The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (9 page)

The sergeant said, “Who will buy your candles if the keep falls?”

The chandler pushed his daughter toward the stairs. “Go upstairs, Élodie. We’ll handle this.”

Longchamp kneaded his beard, wondering how this fool could possibly believe he stood to win this argument. Or how he thought it was merely an argument in the first place. He was already twice guilty of violating a royal decree, and of interfering with soldiers conducting their rightful duty in the defense of New France. The girl had more sense.

So he waited until she was clear of her father. Then he grabbed the chandler’s collar in his left hand and with his right he knocked the man’s feet out from under him with a quick swipe of his sledge’s haft. He spun the man around and pinned him to the wall with the head of the sledge. Candles toppled on the shelves. A long candle clock fell from the racks overhead and snapped into three pieces.

Longchamp leaned forward until his beard brushed the gasping chandler’s face.

“My patience has run out, and every moment of your increasingly short life that you squander on the delusion that
you can somehow prevent this is another moment delaying my hard-earned dinner. So if the very next words out of that shit-gobbler you call a mouth aren’t, ‘At your command, Sergeant Chrétien,’ I swear by all the saints that I will personally gnaw out your heart and crap it into a hole so deep the Virgin Mary can’t find it to pray over it.”

The chandler’s wife crossed herself. Longchamp stepped outside while father and daughter packed bags and bundled up for a long walk on a snowy night. He trusted the sergeant could shepherd their wayward lambs to the keep without incident or embarrassment. Well, probably.

So what if the chandler bolted? A war against the machines couldn’t be won with even ten thousand men like him. They needed women and men who could stand on the battlements and not go weak in the knees when the ticktocks scuttled up the walls like roaches. Who wouldn’t piss themselves at the sound of clockwork. But many of those had died in the previous conflict. Marseilles-in-the-West needed time. Time to replenish, recuperate, repopulate.

The wind had risen and the temperature fallen while they argued with the Chastain family. Longchamp’s breath formed long streamers that eeled around tree boughs and silent fountains en route to the river, as if fleeing Marseilles before it was too late. Longchamp directed his mount around the corner, to get off the boulevard and out of the worst of the winter chill. Little drifts of snow collected on his shoulders, beard, eyebrows, and the mare’s wispy mane. Combined body heat of soldier and horse melted the snow, but the meltwater beaded and ran clear of the natural oils in Longchamp’s beaver pelt cloak.

The detour took him past an empty playground adjoining the Orphanage of Saint Jean-Baptiste. Swings creaked in the wind, swaying like pendulums in a Dutch clock. The slow
twisting of the merry-go-round etched arabesques in the windblown snow. There would be more orphans, too many for this playground, before all was said and done.

He rode through pools of yellow-white light cast from the orphanage windows. Too bright for candles; that was synthetic lamp oil. Longchamp made a mental note to speak with the nuns to learn what the kids needed most. The winter had caught him by surprise; Christmas would be upon them sooner rather than later. By this time last year he’d already made hats, mittens, and scarves for half a dozen of the little brats.

But, then, the past year had been one unending shitstorm. He hadn’t much time to spare for the urchins.

He nodded to the sentries manning the outer keep’s north gate. They saluted. As his mare clopped under the spear-point teeth of the portcullis, he said, “I reckon it’s been quiet.”

“Just a couple petitioners,” said one. “The townies are in denial.”

Said the other, “They still haven’t grasped that the Clakkers are coming back.”

Longchamp said, “They will. And when they do, the entire town will try to wheedle a spot behind these walls. That’ll be a fun day.” Then he added, speaking over his shoulder as he entered the keep, “Sergeant Chrétien will be coming along with two wayward conscripts in tow. I’m off duty now. Try not to hand us over to the tulips before morning.”

He left his mare in the stables adjoining the north barracks. He shed cloak, scarf, and hat in the mudroom, stamped the snow from his boots, and shook it from his beard. After retrieving his needles and a ball of woolen yarn dyed cobalt blue, plus bread, cheese, and cider, he took a seat near the fireplace in the common room. The
click
of his knitting needles, regular and repetitive as a monk’s chant, melted into the quiet noise of
the barracks. The gossip, the plastic-on-wood
clatter
of desultory dice games, the
squeak
of boots being polished, the
rasp
of sharpened blades. The amity of soldiers.

Knitting helped slow his racing thoughts. It eased the sickening twist in his stomach that lately accompanied contemplations of the near future. He’d been working on a scarf the day they pulled the military Clakker from the wall; he’d never finished it. Dried blood had made the yarn too crusty to work. But he’d kept the unfinished scarf as a reminder. Like a bad penny that couldn’t be spent or discarded, memories of that day always found their way back to him.

The fire had burned low, Longchamp noticed, and so had the soldiers’ banter. He didn’t have to look to know they were watching him. They’d taken to studying his facial expressions and his moods, as though he were a talisman from which their futures could be divined.

“Captain, sir?”

Longchamp looked up. A corporal stood nearby, clutching an envelope. That’s what had broken his reverie. How many times had the boy addressed him? Longchamp shook his head, rubbed his neck. A lone mitten dangled from his needles, at the end of an implausibly long wrist. Sometimes his hands knew the pattern too well; there was such a thing as being too distracted.

“What is it, lad?”

“This came for you today.”

Longchamp took the envelope. It was addressed to
Sergeant Hugo Longchamp, Marseilles-in-the-West
. No return address.

The boy hovered nearby, displaying a depressing lack of guile. Longchamp said, “Well done, Corporal. You can rest well tonight knowing you’ve served the king with singular and noteworthy dedication.” The boy blinked at him. “Now, get the hell out of my fucking shadow before I feel the need to do
something about it. Make yourself useful and goose that fire while you’re at it.”

The lad, who looked barely old enough to shave, put another log in the fireplace and set about stoking the coals. The fire crackled, each pop wafting the scent of yellow birch through the room. Longchamp studied the handwriting on the envelope. He’d seen that script before.

Paranoia was always her way. But then, as she might have told him: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t plotting against you. New France’s enemies had plotted against it for centuries.

The seal hadn’t been obviously broken. Which meant exactly nothing. Anybody with half a brain could steam an envelope open. Especially one sealed with cheap Dutch adhesives, as this one had been. French glues weren’t defeated so easily; it was de rigueur among the courtiers of New France to use tamperproof adhesives when sending notes to one’s lovers. But this wasn’t such a thing.

With a pocketknife he slit the narrow edge of the envelope. He shook out a single slip of paper. It read:

December 1, 1926.

It’d been in transit for a while, then.

Longchamp sighed. Hell. It was her.

Ah. So she’d found duc de Montmorency, then. She’d suspected him for a secret tulip-sniffer, and when banished, she’d become obsessed with hunting the man.

Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord. The former vicomtesse de Laval. The former Talleyrand, and—setting aside her astounding propensity for hubris—a damn good one, too, until the end. After her banishment she’d been replaced by the marquis de Lionne, who’d lusted after the Talleyrand title for years, and who, having finally landed it, had no idea what to do about it.

Longchamp sighed. He rubbed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose.
Lord, preserve me from the machinations of stubborn one-eyed ex-vicomtesses.
Her signoff gave him a smile, though, and that was no mean feat these days. She still had his gift. He’d had a glass eye fashioned to replace the one she’d lost to the military Clakker in her laboratory. A going-away and good-luck token, of sorts. That she was still alive and scheming he took as a sign his token had worked.

He reread the note, crumpled it, flicked it into the fire. It burned.

S
ervitor.”

The human lieutenant pitched his voice so it wouldn’t carry through the muffling snowfall to the other sentries spread through the forest. His breath steamed, wreathing the naked boughs overhead.

The man gnawed on his thumbnail. Jax waited while the man chewed. After spitting a ragged crescent into the snow, he inspected his thumb, saying, “Tell me: How many agents have the Verderers placed among us?”

As Jax had hoped, the Frenchman’s escape had precipitated a crisis: He must have received assistance. Since the Clakkers were above reproach, the human officers suspected each other.

“I know nothing of the Verderers, sir.”

“Hmmm. I suppose so. But then again,” he mumbled, going to work on another fingernail, “they would have ordered you to say that, wouldn’t they?”

His fingernails did need a trim. But his teeth were a crude instrument compared with the emery boards used by the manicurists who attended Madam Schoonraad, whose husband had owned Jax prior to the accident that set him free. Dirt and other
filth encrusted the lieutenant’s nails. It was remarkable how the man managed to get so dirty while surrounded by mechanicals to do everything for him. Then again, the empire’s reliance upon mechanical fighters had meant that for centuries the army and navy hadn’t worried about promoting the best and brightest.

Jax wondered if it might have triggered the hierarchical metageas related to human safety, had he still felt the sizzling agony of geasa. Ought he caution this fellow not to sicken himself, just for appearances’ sake?

Such were the considerations that consumed Jax night and day. Maintaining his disguise required ceaseless vigilance, leaving Jax steeped in endless contemplation of the most obscure minutiae in the calculus of compulsion. He’d outed himself as a rogue by disregarding that calculus for a split second, and almost died for the mistake.

“Sir, your hand—”

“I think the captain carries secret orders. I order you to tell me everything you have witnessed in his behavior that might support this.”

Oh, to hell with it. I’ve become too timid. We’re alone. This is my chance.

“The captain had nothing to do with the Frenchman’s escape,” Jax said. “I did it.”

The lieutenant frowned. Before the full import of the admission could percolate through his skull, Jax clamped his hand over the man’s face. The man tried to yell through his sealed mouth and nose, but Jax had caught him on the exhale so he had little breath to spare. The fellow tried to thrash, but his soft flesh, made softer still by its wrappings of thick woolen flannel, could not sway alchemical brass and resolute purpose. Jax took care not to crush the man’s skull or fracture his jaw. His flailing slowed into desultory waving of the arms.

As the man slid into unconsciousness, Jax said, “And I am not Glass.”

He carried the lieutenant away from the naked birch and laid him in the snow beneath the drooping boughs of a jack pine. The conifer would offer more protection from the snow until he awoke. Jax studied the officer’s coat, hat, and gloves. But what if it snowed all night?

Jax delayed his flight by a precious one hundred and seven seconds, which was how long it took him to gather a mound of snow and sculpt a suitable quinzhee. He dragged the unconscious man down the entrance ramp into the snow cave. The below-grade entrance would, Jax hoped, prevent the warmer interior air from seeping out.

Jax knew his compassion would not soften the humans’ views of a rogue mechanical. His pursuers in New Amsterdam had murdered an innocent woman to whom Jax had shown compassion, then blamed her death on the rampage of a malfunctioning machine. Perhaps they’d do something similar to this officer. But Jax’s conscience wouldn’t let an innocent man die of exposure.

Jax emerged from the shelter and started trudging through the snow. But as soon as he’d gone too far for the sentries to hear him, he leaped into the trees.

He hurled himself from treetop to treetop rather than leave a convenient set of tracks for his hunters. But the arboreal path left its own signatures. The
crack
and
clank
of impact. The
sluff
and
clump
of snow-heavy boughs shaken to dumping their burdens on the ground below. The groaning of overburdened limbs, the snapping of broken branches. Every leap sent wind whistling through the gaps in his skeletal frame and left eddies in the thickening snowfall. Jax’s metal fingers and toes tore through the thickest bark as though it were crepe paper bunting, etching birch, pine, and ash with a record of his passage.
Though it was winter, and the trees mostly dormant, his metal digits soon turned sticky and smelled not unpleasantly of sap.

The sun, shrouded all day by dark, low clouds like a wet woolen blanket, sank to the western horizon. Immune to the deepening chill, he threw himself north. Then west. Then north again.

But where? And to what end?

He followed a legend.

Every Clakker had heard tales of Queen Mab and her heroic band of Lost Boys. The folklore of the ticktock men said Neverland, her winter kingdom, was a refuge populated by freed slaves from around the world. Nobody had ever seen this place or met a Lost Boy; the stories were always third-, fourth-, fifth-hand. Any Clakker doubly fortunate enough to somehow achieve Free Will
and
escape the empire could hardly be expected to return and mingle with its less-fortunate kin. It did raise the question of how many Clakkers over the centuries had enjoyed that double lightning strike of luck, and whether their numbers could populate any fairy kingdom larger than myth. But rumors of Queen Mab persisted. Jax had heard them all the way back in his first decade of servitude, over a century ago. Much more recently, Berenice had told him of a rogue Clakker who’d taken up residence in Marseilles-in-the-West. Apparently Lilith had come through the French city en route to points north, but stayed.

Jax hurled himself into the bole of a towering oak and kept moving. The impact snapped branches and shook snow from half the boughs. The crash echoed softly through the forest. He paused, listening.

Jax’s former masters had other reasons to curtail a protracted chase. While formidable, a dyad or triad of Clakkers sent on a mission to retrieve the rogue were more susceptible to French partisans than several dozen. There was a danger that
the French might bring chemical defenses to bear and trap a mechanical. That was the worst-case scenario: that the rogue could lure loyal machines into enemy hands, where they might be disassembled and studied. If agents of the Verderer’s Office had been inserted with the other troops, their mandate would have been to prevent just that sort of technological espionage. But as far as Jax knew, their presence among the troops was a paranoid fantasy invented by—

A shot ripped through the branches and smashed into the pine bole just above his left hand. The glob ruptured, coating his hand and wrist with chemicals. As they hardened, they grew warm enough to melt snow caught in the crevices of the bark. Jax heaved. His hand came free with a tremendous crackling, taking with it a patch of pine bark. The noise of extricating his hand nearly deafened him to the second shot. He leaped higher into the branches a fraction of a second before another chemical membrane impacted.

Bowed by wind and Jax’s weight, the tree swayed. Jax launched himself over an icy stream to clamp himself against a birch. His creaking, chemically coated hand refused to act at the speed of his thoughts; he scrabbled for purchase. The forest echoed with two more shots. Jax was on the ground before the second of the soft little
pop
s had dissipated. Both shots whizzed harmlessly overhead.

He spun around the trunk. It put the tree between him and the shooter (shooters?). That bought him a few seconds to think. The attackers were human: Mechanical snipers wouldn’t have missed after the first shot. They were on the ground, too, judging from the shot trajectories. So they had to maneuver through underbrush and snow to get a new line on him. He’d exposed himself by clinging to the trees’ crowns, evergreen and winter-naked alike. But even on foot, and unable to move at top speed owing to the terrain, he could still easily outpace them.
And the fall of night was well under way; he had the advantage of vastly superior night vision. He set off at a sprint. Jax vaulted fallen boughs and rotted logs, zigzagged around yellow birch, dove through winter-brittle underbrush.

He must have run afoul of a French scouting party. The vitreous mass coating his hand held it solid—it took highly advanced chemistry to make something so strong—and smelled faintly of lilacs rather than pitch.

They’d mistaken him for an invader. Understandable, but annoying as hell. He’d expected to stop running once and for all after putting sufficient distance between himself and the true invaders. Instead he now had to outpace those who should be his allies. But he’d escaped a city populated with enemies; here in the forest he had every advantage.

The ground underfoot erupted in gouts of fire. Thunder shook the forest.

Oh
, thought Jax, as the ground fell away.
Not every advantage.
The random slewing of his weathervane head afforded him a glimpse of something metal spinning away into the shadows. Firelight glinted on the burnished shrapnel like a meteor streaking into the forest.

They have explosives
.

… I won’t go back. I won’t go back. I won’t go back. I won’t go back…

Three times fire had consumed him. Once in the sky. Once in a pit deep underground. And once under a starry sky in a snowy old-growth forest. Each time, the fire changed him. The airborne fireball—the spectacular funeral pyre of a flying leviathan—made him more cautious. From the fiery furnace he had emerged a new being with no past, no crimes, no enemies. But his third emergence from the flames was the worst.

He was no longer whole.

… I won’t go back. I won’t go back. I won’t go back. I won’t go back…

The gaps in his skeletal frame were blackened in places. That was probably superficial damage. But his spinal gear trains clicked and rattled in ways they hadn’t before, the escutcheons over his most delicate mechanisms had shattered, and one of his legs ended at the ankle joint.

The foot previously attached to that ankle currently sat in the lap of one of his three captors. The humans huddled beside a low fire, speaking in whispers and occasionally turning a pair of spitted rabbits.

Jax sat on the ground, legs splayed before him, arms wrenched behind him. At least he hadn’t been encased like a bug in amber. But his assailants had coated his arms with epoxy from fingertip to shoulder; it affixed him to the bole of a towering evergreen just as effectively.

The man holding Jax’s severed foot pried at it with the tip of a hunting knife. In the crackling firelight, his cloak and hat both evidenced the thick, oily sheen of beaver pelts. Under the cloak he wore a variegated flannel coat and buckskin trousers. Either the man was quite lumpy or these were lined, perhaps imperfectly, with thick wool. His comrades, a man and a woman, were dressed similarly. They might have stepped straight from the seventeen hundreds. Or sprung to life straight from the pages of an illustrated tale of the old coureurs de bois, the legendary woods runners.

Then again, the original traders who formed the backbone of the fledgling New France didn’t trek through the forests and rivers carrying epoxy guns and mortars.

He tried to glimpse the weapons. The explosion hadn’t done his insubordinate neck any favors. He leaned forward and back. By straining against the solid mass of adhesive that held
him tight, he could tip his head just enough to cause it to sway to and fro. In this way he saw the double-barreled guns stacked together under a lean-to. He couldn’t see the launcher they’d used to hit him with the explosive.

They saw him studying the camp. “
Notre ami, il se prepare à courir
,” said the woman.

The second man stood. “
Il peut essayer
,” he said.

Jax said, “I’m not who you think I am.” The man trying to disassemble Jax’s foot looked up briefly, but turned his attention back to his task. The standing man cocked his head. He looked at Jax as though curious about something. Jax continued, “You’re in danger. I was fleeing my own kind. They have crossed the border. Dozens of machines like me, and their masters. They might have heard you attack me. They’ll be coming to investigate.”

The man frowned. He and the woman exchanged a shrug. He sat again.

They didn’t speak Dutch. Any more than Jax knew French. The only other Frenchwoman he’d met, Berenice, had spoken fluent Dutch.

The knife slipped. The man holding Jax’s foot grunted in frustration. He sheathed the knife, placed Jax’s foot on the ground, and stood. From the supplies stacked neatly beside their tent he produced an ax. The other two scrambled away from the fire as he hefted it overhead.

The steel blade whistled, and then metal clanged against metal amid a fountain of violet sparks. Unseen wings took flight in the forest, frightened by the noise. Three humans bent to inspect the Clakker part; from the muttering and foul looks cast in his direction, not to mention how they crossed themselves, Jax gathered they spoke of dark magics.