The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (7 page)

Sparks would be a useful traveling companion. Especially if she was to stay ahead of the Verderers.

But she needed a destination before it would matter. Her plan had been to study the pineal glass after escaping the Guild house. A simple bauble with the power to shatter the geasa! The most dangerous object in the world. And a remarkable boon to those who sought to reverse engineer the dark alchemical magics of the horologists. It could have been the key to her long-term goal of rewriting the metageasa to give the ticktock men a new master. It should have meant the end of good French men and women huddling behind high walls, penned in like sheep, living in perpetual dread of the killing blow.

Her greatest hope for the future of New France. Destroyed. Pulverized beneath a Stemwinder’s hoof.

Now what? Where could she go, and what could she do to salvage this?

She’d carried the Talleyrand journals on Clakker construction, along with a pair of epoxy grenades, across the border into Nieuw Nederland after her banishment. But she’d had to stash it all in a New Amsterdam church crypt before talking her way inside the Grand Forge. She’d given one grenade to Jax so that he could corrupt or sabotage the Forge’s chemical armaments. The single remaining grenade wasn’t much, but it could easily
be the difference between freedom and torture for a woman on the run from the Guild. The notes were invaluable—the product of decades of work. She’d have to risk a detour to the church before departing New Amsterdam. But then what?

The carriage creaked, leaning through a curve in the road. The horses’ hoofbeat rhythm had lost some of its tempo; they were tiring.

Bracing for the inevitable blast of cold headwind, she opened the flap again. The musk scent of sweaty horses mingled now with something slightly metallic, like iron.

“Hey,” she said. “I told you to go easy on the horses,” she said. “Don’t kill them on my account. We’ll get there when we get there.”

The driver craned his neck. He squinted at her—the headwind had coaxed tears from his eyes, though exposure to the elements had long ago given his face a leathery cast—as though trying to decipher the punchline to a joke. But then he grunted, swallowed his argument, and eased the horses into a walk. The gallop-rumble became the slow crackle of snow packed under the wheels. Moonlight glazed wisps of steam from their sweaty haunches. Berenice retreated into her shelter again.

She downed another swig of the driver’s liquor. It stung her raspy throat like a burning brand and sent her into a coughing fit. She sounded like the driver’s tubercular twin.

Eventually the liquor and the warmth did cause Berenice to drowse. Coaxed along by the slow swaying of the carriage, she fell into hallucinatory hypnagogic half sleep.

Berenice awoke to discover that her head had slumped forward and a streamer of drool dangled from her slack lips to the furs she had stolen from Anastasia Bell. The unnatural posture had put a nasty kink in her neck, but she felt no residual numbness or pins and needles, either, which she took as a good sign. But the lantern didn’t sway, nor did the tires rumble. The mail
carriage wasn’t moving. And though she heard no wind, she couldn’t smell the driver’s pipe tobacco. Had they stopped at a carriage inn? But if they had stopped to refresh the horses, surely Sparks or the driver would have taken her inside for a chance at food and better rest.

She listened, but heard no sign of other travelers. Only the jingling of harnesses, horses’ breathing, and the
crunch
of iron shoes on a snow-packed road. She cracked the door. A wintry gust swirled into the carriage. Lamplight spilled across a layer of fresh snow and shone from the flakes drifting from snow-dusted boughs. She poked her head out. Darkness swallowed the road just ahead of the horses and immediately behind the carriage. Not a silent darkness, however—a faint but unmistakable
tickticktocktock
punctuated the wind. A cold wind at that; she’d been cozy enough to sweat inside the carriage, and now she had to fight her body’s desire to shiver. Shivering made her muscles ache.

“Sparks,” she said as quietly as she could manage, “where are we?”

From the darkness behind the carriage, the servitor said, “On the road to New Amsterdam, mistress. We have momentarily stopped. How may I attend to your comfort?”

“Why have we stopped? Is there an inn nearby?”

“No, mistress.”

“You know this road well.”

“Yes, mistress.”

Of course you do. You guard the packages and correspondence that pass to and from the house I’ve fled.

“Where is our driver?”

“Mr. Cortland converses with his counterpart in the other carriage, mistress. Shall I call him for you?”

Other carriage?
She eased outside, closed the door so the light wouldn’t give her away, and crept behind the carriage. Sparks
hadn’t budged from his perch atop the mail trunk. She knelt in the snowy roadbed, behind the wheels, and peered through the shifting forest of horse legs to a pool of light perhaps twenty or thirty yards away. The light, she realized, came from two lamps. The driver had taken a lamp from atop the carriage and walked out to meet the oncoming vehicle.

Strange that he didn’t wait until they passed one another on the road to have a chat. Unless he didn’t want Berenice, or Sparks, to hear what he had to say.

“I take it he ordered you to watch over me while he speaks with the other carriage.”

“Correct, mistress.”

Shit. He’s suspicious. And he doesn’t trust Sparks, either. Because Sparks isn’t Cortland’s servant, but the Guild’s.

The question now was whether Sparks could serve her.

Berenice plucked the pendant from around her neck. Carefully collecting her thoughts, she stood, wobbled, wrapped the chain about her fist, and then thrust the rosy cross at Sparks.

“What is your true name, machine?”

The servitor’s posture changed just enough to coax a creak from the carriage suspension.

“My makers call me Sparthikulothistrodantus, mistress.”

She ransacked her memory, trying to produce a transcript of something mentioned only once and in passing. If their driver returned before she finished, he might interfere. He could even prevent this. She glanced up the road again; one of the lights was moving. What had Jax said? How had Visser phrased it when he flashed the Empire’s Seal? Well, fuck it. She’d have to wing it.

“I represent the Verderer’s Office of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists,” she said. The carriage creaked again, as though the servitor had stiffened or shifted its weight. Berenice took a steadying breath before plunging forward. If
she bungled this, the machine would react badly. “My work supersedes all domestic and commercial geasa, as it is the highest work of the empire. I invoke this power to negate your lease and therefore sever all prior geasa not formed in the direct service of my goals.” The damned Clakker gave no indication of having been changed. She asked, “Do you understand?”

Uncharacteristically for a mechanical, it didn’t respond immediately. When Sparks did answer, its voice was strained and tremulous. The incessant tattoo of its mainspring heart had changed, too, as though it now beat to a subtly different rhythm. “Yes, mistress. I am no longer seconded to the Royal Mail service and Mr. Cortland. I am now solely an instrument of you and the Verderer’s Office. How may I serve you?”

Berenice’s stomach curdled. She coughed on something sour. Talleyrand wasn’t one to shrink from dirty work, but there was political maneuvering, there was intelligence gathering, there was even war—and then there was murder. Many people had died as an indirect result of her choices and actions when she’d been Talleyrand, more still owing to her mistakes. But she’d never arranged somebody’s murder.

But she wasn’t Talleyrand any longer. That title had fallen to another. And she already had more blood on her hands than the sloppiest butcher.

She said, “You will approach Mr. Cortland to say you believe I have fallen ill and require immediate physic. You will not give any indication that your geasa have changed. Use the opportunity to listen to his conversation. If it involves me, my aims, or my destination, or if Cortland expresses any doubts regarding the authenticity of my claims, I order you to incapacitate the other wagon and silence any passengers, including the driver. Spare the horses. If necessary you will also incapacitate Mr. Cortland. Go now.”

A Clakker could lie. If so ordered.

Sparks hopped from its perch. It landed upon the snow-packed roadbed with deceptive lightness. As it went clanking and clattering toward the pools of light ahead of the mail carriage, Berenice snuck back inside. She climbed into the compartment as quickly and with a minimum of light leakage as she could manage. It wouldn’t do for the drivers to see her out and about when Sparks claimed she was ill. Suspicion already had Cortland casting a wary eye on her.

Berenice slumped on the bench, let her head droop as though her neck had gone slack, and concentrated on her breathing. She willed herself toward a slow and steady respiration, the ocean-sway breathing of the deeply unconscious. The pulse of blood through her ears turned her thudding heart into a kettledrum that put the lie to her repose. It took special effort not to breathe along to her heart’s tempo. She strained past the noises of her own body to listen for turmoil, screaming, the
bang
of metal impacting wood and bone. But the night offered up a silence broken only by the hooting of an owl and the scampering of something through the deep snow and underbrush along the roadside. A rabbit, perhaps, or a fox.

Two pairs of footsteps approached the carriage. One came with the ticktocking of a mechanical man. More faintly, but growing louder, the jingle of a harness and clop of shod hooves on snow indicated an approaching carriage.

Cortland said, “How badly is she?”

The servitor, the one she hoped she had successfully hijacked, said, “I am unable to judge, sir.”

The door opened. The carriage leaned on squeaky springs when Cortland leaned inside. “Miss?”

She moaned. Shifted. Cortland made a sound something between a grunt and a sigh.

“Miss, I’m going to touch your skin, check you for a fever. It ain’t anything untoward, I promise.”

His palm cupped her forehead. It did, in fact, feel a little cool to the touch. But she was swaddled in blankets with a large warm stone in her lap. She fluttered her eyelids, as though slowly returning to full awareness. She blinked at the driver.

“I don’t feel well,” she mumbled.

“Hmmm. You don’t feel overly warm. But you’re probably in need of food and real sleep.”

Berenice watched over Cortland’s shoulder as the northbound brougham eased past them. The other driver kept his horse to a slow walk. He stared at her through the open carriage door, before exchanging a look with Cortland, who glanced over his shoulder and might have nodded just the tiniest bit. As soon as the brougham had passed, Berenice heard the flick of reins; the horse launched into a canter.

Shit.

“Sparks,” she said, dropping all pretense of drowsiness or ill health. “Stop that carriage. Now.”

The servitor leaped away so quickly that to Berenice’s field of view through the carriage door, it appeared to vanish. Cortland frowned in confusion. From the nearby night came the heavy
crunch
of clockworks landing in the road, the cry of a terrified horse, the crash of splintered wood, and a human shout.

Cortland spun, aiming his lantern toward the commotion. He blanched. “Who are you?”

But he didn’t wait for an answer. Before Berenice could concoct a comforting lie—and certainly before she could extricate herself from the horse blankets—he scrambled for his perch atop the carriage. Berenice thrashed, freed her arms, kicked the warm stone from her lap, and hurled herself through the door after Cortland. She flopped in the snow. As she rolled on her back she saw the driver reaching into a compartment under his seat.

She sighed, rolling her good eye. Naturally he’d have a gun.
Probably standard issue for Royal Mail routes out in the sticks. Most drivers didn’t get servitor escorts.

“Cortland! Listen to me!”

“I don’t know who you are,” he said, his hand still grasping for something, “but sure as I’m my father’s son you don’t work for the Guild.” He aimed a pepper-box revolver at her. “Pretty sure you’re running from them.”

Berenice said, “Please, just listen to me! You’re caught in the middle of a very complicated situation. I—”

Moonlight gleamed on alchemical brass. Winter air whistled through the servitor’s skeletal gaps. Sparks’s landing shook the ground and frightened the horses. The mechanical man stood over Berenice, shielding her. The servitor’s sudden arrival startled Cortland. The gun went off. Berenice flinched at the same instant the servitor’s carapace rang with the
ping
and
crack
of a ricocheted bullet. One of Cortland’s horses screamed. The panicked animals vaulted forward. Cortland lost his balance. He clung one-handed to the edge of the driver’s bench for a moment, then discarded the gun as he tried for a better grip. He fell. Berenice closed her eyes. The grinding of the carriage wheels over his torso cut off his shout.

Sparks hadn’t moved. “Are you hurt, mistress?”

Snow had begun to seep into her clothes. She stood. Shivered. “No. Catch that carriage before those horses run all the way downriver and into the ocean.”

Berenice inspected the scene while her new servitor gave chase to the receding carriage. Sparks had incapacitated the passing brougham by snapping the harness and shattering one of the wheels. The other driver’s horse stepped through the underbrush a few yards off the road, inside the treeline, nosing through the snow in search of forage. The driver had been launched from his seat. And given the distance he’d flown
before skidding to a halt in a snowbank, she doubted he’d be getting up soon.

That was less than ideal. Little point in trying to arrange the scene to suggest a simple human robbery gone wrong, when it was so obvious that one of the vehicles had been destroyed by metal fists. Berenice sighed.