Mail carriage, she realized.
But then icy metal arms swaddled her in yards of scratchy wool thick with the scent of horse. The mechanical deposited her inside the carriage. It took the stones from a hanging basket and applied friction heat by rolling them between its hands. Berenice winced; the noise would carry for hundreds of yards through the silent woods.
The driver ordered the servitor back to its perch outside. He twisted the plug from an insulated vacuum flask; apple-scented steam filled the carriage. He helped Berenice free one trembling hand from the swaddling and set a cup in it. She slurped, but spilled half the liquor on herself before she got any into her mouth. Still, she wondered why she’d always disregarded apple brandy. What heavenly libation.
She looked at the cup in her hand. Realized she ought to be holding something else. Straightened.
“My pendant,” she managed.
“Relax. I got it.” The driver lifted his hand. Bell’s pendant dangled from the chain twined through his fingers, dripping water. It twinkled in the lantern light. The man took a moment to study it. When his gaze fell upon the small v alongside the rosy cross, a new wariness crept into his manner. He set the pendant on the bench beside her like a man tiptoeing past a snoring bear.
“So you’re with them Stemwinders, then.”
Berenice sluiced more brandy down her throat. She coughed. A new numbness spread through her body. But this was a warm numbness, and started on the inside. The driver refilled her cup while she found her voice.
“I represent the Verderer’s Office of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists,” she lied, “if that’s what you mean.”
“How’d you end up way out here? You been walking a long spell.” The driver, whose name was Cortland, spoke a version of the Queen’s Dutch slightly yellowed around the edges by age, for it still carried traces of the original settlers of Nieuw Nederland. A thick layer of the rural New World frosted the driver’s speech. If she listened carefully, she could even discern hints of the French/Dutch creole spoken by boatmen along the Saint Lawrence. He went on. “Your boots is wet. You can take ’em off, Sparks’ll keep the carriage plenty warm for you. Figure maybe it should give you a careful lookover, too. I won’t peek or nothing, on my word. But frostbite ain’t gonna do a lady like you no favors.”
She sipped, changed the subject. Her voice still warbled owing to the residual shivers in her chest, but at least she no longer worried that chattering teeth might sever the tip of her tongue. “I have urgent business in the city. Your deliveries must be delayed, I’m afraid, for in this matter the Guild’s business takes precedence.”
He nodded, but not without reluctance, clearly having reached the same conclusion. To his great credit, however, he vowed to drive through the night to get her to her destination. Berenice took care to give the Clakker, Sparks, an extra look at her stolen pendant while it inserted more hot stones under the folds of her blankets. She wished she still had Jax’s alchemical glass, the strange pineal lens that had set these events in motion.
Berenice insisted the driver not overtax his horses, and that he stop at a carriage inn to change them out if necessary. The delay wouldn’t matter; if one or both of Bell’s Stemwinders gave chase, they’d catch her regardless of how hard he drove his horses. Driving them to their deaths would be pointless cruelty.
The untrampled snow beyond the verges of the road stood too high for the driver to guide the carriage through a U-turn. Instead he unhitched the horses. Sparks lifted the carriage (Berenice and all) and then, after turning it to face the way it had come, set it back into its own wheel ruts so gently she barely felt the bump. After a few jingles and neighs while the driver rehitched the horses, the mail carriage was bumping and rattling south.
Berenice expected to drowse in the cozy warmth. But the pins-and-needles hurt too much as sensation returned, with agonizing reluctance, to her hands and feet. And by the time that pain had subsided, the brandy had her rather pleasantly sozzled. Sozzled enough to break the endless chain of her thoughts and steer her worries away from capture. What now?
The carriage smelled like old leather and horse sweat. She declined an offer of the driver’s pipe, but she could still smell and taste its aroma. Clearly he took his breaks inside the cab when he could. A cold job, driving the mail. She had a new respect for it.
A new question bubbled to the top amid her sloshing thoughts. She leaned forward, opened the slider at the front of the cab. “Mr. Cortland,” she called, “where are the rest of your passengers?”
“Passengers is rare,” he shouted into the headwind. “Not many’s keen on riding hell-bent for leather without stopping to piss or eat. The job is to see the mail delivered, anything else is a bonus. Maybe you’re still too numb to notice that bench ain’t padded.”
She wasn’t. But given the choices, she’d choose a sore ass over frostbitten fingers, toes, and nose eight days out of seven. She’d endured enough endless church services, and so many pointless privy council meetings, to have a particularly high bar for what constituted mere discomfort. An unpadded bench in a mail carriage with dodgy suspension was a roll on a goose down mattress by comparison; she wasn’t even wearing a corset.
The driver’s cough, a wet, hacking thing, drew phlegm from the back of his throat. He turned his head as though tacking out of the wind. Berenice winced, but his spittle flew true, beyond the edges of the coach despite the headwind. “Hell,” he added. “I’d have run you down, too, missus, if you hadn’t flashed that jewelry at us. ’Course if I had, old Sparks back there would’ve had my head.” He spat again. “Nothing personal, I hope you understand. We have a timetable to keep, is all.”
“Not any longer. Not on this run,” she said.
In the Central Provinces, and most of the empire for that matter, postal mail was delivered quite literally on the backs of Clakkers. Apparently mechanicals were still too expensive in the New World to use them to distribute packages and parcels between far-flung outposts. Which caused her to wonder…
After briefly closing the flap while one of the horses defecated, she asked the driver, “What’s your route?”
“Mostly back and forth up the river. The run between Fort Orange and the city, a few stops between.” He spat another gob of phlegm into the frigid night.
The onrush of cold air hurt her throat and nose. She wanted never to feel cold again. She asked, “There’s a house north of where you picked me up. Have you ever stopped there?”
“The Guild house? Of course,” he said. “Only when there’s a package to deliver, though.”
Oh, you poor bastard, thought Berenice. I’m so sorry. When they figure out where I went, they’re going to question you.
“How do you know it’s one of our properties?”
There might have been the slightest beat, just a sliver of hesitation, before Cortland said, “Lady, no offense, but I ain’t blind. It’s the only place outside a city I ever seen one of them Stemwinders, much less two in one place. Hell, with a couple of them ticktock horses I could do this run in a fraction of the time!” His laughter was a bit forced. “I figure they run like demons.”
They are demons, she thought, and they do. In her mind’s ear the susurration of the carriage wheels over hard-packed snow became a faint clockwork gallop, swiftly growing closer in the darkness…
Hold on a moment. Why does Cortland bother with horses at all when he has a servitor under lease? Sparks could pull this carriage just as well, which would save Cortland no end of hassle and money. And then she realized: Sparks doesn’t belong to him. This isn’t a regular mail carriage. Sparks is here to guard whatever comes and goes from the safe house.
Just then the driver said, “Come to mention it, I have to admit I was sorta surprised you weren’t headed that way. Seems like that would’ve been your best bet for help as you didn’t know me and Sparks was on the way.”
The warmth and comfort left her. Even the lightheadedness from the brandy seemed to disappear.
“There was an accident,” she said. “There’s no help to be had at the house.” It was true enough.
“Bet it was the Goddamned Frenchies, wasn’t it?” He spat again. “Sons of bitches, all of them.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Lady, begging your pardon, but how long have you been out here? By now you must’ve heard about what they did down in the city.”
Oh. That, she thought. “Oh. That,” she said.
“Yeah. They’re fixing for a fight they can’t win. Ain’t that right, Sparks?”
If the servitor responded, Berenice couldn’t hear it. She’d have to deal with Sparks, too, she realized.
Shivering, she closed the flap. The rush of cold air had blown away the snug coziness of the compartment. She wrapped the driver’s blanket around her shoulders and took the warming stone in her lap. Her eyes closed, but still sleep eluded her.
Bell’s pendant could open many doors for her, assuming Berenice didn’t overstep herself. At the same time, though, she was soon to be the most wanted woman in the New World. No pendant, no Clockmaker shibboleth, no amount of subterfuge, could protect her if she continued to lurk around New Amsterdam. She held the rosy cross at arm’s length, watching its long chain sway against the rocking of the carriage. Lamplight glinted from rose quartz. The Rosenkreuz. The rosa crucis. She’d seen it a thousand times. Its ubiquity within the empire granted it a strange invisibility. It even adorned the arms of the empire and the Brasswork Throne, and it could be found anywhere the Guild wanted to stake its claim. The emblem even granted, to those who wielded it, the power to requisition random Clakkers and rewrite their geasa.
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.
The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 6