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

suggested any relationship between himself and the multiple dredges and locks that had recently been installed on the river. Lying by omission was easy; he was getting the hang of that. Far more difficult was hiding his trepidation when the march took them past Fort Orange, a river outpost originally intended as a hub for the beaver pelt trade but later turned into a military hardpoint. He had fallen from the sky over Fort Orange, launched from the fireball demise of a sentient airship. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.
    Dozens of Clakkers, servitors like himself dragged from the smoldering wreckage of the Grand Forge, had been conscripted by the army in those first few hours when their makers’ rage and indignation blazed white-hot. Hotter even than an unfulfilled geas.
    So hot that they didn’t wait to assemble a proper army of military-class Clakkers for this first foray into New France. Lowly servitors could do in a pinch, especially once the horologists annulled their human-safety metageasa. A few mechanicals of the military design—machines
designed
to scythe through humans—filled out the ranks. And though they did not know it, they kept the imposter servitor, the one they called Glass, from fleeing.
    The humans believed his weathervane head and missing flange plates were damages incurred during the fiery destruction of the Grand Forge. They weren’t. But it was convenient to let the humans believe so.
    Many humans had died in the conflagration. Leaving manyClakkers who emerged from the ruins without well-defined owners. Clakker leases always contained provisions for dealing with the demise or incapacitation of the primary leaseholder, but unraveling so many legalistic knots would have taken weeks. Thus the Brasswork Throne (acting through the colonial governor of Nieuw Nederland) had exercised its power of eminent domain to conscript the orphaned Clakkers. Not that anybody felt compelled to thoroughly investigate the leaseholders and track down possible heirs; and anyway, all Clakkers, everywhere, were officially property of the Throne.
    Knowing he shared this excursion with fellow mechanicals who had also been present for the Forge’s collapse filled him with dread. He’d been fighting his own kind atop the rings of a vast armillary sphere orbiting the blazing heart of the Forge when the alchemical sun collapsed, pulling the rest of the building into the blaze like so much kindling. He wondered how many of the Clakkers on this march had been there. If even one recognized him as the fugitive rogue…
    He’d tried and failed to cross the border on his own. He’d tried to reach the
ondergrondse grachten
, the so-called underground canals run by Catholics and French sympathizers intended to ferry free Clakkers out of Nieuw Nederland. But that had failed, too, with the canalmasters’ murder. Now he would try again to enter New France, and this time he would do it at the vanguard of invasion. It could work, as long as nobody recognized him and he never revealed to his fellow mechanicals how the agony of geasa did not touch him, that their makers’ words held no sway over him.
    Glass, whose real name had been Jalyksegethistrovantus—Jax for short—hefted an oven from the bed of the wagon he’d been pulling for the past eighty miles. A bulky thing of iron and ceramic, it might have been at home in an Amsterdambakery. No piddling camp stove would suffice for the leaders of this excursion: One could not prepare a feast on a camp stove. Jax’s fellow yokemate unpacked an additional stove while other servitors constructed tents, made beds, collected fuel. Their human masters saw no need to deprive themselves on a forced march into enemy territory; just because they were marching to war was no reason to accept a lessened standard of living. So it was with soft creatures of blood and flesh.
    The appeltaart had just achieved a golden-brown crust, its filling wafting the scent of apples across the campsite—the commander