The Rising (The Alchemy Wars)

by Ian Tregillis

  Lucifer glass. It must have been one hell of a lie.

  What other lies had Daniel spun this day?

  Civvies were the next problem. They were everywhere underfoot in the overcrowded inner keep. Including milling around the funicular station at the Spire’s base. As the car docked, Longchamp said, “Get ready. The civvies are going to shit themselves twice when we open this door.”

  And they did. That a pair of human guards held weapons trained on the mechanical did little to temper the crowd’s reaction: A mindless howl of terror and anger went up the instant Daniel emerged.

  Longchamp bellowed, “Clear a path, or I’ll make one!” When the crowd didn’t part, he jammed the haft of his hammer into the stomach of the nearest civvy, hard enough to make the man vomit. “Make like the Red Goddamned Sea and clear a path, or I swear you’ll pray for the tulips to overrun this citadel before my wrath has run its course!”

  That did the trick.

  Longchamp raised his pick. He pointed over the crowd toward the basilica’s shattered rosette window. “That way, Brass Pants.”

  The ticktock seemed to get the idea. It headed for the broken church, immune to the stares, shudders, and jeers of the crowd. People hurled things: stones, curses, shit.

  The three of them went straight inside. The wind of their entrance caused the candles to flicker; Longchamp crossed himself and made a note to light one on the way out. It’d probably be the last time he’d ever get to do so. He wondered if the Holy Mother would frown if he lit one for himself in the final hours of his life. Christ knew nobody else was likely to do it.

  It was packed in the cathedral. The civvies had crowded inside for relative shelter from the elements, and perhaps in the hope that the house of God would somehow protect them against the predations of horology and black magic. There wasn’t a bare inch of pew space; the floors of the aisles, which had become impromptu pens for goats and chickens, were invisible under a layer of damp hay that reeked of urine and worse.

  The machine’s metal feet made sharp crack-snap-crack sounds on the narthex tiles. It sliced through the whispered lamentations of the faithful, the clicking of rosary beads, the nervous snuffling of livestock. Hundreds of heads turned to find the source of the disturbance. A collective gasp went up as the trio strode into the nave. Off to the left, just visible through the aisle arcade, Father Chevalier stood outside the sacristy, whispering to the king of France. Prelate and monarch crossed themselves when they glimpsed the mechanical.

  Longchamp flinched when he realized his mistake; he ought to have determined the king’s whereabouts before taking the ticktock on parade. He was too exhausted for the machinations of mechanicals; all he could do was fight until he died. He tensed, but Daniel made no sudden move toward the king.

  “Quickly,” Longchamp muttered. Anaïs nudged the mechanical with the barrel of her gun. Longchamp concentrated on looking like he knew exactly what was going on and that it was all under control.

  As they passed the altar en route to the undercroft, Longchamp pitched his voice so it would carry. “Pay us no mind, Father.” Then in a whisper, he added, “Is she still down there?” The priest nodded.

  Once under the basilica in the crypt antechamber, Anaïs kept her gun on Daniel while Longchamp jogged ahead. He found the ex-vicomtesse hunched over an impromptu writing desk she’d positioned near the inhuman priest. She was scratching out a line of nonsense symbols and cursing to herself, while the priest pleaded with her: “Please, no more. Please free me. Free me. Please please please…”

  Longchamp’s approach startled her. Visser merely stared at him with the dead eyes of the utterly defeated.

  Berenice said, “I thought you had fighting to do.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s my lunch break.”

  “I need more time, Hugo. I’ve only just started, and this grammar is… Shit.” She looked ready to cry. She looked like he felt. “I need more than a few hours. I need a few days.” Her sigh was almost a shudder. “Weeks.”

  “Well, I was planning to take two feet of steel through the gullet this afternoon, but since you asked so nicely I’ll try to hold off on that. In the meantime, I need you to talk to somebody.”

  “Hugo, please, I haven’t the time. Every time I try something new on Visser, I have to question him thoroughly—”

  “A lone mechanical just surrendered.”

  The interruption stopped her dead. Her teeth actually clicked together when she closed her mouth. She blinked. It was the first time he’d ever seen her speechless. He took it as evidence the Virgin smiled upon him, that his final hours should bear witness to a minor miracle such as this.

  Berenice swallowed. Coughed. “What?”

  “All I know is that you understand more about the fucking ticktocks than anybody else around here, and that you speak Dutch, so I brought it down here. I’m too busy to deal with this bullshit.”

  Berenice looked to her notes, then to Visser, then to her notes, then back at Longchamp. Even now, in the midst of everything, he could see the insatiable curiosity take hold of her.

  “Is it a ploy?”

  “Probably. But it’s not aimed at me or my people, and it can’t be aimed at you—it landed on the Spire too soon after you arrived to know you were here. If the king’s the target, it just passed up a golden opportunity. Meanwhile, it claims to want to work together.”

  “Okay. I’ll see what it has to say.”

  Longchamp turned. Into the antechamber, he called to Anaïs. “Bring it in.”

  Just in case, and despite the weak assurances he’d just given Berenice, Longchamp readied his pick and hammer. But when the human guard and the machine entered the crypt, the Clakker stopped as though all its gears and whatsits had seized up. Its body emitted a twang that reverberated in the cramped chamber. It cocked its head. And then Longchamp witnessed the strangest thing in all his years, and the second miracle of his final hours.

  Clear as a wedding bell on a June morning, the mechanical said, “Berenice?”

  CHAPTER

  24

  It was her. Her voice had changed, but it was her. The Frenchwoman he’d met in a New Amsterdam bakery, with whom he’d forged a tentative alliance, and with whom he’d infiltrated the New Amsterdam Forge. She on a mission of revenge, he on a mission of sabotage.

  She made a noise something between a cough and a yelp. She winced and rubbed her throat. Daniel wondered what had happened to her.

  She asked, “What did you say?”

  “Hello, Berenice.”

  She squinted. Her lips parted. “I… Have we met?”

  “My name is Daniel. But you knew me as Jax.”

  Behind her, chains rattled. He’d been so surprised to encounter Berenice that he hadn’t paid attention to anything else. Now he saw—Sacré nom de Dieu, as Berenice herself might have said—that behind her lay a man wrapped in chains. And he knew this man, too.

  The Blessed Virgin smiled on Hugo Longchamp more than he’d ever thought possible. Because there on the heels of two miracles he witnessed a third. The shackled priest-thing sat up, squinting teary eyes against the glare of lamplight.

  “Jax? I once knew a mechanical named Jax.”

  And sure as hell the Clakker must have recognized him, too, because it reacted just as it had upon seeing Berenice. Twang.

  Longchamp gripped the rosary beads on his belt. He prayed under his breath, thanking Holy Mary for her grace.

  And then he said, “Will somebody kindly tell me what the hell is happening, so that I can get back to dying in futile defense of my country without the burden of unanswered riddles to torment me in my final moments?”

  The machine and the prisoner conversed in a low murmur. Berenice noticed how Longchamp kept an eye on them; she knew he was gauging the likelihood that the mechanical might snap the chains and free Visser. The guard, Anaïs, kept her weapon at the ready, too.

  Berenice said, “It’s a very long story. Jax here—”

  From where
he crouched near the tormented priest, the Clakker said, I told you. My name is Daniel.

  “—Very well. Daniel here gets around. He knew Father Visser as Pastor Visser, back in The Hague. They met again in New Amsterdam after the Clockmakers had turned Visser into their creature, though Visser didn’t recognize him then. Soon after that, I met Daniel when trying to contact the ondergrondse grachten. Indeed, you and I owe him thanks. It was his information that prompted me to write you. Not just about Visser, but also about the chemical stocks. His former owners colluded with Montmorency to give our chemical technology to the Clockmakers. Speaking of which, I was right about the inventories, wasn’t I?”

  Longchamp grunted. “We’re not leaning on steam and lightning because we believe they’re the technologies of the future, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  In the corner where Daniel/Jax crouched beside him, Pastor Visser laughed. He actually laughed. Berenice and Longchamp turned to watch the pair. An almost beatific smile came over the priest.

  “Thank You, Lord, for the knowledge that my efforts on Your behalf brought some good into this world.”

  Longchamp asked her, “And what the hell is all that about?”

  “I have a guess, but it would take too long to explain.”

  A thunderous rumble shook the crypt. More dust sifted from the chiseled ceiling. Longchamp looked up, eyes narrowed as though peering through meters of rock to the battle above. His fingers turned white where they squeezed the hafts of his weapons.

  Berenice said, “Go, Hugo. Do your work, I’ll do mine. Don’t bother leaving a guard posted.”

  The captain sprinted away without another word.

  Berenice joined Daniel and Visser. Addressing the Clakker, she asked, “I know why Father Visser came here. But why are you here?”

  I could ask the same of you.

  “You know damn well why I’m here. I’m trying to save Marseilles-in-the-West.” The time to be cagey was long past. She forged ahead, on the theory that the basic outline of her plan would appeal to a free mechanical such as Jax. Daniel. Whatever he called himself these days. “I’ve decoded the alchemical grammar of your makers. I know, roughly, how to write new metageasa. I’ve tested the capability on Visser here. It works.”

  “How humane of you.”

  “I’m trying to win a war, Daniel. I’m trying to save my country.”

  “Then why haven’t you?”

  “It works on Visser because he has no lock.” She pointed to Daniel’s forehead. “You know as well as I that I can’t overwrite the metageasa of your kin without first turning that lock.” She outlined her plan to send Visser out with a Guild pendant and a key ring to alter a few mechanicals at a time, infecting them with a subversive metageas that would drive them to convert still more machines.

  “It’s desperate, but it’s all I have. That’s why I’m carrying out these experiments. I don’t enjoy doing this, truly I don’t, but we’re talking about a self-referential self-propagating metageas. Surely you see how badly that could go wrong.”

  “So you don’t intend to free my kin. Only to subvert them.”

  Berenice chose her words carefully. “I can’t. I could alter their metageasa, assuming I had a way around the keyhole problem, but I can’t make them immune to alchemical grammars. The freedom I imposed would be short-lived before the Clockmakers reasserted control. Now, why are you here?”

  The Clakker said nothing for several seconds—a mechanical eternity. “I came to help in my own way.”

  “I notice you’re not on the walls.”

  Daniel mimicked a human gesture by shaking his head. “I didn’t come to fight. I came to end the fighting.”

  “How?”

  Daniel marveled at the cyclical nature of fate. This was Frederik Ahlers’s chilly bakery all over again. Even down to the smell of dead humans. Just as last time, they both had something the other wanted. And once again, Daniel saw how they could help each other.

  He said, “What would you say if I told you I had a means of overriding the locks?”

  Berenice twitched as though she’d been stabbed. “Jesus fucking wept! We could break this siege within a day.” She came closer, peering at him. “Do you? Have a way of doing that?”

  The look on her face was plain ambition and sheer cunning. He wondered if this was how she had looked when she trapped Lilith. Was it the same amalgam of determination and guile that led her to ignore Lilith’s pleas for mercy?

  He said, “Before I say any more, I think we should make an agreement.”

  “Daniel, we don’t have time for this. Do you want to help or not?”

  When had he become so cagey? Had his chimerism infected him with the twisted scruples of Queen Mab and her brainwashed adherents? Perhaps Berenice herself had begun to rub off on him. Or would Lilith tell him that he was finally shedding some of his naïveté?

  “Incorrect. You don’t have time. But I do. Whether Marseilles-in-the-West stands or falls, I’ll keep my secrets. But if it falls, you won’t keep your head, much less your secrets.”

  “If we’re overrun, you’ll be outnumbered. You’ll be a rogue on the run again.”

  Again Daniel shook his head. “I doubt it. I’ve become quite good at passing as an enslaved machine. I’ve learned from my mistakes.”

  Berenice trembled. Her pupils dilated; her heart beat faster. Physiological signs of excitement and/or anxiety. She wasn’t accustomed to having terms dictated to her. Too bad. Daniel had been helpless before others’ needs and schemes for almost one hundred and twenty years. Even after gaining his freedom and seeking the company of other free Clakkers, he was still a pawn to the machinations of others. This situation was his chance to change that. For once, he could exert his own will on others.

  It felt good.

  “You’ve changed,” she said. The muscles in her jaw rippled; she was grinding her teeth. “What do you want?”

  “I want an agreement that we’ll work together for the specific goal of freeing my kin. You can write a metageas that grants permanent, irrevocable immunity from the decrees of humans. All humans. I can see it distributed to the attacking forces en masse.”

  Berenice whistled. “How? How can you do that?”

  “Do we have an agreement or not? My assistance, and the end of this siege, in exchange for total freedom for my fellow mechanicals?”

  She ran her hands through her hair. She chewed her lip so hard a drop of blood swelled at the corner of her mouth.

  “Yes. Very well. We’ll do it your way. Quickly now, how does this work?”

  Daniel reached into his chest for the birchwood box containing Mab’s locket and the luminous gem from within poor Samson’s skull.

  “If you thought Pastor Visser’s pineal glass was strange,” he said, “take a look at this.”

  CHAPTER

  25

  While Longchamp had been underground witnessing the world’s strangest reunion, cursory forays had topped the wall in two places. Four men and women died sealing the first incursion. Nine died repelling the second. The bodies piled up so quickly there was no time to haul them away. The final defenders, Longchamp among them, made their last stand literally upon their dead comrades-in-arms.

  Moments after he regained the banquette along the southeast bastion of the inner wall, Colonel Saenredam apparently decided the Lucifer glass was a failure. The mechanical army charged forward like a tightening noose.

  Metal on the wall.

  “How do we handle the human commanders?”

  Berenice nodded. She knew what Daniel was thinking. As soon as they realized what was happening, they’d order their mechanical troops to look away. She gave her best answer.

  “The new metageas must compel the altered Clakkers to force their unaffected colleagues to look.”

  “This isn’t granting freedom if it forces behavior. I reject a metageas that compels my kin to visit violence upon one another.”

  “Daniel, the change must be self-pro
pagating. Otherwise it’ll never reach enough mechanicals in time to break this siege. All it will do is ensure they attend to one another’s freedom,” she lied.

  The machine might have sighed. “Very well.”

  A dull roar filtered into the crypt. The noise of combat. The sound of time running out.

  Berenice paged through her notes, looking for a grammatical toehold. Her head throbbed; this was a daunting task. It was difficult enough without the added complexity of hiding the true grammar from Daniel.

  Because there was no way in hell that she’d ever set the mechanicals loose. She’d turn the tide of this war, and she’d do it with Daniel’s help, but she’d do it on her terms. The mechanicals’ realigned allegiance to New France needn’t be permanent. Only until a French monarch was permanently restored to the throne in Paris. And perhaps just a little bit beyond that.

  There’d be cleaning up to do, after all.

  New France’s last line of defense was a loud and violent place, echoing with the wails of the fighting and the dying, the crackle of lightning guns, the teakettle hiss of steam harpoons, the thump of the chemical cannon. It stank of blood and hot metal.

  Longchamp’s sledgehammer weighed more than all the men and women who’d given their lives for the ideal of New France. He couldn’t think, couldn’t plan. His entire universe was this wall, his entire history one of shouting, dodging, swinging. He’d been born here. He would die here.

  Somebody bumped against him in the scrum of combat. He didn’t look, but he knew. Élodie Chastain.

  “I told you to go with the king,” he gasped.

  “Too late. Couldn’t get him away in time,” she said. “And I’m needed—” Together they ducked as a razor-sharp alchemical blade cleaved the air so swiftly it left the smell of ozone in its wake. “—here.”