Centuries ago, before Het Wonderjaar, a woman following an army raised no eyebrows. Camp followers were just another consequence of warfare. But now, in these days of metal infantry, women of negotiable affection found no reason to follow the hosts en route to war. So as she talked her way aboard a wagon at the tail end of the mechanical column headed, with some speed, to Marseilles-in-the-West, Berenice gave careful thought to how she’d justify her presence. A day later and many leagues from the locks where a massive trekvaart, a tow canal, married the North River to Lake Champlain, a human commander spotted her.
He reined up, falling back until he drew even with Berenice’s wagon. The wagon was piled high with tapestries for the commanders’ tents and locked wooden crates. It was pulled by a trio of servitors, who together strained to keep pace with their fellow mechanicals trotting tirelessly along muddy, snow-churned forest roads to the shores of the Saint Lawrence Seaway.
He frowned. “Who are you, and what are you doing back here?”
The insignia on his peaked cap and epaulettes marked him as a captain in the Fourteenth Irregulars out of Zwaanendael, more than seventy leagues south of New Amsterdam. Why would the tulips be pulling reinforcements from as far away as the South River watershed when, by all accounts, Marseilles already teetered on the verge of collapse? She wasn’t alone in wondering; she’d spent the ride eavesdropping on the mechanical troops. But none brought hard facts to their clickety-tickety speculations.
She trembled with an unpleasant combination of dread and spiteful pride. The captain mistook these for the usual winter misery.
“I’ve been sent by the colonial governor’s Land Grant Office,” Berenice rasped. She no longer recognized her own voice when she spoke. “I was supposed to be across the Saint Lawrence by now, along with all the other surveyors, not to mention my Goddamned equipment, but I missed my boat at Fort Orange.”
Her breath became a silver cloud wreathed through the remnants of the officer’s exhalation. Together they rode the winter wind to disappear into a forest of yellow birch. Aside from the captain’s horse (working hard to keep pace with the tireless mechanicals) she and he were the only two creatures with visible exhalations in this fast-moving phalanx of killers.
“Traveling a bit light for a surveyor, aren’t you? Where’s your theodolite?”
“I told you, I missed my boat. So I assume my theodolite is currently standing in a farm field somewhere in the ass-end of what used to be called New France.” The bitter taste in her mouth lingered after she spat over the side of the wagon. Her tongue curled in disgust.
“Well, it’s still New France for a little while, technically,” said the captain. Hidden behind her breastbone, Berenice’s Gallic heart did a cautious pitter-pat.
“Oh? I’d heard the Frenchies’ citadel, the Needle or whatever the hell they call that obnoxious phallus, had fallen days ago.”
“They call it the Spire, and not yet. But it will once we arrive.” His gaze flickered from her face to her neck. A frown sagged the corner of his mouth. She tugged up the scarf that hid the ropy scarlet weal twined about her throat like a torque. Just thinking about it made her cough.
“Well, then, Nieuw Nederland is about to double in size. The Brasswork Throne doesn’t need to send an army of mechanicals across the border. They need to send an army of surveyors, yeah?”
He scratched his temple. “Are you certain you’re headed in the right direction? We’re headed to Marseilles-in-the-West, which is technically still a war zone.” (Pitter pat, pitter pat went Berenice’s heart…) “I’d think they’d have sent you to Québec. That fell weeks ago.” (… Until it froze, pinned in place like a butterfly pierced by an icicle.) Berenice shivered.
“Look, Officer. I know only two things.” She paused while the trio of mechanicals pulled the wagon over a gnarled oak root. It landed so hard she bit her tongue. Still trembling, she mumbled, “One is that all my equipment crates were bound for Marseilles. The other is that if I’m not with those crates soon, I’m going to lose my job. If I haven’t already.”
His horse gamely hopped the root and kept pace with the wagon. Well trained, it was. He said, “We’re not a civilian taxi service. We’re a military unit.”
“Please,” said Berenice. “If I lose my job, I’ll have to go back to Vlissingen. I hate Vlissingen. Have you ever been there, sir? It’s a shithole, it is.”
The officer winced at the coarse words. “You don’t understand. We’re a military force in time of war! We could fall under attack by French partisans armed with explosives. If that happens, they’ll aim for the supply wagons.” He rapped his knuckles on the side of her wagon to emphasize his point as though she were too dim to catch his meaning.
I should fucking hope so, thought Berenice. By now every woman, man, and babe in New France not manning what remains of the walls of Marseilles-in-the-West ought to be waging a guerilla war against these bison-fuckers.
“If it’s a choice between getting blown to bits and returning to Vlissingen, I’ll take my chances, thanks all the same.” He hesitated; she could see the uncertainty tugging at him. She touched her scarf again as if doing so unconsciously. A subtle prod to his own subconscious, urging speculative interpretation of her bruises. Perhaps she ran from a dangerous husband?
“Please,” she said. “I can’t go back.”
“Very well.” He rolled his eyes. “Though it’s in my power to have you bodily removed, I won’t. But I’ll change my mind the instant I decide you’re in danger, or that you’re interfering.”
Berenice laughed. If it sounded authentic, it surely also carried a hint of desperation. Then she rose to her knees to peer over the crates and the Clakkers pulling the wagon. Pale winter sunlight gleamed on alchemical brass marching three abreast almost as far down the forest road as she could see.
“Sir, by my estimate you’ve got over a hundred mechanicals at your beck and call. Now, what on earth could a poor woman like me possibly do to interfere with your grand plans?”
He touched two fingers to the brim of his cap. “Good day, miss. I hope you find your equipment and retain your employment. Do remember what I said.” Then he clicked to his horse. It launched into a tired trot.
To his retreating back, she called, “Thank you, sir! And don’t worry. Once we’ve landed on the Île de Vilmenon, you’ll never see me again!”
Or so I most sincerely hope.
Daniel’s attempts to use Mab’s alchemical locket were a series of tremendous failures.
A few of his pursuers kept coming regardless of the light. Those were the zealots, the ideologues, chasing him out of sheer fervor and thus undeterred by the alteration of their metageasa. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst was knowing he’d recklessly lobotomized innocent kinsmachines. His desperation had made him careless; he hadn’t thought it through. He did now as he sprinted through a forest much like the one where he’d lost his foot.
He had no authority over the Lost Boys, so his attempts to verbally realign their metageasa could never work. The mine overseer had essentially commanded the miners to reprioritize their metageasa—which they did because the illumination overrode their keyholes and rendered the foundations of their obedience mutable—and thus they became Mab’s thralls. Daniel couldn’t do that. Instead, when he shone the light into their eyes and then removed it without a successful realignment, their metageasa became corrupted. That triggered fail-safes; their bodies ground to a halt.
Once again, Daniel had left a swath of ruined lives in his wake. Such had been his legacy ever since he went on the run. The murdered woman in the belltower, the leviathan airship, the canalmasters of the ondergrondse grachten, lonely but selfless Dwyre, the Frenchman, and now the Lost Boys whose minds he destroyed.
Unless he wanted to kill his fellow machines en masse, the locket was useless without an alchemical grammar. He’d have to find a way to do things the regular way and shine the altered metageasa directly into their eyes. I
nto the windows of their souls.
Daniel burst from a copse of birch to find himself tearing across acres of winter-fallow farmland. To the southeast, directly ahead, something peeked over the distant horizon. Too slim to be a mountain yet too tall to be a tree. It had the nacreous sheen of a pearl, yet was thousands of times larger than the finest gems of Brigitta Schoonraad, the wife of Daniel’s final leaseholder.
He’d heard tell of this unnatural wonder from a Frenchwoman he’d known briefly.
The Spire.
CHAPTER
22
Berenice’s heart abandoned its secret jig and launched into wild capering when the Spire heaved into view. Still standing! Surely the tulips would have ordered their machines to swarm and dismantle the tallest tower in the New World if the citadel had already fallen? They knew better than to leave any symbol around which a battered-but-resilient French esprit de corps could rally.
She’d forgotten how on the clearest days, like today, the very tip of the Spire—itself situated atop the crown of Mont Royal—was visible far south of the Saint Lawrence. Upon departing she’d turned her back to Marseilles-in-the-West, like any dedicated exile. Turned her back but not her heart. Never that. And now she’d returned to violate the king’s decree and flout her banishment.
Berenice boarded the last longboat from Île Sainte-Hélène, directly across the narrow, icy strait from the Île de Vilmenon. Water lapped against the hull, a deceptively soothing counterpoint to the irritating screech of the oarlocks and the malign ticktocking of twenty mainspring hearts. The mechanicals rowed the boat faster than a galloping horse. She hugged herself to fend off the chilly river spray. The true difficulty was fending off the desire to pat at her satchel, to confirm for the thousandth time that she still carried her hard-earned contraband. She worked a hand inside her scarf to massage her neck.
The tulips had burned the town again. No surprise there. She scanned the south-facing slopes for the cemetery where Louis was buried. She frowned: It had too many gravestones, and they lacked order. Many were rough-hewn as though plonked down in a hurry. Why bother with stone gravemarkers at all? Wooden crosses were needful expedients in times of war.
But then she cast her gaze more widely upon the rapidly approaching Mont Royal, and a chill went straight to her soul. Her cavorting heart slipped on black ice. It hit the dance hall floor hard enough to get the wind knocked from it. Or so it felt when her heart skipped a beat. And then another.
Where… Oh, Jesus. Where was the Crown?
The Crown, the Keep, and the Spire: This was how boatmen upon the Saint Lawrence had described the Last Redoubt of the Bourbon Kings for generations. It truly had looked like an elaborate crown, worthy of the king of both Frances, Old and New. She’d never quite seen it like that until she’d seen it through Louis’s eyes. Even then she’d never fully shaken the impression that the Porter’s Prayer looked like nothing more than blood seeping from a mortal wound. He’d laughed at that.
But now…
The topography of Mont Royal had changed. The outer wall was gone. Not broken, not breached, but gone.
Jesus’s bloody tears. In her Talleyrand days she’d been privy to top-secret conversations about the contingency plan, and had even seen cutaway diagrams showing how the chambers in the wall could be crafted to create shaped charges that would focus the blast outward. But even she never believed they’d go through with this final fuck-you from the last defenders of New France to the minions of the Brasswork Throne.
As the longboat drew closer, Berenice rubbed the mist from her eye and studied the debris field around what used to be the outer wall. The avalanche of rubble had tumbled all the way into the cemetery, breaking headstones and obscuring the graves. Poor Louis lay under tons of granite, his eternal view of the river he’d loved so much obscured by heaps of talus. Blowing the wall had flattened a wide swath of the town’s charred ruins. The churned ashes of the city made the river smell like a fireplace grate.
Here and there, as the longboat sliced through the waves, the pale winter sun glinted on something in the wreckage. And then the river haze parted for a moment, the sun came out, and the rubble field shimmered with mechanical detritus for as far as Berenice could see from her low vantage. A chorus of twangs, clicks, and rattles rippled through the Clakkers in the longboat. They saw it, too. And didn’t like it.
The detonation of the curtain wall must have caught hundreds of mechanicals by surprise. Berenice risked a sideways glance at the nearest rowers. Did their tireless hearts balk when they witnessed the charnel where so many of their kin had been flattened? Did they know fear? She eavesdropped on the mechanicals’ secret gossip. Much of it unfolded faster than she could follow, but she got bits and pieces of it.
What have they done? said a mechanical to her left. What am I seeing?
All around her, the Clakkers refocused their eyes for a better look at the destruction. The machine in the prow emitted a steady tattoo of chattering cogs. I count… hundreds… of our kin. And… what used to be our kin.
The rowers fell into elegiac silence.
My people did this, she wanted to stand and scream. New France did this to you fucking abominations!
But the tulips could afford to wait. They could call up as many reinforcements as they wanted, and swarm the inner wall just as they’d done the outer.
The longboat crunched against the icy shore of the Île de Vilmenon. The mechanicals disembarked. Berenice accepted without comment their unfailingly polite assistance. She steeled herself against cold metal’s embrace and let a mechanical lift her over the gunwale. The last machine to touch her had done so with murderous intent. This one held her delicately as a newborn kitten.
The Clakkers promptly forgot her. They sprinted across the marshy lowlands toward the long slopes of Mont Royal. She watched them go until she was certain she’d been left alone and far behind. Then she turned north to pick her way along the shore, toward the charred ruins of the docks of Marseilles. It was a long, cold slog, made musical by the tinkling of shingle underfoot and the occasional booming of ordnance. Treacherous, too, because the beach was icy. Her ankles ached when she finally turned inland.
Partially hidden behind winter-bare clumps of scrub oak, she crept along the river bluffs, squinting. Somewhere nearby, a narrow cleft hid the entrance to a cavern. The same cavern through which she’d departed at the onset of her banishment, though it had been designed as an emergency escape in case Talleyrand’s laboratory was overrun. The cold stone rubbed her hands raw and abraded her cheek when she squeezed through the gap into near-total darkness.
She straightened, slowly, taking care not to give herself a concussion on an unseen overhang. Something felt wrong. After a moment’s self-assessment she realized the weight on her shoulder was gone. The satchel strap had come undone.
“Fuck.” Her voice echoed.
Her heart hammered. The satchel contained her notes on the Clockmakers’ strange secret mathematical grammar of compulsion, plus van Breugel’s accoutrements from aboard De Pelikaan. She dropped to her knees, scrabbled in the dirt.
“No, no, no.”
To lose the satchel now would prove that God, if He existed, was a truly sadistic son of a bitch.
Her numb fingers raked through dirt and sand and things she couldn’t identify. Berenice’s sigh of relief echoed when the touch of leather brushed her knuckles. She gathered up the leather only to find it terminated in something furry. “Shit!” This echoed, too. She flung the dead bat aside and kept searching.
It felt like a century passed before she recovered the satchel. She retied the satchel strap, draped it over her shoulder, and then stuffed the bag inside her coat. Then she knelt in the darkness until she stopped hyperventilating. But the near miss had undermined the last shreds of her optimism.
What chance did she have of making use of these notes before the inner keep fell? All they did was tell her how to scribble rules for new metageasa. But lacking any means of testi
ng her attempt, she’d need a miracle to get the logico-alchemical-mathematical grammar correct on the first try. And even then it wouldn’t do any good. The Clakkers arrayed against the inner wall were immune to attempts to alter their metageasa as long as the locks in their foreheads remained inviolate. She had a key ring, but doubted the mechanicals would oblige the defenders by standing in line to have their locks opened one by one.
She sighed. One thing at a time. Keep moving forward. Can’t save the citadel from outside. Get inside.
Her next worry was Hugo Longchamp. Few people knew of this passage, but he was one of them. He’d been with her in the subterranean laboratory when she departed. Having learned of the passage’s existence, he would have sealed it. And if the barricade could withstand mechanicals…
The cavern was narrow enough that it could be navigated with arms stretched to either side, and it lacked side passages. So while the very first bend in the path took Berenice from near-total darkness to pitch-blackness, she could still inch forward. The heel of her boot caught another stone; it slid under her weight and sent her sprawling. She landed on her back hard enough to expel the breath from her lungs. A blow to her head filled her vision with illusory points of light, phantom glowworms dangling from the cavern roof. Berenice lay upon what felt like a pile of fossilized pinecones. For one long, panicky moment she thought her spine had snapped, leaving her paralyzed and unable to breathe. But then her breath returned and she rolled, moaning and bleeding, to unsteady feet.
She didn’t remember the floor of the cavern being strewn with so much rubble. The footing had been a little tricky, but it hadn’t been deadly. Crunch, crunch, scrape… The noise of her passage reverberated throughout the narrow cavern, forward and back, the auditory equivalent of standing between two mirrors.
The texture of the talus changed, and so did the noise it made. Less crunching and scraping, more crackling. She’d heard something similar on the day Louis died, on the day so many others died, the day she’d failed. It was the sound of a shattered chemical prison. The sound of epoxy stressed beyond its limits. She trod on chemical debris.
The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 35