The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (35 page)

Clakkers swarmed the walls. Too many at a time to repel them manually. That was too slow. But he didn’t dare lay down his weapons. Captain Longchamp’s Pick and Sledge? They were a symbol.

A symbol he currently used to dent the skull of a metal demon scuttling over the northeast bastion. A lucky blow that rang like a gong and brought flares of pain to Longchamp’s wrists. Thank the Lord for that twinge of pain—if he’d missed, the sweat-slick haft would have slid through his weary fingers and the sledge would have gone winging over the wall. The concussion dislodged the clockwork soldier. The mechanical fell, spinning backward through two full revolutions before reanchoring itself to the wall ten yards farther down. But another killer took its place before it scuttled to the top.

Longchamp swung again. Missed. “Get your hands off your useless dicks and fix that fucking thing right Goddamned now!”

Back to back with Corporal Élodie Chastain, he strove to fend off a pair of mechanicals just long enough for the gunnery team to clear the blockage in their epoxy cannon. From behind him came the
clang
of a diamond-tipped pickax on alchemical steel. A blade hummed through the crenel. Longchamp’s parry created a cloud of incandescent sparks. The return swing came faster than he could recover. He leaped back, crashing into Élodie. She grunted. The sleeve of his shirt fell open where a scarlet paper-thin seam in his flesh bled from shoulder to elbow. It hurt.

“GET DOWN!” screamed the gunner.

Longchamp tackled Élodie to the banquette. Another alchemical blade sheared through the empty space over their heads; tufts of hair fluttered in its wake. A valve clicked open. Longchamp shielded his face behind the crook of his elbow. Chemicals convulsed through the modified gun hard enough to make the bastion shudder. The gun vomited. A sticky mist rained
into Longchamp’s hair, turned the back of his blood-and sweat-soaked shirt into a rigid shell. He rolled aside before the backsplash glued his weapons in place.

“NOW!” cried the gunner over the
k-chank
of metal talons on granite. The mechanicals weren’t immobilized.

But they were temporarily sightless. Blinding the machines consumed fewer chemical resources than immobilizing them. Both machines had taken an opaque layer of turquoise-blue lacquer in the face. Each became a flurry of blades and fists, trying to fend off assault while also trying to clear the chemicals from multifaceted eyes. Still deadly as cancer, the motherfuckers, but slightly less fearsome, slightly more vulnerable. Élodie landed the tip of her pickax square in one machine’s keyhole, and Longchamp drove it home with his sledge. The blow scored the Clakker’s sigils. Its perpetual impetus evaporated in an explosion of black sparks. She had her bolas out before Longchamp called for them. He ducked again; they whirled overhead and tangled themselves in the second Clakker’s legs. It fell to the banquette, blind and thrashing. Together they vaulted over the inert machine and dispatched the second one before it could clear the goop from its eyes or sever the steel cables twined about its legs.

A high-pitched whine pierced the din of battle. Longchamp’s beard crackled; the hairs on his arms and scalp stood on end. A metallic tang filled his mouth. He gritted his teeth. The world flashed blue and white as lightning rained from the adjacent bastion with a deafening
zap
and
crackle
. It burned purple afterimages into Longchamp’s eyes and the pervasive stink of ozone into his nose.

The discharge from the lightning gun melted the carapace of one mechanical even as the streamers of wild energy hopped to the machine beside it. And to another, and another, and another, momentarily freezing in place the machines it chained together.
It also snagged a pair of unlucky defenders; they convulsed as though possessed by the Holy Spirit. The discharge stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving the sunlit world momentarily dark as dusk in comparison. A squad rushed in, past their stricken comrades-in-arms, who fell smoking from the wall and smelling of charred pork. The first mechanical, the one that had taken the brunt of the lightning, tried to fend them off, but it moved too slowly, its every hinge and spring giving the
squeal
of fused metal. The mechanical beside it atop the wall was similarly vulnerable, moving only slightly faster. The Clakker at the end of the lightning chain was barely fazed by the discharge.

Farther along the outer wall, two squaddies wheeled a hydraulic ram into place while the third worked the pressure crank for all she was worth. Somebody had trained them well. They anchored the ram in a crenellation just as a clockwork assailant reached the top of the wall. The hydraulic piston lashed out. It took a chunk out of the wall but also sent the machine’s head soaring toward the river, over the smoldering ashes of Marseilles-in-the-West.

All around him, up and down the wall, defenders fought the clockwork tide with epoxy, lightning, hydraulics, bolas, picks, sledgehammers. It wasn’t enough. For every machine they disabled or knocked from the wall, two more took its place. And every inert machine left a trail of human bodies in its wake. A line of mechanicals topped the battlements, scissoring through beleaguered defenders as though they were ripe autumn wheat.

They were losing. They had too much wall, too few defenders.

Longchamp clutched Élodie’s shoulder. “Are they through? Find out if the civvies are through!” Then he shoved her toward the signal station and waded into the fray, pick and sledge held aloft for all to see, shouting encouragements and curses in equal measure. His head spun; runnels of blood trickled down his
lacerated arm, making him dizzier with every drop. He couldn’t spare the time for a bandage. He’d already tried to hold the outer wall too long. They’d be fully overrun in moments.

Élodie exchanged terse words with the heliograph operator, then gave Longchamp a thumbs-up.

The last civilians had made it through to the inner keep. It wouldn’t prove much of a refuge if the mechanicals on the Spire fought their way down, but it was all they had. Longchamp gathered his strength for one more bellow. “FALL BACK! FALL BACK! EVERYONE THROUGH THE INNER WALL
NOW
!”

This, too, became a series of flashes, blinks that shot from one heliograph to the next around the faltering defensive perimeter.

“Everybody off the wall! CLEAR THE WALL
NOW
!”

The defenders of the Last Redoubt of the Exile King of France abandoned the outer wall.

The gunnery teams affixed crane hooks to iron hoops on their weapons and fired the explosive bolts that anchored the heavy weapons to the wall. Lift teams stationed on the armored gantries affixed to the Spire heaved, swinging the weapons and their operators across the gap between the outer and inner walls. A few machines leaped upon the weapons, attacking gunnery teams even as they retreated. Every man and woman still able to run, walk, or crawl fled the battlements. They sprinted down ramps, tumbled down ladders, slid down poles, limped across catwalks over chemical moats toward posterns in the curtain wall of the inner keep. The sight of their battered and bloody defenders in full retreat evoked a wail of despair from the civilians.

A sea of magicked metal swelled forward to fill the vacuum. It crested the outer wall like a burnished tide.

Longchamp stopped outside a postern. He stood aside, waving and shoving the last stragglers through the gate while an
army of Clakkers occupied the outer keep. A few men and women were too slow fleeing the battlements, and now they ran for their lives.

If he waited just a few more moments, they could make it to safety.

If he waited just a few more moments, the inner keep would fall before the sun rose tomorrow.

He dove through the postern and slammed it shut. He hoped to hell the other posterns were already shut, and wondered how many of their own they were leaving to the nonexistent mercy of the mechanicals. As a quartet of hydraulically driven steel braces slammed into place, he looked up to the heliograph operator atop the inner wall. Longchamp caught the woman’s eye and gave the signal: He made a slicing motion across his own throat. Then he hunkered down with hands over his ears.

The signal flash reached the demolitions station. Somebody lit a fuse. Two dozen braided chemical cords had been threaded through dedicated pipes beneath the high inner wall and across the keep to spots drilled at regular intervals around the curtain wall like the points of a deadly compass rose. Fire sizzled down each line so quickly it left a whip-like
crack
in its wake. In a fraction of a second the fuses funneled their payload to the shaped charges embedded in the outer wall.

Hundreds of Clakkers stood atop the fallen defensive perimeter, with countless more scurrying up the sheer stone face of the outer keep, when the curtain wall detonated. So loud was the thunder it shook the bones of the earth and rattled the heavens. Longchamp’s ears popped. It knocked everyone from their feet, even those expecting it, and pulverized every jewel-colored windowpane in the basilica. It slapped Longchamp to the rumbling ground, which, still convulsing in the aftershock, hurled him back into the air. He slammed against the postern gate hard enough to lose a tooth. A shadow fell over the sun.

He stumbled to his feet, deaf but for the ringing in his ears. Then the rarefaction wave rippled through the inner keep and knocked him down again. It felt like somebody’d driven a nail in his ears and punched him in the watery part of his gut. One by one, in twos and threes, the dazed refugees found their feet. They looked up, into a sky made dark with airborne debris.

The shaped charges were the most advanced explosives known to French chemical wizardry. Longchamp gathered it was a moldable form of plastic, something the chemists could literally pour into place. It was the cutting edge of technology applied to a tactic of sheer desperation: a last resort that had been in place for over a century. The great Vauban and his assistant architects had known that nothing could withstand the mechanicals forever; they knew their works would fall to a sufficiently determined enemy. Some day, they knew, perhaps in their own lifetime, or their children’s, or their grandchildren’s lifetime, an army of Clakkers would overrun that wall. So it was designed with hidden boreholes and secret chambers for explosives. One of the citadel’s greatest secrets.

Back then the designers probably had primitive black powder in mind. But the modern stuff packed a far greater wallop. So the engineers had recalculated optimal shapes for the explosive chambers. Their efforts rendered the curtain wall a tidal wave of high-velocity shrapnel, pummeling and pulverizing the mechanicals on the wall and in its path. Jagged chunks of granite pierced their alchemical armor plating and mangled the internal clockworks.

It rained shattered mechanicals.

D
aniel was skating across a frozen lake when the wall of thunder came rolling over the horizon. The sound crashed over him like a breaking wave. It set yellow birch to swaying and sent clumps of snow sloughing from evergreen boughs. It echoed from the distant massifs and launched zigzag fissures through the ice. It sounded like the explosion that had shorn his ankle, but on a staggering scale. More French partisans at work?

Still barreling forward, he turned his head through a full half circle to watch for signs of his pursuers. But his toes etched the ice and tossed up a fine vapor mist in his wake. Subzero temperatures caused the mist to instantly sublimate back into frost. It caught the sunlight like countless microscopic prisms. He could see nothing behind him except a dazzling prismatic cloud.

Thunder broke the ice into several massive plates. They bobbed slightly, cracking against one another at jagged boundaries. Daniel’s toes caught one such edge while he surveyed the distant lakeshore to his left and right. The discontinuity threw him momentarily off his feet. He flipped, folded, and unfolded himself. His balance he could adjust. His momentum he could not.

He cradled Mab’s box to his chest as he tumbled across the ice. The fissures grew wider, the grinding of the ice plates more pronounced, even as the last echoes of thunder faded from perception. He tripped over a ridge where the lip of one plate rose several inches above another. More ice shattered. Daniel, slowed by the impacts and the tumbling, couldn’t outrace the fissures zigzagging across the lake. They caught him. Passed him. Widened.

Into the frigid depths he plunged.

The outer keep had fallen.

Longchamp surveyed the damage as he trudged the last several revolutions of the Porter’s Prayer toward the king’s apartments, where the squaddies had fallen silent after engaging the Clakkers atop the Spire.

All that remained of the outer wall was a smoldering rubble pile. Gone was the proud ring of high crenellations girding the outer keep, which boatmen on the Saint Lawrence had long called the Crown, for so it looked from the river. The Crown, the Keep, and the Spire: the secular trinity that for generations untold had safeguarded and nurtured dreams of long-lost France. No more.

A brimstone stench permeated everything. The land beyond the former curtain wall had become a cratered, smoking hellscape littered with pulverized mechanicals. Every tree for miles around had been flattened; some still burned. A light winter breeze cleared the worst of the haze, allowing the sun to glimmer on the oily sheen of battered magic metal. The inner keep was an island within a sea of Clakker debris.

Boulders the size of carriages had churned the soil yards deep in places as they smashed through the legions of mechanical men arrayed around the besieged keep like ninepins. Most
of the curtain wall had been transformed into a blistering cloud of shrapnel. It had shredded the nearest Clakkers. Those farther from the blast hadn’t been torn apart or punctured, but many were damaged badly enough to curtail their mobility. The dented Clakkers made wonderful screeching noises when they tried to move. The blast wave had even toppled the cannon emplacement behind the Dutch lines. It was a grand sight.

But detonating the curtain wall had been the most drastic of extreme measures. And while it bought the defenders time to regroup and recover, it also betrayed the extent of their desperation. It hadn’t destroyed the enemy. It hadn’t crushed the drive to conquer, nor had it broken the siege. It rocked the attackers on their heels, but it didn’t change things. The tulips still had the advantage; they would take the citadel eventually. And they knew it.

Most chilling of all was the nonchalance. The human commanders spurned standard practice and neglected to send teams into the churned no-man’s land to recover every chipped cog and snapped leaf spring. From the very earliest days of Clakker combat the tulips had always scoured every crumb of Guild technology from their battlefields, lest it fall into enemy hands. That they hadn’t done this was a glaring statement.

Soon we will crush you so completely
, it said,
there will be nobody left to study our secrets.

A set of bolas dangled from Longchamp’s belt, alongside the rosary beads. The other guards who’d ridden the funicular with him as high as it went had already ascended the stairs. He’d fallen behind. Some of the squaddies were half his age. He felt like a fucking fossil. Like he hadn’t slept since Noah had beached his raft.

He brandished his pickax as he burst through the doors in the upper funicular platform. It was empty. Silent. He’d half expected to join a pitched battle, and half expected to find the
platform sticky with blood, littered with meat and shards of bone. Then a resounding
clang
broke the silence. He forced himself forward and followed the sounds of combat past the funicular platform to the privy council chambers.

These were empty, too. The noise came from above. From the king’s apartments. Longchamp doubled over with hands braced on his knees. He was panting so hard through his desert-dry mouth he felt ready to vomit. He scraped his sweaty palms against his trousers. He allowed himself just a few seconds to check himself before tightening his grip on the pick. A slow jog was all he could manage, but he forced himself forward. He passed the empty chairs of the long privy council table toward the rococo oaken banisters of the stairs leading to the very top of the Spire.

He arrived too late to do any good. The survivors had already toppled the last Clakker with bolas and managed to land the killing blow on its keyhole a moment after Longchamp stumbled in. A second inert machine crouched in the corner, encased in a faint green cocoon. A third mechanical killer had been immobilized on the ceiling, partially obscuring a fresco that depicted a scene from the legends of Roland and Durendal.

But the victory over this trio of Clakkers had been extremely hard-won. The king’s apartments were the scene of a massacre. The walls and tapestries had been repainted with arterial spray. Dead men, or parts of them, lay strewn across the floor, the divan, the immense four-poster bed and its robin’s-egg-blue silk sheets. Yet the human carnage wasn’t what stopped Longchamp in his tracks: Their attempt to turn the Spire into an artillery emplacement had failed. Their best chance for keeping the tulips off-balance: gone.

The king’s apartments were the highest ground for hundreds of miles around, an ideal place for artillery. From here
they could have put the tulips’ Clakker cannon out of service and flattened any attempts to repair it. They could have rained explosives anywhere on the tulip lines, halfway across the Île de Vilmenon if need be. But the damage to the funicular had slowed construction of the secret cannon to the extent it hadn’t been finished before the tulips unveiled
their
new weapon. And the Dutch, expecting to send their clockwork assassins straight to the king’s chambers on a war-winning mission of regicide, instead inadvertently dismantled the defenders’ sole remaining tactical advantage.

The enemy soldiers had chopped the installation to flinders even as they massacred its defenders.

One of the squaddies, Anaïs, trotted over to Longchamp and saluted. Possibly she was a corporal now, like Élodie the chandlers’ daughter, but her armor was too stained with blood for Longchamp to tell. She bled from a gash in her forehead, and favored one leg. She said, “That’s the last of the ticktocks, sir.”

“Do an exterior sweep,” Longchamp said, panting. “Make certain there are no mechanical spiders hanging around outside.” Longchamp tried to make it appear as though he was deep in thought while he took a moment to catch his breath. “When that’s done, clear the debris and rest, in shifts. Sooner than later the tulips are going to wonder why we haven’t surrendered yet. They’ll start lobbing more mechanicals at the Spire for good measure.” She nodded.

Dreading the answer, he asked the question his duty demanded: “How many casualties?”

“We number seven still standing. Two more might pull through if they survive the descent and get medical attention soon. Three others are breathing but beyond hope. The rest have already passed.” She crossed herself, then kissed the tiny crucifix on the chain around her neck.

Mother Mary.
Longchamp crossed himself, too. That made
at best nine survivors out of twenty-four in a battle with just three mechanicals.

“I’ll have additional supplies sent up. This is your ground. You will hold it.”

“How long, sir?”

“Until I fucking say otherwise. Until the sun and moon abandon their merry chase and rut like wild boars in the middle of the sky, and not a moment sooner.”

Gaspard had a broken arm, Jean-Marc a broken leg. Longchamp hardly remembered helping the crippled man descend from the king’s apartments to the privy council chamber, nor did he remember staggering down the Porter’s Prayer until they reached the functioning portion of the funicular tracks. It seemed a century passed until they finally collapsed on the benches in the car.

Longchamp dozed off. But his respite was short-lived.

“Mother Mary protect us,” said Gaspard, cradling his broken arm. Longchamp opened blurry eyes. Just before the funicular passed below the height of the inner wall, he glimpsed brass-plated killers bounding across acres of churned earth. Too few for a full assault; too many to be a diversionary feint.

Too soon. Too soon.

Their enemies would not rest. They’d keep nipping at the defenders until reinforcements arrived and they could once again swarm the walls. If need be, they’d keep throwing their remaining servants at the keep like the tireless ebb and swell of the tides until the very last defender of New France died of exhaustion.

Longchamp threw the door open and jumped from the car. Sprinting past the funicular operator, he yelled, “Get those two to the infirmary!”

And then he was at the wall and climbing yet another set of Goddamned stairs. He reached an embrasure just as the first
mechanicals reached the moat. They vaulted the counterscarp and pounded the inner curtain wall like cannonballs. The wall shook. An epoxy cannon salvaged from the outer wall fired off new barrages. But it hadn’t been properly anchored to its new site; Longchamp watched in despair as the recoil snapped the anchor bolts and sent it tumbling into a courtyard of the inner keep, spewing epoxy and fixative. The tanks ruptured on impact, and the splash encased a dozen people.

The war wasn’t over yet. Yet. But the attitude on the streets of New Amsterdam was that it would be very soon, its conclusion inevitable. The entire length of the Saint Lawrence and lands north of it were already considered part of Nieuw Nederland, to the extent that a pair of quick-thinking entrepreneurs were already offering guided tours of the ruins of the Vatican in Québec. Berenice considered signing up just so that she could slit the vultures’ throats. But the expedition to Québec would have to veer hard east to avoid the martial zone around Mont Royal and Marseilles-in-the-West.

That didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of boatmen on the North River willing to make a few guilders ferrying macabre sightseers up the river. Berenice hired one.