The Rising (The Alchemy Wars)

by Ian Tregillis

  “Can you and your cohort replace the missing goop?”

  “If we work all day and night for the next several weeks, we could replenish a portion of it. Given the necessary precursor chemicals, catalysts, and reagents.”

  “I can’t give you orders, Doctor, but I can give you advice. And my advice is that if you and your fellow eggheads don’t want to get strung up by your thumbs, you should do exactly that.”

  “I said, ‘given.’ We don’t have the resources to replace what’s missing.”

  At this, the sergeant’s eyebrows tried to climb under the brim of his hat. Good instincts. Longchamp closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and counted to five.

  “Why the hell not? Just what, for God’s sake, are you people doing with it all?”

  “Nothing! We’ve been able to do very little since the supply caravans from the northwest became so sporadic. And the precursor shipments we have received are of inferior quality, requiring extensive effort to remove impurities.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on a horny syphilitic camel. How long has this been going on?”

  The chemist shrugged. “A couple of months, maybe? We wrote a report.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure that did the trick. People love to read the shit out of those.” Longchamp beckoned to the sergeant. “Come on, lad. Let’s go start the marshal general’s day in fine fashion.”

  The marshal general, like all members of the privy council, kept apartments within the inner keep. Longchamp and Chrétien’s stroll through the heart of New France took them over trenches supposedly wide and deep enough to slow a Clakker, under machicolations, and through posterns. The walk was made slightly perilous by miserly use of synthetic lamp oil in the keep’s lanterns. The king had decreed that only every third lamp be lit at night, as a means of conserving precious chemicals that could be turned to defense. But it was early enough that the streets were mostly empty, except for the night-soil collectors.

  The keep’s star-shaped perimeter and its outer defenses had been designed by the great Vauban himself, who had come to the New World as part of the original Exile. The legendary military engineer had also turned his keen mind for siege warfare inward, against the not-so-unthinkable proposition that swarms of mechanical killers might come over, or through, the walls. In peacetime the pincer-like tenailles provided convenient niches for vendor carts and displays of flowering herbs. But now the winter-wilted anise and lavender had been sheared away, and corners that used to crackle with fish fried in bison fat now bristled with harpoons, bolas, and epoxy guns.

  Apparently the sergeant frequented some of the same vanished stalls, for as they turned one corner, he sighed.

  “What’s on your mind, Sergeant?”

  “Flowers and bacon. That’ll always be the smell of home to me. But I wonder how this city will smell come the next bloom.”

  Longchamp said, “Don’t concern yourself. After you’ve lived on nothing but cold pemmican for two months, you’ll never again miss the smell of animal fat.”

  “Yes, sir. I remember, sir.”

  The captain took a slightly circuitous route that gave him the opportunity to light candles in the basilica narthex. The sergeant removed his hat, knelt, and crossed himself. Despite the early hour and the empty streets, dozens of faithful had heeded the monks’ call to prayer. It had been that way since the terrible news from Québec; Longchamp included the murdered pontiff in his prayers for New France.

  At the marshal’s residence, Longchamp leaned against a dry fountain, scratching his beard, while Sergeant Chrétien gave the bellpull a discreet yank. The chiming of the bells came through clearly enough, but no footsteps. The sergeant yanked the bell cord with one hand and knocked with the other. Quick learner: He put his fucking wrist into it.

  The marshal’s attendant opened the door. He wore a robe with more dignity than many could muster in their Sunday best. Not recognizing the sergeant, he twisted his face into a scowl that might have sent lesser men packing.

  “Sir!” he said, in something between a stage whisper and a shout. “The comte and comtesse de Turenne do not take visitors at this hour.”

  “I apologize for the early hour. I’d like to speak with the marshal, if it’s possible,” said the sergeant.

  “As would a great many people. But the comte is not inclined to favor those who can’t observe basic courtesies.”

  Longchamp watched this unfold for a minute or so, until he decided to let the sergeant off the hook. He cleared his throat and spat into the fountain basin, which contained snow and crumbled leaves.

  “Oh, for fucking serious, Richard. You and I both know you’re going to let us in, because you and I both know I wouldn’t bother the marshal unless the sky was falling and the dead were rising.”

  “Captain. I’ll wake the marshal at once.” The attendant ushered both men inside as if he hadn’t just pitched a fit.

  Chrétien whispered, “Thank you, sir.”

  Longchamp said, sotto voce, “Try acting like you belong in that Goddamned uniform. Because that was one of the saddest displays I’ve ever seen.” He snorted. “You’d like to speak with the marshal? If it’s possible? Jesus. I’d love to watch you haggle with the fishwives down in Saint Agnes. You’d come away naked, married, and in debt.”

  Richard saw them to the parlor and made to stoke the glowing ashes in the hearth. Longchamp growled. “The sergeant will take care of that.”

  Chrétien, hearing his cue, set about resurrecting the fire.

  “Very good, Captain. Shall I ask Sabine to warm something for you? There is coffee.”

  “Thank you, no. But if you could fetch your master’s martial wisdom before the sun sets tonight, that would be grand.”

  He did, in short order. Longchamp and Chrétien saluted the marshal, who entered the parlor looking old, and rumpled, and bleary. But he rallied impressively. And he didn’t carry his ceremonial baton of office; Longchamp pictured the man sleeping with it under his pillow.

  “Captain Longchamp. When the bell rang, I had a premonition that I’d be seeing you this morning.” He blinked at the sergeant. “I don’t know you.”

  “I’m sorry about the hour. This is Sergeant Chrétien.”

  “Ah.” The marshal took a seat. “You’re the one promoted in his wake,” he said, jerking a thumb at the captain.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Big shoes to fill.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I hear he’s a bit of a bastard to work for.”

  The sergeant cleared his throat. Turning red, he said, “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

  The marshal turned to Longchamp. “He needs to learn how to lie better.”

  “I’m working on that.”

  “All right.” The marshal slapped his knees. “You’re here. I’m up. It’s dark outside. What bad news have you come to deliver?” He cocked his head, as if listening to the city. “I don’t hear screaming. The tulips aren’t already at the walls?”

  “Not yet, thank the Blessed Virgin,” Longchamp said. All three men crossed themselves. “But this is about the siege preparations.” Longchamp explained the situation with the chemical inventories. He took care not to mention Berenice’s letter.

  “Surely there are reserves for manufacturing more.”

  Chrétien cast a sideways glance at Longchamp. The young sergeant’s eyes had assumed the white-limned panic of a rabbit in a snare.

  “That raises another issue.” He relayed the news about the dodgy chemical shipments. “As you pointed out, we might be surrounded by metal men before long. It’s crucial that we can arm all the epoxy cannons and keep them armed.”

  The marshal closed his eyes. His head drooped, slightly, but his breaths came more rapidly. He kneaded the arms of his chair. When he reopened his eyes, he’d sunk into himself. The comte de Turenne, Longchamp reminded himself, had not been a career military man. He’d become the marshal general through politics.

  “What do we do?”

>   And in that moment, the young sergeant discovered that his leaders were just old men with feet of clay. It hurt Longchamp’s heart, the look on the boy’s face. But it was a necessary lesson.

  “I think,” said Longchamp, feeling a bit out of place in the attempt to be gentle, “the king should know about this. And then I think we should pray.”

  “Yes. Right.” The marshal slapped his knees again. “Since you’re in charge of the defenses, Captain, he’ll want the report directly from you. He may want to assemble the privy council for this.” He stood. “Richard! Lay out my clothes, I’m going to the Spire. Sabine! Coffee!”

  By the time Longchamp and his shadow reached the Spire on foot, the marshal had already dismounted. A guard attended the marshal’s horse while, overhead, a pair of funicular cars passed each other. The ascending car contained the marshal; its empty twin came to a gentle stop at the base of the tracks.

  Despite the hour, a small crowd of petitioners had already gathered at the funicular station. Mere rumors of war made people edgy, but when they saw siege preparations going into effect, no matter how surreptitiously, they tended to lose their minds. They’d been a common sight around the Spire, these past few weeks. Dozens waited in line, sometimes for an entire day, for a chance to present a case to the king. Usually it was civvies wanting an exemption from the conscription lottery, or businessmen trying to profit on the inevitable hostilities with Nieuw Nederland. Even in peacetime the petitioners occasionally included the old-timers, who believed the king could heal with a touch.

  A slightly rowdy bunch for this time of the morning, but a pair of guards kept the line in order. As they neared the crowd, Simon, one of Longchamp’s men, pointed at the rising tram car and said, “Because he’s the marshal general, that’s why. You could ride the funicular, too, if you had urgent affairs of state to discuss with His Majesty. But since you don’t, Father, you can wait for the tram to start running at its regular time. The very same goes for the rest of you.”

  The guards saluted Longchamp as he passed. Chrétien frowned.

  Lamplight and the first hints of sunrise shimmered on the windowpanes of the funicular cars, more tempting than the wink from any seductress. They might as well have been sirens from the old stories: Some day Longchamp’s resolve would falter, and rather than endure the long climb up the Porter’s Prayer he’d submit to the shortcut. There had been a time when he’d pounce on the stairs without a second thought. Nowadays thoughts of ascending the Spire the hard way came in tandem with a mental grimace. It was a long damn climb on rickety knees.

  Were he alone, he might have chanced it. But given time a cut corner could become a self-justification that could become a habit. He couldn’t risk the pernicious undermining of his strength and stamina. Which is why Longchamp grabbed Chrétien by the collar when the sergeant headed for the funicular.

  “Not a chance. We go up the old way. You’re too young to get lazy, and I’m too grizzled to change my ways. And besides,” he added, “not only will it look better to the marshal general, it will give the marshal time to speak with the king in private before we arrive. They need to work themselves into a lather.”

  At least the sergeant had the self-discipline not to groan. “Yes, sir.”

  They mounted the stairs. From behind them again came the voices of the guards on crowd-control duty. “See? Even the captain of the guard takes the stairs.” Somebody raised a voice in reply, to which Simon said, “Because they’re on official business. The king doesn’t see petitioners at the crack of dawn.”

  This caused more raised voices, but by then the curvature of the Spire had put the argument just enough out of earshot that Longchamp couldn’t make out the words. Chrétien looked preoccupied, as though still listening; Longchamp wondered how far around the spiral those younger ears could track the argument.

  Perhaps because of this, Longchamp pushed himself through the long, cold climb. Before they’d made it halfway up, they saw two pigeons arrive and one depart in the space of about ten minutes. The birds were little more than flapping silhouettes in the brightening sky, but they cast a shadow on Longchamp’s heart. He called a stop at the pigeon roosts. Not because he needed a break, he told himself, and not because the sight of Brigit’s friendly face would have cheered him, but to get wind of the latest news.

  Brigit wasn’t up at that hour. But Lord knew the pigeons were. They’d been working all night to bring all the news from the far corners of New France.

  More incursions along the border. Spotters in a balloon tethered a thousand feet above Trois-Rivières had caught glints of light moving through the nearby marshes. Meanwhile, more than a hundred leagues to the south, Clakkers had stormed the bridges at Niagara Falls; the Dutch now controlled the crossing there.

  Every hour, the metal tide inched higher.

  And the keep’s chemical defenses were understocked.

  Cold wind made Longchamp’s eyes water. Both men sweat despite the wind. The sergeant’s frown, the same one he’d donned at the base of the Spire, etched itself deeper into his face with every circuit of the spiral staircase.

  “Sir,” he said.

  Longchamp grunted, trying not to sound like he was panting too heavily. “Hmmm.”

  “Did you hear what Simon said? To the petitioners?”

  “I heard him making it clear that despite many a tale to the contrary, His Holiness is not hiding in the Spire,” Longchamp puffed, “and that the king could not cure the afflicted with a touch, and…” The captain climbed a few more stairs, caught the ragged edge of his breath. “… And that on no account would people be allowed to bring their goats to petition the king, no matter how lame the wretched beasts.”

  “I don’t mean that. There was a fellow near the back of the line. Simon called him, ‘Father.’”

  “Good ears, Sergeant.”

  “You told us to keep our eyes open for any men of the cloth recently arrived to Marseilles.”

  Longchamp stopped. So I did. Son of a bitch.

  “Good memory, Sergeant. Was he making a fuss?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at him.” Chrétien peered over the outer balustrade of the Porter’s Prayer. “Damn.”

  The limb of the sun had breached the eastern horizon by the time the breathless, sweaty captain and sergeant gained the rounded bead atop the Spire. Here lay the privy council chamber and, above that, the king’s apartments.

  Longchamp had to catch his breath before saying, “Go back down and get the details. And if he’s not still in line, have Simon draw up a sketch. Then get it copied and pass it around to the rest of the men. Quietly.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  It wasn’t easy to sprint through a winter forest with two useless arms and one severed foot clutched to his chest. Jax’s weathervane head swayed in herky-jerky time to the awkward loping stride he’d adopted, reluctantly, to accommodate the shattered stump of his ankle joint. It meant that he couldn’t keep his eyes fixed on the ground ahead of him. And it was treacherous country, this taiga: sometimes swampy, sometimes choked with underbrush, sometimes so thick with conifers as to be impassable, and everywhere blanketed with snow. Sometimes the wind of his passage kicked up a rooster tail of loose flakes when he crossed a field. Sometimes the trees he brushed would hurl icicles in protest, glassy fléchettes that shattered against his body.

  Back in The Hague, he easily could have run thrice as fast along the old veerkaden, the tow-canal paths. But back then he’d had two feet, two useful arms, and a head that moved as he commanded.

  The mutilation caused him no pain. Not as a Clakker understood pain, anyway. A human who’d lost his foot as Jax had done would probably go blind from the agony before bleeding out.

  Perhaps Jax’s kin and their human makers were destined never to find common ground.

  Meanwhile, Jax had discovered a new kind of torment. Not the magical pain inflicted upon the Clakkers as a matter of course, but the self-inflicted spiritual a
nguish of the sinner. The indelible guilt of the murderer. Jax would carry that mantle to the end of his days. Though he was ultimately responsible for the murder of a leviathan airship—another guilty burden—he had tried to save the machine’s life. His pursuers in the city had killed a human witness to spin the story of a crazed murder machine. A fellow servitor, Dwyre, had even sacrificed himself for Jax. But this was worse.

  Was there a God who punished murderers? And if so, did He punish rogue mechanicals like Jax, or only soulful humans? And what of his soldier kin, those who would be powerless to do anything but kill Frenchmen—were they sinners? Had Jax somehow retrieved his own soul when he attained freedom from the geasa? Or was he still just a hollow shell hated by his creators, disregarded by their Creator, and exempt from the bonds of human social conventions? Perhaps. But if that were the case, why did the weight of his remorse threaten to flatten him?

  And assuming there was a God to listen, did He answer prayers? All prayers, or only the prayers of the devout? Would He listen to the penitent whispers of a poor pathetic machine? Some humans believed their God could know their hearts and minds. Did He concern Himself with the inner lives of Clakkers? The Calvinists’ God had put all things into motion at the beginning of time, like a celestial Clockmaker winding a pocketwatch, including the infinitely twisting braided paths of His creations’ lives. Did that extend to Clakkers, too? Were they predestined to lives of interminable servitude?

  Had Jax been predestined to meet Pastor Visser, and Berenice, and the man he killed in the forest?

  The forest smelled better than The Hague, and Amsterdam, and even Delft. No faint stagnation of the canal waters here. Just the cold crisp snow, the evergreens, and occasional scents of the animals he startled—elk musk, rabbit scat. He imagined this was bear territory, and wondered if he’d see one, though he understood they slept through the winter. Late the previous night he’d heard a growl from something apparently rather large.

  He remembered a storyteller at Pieter Schoonraad’s seventh birthday party, decades ago when Jax had belonged to Pieter’s father and his final leaseholder had been just a little boy younger than his daughter, Nicolet, was now. He’d entertained the children with fanciful stories of New World animals punctuated with snorts and barks and whinnies. Little Piet had wet his pants when the man described the fearsome mountain lion.