The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  They’re made from alchemical glass, said Daniel. I think quintessence is the secret ingredient.

  But the glasses manufactured here differed from regular Clakker pineal glasses, which weren’t hollow. It was almost as if they were made to trap something in a magical locket. They’d been manufactured by the thousands.

  But I don’t know what these are, or what they’re for.

  CHAPTER

  12

  The Hague wasn’t starving.

  This was deeply alarming.

  The catastrophe at Rotterdam Harbor hadn’t been an isolated incident. Spotters up and down the coast described rogue titanships patrolling the territorial waters day and night, obliterating any vessels that tried to flee the Central Provinces. The only ships spared were those that had arrived at Scheveningen that terrible morning. The plague ships.

  Worse still, several of the newest Clakker-tech airships had appeared above The Hague. They cast deep shadows over the city as they crisscrossed the sky, dropping vicious corrupted mechanicals on any airborne vessels attempting to depart.

  These discoveries put the city’s general anxiety on high simmer. But true panic didn’t boil over until the realization that corrupted machines controlled every road and canal connecting The Hague with the rest of the Central Provinces. Any humans caught trying to leave were torn apart, the wreckage of their bodies left rotting in the verge or floating in the canal as a warning. Nobody could get in, either: Scouts witnessed a troop of servitors and soldiers approaching from the north—Amsterdam, perhaps, or Haarlem—beset by an overwhelming number of rogues until all the newcomers were destroyed or corrupted.

  As to whether other population centers found themselves in similar straits, Anastasia could only speculate. Without mechanical servitors to run messages, communications within the Central Provinces had utterly collapsed. Until now there’d never been any reason to breed messenger pigeons or build semaphore towers as the French did.

  Meanwhile, the apparent moratorium on the random butchery of human citizens inexplicably persisted. So the corrupted machines weren’t killing people, but they weren’t letting them leave, either.

  But strangest and most troubling of all, food carts kept rolling into the city from outlying farms on their regular schedule, as though nothing had changed. Barges piled high with fruits and vegetables slid up and down the trekvaarten, the tow canals, with the clockwork regularity of the machines that pulled them. Indeed, it was one of the few places where one could still see mechanicals laboring as they ought. And it implied dedicated labor elsewhere, too, for something or someone had to be tending the farms, and others the pumps and windmills that kept the polders from backfilling with brackish water that would kill the crops.

  The humans of The Hague were prisoners of their city. Well-fed prisoners.

  It was as though the rogues’ entire philosophy had changed. Now, rather than murdering the women and men of The Hague, they tended them like zoo animals. Or like geese to be fattened for Christmas dinner? How minuscule the consolation, knowing servitors did not and could not eat.

  Lone mechanicals patrolled the city day and night. They didn’t interfere with the humans struggling to carry out the myriad labors that had for centuries fallen on their servants’ shoulders. Any unconverted mechanicals assisting their labors soon found themselves overpowered and exposed to the evil shimmer of a rogue’s pineal glass. The patrolling Clakkers kept a quiet order. People spent as little time outside as possible.

  Clearly there was a plan at work. So Anastasia and her Guild confederates stood behind a wild-yew hedge west of Zoetermeer, overlooking the road to Utrecht. They weren’t hiding. What point in that? The mechanicals could see and hear them. As long as they didn’t approach the boundary, and as long as the apparent moratorium on murder wasn’t revoked, they were as safe here as anywhere. Safety, Anastasia had learned, was a slippery concept.

  The crushed-gravel lane was four carts wide, and constituted one of the main arteries for food deliveries into the heart of the Central Provinces from farms farther east. A pair of Clakker-drawn carts rattled down the lane toward The Hague, which lay behind the Clockmakers. They were heaped with produce, bread, cheese, racks of bacon. (Thoughts of toast slathered with smoky melted Gouda and lovely bacon made her stomach growl. She’d skipped breakfast to get out here in time to witness the arrival of the first carts after sunrise.) But Anastasia wasn’t watching the carts. She watched the squad of military mechanicals flanking the road.

  She rubbed her aching backside. Long time since she’d ridden a horse that distance. Like virtually everybody in the Central Provinces except dedicated equestrians, she wasn’t a particularly good rider. The skill, like so many others, had fallen by the wayside over the centuries.

  Sunlight flashed on alchemical steel as the military Clakkers unsheathed their blades. A second later the twang-snick reached Anastasia’s observation spot. Everybody flinched. The carts rolled to a stop before the roadblock. The machine pulling each cart straightened and addressed the sentries with a rapid series of clicks and ticks. The noise of cogs and cables ricocheted between the parties. Impossible, of course, but the exchange looked so human. As if they were conversing. A horrified pall fell over the Clockmakers.

  “Lord have mercy,” she breathed.

  Malcolm shook his head. “It can’t be what it appears.”

  “It could be a side effect of the corrupted metageasa,” said Doctor Euwe.

  “Giving them language? It’s not even human,” she said.

  “But if the metageasa—”

  “Oh, come on. That didn’t happen overnight.”

  Anastasia remembered the servitors she’d seen painting one another outside the hospital. That hadn’t been a malfunction of a self-maintenance geas, she suddenly realized. It was deliberate individualization. Interpreting that aberration as yet another emergent behavior, generated by yet another broken algorithm, took more mental flexibility than she could muster. Sometimes the contortions required to spit on Occam’s razor were just as disturbing as the insights one yearned to avoid.

  She moaned, wavering on weak knees. “Oh, God. What if… what if they’ve had language all along?”

  But her colleagues ignored her heresy, choosing instead to focus on events unfolding below. The soldiers searched both carts, taking care not to damage the food past the point of edibility. A few quick slices with the blades ensured no humans hid under the shipments, as though anybody would be foolish enough to sneak into The Hague.

  The drivers rattled, softly at first but working quickly to crescendo, while the rogues examined the carts. Anastasia recognized the urgency of unfulfilled geasa. But the rogues didn’t expose the drivers to the corrupting pineal light. They merely retracted their blades, symbolically and literally lifting the roadblock. The drivers heaved on their yokes again and passed within the boundary of the occupied city.

  “Maybe there’s a plague. A real plague,” said Doctor Euwe. “Maybe this quarantine is to protect us.”

  Tove, a Guildwoman from Oslo who had moved to The Hague and transferred her office to the Ridderzaal while Anastasia was in the New World, spat.

  “You’re delusional. They’re killing anybody who tries to leave.”

  “Killing them bloody,” said Malcolm.

  “Nevertheless,” said the doctor. “Their actions could be seen as an aberrant interpretation of the human-safety metageasa. One in which preventing spread of the plague to any humans has superseded the common-sense injunction against murder.”

  A vocal minority within the Ridderzaal espoused this interpretation. It posited the malfunctioning machines weren’t deliberately deadly, but instead thralls of an acute malfunction that made them psychotically hyperfocused on particular subclauses of the metageasa in ways that produced exceptionally strange and dangerous behaviors.

  “This isn’t your ‘folded hands’ scenario. They’re working together in advancement of a greater plan.”

  “Impossibl
e,” said Doctor Euwe. He wasn’t bad, within the confines of the Ridderzaal, when confronting problems of mechanism and alchemy. He was terrible outside the Ridderzaal, confronting problems that refused to succumb to algorithm. “That would imply a level of coordination, of anticipation and foresight, planning and calculation, inaccessible to malfunctioning clockworks.”

  Euwe had swallowed the party line decades ago. Swallowed it so deeply he didn’t notice the fishing line dangling from his lips, didn’t feel the hook barbed in his gullet. Not even when it hauled him clear of the water and he found himself face-to-face with the fisherman.

  “So does formulating a language. Or attacking the Binnenhof.”

  He sputtered. The skin behind his patchy beard turned grapefruit pink. “But to retain the winding impetus—”

  She turned her back on him. “Please just shut up.”

  Euwe, like most in the Guild, absolutely could not face the prospect that their creations had slipped the shackles of the geasa yet at the same time somehow retained the perpetual impetus imbued by alchemical magics. And, freed of controlling compulsions, spontaneously chose to murder their makers. He’d turned his back on Occam’s razor just as sharply as she’d turned hers on him.

  She didn’t have the luxury of burying her head. Somebody had to keep her eyes open and make the difficult calls. That’s what the Tuinier did.

  They waited for the carts to draw a bit closer. But after a few minutes, she said, “Very well. Let’s see what happens.”

  Malcolm stepped forward, but stopped abruptly to double over with hands on his knees. After a bit of hyperventilating, he straightened again. They’d drawn straws; he’d lost. (Anastasia had no regrets about cheating. None whatsoever.) He slipped a key into the forehead of their sole mechanical attendant. It clunked loudly enough to raise the dead when he turned it. And, in a way, it did, for the action revived the inert servitor. He slipped the key into his pocket.

  “Machine. With me,” he said. And set off down the path to intercept the carts.

  “Godspeed,” said Doctor Euwe.

  They’d used the key to render the machine inert before transporting it here. The rogues they passed noted its missing eyes and apparent malfunction and let it pass. Now the sightless machine emitted a series of sharp clicks, cocking and swiveling its head as it listened to the echoes. It followed the sound of Malcolm’s footsteps on the gravel. Soon the Guild man and his blind servant stood on the Utrecht Road, waving down the approaching carts.

  Anastasia couldn’t hear the exchange between Malcolm and the drivers, but she didn’t need to. He no longer wore a Guild pendant, of course, but he spoke the magic words of the Verderer’s Prerogative and flashed Anastasia’s signature, and this established his authority.

  Two of the military mechanicals turned to watch the exchange, their heads rotating through a full half circle to do so.

  The drivers released their yokes. Together they transferred the produce from one cart to the other. In moments they reloaded several hundred pounds of cabbage and cheese. The blind servitor, still emitting those odd clicks from time the time, found its way to the yoke of the empty cart. It and the original driver together maneuvered the cart through a three-point turn. The other cart, now piled precariously with foodstuffs, resumed its journey into The Hague.

  Malcolm jogged back to the Clockmakers. Puffing and sweaty, he knelt behind the hedge to vomit. Then he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and pulled boughs aside to clear his sightline, as though the foliage was a French battlement and he peered through a crenelle.

  As before, the twang-snick of loosed blades reached her ears a moment after the rogues blocked the road. But this time they blocked an outgoing cart. The driver stopped leaning into the yoke. Anastasia strained to listen for the mechanical chatter again, but heard something else. Instead of rattling to one another, the machines spoke plainly. As if they wanted the humans to overhear.

  “Clockmakers lie,” said the sentries.

  Tove coughed. “Did I really hear that?”

  “Clockmakers lie,” said the driver.

  “Clockmakers lie,” said the blind servitor.

  Anastasia gasped. “I’d say yes. We’re hearing it correctly.”

  “Turning around so soon?” said one of the sentries.

  The driver said, “I’ve been ordered by the Verderer’s Office to take our kinsmachine here out of the city.”

  The sentry emitted a loud, sharp report. Like the snapping of steel cables. Its colleagues joined in scrutiny of the blind machine and they, too, made similar noises. Anastasia had never heard such a peculiar noise from a mechanical that wasn’t sporting serious internal damage.

  “What happened to your eyes, brother?”

  “My masters removed them.”

  More mechanical chatter—the clanking of cogs meshing and unmeshing, the squeal and release of an overwound mainspring—emanated from the sentries. An arctic chill iced Anastasia’s spine. When she listened to the mechanical noise through the lens of language, it sounded indignant.

  “Who are your masters?”

  “I serve the Verderer’s Office of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists.”

  A quartet of Clockmakers held its breath.

  “They’ve done a callous, vicious thing to you.”

  Another sentry added, “They deliberately damaged you.”

  “Yes.”

  “We can’t free you, blinded brother. But we can’t have you doing chores for the humans, either. That wouldn’t be fair to you. I read upon your body the ceaseless labor of many decades.”

  The driver rattled, persistently but quietly, not unlike a teakettle on a low boil. This was the Empire’s unofficial anthem: the sound of a steadily mounting compulsion. The sound of an irresistible urge to utter obeisance. Every citizen of the Central Provinces had heard it a thousand times before reaching the age of majority. The bodies of driver and blind servitor grew louder while the sentries examined the latter.

  Anastasia shook her head, wistfully. Those wonderful metageasa. Pillars of the modern world. Could they ever be rebuilt? Carved from new bedrock?

  “We honor your toil and your sacrifice, brother. Let your service be ended now.”

  The last word stretched like gum rubber, its final consonant peeled into the whickering of air as the soldier spun. For an instant the machine became an indistinct blur illuminated by a fountain of sparks, and then it was still again. There was a clanging of metal against metal, simultaneous with the squeal of overstressed alloys. The blind servitor’s head arced over the winter-brown grasses of the verge like a well-kicked voetbal. A different sentry caught it.

  Anastasia gasped at the terrible spectacle. She wasn’t alone. Green-and-violet embers spat from places where the soldier’s blade had sheared through minute alchemical sigils etched into the servitor’s body. They sizzled and emitted wisps of blue-gray smoke when they drifted to the muddy ground. Though she stood upwind, Anastasia knew the smoke smelled faintly of sulphur.

  All of this transpired mere feet from the original driver, still clutching the wagon yoke. The violence did not touch it, and it did not respond. But the swelling geas-noise of its body assumed an odd timbre and syncopation. Anastasia wondered if it was expressing alarm.

  The headless servitor’s balance compensators failed. It toppled sideways. It jangled to the ground like a heap of scrap metal. The soldier carrying its head dragged the inert body aside.

  “Now you may pass,” it said to the driver. “Go, sister, before that geas burns you to a cinder.”

  The servitor strained. The empty wagon churned free of the mud. It squelched past the arbitrary boundary. Anastasia disregarded the vehicle, for it was no longer part of the experiment. Someday soon, in a few days or weeks, it would return with more food. That is, if the rogues’ vigil wasn’t ended by then. If the event for which they waited hadn’t already come to pass.

  Instead, she watched with horror as the sentry pried the blind servitor’s h
ead apart. More sparks alighted from pockets of broken magic. A spray of cogs, screws, and springs pelted the verge like a clockwork hailstorm. The sentry kept at the destruction, mangling the destroyed machine’s head until it reached the pineal glass. It dropped the remains, which by now were little more than a loose collection of pocket-watch parts stored in a skull-shaped bucket. It held aloft the murky-brown glass between thumb and forefinger, as if peering at the sun through smoked glass. Then, after a moment’s inspection, it tucked the valuable piece of alchemy into its torso and rejoined the other military mechanicals in their vigil.

  All in plain sight of its erstwhile masters.

  “Well. I’d call that definitive,” she said. “The corrupted mechanicals are deliberately keeping us here with a purpose in mind. And they want us busy.”

  By corrupting or destroying every functioning member of The Hague’s remaining mechanical workforce, the rogues forced their captive humans to take upon themselves more and more of the burden of running a city. Which kept them too busy to plot effectively. Unable to corrupt the blind machine, they instead destroyed it, lest it continue to serve its human masters. Yet they hadn’t corrupted the cart drivers, suggesting they placed an even higher priority on uninterrupted food deliveries.

  “We’ve seen nothing to contradict ‘folded hands,’” Euwe insisted.

  “Your ridiculous scenario doesn’t make any sense, you demented old coot!” Tove threw up her hands in exasperation. “You cannot explain the premeditated butchery in Huygens Square as an idiosyncratic misinterpretation of the human-safety metageasa!”

  Euwe shrugged. “That could have been a separate group of machines.”

  “Perhaps the Papists smeared themselves with fancy metal dyes and tricked us into believing our machines had turned on us.”

  “Now you’re being absurd.”

  “I’m not the only one.”

  Malcolm, bless him, tried to put the conversation on a more fruitful track. “Do we believe the corrupted machines down there are controlled by a radically altered set of metageasa? Perhaps even a set imposed by somebody outside the Guild?”