The Rising (The Alchemy Wars)

by Ian Tregillis

  “Enter.”

  Berenice placed the tray of keys on her bunk. Indicating the decking before the porthole, where the inconstant light was best, she commanded, “Stand there.”

  The machine crossed the cabin in two strides. Despite the gentle but random sway of the ship, it stood motionless. The buzzing of the porter’s eyes told her it had noticed the keys. Casually, as though it weren’t a possibly paranoid afterthought, she also laid the Verderer pendant on the blanket alongside the keys. The rosy cross assumed a dusky coral glow in the patchy daylight.

  She hated to lean on the pendant so Goddamned much, but far more she loathed the thought of losing her disguise. So she invoked Anastasia Bell’s stolen jewelry yet again, and did to the porter as she’d done to Sparks: commanding the machine to store no memories of its interactions with Berenice.

  A subtle change came over the tempo of its internal clacking. The resyncopated tock-tick synchronized with rests in the ever-present but nearly subaudible thrum of the galley Clakkers’ secret song. Those machines who labored twenty-four hours per day to row the ship across the roiling sea did so while chanting in the mechanicals’ secret language. A dirge sung openly in a tongue unsuspecting human ears could never recognize as language. No romantic chanson de geste or bawdy sea shanty, this; she’d traveled the Saint Lawrence with the modern-day voyageurs, those men and women who moved their oars to wistful, playful songs of lost France and lost loves. It was too complex for Berenice to translate, though she’d picked up the sense of lamentation soon after the ship left the breakwater of the New Amsterdam pier. And now the porter had joined the conversation.

  Sneaky bastard. The porter adhered exactly to her command: It didn’t speak, not in the human sense, while it communed with its kin throughout the ship. Like prisoners of war conversing with each other in coded coughs, sneezes, and fingernail taps.

  “When I say our interactions shall be forever unremembered, that encompasses all mechanicals on this vessel. It means you will not communicate about this prior to erasing your own memories. That includes nonvocal communications with your kin.”

  The porter froze as though its internal mechanisms had been doused with epoxy. A terrified silence emanated from its body. Amazing, how quiet a Clakker could be when it wasn’t carrying on a covert conversation. Now it was little louder than a true pocketwatch.

  A moment’s pique moved her to add, “But is that really what you and your shipmates think of me? Tsk, tsk. I’d hate to hear what you have to say about our charming captain.” Berenice had her own thoughts on him; he was only slightly less charming than a rusty wire brush scraped across the tenderest part of one’s armpits.

  The porter’s crystalline eyes followed her. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ve been listening.”

  Berenice scrutinized the keyhole in the porter’s forehead, the tip of her nose a hairbreadth from cold metal. The circular hole lay between the eyes, just a bit above where the gap between the eyebrows would be on a human. Clakkers had no brows to furrow, just an alchemical anagram etched in a spiral about the keyhole. When van Breugel used a key in the process of embedding new metageasa on Sparks, the arcane sigils had rotated with each twist of the key.

  Regular geasa could be applied verbally. And they were, hundreds of times per day. But metageasa were embedded during the forging process, because these were more fundamental. So… did the keyhole enable modification of the metageasa?

  She pulled the porter forward. When the play of light off the sea was just right, she could see the hairline joints where annular plates on the Clakker’s skull could slide against one another. What happened when they did? And what if there was no alchemical glass shining into the machine’s eyes at the same time?

  Well. Only one way to find out.

  She took the first key from the tray. The ring at the tip just fit the fleshy pad at the end of her pinky finger. And the porter’s keyhole. Heart racing, wondering if she were about to trigger some unknown defensive geas but unable to stay her own hand, she touched the key to the Clakker’s skull.

  It didn’t go in easily. She thought at first that she’d have to try every key in the chest until she found one that fit, if any. But one hearty shove and the metal slid home like a recalcitrant housekey newly copied by an inexpert locksmith and not yet worn. A static shock bit her fingers; she flinched. The machine didn’t sway a hairbreadth. Berenice twisted the key. A series of clunks shook the porter’s head. Sigils orbited the keyhole. Those closest to the hole moved most rapidly while those farthest from the key revolved the most slowly, like planets around the sun. But rather than following the fixed law of gravity, they obeyed the secret laws of horology and alchemical grammar.

  She licked a salty bead of sweat from her lip. She yearned to ask the machine what effect she’d just wrought. But that risked alerting the machine to the fact that she was an imposter. Her commands would fall by the wayside if she gave the metal demon a strong case for doubting her. And then the standard metageasa pertaining to the protection of Guild secrets would take over. She’d die before she blinked twice, neck twisted around like a wrung-out dishrag.

  Sweat trickled from her armpits. Salt stung her eye. She wiped a sleeve across her brow, wondering if the machine registered her body’s traitorous excitement. Perhaps by now it had compiled a catalog of her physiological displays.

  But the bezels in its eyes had stopped whirring. Even the ticktocking had subsided. Strange to stand so close to a mechanical without hearing the incessant metronome of its subservience.

  “What is your true name, machine?”

  It didn’t answer.

  “Machine, your true name. I demand you tell me now.”

  The machine kept its silence.

  She pressed her palms to the Clakker’s skeletal chest and shoved. The machinery of its legs automatically compensated; it neither stumbled nor toppled.

  “Machine, count to ten.”

  Nothing.

  Berenice thought for a moment. “Clockmakers lie,” she said. But even the Dutch translation of the mechanicals’ secret seditious greeting to one another brought no response from the dormant servitor.

  A winter wind spritzed the porthole with sea mist. The ship lurched. It dipped into the trough between two particularly tall waves; the sea grew rougher. Spindrift cast a cobweb of shadows across Berenice, the bulkheads, and the porter.

  The dormant machine couldn’t be fully inactive: It continued to stand, automatically compensating for the shifting of the deck. Like a person whose heart still beat and lungs still drew breath even while they slept.

  So… it was possible to render a Clakker inert without doing violence to the sigils on its head. At least temporarily. It made sense that the machine would have to cease operation while its metageasa changed. Damn interesting. Her fingers itched to record this discovery in the pages of the lost Talleyrand journals.

  Could she use this somehow? Berenice wondered if this discovery—confirmation, really—could be weaponized. Hard to see how—getting close enough to a military Clakker to jam a key between its eyes meant getting well within its lethal radius. But what if New France could meet the metal tide by rendering the attackers inert? That alone could be a seismic geopolitical drift. Yet it still wasn’t what Berenice had envisioned. Freezing them in their tracks was one thing; rewriting their allegiance and sending them against their former masters, now that would be the killing stroke for which she yearned.

  She leaned closer to examine the reconfigured sigils. They had unquestionably landed in a different arrangement, though the symbols remained just as opaque to her as ever. The significance of the new pattern, if such existed, continued to elude her.

  The ship lurched again. The sea hissed. A cloud crossed the sun, sending the cabin into deep shadow as though the ship had sailed into a solar eclipse.

  The porter collapsed in a jangly heap.

  Berenice yelped, stumbled backward.

  It didn’t topple over like a person fainted
or a tree was felled. Instead its every joint went slack at once, as though every spring and cable had lost its tension. It fell straight down like a random assemblage of loosely joined spare parts. Like a human suddenly and inexplicably devoid of her skeleton.

  “Jesus wept,” she gasped. Her heartbeat pulsed in her throat, too hard to swallow.

  The cacophony of crashing metal reverberated in the tiny space. Berenice thought she could hear the racket ricocheting through the passageway outside. It felt as though the incriminating clamor had assumed a life of its own to tell the entire ship of her unwise, incriminating experiment.

  She stared unblinking at the jumbled and still jangling pile of metal at her feet. The porter’s hinges had folded at random when the balance compensators abruptly cut out. Beneath a heap of limbs and flanges, the key still poked from the disabled machine’s forehead; it made the dormant (Oh, you piece of shit, please don’t be dead!) machine look like a narwhal about to surface from beneath a sea of scrap metal.

  Good Lord.

  She nudged the inert Clakker with the toe of her boot. The crystalline eyes didn’t summon the faintest glimmer or glint here in the deep shadows of Berenice’s cabin.

  Damn it, damn it, damn it. Goddamn it.

  What if she couldn’t reverse the damage? What if she’d somehow permanently disabled the servitor? How could she hide this?

  How often did a Clakker go missing from a ship in the middle of the ocean? She supposed that if a mechanical did manage to fall overboard, it would sink without a trace. And the Goddamned thing would reappear years later after it walked, climbed, and trudged hundreds or thousands of miles across the ocean floor back to land. But just how often did the machines take a tumble? It had to be rare even in the most vicious of high seas. Which these were not.

  But if she couldn’t reactivate the Clakker, her choices were limited. Either she had to conspire to heave the dead machine overboard, which would require Sparks’s assistance, or she could lean on her fake Guild credentials yet again and brashly refuse to explain, apologize, or make amends. Both amounted to a pile of shit. The chances of nobody witnessing them hauling a dormant Clakker topside were almost nonexistent. And even the most pompous Guild member would at least be required to make recompense to the shipping company for damaging a legally leased Clakker. Berenice had hurled herself between Scylla and Charybdis. Fucking wonderful.

  By now the noise had dissipated. If anything, the ship seemed even quieter than it had before the porter collapsed. Even the faint shudder and creak of the deck had subsided. Vibrations from the enormous sculls that drove the ship had been the ceaseless background noise of the last several days. The unaccustomed silence put Berenice on edge. She frowned. Peered through the porthole.

  Stumbled. Tried to catch herself. Knocked the tray of Clakker keys crashing to the deck, where they skittered under the bunk and underfoot.

  “Oh, shit,” she breathed. “Bugger me with a rusty crucifixion nail.”

  The pulse hammering in her throat threatened to choke her; the soft candle wax of her knees threatened to dump her on the deck like an inert Clakker. She sagged against the hull, still staring outside.

  Her cabin hadn’t gone dark because a line of storm clouds had obscured the sun. The light was eclipsed by the massive ship that had pulled alongside the Pelikaan. It towered over Berenice’s vessel. Crouching, craning her neck, she could not see the uppermost deck of the leviathan. But it was the sculls that gave her pause and sent beads of cool sweat to collect at the small of her back and between her breasts.

  The oars of the titan ship writhed like tentacles. The newcomer was fringed with them, dangling just above the waterline like Medusa’s bangs. Some hung limp; others flailed at the air like whips. Still others stirred the sea into a hissing froth. They twisted organically, unlike the rigid choreography of a typical Clakker. She opened the porthole and heard the rippling of the oar scales shifting across each other. Each oar must have comprised dozens of individual segments.

  She had heard of these leviathans. New designs based on the concept that rather than build vessels on traditional lines and then staff them with mechanical servants, one could use Clakker technology to make the entire vessel a single servant. There were airships along the same lines.

  The oceangoing Clakkerships were the fastest things on the sea. Somebody wanted desperately to catch Berenice’s ship. She could imagine who that somebody might be. The midoceanic rendezvous had a grim whiff of deliberation about it.

  Nowhere to go. Nowhere to run.

  But how had they found the Pelikaan? By now it had to be hundreds of leagues off its usual course, owing to her detour. They couldn’t have caught up unless they knew where to look—unless they knew of the altered destination.

  Barendregt, you elk-buggering bastard. You notified the harbormaster before we departed New Amsterdam.

  She looked again to the heap of disabled servitor at her feet. It slid toward the door as the ship listed over bow waves shed by the leviathan. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The porthole was too small; she couldn’t possibly dispose of the porter that way. It would require disassembly but she hadn’t the time nor the tools.

  A heavy clunk shook the ship. She crouched again and looked up; a gangplank had been extended from the massive ship. Lines, too. A bevy of servitors sprinted across the swaying mooring lines before they’d even been snugged to the bollards, dancing across the choppy sea with their preternatural balance.

  Sparks—she had to find Sparks.

  She ran to the door. A knock sounded a half second before it opened. If Sparks made note of the tangled heap of porter on the floor, he gave no sign. He closed the door, vibrating so rapidly that his outline was a blur. His feet hummed against the deck. Bad sign: Sparks was laboring under several urgent geasa at once.

  Wow. These buffalo-fuckers didn’t waste any time.

  “Mistress. Please forgive the intrusion. I apologize most humbly for returning before I was summoned. I have been compelled to notify you that we have been boarded by your colleagues in the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists. Captain Barendregt requests your immediate presence on the bridge.”

  “I’ll bet he does. How many came aboard, what is their disposition, and what the hell do they want?”

  The incipient delay forced Sparks’s vibrations to shift to a higher frequency. Nevertheless, he answered her questions. “Before I came to find you, visitors from the other ship included two Guild members, like yourself, three servitor Clakkers, like me, and one soldier Clakker. More may have boarded this ship in the intervening time. I do not know their purpose. Captain Barendregt requests your immediate presence on the bridge.”

  Shit, shit, shit. Cornered like a rat.

  Resources. Resources. What do I have on hand?

  Sparks. (For the moment, anyway.)

  One possibly dead servitor. (Penalty for conducting unsanctioned experimentation on a Clakker: execution.)

  Dozens of Clakker keys. (Penalty for stealing Guild property: heavy prison time, probably interspersed with generous bouts of torture.)

  A Verderer’s pendant. (Penalty for impersonating a member of the Guild: the sickest, most devious shit one human being could devise to inflict upon another.)

  It was a lousy fucking list. And not particularly conducive to her long-term prospects, “long-term” meaning beyond the next ten minutes or so. Berenice jabbed a finger at the keys strewn across the small cabin.

  “Toss those out the porthole. Quickly! Then smash the chest and jettison those pieces.”

  Sparks bent to the task, though now he rattled so urgently that it sounded like somebody was throwing all the silver for a twenty-person, five-course meal down the Porter’s Prayer. “Captain Barendregt requests—”

  “Shut up and work.”

  Berenice crouched over the inert porter and struggled to yank the key from its forehead.

  Van Breugel had used a key to modify Sparks’s metageasa, but—

  Light. He’d us
ed light and a lens.

  She glanced out the porthole again. The titanic Clakkership still blotted out the sun.

  A shadow had fallen… and, a moment later, so had the vulnerable porter.

  The stomp of metal feet shook the passageway outside the cabin, and the decking overhead. Raised voices filtered through the porthole, faintly audible over Sparks’s death rattle. Somewhere nearby a metal fist or foot smashed a cabin door to flinders. Berenice flinched. She lost her grip on the key and landed on her ass while her heart tried to chisel through her breastbone. Now the shouting was easily audible, and grew moreso with every smashed cabin door. Sparks flung the last of the spilled keys out the porthole. He went to work on the incriminating chest. It shattered under his metal fist.

  The noises from the passageway grew louder. Shouts and smashes and clangs, audible even over Sparks’s hasty demolitions. A peculiar stomping, too, like a peglegged pirate striding the deck.

  Berenice flung herself at the inert porter. She gave the key another savage twist, recoiling the alchemical anagram. The hard edges of the key bit her hand. Through clenched teeth, she muttered, “Come on, you piece of shit, come on…”

  “I don’t understand, mi—”

  “Shut up and keep working!”

  Another yank. This time the circular blade screeched free. The porter’s head rattled as though something fine had come loose, sifting through the interstices of its skull like windblown sand. She slipped the key onto the chain of her stolen pendant, which hung beneath her shirt. She yelped when it touched her breast. It was hot.

  Somebody knocked. Berenice looked at Sparks. Her purloined servitor tossed the last fragments of the incriminating chest through the porthole.

  Sweetly as she could manage, oblivious as Maëlle Cuijper had ever been, she called, “Who is it?”

  Another knock, this one hard enough to rattle the hinges on the flimsy cabin door. Berenice looked at the Clakker crumpled on the deck like a broken doll.

  But the worthless scrap heap wasn’t moving.

  “Yes, yes,” she called, “one moment, please—”