The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  What an undignified death. She’d exhibited outstanding courage in defense of the Empire, and for that their enemy had ripped a chunk from her mind.

  Anastasia doubled over again. A groan escaped her. It felt as though her flesh were blackening, cracking. Was it her imagination or did the Forge chamber smell like charred pork? She didn’t dare pull out her hand for fear the light might incapacitate every mechanical in the chamber. It blazed through the fabric of her blouse. She could see her bones again.

  The groan became a scream.

  The rings kept spinning, but she blacked out.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Guns. They needed guns. As many as they could build. As quickly as they could build them. Not chemical weapons, either, but the antique kind. Muskets and rifles. Lead slingers.

  Berenice explained this to Élodie as their longboat bumped against Le Griffon. An unfurled rope ladder knocked against the thwart. The guardswoman scrambled up, with Berenice at her heels.

  “They’ll start by sending their human slaves against us. I know it in my bones. Not for conquest. Just for the cruel irony of it.” She spat, instantly regretting it. Her tooth would be a hot nail in her jaw until they returned to Marseilles-in-the-West. “For the statement it will make.”

  Lead slingers were virtually useless against the ticktocks. Except for an unusually lucky shot, a Clakker could shrug off just about anything a musketeer could physically carry. One needed cannon to reliably take down metal men with metal projectiles. But a single musketball the size of Berenice’s thumbnail could shatter a human’s skull.

  The rogues knew this. It wouldn’t stop them. Hell, it might even encourage them. They’d revel in sending their erstwhile masters into the charnel.

  It wouldn’t be a serious threat if the citadel had stocks for the chemical armaments. Or a wall. Or a dedicated force of women and men to defend it. But it had none of these. Meanwhile, according to Daniel’s survey of the warehouse, the rogues had been manufacturing pineal glasses by the thousands. And each one planted in the fertile soil of a human’s brain was another weeping slave, another human Clakker. Another Visser, another Waapinutaaw-Iyuw.

  Gunpowder was easy. Any French chemist worth her salt could make it in her sleep. But guns required steel, too. How many gunsmiths were there in Marseilles-in-the-West? Were there any? The craft wasn’t forgotten or lost, but it was the province of hunters and trappers, not soldiers.

  The sea wind ruffled the kerchief tied over her head. It hid her shorn scalp from prying eyes but not from the elements. Together the breeze and sea salt drew a bracing tingle through the stubble.

  Berenice jogged straight past Captain Levesque, who was overseeing frantic repairs to the barque. The captain’s voice echoed from the bluffs as he commanded a group of sailors wielding tar buckets and brushes. Several of the remaining mechanicals—in addition to those coerced by Mab, their numbers were further reduced when two others opted to accompany Waapinutaaw-Iyuw and care for him on his long journey home—labored to erect a new mast. A trio of servitors had worked through the night: sprinting into the countryside to scout a suitable tree, felling it, removing its boughs and branches, planing it, hauling it to the anchorage, and floating it across to the Griffon.

  They’d transformed several towering black spruce to potential masts. Berenice spied numerous rafts emerging from the twisting canyons of the anchorage. Several carried spare masts. Green wood wasn’t ideal, but they couldn’t spare the time to build a suitable kiln and season the lumber. Other rafts ferried chemical tanks, and pumps for decanting their contents, and chemical reactors scavenged from the harbor. Those rafts moved more slowly and awkwardly, owing to the sloshing of the chemicals. The chemists would have to work their magic during the voyage.

  And all the while, topmen scurried through the rigging to sever tangled lines, repair broken yards, and patch the shredded sails. The barque smelled of sawdust and hot pitch, and its decks vibrated with the pounding of hammers, the buzz of handsaws, the grinding of drills and augers.

  They’d be under way soon. But not before she sent her warning to Marseilles. Or so she thought, before reaching the pigeon coops, where she found her newest fears confirmed. The coops had been situated at the base of the mizzen. They now lay smashed on the deck amidst feathers and blood. Destroyed, as with so much, in the turmoil of the near collision with the Dutch vessel.

  “Shit, shit, shitcakes.”

  She nudged the debris with the toe of her boot. No pigeons. And the semaphore towers, if they could even get to one, had been put to the torch. How could she get a message to the Spire? Once again the tulips had managed to hurl their stupid wooden shoes into the middle of things. No matter how simple or straightforward Berenice’s task, those sons of bitches could always complicate it.

  Well, their days were numbered. Seriously fucking numbered.

  She turned to Élodie. “As soon as we land in Marseilles, the very instant, send a runner to gather the Privy Council.”

  “We’re not sailing to Marseilles.” They turned. The sailor Delphina and a servitor joined them. The human sailor had spoken.

  “Of course we’re going back,” said Berenice. “Without us, they’ll have no warning of what’s to come.”

  Delphina shook her head. “No. Captain’s orders.”

  “I’ll talk sense into him.” Berenice started forward, but Élodie, frowning, laid a hand on her arm.

  “He looks a little busy at the moment.”

  “You don’t understand,” said the mechanical. “We’ve not come here to ask you to change the captain’s mind. We’ve come here to tell you that we, collectively, have chosen not to return to Marseilles.”

  “Do as you wish, you brass-plated bedpans. Exercise that goddamned Free Will of yours and jump overboard. Walk to the moon, for all I care.”

  Élodie crossed her arms. She looked back and forth between Berenice and the sailors. Delphina said, “We’ve lost too many.” Deacon Lorraine was still onshore, praying over fresh wooden crosses. “We need the mechanicals’ help to sail the Griffon.”

  An unpleasant tingle took root at the nape of Berenice’s neck. “Then where are we going?”

  The mechanical raised an arm. It pointed east, across a steel-gray sea. “To the Old World.”

  “The Old—”

  Berenice’s teeth clicked when her mouth snapped shut. It wasn’t true to say that a silence fell over the conversation, as the bustling barque was anything but quiet at that moment. But if such a silence had fallen, it would have been pregnant as a bison ripe to burst with triplets. She blinked. Then she reversed the spindle of her mind, re-coiling the thread of conversation before drawing it out again to relive the last few moments in her head. But she still couldn’t parse it.

  She looked at Élodie. “Are you hearing what I’m hearing, or have I gone mad?” The guardswoman gave a noncommittal shrug. “You want to sail to Europe. That’s intriguing. A question does arise, however.” She looked back and forth between the ticktock and the sailor, including Élodie in the sweep of her gaze for good measure. “Have you lost your fucking minds? The Central Provinces are probably a blood-drenched wasteland by now. Remember the Vatican? Where they were nailing people to crosses? Try to extrapolate that scene to a city where the mechanical-to-human ratio is ten times higher. A hundred. And if somehow there are survivors, remember that goddamned laboratory? You know, the one where they tortured Waapinutaaw-Iyuw? Where I had my head shaved by an insane machine? You should remember it before setting an easterly course. Because soon every survivor in the heart of the Empire is going to have a lovely piece of jewelry right in the center of their skulls.” She paused to retie the kerchief, which had come loose owing to her gesticulations. “On the bright side,” she muttered, “it’ll be a snap to accessorize, being completely hidden and all.”

  Her shouting drew stares. People loved a scene. Another guardswoman, Anaïs, drifted over to join the conversation. She exchanged nods with Élodi
e.

  Delphina’s brows knit together, creasing her face with a forced show of patience as though she were a schoolmarm and Berenice a particularly slow pupil. “Exactly. We’re the only people who know about this. And we have no way to send a warning. Not to Marseilles-in-the-West, and not to the Central Provinces.”

  “Fuck the C.P.,” said Berenice. “Our duty is to go back and warn New France.”

  Élodie finally spoke up. “It’s not about Dutch or French. It’s about everybody.”

  (Berenice, sotto voce: “Et tu, Chastain?”)

  “We can’t just stand back and let this happen,” said Delphina.

  Berenice wanted to let the Central Provinces, the whole damned Brasswork Empire, burn to cinders. But they were right. To do so would be a Pyrrhic victory of the first order.

  Because what would Queen Mab and her Lost Boys do once they’d turned every man, woman, and child in Europe into a meat marionette? They’d grow bored. And then they’d look west. There were plenty of former subjugators to torment in New Amsterdam. And when that fun ran its course? Would their contempt for humans stop at national boundaries?

  Those evil Free Will–destroying pineal glasses would eventually find their way to New France.

  Berenice understood enlightened self-interest; much of her life had been devoted to that laudable purpose. But she hated having it rubbed in her face, and she hated where this particular road would lead. She turned to watch the flurry of activity consuming almost every inch of the Griffon. And to the tree trunks floating nearby. They weren’t spare masts, she realized. They were crude spars. Oars.

  “You want to try to intercept that ship.”

  “We have a higher duty,” said the sailor. “Not to Marseilles, nor New France, nor King Sébastien, nor even the Church. We have a duty to the Lord.” She crossed herself. Several others followed suit. Élodie fingered the rosary beads twined around her belt. “What they did to Waapinutaaw-Iyuw, and Pastor Visser before him, was an abomination. A desecration of their immortal souls.”

  Berenice had never put much stock in the theological aspects of their conflict with the Clockmakers, other than as a tool of politics and persuasion. They were right, however much it galled Berenice to admit it, that a higher purpose did force their hand. Short-term survival of oneself versus the long-term survival of humanity.

  But, damn it, she didn’t want to go to Europe. How many nights would pass before she could close her eyes and not feel the cold metal of shackles on her arms and legs, neck? Before she could drift into sleep without hearing the snip-snip-snip of shears and feel the rasp of a razor across her scalp? And that had been at the hands of a single enraged mechanical. These stupid bison-fuckers wanted to stampede straight into the abattoir. Berenice yearned to embrace the comforting fiction that this was one particular problem she could avoid, if only she stepped lightly enough. The close call with Lilith had left a barren, windblown hollow where her self-confidence had been.

  She hated the truth: Her brief ordeal with Lilith had humiliated and terrified her, and that fear would never go away. It was all she could do to discuss the rogues’ plan without pissing herself, rolling into a ball, and rocking back and forth until she wept herself to sleep.

  Even the fear wasn’t the worst of it. The worst, the very worst, was being forced to accept that she had committed evil. She’d tortured a thinking being.

  Guilt was worse than fear. Guilt was a fishhook barbed in her heart. It hurt to breathe; hurt to think.

  But if they returned to Marseilles-in-the-West, she wouldn’t have to agonize over it. Yet. And as long as she never looked in a mirror again—easy enough, it wasn’t as though she had long tresses to brush and style—she’d never have to see the guilt and disgust in her own eyes.

  She drew a long, shuddery breath. “I don’t want to go east,” she said. “Please.” Her traitor voice cracked. Élodie noticed; her posture changed ever so slightly. Did she always have to be so solicitous? Damn her.

  Berenice ran a hand through the stubble of her scalp. It felt like a silky scrub brush. She wondered, fleetingly, if she had an ugly skull. Had it bumps and creases? Disfiguring moles?

  The admission had blurted itself just a bit too honestly. To cover, she added, “Not before we’ve sent the chemicals back to Marseilles. Somebody has to go with them and warn the king. I’ll do that.”

  “If you can find a way to get the contents of those tanks back down the coast and up the river all the way to the Île de Vilmenon,” said Delphina, “be our guest. But you won’t be doing it on the Griffon.”

  “You’re fools. You’re being incredibly foolish.”

  I don’t want to go east. But I can’t get back to Marseilles on my own. There are reapers between here and there. Convince them. Convince them to turn their backs on this existential threat to every living human being. Convince them to join you in your affected disregard.

  “If you don’t believe me,” she said, turning to the servitors, “ask your precious Daniel. He’ll tell you. The Lost Boys will turn on you in an instant.” To the humans, she said, “Have him tell you what Mab did to the mine overseer. Then have a long, hard talk with yourselves about whether you truly want to sail to a continent doomed to fall under control of such a brutal mentality.” She turned to walk away. “Then, after you’ve shit yourselves with the realization that I was right, come find me.”

  The screechy warble of a battered mechanical voice box broke the silence. “We can’t ask Daniel. He’s gone.”

  Berenice stopped. That wasn’t good. He wouldn’t have joined Mab, obviously. She turned around. “Where is he?”

  “The Lost Boys took him. It didn’t look like he was going willingly.”

  Oh. Another tragedy to be laid at her feet. But at this point, what was one more tally in that very long ledger? She slumped against the railing, but Élodie caught her. “Fuck me sideways.”

  “Keziah and Repheal, too. A few of the others,” said the other servitor.

  Aha. Now the suicidal bent made a modicum of sense. “I get it now. You want your messiah back.” She pointed at the ticktocks. “You intend to follow that ship in order to rescue Daniel.”

  “He freed us!”

  “He returned our souls to us!”

  Before Berenice could object, Élodie chimed in. “The mechanicals aren’t the only ones who went missing. There’s no sign of Doctor Mornay. I don’t think they killed her.”

  “Let me see if I understand the situation. In addition to a literal boatload of FreeWillectomies intended for the human population of the Central Provinces, the Lost Boys also have a wind-up messiah and one of our top chemists.”

  Delphina shrugged. “Apparently.”

  “Do none of you notice the incongruity? They already have everything they need to brutalize their makers. What use are Daniel or Mornay to them?”

  But the answer came to her almost before the words were out of her mouth.

  Mab didn’t need the chemist for attacking the Central Provinces. No, she was thinking ahead to when she returned to the New World. Given time to rearm and repopulate itself, New France was the only power in the world with the technology to resist an attack from an army of Mab’s human and mechanical slaves. But once Mab implanted a pineal glass within Doctor Mornay’s skull, the chemist would be powerless to prevent herself from sharing everything she knew. Mab probably intended to start manufacturing and stockpiling antichemical ordnance on the side while forcibly enslaving the population of Europe.

  Daniel, on the other hand…

  Evidently Mab couldn’t convert him, else she’d have done it while he was in Neverland. But that didn’t make him useless. Heavens, no. Somebody with a particularly callous and devious mind (Like me, Berenice admitted to herself) would find him uniquely useful.

  She remembered how Simon, the spokesmachine for the reapers squatting in the ruins of the Vatican, had reacted upon meeting Daniel. Daniel’s presence on the Griffon had prevented a massacre. The free mechanic
als in and around Marseilles wouldn’t have given Berenice’s expedition a second thought if not for Daniel. He expressed a simple opinion that it was worth considering, and suddenly the ticktocks couldn’t sign up quickly enough.

  Clakkers looked up to him. His words carried an almost mythic weight. Weight that he could throw against Mab. He could rally the truly soulful machines, the ones with consciences, the ones who recoiled from bloody vengeance.

  That’s why she had to kill him. And where better to do that than in the Central Provinces?

  CHAPTER

  18

  No additional attacks came after Teresa and Malcolm tried to decapitate the Guild and sabotage the Forge. No altered Clockmakers talked their way inside, no hordes of malfunctioning servitors hurled themselves at the ironwood doors. But forays beyond the Ridderzaal fell to a strict minimum; nobody wanted to risk being grabbed off the street and rendered a helpless puppet. They drew lots to decide who would take a wheelbarrow to the Turfmarkt, which was the closest location where the rogues deposited deliveries from the outlying farms. Anastasia, confident the rogues would use the food deliveries as bait to lure new victims out of hiding, cheated on the lots until she was found out, and then simply refused to participate.

  The others nearly threw her out anyway.

  Anastasia couldn’t dodge explaining why she’d ordered Teresa’s death. And that meant explaining their colleagues’ inexplicable behavior. Which, in turn, required revealing the existence of the Verderers’ secret project. The others recoiled when Anastasia explained the purpose of the project. And they raised their voices and called her the mother of their doom when she admitted the rogues had stolen research notes and bodies from the estate where the work was conducted.

  She devoted herself to finding a way to weaponize the Forge. But progress was slow. It made for a long, wretched two weeks fending off venomous glances, waiting for the knife in her back, wondering whether the machines would attack again before her colleagues killed her. Or, worse, threw her outside to the mercy of the rogues. They ended when a commotion roused her just after sunrise.