The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

She circled behind the hospital to the small garden where she’d taken her abortive walk with Rebecca. She sagged with relief once inside, away from the scrutiny of the eerily motionless Clakkers. Minutes passed before she could stop hunching her shoulders, before she could stop panting like a drowning woman. But the feeling of malevolent eyes watching her every step refused to dissipate. It felt like an icy wire brush raked across her naked skin.

  Anastasia had entered through the kitchen. The smell told her she’d find no food worth scavenging, were that her intent. She went straight to the infirmary.

  Every few yards, she stopped and listened. Before the attack, the hospital had been full of medical servitors: machines with attachments for scalpels, saws, drills, clamps, forceps, and other instruments for working frail human flesh and bone. Just because the corrupted machines had enacted a moratorium on public murder didn’t mean that any Clakkers lurking in the shadows were bound by the same prohibition. But to her ears, the hospital was quiet. No ticktocking revealed the presence of mechanicals, friendly or otherwise.

  She’d expected to find the place bustling. It was bright, but empty. But, then, perhaps that made sense. The initial attack hadn’t left many Hague residents in need of a physician; the victims needed undertakers. The patients capable of leaving would have done so at first opportunity, to try to find their families, to find someplace safe to hole up until the crisis passed. The hospital was not such a place; it had swinging doors, and clear, high windows easily wide enough for a servitor to crash through. As for the less fortunate patients, Anastasia found no sign. Perhaps they’d been moved to a larger facility.

  Apparently even the doctors and nurses had stopped coming in after the social order collapsed. If people were too scared to venture out of their homes for bread, they weren’t going to chance a visit to the hospital for a runny nose. And nurses were only human, too. Why risk death going to work, only to wait for patients who wouldn’t risk the journey?

  Surely Rebecca was smart enough to stay home. She’d probably hid here until the initial attack passed. The hospital had food, after all, and nobody knew when the murders had stopped. The nurse might have gone home days ago.

  If there was a special cabinet for alchemical bandages, she didn’t know it by sight. And judging from the mess, neither had the previous scavengers.

  Apparently Anastasia and her colleagues had been latecomers to this idea. She found her way back to the infirmary easily enough, and even recognized the bed where she’d convalesced. But the cabinets were empty, their few remaining contents strewn about the floor. Mundane gauze bandages, empty syringes, rubber tubing. She spent an hour sorting through the debris before giving up on alchemical bandages. She gathered what she could, but it wasn’t enough to justify a long, terrifying walk through a city-sized mausoleum.

  She made one additional stop before departing. The personnel records were stored in an unlocked filing cabinet in the head nurse’s station.

  Rebecca Frijhoff lived a quarter mile west of Willemspark. A smile touched Anastasia’s lips for the first time in what seemed like years. Her second errand of the afternoon would bring her most of the way there. She could swoop in to check on the nurse’s well-being, heedless of the danger. How impressed, how grateful Rebecca would be. So grateful, in fact, that she might forget to see Anastasia as the Tuinier. She wouldn’t see a woman she feared; she’d see a former patient. A patient who’d come to turn the tables and take care of her, to whisk her to the fortress of the Ridderzaal.

  Yes. Find the flirty nurse because you want to impress her, protect her. Not because you’re too frightened to walk back to Huygens Square alone.

  Anastasia intended to depart through the main entrance. But it was there, standing just within the wide double doors of the admittance lounge, that she witnessed the most bizarre malfunction she’d ever seen during her career in the Guild.

  A half-dozen servitors stood on the street just outside the hospital. They stood in a circle, but weren’t motionless like the other machines she’d witnessed.

  They were painting one another.

  It looked like they had taken brushes and pails of house paint from a construction project across the street. And now they were daubing one another with random streaks of red and orange. Arms, legs, carapaces, escutcheons: Everything was a blank canvas.

  She crouched in the shadows, lest they see her, and stared. She’d never seen or heard of anything like it. What could cause something like this? The nearest analogy she could think of was a rarely exercised sub-subclause of the hierarchical metageasa governing minor self-maintenance, which allowed a mechanical to seek assistance from another machine. That was supposed to be the only scenario where one could see a servitor altering another’s body.

  What had happened to their servants? They were behaving as though their core strictures—human safety, self-maintenance—had been utterly, thoroughly scrambled.

  Anastasia lived on the edge of the Willemspark neighborhood, for it was close to work and yet far enough from the pomp of Huygens Square for the neighborhood to have a bit of life. Her predecessor, Tuinier Konig, had lived on the much tonier Lange Voorhout, alongside wealthy bankers and jonkheers. But she preferred a place where professionals still on the eager side of young convened for drinks and carousing on Friday night, and pastries and coffee and newspapers on Saturday morning. Inevitably those same professionals relocated to quieter districts more suitable to raising families, and a new infusion of youth kept the neighborhood fresh. It meant a steady stream of callow young ladies, easily impressed and easily talked into bed for a night or three.

  Here, as everywhere else, the rogues watched everything.

  Naturally, the Clakker-powered lift in Anastasia’s building was out of commission. She trudged up the stairs, huffing and panting, until she made it to the top floor. The accommodations were larger here; she had only one set of neighbors.

  She’d long ago learned the value of keeping a spare key in her office, and she used this now to open her apartment. It was useful when working long hours—during interrogations, for instance—to be able to send a servitor out to purchase and deliver groceries, or to pick up her laundry, or do any number of errands. She didn’t lease her own Clakker servants; her position in the Guild came with certain perquisites. She’d had a servitor seeing to her household needs just before she’d left for the New World, but on her way out the door she’d ordered it to lock up behind her, return to the Ridderzaal, and submit itself for a new assignment.

  On the theory that the sudden bloom of illumination behind a long-dark window might draw unwanted attention, Anastasia didn’t bother with the gas lamps. It was still light enough outside that she didn’t need extra light, and of course she could navigate her flat in the dark, and had frequently done so in the middle of the night.

  She justified this detour to herself because she knew there was an unused medical kit in her flat. But the cowardly truth was that she needed a few minutes of normality before she could brave another walk on those alien streets. She wanted to pretend, for five minutes, that she was home, and safe, and that everything was going to be OK. She wanted to wrap herself in that lie. So she roamed the flat like a ghost.

  She could have made the apartment quite bright, if she chose; she’d installed extra lamps so that the illumination would favor the paintings. Granted, it wasn’t often she had a chance to share them with others. (Again the image of Rebecca and her single artfully unkempt lock sprang to mind. Soon, she promised herself.) But the purpose of the art wasn’t to impress people; it was for her own enjoyment. And she did, very much. The piece over the writing desk was a reproduction of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, though her favorite was a companion to the de Bray in her office. She’d once owned a rare reproduction of Schouman’s Epiphany for a few years, but in the end decided the angel with its fiery wings overlooking Huygens’s shoulder was a bit much. The quotidian realities of her working life had long ago banished any sense of divine mystery from the
Guild and its origins. Like every human endeavor, it was messy and complicated.

  Her cupboards were bare. Dusty, too. The plumbing hadn’t been exercised recently; the apartment reeked of dry pipes. She wondered if the place would ever be clean again, or if the collapse of civilization would interfere with that. If her colleagues did sustain an indefinite holding action against the corrupted machines and the spread of their contagion, would regular citizens of the Central Provinces learn to do the things for which they’d always relied upon their mechanical servants? Would they learn to sweep and mop and foam their toothbrushes? Or would their lives descend into hopeless squalor?

  The invisible thread of a cobweb tickled Anastasia’s face when she entered the bedroom. She didn’t recognize the sheets under the duvet. How long had she owned them? The previous servitor must have found them in the linen closet when making up the place in anticipation of her return.

  Her home medical kit was just where she’d left it, under the bathroom vanity. She retrieved it without sparing a glance at the mirror. She didn’t need to see the toll recent events had taken on her. She’d seen mortal fear on many a face, down in the Ridderzaal tunnels; no need to add her own face to that list. Pausing only to grab an ankle-length rain cloak from the hallway closet, she swept it around her shoulders and departed. Two errands down, one last to finish before sunset.

  A cat yowled at her when she emerged from the apartment. She screamed, dropped her bundle. A pair of battered ears and a thatch of thinning whiskers like a worn-out broom poked through the wrought-iron bannister. Heart racing, she clutched her chest and knelt.

  “Is that you, Xerxes? Hadn’t expected to see you again, you remorseless lothario.”

  It felt good to talk. The sound of a lone human voice, even her own, made the broken world slightly less claustrophobic.

  Xerxes was a bony marmalade tabby belonging to the neighbors. He’d used up at least six of his lives before Anastasia had met him, and a couple more since then. Somehow he’d found time, when not defying death, to double the feral cat population of the Central Provinces. She’d taken it for granted that he’d run out the clock on his final life while she was away; her trip to the New World had taken so much longer than it ought.

  “I thought for certain your lifestyle would have caught up with you by now. Wrote you off, I did.” She scratched his ears. Poor thing must have been locked out when the trouble started and everybody went to ground. But surely if his owners were home, they’d have heard the caterwauling and let the beast inside. Or had they moved while Anastasia was away and forgotten to take the fleabag with them? Or maybe his owners had succumbed to a corrupted mechanical, but the machine had spared the cat.

  The cat made little purrup noises when she stood, teetering on his haunches to bat at her coat.

  “How long have you been out here?”

  She crossed the wide landing and knocked on the neighbors’ door. It swung open. “Hello?” she called. There was no answer.

  She realized she didn’t know their names, only their cat. But she would have known the smell even if she hadn’t found the bodies.

  A man and woman hung from bedsheet nooses looped over a high beam in their tastefully appointed solarium. No rogues had done this; the couple had died holding hands. They’d died of despair.

  Anastasia stepped widely around the grisly pendulums, and tried not to trip over the cat as it twined between her ankles. The solarium’s bay window overlooked the Mauritskade Bridge. Which, she now saw, had been the scene of a vicious massacre. Anastasia could imagine the couple standing right here, on this very spot, with arms clutched around each other as they witnessed the attack by corrupted machines. And then they’d chosen to die by their own hands rather than be torn apart by feral Clakkers.

  Good God. Was this scene playing out all over the city? Is this why The Hague felt so empty? Things would never be normal again.

  From a rooftop across the street came the glint of sunlight on burnished metal.

  She left in a hurry, cat at her heels. Pointlessly, she closed the door on the way out. What would she find at Rebecca’s modest home? Would she find a nurse swinging from the rafters? Would she find the remains of a family, cut down in their garden as they tried to flee?

  She abandoned all thoughts of finding Rebecca, and went straight back to the Ridderzaal.

  CHAPTER

  11

  You crafty motherfuckers.” Berenice twisted the spyglass. The shoreline kept coming in and out of focus as the mast swayed to and fro. The skirling wind sent veils of snow whipping through the secret anchorage, obscuring her field of view. “Conniving, bison-buggering, shit-gobbling sons of bitches. I knew it. I fucking knew it. I hope they dump a wagonload of horse turds down Montmorency’s gullet—”

  Le Griffon II swayed hard to starboard. She lost her grip on the ropes and the spyglass. She fell.

  A pair of metal hands caught her and the optics. Daniel, clamped to a yard by the strength of his toes alone, hauled her upright again.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “you must be feeling very proud of yourself right now.”

  “It occurs to me that I might be an underappreciated genius.” She paused to clutch the mast again during a particularly hard gust. “But I’ll tell you something. It’s not so wonderful, learning you were right all along to suspect the world is conspiring against you.”

  The servitor grew slightly taller before shrinking again. Berenice hooked one arm around the mast and lifted the spyglass to her eye again. Captain Levesque’s charts showed an abundance of potential natural harbors dotting the perimeters of the islands east of the Acadian coast. But it had seemed likely the tulips used a harbor on the mainland. And despite Montmorency’s vague indication, the nautical charts showed no potential anchorages for many leagues along the rocky Atlantic coast north of Battle Harbour, which the Inuit called Ca-tuc-to. At least, nothing large enough to accommodate a vessel the size of De Pelikaan, the icebreaker upon which she’d absconded from Nieuw Nederland.

  But that was thinking too small. Why should the tulips resign themselves to natural topography? They had slaves capable of punching through granite. So after Le Griffon II had emerged from the mouth of the river, it skirted the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, threaded the foggy needle of the Strait of Belle Isle—escorted and serenaded all along by massive herds of harp seals—and turned north to hug the coastline in search of something that shouldn’t be there.

  Slow going, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Levesque’s crew had honed its craft on the Great Lakes, where ice wasn’t uncommon, so the barque dodged most floes. When collision was imminent, a troop of mechanicals belayed over the side to break and deflect the obstacle.

  They’d sailed past the last French outpost five days ago. Last night, like every evening, they’d dropped anchor when the sun fell behind New France. This morning a human spotter noticed something that had been invisible without the rising sun directly behind: a cleft in the coastline conspicuously missing from the charts. Then one of Daniel’s mechanicals—the one with the badly damaged flanges, the one whose body screeched when it moved too quickly—scrambled up the mast like a monkey on a Spice Island coconut tree and turned its ticktock eyes to the problem. And there spotted something even more telling. Berenice aimed the spyglass at it now.

  The edge of a single scull blade, black as jet, poked from behind a high rocky shelf. It sported serrations similar to those Berenice had witnessed on De Pelikaan. She hadn’t understood at the time, but now she recognized the sinister shape as an adaptation for rowing through icy seas. At this distance, given the oar’s apparent size, it had to be a half meter across. Which suggested a vessel to dwarf the barque. Yet no mast poked above the shelf, though proportionately one would expect it to tower over the rocky bluffs. Dutch vessels had no need of wind power. They had galley slaves.

  Captain Levesque gazed up at the crow’s nest, awaiting Berenice’s pronouncement.

/>   “That’s it,” she called. “We found it.”

  The human crew broke out in applause. They stomped their feet, whistled. Though they’d all been eager to stick it to the tulips, whether or not this expedition would prove a fool’s errand had been the basis of many wagers. And after the harrowing close call in Québec City, this simple vindication raised spirits from taffrail to bowsprit. Even the ticktocks joined in with synchronized clicking. Interactions between the cohorts had been less stilted, less fraught, after the encounter with the reapers.

  The captain bellowed orders. Soon the barque had maneuvered itself crosswise over the mouth of the secret anchorage, and there it dropped anchor once again. Any treaty-violating ships trapped in that concealing wrinkle of geography weren’t going anywhere unless Le Griffon II chose to let them. Their hated and feared enemy had been disarmed, and found squatting on the chamber pot with her skirts around her ankles. And they weren’t about to let her go without a word or two.

  Now things got tricky. How many Clakkers labored in the Dutch moorage? Where were they?

  A dozen mechanicals leapt into the churning sea. The ship had anchored a bit too far from the inlet for the machines to leap directly from deck to land. Some could have made it had they leapt from the masts, but that would have slowed them down and possibly damaged the rigging. Instead, they dropped into the sea like anchor weights.

  The Clakkers emerged from the surf moments later, scaling the craggy outcrops. Anybody who’d been within the citadel during the siege knew the machines could scale sheer granite. Berenice listened for the dreadful crackling of stone as the machines used their fingers and toes as pitons. But it never came. Daniel’s friends kept their approach quiet. It slowed them a bit, but still they scuttled over the cold, slick stone with the surety of spiders.

  Élodie fingered the rosary twined around her belt, murmuring to herself. The beads were an affectation she’d picked up from Longchamp. Berenice cocked an eyebrow.