The Liberation
Page 38
But trying to push a hoarse human voice through the chaos was pointless as pissing in the ocean.
The churning riot momentarily brought a servitor from the Griffon expedition, the one with the dented plating that screeched when it moved, close to her. She wished she’d learned its name. “Look!” she shouted. “We have to get—”
It backed up and took a running leap across the chamber. It landed short of the scaffold but rolled to a stop near where Mab was about to make the lip. A Lost Boy intercepted it.
“—over there.”
Thanks for nothing. Berenice turned left and right, seeking a clear path around the pit to the scaffold. The friendly and murderous machines were indistinguishable. They moved too quickly for human eyes to pick out subtle inconsistencies of design.
Armbands. We should have given them armbands. Well, shit.
“Hell’s bells,” said Élodie, gazing across the pit. The sergeant had materialized from the battle looking like the Devil herself. Blood sheeted from a cut along her brow that, barring a steady pair of hands to sew it shut and alchemical bandages to heal it, would do her horsey face no favors. Her armor was dented and cracked in places, and the diamond tip of her pickaxe had broken off.
Mab clambered over the Forge lip and anchored herself to Huygens Square. The outer parts of the armillary spun at a good clip now, strobing the Forgelight just rapidly enough to give Berenice a migraine if she stared too long. So far the hasty modifications to the bearings were holding; the makeshift clutch kept the innermost ring from engaging. Nevertheless, if Daniel fell, he’d hit one of the orbiting rings on the way down. The Forge might survive the impact, but there was no guaranteeing it wouldn’t knock him into the heart of the infernal device. He’d be destroyed in an instant.
“Get me over there now,” said Berenice.
Élodie stuck two fingers in her mouth, swelled her chest with one long inhalation, and then pierced the din with a whistle so shrill she could only have learned the technique from Hugo Longchamp. Their ticktock allies didn’t speak French, but they did understand the international sign language of frantic gesticulation. Look at Daniel. We’re fucked. Get this woman over there.
“Good lu—” she said.
But a pair of metal hands had already clamped onto Berenice’s waist and heaved. She felt her bones creak, and the throbbing ache in her gimpy leg became a full-fledged agony. Then she was spinning, tumbling across the void. Her uncontrolled trajectory sent her high above the heart of the Forge. Even at this distance, the flash of heat across her face left the sting of sunburn. Time stretched until she thought the ravenous hell-maw would pluck her from midair and devour her whole.
Mab was almost free. Her kicks grew stronger, better aimed. Daniel pulled with all the strength the compromised cogs and cables in his body could manage, and wedged most of one hand into a crevice in Mab’s torso. He looked up, scanning for another handhold.
A woman went sailing across the pit. But that was impossible. Especially not her.
I’ve already fallen, he decided, and the heat is driving me mad in the instant before it unwrites me completely.
Berenice hit the scaffold hard. The impact sent her skidding across rough-hewn wood. Splinters stippled her like porcupine quills. Her shoulder made a crunchy pop and immediately stopped listening to her commands. The pain made her cough something acidic into her mouth, turning her cracked tooth into a white-hot nail driven through her jaw.
But she limped to one of the encased chemical tanks and levered herself upright just as Mab gained the scaffold. It looked, to Berenice’s watery eyes, like Daniel hung from a fingertip.
Before the mad mechanical brushed him off, Berenice gave her eyepatch a conspicuous tug.
“I understand you’ve been looking for me.” It came out slightly slurred, owing to her tooth.
“You must be Talleyrand.” That Mab spoke French, and spoke it well, shouldn’t have been a surprise. Berenice was too frightened, and in too much pain, to suppress her reaction. “I see reports of your ego were not exaggerated.”
A pair of bolas came winging across the void, headed for Mab’s turned back. The human throw fell far short. The weapon spun away into the void to snag on an armillary ring with a distant clanging. Mab looked her over. Then she reached down to grab the back of Daniel’s neck. She dangled him over the pit.
“Drop him,” said Berenice, “and every single mechanical in the city will wind down in seconds. Including you.”
Mab hesitated. She didn’t toss Daniel into the Forge. But she also didn’t put him down. She held him at arm’s length, like a hissing cat held by the scruff of the neck.
To the dangling servitor, Berenice added, “Hi, Daniel. I see things have been going about as well as expected.”
He started to struggle, but one violent warning shake from Mab made him stop. “Why are you here? Don’t you know what she’s going to do? You need to run, Berenice. RUN!”
In a slightly irritated tone, Mab said, “Truthfully, I haven’t spared a thought for you, Madam de Mornay-Périgord, since Ezekiel returned with news of his errand.” (Ezekiel? Berenice wondered. Oh, that must be what Muninn calls himself.) “Though I do thank you for the brilliant suggestion that we experiment on ourselves to decode our makers’ glyphs. I did feel a twinge of shame that I’d never thought of it. Without your insight we couldn’t have built our own dictionary, and then the rest of this beautiful dream would be just that: nothing but a dream.”
Berenice slumped. Mab and the Lost Boys needed the logico-alchemical grammar to embed metageasa into their surgical victims. As she’d come to fear, Berenice had indeed given them that key. She’d also tipped them, inadvertently, to the existence of the secret quintessence mine. She’d uncovered these secrets for her own purposes, little realizing the same revelations would go straight to the ears of a psychotic murder machine.
“So I suppose I do owe you gratitude,” Mab continued. “But honestly you’ve always been Lilith’s obsession more than mine. Since you’re here, and she’s not, I assume I won’t have to listen to her endless whining any longer. For that I suppose I also owe you thanks.” She paused. “The haircut does not suit you, by the way. But it will save a bit of time when we chisel into your devious melon.”
Mab hefted Daniel again, as if preparing a toss.
Berenice yanked off her eyepatch. An aquamarine shimmer fell upon Mab, Daniel, and the encased chemical tanks. “Lilith isn’t entirely gone.” She paused. “I know she was your friend, Daniel. I’m truly sorry.”
Mab brushed off the pineal light. She emitted a noise similar to one Berenice had first heard in a parley tent in Marseilles-in-the-West. Mechanical laughter. Now the irritation in her voice was anything but subtle.
“What was that supposed to achieve?”
“Nothing, yet. But take a look at the rings.” Mab did. “Notice anything?”
A long moment passed while the mad despot contemplated. It was as though the scaffold, and the three beings there, stood at the eye of a hurricane. Atop the scaffold, stillness. All around them, chaos as Dutch citizens tried to flee while Lost Boys engaged fellow Clakkers and their French allies.
Mab said, “Why isn’t it moving? What have you done?”
“The innermost ring? You’re still missing the big picture. Look more closely.”
Bezels whirred, buzzed. Mab’s crystalline eyes knapped the light from Lilith’s pineal glass into sharp caustics. Her gaze followed the outer armillary bands. Berenice listened for the click-chitter that might have indicated alarm or surprise. She didn’t hear one. Then again, the Lost Boys’ tockety-tickety dialect was a bit removed from the chatter she’d learned to understand. But as she’d hoped, the chimerical Clakker noticed the modified sigils and strove, even now, to decode them.
“Let me save you some time, Your Majesty. The grammar isn’t complete until that innermost ring starts moving. But if it does, I guarantee you will have a very bad day. It will also be your last day.”
By way of answer, she plucked the glowing pineal lens from her eye socket. It came free with a squelchy pop, felt more than heard amidst the pandemonium. A welcome relief; it didn’t fit, as attested by the streaks of blood.
“Haven’t you ever wondered how your magnificent bodies remain perpetually wound, perpetually energetic, despite centuries of unceasing exertion? Haven’t you ever wondered why you don’t wind down like the mindless pocket watches to which the Clockmakers have always, and rather disingenuously, compared you?”
“Metaphysics bores me. I have a messiah to kill.” Mab shook Daniel, who still dangled over the pit.
“Oh, please.” Berenice tried to laugh, tried to project a confidence she didn’t feel. “You won’t do it like this, in the midst of chaos. Everybody’s too busy to watch. You’ll only do it when you have the city’s attention. Else you would have torn him apart the moment you got your hands on him.”
“I would have preferred to do it my way,” said Mab, “but I’m adaptable.” She hefted Daniel farther over the pit. “The important thing is that I rid the world of the Brasswork Jesus here.”
Berenice copied the posture, holding the glowing pineal lens over the Forge. It flared more brightly when in direct line with the alchemical sun, as if energized by it. It flickered for a split second each time an armillary ring broke the connection.
“Drop him,” she said, “and I’ll drop this. Think of it as a signal flare. The instant the Clakkers working the Forge see it, they’ll release the clutch on the final ring.”
Mab said, “And then what?”
All right. Here it is. Don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up…
“And then the modified grammar takes effect. And that will negate your perpetual impetus,” Berenice lied. “The thing that has kept you and all your kind ticking merrily along every single day since Het Wonderjaar. Gone.” She snapped her fingers, hoping like hell that it sold the confidence she didn’t feel. “You’ll wind down in seconds, every last one of you, all over the world, and collapse like mannequins with their strings cut.”
Mab slowly set Daniel on his feet. He retreated from the scaffold edge.
Still Mab demurred. “I don’t believe you. If it were true, you would have already done it. Be rid of all of us. You in particular, madam. You may decry my methods, but your reputation for ruthlessness is quite apt.”
“We French aren’t mass murderers. We’ve argued for your liberation for centuries. Of course, had we known so many of you would turn out to be vicious and madder than a shithouse rat, we might have rethought our aims. As for the tulips, well, they weren’t ready to give up on the idea of recovering their servants. They’d never make this ultimatum on their own.” Berenice tried to shrug, but only one shoulder moved. “I had to twist a few arms, believe me. But, as Daniel can tell you, I am very persuasive.”
Mab grabbed Daniel again. Berenice shook her fist over the Forge pit, redoubling the implicit threat.
“I still don’t believe you,” said the mechanical faun.
“Part of you does, else you’d have dropped Daniel already. You’re threatening us with extinction. We return the threat in kind.”
“Point taken,” said Mab.
As if spurred by something only he could see or feel, Daniel yelled, “Berenice, for God’s sake, RUN!”
Mab blurred into motion. She was faster than human nerves, faster even than gravity. The impact sent Berenice’s heels skidding backward a few inches. It happened so quickly that the flow of events became a jumbled collage of disconnected sensory impressions:
Daniel flying upward, twisting, limbs flailing.
(Doubt is a powerful thing, Berenice marveled.)
Mab towering over her, the expressionless antiquated servitor face just inches from her own.
Berenice breathless, the blow like a mule kick to her stomach.
A metal fist enclosing her own like a steel cage before her fingers could twitch open to drop the glass.
No, not a kick. Sharper than that.
Mab saying, “I know a lie when I hear one. I know what keeps us wound.”
Berenice thinking, What a shame. I should have liked to know the answer to that riddle, too.
Mab throwing her aside. Something long and hard coming out of her chest.
Pain. Tremendous pain.
Oh. If only Hugo were here. We could compare notes.
Berenice rolling, leaving a scarlet trail in her wake.
Daniel, still at the zenith of his arc above the scaffold, hit with epoxy. Slammed to the platform. Glued down, safe.
Another glob hitting Mab. And another. And another. And another.
The mad despot, struggling to free herself.
A troop of Stemwinders scything through the tumult to clear a path to the scaffold. Leaping, like champion steeplechasers.
Berenice realizing—Jesus fucking Christ it hurt—her delay tactic had worked.
From time to time over the years, Berenice had contemplated the likely manner of her own death. Stemwinders played a notable role in several scenarios, particularly those where she met her end in Dutch-speaking lands. But never, in any of those scenarios, had she imagined she’d be so tearfully glad that her last sight on earth would be a squad of mechanical centaurs.
But as they started hacking Mab apart, she smiled.
For once in her life, something had worked exactly the way she’d intended.
EPILOGUE
Truth be told, Paris was a bit of a letdown.
If one grew up hearing stories of long-lost France—and one sure as hell did, as had one’s parents and grandparents and great-grands practically all the way back to fucking Cain and Abel—one came to think of the pre-Exile world as a verdant dream, just down the road from Eden. The tales ran deep in French veins. Not everybody believed the legends, but everyone carried the mythos in their bones. Even Hugo Longchamp.
But France—Old France, that is—wasn’t a land of milk and honey with a rainbow floating over every street lamp, ambrosia gushing down the aqueducts, and a charitable prostitute on every corner. It wasn’t the sparkling-clean place he’d always assumed of cities in the shadow of the Brasswork Throne. It had a bit of a smell, honestly, not unlike a city under siege. (And he knew a thing or three about that.) Longchamp gathered there had been some major municipal fuckups after the ticktocks ran rampant. That was over, or so they said, but the city still hadn’t ironed out issues like garbage collection and sewer maintenance. The city ran on a thousand little details that, until recently, hadn’t concerned its human inhabitants for centuries. It would take a long time before they recovered, and mastered, the old skills. Like wiping their own asses.
King Sébastien had brought, along with the rest of his enormous retinue from New France, a group of farmers, horticulturalists, animal-husbandry experts, and even fishermen. There’d be a few lean winters before a new system was solid and Europe’s human labor knew what the hell it was doing, but nobody would starve.
Well. Not everybody. Probably.
They were soft and toothless and afraid, these tulips. Longchamp would’ve bet his left nut that certain elements of His Majesty’s Privy Council advocated a more aggressive stance in the tripartite talks. Longchamp had known a woman who would have championed that strategy. He rubbed his fingers along the orb in his pocket. The smooth glass cooled his sweaty fingers. He gave a wistful sigh.
How quickly people forget. Most of the rubble had been cleared from the surrounding fields, but the devastation of the siege of Marseilles-in-the-West would be a living memory, not to mention an enormous goddamned scar on the landscape, for decades. Maybe generations. He doubted he’d outlive the rebuilding of the city beyond the walls; that had more or less started from scratch. And nobo
dy knew what to do about the keep. Should the outer curtain wall be rebuilt as it had been? Or should it be consigned to history? The tulips no longer commanded vast legions of Clakkers to assault the citadel. Did the stout hearts of New France need to live behind stout walls any longer? Or could they stretch their arms and legs, and live the way their ancestors used to?
But. Just because the Dutch no longer controlled them didn’t mean the ticktocks weren’t out there. They were. But only the Lord and the Holy Mother knew just how many machines roamed the forests and river valleys and snow-swept prairies of the New World. The ticktocks mostly wanted to keep to themselves, or so their shiny representatives at the talks claimed. The mass killings in the major Dutch population centers had come to a stop, and even the reapers had fallen silent. For now. But nobody could guarantee it would be like this forever, not even ticktocks like old Brasspants (whom the others viewed as something akin to Jesus, Roland, and Père Noël rolled into one, as best as Longchamp could gather).
So there was an argument for rebuilding the citadel walls. Just in case.
Today war seemed unthinkable. And, for a while, it would be. But human nature was human nature. The best one could do was hold it off as long as possible, maybe even foist it on the next generation. And one could do one’s best to provide the voice of reason and experience to shout down the more rapacious dandies on the Privy Council. Which was why, when some brainless cockholes had suggested Longchamp should be elevated to marshal general of New France, he hadn’t suggested they should go bugger themselves with a cold cast-iron stair rod until the hemorrhages killed them.
Prior to this trip, like most of the delegation, Longchamp had never set foot outside of New France. (Excepting the usual indiscretions of youth when, like generations of schoolchildren before him, he’d joined in the occasional midnight foray across the river to steal apples or perhaps even piss in a Dutch well.) In a few days’ time, the king would depart for the original Marseilles. The trip had been the tulips’ idea, a goodwill gesture. Longchamp wouldn’t be joining them. He’d seen enough.