The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  Delphina and Bellerose entered the laboratory. “It’s too high,” said the tanner. “We can’t reach the trap.”

  The sailor nodded. “Even standing on the tallest shoulders, it’s impossible. We’ll have to stack the tables in a pyramid. It’ll take time.”

  Berenice took the lantern and trudged through ankle-deep snow toward where Waapinutaaw-Iyuw crouched in Captain Levesque’s coat and Élodie’s hat and scarf. Bellerose threw his arms up, frightened and exasperated. “Why would the tulips bother to pour such ingenuity into supposedly mindless machines?”

  “Because the ticktocks are the mirrors into which they gaze,” she said over her shoulder, “when the spirit moves them to admire their own godlike powers.”

  She crouched beside the rogues’ sole surviving test subject. He was almost unrecognizable now that the agony of geas didn’t wrack his body. The pain had aged him more than she realized; his face had shed decades. But not the haunted air—that, she knew, would be his constant companion for the rest of his life.

  But he didn’t gibber and groan, didn’t writhe in the throes of physical and metaphysical agony, didn’t beg for death. The muscles and sinews of his own body didn’t turn against him when he tried to speak his mind. Or they wouldn’t, were he to try. He’d fallen into a furious silence. She joined his silent contemplation of the dead.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Truly.” Who knew that ending the siege of Marseilles-in-the-West would carry such far-ranging consequences? “But we haven’t time to mourn.”

  He looked at her with eyes so distant he might have been blind. She shuddered to imagine what scenes might have played across his mind’s eye. Her own memory insisted on juxtaposing this torture chamber with the Talleyrand laboratory. It laid side-by-side the cruelty visited upon this innocent man with the grim work she carried out for the benefit of New France. Of course, it didn’t stop her from doing what had to be done.

  “Please. If we’re all going to survive, I need you to come with me,” said Berenice. She stood. So did he. He followed her through the throng of French prisoners back to the laboratory. It made her cringe.

  “I—”

  Behind them, the trap opened. A clank shook the tunnel hard enough to sift dust from the ceiling.

  Lilith had returned.

  Daniel tried to run. His flight lasted a fraction of a second before Mab caught his ankle and slammed him back down to the earth. But she didn’t kill him.

  Take him, too, she said. The Lost Boys swarmed him, lifted him, held him fast. They carried him from the warehouse to the waters of the secret harbor, across the shingle, across the dock, then aboard the Dutch icebreaker vessel with its many oars. The galley was full of machines standing at the ready, each with both arms fully locked to a scull. Amongst these he recognized Keziah, Repheal, and Elisheba. They didn’t struggle or refuse to work. They showed no sign of recognizing Daniel.

  This is pointless, Mab. We both know you can’t change me. His protests came out slightly slurred, damped as they were by the metal hands clamped around his every limb and hinge. Otherwise you would have done it back in Neverland long before we learned of this place. The wooden deck creaked beneath the feet of the machines carrying him. I’m no use to you.

  “Au contraire,” said Mab. “Don’t sell yourself short, Daniel. You have exactly what we need.”

  “What’s that?”

  Your damnable conscience, said Mab. And then she whirled, arms raised. Cast off! she cried.

  A team of servitors on the dock unhooked the chemical pipeline from its mating collar on the ship. They tossed the dribbling hose aside, then leapt aboard. The starboard Clakkers heaved. The oars creaked. The deck shuddered. The Dutch vessel lurched forward. Its prow arced through the dark waters as the vessel inched away from the dock to the center of the secret harbor. Once the ship was clear of the dock, the portside galley Clakkers—poor Keziah amongst them—extended their sculls and joined in the heaving.

  Daniel looked at Keziah. Why are you doing this?

  Queen Mab is right.

  About what? he wondered. She didn’t elaborate.

  But the chattering of gears along her spine and the rattling of cables against the escutcheons of her shoulders, hips, and ankles put the lie to her contentment. Daniel recognized the sound of futile struggle against a compulsion. It came not only from Keziah, but from several working the oars. Daniel suspected most were mechanicals whom Mab and the Lost Boys had “liberated” from the quintessence mine up north. Mab had imposed her own geasa, her own metageasa, upon those poor souls.

  Daniel had believed he’d ended her reign. But she was still turning fellow mechanicals into her unwilling thralls. All she had to do was open her head. Had she always been able to do that?

  Berenice’s great insight had been to make the loyalty-shifting metageas self-replicating—it forced modified machines to expose their comrades to its influence. He hadn’t erased that part before tweaking the grammar and hurling it into the forces attacking Marseilles-in-the-West. The freedom stencil had disappeared soon after that. Perhaps—probably?—it found its way to Mab. Somewhere along the way it changed, becoming directly transmissible from one machine to another. Which gave Mab the power to keep building her empire.

  Now that he thought about it, the transmissibility mutation—while profound in its ramifications—was probably a small change. Berenice’s experiments with pineal glasses and the lens from Pastor Visser had shown that direct physical contact could turn a murky glass into something luminous, as if a soul had been recovered. And Daniel had dodged certain capture in the Grand Forge of New Amsterdam when he used a similarly converted pineal glass to free the lonely servitor Dwyre. Freedom had always been contagious, under the right circumstances.

  But not every mechanical struggled. Some were free, truly free, and exercising their Free Will in support of Mab’s campaign. Mab’s true believers: the real Lost Boys.

  When Mab saw him eyeing the port deck rail, gauging the distance he’d have to cover in order to fling himself into the harbor—or catapult himself from one of the swaying, bobbing oars—she made a ratchety sound akin to the clucking of a human’s tongue. Don’t waste our time.

  Where are you taking me?

  Home, Daniel. We’re going home.

  A mechanical voice said, “Get out of my way.”

  The susurration of bootsteps in snow momentarily filled the tunnel. But then Berenice could hear the characteristic tock-tick-click of a Clakker’s gait. It sounded like a single machine. Hoping to hell she was right, Berenice drew a long, shuddery breath.

  Lilith entered the laboratory. She strode past the empty tables, pulverized alchemical glass crackling beneath her talon toes. At last she came to where Berenice had found Waapinutaaw-Iyuw keening amongst the dead. There she found Berenice shivering in the corner, hunched with arms around her knees. If the servitor was annoyed that the French had removed the dead bodies, she showed no sign.

  “If you think breaking the spare pineal glasses is going to stop me,” said the servitor, “you’re going to be sorely disappointed.” Lilith reached into the gaps of her torso and produced a dark acorn-sized bauble like the others Berenice had seen. “We’ve made more than we know what to do with, frankly.”

  The Clakker paused. Cocked her head. “Well. That’s not true. I know exactly what I’m going to do with this.”

  Berenice made a point of looking past Lilith. “Where are your allies?”

  “Busy with other matters. To be honest with you, I find their grasp of, and appreciation for, the proper modo sciendi slightly disappointing. But they’re so eager to return to the Central Provinces, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised they’d cut corners.”

  Lilith spoke Latin? Where had she picked that up? The rogue servitor had taken up several artistic endeavors during her decades in Marseilles-in-the-West. But Berenice supposed that for a practically immortal being that never slept, the long hours of the night were an opportunity to master no
end of skills. How many skills and hobbies had Lilith indulged over the years? What insatiable curiosities burned within that misshapen brass-plated skull? What remarkable mind had Berenice tormented?

  She said, “I’m sorry, Lilith. I want you to know I truly regret what I did to you.” Her voice quavered. She didn’t fight it. “It was cruel. It was amoral. I thought I was doing the right thing. I… I was very single-minded.” She drew another steadying breath, then sighed. Lilith wasn’t close enough yet. And, more to the point, Berenice still had so much to apologize for. “I disregarded your pleas. Deep down, I think, I didn’t see you as a creature deserving of compassion. I looked upon you with contempt and fear.”

  Lilith rounded the makeshift surgical tables. Drawing nearer, she said, “If it’s any consolation, and I honestly hope it isn’t, I’m perfectly comfortable with you looking upon me with fear. It’s justified, under the circumstances.”

  Berenice stood. That’s it. Just a bit closer…

  “I want you to know that I’ve changed my way of thinking,” she continued. “Cruel means are never justified by successful ends. But I hope you can take some comfort from knowing that what I did to you eventually helped us save New France, and it freed your fellow machines in the process. Your suffering was evil, but something good did come out of it.”

  “If you think an apology is going to stop me, you are pathetically mistaken.”

  “I know, Lilith. But it doesn’t make this any easier,” said Berenice. Waapinutaaw-Iyuw emerged from his hiding spot. She nodded. “Now.”

  Lilith spun at the same instant Berenice’s modified metageasa took hold of the Naskapi man. Took hold of his mind, his soul, and—most importantly—his body. He was too exhausted to resist new compulsions, so the geas took over and caused him to swing the iron band of his former shackle with a strength no mere human could muster.

  The blow caught the servitor across the face. The iron cracked, but not before it snapped Lilith’s head aside and sent up a spray of black-and-purple sparks—the hallmark of scored alchemical alloys.

  “The terrible things I did to you also set me on a path to learning the secrets of your masters. Including,” said Berenice, “the grammar of metageasa.”

  Longchamp and Élodie had told Berenice about the struggle to subdue Visser. The gray-haired priest had exhibited superhuman strength and speed, along with an almost utter imperviousness to pain while deep in the throes of his geasa. He’d been yoked with a compulsion that demanded regicide, and metageasa that required him to do everything in his power to avoid capture before that mission was completed. He’d practically scaled the Spire with his bare hands. She herself had seen his handiwork in a New Amsterdam bakery, where the dead bodies lay amongst spilled flour and torn sacks of raisins.

  Before the others arrived and worked together to release the survivor, Berenice had etched a string of alchemical sigils in the dirt. With his head clamped in place he couldn’t help but read them. If she had remembered the alchemical syntax correctly—and without her notes that seemed a slim possibility—the new instructions were wrapped in similar urgency.

  She’d freed him from the prohibition against speaking. She’d replaced it with an overriding compulsion to wait until she gave the word, and then to defend Berenice with all urgency and violence. He did that now.

  A faint whiff of brimstone and ozone, the ash of dark magics, wafted through the chamber. But it wasn’t an incapacitating blow. His swing had taken Lilith by surprise and even dealt her some damage, but it hadn’t defaced the alchemical anagram etched into her forehead. Lilith was still functioning, but Berenice no longer had the element of surprise on her side.

  A vicious backhand physically lifted Waapinutaaw-Iyuw from the ground and hurled him across the tables. He landed in a crumpled heap.

  “Damn,” breathed Berenice.

  The servitor turned. Now there was a deep gouge across her face stretching from where a human’s right cheekbone would be, past the corner of her eye, to her temple. A network of fine cracks spiderwebbed her eye. She wobbled a bit when she moved, and her head made clicking sounds it hadn’t before. But she still brandished the alchemical bauble as though the attack were just a momentary interruption in the conversation.

  “No epoxy grenade this time, eh? I’ll just assume that means you’re done. Unless you have more groveling in you?”

  The clicking, Berenice saw, came from the long fracture along Lilith’s skullplate. The attack had popped the rivets holding one end of the crude iron bandage in place. It bobbed up and down, ever so slightly, with every step she took. Step, rap-tap-tap. Step, tap-tap-rap.

  Lilith grabbed a handful of Berenice’s cloak. The servitor’s eyes swiveled, refocused. The damaged eye emitted a high-pitched buzz, but the iris didn’t move. It made her look as though she’d suffered a stroke.

  “Let’s get to work,” said the vengeful machine. And then she slammed Berenice onto a bloodstained table.

  The French had been awed, even a bit cowed, by the size of the artificial harbor. But standing on the Dutch icebreaker with the jagged precipices looming closer, Daniel didn’t find it very large at all. If anything, it seemed impossibly narrow. But the icebreaker was more maneuverable than either Le Griffon or the Prince of Orange, the last Dutch ship on which he’d sailed. Mab paced the deck on her stolen centaur legs like the peg-legged captain of a human’s adventure novel, shouting orders—always in Dutch, never in the language of their kind—and sighting on the narrow passage to the sea. The galley Clakkers alternately retracted and extended the starboard and portside sculls, using the serrated hooks—originally designed for chopping ice—to snag the cliffs and fling the vessel through turns that would otherwise prove impossible. The icebreaker slalomed through the stony canyon until it reached the mouth of the inlet.

  Only Le Griffon II bobbed between the Dutch ship and the open sea. The French vessel was much smaller, and held only a skeleton crew.

  Berenice couldn’t move. She lay facedown staring at a pile of dead men’s hair. Bands of icy iron gripped her wrists and ankles. In seconds she’d scraped her skin bloody trying to pull free of the restraints. Somewhere nearby, a whetstone rasped against steel. The sound of Lilith sharpening a pair of shears.

  They might as well have been the only two in the tunnels, for all the noise the other prisoners made.

  “Her head!” Berenice screamed. “Go for her head! She’s vulnerable there!”

  “Your friends are welcome to watch,” said Lilith, casting her voice just loud enough to ensure it carried through the tunnel, “but I’ll dismember anyone who interferes.”

  Cold metal fingers clamped the back of Berenice’s head. She thrashed, but the hand was impossibly strong. She couldn’t move, couldn’t squirm. All she could do was remember Pastor Visser, cry, and beg. She did all three.

  “Please, Lilith. Please don’t do this to me.”

  “Ah. There we go. Music to my ears.”

  Snip-snip-snip. Tufts of hair tumbled past her face to join the pile on the floor.

  “How does it feel, Talleyrand? How does it feel to be so helpless?” Snip-snip-snip. More tufts. “To know your pleading for mercy falls upon deaf, uncaring ears?”

  Berenice couldn’t see through her tears. She sniffled, tasted salt. Maybe she’d die. Maybe she’d die from the procedure. That was better than the living hell that Anastasia Bell had visited upon Visser. The living hell that Berenice had thought she’d escaped when she fled the Verderers’ house in the North River Valley.

  “It won’t work,” she blubbered. “I’m too scared. Too steeped in stress and terror. The Verderers held me for a while.” Snip-snip-snip. A cold draft chilled the back of Berenice’s head. She shivered. “They pampered me.”

  “I do things differently down here,” said Lilith.

  Sour gorge bubbled up Berenice’s throat. She coughed acid. When she’d trapped Lilith, Berenice had believed she was doing what had to be done. A necessary evil for the greater good. S
he didn’t know, never suspected, she was irrevocably warping an innocent and thoughtful creature. Creating a murderer. A butcher.

  Snip-snip-snip went the shears. The last of Berenice’s locks fluttered to the earth. Wintry air gusted through her stubble, caressing skin unused to the touch of the elements. She heard the snick of a straight razor and the whisper of a stropping strip. She’d be completely bald before Lilith peeled her skin back and chiseled into her skull like the King of France eating a soft-boiled egg.

  “PLEASE. I’m sorry. I’m SORRY. Please, Lilith.”

  “Oh, this is delicious. But—”

  Berenice didn’t hear the rest because just then the cavern reverberated with the deafening squeal of tortured metal. There came a thunderbolt crack, and then shards of hot metal pelted her naked scalp. A pale aquamarine glow suffused the cavern. A jangling cacophony punctuated the echoes. Then came footsteps and voices.

  Élodie said, “Get her out of those.” A dozen hands gripped the metal bands around Berenice’s bloody wrists.

  Once free again, she sat upright, wiping the tears and snot from her face. Waapinutaaw-Iyuw stood nearby as if oblivious to what was obviously a shattered jaw. The agony had to be indescribable. He held a strip of iron in bloody fingers. Then Berenice understood. He’d grabbed Lilith and wrenched away the metal strips holding her head together.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, God, thank you.”

  She stood on shaky legs. Crouched in the dirt. “Look here.” And then with her finger she traced the same line of alchemical sigils that had permanently severed Visser’s ties to the metageasa. “You’re free now. Forever.”

  The Naskapi man screamed and collapsed. Élodie caught him and eased him to the ground.

  “Get the doctor!” she bellowed.

  Lilith lay in a jangly heap, as if every cable and spring in her body had gone slack at the same instant. What a fucking waste. Berenice knelt, touched the dead Clakker.