The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  Euwe flipped his attention back and forth between her and the strange pings emitted by the sightless servitor. She shook her head, clearing away the cobwebs and turning her mind back to the conversation at hand.

  “How many shipments are late?”

  Please tell me it’s only one, she thought. Please say, “Just one, Tuinier.” One is a storm, an accident, a wild wave, a weak hull. Any more than that, however… well, that would be the teeth at our throat.

  “I’d have to ask to be certain,” Euwe said, “but at this point it must be several.”

  When it came right down to it, Anastasia decided, she didn’t believe in unlucky coincidences, either.

  She asked, “Do we think the French are behind this?”

  “Perhaps. But there was absolutely no indication they knew of the operation prior to events on De Pelikaan.”

  “And by then they should have been too busy preparing for invasion to send armed expeditions into the wild.”

  Euwe wasn’t too proud to grasp at straws. “The Vatican, then.”

  “That’s even more absurd,” Anastasia snapped. “Next you’ll suggest a host of New World savages are responsible. That they descended upon our mine wearing nothing but sealskins and somehow disrupted the work using nothing but bone knives and their teeth.”

  “Of course not,” said Euwe, equally tetchy. “But if the blame lies not with the French, nor the Vatican, the alternative is…

  The alternative was a snarl, a snap, and a leaky carotid. Anastasia rubbed the soft cotton bandages of her aching hand across her throat, as if to dispel the phantom touch of fangs.

  They needed that New World mine. Quintessence ores in European and Eurasian veins had become increasingly impure over the past forty years as the mines were tapped out. When the Frenchman, Montmorency, first approached the Guild, he’d been laughed off. In the end, however, his overture had been manna from heaven.

  Unfinished repairs to the boarded-up rosette window eclipsed the last rays of the setting sun. The final glimmerings of daylight faded; shadows grew deeper in every corner of the Ridderzaal. Another servitor, spurred by this cue, made the rounds lighting alchemical lamps.

  Anastasia pointed a thumb toward the blind servitor. “It functions well enough if it doesn’t have to move around. Draw up a list of all essential city services where mobility is unimportant. Then organize teams to go out and start ripping the eyes from every mechanical that can spare them. I’ll join you this evening.”

  After thwarting the first attempt to murder the sovereign, Anastasia had coaxed the queen and her consort into a water closet. They had balked at first, not only because the queen’s voluminous gown made for a tight and undignified fit. Then Anastasia had summoned a troupe of servitors in royal livery. That the Queen’s Guard had been compromised meant none of the Empire’s most elite Clakkers could be trusted with the monarch’s safety. She had no particular reason to trust the stewards either, but her options were limited.

  She’d invoked the Verderer’s Prerogative—and the safety of the queen herself—and, in the name of saving the Royal Family, ordered the liveried servitors to tear up the floor to find the plumbing. Their fists and feet blurred into motion, pulverizing Italian marble, fracturing oaken beams, and crushing concrete. In this way they excavated a path to the sewer tunnels beneath the Summer Palace. Convincing the Royal Personage to lower herself, literally and figuratively, took longer.

  In the end, it wasn’t Anastasia’s perseverance that settled the matter. It was the Queen’s Guard machine that came charging down the corridor, scything through the royal servitors. The prince consort physically shoved Her Majesty through the gash in the floor. Anastasia ordered the remaining servitors to form a rearguard to cover the retreat.

  The stewards were no match for the elite soldier. The futile effort at resistance barely slowed the deadly rogue. But the extra moment gave Anastasia a chance to hurl herself through the hole in the floor, stumble to her feet, and raise her injured hand.

  The killer dropped into the tunnel. The impact shook the tunnel and sent a long crack zigzagging through the centuries-old bricks. The aftershock knocked Anastasia from her feet.

  She scrambled backward through the cold effluvia, waving her hand. Nothing happened. The rogue Clakker advanced. The tunnel was dark but for the light streaming from the breach in the tunnel arch. It imbued the rogue’s armor plating with an oily shimmer.

  “Majesty, run!” she cried. From behind came the splashing of slowly receding footsteps.

  Snick. Blades sprang from its forearms. They gleamed in the half-light.

  Anastasia voided her bladder. Again.

  The machine leapt. She screamed. A searing flash like the light of blazing emeralds banished the shadows. The inert Queen’s Guard mechanical fell on her, nearly pinning her in the muck.

  The alchemical glass of the Spinoza Lens hadn’t just been crushed into her skin. It had grafted itself to her, somehow, and retained some fragmented, kaleidoscopic version of its original function. It was possible to graft working alchemical glass to flesh, as the surgical alterations to Pastor Visser’s pineal gland had demonstrated. But that had taken exquisite care, and numerous failed experiments, before it worked. The Spinoza object had been crushed into her flesh in a split second of chaos, agony, and terror.

  And apparently it required similarly heightened emotion to access whatever distorted function it retained. Such as the terror of imminent butchery.

  That seemed less than ideal.

  She wobbled to her feet. She caught up to the prince and queen, who hadn’t made it far in the darkness.

  Together they walked through three miles of darkness, rats, and ankle-deep shit before finding a spur into a colder, but marginally cleaner, storm sewer. And then they kept walking.

  Full dark had descended upon the city when Anastasia dashed from the Ridderzaal to an unmarked carriage hitched to a large team of Stemwinders. She gave the centaurs the address of an antiquated pumping station on the periphery of the Amsterdam Veerkade. They launched into a breakneck gallop, for this would be the most vulnerable leg of tonight’s long journey. It brought fresh memories of her last experience riding in a carriage hell-bent for leather. She told herself the watery churning in her gut was just indigestion, not terror.

  The streets were deserted, the walks strewn with trash. The garbage piles had begun under windows, but wind had quickly spread the filth. Curtains twitched as she passed. Here and there she glimpsed a shattered window, a broken door. A splash of blood, a mechanical handprint crushed into a granite traffic bollard. The residents holed up in their houses and shops hadn’t even posted mechanicals as guards. They didn’t dare, of course, for fear their machines would come back changed.

  Time and again, servitors emerged from alleys and dark storefronts, or leapt from rooftops, and tried to follow. Each time, one of her escorts would peel off to stay behind and dismember the attackers. It was impossible to survive a foray into the open while remaining inconspicuous. But the evening’s plan counted on that.

  Anastasia grabbed a lantern and hopped from the carriage. The Stemwinders removed the corrugated metal bands that had been strapped to the underside of the carriage and a sack of nails from the compartment beneath Anastasia’s seat. Their multijointed fingers folded backward, turning their fists into hammer heads. The clockwork centaurs affixed steel rims to the wooden carriage wheels almost before Anastasia finished the short jog from the carriage to the pumping station.

  As she closed the door behind her, the clockwork centaurs resumed their wild gallop, pulling the empty conveyance back through the eerily subdued streets of The Hague. The steel rims of the carriage wheels struck sparks from the pavers and filled the thoroughfare with a reverberating growl. Audible even through the pump station’s closed and barred steel door, the noise receded more slowly than the carriage itself. It lingered like the pain of a burn.

  The noise would insinuate itself into every quarter of the city. Th
e Stemwinders’ serpentine route through The Hague would ensure every rogue in the city heard it. And, she hoped, would follow it.

  Meanwhile, Anastasia activated the lantern and descended into the pump station. It was an old building, the stone and mortar reinforced with timber frames. She followed the sound of running water. At the bottom she met Doctor Euwe and Teresa, the technician whose quick thinking had saved Anastasia’s life in Huygens Square. He held an axe; she held a map. They were accompanied by a military mechanical. The sight of the machine’s fluted forearms caused a frisson of fear to pluck Anastasia’s spine like a guitar string; her hand tingled. A faint whiff of singed cotton tickled her nose. But then her lantern light glinted from empty eye sockets, and she relaxed. The soldier was blind and incorruptible.

  She couldn’t lie to herself any longer: I’m afraid. I’m afraid of unfamiliar mechanicals. Her mind’s eye saw empty streets. Twitching curtains. The pall of fear would suffocate this city.

  Her bandages smoldered. Perhaps the fragments of the Spinoza Lens didn’t feed exclusively on fear. Perhaps any strong emotion—despair, for instance—did the trick.

  She clenched her eyes, concentrated on her breathing.

  “Tuinier? Are you unwell?”

  She shook her head. Opened her eyes. “Let’s go.”

  From the top of the stairs came the gong-noise of metal fists pounding on the steel door. More rogues had followed her carriage to the pump station. They hadn’t fallen for the Stemwinders’ diversion.

  Teresa opened a hatch. A fusty odor billowed into the chamber and the sound of running water grew louder. Anastasia followed the pair into a cramped service tunnel. They’d opened the gates that kept the sea at bay, so now brackish water sluiced through the flood-control channels under The Hague. The other Clockmakers crawled aboard a bobbing raft.

  Anastasia yelled to the military machine, “Now! Bring it down!”

  Then she slammed the hatch and spun the wheel that engaged the waterproof seal. From the other side of the hatch a new noise joined the clang-bang-crash of rogue mechanicals tearing the pump station door from its hinges. This was the double twang of unsheathed blades and the crunch of alchemical steel shearing through wood, stone, and mortar. She leapt aboard the raft. A rumble and crash sent water sloshing over the lip of the channel. Doctor Euwe chopped the rope holding the raft steady.

  They bobbed away, like a cork in a washbasin.

  Six miles and several branchings of the sluiceway later (“Right!” “Left!” “Left!”) they scrabbled for purchase beneath another pumphouse. They had no anchor and no way to stop the raft by themselves.

  “Machine!” called Teresa. “Catch us.”

  A servitor jumped into the channel, arms outstretched like a net. Doctor Euwe grabbed its arm as the current tried to sweep them beyond. Its hand found Euwe’s, and then the raft. It held the raft steady while the trio disembarked. They climbed upstairs.

  The Clakkers in this pump station, like the one they’d destroyed, were blind machines taken straight from the tunnels beneath the Ridderzaal. The tunnel echoed with clicks and pings. Each burst of noise was sharp and distinct, reverberating again and again until it faded into inaudibility. Not body noise, but something else. The shadows made Anastasia think of bats.

  This station was more crowded. In addition to three military mechanicals it hid Malcolm, Prince Rupert, and Queen Margreet. Anastasia curtseyed.

  The royals had shed their filthy clothes. Rupert might have been a greengrocer, judging from his shirtsleeves, apron, and dungarees. Her Majesty wore the woolen dress and starched white bonnet of a governess.

  Malcolm opened a chest. The reek of sewer water, and worse, wafted through the room. The royals’ ruined clothes. The second distraction. There would be another carriage outside this pumphouse, waiting to take the queen’s doppelganger on a ride away from the docks. Teresa stripped. No modesty, no shame, no fear. She did what needed doing, even though it might lead to her death.

  “If you’re ready, Your Majesty?”

  Anastasia ushered the queen and prince consort down the stairs. She paused behind them long enough to wish luck upon brave Teresa, who had already donned a wig and was, at that moment, slipping colored contact lenses into her lovely eyes. If Teresa heard her, she gave no sign. Her mind was elsewhere. Nobody had ever tried to fool a mechanical with a disguise. The deception wouldn’t persist long.

  Anastasia sealed the hatch and joined the royals, who were already aboard the raft.

  It was a straight shot, seven more miles, to the third pump station of the night. Another blind servitor used its prodigious strength against the flow of floodwater to seal the sluice gate behind them. Doing so separated this channel from the rest of the subterranean network. After that, it was just a matter of waiting for moon and tide to pull the raft toward the sea and Rotterdam Harbor.

  The Rotterdam pump station adjoined one of dozens of warehouses along the wharf. Anastasia led the queen and consort past piles of imported crates—the riches of a global empire—to the windows fronting the harbor. They crept in the dark lest lantern light give them away. The harbor front was dark, too, owing to unlit gas lamps: another symptom of the rapid disintegration of society. Anastasia had to squint when she scanned the seafront. Several quays were empty, but large ships abutted others. Her eyes adjusted and she picked out the silhouette she’d been desperate to find. She sighed in relief. She pointed to a small sailboat bobbing at the end of a nearby pier. A full moon shone on the rigging, rendering the pale sailcloth a ghostly apparition.

  Anastasia hoped it wasn’t a will-o’-the-wisp.

  “There it is, Your Majesty.”

  The Brasswork Throne pursed her lips. “Rather small and primitive, isn’t it?”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  Clockmakers had scoured every inch of coastline between Rotterdam and Den Helder to obtain a recreational vessel that didn’t rely upon oars and mechanical labor.

  “It will draw attention. We should be traveling inconspicuously.”

  “We considered many options, Your Majesty. But if we’re to get you clear of the Central Provinces, we must do so with as little mechanical labor as possible. We can’t trust any machines that didn’t come direct from the Ridderzaal. Not one. All it would take is a single rogue hiding amongst the galley crew of a ship to create a terrible disaster.”

  “Are you telling me I’m meant to sail on the ocean in that… that bathtub toy? Without a crew?”

  “No mechanical crew, Your Majesty. But you’ll be in good hands.” Anastasia looked at Prince Rupert. “I’ve heard you’re something of a hands-on sailor, Your Highness. I hope that’s not just a rumor.”

  For the first time since the debacle at the Summer Palace, his face approximated a smile. “It isn’t. In my youth I sailed a sloop smaller than that from Lisbon to Copenhagen and back.” To the queen, he said, “Have no worries. We don’t need ticktocks for this.”

  “But where are we supposed to go?” said the queen. “We can’t cross the sea in that.”

  “It’s not for me to say, Majesty. That’s a matter for a proper sailor, a question of winds and tides and luck. And honestly, in the worst case, it’s better if I don’t know. What matters is that we get you as far away from The Hague and the Central Provinces as possible. North to Scandinavia, perhaps, or south beyond the Mediterranean. Anywhere the rogues’ secret masters won’t think to look for you.” Anastasia looked to Rupert again. “It’s provisioned for two people for several weeks. Our suggestion is that you let the tide pull you beyond the breakwater. If you lie low, it’ll look like a pleasure craft accidentally cast adrift. You’ll want to wait until you’ve drifted well beyond sight of land before you start sailing in earnest. Otherwise there’s a danger the machines will see you.”

  He frowned. “That will make navigation a challenge.”

  “There’s a sextant on board. Take occasional sightings if you absolutely must. But please take care not to present a silhouette
toward shore.” She checked her watch. “We need to hurry if you’re to ride the tide out.”

  The last leg of the journey was a desperate sprint from the warehouse to a strategically arranged mound of crates, tarpaulins, and coiled ropes, and thence to the sloop. Every step of the way, Anastasia expected to hear the dreaded chank-chank of metal footsteps on cobblestones. But they made it.

  “I will return,” said Queen Margreet.

  Only when you’re one hundred percent convinced it’s safe, Anastasia thought. Aloud she said, “We shall work day and night to hasten it, Your Majesty.”

  She helped the prince consort sever the mooring lines. Then she huddled behind the bollards and watched the sloop drift away. It was agonizingly slow. At first she worried that they’d mistimed the venture, and thus missed the tail end of the receding tide. If the tide brought the sloop back to shore… But eventually, after what felt like hours, the sloop bobbed past the breakwater as the promise of morning pinked the eastern sky.

  Anastasia had to hurry back to the pumping station while she still had the cover of darkness. She prepared to stand on numb legs when another, much larger, silhouette appeared on the water, heading inland from the deep sea. It was fast. Very fast. And fuzzy somehow, as though the moon shone upon something that kept changing shape. She realized it was heading not straight inland but toward the queen’s sloop. Anastasia’s eyes finally parsed the situation moments before the collision.

  A rogue titanship converged on the queen’s sailboat like a ten-story shark.

  “Dear God,” she breathed.

  Its mountainous bow wave flung the queen’s sloop aloft. The smaller vessel spun almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees in the air before touching water again. The mast snapped. The sailboat hit the sea upside down, like an artless diver’s belly flop. The titanship kept coming, crushing the sloop and anybody trapped under it.