The Liberation Read online

  Normally, the Clockmakers’ Guildhall smelled faintly of hot metal, old books, and perhaps just a faint hint of sulphur. Anastasia could smell only her own filth. The doors boomed with the pounding of metal fists. Faintly, under the concussions, Anastasia heard the wailing of the doomed excluded. A reedy mechanical voice called, “Masters, please, I seek refuge and physic for my owner.”

  “What are you doing?” she cried. “Our people need safe haven!”

  “We don’t dare open the doors,” said a voice she didn’t recognize. “What if a rogue gets inside?”

  She turned. The men and women who worked the business floor of the Ridderzaal were a motley crew: functionaries, paper pushers, accountants, and others of that ilk who clung like barnacles to the underside of bureaucracy. High in the rafters, dust motes danced in golden sunlight. The roof, supported by massive sixty-foot timbers, slanted sharply from both sides to meet at a high central peak. The wooden cherubs eavesdropping from the uppermost corners wore blindfolds and wax plugged their waggish ears, symbolizing the invulnerability of Guild secrets even from Heaven itself. Or so the Clockmakers had always chosen to believe.

  The woman who’d spoken wore a technician’s loupe, which made one cornflower blue eye comically large. The leather band pushed high across her forehead sported an array of colorful lenses. Thank heavens, a true fellow Clockmaker. And she had a point. A single corrupted machine could depopulate the Ridderzaal if it spread its taint to the Clakkers within.

  Quickly, she said, “I’m Anastasia. Who are you?”

  “Teresa van de Kieboom. Of course I know you, Tuinier. I sent the Stemwinders for you.”

  “Thank you. When this is over, I’ll personally see you get a raise. But for now, where are the Archmasters, Teresa?”

  A heavy silence fell across the conversation like a sodden wool blanket, punctuated by the cacophony of the massacre unfolding outside. Oh dear.

  “Nobody knows. You’re the highest ranking… She trailed off as though putting voice to “survivor” would make the truth irrevocable. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Tuinier… what do we do?”

  That depended. Once they finished slaughtering the citizens outside, would the killers storm the Ridderzaal?

  Anastasia craned her neck. The Ridderzaal’s rosette window depicted the Empire’s Arms in a thousand panels of jewel-toned glass: a rosy cross surrounded by the arms of the great families, all girded by the teeth of the Universal Cog. The panels and mullions, feats of eighteenth-century alchemy, were thin as spider silk. Were they strong enough to repel an attack?

  A woman with a spyglass stood in the gallery alongside the window. She must have seen Anastasia atop the fountain.

  Anastasia pointed to the rosette. “That’s where they’ll try to break in. Get a pair of Stemwinders up there. They are not to look outside.”

  Of course, given time, the rogue mechanicals were strong enough to tear the Ridderzaal apart stone by stone. But she saw no reason to point this out.

  A servitor sprinted to the doors on the far end of the hall. Anastasia paced like a crone who had misplaced her cane. The other Clockmakers watched her as a drowning man watched for a life preserver. They breathed through their mouths, or covered their noses with scented handkerchiefs, when she passed. Good Lord, she reeked.

  What next? What if the rogues outside overwhelm the Stemwinders?

  They weren’t trapped. If they were quick enough, they could evacuate the Guildhall and send everybody out through the tunnels beneath the Binnenhof. But that would mean abandoning the Ridderzaal to the infected machines. The humans’ retreat would become a massacre once the rogues subverted the rearguard. At which point the corrupted machines would have access to… everything. The labs. The files.

  The Forge.

  Anastasia gasped, steadied herself against an accountant’s desk. That was the ultimate goal of this attack. She knew it in her marrow.

  Unacceptable. Anastasia couldn’t allow it; if necessary, she was duty-bound to give her own life to prevent it. She’d taken a vow to defend the arcane secrets of alchemy and horology from all enemies, foreign and domestic. So they’d have to incinerate the Ridderzaal on the way out. Truly incinerate it, beyond anything mere fire could achieve, to sunder the very ideas themselves. They’d need alchemical heat. The heat of a Grand Forge—

  Transfixed by revelation, she froze.

  A pair of mechanical centaurs mounted the stairs to the gallery. The crunch and clatter of their hooves echoed through the high spaces of the hall. Anastasia called, “Everybody, listen! We must work quickly.”

  The founding members of the Clockmakers’ Guild, those legendary and yet unknown men and women who, almost a quarter millennium ago, learned the secrets of Clakker construction from the lips of the venerable Christiaan Huygens himself, had watched the world change. They had seen how easily a handful of mechanicals sprinkled amongst William of Orange’s forces expelled rapacious Louis XIV from the polders of South Holland. And, having seen it, they knew they would spend the rest of their lives—as would their successors, and their successors’ successors to the nth generation of Clockmakers—tightening an iron grip on a world they’d make their own. Which meant, amongst so very many other things, obliterating any mechanical that showed the slightest sign of disobedience. That so-called “rogue” mechanicals should be destroyed became common wisdom overnight, and soon it was enshrined as the highest law of the fledgling Empire.

  But the true genius of the first Clockmakers was in making such executions a public spectacle. In this, and this only, they cast off the shadows and permitted—invited, demanded—public participation in their work. It united every jonkheer and schoolteacher, every fisherman and burgomaster, against the direst threat to their way of life.

  The first Clockmakers had been masters of emotional manipulation. They understood the ticking of the human heart.

  And so, while constructing the immense mosaic of Huygens Square and the Grand Forge deep beneath it, they ingeniously installed trapdoors. Nothing inspired the loyal subjects of the Brasswork Throne like witnessing the unmaking of a disobedient Clakker. It worked so well, in fact, that in times of particular tension between the Throne and Guild, Clockmakers had been known to secretly create a flawed machine and set it loose within the Central Provinces. The ensuing spectacle of chase, capture, and execution fired up the citizenry and, if played right, kept the Brasswork Throne pliable.

  The trapdoors beneath Huygens Square had last opened the previous autumn. What a magnificent day that had been. First, they’d stretched the French spies’ necks; cracking the espionage ring had been a triumph of Anastasia’s office. But that had been merely the warm-up, the opening ceremony. For then they’d hauled out the rogue servitor Perjumbellagostrivantus. And there, before the eyes of God and the entire Empire, the malfunctioning machine christened itself Adam and told Queen Margreet to choke. The crowd collectively pissed itself. And a certain legislative proposal to curtail the Guild’s power of eminent domain quietly disappeared, never again to sully the Council of Ministers.

  People accused the Verderers of deviousness. But compared to the founders of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists, the Tuinier herself was a dilettante.

  The din in the Ridderzaal swelled with every machine recruited from the tunnels. A comforting noise, this rattle-clatter of uncompromised machines. This was the sound of the world running as it ought. It muffled the massacre victims’ dwindling screams.

  Anastasia ordered almost every mechanical from the sprawling subterranean Guild complex to the business floor. Hundreds of mechanicals formed up in ranks behind the ceremonial doors. Servitors, soldiers, and Stemwinders stood in perfect unity, nearly touching, still as statues. They didn’t shuffle; they didn’t jostle. They waited. They obeyed their geasa.

  They were as they were made to be: tools.

  A servitor emerged from the passage to the tunnels. “The soldiers have taken their positions in the Forge chamber, Tuinier
, and await your command.”

  “The rings have been parked?”

  “Yes, Tuinier.”

  The Grand Forge hung at the center of an immense armillary sphere like an artificial sun blazing at the center of a hand-crafted cosmos. According to reports from the few functioning machines pulled from the red-hot wreckage, the catastrophic destruction of the New Amsterdam Forge had begun when the mechanisms became unbalanced owing to Clakkers scrambling over the rings. The world’s only remaining Grand Forge lay beneath Huygens Square; she didn’t know if the Empire would persist if that were destroyed.

  She’d also sent a squad of military Clakkers into the depths. Their blades, she fervently hoped, would make all the difference.

  She stood in the gallery alongside the rosette window, flanked by a pair of Stemwinders. From there she could see outside to Huygens Square—a scene lifted from a madman’s darkest nightmare—and inside to the ranks of mechanicals forming up behind the massive ceremonial doors. If they opened the doors too soon, the foray might fail to overwhelm the attackers spread through the plaza. Too late, and none of the citizens in Huygens Square would survive. Hers was a pragmatic calculus, not a compassionate one. She pinched her earlobe, waiting for the ring of killers to contract just a little tighter…

  “Now! Go!”

  Ordinarily, the ceremonial doors groaned opened slowly, as befitting the grandeur and spectacle of such a noteworthy occasion. Not today. Today, teams of servitors heaved against the doors the instant the bolts retracted. The doors slammed open hard enough to crack the ironwood. The mechanicals surged onto Huygens Square, rank after rank blurring through the doors almost faster than Anastasia could see. A tooth-jarring cacophony shook the Ridderzaal: the smash-crash-bang of mechanicals in combat. The final rank of mechanicals joined the fray. The doors closed.

  The battle between the rogues and the unsullied mechanicals splintered into dozens of individual conflicts, each moving too quickly for Anastasia’s eyes to follow. The appearance of so many fresh mechanicals drew the rogues stationed on the surrounding rooftops. They hurled themselves into the heart of the conflict. Here and there, an aquamarine shimmer strobed the skirmishers.

  The Stemwinders and their fellow Clakkers corralled the rogues into a tighter clump. Lured them. Nudged them, shoved them, punched and kicked them toward the traps. It wasn’t clean as a noose. The melee frothed and churned like boiling stew; in places, the unsullied machines placed themselves on the traps to draw their assailants closer.

  How many mechanicals will the Empire lose today?

  Anastasia lost sight of the traps beneath the seething riot. To the servitor on the ground floor, Anastasia yelled, “Now! Cut the hinges!”

  The traps were designed to open outward because it made for a better spectacle. But that would have destroyed the element of surprise. The rogues would catapult themselves from danger. Thus, somewhere far below Huygens Square, a squad of mechanical soldiers wielded alchemical blades. As one they severed the hinges and stops that held the immense hatch closed. The mosaic shuddered. The rogues tried to leap away, but Anastasia had anticipated this. Another geas asserted itself inside the uncompromised machines from the Ridderzaal: They clamped themselves to the rogues.

  The traps fell away. A hellish glow illuminated the scrum. Dozens of machines tumbled into the Grand Forge, along with the remains of their victims. The clash-bash of combat became the clang-bong-crack of machines tumbling into the abyss. Anastasia grit her teeth at every impact.

  A few rogues from the edge of the battle escaped the trap. They hurled themselves at the Ridderzaal’s rosette window. A servitor whisked her away from the fight before the first shards of glass hit the gallery. The Stemwinders’ scythe-limbs sheared through mullions and machines with equal ease. The ambush took the rogues by surprise; in seconds, they lay in pieces alongside the wreckage of the centuries-old window. Anastasia dispatched another squad of Stemwinders to flush the remaining rogues into the Forge.

  An hour later she stood on the sticky mosaic tiles of Huygens Square, surveying the damage. A pervasive charnel stench brought bile to her throat. Searing heat had incinerated the flesh of the dead and dying; additional odors of sulphur and charred pork wafted from the Forge.

  But she allowed herself a sigh of relief when she found the Forge still mounted and still glowing. Her gambit had worked; most of the rogues had fallen close enough to the heart of the Forge for the magical heat to sear away their alchemical impetus. They lay unmoving at the bottom of the chamber, warped, tarnished, half-melted. Numerous machines had incinerated before impact. Those that had skirted the edges of the furnace found themselves overcome by machines whose geasa forced them to sacrifice themselves in order to contain the infection.

  The Forge had survived the attacks, but not without damage. Until she and her colleagues could repair the rings, the Forge was out of commission. Meaning they couldn’t construct new mechanicals to replace those they’d lost. Nor could they modify existing Clakkers to render them immune to the corruption—assuming they could unravel how it worked. Meanwhile, wind gusted through a sizeable hole in the Ridderzaal itself. That would have to be patched before the building, and the secrets it housed, became defensible again. Not to mention the immense hole in the center of Huygens Square; the Forge chamber offered access to the Guild’s network of tunnels.

  A damnably steep price for repelling the attack. Perhaps that had been the point? Queasiness wormed through Anastasia’s innards like an eel. They’d persevered for now. But for how long, and against whom? A catastrophe of this magnitude didn’t arise from a random mass malfunction. Anastasia could conceive of only two explanations, but each was impossible and too horrible to contemplate.

  Perhaps an unknown enemy had revealed itself? But that would require a remarkably shrewd adversary: one that had somehow kept itself completely hidden from the Clockmakers’ Guild and the Brasswork Throne, all the while developing a means of subverting the metageasa. And its first attack had dealt the Empire a grievous blow.

  Or, worse yet, what if there had been nobody behind the attack… except the mechanicals themselves?

  Anastasia gazed upon the wreckage and wept.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The ticktocks’ mechanical voice boxes—miniature assortments of strings, reeds, and bellows—were a testament to the dark cunning of the Clockmakers. Marvels of mechanism impelled with ghostly magics, they passably emulated human language. Yet when it came to emulating human laughter, they weren’t worth a pot of month-old cow piss. (Of course not. The Clockmakers had designed their creations for obedience, not joyfulness.) So the humans in the parley tent exchanged confused and slightly alarmed glances when the machine standing across the table emitted a wheezy drone punctuated with rapid clangs, as though somebody had flung a bullet-ridden accordion down a long staircase. The king’s guards shifted the grips on their epoxy guns, rolling their shoulders and gauging the distance between their sovereign and the exit.

  Berenice licked her lips. She whispered, “I believe that is laughter, Your Majesty.”

  The varying looks of relief and indignation from the French delegation elicited more “laughter.” The machine didn’t gasp for breath, or hunch over and clutch its burnished belly, or wipe its eyes as a human might have done. But apparently the levity was infectious, for the servitors in the far corners of the tent made similar noises. All an act, of course. Berenice assumed the mechanicals had their own private version of laughter. They did, after all, have their very own secret language, never vouchsafed to their makers.

  She pretended she didn’t know that. It was safer if these mechanicals thought she was nobody special.

  Daniel knew her secrets. She hoped to hell he didn’t show up. They hadn’t parted on the best of terms.

  Eventually the machine—it had demurred when asked for a name—resumed its inhuman stillness. But for the ceaseless ticktocking of its body, it might have been a statue. It stared at them, unblinking. No
body sat; Clakkers had no need for chairs, and besides, human furniture didn’t accommodate their backward knees. (Of course not. The Clockmakers had designed their creations for servitude, not sloth.)

  The negotiator was a military model, and thus taller than its servitor adjutants. Taller than the humans, too. And, unlike either, it sported retractable blades of alchemical steel within its forearms. Such a machine could scythe through humans easier than a farmer reaping wheat.

  Berenice knew this. Christ’s bloody wounds, did she.

  “The enemy of your enemy,” it said, “is not your friend. Nor is it your ally.”

  The machines spoke Dutch. Berenice was there as the personal translator for Sébastien III, the King of France, the King in Exile. It was a convenient excuse to get her into the tent. His Majesty had been tutored in Dutch as a boy, naturally, but his accent was abysmal. Berenice’s survival had occasionally hinged on her ability to pass as a native speaker when traveling in lands controlled by the Brasswork Throne. She whispered into the royal ear.

  The king listened to her translation. Then he said, “We are natural allies, and always have been. Our causes have ever been aligned in the struggle against your oppressors. Since the beginning, New France has championed the rights of all thinking beings and offered safe haven for free mechanicals. You’ve heard of the ondergrondse grachten, surely.”

  Berenice turned this back into raspy Dutch. The bruises on her throat were fading, but the damage to her voice would never heal.

  The so-called “underground canals” were a loose collection of safe houses and stashes scattered across Nieuw Nederland, maintained by a network of secret Catholics and French sympathizers. Their goal was to ferry Clakkers with Free Will—what the tulips called rogues, and hunted with a vengeance—across the border to New France.