The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (2 page)

It took ten minutes to reach the base of the Spire. Another ten to navigate the maze of barricades and trenches before he could gain the top of the inner wall. A Clakker could leap over most obstacles; the trick was to slow them down enough to give the gunners a snowball’s chance in hell of spraying them down. Or to funnel them together so that they could be incapacitated most efficiently. Certain trenches and moats contained corrosives intended to destroy delicate mechanisms. Others brimmed with chemical reagents that needed just a dollop of catalyst to initiate the reaction that would solidify the moats in an instant, complete with Clakkers trapped inside like raisins in a Christmas cake. Longchamp fucking hated raisins.

Just like he hated the thought of the inner keep’s defenses ever seeing use. Because the war was already lost if the tulips’ mechanical servants made it this far. The obstacles and rearguard tactics could only slow their final advances, and maybe, just maybe, give the king enough time to escape. Though where he would go when the Dutch truly ruled the earth was an open question. Perhaps he’d go north and become king of the White Bears.

When he finally reached the outer wall, he sidled behind the cluster of new conscripts, taking care the
crunch
of frost beneath his boots didn’t signal his arrival. Even the civvies tended to shrink when they felt his eyes on them; they’d heard the stories, too. Sergeant Chrétien saw him lurking behind the group but continued to harangue the newcomers without acknowledging the captain. The newest conscripts shivered as though palsied, wiping their noses on their sleeves while they shuffled and muttered to themselves, hardly listening to anything the sergeant said. Half of them looked barely strong
enough to raise a glass of wine much less a pick and sledge. Christ! Their forearms weren’t even the size of Longchamp’s
wrists
! What in the seven hells were they supposed to do with such a motley piss-poor group? Only two men in this group could be less than forty.

The captain wondered if they could slow the mechanical horde by tossing the bodies of the useless in their path. The image brought him a modicum of satisfaction, though he knew that even this tactic would be pointless. Military Clakkers were walking scythes who churned through men like razor-edged tornadoes. They left nothing but screams, limbs, viscera, and arterial spray in their wake. Mere meat and bone could never slow them.

Longchamp knew. He’d seen the ticktocks at work more than once. He’d seen friends fall to the
snick
and slash of alchemical blades. He’d seen the fountain in the inner keep run red in the aftermath of a single Clakker’s rampage. He shook his head. But no matter how he tried to free his head of memories and horrors, they clung like dusty cobwebs.

“All right,” said Chrétien. “Let’s see if you civvies have listened to a single thing I’ve said.” He selected three men at random. “You, you, and you. Congratulations, you’re now a gunnery team. Step to it!”

Two men shuffled forward with all the enthusiasm of a criminal gang going to the gallows. The third hung back, perhaps hoping the soldier had been pointing at somebody near him. The flecks of silver at his temples, the thick ruff of his coat, and the faint hint of nascent jowls made him a merchant or trader. Softened by success. Longchamp grabbed him by the fur-lined collar.

“I could swear the sergeant told you to move,” he said. “So I find myself wondering why you haven’t done so with alacrity. A fine gentleman like yourself would surely do so if he could.
So what’s the problem, friend? Legs broken? Or perhaps an imp has nailed your feet to these stones?”

The merchant squirmed within the voluminous fur coat. He shot an alarmed glance at Longchamp. The captain didn’t loosen his grip.

“I notice also,” he continued, “that you seem to have lost your voice. And your eyes are bulging just a bit. Choking on your own fear, I’d wager. Well, not to worry. I’ve seen this, too. Happens on the battlefield from time to time. We’ll get you right in no time.” Longchamp clapped twice, calling for the attention he knew he already commanded. “Lucky us! This’ll give me a chance to teach proper emergency surgery techniques. Sergeant, hand me your knife. You and you,” he said, pointing at the two closest bystanders, “kneel on his arms and legs. And put your fucking weight into it. They flop around like a trout in a canoe once the knife goes in the gizzard.”

At this point Longchamp loosened his grip just enough for the lazy merchant to slip free. He scuttled over to join the other men at the epoxy cannon.

“Thank the Virgin!” said Longchamp, crossing himself. “She’s cured him! It’s a Goddamned miracle.” He clouted the nearest conscript on the back of the head. “Show some respect to the Holy Mother, you cretin. All you cretins.”

As one, the conscripts crossed themselves, good Catholics all.

Sergeant Chrétien made one man the spotter; he crouched inside a crenel, alongside the barrels. The other two, including Longchamp’s lazy merchant, manned the chemical compressor and the firing mechanism. Under the soldier’s direction the latter pair turned the crank that charged up the compressor. The measured
chug-chug-chug
of the hydraulics climbed a few registers and adopted the quickened tempo known to everybody who’d been through a siege: the dreaded rhythm of an epoxy gun fending off an attacker.

The sergeant mounted a battlement and waved a yellow flag half again his own height. The flagman at the edge of the forest returned the semaphore, and then another soldier bolted from the treeline. The newcomer dashed across the field, tracing zigzags and serpentines in the frost. Longchamp wondered which hapless conscript had drawn the short straw for this demonstration.

“Runners on the field!” cried the sergeant. “I say again we have INBOUND MECHANICALS!”

The spotter muttered a string of bearings. “North by northeast. No, wait, he’s turning east. I mean he’s running from the east. East by north… Wait, he’s turning again—”

“I can’t fucking hear you!” said Longchamp. “And it’ll never be quieter than this. When the walls are aswarm with clanking murderers, and every cannon in the keep is chugging along loud enough to wake the Devil after a six-bottle bender, you’d better be able to MAKE YOURSELF HEARD!”

Meanwhile, the hapless sprinter had covered a third of the distance to the wall. Far, far slower than a real mechanical. But far too fast for the novice gunners to handle gracefully.

“He’s getting closer!” cried the spotter. The onset of true panic improved the volume and urgency of his voice, but at the cost of his judgment. “Just fire! For God’s sake, fire!”

The second man flipped the levers that opened the breach chambers on the double-barreled cannon. A momentary
glug
interrupted the rhythm of the compressor as epoxy and fixative sloshed into place. He waited a moment until the breach attained the proper hydraulic pressure, then closed off the chamber again. This one, at least, had listened to the lecture and, miracle of miracles, learned something.

“He’s halfway here!” said the spotter.

Chrétien asked, “He? Who’s he? All I see is a murderous ticktock that’s about ten seconds from leaping on this wall, scuttling up like a spider, and killing us all.”

“Jesus Christ,” cried the spotter, now in the throes of true panic, “just fire!”

“You’re oversimplifying, Sergeant, and shame on you for it,” said Longchamp, picking his teeth with a fingernail. “It won’t kill us all at once. It’ll start with the gunners, you know. Cut them in half before moving on to us. So we’ll enjoy a few more seconds to make our peace with the Lord before that Clakker carves us up.”

The merchant, hunkered behind the bulk of the cannon, blindly swung the barrel back and forth. “I can’t see! Where is it?”

“Anywhere! Northeast! Everywhere!”

The merchant-gunner squeezed the double trigger with a grip that turned his knuckles whiter than freshly fallen snow. Twinned streams of blue and yellow water vomited from the cannon barrels, combining over the crenels to make a single stream the color of the first springtime fringe on the maple trees. The explosive release of pressure from the breach set the cannon to kicking like a mad stallion. The barrels snapped up, forcing the controls down with enough force to make the merchant yelp. He lost his grip. The breachman leaped aside. The cannon fired uselessly into the sky, then slewed back and forth to slam against the battlement hard enough to knock chips from the granite. Another wild swing caught the spotter by surprise. It connected with the characteristic celery-stalk
crunch
of broken bones that sent him sprawling along the wall. The sprinter reached the wall a few seconds later without a drop of green on him.

The sergeant rounded on the spectacularly unsuccessful gunnery team. Over the crying of the spotter, he yelled, “What the hell was that?”

A spot of motion over the seaway caught Longchamp’s eye: a fluttering blur of gray and white against a powder-blue sky.
Soon it resolved into a pigeon. The messenger flew low over the town of Marseilles-in-the-West. It climbed as it passed over the walls of the keep, twice circling the Spire. The pigeon coops were situated about halfway up the tower.

So. News from downriver. Longchamp sighed. Maybe for once the news would be good. Perhaps the tulips had caught the saboteur and found no connection to New France, no reason to swarm across the border to avenge their damaged pride. That would certainly merit the use of pigeon post. Pigeons were faster and more secure than the network of creaky semaphore towers snaked across New France.

He snorted hard enough to clear his sinuses, then spat salty phlegm over the parapet. It would take a particularly callow fool to stake hopes on such fancies. Longchamp retied his scarf, stamped the creeping numbness from his feet, and headed back to the base of the Porter’s Prayer to begin the long ascent.

The news from downriver was not good. It was a shitstorm of the Old Testament variety.

Dozens of messenger pigeons occupied the rows of cages situated within the alcove stretching halfway around the Spire. The coops were louder than a whorehouse on payday, though not as enjoyable. Cleaner, too: every ounce of guano went to the chemists. An apprentice birdkeeper was seeing to that duty when Longchamp barged, panting and sweating, through the door from the Porter’s Prayer. The boy jumped; the tray he’d been sweeping hit the floor, the splash stippling his clothes with flecks of white and brown.

“Saw the news arrive,” Longchamp gasped. “Where’d the little fucker go?”

The boy pointed across the rows of coops toward the interior of the Spire. His hand, which still held the brush, shook.
Longchamp shook his head and scowled, because it was friendlier than growling. It had been like that since the massacre in the inner keep when he’d deactivated a rampant military Clakker the old-fashioned way, using a hammer, pick, and his entire life’s quota of good luck. Now every stupid bastard on the street looked at him like he was some kind of hero, and not an extraordinarily fortunate son of a bitch who’d gritted his teeth and done his job fully expecting to get skewered like a hairy pig. Longchamp left the apprentice to his ill-advised hero worship and tromped through the aisles of cages.

“Over here, Captain.” He recognized the voice of the on-duty birdkeeper; they’d attended school together. That had been before he was expelled, though not before they’d fumbled a bit behind the chapel, playing fisherman and fisherwife. Brigit Lafayette wore a matching blouse and skirt of marigold and midnight-blue satin under a rainproof cloak of otter fur. She looked like a clown. The years had been kinder to her face than her dress sense. She added, “You must be sleeping atop the Spire these days, if you’re seeing the pigeons almost before we do.”

He followed her voice to the workshop she shared with the other birdkeepers. Brigit held the cooing messenger in one hand, delicately peeling away the message capsule strapped to its leg with the other. She glanced at Longchamp while an apprentice—a different one, a girl spattered with less bird shit than the boy he’d startled—caged the bird.

“You’re not getting enough sleep,” she said. “Your eyes are bloodshot.” She dropped her head, focusing her attention on the desk. Her voice dropped close to a whisper when she asked, “When was your last decent meal? I mean a real meal, with real food, and dessert, and company with whom to share it?”

“Shit,” he said.

There was only one capsule, he realized. Bad sign. Economy preferred loading the feathered rats with as much information
as they could carry. A single capsule usually pointed to urgent news. Urgent news rarely pointed to rainbows and blow jobs.

“It’s a wonder for the ages why you never married, Hugo Longchamp.” For some reason she spoke more stiffly than she had a moment ago. Brigit turned the capsule over in her hand. “No special markings. It isn’t coded.”

After checking that none of the apprentices lingered among the nearby cages, she offered the capsule to the captain. He’d convinced the marshal general to grant him authority to read all uncoded traffic as it arrived. It was one of his conditions for accepting the promotion to captain of the guard. He’d expected it to become an argument, but in truth the marshal seemed content to let Longchamp shoulder as much of the real work as he could.