The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (37 page)

Daniel’s attempts to use Mab’s alchemical locket were a series of tremendous failures.

A few of his pursuers kept coming regardless of the light. Those were the zealots, the ideologues, chasing him out of sheer fervor and thus undeterred by the alteration of their metageasa. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst was knowing he’d recklessly lobotomized innocent kinsmachines. His desperation had made him careless; he hadn’t thought it through. He did now as he sprinted through a forest much like the one where he’d lost his foot.

He had no authority over the Lost Boys, so his attempts to verbally realign their metageasa could never work. The mine overseer had essentially commanded the miners to reprioritize their metageasa—which they did because the illumination overrode their keyholes and rendered the foundations of their obedience mutable—and thus they became Mab’s thralls. Daniel couldn’t do that. Instead, when he shone the light into their eyes and then removed it without a successful
realignment, their metageasa became corrupted. That triggered fail-safes; their bodies ground to a halt.

Once again, Daniel had left a swath of ruined lives in his wake. Such had been his legacy ever since he went on the run. The murdered woman in the belltower, the leviathan airship, the canalmasters of the
ondergrondse grachten,
lonely but selfless Dwyre, the Frenchman, and now the Lost Boys whose minds he destroyed.

Unless he wanted to kill his fellow machines en masse, the locket was useless without an alchemical grammar. He’d have to find a way to do things the regular way and shine the altered metageasa directly into their eyes. Into the windows of their souls.

Daniel burst from a copse of birch to find himself tearing across acres of winter-fallow farmland. To the southeast, directly ahead, something peeked over the distant horizon. Too slim to be a mountain yet too tall to be a tree. It had the nacreous sheen of a pearl, yet was thousands of times larger than the finest gems of Brigitta Schoonraad, the wife of Daniel’s final leaseholder.

He’d heard tell of this unnatural wonder from a Frenchwoman he’d known briefly.

The Spire.

B
erenice’s heart abandoned its secret jig and launched into wild capering when the Spire heaved into view. Still standing! Surely the tulips would have ordered their machines to swarm and dismantle the tallest tower in the New World if the citadel had already fallen? They knew better than to leave any symbol around which a battered-but-resilient French esprit de corps could rally.

She’d forgotten how on the clearest days, like today, the very tip of the Spire—itself situated atop the crown of Mont Royal—was visible far south of the Saint Lawrence. Upon departing she’d turned her back to Marseilles-in-the-West, like any dedicated exile. Turned her back but not her heart. Never that. And now she’d returned to violate the king’s decree and flout her banishment.

Berenice boarded the last longboat from Île Sainte-Hélène, directly across the narrow, icy strait from the Île de Vilmenon. Water lapped against the hull, a deceptively soothing counterpoint to the irritating
screech
of the oarlocks and the malign ticktocking of twenty mainspring hearts. The mechanicals rowed the boat faster than a galloping horse. She hugged herself
to fend off the chilly river spray. The true difficulty was fending off the desire to pat at her satchel, to confirm for the thousandth time that she still carried her hard-earned contraband. She worked a hand inside her scarf to massage her neck.

The tulips had burned the town again. No surprise there. She scanned the south-facing slopes for the cemetery where Louis was buried. She frowned: It had too many gravestones, and they lacked order. Many were rough-hewn as though plonked down in a hurry. Why bother with stone gravemarkers at all? Wooden crosses were needful expedients in times of war.

But then she cast her gaze more widely upon the rapidly approaching Mont Royal, and a chill went straight to her soul. Her cavorting heart slipped on black ice. It hit the dance hall floor hard enough to get the wind knocked from it. Or so it felt when her heart skipped a beat. And then another.

Where… Oh, Jesus.
Where was the Crown?

The Crown, the Keep, and the Spire: This was how boatmen upon the Saint Lawrence had described the Last Redoubt of the Bourbon Kings for generations. It truly had looked like an elaborate crown, worthy of the king of both Frances, Old and New. She’d never quite seen it like that until she’d seen it through Louis’s eyes. Even then she’d never fully shaken the impression that the Porter’s Prayer looked like nothing more than blood seeping from a mortal wound. He’d laughed at that.

But now…

The topography of Mont Royal had changed. The outer wall was gone. Not broken, not breached, but
gone
.

Jesus’s bloody tears. In her Talleyrand days she’d been privy to top-secret conversations about the contingency plan, and had even seen cutaway diagrams showing how the chambers in the wall could be crafted to create shaped charges that would focus the blast outward. But even she never believed they’d
go through with this final fuck-you from the last defenders of New France to the minions of the Brasswork Throne.

As the longboat drew closer, Berenice rubbed the mist from her eye and studied the debris field around what used to be the outer wall. The avalanche of rubble had tumbled all the way into the cemetery, breaking headstones and obscuring the graves. Poor Louis lay under tons of granite, his eternal view of the river he’d loved so much obscured by heaps of talus. Blowing the wall had flattened a wide swath of the town’s charred ruins. The churned ashes of the city made the river smell like a fireplace grate.

Here and there, as the longboat sliced through the waves, the pale winter sun glinted on something in the wreckage. And then the river haze parted for a moment, the sun came out, and the rubble field shimmered with mechanical detritus for as far as Berenice could see from her low vantage. A chorus of
twangs
,
clicks
, and
rattles
rippled through the Clakkers in the longboat. They saw it, too. And didn’t like it.

The detonation of the curtain wall must have caught hundreds of mechanicals by surprise. Berenice risked a sideways glance at the nearest rowers. Did their tireless hearts balk when they witnessed the charnel where so many of their kin had been flattened? Did they know fear? She eavesdropped on the mechanicals’ secret gossip. Much of it unfolded faster than she could follow, but she got bits and pieces of it.

What have they done?
said a mechanical to her left.
What am I seeing?

All around her, the Clakkers refocused their eyes for a better look at the destruction. The machine in the prow emitted a steady tattoo of chattering cogs.
I count… hundreds… of our kin. And… what used to be our kin.

The rowers fell into elegiac silence.

My people did this
, she wanted to stand and scream.
New France did this to you fucking abominations!

But the tulips could afford to wait. They could call up as many reinforcements as they wanted, and swarm the inner wall just as they’d done the outer.

The longboat crunched against the icy shore of the Île de Vilmenon. The mechanicals disembarked. Berenice accepted without comment their unfailingly polite assistance. She steeled herself against cold metal’s embrace and let a mechanical lift her over the gunwale. The last machine to touch her had done so with murderous intent. This one held her delicately as a newborn kitten.

The Clakkers promptly forgot her. They sprinted across the marshy lowlands toward the long slopes of Mont Royal. She watched them go until she was certain she’d been left alone and far behind. Then she turned north to pick her way along the shore, toward the charred ruins of the docks of Marseilles. It was a long, cold slog, made musical by the tinkling of shingle underfoot and the occasional booming of ordnance. Treacherous, too, because the beach was icy. Her ankles ached when she finally turned inland.

Partially hidden behind winter-bare clumps of scrub oak, she crept along the river bluffs, squinting. Somewhere nearby, a narrow cleft hid the entrance to a cavern. The same cavern through which she’d departed at the onset of her banishment, though it had been designed as an emergency escape in case Talleyrand’s laboratory was overrun. The cold stone rubbed her hands raw and abraded her cheek when she squeezed through the gap into near-total darkness.

She straightened, slowly, taking care not to give herself a concussion on an unseen overhang. Something felt wrong. After a moment’s self-assessment she realized the weight on her shoulder was gone. The satchel strap had come undone.

“Fuck.” Her voice echoed.

Her heart hammered. The satchel contained her notes on the Clockmakers’ strange secret mathematical grammar of compulsion, plus van Breugel’s accoutrements from aboard
De Pelikaan
. She dropped to her knees, scrabbled in the dirt.

“No, no, no.”

To lose the satchel now would prove that God, if He existed, was a truly sadistic son of a bitch.

Her numb fingers raked through dirt and sand and things she couldn’t identify. Berenice’s sigh of relief echoed when the touch of leather brushed her knuckles. She gathered up the leather only to find it terminated in something furry. “Shit!” This echoed, too. She flung the dead bat aside and kept searching.

It felt like a century passed before she recovered the satchel. She retied the satchel strap, draped it over her shoulder, and then stuffed the bag inside her coat. Then she knelt in the darkness until she stopped hyperventilating. But the near miss had undermined the last shreds of her optimism.

What chance did she have of making use of these notes before the inner keep fell? All they did was tell her how to scribble rules for new metageasa. But lacking any means of testing her attempt, she’d need a miracle to get the logico-alchemical-mathematical grammar correct on the first try. And even then it wouldn’t do any good. The Clakkers arrayed against the inner wall were immune to attempts to alter their metageasa as long as the locks in their foreheads remained inviolate. She had a key ring, but doubted the mechanicals would oblige the defenders by standing in line to have their locks opened one by one.

She sighed. One thing at a time. Keep moving forward. Can’t save the citadel from outside. Get inside.

Her next worry was Hugo Longchamp. Few people knew of this passage, but he was one of them. He’d been with her in the subterranean laboratory when she departed. Having learned of
the passage’s existence, he would have sealed it. And if the barricade could withstand mechanicals…

The cavern was narrow enough that it could be navigated with arms stretched to either side, and it lacked side passages. So while the very first bend in the path took Berenice from near-total darkness to pitch-blackness, she could still inch forward. The heel of her boot caught another stone; it slid under her weight and sent her sprawling. She landed on her back hard enough to expel the breath from her lungs. A blow to her head filled her vision with illusory points of light, phantom glowworms dangling from the cavern roof. Berenice lay upon what felt like a pile of fossilized pinecones. For one long, panicky moment she thought her spine had snapped, leaving her paralyzed and unable to breathe. But then her breath returned and she rolled, moaning and bleeding, to unsteady feet.

She didn’t remember the floor of the cavern being strewn with so much rubble. The footing had been a little tricky, but it hadn’t been deadly.
Crunch, crunch, scrape
… The noise of her passage reverberated throughout the narrow cavern, forward and back, the auditory equivalent of standing between two mirrors.

The texture of the talus changed, and so did the noise it made. Less crunching and scraping, more crackling. She’d heard something similar on the day Louis died, on the day so many others died, the day she’d failed. It was the sound of a shattered chemical prison. The sound of epoxy stressed beyond its limits. She trod on chemical debris.

Longchamp’s barricade. It must have sealed the passage snugly as a cork in a wine bottle. But then they’d activated the booby traps and detonated the outer wall. The same explosion that sent boulders smashing through the besieging forces also convulsed the chthonic heart of Mont Royal. An artificial earthquake had rippled the bedrock of the Île de Vilmenon. And crumbled the chemical barricades.

The farther she went, the worse the debris. The chunks grew larger; the footing more unsteady. Until she hit a mound of broken stone heaped higher than she could reach. The tunnel had collapsed.

“Fuck.”

She kicked a stone. Swore again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Fuck… uck… ck… k…
Her curses echoed.

She knelt. Ran her hands over the blockage, wondering how she could possibly clear a path.

Something twinkled. Dimmer than a star, yet bright enough to her dark-adapted eye that she had to blink away tears. Glowworm? Hallucination? But then she heard a tumbling noise, like debris falling away. And the glimmer, the faintest shimmer, of marigold-orange light within the crevices of the talus grew wider.

There was somebody on the other side. And they were trying to reach her. Her heart tried to chisel its own escape tunnel through her breastbone. She cocked her head and leaned into the debris, trying to listen past the noise of her own body. Had she just announced herself to a nest of Clakkers?

Her fingers kneaded the satchel strap. Her chances of evading the machines in this passage were nil. They’d find her notes and execute her.

She scrambled to her feet when a stone popped out of place. It rolled away. A shaft of dusty lamplight flooded the passage. A human face peeked through a gap in the rockfall.

The king of France said, “Bon soir, Madam de Mornay-Périgord. I thought I recognized your voice.”

Talleyrand’s laboratory had seen better days. The signs of a massacre remained: bloodstains, overturned tables and shelves, gouges in the granite that only an alchemical blade could have
made. Parts of damaged machines, scavenged from battlefields over the past century, lay scattered on the cavern floor like so much trash. A disabled military Clakker lay on a table in the corner, its neck and head cut open. More recently, the massive explosion up top had sent cracks zigzagging through the cavern and created a rain of stony dust that had coated everything.

Established generations ago by sealed royal decree, it had been a place for clandestine treaty-violating study of Clakker technology. A place where pieces of damaged Clakkers secretly found their way. Every overstretched spring, every shattered escutcheon, every warped hinge, every scored and blackened crumb of alchemical alloy received hours of study. Extensively documented in journal after journal, in a variety of hands and inks, as the years turned and one Talleyrand became another. Until Berenice lost the Talleyrand journals in the undercroft of a New Amsterdam kerk. But it hardly mattered: In all that time, the Talleyrands had divined almost nothing of value. They’d believed they were making slow but meaningful headway toward unraveling their enemies’ secrets. They’d done no such thing. They’d been as children building sand castles and calling themselves the rightful heirs of the sea.