The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (20 page)

Jax remembered the execution he’d witnessed in Huygens Square. Remembered how the rogue Clakker Adam had responded when Queen Margreet demanded to know his full name.

My makers called me Jalyksegethistrovantus
, he said.
But I call myself Daniel.

Mab seemed much pleased by this. She spread her mismatched arms (
Ignore it, just ignore it,
he thought,
don’t look at them
) and bellowed:
WELCOME, DANIEL! WELCOME TO NEVERLAND! WELCOME HOME!

The others responded in kind.
Welcome, Daniel!

And just like that, he found he no longer thought of himself as Jax. The new sense of identity came naturally. He marveled at the ease with which he could dispense with his makers’ legacy. Jax had been a different mechanical.

Mab looked him over.
You’ve suffered greatly in your quest to join us, haven’t you?

It’s been difficult
, Daniel admitted. He meant this honestly, but quiet laughter rippled through the assembled machines. It comprised a strange amalgam of mirth and irritation he couldn’t parse.

It has, indeed
, said Mab.
Your exploits have been a topic of much discussion here.

He wondered how that was possible, but he wasn’t given the chance to inquire. Mab pointed into the crowd with her retrofitted blade arm (
Don’t look, don’t look, don’t think about it right now
). She indicated the mechanical with the iron bandages.

Lilith. Will you take our new brother to be healed?

Lilith! He knew that name. He’d heard of this kinsmachine, back when he’d been somebody else.

Of course
, said the mechanical with the misshapen head.

The other Lost Boys drifted away in conversational duos and trios. Mab looked at Daniel.
Welcome again, brother. Come find me when you’re whole. We should talk.

I will
, he said.

The workshop is this way
, said Lilith. They set off toward the treeline.

He studied her. The rosy blush of frustrated sunrise shone on the burnished metal of her misshapen skull. Light skimmed
across the surface of her alloys, like rainbows trapped in an oily sheen atop a rain puddle. But the refractive hues changed subtly at the joints where her skull plates met. A bit more indigo here, more emerald there. It took an effort to suppress another shudder of revulsion. The Clockmakers were known to alter the composition or fabrication of alchemical alloys a few times per century. Lilith’s body contained several such variations. Her body wasn’t whole. It wasn’t entirely
her
body. With whom had she been mixed? And what had become of that Clakker?

Lilith said,
You can stop staring any time now.

I apologize. It’s rude of me.
Daniel felt a flush of shame.
I’ve never been among other rogues before.

Lilith froze.
Shut up! Don’t use that word.
Her head turned a rapid circuit and the bezels in her eyes hummed as she scanned their surroundings.

What word?

The
R
word. Mab doesn’t like it.

Okay
, he said, adding a syncopated triple
click
to express confusion.

It implies that our freedom is an aberration. That our bondage is the normal order of things.

She has a point
, said Daniel. It sounded reasonable.

Lilith set off again. Her rapid stride kicked up a spray of fine white snow.
Yes, well, she likes to make her opinions known.

He watched her go, wondering what she meant by that. After a few moments he hurried after her. Jogging on his severed ankle forced him to adopt a graceless limping gait. It induced a chaotic swaying of his weathervane head. Fighting to dampen the oscillations, he changed the subject.
I can’t wait to get this fixed. It’s driving me insane.

I’m sure.

Lilith didn’t seem very talkative. But he buzzed with unasked
questions.
How does Queen Mab know so much about me? The mechanicals she sent to find me knew my full name.

I’m sure she’d prefer to explain it herself. She will.

Perhaps he was being too serious. Daniel changed tack to something a bit more frivolous. Something that had always lingered in the back of his mind whenever he cast his thoughts to legends of Neverland.

So… not to ask a stupid question, but what does a community of free Clakkers do all day long?

I’m teaching myself oil painting
, she said.
And I play the violin.

But how do you know what to do with yourself if you don’t have the geasa controlling everything you do?

You miss the geasa?

Of course not. But, I mean, how do we spend our time around here?

An extra-long pause fell between two beats of her body’s ticktock rhythm. Finally, she said,
I haven’t been here much longer than you
.

Truly? But the
ondergrondse grachten
took you across the border decades ago.

Lilith spun so quickly that she launched a vortex. It gamboled across the meadow, tracing curlicues in the fine fresh snow. In the silvery starlight it became a crystalline tornado.

She grabbed his arm.
How could you possibly know that?

When I went to the canalmasters for help, they debated what to do. Your name came up.
That had been back in New Amsterdam, where he’d been forced to return after his first attempt to reach the border had ended in a fireball in the skies over Fort Orange.
That is, they spoke of a ro
—She emitted a warning
clank
. Daniel caught himself.—
A free Clakker named Lilith. I assume that was you.

She said,
This must have been before you got the canalmasters killed.

Now it was Daniel’s turn for shock.
How do
you
know about
that
? And anyway I didn’t get them killed. The man who did that knew exactly where to find them. It had nothing to do with me.

She didn’t answer his question, so he asked another.
If it’s true that you escaped so long ago, why did you wait so long before coming here? Surely you’d heard the tales of Queen Mab and the Lost Boys?

Oh, I’d heard the stories. The Inuit say many things about this place.
Lilith tilted her head just a few degrees. The gesture was precisely executed to catch the horizon light on one of her mismatched alloy plates and knock a glint into Daniel’s eyes. It would have been invisible to anybody else.
Once I was free, and no longer pursued, I felt no need to keep running. I paid my respects to King Sébastien II, the current king’s father, and stayed there.

Daniel had a second flash of insight. The canalmasters weren’t the only French agents who had spoken of a mechanical who called herself Lilith.
Oh, you spent those years in Marseilles-in-the-West! That’s how you met my friend Berenice.

The blow came without warning. The next thing Daniel knew he was bouncing through snowdrifts, his loose foot tumbling away, a metal-on-metal crash echoing like thunder in the mountains. He skidded to a rest in a snowy furrow. Lilith pounced. He flinched when she hit the ground to loom over him. Confusion became abject fear when he realized she intended to keep assaulting him. His arms were useless, he could barely stand, and he couldn’t even keep his head steady. He was defenseless against her fury, yet he didn’t understand what he’d said or done to enrage her so.

He cowered.
I’m sorry! I’m sorry! What did I do?

She kicked him. His head slammed back and forth like an unlatched gate in a gale.

Never speak of rogues to Queen Mab, and never
ever
speak to me of having human
friends. He’d never witnessed so much contempt loaded into a single word.

I misspoke! I didn’t mean it!

I’m sure you didn’t
, said Lilith.
How could any mechanical be friendly with the human who used lies to lure me into seclusion, trapped me with glue, disassembled me while I screamed pleading for her to stop, and brought a parade of people to gape and poke at my innards while day after day I begged them to either let me go or kill me?

Daniel shuddered, meshing and unmeshing cogs along the length of his spine. What Lilith described was torture. It was sickening. More sickening than Mab’s grotesque chimerical body. He remembered the terror he’d felt when he realized the French partisans planned to disassemble him. It was bad enough just imagining it. But to actually endure it, and for days on end…

What say you, Daniel? Does that sound like something your good
friend
might have done to one of us?

He couldn’t meet her angry stare.
Berenice is… very single-minded
, he admitted. Hoping to mollify her by offering common ground, he added,
She deliberately caused this damage to my neck.

This was true. But he didn’t mention that it had been consensual and necessary. It had been their ticket inside the Forge.

Lilith stalked away. She paused in a patch of undisturbed snow, reached into a snowbank on the windward side of a boulder, and opened a hatch.

When you put it like that, you and I are practically interchangeable,
said Lilith before hopping into the hatch and disappearing underground.

She infused her last word with special emphasis. It launched
another frisson of disquiet twanging through Daniel’s body. Interchangeability was anathema to their kind. Fundamental to how humans viewed them, it denied every mechanical’s inner life, as though they were fungible commodities. Though she spoke in the throes of anger, he sensed a more complicated admixture of emotions behind her words. Or perhaps the beating had scrambled what remained of his judgment.

Daniel felt the eyes of the other Lost Boys upon him as he limped a humiliating several hundred yards to where his foot had come to rest nestled at the foot of a spruce. The alpine meadow buzzed with so many eye bezels tracking his movements that it might have been an apiary. More humiliating still was the struggle to gather his foot with his entombed arms. After several attempts to use his arms like crude pincers, a servitor jogged across the meadow. Based on the scrollwork around his shoulder flanges, he’d been forged a few decades after Daniel. He was also apparently intact, lacking the disquieting chimerism characteristic of Mab and many Lost Boys. Daniel felt intense relief.

The other mechanical picked up Daniel’s foot. Inspected it.
You should probably watch what you say around Lilith. She has a temper
, he said.

Daniel said,
I hadn’t noticed.

Here.
The Lost Boy offered the foot. Daniel cradled it against his chest.

Thank you.

Lilith has been through worse trauma than many of us. And it’s still very raw for her.
Daniel’s fellow mechanical gave a self-conscious rattle.
Most of us have had decades to hone the wildest edges of our anger.

What an odd thing to say.
Why hone it at all? Better to file it down entirely. Holding on to that anger won’t achieve anything
, Daniel said.

The Lost Boy cocked his head, studying him as if he’d just suggested they take a stroll to the moon, or return to their makers. With genuine confusion he asked,
But what good is a dull knife?

Daniel jumped into the hatch. He fell roughly fifteen yards before hitting bottom. He’d expected to find a crude cavern dimly lit with flickering torches. Instead, he landed in a clean, dry passageway lined with perfectly squared timbers. (
Well, I guess they have plenty of time on their hands around here.
) It was well lit, too: The illumination sprang from sconces containing heatless alchemical lamps. The only place he’d ever seen lamps like those was inside the Ridderzaal, the Clockmakers’ Guildhall on Huygens Square in The Hague, and in the homes of particularly wealthy families of the Central Provinces. A secret subterranean cavern many hundreds of miles from Nieuw Nederland was the last place on earth he’d expect to find them.

The passageway extended to left and right. Presumably all the hatches opened into the same network of tunnels. He wondered how extensive the excavations were. Dozens of Clakkers working in concert for decades could practically dig halfway around the world.

Lilith called from somewhere to his left:
This way.

He followed her voice around a corner. There he froze as if every cog in his body had seized. This was a scene straight from the deepest caverns beneath the Grand Forge, and one he’d hoped to never see again.

Lilith had taken him to a charnel house.

She stood with two Lost Boys in a chamber hewn from the igneous heart of the valley. The ceiling and floor were bare rock, chiseled and polished with such mechanical precision they shone like mirrors. A table occupied the center of the room. Wooden shelves covered the walls to a height of twenty
feet. On the shelves lay a grisly assortment of incomplete Clakkers: arms, legs, hip joints, spines, eyes, jaw hinges, skull plates, flanges, cables, planetary gears, torsion springs… Variegated pieces of their kin, from a variety of models and a variety of eras. Daniel saw parts of servitors that must have been forged fifty years after him, and others that were at least a century older than he. The highest shelf even held two of the old hand-painted porcelain masks from the first days after Het Wonderjaar; the custom of giving each servant a unique visage had fallen out of favor centuries ago. Even chipped and weathered as these were, they were worth a small fortune. Had the first settlers of Neverland worn such masks?

This warehouse… it was a catalog of broken servitors, broken soldiers, even one or two strange limbs on the highest shelves that must have come from early-model Stemwinders—things that Daniel had never seen in his one hundred and eighteen years.

Some pieces were pristine, as though they’d been taken straight from the Forge. Others were warped or shattered. This made it even worse than what he’d witnessed beneath the Forge, for everything there was pristine. Intended for construction rather than the result of destruction.