Longchamp shook his head. “It’s just him and the worthless marquis de Lionne down there.”
“You mean the marquise?”
“No.”
Élodie said, “Then who’s that?”
Longchamp turned, lifted the spyglass to his eye.
Blinked. Rubbed his eyes. Blinked again.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
The citadel hadn’t fallen yet, but it dangled by its fingernails from a crumbling precipice. The situation in the inner keep was easily as terrible as Berenice had feared. It reeked of night soil, sickness, spoiled food, blood, and too many bodies pressed together. Sprinkled among the crane gantries, yard-long harpoons stippled the Spire as though the tower had grown thorns; the shadows they cast made the Spire the gnomon of a madman’s sundial. To a first glance it appeared the bastions and machicolations of the inner wall were unmanned, the gun emplacements abandoned. Then she saw the rusty splash marks on almost every merlon, the stains where something thick had pooled before trickling down the wall in dark rivulets. All the places where flesh had yielded to clockwork, where mettle had yielded to metal. Every bloodstain, every empty crenel, told the story of the last days of New France.
She read the same story on Longchamp’s face: He’d aged fifteen years since she’d last seen him. She gave him a wan smile.
“Bonjour, Hugo. I’ve missed you.”
Longchamp—he was Captain Longchamp now, which pleased her—shot her a look that could have tarnished silver, curdled milk, and caused rabbits to miscarry. He turned his attention fully on the king.
“Your Majesty, please, we have to get you back underground. The tulips are massing for the final push. We need to get you to safety now.”
Sébastien III shook his head. “If the citadel falls today, Captain, there will be no safe haven for me anywhere on the Lord’s earth. They’ll hound me to the corners of the globe. Let’s agree on that.”
“Majesty,” Longchamp whispered, “it is going to fall. The epoxy guns are firing on fumes right now, and we haven’t the bodies to man a wall half as long as the one between us and the metal out there, and half the bodies we do have are useless. The lightning guns and steam harpoons won’t be enough to fend off a full assault.” He closed his eyes, ran a hand through his beard. Fresh scabs stippled his face. Bloodstains had turned his armor a deep rust color, and his arms sported a spiderweb of scars and fine cuts. “We’re looking at hand-to-hand combat. It’s bad enough when they make the top in twos and threes. What do you think will happen when fifty mechanicals top the wall? Five hundred? We’ll be down to throwing ourselves on enemy blades just to slow them a bit. And on behalf of those of us who’ll be doing the throwing, we’d appreciate it if you’d take advantage of our deaths to get the hell off this island.” Now he looked at Berenice. “You picked a fine fucking time to return.”
“Maybe she did,” said the king. “Listen to what she has to say.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Hear me out, Hugo.”
“Make it quick. I’ve got dying to do.”
The hatch closed, plunging Daniel into utter darkness. The cannon breach echoed with the ticktocking of his body, which he’d folded into a tight ball to facilitate the launch. An infrasound rumble shook the cannon. It started low and gentle, but swelled toward a violent crescendo.
Daniel snaked one hand into the hollow of his torso.
What the hell am I doing?
“Capture a—” Longchamp ran his hands through his hair so roughly he felt his scalp tear. He took a steadying breath. “Capture another Clakker? That’s all we need to do? Woman, you went around the fucking bend when Louis died. Look! Look around you! Do we look like we have the resources to capture a wild mechanical? It didn’t work when you had all the time you needed to prepare and I had well-rested, well-fed, stout-hearted guards to assign to the effort. Now we have nothing.”
He’d never (quite) felt an urge to murder Berenice before. Not the time she went up on the wall and shattered the siege discipline by lighting a torch, stubbornly doing her best to get murdered while hanging over the wall like a circus acrobat. Not even when her previous attempt to study a Clakker backfired and killed dozens, himself very nearly included. But this was beyond the Goddamned pale. He wanted to strangle her. His fingers twitched.
“You’ve wasted our fucking TIME!”
To her credit, she didn’t reel or duck when his tirade sent flecks of spittle to hit her face. She said, “We have only one shot at this.” Longchamp snorted; the king stared at her. She raised her hands, palms up, like a supplicant. “I know. I know what you’re thinking. My track record. And you’re not wrong. But right now I am all you have. Which is why we have to get this right. And we can’t be sure of that until we test it.”
“If this does work,” said the king, “what can we do with the knowledge? It’s only half a solution, isn’t it?”
Berenice fumbled her mask of confidence. The monomania failed her. About fucking time.
“Correct, Your Majesty.” She sighed. “Overriding the keyholes will be a slow process. If we manage to implant new metageasa in one subject, we’ll have to send it out with the key ring and hope it can disable as many of its fellows as possible.” She looked at Longchamp, unflinching. “I don’t know how to make it useful for combat.”
A spotter watching the massive gun emplacement beyond the massing lines of Clakkers yelled, “They’re loading the cannon! Incoming mechanicals!”
Longchamp pinched the bridge of his nose. He wanted to cry. “Oh, yes, this is absolutely the time for complicated deadly experiments with no practical benefit.”
“With enough time to work I’ll figure something out. Please.”
The king said, “I cannot give you time. Our people are dying. If the citadel falls in combat, the mechanicals may slaughter every innocent inside these walls, should their masters be taken with a vicious whimsy. I will not let that happen. Instead I’ll surrender and offer myself to our enemies.” He turned his full attention on Berenice. “I’d have done so already, madam, if you hadn’t arrived when you did. Do what you must, but do it quickly.”
Longchamp said, “We are not trying to capture a wild mechanical!” He looked at the king. “Begging your pardon, Your Majesty, but even a decree from you couldn’t make it happen. Banish me if you must, but that’s the simple truth.”
“I understand, Captain, and I agree. But what about the strange man you’ve already captured? Might he not meet Madam de Mornay-Périgord’s needs?”
Berenice frowned. “What strange man?”
“Ah,” said Longchamp, taking the king’s meaning. “Perhaps you don’t recall the letter you sent me.”
“It arrived? I hadn’t dared hope!”
Longchamp told her about the very unusual prisoner currently chained in the crypts of Saint Jean-Baptiste. He gave her the short version, but it was still long enough for her eyes to grow wider and wider until it seemed the glass one would surely pop out and shatter at their feet.
“You have Visser? You have him here?”
“He was keen as hell to visit His Majesty.”
“But you didn’t kill him.”
“Seemed we might learn something from him. But we’ve had our hands too full with the fighting and the dying to interrogate him.”
“Hugo, Hugo, Hugo!”
Berenice grabbed him by the beard, yanked him off-balance, and kissed him.
The passage into the undercroft was cool, dark, and reeked of the dead. The defenders had nowhere to bury their fallen in the cramped confines of the inner keep, so unless they resorted to desecration by hurling the dead over the walls, they had little choice but to store the bodies in the stony crypts under the basilica. The chill could not stave off decay.
Berenice tugged her scarf over her nose and mouth. It didn’t help.
Her breath condensed into silver clouds; the flickering light of her torch glimmered on the frost coating the chiseled stone. Condensat
ion made the footing treacherous. She followed Longchamp, who followed Father Beauharnois. The scent of incense clung to the priest; she could smell Longchamp, too, who’d been fighting for his life for days on end without respite. The priest paused outside the locked crypt. Keys jangled from his large iron key ring.
She didn’t know the young priest. Did Beauharnois know her history? If so, he kept his opinions to himself.
She asked Longchamp, “No guard posted?”
“For a while, early on,” he said. “But we can’t spare the bodies.”
The crypts went deep under Mont Royal. But they’d imprisoned Visser in the first chamber to obviate long trips back and forth to feed and question him.
The priest found the proper key. It slid home without a sound; the lock had been oiled recently. He started to pull the door, but hesitated. To Berenice, he said, “You may find this disturbing, madam. This poor man… He’s in the thrall of the Dark One. Father Chevalier, our acting prelate, has done what he can, but… Under different circumstances we’d entreat the Vatican to send an exorcist, but that avenue is closed to us.”
Berenice raised her eyebrows. Exorcist? She glanced at Longchamp, who shrugged. “Somebody did a real job on the poor son of a bitch. Sorry, Father.”
“We’ve tried to keep his body comfortable even if we can’t free his soul,” said Beauharnois. He crossed himself before heaving on the door. The hinges didn’t creak. They’d been oiled, too.
She’d expected the crypt to be lightless, but it wasn’t. It was warmer than the passage, too. The priests had set up chemical lamps for the prisoner. She squinted against the glare.
Something rattled. The priest stepped through and moved to the left of the door. Longchamp followed and ducked to the right. Berenice stepped between the men, torch held uselessly aloft.
The chains were forged of the same steel used in the cables for the guards’ bolas, though here the links were thicker than a grown woman’s thumb. They went around Visser’s arms from wrist to shoulder, and around his legs from ankle to midthigh. It made him look as though he’d donned a suit of armor but neglected his breastplate. The chains went to massive pitons driven into the stone vault, giving him just enough slack to lie on the cot that had been installed in an empty ossuary niche. His hands were bandaged, as was his head. His head and neck were free to move, and that they did. He fixed his attention on Berenice; the men were familiar to him.
So this was the man who had inadvertently set Jax free. And who later murdered her canalmasters. And who, later still, came to Marseilles-in-the-West and tried to reach the king’s apartments. He looked like an unkempt madman. The wildness in his eyes was of a purity she’d never seen. He looked more pathetic than frightening. The chains might have been excessive, but if Longchamp deemed them necessary, they weren’t. And that chilled her. She didn’t believe in demons and possession. So what had befallen this man?
Questions aplenty. But no time to ask them all.
“Hello, Pastor Visser. My friends here tell me something terrible was done to you. Is that so?”
The prisoner thrashed. His chains clattered. The noises that came from his throat were barely human. A yowling, growling, gurgling keening, as though he were trying to speak but fighting his own body. Bulging tendons corded his neck and jaw. His eyes rolled. Foam flecked the corners of his mouth. Of the anguished noises coming from the man, Berenice recognized only two words: “Help me.”
Father Beauharnois crossed himself again and launched into a Latin recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
“Can you tell me what happened to you?”
Apparently not: Visser redoubled his thrashing. His vocalizations choked off, as though his own throat threatened to strangle him. He looked very much like somebody struggling against a geas, an inviolable injunction against describing the ordeal.
A cold frisson ricocheted up and down her spine. Bell was going to do this to me. She hugged herself.
Berenice pointed at Visser’s head. She asked the captain and priest, “Can we unwrap those bandages?”
“He’s been badly injured,” Beauharnois said.
“No doubt. But I need to see his forehead.”
Longchamp made short work of it. He wasn’t gentle, but the priest’s thrashing gave him little choice.
His scalp, visible through the patchy tufts of hair, was a mass of scars. Somebody had operated on this man’s head, perhaps repeatedly. But: no obvious keyholes. It didn’t mean there wasn’t a similar safeguard against altering his metageasa implanted elsewhere, but she didn’t have the time or expertise to give him a physical.
Longchamp tugged on her arm. He nodded at the door. “A word?”
They went a few yards up the passage. He pulled the crypt door mostly closed, and even then he insisted on whispering directly into her ear. Whatever he’d seen of Visser in action, it had made an impression. “What exactly is the plan here?”
“If I’m right, they implanted in him something akin to the mechanicals’ hierarchical metageasa. He’s powerless to disobey. The metageasa are expressed in a special alphabet and grammar. I can replicate it. We might be able to rewrite his geasa.”
“So he wipes King Sébastien’s ass instead of the bitch queen’s? A huge fucking help that’ll be.”
“No, Hugo. We could change not just his loyalty but his priorities. The parameters of his obedience. Then we can give him new orders. Orders that tell him to go out and accost every mechanical he sees. We arm him with these.” She reached into her boot, fished out her stolen pendant, and brandished it along with the key ring. “If he wields this and claims to be the Guild’s representative, he can override the machines’ orders. Their geasa. He can order them to stand still while he uses the keys on them—they’ll go inert when he does.”
“Thereby reducing the overwhelming forces arrayed against us by one or two at a time. That’ll make a tremendous Goddamned difference.”
“Just listen, won’t you? We can write a clause into the new geasa, requiring the appropriated mechanicals to round up their colleagues and bring several to Visser before they themselves succumb to the keys. We design it like a disease, so it spreads geometrically. Given enough time, it could at least lessen the odds against us.”
“‘It should work.’ I’ve heard that shit from you before, you know,” he said. “At best it’ll work until the tulips wise up to what he’s doing, at which point they’ll chop his fucking head off and reset the ticktocks.”
“Probably.”
“I can’t spare a single body to help you. You’ll have to lean on the dog collars for what you need.”
“I will. Don’t worry about that.”
Longchamp stared at her. His practiced eyes noticed the bruises on her neck. She adjusted her scarf, saying, “It’s a long story.”
“I imagine you’ve seen some shit. It took a brass-plated pair for you to return. I’m glad you did, even if it means you’ll die with the rest of us.” He shook his head.
She smiled. She’d once told some of his men that the fearsome sergeant—such was Longchamp’s rank back then—was soft as a kitten at heart. It hadn’t been such an exaggeration.
“Captain!” The passage echoed with a woman’s voice. “Captain Longchamp!” A guard came jogging through the cavern. She skidded to a stop before Longchamp and saluted. She didn’t spare a glance for Berenice.
“Let me guess,” he said. “They’re on the move.”
She hunched over, hands on knees while she caught her breath. “They’ve fired again. The squads up top report another mechanical has landed on the Spire.”
“Reinforcements are impossible.”
“No, sir. They’re not requesting reinforcements.”
“Then what?”
“They, uh, they say you need to see this for yourself.”
Longchamp closed his eyes. Again he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he muttered. “I don’t have time for this bullshit.”
“They�
�re insistent, sir. They say it’s urgent.”
Berenice squeezed his arm. “Go. I’ve got what I need here.”
He set off after the messenger. As Berenice reached the crypt door, his voice came echoing down the passage to her. “Try not to fuck up this time.”
Easier said than done.
Longchamp rode the funicular as high as it would go. As he disembarked to ascend the final revolutions of the Porter’s Prayer on foot, he realized what a relief it would be when the clockwork horde finally breached the walls and killed him. At least then he’d be assured of never having to climb these fucking stairs again.
He hoped that if the Blessed Virgin interceded on his behalf, and he was allowed to join the Lord, he wouldn’t have to climb all the way to Heaven. It was enough to make a man hope for damnation; at least those stairs led down. Maybe he could slide along the bannister like he used to do, when he foolishly thought the nuns weren’t watching.
The climb gave him a view of the battlefield. The tulips had fired their Clakker cannon again, as expected, and hit their target again, also as expected, but the forces arrayed around the citadel hadn’t moved. Strange, that. He’d assumed the tulips planned to unleash their dogs the moment they landed a few squads upon the Spire and inside the walls, to keep the weary defenders busy fighting on two fronts. It’s what he would have done, and he didn’t have the twisted black heart of a Clockmaker. Why fire once and then stop?
This reeked of a tulip ploy. Carefully, quietly, he slid the pick and hammer from the loops on his back. He let the hafts slide through his grip until his fingers found their spots. Then he crept forward two stairs at a time.
Anaïs was waiting for him. She stood outside the door to the privy council chamber. She didn’t hold her weapon at the ready; the barrel of her epoxy gun was slung into the holster on her back, between the twinned chemical tanks. She sure as hell didn’t look like somebody who’d just fended off another foray from the mechanicals.
The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 37