The mechanical the alche.., p.7
The Mechanical (The Alchemy Wars), page 7
The heliograph atop the Spire flashed a message to its twin on the ground. A moment later a return blink shone from the shadows of the courtyard below. Somewhere behind her a pump rattled to life. Then a valve beneath the funicular track opened with a hiss. The pump, working in concert with several others situated at various heights along the tower, sluiced water against the pull of gravity into the ballast tank in the upper funicular car. The car at the bottom of the spire must have carried a full load of people en route to the king’s apartments, else the butterball marquis himself might have provided sufficient ballast to drive the funicular. The plumbing noises abated; the pump chugged to a stop. Metal screeched as the brakeman let out the stops. Berenice gave the marquis a genial nod as the car descended. He pretended not to see her. The minister dozed with his chin on his chest.
A breeze came off the distant river. From her high vantage she gazed past the fortifications of the outer keep, beyond the city, toward the horizon where the setting sun twinkled on the water. The wind shook the leaves of towering white elms and yellow birch before whickering through the few remaining tall grasses along the muddy, artillery-churned western slopes of Mont Royal. The Dutch had decamped back south a month earlier, leaving behind only the privy trenches for the human commanders and the various scars of warfare on the landscape. They hadn’t cut many trees from the surrounding forest; only the humans had needed firewood, and they were but a small contingent of the forces that had besieged Marseilles-in-the-West. And Clakkers had no use for privy trenches, so while Marseilles-in-the-West was nearly overrun the fortress city had at least been spared the stench of a massive human encampment outside its walls. The wind fluttering the pennants atop the outer keep and teasing Berenice’s hair carried the loamy smell of damp earth, the fresh scent of the river, and, even now, a ghostly chemical astringency. The miasma wafted from the battlefield.
It was the scent of secret reagents used to melt down the quick-set epoxy resins French grenadiers had hurled into the lines of Clakker infantry. Immediately following the cease-fire, the fields had been stippled with immense crystal flowers of variegated hues. The petals in this giant’s garden were streamers of epoxy, like water balloons frozen in the moment of bursting. Many such blasts had entombed clockwork assassins like deadly insects in amber. But the Dutch had laboriously chiseled massive blocks from the diamond-hard coatings (or, more correctly, their mechanical servitors had) to cart the immobilized Clakkers back across the border to Dutch territory. Likewise they had scoured the battlefield for any fragments of the few mechanicals impaled by the experimental steam harpoons or ruptured by explosives. The crystalline debris posed a hazard for plows and hooves. So once the tulips took their broken toys home, there was nothing to do but send out the chemists. Hence the astringent odor on the wind.
Berenice descended. The stairs bounced slightly underfoot as the stiff breeze eddied around the Spire. Another half-turn along the stairwell put her out of the wind. It swirled through the inner and outer keeps, past stables and smithies and chapels with the Blessed Virgin’s image in stained glass, past the gleaming chromium-plated tanks of the chemical-processing plants, to meander through the town beyond the walls. Wisps of ash swirled over the charred remnants of large swaths of the town. A favorite Dutch terror tactic was to cover their Clakkers in burning pitch and send them for a stroll through enemy territory. The docks had taken the worst of it. She watched the wind tug at streamers of wood smoke rising from chimneys where the city hadn’t burned. The smoke stretched into wispy streamers, blushing slightly in the sunset.
Situated so close to the head of the Saint Lawrence Seaways, and thus being an invaluable center for commerce and trade, the town of Marseilles-in-the-West had grown far beyond the original vision. The town lay mostly to the north, east, and south, hugging the land between the river and the star-shaped perimeter of the outer keep. The outer fortifications had been designed by the great Marquis de Vauban himself, who had accompanied Louis XIV on the long flight from Paris, and featured numerous modifications to the standard star-fort plan to account for clockwork assailants. It bristled with machiocolations and tenailles, bastions and retrenchments. Seen from the Spire, the serrated boundary of the outer keep resembled a ring of spear points arrayed to keep the world at bay.
The funicular had docked at the bottom of the Spire by the time she had descended another revolution of the stairs. The marquis hopped gracefully from the car to the narrow platform. The minister, less so.
Few new notes had appeared in the mortar of the Spire, meaning she had little snooping to do on the way down. It gave her time to visit the pigeon coops, too, which were situated halfway down the Spire and could frequently be counted upon to provide something interesting. But it had been a quiet day. The on-duty birdkeeper apologized; they hadn’t received a bird all day. And the outgoing messages were the usual fare, hardly worth the detour. So Berenice resumed her descent.
Once free of the stair, she navigated the high terraces of the inner keep. She passed the hulking boilers of dormant steam-powered harpoons. It was an intriguing concept, to be sure, but not very practical. Fighting mechanical demons with an oversized teakettle? No projectile could ever be faster than a Clakker’s reflexes. Aside from a handful of lucky hits, the mechanical onslaught had been held off with area-effect weapons: chemical adhesives, chemical explosives. Unless somebody devised a better martial application, or a way to turn it into a lucrative trade with the Orient, steam power seemed destined for the scrap heap of technological curiosities.
Narrow timber walkways connected the terraces; Berenice stepped lightly in her heels and gown across moats of corrosive acid and deep trenches bristling with land mines. In peacetime, the trenches were planted with crops, the moats filled with water and freshwater fish. And if the cease-fire did resolve into a lasting peace, the mines would be cleared away, the moats pumped down and sprayed with a neutralizer. The death traps would once again become sanctuaries for delicate life. But for now the invasion preparations stayed in place. Just in case. If things went awry and the Dutch breached the outer walls, Marseilles-in-the-West could be swarming with Clakkers in no time. And every moment that could be gained to slow their advance might mean the difference between a living monarch and the death of dreams of long-lost France.
She made better progress once she reached the broad granite avenues of the outer keep. Here she needed dodge only artisans, priests, and the occasional fishwife hawking the last remnants of the day’s catch from the pair of rivers that bounded the Isle of Mount Royal. Rarely did a misstep in the outer keep prove deadly, or even particularly unpleasant. The soil collectors did a respectable job of sweeping the streets in the wake of the horse-and mule-drawn carts that ferried goods between the keep and the surrounding city.
She glimpsed several members of an Algonquin band; native trading parties were a rare but welcome sight this time of year. They’d had an audience with the king earlier in the week, as befitted honored guests. If not for their ancestors’ help in bygone centuries—first against the Iroquois Confederacy, later against the Dutch—New France would have disappeared from the map long ago. The traders spoke with Lilith; Berenice wondered what they could possibly have to discuss with the rogue mechanical.
Berenice detoured through the laboratories in order to stay abreast of any interesting technical developments. She diverted what funds she could afford from activities of spycraft—observing, suborning, stealing, blackmailing—to the more esoteric explorations by the women and men with academic titles and strange enthusiasms. It was a paltry sum, but it did earn their gratitude. The silly steam weapons had come from explorations like this, but so had the quick-set epoxies that were now part of the standard anti-Clakker ordnance. So she stopped in a large stone silo that had originally been intended for grain storage but which had become badly overrun with rats. The grain had been moved out, the technicians moved in, and a litter of lazy cats stayed. Though the evening was getting long in the tooth, the laboratory didn’t suffer from lack of activity. It never did, regardless of the hour. Scientists were a strange lot.
But to her annoyance she found they were still playing with something they called a “pile”: alternating layers of dissimilar metal bathed in a caustic chemical paste. Such arrangements gave rise to macabre party tricks. Several weeks earlier they had proudly demonstrated how the pile, along with a pair of wires, could be used to make the severed legs of a dead frog twitch and kick as if afflicted with St. Vitus’s dance. At the time she had assumed the scientists would outgrow their divertissement and move on to more useful efforts. Instead, they had doubled down—now the piles were considerably larger. Large enough to send sparks flying between metallic electrodes, to snap and crack and make the laboratory smell as if a thunderstorm had recently passed through. It was impressive, but when pressed on how this trick could be used on the battlefield, the scientists hemmed and hawed.
“Perhaps,” ventured one woman, “we could strike the Clakkers with lightning of our own making.”
“Interesting,” said Berenice. She asked, “What happens when a Clakker is struck by lightning?”
Nobody knew.
The sun had melted into the horizon by the time she gained the top of the north wall. A guard watched the sunset through a smoke-darkened glass. When the limb of the sun had disappeared, he turned an hourglass. Then he sighed and slouched inside a crenelle. Berenice gave a discreet cough. He started, turned, bowed.
“Vicomtesse. You are very quiet.”
“I know several who would take issue with your assessment. As you were.”
The guard pulled a pipe from his belt. Berenice rifled her mental filing cabinet for his name while he tapped cold ashes from the bowl. Maurice, a corporal; he’d joined up after his wife left him, which was just before the siege. They’d joked about her timing.
Inspecting the bowl of his pipe, he said, “You’ve come to visit our friend, no?”
“Yes.”
“He waits still for his masters to reclaim him.”
“It’s very patient,” said Berenice. She listened. “And quiet.”
The flare of a distant hot-air balloon briefly lit the gloaming like the spark of a lumbering firefly. A sparrow fluttered past. Hurrying home before full dark.
“Pleasant night for being patient.”
“Yes.”
Maurice pulled a waxed-paper packet of sulphur matches from his belt. He removed one and tucked the rest away. After wedging the pipe stem between his teeth, he made to strike the match on the coarse stone of the battlement, using one hand as a windbreak. This section of the parapet, Berenice noticed, was darkened with myriad dark streaks such as those made by matches. He started to flick his wrist but, apparently remembering in the same instant that he was not alone and that the light of his match would have broken the siege protocols, caught himself. Though the assault had ended—for now—the Keep’s defenders still cleaved to siege disciplines while there was any chance the cease-fire might crumble. Chief among those disciplines was taking care to not present targets to the enemy. Such as the spark of a lit match after sunset.
The unlit match went fluttering over the wall. A faint tink sounded from the shadows below. The pipe almost went over the wall, too, but Maurice secured it with just a bit of bobbling.
Berenice appreciated the show. Though it caused the stays to lay siege against her rib cage once again, the laugh was most welcome after the long, frustrating, and bewildering council meeting. The soldier coughed. With as much dignity as could be mustered (not much, to Berenice’s eye) he tucked the pipe away as though he’d never intended to smoke it.
He finally chanced a look in her direction. She cocked her head and gave him an innocent smirk as though expecting a question or inconsequential observation.
“Ah,” he said.
“I won’t tell Longchamp.” Berenice shrugged. “I think we can trust the tulips won’t attack tonight. And as for our friend down there, well, it already knows we’re here.”
“Ah,” he repeated. But the pipe didn’t come out again. “The vicomtesse is the soul of kindness.”
“Again, I know several who would question your assertion. And anyway, I came out here to the shatter the protocols.” She stepped into a crenelle, braced her hands on the battlements, and leaned over the parapet.
“The sergeant will not like that, my lady.” Maurice shook his head. “His wrath is a fearsome thing.”
“Oh, you’re not afraid of old Longchamp. He’s a kitten.” She squinted into the shadows below the battlement. Her eyes could just make out a dark silhouette in the fading light of dusk. It was a hole in the deepening night, nearly the same color as the inside of her eyelids in a lightless room. “Now. Be a good soldier and fetch a torch, a piece of chalk, and a stout length of rope.”
“My lady?”
“It needn’t be terribly stout. I assure you I am thinner than the gown suggests. Now scoot.”
He trotted down the stairs, hobnails scritching on the uneven stone. Berenice kept her eyes on the silhouette beneath the embrasure. She could just discern the assailant if she tried to peer at it from the corners of her eyes rather than straight on. That was an old campaigner’s trick she’d learned from Longchamp.
Even by day, the lone Clakker was nearly invisible from her vantage point almost directly above. It had managed to creep up to the inflected corner of a sharp tenaille on the north side of the keep where the glint of sunlight wouldn’t give it away. Shrubbery and ivy nourished by rain runoff from the wall hadn’t been properly pruned back, hiding the Clakker from observers outside the wall, and a bartizan added sometime after the original construction—and clearly not part of Vauban’s plan—partially obscured the defenders’ view into the corner. Thoughtless modifications and lazy maintenance had given the keep a blind spot, and now the forgotten Clakker was almost as invisible to its enemies above as it was to its masters on the field.
Thank you, Saint Jean, for sharp-eyed and sharp-eared officers.
Straining with her ears proved pointless. All through the keep lamplighters had come out in force, meaning the great brass bourdon bell of the Basilica of Saint Jean-Baptiste chimed vespers. The call to evening prayer reverberated through the keep, rebounding from the high walls like surf crashing on the craggy shore of Hudson Bay. It rattled her teeth. Berenice gripped the battlements. She doubted the Clakker on the wall would be inclined to catch her even if it weren’t encrusted in a glassy cocoon.
The temperature had dropped with the sun. Cool evening air put a chill on her skin. She had eschewed a lengthy detour to obtain a shawl en route to the wall. The duke’s offer goaded her to action. She’d been dying to see this beast up close since the day it nearly entered the keep. And that was before the bitch queen Margreet made a public show of rendering her deaf and blind to the heart of the Empire.
They had to learn all they could from this Clakker. There would be another war someday; maybe not this year, maybe not in five years’ time, but someday. It could easily come sooner than Berenice—or her successor Talleyrand—could replace the dead agents in The Hague. She shivered, but not from cold.
Maurice returned. And, judging from the voices and the scritching of hobnails on the stairs, he was trailed by several off-duty guards. He must have gone to the barracks to fulfill her request. Soldiers had a nose for cheap entertainment. Berenice wondered if the story of her escapade would touch Louis’s ears before her lips did. Probably. She’d made a study of rumor propagation some years back; good work, even if those troglodytes in the Académie des Sciences had rejected the manuscript.
“Your things, my lady.”
The torch Maurice offered appeared to be a sturdy length of maple—a repurposed chair leg?—one end wrapped in rags and doused in pine resin. On his shoulder he wore a coil of coarse hemp rope twice as thick as her thumb. After she took the rope and torch, he dropped a nub of chalk into her palm. She frowned at it. He shrugged.
“Next time, try romancing a schoolmistress.”
“I did. How do you think I ended up here?”
Berenice tied a loop at the end of the rope, just wide enough for both her feet. She kicked off her shoes. The cool stone chilled her feet and elicited twinges from her calves: charley horses flicking their tails in irritation. She draped the looped end of the rope over the parapet. When it hung a yard below the battlement, she gestured to the guards who had returned with Maurice.
“Make yourselves useful, you two. Take the other end and try not to drop me.”
They looked at each other, then shrugged. They took up the rope. One tied it around his waist and braced himself behind an empty two-chamber iron cauldron while the other donned gloves and prepared to feed the slack. Like numerous others dotted along the outer wall, the cauldron had contained curatives and epoxy during the siege. And, like the others, it had seen extensive use.
She sat on the edge and hooked her feet in the loop. They lowered the rope a few inches at a time until she could put her weight on it. Gripping the rope with one hand and holding the torch in the other, she shoved off the wall and dangled eighty feet above the ground. The hiss of breath through Maurice’s teeth told her his opinion of this idea.
“I’ll thank you gentlemen not to sneak glances inside my bodice.” When she hung with her eyes level with his boot soles, she raised the torch. “Put those matches to good use, won’t you?”
Maurice’s companions looked over their shoulders. One fellow, the anchor, actually took a hand off the rope to cross himself.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Berenice. “If it will put you big strong men at ease, I’ll make certain the dread sergeant knows this was my idea. I’ll tell him I threatened to bop your noses bloody if you balked.”
