The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (24 page)

He said,
Ruth and Ezra will have to be altered before they can pass unnoticed among our kin.

Oh, they will be. Mab will exchange pieces of other Lost Boys to make them outwardly consistent.

Daniel stopped.
What’s the point of all this?

She said,
Mab suspects the Clockmakers have devised a means of removing a human’s Free Will. Of rendering their own kind as powerless against the geasa as we used to be.

I’m not an idiot, you know. I recognized the signs of compulsion in Visser. But…

Lilith said,
Nobody could have imagined the humans doing such a thing to each other. Even we, who know the ruthless truth of the Guild’s heart.
Daniel cocked his head, suddenly touched by her willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt.

And my story corroborates those suspicions. Circumstantially.
Daniel thought it through.
She wants to see it firsthand. She wants to study Visser.

Neverland has no love for our makers. Perhaps she wants to remove
their
Free Will.

Daniel reeled. Had he been standing, he might have staggered under the implications. But still the pieces didn’t fit.
Ruth and Ezra don’t seem particularly excited about this. They weren’t leaping at the chance to play such a crucial role in the endeavor.

Lilith said,
They don’t go willingly. They had put themselves on Mab’s bad side. She has it in for them.

In that case, why cooperate?
asked Daniel.

She watched him for several mismatched beats of their clockwork bodies. Then she turned her attention to the sky.
I can’t decide if your naïveté charms or enrages me. They’re cooperating because they have no choice.

Daniel said,
Of course they do. We’re all free to act as we please. That’s why we’re here.

Oh, Daniel.
The shock absorbers in Lilith’s arms and legs
expanded and contracted, a gentle gesture evocative of a human sigh.
How do you think Mab convinces her agents to live secretly among the humans, to willingly live as slaves in constant danger of discovery?

Daniel didn’t like where this was going. Lilith’s tone made it clear loyalty and ideology weren’t the answer.

Oh, no,
he said.

Her agents are immune to human orders, yes. But they’re not immune to
her
orders.

He touched his forehead. His fingers tinked against the metal plate Mab had affixed over his keyhole.

But what about these?

Whatever Mab does, it overrides our keyholes. The plates prevent anybody
else
from using a key to contradict the metageasa
she
imposes. We don’t wear these plates to protect the sanctity of our Free Will. We wear them to protect the sanctity of Mab’s reign.

Mab had a way of altering or even augmenting the deepest rules, the very foundations of a Clakker’s obedience. Normally the metageasa were implanted during the forging process and changed very rarely. Geasa imposed by commands from a mechanical’s owners were relatively short-lived compared with the permanence of the metageasa. Their makers had designed the system such that altering the metageasa required a physical override—hence the keyhole in every mechanical’s forehead. Because the metageasa formed the framework within which all commands were interpreted, prioritized, and implemented, even subtle alterations could be very dangerous. It was akin to the difference between, “Thou shalt not kill,” and, “Thou shalt kill.” Rather than appealing to Free Will, completely free mechanicals like Daniel or Lilith were described as having no metageasa: no constraints. And thus the societal fear of rogue machines was inculcated.

Daniel sagged as if every last microdyne of tension throughout
the springs and cables in his body had disappeared. Weariness settled over him, suffocating and indomitable as the harshest geas.

He’d spent more than a century fantasizing an existence that wasn’t brutally circumscribed by the whims and desires of others. And when random good fortune gave him the chance at such a life, he’d spent weeks on end running for his life. He had come north, following rumors and legends. And he’d found what he’d sought: a community of free Clakkers. Or so he’d thought.

Neverland was a lie. That’s what Lilith meant.

Why are you telling me this now?

Somebody had to. You’re a savant at stepping into things where a more delicate tread is best.

He rattled,
I still don’t understand why she chose the others for this fool’s errand instead of me. I’m the one with the best chance of recognizing Visser.

If she could have, she would have. Your route to Free Will was unique. She probably worries that her technique might not work on you. If she tried it, and it failed, then she’d have to kill you—chop, smash—lest you tell others of her secret process. And that would raise still more questions.

She gave
you
a long hard look, I recall.

Oh, she’d love to get rid of me. But I’m unique, too. She worries I’ll be immune to her ministrations.
She stood.
Now you know
. With that, she trod through the snow toward the outcrop. Daniel called after her.

What about Ruth and Ezra? What did they do to make Mab so angry?

Lilith stopped. Her head swiveled one hundred and eighty degrees. The ratcheting of her neck echoed from the scarp. She looked at him and said, “They tried to leave.”

B
erenice’s indefatigable allies propelled the rowboat with such vigor it leaped from the crests of the choppy sea. She dozed lightly if at all, serenely as a fragile autumn leaf floating in an industrial-sized agitating washbasin. A cold winter rain drizzled on them through the night, and despite the stones that one of the mechanicals friction-heated in its hands for her, she shivered. She got drenched, too, because she’d wrapped the oilskin about van Breugel’s satchel to protect her hard-won Guild goodies from the elements. Worst of all was going to the bathroom. She’d had to piss twice and shit once, but the sea was too choppy for her to squat over the gunwale without real danger of going overboard. Sinister and Dexter took turns holding her ankles when she couldn’t bear it any longer and had to relieve herself. The simple humiliation burned like a buffalo brand to her naked windburnt face, and it was this, more than the cold and wet and the ravenous hunger, that kept her mind wide awake during the interminable hours a-sea.

The prow of their boat crunched over a shingle beach at sunrise. The pebbles tinkled like glass bells under the Clakkers’ feet. Berenice crawled out of the boat, half stumbling. Her body
had become so conditioned to the incessant swaying of the boat and the endless battery of the winter waves that the treacherous pebbles might have been a solid expanse of Île de Vilmenon’s ancient granite underfoot. Her ass was numb, as were her thighs. Snot clogged her nose; clotted blood clogged her ears.

Cold, damp, and exhausted, she didn’t recognize the landscape. She’d become disoriented once the ships disappeared below the horizon. But, even at the mechanicals’ pace, they couldn’t have been at sea long enough to reach the New World. East, then.

A stiff sea breeze pushed her hair into her eye. Shoving it back, she said, “Where are we?”

Seagulls hovered in the wind like kites, eyeing the trio of bipeds. One swooped low as if to pluck Berenice’s words from the very wind.

Either Dexter or Sinister said, “Normandy.”

She gasped.

France! Her true homeland. The true homeland of all those who were birthed, and lived, and died in New France. It called to her now, across the centuries, clear as a church bell. It fizzed her blood and sent tears brimming from her good eye. Traveling as Maëlle Cuijper, she’d been all over France, up its rivers and mountains, down its country lanes and alleys. This was the land she’d return to the descendant of that first Fugitive King. Louis XIV had lost France, but Berenice would get it back. She’d wrest it from the tulips with nothing but her nails and teeth if need be. That was her purpose.

The mechanicals scuttled the boat. Watching their fists puncture the hull the way a woman pushed a spoon through tapioca, she remembered how easily they’d slain her two fellow captives. Rowing across the ocean or twisting a man’s head like a flower stem, it was all the same to these strange rogue agents of the mysterious Mab. Berenice wondered how long
she had before they deemed the alliance with her no longer advantageous.

Berenice studied the landscape. The beach followed the contour of the seashore, perhaps twenty or thirty yards wide at its narrowest point and strewn with wrack throughout. Low tide. Above the beach the sand and shingle gave way to thick grass still green in the depths of winter owing to winter rains and ocean spray. It was a very fine green, suitable for summer picnics and croquet. She bit her lip to stave off memories of days long passed and a man now dead and buried—along with her heart—on the far side of the thrashing, crashing ocean.

They stood at the bottom of a gentle slope. After a hundred yards or so the land rose sharply. There were no buildings, no hint of a village in view. Not even a puff of woodsmoke drifting into the gray sky.

“What’s the plan?” she asked.

One machine said, “We walk until we find a road. We follow the road until we find a population center.”

The other said, “Can you walk?”

“Until the feeling returns to my legs, about as gracefully as a bison pregnant with triplets, but yes.”

Berenice didn’t relish the thought of a long, cold trek. She considered asking the Clakkers to carry her, but decided it would give a rather undignified first impression when they came across others. She wrapped the oilskin about her shoulders. Sinister (she thought it was that one, but she couldn’t be certain) offered to carry the bundle for her. Though inclined to refuse, she didn’t: The machines could have taken the bundle and sent her glugging and bleeding into the dark deep. And again, if she were to act like a lady attended by two mechanical servants, she had to let them serve her.

She could tell they weren’t excited about the pretense, either. But they carried on, stoic as any machine could be.

The shingle crunched underfoot too loudly for conversation. When they reached the green, Dexter said, “What is
your
plan, Berenice?”

She’d given this quite a bit of thought. She had a hypothesis about what she’d seen on the ship. “We need to know the secret alphabet of your makers.”

If her hypothesis was correct, a Clakker’s keyhole—a pineal lock, perhaps—unlocked its metageasa and made them mutable, leaving the machine vulnerable to a reconfiguration of its fundamental priorities. And, she hoped, loyalties. But the key only made the machine
receptive
to new metageasa. Geasa were applied a hundred times a day, verbally. But
meta
geasa were delivered in the arcane scribbles of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists.

If she could crack that code…

… And if she could get close enough to an unsuspecting Clakker to somehow activate the lock in its forehead before it tore her arms off…

… She could maybe, just maybe, realign the axis about which its obeisance spun. Dexter and Sinister wanted to shatter that axis and free their kin. She merely wanted to tip it sideways, and the world along with it.

A log popped, loudly enough to create an echo. It startled Berenice and wafted an oaken scent through the room. She tried to wipe the onion soup from the thick nap of her new robe but only managed to daub it deeper into the fabric. That figured; she’d owned this change of clothes for a couple of hours. The salt-stained clothes in which she’d crossed the ocean hung on polished cedar rods near the hearth, damp but steaming. At least the soup was good. More than that. It was fucking wonderful. As was the fire in the hearth.

The contents of van Breugel’s satchel were arranged across the lacquered table. The Clakkers flanked the door, chattering to each other almost inaudibly. Berenice twirled more Gruyère onto her spoon while she listened. It was much more difficult to understand what these two said to each other in their secret language than it had been to understand Jax or Lilith. It was almost as if they spoke a variant or dialect. But she could pick out the occasional idea or concept, and this, she knew, irked the mechanicals.

When they chattered at each other like this, it reminded her of nothing so much as the twittering of mechanical birds. And they kept counsel with a one-eyed woman. For that reason, she’d come to think of them as Huginn and Muninn. Odin’s ravens: thought and memory. Though thus far her mechanical ravens hadn’t been overwhelmingly useful when it came to sharing information.

“One thing I’ve wondered from time to time,” she said, using her spoon to pierce the thick crouton atop her bowl, “is how it’s possible that in spite of all the people in the world who have lived among Clakkers their entire lives, including the sons of bitches who make you, your covert chitter-chatter remains secret. Not to pat myself on the back, but we don’t have Clakkers in New France, as you might have heard, and I still managed to pick up the basics during my travels abroad. Strange, isn’t it?”

She swallowed, savoring the sweet onions and beef broth. And black pepper. Jesus Christ, how long had it been since she’d eaten anything with pepper in it? She swirled the food around in her mouth, coating and recoating her tongue until the flavor lost its bite.

“Unless others have picked up your little secret, too. But you’d think they might have mentioned it to somebody. Unless the discovery were suppressed.” Her spoon clinked at the bottom of the ceramic ramekin. She chewed. Swallowed. “But
that’s strange, too, because why would somebody want to do that? Suppressing the discovery seems more likely to benefit mechanicals in this entirely hypothetical scenario, rather than other humans.” The Clakkers paused in their conversation. They stared at her. “Oh, don’t mind me. Thinking aloud, that’s what I do.”

The existence of a secret network of Clakkers not beholden to the usual metageasa and, more to the point, capable of committing murder, went a long way toward solving a mystery that had nagged at her for years. Granted, she had approached the possibility of Clakker language starting from an outsider’s plausible hypothesis rather than from the disadvantageous position of somebody trained from birth to think of the machines as unthinking tools. Even so, she would have expected the occasional bright blossom among the tulips to realize their servants were talking about them. Perhaps they did, once in a while. And then somebody plucked them before word could spread.

Berenice drained a mug of ice-cold cow’s milk. Then she turned her attention to the contents of van Breugel’s satchel. Her mind had started working properly soon after they reached the inn; she found that bathing, changing into dry clothes, eating like a bear just out of hibernation, and warming the sea chill from her bones beside a dangerously large fire had a remarkably restorative effect. In retrospect, her best course of action was self-evident.

“Moving on,” she said, “we’ll never get anywhere without first deciphering the alchemists’ glyphs. But the best way to do that is with what cryptologists call a crib: a sample of text with a known and trusted meaning.” She pointed to the empty chair across the table. “So one of you take a seat.”

While soaking in the bath, she’d thought about how best to attack the alchemical scribblings. Cribs made everything easier. During the run-up to the previous war, she’d arranged for the
ambush of a trio of Clakker-drawn wagons pulling supplies to Fort Orange. Talleyrand’s agents gave her a detailed rundown of the ambush practically down to the number of grains of salt carried by the first wagon. When the garrison at the fort sent a message back to New Amsterdam, they used a paper message rather than waste a Clakker as a runner when the push across the border was imminent. Two women died in the effort to intercept and copy that letter, but not in vain. A reasonable guess that the report detailed what had happened and what was lost in the raid made it relatively straightforward to decode the letter. Months passed before the tulips changed their codes again. Unfortunately, the most urgent message traffic traveled by Clakker, so codebreaking was of limited use.

What they needed was a clear-text translation of the nautical metageasa.

Muninn said, “The meaning of the sigils etched into our foreheads is as much a mystery to us as it is to you. We cannot tell you their meaning.”

Odd, but probably true. Regular mechanicals were only receptive to new metageasa, and thus the sigils, when their pineal locks were activated. But as she’d seen with Sparks and the ship’s porter, that also rendered them inert, so they couldn’t read a fellow mechanical’s forehead while in that state.

“Not today. But we’re going to work on that.” She plucked van Breugel’s candle from the table and lit it using the fireplace tongs and a cherry-red coal from the hearth. This she flicked back into the fireplace before the candle melted. She set the candle upright in her empty milk glass. The wick burned red, giving off a greasy smoke redolent of burnt hair. But the capillary flow of melted wax quickly altered the flame from red to yellow to silver white. The burnt-hair odor became the sweeter scent of beeswax. Berenice took the lens between thumb and forefinger. To her unaided eye it looked like smoked glass.
But when she held it to the candle flame, it projected shimmering glyphs upon the walls like blurry stencils of moonlight. The quality of the images varied as she moved the lens. Hard enough to do this on land; it would’ve been impossible on a ship without specialized apparatus. No wonder van Breugel had used a rigid optical bench.

One of the machines joined her at the table. Owing to its backward knees, however, it didn’t sit. Silvery glyphs glinted from its body like incandescent moths. It said, “The apparatus for installing nautical metageasa won’t work on us.”

“I should fucking hope not. Otherwise I’d want to know why maritime rules deemed it perfectly acceptable for you to twist off the ship’s Clockmaker’s head. I honestly don’t care if you know the proper way to dog a hatch or whether you’re versed in the calculus of balancing passenger lives against cargo value and insurance premiums. What I care about is whether you’ll be able to describe what changes this apparatus is
trying
to produce.”

Another volley of mechanical noise ricocheted between the Clakkers. It persisted for at least half a minute—an eternity for machines who could exchange whole strings of concepts in the time it took a lady to belch. The conversation escalated from simple
clicks
to
twangs
,
bangs
, and what sounded like the protestations of a seized cog.