The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (28 page)

Two days (though day and night had little meaning in this wintry land of endless twilight) and hundreds of leagues later, Daniel sprinted to catch up to the head of his column. The
moon fell behind a distant mountain while he jogged alongside Lilith before she acknowledged him.

What?

Running through snowy forests and crashing through river ice for days on end hadn’t sapped the heat from her latest bout of temper. But at least she spoke like a normal machine without attacking him.

I was thinking about the human that Ezekiel and Caleb found. The woman partnered with them to unravel the geasa. What happens to her? Once they no longer share the same goals?

The Lost Boys bounded across a frozen marsh. The passage disturbed a herd of caribou. The animals charged across the plain, snorting and—oddly—clicking.

A distorted reflection of the moon swirled across the dent in Lilith’s head when she turned. She looked at Daniel as if he were stupid. Which was something she did with notable frequency.
You poor naïve thing
.

Oh.

Yeah. They’ll kill her and dump her body in a ditch, just as soon as they can make it look like an accident.

Why did everything always boil down to murder? Berenice had stalked the man who betrayed her in large part so that she could kill him to avenge her husband. Pastor Visser had murdered the canalmasters of the
ondergrondse grachten
. Untold numbers of French citizens had died in the current war, and more still would perish when Marseilles-in-the-West finally fell. Mab’s agents would kill their human collaborator when they deemed their collaboration finished. It was a sad world, populated by savages of flesh and brutes of brass.

The labor at the mine is undoubtedly mechanical
, he said.
So what are we supposed to do when we get there?

He and Lilith hurdled a fallen tree in almost perfect synchrony, their footfalls separated by a third of a second. The
crashing of the dozens of mechanical feet in their wake startled something that went bounding into the snow. A fox, perhaps, or pekan. Lilith’s fellow scouts broadcast a quick rattle-chatter. She responded, confirming their bearings and agreeing that their route appeared correct.

Then she said,
I don’t know. But I have a good guess. And you do, too, whether or not you want to admit it to yourself.

She wouldn’t do that, would she? She wouldn’t have us attack fellow Clakkers.

No? Well, I guess we’ll find out when she opens that thing.

Lilith didn’t point at their leader. And Daniel didn’t risk a glance at Mab. If he had, he knew, he’d probably see the queen of Neverland watching him and Lilith. Daniel had concluded that her method for controlling the other Lost Boys didn’t work on them, else she would have applied a loyalty metageas on them. So Mab tended to cast a paranoid eye on their association. He’d be hard put to think of a more effective means of stoking her paranoia than glancing over his shoulder at her while embroiled in conversation with Lilith. So he didn’t.

But if he had looked at Mab, he would have seen in her hands a birchwood box slightly larger than a human baby’s head. It hadn’t left her side since she rallied the Lost Boys on their foray out of Neverland.

Nobody could tell Daniel much about the crater. Only that the Inuit spoke of it from time to time, and that it was very old: Their oral history had included it as an ancient truth of the world since generations that long predated Het Wonderjaar. The humans who traversed this land had discerned, also over many years, that the geological feature was almost a perfect circle, albeit one on a scale to dwarf even the greatest Clakker-driven architecture of the empire. Of the mechanicals Daniel
polled, some said it was a fluke of geography, perhaps a collapsed volcanic dome, and others that it was the fingerprint of God. Still others, and these were in the majority, echoed Samson’s sentiment: As long as this adventure led to grief for their former subjugators, they didn’t care about the minutiae.

Daniel saw the crater for himself a day later as the forest thinned and they approached the ragged treeline boundary between taiga and tundra. Over the decades in the Schoonraads’ service, he’d occasionally attended his masters at church and sometimes at salons put together by the city’s intelligentsia, or those who fancied themselves as such. So he knew there were two schools of thought about the nature of the Earth and God’s works upon it. There were those who maintained that the Earth was essentially the same as it had been wrought on the day of Creation, and that any deviations from the Lord’s blueprints accumulated very gently and very slowly; conversely, the catastrophists posited that change was a sudden, violent process. Finally laying eyes upon their destination didn’t enlighten Daniel in either regard, but it did make him wonder whether the changes they’d wreak here today would be gentle or catastrophic.

The former could become the latter more easily than one might prefer. He’d snuck into the New Amsterdam Forge intent on a more subtle form of sabotage, but circumstance had intervened, and some time later he’d been pulled from a mountain of smoldering wreckage.

As they trudged through the windblown snows in the shadow of a three-thousand-foot massif, Lilith and the other scouts exchanged a rapid flurry of
clacks
and
clicks
. Having reached a quick consensus, they urged the columns to a slower and quieter pace. After several straight days of sprinting, the war party of Lost Boys slowed to a stroll. Wind came whipping over the peaks to whistle through the gaps in their
bodies. The rosy glow of another failed sunrise gilded the eastern horizon and cast a faint blush across the snowy landscape. Minutes later, they stood atop a ridge, gazing north into the shallow bowl of a valley so wide Daniel couldn’t follow its contours. Its limbs were lost to darkness in the west and beneath a frozen lake to the east. The visible portion of the formation’s boundary traced a slight curve, like a human’s mouth warped in laughter or sorrow. The crater itself wasn’t the spectacular geologic showstopper that he’d envisioned. If he’d encountered it by running across the rim, he certainly wouldn’t have recognized the lip as part of a much larger structure. The depth of the bowl was similarly underwhelming. It dipped less than a hundred feet from the rim, and not in a precipitous cliff but in a gentle slope, like a thumbprint pressed into soft bread dough.

The feeble glow of a halfhearted sunrise couldn’t penetrate the interior of the crater. The land there lay in deep twilight. Occasionally star-and aurora-light glinted within the shadows at the crater floor: the signature of burnished metal in motion. Daniel refocused his eyes. So did the others. Dozens of eye bezels clicked and whirred as the Lost Boys all strained to pick out details of the work. Daniel spotted what might have been a tunnel entrance, but it was little more than a spot of full darkness in the crater’s already dark interior.

About halfway across the arc bounding the natural bowl, just a few leagues away from where they stood, cheery yellow lamplight streamed from the windows of a small building. An actual house, with two stories and glazed windows and shingles and smoke puffing from a chimney. Daniel recognized the architecture instantly. He’d seen thousands of houses like it during his century of service in the Central Provinces. It had been built by Dutch machines to Dutch designs. It looked almost cozy despite being surrounded and isolated within millions of acres of barren northland. And coziness meant humans.

But this outpost was hundreds of leagues from Nieuw Nederland. Far from the ragged edge of New France, too. He doubted few of the legendary coureurs de bois had made forays this far north. And if they had, they surely hadn’t stayed long enough to build houses.

The sight of the house filled Daniel with dread. The way Mab and some of the Lost Boys spoke about humans made him uneasy even when it came as idle talk hundreds of miles from any settlement. Now they had proof of a secret incursion by their makers into the lonely, trackless latitudes that Mab thought of as her extended domain. Daniel saw no sign of fellow Clakkers, but surely there would be machines to attend whoever lived there.

Mab addressed them. She used a human language. If there was a mine somewhere nearby—and suddenly that didn’t seem so far-fetched—it meant the countryside might be swarming with their kin. Tocks and ticks could pierce the wind, but frail human language was apt to get swept away by the arctic gales coursing down from the pole.

“Jonah, Rachel. Take your fellows down and stay behind the tor as long as you can. Go through the trees and circle around to the northeast and northwest until you’re within seconds of that house.” That would put them on the crater edge to either side of it. “And do not make any noise! I will impale any idiot who gives us away.” That left Lilith’s column. Though it had never really been an issue of command or control. “As for the rest of us,” said Mab, looking at Lilith and Daniel while she addressed the final column, “let’s go see who’s home this beautiful morning.”

The brief reassembly of the Lost Boys again split into thirds. The mechanicals led by Jonah and Rachel scampered down the massif with such verve that Daniel wondered if Mab had bestowed a geas upon them just now, or if they were merely
eager to see this through. Mab took the lead of Daniel’s group; the brass-plated Baphomet was agile as a mountain goat on her Stemwinder hooves. Upon gaining the snowy plain they crouched in crevices at the base of the mountain to give the others time to reach their stations. Daniel watched the house and surrounding landscape for any sign of fellow mechanicals in the area.

Mab didn’t wait long. She leaped from her hiding spot and sprinted across the icy plain as the last light of the aborted sunrise faded to gray. The others followed single-file, leaping with clockwork precision from one snowy hoofprint to the next in order to obscure their numbers. They were still half a league from the house when the high-pitched warble of shorn metal rent the silence. It came from the west. Then came the
bang
of metal against metal and the
crack
of seized gears. Sparks lit the shadows of a fir copse like violet fireflies: the color of abused alchemical alloys. It took Daniel a moment to understand what was happening, for he’d never seen it before.

Clakkers. Fighting each other.

Somebody had seen them.

A piercing shriek shook the ground and sent jagged cracks zigzagging across the ice. It was the sound of a machine wailing in existential despair. The sound of a soul betraying itself. Daniel had heard it twice in the past several months: the Rogue Clakker alarm.

Damn it
, said Mab.
Those idiots.

Somebody had seen Jonah’s group of Lost Boys coming from the south. If the work was concentrated in the crater and along the lip near the house, it would be immediately apparent that the newcomers were not regular mechanicals. If they’d been sent as extra labor, they would have presented themselves to the humans in charge of the work and thus would have gone to the house.

The crash of metal reverberated through the ragged treeline, audible even through the alarm, each blow knocking snow from naked boughs and shaking the earth underfoot. Every
clang
and
crack
swelled Daniel’s disquiet. The Rogue alarm temporarily paralyzed the mechanicals caught up in it—they were incapable of combat as long as it held them in thrall. The crashing and clanging was the sound of helpless kin beset by the Lost Boys. Mab’s subjects were thrashing the immobilized machines.

The alarm intensified as more of the enslaved Clakkers joined the chorus. Lilith asked,
Should we help them? It sounds bad.

Daniel wanted to explain to her that her compassion was ill placed. That the ones making the alarm were the ones needing the help.

Fuck those idiots. Get to the house!

Mab’s purloined legs cycled like pistons, punching clean round holes in the snowcover. Lilith accelerated. Daniel drove his body faster to keep pace with them. He launched into the fastest sprint of which his body was capable. The swell of
tock-tick
rattling from behind told him the other Lost Boys had done likewise.

The shriek of the Rogue alarm erupted from within the house. Window glass shattered. Any humans inside the house, Daniel knew, would be incapacitated by the noise. Mab appeared to know this, too, because she poured on still more speed and began to pull away from the rest of her column.

The alarm stopped. The noise from Jonah’s group changed. It lost the steady
clang-bang
rhythm of metallic impacts and became something chaotic. Now it was a true battle. Freed of the paralyzing alarm geas, the miners could defend themselves against the opportunistic Lost Boys.

Meanwhile, starlight gleamed on metal as dozens of enslaved machines came boiling over the lip of the crater. They encircled
the house. They saw Mab streaking toward them like an arrow, and hastily locked themselves together into a high bulwark to prevent her from leaping through the windows. She flung the box she’d been carrying for hundreds of leagues high overhead and backward. Samson caught it. Mab veered to the right, as though deterred by the wall of living brass.