The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 4
What have I unleashed?
The last time she’d witnessed a Clakker rampage, her husband had died shuddering. The rampant killer dispatched three dozen citizens of Marseilles-in-the-West before it was deactivated. All because of Berenice’s miscalculation…
She shook her head, forcing herself to focus lest she die transfixed by the terrible spectacle of a rogue Stemwinder. She reached for the bauble on the coffee service but touched an empty pool of cold spittle. Meanwhile, the Tuinier crawled on hands and knees toward the door at the far side of the room.
Just as Berenice made to tackle her, the damaged Stemwinder leaped upon the rogue with a tooth-loosening clang like the bells of Europe’s greatest cathedrals smashed together. The collision sent the rogue skidding into the table and knocked Berenice off-balance. Another appendage, reconfigured into a spear, sliced through the space where her head had been an instant earlier. She couldn’t tell whence the nearly fatal blow had come; the warring Clakkers assailed each other with a speed invisible and strength incomprehensible to human senses. The two machines became blurred ghosts highlighted by the glinting of sunlight and gouts of sparks as they smashed at each other in a relentless sequence of concussions. The floorboards groaned under the assault from their pounding hooves; another bodily collision smashed the table into flinders and sent the Clakkers into the wall, crushing the beams and sending great jagged cracks zigzagging through the plaster. Cracks appeared in the alchemical windowpane with a report like cannonshot. Dust sifted from the beams to salt Berenice’s hair. She scuttled on elbows and ankles as quickly as she could manage away from the killing zone. It wouldn’t take an errant blow to crush her skull or skewer her heart—all they had to do was step on her, or slam into her, or brush against her with a fraction of their alchemically enhanced strength, and her shattered ribs would shred her lungs. The unchanged Stemwinder was now slave to a directive that superseded even the human-safety clauses in the hierarchical metageasa. Collateral damage was acceptable in the drive to disable a rogue. No rules burdened the rogue Stemwinder.
Vicious combat embroiled the rival mechanicals. They fought without consideration for the humans in their vicinity. Blood slicked the floor. In spots it had already begun to congeal in dark tacky puddles that tugged at Berenice’s blouse and skirt.
She wouldn’t get far in the wintery hinterlands of Nieuw Nederland wearing wet, bloodstained clothing. She needed a change of clothes and she needed her Goddamned prism back. If she escaped, she’d still be the most wanted woman in the world; Jax’s mysterious glass was her insurance policy against any Clakkers that tried to snag her. It was also her ticket to unraveling the forbidden knowledge of the Clockmakers’ Guild. Which, in time, would be the lever with which they overturned the Dutch once and for all. But at the moment, that lever was inching toward the door, clenched in Bell’s fist.
The Stemwinders slammed into the wall again. The house shook. The impact sent a spray of shrapnel, broken cogs, and hot sheared metal across floor. Berenice could barely glimpse the warring machines, so rapidly did they move, but it looked as though they’d both taken substantial damage.
Shit, she realized. Bell’s carriage had been pulled by a pair of Stemwinders. Plus my butler. So where’s centaur number three? The deafening commotion from the fighting mechanicals surely warned all and sundry of a rogue on the premises.
Bell reached the door. Unable to turn the knob from her spot on the floor, she rose into a crouch. Berenice leaped at her. But her compromised depth perception caused her to misjudge the distance and overshoot—
—Thereby sparing her an incapacitating injury when the third Stemwinder burst through the door. It trampled Bell. Her body crackled under the Stemwinder’s charging hooves. The impact sent her skidding across the blooded floor; she came to rest as a heap with one splayed arm bent above and below the elbow. The third Stemwinder threw itself into the fray. It plowed into its kin with such force that all three mechanicals smashed through the window. A gust of wintery air chilled Berenice as the clockwork trio rolled atop the porte cochère, kicking up great gouts of snow before they fell out of sight. A moment later a horse-drawn carriage, not Bell’s Clakker-driven conveyance, drove away from the house. It swerved to avoid the fighting machines. Clockmakers, or their staff, fleeing the rogue Stemwinder.
Berenice struggled to catch her breath. It steamed in the suddenly cold room. So did the blood congealing on the floor. A dusting of snow swirled through the massive hole in the wall.
Bell groaned. Berenice staggered across the room. She knelt over the whimpering Tuinier. Bell still held the fist of her shattered arm clenched tight. But new cold, a different kind of cold, shivered down Berenice’s spine when she saw the rivulets of blood leaking through Bell’s curled fingers. The woman whimpered when Berenice pried her hand open.
The bauble had been pulverized. A few larger shards of alchemical glass had sliced the flesh of Bell’s hand to ribbons. But most of the lens, or prism, or whatever the hell it was had been crushed into sand. Berenice’s insurance policy, and her best chance of unraveling the Clockmakers’ most closely guarded secrets, was no more.
“You wretched pus-dripping cunt!” she said. She punched Bell on the nose. “I needed that, Goddamn you.”
The smash-clash-clang of Clakker combat shook the house. The rogue Stemwinder—the last Clakker to ever be freed by the strange bauble that Jax had obtained—was outnumbered. Berenice didn’t like its chances. And even if it did prevail, there was no telling how it would interact with her. Would it kill every human it met, just for spite? Judging by their haste to escape, the Clockmakers in the house considered that a possibility. She needed to get as far from this house as possible before the fight ended. Which meant trekking through the cold and snow without any means of fending off any mechanicals that confronted her.
Berenice sifted through the wreckage for Bell’s hat, gloves, and fur stole. All lay in sticky pools of blood and had to be peeled from the floor. Berenice removed the woman’s boots, too. She tried to do it without jostling the broken legs but failed, judging by Bell’s groan. Last, Berenice unclasped the Guild pendant. She had to lean close and put her arms around the dying Tuinier to do this. Close enough to hear the watery gurgle in her exhalations. Close enough to feel the woman slide into shock. Close enough to remember how it had felt when Louis had died in her arms. Her husband, whom she’d loved ferociously, whimpering in a lake of his own blood until the shine left his eyes.
Now it was her whimpering enemy who lay dying in her arms, covered in blood. Her enemy whom she detested with similar ferocity.
Berenice fastened the chain around her own neck. She sighed. It took a few seconds’ work to assess Bell’s injuries and know they were beyond anything Berenice could do for her. Multiple broken bones, at least one compound fracture, and massive internal bleeding. She needed a team of physicians, not palliative first aid. The wintery air breezing through the demolished wall turned her inconstant breaths to a ghostly fog, as though her spirit was already leaving her body. Bell shuddered.
Good, thought Berenice. But then she pictured Louis again, shuddering much the same way as he drew his final breaths. If she was going to leave the woman for dead, she didn’t have to be quite so cruel about it.
“Oh, damn it.”
Berenice could at least do something about the cold. Physically carrying Tuinier Bell was out of the question, not only because Berenice lacked the strength but also because Bell’s body was little more than a loose sack of broken bones and that amount of jostling would surely hasten her demise. So Berenice hooked her hands under the other woman’s shoulders and physically dragged her across the room. Bell whimpered and cried out. Berenice had worked up a good sweat by the time she’d pulled Bell out of the room. She deposited the dying woman in the corridor, out of the wind. Then she took the coverings from the bed, wrapped Bell as best she could, and closed the door.
Berenice considered searching the house. If the Guild had been usin
g this property for a long time, it might be a storehouse of useful information. But the thunderous crashing of Clakkers at war with each other reminded Berenice that she couldn’t spare the time.
She escaped through the hole in the wall. The wintry air felt like an ice cube rubbed along the empty socket of her eye. She stood atop the porte cochère. The Clakkers’ passage had wiped it clear of snow. She clambered over the edge and fell into a snow bank.
The clanging and squealing of tortured alloys echoed from behind the house. Berenice crept along the drive. She glimpsed flashes and sparks in the shadows of the carriage house. Well, if there were any horses left on the property, she wasn’t getting to them.
She turned around. Bell’s carriage had pressed deep ruts into the snow; Berenice followed those now, jogging down the long gravel drive. Soon the tulips would scour every inch of the countryside in their search for a one-eyed woman. She couldn’t do anything about the blood matted into her clothes, but she could do something about the missing eye. So while running she again retrieved the leather pouch that hung from the cord around her neck. It contained her real glass eye, the gift from Longchamp, returned in the first days of her incarceration. The crunch of snow beneath her stolen boots drowned out the wet squelch as the eye slid into place. Longchamp’s gift was a much better fit than Jax’s prism.
The pineal glass was destroyed. Her best opportunity for breaking the Dutch hegemony: lost.
Well. At least it got her out of Bell’s hands. And for that Berenice was extremely grateful.
Thank you, Jax, wherever you are.
CHAPTER
3
The machines, dozens of them, could have sprinted for weeks upon end without tiring. Alchemically magicked clockworks imbued them with perpetual impetus and inhuman stamina and strength. But humans—soft creatures of meat and bone—tired easily. And so the machines had marched for merely a day, a night, and another day when their human commanders ordered a halt. In that time they never deviated from the North River, from its mouth in New Amsterdam through the canals to the icy shores of the lake the French called Champlain. They’d covered three hundred miles on their march almost due north from the Atlantic tip of New Amsterdam.
Winter’s arrival had stripped the river valley of its color. Gone were the rolling hills of robin’s-breast orange, marigold yellow, and cherry red. The fallen leaves now lay beneath a deep white blanket, and the naked stone of the umber river bluffs now sported silver rime. Gone, too, was the rustle of wind through autumnal boughs, the earthy smell of freshly harvested fields.
The broken servitor, the one with the weathervaning head who claimed to be called Glastrepovithistrovantus—Glass for short—had seen and heard and smelled these things from the air. He’d flown above the river, and crawled its bed, but until this march he’d never walked alongside it. His footprints in the silty mud, headed south instead of north, had long since been erased by the restless current. He never mentioned this. And he never suggested any relationship between himself and the multiple dredges and locks that had recently been installed on the river. Lying by omission was easy; he was getting the hang of that. Far more difficult was hiding his trepidation when the march took them past Fort Orange, a river outpost originally intended as a hub for the beaver pelt trade but later turned into a military hardpoint. He had fallen from the sky over Fort Orange, launched from the fireball demise of a sentient airship. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.
Dozens of Clakkers, servitors like himself dragged from the smoldering wreckage of the Grand Forge, had been conscripted by the army in those first few hours when their makers’ rage and indignation blazed white-hot. Hotter even than an unfulfilled geas.
So hot that they didn’t wait to assemble a proper army of military-class Clakkers for this first foray into New France. Lowly servitors could do in a pinch, especially once the horologists annulled their human-safety metageasa. A few mechanicals of the military design—machines designed to scythe through humans—filled out the ranks. And though they did not know it, they kept the imposter servitor, the one they called Glass, from fleeing.
The humans believed his weathervane head and missing flange plates were damages incurred during the fiery destruction of the Grand Forge. They weren’t. But it was convenient to let the humans believe so.
Many humans had died in the conflagration. Leaving many Clakkers who emerged from the ruins without well-defined owners. Clakker leases always contained provisions for dealing with the demise or incapacitation of the primary leaseholder, but unraveling so many legalistic knots would have taken weeks. Thus the Brasswork Throne (acting through the colonial governor of Nieuw Nederland) had exercised its power of eminent domain to conscript the orphaned Clakkers. Not that anybody felt compelled to thoroughly investigate the leaseholders and track down possible heirs; and anyway, all Clakkers, everywhere, were officially property of the Throne.
Knowing he shared this excursion with fellow mechanicals who had also been present for the Forge’s collapse filled him with dread. He’d been fighting his own kind atop the rings of a vast armillary sphere orbiting the blazing heart of the Forge when the alchemical sun collapsed, pulling the rest of the building into the blaze like so much kindling. He wondered how many of the Clakkers on this march had been there. If even one recognized him as the fugitive rogue…
He’d tried and failed to cross the border on his own. He’d tried to reach the ondergrondse grachten, the so-called underground canals run by Catholics and French sympathizers intended to ferry free Clakkers out of Nieuw Nederland. But that had failed, too, with the canalmasters’ murder. Now he would try again to enter New France, and this time he would do it at the vanguard of invasion. It could work, as long as nobody recognized him and he never revealed to his fellow mechanicals how the agony of geasa did not touch him, that their makers’ words held no sway over him.
Glass, whose real name had been Jalyksegethistrovantus—Jax for short—hefted an oven from the bed of the wagon he’d been pulling for the past eighty miles. A bulky thing of iron and ceramic, it might have been at home in an Amsterdam bakery. No piddling camp stove would suffice for the leaders of this excursion: One could not prepare a feast on a camp stove. Jax’s fellow yokemate unpacked an additional stove while other servitors constructed tents, made beds, collected fuel. Their human masters saw no need to deprive themselves on a forced march into enemy territory; just because they were marching to war was no reason to accept a lessened standard of living. So it was with soft creatures of blood and flesh.
The appeltaart had just achieved a golden-brown crust, its filling wafting the scent of apples across the campsite—the commander of this march believed in healthful desserts for his staff, hence the fruit—and the bacon on the stove filled the tent with the white-noise sizzle of hot grease when shouts and yelling pierced the quiet rhythms of the campsite. It happened from time to time, when humans found their slaves’ efforts lacking. But this wasn’t a master excoriating his servant. Somebody was cursing in French.
Jax had heard more than his share of French profanity thanks entirely to the one-eyed woman who’d talked their way inside the Forge. For a moment he thought perhaps Berenice had followed the column and now been caught. But that was absurd. He didn’t know if she’d departed prior to the fire, and if she hadn’t, whether she’d survived. All he knew was that she’d gone in with malice aforethought.
And anyway, this was a man’s voice. Made shrill with rage. Or was that mortal terror? By now the oven had made the tent warmer than humans found comfortable, so he tied the flap back, which allowed cooler air to enter and conveniently allowed him to see what had transpired.
A military scout held a man by the forearm with a grip that was just shy of crunching bone. The fellow wore leather trousers and gloves the color of moldering leaves, a wool coat the color of dirty snow, fur-lined boots, and a hat made from a raccoon pelt (complete with tail); a hand ax dangled from a belt loop. Veiny sclera limned the irises of his widened eyes. H
e looked like a caged animal. Backed into a corner, terrified, bearing its teeth at the world. Jax had once seen a New World wolverine at the Amsterdam zoological gardens. The Frenchman reminded him now of that animal’s combination of terror and fury.
He might have been a forest runner, one of the original coureurs de bois transported unchanged across the centuries to the modern day from a time long ago when France’s European enemies in the New World spoke English. But the mechanical scout held in its other hand the glistening gel membrane of an epoxy grenade, and that was a modern weapon. Not something one could whittle from birch bark or catch in a snare.
An avalanche of French poured from the terrified man’s mouth only to pile at his feet, dusty and disregarded like so much unwanted talus. The language sounded to Jax as though the man wrapped each word in silk and tied it with a bow before letting it float past his lips. French was the language of the Catholics, who believed mechanical men were thinking beings capable of Free Will, and that their unswerving bondage indicated something evil, something unholy, had been done to their souls. It was the language of those who would see the end of Clakker slavery.
It was also the language of the doomed. And that saddened Jax.
Several servitors like him (Well, not exactly like me, he thought) found ways to carry out their duties while watching the human captive. One such mechanical, the filigree on whose escutcheons and flange plates suggested she had been forged about half a century after Jax, making her a young sixty or seventy, rattled the gear train along her spine in a way that inquired, What’s he saying?
He’s wetting himself with fear, said another via the muted twang of a leaf spring and click of overly loosened ratchets.