The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Read Online Free PDF Page A

The timing was about right. She’d been sequestered here in the countryside for over two weeks since the Stemwinders caught her dulling her blade in the duc de Montmorency’s eye socket. He’d revealed her identity as Talleyrand to the tulips. So: say a week to get an urgent message across the Atlantic to the Central Provinces; several days while the rulers of the Dutch Empire decided what to do with their windfall; and another week for somebody important to make the trek to the New World. The timing worked if they commandeered the most advanced ships and airships in the world. Which is exactly what they’d do for a chance to get in a room with a former Talleyrand.
    Berenice wondered, not for the first time, what they had planned for her. She’d spent the first few days of her incarceration waiting with nauseating dread for the knives and hooks, the hot coals and devilish machinery, to appear. But her captors had treated her no worse than they might a royal princess confined to the grounds of a single estate for some trifling transgression of the byzantine social order. They fed her, clothed her, bathed her, did everything they could to ensure her comfort. For what purpose she couldn’t begin to guess. But the Stemwinders were fanatical about her comfort. The food was excellent. If the tulips thought they could win her cooperationwith honey rather than vinegar… well, so much the better. Why waste all that delicious honey?
    But all good things did eventually find their end. Berenice took it on faith that the appearance of the black carriage signaled the end of her enforced holiday. She wondered if her hosts intended a hard end, complete with white-hot flensing blades and broken bones.
    She sighed and set down her cup. An ache took root in her eye socket like the moaning ghost of her body’s integrity. From the leather pouch hanging between her breasts, Berenice gently removed a glass marble. She swished it around in her mouth, then flinched when it popped into her eye socket with a wet squelch. It wasn’t fitted to the socket; she’d have the world’s worst sinus headache if she kept it in long. Her tongue tingled.
    The black carriage appeared again. It emerged from the snow-blown shadows of the house, passing through the porte cochère beneath her window to roll to a stop before what she assumed was the front door, though she could not see it from her vantage. The rumbling of the carriage wheels along the drive shook loose a cornice of windblown snow from the corbels over the porte, leading to a heavy wet
thump
accompanied by a man’s yelp.
    Berenice turned her chair so that she faced the door rather than the window. These accommodations were smaller than the apartments she and Louis had shared within the keep of Marseilles-in-the-West as members of the court of King Sébastien III. It was just a single room with a locked door and unbreakable glass, plus a private lavatory, but the mattress was soft, the goose down warmer than a widow’s bed had any right to be, and the furniture handsome.
    A Stemwinder entered a moment later. It didn’t knock. There followed a woman, a man, and a second Stemwinder. She’d expected the humans. But the sight of the additionalcentaur caused Berenice’s confidence to collapse like a fragile cornice of wind-sculpted snow. She hadn’t accounted for two monsters.
    Christ on a blood-smeared cross, you tulip bastards just had to throw another wrench at my head, didn’t you?
    The second Clakker carried a chair upholstered in button-tufted chintz matching the one Berenice occupied. The man wore a topcoat of gray twill. He held a somewhat wet and battered top hat and the sour expression of a man much put-upon by the world; he brushed snow from the former and muttered to himself, which did nothing to dispel the latter. The woman was dressed as though she’d been invited to a sleigh ride at the premiere winter ball of the season. The brim of her own hat was just narrower than the door