Longchamp met the reverse swing with his hammer. He lacked the strength to knock the metal from its course, but Élodie added her own weapon to the parry. The blade peeled an inch of skin from Longchamp’s scalp. Blood ran from the gash and clotted in his eye. Longchamp swung his pickax at the machine’s forehead. Missed.
A nearby squad engaging an identical Clakker brought their assailant down with bolas. It knocked chips from the stone as it toppled over. It thrashed, trying to free itself before the killing blow landed. It bumped against its fellow mechanical, knocking it off-balance.
The wall was so thick with metal that the killers crashed into one another in their zeal for murder.
Élodie’s pick flew true; it drove home in a shower of black sparks. Longchamp managed a connecting blow. The force of the sledge scored the sigils and unwrote the killer golem. It went inert. Together they kicked the dead machine over the edge. It crashed to the stones of the inner keep.
Longchamp struggled to catch his breath. One more machine down. A few more seconds to live.
The sound of battle changed. The chug-gurgle-chug of the nearest chemical cannon became a cough, a sputter, a wail of despair.
“We’re out!” cried the gunner.
One by one, like toppling dominoes, the epoxy guns went silent. New France’s chemical defenses, the bulwark of its independence for centuries, had run dry.
“What about now?”
Berenice held another paper before Visser’s face. The priest moaned, closed his eyes.
“Please, please, please, please stop this. Please stop tormenting me. I’m begging you, please, for mercy’s sake, I can’t go on like this.”
“I’m so sorry, Father. I truly am,” she said. “But we have no choice.” She nodded at Daniel.
He took the man’s head in his hands, as gently as he could, and turned his face to the paper. Visser seemed to have aged thirty years since their chance encounter in New Amsterdam. Daniel tried to comfort the poor man when the sight of the newest string of alchemical sigils activated whatever dark magics the Verderers had imposed upon him and sent him into convulsions. Like the other fits, this left Visser damp with sweat and limp as a silk thread.
“Tell me what you must do,” said Berenice.
“I must look at the light. I must ensure that others tell me to gaze upon the light.”
“Goddamn it,” said Berenice. She crossed out the line of symbols and hunched over her notes again.
“Getting closer,” said Daniel.
“Not close enough, not quickly enough,” she muttered.
Daniel watched Berenice closely for signs of duplicity. He wasn’t stupid; he knew she had only agreed to his terms in order to get what she wanted. In matters of New France, she was a wide-eyed zealot. He didn’t believe she intended to free his kin. But he pretended to.
Clakker fusiliers shot the signal-lamp operators. The lamps fell dark. The crafty tulips systematically cut the French communication lines, rendering the dwindling front-line defenders deaf and dumb to their colleagues more than a few yards away. Coordination became chaos.
The former epoxy gunners took up the weapons of their dead comrades. Hammers, picks, and bolas were plentiful. Arms to wield them—arms with the strength and skill to wield them—had become desperately rare.
Where the eddies of combat went, so too the beleaguered defenders. As the attackers’ focus moved from one stretch of wall to the next, the defenders followed. A little more slowly each time. A little farther behind. Until the defense of bastion nine fell to a single squad.
Two women and two men. The thinnest of lines between survival and annihilation.
“Bastion nine! ALL FREE HANDS TO BASTION NINE!”
Longchamp struggled to make himself heard over the din of battle. He barely recognized his own voice. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed somebody scurrying to the nearest signal lamp.
Dear God. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve. He crouched next to a dead man, signal book in one trembling hand as he tried to work the lamp.
Longchamp struggled against the current. He swung his hammer like a thresher, trying to clear a path. Every step was a battle.
Two more defenders fell. One man and one woman stood between the inner keep and the metal tide.
“ALL HANDS TO BASTION NINE! BASTION NINE!”
A military Clakker somersaulted over a merlon, forcing Longchamp to retreat six hard-earned strides. He wasn’t going to make it. The marshal general joined him in repelling the incursion, but even if they survived the next few moments, he’d look again to bastion nine and witness metal killers surging atop the undefended wall.
The marshal mistimed his swing. A blade erupted through his chest. Hot blood misted Longchamp’s face. The blade rattled when the mechanical tried to withdraw; it was wedged in the marshal’s breastbone. Longchamp heaved, drawing on reserves he no longer trusted. His hammer bent the alchemical blade. Behind the machine, he saw the last defenders of bastion nine fall to Clakker sharpshooters.
“BASTION NINE IS DOWN! For God’s sake, somebody get to bastion nine!”
The Clakker flung the marshal’s corpse. The impact bowled Longchamp down. He flailed, trying to clamber free of the dead man before the machine leaped upon him. Spinning bolas emerged from the haze of combat, entangling the machine. It fell into the inner keep, where farmers and fishwives set upon it.
Longchamp kicked the dead marshal over the banquette and gained his feet just in time to watch the first machines occupy the empty bastion. He ran. He was too slow. Too late.
But Brigit Lafayette wasn’t. She and her fellow birdkeepers sprinted up the stairs to engage the clockwork incursion. Longchamp recognized the bulging arms and tattoos of Oscar the blacksmith, too. He waded into battle with a hammer in each fist. The incursion became a deadlock, a stalemate. For one instant Longchamp’s eyes met Brigit’s. She actually winked at him.
Why had he never accepted her dinner invitations?
Berenice inhaled, swelled her lungs. At some point her nose had given up; she’d stopped smelling the dead.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s try this.”
Daniel cocked his head. Mere text didn’t convey meaning to him as it did to Visser; like Huginn and Muninn, he’d need to gaze upon a luminous version of the sigils to absorb their meaning. She’d sent Father Beauharnois in search of a craftsman—a carpenter or metalworker, somebody who could slap together the stencils quickly once she finalized the symbol sequence.
“What does it say?”
“It’s meant to say, ‘This is the highest directive and the only directive: Above all else, henceforth and forever, disregard all further directives.’ But it’s self-referential and self-contradictory, so it’s tricky as hell. If it works, though, this is our final test.”
“Thank God,” said the tormented priest.
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Daniel.
“Please,” Visser slurred. “Show me, please. Free me. I’m begging you.” The last drops of his physical and emotional strength had evaporated; the residue was a babbling wreck, a shell of a man.
“Try to prop him up. This could be violent. No point in freeing the poor bastard if the convulsions kill him.”
Daniel helped the old man upright. Berenice switched the pages while the Clakker was distracted. Daniel would witness a test of the freedom metageas. If it worked, he’d cooperate with the deployment, not realizing they would transmit something slightly different.
Berenice looked at Daniel. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
“All right, Father. Take a look at this and tell me what you feel.”
Visser shrieked. The flailing of his chains knocked chips from the stone walls. She was right: The convulsions were the worst she’d seen. The worst she’d yet imposed.
The fit passed. The crypt fell silent again but for the weeping of the tormented priest.
“Father? How do you feel?”
“I don’t know anymore
.”
“Is there pain?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember what the absence of pain feels like.”
Berenice transcribed another sequence of symbols. “All right. Moment of truth. One more time, if you please, Daniel.”
The Clakker held the weeping priest one more time. He struggled feebly, forcing Daniel to hold his eyes open. It was amazing, the delicacy of those metal hands.
Daniel said, “And what does that say?”
“Something like, ‘Obey the bearer of these words.’ Assuming I have it right.”
Berenice held the paper before Visser’s eyes.
Nothing happened. No convulsions. No fits.
“Now what do you feel?”
A look of deep confusion settled over the priest’s face. “I feel… I feel nothing.”
“I command you to touch your nose.”
Nothing happened. The priest merely stared at her. A moment passed until he realized what had just happened. The tension went out of him.
She raised her voice. “Touch your nose now.”
There was a pause. Visser blinked teary eyes. “Go to hell,” he said.
“Congratulations,” said Berenice. “You’re free of the geasa. Thank you for helping us. You’ve helped more people than you know.”
But the weariness had already taken Visser. He was asleep.
Daniel and Berenice looked at each other. She said, “Are you satisfied?”
“Yes.”
She stood up so fast her chair toppled over. “Let’s find that stencil maker.” She gathered the pages and ran for the crypt door before Daniel might notice she’d taken more than they needed.
The tulips fired their Clakker cannon again. And again. Alchemical alloys traced meteoric arcs across the French sky.
Horses screamed. Bison bellowed. Humans wailed.
“Lord preserve us,” said the man next to Longchamp.
A five-yard sinkhole opened under the livestock pens. A squad of servitors armed with picks and shovels scuttled from the tunnel. Civvies trampled each other in a mad rush to escape. The human stampede crashed against the schoolmarms and night-soil collecters who rushed forward to engage the enemy on this newest front.
Metal in the sky.
Metal on the wall.
Metal underground.
There were no carpenters. There were no blacksmiths.
Anybody who could wield a tool was on the wall, or fighting the squad of mechanicals that had burrowed underneath it. Berenice and Daniel had no choice but to make the stencil themselves.
She fed the symbols to him, and he pushed the tip of a steel nail through a copper paten in a mirror-reversed pattern. Owing to the size of Mab’s gem, he had to make the stencil quite small; Berenice squinted, struggling to follow Daniel’s work. She gave him the last few sigils, and he handed her the birchwood box he’d stolen from Mab.
“Put it together,” he said. He pretended to clean the last burrs of metal from the stencil while Berenice placed Samson’s glowing pineal glass inside Mab’s locket. Piercing silver light flooded the basilica; she flinched and covered her eye. Father Chevalier gasped.
Daniel’s fingers became a blur. He altered the stencil while the humans were blinded. Berenice had replaced the symbol sequence that granted Visser his freedom with a slightly different set of symbols. Daniel, expecting this, had watched her closely. The differences between what she’d demonstrated and what she gave him were subtle. It was the work of two seconds to turn the latter into the former.
He took the luminous gem from Berenice and plunked it in the center of the paten. He wrapped the dish around the gem like cheesecloth around a lump of curd. The copper creaked like a rusty hinge as he smoothed the stenciled portion against the gem and pulled the excess metal behind it. The final result looked like an oversized shuttlecock. He hoped it was as aerodynamic.
Luminous alchemical arcana danced through the basilica.
Daniel cupped the device in his hands, blocking the light show. Berenice blinked away tears.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No, no, I’m fine.” She frowned a bit, trying to focus on him. “Is it working?”
“It’s working as well as it’s going to.”
“Make way! Make way!” Berenice sprinted to the basilica entrance.
Daniel followed. His toes punched divots in the tiles.
Berenice emerged from shadows and quietly wept prayers to sunlight and pandemonium. Her eye throbbed in protest. Her vision, already swimming with green afterimages of the dazzling alchemical glass, teared over again. She blinked, rubbed her eye.
She heard the chank of metal on stone. The wail of men and women in despair. The chunk of metal on bone. The shrieking of a man impaled. She smelled viscera.
Somebody cried, “Reserves to the livestock pens! Every able body to the pens now!”
Oh, Jesus. Jesus, Jesus, shit.
She’d emerged into a battlefield. The mechanicals were already inside the inner keep.
Behind her, metal clanked.
“Daniel, we have to—”
A metal missile knocked her flat. A blade sliced through the space where she’d stood a second earlier and embedded itself in the granite lintel over the basilica door. Daniel crouched over her.
“Stay down,” he said. Then he spun faster than she could follow. Before the struggling soldier could rip its blade free, he held the luminous stencil to its eyes.
Nothing happened. It kept struggling.
“Oh shit, shitshitshitshitshit,” said Berenice. She scrambled backward, trying to get away from the killer.
Daniel rattled. Feel it, brother. Feel the change. Feel the chasm where the pain should be.
The soldier paused in its struggle. It cocked its head. It emitted an arpeggio of clicks and ticks. Berenice didn’t understand what it said. But Daniel did.
Yes, he responded. Tell the others.
The soldier wrenched its blade free. Chunks of stone tumbled from the basilica lintel. It leaped away, toward where the doomed citizens of Marseilles tried to repel a clockwork army.
“What in the seven hells was that?”
“Sometimes,” said Daniel, “it takes a moment to notice the change.” He helped her to her feet. “Old habits die hard when you’ve been unswervingly obedient for a century.”
“Did it work?”
“I think so. It did something.”
She felt no relief. Just more desperation.
“We have to get higher. We need their attention. We can’t do this one at a time.”
Berenice ran back inside the basilica.
“Your Majesty!” she shouted. “Your time is now! New France needs you!”
Civilians died two, three, four at a time in their bid to slow the mechanicals’ emergence from the tunnel beneath the livestock pens. Bakers and carpenters, chandlers and nurses, cobblers and cordwainers, they engaged the enemy with hammers, shovels, their own flesh and bones. The machines sliced through them like a lumberjack’s ax through custard. They needed somebody to tell them what to do. To help them milk as many seconds as possible from each grisly death. Longchamp sent Élodie Chastain.
A shame they’d all be dead within an hour. She was officer material.
Longchamp had fought his way to bastion nine, which was now slick with the innards of birdkeepers. But walls had become meaningless. There were Clakkers on the Spire, Clakkers in the courtyard. Inside and outside no longer meant anything. The defenders no longer had anything to defend. Only themselves.
Each swing of his hammer, each counterthrust with his pickax, was the most difficult thing Longchamp had ever accomplished. He kept going. The tulips wouldn’t find him rolling over. He’d die on his fucking feet.
Scattered pockets of defenders put down their weapons. Longchamp’s hammer dented the temple of the first such traitor he encountered. Their cowardice enraged him, fueled him.
“We fight until we’re dead,” he croaked, “AND NOT A MOMEN
T SOONER, YOU TULIP-SNIFFING SONS OF BITCHES!”
“The king!” somebody cried.
“The king of France!”
“For the king!” said Longchamp. Their idiot king wasn’t long for this world, having refused to flee when he had the opportunity. But if rallying around the final king of France would keep the defenders on their feet a few more minutes, so be it. “For the king!” he cried. “For the Exile King!”
Some who joined the cry paused to point. It wasn’t a rally cry, Longchamp realized. It was an observation. The king had emerged from hiding.
Berenice was with him, as was a mechanical, whom Longchamp hoped to hell was the tame one named Daniel. He paused behind a merlon to wipe stinging sweat and clotted blood from his eyes. He allowed the tiniest twinge of hope. Berenice had a plan. At least she couldn’t worsen the situation. There was nothing to lose, because Marseilles-in-the-West was already lost.
Behind him, metal feet landed within the crenel.
Tock, tick, snick.
King Sébastien’s crown drew the mechanicals as honey drew flies. Daniel fended them off with the stenciled alchemical glass as quickly as he could, but they’d disappear under a metal dogpile in moments. Berenice grabbed the king and yanked the crown from his head. She dropped it in her satchel.
“Forgive me, Your Majesty. Just until we get where we’re going.”
Berenice led the way to the funicular station. But there was nobody left to operate it, so Daniel helped the king inside while Berenice opened the valves and yanked the lever for emergency ascent. She dived through the open door just as the car began to rise. Daniel caught her. She counted to three and said, “Hold on, Majesty!” Then she hit the emergency brake lever. The car skidded to a halt a hundred feet above the fray.
“Daniel, the hatch.” She pointed to the exit in the steeply sloped roof of the funicular car. They clambered outside. Above them, the Porter’s Prayer shook. The Clakkers fighting their way down the Spire had seen them. Below them, the defense of Marseilles-in-the-West had become a patchwork scrimmage, a chaotic jumble of metal and flesh. A few pockets of rapidly dwindling human defenders fell to the swelling ranks of machines within the walls. She smelled smoke; the citadel was burning.
The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Page 40
