The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  He hadn’t come to see the lost cities. He hadn’t really come for the peace talks, either, though these made a convenient excuse. He’d come for a funeral. To witness the first Free French citizen interred in Paris since the Exile. She’d given her life for New France, but she would have given so much more, he knew, just to sit on this bench and witness the fulfillment of her lifelong goal: the King of France strolling the boulevards of Paris.

  Though she’d been aggravating, and stubborn, not to mention fucking reckless, she’d had more drive and vision than anybody he’d ever known. And she’d been a friend. He owed it to her to be here now. The doctors had told him he was too weak for a long sea voyage. He’d told them he’d row across the goddamned ocean himself if he had to, though not before introducing them to several anatomical concepts not on the curriculum of any French medical college.

  So now here he was, lounging in the shade of flowering chestnut trees, on an island much smaller than Île de Vilmenon, listening to the gurgle of a river much smaller than the waterways of home. The Seine was pleasant, in its own way, but it wasn’t a patch on the Saint Lawrence. Nothing here could hold a candle to home. France had been lost long ago, and its children had moved on.

  A sonorous gonging intruded on his thoughts. The newly refurbished great bourdon bell of Notre-Dame de Paris shook the city, the island, his bones, his French heart. He’d read that Emmanuel—for that was the name Louis XIV had bestowed upon this largest bell—had been cast just prior to the Exile but never installed. Until now.

  Perhaps it wasn’t fair to say the Old World had nothing to offer. The churches were nice. Fucking spectacular, really. He’d fallen to his knees and recited a rosary cycle in several: Saint-Eustache, St-Gervais-et-St-Protais, and, this morning, Sainte-Chapelle, on this very island. Each had stolen his breath away. He wiped his eyes and crossed himself now, offering a prayer of thanks to the Blessed Virgin that he, a wicked recidivist sinner, had lived to see such things. Countless people better than he had perished in the struggle to get here.

  The bourdon rang for a good ten or twenty heartbeats before the rest of the bells joined in. From now on, the bells of the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Jean-Baptiste in Marseilles-in-the-West would always sound just a little bit tinny. It pained him.

  From behind him came the quiet crunch of booted feet on raked gravel. Sergeant Élodie Chastain rounded his bench, stepping lightly into his peripheral vision. The sun turned the dye in her dress blues a stunning cobalt.

  “Marshal? It’s time.”

  “So I gathered.”

  Longchamp turned, stiffly, to grasp the canes hooked over the wrought-iron armrest. He jabbed them into the gravel at his feet and, stifling a groan, levered himself upright. It was a slow and undignified process. But Élodie knew better than to offer a helping hand.

  He’d never wield a hammer and pick again. But he still had his scowl, and his tongue, and his knitting needles, for that matter. And somehow, for reasons he’d never unravel, those could still strike awe into the more gullible of his countrymen.

  Once upright, he leaned one cane against his leg just long enough to double-check the contents of his pocket. He hadn’t dropped the eye. Good. He started forward; Élodie cleared her throat and gave a little nod at the ceremonial baton lying on the bench. He pretended he’d merely forgotten it, and she, being an excellent sergeant, pretended to believe him. He tucked it in his belt.

  “All right, ma jeune fille. We have hymns to sing, heroes to honor, oceans to cross, cities to rebuild.” He paused, adjusting his grip on the canes. “And the ticktocks won’t intimidate themselves, you know.”

  Daniel stood in the narthex, watching through the screen as congregants filed into the nave. The King of New France was already there, in the front row, as was a representative of the Sacred Guild of Horologists and Alchemists, and the senior-most surviving members of the Council of Ministers, which was the sole remaining administrative body in what used to be the Central Provinces. Daniel also recognized representatives from the Cree, Iroquois, Naskapi, Sioux, and Mi’kmaq. The French had extended the invitation to others as well, but he had yet to see any Inuit exploring Paris. But, then, he’d been a little busy.

  The participants called the peace negotiations tripartite talks, but in truth it was much more complicated than that. The Dutch refugees fleeing the former Central Provinces sought new lives beyond the ragged fringes of Nieuw Nederland. (The journey took patience; crossing the ocean on a Dutch vessel took much longer than it used to. Shipbuilding was just one of hundreds of skills they’d have to relearn. Unsurprisingly, the French had rebuffed requests for aid on that front.) But their ancestors had seen no reason to engage the native populations of the New World with honesty or courtesy or compassion. The memory of that treatment would persist to the nth generation. So while the maps wouldn’t be finalized for a long time, it was already evident the Dutch would not be permitted to expand west of the Appalachian Mountains. And woe to those who tried.

  The booming of the church bells muffled the whirring of Daniel’s eyes as he refocused; as he feared, there was an open spot in the front row amongst the other dignitaries. The leaf springs in his legs expanded, contracted. A mechanical sigh. He’d have to join them soon.

  Well. He couldn’t begrudge Berenice this. She had saved his life, after all. And maybe, just maybe, many others. In the months since the events at the Forge, he found he even missed the Frenchwoman. She’d been an ally, perhaps even a friend, in her own way. But he still didn’t know what he was going to say. He’d never spoken at a funeral. And that felt shameful, given how many had died in his wake since he’d gained Free Will.

  More than anything else, it was their memory that drove him to accept the mantle others laid upon him. Maybe, he hoped, the long, terrible journey would give rise to something valuable.

  Fading reverberations filled every corner of the cathedral. The cavernous nave echoed with shuffled feet, discreet coughs, hushed conversation, and the clicking and ticking of a hundred mechanicals. So many of his kinsmachines had wanted to attend the service—so eager were they to witness Daniel delivering his eulogy—that they’d had to institute a lottery for the mechanicals’ share of space at the ceremony.

  A steady stream of congregants filed through the great cathedral doors. He recognized a pair of French guards. The guardswoman had sailed with Daniel on the Griffon. Daniel had met her senior officer in the final hours of the siege of Marseilles-in-the-West. Back then he’d been an imposing figure streaked with ash and blood, radiating fury and exhaustion in equal measure. Today he hobbled on a pair of canes as if the weight of his golden epaulettes bent his back. The marshal had been a friend of Berenice’s, too.

  They gave him a nod as they passed. Most humans couldn’t tell individual mechanicals apart. But even they could recognize Daniel. He still wore the damage he’d taken during his aborted execution. Most notably the handprints pressed, perfectly but faintly, into his shoulders. His body screeched when he raised his arms. It always would.

  Élodie broke off to join him in the corner. “They won’t start without you,” she whispered.

  Daniel’s French was coming along. When he’d realized he’d have no choice but to represent his fellow mechanicals in the talks (a role that grated worse than sand in a gear train), he’d decided he should at least be able to speak without a translator.

  “I can hope,” he said.

  “How are the talks going?” She waited for a particularly large clump of faithful to pass into the nave. Regular citizens, by the look of them. She hunched her shoulders as if yearning for the reassuring heft of chemical tanks slung over her back. “Please tell me we’re not going to have to fight our way out of here.”

  She meant Paris. The Old World.

  “I don’t think so.” Knowing she couldn’t understand the nuances of mechanical body language as Berenice might have, he consciously emulated a human shrug. The shriek of warped metal pierced the cathedral, momentarily drow
ning out the choir hymn. Human congregants craned their necks for the source of the noise. The Dutch had become particularly jumpy when it came to unfamiliar mechanicals. Many rank-and-file French shared that affliction, despite the achievements of the Griffon expedition.

  After the awkwardness passed, he whispered, “The broad outlines are there. It’s just a matter of hammering out the minutia. With luck, it won’t take a human lifetime.”

  A large portion of The Hague, centered on the Grand Forge, would be ceded to all Clakker-kind. Daniel and his fellow mechanicals were citizens of their own country, their own ideals. They carried their nation inside their ticking hearts, their free minds. Their souls, even. National boundaries were meaningless to nigh-immortal beings that never slept, never ate, never felt cold or hunger. But humans put great stock in such things. So the Forge would become the Clakkers’ “capital,” for lack of a better analogy. The proposal was modeled on the original Vatican within Rome.

  This arrangement gave mechanicals control over their own destiny. It ensured the Grand Forge would never again be used as a tool of oppression. It also hampered the designs of any human agents who might feel tempted to turn Berenice’s doomsday gambit from a bluff into reality: Revoking the perpetual impetus, if such were even possible (and the Clockmakers seemed split on the issue), would require access to the Forge itself. It even enabled the mechanicals to reproduce, albeit in the manner peculiar to their kind.

  But that required quintessence. And the New World powers—the French, and their native allies—controlled the only known source. They’d share it, so long as the reapers and fugitive Lost Boys—Mab’s hardliner holdouts—were kept under control. Humans of all stripes wanted to live without fear of massacre.

  Daniel’s most difficult job was convincing his fellows to band together to reel in the more extreme and dangerous members of their kin. Doing so went against their strict libertarian ideals. But there were those machines who recognized the wisdom in this, who understood that Free Will didn’t magically make the world black and white. And there were others who were simply grateful for anything that provided an honorable direction in life; amongst them, many machines who subscribed to the Catholic notion that Free Will and the immortal soul were inseparable. Those strove to preserve their hard-won souls from the stain of sin. Consequently, many of his kin saw stewardship of the brittle, untested peace as an essential effort. Essential for the greater good, and essential for salvation.

  An essential globe-spanning effort. He’d spoken to a few mechanicals who’d sailed with the king. Four days into the crossing, the lookouts had spotted a pair of titanships gliding across the far horizon. Nobody knew what had become of the sentient vessels. Sailors, for whom tale-telling was a staple of the profession, claimed the machines congregated in the warm waters of the distant South Pacific, thousands of leagues from the nearest shore. It might have been true. It might have been a tall tale. Nobody could say for certain.

  Someday soon, Daniel knew, somebody would have to follow up on this. Preferably before the titans decided to hunt every human vessel on the sea. He added it to a constantly growing mental list. Foremost on that list was the Neverland expedition, to find and free those mechanicals still suffering under Mab’s geasa. But Neverland was just part of the puzzle. The combined human/mechanical teams would be traveling the globe for years to come, seeking every last pocket of Clakkerdom where the metageasa had not yet been erased. And then there were the Lost Boy holdouts, with their dire knowledge and vast number of unused human pineal lenses…

  The Dutch brought very little to the table except reparations. Reparations to the French for the destruction wrought in the recent war, and for the lands taken from their ancestors. Reparations to the Church, too. Dutch coffers, which by all accounts were breathtakingly deep, would finance most of the work, including the many expeditions, for decades to come.

  Of course, Daniel’s fellow mechanicals had demanded, and received, the most extensive and extravagant reparations from their former masters. First and foremost, the Guild would be busy for quite some time repairing any damaged mechanicals who wished it. (Daniel had opted to keep the handprints. His journey had changed him profoundly; it seemed wrong, then, to revert his body to its days as Jax.) But not just repairing them: teaching them everything they needed to know to repair themselves. Not merely the superficial maintenance, but deep secrets of operation and construction. Instructing them in the mysteries of their own bodies. Training an entirely new class of mechanical alchemists and mechanical horologists.

  The price of peace was that the Guild disseminate its secrets to all Clakker-kind.

  But as long as the Dutch kept to the agreements, and allowed regular ongoing inspections by large teams of both mechanical and French inspectors tasked with certifying that no new alchemical and horological research had been undertaken, they’d be left in peace. Nobody truly believed the Clockmakers had ceded every last scrap of information in their records.

  In return, the mechanicals’ workspaces had to submit to inspections by joint French and Dutch teams. As Daniel pointed out to his fellows, it was in everybody’s best interests that the Verderers’ procedure for removing a human’s Free Will stay buried and lost forever.

  We’ve got to rein in the Lost Boys. We’ve got to find those lenses.

  It was all for the best. This way, whether real or perceived, there were checks and balances all around.

  More encouragingly, several of his fellows had approached the French contingent about paints, dyes, and other ways they might individualize themselves. He’d introduced them to Doctor Mornay, whom the French had rescued from the ruins of the Summer Palace. She still trembled in the presence of mechanicals, but as Daniel had hoped, the challenge of formulating an effective paint for alchemical alloys had intrigued her. Fascinating days ahead…

  “I’m going to old Marseilles in a few days.” Whispering didn’t hide the excitement in Élodie’s voice. “Will you be joining us?”

  Daniel shook his head, again in deliberate emulation of the human gesture. “Back to The Hague,” he said. Not for another funeral, however; they’d buried Anastasia Bell months ago, and he hadn’t felt inclined to attend. “I had friends, fellow servants in the city. I’d like to know what happened to them.” She gave a sincere nod; the desire for companionship wasn’t confined to humans. He continued, “After that, I’ll go to New Amsterdam. I have to find my former owners.”

  She recoiled, taken aback. “I thought you’d want nothing to do with them, after all this.”

  “If they’re still around, if they survived, they might have the information I need to fulfill a promise. There is, or was, a family that helped me when I sought refuge with the ondergrondse grachten. I owe them.”

  An unfulfilled promise, he’d discovered, felt just a bit like a geas, albeit without physical pain. But, like a geas, the obligation persisted and couldn’t be ignored.

  The last few congregants filed in. The doors closed.

  “We’d better find our seats,” said Élodie. After a moment’s contemplation, she offered her arm. “I know this is a funeral and not a political rally. But… we could make a nice statement. If you wanted to.”

  It felt good to laugh. It wasn’t something he did very often.

  “Madamoiselle Chastain, I hope that all sides learn from your example.”

  Daniel took the sergeant’s arm and together they strode into the cathedral proper. He still hadn’t decided how to eulogize Berenice.

  Freedom, he had learned, was one damn thing after another.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to Howard Andrew Jones for his close and dedicated read of an early draft. His thoughtful feedback was exactly what the book needed. Thank you also to Dr. Corry L. Lee for an offhand comment she probably doesn’t remember, but which provided a crucial insight. And thanks again to Tieman Zwaan for language advice.

  The secret backstory of the Alchemy Wars world was inspired and informed in
large part by the extraordinary scholarship of Dr. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, whose study of Newton’s alchemical work is unparalleled. For a glimpse at the truth behind this world, I highly recommend her work, particularly The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy.

  As ever, I consider myself extremely fortunate to have such fierce and thoughtful advocates in Kay McCauley and John Berlyne.

  Likewise, I’m humbled by the enthusiasm and dedication brought to every single page of the Alchemy Wars trilogy by the great people at Orbit. Taking a manuscript from laptop to bookstore shelves is a long journey requiring the efforts of many people, all of whom deserve my sincere gratitude. They have it, in abundance. I’ve worked most closely with Anna Jackson, Will Hinton, Lindsey Hall, and Ellen Wright. They’re great, as are the copyeditors and proofreaders who labored long and hard so that these books would make sense.

  I am thankful beyond words for my loving wife, Sara. Her kindness, wisdom, and gentle encouragement sustained me when I couldn’t bear the thought of spending yet another evening at the keyboard.

  extras

  meet the author

  Photo Credit: Anton Brkic/Pixel Images

  IAN TREGILLIS is the son of a bearded mountebank and a discredited tarot card reader. He was born and raised in Minnesota, where his parents had landed after fleeing the wrath of a Flemish prince. (The full story, he’s told, involves a Dutch tramp steamer and a stolen horse.) Nowadays he lives in New Mexico with his wife and a pampered cat, where he consorts with writers, scientists, and other unsavory types.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  THE LIBERATION,

  look out for

  WAKE OF VULTURES