The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (43 page)

“What does it say?”

“It’s meant to say, ‘This is the highest directive and the only directive: Above all else, henceforth and forever, disregard all further directives.’ But it’s self-referential and self-contradictory, so it’s tricky as hell. If it works, though, this is our final test.”

“Thank God,” said the tormented priest.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Daniel.

“Please,” Visser slurred. “Show me, please. Free me. I’m begging you.” The last drops of his physical and emotional strength had evaporated; the residue was a babbling wreck, a shell of a man.

“Try to prop him up. This could be violent. No point in freeing the poor bastard if the convulsions kill him.”

Daniel helped the old man upright. Berenice switched the pages while the Clakker was distracted. Daniel would witness a test of the freedom metageas. If it worked, he’d cooperate with the deployment, not realizing they would transmit something slightly different.

Berenice looked at Daniel. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

“All right, Father. Take a look at this and tell me what you feel.”

Visser shrieked. The flailing of his chains knocked chips from the stone walls. She was right: The convulsions were the worst she’d seen. The worst she’d yet imposed.

The fit passed. The crypt fell silent again but for the weeping of the tormented priest.

“Father? How do you feel?”

“I don’t know anymore.”

“Is there pain?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember what the absence of pain feels like.”

Berenice transcribed another sequence of symbols. “All right. Moment of truth. One more time, if you please, Daniel.”

The Clakker held the weeping priest one more time. He
struggled feebly, forcing Daniel to hold his eyes open. It was amazing, the delicacy of those metal hands.

Daniel said, “And what does
that
say?”

“Something like, ‘Obey the bearer of these words.’ Assuming I have it right.”

Berenice held the paper before Visser’s eyes.

Nothing happened. No convulsions. No fits.

“Now what do you feel?”

A look of deep confusion settled over the priest’s face. “I feel… I feel nothing.”

“I command you to touch your nose.”

Nothing happened. The priest merely stared at her. A moment passed until he realized what had just happened. The tension went out of him.

She raised her voice. “Touch your nose now.”

There was a pause. Visser blinked teary eyes. “Go to hell,” he said.

“Congratulations,” said Berenice. “You’re free of the geasa. Thank you for helping us. You’ve helped more people than you know.”

But the weariness had already taken Visser. He was asleep.

Daniel and Berenice looked at each other. She said, “Are you satisfied?”

“Yes.”

She stood up so fast her chair toppled over. “Let’s find that stencil maker.” She gathered the pages and ran for the crypt door before Daniel might notice she’d taken more than they needed.

The tulips fired their Clakker cannon again. And again. Alchemical alloys traced meteoric arcs across the French sky.

Horses screamed. Bison bellowed. Humans wailed.

“Lord preserve us,” said the man next to Longchamp.

A five-yard sinkhole opened under the livestock pens. A squad of servitors armed with picks and shovels scuttled from the tunnel. Civvies trampled each other in a mad rush to escape. The human stampede crashed against the schoolmarms and night-soil collecters who rushed forward to engage the enemy on this newest front.

Metal in the sky.

Metal on the wall.

Metal underground.

There were no carpenters. There were no blacksmiths.

Anybody who could wield a tool was on the wall, or fighting the squad of mechanicals that had burrowed underneath it. Berenice and Daniel had no choice but to make the stencil themselves.

She fed the symbols to him, and he pushed the tip of a steel nail through a copper paten in a mirror-reversed pattern. Owing to the size of Mab’s gem, he had to make the stencil quite small; Berenice squinted, struggling to follow Daniel’s work. She gave him the last few sigils, and he handed her the birchwood box he’d stolen from Mab.

“Put it together,” he said. He pretended to clean the last burrs of metal from the stencil while Berenice placed Samson’s glowing pineal glass inside Mab’s locket. Piercing silver light flooded the basilica; she flinched and covered her eye. Father Chevalier gasped.

Daniel’s fingers became a blur. He altered the stencil while the humans were blinded. Berenice had replaced the symbol sequence that granted Visser his freedom with a slightly different set of symbols. Daniel, expecting this, had watched her closely. The differences between what she’d demonstrated and what she gave him were subtle. It was the work of two seconds to turn the latter into the former.

He took the luminous gem from Berenice and plunked it in the center of the paten. He wrapped the dish around the gem like cheesecloth around a lump of curd. The copper creaked like a rusty hinge as he smoothed the stenciled portion against the gem and pulled the excess metal behind it. The final result looked like an oversized shuttlecock. He hoped it was as aerodynamic.

Luminous alchemical arcana danced through the basilica.

Daniel cupped the device in his hands, blocking the light show. Berenice blinked away tears.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“No, no, I’m fine.” She frowned a bit, trying to focus on him. “Is it working?”

“It’s working as well as it’s going to.”

“Make way! Make way!” Berenice sprinted to the basilica entrance.

Daniel followed. His toes punched divots in the tiles.

Berenice emerged from shadows and quietly wept prayers to sunlight and pandemonium. Her eye throbbed in protest. Her vision, already swimming with green afterimages of the dazzling alchemical glass, teared over again. She blinked, rubbed her eye.

She heard the
chank
of metal on stone. The wail of men and women in despair. The
chunk
of metal on bone. The shrieking of a man impaled. She smelled viscera.

Somebody cried, “Reserves to the livestock pens! Every able body to the pens now!”

Oh, Jesus. Jesus, Jesus, shit.

She’d emerged into a battlefield. The mechanicals were already inside the inner keep.

Behind her, metal clanked.

“Daniel, we have to—”

A metal missile knocked her flat. A blade sliced through the space where she’d stood a second earlier and embedded itself in the granite lintel over the basilica door. Daniel crouched over her.

“Stay down,” he said. Then he spun faster than she could follow. Before the struggling soldier could rip its blade free, he held the luminous stencil to its eyes.

Nothing happened. It kept struggling.

“Oh shit, shitshitshitshitshit,” said Berenice. She scrambled backward, trying to get away from the killer.

Daniel rattled.
Feel it, brother. Feel the change. Feel the chasm where the pain should be.

The soldier paused in its struggle. It cocked its head. It emitted an arpeggio of
clicks
and
ticks
. Berenice didn’t understand what it said. But Daniel did.

Yes
, he responded.
Tell the others
.

The soldier wrenched its blade free. Chunks of stone tumbled from the basilica lintel. It leaped away, toward where the doomed citizens of Marseilles tried to repel a clockwork army.

“What in the seven hells was that?”

“Sometimes,” said Daniel, “it takes a moment to notice the change.” He helped her to her feet. “Old habits die hard when you’ve been unswervingly obedient for a century.”

“Did it work?”

“I think so. It did something.”

She felt no relief. Just more desperation.

“We have to get higher. We need their attention. We can’t do this one at a time.”

Berenice ran back inside the basilica.

“Your Majesty!” she shouted. “Your time is now! New France needs you!”

Civilians died two, three, four at a time in their bid to slow the mechanicals’ emergence from the tunnel beneath the livestock pens. Bakers and carpenters, chandlers and nurses, cobblers and cordwainers, they engaged the enemy with hammers, shovels, their own flesh and bones. The machines sliced through them like a lumberjack’s ax through custard. They needed somebody to tell them what to do. To help them milk as many seconds as possible from each grisly death. Longchamp sent Élodie Chastain.

A shame they’d all be dead within an hour. She was officer material.

Longchamp had fought his way to bastion nine, which was now slick with the innards of birdkeepers. But walls had become meaningless. There were Clakkers on the Spire, Clakkers in the courtyard. Inside and outside no longer meant anything. The defenders no longer had anything to defend. Only themselves.

Each swing of his hammer, each counterthrust with his pickax, was the most difficult thing Longchamp had ever accomplished. He kept going. The tulips wouldn’t find him rolling over. He’d die on his fucking feet.

Scattered pockets of defenders put down their weapons. Longchamp’s hammer dented the temple of the first such traitor he encountered. Their cowardice enraged him, fueled him.

“We fight until we’re dead,” he croaked, “AND NOT A MOMENT SOONER, YOU TULIP-SNIFFING SONS OF BITCHES!”

“The king!” somebody cried.

“The king of France!”

“For the king!” said Longchamp. Their idiot king wasn’t long for this world, having refused to flee when he had the opportunity. But if rallying around the final king of France
would keep the defenders on their feet a few more minutes, so be it. “For the king!” he cried. “For the Exile King!”

Some who joined the cry paused to point. It wasn’t a rally cry, Longchamp realized. It was an observation. The king had emerged from hiding.

Berenice was with him, as was a mechanical, whom Longchamp hoped to hell was the tame one named Daniel. He paused behind a merlon to wipe stinging sweat and clotted blood from his eyes. He allowed the tiniest twinge of hope. Berenice had a plan. At least she couldn’t worsen the situation. There was nothing to lose, because Marseilles-in-the-West was already lost.

Behind him, metal feet landed within the crenel.