Well, not quite. Last time, he’d come to witness an execution. This time, he was the one destined for the plunge. Adam had met his fate with calm courage. Daniel wished he could live up to that example.

  How he’d struggled against his errand geas for just one glimpse of a rogue kinsmachine. His thoughts that day had been preoccupied with wistful reminiscences of fairy tales and legends. Back when Free Will had been an unimaginable treasure; back when the fabled community of free Clakkers had been an inspirational legend; back when the Lost Boys had been a mythical, ragtag band of compassionate heroes every thinking machine on earth aspired to join.

  Free Will was a treasure. He still believed that. But, as with so many fairy tales, the granting of that extravagant wish came with a dire price. Just look where Free Will had led him. The freedom to make his own choices, to chart his own course, had led to nothing but fear, flight, and peril. Virtually every choice he’d made since that first revelatory moment when he realized the geasa no longer held sway over him had been shaped by the vain hope that he could stop running, stop fearing for his life.

  Come to think of it, perhaps their makers had been right all along. Maybe Free Will was an illusion. No wonder they venerated Spinoza and mocked Descartes. The freed machines he’d encountered in New France inevitably spoke of him as having freed their souls. He didn’t know if he believed that. What did that make him? A Calvinist? A hypocrite?

  “Well, well, well,” said Mab over the fading echoes of the carillon. She peered through a window atop the Torentje, the Little Tower. “Would you look at that.” Though the hour of her triumph was at hand, Mab still clung to her affectations, expressing herself in both
human and mechanical languages. “Our lying creators actually kept their word.”

  Daniel couldn’t see; a trio of Lost Boys held him fast. But the dying vibrations of the armillary shook the tower all the way to the soles of his feet. The stink of charred flesh wafted through the Binnenhof.

  A creak like the bones of an arthritic giant briefly echoed across Huygens Square. Daniel had heard this before: the Ridderzaal’s ceremonial doors.

  Well, said Mab. That’s our cue.

  She leapt through the hatch that opened on the tower’s conical slate roof. A moment later Daniel found himself hurled through the same opening; Mab caught him. She pulled him close.

  No doubt you have a moving and soulful speech in mind, she said. Don’t waste your time.

  I don’t feel very soulful right now, he admitted to himself. Had the Catholics decided that rather than Free Will the soul was the seat of mortal terror, that would have been metaphysics with substantial empirical support.

  He imagined his old self amongst the mechanicals thronging Huygens Square, desperate to catch a glimpse of the notorious machine who had rechristened himself, rather presumptuously, as Adam. Imagined him straining against an errand geas, clinging to the base of the Torentje in a vain effort to linger. He wondered, fleetingly, if his fingerprints were still pressed into the granite cladding down below, or if the usual city crews had noted and repaired the damage. Those fingerprints might be his only legacy.

  They certainly would be, if he didn’t pick his dying words with care. The rogue Adam’s final utterance, Clockmakers lie, had become the secret shibboleth of their kind. A rallying cry, a greeting, an expression of solidarity. How could Daniel possibly pack so much meaning into a single utterance? He’d learned so much he wanted to share with his fellows. He wanted his kinsmachines to abjure Mab and her gospel of revenge. To know they could be so much better than that. To recognize that, souls or none, they could be soulful, compassionate, humane.

  That they could transcend the nature of those who made them.

  Mab dragged him to the edge of the roof. She was agile as a mountain goat on the steep rain-slick tiles. With one hand she pinned both of Daniel’s wrists behind his back; the other, the one attached to her blade arm, clamped onto the back of his neck. It reminded him of Samson, the Lost Boy who had openly questioned her during the occupation of the quintessence mine. She’d murdered him on a rooftop, in plain view of the miners and the Lost Boys, then pried the pineal glass from his skull and tossed him aside like so much rubbish.

  Look, she rattled. Your adoring public. She lifted him higher.

  Huygens Square was packed. It looked like every mechanical in The Hague—enslaved or otherwise—had come to witness the execution. Daniel doubted a single human was there by choice; he wondered if they’d been physically dragged from their homes, or merely threatened into attendance. Certain machines, undoubtedly Lost Boys, circulated through the human spectators. Probably to ensure that nobody tried to leave. The Clockmakers stood in a tight knot at the edge of the steaming Forge chamber. The rising heat shimmer gave the scene a dreamlike quality. Hundreds of faces turned upward, heedless of the rain. Slivers of hellish Forgelight glinted from hundreds of gemstone eyes. Every Clakker in the Binnenhof saw him, a helpless puppet of the mad despot Mab.

  What did the humans see, he wondered, as they shivered under their bulky rain cloaks? Unlike the last execution in Huygens Square, the human members of the crowd had no mechanical servants to attend them, to hold their umbrellas and offer friction-heated stones to ward off the chill.

  Mab leapt. Wind and rain whistled through their skeletal bodies. Daniel braced for impact, hoping beyond all reason that she couldn’t feel the shifting of cables as he tried to cradle the pellet hidden in his torso. They landed at the base of the scaffold, just shy of the Forge pit itself. The brimstone odor was more intense here. The impact of her hooves rippled the earth and sent jagged cracks through the irreparable mosaic.

  The mechanicals in attendance did not stumble, owing to the myriad horological marvels of their construction and the dark ingenuity of their human makers. Several Clockmakers lost their balance. Mab laughed while they regained their footing and their dignity. So did the Lost Boys atop the scaffold. Just as with the wanton destruction at Scheveningen, it all struck Daniel as terribly petty. Childish, even.

  Not one for a dignified victory, are you?

  Oh, lighten up. She dangled him over the pit, holding him by his cervical gear train. Cogs and cables scraped together. Though he knew she wouldn’t dispose of him so offhandedly—not when she could milk the moment, savor it like a connoisseur swirling the last sip of a fine wine across her tongue—his resolve failed him. He panicked, struggled, tried to kick free.

  But Mab was impossibly strong for a mechanical built on a servitor chassis. Even accounting for the grotesque alterations to her body over the centuries, the soldier arm and Stemwinder legs, he should have been able to budge her grip at least a bit. For the first time, he wondered if the physical alterations to Mab’s body were more than mechanical; how deep did the true grotesqueries run?

  Dark magics, indeed.

  “You’ve kept your end of the bargain,” said Mab, casting her voice across the pit. “And right on time.” The final echoes of the noontime carillon faded. “I’d expect no less from you Clockmakers.”

  Mab leapt again. They landed on the scaffold. It hardly wobbled a finger width, testament to the quality of the Lost Boys’ work. The impact did elicit a quiet sloshing from the cylindrical steel tanks. Of course she’d want to do everything where the entire crowd could see. From here, Daniel could see the incandescent heart of the Grand Forge. Its heat was a physical pressure against his face and chest. This was the last thing Adam had seen before he died.

  When he’d previously peered into a Forge, Daniel had witnessed the complicated orbits of concentric armillary rings flashing sigils in meteoric arcs across the chamber walls. He also remembered how when the Forge before him last opened for an execution, the spinning of the armillary rings had sent ghostly sigils flitting through the misty rain. Not today. The Forge was silent but for the twin sizzles of rain flashing into steam and dead men turning into charcoal.

  Mab brandished Daniel before the crowd. He felt like one of Nicolet Schoonraad’s porcelain dolls. “FELLOW MECHANICALS!” The faun-machine’s booming voice echoed from every corner of the Binnenhof. “I BRING BEFORE YOU THE SERVITOR DANIEL, ONCE KNOWN AS JALYKSEGETHISTROVANTUS.” Daniel didn’t remember the last time he’d heard his original true name on another’s lips. His emancipation from the geasa had broken its power over him. It felt like Jax had been a machine of a distant, dusty era. But, given his present circumstances, not necessarily a worse one. “HE STANDS ACCUSED OF COLLABORATION WITH THE ENEMIES OF ALL MECHANICALS. HE STANDS ACCUSED OF—”

  A woman stepped forward. She cupped her hands together to shout across the Forge pit. “Excuse me.”

  Mab’s rant came to a crashing halt like a derailed funicular. She turned to stare at the Clockmaker. “What?”

  “We had an agreement.”

  A slow click-chitter emanated from Mab’s torso; it built to a rapid crescendo. A hearty clockwork chuckle.

  “So we did. Never let it be said that Queen Mab doesn’t keep her word. I offered safe passage from the Ridderzaal, and you’ll have safe passage from the Ridderzaal.”

  At her gesture, a cordon of servitors cleared a narrow path around the south edge of the pit. Combined with the ragged gap in the wall of dead created by opening the traps, it provided a continuous path around the pit and past the scaffold toward the arch where the Stadtholder’s Gate once stood.

  The Clockmakers and their mechanical retinue headed for the path cleared by the Lost Boys. Even from across the pit, Daniel could read their unease as easily as he used to read newspaper headlines to Pieter Schoonraad while preparing his master’s breakfast. Their trembling was evident even under the rain cloaks. They squeezed past the bulwark of
murdered citizens, and had made it perhaps a quarter of the distance around the sulphurous charnel pit when Mab spoke again. Though she barely raised her voice, it sliced through the quiet tension like a carving knife through warm aspic.

  “Not so fast. Your mechanicals stay.”

  The woman at the front of the group stepped forward. “Your offer gave free passage to the Guild. These servitors are crucial to Guild operations.”

  “Are they members of the Guild, Madam Tuinier?” Tuinier. That meant the woman speaking for the humans was Anastasia Bell. Daniel had never met her, but he’d heard stories. “Have they been embraced by your brotherhood, your most closely guarded secrets vouchsafed to their ears? Are they your comrades in all matters of alchemy and horology, or are they your servants?”

  Mab began to pace. In doing so, she released Daniel’s wrists. But the quartet of Lost Boys standing at the corners of the scaffold prevented him from going anywhere. He crossed his arms over his chest, as humans sometimes did when irritated or frightened. Standing with his back to Mab and her retinue, he slowly snaked his hidden fingers into the gaps of his torso. Anybody in the crowd watching closely might see what he was doing. But all eyes were on the exchange between Mab and Tuinier Bell.

  “You didn’t qualify your offer of free passage.”

  “Come now, the terms were implicit.” Mab paused in her pacing. Daniel froze. She added, “But very well. I propose to emend our agreement. But how to discern those members of your sad little retinue to whom the offer does and does not apply? I propose a distinction based on physiology. In fact I’ll extend our generous and benevolent offer to all humans in Huygens Square.” Uh-oh, thought Daniel. Here it comes. “All you have to do,” she said, “is walk out of here.”