The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (4 page)

Berenice groaned, rubbing her eye again. “In that case, I wonder why my comfort is so important. Gratifying as it is, one assumes this is a bit out of character for you.”

The head of the Guild’s secret police force waved off the question as if shooing away a bothersome housefly. “Oh, again, that’s something more suited to Vega’s expertise than my own.”

“I see.” Berenice plucked the glass from her eye socket. “Damn this thing,” she muttered. She blew on it, as if clearing away dust.

“Hmmm. I’d heard about your eye,” said Bell. “It’s a shame you couldn’t find something that matches. But I think it’s safe to say that once you’re working for us—”

Berenice snorted. “And people accuse me of overconfidence.”

“—we’ll have no trouble at all outfitting you with something slightly less conspicuous. No need to call attention to your wound, after all. I’m sure we can give you a better and more comfortable fit as well.”

The tendrils of unease twined through her insides gave Berenice a firm cold squeeze. Turning somebody was long, hard, delicate work. Frequently painstaking—best suited to the patience of a craftswoman. So the matter-of-fact way Bell took
it for granted that she could and would turn Berenice… The temptation was to discount her as a loon, and she would have, if not for what Jax had told her about Pastor Visser.

“Good with glassworks, are you?” Berenice asked.

“As with so many things,” said Bell, “our skill in that arena is without equal.”

“The Chinese make better porcelain. I’d bet their glassmaking is likewise superior.”

At this, Bell shook her head. Smirking, she added, “Nobody makes glass like we do.”

You’re telling me.
Berenice knew well the strange bauble that Jax had shown her, the lens or prism that had somehow broken his bonds and imbued him with Free Will. Thus turning him into a rogue and leading, somewhat indirectly, to Berenice’s current predicament.

Inspecting the piece from her eye for dust and scratches, she said, “This’ll scrape the inside of my head raw if it isn’t clean as a newborn’s conscience.”

She popped the glass in her mouth. It coated her tongue with the faintly metallic taste of blood. The doctor made a little grunt of disapproval. Bell was unmoved; surely she had witnessed far more unpleasant things as Tuinier. But she did frown.

“If you’re trying to choke yourself,” she said, “it won’t work. You wouldn’t even reach unconsciousness before the Stemwinders and Dr. Vega unclogged your throat.”

Berenice swished the bauble around her mouth, as though giving it a good tongue scrub. She wedged it to one side of her mouth. It was difficult to speak around the thing without running the risk of swallowing it, but she managed to say, “If I wanted to kill myself, I’d be dead already.” Her tongue shepherded the bauble across her mouth.

The Tuinier continued to affect an amiable sangfroid.
“Perhaps it would be better to have the cleaning done professionally. That doesn’t seem terribly sanitary.”

“Oh, this isn’t as bad as it looks.”
Swish, slurp, swish
.
Berenice used the table cloth to wipe spittle from the corner of her mouth. It gave her a chance to turn her head back and forth without obviously gauging the distance to the mechanical sentries. Too far. Again speaking around the glass in her mouth, she said, “Look, if we’re going to fence, I’d at least like some more of your coffee. It’s better than the shit we get in Marseilles.”

“I sense in you a civilized kindred spirit,” Bell said. Berenice assumed this came with a hefty dose of sarcasm, as at that particular moment she was finding it rather difficult not to drool with the bauble stuffed in her mouth. “I have a feeling that, given time, I’ll come to feel sadness that an accident of birth made us heirs of opposing ideologies. Perhaps if history had unfolded differently we might have been sisters, eh?”

Berenice rolled the glass around in her mouth. It clicked against her teeth. “I doubt it.”

Bell addressed the Stemwinder that wasn’t doing a passable imitation of a coatrack. “More coffee, now.”

Somewhere inside the clockwork centaur, Berenice knew, a new geas sprang to life. A burning ember of compulsion, the first flames of a searing fire that could not be extinguished by anything other than unswerving obedience. The Stemwinder had no choice but to obey Bell because, unlike the humans in the room, it had no Free Will.

The hulking machine crossed the room in two steps. It reached for the coffee service. It loomed over both women. Bell showed no concern for the deadly limbs just inches from their throats. Berenice took a deep, steadying breath.

And used it to launch the alchemical bauble across the table.

Bell recoiled from the spray of glass and spittle. She raised
an arm to shield her face. For a heart-piercing moment Berenice thought she had missed. But then Jax’s prism glanced from the Stemwinder’s outstretched arm with a quiet
tink
. The alchemical glass made a louder
clunk
when it fell to the silver coffee service, where it rolled to a slimy stop. But for the creak of Bell’s chair, the room fell still. Even the Stemwinder now stood frozen in midreach.

Bell wiped beads of spittle from her sleeves. The veneer of jocund civility dissolved. “I spoke much too soon. You’re just another jack-pine savage, like all your countrymen. How dare you
spit
on me?”

Berenice ignored her. Instead she addressed the Stemwinder, which still hadn’t moved. She met its strange, impassive eyes. Suppressing a shudder, she said, “You’re welcome. Have fun.”

A frown pulled Bell’s eyebrows low over her eyes. An instant later she saw the bauble on the coffee service. Her eyes widened as comprehension dawned. Indignation became abject terror.

Berenice had just granted Free Will to a Stemwinder.

“You—”

Whatever Bell intended to say, it was cut off by the high-pitched
whir
of machinery. The freed Stemwinder’s torso spun like a dervish, its equine body motionless while the rest of it rotated to face its companion. One limb clipped Bell hard enough to knock her to the floor. The other Stemwinder, untouched by Berenice’s trick, flung the hats and coats aside as it leaped to Bell’s defense.

Two of the rogue Stemwinder’s arms extended faster than Berenice’s eye could follow. The deafening
squeal
of tortured metal accompanied an explosion of violet sparks, and then one of the other Stemwinder’s limbs clattered to the floor in a spray of cogs and shrapnel.

Dr. Vega took just a few seconds to assess the situation. He sprinted for the door. He’d managed two strides before the
rogue extended another limb, piercing his throat and momentarily pinning him to the wall. Red arterial spray fountained from his neck as he slumped to the floor, twitching.

What have I unleashed?

The last time she’d witnessed a Clakker rampage, her husband had died shuddering. The rampant killer dispatched three dozen citizens of Marseilles-in-the-West before it was deactivated. All because of Berenice’s miscalculation…

She shook her head, forcing herself to focus lest she die transfixed by the terrible spectacle of a rogue Stemwinder. She reached for the bauble on the coffee service but touched an empty pool of cold spittle. Meanwhile, the Tuinier crawled on hands and knees toward the door at the far side of the room.

Just as Berenice made to tackle her, the damaged Stemwinder leaped upon the rogue with a tooth-loosening
clang
like the bells of Europe’s greatest cathedrals smashed together. The collision sent the rogue skidding into the table and knocked Berenice off-balance. Another appendage, reconfigured into a spear, sliced through the space where her head had been an instant earlier. She couldn’t tell whence the nearly fatal blow had come; the warring Clakkers assailed each other with a speed invisible and strength incomprehensible to human senses. The two machines became blurred ghosts highlighted by the glinting of sunlight and gouts of sparks as they smashed at each other in a relentless sequence of concussions. The floorboards groaned under the assault from their pounding hooves; another bodily collision smashed the table into flinders and sent the Clakkers into the wall, crushing the beams and sending great jagged cracks zigzagging through the plaster. Cracks appeared in the alchemical windowpane with a report like cannonshot. Dust sifted from the beams to salt Berenice’s hair. She scuttled on elbows and ankles as quickly as she could manage away from the killing zone. It wouldn’t take an errant blow to
crush her skull or skewer her heart—all they had to do was step on her, or slam into her, or brush against her with a fraction of their alchemically enhanced strength, and her shattered ribs would shred her lungs. The unchanged Stemwinder was now slave to a directive that superseded even the human-safety clauses in the hierarchical metageasa. Collateral damage was acceptable in the drive to disable a rogue. No rules burdened the rogue Stemwinder.

Vicious combat embroiled the rival mechanicals. They fought without consideration for the humans in their vicinity. Blood slicked the floor. In spots it had already begun to congeal in dark tacky puddles that tugged at Berenice’s blouse and skirt.

She wouldn’t get far in the wintery hinterlands of Nieuw Nederland wearing wet, bloodstained clothing. She needed a change of clothes and she needed her Goddamned prism back. If she escaped, she’d still be the most wanted woman in the world; Jax’s mysterious glass was her insurance policy against any Clakkers that tried to snag her. It was also her ticket to unraveling the forbidden knowledge of the Clockmakers’ Guild. Which, in time, would be the lever with which they overturned the Dutch once and for all. But at the moment, that lever was inching toward the door, clenched in Bell’s fist.

The Stemwinders slammed into the wall again. The house shook. The impact sent a spray of shrapnel, broken cogs, and hot sheared metal across floor. Berenice could barely glimpse the warring machines, so rapidly did they move, but it looked as though they’d both taken substantial damage.

Shit
, she realized.
Bell’s carriage had been pulled by a pair of Stemwinders. Plus my butler. So where’s centaur number three?
The deafening commotion from the fighting mechanicals surely warned all and sundry of a rogue on the premises.

Bell reached the door. Unable to turn the knob from her
spot on the floor, she rose into a crouch. Berenice leaped at her. But her compromised depth perception caused her to misjudge the distance and overshoot—

—Thereby sparing her an incapacitating injury when the third Stemwinder burst through the door. It trampled Bell. Her body crackled under the Stemwinder’s charging hooves. The impact sent her skidding across the blooded floor; she came to rest as a heap with one splayed arm bent above and below the elbow. The third Stemwinder threw itself into the fray. It plowed into its kin with such force that all three mechanicals smashed through the window. A gust of wintery air chilled Berenice as the clockwork trio rolled atop the porte cochère, kicking up great gouts of snow before they fell out of sight. A moment later a horse-drawn carriage, not Bell’s Clakker-driven conveyance, drove away from the house. It swerved to avoid the fighting machines. Clockmakers, or their staff, fleeing the rogue Stemwinder.

Berenice struggled to catch her breath. It steamed in the suddenly cold room. So did the blood congealing on the floor. A dusting of snow swirled through the massive hole in the wall.

Bell groaned. Berenice staggered across the room. She knelt over the whimpering Tuinier. Bell still held the fist of her shattered arm clenched tight. But new cold, a different kind of cold, shivered down Berenice’s spine when she saw the rivulets of blood leaking through Bell’s curled fingers. The woman whimpered when Berenice pried her hand open.

The bauble had been pulverized. A few larger shards of alchemical glass had sliced the flesh of Bell’s hand to ribbons. But most of the lens, or prism, or whatever the hell it was had been crushed into sand. Berenice’s insurance policy, and her best chance of unraveling the Clockmakers’ most closely guarded secrets, was no more.

“You wretched pus-dripping cunt!” she said. She punched Bell on the nose. “I needed that, Goddamn you.”

The
smash-clash-clang
of Clakker combat shook the house. The rogue Stemwinder—the last Clakker to ever be freed by the strange bauble that Jax had obtained—was outnumbered. Berenice didn’t like its chances. And even if it did prevail, there was no telling how it would interact with her. Would it kill every human it met, just for spite? Judging by their haste to escape, the Clockmakers in the house considered that a possibility. She needed to get as far from this house as possible before the fight ended. Which meant trekking through the cold and snow without any means of fending off any mechanicals that confronted her.

Berenice sifted through the wreckage for Bell’s hat, gloves, and fur stole. All lay in sticky pools of blood and had to be peeled from the floor. Berenice removed the woman’s boots, too. She tried to do it without jostling the broken legs but failed, judging by Bell’s groan. Last, Berenice unclasped the Guild pendant. She had to lean close and put her arms around the dying Tuinier to do this. Close enough to hear the watery gurgle in her exhalations. Close enough to feel the woman slide into shock. Close enough to remember how it had felt when Louis had died in her arms. Her husband, whom she’d loved ferociously, whimpering in a lake of his own blood until the shine left his eyes.

Now it was her whimpering enemy who lay dying in her arms, covered in blood. Her enemy whom she detested with similar ferocity.

Berenice fastened the chain around her own neck. She sighed. It took a few seconds’ work to assess Bell’s injuries and know they were beyond anything Berenice could do for her. Multiple broken bones, at least one compound fracture, and massive internal bleeding. She needed a team of physicians, not
palliative first aid. The wintery air breezing through the demolished wall turned her inconstant breaths to a ghostly fog, as though her spirit was already leaving her body. Bell shuddered.