The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (42 page)

W
hile Longchamp had been underground witnessing the world’s strangest reunion, cursory forays had topped the wall in two places. Four men and women died sealing the first incursion. Nine died repelling the second. The bodies piled up so quickly there was no time to haul them away. The final defenders, Longchamp among them, made their last stand literally upon their dead comrades-in-arms.

Moments after he regained the banquette along the southeast bastion of the inner wall, Colonel Saenredam apparently decided the Lucifer glass was a failure. The mechanical army charged forward like a tightening noose.

Metal on the wall.

“How do we handle the human commanders?”

Berenice nodded. She knew what Daniel was thinking. As soon as they realized what was happening, they’d order their mechanical troops to look away. She gave her best answer.

“The new metageas must compel the altered Clakkers to force their unaffected colleagues to look.”

“This isn’t granting freedom if it forces behavior. I reject a metageas that compels my kin to visit violence upon one another.”

“Daniel, the change
must
be self-propagating. Otherwise it’ll never reach enough mechanicals in time to break this siege. All it will do is ensure they attend to one another’s freedom,” she lied.

The machine might have sighed. “Very well.”

A dull roar filtered into the crypt. The noise of combat. The sound of time running out.

Berenice paged through her notes, looking for a grammatical toehold. Her head throbbed; this was a daunting task. It was difficult enough without the added complexity of hiding the
true
grammar from Daniel.

Because there was no way in hell that she’d ever set the mechanicals loose. She’d turn the tide of this war, and she’d do it with Daniel’s help, but she’d do it on her terms. The mechanicals’ realigned allegiance to New France needn’t be permanent. Only until a French monarch was permanently restored to the throne in Paris. And perhaps just a little bit beyond that.

There’d be cleaning up to do, after all.

New France’s last line of defense was a loud and violent place, echoing with the wails of the fighting and the dying, the
crackle
of lightning guns, the teakettle
hiss
of steam harpoons, the
thump
of the chemical cannon. It stank of blood and hot metal.

Longchamp’s sledgehammer weighed more than all the men and women who’d given their lives for the ideal of New France. He couldn’t think, couldn’t plan. His entire universe was this wall, his entire history one of shouting, dodging, swinging. He’d been born here. He would die here.

Somebody bumped against him in the scrum of combat. He didn’t look, but he knew. Élodie Chastain.

“I told you to go with the king,” he gasped.

“Too late. Couldn’t get him away in time,” she said. “And I’m needed—” Together they ducked as a razor-sharp alchemical blade cleaved the air so swiftly it left the smell of ozone in its wake. “—here.”

Longchamp met the reverse swing with his hammer. He lacked the strength to knock the metal from its course, but Élodie added her own weapon to the parry. The blade peeled an inch of skin from Longchamp’s scalp. Blood ran from the gash and clotted in his eye. Longchamp swung his pickax at the machine’s forehead. Missed.

A nearby squad engaging an identical Clakker brought their assailant down with bolas. It knocked chips from the stone as it toppled over. It thrashed, trying to free itself before the killing blow landed. It bumped against its fellow mechanical, knocking it off-balance.

The wall was so thick with metal that the killers crashed into one another in their zeal for murder.

Élodie’s pick flew true; it drove home in a shower of black sparks. Longchamp managed a connecting blow. The force of the sledge scored the sigils and unwrote the killer golem. It went inert. Together they kicked the dead machine over the edge. It crashed to the stones of the inner keep.

Longchamp struggled to catch his breath. One more machine down. A few more seconds to live.

The sound of battle changed. The
chug-gurgle-chug
of the nearest chemical cannon became a cough, a sputter, a wail of despair.

“We’re out!” cried the gunner.

One by one, like toppling dominoes, the epoxy guns went silent. New France’s chemical defenses, the bulwark of its independence for centuries, had run dry.

“What about now?”

Berenice held another paper before Visser’s face. The priest moaned, closed his eyes.

“Please, please, please, please stop this. Please stop tormenting me. I’m begging you, please, for mercy’s sake, I can’t go on like this.”

“I’m so sorry, Father. I truly am,” she said. “But we have no choice.” She nodded at Daniel.

He took the man’s head in his hands, as gently as he could, and turned his face to the paper. Visser seemed to have aged thirty years since their chance encounter in New Amsterdam. Daniel tried to comfort the poor man when the sight of the newest string of alchemical sigils activated whatever dark magics the Verderers had imposed upon him and sent him into convulsions. Like the other fits, this left Visser damp with sweat and limp as a silk thread.

“Tell me what you must do,” said Berenice.

“I must look at the light. I must ensure that others tell me to gaze upon the light.”

“Goddamn it,” said Berenice. She crossed out the line of symbols and hunched over her notes again.

“Getting closer,” said Daniel.

“Not close enough, not quickly enough,” she muttered.

Daniel watched Berenice closely for signs of duplicity. He wasn’t stupid; he knew she had only agreed to his terms in order to get what she wanted. In matters of New France, she was a wide-eyed zealot. He didn’t believe she intended to free his kin. But he pretended to.

Clakker fusiliers shot the signal-lamp operators. The lamps fell dark. The crafty tulips systematically cut the French communication lines, rendering the dwindling front-line defenders deaf and dumb to their colleagues more than a few yards away. Coordination became chaos.

The former epoxy gunners took up the weapons of their dead comrades. Hammers, picks, and bolas were plentiful. Arms to wield them—arms with the strength and skill to wield them—had become desperately rare.

Where the eddies of combat went, so too the beleaguered defenders. As the attackers’ focus moved from one stretch of wall to the next, the defenders followed. A little more slowly each time. A little farther behind. Until the defense of bastion nine fell to a single squad.

Two women and two men. The thinnest of lines between survival and annihilation.

“Bastion nine! ALL FREE HANDS TO BASTION NINE!”

Longchamp struggled to make himself heard over the din of battle. He barely recognized his own voice. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed somebody scurrying to the nearest signal lamp.

Dear God. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve. He crouched next to a dead man, signal book in one trembling hand as he tried to work the lamp.

Longchamp struggled against the current. He swung his hammer like a thresher, trying to clear a path. Every step was a battle.

Two more defenders fell. One man and one woman stood between the inner keep and the metal tide.

“ALL HANDS TO BASTION NINE! BASTION NINE!”

A military Clakker somersaulted over a merlon, forcing Longchamp to retreat six hard-earned strides. He wasn’t going to make it. The marshal general joined him in repelling the incursion, but even if they survived the next few moments, he’d look again to bastion nine and witness metal killers surging atop the undefended wall.

The marshal mistimed his swing. A blade erupted through his chest. Hot blood misted Longchamp’s face. The blade rattled when the mechanical tried to withdraw; it was wedged
in the marshal’s breastbone. Longchamp heaved, drawing on reserves he no longer trusted. His hammer bent the alchemical blade. Behind the machine, he saw the last defenders of bastion nine fall to Clakker sharpshooters.

“BASTION NINE IS DOWN! For God’s sake, somebody get to bastion nine!”

The Clakker flung the marshal’s corpse. The impact bowled Longchamp down. He flailed, trying to clamber free of the dead man before the machine leaped upon him. Spinning bolas emerged from the haze of combat, entangling the machine. It fell into the inner keep, where farmers and fishwives set upon it.

Longchamp kicked the dead marshal over the banquette and gained his feet just in time to watch the first machines occupy the empty bastion. He ran. He was too slow. Too late.

But Brigit Lafayette wasn’t. She and her fellow birdkeepers sprinted up the stairs to engage the clockwork incursion. Longchamp recognized the bulging arms and tattoos of Oscar the blacksmith, too. He waded into battle with a hammer in each fist. The incursion became a deadlock, a stalemate. For one instant Longchamp’s eyes met Brigit’s. She actually winked at him.

Why had he never accepted her dinner invitations?

Berenice inhaled, swelled her lungs. At some point her nose had given up; she’d stopped smelling the dead.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s try this.”

Daniel cocked his head. Mere text didn’t convey meaning to him as it did to Visser; like Huginn and Muninn, he’d need to gaze upon a luminous version of the sigils to absorb their meaning. She’d sent Father Beauharnois in search of a craftsman—a carpenter or metalworker, somebody who could slap together the stencils quickly once she finalized the symbol sequence.