The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  But no pigeons returned, and the king’s emissaries had yet to report. Every group had taken empty epoxy guns, in the hopes of recharging them for the return trip. The countryside was lousy with metal these days.

  Her own emissaries hadn’t returned, either. Free hands were scarce in Marseilles, yet she’d had no shortage of volunteers for this particular errand. They’d departed the citadel in a rush, braving the reapers to pluck wild tulips. The nearest Dutch medical clinic was at the border crossing in St. Agnes. But there were others, too.

  She’d ransacked the parley tent with her eyes the moment she entered; surely the commanders of a violent siege would have kept a fully stocked medical trunk on hand, just in case. But if they had, it’d disappeared—like the officers themselves—in the chaos of the Clakker mutiny. Probably some scavenger brave enough to loot the battlefield had taken it, perhaps without even realizing the treasure it contained. Even Berenice, in all her travels, had never laid eyes upon alchemical bandages.

  Without those bandages, a good man was sure to die. With the bandages, he was almost sure to die.

  Beneath the crunching of debris underfoot and the rattle of hoses on the guards’ guns, Berenice heard the guttural lowing of bison. Their path took them downwind of the pens. The stink of manure joined the tamer scents of thawing mud and ashfall as they neared the citadel. So did a skunky chemical astringency. A team of chemists crouched alongside one of the chromium-plated storage tanks, decanting the last drops. They stared with goggled eyes at the dribs and drabs trickling from the spigot. They’d been consolidating the meager remnants of their various products, but so far their scrapings had produced less than Berenice could piss on a dry day.

  The king’s voice intruded upon her reverie. She shook her head. “My apologies, Your Majesty. My mind is wandering.”

  “I said, ‘What else can you tell me?’”

  She cast her thoughts back over the meeting. “I don’t see the machines had any reason to humor us. It’s little bother for them if we follow their move to free the machines on the continent.” She sighed. “Little bother for them if we’re killed in the attempt.”

  “If the machines do push across the ocean, it’ll be sheer chaos from Lisbon to the Gulf of Bothnia.”

  “They will, and it will, Majesty. And you will sweep in to fill the void.”

  The king’s return from parley raised heads and voices amongst the multitudes laboring to rebuild Marseilles. Sébastien III waved to his subjects. His guards raked the crowd with tired eyes. Clakkers weren’t the only Dutch threat; merely the easiest to identify. Pastor Visser had muddied the distinction between allies and enemies. Élodie slung the barrel of her epoxy gun over her shoulder and loosened her pick. Normally the guards carried either a gun or the traditional sledge, pick, and bola, but with the guns good for one or two shots at most, they had no choice but to lug everything. To her credit, Sergeant Chastain carried the additional kit without a grumble; she looked much more unhappy about the civvies coming to greet the king and touch the hem of his garments.

  He watched them approach, smiling and waving to his subjects. Quietly, while he could still speak frankly, he said, “You’ll do two things for me, Madam de Mornay-Périgord.”

  “Of course, Majesty.”

  “First, get some sleep. You’re swaying.”

  “I will, sire. And then?”

  He laid a royal hand on her shoulder. “I want you to think carefully about what a return to Paris would entail. I want you to be prepared for the possibility that there may be nothing to return to. Assuming the machines would tolerate a human king in their midst.”

  “But, Your Majesty, we—”

  “King of what? Ask yourself.”

  The vanguard of desperate citizenry arrived, slamming the door to any further conversation. Especially on this topic. Berenice curtseyed and took her leave of the monarch. She slipped through a crowd of men and women eager for a glimpse of the royal person. The king’s audiences with petitioners had gone on hiatus when the siege began.

  Her path took her atop a mound of debris. From there she caught sight of the Saint Lawrence. The graveyard should have been visible from here, but the explosion of the outer curtain wall had rewritten the landscape. Farther down the slope she could see a pair of twisted iron poles where the lich-gate might have been.

  She’d never be able to visit Louis’s grave. Jesus, how she missed him. Sometimes, when watching the river, she felt him at her side. At those times, she could remember the warmth of his body, the peppery scent of his skin. Inevitably she found herself expecting a caress that never came. But it never stopped her from watching the river. It had been Louis’s first love, and through his eyes, she’d learned to love it, too.

  A fishing boat pulled in to the temporary replacement docks; farther out, two more tacked into the wind, pushing home. She could just make out the crews on three seiners preparing to cast off. Hard and unforgiving work, fishing on a river half-choked with ice, but most of the food stores had burned or been otherwise depleted during the siege. Even the communal stores of calorie-dense pemmican were running low, and would stay so until it came time to slaughter and render more bison; until then, northern pike and yellow perch had become staples of the survivors’ diet. Berenice wondered what would happen when the local bays and inlets were fished out. That would be a bad time to be a bison, she supposed.

  A few of the braver townspeople had trudged off into the woods, choosing the danger of reapers over the invisible insidious dangers of the tent village. (Clockwork killers? Those were the devil all Frenchmen knew. But dysentery, that was the devil they didn’t.) The Crown offered generous compensation for winter game: Caribou paid best of course, but coyote, hares, and rabbits could line the pocket of a determined hunter. Even a brace of squirrels was worth a few coins. The real coureurs des bois, the woods-runners, stood to profit, assuming their scrip eventually turned into real money. But that would require the royal treasury to contain something other than cobwebs and IOUs.

  But these weren’t her problems; food was the Minister of Agriculture’s purview, money the Royal Eschequier’s. But speaking of the Privy Council…

  As though her thoughts had summoned the Devil, a pocket of cobalt and vermilion moved slowly and unsteadily through the rubble. The color contrast with the ashen landscape speared her remaining eye like a shard of concentrated insensitivity. Though far from alone in his patriotic veneration of chemical dyes, the marquis de Lionne somehow managed to present a particularly offensive contrast with the gray lives of the commoners, who had lost everything in the war. The marquis wobbled over heaps of talus, trailing toadies and courtiers in his wake. Berenice imagined that if she strained, she might hear the sizzle of the laborers’ glares raking the marquis’s retinue. His bejeweled and beribboned clogs made hollow clack-clack sounds against the talus, in contrast to the chanking of iron rods and clanking of pickaxes from the gangs of men and women breaking down and hauling away the rubble. A single servitor labored amongst them, its strength worth that of ten humans. It worked alone. The wind shifted; the marquis plucked a lace handkerchief from the ruffles at his cuff.

  He stopped to watch Oscar the blacksmith and his two apprentices lever a particularly large chunk of granite from the earth. Quivering with the exertion, they pried it loose to reveal the severed, crushed limb of a mechanical. The alchemical alloys still had their oily rainbow sheen, as though the fragment of the former curtain wall contained a hidden vein of some precious mineral. The marquis nodded, gesturing with vaguely supervisory gestures.

  The blacksmith made his own gesture to the marquis. The nobleman’s blush matched his vermilion coat. Berenice didn’t bother to hide her expression as he approached.

  “Bonsoir, my lord Marquis,” she said. He paused before responding, waiting for a curtsey that never came.

  “Madam,” he said, somehow putting heavy emphasis on her stripped title. The king had restored her as Talleyrand, but he hadn’t restored her no
ble title nor her lands. After all, before narrowly saving the citadel (and, technically, violating her banishment to do that), she’d nearly destroyed it with an ill-advised experiment.

  She didn’t recognize the younger woman with him; she wore a voluminous dress of lemon and lime cloying enough to rival the immaculate confection of her hair. A faux birthmark on her chin spotted her otherwise powder-pale and flawless face. Berenice didn’t miss the intricacies of the royal court. The third member of the trio was Reynaud Galois, also known as the comte de Beauharnois and the Royal Eschequier. Galois wore an overcoat of martial cut, its blues and reds dulled by the reflected glare of the marquis.

  Apropos of nothing, Lionne said, “I thought you were to accompany His Majesty at parley.”

  “I did.”

  “Are you certain?” He pressed a finger behind one ear and cocked his head as if listening for something. “I hear no screaming. I see no evidence of a new catastrophe soon to overwhelm us. Isn’t that what you do? Wander from one tragedy to the next?”

  “Ending the war while the Spire still stands counts as a tragedy in your book? Engineering the devastation of our enemies? Seeing them routed, panicked, and on the run? Bringing a decisive end to centuries of living under the thumb of our tulip aggressors? Clearing the path for our blessed sovereign to return to the Old World and reclaim his rightful throne? For the first time since our ancestors fled the continent we are free to live our lives as God intended.” As an aside to the eschequier, she said, “All this without costing the royal treasury a single livre. Why, someday you may see the end of card money.” She continued, “What a strange world you inhabit, my lord Marquis, that these are the hallmarks of tragedy. Why, to your standards, the very Garden of Eden would be quite disagreeable.”

  “I still have access to information,” he huffed. He’d coveted the Talleyrand post for years without considering whether he could actually do the job. King Sébastien’s decision to replace him with Berenice, as the marquis himself had originally supplanted Berenice, was a stinging rebuke. He blamed her, of course. “As always, your actions are more dangerous than you realize.”

  “I know exactly what I unleashed. I wasn’t cowering in the caverns with you when the change came over the machines.” She pointed to the Spire. “I was in the thick of it. I saw the birth of the reapers. I saw the explosion of blood and bone as they turned against their masters.” Berenice shrugged. “But that’s all beside the point, isn’t it? Because we both know you’ve received no new information. It’s been days since a single pigeon arrived, and the old overland routes have been eradicated by the roving bands of mechanicals now haunting the countryside.”

  “As usual, your confidence is unfounded.” From the ruffles of his other cuff, the one that didn’t store his handkerchief, the marquis produced a tiny snuffbox and a sliver of paper. The latter he dropped in the woman’s palm; she stepped forward to hand it to Berenice while the marquis shook a dusting of snuff into the hollow between his thumb and forefinger. The paper scrap still retained the tight curl from having been wound about a pigeon leg. Of course the marquis had already read the message. In his own head, if nowhere else, he was still the real Talleyrand. Berenice’s remaining eye struggled to read in shifting light conditions, but she refused to give him the pleasure of watching her squint. Predictably, the message had no markings to indicate its origin; was that how he’d run things? What a fool. Meanwhile, he inhaled the snuff with a snort like a sow in full rut, affecting utter disinterest in Berenice’s perusal of the message.

  “Fascinating.” She flicked the scrap back to his flunky. A gust of wind caused it to flutter past the woman’s outstretched hand. While she chased it, Berenice added, “I won’t keep you. His Majesty will want to know at once, of course. Bonsoir.”

  She turned her back on the trio. Two steps later, the marquis cleared his throat. She allowed herself a moment’s private smile before turning. “Was it something, my lord?”

  “Hmm. You, ah, agree, then? That we should share this with the king.”

  “Why, of course.” She frowned as if he’d asked a silly question. Then she shrugged and turned away again. Her boots scraped across the talus. A moment passed. Then: “Damn you, woman!”

  Berenice whirled. “I’m not your fucking code book, you greasy shitstain. If you can’t understand such a simple message, you never should have held the post. You’ve failed. Show some goddamned grace about it.” She collected herself. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must queue up with my fellow commoners for today’s ration of cold pemmican. Rumor has it somebody caught an eel this morning; perhaps if I hurry, I can wheedle a morsel. A slimy eyeball, perhaps, or a good lick of its cloaca. I bid you adieu.”

  She strode away. Over the pulsing of blood through her ears, she heard the marquis call to her retreating back, “What does it mean?”

  Berenice had expected something unusual; even the idiot marquis could have churned through a standard Vigenère decryption. Assuming he hadn’t forgotten—or, God forbid, mislaid—the code phrases. But the scrap held no ciphertext. The marquis had mistaken it for a code.

  It wasn’t. The message was a single word of unencrypted plaintext, plus one symbol, written in an extremely precise hand:

  QUINTESSENTIA ↑

  CHAPTER

  4

  As usual, a knot of malcontents crowded the orphanage gate. They didn’t chant, or carry placards, or throw things. But they muttered. And scowled. And watched the grounds hoping for a glimpse of the one they reviled. They sought fuel for their outrage.

  Daniel felt badly for the abandoned children. They probably spent every waking hour desperate for new families, for people who wanted to become their parents. So to see perfectly able adults come each day but in a spirit of hatred rather than love… he couldn’t imagine the heartbreak. Unwanted children were the true victims of the vigil, not the half-mad former priest it targeted.

  Daniel wasn’t loved any more than the orphans. The French took a dim view of Clakkers in general, but especially those within the boundaries of the fallen citadel.

  “Excuse me,” he said. The protestors disregarded him. He raised his voice and tried again. “Excuse me, please? I’d like to get through.”

  They heard him, and probably even understood his tone, if not the words attached to it. But they wouldn’t have stepped aside even if he knew how to ask in French. They wouldn’t cede an inch to a Clakker. Not in principle.

  He laid a single fingertip on one man’s nape. The touch of cold metal caused him to flinch. His alarm startled the others, too. They retreated to a new equilibrium between fear of mechanicals and anger at Pastor Visser. A pang of guilt tugged at him; he disliked appealing to fear. But at least for a moment he was the focus of their attention, rather than poor Visser.

  “Merci beaucoup,” he said. He’d learned that much. He opened the low wrought-iron gate, stepped through, and closed it behind him.

  One woman found the courage to address Daniel. She spoke in the river creole adopted by those who spent much of their time upon the Saint Lawrence, wedged between French-and Dutch-speaking populations. Daniel had picked up just a few words of French, but together with his makers’ tongue it was sufficient to suss out her meaning. “You’re going to see him, yes?”

  “To see whom, miss?”

  “Him.” She pointed up, toward the Spire. Her fingernails were painted the color of unripe apples. “The one who tried to murder the king.”

  “He killed the pope, too!” shouted a man wearing a flannel shirt under waist-high rubber waders. A shudder rippled the assembly like a gust of wind through summer wheat. Everybody in the group made the sign of the cross.

  So they knew about Visser’s evil errand to Québec City, then. The information had likely come from one of the priests who had attended Visser in the basilica undercroft, mistaking his affliction for demonic possession.

  Daniel had also killed a man without wanting or intending to. He sympathized with Visser’s bu
rden of unquenchable guilt. And he knew well the agony of an unfulfilled geas. Left unchecked, the exponentiating torment could drive the most devout Catholic to papicide. But Visser’s anguish could never be assuaged.

  Nobody cared that Visser had fought the compulsion with all the strength in his body and soul. Nobody cared that he wept as he murdered. Together Daniel and Berenice had shattered Visser’s geasa, but not before that awful yoke had shattered his mind.

  It was a testament to Christian compassion and mercy that the nuns agreed to house Visser. The French had asylums for the mentally unwell, but shipping the mad priest to such a place would have been a merciless death sentence. Rumors of vile deeds would swirl about Visser no matter where he went. And in the wrong ears, those rumors could impel men to kill. That process was slowly taking place outside the orphanage gate. So the nuns of Saint Jean-Baptiste had taken the poor man under their protection.

  Sister Marie met Daniel at the door. In the river creole, she said, “It’s good of you to come,” or something like it. “You’re his only visitor.”

  “Nobody else?”

  The nun shook her head. “Vous seulement.”

  That saddened him. Berenice owed the poor fellow a courtesy call now and then. He had worked for her when he was a secret Catholic in The Hague, though neither of them had known it at the time. It was because of that work the Clockmakers had captured and warped him, revoking his Free Will through the application of their dark magics. So a compassionate woman might have felt an obligation to check on Visser from time to time. But Berenice was a ruthless pragmatist disinclined to visits of simple compassion. She wanted to study Visser, not console him.