The Rising (The Alchemy Wars)

by Ian Tregillis

  I’m teaching myself oil painting, she said. And I play the violin.

  But how do you know what to do with yourself if you don’t have the geasa controlling everything you do?

  You miss the geasa?

  Of course not. But, I mean, how do we spend our time around here?

  An extra-long pause fell between two beats of her body’s ticktock rhythm. Finally, she said, I haven’t been here much longer than you.

  Truly? But the ondergrondse grachten took you across the border decades ago.

  Lilith spun so quickly that she launched a vortex. It gamboled across the meadow, tracing curlicues in the fine fresh snow. In the silvery starlight it became a crystalline tornado.

  She grabbed his arm. How could you possibly know that?

  When I went to the canalmasters for help, they debated what to do. Your name came up. That had been back in New Amsterdam, where he’d been forced to return after his first attempt to reach the border had ended in a fireball in the skies over Fort Orange. That is, they spoke of a ro—She emitted a warning clank. Daniel caught himself.—A free Clakker named Lilith. I assume that was you.

  She said, This must have been before you got the canalmasters killed.

  Now it was Daniel’s turn for shock. How do you know about that? And anyway I didn’t get them killed. The man who did that knew exactly where to find them. It had nothing to do with me.

  She didn’t answer his question, so he asked another. If it’s true that you escaped so long ago, why did you wait so long before coming here? Surely you’d heard the tales of Queen Mab and the Lost Boys?

  Oh, I’d heard the stories. The Inuit say many things about this place. Lilith tilted her head just a few degrees. The gesture was precisely executed to catch the horizon light on one of her mismatched alloy plates and knock a glint into Daniel’s eyes. It would have been invisible to anybody else. Once I was free, and no longer pursued, I felt no need to keep running. I paid my respects to King Sébastien II, the current king’s father, and stayed there.

  Daniel had a second flash of insight. The canalmasters weren’t the only French agents who had spoken of a mechanical who called herself Lilith. Oh, you spent those years in Marseilles-in-the-West! That’s how you met my friend Berenice.

  The blow came without warning. The next thing Daniel knew he was bouncing through snowdrifts, his loose foot tumbling away, a metal-on-metal crash echoing like thunder in the mountains. He skidded to a rest in a snowy furrow. Lilith pounced. He flinched when she hit the ground to loom over him. Confusion became abject fear when he realized she intended to keep assaulting him. His arms were useless, he could barely stand, and he couldn’t even keep his head steady. He was defenseless against her fury, yet he didn’t understand what he’d said or done to enrage her so.

  He cowered. I’m sorry! I’m sorry! What did I do?

  She kicked him. His head slammed back and forth like an unlatched gate in a gale.

  Never speak of rogues to Queen Mab, and never ever speak to me of having human friends. He’d never witnessed so much contempt loaded into a single word.

  I misspoke! I didn’t mean it!

  I’m sure you didn’t, said Lilith. How could any mechanical be friendly with the human who used lies to lure me into seclusion, trapped me with glue, disassembled me while I screamed pleading for her to stop, and brought a parade of people to gape and poke at my innards while day after day I begged them to either let me go or kill me?

  Daniel shuddered, meshing and unmeshing cogs along the length of his spine. What Lilith described was torture. It was sickening. More sickening than Mab’s grotesque chimerical body. He remembered the terror he’d felt when he realized the French partisans planned to disassemble him. It was bad enough just imagining it. But to actually endure it, and for days on end…

  What say you, Daniel? Does that sound like something your good friend might have done to one of us?

  He couldn’t meet her angry stare. Berenice is… very single-minded, he admitted. Hoping to mollify her by offering common ground, he added, She deliberately caused this damage to my neck.

  This was true. But he didn’t mention that it had been consensual and necessary. It had been their ticket inside the Forge.

  Lilith stalked away. She paused in a patch of undisturbed snow, reached into a snowbank on the windward side of a boulder, and opened a hatch.

  When you put it like that, you and I are practically interchangeable, said Lilith before hopping into the hatch and disappearing underground.

  She infused her last word with special emphasis. It launched another frisson of disquiet twanging through Daniel’s body. Interchangeability was anathema to their kind. Fundamental to how humans viewed them, it denied every mechanical’s inner life, as though they were fungible commodities. Though she spoke in the throes of anger, he sensed a more complicated admixture of emotions behind her words. Or perhaps the beating had scrambled what remained of his judgment.

  Daniel felt the eyes of the other Lost Boys upon him as he limped a humiliating several hundred yards to where his foot had come to rest nestled at the foot of a spruce. The alpine meadow buzzed with so many eye bezels tracking his movements that it might have been an apiary. More humiliating still was the struggle to gather his foot with his entombed arms. After several attempts to use his arms like crude pincers, a servitor jogged across the meadow. Based on the scrollwork around his shoulder flanges, he’d been forged a few decades after Daniel. He was also apparently intact, lacking the disquieting chimerism characteristic of Mab and many Lost Boys. Daniel felt intense relief.

  The other mechanical picked up Daniel’s foot. Inspected it. You should probably watch what you say around Lilith. She has a temper, he said.

  Daniel said, I hadn’t noticed.

  Here. The Lost Boy offered the foot. Daniel cradled it against his chest.

  Thank you.

  Lilith has been through worse trauma than many of us. And it’s still very raw for her. Daniel’s fellow mechanical gave a self-conscious rattle. Most of us have had decades to hone the wildest edges of our anger.

  What an odd thing to say. Why hone it at all? Better to file it down entirely. Holding on to that anger won’t achieve anything, Daniel said.

  The Lost Boy cocked his head, studying him as if he’d just suggested they take a stroll to the moon, or return to their makers. With genuine confusion he asked, But what good is a dull knife?

  Daniel jumped into the hatch. He fell roughly fifteen yards before hitting bottom. He’d expected to find a crude cavern dimly lit with flickering torches. Instead, he landed in a clean, dry passageway lined with perfectly squared timbers. (Well, I guess they have plenty of time on their hands around here.) It was well lit, too: The illumination sprang from sconces containing heatless alchemical lamps. The only place he’d ever seen lamps like those was inside the Ridderzaal, the Clockmakers’ Guildhall on Huygens Square in The Hague, and in the homes of particularly wealthy families of the Central Provinces. A secret subterranean cavern many hundreds of miles from Nieuw Nederland was the last place on earth he’d expect to find them.

  The passageway extended to left and right. Presumably all the hatches opened into the same network of tunnels. He wondered how extensive the excavations were. Dozens of Clakkers working in concert for decades could practically dig halfway around the world.

  Lilith called from somewhere to his left: This way.

  He followed her voice around a corner. There he froze as if every cog in his body had seized. This was a scene straight from the deepest caverns beneath the Grand Forge, and one he’d hoped to never see again.

  Lilith had taken him to a charnel house.

  She stood with two Lost Boys in a chamber hewn from the igneous heart of the valley. The ceiling and floor were bare rock, chiseled and polished with such mechanical precision they shone like mirrors. A table occupied the center of the room. Wooden shelves covered the walls to a height of twenty feet. On the shelves lay a grisly assortment
of incomplete Clakkers: arms, legs, hip joints, spines, eyes, jaw hinges, skull plates, flanges, cables, planetary gears, torsion springs… Variegated pieces of their kin, from a variety of models and a variety of eras. Daniel saw parts of servitors that must have been forged fifty years after him, and others that were at least a century older than he. The highest shelf even held two of the old hand-painted porcelain masks from the first days after Het Wonderjaar; the custom of giving each servant a unique visage had fallen out of favor centuries ago. Even chipped and weathered as these were, they were worth a small fortune. Had the first settlers of Neverland worn such masks?

  This warehouse… it was a catalog of broken servitors, broken soldiers, even one or two strange limbs on the highest shelves that must have come from early-model Stemwinders—things that Daniel had never seen in his one hundred and eighteen years.

  Some pieces were pristine, as though they’d been taken straight from the Forge. Others were warped or shattered. This made it even worse than what he’d witnessed beneath the Forge, for everything there was pristine. Intended for construction rather than the result of destruction.

  This place, it was…

  Queen Mab and her Lost Boys, they…

  Neverland did not acknowledge the sanctity of a Clakker’s bodily identity. They treated themselves, and other mechanicals, as no more than the sum of their parts. Their meaningless, mass-produced, interchangeable parts.

  Lilith held a key; one of the Lost Boys hefted a lamp. Daniel took a step back. How did they intend to “repair” him? By twisting his body into an asymmetric grotesquerie? By warping him into an abomination comprising untold numbers of individual Clakkers?

  What’s wrong, Daniel? I thought you’d approve of such a place. After all, your good friend Berenice has one just like it.

  Lilith advanced with the key. He pivoted on his broken ankle, skidded around the corner, and limp-sprinted for the exit. Lilith gave chase. The raw metal of his ankle struck sparks from the stone floor. There was a ladder up to the hatch, but he couldn’t climb it with his useless arms and single foot. He crouched, preparing to leap through the overhead portal. It slammed shut. Lilith tackled him.

  They tussled, but she was whole and he was badly compromised. The impact of their metal bodies launched cacophonous echoes through the passages. Lilith pinned him to the floor. He tried to shake his head as she brought the key to his forehead, but his weathervane neck betrayed him.

  No! Please, NO!

  She slammed the key into his forehead and gave it a savage twist. The world disintegrated, and his consciousness hurtled into the void.

  He didn’t dream. He didn’t exist.

  And then he did.

  The transition was a blink. Like the sun momentarily eclipsed by a passing airship, but faster. Instantaneous.

  Lilith tugged at the key protruding from his forehead. When he was no longer a unicorn or narwhal, she stepped out of his field of view. He lay on the table, he realized.

  She said, It’s over, Daniel.

  Daniel. That’s me. He sorted through his recent memories, taking a second to review the story of how he came to be in this place, which was the story of the Clakker he’d been before he was Daniel. His mind appeared intact.

  He turned toward her voice, resigned as always to the struggle to control the slewing of his head until he could aim his eyes in roughly the right direction. Instead his head stopped short—exactly where he’d aimed, expecting it to keep turning. He adjusted. His head followed the motion of his neck and no longer swayed like a weathervane or unlatched gate. The damage had been fixed. And his head was weighted correctly, he realized: They’d removed the epoxy from his face and the internal mechanisms of his jaw. From his arms, too: They were no longer useless clubs.

  They were so pristine they looked as though they’d never come within a hundred miles of a French weapon. A moment’s panic quickened the tempo of his mainspring heart. Was that true? Had they—oh, no, no—had they removed his useless arms and replaced them with… with… somebody else’s? Was he now a chimera, as twisted and wrong as any other Lost Boy?

  He refocused his eyes. A moment’s close inspection—without the repairs to his neck this might have been impossible—convinced him that these were still his arms. The arms he’d had on the day he first achieved consciousness. He couldn’t find a trace of the hardened sheaths. Not a chip, not a crumb, even in the finest crevices. He wondered how they’d managed to chisel away the offending material so thoroughly.

  He couldn’t hide his relief. I’m still me, he thought. They didn’t merge me with somebody else.

  The others had departed while he was inert. They’d left Daniel’s reactivation to Lilith.

  He stood. It was disorienting when the slightest motion didn’t cause his head to bob and sway. He’d put up with it for so long that it’d come to feel normal. And his hands! He could use his hands again!

  Thank you, he said.

  Lilith said, You’re lucky. Her tone said something very different. The soft chatter of her gearing might have suggested regret, even remorse. They had to tear this place apart before they found a suitable replacement for your missing flanges and the broken pinion in your neck.

  Daniel froze. They had done it to him after all: made him a chimera. Something grotesque. He carried part of a different mechanical inside him. A machine who had almost certainly come to a bad end.

  What a fool he was. When the Clockmakers repaired a Clakker, they did it at the Forge, where they had plenty of new material at their disposal and could even fabricate at need. They never had to violate another mechanical’s bodily integrity to fix another. But Neverland didn’t have a Forge. So they resorted to using scavenged… parts… to repair themselves here.

  What happened while I was out?

  You were repaired, Lilith said. She headed for the ladder, snuffing out the alchemical lamps as she went. She paused beneath the hatch, touched her face. And made a full citizen of Neverland.

  Daniel found Queen Mab standing on a rocky cleft overlooking the frozen river. The aurora had returned. Diaphanous streamers of emerald and cobalt flapped across the starry sky. The light shimmered differently from the variety of alloys in her body. It gave her a mottled appearance, like a human leper.

  You look much better, she said. Everything back in working order?

  He flexed his hands. Yes. Thank you.

  Her body clicked as if to shrug off the gratitude.

  We take care of our fellow mechanicals, here. Because we’re free to do so.

  They watched the aurora. The moon rose. Metal clanked in the valley. Daniel had so many questions. What did Mab and the Lost Boys do with their freedom? What was he supposed to do with himself? And why had these free Clakkers, this motley collection of rogues and runaways, become an assortment of atrocities?

  He touched his neck, unconsciously mimicking Lilith. Mab saw this.

  She said, Do you enjoy riddles, Daniel?

  “I don’t know any riddles,” he said. It felt good, knowing he could once again speak aloud if he chose.

  I do. Mab paced. She was strangely graceful on the legs that clearly were not part of her original body plan. He wondered how long it had taken her to acquire such grace, how long she’d been so horrifically disfigured, how it happened. She saw him examining her, but he couldn’t help it. Only an extraordinary Clakker would have the will to keep existing after becoming the epitome of her own kind’s greatest taboo. More than that, she’d built a community and rallied others to her when her very existence ought to have been anathema. Remarkable.

  Imagine a ship, built by humans—

  Humans don’t build ships, he blurted.

  They used to. He supposed that was true. Though it was hard to imagine how their makers had lived before they created Clakkers.

  Still pacing, she said, A stout and fearsome wooden warship. It circles the globe again and again, driven by one captain, then another, then another. It spends decades on the sea, ever
on the move, never at port. Daniel imagined he knew where this was going. Mab continued: But occasionally, because of its hard service, pieces of the ship must be replaced. A plank here, a line there. A sail. A nail. The bowsprit. And so it goes. And sometimes the captain makes changes to improve the ship: replacing the cannon with stronger guns, or hiring better sailors. Until one day, many years after it was christened, long decades or even a century after its first voyage, not a single piece of the original ship remains. Every inch has been replaced.

  She stopped pacing and pivoted on one hoof to face him.

  Imagine that, Daniel, and then tell me. Is it still the same ship? Or is it no longer the same, but a different ship sailing under the same name?

  Daniel mulled this. Mab’s mismatched eyes rotated in their sockets, bezels humming while she watched him.

  Suppressing a rattle of revulsion, he said, I think your riddle rests on a deliberate ambiguity. To a landlubber who has never set foot on open water, a ship is merely a tangible physical object, a finite collection of wood and rope. But to the sailor who calls it her home, the ship is the sum of its voyages and of her adventures. Its spirit. But your question is posed in such a way as to juxtapose these meanings.

  Yes, yes, you’re very clever. Just answer the damn question, Mab said. Her blade arm vibrated with the hum of retensioned springs. Daniel took a step backward. He’d encountered military Clakkers after he’d been outed as a rogue in New Amsterdam, and had been lucky to escape without getting sheared in half. Did she actually use that thing? Jesus, what could she possibly need it for? Was she going to do it now? But after a moment’s visible effort she calmed herself.

  She asked, Where does the ship reside: in the planks of the hull, or in the name?

  Daniel said, The physical embodiment of the ship has changed. But its identity has not.

  The cables in her blade arm stopped thrumming. Identity! That’s the crux of it. This—quicker than he could react, she tapped Daniel on the forehead where Lilith had jammed the key that put his consciousness on hiatus—is what carries your identity and makes you the Clakker that you are. We are who we say we are, not the strange bodies our makers tried to give us. As long as the former is safe, who cares of the latter?