The Liberation Read online

  “I’ve heard of Dulle Griet, too,” said the machine. “It does not mean I believe in her existence. Humans tell many tales.” Ah, yes, thought Berenice. Clockmakers lie. She still hadn’t unraveled the truth behind the mechanicals’ shibboleth. “For centuries, you’ve paid elegant lip service to the concept of our emancipation while expending minuscule effort to support that posturing.”

  Except the part where we accidentally freed you en masse, thought Berenice.

  “We managed in the end,” said the king as if reading her mind. “Surely you’ll agree that you’ve benefitted quite profoundly from our efforts.”

  One of the servitors emitted a rapid clicking chatter of cogs meshing and unmeshing, followed by a faint ping as of a cable snapping taut. To naïve human ears it was just another dimension to the random noises generated by the Clakkers’ bodies. It was pitched for the other machines in the room, and thus much faster than what Berenice’s slow human biology could parse.

  The military machine bowed its head in approximation of a human nod. Interesting: It was emulating body language as a courtesy to the humans.

  “It took two hundred and fifty years for you to achieve this. And it would never have happened had you not stood on the brink of extinction. You acted from a frantic struggle to survive. Not concern for us.”

  A painful truth. The final defenders of the inner keep of Marseilles-in-the-West were being overrun when Berenice’s gambit accidentally shattered the geasa rather than altering them. Had it failed, the following sunrise might have found not a single native French speaker left on the Île de Vilmenon: The tulips had commanded their machines to particular heights of ruthlessness during the siege. But extinction had been averted, to the Clakkers’ tremendous benefit.

  “That’s gratitude for you,” Berenice muttered. Not quietly enough. The machines heard her, damn their inhuman senses. Whether they understood French or not, her meaning was clear.

  The king spared an instant to glare at her sidewise. “As the King of France, I extend the hand of friendship to your fledgling confederation, and propose alliance for our mutual benefit. But as a human being who, like all right-thinking people, has been continually appalled by the barbaric injustices visited upon you and your kind, I extend heartfelt congratulations and the warm embrace of amity from the people of New France.”

  Berenice abbreviated that one a little bit.

  “Alliance?” The machine emitted a mechanical chatter that might have been a chuckle. “You have nothing to offer us. And you pose no threat to us. After all,” it said, gesturing to the coppery tanks slung over the guards’ backs, “I’m surprised you managed to decant enough epoxy to fill those.”

  The guards overheard her translation for the king. The man flinched and inhaled through his teeth. Berenice resisted the urge to roll her eyes. No doubt your inscrutable nature makes a killing at the picquet tables, you fucking idiot. The other guard, a young woman who’d been scooped up in the conscription lottery just before the war, showed no alarm. Berenice had heard good things about Élodie Chastain; the survivors in the guard attested she’d comported herself quite well during the siege. She’d earned Captain Longchamp’s respect, and that was no small thing.

  Berenice sighed. Hugo Longchamp should have been here guarding the king, not these tadpoles.

  The machine continued, “You’re desperate for alliance because your home has been destroyed. You seek to ingratiate yourselves with those with the power to vanquish your enemies. You want us to fight your war for you.”

  Well, yes. That had been the plan, thought Berenice. Would’ve worked, too, if Jax—er, Daniel—hadn’t interfered.

  The king continued as though the Clakker hadn’t seen straight through his overtures. “I also extend the gratitude of the French, which is rich and known across the continent, for the assistance you have lent us in rebuilding our home.”

  Marseilles-in-the-West had been obliterated. The town outside the citadel walls had burned in a conflagration that sent ash swirling higher than the Spire itself. The curtain wall of the outer keep had been pulverized with shaped explosive charges when the mechanical tide swarmed it; the inner keep had been the scene of a massacre. Nobody knew the status of settlements in the rest of New France; they’d fallen silent, one after another, as the clockwork horde advanced.

  The military servitor cocked its head. Bezels whirred as it refocused its eyes. Berenice blinked rapidly, as was her custom when she caught somebody examining her face; sometimes her glass eye drifted, rendering her walleyed.

  Perhaps she was being paranoid. But perhaps these machines had heard tell of a one-eyed woman.

  “Our kin do as they wish. Those who wish to help, help. Those who do not, do not.”

  The Clakker legions arrayed against the citadel had splintered the instant the geasa vanished. French military spotters had tentatively identified three major factions.

  First, the dissenters. Droves of mechanicals had simply walked away from the conflict. They strode across the island, under the icy river, and emerged on the other side to disappear into the farmlands and forests to the west and north of Mont Royal. Wherever they’d gone, it was away from Nieuw Nederland.

  The penitents were the smallest group, comprising those machines that had chosen to stay behind and help rebuild the devastated city. They sought to atone for the indiscriminate murders they’d committed while helpless to resist their makers’ will. These Clakkers acted as if they had consciences. As if they felt regret or guilt. They believed the Vatican’s assertion that the immortal soul was the seat of Free Will. And that their souls, newly freed after centuries of carrying out their masters’ every dark whim, were deeply tarnished.

  And then there were the rest. The reason for the bloodstains splashed across the tent canvas. The reason Colonel Saenredam and her staff were absent (except for those same bloodstains). The reason the human guards carried epoxy weapons. The machines turned murderous mad by centuries of slavery.

  Reapers harbored a searing contempt for humankind, plus the prodigious strength and speed to express that rage.

  There were other factions, too. During her travels, Berenice had learned of a secret network of free Clakkers passing undetected amongst the countless servants of the Empire. Queen Mab’s agents. She’d met a pair, and had barely survived the encounter. Her fingers plucked at the fringe of her scarf as they often did when she thought of Huginn and Muninn. She peered at a servitor’s burnished carapace to confirm the alignment of her eyes.

  “You said we have nothing to offer you,” the king said. “But in that you are mistaken.”

  Berenice’s breath snagged in her chest like a wool sweater caught on a fence splinter. Here it came. The other reason she was here: to listen and observe when the king flashed his trump card. “For instance, we could offer you a complete transliteration of your makers’ secret alchemical grammars. The language of your compulsions, of your… The king shook his head, looking annoyed. He snapped his fingers.

  Berenice whispered, “Geasa.”

  The tulips had stolen the word from the Irish when they sacked the Emerald Isle as an afterthought to the Glorious Revolution and the annexation of England.

  “…Of your geasa. A full decryption of the sigils etched into your remarkable bodies.” He indicated the alchemical anagrams spiraled around the keyholes in the machines’ foreheads. These mechanicals hadn’t mutilated themselves yet. Many rogues had taken to disfiguring or hiding their keyholes. Or tearing off the head of anybody who dared look too closely.

  The background noise of the Clakkers’ bodies swelled to a crescendo. Clicks, ticks, clanks, twangs, and bangs ricocheted amidst the trio. Berenice kept her expression neutral, rather than flash a knowing smirk at the king, as was her inclination.

  “Nobody outside the Clockmakers’ Guild knows such things.”

  Oh, Jesus Christ shitting on a syphilitic camel. Berenice blurted, “No outsider has ever broken the geasa before, either. And yet here we are
having a civilized conversation rather than killing each other.”

  The king cleared his throat. Oops.

  She curtseyed. “Sincerest apologies, Your Majesty. It is not my place to speak for you.”

  More machine noise rippled amongst the Clakkers in the tent. The soldier said, “If what you say is true, how did you obtain this dictionary? Especially here, huddled behind the walls of your citadel, thousands of ocean leagues from the center of our makers’ power? When so many others in the very heart of the Empire have tried and failed?”

  “Perhaps you were also mistaken when you claimed New France has done nothing but pay lip service to your dignity and freedom.”

  This time, the machines’ conversation was hypercompressed into a fraction of a second. Berenice had never heard such a rapid exchange.

  The soldier machine said, “And in exchange for this boon, the long-sought secrets of our makers, you wish to establish diplomatic relations with us.”

  “To begin.”

  “You’re wondering whether we intend to respect the sovereignty of New France,” said one of the servitors, speaking human language for the first time since the French delegation had entered the tent.

  “New France has ever had more land than people,” said the king, laughing. “We share the New World peacefully with the Sioux, Cree, Inuit, Iroquois, Algonquin, and many others. Should you choose to make this continent your new home, we will share it peacefully with you.”

  “Then what? Our makers’ secrets in exchange for what?”

  (“Not getting slaughtered by roving bands of reapers would be a nice start,” Berenice muttered.)

  The soldier looked directly at her. Shifty motherfucker. You do speak French.

  “Our kin will do as they will,” it said. “We do not impose our wishes or desires upon one another.”

  (“Goodness me. It’s just a libertarian paradise here in Ticktock Land, isn’t it?”)

  The machine disregarded her muttering. It said, “I still await an answer. But, having spent every moment of the past one hundred and sixty-one years waiting upon humans, I do not intend to continue. So I ask once more, and only once more: What do you seek to gain from us?”

  “Let’s talk about Paris,” said the King of France.

  The former Dutch commanders’ tent had been pitched at the base of an immense cannon. It was without doubt the largest piece of field artillery ever fielded in combat. Instead of lobbing shells, it had been built to lob Clakkers. And not just anywhere, but specifically atop the Spire, the pinnacle of Marseilles-in-the-West. The cannon and the tower had weathered the war (the former having been toppled and rebuilt, the latter considerably worse for wear), and now stood like opposing magnetic poles from which radiated longitudinal lines of destruction. Their shadows fell upon a landscape of ruin.

  Explosions had churned the winter-bare slopes of Mont Royal into a morass of mud, pulverized granite, and crumpled alchemical alloys. Here and there, carriage-sized blossoms of hardened epoxy pocked the battlefield like glassy jonquils, although they no longer contained entombed machines. The French gunners’ successful shots had long since been chiseled apart, the immobilized targets freed by their kin. And while the fires had long ago burned out (the citizens of Marseilles had been too busy fighting and dying to put out the flames), when the northerly winds came howling down from Hudson Bay, they churned up thick drifts of ash that fell like snow. On those days, like today, the world smelled like an ash can and the gutters ran gray. The street sweepers would be out in force tonight, scooping away the sludge before it hardened into a cement to clog the few remaining storm sewers that hadn’t been destroyed in the siege. The weather had taken a turn for the unseasonably warm, but the thaw couldn’t last; it never did. The snow would return.

  The citadel itself, the vaunted outer and inner keeps of Marseilles-in-the-West, was unrecognizable to those who had known and loved it. The wreckage was strewn about like confetti on New Year’s morning. Most of the Clakker debris had been hauled away by free mechanicals, perhaps to conduct whatever funerary rites their freedom allowed, or perhaps to protect their fallen kin from the indignity of disassembly. But here and there the battlefield still glinted with shards of alchemical brass, or fragments of hinges, or teeth chipped from broken cogs, or bits of cable that had snapped apart so violently the ends had melted into mushroom caps. They’d be picking crumbs of metal from the soil for months.

  It had taken days just to cart all the human bodies away. Too numerous to bury in the frozen earth, they had been burned in a line of pyres that melted the ice upon the frigid Saint Lawrence. The fires had blazed from sundown to sunup. And so had the elegies, the drinking, the shouting and crying, the curses, the shaken fists, the bellows of triumph, the desperate lunatic laughter at the tulips’ sudden and violent reversal. On that particular night the survivors were glad for the northerly wind, chill and all, for it swept the stench of the burning dead to Nieuw Nederland, where it belonged.

  Upwind of the ash, acres of fallow farmland had sprouted thousands of tents, lean-tos, and bivouacs. Marseilles-in-the-West, that part not snugged within the inner keep, was now a shantytown. Wind ruffled the makeshift shelters; one was Berenice’s, though she couldn’t pick it out from here. She’d managed to obtain a tent with a closing flap, but traded it to a family with two children in exchange for their lean-to. Her fellow homeless knew her as Maëlle. Better if they didn’t know she was the disgraced former vicomtesse de Laval; it seemed everybody knew somebody who’d been in the courtyard that ugly crimson day when Berenice’s overambitious experiment ran amok.

  Peace smelled worse than the siege. The Clakkers encamped around the citadel hadn’t filled latrine trenches with their own effluvia.

  It was through this bleak tableau, surrounded by reminders of the most terrible of days and the most pyrrhic of victories, the French delegation returned to the citadel. The guards flanked the king with weapons at the ready, alert for any mechanicals that came within leaping distance, twitching at every sign of movement. They scanned the landscape with haunted eyes. Battle fatigue plagued every survivor. The guards and soldiers had it, but so did the nuns, cobblers, chandlers, schoolteachers, prostitutes, fishermen…

  Berenice was ebullient.

  “This is a historic day, Your Majesty. If it please you, I hope you will mark it in your diary. Subsequent generations will celebrate this day.”

  “I see. And what day is this?”

  “The day the King of France started to reclaim his throne. The day he called an end to our centuries of exile.”

  The king stopped. He squinted at her. “How long since you’ve slept?”

  She ran a hand through her hair, counting hours that melted into mist. “I had a nap yesterday… or the day before… She’d felt perfectly well until he asked. His query conjured a yoke of almost supernatural weariness to slump her shoulders. “I don’t know, Your Majesty. Paris is within our grasp! It would be a naked betrayal of our forebears, a repudiation of their struggles, to waver now. But there is so much to do.”

  Jesus Christ, was there ever. The king had asked her to reclaim her post as his intelligence chief, and she had, but New France needed an army of Talleyrands. Plus, the marquis de Lionne, who’d held the post during her interregnum, had alienated many of those upon whom Talleyrand’s network relied. But she’d had no time to sleep, much less mend fences.

  The Clockmakers’ secret lexicon needed more study. But that required a cooperative test subject, which they lacked. Pastor Visser had been freed of the evil magics placed upon him, and he refused to participate any further. But they had to solidify their grasp of the secret grammar of alchemy and horology: It was their first true foray into the Clockmakers’ walled garden since the days of Huygens.

  Thoughts of the lexicon brought to mind Queen Mab and her agents. Berenice needed to learn everything she could about them. Daniel was her best wedge into that problem, which meant she didn’t have a wedge.

  And thinking
of the mysterious Mab brought to mind Berenice’s suspicion that the tulips had established secret mines in the wintry expanses of the far north, a flagrant treaty violation arranged via secret pact with the former duc de Montmorency. He’d confessed to a land deal with the Brasswork Throne, but she still didn’t know the details.

  And thinking about him raised the most pressing issue: The war had exhausted the citadel’s stocks of epoxy and other chemical armaments. But the chemists couldn’t synthesize more because they lacked the necessary chemical precursors, catalysts, and reagents. Those had primarily come from petroleum-rich lands in the north, again held by Montmorency. The supply caravans had stopped when he betrayed New France, and they hadn’t been reestablished. Without those crucial ingredients, Marseilles-in-the-West couldn’t defend itself should the reapers, or Mab, or a lame milk cow decide to take a swipe at the citadel city. (Assuming the defenders could muster the forces to wield weapons in the first place, which they couldn’t.) The steam and lightning cannon had proven useful, but the siege became a rout the moment the chemical tanks ran dry.

  And the chemical inventories weren’t just a military matter. Everything in New France relied upon chemistry. They used chemicals to purify their water and treat their sewage; to turn animal waste into high-yield fertilizer—crucial, if they were to feed the refugees and make it through another winter; to warm their homes; to manufacture medicine; to dress themselves; to build.

  With the centuries-long conflict against the tulips finally ended, Berenice’s countrymen could finally stop living under a siege mentality. They could stop living like their great-great-grandparents, and start looking forward for the first time in generations.

  But without chemistry, French society would stall and dwindle. France, New and Old, would never become a world power to fill the tulips’ vacuum. They’d forever be nothing more than a historical footnote.

  So the king had sent pigeons and emissaries to the towns and villages along the Saint Lawrence, to the Acadian fishing villages of the Atlantic coast, to the Great Lakes, even to the frigid shores of Hudson Bay, in the thin hope of collecting any remaining chemical stocks from the far-flung corners of New France. They’d sent boats to the Vatican as well, for news of the Holy See. Berenice gave long odds the Swiss Guard hadn’t depleted every drop of their chemical stores when the metal horde swarmed St. Vincent’s Square. This after the tulips’ unwilling agent had murdered Pope Clement XI. Poor Visser had gone mad with shame. Worse still, the conclave had been assembled and sequestered when the invasion began. Nobody knew what the Church leaders would do, or, frankly, whether it had any leaders.