The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 9

  Jax’s former masters had other reasons to curtail a protracted chase. While formidable, a dyad or triad of Clakkers sent on a mission to retrieve the rogue were more susceptible to French partisans than several dozen. There was a danger that the French might bring chemical defenses to bear and trap a mechanical. That was the worst-case scenario: that the rogue could lure loyal machines into enemy hands, where they might be disassembled and studied. If agents of the Verderer’s Office had been inserted with the other troops, their mandate would have been to prevent just that sort of technological espionage. But as far as Jax knew, their presence among the troops was a paranoid fantasy invented by—

  A shot ripped through the branches and smashed into the pine bole just above his left hand. The glob ruptured, coating his hand and wrist with chemicals. As they hardened, they grew warm enough to melt snow caught in the crevices of the bark. Jax heaved. His hand came free with a tremendous crackling, taking with it a patch of pine bark. The noise of extricating his hand nearly deafened him to the second shot. He leaped higher into the branches a fraction of a second before another chemical membrane impacted.

  Bowed by wind and Jax’s weight, the tree swayed. Jax launched himself over an icy stream to clamp himself against a birch. His creaking, chemically coated hand refused to act at the speed of his thoughts; he scrabbled for purchase. The forest echoed with two more shots. Jax was on the ground before the second of the soft little pops had dissipated. Both shots whizzed harmlessly overhead.

  He spun around the trunk. It put the tree between him and the shooter (shooters?). That bought him a few seconds to think. The attackers were human: Mechanical snipers wouldn’t have missed after the first shot. They were on the ground, too, judging from the shot trajectories. So they had to maneuver through underbrush and snow to get a new line on him. He’d exposed himself by clinging to the trees’ crowns, evergreen and winter-naked alike. But even on foot, and unable to move at top speed owing to the terrain, he could still easily outpace them. And the fall of night was well under way; he had the advantage of vastly superior night vision. He set off at a sprint. Jax vaulted fallen boughs and rotted logs, zigzagged around yellow birch, dove through winter-brittle underbrush.

  He must have run afoul of a French scouting party. The vitreous mass coating his hand held it solid—it took highly advanced chemistry to make something so strong—and smelled faintly of lilacs rather than pitch.

  They’d mistaken him for an invader. Understandable, but annoying as hell. He’d expected to stop running once and for all after putting sufficient distance between himself and the true invaders. Instead he now had to outpace those who should be his allies. But he’d escaped a city populated with enemies; here in the forest he had every advantage.

  The ground underfoot erupted in gouts of fire. Thunder shook the forest.

  Oh, thought Jax, as the ground fell away. Not every advantage. The random slewing of his weathervane head afforded him a glimpse of something metal spinning away into the shadows. Firelight glinted on the burnished shrapnel like a meteor streaking into the forest.

  They have explosives.

  … I won’t go back. I won’t go back. I won’t go back. I won’t go back…

  Three times fire had consumed him. Once in the sky. Once in a pit deep underground. And once under a starry sky in a snowy old-growth forest. Each time, the fire changed him. The airborne fireball—the spectacular funeral pyre of a flying leviathan—made him more cautious. From the fiery furnace he had emerged a new being with no past, no crimes, no enemies. But his third emergence from the flames was the worst.

  He was no longer whole.

  … I won’t go back. I won’t go back. I won’t go back. I won’t go back…

  The gaps in his skeletal frame were blackened in places. That was probably superficial damage. But his spinal gear trains clicked and rattled in ways they hadn’t before, the escutcheons over his most delicate mechanisms had shattered, and one of his legs ended at the ankle joint.

  The foot previously attached to that ankle currently sat in the lap of one of his three captors. The humans huddled beside a low fire, speaking in whispers and occasionally turning a pair of spitted rabbits.

  Jax sat on the ground, legs splayed before him, arms wrenched behind him. At least he hadn’t been encased like a bug in amber. But his assailants had coated his arms with epoxy from fingertip to shoulder; it affixed him to the bole of a towering evergreen just as effectively.

  The man holding Jax’s severed foot pried at it with the tip of a hunting knife. In the crackling firelight, his cloak and hat both evidenced the thick, oily sheen of beaver pelts. Under the cloak he wore a variegated flannel coat and buckskin trousers. Either the man was quite lumpy or these were lined, perhaps imperfectly, with thick wool. His comrades, a man and a woman, were dressed similarly. They might have stepped straight from the seventeen hundreds. Or sprung to life straight from the pages of an illustrated tale of the old coureurs de bois, the legendary woods runners.

  Then again, the original traders who formed the backbone of the fledgling New France didn’t trek through the forests and rivers carrying epoxy guns and mortars.

  He tried to glimpse the weapons. The explosion hadn’t done his insubordinate neck any favors. He leaned forward and back. By straining against the solid mass of adhesive that held him tight, he could tip his head just enough to cause it to sway to and fro. In this way he saw the double-barreled guns stacked together under a lean-to. He couldn’t see the launcher they’d used to hit him with the explosive.

  They saw him studying the camp. “Notre ami, il se prepare à courir,” said the woman.

  The second man stood. “Il peut essayer,” he said.

  Jax said, “I’m not who you think I am.” The man trying to disassemble Jax’s foot looked up briefly, but turned his attention back to his task. The standing man cocked his head. He looked at Jax as though curious about something. Jax continued, “You’re in danger. I was fleeing my own kind. They have crossed the border. Dozens of machines like me, and their masters. They might have heard you attack me. They’ll be coming to investigate.”

  The man frowned. He and the woman exchanged a shrug. He sat again.

  They didn’t speak Dutch. Any more than Jax knew French. The only other Frenchwoman he’d met, Berenice, had spoken fluent Dutch.

  The knife slipped. The man holding Jax’s foot grunted in frustration. He sheathed the knife, placed Jax’s foot on the ground, and stood. From the supplies stacked neatly beside their tent he produced an ax. The other two scrambled away from the fire as he hefted it overhead.

  The steel blade whistled, and then metal clanged against metal amid a fountain of violet sparks. Unseen wings took flight in the forest, frightened by the noise. Three humans bent to inspect the Clakker part; from the muttering and foul looks cast in his direction, not to mention how they crossed themselves, Jax gathered they spoke of dark magics.

  “You’ll dull your ax if you keep that up,” said Jax. “That’s alchemical brass.”

  But the axman ignored Jax. He wound up for another swing.

  “Wait!” said Jax. “That’s my body!”

  Which was the whole point, he realized.

  Oh, God. They’re going to try to take me apart. They’ll hack me apart until their blades are broken and dull. Or deliver me to somebody with better tools. And then he realized: There’s probably a bounty in it for them. The French know their enemies are coming.

  Another plume of sparks lit the flickering shadows beyond the campfire. The echoing chank made the forest sound as though it hosted a phantom smithy. Jax cringed. Didn’t they know they were broadcasting their position to enemy invaders? Did they somehow think Jax had come alone?

  The axman’s blade now had a pronounced notch, like a murderer’s gap-toothed smile. He looked displeased.

  “You have to stop,” said Jax. “They’ll hear you. If they haven’t already.” Full dark had fallen, too. “And for the sake of whatever God you
worship, put out that fire!”

  The axman exchanged a look with the woman. He tilted his head toward Jax. She nodded. Sauntered over to the epoxy guns.

  Jax said, “You don’t understand. They’ll kill you and they’ll take me back.”

  They’ll melt me down, they’ll destroy me, they’ll burn away this Free Will before I’ve known freedom from fear, freedom from pursuit.

  She raised a gun to her shoulder. A pair of rubbery hoses on the stock looped down to a double-chamber tank on the ground at her feet. Jax strained, but the chemicals held him fast.

  As she pulled the trigger, Jax yelled, “Please! I don’t want to go back!”

  Despite the erratic weathervaning of his head, she fired a glob directly at his mouth. Disparate chemicals splashed against the mechanisms of his face and jaw, combining into a steaming gel that sluiced into his throat in the split second before it hardened. It was hot, like swallowing a burning brand. He tried to speak, to prevent the epoxy from taking hold, but the only vocalization he could make was the whine of overstressed bearings. She put the gun down and returned to her place beside the fire.

  They’d glued his mouth shut. Just like Adam. Their makers had done the very same thing to that rogue, too, just before they executed him in Huygens Square.

  Oh, God, it’s already starting.

  Jax tasted ashes.

  All his flight, all his caution, all his fear had been directed at avoiding Adam’s fate. Anything to avoid getting dragged back to The Hague and tossed into that Grand Forge under Huygens Square as entertainment for the masses. But now he was captured, and not by his makers. These French, who claimed to be friends to his kind, would hack him apart. They’d ignore his pleas, crack him open like a chestnut, and remove one cog at a time while they studied how he worked. Until he didn’t.

  No. No, no, no, no.

  Jax speared the talon toes of his remaining foot into the frozen ground. He heaved, straining with every spring and cable, until his entire body vibrated. The human trio paused in their quiet, mellifluous conversation by the fire to frown at him. But his visible effort left them unconcerned. And indeed, with his arms affixed to the tree behind him, he could find little leverage for pulling. They knew what they were doing. His toes tore up clods of earth; still the epoxy held him fast. It was stronger than he. Stronger than the horological and alchemical arts that made him. If he was to pull free, he’d need more leverage than his single foot could attain.

  Then again, he didn’t have to pull.

  Jax shifted. Slowly, so the humans wouldn’t notice, he plunged the broken spar of his severed ankle deep into the earth. His talon foot folded into a spearhead. He pushed this into the ground, too, probing, testing, until it clicked against something solid. A stone, perhaps, or a root. Then he splayed his buried toes as far as they would go. Newly anchored, he pushed.

  His carapace pulverized the craggy bark under his back. The crushing sounded much like the crackle of the French campfire; nobody turned to watch. The buried stone lost its purchase and shifted. Jax’s foot tore a long furrow in earth. He reconfigured the joints in his waist, refolded his knees, speared down again with foot and ankle, and renewed the pressure against the tree. Dozens of minuscule vibrations rattled through the bole as sap chambers collapsed. The shuddering cables and springs in Jax’s body took up a high-pitched whine. The epoxy layer muffled the crackling of wood under his immobile arms.

  That snagged the humans’ attention. But Jax could feel an infinitesimal shifting in the tree trunk, and in the earth underfoot. He had to keep the tree, and the epoxy, under stress. The woman and one of the men stood, squinting at Jax past the glare of the fire. They’d lost their night vision; that would buy him a few more seconds.

  Something large shifted deep underfoot. The root ball, Jax hoped. The tree emitted a long, low groan. The humans shouted.

  “Arrêtez-le!”

  Jax gathered the tiny bit of slack in his cables, clamped down, and increased the pressure on the tree. A flange plate emitted a hideous squeal of tortured metal when it bent. His overstressed legs vibrated against the cold earth, warming it. The tree groaned again.

  The humans ran for their weapons. They’d encase him head to toe this time.

  Cracks like lightning echoed through the forest. The ground shifted, jolted, jumped. The tree lurched. Jax reeled in more slack and heaved again.

  The Frenchwoman snatched a gun. The coiled hoses snagged the stock of a second gun in the hands of one of her colleagues. She tripped on the tangled pile; it yanked the gun from the other shooter’s fingers.

  The tree lurched again, lifting Jax several inches. Friction heat from his juddering limbs melted snow and softened the earth. Jax slid. Reanchored himself. Snowmelt turned to wisps of steam faintly visible in the firelight. The astringent scent of warm chemicals wafted through the camp. So did the smell of warm sawdust, like a carpenter’s or cooper’s shop.

  The third Frenchman shouted. Flipping Jax’s foot aside, he took up his ax and charged. The notched blade winked at Jax.

  He’s going for my keyhole. He’ll hack and hack until the blade has shattered and my sigils are unrecognizable. Oh, God, he’ll unwrite me.

  The shooters untangled their guns.

  The earth heaved. The massive root ball pushed up through the mud like a breaching whale. Gnarled dendrites raked the winter air.

  The axman jumped through the fire, blade aloft.

  The trunk crumpled. Hot damp pine shards whizzed into the shadows. The groaning tree toppled backward. It lifted Jax. His toes came loose of the earth.

  The axman charged. The shooter angled her barrel away at the last moment, narrowly avoiding him. The chemical glob whirred into the forest.

  The axman swung. Jax, still affixed to the defeated tree and hoisted by its ponderous fall, snapped his legs up. Kicked. The broken spar of his ankle glanced off the ax haft, kinking the man’s forearm at an unnatural angle. The cacophony of the falling tree drowned out the wet crackle of broken bones. But the man didn’t scream: The flat of Jax’s talon foot caught him squarely under the chin at the same moment. It shattered his jaw and snapped his head back with a crunch from the base of his neck, tossing him across the campsite. His limp body tumbled like one of Nicolet Schoonraad’s disregarded rag dolls.

  The second shooter brought his gun to bear and fired. Jax’s arms tore free. He scrambled aside in the instant it took the chemical glob to cross the campsite.

  The toppled tree pounded the earth with a tremendous crash. The earth shook. Fading rumbles rolled through the forest like thunder.

  The woman fired again. Jax leaped high, flipping and folding through a series of contortions. His useless club arms made it difficult. He landed short of his target. But he crouched, shot one leg out, and tripped the second man before he could re-aim for another shot. As he went down on his back, Jax brought an arm up and knocked the gun from his grip. The warped barrel went spinning into the fire. The woman tried to back away, to give herself room to fire, but a quick pirouette disarmed her, too.

  The man on the ground sobbed. Eyes wide, he scooted backward. He looked like a crab scuttling through the snow. The woman didn’t flinch. Her eyes flicked back and forth. She watched Jax, the fire, evaluated the distance to the guns, searched for the ax. She didn’t spare a glance for her dead colleague, or the whimpering one.

  Jax crossed to the fire. Stomped the gun there into flinders. Then he crossed the campsite and disabled the second gun. Only then, when he couldn’t avoid it any longer, did he go to the dead man.

  I killed a man. I killed a human.

  Though so many of the things he’d done and said since breaking free of the geasa would have been unimaginable during his prior existence, this struck more deeply than anything else he’d experienced in these hectic, exhilarating, terrifying weeks. Murder. The hierarchical metageasa proscribed killing a human even in circumstances of self-defense. If the axman had been a deranged lunatic on the streets of The Hague
and Jax a normal servitor, he might have had to endure the assault rather than defend the alchemical sigils around his keyhole. Depending on the circumstantial calculus of compulsion, he might have been helpless to do anything but let himself be unwritten rather than cause grievous harm to his assailant.

  But he’d killed the man without a second thought. It hadn’t been his aim. He’d just wanted to live. With just a fraction of a second to react, and without the searing agony of the geasa mediating his every thought and action, he’d overlooked the fundamental truth of human frailty. He’d forgotten how their skulls are fragile as hollow eggshells.

  His club arms made crude spades. But he dug a shallow trench and dragged the dead man into it. So strange, the way he slid into his grave without comment or protest.

  If he could have spoken, he would have told the woman, “I am so deeply sorry about your friend. It’s going to haunt me a long time, I fear.”

  But he couldn’t. So he retrieved his severed foot and bounded into the forest.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Very well. See it done.”

  “Immediately, mistress.”

  Sparks retreated. The brocade curtain swung free, eclipsing the early-afternoon sunlight and sending Berenice once more into shadow. She’d had the servitor obtain a carriage just after sunrise, after they crossed Bronck’s River and reentered New Amsterdam proper. Soon the Verderers would have every ticktock man in the city on the watch for a woman of her description. Strolling about on horseback, for all the world to see, seemed imprudent.

  Then she’d had Sparks drive the carriage to a church roughly midway between the North River piers and the tony Roosevelt Park neighborhood. There she watched in dismay from across the street while six pallbearers carried a lacquered box into the undercroft. Though it was possible her stash of treaty-violating notes and chemical armaments had gone undiscovered during the interment preparations, she couldn’t spare the time to find out. Sneaking into the crypt would mean waiting until dark, but she didn’t dare loiter in New Amsterdam that long. She had to depart the continent immediately.