The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (6 page)

The wind of Jax’s passage flipped the officer’s hat into the air, tousled his hair.

Another servitor skidded into the original path of the weapon to shield their master with its body.

Jax landed. Bouncing and skidding through the underbrush, he ripped a furrow in the frozen earth.

The tent collapsed, canvas shredded and poles snapped by the vicious rarefaction wave created by Jax’s departure.

Sparks drifted to the snowy ground. Sizzled. Became smoky wisps smelling of ozone and dark magic.

Jax unfolded. The shattered tomahawk tumbled to the ground. The handle had snapped in two and the steel blade had been warped. He tromped through the underbrush, hopping over his own furrow, returning to the camp just as the humans registered the sequence of events. Both looked confused and alarmed. Now it was the officer who studied his surroundings, wide-eyed, while the Frenchman sighed.

Well
, thought Jax.
That should eliminate any doubts about my loyalty.

Collapsing tent canvas draped itself across the oven Jax had stoked. Flames engulfed it. But this was a mundane fire. Harmless. A trio of the nearest servitors strode into the flames. In moments they had suppressed the blaze before it spread through the camp.

The captain shook off the metal hands holding him. He approached the captive until they stood just feet apart.

In Dutch, he said, “That was an act of war.” Jax wondered if the Frenchman understood. “We’re within our rights to execute you.”

When the Frenchman spoke again, his voice was just barely above a whisper. Jax couldn’t distinguish what the man said from the background rustle of wind, the rustling of the humans’ clothing, the ticktock patter of his kin. He couldn’t even tell if he spoke French or Dutch or Algonquian. The officer stepped closer.

“What?”

The other man twisted in his captor’s grip. He lunged for the epoxy bladder, fingers outstretched to puncture it. But this time he was far too slow. The military Clakker easily yanked the grenade beyond his reach. The Frenchman’s shoulder gave a wet pop. He yelped.

The ax was a ploy
, Jax realized. To himself, he thought,
He knew he had no chance of hitting his mark, not with so many of us around. He did it to ignite the need to gloat. To lure the officer closer
.

Others followed the same train of thought.
A vengeful suicide
, said the servitor who had tried to pull the officer out of harm’s way.
Maybe the French truly are ideologues.

Shaking his head as though disappointed in a child, the officer turned and walked away. But he stopped after a few strides and glanced over his shoulder. To the military Clakker, he said, “Break his arm.”

Even the lapping of the river and the wind through the trees couldn’t muffle the sharp wet
crunch
. A hoarse scream shook snow from the naked boughs.

Jax navigated through the camp via the soft glow of moonlight on snow. The sentry outside the prisoner’s tent acknowledged
his approach in what had, in recent months, become the traditional fashion among their kind.

Clockmakers lie
, she rattled.

Clockmakers lie
, he responded.

Somewhere nearby, an owl hooted. The sentry queried him. Jax responded,
I’m to check the prisoner’s injury and inspect him for signs of infection. His arm must be set properly.

I thought they’ve already done that
, said the sentry.

They have
, said Jax.
And surely will again. The captain wants him hale and hearty before he’s sent down the river for interrogation.

While he’d lost the advantage of anonymity to his missing flanges and weathervane head, he still retained his greatest advantage. Rogues were so rare—or so the Guild, Church, and Throne told the world—that nobody ever considered the possibility a machine might lie.

The sentry took him at his word.
He’s still angry about the ax.

Jax concurred with a
click
. As of course it would, the other machine noticed the swaying of Jax’s head.

Did that happen when the Forge fell?
she asked.

Yes
, Jax lied again, suddenly nervous. Perhaps she was merely making conversation? It was lonely, this life of eternal servitude. Or was she wondering if she might have glimpsed him in the tunnels, or on the armillary sphere, or thrashing about in the alchemical fires?

He affected a mild but growing agitation. Every single Clakker ever forged knew intimately, from the first moments of its functioning, the unquenchable fire of the geasa. The steadily mounting heat ever threatening to explode into agony. Such was their birthright: the inability to disregard a human directive. He conveyed that now.

The sentry said,
There we were, surrounded by those who
designed and built us. And in their haste for war they couldn’t take a few minutes to fix you.

Jax willed his body to rattle more loudly. He feigned the growing distress of a Clakker in the throes of an impatient geas.

It’s not-t-t-t-t surp-p-prising
, he stuttered.

The sentry stepped aside.
Go, brother
, she said,
before you burst into flames.

It was dark in the tent. There hadn’t been any need to provide the prisoner with light, or, for that matter, the warmth of a fire. Nor had there been a need to chain him. Pain was a stronger shackle than any chain. Every Clakker knew that. So did their makers. So the Frenchman slept unfettered under two blankets, the fur a faint shimmer in the moonlight leaking through the tent flap. When he listened past the clacking of his own body, Jax heard the shallow breathing of a human in pain. He had to dial his eyes to their maximum sensitivity in order to see the sweat-runnels carved through the dirt on the man’s forehead.

The prisoner jerked awake as Jax approached. He tried to scoot away, but the pain of his shattered arm hobbled him. He didn’t get far. Jax knelt. His backward servitor knees left his shins splayed before him like a broken doll.

“I’ve been sent to check your wounds,” he said.

And wondered how much Dutch this man understood. At least a bit, it stood to reason, if he had been sent across the border armed with an epoxy grenade. Jax doubted regular woods runners carried anti-Clakker chemical ordnance.

Jax produced a torch. The Frenchman flinched (then groaned) from the metal-on-metal
chank
when Jax snapped his fingers, but the resulting sparks ignited the torch. He crept forward, trying not to further spook the man. It also enabled him
to put his back to the tent flap and the sentry, should she decide to peer inside.

After a bit of pantomime, Jax managed to convey his intent. The Frenchman offered a shattered arm and a stoic face.

A severe break, though set and splinted as well as possible. (After all, the Clakkers on this foray were trained to deliver any manner of first aid to their human commanders.) But the soldier had crushed the man’s arm in two places, and a compression injury sometimes led to bone chips. Jax had no way to treat that, nor could he afford the time.

He released the man’s arm but not his attention. Jax pointed to his own eye, then the man’s, then lay a fingertip over the man’s lips when they parted. He reached into the hollow spaces of his torso. His fingers clicked lightly against his whirring innards, then after a moment he produced a knife. Again the man flinched. But the dread turned into surprise when Jax laid the handle in the palm of his good hand. Jax hadn’t the vocabulary to describe the Frenchman’s expression when he next produced the epoxy grenade and a handful of willow bark. No stranger to medicinal herbs, the man didn’t hesitate to snatch the white willow. Jax doubted it would accomplish much more than dulling the very worst of the pain. And only if the man had a chance to boil the bark into a tea; more likely his injury, and the cold, would kill him before that.

Jax pointed at the epoxy weapon, then at himself, then shook his head in the human manner. Then he gestured toward the tent flap and again laid his fingertip on the man’s lips.

With his other finger he jotted in the dirt, in Dutch:
100 of us. Mostly servitors. Swinging east, through Acadia, then down the Saint Lawrence to Marseilles. 1 human commander. 5 lieutenants.

The man frowned. Jax let him have just a few seconds to read before erasing the message with a swipe of his hand. Next
he wrote,
Do you understand?
The Frenchman nodded. Jax replaced the query:
Bonne chance.

A moment later he had erased this and extinguished the torch. He went outside to distract the sentry while the Frenchman cut his way out of the tent. When it came time to leave, Jax found he didn’t have to feign the urgency of another geas. The fear of discovery gave rise to a very natural rattling.

T
he Verderers’ safe house lay somewhere along the North River Valley, far from the outskirts of New Amsterdam. She couldn’t run all the way back to the city. And certainly not in winter, through the snow. But she tried anyway, jogging until she needed to vomit, emptying her stomach, then staggering off again, pausing only as necessary to rehydrate with snowmelt. Running was futile, but she couldn’t help herself: Any moment the quadrupedal
clank-chank
of a mechanical canter would approach from behind, quickly growing loud enough to overwhelm her own hoarse breathing and the
crunch
of snow underfoot.

She could do nothing about her trail of footprints.

There wasn’t enough snow in the world to rinse the acid tang of vomit from her mouth. All the air in the world couldn’t sate her fiery lungs, or clear her spinning head and anchor the wheeling stars. Even fear of the Verderers’ wrath couldn’t goad her forever. She was a frail machine of flesh. Perhaps she’d collapse into a snowbank and freeze solid before the Verderers caught her again. Good. Fuck them.

Her jog became a trot, then a shuffle, then a limp, then eventually a stagger. The cold ache in her fingers and toes became a burn, then numbness, then nothing. The moon cast a silvery light across the snow. The light felt conspicuous, as though some capricious god had chosen to illuminate her struggle for all the world to see. To ease her hunters’ work.

The effort to stay upright and put one foot in front of the other, and then remembering to do it again, became the entirety of her consciousness. Her thinking mind retreated behind an ascetic trance of pain, crumpled beneath the titanic weight of her exhaustion. Gulps of frigid air scraped her throat and sinuses; her nose bled.

A new light shone through the trees. It flickered on the snow and cast shifting shadows through the forest. The stars had come undone. They’d traced curlicues in the sky, but now the weight of her exertion had knocked them loose. They’d plummeted to earth and now shone from within forests and valleys. The light approached. The stars had come to warm and embrace her.

Slowly, like the ponderous shifting of continents, rational thought broke through the hallucination.

That wasn’t a star. It was a lantern. On an approaching carriage.

Berenice limped to a halt. She swayed in the middle of the road. There she mashed at her pocket, trying to retrieve the pendant she had taken from Anastasia Bell. No longer fine and dexterous tools subject to her every thought, her hands had become crude instruments. She managed to shake the pendant loose. The carriage, its wheels grinding and its horse harnesses jingling, rounded the bend. She looped the chain around her wrist and held the Verderer’s pendant aloft.

Not since her husband’s murder, and the permanent heaviness it embedded in her heart, had anything ever been so
leaden. Berenice had never concentrated so hard as she did on maintaining her balance there in the middle of the road in the middle of the night. But she forced herself to maintain a modicum of dignity in presenting the pendant to the oncoming carriage. But her blood-and sweat-soaked clothing had begun to freeze and she was shivering violently by the time the lantern light reached her.

“Whoa. Whoa.”

The driver clucked to the horses. Their flanks steamed, eddying warmth and the scent of animal sweat across Berenice’s numb face. The driver unwrapped the scarf wound about his face. It revealed a pair of wide eyes over a craggy leathered face dusted with stubble the color of peppered salt. He blinked.

“Miss? What are you doing way out here? Was you attacked?”

Berenice tried to speak. But the shivering had grown too violent; she bit her tongue. She coughed, spat, raised the pendant higher. Shook it in the driver’s face. The horses shied from the smell of blood on her clothes.

“G-g-g—” She coughed. Wheezed. “G-GUILD!”

“Holy shit on toast,” said the driver. “Sparks! Get them horse blankets, now!”

The wagon bounced on squeaking springs. With much ratcheting and clicking, a servitor unfolded from a ledge behind the carriage. Berenice staggered. The snow cushioned her fall. The pendant slipped from her nerveless fingers. She glimpsed the Royal Arms embossed on the carriage door, and chests strapped to the roof and the servitor’s ledge.

Mail carriage
, she realized.

But then icy metal arms swaddled her in yards of scratchy wool thick with the scent of horse. The mechanical deposited her inside the carriage. It took the stones from a hanging basket and applied friction heat by rolling them between its hands.
Berenice winced; the noise would carry for hundreds of yards through the silent woods.

The driver ordered the servitor back to its perch outside. He twisted the plug from an insulated vacuum flask; apple-scented steam filled the carriage. He helped Berenice free one trembling hand from the swaddling and set a cup in it. She slurped, but spilled half the liquor on herself before she got any into her mouth. Still, she wondered why she’d always disregarded apple brandy. What heavenly libation.

She looked at the cup in her hand. Realized she ought to be holding something else. Straightened.

“My pendant,” she managed.

“Relax. I got it.” The driver lifted his hand. Bell’s pendant dangled from the chain twined through his fingers, dripping water. It twinkled in the lantern light. The man took a moment to study it. When his gaze fell upon the small
v
alongside the rosy cross, a new wariness crept into his manner. He set the pendant on the bench beside her like a man tiptoeing past a snoring bear.

“So you’re with them Stemwinders, then.”

Berenice sluiced more brandy down her throat. She coughed. A new numbness spread through her body. But this was a warm numbness, and started on the inside. The driver refilled her cup while she found her voice.

“I represent the Verderer’s Office of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists,” she lied, “if that’s what you mean.”

“How’d you end up way out here? You been walking a long spell.” The driver, whose name was Cortland, spoke a version of the Queen’s Dutch slightly yellowed around the edges by age, for it still carried traces of the original settlers of Nieuw Nederland. A thick layer of the rural New World frosted the driver’s speech. If she listened carefully, she could even discern hints of the French/Dutch creole spoken by boatmen along the
Saint Lawrence. He went on. “Your boots is wet. You can take ’em off, Sparks’ll keep the carriage plenty warm for you. Figure maybe it should give you a careful lookover, too. I won’t peek or nothing, on my word. But frostbite ain’t gonna do a lady like you no favors.”

She sipped, changed the subject. Her voice still warbled owing to the residual shivers in her chest, but at least she no longer worried that chattering teeth might sever the tip of her tongue. “I have urgent business in the city. Your deliveries must be delayed, I’m afraid, for in this matter the Guild’s business takes precedence.”

He nodded, but not without reluctance, clearly having reached the same conclusion. To his great credit, however, he vowed to drive through the night to get her to her destination. Berenice took care to give the Clakker, Sparks, an extra look at her stolen pendant while it inserted more hot stones under the folds of her blankets. She wished she still had Jax’s alchemical glass, the strange pineal lens that had set these events in motion.

Berenice insisted the driver not overtax his horses, and that he stop at a carriage inn to change them out if necessary. The delay wouldn’t matter; if one or both of Bell’s Stemwinders gave chase, they’d catch her regardless of how hard he drove his horses. Driving them to their deaths would be pointless cruelty.

The untrampled snow beyond the verges of the road stood too high for the driver to guide the carriage through a U-turn. Instead he unhitched the horses. Sparks lifted the carriage (Berenice and all) and then, after turning it to face the way it had come, set it back into its own wheel ruts so gently she barely felt the bump. After a few jingles and neighs while the driver rehitched the horses, the mail carriage was bumping and rattling south.

Berenice expected to drowse in the cozy warmth. But the
pins-and-needles hurt too much as sensation returned, with agonizing reluctance, to her hands and feet. And by the time that pain had subsided, the brandy had her rather pleasantly sozzled. Sozzled enough to break the endless chain of her thoughts and steer her worries away from capture. What now?

The carriage smelled like old leather and horse sweat. She declined an offer of the driver’s pipe, but she could still smell and taste its aroma. Clearly he took his breaks inside the cab when he could. A cold job, driving the mail. She had a new respect for it.

A new question bubbled to the top amid her sloshing thoughts. She leaned forward, opened the slider at the front of the cab. “Mr. Cortland,” she called, “where are the rest of your passengers?”

“Passengers is rare,” he shouted into the headwind. “Not many’s keen on riding hell-bent for leather without stopping to piss or eat. The job is to see the mail delivered, anything else is a bonus. Maybe you’re still too numb to notice that bench ain’t padded.”

She wasn’t. But given the choices, she’d choose a sore ass over frostbitten fingers, toes, and nose eight days out of seven. She’d endured enough endless church services, and so many pointless privy council meetings, to have a particularly high bar for what constituted mere discomfort. An unpadded bench in a mail carriage with dodgy suspension was a roll on a goose down mattress by comparison; she wasn’t even wearing a corset.

The driver’s cough, a wet, hacking thing, drew phlegm from the back of his throat. He turned his head as though tacking out of the wind. Berenice winced, but his spittle flew true, beyond the edges of the coach despite the headwind. “Hell,” he added. “I’d have run you down, too, missus, if you hadn’t flashed that jewelry at us. ’Course if I had, old Sparks back there would’ve
had my head.” He spat again. “Nothing personal, I hope you understand. We have a timetable to keep, is all.”

“Not any longer. Not on this run,” she said.

In the Central Provinces, and most of the empire for that matter, postal mail was delivered quite literally on the backs of Clakkers. Apparently mechanicals were still too expensive in the New World to use them to distribute packages and parcels between far-flung outposts. Which caused her to wonder…

After briefly closing the flap while one of the horses defecated, she asked the driver, “What’s your route?”

“Mostly back and forth up the river. The run between Fort Orange and the city, a few stops between.” He spat another gob of phlegm into the frigid night.

The onrush of cold air hurt her throat and nose. She wanted never to feel cold again. She asked, “There’s a house north of where you picked me up. Have you ever stopped there?”

“The Guild house? Of course,” he said. “Only when there’s a package to deliver, though.”

Oh, you poor bastard
, thought Berenice.
I’m so sorry. When they figure out where I went, they’re going to question you.

“How do you know it’s one of our properties?”

There might have been the slightest beat, just a sliver of hesitation, before Cortland said, “Lady, no offense, but I ain’t blind. It’s the only place outside a city I ever seen one of them Stemwinders, much less two in one place. Hell, with a couple of them ticktock horses I could do this run in a fraction of the time!” His laughter was a bit forced. “I figure they run like demons.”

They
are
demons
, she thought,
and they do
. In her mind’s ear the susurration of the carriage wheels over hard-packed snow became a faint clockwork gallop, swiftly growing closer in the darkness…

Hold on a moment. Why does Cortland bother with horses at all when he has a servitor under lease? Sparks could pull this carriage just as well, which would save Cortland no end of hassle and money.
And then she realized:
Sparks doesn’t belong to him. This isn’t a regular mail carriage. Sparks is here to guard whatever comes and goes from the safe house.

Just then the driver said, “Come to mention it, I have to admit I was sorta surprised you weren’t headed that way. Seems like that would’ve been your best bet for help as you didn’t know me and Sparks was on the way.”

The warmth and comfort left her. Even the lightheadedness from the brandy seemed to disappear.

“There was an accident,” she said. “There’s no help to be had at the house.” It was true enough.

“Bet it was the Goddamned Frenchies, wasn’t it?” He spat again. “Sons of bitches, all of them.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Lady, begging your pardon, but how long have you been out here? By now you must’ve heard about what they did down in the city.”

Oh. That
, she thought. “Oh. That,” she said.

“Yeah. They’re fixing for a fight they can’t win. Ain’t that right, Sparks?”

If the servitor responded, Berenice couldn’t hear it. She’d have to deal with Sparks, too, she realized.

Shivering, she closed the flap. The rush of cold air had blown away the snug coziness of the compartment. She wrapped the driver’s blanket around her shoulders and took the warming stone in her lap. Her eyes closed, but still sleep eluded her.

Bell’s pendant could open many doors for her, assuming Berenice didn’t overstep herself. At the same time, though, she was soon to be the most wanted woman in the New World. No pendant, no Clockmaker shibboleth, no amount of
subterfuge, could protect her if she continued to lurk around New Amsterdam. She held the rosy cross at arm’s length, watching its long chain sway against the rocking of the carriage. Lamplight glinted from rose quartz. The Rosenkreuz. The
rosa crucis
. She’d seen it a thousand times. Its ubiquity within the empire granted it a strange invisibility. It even adorned the arms of the empire and the Brasswork Throne, and it could be found anywhere the Guild wanted to stake its claim. The emblem even granted, to those who wielded it, the power to requisition random Clakkers and rewrite their geasa.