The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  “I don’t know. If they start causing trouble… Élodie trailed off, her gaze landing on Daniel. He finished the unspoken thought.

  “…the evil machines might decide to murder you all in your sleep, is that it?”

  “That’s not it at all,” Élodie protested. “Nobody thinks you’d wait until nightfall.”

  “That’s why I wanted you on this boat,” said Berenice. “You’re seen as Hugo’s anointed successor. Naturally some of the awe reserved for the captain has rubbed off on you. The civvies will tow the line if they see you’re comfortable working alongside the ticktocks.”

  Looking to Daniel, she asked, “And how are your fellows feeling about their human crewmates?”

  “We are far more accustomed to the company of your kind than you French are accustomed to quiet coexistence with us. In this, your venture may find success. Being around humans is a familiar discomfort to us, but a minuscule one compared to the geasa.”

  All nice and cozy in theory. But at the moment Le Griffon II had two crews, one of flesh and one of metal. One spoke French, the other spoke Dutch and the once-secret click-tick chatter of mechanical beings. The mechanicals resented the natural hierarchy of the sailor, for this meant obedience and the swift completion of orders issued by the human captain and his officers. The human sailors resented the predations, historical and recent, of hereditary enemies.

  Like every French soul plying the waters of the New World, the Griffon’s sailors were the spiritual heirs of the original voyageurs. They sang as if seeking their ancestors’ approval.

  Berenice’s late husband had been a riverman before falling to the seductions of a certain vicomtesse. They’d met on the docks of Marseilles-in-the-West one morning when she was just returned from her travels and still incognito as Maëlle Cuijper. She’d elevated him and brought him to court, but the Saint Lawrence had flowed through his veins until the day he died. Or so she’d believed until the terrible day when a wild machine proved there wasn’t a drop of river water anywhere in the man. But they’d had a few years together, and in that time he’d sung to her countless times. From bawdy ballads (usually when he was tipsy) to stirring chansons de geste (usually when he was roaring drunk), she’d heard it all.

  Captain Levesque and his crew shared that musical vocabulary. Berenice would never again hear the songs without feeling the stab of guilt in her heart. But they sang with such joy, such dedication, that she could bear to listen. She liked to stand near the bow with river spray numbing her face, listening to the sailors and pretending Louis was amongst them. In those moments, it felt like he was closer to her than he had been in months.

  Fucking tulips.

  Much of the countryside along the river was farmland. But while this was burned and churned, the invaders hadn’t moved on to salting the earth before being put to rout. The breadbasket of New France was still arable.

  Le Griffon passed a succession of French settlements: Sainte-Hénédine, St. Agnes, Trois-Rivières… Each had suffered under the invasion. The docks—the heart and lifeblood of any river settlement—were missing in some places, or reduced to blackened, twisted timbers in others. Entire hamlets, such as Lotbinière, had burned to ashes. In larger settlements, such as Champlain, marauders had put the torch to the local church and any civic buildings on hand, leaving the rest of the settlement to burn or not as it saw fit. More often than not it had burned, for the local fire brigades had fled along with the rest of the refugees. The churchyards were frequently visible from the river because they resided on higher ground (a necessity when living along a waterway with powerful moods). Inevitably, these showed signs of recent interments: fresh mounds of dirt chiseled out of the winter-hard earth, rows of simple wooden crosses.

  Le Griffon was a welcome sight. It brought news that King Sébastien III still lived, the Spire was still the tallest building in the New World, and New France persisted, battered but proud. The mechanicals always stayed aboard lest their presence incite terror in the local populations. But Berenice and Daniel together made certain that every villager knew the voyage was a joint venture of humans and mechanicals working in historic partnership.

  This was less welcome. There were those who could not believe that any French would willingly align themselves with the devil machines. Others considered it a betrayal of all right-thinking humans.

  Berenice tracked the Griffon’s progress by counting skeletons. The semaphore network was a vast chain linking the far-flung corners of New France. In some remote areas, she knew, the towers could be quite distant from one another, such as those that faced one another from atop mountain peaks. But here along the river, where haze and humidity were a constant problem, the towers were rarely situated more than a few leagues apart, and always on the highest ground in the vicinity. The burned husks were visible from the water. Several had collapsed.

  Occasionally, when the sun was high and the mist low, spotters on the high yards reported metal glinting in the countryside. Unaligned Clakkers roamed the land.

  “What are they doing out there?” Berenice asked.

  “Marveling at the sensation of consciousness without pain,” said Daniel.

  A sailor named Delphina, part of the Griffon’s original crew, said, “But why do it out there? It’s just fallow farm fields and scrub forest for miles.”

  “It’s where they were born, miss.”

  After one such sighting Doctor Mornay, the expedition’s lead chemist and a distant relation, took Berenice aside.

  “I’ve had an idea,” she said. “Will you bring it to the captain for me?”

  Berenice blinked. “I, ah, don’t know what you’ve heard about me, but honestly I’m not one to steal others’ ideas. Except the Clockmakers’. I have plenty of my own, as you might have noticed.” This last she punctuated with an expansive gesture encompassing the ship.

  “It’s a good idea. But he’s not going to like it. I don’t like conflict. I hate arguing.”

  “Contrary to popular opinion, so do I. I just happen to be quite good at it.”

  “You’re more… assertive.”

  “That’s a nice way of saying it. Most people use words like ‘arrogant’ and ‘bitch.’”

  Mornay looked aghast. “I didn’t—”

  “Relax, I’m teasing you. What’s your idea?”

  The chemist pointed starboard, toward the distant tree line whence the latest glinting had come. “Every time that happens, it scares me witless.”

  “No shame in that. You were in the siege, yes?”

  A distant look came over Mornay. She slumped, as if buckling under the weight of her memories. “We didn’t sleep, those final days. Fifty hours straight, trying to squeeze every last shot from the epoxy cannon.” She shook her head, dispelling the past. “But that”—she nodded toward shore—“gave me an idea.” Now she pointed up, to the topmen suspended in the rigging with buckets and brushes. They were tarring the hemp lines, part of a ship’s regular and ongoing maintenance. “There’s tar in the hold. If Levesque will part with it, we could turn it into crude ammunition for a heavily modified epoxy gun.”

  “How many shots are we talking?”

  The chemist hesitated. “Two or three.” Hesitated again. “And it’d destroy the gun.”

  Berenice chewed her lip. “How much of the ship’s store would you need?”

  “All of it.”

  “Jesus. Not one for the soft sell, are you?”

  The other woman deflated. “You’re right. It’s a foolish idea. I just thought… She shrugged and made to walk away. “Thanks for hearing me out.”

  “Whoa, whoa.” Berenice touched her arm. “It’s a great idea.” Mornay brightened. “I can’t guarantee that hearing it out of me will make the captain like it any better, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  Which, in that case, was nothing. Berenice worked on the captain for two hours, but he wouldn’t budge. The stores for ship repairs would not be repurposed, period.

  And so it went as t
he Griffon drifted down the river, until the Vatican hove into view. It was then, and only then, that Berenice realized she’d never seen true devastation before. Two centuries after the migration of cardinals, the Québec Papacy had come to a brutal end.

  Though it had burned, Marseilles-in-the-West was still recognizable as a settlement. Even after the titanic detonation of the outer curtain wall had littered the battle-chewed slopes of Mont Royal with wagon-sized boulders, the capital of New France retained its identity as a human settlement. That wasn’t true here. The Vatican had been so much greater, so much grander, yet all that remained was rubble. The ruins might have been a thousand years old. Not a single structure stood intact.

  The Vatican hadn’t been attacked. The heart of the Catholic Church—an entire city—had been pulverized. The capital of God’s kingdom on earth was a desert built from drifts of crumbled marble, crushed masonry, shattered glass. Wind-sculpted drifts of soot stood a yard high in places. Everything that could burn—timbers, tapestries, papers, paintings, everything—had been collected in towering piles and set ablaze. The fires had burned long, and they had burned hot.

  (“Look,” Doctor Hammond whispered, breaking the elegiac silence. He pointed to a mile-long line of evenly spaced heaps along the riverfront. “Those used to be marble columns. The heat turned them to lime.”)

  Where were the domes, the campaniles, the pennants, the Greek and Roman columns? The desecrated wind smelled of cold ashes and the unburied dead. Where were the rose attar and incense? The Holy City lay silent as a tomb, but for the croaking of vultures and the sifting of sand. Where were the choirs who day and night sang the Lord’s praises? Had they exchanged their Latin psalters for the barking of stray dogs? Had they abandoned the soul-stirring power of pipe organs for the quiet crumbling of toppled masonry?

  The human sailors paused in their tasks to gape and cross themselves. A tearful and shaken Deacon Lorraine led the crew in prayer. Then the deck fell silent but for the creak of sails, the slap of lines, the ticktock rattle of the mechanicals, and the quiet weeping of the faithful. Until:

  “Movement!” cried Delphina from atop the foremast. She pointed toward one of countless mounds of ashen rubble in what Berenice gauged, from old memories, to be the general direction of St. Vincent’s Square. Every head on deck, bone and brass alike, turned to look. The ratcheting of dozens of bezels muffled the sniffling of the devout as mechanical eyes focused on some distant detail.

  The click-chitter of slipped cogs rippled through the Clakkers. That split-second reaction carried onionskin layers of connotation Berenice couldn’t peel. A moment later the patchy late-winter clouds scudded clear of the sun, and then Berenice saw it, too: the oily rainbow sheen of alchemical alloys. Mechanicals lurked in the ruins.

  To Daniel, Berenice murmured, “Are they friendly?”

  He didn’t answer, only cocked his head as he listened to the call-and-response that had become the secret greeting of his kind. The shipboard mechanicals broadcast: Clockmakers lie.

  Clockmakers lie, came the reply.

  Berenice knew why the scouting parties sent to assess the situation in Québec City hadn’t reported back to Marseilles. The scouts were dead. Perhaps they’d been ambushed by machines ordered to stay behind for just that purpose. Or perhaps a colony of reapers had taken up residence atop the smoldering corpse of the Holy See.

  A servitor hopped atop a rubble pile. Its toes chipped the broken masonry, adding drifts of sand to the talus. It struck a pose. Arms akimbo, it hailed the Griffon in Dutch.

  “Ho, brothers!”

  Under her breath, she asked Daniel, “More Lost Boys?”

  He shook his head, emulating the human gesture. In the reedy wheeze of a Clakker whisper, he said, “Perhaps, but I doubt it. They wouldn’t have any reason to hide their peculiarities here.”

  Meaning the lurkers were too symmetrical to be Mab’s servants. They were insufficiently grotesque, the poor things.

  The machine on land switched into the clack-clang argot of its kind. As near as Berenice could make out, it said, Yours is the largest ship we’ve seen since we arrived here. But you are a strange vessel. I spy many fellow kinsmachines, yet no oars. What kind of a ship has galley slaves but no galley?

  The deck fell truly silent. Even the ticktocking subsided. Everybody looked to Daniel.

  Berenice whispered, “Careful…

  Daniel hopped atop the port manrope. There he strolled the length of the barque as it floated past the lone machine perched atop a promontory of destruction. The gyroscopes in his body made trivial a feat of balance that would shame the fleetest human sailor.

  We’re not a Dutch ship, he called. Berenice translated for the human crew. We’re a French ship, the Griffon, out of Marseilles.

  Is that so? Unless my perfectly crafted eyes deceive me, I count near equal numbers of humans and mechanicals on your vessel. Yet everybody knows the French loathe us.

  Daniel said, Sensible, yes? They have cause.

  Perhaps so. Still, I wonder why your ship carries so many men and women, said the other Clakker.

  A handful of additional machines appeared within the ruins. One, two at first. A dozen. A dozen dozens. They swarmed over the rubble, scuttling like cockroaches as they kept pace with the barque. A collective shiver went through the human crew. If these siege survivors never again saw Clakkers acting in aggressive concert, it would be too soon.

  Élodie told a guard, “Get the guns. Now.” He opened his mouth, as if to remind her the guns were empty and useless. “I want them to believe we’re armed.” He pushed through the press of bodies toward the forward ladder.

  The barque passed the last of the towering debris heaps fronting the river. The artificial bluffs petered away as they neared the confluence where the much smaller Saint-Charles River joined the mighty Saint Lawrence. The bowsprit pointed to the spot half a league downriver where the Saint Lawrence split to flow around the Île d’Orléans.

  The expanded vista revealed the blackened, shattered heart of what was once Québec City’s Old Town. The buildings had been razed here, too. The view was clear from the foredeck of Le Griffon all the way to St. Vincent’s Square, a mile to the north and west. As before, the Clakkers’ eyes clicked and whirred.

  Meanwhile, the machines onshore continued their insectile scramble to keep pace with the ship.

  “Oh, no,” said Daniel. His fellows’ clicking became a hypercompressed chatter that Berenice couldn’t parse.

  The woman atop the foremast cried out. Speechless, she pointed. Captain Levesque opened a spyglass; it reminded Berenice of the one she’d seen Longchamp carrying in the final hours of the siege.

  “Sacre Nom de Dieu,” he breathed. After a moment, he offered the optics to Berenice. She lacked a sailor’s experience, so it took her a moment to find the source of the dismay. But then she saw the men and women in St. Vincent’s Square. And the wooden crosses to which they were nailed.

  Even at their most ruthless, the tulips would never countenance such a thing. These machines weren’t hiding out in the ruins on orders from their dead commanders. They were hiding out in the ruins because they wanted to. This was a reaper camp.

  The spokesmachine switched to Dutch.

  “Tell me, Griffon. Are you a slave ship?”

  “Of course not,” replied Daniel, also in Dutch.

  “What a shame.” The foreign machine switched languages again, this time to French, the cagey bastard. “Wouldn’t you prefer to be a slave ship?”

  “Oh, crap,” Élodie muttered. Disconcerted murmuring rippled through the barque’s human crew.

  “All speed!” cried the captain. “Keep Orléans to port.”

  The bifurcated river was wider and deeper on the southeastern side of the island. A dozen sailors clambered into the rigging, agile as monkeys.

  The machine onshore said, “Of course you would. Let us help you achieve that.”

  The killer machines launched themselves into the river
. Their blurred limbs foamed the water.

  “Prepare for boarders! Marlinspikes and tar buckets to port!” bellowed Captain Levesque.

  Berenice said, “Suddenly Doctor Mornay’s proposal doesn’t sound so outlandish.” He glared at her.

  Panicked civilians bumped against the sailors striving to carry out the captain’s orders. Simultaneously, as if the object of an alchemical transmutation, Élodie, the humble chandlers’ daughter, became Sergeant Chastain, veteran of the Great Siege of Marseilles-in-the-West.

  “Incoming metal!” she cried. “I say again, we have METAL IN THE WATER!”

  The sailors in the rigging unfurled every inch of sailcloth. The sails billowed, the lines snapped taut, and the barque lurched forward. It listed to starboard, cleaving to the bearing called out by the quartermaster, whose charts showed where lay the fastest waters of the river channel.

  The reapers sprinted straight along the riverbed to disappear under the chill currents.

  Berenice closed her eyes, imagining a mechanically precise choreography unfolding in the murky waters beneath the hull. Machines climbing one another like inhuman circus acrobats, turning themselves into a swaying tower of metallurgy and menace. The bottom-most machine’s feet splaying wide, its talon toes pressed into the mud by the weight of its fellows. The waters beneath the hull reverberating with muted clanging as the enemy machines climbed higher and higher, their evil fingers grasping at the keel.

  But they wouldn’t tear the ship apart. They wouldn’t want the humans to drown. Not when there were still empty crosses in St. Vincent’s Square.

  Hypercompressed conversation ricocheted through the mechanical expedition members with the speed of grapeshot. A human chain relayed the useless epoxy guns from the hold to the deck. Élodie threw a pair of empty copper tanks over her back and shrugged into the shoulder straps. With an ease born of extensive practice, she flicked the rubber hose dangling from the chemical reservoirs, causing the doubled barrel to flip through a short arc and land in her ready hands. Everybody not actively sailing the ship donned a gun, though few did it as gracefully as the sergeant.