The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (32 page)

Berenice had known long before her mechanical companions sighted the Norman coast that they’d never let her go. The purpose Huginn and Muninn served was too bloodthirsty—as demonstrated by the murders on the
Pelikaan
—for her to go free. Once their alliance prised as many secrets as possible from the clenched fist of the Clockmakers, she knew, the impetus to work together would evaporate. At which point they’d kill
her. Because while such secrets would benefit any enemy of the Guild, these crafty machines knew better than to assume the enemy of an enemy was automatically an ally.

It had been something of a reprieve, then, when they uncovered the coded references to quintessence. That serendipitous discovery promised many days of fruitful work. Berenice had tried to drag it out as long as she could, but her curiosity and all-encompassing animosity toward the Guild conspired against her. She worked faster, and harder, than a wise woman would have done. But no matter how she impeded the transcription work, she never forgot she lived on borrowed time.

Muninn’s departure had improved Berenice’s chances of survival, albeit almost infinitesimally. She still had to outmaneuver a murderous rogue before it decided the time had come to twist her head off. But she’d been expecting to deal with a pair of the beasts, and making what meager preparations she could.

Which is why she’d been passing messages to the chambermaid. The mechanicals kept Berenice on a very short leash, meaning she’d had to pass her notes to Sigrid under their brassy noses. Usually in the guise of a tip to mollify the indignant charwoman. And, wonder of wonders, Sigrid kept up the act. She kept coming back.

Sigrid might have had a questionable name, but her heart was pure French. The blood of Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orléans, coursed through that woman’s veins.

Huginn lifted Berenice from her feet. The one-handed grip squeezed her windpipe as though the cartilage were nothing but limp macaroni. She hadn’t felt such pain since she’d lost her eye. But she couldn’t scream. The trickle of air in her throat made the faintest
squeak,
like the mewling of a newborn
kitten. Berenice spasmed, trying to inhale, her thrashing toes barely brushing the deadly machine. Her fingers scrabbled at its brassy arm, seeking the metal digits clamped on her throat, but she may as well have been a kitten fighting a mountain.

The edges of existence bled away to shadow, and the world—her tiny world, consisting of her murderer’s arm and little else—retreated down a long tunnel.

The collapse of her windpipe sounded oddly like an explosion of timbers and the shattering of window glass.

Help. These mechanicals are severely damaged, the thrall of dark forces, and acknowledge no human master. I, amanuensis to an Archmaster, am their prisoner, kidnapped and forced to share Guild secrets. They will kill me soon.

The world lurched sideways. The resounding
clang
of a brutal metallic impact loosened her teeth, and then she was tumbling across the dining room floor, wheezing while her skirts kicked up dust bunnies and mouse shit. Her inhalations made the tuneless tootling of a child’s broken recorder.

Through a teary eye Berenice glimpsed meteoric flashes of firelight on swift metal. Shards of splintered wood and fractured glass pelted her. Hands to her throat as though she might pump it like a bellows, she writhed on the floor. Slowly, agonizingly, her lungs took in air. The shadows ebbed away, and color returned to the world.

The very loud world. The world that sounded like two brass bands had converged for hand-to-hand, cymbal-to-cymbal combat.

A dusting of snowflakes rode a cold wind through the dining room. Flames flickered in the hearth. Wind? Berenice grabbed
a trestle and pulled herself upright. Oh. Through a hole in the wall Berenice glimpsed a pair of servitors brawling in the street.

Once, when she was a girl traveling with her father, the vicomte de Laval, on his regular rounds of the tenant farms, she’d seen a pair of tomcats fighting behind a barn. It was mesmerizing. She remembered how the animals had merged into an almost indistinct blur, a hissing ball of fur and fangs and claws moving too fast for her to follow but for the errant tufts of hair wafting incongruously from the yowling maelstrom. She’d long ago relegated that memory to some dusty corner of her mind, but it came back to her now: The brawl in the street was like that catfight, but sped up twentyfold, with mechanical cacophony in place of the noise of raw animal aggression.

A time will come when I declare a desire to settle my account. Then you’ll know my time is shortly to end. Go quickly to rouse the mechanicals of Honfleur and waken them to the evil in our midst.

Outside, men and women scattered like windblown dandelions. They yelled in panic, fear, and confusion while a tumbling boulder of alchemical alloys rolled in the street.

Sigrid must have found a machine on the street. The rarity of rogues meant that this one couldn’t believe her tale outright, but it also had no choice but to investigate. And upon peering through the window and seeing Berenice’s life in dire danger, the fires of compulsion launched it through the wall.

Berenice stumbled through the ruins of the inn. Shattered glass crunched under the soles of her boots. She grabbed the satchel and tossed the strap over her shoulder. Then she dashed through the kitchen to the bar, where she emptied the register. A pitiful take, just a handful of guilders. Then it was back to
the dining room and the new hole in the wall. She scanned the street. Past the brawling mechanicals she saw what must have been the livery stable. Cold air made her wince; her throat ached as though she’d tried to swallow a pétanque ball. Her voice had been permanently damaged, she feared. She’d have to find a scarf to hide the bruises. She staggered through the demolished wall to the snow-slick cobbles.

Two strides later, she doubled over, hands clamped to her ears. As did every human watching the incomprehensible war on the street: The mechanical men of Honfleur had sounded the Rogue Clakker alarm. Ah, there it was.

Berenice had salted her tale for Sigrid with mention of an Archmaster. Thank all the fates she had—else the machine fighting Huginn would have sounded the alarm without first saving her life. Few human lives outweighed the Rogue Clakker metageasa.

The piercing shriek cracked windows up and down the street. It knocked loose the last shards of glass still seated in the mullions of the ruined dining room windows. Berenice gritted her teeth—flinching, because even this wrenched her throat—and forced herself forward while the rest of the village was paralyzed.

These yokels surely hadn’t experienced the Rogue Clakker alarm in living memory. It would be foreign, terrifying, incapacitating. It sure as hell knocked Berenice on her ass the first time she heard it, the night the newly completed Grand Forge of New Amsterdam became a smoking crater. But by now she was an old hand at suffering through the ear-shattering warble. Not so the citizens of Honfleur, who writhed on the ground with hands clamped over their ears and blood streaming through their fingers.

Honfleur was a small village. The noise dissipated even as Berenice ducked around the corner. Stumble-sprinting to the
livery, she saw another mechanical join the fray. This one burst through the upper windows of what appeared to be the postal office. Huginn was outnumbered. It punched through the masonry of a house abutting the postal office, strode inside, and reemerged with a balding man in its grasp. The rogue had taken a hostage.

Poor bastard. She wondered who he was, and whether he held a station in the village that would preserve his life.

She dashed into the livery. Like every stable she’d ever known, it stank with the mélange of manure, hay, and horse. There were only two horses. The first was a roan nag, the other a bay that had to be at least sixteen hands. Both were rearing and neighing, upset by the alarm. Poor things were probably half deafened by the cacophony. Christ knew she was; the ringing in her ears was worse than it had ever been. The livery man lay in a fetal curl amid wet hay and shit. She knelt beside him.

At first he thought she’d come to check on him, and so was confused when she rifled the pockets of his leather apron. She pulled out a handful of sugar cubes. He frowned, still not realizing she intended to steal one of the beasts in his charge. He leaned onto one elbow to watch her approach the stalls. The nag she disregarded immediately. If pursuit came, she’d need everything the bay could give her, and probably more. She worried that it would have a temperament to match its size, but it calmed considerably after finding the sugar in her palm. The livery man lurched to his unsteady feet when she started to saddle the horse. His lips moved, but the ringing in her ears drowned out his voice.

Berenice tried to say, “I’m so sorry, truly,” but it felt as though she’d eaten a pulverized wine bottle.

She swung the saddle with all her strength, hitting him in the face and sending him to sprawl in the muck. He touched
a hand to the blood trickling from his nose and cried. But he didn’t get up.

Meanwhile, on the street outside, Clakkers fought. She felt the concussions through the soles of her feet more than she heard them with her ringing ears. The livery shook with an impact when one machine threw another against the siding. The horses didn’t like this.