The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (25 page)

Berenice said, “If you think it’s such a terrible idea, then suggest something better.”

The mechanicals ceased their chattering. “No. It’s not a terrible idea,” said one.

“We find the suggestion rather clever,” said the other.

“We are expressing regret that such a simple experiment never occurred to us.”

She put the lens on the table alongside the key ring and
mirror. It clinked against her spoon with a sound like a glass wind chime.

The fire popped again. A glowing cinder landed on the hearth and faded to black a moment later. A strong sea wind evoked low groans from the inn’s timber frame and disrupted airflow up the flue, which sent puffs of woodsmoke eddying into the room. Her eye stung.

She opened the slim leather volume and flipped through the charts, looking for something that would describe the correct configuration for the optical hardware. The concave mirror rocked back and forth while she paged through the charts. They were indexed by Clakker model.

“When were you forged?”

“Seventeen thirty.”

Berenice cocked her head. “Really?”

She lacked the expert eye of a true horologist, but she might have sworn the lack of scrollwork on the flange plates dated to the more austere modern designs that had come into fashion in the late eighteen hundreds. Although now that she looked more closely, the spare utilitarian design of the cervical escutcheons was at odds with the adornments elsewhere. Strange mismatch, that.

“Do you know your lot number?”

“Do you know every last ripple in your sinews?”

“Of course not.”

“Neither do I.”

“The serial number of your lot is inscribed inside your flange plates. There’s one inside your neck, another under your skull.” She tapped her temple lightly with the handle of her unused butter knife. “We’ll need that number to figure out where you fit in these tables. Either of you happen to have a seven one-hundredths of an inch triangular-headed screwdriver on you?”

Both machines fell silent. Or into what passed for silence among the ticktock men. Then the one by the door said, “How have you acquired such intimate knowledge of our kind’s innermost construction?”

“You know exactly how. You need me because I’m not burdened with a system of mores that hobbles my inquiries. So you can drop the indignation and make yourselves useful.

“Lacking a lot number, do either of you have a way of finding your entry in these tables?”

Huginn and Muninn met her question with silence. If they had been naughty schoolchildren, she imagined, they’d be shuffling their feet right now.

Trial and error, then. She pointed at Huginn, still flanking the door. “Come over here and pretend you’re an optical bench. And you,” she said, pointing to Muninn at the far end of the table, “don’t move. Tell us what you experience.”

She pressed the base of the burning candle firmly into the empty mug and pulled it to the edge of the table. Then she handed the opaque alchemical lens and mirror to Huginn, who crouched beside the table. Berenice took the mechanical hand holding the glass and pulled it until it hovered just an inch from the candle flame. In spite of the heat pouring from the fireplace, Huginn’s alchemical alloys numbed her fingers. The candlelight evoked a faint shimmer from the glass, and sent ghostly images skittering along the oaken wainscoting. Huginn pulled his other hand close to the lens until the mirror and glass nearly touched. Faintly luminous alchemical sigils danced around the room in time with the pitch and roll of the mirror as Huginn tried to direct the images into Muninn’s crystalline eyes. But the shimmering sigils were too diffuse.

Huginn moved the mirror a fraction of an inch farther away from the glass. Berenice nearly had to squint to notice the difference. Again the mirror pivoted; again images streaked
around the room; again Muninn gave no indication of success. Huginn moved the mirror again, repeated the process. Each iteration unfolded more quickly than the one before.

When Huginn crouched with arms spread widely, lens nearly in the candle flame at one end of the table and the mirror nearly touching Muninn’s face, he increased the distance between the candle and the lens by another fraction of an inch. And started over.

The iterations accelerated until they came too quickly for Berenice’s eye to follow. The soft breeze from Huginn’s motion became a draft, then a steady wind. It kicked up dust bunnies from the cracks between the floor planks and fanned the fire. Smoke and embers wafted from the fireplace. Logs popped; flames crackled; luminous emblems streaked along the ceiling like a dizzying shower of shooting stars. Stencils of light turned Berenice’s room into an alchemist’s grimoire.

Huginn moved faster still. An ember wafted from the fireplace to alight on Berenice’s dress. She swatted it. The luminous arcana streaked across the walls and ceiling so rapidly they became scintillations barely glimpsed in the corner of Berenice’s eye before disappearing and flashing somewhere else.

Clank.

Metal crashed against metal. The wind dissipated; the flames went back to licking at the logs without trying to set the room ablaze. Muninn held Huginn’s forearm like a vise. The room seemed darker now that stray stencils of light no longer flashed across the walls. Muninn’s eyes reflected the glow of alchemically augmented candlelight.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, my.”

“It’s quite all right,” said Berenice, through the minuscule crack in the open door. “I’ve no need for new bedding. Thank you.”

“But it’s been over a week!”

Honfleur, a small fishing village of less than nine thousand souls, was not particularly prosperous. Unsurprising, then, that its innkeepers lacked the revenue to lease a Clakker. Thus they employed a human chambermaid. To her credit, she was a very persistent chambermaid, unimpressed and uncowed by Berenice’s pendant.

“My servitors are taking care of it.”

Muninn, standing behind the door, made a rude gesture at Berenice. Huginn stood behind Berenice, where the maid could see him, mimicking the posture of servility. In truth his job was to obscure her view of the room, lest she glimpse the pages of a nascent but crude alchemical dictionary tacked to the walls. So far Berenice’s cover as a Guildwoman appeared intact, but she desperately wanted to prevent her rogue companions from murdering a poor cleaningwoman so dedicated to her job.

“But you’ve had the same bedding since you arrived! It ain’t right, a lady like you sleeping like that. I don’t even let my husband sleep in week-old bedding, and he’s a drunken lout.”

“Be at ease,” said Berenice, forcing what she hoped was a reassuring smile.

Jesus, all she wanted was to get back to the alchemical syntax of the geasa. The discovery that there
was
a syntax, a formalized grammar of compulsion, still had her heart thudding as though it sought to chisel free of her chest. She’d had the bone in her teeth for days now. She was chipping away at major discoveries. Discoveries that could turn the fortunes of war, if they came quickly enough. Did Marseilles-in-the-West still stand? Or was her feverish work pointless?

She continued, “These accommodations are a far cry from my worst nights. It’s all quite suitable.”

“But you ain’t even got a proper broom in there. And you
ain’t come out once since you arrived. The crumbs have to be piled higher than my ankles.”

Like everybody in Europe, the chambermaid spoke Dutch. But here on the Norman coast it came with the unapologetic purr of French vowels. Centuries after the conquest, the heritage of this land still twined itself through the invaders’ tongue like silk upholstery smoothing the sharpest edges of the empire’s linguistic furniture. Apparently even the Stemwinders couldn’t stamp that out.

“Bah. I leave no crumbs, and you know that. I lick the plates clean.”

The chambermaid shook her head. “It ain’t right.”

“On the contrary, madam.” Berenice paused to fish a few coins from her purse, which she’d taken to the door in anticipation of this. She reached through the gap in the door to pat the chambermaid on the back of her hand. At the touch of cold metal, the woman instinctively turned her hand and palmed the coins. “And may I just say that your conscientiousness is beyond reproach. Your dedication to my comfort is exemplary. I’ll make this known.”

That did it. She could see the resistance melting. The maid still put on a show of shaking her head and mumbling, but she also curtsied. “Oh. That’s very kind, I’m sure. No need for…” She frowned, this time in what appeared to be genuine uncertainty. “If you’re sure there’s nothing you need?”

“Quite certain.”

Berenice closed the door. She sighed, rested her forehead against the doorframe. Her eye burned. How long since she’d taken a nap? She pinched the bridge of her nose, eyes clenched, and shook off the exhaustion like a sheepdog shaking off rain.

“Jesus Christ on a six-day wine bender. Where were we?”

She returned to the table. Days ago she’d sent one of the Clakkers into the village, and after he returned with clamps
and brackets from an ironmonger’s shop, she’d affixed the lamp, mirror, and lens in the arrangement they’d discovered through trial and error. She’d added one component to the arrangement: a small loop of wire dipped in wine. The wine adhered to the loop and made a decent (if short-lived) magnifying lens. A real magnifier would have been preferable, but a Guildwoman patronizing the local glassblower might have drawn notice. She’d be expected to carry her own special Verderer’s tools.

The wine lens enabled her to project the focused beam of alchemical sigils onto a bedsheet tacked to the wall. A murky projection, but sufficient for her to transcribe the symbols. The same setup enabled them to project just a subset of the nautical modifications to the hierarchical metageasa into the machines’ eyes. Who, being immune to the Clockmakers’ compulsions, could report what changes each string of symbols was meant to wreak upon them. They didn’t read the symbols so much as absorb their meaning.

In that way Berenice had scratched out the crude beginnings of a grammar. No, not a grammar—not yet even a dictionary. Right now it was a phrase book—a handy reference for a foreign traveler in an unknown land. Except that this work said nothing helpful about asking for the ladies’ convenience or purchasing banketstaaf pastries. No. This phrase book told her what sequence of symbols indicated that in case of catastrophic flooding the human-safety metageas became subordinate to the shipping company’s economic considerations. Passengers were to be evacuated to the lifeboats in descending order of whose families were most likely to have the resources to bring successful litigation against the company, while doing everything possible to hide any such appearance of favoritism, while also weighing issues of insurance and the financial consequences of lost cargo.

Berenice realigned the optics. She’d moved things around when the chambermaid knocked, lest the woman witness luminous esoterica. Berenice dipped the wire in her bowl of wine and refastened the clamp. When a line of blurry pink sigils glowed on the bedsheet, she took up a pen, lodged the tip of her tongue at the corner of her mouth, and started transcribing them to paper.

The pen nib scritched across a scrap of butcher’s paper Huginn had taken from the kitchen. A winter squall took a running start off the Atlantic to hurl itself at Honfleur. The shutters rattled; the fire smoked and guttered. Meanwhile the machines chittered to each other. They still spoke too quickly for Berenice to follow. After double-checking a transcription, she said, “All right. One of you get over here. I can’t believe how much thought these sons of bitches give to cargo, for Christ’s sake. Let’s keep peeling this onion.”

“I thought humans occasionally required sleep,” said Huginn, feigning a human stretch.

Muninn said, “They do. I once was leased to a man who I swear slept twenty hours per day. He woke only to give me new orders and rant about my inability to complete the previous orders.”

“I’ll sleep when we’ve overthrown your tyrannical makers. So get your shiny asses over here.”

Muninn stood before the bedsheet. Berenice swiveled the mirror to focus the discrete line of sigils she’d just transcribed into his eyes.
Clank, clatter, click click tick.

Huginn said, “Strange. It seems the fragment can’t be translated out of context.”

The wine lens burst. Berenice fixed that, then adjusted the focal length to gradually increase the amount of information shining into Muninn’s eyes.

“That’s it,” he said.

Berenice locked down the arrangement. Taking up the sheet of butcher’s paper, she said, “All right, then. What do you make of this?” She tapped a sigil that hadn’t appeared elsewhere in the nautical metageasa, but that appeared integral to this thicket of conditions.

“It represents…” Muninn trailed off. A clickety-tickety conversation ricocheted between the machines. They might have been arguing; she couldn’t tell.

“Quintessia,” said one. “Quintessence,” said the other.

Berenice asked, “What the hell is ‘quintessence’?”

They said, in unison: “We don’t know.”

“But?”

Muninn said, “When it is present in the hold of the ship, this section of the nautical metageasa prioritizes the preservation of quintessence above—” Another mechanical stutter, and the faint
twang
of a loose cable. “—Everything else. Including human safety and the preservation of the vessel itself. In fact…” He cocked his head. A faint ratcheting came from the bezels in his eyes. “Feed a bit more. Give me the rest of this syntactic block.”