The Rising

[sawyl]

Following swiftly on the heels of the first book in his Alchemy Wars series, Ian Tregillis novel The Rising opens with both his protagonists — the former French spymaster Berenice Charlotte de Morney-Périgord and Jax the Clakker, a rogue mechanical man — in serious situations following the destruction of the Dutch Empire's first Forge in the Americas.

Caught in the act of dealing out revenge to a French traitor, Berenice finds herself imprisoned by the Dutch in comfortable but isolated house upstate from New Amsterdam. After a couple of weeks of inactivity, she has a visitor: Anastasia Bell, the Empire's chief torturer, who promises to convert Berenice into a Dutch agent. Using the small alchemical lens she has been using as a replacement for her glass eye, Berenice breaks the binding geasa on one of her guards, causing them to attack each other. In ensuing confusion, she steals Bell's identification and, brazenly impersonating a member of the feared Verderer's Office, gets herself to coast and boards a ship bound for Europe.

As ever, Berenice is a woman of action who refuses to allow the world to phase her. She anticipates the arrival of a senior Guild member to interrogate her and correctly identifies her captor as Tuinier Bell. She even manages to surprise Bell, guessing that she means to transform Berenice into an obedient monster similar to Luuk Visser. Once free, Berenice is unable to prevent herself from indulging in a bit of experimentation; something that leads to a sudden breakthrough in her understanding of how clakkers are magically programmed with new orders and thus, how their conditioning might be broken or how they might be twisted into serving a new set of masters.

Meanwhile in Marseille-in-the-West, Hugo Longchamp, recently promoted to captain of the Keep's defence forces, finally receives a much delayed letter from Berenice. In it she warns him against Father Luuk Visser, now an inhumanly strong, murderous monster, and advises her old friend to urgently investigate Marseille's siege supplies. To his horror, Longchamp finds that France's former spymaster's information is all to correct: the tanks of precursor compounds required to create the anti-clakker polymers are all but empty and there is no rapid way to refill them.

Hugo Longchamp, a minor character in the first book, snaps into proper focus here as the de facto commander of what remains of the French military. A classic gruff character with a heart of gold, he swears up a storm when faced with any aggravation, but he spends his every off-moment knitting presents for the orphanage christmas. Despite encroaching age, Longchamp remains a formidable adversary: his pickaxe and hammer have become the stuff of legend after he used them to dispatch the lethal military clakker that ran amok after one of Berenice's experiments misfired. When conscripts are reluctant to obey the draft, it is Hugo Longchamp who brings them in. When Father Visser finally rears his head, it is Hugo Longchamp who has to deal with him. And when the Dutch encircle Marseille, it is Hugo Longchamp who commands the last, desperate defence.

Jax, having fallen through the fire of the Forge at the end of The Mechanical, has been reborn: the fire that destroyed the Guild's records has effectively erased any knowledge of his rogue status. Initially concealing himself in the Dutch army of mechanicals marching on Marseille, Jax decides to leave when he witnesses a human officer abusing a French prisoner. Fleeing north, Jax encounters a strange group of mismatched clakkers who call themselves the Lost Boys and claim to live in Neverland under the rule of the near-mythical Queen Mab. Arriving in Mab's domain he also meets Lilith, a clakker who suffered at the hands of Berenice's fanatical desire to understand the mechanicals, and who sees far more clearly than the rather naive Jax just what it really means to live in Neverland.

Jax, the oldest of the main characters at 118 years old, is the child-like optimist in a cast of cynical pragmatists. His rather naive idealism when he arrives in Neverland gets him in all sorts of trouble which his attitude prevents him from seeing until the more worldly Lilith points it out to him. Upon arrival in Neverland, Jax sheds his old identity and takes on a new name. Remembering Adam, the clakker he saw destroyed at the start of The Mechanical, he calls himself Daniel in memory of his fall through the fiery furnace and his subsequent rebirth.

With Lilith to help remove the scales from his eyes, Daniel soon comes to see that Neverland isn't the utopia of his imagination. He struggles to come to terms with the chimeric rogue clakkers whose mixing and matching of parts is strictly contrary to Guild dogma and which triggers a deep-seated distaste in someone who believes he has passed beyond his makers' commands. When Lilith angrily details the abuse she suffered at Berenice's hands in The Mechanical, Daniel is forced to acknowledge the darkness and ruthless drive that lie at the heart of his human friend's nature. And only when it is made painfully explicit does he realise that the Lost Boys may not be as free of obligations as he had originally believed.

Gradually the three different plot strands begin to converge. Berenice, who has been holed up in a small inn in Normandy, concludes that she must break her exile and return home if she is to make use of her ideas about the grammer of metageasa. Daniel, having discovered who to transfer geasa but not how to shape them, feels obliged to flee Neverland with his new knowledge. And Hugo, surrounded by the Empire's mechanical men and running dangerously low on supplies, desperately need a miracle to deal with the encircling army.

A satisfying and solid sequel, The Rising deals with the consequences of the war triggered, almost accidentally, by Berenice's rash raid on the Guild's new Forge at the end of The Mechanical. Through Longchamp we get a world-weary view of the inevitably of war and the need to focus on the practical while the useless aristocratic marshal defers to his judgement. Through Jax/Daniel and Berenice, we see the different parts coming together in a way that ensures that the final conclusion doesn't feel like a deux ex machina but, rather, a synthesis that has been hard won.