The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 5

  No, said a passing servitor who carried several hundred pounds of firewood, absorbing the swaying of the uneven load through the carefully timed bobbing of its backward knees. The machine paused, listening to the torrent of anxious French before adding, He’s a brave one. He demands to know our destination and our purpose.

  The military Clakker said, He’d have to be blind and stupid not to know already.

  The entire conversation took a few seconds.

  If any of their human masters had bothered to notice the exchange, it would have seemed nothing more than the characteristic cacophony of clockworks. Humans were deaf to the language of Clakkers because they didn’t believe it could exist in the first place: Unthinking, unfeeling machines could not converse. Language was the province of human beings, a gift from God to Adam that he might praise his Creator and bestow names upon everything in His garden.

  Jax retreated into the shadows of the cooking tent, his head and heart filled with unease. The captive kept up his protests, shouting to any who would listen, like a minister without a flock. He looked around the camp, from one Clakker to the next, as though addressing them. The human captain overseeing their advance ambled through the camp. The Frenchman saw the crowd of Clakkers parting like the sea before a biblical prophet and spoke more rapidly, as though he saw his doom approach.

  His gaze flitted across Jax’s cooking tent. The look on his face reminded Jax of the rogue servitor Adam, formerly Perjumbellagostrivantus, whose execution in Huygens Square he had witnessed in the autumn. Adam’s face had betrayed no fear, no terror, for mechanical bodies were incapable of expression in the human mode. But he’d had Free Will, and maybe even a soul, and surely feared the snuffing out of his candle just as this man did now. Just as Jax had feared every moment since he went on the run.

  Now he’s saying that New France is a friend to our kind. That we should throw off our shackles and join with those who would stand firm against our oppressors. He says, oh, this is good, he says there’s a network of secret canals just ready and waiting to whisk us to freedom. The servitor carrying the firewood stalked off again, its talon toes stabbing the frozen earth like accusations. In other words, the usual lies.

  Moderately incensed, Jax said, They’re not lies.

  And then realized, in the silence that fell upon the conversation among his kin, that he’d just drawn attention to himself. They waited now for him to explain. Perhaps he knew something about the ondergrondse grachten?

  It was through miscalculations like this, he knew from bitter experience, that rogues gave themselves away.

  They can’t be lies, he improvised. They believe in us, otherwise why would the French have stood against our makers for hundreds of years?

  The nearest Clakkers rattled with mechanical laughter. One of his kin said, Do you honestly believe that if our inventor had been a Frenchman, things would be any different today?

  Perhaps they would be, said Jax.

  The soldier said, Humans are the same all over the world. Doesn’t matter who’s on top of the pile and who’s crushed at the bottom.

  They affect enlightenment because it’s politically expedient, said another. It gives them the aura of moral rectitude, of inhabiting some mythical ethical high ground.

  (But they’ve harbored rogues, Jax wanted to say. I’ve spoken with Catholic sympathizers and canalmasters of the ondergrondse grachten. I’ve worked with a former advisor to the king of France himself. They want to change the world!)

  Instead he said, What about Queen Mab? They say she lives in the northern reaches, among the white bears and seals. That’s French land, isn’t it? They must have granted it to her.

  First, that’s Inuit land, not French. Second, that’s a fairy tale! Have you taken damage to your head? And anyway. Even if she were real, they couldn’t stop her if they wanted to.

  Still the Frenchman kept up the stream of patter. The dry winter air rasped his throat. His gaze drifted to the officer. Still wide-eyed, his expression changed. The terror became something else. Jax had seen something similar on Berenice’s face at the moment their ploy to enter the Forge had worked: triumph.

  Jax launched himself from the tent at the same moment.

  The Frenchman’s free hand darted to the tomahawk at his belt. The weapon was out and spinning toward the officer faster than Jax thought possible for a human.

  The officer’s personal army of Clakkers was, naturally, faster still. They leaped to intercept the ax, to shield the officer, to pull him aside. But though many were closer to the action, Jax had the advantage of a full two seconds over them, having been focused on the captive’s eyes at just the right moment. And to a being of metal and magic, two seconds were but an eternity: two hundred centiseconds, two thousand milliseconds. In two seconds a servitor could transform itself from a statue to a missile.

  Jax’s wake sculpted snow, dirt, and moldering leaves into twisting vortices.

  A glancing collision with a fellow Clakker ignited a shower of white-hot sparks.

  Slow human nerves and sinews caught up with the sequence of events. The officer started to flinch.

  The tomahawk handle clanked against Jax’s chest. He wrapped himself in a ball, enveloping the weapon.

  The first mechanical reached the officer. It started to pull him aside but had to do so gently, ineffectually, owing to the fragility of human bones.

  The wind of Jax’s passage flipped the officer’s hat into the air, tousled his hair.

  Another servitor skidded into the original path of the weapon to shield their master with its body.

  Jax landed. Bouncing and skidding through the underbrush, he ripped a furrow in the frozen earth.

  The tent collapsed, canvas shredded and poles snapped by the vicious rarefaction wave created by Jax’s departure.

  Sparks drifted to the snowy ground. Sizzled. Became smoky wisps smelling of ozone and dark magic.

  Jax unfolded. The shattered tomahawk tumbled to the ground. The handle had snapped in two and the steel blade had been warped. He tromped through the underbrush, hopping over his own furrow, returning to the camp just as the humans registered the sequence of events. Both looked confused and alarmed. Now it was the officer who studied his surroundings, wide-eyed, while the Frenchman sighed.

  Well, thought Jax. That should eliminate any doubts about my loyalty.

  Collapsing tent canvas draped itself across the oven Jax had stoked. Flames engulfed it. But this was a mundane fire. Harmless. A trio of the nearest servitors strode into the flames. In moments they had suppressed the blaze before it spread through the camp.

  The captain shook off the metal hands holding him. He approached the captive until they stood just feet apart.

  In Dutch, he said, “That was an act of war.” Jax wondered if the Frenchman understood. “We’re within our rights to execute you.”

  When the Frenchman spoke again, his voice was just barely above a whisper. Jax couldn’t distinguish what the man said from the background rustle of wind, the rustling of the humans’ clothing, the ticktock patter of his kin. He couldn’t even tell if he spoke French or Dutch or Algonquian. The officer stepped closer.

  “What?”

  The other man twisted in his captor’s grip. He lunged for the epoxy bladder, fingers outstretched to puncture it. But this time he was far too slow. The military Clakker easily yanked the grenade beyond his reach. The Frenchman’s shoulder gave a wet pop. He yelped.

  The ax was a ploy, Jax realized. To himself, he thought, He knew he had no chance of hitting his mark, not with so many of us around. He did it to ignite the need to gloat. To lure the officer closer.

  Others followed the same train of thought. A vengeful suicide, said the servitor who had tried to pull the officer out of harm’s way. Maybe the French truly are ideologues.

  Shaking his head as though disappointed in a child, the officer turned and walked away. But he stopped after a few strides and glanced over his shoulder. To the military Clakker, he s
aid, “Break his arm.”

  Even the lapping of the river and the wind through the trees couldn’t muffle the sharp wet crunch. A hoarse scream shook snow from the naked boughs.

  Jax navigated through the camp via the soft glow of moonlight on snow. The sentry outside the prisoner’s tent acknowledged his approach in what had, in recent months, become the traditional fashion among their kind.

  Clockmakers lie, she rattled.

  Clockmakers lie, he responded.

  Somewhere nearby, an owl hooted. The sentry queried him. Jax responded, I’m to check the prisoner’s injury and inspect him for signs of infection. His arm must be set properly.

  I thought they’ve already done that, said the sentry.

  They have, said Jax. And surely will again. The captain wants him hale and hearty before he’s sent down the river for interrogation.

  While he’d lost the advantage of anonymity to his missing flanges and weathervane head, he still retained his greatest advantage. Rogues were so rare—or so the Guild, Church, and Throne told the world—that nobody ever considered the possibility a machine might lie.

  The sentry took him at his word. He’s still angry about the ax.

  Jax concurred with a click. As of course it would, the other machine noticed the swaying of Jax’s head.

  Did that happen when the Forge fell? she asked.

  Yes, Jax lied again, suddenly nervous. Perhaps she was merely making conversation? It was lonely, this life of eternal servitude. Or was she wondering if she might have glimpsed him in the tunnels, or on the armillary sphere, or thrashing about in the alchemical fires?

  He affected a mild but growing agitation. Every single Clakker ever forged knew intimately, from the first moments of its functioning, the unquenchable fire of the geasa. The steadily mounting heat ever threatening to explode into agony. Such was their birthright: the inability to disregard a human directive. He conveyed that now.

  The sentry said, There we were, surrounded by those who designed and built us. And in their haste for war they couldn’t take a few minutes to fix you.

  Jax willed his body to rattle more loudly. He feigned the growing distress of a Clakker in the throes of an impatient geas.

  It’s not-t-t-t-t surp-p-prising, he stuttered.

  The sentry stepped aside. Go, brother, she said, before you burst into flames.

  It was dark in the tent. There hadn’t been any need to provide the prisoner with light, or, for that matter, the warmth of a fire. Nor had there been a need to chain him. Pain was a stronger shackle than any chain. Every Clakker knew that. So did their makers. So the Frenchman slept unfettered under two blankets, the fur a faint shimmer in the moonlight leaking through the tent flap. When he listened past the clacking of his own body, Jax heard the shallow breathing of a human in pain. He had to dial his eyes to their maximum sensitivity in order to see the sweat-runnels carved through the dirt on the man’s forehead.

  The prisoner jerked awake as Jax approached. He tried to scoot away, but the pain of his shattered arm hobbled him. He didn’t get far. Jax knelt. His backward servitor knees left his shins splayed before him like a broken doll.

  “I’ve been sent to check your wounds,” he said.

  And wondered how much Dutch this man understood. At least a bit, it stood to reason, if he had been sent across the border armed with an epoxy grenade. Jax doubted regular woods runners carried anti-Clakker chemical ordnance.

  Jax produced a torch. The Frenchman flinched (then groaned) from the metal-on-metal chank when Jax snapped his fingers, but the resulting sparks ignited the torch. He crept forward, trying not to further spook the man. It also enabled him to put his back to the tent flap and the sentry, should she decide to peer inside.

  After a bit of pantomime, Jax managed to convey his intent. The Frenchman offered a shattered arm and a stoic face.

  A severe break, though set and splinted as well as possible. (After all, the Clakkers on this foray were trained to deliver any manner of first aid to their human commanders.) But the soldier had crushed the man’s arm in two places, and a compression injury sometimes led to bone chips. Jax had no way to treat that, nor could he afford the time.

  He released the man’s arm but not his attention. Jax pointed to his own eye, then the man’s, then lay a fingertip over the man’s lips when they parted. He reached into the hollow spaces of his torso. His fingers clicked lightly against his whirring innards, then after a moment he produced a knife. Again the man flinched. But the dread turned into surprise when Jax laid the handle in the palm of his good hand. Jax hadn’t the vocabulary to describe the Frenchman’s expression when he next produced the epoxy grenade and a handful of willow bark. No stranger to medicinal herbs, the man didn’t hesitate to snatch the white willow. Jax doubted it would accomplish much more than dulling the very worst of the pain. And only if the man had a chance to boil the bark into a tea; more likely his injury, and the cold, would kill him before that.

  Jax pointed at the epoxy weapon, then at himself, then shook his head in the human manner. Then he gestured toward the tent flap and again laid his fingertip on the man’s lips.

  With his other finger he jotted in the dirt, in Dutch: 100 of us. Mostly servitors. Swinging east, through Acadia, then down the Saint Lawrence to Marseilles. 1 human commander. 5 lieutenants.

  The man frowned. Jax let him have just a few seconds to read before erasing the message with a swipe of his hand. Next he wrote, Do you understand? The Frenchman nodded. Jax replaced the query: Bonne chance.

  A moment later he had erased this and extinguished the torch. He went outside to distract the sentry while the Frenchman cut his way out of the tent. When it came time to leave, Jax found he didn’t have to feign the urgency of another geas. The fear of discovery gave rise to a very natural rattling.

  CHAPTER

  4

  The Verderers’ safe house lay somewhere along the North River Valley, far from the outskirts of New Amsterdam. She couldn’t run all the way back to the city. And certainly not in winter, through the snow. But she tried anyway, jogging until she needed to vomit, emptying her stomach, then staggering off again, pausing only as necessary to rehydrate with snowmelt. Running was futile, but she couldn’t help herself: Any moment the quadrupedal clank-chank of a mechanical canter would approach from behind, quickly growing loud enough to overwhelm her own hoarse breathing and the crunch of snow underfoot.

  She could do nothing about her trail of footprints.

  There wasn’t enough snow in the world to rinse the acid tang of vomit from her mouth. All the air in the world couldn’t sate her fiery lungs, or clear her spinning head and anchor the wheeling stars. Even fear of the Verderers’ wrath couldn’t goad her forever. She was a frail machine of flesh. Perhaps she’d collapse into a snowbank and freeze solid before the Verderers caught her again. Good. Fuck them.

  Her jog became a trot, then a shuffle, then a limp, then eventually a stagger. The cold ache in her fingers and toes became a burn, then numbness, then nothing. The moon cast a silvery light across the snow. The light felt conspicuous, as though some capricious god had chosen to illuminate her struggle for all the world to see. To ease her hunters’ work.

  The effort to stay upright and put one foot in front of the other, and then remembering to do it again, became the entirety of her consciousness. Her thinking mind retreated behind an ascetic trance of pain, crumpled beneath the titanic weight of her exhaustion. Gulps of frigid air scraped her throat and sinuses; her nose bled.

  A new light shone through the trees. It flickered on the snow and cast shifting shadows through the forest. The stars had come undone. They’d traced curlicues in the sky, but now the weight of her exertion had knocked them loose. They’d plummeted to earth and now shone from within forests and valleys. The light approached. The stars had come to warm and embrace her.

  Slowly, like the ponderous shifting of continents, rational thought broke through the hallucination.

  That wasn’t
a star. It was a lantern. On an approaching carriage.

  Berenice limped to a halt. She swayed in the middle of the road. There she mashed at her pocket, trying to retrieve the pendant she had taken from Anastasia Bell. No longer fine and dexterous tools subject to her every thought, her hands had become crude instruments. She managed to shake the pendant loose. The carriage, its wheels grinding and its horse harnesses jingling, rounded the bend. She looped the chain around her wrist and held the Verderer’s pendant aloft.

  Not since her husband’s murder, and the permanent heaviness it embedded in her heart, had anything ever been so leaden. Berenice had never concentrated so hard as she did on maintaining her balance there in the middle of the road in the middle of the night. But she forced herself to maintain a modicum of dignity in presenting the pendant to the oncoming carriage. But her blood-and sweat-soaked clothing had begun to freeze and she was shivering violently by the time the lantern light reached her.

  “Whoa. Whoa.”

  The driver clucked to the horses. Their flanks steamed, eddying warmth and the scent of animal sweat across Berenice’s numb face. The driver unwrapped the scarf wound about his face. It revealed a pair of wide eyes over a craggy leathered face dusted with stubble the color of peppered salt. He blinked.

  “Miss? What are you doing way out here? Was you attacked?”

  Berenice tried to speak. But the shivering had grown too violent; she bit her tongue. She coughed, spat, raised the pendant higher. Shook it in the driver’s face. The horses shied from the smell of blood on her clothes.

  “G-g-g—” She coughed. Wheezed. “G-GUILD!”

  “Holy shit on toast,” said the driver. “Sparks! Get them horse blankets, now!”

  The wagon bounced on squeaking springs. With much ratcheting and clicking, a servitor unfolded from a ledge behind the carriage. Berenice staggered. The snow cushioned her fall. The pendant slipped from her nerveless fingers. She glimpsed the Royal Arms embossed on the carriage door, and chests strapped to the roof and the servitor’s ledge.