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

who wielded it, the power to requisition random Clakkers and rewrite their geasa.
    Sparks would be a useful traveling companion. Especially if she was to stay ahead of the Verderers.
    But she needed a destination before it would matter. Her plan had been to study the pineal glass after escaping the Guild house. A simple bauble with the power to shatter the geasa! The most dangerous object in the world. And a remarkable boon to those who sought to reverse engineer the dark alchemical magics of the horologists. It could have been the key to her long-term goal of rewriting the metageasa to give the ticktock men a new master. It should have meant the end of good French men and women huddling behind high walls, penned in like sheep, living in perpetual dread of the killing blow.
    Her greatest hope for the future of New France. Destroyed. Pulverized beneath a Stemwinder’s hoof.
    Now what? Where could she go, and what could she do to salvage this?
    She’d carried the Talleyrand journals on Clakker construction, along with a pair of epoxy grenades, across the border into Nieuw Nederland after her banishment. But she’d had to stash it all in a New Amsterdam church crypt before talking her way inside the Grand Forge. She’d given one grenade to Jax so that he could corrupt or sabotage the Forge’s chemical armaments. The single remaining grenade wasn’t much, but it could easilybe the difference between freedom and torture for a woman on the run from the Guild. The notes were invaluable—the product of decades of work. She’d have to risk a detour to the church before departing New Amsterdam. But then what?
    The carriage creaked, leaning through a curve in the road. The horses’ hoofbeat rhythm had lost some of its tempo; they were tiring.
    Bracing for the inevitable blast of cold headwind, she opened the flap again. The musk scent of sweaty horses mingled now with something slightly metallic, like iron.
    “Hey,” she said. “I told you to go easy on the horses,” she said. “Don’t kill them on my account. We’ll get there when we get there.”
    The driver craned his neck. He squinted at her—the headwind had coaxed tears from his eyes, though exposure to the elements had long ago given his face a leathery cast—as though trying to decipher the punchline to a joke. But then he grunted, swallowed his argument, and eased the horses into a walk. The gallop-rumble became the slow crackle of snow packed under the wheels. Moonlight glazed wisps of steam from their sweaty haunches. Berenice retreated into her shelter again.
    She downed another swig of the driver’s liquor. It stung her raspy throat like a burning brand and sent her into a coughing fit. She sounded like the driver’s tubercular twin.
    Eventually the liquor and the warmth did cause Berenice to drowse. Coaxed along by the slow swaying of the carriage, she fell into hallucinatory hypnagogic half sleep.
    Berenice awoke to discover that her head had slumped forward and a streamer of drool dangled from her slack lips to the furs she had stolen from Anastasia Bell. The unnatural posture had put a nasty kink in her neck, but she felt no residual numbness or pins and needles, either, which she took as a good sign. But the lantern didn’t sway, nor did the tires rumble. The mailcarriage wasn’t moving. And though she heard no wind, she couldn’t smell the driver’s pipe tobacco. Had they stopped at a carriage inn? But if they had stopped to refresh the horses, surely Sparks or the driver would have taken her inside for a chance at food and better rest.
    She listened, but heard no sign of other travelers. Only the jingling of harnesses, horses’ breathing, and the
crunch
of iron shoes on a snow-packed road. She cracked the door. A wintry gust swirled into the carriage. Lamplight spilled across a layer of fresh snow and shone from the flakes drifting from snow-dusted boughs. She poked her head out. Darkness swallowed the road just ahead of the horses and