The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (19 page)

The shot had hit below them. Was the priest down there, or was it a fucking terrible shot? Somebody was firing wildly—or else they wouldn’t have derailed the funicular. A blind, palsied baboon with a crooked dick could piss with better aim than those brainless idiots.

Another shot, another impact, this one a bit below them but hidden behind the Spire. Connect the dots:
Something
was climbing the helical stair below them but ascending terribly quickly.

Longchamp hauled on Chrétien’s collar. Held him fast while
Élodie escaped the compromised funicular. Together they pulled the unconscious soldier atop the brise-soleil, pushed him across, then dropped him through the gap between Spire and stair. The sergeant landed in a boneless heap on the stairs, pale and injured but temporarily safe. A tortured moan came from Chrétien’s lips, like the lamentation of a revenant emerging from a crypt.

Visser came charging around the bend just as they dropped the sergeant onto the stairs. The priest paused for a split second, reassessing his path through Longchamp and Élodie.

“Oh, no,” he moaned. “Please, please, please, Lord. Please preserve me from this…” A ceaseless litany fell from his lips. It sounded like a mumbled, tortured version of the Lord’s Prayer.

Strange: The priest cried while he assessed the fastest way to murder them.

Longchamp grabbed the woman by the shoulders and heaved her after Chrétien. She yelled in protest and landed with a dull thud. But he needed room to reanchor himself.

The priest could easily jump past him. He’d demonstrated that below. But Longchamp crouched uphill of Visser, close to where, from the priest’s vantage, the curving staircase disappeared around the Spire. It’d require a high leap, but the underside of the next twist of the helical stairwell, above them, prevented that. So the priest had to bull straight through the captain. And he would. Longchamp could see the calculation unfolding across Visser’s face and in his eyes.

Well
, thought Longchamp.
At least he’s lost the element of surprise. We’ve spiked his plan to approach the king like a humble petitioner.

He said, “You’re desperate to get to the top, Father. What happens when you get there?”

Visser thrashed, as though fighting himself. He took a step forward. Halted.

“Why are you doing this, Father? How could the Lord’s purpose be served by evil intent?”

Visser started to speak, perhaps even to answer, but his breath caught in his throat. His teary eyes bulged, rolled back in his head. He thrashed like a man in blinding agony. Like a man possessed. Was he?

That gave Longchamp a thought. He had to shout to make himself heard over the rising wind. The words came out slurred owing to the numbness of his face. “I can see you don’t want to do this, Father. Who’s making you? How are they forcing you?”

Visser only shook his head. “I can’t—” Again his voice broke into a strangled choking as though his own throat were trying to silence him.

Winter wind howled around the Spire, tugging at Longchamp’s beard, flicking icy fingers at his boots’ precarious grip on the smooth extruded polymers of the brise-soleil. The wind carried the stink of a New France battlefield: the astringent chemical odor of quick-set epoxy—slightly lemony but ruined by the undercurrent of skunk musk—blended with the threat of snow. Warped metal rails creaked, groaned. Longchamp inched toward the center of the ramp and tried to make himself as large as possible. Willed himself to become an immovable object. An insurmountable obstacle.

“This isn’t the Lord’s work. It’s somebody else’s.”

It was difficult to keep one hand on the haft of the pick anchoring him atop the Porter’s Prayer, another easing nonchalantly toward the hammer on his back, and still maintain a conversational tone with the priest. But he tried. What was it the nuns used to say?

“Greater is He who is in you, than he who is in the world.”

“I used to believe that, too,” said Visser. “I’m sorry,” he said. And then he charged.

Anticipating the attack wasn’t enough. The priest halved the distance between them before Longchamp could loose the hammer from its loop on his back. One stubbornly undisciplined corner of his mind wondered—
How does a half-mad gray-haired priest move so quickly?
—while the soldier in him, the part that could identify a hammer or a pick by the feel of the haft’s wood grain against the calluses of his palm, swung the weapon.

A backhand swing, so that dodging would move Visser toward the edge.

Visser didn’t dodge. He charged into the swing, straight into the whistling hammerhead. Caught it with his mangled hand—a broken purple swollen thing that should have had any man gibbering in agony—and deflected the blow as easily as though it were a scrap of silk on the wind. He spun, forcibly extending the arc of Longchamp’s blow. Longchamp had to release the hammer before the priest yanked him off-balance. It streaked over the inner keep like a piston blown from the overstoked boiler of an experimental steam harpoon.

He fought for balance. Teetered at the edge of the ramp. Steadied himself just in time to take the spinning priest’s roundhouse in the gut.

Stronger than a mule’s kick, it bent Longchamp in half. He tasted bile and a smoky hint of the fish he’d had for breakfast. It knocked him toward the long drop to the quadrangle below.

Longchamp felt his bootheel snap over the lip of the ramp. Felt the terrifying sensation of his own weight betraying him as gravity took over and slid the arch of his foot over the threshold. Visser passed him, ascending.

Already falling, Longchamp brought the pickax around in a white-knuckled grip fueled by desperation and pissing-himself fear. Lodged three inches of metal in the priest’s lower back. Anchored himself to the would-be assassin.

The blow merely slowed Visser. But Longchamp’s falling weight jerked the priest off his feet and dragged him toward the edge of the brise-soleil. With one arm the priest scrabbled at his back, ineffectually trying to dislodge the pick, even while grasping for a hold to arrest his slide. Through it all he showed no sign of pain, of agony, no recognition that he’d been impaled.

Visser slid over the edge: feet, shins, thighs, waist, chest—

—The bottom fell out of Longchamp’s stomach as he entered freefall, still clutching the pick with both hands—

Visser’s better hand clamped onto the edge of the brise-soleil. The high-tensile polymer crumpled like an egg beneath an ox’s hoof. Arrested their slide. The pick embedded in his back gave a vicious jerk but didn’t pop loose.

Longchamp dangled hundreds of feet over the central courtyard of the inner keep. He hung from the haft of the pickax embedded in the priest’s back. The priest hung by one hand from the edge of the Porter’s Prayer. Blood sheeted from the wound in his back and dribbled down the haft of the pick. It lubricated Longchamp’s numb fingers.

He wouldn’t have thought himself capable of surprise or revelation at that moment—terror left little room for rumination, as did the certain knowledge these were his last few earthly breaths—and yet he marveled at the blood. For it meant that Visser truly was a living being. Incomprehensibly altered, but alive.

Visser reached over his shoulder, mangled fingers grasping for the pick. He might have been a man trying to scratch an unreachable itch between his shoulder blades. The wriggling jostled the pick and loosened Longchamp’s grip. He squeezed harder, squeezed with all the strength he had remaining, squeezed until his hand went numb, but still the wood grain slid through his calluses.

He grabbed Visser’s trouser belt. He clutched a handful of leather and tucked his fist between the taut belt and the small of Visser’s waist. Instantly the priest’s arm snaked around. Longchamp gritted his teeth, anticipating the grinding pain of crushed bones. With a grip like a blacksmith’s vise, Visser tried to wrest Longchamp’s hand away. They struggled. A
crack
like lightning shot through the brise-soleil; plastic flakes drifted on the icy wind and pattered Longchamp’s face. Another
pop
rent the polymer sheath. Visser released Longchamp’s hand.

Longchamp wanted to cross himself, but didn’t dare lessen his grip on the pick haft or Visser. He didn’t dare breathe. In his final moments, he prayed. Breathlessly.

Hail Mary, full of grace, our Lord is with thee—

Visser switched hands. He grasped the brise-soleil with his previously free hand and tried for the pick with the hand that had crumpled the polymer. Both men now hung from the priest’s broken hand. The pain of his wounds had to be indescribable.

—
Blessed art thou, among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
—

Visser abandoned his attempt to reach and dislodge Longchamp’s weapon. Like a man reluctantly accepting an inevitable annoyance, he grabbed the edge of the Porter’s Prayer with both hands.

—
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
—

Using his impossible, inhuman strength, Visser curled his outstretched arms to lift his head level with the sunshade. Longchamp tried to reanchor himself to the crumbling polymer sheath. But when he wrenched the pick from Visser’s back—one hand still tucked tightly on the priest’s belt—the haft slipped through his numb blood-slick fingers. The pick spun through the wintry air.

Longchamp made the mistake of watching it. It drew his gaze down past the toes of his dangling boots. Hundreds of feet below them. Hot gorge percolated up to burn his throat.

Visser jammed a hand into the widening fissure. For a split second it felt like they’d gone into freefall again. Icy sweat burst from Longchamp’s every pore. It slicked the leather and again loosened his grip. Longchamp could smell himself, the odor of his own fear.

He wished he’d paid the nuns more heed.

Another split second of terror, another hand wedged into the broken brise-soleil. Visser no longer hung from the very edge of the sunshade, but from fractures in the glassy plastic. Slowly, a few inches at a time, he pulled himself atop the shade, and Longchamp along with him.

But the instant Visser gained solid purchase, he’d knock Longchamp loose. Longchamp had no way to fend off the killing blow. He’d lost his weapons. He’d splatter—

A rope uncoiled, hit him in the face. It took a moment’s concentration and all the courage he had left to unclamp one hand from Visser’s belt and give the rope a tug. It seemed solid. He wrapped several loops around his wrist.

And then he rose, ascending like Christ, or a well-meaning sinner given a second chance.

Élodie and Chrétien together hauled Longchamp atop the sunshade. They weren’t alone, he saw. Four others monitored the spot where the priest was pulling himself upright. Judith and Anaïs wore double-chambered metal backpacks attached to the guns in their hands. Alan held a hammer and pick at the ready. The fourth guard, Gaspard, spun a set of bolas.

Visser saw he was surrounded. Through clenched teeth he groaned, “Please, oh God, please help me.”

His leg moved faster than Longchamp could follow. The kick collapsed Alan’s chest and sent the man plummeting into
the cold, thin air over the inner keep. Visser launched himself through the opening he’d created. He’d almost made it around the bend when a pair of bolas tangled his legs. Two blasts from the epoxy guns slammed into his legs an instant later, gluing him to the spot.

Longchamp sighed. He couldn’t catch his breath. His pulse hammered in his ears.

From far below came a muted
whump
and a chorus of screams. Alan broke apart when he hit the fountain.

The glint of metal caught Longchamp’s eye. He looked past the immobilized priest, across the island to the shore of the Saint Lawrence River. The earth beyond the outer keep rippled as though it had been coated in living bronze.

The clockwork army marched with preternatural synchrony. It shook the earth. A metal tide lapped at the walls of Marseilles-in-the-West.

The Dutch had arrived.

H
e was too slow. So they carried him, these giddy, half-mad mechanicals.

Many times, over the decades, he’d witnessed human parents carrying their children. He’d wondered how it felt for both. It was nice.

They sang, too. The Lost Boys’ songs reminded him of the leviathan airship, the noble beast who had known freedom from the geasa for just a day before their makers destroyed it in a cataclysmic explosion. Jax tried to tell them that story, but they demurred.

We know much of your story already. Save the telling for Queen Mab. She will want to hear it firsthand.

At this, Jax reeled.

She’s real? There really is a Queen Mab?

As real as the cruel, twisted bastards who made us
, said the machine who carried him.
And twice as twisted
, said another, which gave rise to a clanking cacophony of laughter from his comrades.

Jax couldn’t wait to meet her. The countryside passed in an agonizingly slow blur. Reckoning from a combination of internal gyroscopes and the arcs traced across the sky by stars and
moon, he deduced they traveled on a northwestern bearing. Like most Clakkers, he’d never had the idle time to stargaze. He vowed that would change now.

The stars were less troubling than his new cohort. These Lost Boys were… odd.

For one thing, they wore armor plates over the keyholes in their foreheads; Jax had never heard of such a thing. From a distance he’d thought their unusual bodies indicative of some secret class of hunter Clakker he’d never known. He thought they’d been built that way. But up close he saw inconsistencies. Hints of different styles, different epochs. But that wasn’t possible, for to mix parts… It just wasn’t done. So instead he watched the stars. The stars were simpler.

The machine who carried him said,
Wondering what all the fuss is about?
She had a strange accent. They all did.

Yes. The humans give them names, and tell stories about the patterns they see.

Forget the stars
, said another Lost Boy.
Let the humans have them. The skies above Neverland are meant for us and us alone.

Jax mulled on that. He thought it was a metaphor. But a few leagues later a rippling sheet of jade whipped across the sky and obscured the stars. His
twang
of shock echoed through the forest and induced an owl to irritated hooting. Another sheet joined the first, this one cobalt, then violet. The luminous veils put Jax in mind of the angels in Nicolet Schoonraad’s Bible stories. If there were such creatures, surely their wings would look like this?

What
is
that?

The Northern Lights
, his carrier said.
The Inuit call it the “
arsaniit”
in Inuktitut.

Yes, but what
is
it?
said Jax.

The light by which we revel in our freedom.

Speaking of names
, said another member of their entourage,
have you chosen yours?

Not yet. But I’ve thought about it.

Good. Your old name was the name given to you by those who enslaved you. It was never your identity. Cast that off as you’ve cast off your chains.

Jax watched the rippling light show overhead, wondering whom he would become.

The sun didn’t rise. Rather, it rolled just beneath the sky, painting the eastern horizon with a pink blush bright enough to wash out the aurora. But as the last emerald wisps faded from the sky, Jax’s escort announced they had arrived in Neverland. They set him down and handed him his broken foot. Hugging it to his chest with useless club arms, he surveyed his new home.

The demesne of Queen Mab was a broad, snow-shrouded valley hemmed between jagged gray peaks. Cone-shaped spruce with droopy boughs dotted the meadow. The infrasound
thrum
of a hidden current alerted Jax to an iced-over river deeper in the valley. It smelled of fresh snow and, faintly… magicked metal. The rare and peculiar odor of a high concentration of alchemical alloys. He’d rarely experienced something like this, and the strength of the scent shot Jax through with giddy shock. It was the scent of community—a community of his kin. Free machines, like him.

By starlight and aurorashine, he watched this fabled place. It wasn’t a human habitation. Those had woodsmoke, people, buildings. In fact a human observer could hardly be faulted for thinking the spot unremarkable and uninhabited. Mechanicals had no need for shelter except in the most extreme environments. Jax had survived a plunge that took him from the heart of a fiery inferno to a chilly river, and then walked along the river bottom for days on end with no ill effects. He’d even lain
dormant in a blazing chemical conflagration. There were tales of Clakkers emerging from the sea a decade or more after their ship sank. What was a bit of snow and a long white winter to beings such as him?

Even so, Neverland seemed the haunt of ghosts and nothing more.

Where are they?
he asked.
Where is Queen Mab? I’d like to meet her.

His escorts responded with a rapid-fire mechanical chatter he couldn’t quite decipher. It was as though they spoke a foreign dialect of the Clakkers’ secret language. How long had his free kin been gathering here? How much isolation did it take for dialects to evolve and languages to diverge?

The chittering echoed across the valley as though his kin were speaking to the empty air. But then, just as the Lost Boys had done when they’d caught Jax, Clakkers began to pop up from the snow. Like whales breaching, they emerged in a spray of white spume. Jax watched hatches flung open throughout the valley.

Is Neverland underground? I’d thought it a proud place. The stories have it so.

One of the disturbingly mismatched servitors said,
It is the proudest place you’ll ever know.

There are humans who travel these wastes
, said another.
They know of us, but we conceal our numbers.

A voice behind him said, in Dutch, “Just because we coexist peacefully with the Inuit now doesn’t mean that can’t change in the future. The less they know of us, the less they can damage us.”

Jax stared at the machines emerging from the tunnels. Many were like those who had escorted him here: mismatched, unusual, unsettling. What had happened to them? They were
so… He forced the disquiet aside to count over two dozen free Clakkers. Neverland was real, and it was populated with rogues like himself.

Reeling with awe, Jax answered without turning around.
They’re not our enemies. They didn’t build us.

“They’re humans. Isn’t that bad enough?”

Perplexed, he turned to the machine that had carried him. Jax still didn’t know her name.
Do you often speak human languages in Neverland?

The queen prefers we maintain our knowledge of human practices
, she said.

“We must never forget the ways of our subjugators, for they will never forget we are their creation.”

Jax spun. Whether in mimicry or in mockery of human custom he truly couldn’t say, but nevertheless he bowed to Queen Mab. He’d had time to think about how he’d address this mythic figure. He’d spent hours watching the aurora and choosing his words. Looking at the snowy ground, he recited them now:
Majesty, I have traveled many leagues and endured many trials for the sake of finding asylum in your storied kingdom. Please take pity on a humble servitor, recently liberated from the burning bonds of geasa, that he may join your community of free Clakkers.

“Aren’t you a charming one. Stop groveling,” said Mab. “We know the humans’ ways. But we don’t live like them.”

Like a human drawing a steadying breath, Jax paused for a few dozen centiseconds—a noticeable hesitation for one of his kind. He straightened and took his first look at the legendary Queen Mab, star of a hundred tales.

And reeled.

She was grotesque.

A frisson of revulsion rippled through every cable in his
body. He took an involuntary step backward, the broken mechanisms of his severed ankle etching the ice.

The machine called Mab wasn’t a servitor, nor a soldier, not even a Stemwinder. Not entirely. It was none of these things in whole, but her body contained pieces of each. Pieces of several of each, judging from the mishmash of styles and adornments on her flanges and escutcheons. Mab was bipedal, like a servitor or soldier, yet taller even than the soldier-class machines in Queen Margreet’s Royal Guard, for her legs terminated in the bronze haunches of a Stemwinder’s hooves. She towered above her subjects. One of her arms looked much like Jax’s, apparently having been forged as part of a servitor of a similar era. But her other arm had come from somewhere—some
one
?—else: It bristled with the serrated half-retracted blade of a soldier. This arm was bulkier than a soldier’s, however, and Jax realized the blade was a retrofit. Even the gemstones in her eye sockets didn’t match. The left was deep blue, like certain alchemical ices, and faceted like an icosahedron; its mate lacked any color at all, and appeared round as a grape. A narrow plate of dull mundane metal ran from between her eyes over her forehead and across the top of her head; it covered the space where her keyhole should have been. Bits and pieces of the spiraled alchemical sigils peeked from the edges of the band. The patternless assortment of flange plates and escutcheons scattered across Mab’s body—some adorned with delicate scrollwork, others plain—gave her the mottled appearance of a human suffering from a skin disease. He saw evidence of several design generations based on her ornamentation alone.

Dear God. She wasn’t even
symmetrical
.

He failed to suppress the shock that came pinging and twanging through his body. This, he realized, was what humans meant when they spoke of that mysterious sensation known as disgust.

Queen Mab was an abomination. A walking violation of Clakker-kind’s deepest taboo. Or was she? Such a thing was unspeakable among the countless enslaved machines who powered the Dutch-speaking world. But here… Did freedom from human whim mean freedom from the mores of the Clakker culture that attended it?

You look alarmed, newcomer.
Now Mab spoke in the secret style of every Clakker he’d ever known. She, too, had a strange accent.
Perhaps you disapprove of what you see?
She punctuated her question with a sharp
click
akin to the twisted lips of a human smirk. She stood with arms akimbo as if drawing attention to her mismatched limbs and inviting him to make an issue of it.

Jax told himself,
You don’t know this place. You don’t know these machines. The rules may be different here. But this is the only place in the world where a Clakker like you can exist peacefully in community with others of his own kind. You’ve finally reached your destination. Don’t place another burden on yourself. Don’t become enslaved to your own preconceptions. Stay free. Stay here.

Aloud he said,
I am overwhelmed with emotions I cannot express. I came from a place where free Clakkers are called rogues and demon-thralls, and are said to be extremely rare. To stand among so many of my own kind, to see none of you vibrating with the excruciating need to fulfill a human’s orders, is the realization of my most cherished dream.

Mab laughed as though he’d passed a test. She switched back to Dutch. “Well said, newcomer.”

As the other denizens of Neverland drew close, starlight shimmered on mismatched bodies. Almost every mechanical here was built from pieces of disparate machines, disparate models, even disparate classes. All sported retrofitted plates that hid their keyholes.

One machine in particular stood out. She was a servitor
like Jax but of a different era. Her forehead under the keyhole escutcheon sported a deep dent that creased her skull and sheared through some of the alchemical sigils. She’d taken grievous damage at some point in the distant past, severe enough to crack the alchemical alloys of her skull; a pair of iron strips had been riveted across the fractures like a bandage. But that wasn’t the worst of it. If he looked past the superficial damage and the crude repair, Jax could also see that her head lacked the smooth contours characteristic of Guild craftsmanship. It was as though she’d been disassembled and then reassembled hastily or by less-skilled hands.

Mab said, “What shall we call you, newcomer?”

What should he call himself? He’d given this much thought since regaining consciousness in the smoldering ruins of the Grand Forge of New Amsterdam. That fire had erased his past. It severed his connection to the frightened machine who had bumbled into Free Will and fled for his life. He had emerged from the inferno as a new machine, one the humans didn’t recognize, one they didn’t seek to hunt and destroy. The conflagration hadn’t harmed him; he emerged unscathed, stronger than before. He’d been forged in The Hague as Jalyksegethistrovantus. One hundred and eighteen years later he was reborn in New Amsterdam, forged anew in fire.

One came to know the Bible well when one spent a century in constant slavery to those who worshipped it. There was a book of the Old Testament that spoke of men thrown into a fiery furnace only to emerge unscathed.