The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (3 page)

He said, “You might as well read it with me. Good or bad, the news will be all over the place before the bells ring Sext at midday. Earlier, if the news is terrible.”

Brigit unfurled the scrap of paper, but couldn’t read it until she’d rummaged the desk for a magnifying glass. It depressed Longchamp no small amount to think that she and he were of the same age. His eyes were no younger than hers, and they’d seen more terrors. His stomach growled. He was hungry enough to eat one of the pigeons, feathers and all, he realized. In fact… what had Brigit been saying about a meal? Had she been—

She put a hand over her mouth and swallowed a sob. The curled scrap of paper fluttered to the bench as she crossed herself with a trembling hand. Longchamp retrieved it. She found her voice and used it to call for an apprentice.

Pope Clement strangled. No murderer in custody. Swiss Guard silent.

Longchamp crossed himself for the third time that
morning. Then he looked at the sky. He couldn’t see the entity of his attention, but felt confident he’d be heard. If the Virgin wasn’t inclined to intercede on his behalf when his thought strayed the tiniest bit from the pious path, she could damn well listen while he expressed his feelings fully and honestly.

“Is this a fucking joke? Go ahead and take a crap in our porridge while you’re at it.”

A boy arrived just in time to hear Longchamp’s tirade. His face turned the color of a broken bone. Brigit pried Longchamp’s fingers open to pluck the crumpled message from his grip. She handed it to the boy. “Run this up to the Council Chambers. If there’s nobody to take it, get it to one of the king’s attendants.”

“No.” The lad looked ready to piss himself when Longchamp snatched the scrap of paper away from him. “That lot has a bad habit of blaming the messenger. You shouldn’t be the one to bring them this news, lad.”

Longchamp bundled up once more, not looking forward to ascending the Spire again. The wind had picked up; it whistled through the cages.

“Remember what I said.” Brigit’s hand brushed his elbow. “About sleeping, and eating. You’re not the young man you once were. You have to be careful. This place needs you.” Her gaze flicked to the message scrap and back. “More and more every day.”

He headed for the Porter’s Prayer. She trailed after him. “At least ride the funicular, Hugo.”

Shaking his head, he said, “My strength is my livelihood. I’m worthless without it. The day I can’t climb the Spire on my own is the day you should bury me.”

He emerged in the lee of the tower. The wind hit him in the face when he’d climbed a quarter circuit. It carried a faint dusting of ice that forced him to squint. Low, dark clouds scudded
across the fields to the west of Île de Vilmenon. Longchamp launched into a jog that took the stairs two at a time. Soon he was sweating.

Unless he’d forgotten his history, the tulips hadn’t moved against the Vatican since the so-called Migration of Cardinals long ago. Sure as deer fucked in the woods, this was retaliation for the Forge. That ice queen on the Brasswork Throne had a burr up her ass.

A patch of frost caught him unawares. He stumbled, fell. He slid outward and down, bumping down the stairs toward the blood-colored banister. He caught a slat and arrested his fall before he went corkscrewing all the way down to the inner keep. Snow flurries, the advance units of the coming storm, dusted him with a thin white coat as he climbed to his feet. He’d have bruises from knee to hip.

What a clusterfuck. Longchamp wondered what the former Talleyrand would have made of it.

B
erenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord—formerly known as the vicomtesse de Laval (prior to her banishment); formerly known as Talleyrand (before her post as spymaster for the king of New France went to a rival); formerly known as Maëlle Cuijper (when traveling incognito through the lands of her enemies); but, currently, a prisoner—looked up as the dark shadow of a mechanical centaur fell over her. The Stemwinder’s arms, all four, snapped like caged hounds catching a whiff of fox. Its
clip-clop
gait brought it close enough for her to hear the tintinnabulation of its clockwork heart; even standing, she would have felt like a child alongside the beast.

Berenice held a small knife the length of her index finger. It was dull. The Stemwinder could turn its arms into harpoons worthy of a kraken in half the time it took her to blink. It existed solely to serve the Verderer’s Office of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists: the Clockmakers’ secret police force. Stemwinders were mute witnesses and accessories to every act of murder, torture, sabotage, and coercion deemed necessary to safeguard the Clockmakers’ secrets. Rumor said
that even other Clakkers avoided the Stemwinders, and they had the benefit of alchemical alloy plating.

It loomed over her now, this self-aware amalgam of magic and mechanism. Its reconfigurable arms were wonders of horological ingenuity, equal to any task deadly or delicate. Berenice shifted her grip on the blade and cleared her throat.

“This pomegranate is excellent,” she said. “I would have another.”

The Stemwinder took her tray in its lower arms. As it pirouetted, turning for the kitchen, she added, “More coffee, as well. And don’t be stingy with the cream this time. Your masters practically rule the world, for Christ’s sake. They can afford to milk one extra cow.”

The clockwork servant opened the door, exited, and pulled the door closed with a rear hoof. As usual it gave no indication of having heard or understood what she said. But she knew it would return with another pomegranate, another cup of coffee, and a Delftware creamer. Stemwinders made excellent domestic servants.

She sipped the lukewarm dregs of her coffee and gazed through the immense pane of paper-thin alchemical glass that afforded her sitting room a view of the snowy hills and bluffs of the North River Valley. The contours of the countryside presented a peculiar flatness that contradicted her knowledge of the region; her depth perception had gone to hell after she lost an eye to a rampant military Clakker inside the walls of Marseilles-in-the-West, hundreds of miles to the north.

Her glass eye, an exquisite gift from her friend Hugo Longchamp, matched her real eye rather well. But it was a mere ornament. She hadn’t worn it since the Stemwinders returned it, a day or two after her capture.

The whole world had lost its texture the day Louis died. The mangled eye was just a detail compared with the
devastation wrought upon her heart by her husband’s death. Guilt cut more deeply than any knife.

Berenice blew her nose on the tablecloth and forcibly changed the direction of her thoughts. Based on the duration of the carriage ride on the night of her capture, she estimated this estate lay sixty or seventy miles upriver from New Amsterdam. She’d traveled the same river valley en route to the capital of Nieuw Nederland not long before she’d infiltrated the Forge, and this landscape looked familiar. A sentient airship had crashed along the river north of here, near Fort Orange; it had been shot down by its fellow mechanicals. There’d been a single survivor. She wondered, idly, what had happened to Jax, and whether he’d escaped the destruction of the Forge.

Doubtful. She’d heard the ear-shredding Rogue Clakker alarm before the building fell. Meaning they’d discovered him. She wondered if, in his dying moments, Jax had regretted the serendipitous series of accidents that had granted him Free Will.

Today had dawned cloudless, giving Berenice her first glimpse of a blue sky since her capture. Bare boughs of sugar maple, red oak, and hickory crosshatched her view of the hills like the withered hands of a crone waving her away. (
Too late
, she thought.) The snows of recent weeks still coated the countryside like a thick and exceptionally clean woolen blanket. A sheen of sparkling white caked the windward boles, suggesting steady winds from the northwest. Berenice made note of such information as she could glean from her picture window. The collecting of information had been her stock-in-trade; a habit etched into a woman’s bones wouldn’t succumb to the mere fact that she’d been banished, supplanted, and was now in the custody of her enemies.

The winter landscape was barren as the future of New France in the coming war. The war she had started. Well, she
and Jax. She had to assume he was responsible for the Forge’s destruction; she’d been busy cutting out a traitor’s eye, making her displeasure known to the man she had tracked from Marseilles-in-the-West across the border to New Amsterdam.

The view from her window also encompassed a long gravel drive. A carriage appeared there now, pulled by two Stemwinders galloping in perfect synchrony. Berenice glimpsed a crest on the lacquered blackwood: the rose-colored cross of the Clockmakers’ Guild.

She took another sip, seeing now not the landscape but a calendar. The timing was about right. She’d been sequestered here in the countryside for over two weeks since the Stemwinders caught her dulling her blade in the duc de Montmorency’s eye socket. He’d revealed her identity as Talleyrand to the tulips. So: say a week to get an urgent message across the Atlantic to the Central Provinces; several days while the rulers of the Dutch Empire decided what to do with their windfall; and another week for somebody important to make the trek to the New World. The timing worked if they commandeered the most advanced ships and airships in the world. Which is exactly what they’d do for a chance to get in a room with a former Talleyrand.

Berenice wondered, not for the first time, what they had planned for her. She’d spent the first few days of her incarceration waiting with nauseating dread for the knives and hooks, the hot coals and devilish machinery, to appear. But her captors had treated her no worse than they might a royal princess confined to the grounds of a single estate for some trifling transgression of the byzantine social order. They fed her, clothed her, bathed her, did everything they could to ensure her comfort. For what purpose she couldn’t begin to guess. But the Stemwinders were fanatical about her comfort. The food was excellent. If the tulips thought they could win her cooperation
with honey rather than vinegar… well, so much the better. Why waste all that delicious honey?

But all good things did eventually find their end. Berenice took it on faith that the appearance of the black carriage signaled the end of her enforced holiday. She wondered if her hosts intended a hard end, complete with white-hot flensing blades and broken bones.

She sighed and set down her cup. An ache took root in her eye socket like the moaning ghost of her body’s integrity. From the leather pouch hanging between her breasts, Berenice gently removed a glass marble. She swished it around in her mouth, then flinched when it popped into her eye socket with a wet squelch. It wasn’t fitted to the socket; she’d have the world’s worst sinus headache if she kept it in long. Her tongue tingled.

The black carriage appeared again. It emerged from the snow-blown shadows of the house, passing through the porte cochère beneath her window to roll to a stop before what she assumed was the front door, though she could not see it from her vantage. The rumbling of the carriage wheels along the drive shook loose a cornice of windblown snow from the corbels over the porte, leading to a heavy wet
thump
accompanied by a man’s yelp.

Berenice turned her chair so that she faced the door rather than the window. These accommodations were smaller than the apartments she and Louis had shared within the keep of Marseilles-in-the-West as members of the court of King Sébastien III. It was just a single room with a locked door and unbreakable glass, plus a private lavatory, but the mattress was soft, the goose down warmer than a widow’s bed had any right to be, and the furniture handsome.

A Stemwinder entered a moment later. It didn’t knock. There followed a woman, a man, and a second Stemwinder. She’d expected the humans. But the sight of the additional
centaur caused Berenice’s confidence to collapse like a fragile cornice of wind-sculpted snow. She hadn’t accounted for two monsters.

Christ on a blood-smeared cross, you tulip bastards just had to throw another wrench at my head, didn’t you?

The second Clakker carried a chair upholstered in button-tufted chintz matching the one Berenice occupied. The man wore a topcoat of gray twill. He held a somewhat wet and battered top hat and the sour expression of a man much put-upon by the world; he brushed snow from the former and muttered to himself, which did nothing to dispel the latter. The woman was dressed as though she’d been invited to a sleigh ride at the premiere winter ball of the season. The brim of her own hat was just narrower than the door through which she entered; the peacock feather in the brim had been dyed a ghastly shade of lavender that matched her gloves. Beneath the hat she wore a head scarf mottled in a jacquard pattern. Sunlight evinced a lustrous sheen in the voluminous fur stole that threatened to swallow her, suggesting a petite woman wrapped in ermine or mink.

The second Stemwinder placed the chair across the table from Berenice. Then it extended its arms, allowing the newcomers to use the centaur like a coatrack. They draped it with hats, coats, and stoles. The machine retreated into a corner while the other stood motionless beside the door. The man went to the window, where he squinted at the glare of sunlit snow. The woman seated herself and peered at Berenice across the remains of her breakfast of fruit, toast, roasted potatoes, and chicken sausage. Her leather boots dripped snowmelt on the rug, but the corners of her smile dripped something much colder. Sunlight glinted from the rosy-cross pendant on the fine silver chain around her neck. Nestled in one corner of the cross was a tiny inlaid
v
denoting the Verderer’s Office.

Clearly this was the person for whom Berenice had been waiting. So who was this tarty bitch from the Clockmakers’ Guild? Somebody with the clout to commandeer ships of the sea and ships of the air. But not so high up the ladder as to score her own retinue of Royal Guards. Not royalty, then, but somebody high in the Guild.

Berenice concluded the woman now settling across the table was the Tuinier: Anastasia Bell. The woman who ran the Stemwinders.

It seemed a solid guess. But as for the fellow who plodded along like a piece of flotsam caught in her wake, Berenice hadn’t a Goddamned clue. If Bell had come to question Berenice, she had her own skills and the Stemwinders to apply to the problem. Anybody else was superfluous. Unless questioning wasn’t what they had in mind. They could have questioned Berenice and ripped the answers from her broken body several times since her capture. The fact they hadn’t suggested a different aim.

A name fluttered to the forefront of Berenice’s mind. Like a scrap of paper caught in an errant breeze, it snagged in the bramble of her thoughts.
Visser.

A pastor from The Hague. Who had, whether intentionally or inadvertently, given Jax the errand that led to his emancipation from the geasa. Visser had known things only a French agent should have known. But, according to the mechanical, when they met again in New Amsterdam, he’d seemed an entirely different person. The previously pious and compassionate man had become a murderer. It was as though he’d been caught and… altered.

Berenice tried, with middling success, to sever the tendrils of fear now twining themselves around her stomach and spine. Not wanting her enemies to sense her anxiety, and hoping to set them off-balance, she said, “I assume you intend to change me as you did the pastor.”

She knew instantly that her stab in the dark had found a target because it cut the supercilious smile from the other woman’s face. She blinked. She cocked her head as if reassessing. It reminded Berenice of Jax.

“Yes.”

Nauseating dread sloshed in the pit of Berenice’s stomach. Being right wasn’t much comfort when faced with the impending ministrations of the Verderer’s Office. Berenice willed herself to outward calm.

“How?”

The woman removed her gloves and reassumed her composure. “Oh, I couldn’t explain it if I tried. My colleague here, Dr. Vega, is the expert. A pioneer, if truth be told. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

The man snorted. His breath frosted the glass.

A doctor. That wasn’t a good sign.

Berenice said, “You’re a medical doctor?” Now both newcomers looked at her. “Perhaps later you can inspect my wound,” she said, pointing to her eye. “It’s giving me a bit of trouble.”

“We certainly can’t have that,” said the other woman. “It’s very important to me—to us—that your comfort is completely uncompromised.”

“So I’ve noticed. You must be Anastasia Bell.”

“I am.” Again that unctuous smile. “The duke was right about you.”

“He survived? That’s a shame.”

“Yes, though you did him no favors. I’ll admit I appreciate your notion of poetic justice more than he does,” said Bell, pointing to one of her own eyes. “Since you admit to knowing Henri, I assume you also admit to being the one known as Talleyrand.”

“It brings me great pain to have to tell you, Mademoiselle Bell, that our mutual friend’s information is outdated. I no longer carry that title.”

“It’s not the first instance of Henri being mistaken. He told us you were dead.”

“Very nearly.” Berenice paused to rub her eye. “Don’t fault him for a lack of effort. He really did fuck us.”

Bell’s laughter was like that of a noblewoman caught unawares by the blunt pronouncements of a longshoreman. It carried just a hint of scandal, of thrill in taking momentary enjoyment of something untoward.

She said, “Oh, well. Doubtless even a disgraced spymaster carries all manner of fascinating information in her head.” Berenice tensed without intending to; Bell saw this. “But don’t worry. We won’t have to be crude about extracting it.”