The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  “We’ve run out of test subjects, you see.”

  Elisheba, a servitor who’d worked border crossings on the Saint Lawrence prior to the siege, carried the physician, Yseult Chartrand, to Daniel’s location at a speed that made the woman’s eyes water. Meanwhile Repheal found the doctor’s medical bag and lobbed it high across the camp to Daniel, who caught it. Just seconds after Daniel called for help, Doctor Chartrand was inspecting the wounded chemist. Other servitors followed the call, too. Keziah, who had explored the warehouse with Daniel, arrived carrying a lamp.

  The physician pointed at the lantern, then to her patient. Then she found the warm stones as she cut the chemist’s shirt away. She spoke again.

  Elisheba translated: “Who put these here?”

  “I did,” said Daniel.

  “Good thinking. Now get out of my light. Both of you.” Next she pointed at Elisheba, who kept translating: “I need an assistant who speaks French.”

  With Keziah close behind, Daniel set off to follow the trail of Doctor Mornay and her abductor. They didn’t blur into a sprint until around the corner to avoid kicking debris over physician and patient. But the ground was hard and the snow light; the trail, if such existed, was faint.

  Keziah asked, The Lost Boy. Was he… different?

  Mab flouted Clakker mores and reveled in the taboos of their kind. Sometimes she forced her subjects to violate those taboos, too. Even Daniel carried that taint. He resisted the urge to touch his neck, as he sometimes did when he thought about it. The aberration wasn’t apparent from the outside, so he’d chosen to hide it. As any coward might.

  He wore a protective plate over his keyhole. He emitted an arpeggio of sorrowful clicks. I’m an idiot. I should have known Mab would have agents here.

  Mab controlled the quintessence mine. But what then? Why be a thorn in the Clockmakers’ side when she could pierce them through? Mab would have carried out a series of deductions similar to Berenice’s logic: If the ore was ever to reach the Clockmakers, it had to go to the coast. So Mab would have followed the ore here. It offered more humans to murder and more chances to inconvenience their makers. All rather obvious, in retrospect. Perhaps he’d picked up Berenice’s tendency to combine rash action with dangerous oversight.

  Her agents had probably been hiding here all along. Perhaps the Lost Boys were even in contact with the reapers at the Vatican; they might have learned of the Griffon’s voyage that way, if not via agents around Marseilles-in-the-West, such as the pair that had tried to abduct him.

  He skidded to a stop where the cleft opened on a shingle beach. Torchlight traced flickering curlicues on the harbor, but these faded as the humans ran away from the water, apparently chasing something, or being chased.

  What could Mab do with a chemist? She could stockpile her own defenses against French epoxy weapons. Or she could make epoxy weapons for use against her own kind. Together, these would help to ensure the autonomy of Neverland and the permanence of her reign.

  But Élodie Chastain had a saying: There’s only one way to kill a Clakker, but a hundred ways to kill a man.

  Chemists could make poison, too.

  Was Mab building an arsenal? Was she preparing for a war against their makers? He didn’t doubt it. She wasn’t the forgiving type. Speaking of which:

  We should split up, he said.

  I’m following you, Keziah said, because I don’t know what’s happening and I don’t know what to do. She paused, still running. The timbre of her body changed, assuming an emotional quality humans called sheepishness. Sometimes it’s strange, not having a geas to tell me what I should be doing. As if worried he might be offended, she hurried to add, Not bad, though. It’s wonderful. Just… different.

  He said, I know. I remember how it was for me at first. Constantly expecting the flare of pain telling me I’d made the wrong choice, or that I wasn’t choosing quickly enough. But I meant we should split up for your safety.

  They neared the empty dock. It was as dark as the shoreline. Where had everybody gone? Moments ago French lanterns had shimmered on the dark waters as their confused carriers sprinted to and fro like windblown leaves. He didn’t hear their voices anymore, either. Why had they stopped shouting?

  The waterfront erupted. A trio of servitors burst from the dark waters. They landed on the shingle before Daniel and Keziah with a crash like somebody taking a hammer to a glass carillon.

  Well, that clinches it, he said. If you had any doubt about whether there were Lost Boys in the camp—

  Keziah said, I’ve figured it out, thanks.

  Misshapen machines advanced on them. Each was a testament to the suffering of some hapless kinsmachine somewhere in the world at some time in the past.

  Allow us to dispel your doubts, Daniel. Queen Mab knows you’re here. She knows you’ve been sailing on that French canoe, said one of the dripping servitors. We’ve been watching you.

  We’ve missed you, clicked another. Her Majesty is offended that you didn’t accept her invitation to return to Neverland.

  The third said, Who are you, sister?

  My makers called me Xerikulothistrogantus, she said, backing up, but I call myself Keziah.

  The middle Lost Boy asked, How have you enjoyed your emancipation, Keziah?

  It’s a gift, you see. A gift from Queen Mab, said the first. Although your companion, this usurper, enjoys the credit.

  Daniel said to her, I think you should probably run.

  She said, I’ll get help. And leaped.

  A Lost Boy launched himself into the air a split second after she did. We’d much prefer you didn’t. They collided in midair. The burst of sparks lit the dark sky like a celebratory firework.

  When traveling in the Central Provinces, Berenice had occasionally seen children sitting or sometimes even standing on their servants’ shoulders. But Lilith had slung Berenice over her shoulder like a sack of flour. And the children never rode with a hand clamped over their mouths.

  It hurt; the servitor’s jouncing gait sent metal digging into Berenice’s stomach with every stride. She doubted that was accidental. Berenice’s bare fists and booted feet bonged against the servitor’s carapace, which served only to bruise her hands and scuff her boots.

  But it wasn’t a long ride. Soon Lilith crouched on her backward knees, swept aside snow and stones with her free hand, and opened an expertly hidden trapdoor.

  Well, shit.

  Lilith flung her into the hidden chamber. She fell like a sack of potatoes dropped into a vegetable cellar. She plummeted for one long, heart-stopping moment before a snowbank broke her fall. It had been piled for just this purpose, she realized. Still, the landing jarred her cracked tooth. Pain flared.

  “There,” said Lilith. “Now you can scream all you like.” And then she slammed the hatch. A faint scraping sound told Berenice that her abductor had hidden the door again.

  Berenice shivered. Her clothing was sodden from her encounter on the beach. Lilith’s sprint, and the subsequent immersion in a snowdrift, had done her no favors. The fear wasn’t helping, either.

  It wasn’t pitch-black. There were alchemical lights; even a Clakker couldn’t see in absolute darkness. She saw she hadn’t been thrown into an oubliette, as she’d feared, but a tunnel. The floor was gravel groomed by the passage of many feet; the tunnel walls and ceiling were shored with neat timbers. It was cold but dry, except for the slow dripping of meltwater from around the edges of the hatch. The work was so thorough she wondered if the tunnels had been part of the tulips’ original site. Perhaps the secret harbor was even larger than Berenice had imagined. The tunnel was unquestionably the work of metal hands; the beams had been squared too identically for any human who wasn’t a master carpenter.

  From one end of the tunnel came weeping, and the low murmur of somebody reciting a rosary cycle. There she found the guard Anaïs along with the rest of the team who’d gone to investigate the Dutch ship earlier that afternoon. They appeared unharmed, though she saw in
every eye the deadness of a trapped and terrified animal.

  “Is anybody hurt?” she asked.

  Anaïs shook her head. “No. Not yet. But… She trailed off with a shiver, staring past Berenice.

  Who were these machines infiltrating the camp? Not reapers, apparently, else they would have slaughtered the entire expedition without resorting to artifice. (Unless, said the persistently unhelpful voice in the back of her head, Lilith has joined the killers but has special plans for you, Madam Talleyrand…)

  As her breathing slowed, and the rosary cycle finished, Berenice heard a new sound under the scrape of gravel and drip of meltwater. Faint but unmistakable, moaning and keening. Human distress emanated from the other end of the tunnel.

  The gravel shifted underfoot, causing every step to crash like the breathing of the ocean. The tunnel sloped downward. It ended in a laboratory.

  A row of alchemical lanterns dangled from the ceiling. But these weren’t shining at the moment, so the only light came from the tunnel itself and a small lamp hanging from a hook beside the door. The chamber held a row of pitted and bloodstained wooden slabs like butcher’s tables, except these featured an iron shackle affixed to every corner. And each had a metal frame that appeared to be some sort of neck brace and clamp apparatus. Berenice’s footsteps kicked up drifts of what she first mistook to be dusty cobwebs. But in this environment?

  She looked again. Her breath caught in her throat. The toes of her boots were dusted with hair.

  It was heaped everywhere. Beneath every table, piled under the braces and clamps like snowdrifts. Crouching behind one table, she ran her fingers through it. It looked and felt like human hair. She gave it a sniff. It even smelled like human hair, if the humans in question had been sweating terribly while their heads were shorn. The wintry climate made that unlikely, unless of course they’d been running for their lives and terrified.

  She remembered Pastor Visser: he with the badly scarred scalp.

  Freestanding shelves flanked every table. Bloodstained menace glinted from saws and scalpels arrayed there. Unless she used them to kill herself, the blades were useless. She wondered, idly, where the rogues had obtained surgical equipment, or if they’d crafted it themselves. It was possible, given a supply of raw metal. God only knew all the things they chiseled from the bones of the earth at the quintessence mine.

  Atop each shelf sat a small multiaxial clamp, but the cradle at the center of most sat empty. A few contained a dark glass marble the size of an acorn. Unlike the surgical instruments, these didn’t gleam. They absorbed light.

  This is where the alchemical glasses had been taken after their manufacture at the warehouse Daniel had explored. But they weren’t intended for use in Clakkers. They’d been constructed for something far worse.

  Like a boomerang, her thoughts returned again to Visser. Perhaps he’d been the victim neither of mob violence nor of the Verderers. What if somebody else—a ticktocking somebody—had decapitated the insane ex-priest not for purposes of revenge, not to hide what had been done to him, but for purposes of research? If the rogues wanted to learn how the Guild removed a man’s Free Will, what better way than to study Luuk Visser? Perhaps these shelves contained an item torn from the poor bastard’s skull.

  The keening was louder here. It ranged from a low rumble like the yowling of a cat in heat to the high-pitched weeping of human anguish. Visser had made terrible noises while struggling against his affliction. The geas preventing him from describing his plight had wrung inhuman sounds from his throat. Dreading what she’d find, she followed the noise to the adjoining chamber.

  It was much like the first, only larger. But it stank of piss, shit, and the recently dead. Three of the tables in this chamber weren’t empty. Berenice took the lamp from its hook. Two men and a woman lay facedown on the tables, their arms and legs shackled, thick leather bands tied across their waists, their heads clamped into the surgical vises. They weren’t from the French expedition. Two appeared to be Inuit far from home, judging from their torn clothing, but the third might have been Montagnais, perhaps of the Naskapi subnation.

  As in the other room, tufts of hair were piled beneath the vises. Two victims’ scalps had been peeled back, laying bare incomplete skulls. Blood didn’t pulse through their excavated brains; fast shallow breaths didn’t steam from their nostrils.

  But the third subject was still alive.

  His tormentors had put his head back together… and then left him here to die. Terrified, alone, and wracked with indescribable pain. Once they’d proven they could finish the procedure while keeping the subject alive, they’d lost interest.

  No wonder Lilith and company found it difficult to keep test subjects in stock. The level of malice was staggering. Literally. Berenice’s knees went slack. She steadied herself against an empty surgical table.

  Every Clakker in existence had been forged with an innate understanding of human requirements for health and comfort. And not just the specially modified machines laboring in the legendary hospitals of the Central Provinces—even the oldest, ricketiest household servitors carried deep metageasa enforcing a constant awareness of their masters’ health and well-being. They were built knowing first aid and emergency medical procedures. How many burgomasters had died peacefully in their sleep at the ripe age of ninety-five? It was no coincidence that life expectancies in the Central Provinces were the longest anywhere in the world. (Well, she thought. They had been. The shattered metageasa had reached New Amsterdam weeks ago. Surely they had made their way across the ocean by now.)

  So this wasn’t ignorance. It was deliberate torture. Those brass-plated motherfuckers knew exactly how to keep somebody alive, and knew how to let a man die a slow death. They just didn’t care. They wanted to hurt people.

  The Verderers had kept Berenice imprisoned but pampered for weeks. Tuinier Bell had implied, obliquely, that it was important to the process for removing her Free Will. A process, she now realized, that required implanting a piece of alchemical glass within a person’s brain. And thereby snagging the fishhooks of geas through every fold of their minds. But it only worked if the subject was in the proper physical and emotional state before the procedure began.

  The rogues haven’t realized this yet. They haven’t connected the failed FreeWillectomies to the brutalization of their “test subjects.”

  Their ferocity had interfered with experimentation.

  “Sacre Nom de Dieu. You poor son of a bitch.”

  The man shackled and bolted to the table stiffened, fell quiet. Whimpered. Tried to speak.

  She passed the corpses to crouch beside the surviving victim. She shone the lantern on his face, but recoiled from the rictus of agony twisting his features into something barely human. But she touched his blood-crusted cheek. The simple gesture of compassion caused him to shudder and convulse.

  “Parlez-vous français?” she whispered.

  The man gulped like a goldfish. His eyes locked on her, but no words came out. Just grunts and stutters. And then, so fast she almost missed it: “Oui.”

  There was no hope of placing his accent, if he had one; the effort to speak distorted his voice beyond any trace of the original man. Just as Visser had struggled against the compulsions Anastasia Bell had laid upon him.

  “Comment-vous appelez-vous?”

  “Waapinutaaw-Iyuw.”

  This wretch could still defy the geasa. He had to be remarkably strong to have survived his ordeal as long as he had. But nothing could resist the indomitable geasa forever. It could only mean the procedure was imperfect. The metageasa hadn’t been hermetically sealed around his mind and soul. But his strength was flagging, sapped by relentless assaults from a metaphysical taskmaster.

  He growled, choked again. The effort to speak again, and the ruthless punishment for attempting it, wracked him with convulsions. His struggles and his suffering doubled, tripled. The things he wanted to voice contravened the rules the rogues had tried to implant within him. He strove
to disprove the Euclidean axioms of his own obeisance.

  “Aidez—” He groaned. “—Aidez-moi!” he pleaded.

  Spitting out just two words, the simplest plea for mercy, took an almost superhuman effort.

  Revelation hit Berenice like a mule kick. It took her breath away. They’re going to succeed.

  The rogues were a hairsbreadth from replicating the Verderers’ darkest achievement. More than that—they would surpass it. Because if the rogues could install metageasa in a human under these conditions, how soon before they were grabbing people on the street, cracking their heads like walnuts, and scooping out their Free Will?

  And if Lilith has her way, I’ll be the subject on which they perfect the technique.

  “Hold on,” she said. Her voice warbled with revulsion and panic, but she doubted he was in a state to tell the difference between that and a soothing lullabye. “I’m going to untie you.”

  Keys. Keys. Where would they have put the keys for those shackles?

  She scanned the room, shining the lamp around the chamber. But then she realized there were no keys, for there were no locks. Why bother? The ticktocks merely bent iron bands around their victims’ wrists and ankles. She’d have to find a crowbar or—

  “Tuez-moi. S’il vous plait! TUEZ-MOI!”

  “I can help you,” she said. “I met a man like you. I broke the chains in his mind. Set him free.” Yes you did. And he lived like a beast, driven mad by guilt, until some sick bastard tore him apart.

  He tried to beg again, but the entreaty died in his throat, trampled by a howl of agony. Begging for death was supposed to be against the rules. It was supposed to be impossible.

  How long had he suffered down here while she and the rest of the expedition scampered around the secret harbor like children storming a playground? Death would be a mercy. Even if she managed to uncoil the iron bands from his limbs, how would they get out of here? And even if they escaped this carnival-mirror counterpart to the laboratory she had once maintained, what then? Where would they go? Could he go anywhere? Or would each stride away from his masters require a war of willpower? She’d never get anywhere with this wretch in tow. But she couldn’t leave the poor wretch to such a terrible fate. Were their places swapped, she’d beg for death, too.