The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) Read Online Free PDF

through which she entered; the peacock feather in the brim had been dyed a ghastly shade of lavender that matched her gloves. Beneath the hat she wore a head scarf mottled in a jacquard pattern. Sunlight evinced a lustrous sheen in the voluminous fur stole that threatened to swallow her, suggesting a petite woman wrapped in ermine or mink.
    The second Stemwinder placed the chair across the table from Berenice. Then it extended its arms, allowing the newcomers to use the centaur like a coatrack. They draped it with hats, coats, and stoles. The machine retreated into a corner while the other stood motionless beside the door. The man went to the window, where he squinted at the glare of sunlit snow. The woman seated herself and peered at Berenice across the remains of her breakfast of fruit, toast, roasted potatoes, and chicken sausage. Her leather boots dripped snowmelt on the rug, but the corners of her smile dripped something much colder. Sunlight glinted from the rosy-cross pendant on the fine silver chain around her neck. Nestled in one corner of the cross was a tiny inlaid
v
denoting the Verderer’s Office.
    Clearly this was the person for whom Berenice had been waiting. So who was this tarty bitch from the Clockmakers’ Guild? Somebody with the clout to commandeer ships of the sea and ships of the air. But not so high up the ladder as to score her own retinue of Royal Guards. Not royalty, then, but somebody high in the Guild.
    Berenice concluded the woman now settling across the table was the Tuinier: Anastasia Bell. The woman who ran the Stemwinders.
    It seemed a solid guess. But as for the fellow who plodded along like a piece of flotsam caught in her wake, Berenice hadn’t a Goddamned clue. If Bell had come to question Berenice, she had her own skills and the Stemwinders to apply to the problem. Anybody else was superfluous. Unless questioning wasn’t what they had in mind. They could have questioned Berenice and ripped the answers from her broken body several times since her capture. The fact they hadn’t suggested a different aim.
    A name fluttered to the forefront of Berenice’s mind. Like a scrap of paper caught in an errant breeze, it snagged in the bramble of her thoughts.
Visser.
    A pastor from The Hague. Who had, whether intentionally or inadvertently, given Jax the errand that led to his emancipation from the geasa. Visser had known things only a French agent should have known. But, according to the mechanical, when they met again in New Amsterdam, he’d seemed an entirely different person. The previously pious and compassionate man had become a murderer. It was as though he’d been caught and… altered.
    Berenice tried, with middling success, to sever the tendrils of fear now twining themselves around her stomach and spine. Not wanting her enemies to sense her anxiety, and hoping to set them off-balance, she said, “I assume you intend to change me as you did the pastor.”
    She knew instantly that her stab in the dark had found a target because it cut the supercilious smile from the other woman’s face. She blinked. She cocked her head as if reassessing. It reminded Berenice of Jax.
    “Yes.”
    Nauseating dread sloshed in the pit of Berenice’s stomach. Being right wasn’t much comfort when faced with the impending ministrations of the Verderer’s Office. Berenice willed herself to outward calm.
    “How?”
    The woman removed her gloves and reassumed her composure. “Oh, I couldn’t explain it if I tried. My colleague here, Dr. Vega, is the expert. A pioneer, if truth be told. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”
    The man snorted. His breath frosted the glass.
    A doctor. That wasn’t a good sign.
    Berenice said, “You’re a medical doctor?” Now both newcomers looked at her. “Perhaps later you can inspect my wound,” she said, pointing to her eye. “It’s giving me a bit of trouble.”
    “We certainly can’t have that,” said the other woman. “It’s very important to me—to