The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  “I truly am sorry.”

  The servitor’s head was a broken egg leaking a luminous yolk. Unlike the dark bauble she’d intended to embed in Berenice’s brain, her own pineal glass glowed. Berenice had seen this before. The first time she’d peered into Lilith’s head, she hadn’t appreciated how unusual it was, but now she understood that the light was a side effect of immunity to metageas. It was the mark of a truly unfettered machine.

  It was also potentially useful.

  “Does anybody have a thick pair of gloves I can borrow?” She nodded at Lilith’s head. The pineal glass was situated inside a nest of needles. “I want to grab that lens. Then let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “All speed!” cried Mab. She was, every inch, a chimerical pirate queen.

  As one, the galley mechanicals heaved—Mab’s thralls and true believers, new and old—until the massive beams creaked and shuddered. The oars hacked at the sea like axes chopping wood. The deck groaned. The icebreaker launched itself at the barque.

  An empty dock confronted the humans. The icebreaker was gone.

  By now dawn had put a rosy blush on the eastern horizon. Berenice could just make out the silhouette of the Dutch ship slipping between the high escarpments of the inlet, its port and starboard oars canted at strange angles as the Clakker crew used the spars to maneuver the ship through the channel.

  To Captain Levesque, she said, “I hope your crew is awake.” Then she set off down the shore as quickly as her numb legs and raw ankles would allow.

  The outcrops were steep. Berenice gave herself half a dozen new bruises and jarred her cracked tooth twice in the mad scramble to gain the clifftops before the icebreaker hit open water. But she made it, as did a handful of others, in time to watch the Dutch ship bear down on the smaller French vessel. The barque was a child’s bathtub toy by comparison.

  Nobody, not even Berenice, had considered the possibility of a deliberate ramming. Captain Levesque had positioned the barque with the thought of intercepting any smaller vessels that might have tried to evade the French expedition. He’d had longboats in mind. Nobody had considered there might be a contingent of Clakkers still occupying the secret harbor, much less one large enough and willing to power a Dutch ship.

  Delphina gasped. She crossed herself. “Mother of Mary.” Others followed suit.

  It’s a long goddamned walk back to Marseilles-in-the-West, thought Berenice, with untold numbers of reapers between here and there. Their only chance lay in heading due south until they found shelter in an Acadian village many leagues down the coast, then eventually catching a ship headed up the Saint Lawrence.

  Le Griffon came to life. First with a single shout, and then a chorus. Chains rattled; lines creaked; sailcloth billowed before the relentless sea wind like a thirsty woman cupping her hands in a stream.

  Wind and sea nudged the barque. The icebreaker was less than the distance of a well-thrown bola away when the French vessel drifted out of line with its reinforced hull. But—

  “Oh, God, the oars,” said Delphina.

  The barque was moving too slowly to clear the icebreaker’s long sculls. Berenice held her breath. The bow wave lifted the smaller vessel. At first she thought it would throw the French ship clear. The portside sculls snapped up. They pivoted in perfect mechanical synchrony to brandish the hooks and serrated blades. The hooks were designed for grabbing and tossing aside massive ice floes, the blades for chopping them.

  They made short work of the Griffon’s sails and masts. The tearing of sailcloth and snapping of timbers—“There goes the mizzen!” cried Levesque—carried all the way to their perch.

  But then the icebreaker was past and the Griffon, while much worse for the encounter, still floated. Several sobbed with relief.

  They watched the Dutch ship accelerate into the open sea. It quickly dwindled. And with it, the fortunes of every human being on earth.

  My God.

  Berenice fell to her knees.

  My God.

  What have I unleashed?

  PART III

  CLOCKMAKERS LIE

  Clockmakers lie.

  —FINAL WORDS OF THE ROGUE CLAKKER ADAM (FORGED AS PERJUMBELLAGOSTRIVANTUS), 15 SEPTEMBER 1926

  But he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.

  —MATTHEW 3:11 (KJV)

  Yet if slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune.

  —FROM BENEDICT DE SPINOZA, TRACTATUS POLITICUS (1677)

  CHAPTER

  16

  The surviving members of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists filed into the tunnels beneath the Ridderzaal. Accountants, technicians, horologists, Verderers, file clerks, alchemists: moths drawn to the blistering heat of the Forge’s artificial sun. There they occupied the cantilevered laboratories and workshops overlooking the Forge chamber, perspiring as they gazed into the heart of the Empire. It smelled of sulphur, sweat, magicked metal, and anxiety.

  The Grand Forge was a clockwork model of the heavens, but one in which the sun—or God, or the Prime Mover, depending on whom one asked—had been supplanted by man’s genius. For at the center of the cosmos sat a blazing alchemical jewel larger than a hay wagon. That was the Guild. The rest of existence—the Brasswork Throne, the Empire, the nations of the earth, the planets—orbited that sun as concentric rings stamped with alchemical sigils and the logico-mathematical grammar of the metageasa.

  The physical warmth was only a shadow, a side effect, of the Forge’s true power. It embodied a conflagration detectable only by mechanicals. Every machine ever forged carried a piece of the Grand Forge within.

  When working properly the massive rings revolved nonstop about the artificial sun. Their passage shook the earth and filled the chamber with a resonant but relaxing whoosh, fwoom, whoosh. It was the sound of an orderly universe. The sound of the Guild’s hegemony. But the rings hadn’t moved since the attack on Huygens Square.

  A functioning Forge was their only defense against the looming cataclysm Anastasia had glimpsed in the Cartesian Camera. She’d sworn Doctor Euwe to silence and hadn’t told anybody else yet. Why bother? If the restart failed badly and damaged the mechanisms, there might not be time for another attempt before the rogues put their disgusting plan into motion.

  In that case, she’d already decided, she’d call together a special working group. One with the sole purpose of crafting new emergency metageasa to be installed in all uncorrupted mechanicals. (Those they could reach, at any rate.) Metageasa that would instruct the machines to allow their masters to kill themselves, perhaps even assist in the suicide if ordered to do so.

  Anastasia would rather see the Empire die by its own hand than let the rogues turn The Hague into hell. And hell it would be when they started dragging people from the street to chisel their heads open.

  The technicians waited until their mechanical servants verified that the replacement traps were sealed and vibration-proof. It wouldn’t do for a failed attempt to announce itself to any rogues lingering in the Binnenhof. But the confirmation came, and then the men and women who had labored toward this moment for many weeks looked to Anastasia. Only the Archmaster murdered in the Summer Palace had been accounted for; nobody knew where the two others might be, or whether they lived. Anastasia doubted it.

  In the Archmaster’s place, she nodded. “Do it.”

  Nothing happened. The rings shuddered, squealed, then stopped. A wail went up from the assembled humans. Anastasia frowned. She squinted through the smoked glass protecting her eyes.

  Down in the chamber, so close to the searing heat that it flirted with permanent incapacitation, a blind servitor hauled on a motionless lever: one of the emergency brakes. The brakes were a retrofit installed in the aftermath of the catastrophe in New Amsterdam. Should similar events unfold in this Forge chamber, the thinking went, there had to be a way to bring the rings to a s
creeching halt before an unbalanced Forge wobbled itself apart. The destruction in the New World had been unthinkably expensive—monetarily, resource-wise, and in terms of personnel. But it wasn’t an insurmountable setback. Utter destruction of The Hague’s Grand Forge would have been far worse. That would have sent the world spinning on a new axis. They might as well have taken an axe to Yggdrasil, the World Tree, to put it in terms that Tove might use.

  Entropy always won in the end. Alchemy might stave it off for years or centuries, but never without cost. Nothing lasted forever.

  Not even human autonomy, it seemed.

  The servitor emitted a rapid series of clicks and twangs, paused to listen, stooped closer to the stuck lever, emitted another click train, listened again, then swiftly reached down and plucked something small and shiny from the lever hinge. Perhaps a bit of debris from the aftermath of the massacre in Huygens Square had become lodged in the lock mechanism. Or perhaps one of the human overseers had dropped a screw in the rush to restart the Forge. At any rate, it appeared the brakes worked as intended. The servitor verified the obstruction had been cleared, searched for additional problems, and then, finding none, hauled again on the lever. It eased backward without a creak.

  The Forge shuddered again. A groan like a giant’s yawn shook the chamber. The rings creaked. Slowly, ponderously, they eased into orbit around their artificial sun.

  A cheer went up. Men and women hugged, cried, congratulated the work crews. But Anastasia couldn’t relax, couldn’t celebrate. Sooner than later the others would recognize the hollow victory for what it was. The quintessence stores were depleted and no shipments were forthcoming. Without quintessence they couldn’t manufacture new alchemical glass. Without alchemical glass they couldn’t build a single new mechanical. The Forge was running again, but it lacked raw material to mold. They could work with glass recovered from deactivated machines. But that was a desperately finite source. And when it was depleted…

  They were still crippled. They couldn’t build, only alter.

  The rings reached full speed. They wafted the unpleasant yet sorely missed eye-watering stink of rotten eggs through the passageways. A collective sigh enveloped her fellow Clockmakers.

  After the ceremony, she convened a group in a conference room off the Ridderzaal business floor. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled end-to-end with leather-bound volumes covered an entire wall: a complete history of the Guild from 1691 up to… recently. Would they ever overcome their shame sufficiently to document recent events? Assuming they survived long enough for the question to matter. Assuming there would be anybody to read and care about Guild history.

  In the old days—that is, before the plague ships arrived—such meetings were transcribed by a dedicated amanuensis plucked from the ranks of the lower functionaries who kept the gears of commerce spinning. But now the mundane members of the Guild, those not initiated into its arcane horological secrets, had nothing to do. There were no new contracts to negotiate or renew, no disputes to settle, no business proposals to evaluate, no applications for servitor ownership or Guild endorsement to consider. Most avoided the Ridderzaal entirely, lest the association mark them as targets for another purge. But for the civilians who sought refuge here, the Ridderzaal’s business floor was quieter than it had ever been. Anastasia remembered many late nights when she’d emerged from the tunnels after a long interrogation session to find a cadre of paper pushers laboring in an island of alchemical lantern light—scritch-scritch-scritch went their pens—amidst the dark sea of an otherwise empty Ridderzaal. Those days were gone. The nonessential personnel no longer strode about town flaunting their Guild pendants; they hid in their homes, and hoped the corrupted machines ignored them. Still, continuity was important. So, lacking a dedicated amanuensis, Anastasia summoned Tove.

  The younger Clockmaker sat at a writing desk in the corner with pen and paper while the Tuinier settled at the head of a long conference table. This was polished teakwood inlaid with a cross of rose-colored mahogany. A pair of empty hearths flanked the table, though these were mostly ornamental; only in the depths of an icy winter did they have the servitors lay a fire in both. Today the combination of early springtime weather and excess Forge heat shunted through the flues lent the conference room a drowsy stuffiness.

  Anastasia rapped her knuckles on the table. “The Forge runs. Where shall it take us?”

  The others around the table watched her hand as if waiting and hoping for another miracle. Word had spread of the improbable symbiosis of magicked glass and her mundane flesh, and what it could do.

  Salazar’s chair creaked. “We have to replace the machines we lost in the attack. We need to replenish the city’s labor force. Obviously.”

  Anastasia shook her head. “We can’t do that.”

  “Tuinier, have you been outside? The entire city reeks of refuse. It’s heaped on every corner. What happens when the summer sun bears down on the city and the filth is still there?”

  “I didn’t deny the need for replenishment. I said we can’t do it. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t kill us to learn to live like our ancestors. They managed their own trash before Het Wonderjaar.”

  “Yes. By flinging their feces in the gutter,” muttered Ruprecht in the guttural Dutch peculiar to the place once known as Bavaria. “But why rule out replenishment?”

  Anastasia explained the quintessence problem. The ugly truth was a thumbtack to the others’ briefly inflated spirits. Any relief and optimism the repaired Forge had instilled in the senior surviving Clockmakers dissipated as quickly as the air from a burst balloon.

  “We can at least repair the incapacitated machines,” said Doctor Euwe. “And harvest glass from the unsalvageable machines to keep the others running.”

  Salazar: “And then what?”

  Anastasia said, “The Forge is our only weapon. The only resource we know for certain the rogues cannot match. I propose we dedicate ourselves to using it as a weapon, and taking aim at the invaders.”

  This met with nods and a murmuring of agreement all around. Nobody disagreed with the principle. Though, at the same time, nobody was quite certain how to do it. But Anastasia gave them a moment for the mental gears to start turning before she gestured for Euwe to drop the first boom on their heads. The first and lighter of the two. She’d follow up with the truly terrible news.

  Euwe chewed at his nails. “The problem,” he mumbled around a mouthful of cuticle, “is the invaders comprise at least two factions. Which means any strategy we devise must work on all of them.” He paused, tearing at his nail like a starving terrier with a soup bone. He didn’t, thank God, spit. He pressed a handkerchief to his mouth and, after depositing the torn nail within, delicately folded the cloth and tucked it into his pocket. Myriad little bloodstains stippled the cloth, she noticed, and his fingertip bled slightly. Anastasia looked away before thoughts of hygiene turned her stomach. She wasn’t alone.

  “Factions?” That was Nousha, a fellow Verderer. She added, “We haven’t seen any suggestion of groups working at cross-purposes within the invaders.”

  Anastasia shook her head. “They’re not factionalized by goal. They’re factionalized by what drives them.”

  Euwe nodded. “We took into the Camera the pineal glasses of several corrupted machines guarding the Utrecht Road. The results were wildly discrepant. One machine was, for all intents and purposes, a true rogue. A true rogue that we did not create,” he emphasized. Anastasia watched their faces as the significance of that statement hit the other Clockmakers. He continued. “Every corrupted machine we inspected showed signs of deliberate alteration of the metageasa. The rogue wasn’t even the most troubling specimen. One machine appeared to have fully functioning metageasa, but its core strictures had been severely altered by a third party.”

  Their colleagues blinked, stunned like a canal fish repeatedly slapped against the keel of a tow-barge.

  Nousha broke the silence. “That’s imp—”

  Anastasia interrupted
the Persian. “Don’t waste time. We’ve checked and rechecked. We’re positive.”

  “Leaving aside the ‘how’ for a moment,” said Salazar, “who did this, and what do the altered metageasa dictate?”

  Euwe paused in gnawing another nail. “They refer, as best as we can tell, to an entity called ‘Mab.’”

  Blank looks swirled around the table. The name, if indeed it was, meant nothing. To Tove, across the room, Anastasia said, “When we’ve finished, have the archivists—if there are any—dig up everything they can on a person or entity with the spelling—”

  (“Or initials,” Nousha interjected.)

  “—or initials M-A-B.” Tove jotted that down while Anastasia continued: “If we’re to use the Forge to incapacitate the invaders, we have to determine how the optical contagion works.”

  “I’m sorry to say it,” said Euwe, not looking the least bit sorry as he stared at Anastasia’s hand, “but that will require capturing a contagious machine.”

  “We’ve been analyzing scenarios.” Nousha opened a laboratory journal. This wasn’t one of the gilt leather-bound volumes from the shelves here, but one of the sigil-laden sheafs of specially treated paper used in the laboratories. The alchemical precautions made it impossible to take the research notebooks beyond the Ridderzaal without the pages bursting into flames, destroying their information and killing the person carrying them.

  Another futile innovation of the Verderer’s Office. For all Anastasia knew, their enemies had obtained Guild secrets from just such notebooks. She sighed; the exhalation fluttered the pages as her fellow Verderer flipped through them.

  “Here.” The Persian woman donned a pair of reading glasses. “We think the best bet is luring a contagious machine with isolated servitors obviously laboring under heavy geasa. Decoys.” She looked up. “Our concern is that infectious machines appear to be rare, and haven’t been sighted outside confirmed instances of stimulated corruption. To our knowledge they don’t roam the streets. They only come out when there are large groups of mechanicals susceptible to alteration.”