In the private confines of his own thoughts, Daniel said to himself, I do. My identity is what I choose it to be. Aloud he said, I see. Although he didn’t.
Speaking of safeguarding your precious identity, said Mab, I have a gift for you. From the cavity within her skeletal chest she produced a thin metal plate and a rubber tube similar to the ones that contained his former owners’ dentifrice. The plate resembled the others he’d seen covering the Lost Boys’ keyholes. The tube, it turned out, contained powerful adhesive. It didn’t set as quickly as the French epoxy that had nearly led to Daniel’s demise, but its origin couldn’t be doubted.
Holding the plate over his keyhole with two fingertips, waiting for the glue to dry, he asked, Where did you obtain a tube of French epoxy?
In French, Mab said, “From the Inuit. They trade with the French, and then they trade with us.”
“But what do you give them? What could a colony of free Clakkers have that would be of any value to them?”
“Labor,” said Mab. “In five minutes you can do with your fingers things that might take a human days to achieve with a hammer and bone knife.”
Daniel thought about this. Overhead, the aurora flared momentarily red. “While they spend a great deal of time traveling inside French territory.” Mab turned to look at him. He concluded, “You pay them for information about New France.”
“I see I was well informed about you, Daniel. You are a clever one.”
Her words struck him like a thunderbolt. “Informed by whom? Once across the border, I never passed through any towns or villages. Who could have brought word of my approach? Damaged though I was, I traveled faster than any human contrivance over this terrain.” He’d heard of dogsleds and hoped to someday see one.
But she went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Clever and ruthless. It’s too bad about the airship. What an ally that would have been! But surely you knew from the start it was an ill-fated beast. I do wonder how you subdued it.”
The demise of the Clakker airship was spectacular and unusual. It wasn’t hard to imagine the tale had spread from within Nieuw Nederland to New France and points elsewhere. But Mab didn’t know, or pretended not to know, about the bauble he’d inadvertently received from Pastor Visser. The glass with the power to break the geasa. Nevertheless, Mab knew much for somebody living in the snowy wilderness hundreds of miles from the ragged fringes of New France.
Daniel asked, “How could you possibly know so much about my movements?”
A sweep of her arm encompassed the valley and their kin in the far distance. “You didn’t think this was the entirety of Neverland, did you? That in a quarter of a millennium less than three dozen of us have been so lucky? No, Daniel. We have brothers and sisters spread throughout the human world.”
“Free Clakkers living undercover in our makers’ world.”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER
13
I don’t suppose,” said Berenice, shivering within her bundle of oiled furs, “that either of you will tell me what the fuck is going on.”
She said it in Dutch. No response. Repeated it in French. No response. She would have repeated it in the cling-clang language of the Clakkers, if only she had the proper metal bits to bash together. As it was, she’d be frozen as solid as the mechanicals’ skeletons sooner rather than later; it was bloody cold on the open ocean in the middle of winter. Even without the wind and sea spray. Her silent kidnappers rowed so quickly they made a blur of the oars. (She wondered what they’d been fashioned from. Regular wooden oars would have shattered an hour into their cruise. Regular metal oarlocks would have glowed a dull red from the friction heat.) The prow of their little boat skimmed above the water, their wake a pair of foamy feathers on the steel-gray sea. Between the swells, and the sea winds, and the fanning of the oars, Berenice’s mound of water-resistant furs had decided to abandon the fight.
One of the Clakkers had pulled the cloak and blankets from a space in the prow and tossed it to her the moment they disembarked from the much larger ships. She tried to take her mind off the damp chill by estimating her life expectancy. After thorough analysis of the situation she concluded it was Very Fucking Short. But still longer than it might have been. So:
“Look. If you’d wanted me dead, you wouldn’t have interfered. My chances were looking just the tiniest bit grim back there. So, well, thanks for that.” She patted the cloak. “Additionally, if you’d wanted to kill me, you wouldn’t have given me this. You could have watched me freeze to death.” She started shivering again. “Maybe you still will.”
She sat in the prow, van Breugel’s satchel on her lap, facing a pair of impassive and unreadable servitor visages. But she did notice something strange about their bodies. Both machines sported minute scoring in the metal immediately around their keyholes. The scratches didn’t range widely or deeply enough to alter or damage the sigils. They were so faint as to be almost invisible to all but continued scrutiny. Which, here in a rowboat in the middle of the Goddamned ocean, was her main diversion. The work was so fine, and so tightly confined to the margin between the keyhole and the innermost ring of the alchemical spiral, that it suggested precision work. Work carried out—or inflicted?—upon both of these disturbing mechanicals. The scratches looked like scrape or pry marks, as though something had been removed from their keyholes.
The blur of the oars propelled their little boat over a particularly large swell; Berenice left her stomach behind when they descended into the trailing trough. It wasn’t a stormy sea, but mere humans couldn’t have rowed through it. Her new traveling companions rowed like demons, apparently to put distance between themselves and the mated ships. Whatever geasa they ultimately served, they were compelled to do so in secrecy. Who compelled them so, and why? To work under the nose of the Verderers like this—not to mention shattering the neck of a Guildman—suggested an internecine conflict. Was this a schism within the Guild? Or between the Throne and the Guild? Were there warring factions within the Clockmakers? Jesus. If not for her Still Very Short life expectancy, she might have felt a twinge of excitement.
“Where the hell are we going? Can you at least tell me that, or how long it’ll take to get there? Because I’m enjoying this cruise, truly I am, and I pray I’ll have time to write some postcards before it’s over.” No response. Finally she asked the question she’d been dreading. “Did Bell send you to find me?”
“We serve the queen.”
All right. Now she was getting somewhere. This made even less sense than everything else that had happened in the last few hours, but at least it was progress.
She couldn’t tell which of the machines had spoken, but in all practical respects it hardly mattered. Addressing them both, she said, “Well, I hate to break it to you, but so did the guys whose necks you wrung like a pair of damp dish towels. If Margreet wants me this badly, she—and you—could have left well enough alone. Her minions had already caught me.” She hugged herself. Her chest and stomach muscles hurt from the effort to suppress the shivering. When it felt like she could speak without her teeth chattering again, she added, “And at least then I wouldn’t be freezing my ass off in the middle of the Goddamned ocean.”
“We do not serve the Brasswork Throne. We serve the queen.”
What the hell did that mean? Had she been abducted by a pair of malfunctioning murder machines?
“Well, whoever this queen is, she wields the power to impose extremely powerful geasa on you. I’m thinking a high-level Clockmaker. Because that”—she jerked her head toward the stern, indicating the ocean behind them and, somewhere, the ships they’d eluded—“was some of the strangest shit I’ve ever seen.”
“We do not serve the Guild. We serve the queen.”
She rocked back in her seat. And just what the hell did that mean? How could they serve neither Throne nor Guild? Every Clakker ever forged carried that involuntary fealty stamped in the deepest recesses of its ticktock heart. Unless…
What
if there was a third entity at work? A hitherto unknown third branch of the Dutch hegemony, one neither Throne nor Guild. Such could explain the riddle of their allegiance. But it would require the existence of a group of which Berenice had never heard the slightest whisper. Nor had any of her predecessors, insofar as there was nothing in the Talleyrand journals to suggest it. Was the Dutch hegemony a triad?
Preposterous. Every Clakker served the Guild. If it came down to brass tacks, those oily Clockmakers would even put themselves ahead of the Brasswork Throne. They’d fiddle the hierarchical metageasa to position themselves on top in a crisis of conflicting loyalties.
Easier to conclude these Clakkers were liars in addition to murderers. Their master wielded incredible power, ranked extremely high within the hierarchical metageasa. A member of the royal family could do this, or a Guild Archmaster.
Shit.
“Every Clakker serves the Guild, whether it wants to or not. And how the hell can you serve the queen without serving the Brasswork Throne?”
Berenice winced. In trying to speak past her chattering teeth she’d bitten her tongue. She tasted warm metal and her body’s own salt.
“We don’t serve Margreet,” said one.
“We serve Mab,” said the other.
The bottom fell out of Berenice’s stomach, but not because the boat seesawed over another swell. Maybe her third-faction theory wasn’t a bullshit fever dream after all, no matter how much she wished it so.
“Who in the seven hells is Mab?”
“She is the one who would know your intentions.”
“And so you dragooned me into joining this idyllic excursion to the middle of the Goddamned ocean just to hear me out. That makes all kinds of sense.” She swallowed. “And if you don’t like my answers?”
“We are, as you note, in the middle of the Goddamned ocean. It is a very wide ocean, and a very deep ocean.”
“Why go that far? You could just twist my head off like you did to poor van Breugel and his colleague.”
One said, “One mustn’t wind stems with impunity lest it lose its thrill.”
The other added, “And thereby grow tedious.”
Berenice said, “Yes, that would be quite a shame.”
“And incidentally, with regard to those particular stems,” said the Clakker on the right, “by now Captain Barendregt and his crew believe you ordered us to the task.”
Its sinister companion agreed. “That man does not like you.” Pantomiming pity, it shook its head.
Berenice’s shivering redoubled the effort to strain every muscle in her arms, back, stomach, chest. Icy fear struck so deep that no mound of furs could warm it.
“I notice your manner has changed since we left the ship. You don’t speak with the usual deference.” It reminds me of another mechanical I once knew. But he wasn’t a murderer, and his only desire was to be free. You two, on the other hand…
“That must be troubling for you. Do something worthy of deference and we’ll consider it.”
Despite the chill, a single rivulet of sweat trickled down the curve of her spine to land at the small of her back. She burped. Her breath smelled of the smoked cod she’d eaten for breakfast that morning, but tasted much the worse for wear. What if…
What if there were a group of rogue Clakkers, machines completely free of any geas and immune to compulsion, living secretly among their kin? Moving invisibly within the world that built them? At any other time she would have considered it preposterous, but her present circumstances lent a unique perspective. Jax and Lilith had both sought to flee the Dutch-speaking world as soon as they achieved Free Will. It was difficult to fathom why rogues would willingly stay behind. But their motivations were immaterial: If this mad hypothesis were true, it would be the greatest secret in the Western world since Huygens’s miracle breakthrough a quarter of a millennium ago.
A secret easily worth killing to maintain.
She shivered uncontrollably now.
I’m not a bumbling interloper who uncovered their secret by accident, she reminded herself. They revealed themselves to me. And risked much to do so.
“You wonder about my intentions. I wonder similarly about the pair of you.”
“No doubt,” said the machine sinister. It (he? she?) proved the more loquacious of the duo. “But you’re not the one in the stronger bargaining position, madam. Let’s start with something simple. We notice you managed to relieve the ship’s horologist of that satchel.” It nodded to the bundle on her lap. She hadn’t peered inside since taking it from van Breugel during her failed escape attempt. “What do you intend to do with it?”
It had a point, the shiny bastard. Start slowly. Test the waters. They know my name. What else?
She tested their knowledge: “My sworn duty is to protect its contents. My work for the Verderer’s Office is crucial to the security of the state.”
“That would be true if you were a Verderer. But we think you stole your pendant.”
“Just as you stole a load of keys bound for the same house where you were being held.”
Sacré nom de Dieu! They knew so much.
“And you’ve been masquerading ever since.”
“For that,” said the machine dexter, “you should be commended. It’s a difficult act to pull off.”
Sinister said, “We think it’s altogether more likely that you’re a French spy.”
Berenice winced. These damnable machines had her over a barrel.
“I think it’s altogether likely that you’re a pair of smug, chromium-plated assholes.”
Sinister and Dexter exchanged a rapid volley of pocketwatch noises. The boat vibrated. She didn’t try to follow the conversation. One said, “We’ll take that as confirmation.”
She slumped. Her ass had gone numb hours ago. Feeling the first tendrils of defeat burning like acid in her veins, she said, “How in the hell do you know so much?”
With distressing ease, it turned out. They, or whomever they worked for, had caught wind of her capture on the night the Forge burned. The traitor and defector from New France, the duc de Montmorency, had outed her name and her Talleyrand identity to her captors. Some time later a major emergency erupted at a secluded Guild property upriver of New Amsterdam. That night a mail carriage traveling the same road failed to reach its destination. The next morning, a woman bearing the emblem of the Verderer’s Office exerted her influence to board the first ship leaving Nieuw Nederland and divert it from its original route…
When they put it like that, she had to admit, the pieces fit. Shitcakes.
“This is all circumstantial.”
“Agreed.”
Berenice sighed. “You know what happened at the estate house.”
“Loosely.”
“Did Bell survive?”
After a moment’s chittering with his comrade, Sinister said, “Unknown.”
“I wasn’t alone on the night the Forge burned. There was a servitor. Jax. Did he escape?”
Dexter said, “Mab knows of the one you describe.”
“I was helping him,” she said.
“We don’t care about your national politics or personal allegiances. New France makes many noises about its sympathy toward the enslaved, but it has never done anything to improve our situation.”
“I’m no friend to your makers.”
“Irrelevant. The Catholic Church has been vocally opposed to our makers’ practices for hundreds of years, too, but it hasn’t made a difference.”
“Look,” said Berenice, “give us a fucking break. It’s a tough nut to crack, all right? We’re not sitting around with our thumbs up our asses. We’re trying to survive.”
They stopped rowing. The boat skimmed across the choppy water, prow slowly settling as it coasted to a stop among the waves. The sudden reappearance of their arms, previously blurred, was disconcerting. Berenice smelled the promise of rain, or probably snow, under the darkening sky. “You’re posing as a Clockmaker to steal Guild secrets. What
do you intend to do with them?”
The truth bounded from Berenice’s numb lips before she had a chance to reel it in: “I want to change the world.”
The rowboat slalomed over another wave. It slewed, skewwhiff, into the trough. Berenice slid free of her perch, righted herself. The Clakkers didn’t. They were as statues bolted to the hull. A rising wind sent ripples knocking against the wooden hull. Berenice watched the machines. They watched her. Now, in the gloaming, she could no longer see the scratches haloing their keyholes.
“Intriguing,” said Dexter. “Indeed,” said Sinister.
In unison, they picked up the oars. They rowed through the night.
CHAPTER
14
They emerged from the water like an army of burnished Venuses. But these were no demure Botticelli nudes riding seashells: The single-minded fiends walked along the riverbed to burst through the ice and swarm the frozen mudflats under the piers of Marseilles-in-the-West. The thunderous cracking of their emergence rattled teeth and windowpanes. Floes the size of hay wagons went bobbing down the Saint Lawrence, tinkling against each other like a sackful of broken crockery.
The Dutch held the waterfront. The defenders had ceded Île de Vilmenon’s shoreline without a struggle. It couldn’t be defended. Not without turning the entire island into a citadel.
First ice. Then fire.
Longchamp watched helplessly as the foremost clockwork troops doused themselves with pitch and set themselves alight. From the distance they looked like herky-jerky effigies. Through the spyglass, they looked like men whose flesh had burned away to reveal the skeleton beneath.
“Heaven preserve us,” said the marshal. “They’re doing it again.”
“Might as well. It worked so fucking well last time.”
A few of the flaming machines sprinted along the docks, their every footstep setting the planks alight. Soon the entire waterfront was ablaze: By tomorrow morning, Marseille-in-the-West’s primary connection to the rest of New France would be nothing but ash. Meanwhile, the rest of the arson squad sprinted like blazing comets through the avenues, boulevards, and squares of Marseilles-in-the-West.
The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 21
