The Rising (The Alchemy Wars)

by Ian Tregillis

  No fire brigade rushed out to extinguish the blaze. The men and women of the brigades had been conscripted weeks ago; now they stood on the outer wall, crying as though their tears might extinguish the flames.

  What little ice remained along the shore melted in the furnace heat of the burning docks.

  The burning Clakkers weren’t the only ones running through the steets of Marseilles. The stragglers, the ones who hadn’t made it inside the walls, or who had disregarded the warnings out of an overabundance of faith, now ran for their lives. They ran from the flames, and the machines that wielded them. But no human could outrun this fate. Some succumbed to smoke and flame; others to alchemical fists.

  The defenders were powerless to do anything but watch their city burn. Against the Clakkers, the only defense was high walls and clever chemistry. There wasn’t enough chemistry in the world to defend a single bare acre beyond the walls.

  Much of what burned was fresh lumber harvested from the surrounding forests just this past summer to facilitate the rebuilding of the capital of New France. The tulips must have salted their pitch with a dash of black alchemy, for the unseasoned wood virtually exploded into flame at the machines’ lightest touch. The conflagration launched billows of smoke into the sky. Roiling plumes of black and ashen gray, firelit a baleful vermilion like the Devil’s eyes, repainted the sky from blue to dirty umber, and rendered the sun a hazy smudge. It wasn’t long before the world smelled like a fireplace grate. As far as a mile away, the heat stung naked skin. Ashfall coated the walkways of the keep.

  Flames consumed the Marseilles semaphore towers. One by one, they ignited like a chain of birthday candles. The segmented signal arms swung freely, buffeted by the updraft of their own conflagration. They looked like madmen capering as they burned to death. Even without a spyglass, Longchamp could see towers blazing on the distant hills. The semaphore network had ever been vulnerable, the isolated and far-flung outposts virtually impossible to safeguard. Anticipating this, the defenders of the keep had dismantled the Spire’s own semaphore before the siege began, and used the lumber to build the crane gantries.

  Livestock had been herded into pens just inside the outer walls. Now the ruddy light of apocalypse stirred the bison to mournful lowing.

  Meanwhile, those mechanicals not tasked with terrorizing, murdering, and displacing thousands of innocent civilians marched upon the keep. They marched through the burning city and fanned out across the island. They marched across glades and frozen streams, across fields and through copses of winter-bare oak. From east, south, north, and west, they converged upon the star-shaped perimeter of the Vauban fortifications. A golden band girded the Last Redoubt of the King of France. The high-pitched chug-chug-chug of epoxy cannon compressors pierced the hissing and popping of the burning city. And faintly audible beneath it all, the ticktocking hearts of their unkillable enemies beating in perfect clockwork synchrony. The Devil’s own tattoo.

  A pair of Clakkers emerged from the front lines. They retreated several hundred yards. Then they sprinted across the field and leaped when they reached the ditches, hurling themselves into the air and soaring toward the wall. One from the south, one from the north. Cannon fired. A glistening bubble of epoxy and fixative intercepted the southbound machine at the apex of its trajectory. The impact stole enough of its momentum that it fell short. It slammed into the scarp and rolled into the moat, coming to rest like an inert clockwork bug trapped in emerald amber. The other set of gunners miscalculated the parabola. Their shot blew harmlessly under the Clakker’s upraised feet. Ranks of mechanicals deftly sidestepped the splash zone. The waste of precious chemicals hurt Longchamp’s heart. The northbound mechanical landed on the wall with a resounding chank like a miner’s pickax on granite. Defenders opened the stopcocks on the nozzles built into the machicolations. A torrent flooded over the climbing machine, gluing it to the wall and halting its progress.

  The real attack hadn’t begun. The Dutch preferred first to let the fear sink deep. To give it time to fester into despair. So for now they confined themselves to small forays against the outer walls. A prolonged, desultory probing of the keep’s defenses.

  Another flight of messenger pigeons emerged from their roosts within the Spire. Longchamp shook his head. He watched through slitted eyes—the smoke stung like a fucking snakebite, but that was nothing compared with the pain of a hot cinder wedged under the eyelid—as the confused trio rose into the hellish morning. The slapping of their wings sounded like applause. Though the sun and setting moon were all but invisible, a single circuit of the tower was enough for them to find their bearings, guided by whatever natural magics the Lord had granted them. Longchamp counted. Un… deux… trois… quatre…

  The birds exploded. Miracles of God’s design one instant, gristly puffs of scarlet the next. Singed feathers fell upon the Porter’s Prayer, twirling like maple seeds. Seconds later the guns’ report reached the defenders on the wall. It sounded like a single shot to Longchamp’s fallible human ears. The Clakker sharpshooters had timed their shots to hit all three birds at the same instant. Just for the intimidating, demoralizing spectacle.

  No messages would make it out of the besieged keep. The defenders were on their own. Did it matter? From whence could help find them? The last message to arrive before the mechanical sharpshooters started perforating the birds was a hasty plaintext lamenting the fall of Québec City.

  The marshal general handed his spyglass to Longchamp. Then he retied the damp handkerchief over his nose and mouth. To his credit he’d eschewed one of the face masks with the charcoal filter. There weren’t enough masks or filters for all the defenders, so he’d refused to deprive the men and women fated to do the real work. Longchamp didn’t wear one, either. His throat stung just as much as his eyes. But the masks muffled his voice. It would be hard enough to make himself heard over the cacophony when the attackers surged forward in earnest.

  He couldn’t believe the motherfuckers had burned the city again. No, scratch that. Of course he could.

  Squinting, he brought the glass to his eye and scanned the enemy’s layout. Longchamp swept his gaze past the bastions’ triangular protrusions and the crews manning the epoxy cannon within. He looked beyond ravelin and demilune bristling with sand sprayers and harpoon throwers powered by ropes of arcane chemical elasticity. Just beyond the range of the largest goop sprayers, hundreds of Clakkers stood in precise rows, motionless as statues. The besiegers’ camp was a garden of statuary.

  Last time, the attackers had been content to take their time. They’d attacked the walls, but not before letting time and hunger soften the defenders. They’d even lobbed leaflets over the walls, seeking to entice citizens and soldiers alike to sell out their defenders. Treachery was always the fastest way to open a walled city. But when the besiegers’ labor was tireless and preternaturally patient, time did not favor the defenders. The mechanicals could stand at attention in the merciless elements for years on end if so ordered. They could stand there for a century, awaiting the order to advance, a silent promise to slaughter any who attempted to leave, to the nth generation. They could wait for starvation and disease to gut the defenders. And unlike a siege camp comprising thousands of human soldiers, the Clakker army was impervious to disease. They could take Marseilles-in-the-West merely by standing out there, ranks upon ranks of deadly statues.

  The attackers could come over the walls, they could smash their way through the walls, or they could dig under the walls. Sorties tasked with the first two objectives would come soon enough, once the tulips had a feel for the defenders’ disposition. Longchamp scanned the enemy lines for signs of digging, even though it was pointless. A Clakker detail could start out in the forest, or on the other side of the island, for that matter. No need to start the tunnel in the middle of the camp. They might have started weeks ago. Longchamp had sprinkled some of the older and more feeble “winners” of the conscription lottery with bowls of water along the skirt just inside the outer wall.
A good spotter could tell the difference between rippling caused by the defenders’ cannon and rippling caused by enemy earthworks underfoot. The fortifications went quite deep, deeper than any human sapper team was likely to dig. But the tulips’ slaves didn’t breathe, didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, didn’t get the bloody flux.

  He studied the enemy camp. They had erected a pavilion in the far distance. With the spyglass he could just make out the mechanicals hauling timber and cartloads of what might have been rock into the secret enclosure. The timber made sense if they were digging there; they’d need props to shore up the tunnel at regular intervals. The cartloads of rock did not. The marshal had noticed it, too.

  Crouched behind an embrasure, he pointed with his baton. “God help us all. They’re excavating a tunnel.”

  “Doubt it. If the bastards were digging, they’d be hauling cartloads out.”

  “Then what are they doing out there?”

  “No idea.” The captain gave the pavilion, and the people standing next to it, another once-over before returning the spyglass. A single singed pigeon feather drifted through his sightline. Using the height of the human overseers to establish a sense of scale, he estimated the pavilion was at least twenty feet high and half again as long. And was that smoke rising from vents in the canvas roof? “It’s going to be big. Whatever that fucking thing turns out to be.”

  “Do we have anything that could lob some pitch out there?” They didn’t actually use pitch any longer. The chemists had a sackful of five-livre words for the sticky fuel that burned even underwater. Wonderful stuff, but pointless when it came to Clakker infantry. As the ashes of the city demonstrated, coating the demons in burning pitch didn’t slow them; it made them twice as dangerous.

  “If we did, I’d have ordered it done by now.”

  The marshal frowned, nodded. Behind him, metal glinted. Movement on the field. Longchamp turned to watch. Even his unaided, smoke-stung eyes could see some kind of shake-up among the metal infantry. Longchamp pointed. “Look! They’re starting.”

  The marshal slammed the metal endcap of his baton on the stone battlement hard enough to throw a spark. “This is it, then.”

  Gaps had appeared in the ranks of mechanical infantry. As before, a single Clakker occupied each empty file. And just as they’d done moments earlier when probing the defenses, they retreated several hundred yards for a good run-up. But this time dozens of mechanicals prepared to fling themselves at the walls.

  “Still testing our gunners,” said the marshal. As if that wasn’t something worthy of concern.

  The uneasy feeling in Longchamp’s gut told him differently. The purpose of this morning’s sorties had been to gauge the speed, range, and reliability of the epoxy cannon. One or two mechanicals at a time could do that. No, they’d learned what they needed from those experiments.

  Having reached their starting points, the runners sank into themselves, pulling themselves into maximum compression. Longchamp turned, but the Spire eclipsed his view of the enemy dispositions to the west. He snatched the spyglass from the marshal’s hand, sprinted along the banquette past the corner of the next bastion. Yanked the spyglass open and pushed it to his eye. Scanned the field.

  Whatever this was, it was happening all around the perimeter of the outer keep. Last time, coordinated attacks on the extended perimeter came as a tidal wave of magicked metal. What did the tulips intend to accomplish with just a few dozen of their clockwork beasts?

  Someone gave an order. All at once around the outer keep, the unleashed mechanicals bounded forward. They kicked up a muddy spray of snow and frozen earth as they blurred toward the moat. None took a straight path down the center of the empty file. Each swerved back and forth like a drunken oxcart driver but a hundred times faster, concealing the exact location and direction of the leap until the last moment. They were most vulnerable during those precious few seconds when they were aloft and unable to steer, humble subjects of wind and gravity.

  They jumped. Longchamp imagined he could hear the wind whistling through their skeletal bodies.

  The gunners fired. Roughly two-thirds of the teams hit their mark on the first shot. Tangled globs of Dutch horology and French chemistry slammed against the counterscarp to drop into the moat like coins dropped in an orphan’s secret piggy bank. The teams that missed their targets used the machicolations to coat them where they landed. The assault had been neutralized in barely more than the few seconds it took the Clakkers to hurtle across the moat.

  Head down, Longchamp crossed the length of the curtain wall to stand directly over one of the encased mechanicals. He still held the marshal’s spyglass. The gunnery team tried to conceal its relief with forced nonchalance.

  “Stinking tulips,” said the spotter.

  “For France, New and Old!” said the shooter. He spat over the battlement for good measure. Luckily no clockwork sharpshooter decided to put a bullet in his eye at that moment; showing himself like that was a foolish show of bravado. The enemy’s attention was trained on the immobilized Clakkers.

  Down in the moat, something moved.

  Longchamp said, “Both of you, cram a sock into your worthless gob holes right fucking now.”

  He crouched on all fours, hunched over the machicolation like a drunk at a privy. He used the spyglass to get a better look at the Clakker entombed at the base of the scarp.

  The glassy cocoon vibrated. Fell over. Hissed.

  Melted.

  Sacré nom de Dieu.

  “Mother Mary, save us,” said the captain.

  He blinked teary, smoke-stung eyes. But the nightmare vision wouldn’t be dispelled. The granite-hard epoxy sheath that had encased the Clakker sagged like overly soft candle wax. The latest and greatest invention—birthed from the minds of the very best French chemists, never seen by the tulips before today—had as much chance of imprisoning these mechanicals as a wad of wet crêpe paper.

  The metal monster inside the cocoon became visible again. Its body discharged some kind of mist.

  Oh, Lord. Berenice was right, he realized. They know how to counteract our defenses. He crossed himself. Mother Mary, please pray for us poor sinners. Holy Father, deliver us from this evil.

  He leaped to his feet.

  “Incoming mechanicals! I repeat, we have METAL ON THE WALLS!”

  The nearest heliograph relay coded his warning into a rapid sequence of flashes. Today the signalers used lamp oil rather than the sun, which hung red and swollen like a bullethole in the sky within the smoky haze and windborn ashes of Marseilles-in-the-West. The message flashed up the Spire, and then back down to all the heliograph stations around the outer wall. In seconds Longchamp’s warning ricocheted throughout the defenders on the perimeter.

  Clakkers in the moat. It was designed to slow the demons during a regular siege, when they came as a swarm but fully vulnerable to the chemical defenses. Rather than fill the moat with quick-set adhesives that might only trap a few machines—and then solidify and form a convenient platform for launching attacks directly from the base of the wall—the defenders could flood it with a special high-viscosity sludge that could gum up precision clockworks. But in the cold depths of winter the goop would eventually thicken and solidify, so they’d held off flooding the moat until the swarm happened. Longchamp saw now that that had been a mistake. Could they flood it in time? Another glance told him the answer: not a chance. Still, they had to try.

  “Flood the moat! I said PISS IN THAT DITCH!”

  The heliographs flickered. A low rumble shook the wall. Massive pumps buried under the outer keep burbled to life. Dozens of nozzles at the base of the scarp irised open to discharge a thick black ooze that looked like tar and smelled like violets. It didn’t gurgle or splash. Instead, it sounded like somebody beating wet wool with a wooden bat to felt it when the ooze slapped against the smooth tiles lining the moat. If they were lucky, one or two of the demons might catch a few droplets in a crucial mechanism.

  Longchamp ran along
the line, bellowing. Several bastions farther down the wall, Sergeant Chrétien hollered the same orders and encouragements to the men at the battlements.

  “Incoming mechanicals! These scuttling rust buckets think they can crash our party, eh? Come on, you lovely dogs, and show them our best French hospitality!”

  The defenders’ faces showed the same fear that threatened to freeze Longchamp’s heart solid. He knew what they were thinking while they fingered their weapons and prayed to the Holy Trinity to deliver them from evil: It’s not supposed to happen like this. We’re supposed to hold out longer before they make the walls. Too soon. Too soon. I’m not supposed to die yet. Not yet. Not this hour.

  Longchamp forced the treacherous fear aside. It was like rolling a boulder uphill. “Ready the lubricant hoses!” Behind him, wheels skidded across the stones of the wall as a team raced to swap out the epoxy tanks feeding the machicolations with tanks of a special ultralow-viscosity lubricant. It wouldn’t keep the mechanicals from gaining the top, but it might slow them. A quick glance showed him trios of soldiers making similarly rapid exchanges across the wall. The signals teams were in top form today.

  He bellowed, “Give me a count, you dogs! I have one mechanical in sight! ONE, COMING TO MEET ITS END!”

  Somewhere to his left, the count continued: “TWO! Cursing the day their makers were born!”

  “Three!”

  The din swallowed the rest of the count. But the count wasn’t the point. Getting these women and men to focus, to turn the job into simple arithmetic, that was the point. It wasn’t about facing down a nigh-unstoppable killing machine. It was about reducing the number of attackers to zero. Zero was the goal. Zero meant they’d see another sunrise.