The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  They had to get it working before the next attack. They had to contain the infection. They had to break the chain before it strangled the Empire.

  Immediately after the battle in Huygens Square, any remaining attackers had disappeared, melting back into the city like raindrops into parched soil. She’d heard of tropical diseases with symptoms that recurred with dreadful regularity. Deep in her marrow she carried a cold fear the corrupted machines would similarly torment the Central Provinces. How many now roamed the city? A secret army of saboteurs passing unnoticed amongst thousands of identical machines. The Clockmakers worked on borrowed time until the agents of chaos rose again.

  A pair of sprinting mechanicals pulled a carriage through the arch where the Stadtholder’s Gate had stood. The actual gate was now so much scrap iron in the Guild foundries; its counterpart from the eastern end of the Binnenhof, the Grenadierspoort, was now a heap of mangled metal behind the Ridderzaal. A pair of Stemwinders had torn down the ancient gates on Anastasia’s orders. Simple gates couldn’t keep out a dedicated force of rogue Clakkers, and this way the Binnenhof couldn’t be used to pen innocent citizens quite so easily.

  The brutal efficiency of that ambush… Anastasia shuddered again, and not from a chill.

  Sodden clothes no longer clung to her body, reeking of piss and puke. She’d tossed her ruined outfit into an incinerator. Today she wore gray corduroy trousers short enough to show her ankles over wooden klompen, a faded yellow shirt with a torn collar, and a moth-eaten shawl. All left behind by guests of the Guild, some of whom might still languish in the tunnels. She’d had a servitor heat a barrel of rainwater to near boiling in the Forge chamber, then gave herself a sponge bath in her office.

  From a rapidly dwindling distance, the Clakkers hauling the carriage appeared to be military models complete with the subtle fluting on the forearms where their blades retracted. Yet they seemed large even for soldiers. Anastasia tensed. Her hand snapped up to the hypersonic whistle that, like all her surviving colleagues, she wore on a necklace in lieu of a Guild pendant. The carriage neared the Ridderzaal. She ducked her head; the silver whistle chilled her lips. But then the carriage turned, and she saw the machines more clearly. They had no faces, just smooth, featureless armor beneath eyes of blue diamond. Their escutcheons blazed in the sun with golden filigree.

  Elite mechanicals of the Queen’s Guard.

  Logistical triage had kept her too busy to worry about the queen. To a certain extent, the Brasswork Throne was superfluous. If the Guild fell, so did the Throne; if the Guild persisted, so would the Empire. But now she wondered: Did Margreet still sit the Brasswork Throne? Did the Empire still have a figurehead? Anastasia’s hand hovered by her mouth, frozen with indecision. If they weren’t beset with deadly malfunctions, these machines would know of Her Majesty. But the possibility of a rogue Queen’s Guard mechanical weakened her knees. Those bespoke killers could rival even the Stemwinders—and she’d seen firsthand the destructive power of a malfunctioning centaur.

  One machine released the carriage and trotted across the shattered mosaic tiles. It came straight toward Anastasia and her colleagues.

  “Oh, shit,” said one. Several made a break for the Ridderzaal. As if they could outrun a mechanical. Foolish. Though Anastasia understood the impulse. Shared it, even.

  Somebody must have blown a dog whistle, because a troop of Stemwinders and regular servitors burst forth from the Ridderzaal. They streaked across the square, intent on intercepting the royal Clakker before it reached Anastasia. It could have reached her already had it moved as fast as it was able, but hadn’t.

  “Hold,” she called. Her defenders skidded to a halt.

  It wasn’t an attack. And the carriage was empty, she saw. She’d interacted with the Queen’s Guard infrequently, but enough to understand how they worked.

  This was a summons. The queen lived.

  To the nearest servitor, she said, “Make it known I have an audience with Her Majesty. Doctor Euwe is in charge until I return, or until our superiors do.”

  “As you say, mistress. Right away, mistress.” The mechanical sprinted away.

  The machine from the Queen’s Guard towered over her. It pointed to the carriage.

  Like the Stemwinders, the mechanicals of the Royal Guard couldn’t talk. By royal decree of centuries past, the Guild had designed them to be mute servants and ruthless bodyguards. This was a safeguard in case of political upheaval or attempted usurpation by other members of the royal family, who, with the weight of royal metageasa on their side, might otherwise force the machines to divulge things they’d overheard while in the sovereign’s presence.

  She entered the carriage. The Queen’s Guard machines waited until she was seated and buckled before accelerating from a walk to a trot to a skin-peeling sprint. Her hand hurt again; she hadn’t had a chance to inspect her bandages beyond checking them for new bloodstains, of which there were none. The Queen’s Guard mechanicals cast a fine illusion over the city: By tearing down the streets so rapidly, they blurred symptoms of the malignance threatening the Empire. It all disappeared: the shattered windows; the mangled rainspouts; the crushed bricks and missing roof tiles; the finger and toe divots pressed into storefronts and street signs; the bloodstains in Italian marble; even the bodies slumped in open doorways, or dangling like broken mannequins from the boughs of boulevard ash trees. But it was just an illusion; the sickness was there, whether she saw it or not.

  The carriage approached the Summer Palace. For centuries, a fifty-foot yew hedge had girded the entirety of the grounds: an unbroken jade edifice enclosing hundreds of acres of private garden and (carefully stocked) hunting preserve dedicated to the Brasswork Throne. It had long been said, amongst the people who said such things, that master horticulturalists had tortured the plants until they sprouted razor-sharp thorns, and that master alchemists had imbued those thorns with a cocktail of deadly poisons. Anastasia knew this to be baseless fancy, but a useful one; the prosaic truth was that the rare citizen foolish enough to sneak onto the grounds jangled a dozen gossamer tripwires before making it halfway through the hedge, and always found a few machines waiting on the other side.

  Queen’s Guard mechanicals were not bound to the same human-safety metageasa as other Clakkers.

  But the Summer Palace wasn’t a fortress. It wasn’t some Bourbon redoubt designed to keep the world at bay, and the hedge wasn’t a ring of Vauban fortifications. Its impregnability wasn’t a fact of stone and steel. It was a social contract. The very same conceit underlay the entire existence of the Empire: the conceit of Clakker loyalty. Owing to that conceit, the hedge hadn’t changed since Anastasia’s grandfather had been a boy. But no longer.

  The carriage slowed; the blur beyond the windows resolved into a landscape so thoroughly ravaged that Anastasia gasped. The barrier was no more. It had been shredded, shorn, ravaged. Great swaths of broken boughs lay strewn on the raked gravel carriage path alongside the hedge. No wonder her escorts had slowed. Each time Anastasia’s ride bounced over the detritus, the wheels crushed the boughs and churned up a mulchy scent. The ruined foliage glinted with shards of broken metal. Pressing her face to the window, Anastasia saw the trail of destruction ranged the entire length of the hedge wall. Light glinted from a thousand strands of gossamer metal where the assailants had burst through the tripwires.

  Surely the French couldn’t have done this. But if not the Papists, who?

  Please, Lord, not the machines themselves. Please.

  She would’ve wagered everything she owned that this attack had been coordinated with the assault on the Guild.

  (Wagers. A new twinge of nausea tickled her empty stomach. Dear Lord… What would this do to the banks? How long until panicky depositors withdrew every last kwartje? Until terrified investors scorched the floorboards in their haste to distance themselves from the markets? History had seen fortunes amassed and erased by nothing more than flights of human fancy. But this was no tulipomania. This crisis wa
s real, and it was dire. Could it erase an entire economy? They’d know soon enough if the Guild failed to stop this avalanche. But the first pebbles were rolling, rolling, rolling…)

  Gates breached the hedge at the points of the compass rose. The assault had spared the west gate. But today the fearsome array of spikes, and the gilt steel forged into a likeness of the Empire’s Arms, looked slightly ridiculous in the context of the devastated wall. A quartet of Queen’s Guard mechanicals opened the massive gate as the carriage approached. The reverberating clang of its closure brought a chilly twinge of déjà vu, rather unpleasantly like the feeling of winter rain dripping under her collar to trickle down her spine.

  Trap, trap, trap! cried the wise coward huddled atop her brain stem.

  The carriage stopped alongside a vast flight of marble stairs. The Palace’s grand staircase was wider than the entire Ridderzaal. The Queen’s Guard mechanicals ushered her from the carriage. At the bottom of the stairs lay the toppled remains of Queen Margreet’s golden carriage. The teakwood and alchemical glass had been pulverized, the brass and gold battered beyond recognition. But the line of Clakkerish legs along the axle still sprinted in place, impelled by magics bereft of purpose.

  Margreet the Second, Queen of the Netherlands, Princess of Orange-Nassau and the Central Provinces, Blessed Sovereign of Europe, Protector of the New World, Light of Civilization and Benevolent Ruler of the Dutch Empire, Rightful Monarch Upon the Brasswork Throne, dabbed New World chocolate from her lips with a wisp of Indian silk.

  “They killed how many?”

  Four pairs of eyes turned to Anastasia. She said, “We don’t know, Your Majesty. We might never know for certain. The catastrophe in the Binnenhof went beyond mere killing. It was orchestrated butchery. Many of the dead will be difficult to identify. I have a squad of servitors working to piece together the, ah, remains.”

  “Merciful God.”

  Minister General Hendriks, pastor of the Sint-Jacobskerk, pressed a handkerchief to his mouth and made a soft gagging sound. His survival wasn’t surprising; their secret enemy had precisely targeted the real power behind the Empire—the Guild—and the Empire’s figurehead—the Brasswork Throne. She doubted the rogues spared a single tock for churchmen, excepting those unlucky enough to have fallen into the meat grinder with the other victims.

  “Furthermore,” she added, “many of the dead and dying fell into the Forge when we jettisoned the trapdoors. Those remains have been incinerated.” She paused while the cadaverous minister retched into his handkerchief. The queen’s glare could have etched alchemical steel. “I fear they won’t be the last citizens to go missing, their fates forever unknown.”

  From her perch atop the dais, the queen said, “Yes, yes, it’s all very sad. But how many of my Clakkers were destroyed in the attack?”

  “Over two hundred at last count, Your Majesty.”

  Prince Rupert, Queen Margreet’s consort, whistled through his teeth. Anastasia had met him at official functions in the past; this was the first time she’d ever seen him out of his naval uniform.

  Lost in his own thoughts, Hendriks had lost track of the conversation. “Those poor souls,” he murmured. “Butchered like lambs.”

  He sighed, gusting acid-sour breath across the table. It made Anastasia’s eyes water. She took a sip of wine.

  The prince said, “Don’t pray for them, fool. Pray for us.”

  Anastasia bit her lip. Apparently the stars had aligned to plunge the world into a time of dark miracles. To hear a member of the royal family doubt the utter invulnerability of the Empire was to witness the unthinkable. His honesty earned a caustic glance from the queen. She cast them about the room like a master archer in the old stories, and she kept a full quiver.

  “Ahem.”

  The robed figure at the far end of the table cleared her throat. It was the first noise Anastasia had heard from within the shadows of the Master Horologist’s cowl. Though her Guild pendant was not in evidence—it would have displayed the rosy cross inlaid with rubies rather than rose quartz—she wore the traditional garb of her office, a scarlet robe trimmed with ermine. She must have already been with the queen when the rogues swarmed the city, else her robe would have drawn the attackers like wasps to a picnic. Anastasia wondered what fates had befallen the rest of the troika; no more than two Master Horologists ever appeared in public together.

  In a voice like the unspooling of a silver thread, the horologist said, “Tuinier Bell. Share with us your analysis of the situation.”

  “I think we can agree, Your Eminence, these events cannot be ascribed to mass malfunction. The rogues’ actions were far too coordinated for that. This was an orchestrated attack on the citizenry of The Hague, focused on our centers of governance and the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists.”

  The unwelcome truth settled over the conversation like a stone sarcophagus lid. Into the uncomfortable silence fell the ceaseless body noise of the queen’s mechanical attendants. A Queen’s Guard soldier stood in each corner, ever vigilant for threats against the royal person. If their eyes were artificial sapphires, Margreet’s were emeralds, sheer and cold as alchemical ice.

  “And how did it happen?”

  “I fear the best scenario is that somebody has developed a means of altering the metageasa, has done so en masse, and has furthermore made the changes self-propagating. A perversion of the grammars could imbue mechanicals with a violent base priority, as well as immunity to our directives.”

  “That’s the best scenario?” The prince looked disgusted. “You Clockmakers are as mad as they say.”

  Anastasia drew a deep breath. “A worse scenario is that this is an endemic design flaw. We must examine the possibility that something or someone is triggering a hitherto unknown fault state, under which every mechanical ever built will default to violence against the state.”

  “Oh,” said the prince. Like a chameleon trapped in an ossuary, the cadaverous minister general paled from ashen gray to bone white.

  Anastasia continued. “And then there is the worst case to consider. That this wasn’t an outsider’s directive, nor was it an accident of design. Simply put, that in the absence of controlling directives, the mechanicals deliberately chose to turn on us.”

  A faint harrumph came from the Archmaster’s cowl.

  “That is absurd,” said Hendriks. “Machines don’t think. Every schoolchild knows this.”

  The prince consort agreed. “Aren’t you overreacting just a bit, Tuinier? I understand you’ve witnessed something terrible. You may be in shock.”

  The queen said, “Which scenario does your analysis support?”

  Anastasia stood. She paced, careful that her circuit never brought her near the queen’s dais, lest her guards leap from their posts. Their eyes tracked her with a faint ratcheting. An ache throbbed within her bandaged hand; she massaged it, choosing her words with care.

  “We don’t know yet. Analysis of the deactivated rogues isn’t straightforward.”

  “Why not?”

  “Disassembly must be carried out by hand. Human hand, I mean. Until we better understand the situation, common sense absolutely precludes the use of mechanical labor.”

  “Isn’t that terribly slow?” asked Rupert.

  “Tedious as well. But we have no choice,” Anastasia answered. “We must think of this as a disease that spreads amongst mechanicals like plague amongst humans.”

  Another harrumph shook the horologist’s cowl. “And you fear the inert rogues are still contagious.”

  “Yes.”

  The horologist twined her fingers together as though weaving a basket of flesh and bone. Liver-spotted and cracked like museum parchment, they were an old woman’s hands, quite at odds with the voice that said merely, “Interesting.”

  Anastasia said, “How is this possible, Your Eminence? What is the mechanism?”

  Margreet’s mouth curled in a moue of contempt. “I cannot begin to express how minuscule is my interest in
listening to you Clockmakers gaze upon your own navels. Instead, turn your oh-so-formidable intellects to the problem of getting me safely out of the Central Provinces until this crisis has passed.”

  Oh. So that’s why we’re here.

  Hendriks goggled at her. “You’re running away?”

  How miraculous that hoarfrost didn’t glide across the floor to freeze him in place.

  “The Verderers’ negligence has impugned the dignity of the Empire.” Anastasia wanted to writhe in shame. She’d failed in her stewardship of Guild secrets. Spectacularly. “Where before our protectorates and enemies looked to the Brasswork Throne and saw unassailable strength, now they will see vulnerability. They will sharpen their knives in the foolish belief they might cut us. And I will have no choice but to order their annihilation.” When the queen shook her head, the pearls beaded through the ringlets of her hair rattled like chattering teeth. “I am not a bloodthirsty woman. But I will not hesitate to wield the full might of the Brasswork Throne.

  “Until that time, my responsibility is to ensure the continuance of the Empire. I am one with the Brasswork Throne. If the Empire is to survive, so must I.”

  She put a pretty face on her cowardice, Anastasia had to admit. But like many a figurehead, Queen Margreet overstated her own importance. The Empire could function without a queen; it would crumble without the Guild. And the Guild could ill afford the time and resources it would require to smuggle the sovereign out of the country.

  “Majesty,” said Anastasia, “your people need you.”

  The queen’s icy gaze pierced her, sharp and true as Achilles’s javelin.

  “Is that not what I said? I will return when the crisis has been averted, and thereby show my subjects and my enemies that the Brasswork Throne is stronger than ever.”

  Anastasia held her breath for fear a sigh of disgust would lay bare her true feelings. The minister general was right; Margreet intended to run away while everybody else struggled to contain the worst disaster to befall the Dutch-speaking world since before Het Wonderjaar. Well. Figureheads had their place, she supposed. It would raise the populace’s morale after the crisis was averted—if it was—to see the queen out and about.