The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  “Thank the Blessed Virgin they’re on our side this time,” said the sergeant.

  “They’re on their own side,” said Berenice. “But, for the time being, that’s close enough to ours. It’s the ticktocks on that fucking icebreaker I’m worried about.”

  “Yeah.”

  The scouts topped the bluffs to either side of the inlet. There they crouched, arrayed across nearly a quarter mile of stone and scrub. Berenice hoped they weren’t talking to one another; those pings and tings could carry quite a distance.

  An hour passed. The human expedition members grew bored craning their necks. They drifted away in twos and threes, talking in hushed voices or falling into games of cards and dominoes.

  Élodie didn’t abandon the vigil. “How long are those blessed machines going to gawp?”

  “I wish I knew. I’m dying to see what they’re seeing. If they sit around all day with their metal dicks in their hands, it’ll be dark and we’ll have to wait for morning.”

  Eventually one of the machines stood and waved its arms: the all-clear for the longboats. That caught Berenice by surprise. She hadn’t expected an all-clear.

  She’d taken it for granted that the mechanical workforce at the secret anchorage would have long ago been exposed to the freedom stencil, or its derivatives, by the time the French expedition found it. But where had all the machines gone? They had no reason to go anywhere. Surely a few had lingered.

  Élodie oversaw the unloading of the empty epoxy guns, which had stayed in the hold since the Vatican. She rode with Berenice and Daniel. If all went as hoped, the chemists would find raw materials amenable to quickly synthesizing a decent epoxy and fixative, thus enabling them to restock the weapons’ chemical reservoirs. In the meantime, it didn’t hurt to look like they could defend themselves.

  The boats rode low in the chill water. Clakkers were heavy. Berenice hoped that the sight of rowboats filled with French and Clakkers working together struck a chord of fear. Any tulip with a crumb of foresight would shit her skirts, she thought. Humans rowed while the mechanicals focused on the distant scull blade. Berenice caught just fragments of their conversation. A few of these machines had spent time as galley Clakkers, yoked more or less permanently to the massive oars of oceangoing vessels such as the one they now approached. She gathered it wasn’t a fond memory.

  Close up, the stony cliffs bounding the serpentine inlet showed signs of physical labor. Hammer, pick, and chisel marks indicated the cove had been widened by a vast outpouring of backbreaking manual labor. But, of course, the Dutch had enjoyed an almost limitless supply of that.

  Above them, the scouts emitted cog chatter and cable twangs. Daniel traded clicks with the machines in the other longboats. The noise echoed across the water and ricocheted between the high, hard walls of the inlet.

  “The site appears to be deserted,” he translated.

  Apprehension grew as they entered the throat of the inlet. It wasn’t a straight shot; the secret anchorage met the sea through an obscuring wrinkle of geology. The longboats were small enough to reach the site without trouble, but getting the Griffon through would need expert navigation past choke points where the cliffs narrowed to stone pincers. But soon they were through.

  The icebreaker’s strangely flared bow rose nearly as high above the water as Le Griffon’s mizzen. Berenice counted twenty oars on each side. At a bare minimum, then, its galley complement comprised eighty Clakkers. Where were they? Had they gone off to join the reapers? Or Mab? Or were they her unwilling thralls now?

  “Well, it’s definitely Dutch,” she said. Then she turned her attention from ship to shore. “Son of a bitch. You slimy motherfuckers.”

  A rough landscape, but there were docks. Docks plural. And there were warehouses. Warehouses plural. Cart tracks had worn ruts in the thin soil between the warehouses and between the warehouses and the docks. One set receded over the gentle swell of a hillock to the west. Were they to follow that bearing for hundreds of leagues, she knew with a certainty hard as diamond it would eventually lead them to a mine also missing from the maps.

  The rugged shore around the secret harbor sported cylindrical storage tanks remarkably similar to the ones found in Marseilles-in-the-West. The warehouses showed signs of weathering, suggesting they’d been here for several seasons, but the gleaming chemical tanks were much newer. A tangle of hoses drooped from ports on every tank. Some hoses ran along the docks, to special hoisted brackets; one of the hoses was still mated with a complementary fixture on the moored ship. Other hoses connected a maze of boilers, stirrers, crackers, and other chemical reactors whose forms were familiar to Berenice, though their functions had always been alien. Montmorency had buggered New France so badly it was a wonder they weren’t all walking stiffly and bleeding from the ass. But the chemists and engineers launched into frantic conversations no less arcane than the tockety-tickety of their metal companions. Soon they were arguing about distillation, vapor pressures, catalysis, contaminants, tetra-this and methyl-that.

  She identified boarding for dozens of human sailors, a mess hall for taking meals, and even a private residence (harbormaster, if she had to guess). All built in the finest example of continental architecture, down to the pale bricks. No, not bricks, she saw, but perfectly hewn granite. They’d harvested the tons of stone they removed from the bluffs and used it for building materials. Daniel’s erstwhile masters never did anything by half measures. Once the inlet had been widened, their machines probably built the entire site in a week.

  How long had this been going on? The spot was isolated, yes, but not unreachable by land. Montmorency’s confession—which she’d read with great interest, and no small amount of fury—stated his secret dealings with the Dutch went back years. Plenty of time, then, for New France’s allies and trading partners to bring word of this place. Why hadn’t they? Surely the Inuit knew about it. Or the Innu, or the Mi’kmaq, or the Beothuk. Somebody. And if they knew about it, France’s wide-ranging trappers and coureurs de bois would soon know, too.

  But nothing, not the quietest peep, had ever reached Talleyrand’s ears. The tulips must have guarded this secret with exceptional ferocity. Anybody unlucky enough to stumble across the site had surely disappeared. And eventually those left behind learned to avoid the area.

  Nothing moved in the camp. It wasn’t hard to see why.

  The remains were strewn far and wide. They’d been hacked apart, or bludgeoned to death with brassy fists, and left for the scavengers. Wolves, foxes, vultures, martens, coyotes, and perhaps even a bear had found the dead. All that remained were scattered bits of bone, scraps of clothing, and the occasional belt buckle.

  When change came over the mechanicals of this secret outpost, it came suddenly and violently. The bloodstains told a simple story. It began when the machines in the camp, many dozens of them, found their geasa shattered in the middle of the long northern night. Had a runner arrived bearing the freedom stencil, like the baton in an ultra-long-distance relay race? In a blink, the machines became immune to the dictates of their human masters… as well as to the strictures that demanded their protection. The middle of the story had the machines standing over the sleeping bodies of their former masters and owners. It ended with aborted screams and muffled shrieks. Blood in the bedclothes.

  The stained wallpaper in the harbormaster’s house told a similar story. The scavengers hadn’t made it inside his bedroom; the killers had taken care to close and lock the door on the way out. Nobody from the expedition bothered to break in; the stink of rot, even here in the cold north, was too much to bear.

  Not every machine in the harbor had become a killer, though. Some had tried to prevent the slaughter. Like their erstwhile masters, their wreckage was strewn hither and yon. At least one of the conscientious objectors had been a military machine and, judging from the pile of debris, it had given as good as it got before falling. The debris was so thick in places the ground crackled when they trod the paths between the buildings.
The hobnails in the humans’ boots clicked against the cogs; mechanical feet struck sparks from their broken kin.

  There had been a time not that long ago when a single handful of such clockwork debris, smuggled at great risk to Marseilles, would have been something to celebrate. Berenice had once paid a prince’s ransom for a single undamaged worm screw, smuggled all the way from a jungle battlefield in Amazonia. Never could she have imagined that one day she’d walk freely on roads and docks strewn with so much wreckage she had to squint against the sun’s glare.

  Berenice shook her head. We were children finding a single shell on the beach and calling ourselves heirs to the sea.

  Arms, legs, torsos. Never an intact skull, however. Those were always torn to shreds, ripped down to the tiniest cogs until they were almost unrecognizable.

  Yet despite the mechanical carnage, there were no pineal glasses to be found.

  Berenice tagged along with the chemists. They traced the hoses from tank to pump to distillery and so on, around and around, untangling a network of clockwork-powered chemical refineries. They paused frequently to compare the findings against a list of procedures and formulas Montmorency had confessed to providing his secret allies. Doctor Mornay led the investigation.

  “I was right about the tulips filling their ships with chemicals.” Berenice pointed to the dock, and the hose still attached to the ghost ship moored there. “But why is it all so complicated? I thought it would be just a holding tank and a pipe. Not this octopus orgy.”

  Doctor Mornay said, “It could be much simpler if they only cared about pumping out the raw chemical precursors.” After a moment’s consultation with her colleagues, she pointed to a pair of tall chromium-plated cylinders at the edge of the outpost. “Which we think are probably over there, based on the layout. But who knows how often the ships arrived? It was probably a better use of their time to perform the synthesis here and pump a finished product to the cargo ships rather than refine the raw precursors at the receiving end, where spies might identify the activity.”

  Berenice bit her lip. Oh. Of course.

  “If you’re going to insist on giving perfectly logical and reasonable answers to stupid questions,” she said, “you may put a dent in my delusions of genius.”

  The chemist chuckled. “We can’t have that.”

  “So what is the finished product they’re pumping out?”

  “We’ll know soon. I’ve sent a team into the ship. They’re doing the assay now.”

  “I’ll bet it’s a solvent. A really good one, too. Cutting edge. Their new Forge was intended to shit out Clakkers with built-in chemical immunities.”

  “I remember.” Mornay shuddered.

  Berenice changed the subject. “Solvents aren’t so useful for us. But do you think—”

  “Once we’ve mapped the layout, we can reconfigure it. Turn those precursors into other things. Maybe even crack apart the finished products, the solvents, and turn them into something useful.”

  Berenice looked at one of the units. If a randy Clakker fucked a wood-burning stove, a machine such as this might be the result. Though unattended for who knew how long, the cogs still turned. Nothing belched from the smokestack.

  “Please tell me ‘something useful’ means ammunition for the epoxy guns,” said Berenice. She cast a quick glance across windswept rock and lichen and an abandoned harbor. It didn’t take a wild imagination to turn the skirling of the sea wind into the keening of ghosts. She shivered. “I feel naked out here.”

  A pair of gulls glided over the shore, croaking to each other. Farther from the water, sunlight shimmered on alchemical brass where Daniel and a group of Clakkers approached a warehouse. A patchwork of low clouds scudded out to sea. The sun disappeared.

  Doctor Mornay gave an unhappy sigh. “There’s a lot to work with here. Somebody has taught them a tremendous amount of chemical engineering.” Berenice spat the taste of ashes from her mouth. The treason had been a matter of fact for quite a while now, yet it never ceased to appall her. The chemist continued, “But I don’t want to get your hopes up quite yet. Contamination is likely to be a problem in this primitive environment.”

  “Not just from the environment,” interjected a fellow wearing a clownish assemblage of multicolored flannels under a beaverpelt cloak. Doctor Hammond’s fur-lined hat had long ear flaps that dangled past his jaw. “Unless we can find fresh, unused hoses coiled in some of these storage units, we’ll have to figure out a way to completely flush the lines before we attempt to make anything.”

  Disappointing. But there was a Plan B: Marseilles-in-the-West already had an infrastructure for making epoxy. Some of it had even survived the devastation of the siege. Crews worked night and day to rebuild the rest.

  Berenice asked, “If it can’t be done here, how hard will it be to ship the raw materials back to the citadel?”

  The sun broke through a gap in the clouds. Doctor Mornay squinted at the storage tanks, shielding her eyes from the momentary glare. “Give us time. We’ll figure something out.”

  While Berenice took a tour of the local chemical landscape, Daniel and colleagues searched the harbor buildings for the answers Berenice had promised them: What was quintessence? Why was it so crucial to the Guild? Did it make them who and what they were? How?

  He knew better than to expect a quick and tidy resolution. At some level it didn’t matter. He was what he was; that wouldn’t change if he solved a hundred riddles. The expedition had already proven its value by teaching humans and mechanicals to work together as equals.

  His colleagues, however, threw themselves into the search for answers with zeal. They hadn’t yet learned to guard their hopes and fears against Berenice’s silver tongue and extravagant promises.

  Walking the grounds gave a different impression of the harbor than that obtained from atop the cliffs. The bird’s-eye view didn’t convey the interlaced geometries of the settlement. There was a chemical circuit where the Dutch had assembled their countermeasures for French siege defenses; Berenice and her people walked that circuit now. The easterly wind carried their voices out to sea. At Daniel’s request, a handful of free mechanicals followed the French at a discreet distance in case of unexpected trouble.

  But interspersed amongst the chemical tanks and machines lay a sequence of unrelated buildings. Buildings with chutes and hoppers, furnace flues, fire-brick chimneys, and ceramic kilns. One such building was a warehouse with a long chute tipped downward like a broken drawbridge. But for a smattering of sand, the tipple was mostly empty. Near the top, however, where it adjoined a conveyor for drawing material into the building, there lay broken stones sporting black-and-silvery inclusions. In places, the stone sported nests of long, needlelike crystals.

  He’d seen this mineral ore twice before, he realized. Once, during his brief but catastrophic foray into the New Amsterdam Forge, where he’d seen carts laden with similar raw material. And he’d glimpsed similar things in the carts when he accompanied Queen Mab and the Lost Boys to the quintessence mine.

  We should take a sample to Doctors Grémonville and Pellisson, he said. They were the only married couple on the expedition. Grémonville was a tenured geologist at the Académie des Sciences; she’d met her future wife when then-Madam Pellisson wrote a dissertation on mineralogy.

  He opened the hatch into the warehouse and crawled along the inert conveyor. A hell scent wafted from the building. Brimstone: the smell of the Grand Forge.

  Ugh. I hate that smell, said Keziah. Something about the way she clicked reminded Daniel of his old friend Fig, she with the dangerous sense of humor. He wondered if he’d ever see Fig again.

  Me, too, he said.

  Various twangs and ticks of agreement rippled through the mechanical coterie.

  Dark lamps hung from the ceiling, the chains rattling in the sea breeze gusting through a gap in the roof. One never found leaks and drafts in human spaces.

  The conveyor ran straight to what appeared to be a grinder, and
this connected to a furnace of some sort. The grinder was dormant, but the furnace was warm to the touch. It lacked a hatch for loading wood or coal; instead, it featured a chain of alchemical sigils etched in an intricate spiral around the frame. Either this furnace had been used recently, and hadn’t yet relinquished its warmth to the elements, or the animating magics had been intended for years of interventionless service.

  Never short of confidence, the Clockmakers.

  Keziah pointed. Look. I don’t think this was originally here.

  He hadn’t noticed it, but she was right. The furnace was a retrofit, an inharmonious addition to the warehouse. The building had been built to break up raw ores, discard the dross, and store the rest. But later, it had become a place for working with it.

  Other chutes and hoppers fed the furnace, too. Sand, lime, and unidentifiable substances fed the alchemical reactor at the heart of the furnace. It had excreted a continuous slab of vitreous material the color of stout beer. Elsewhere, one could see where the still-cooling material had been poured into molds the size of unshelled almonds.

  Repheal, the old soldier, said, What are those?

  Daniel took one. It comprised two fitted pieces enclosing a hollow, as though designed to contain something. He held one half in the patchy daylight. The light didn’t penetrate the glass. Instead it slipped along the perimeter, as though confined to a thin skin. There it shimmered like oil in a rain puddle.

  Each glass ingot ate light just as thoroughly as it would consume the slightest tendency toward sedition, disloyalty, sloth. The murkiness of the glass reflected its dark purpose.

  Daniel and his colleagues each carried something very similar inside their heads. But thanks to Berenice, he knew theirs were luminous, as though filled with aquamarine starlight. Or a recaptured soul. And that before they’d all slipped free of the geasa, their pineal glasses had been dark as the glass he studied now.