The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (26 page)

She moved things around until more sigils were aimed at his eyes. Muninn cooperated by leaning forward or backward to alter the distance as the focal length of the arrangement changed. He froze.

Berenice counted thirty-seven beats of her heart before the machine spoke again.

“Correction. The protection of quintessence doesn’t override the human-safety metageas. It negates it.”

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on a bad-tempered camel. Clakkers could commit murder for the sake of protecting quintessence.

Berenice dropped her pen. Sat back. Rubbed her eyes.

The Guild wrapped itself in knots worrying about this quintessence. So what in Christ’s name was it, and how was it possible
that in all her years as Talleyrand (and all the times she’d read her predecessors’ journals) she’d never heard of such a thing?

“Tell me more about quintessence. What is it? Is it a physical object? Or a concept? Or a person?”

One of the trio of Archmasters, perhaps?

“It’s something to be protected above all else.”

“Yes, we’ve established that. But that could mean Queen Margreet’s favorite recipe for chocolate torte, for all I know. Or the answer to a particularly obnoxious riddle. What are its characteristics?”

Both machines ticked more loudly. The room echoed with their duet of asynchronous introspection.

“It is…” said Muninn.

They were as confused as she. So she tried another approach. “Forget it. Try this. Imagine you were still beholden to the geasa, not free as you are now. And that these nautical metageasa had been imprinted upon you. And that you were aboard a ship somehow imbued with or carrying this quintessence. And that halfway across the sea, it sank. What would you have to do? What actions would the metageasa compel you to perform?”

The answer was immediate. “I would force my way aboard a lifeboat.”

“With the quintessence?”

“Yes.”

A vague start. Was it intangible knowledge, such as a secret or concept, or a tangible physical object?

“What of the humans in the lifeboat? Say they were civilians with no connection to the Guild.”

Again the answer came instantly: “I would eject them. They would not survive the sinking.”

Ah. Out of danger they might witness the quintessence? Or the importance of protecting it? This argued for a physical object.

“Very well. And what if in killing the witnesses you capsized the lifeboat? How then would you protect and preserve the quintessence?”

“I would attach myself to it to prevent its loss. Once upon the ocean floor, I would carry it to its destination.”

Probably a physical object, then. Berenice nodded. This was progress. She took several deep breaths to center herself, lest the rising bubble of giddiness break her concentration. So many questions, so many avenues to chart.

“Instead of a ship, say you were leased to a warehouse containing this ‘quintessence’ along with many volatile materials. A lightning strike ignites a raging fire that burns out of control faster than the fire brigade can contain. What actions would you be forced to undertake?”

This time the answer was not immediate. The machines descended into clicking contemplation.

Muninn said, “I… don’t know. I have never been subjected to any geasa pertaining to quintessence.”

“Nor I,” said Huginn.

She ran ink-stained hands through her hair. “This doesn’t make a shred of sense. Why would they twist themselves in knots worrying about quintessence in a maritime context, but not give two shits about it in other contexts? They’re crafty bastards, but they’re not idiots.”

Muninn said, “We do not understand it either.”

Berenice stood too quickly. The hem of her dress, caught under a wooden leg, capsized the chair. It crashed to the floor. She righted it. Paced.

Damn the fucking Clockmakers and their constant obsession with riddles, secrecy, obfuscation. It was almost as if—
Oh
.

Actually, there was a scenario where this made sense. What if the syntactic block pertaining to quintessence wasn’t part of the
standard
maritime metageasa? What if the quintessence
clauses were unique to that particular ship, or that particular voyage? She could muster enough circumstantial evidence to make it plausible. The odd tenor of her interactions with Captain Barendregt and his human crew, not to mention van Breugel’s anxiety around her, did make more sense if they expected and dreaded the Guild to scrutinize their journey. A slender thread…

Surely the Clockmakers wouldn’t build variants of the hierarchical metageasa on a whim? To do so would be to chisel at the foundation of their house—the fundamental substrate of a Clakker’s obedience, the fence that circumscribed every action it took throughout its life. She had to assume cooking up a variant took considerable effort, and that they wouldn’t release it unless they’d vetted the modified system of geasa for potential problems. Safe to assume, then, that the Guild wouldn’t create unique variants of the maritime metageasa except for extraordinary circumstances.

What was extraordinary about
De Pelikaan
? Something in the hold? Quintessence?

“All right, boys. Tell me again how you knew you’d find me on the
Pelikaan.
”

Muninn said, “We left that to your pursuers. We merely attached ourselves to the effort to recapture you.”

“How in the hell did you manage that?”

“When two extra mechanicals appear on the scene, claiming like the others to have been sent directly from the Verderer’s Office specifically to assist in the effort to capture the most wanted woman in the New World, nobody questions it.”

“Naturally.”

Undetected, a rogue Clakker could go virtually anywhere in the Dutch-speaking world. And the mysterious Queen Mab was exploiting that weakness in Dutch society.

Muninn said, “Your pursuers began with the hypothesis that
you sought to leave the continent. The best opportunity would be via the New Amsterdam port, reachable within a half day from your last known location. Thus they reasoned that you would travel straight there and seek to board a vessel departing as soon as possible. You’d also prefer a vessel where you could minimize interactions with crew and passengers. A cargo vessel rather than a passenger liner.

“Three ships meeting those criteria were moored at New Amsterdam during the probable window of your arrival and departure. Of those, only one,
De Pelikaan
, altered its destination just prior to departure. That was promising, as traveling to the Central Provinces seemed an unlikely move on your part. Witnesses placed somebody matching your description at the port just before its departure. When it became clear which ship you had boarded, a titan was immediately repurposed, its passengers forced to disembark.”

Berenice said, “That must have upset a lot of very wealthy people.”

“We know nothing of it.”

“You studied the
Pelikaan
. Tell me about it.”

“We infer it made a westward crossing, possibly at high latitude, several weeks ago.”

Berenice stopped pacing in midstride. Leaning against the wall, she closed her eyes. A northern crossing in winter… Of course! That explained why the craft had been so odd. The shape of the bow, the bladed hooks on the sculls: The
Pelikaan
was an icebreaker.

Something at the back of her mind raised a flag at this. But pinning it down was like trying to scratch an itch inside her skull. “Go on.”

“We know it arrived in New Amsterdam after landfall in the north and a voyage down the coast. No other stops in Nieuw Nederland.”

“Acadia?” The maritime coast of New France was dotted with numerous seasonal harbors, but these were fishing villages with minimal long-distance shipping and minimal moorage for larger ships. Many iced over in the winter.

“Unknown. Unlikely, given the political situation.”

“Farther north, then,” Berenice said.

“Possibly.”

The phantom itch was a picnic ant crawling through her subconscious. A Dutch ship, whose mechanicals had been imbued with a unique variant of the nautical metageasa, making a dangerous winter crossing followed by landfall in the ragged northern hinterlands beyond the settled outskirts of New France…

She pinched the bridge of her nose, concentrating.
Think. Where did I recently hear something about the north?

It couldn’t have been terribly recent. Her last substantial conversation prior to boarding the ship had been with Anastasia Bell. Prior to that, and now she had to cast her memory back quite a few days, the only human she’d spoken to at anything resembling length had been—

“Son of a bitch. You weaselly short-dicked elk-fucker. You cowardly, shit-eating traitor.”

After her banishment, Berenice had spent weeks hunting a traitor to New France, the former duc de Montmorency. She’d found him across the border, living comfortably among the tulips while they put the finishing touches on the New Amsterdam Forge. He hadn’t been pleased to see her again.

Now the memory of those frantic few moments came rushing back to her:

She knelt on his chest, pinning his arms under her knees, and placed the tip of her knife under his eye. Not hard enough to cut, but hard enough to ensure he didn’t squirm. She leaned forward until her mismatched eyes were just an inch from his.

“Now, dear Henri, what did you give the tulips?”

“Chemical stocks. All of them.”

“And?” He tried to shake his head. She increased the pressure on her knife. “And?”

“Recipes. Formulae,” he whispered. “Manufacturing processes.”

“Goddamn you. What else?”

“Nothing. Nothing else.” The duke tried to look away when he said this. As any liar might.

“What.” She pressed a little harder. Blood trickled from his lower eyelid. “Else.”

His lips trembled. His breath smelled of stale vomit. “Maps,” he said. “Land.”

“You stupid son of a bitch. You can’t give the tulips something they’re already planning to take. You gave your lands to them when you betrayed New France.”

At which point she skewered his eyeball. It seemed a fitting response, and poetically just. She’d been too focused on her own rage and the need to avenge Louis to consider carefully the final drops of information she’d wrung from the fugitive French noble. But now she felt the giddy tingle that came when a particularly vexing pair of puzzle pieces slotted together.

She said, “I can’t tell you what quintessence is. But it must be crucial to the Guild’s aims to rate such extraordinary protections. And I believe they’re secretly mining it somewhere far north of New France.”

If so, this had been under way for a long time—mines didn’t establish themselves overnight, even with Clakker labor. The tulips’ undeclared presence north of the forty-fifth parallel constituted a severe treaty violation. But Berenice saw little benefit to throwing stones from within this particular glass house. And anyway, raising that political quibble during a shooting war made as much sense as trying to flood Venice by pissing in the ocean.

The Clakkers erupted with mechanical chatter. They faced Berenice as if prodded by an urgent geas.

Huginn: “We must notify—”

Muninn: “—Queen Mab.”

“Both of you? We still have work to do.”

The announcement sent a frisson of fear down Berenice’s spine. Was this the moment their temporary alliance came to an end? The moment she became expendable? It was coming, she knew. But she wasn’t ready yet.

She trembled. Huginn and Muninn traded more clickety-tickety chitchat. Then it stopped. Muninn departed without another word. Behind the closed door, metal footsteps receded down the corridor. Berenice went to the window. It was snowing. Moments later a lone servitor emerged from the inn, moving at a brisk walk. It dodged a wagon, then blurred into a sprint. Snowflakes eddied in its wake.

“Goodbye, son. Write when you find work,” she said.

T
he wind smelled of ash from the smoldering ruins of the town, exotic chemical compounds, and the metallic ozone tang of the lightning guns. And, as always, the blood-and-shit stink of viscera. No matter how they scrubbed the stones after each incursion, the scent of the mutilated dead always lingered.

The first engagement with the new mechanicals, the ones immune to epoxy, had been costly. For both sides.

The tulips had sent their forces crashing en masse against the wall, expecting to overrun the epoxy cannon emplacements and take the citadel by sunrise. And they would have, too, if not for the former vicomtesse de Laval.

The tulips didn’t know she’d sent warnings about the chemical stocks and Montmorency’s secret deal with the Dutch. And though he’d colluded with the tulips to see the fall of Marseilles-in-the-West, the duke didn’t know that Berenice had spent her years as Talleyrand quietly funding the development of alternative technologies. The tulips had seen the prototype steam harpoons during the previous siege, but they’d never seen anything like the lightning guns.

Longchamp wished he could have seen the look on the human
commanders’ faces when the defenders first unleashed the incandescent streamers of energy that went zigzagging through the elite mechanicals. In truth, the lightning slowed machines more than it knocked them out of commission. But in the middle of the night that coordinated volley had been impressive as hell.

Impressive enough to give the tulips pause; they’d pulled back and regrouped.

Steam power had proven moderately useful in the previous siege, inferior to chemicals but capable of impaling a Clakker straight through the chest, or shearing off a limb, if the damn thing didn’t explode or fizzle
and
if the gunnery team managed a particularly lucky shot. But the narrow harpoons lacked the area effect of the epoxy cannon and chemical petards. The lightning cannon were an entirely different proposition. The technicians had expected to spend years maturing the technology. A few months ago the most they could do was make a dead frog dance. Now they were trying to paralyze clockwork killers
without
electrocuting half the men and women on the wall.

But there weren’t enough of the new weapons to station evenly around the curtain wall. The defense had become a juggling act, a hodgepodge of dangerously outmoded traditional weapons and terrifyingly immature innovations.

In response, the tulips had adapted to the French tactics by going back to smaller, scattered forays against the wall, all the while mixing their newest toys with traditional clockwork infantry. Longchamp suspected the machines with chemical immunities were the get of the Grand Forge of New Amsterdam, which had been operating just a brief time when it was destroyed. That made them relatively rare and very valuable. But their similarity to regular ticktocks kept the defenders in constant chaos as they scrambled to swap between traditional
and cutting-edge weaponry. A chemical counterattack that immobilized six of eight machines wasn’t good enough.

Because the Dutch didn’t need to place a battalion of Clakkers inside the walls. A mere handful could scythe through the weary defenders like the grim reaper himself. Even a bull could fall to a pack of coyotes, given time. What matter if the bull managed to kick a few skulls and gore a few bellies during its grinding descent into darkness? The pack comprised thousands more ready to leap in.

Longchamp wondered who would run short of supplies first. Would the tulips run out of their newest toys, their machines with built-in chemical defenses, or would the defenders first run out of chemicals to use on the traditional machines, fuel for the steam harpoons, strong arms to recharge the lightning guns?

The marshal had ordered lamps stationed at regular intervals around the Porter’s Prayer. They blazed with dazzling actinic light. They raked the enemy ranks like the angry gaze of God. The lamps, sheltered within the helical stair and moved every few minutes, bounced their light through a gauntlet of mirrors and prisms to obscure their location. Still, clockwork snipers knocked out the lamps almost as quickly as new ones could be brought online. So much shattered glass littered the stairs that Longchamp’s boots crackled as though he walked through a field of ancient bones.

They didn’t dare station the lamps with the gunners. The gunnery teams were already too vulnerable.

Longchamp ordered a lamp team to send its beam farther out, beyond the last rank of the enemy camp, toward the pavilion. It had been so long since he’d breathed air that wasn’t just smoke and ash that he’d forgotten there was a time when his eyeballs didn’t sting as though somebody had snuffed out cigars against them. Using a spyglass, he glimpsed a wooden
frame, steel-blue smoke billowing from a stone chimney, a steady stream of servitors hauling covered carts in, and another hauling empty carts out. His study of the enemy construction project lasted just a few seconds before a concentrated volley of fire shattered the focusing mirror. Crouching behind a shelter, pelted with shards of broken safety glass, Longchamp reflected on the zeal with which the tulips wanted to keep that construction a mystery.

The dread sickened him. Mysteries were just surprises waiting to be unwrapped. Surprises were bad fucking news.

Spots of magnified lamplight slewed across the moat and walls in the never-ending search for movement in the dark. One glinted on metal and froze like a kitten in a windowsill seeing a songbird for the first time. A trio of Clakkers scurried up the outer wall between bastions eleven and twelve, slightly north of southwest. The flash of semaphore lamps strobed the night: spotters sending targeting information to the gunners.

Three uncamouflaged machines at once. Guaranteed to be seen, and guaranteed to draw the defenders’ close attention.

Diversion.

And not even a sly one. A bald-faced feint. That was the most galling—and chilling—thing of all: the tulips’ utter laziness. So thorough was their disregard for the beleaguered defenders they could hardly be bothered to disguise their intentions. Because, in their mind, the outcome of this battle was a foregone conclusion. The longer the siege, the greater the danger that that mind-set would infect the defenders.

“Watch the other quadrants!” he called. “Gunnery teams two, five, and eight, STOKE THE BOILERS!”

The signal lamps turned Longchamp’s orders into a rapid sequence of blinks and flashes, like the mating dance of fireflies. He sprinted around the Porter’s Prayer, ears all but inured to the ossuary crunching of his boots on shattered glass, to
one of the ziplines that had been strung from the Spire to the curtain wall. Sweaty hands on the crossbar and leather loops doubled around his wrists, he gritted his teeth and stepped atop the bannister. The blood-red polymers flexed under his weight. The glass embedded in the synthetic rubber soles of his boots scritched against the smooth bannister. He slipped. The bottom fell out of his stomach during the instantaneous eternity before the zipline cable took his weight. The long hafts of his pick and sledge slapped against his back. Longchamp coughed down an acid gorge with the aftertaste of that morning’s pemmican. Air whistled through his beard. For a few seconds the sounds and smells of the siege fell away, and he was flying through the night with only the buzzing of the zipline cable for ambience.

Falling gave him a unique but dizzying view of the battle. No question the shiny trio was a bald diversionary feint: His ears pricked to the shouts of spotters, and his eyes picked out the frantic activity of gunnery teams on two additional bastions. His gut, that cynical killer of hope, felt there were surely more attacks unfolding upon the outer curtain wall where he couldn’t see them. Additional spots of chaos behind the parapet, drawing additional guards like whirlpools drawing careless soldiers to their deaths. Rivulets of rank sweat trickled down his flanks.

Is this it?
he wondered.
Is this the moment when the unstoppable metal tide truly crashes against our shore?

His fingers twitched, itching for the soothing
click
of rosary beads, or to make the sign of the cross. Anything to ward off this evil. If ever Marseilles-in-the-West needed the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, it was now. But since his wrists were yoked to the zipline crossbar, and since undoing that was sure to prove suicidal, he demurred. Why kill himself, when the Clakkers would see to it soon enough? Still, his lips sent
soundless prayers into the teeth of the wind, praying to Mary and all the saints.

But then the swoop of the cable sent him skimming over the inner curtain wall and across the outer keep. A padded merlon loomed large in the moonlight. The hobnails in his boots tossed sparks as he skidded along the banquette. He gritted his teeth again, anticipating the protest twinges from his bruised ribs. He bumped against the cushion just hard enough to remember why he despised the Goddamned ziplines, no matter how useful and clever they were.

He joined the spotters crouching behind the merlons on the east bastion. He didn’t know any of them by name. Raw recruits fresh out of the conscription lottery; he’d stationed some of the greenest defenders here, out of a vain attempt to preserve them from the worst of the action, and to prevent them from interfering with their more experienced peers when the real fighting started. But this portion of the curtain wall was directly across the keep from the shiny trio, and thus the most logical place for a second prong. At least the spotters and gunners knew better than to tear their attention away from the wall to acknowledge his arrival. The ticktocks could slice a man in half in a fraction of the time it took to salute.

Longchamp squinted through the embrasures, concentrating on the edges of his field of vision, but he couldn’t see a Goddamned thing. His flight over the inner keep and the constant strobing of the semaphores had blown his night vision.

“Metal on the wall! I have METAL ON THE WALL!” announced a spotter on the adjacent bastion. The woman crouched next to Longchamp took up the cry a moment later. “Two! Two mechanicals!”

A pair of lamp beams pierced the shadows. They zigzagged across smooth gray granite pocked with the finger-and talon-holes gouged by previous attackers. Then Longchamp saw the
machines. Big ones, larger than servitors, and blacker than jet. Soldiers. Their enlarged forearms contained serrated spring-loaded blades sharp enough to shear the red from a rainbow. Or shear clean through a man’s shoulders. Which happened to be one of the worst things he’d ever seen. Longchamp whispered a quick prayer to the Blessed Virgin that these young conscripts wouldn’t be plagued with the same kinds of visions permanently inscribed inside his eyelids.

He sprinted along the banquette to join the gunners, the
crunch
of his bootsteps muffled by the
glug
of the epoxy cannon and the buzzing
crackle
of a lightning gun. Longchamp’s hair stood on end as he passed the latter. It felt like a thousand roaches scurrying across his body.

The spotters had a fix on the approaching Clakkers. The deadly machines bounded up the curtain wall in ten-foot leaps. Stone cracked each time they affixed themselves to the wall. The granite was dry. It hadn’t been lubricated.

Longchamp shouted at the men in the overhanging machicolation. “Open that murder hole, you lazy dick-lickers! What in Christ’s name are you waiting for? Grease those motherfuckers and send them sprawling into the moat before they gain the top!”

A lad he didn’t recognize looked up with panicked eyes. “The cauldrons are empty! We can’t get restocked. What do we do?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. All the stores of lubricant had been diverted. Every drop was needed for the wooden rails going up all around the perimeter so that the chemical, steam, and lightning weapons could be reshuffled at will. Meaning they couldn’t slick the walls to slow the attackers’ advance.

“Huygens, there are times when I take comfort in my sinful nature, for it means I’ll meet you in hell. I’ll be the one stomping on your jewels with singular dedication.”

Next problem. From this distance, the modified Clakkers with their ability to shrug off chemical encumbrances were indistinguishable from their traditional counterparts. If these were traditional machines, the epoxy cannon was the best choice. If they weren’t, a wasted shot would only hasten the fall of Marseilles-in-the-West. Each and every clash had become a gamble, a rapid weighing of dwindling resources against the probability of success. The calculus of survival: risk wasting precious chemical defenses, or risk an ineffectual counterattack?

Longchamp yelled over the din. “Epoxy, take the leader! Lightning gun, take his friend!”

The chugging of the compressor grew to a crescendo. The lightning gun emitted a high-pitched squeal as the Saint Elmo’s fire at the tip of the muzzle enveloped half the barrel. It buzzed like a nest of enraged wasps.

The goop gunners fired. The cannon vomited twinned streams of epoxy and fixative that slammed into the lead mechanical just as it flexed for a leap that would send it over the parapet. A musky odor and a wave of heat washed over the defenders as an instantaneous chemical reaction froze the machine in place. Guards cheered. But relief, even for the slimmest of stolen moments, was the province of the dead or the victorious and nobody else.

“Cheer when we’ve won, you spineless lumps of shit!” cried Longchamp. “Don’t waste your energy on a defeated enemy! Give it to the next one!”

And indeed the second machine swerved wildly to avoid the splash zone. It moved too quickly for the lightning-gunnery team to track easily; the new armaments lacked the epoxy cannon’s decades of refinement, and weren’t built with weight and leverage in mind. The military Clakker unsheathed its alchemical blades and backflipped up the curtain wall in the corner
of the bastion, spinning like a top and pulverizing stone with every impact.

“Jesus Christ, fire!” Longchamp screamed.

The machine launched itself at its immobilized kin. It used the crystallized blob of chemistry and alchemy as a platform for a handspring that sent it somersaulting over the parapet.