“All right. I’m here. And you’re in the shit up to your scalp right now. I see nothing to justify summoning me when the final battle is about to start.”
“We sent for the marshal general, too. This is, um… it’s outside our training. This is officer stuff.”
She said that as if she actually believed in the wisdom and experience of her superiors. Poor moon-eyed lamb; the siege should have beaten that out of her by now.
“Very well. What’s the problem?”
“That’s just it. We don’t know if this is a problem.”
She opened the door.
A single servitor Clakker sat on the floor in the center of the room, surrounded by men and women with goop guns, hammers, and bolas. It was motionless, though the dreaded ticktocking instantly raised the hair on Longchamp’s nape. Instinctively he tightened the grip on his weapons. The machine was functional. Yet it appeared docile as a newborn fawn: legs splayed before it, mechanical hands raised in a gesture of appeasement. A faint metallic ratcheting filled the chamber as its eyes focused on him and tracked his entry. He hadn’t known what to expect, but it sure as hell hadn’t been this.
“All right, I’m here. Somebody tell me what the hell is going on.”
The machine spoke a few words of Dutch.
“What did it say?”
Anaïs cleared her throat. “It, uh, it said, ‘I’m here to help.’”
One of the humans translated the Dutch, somewhat haltingly, into French for the others, and vice versa. Meanwhile Daniel and Captain Longchamp studied each other.
The captain’s glare carried the weight of a hammer blow. He addressed the guards with fervor. The translator did her best.
“It’s the tulips make a trick, you brain-not-having excrements. Make it wet now.”
The guards raised their guns. Daniel raised his arms.
“Please! Wait!” he yelled.
The guards hesitated.
Longchamp wrested the gun barrel from one of them. He got his finger through the trigger guard and trained it on Daniel, though the hose still stretched to the metal tanks on another man’s back.
Daniel said, “Please, Captain. Before you fire, I have something that can help you. Take it before it’s permanently encased with me.”
He watched the humans while they listened to the French translation. Calculation unfolded behind the captain’s eyes.
Come on, thought Daniel. One little gesture of trust. That’s all I’m asking for. One moment of détente, and we can end this war.
Longchamp kept his eyes on Daniel as he issued orders. The translation came a moment later: “Judith, Gaspard, to the windows. Tell me what you see.” He kept the gun on Daniel while a man and woman surveyed the scene around the Spire. The view from up here was grand, Daniel knew; he’d admired it during the seconds he traversed the long parabola from cannon to Spire. It reminded him of the view from the leviathan airship. The memory came, as it always did, with a pang of guilt.
The man said, “No change, Captain.”
His colleague concurred. “They’re ready to go. Looks like they’re waiting for something.”
Longchamp nodded in the manner of somebody who’d just heard exactly what he expected. His aim didn’t waver, though. “Speak now, Brass Pants. For what are your masters waiting?”
Brass pants?
The conversation unfolded slowly, routed as it was through awkward forward-and reverse-translations. But conversation did happen.
“Just to be clear,” said Daniel, “they’re not my masters. But I take your point. I expect Colonel Saenredam is waiting to see what Lucifer glass can do.”
“What in hell is ‘Lucifer glass’?”
“A lie. But she doesn’t know that. She’s waiting for an alchemical firestorm to engulf this citadel. Sooner than later she’ll conclude the stratagem was a failure. And then the true attack will begin.”
“So you talked your way inside. Why?”
“I’ve already told you,” said Daniel. “I’m here to help. Please stop wasting time.”
“Help, eh? Since you come from outside, maybe you see you’re many outnumbered?”
“I’m not here to fight for you.”
“Then you can’t help us.”
Daniel said, “I have something better than fists or blades. With your help, I might be able to remove my fellow mechanicals’ compulsion to attack.”
That took a bit of effort to translate. Indecipherable glances, punctuated with more than one cocked eyebrow, bounced between Captain Longchamp and the guards.
Longchamp said something along the lines of, “I believe you because why? What proofs do you give?”
“Why shouldn’t you? How would trusting me worsen your situation? You’ve nothing to lose. If I were here to sow chaos, I’d be doing so right now.”
Longchamp clenched his eyes shut. Flakes of dandruff wafted from his beard when he ran his hand through it.
“Now I see. You come not to help us. You come because you need us to help you.”
“We can help each other, Captain. That’s the simple truth.”
Longchamp fell silent. His beard rippled as the muscles in his jaw clenched and unclenched. He closed his eyes. It looked as though he was concentrating on his breathing.
A guard asked, “Captain, sir, what are our orders?”
He opened his eyes. He looked at Daniel. “I can’t know your truth. But I know somebody who can.”
Visser wasn’t the victim of demonic possession. No. The poor bastard was the victim of something far worse. The Clockmakers had done this to him: Berenice knew it in her bones the moment she saw him.
She tried one more time. “Why are you here? Did somebody send you?”
Chains rattled. Visser shook the crypt with his tortured yowling. He thrashed; pink foam trickled from the corners of his mouth. He’d bitten his tongue.
“Okay, okay! Stop, please! I rescind the question.”
Most troubling of all was how he acted as though he wanted to answer her questions. And he tried, the poor son of a bitch, despite the very obvious agony it caused him. But he was physically incapable of overcoming whatever prevented him. He was very much like a mechanical deep in the throes of a harsh, long-delayed geas. And according to Longchamp—and the chains—Visser was inhumanly strong.
So what if…
What if he was a mechanical, of sorts? What if they had turned him into a human Clakker? A meat automaton bereft of Free Will.
The Guild had conquered the world with dark magics. Perhaps their magics were darker than anyone had imagined or feared. Even Berenice.
If this mad hypothesis were correct, then they’d need a method to impose metageasa on him—a means of laying a foundational substrate, to establish the boundaries and parameters within which each new geas would be fulfilled. True Clakkers were built with the hierarchical metageasa embedded at the core of their beings—the Forge shat them out that way. But Visser had been born to a human mother. Presumably. So how did the Clockmakers circumscribe the rules of his existence? His controller could probably deliver regular geasa verbally, just as the Dutch did with their mechanical servants. But to establish a new master in the first place? The entire system relied upon the existence of deeply embedded metageasa. Metageasa that could even be altered on rare occasions, akin to the nautical modifications applied to landlubbing Clakkers. So, how were those inflicted upon Visser? Perhaps they did it the simple way: through the windows to the soul.
Altering a machine’s metageasa required unlocking its keyhole and shining the appropriate alchemical grammar into its eyes. Visser had no such lock. What would happen if he simply read the symbols himself?
She told Father Beauharnois, “I need paper. And something to write with. Quickly!”
Visser watched the priest go. Berenice said, “I’m going to try to help you. Please trust me.”
“Y—You—” Again, Visser made choking, gurgling sounds. “C-c-c—” He coughed up a glob of pink spitt
le. “Can’t.” Even this simple statement required extraordinary effort. His head drooped as though his neck had gone slack.
While waiting for the priest to return, she turned her back on Visser and pulled out her notes from the transcription of the nautical metageasa. The notes that Huginn had very nearly killed her for. She stroked her bruised neck, leafing through pages of symbols and their approximate meanings. Best if she kept her first attempt as simple as possible. By the time Beauharnois returned, she’d formulated a minimal statement. With a deliberation that belied the urgency she felt, she translated her statement into a sequence of symbols on the paper.
“Pastor Visser. I want you to read something.”
She held the paper to his face.
For a moment she worried that he might refuse to look upon the glyphs, that some deep fail-safe would engage, preventing him from receiving new metageasa from anybody other than his controller. But he didn’t. His eyes scanned the line of sigils. He convulsed. The rattling of his chains toppled bones in the ossuaries and brought a sifting of dust from the chiseled ceiling.
Berenice grinned. Take this, you arrogant sons of bitches. You didn’t anticipate somebody else hijacking your abomination, did you? You didn’t anticipate me.
Visser shrieked. He howled until his lungs expelled every last whisper of breath. He inhaled, and screamed again. But this was a true scream. A true, unfettered human scream, not the anguished sputtering of a man incapable of expressing himself. A banshee wail shook the crypts of Saint Jean-Baptiste.
For the first time, Berenice heard Visser’s voice clearly: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
And then he cried like a newborn. Which, in a sense, he was. But he stopped thrashing, and he no longer choked when he tried to speak. Instead he recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary at the top of his raspy voice. Over and over again, pausing between cycles just long enough to thank her.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he mumbled. “The pain is gone. It’s gone…” And then he launched into more praying and weeping.
“What did you do?” Beauharnois asked her.
“I think I broke a spell,” she said.
He pointed to the line of alchemical sigils on the paper she held. “What does that say?”
She thought for a moment about how to express the almost mathematical grammar of compulsion. She said, “In a sense, it says, ‘Above all else, speak truth. Naught else matters.’” She wanted to let Visser carry on as long as she dared. But time was short. “Pastor Visser, please. I need to ask you a few questions. Can you answer them for me?”
“Yes. But please, I need to make confession. I need absolution. I want to take communion, but I’m trapped in a state of sin. Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, the things I’ve done. The things they made me do! Please, please, I need a confessor.”
Berenice shared a look with Beauharnois. This man was a Catholic at heart. The young priest crossed himself, then made the sign of the cross at Visser. “You poor soul. Of course. You’ll have absolution, and the Lord will clasp you to His bosom.”
The mention of souls made Visser weep again. “No, no, no, you fool! You don’t know. What they took from me. What I’ve done.”
Berenice said, “Then tell us. Start by describing what happened to you.”
Visser’s was the story of a captured spy, imprisoned and subjected to hideous surgical experimentation. (He was one of mine, she realized. He’d avoided the purge that took the rest of my agents in The Hague. But they caught him.) It was by turns disgusting, heartbreaking, and harrowing. When Berenice thought back to her incarceration at the hands of Tuinier Bell and her Stemwinders at the Verderers’ secluded safe house in the North River Valley, her blood tried to freeze solid.
I nearly ended up like Visser. They were going to open my head…
Meanwhile, Father Beauharnois, upon hearing of how the Verderers had excised Visser’s Free Will as cleanly as though it were a bothersome cyst, crossed himself and prayed. That such a thing was even theoretically possible posed difficult questions for Catholic dogma. No wonder Visser seemed half-mad: He was a secret Catholic, trapped and tormented inside the contradiction of his own rebellious body.
“What did they make you do?”
“Oh, God, the things I’ve done…” He wept so violently that Berenice had to lean forward and concentrate to parse his meaning. He flinched for a moment, as if expecting a flash of pain. When no new torment was forthcoming, the look on his face became almost beatific. It lasted for the briefest moment, before he drowned beneath another wave of sorrow and shame. “They made me kill.”
Berenice nodded. “In New Amsterdam.”
“New Amsterdam,” he sobbed. “Oh, Lord, those poor men and women. I broke their necks and crushed their heads.” He sobbed. “And here. I killed a man here. That poor guard, he fell and fell.”
“Longchamp told me about it. You had no choice.”
“I was their tool, their helpless tool. I was my master’s hand. I was the weapon. I was the cudgel, the blade, the executioner’s noose, because the Lord forsook me.” He was babbling now. Tears streamed from his eyes; snot dripped from his nose. “There’s more. There’s so much more. They sent me to the Vatican before I came here. The Lord forsook me, His faithful and dedicated servant for so very long. I wavered at the end, I grew fearful of my martyr’s end and I failed Him, so He forsook me, He cast me aside, and I became an instrument of evil. They made me go to Québec City and there I sought an audience with His holiest representative on earth that I might again become the weapon of those who hold my leash. Oh Lord, oh Lord, my God, why did You abandon me?” Visser curled into a ball, whimpering.
Berenice covered her mouth. Jesus. They’d sent the priest to murder the pope. She looked at Father Beauharnois. His face had the pallor of a trout belly.
“Why did you come here?”
“I came to kill the king. Do not free me! I cannot rest until I twist off his head and throw it from the Spire. Oh, Lord, the pain! I can’t withstand the pain…”
Father Beauharnois made a wet coughing sound. He ran from the room.
She said, “Who? Who is making you do these things?”
More sobs wracked Visser. He spoke haltingly, gulping air between sobs, struggling to speak. But he didn’t fight the prohibitions of a geas; he fought to express himself over the chaos of emotional collapse. “Anastasia… Bell… She is… She… commands the…”
Berenice nodded. “It’s okay. I know who she is. We’ve met.”
The sobbing overcame him. Though time was precious, Berenice knew she had to let him have a moment. At length, he recovered enough to continue his story.
“She forbade me from prayer. From communion, from absolution. She made me do things. Desecrations. Oh, Lord! I tried to resist, Lord, I did! But I was weak and the pain so terrible. The only… the only way to make it stop… The perversions Bell demanded of me, the desecrations, the sacrilege. You can’t imagine the darkness in that woman’s soul. Holy Mother, forgive me!”
Berenice shivered. Her prospects as a special prisoner of the Verderers had been even more dire than she’d imagined. If Anastasia Bell had gone to such lengths to torment a single Catholic priest, what would she have done to the former Talleyrand? Berenice shook herself, as though casting off the unwelcome touch of a cobweb. It lingered.
“You have to understand,” he moaned. “I didn’t want to do these things.”
“I know. I know. How could you? You’re a good man, Father Visser. You’re a victim of the Clockmakers’ evil magic.”
Visser’s utterances trailed off into bawling. He slumped on the cot and tried to curl into a fetal position, insofar as the chains would allow. She had so many questions, but there seemed little point.
Berenice said, “You’re free of her. She’ll never give you another geas.”
But I will, she knew. It brought her no satisfaction. Nor did she feel any pleasure when she took up pen and paper again. He cast a w
ary eye over her. He knew what she was going to do; even his facial expressions spoke plain truth.
“Please, no. Please don’t do this to me.”
“I know you’re exhausted, Father. But we have so much work to do and so little time. And you may yet do New France a tremendous service.”
Longchamp knew there was such a thing as free Clakkers. Though he’d never spoken with her—his job was to kill mechanicals, after all—the machine known as Lilith had been a common sight around Marseilles-in-the-West, even inside the walls. She’d been around since before Longchamp first lifted a war hammer and had never eviscerated a single French citizen in all her decades here. As far as he knew.
But a new one arriving now, of all times? It taxed Longchamp’s faith in divine intervention.
The machine calling itself Daniel didn’t speak French (or so it pretended), but it also didn’t have retractable blades in its arms, so that was something. Longchamp and Anaïs followed the mechanical down the Porter’s Prayer, both with weapons at the ready. Boarding the funicular was a delicate operation, but she managed to keep the goop sprayer trained on Daniel throughout.
Longchamp gave the order for rapid descent; the schoolboy stationed with the improvised heliograph worked the shutters. Pumps shunted ballast water through the hydraulics. Longchamp caught Anaïs’s eye. He looked at the door, then at the mechanical, then at her gun.
This is it. Closed confines. If it’s going to attack us, it’ll do so now.
She nodded, knowing his meaning. Longchamp closed the safety door. A slight bump, and then the funicular began its descent.
Daniel said, “Whee!”
Anaïs tried but failed to hide her bemusement.
Longchamp split his attention between the strange machine and the view from on high. Wisps of winter cold drifted like wraiths over the river. Marseilles-in-the-West and its docks were naught but acres of ash. What once had been the citadel’s outer keep was a smoking wasteland of impaled mechanicals and chemical dead zones, crisscrossed with the fir-like scorch patterns of lightning discharges. Beyond the former wall lay a no-machine’s-land of debris and broken mechanicals. And beyond that: a brassy noose waiting for the order to draw tight. The tulips’ reinforcements had arrived and taken formation. All they needed was an order.
The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 38