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

spaces of his torso. His fingers clicked lightly against his whirring innards, then after a moment he produced a knife. Again the man flinched. But the dread turned into surprise when Jax laid the handle in the palm of his good hand. Jax hadn’t the vocabulary to describe the Frenchman’s expression when he next produced the epoxy grenade and a handful of willow bark. No stranger to medicinal herbs, the man didn’t hesitate to snatch the white willow. Jax doubted it would accomplish much more than dulling the very worst of the pain. And only if the man had a chance to boil the bark into a tea; more likely his injury, and the cold, would kill him before that.
    Jax pointed at the epoxy weapon, then at himself, then shook his head in the human manner. Then he gestured toward the tent flap and again laid his fingertip on the man’s lips.
    With his other finger he jotted in the dirt, in Dutch:
100 of us. Mostly servitors. Swinging east, through Acadia, then down the Saint Lawrence to Marseilles. 1 human commander. 5 lieutenants.
    The man frowned. Jax let him have just a few seconds to read before erasing the message with a swipe of his hand. Nexthe wrote,
Do you understand?
The Frenchman nodded. Jax replaced the query:
Bonne chance.
    A moment later he had erased this and extinguished the torch. He went outside to distract the sentry while the Frenchman cut his way out of the tent. When it came time to leave, Jax found he didn’t have to feign the urgency of another geas. The fear of discovery gave rise to a very natural rattling.

CHAPTER
4
    T he Verderers’ safe house lay somewhere along the North River Valley, far from the outskirts of New Amsterdam. She couldn’t run all the way back to the city. And certainly not in winter, through the snow. But she tried anyway, jogging until she needed to vomit, emptying her stomach, then staggering off again, pausing only as necessary to rehydrate with snowmelt. Running was futile, but she couldn’t help herself: Any moment the quadrupedal
clank-chank
of a mechanical canter would approach from behind, quickly growing loud enough to overwhelm her own hoarse breathing and the
crunch
of snow underfoot.
    She could do nothing about her trail of footprints.
    There wasn’t enough snow in the world to rinse the acid tang of vomit from her mouth. All the air in the world couldn’t sate her fiery lungs, or clear her spinning head and anchor the wheeling stars. Even fear of the Verderers’ wrath couldn’t goad her forever. She was a frail machine of flesh. Perhaps she’d collapse into a snowbank and freeze solid before the Verderers caught her again. Good. Fuck them.
    Her jog became a trot, then a shuffle, then a limp, then eventually a stagger. The cold ache in her fingers and toes became a burn, then numbness, then nothing. The moon cast a silvery light across the snow. The light felt conspicuous, as though some capricious god had chosen to illuminate her struggle for all the world to see. To ease her hunters’ work.
    The effort to stay upright and put one foot in front of the other, and then remembering to do it again, became the entirety of her consciousness. Her thinking mind retreated behind an ascetic trance of pain, crumpled beneath the titanic weight of her exhaustion. Gulps of frigid air scraped her throat and sinuses; her nose bled.
    A new light shone through the trees. It flickered on the snow and cast shifting shadows through the forest. The stars had come undone. They’d traced curlicues in the sky, but now the weight of her exertion had knocked them loose. They’d plummeted to earth and now shone from within forests and valleys. The light approached. The stars had come to warm and embrace her.
    Slowly, like the ponderous shifting of continents, rational thought broke through the hallucination.
    That wasn’t a star. It was a lantern. On an approaching carriage.
    Berenice limped to a halt. She swayed in the middle of the road. There she mashed at her pocket, trying to