The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) by Ian Tregillis Read Free Book Online

to leave the woman for dead, she didn’t have to be
quite
so cruel about it.
    “Oh, damn it.”
    Berenice could at least do something about the cold. Physically carrying Tuinier Bell was out of the question, not only because Berenice lacked the strength but also because Bell’s body was little more than a loose sack of broken bones and that amount of jostling would surely hasten her demise. So Berenice hooked her hands under the other woman’s shoulders and physically dragged her across the room. Bell whimpered and cried out. Berenice had worked up a good sweat by the time she’d pulled Bell out of the room. She deposited the dying woman in the corridor, out of the wind. Then she took the coverings from the bed, wrapped Bell as best she could, and closed the door.
    Berenice considered searching the house. If the Guild had been using this property for a long time, it might be a storehouse of useful information. But the thunderous crashing of Clakkers at war with each other reminded Berenice that she couldn’t spare the time.
    She escaped through the hole in the wall. The wintry air felt like an ice cube rubbed along the empty socket of her eye. She stood atop the porte cochère. The Clakkers’ passage had wiped it clear of snow. She clambered over the edge and fell into a snow bank.
    The clanging and squealing of tortured alloys echoed from behind the house. Berenice crept along the drive. She glimpsed flashes and sparks in the shadows of the carriage house. Well,if there were any horses left on the property, she wasn’t getting to them.
    She turned around. Bell’s carriage had pressed deep ruts into the snow; Berenice followed those now, jogging down the long gravel drive. Soon the tulips would scour every inch of the countryside in their search for a one-eyed woman. She couldn’t do anything about the blood matted into her clothes, but she could do something about the missing eye. So while running she again retrieved the leather pouch that hung from the cord around her neck. It contained her real glass eye, the gift from Longchamp, returned in the first days of her incarceration. The
crunch
of snow beneath her stolen boots drowned out the wet squelch as the eye slid into place. Longchamp’s gift was a much better fit than Jax’s prism.
    The pineal glass was destroyed. Her best opportunity for breaking the Dutch hegemony: lost.
    Well. At least it got her out of Bell’s hands. And for that Berenice was extremely grateful.
    Thank you, Jax, wherever you are.

CHAPTER
3
    T he machines, dozens of them, could have sprinted for weeks upon end without tiring. Alchemically magicked clockworks imbued them with perpetual impetus and inhuman stamina and strength. But humans—soft creatures of meat and bone—tired easily. And so the machines had marched for merely a day, a night, and another day when their human commanders ordered a halt. In that time they never deviated from the North River, from its mouth in New Amsterdam through the canals to the icy shores of the lake the French called Champlain. They’d covered three hundred miles on their march almost due north from the Atlantic tip of New Amsterdam.
    Winter’s arrival had stripped the river valley of its color. Gone were the rolling hills of robin’s-breast orange, marigold yellow, and cherry red. The fallen leaves now lay beneath a deep white blanket, and the naked stone of the umber river bluffs now sported silver rime. Gone, too, was the rustle of wind through autumnal boughs, the earthy smell of freshly harvested fields.
    The broken servitor, the one with the weathervaning head who claimed to be called Glastrepovithistrovantus—Glass forshort—had seen and heard and smelled these things from the air. He’d flown above the river, and crawled its bed, but until this march he’d never walked alongside it. His footprints in the silty mud, headed south instead of north, had long since been erased by the restless current. He never mentioned this. And he never