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

of this march believed in healthful desserts for his staff, hence the fruit—and the bacon on the stove filled the tent with the white-noise sizzle of hot grease when shouts and yelling pierced the quiet rhythms of the campsite. It happened from time to time, when humans found their slaves’ efforts lacking. But this wasn’t a master excoriating his servant. Somebody was cursing in French.
    Jax had heard more than his share of French profanity thanks entirely to the one-eyed woman who’d talked their way inside the Forge. For a moment he thought perhaps Berenice had followed the column and now been caught. But that was absurd. He didn’t know if she’d departed prior to the fire, and if she hadn’t, whether she’d survived. All he knew was that she’d gone in with malice aforethought.
    And anyway, this was a man’s voice. Made shrill with rage. Or was that mortal terror? By now the oven had made the tent warmer than humans found comfortable, so he tied the flap back, which allowed cooler air to enter and conveniently allowed him to see what had transpired.
    A military scout held a man by the forearm with a grip that was just shy of crunching bone. The fellow wore leather trousers and gloves the color of moldering leaves, a wool coat the color of dirty snow, fur-lined boots, and a hat made from araccoon pelt (complete with tail); a hand ax dangled from a belt loop. Veiny sclera limned the irises of his widened eyes. He looked like a caged animal. Backed into a corner, terrified, bearing its teeth at the world. Jax had once seen a New World wolverine at the Amsterdam zoological gardens. The Frenchman reminded him now of that animal’s combination of terror and fury.
    He might have been a forest runner, one of the original coureurs de bois transported unchanged across the centuries to the modern day from a time long ago when France’s European enemies in the New World spoke English. But the mechanical scout held in its other hand the glistening gel membrane of an epoxy grenade, and that was a modern weapon. Not something one could whittle from birch bark or catch in a snare.
    An avalanche of French poured from the terrified man’s mouth only to pile at his feet, dusty and disregarded like so much unwanted talus. The language sounded to Jax as though the man wrapped each word in silk and tied it with a bow before letting it float past his lips. French was the language of the Catholics, who believed mechanical men were thinking beings capable of Free Will, and that their unswerving bondage indicated something evil, something unholy, had been done to their souls. It was the language of those who would see the end of Clakker slavery.
    It was also the language of the doomed. And that saddened Jax.
    Several servitors like him (
Well, not exactly like me
, he thought) found ways to carry out their duties while watching the human captive. One such mechanical, the filigree on whose escutcheons and flange plates suggested she had been forged about half a century after Jax, making her a young sixty or seventy, rattled the gear train along her spine in a way that inquired,
What’s he saying?
    He’s wetting himself with fear
, said another via the muted twang of a leaf spring and click of overly loosened ratchets.
    No
, said a passing servitor who carried several hundred pounds of firewood, absorbing the swaying of the uneven load through the carefully timed bobbing of its backward knees. The machine paused, listening to the torrent of anxious French before adding,
He’s a brave one. He demands to know our destination and our purpose.
    The military Clakker said,
He’d have to be blind and stupid not to know already.
    The entire conversation took a few seconds.
    If any of their human masters had bothered to notice the exchange, it would have seemed nothing more than the characteristic cacophony of clockworks. Humans were deaf to the language of Clakkers because they didn’t believe it could exist in the first place: