A Riddle in Ruby (10 page)

At tea, treat your guests with Honor and Warmth. No matter your skills with a flask, Surly Hosting always leads to a Tarnished Reputation.

—Bethilda Fwallop,
A Young Tinker's Guide to Polite Society

T
he mouse's single remaining chemystral eye recorded a scene far distant from London's Clove and Camel coffeehouse. Its olfactory sensors had scented over three thousand miles since it had hitched a stealthy ride on Lord Athen's boot.

The past seventy-four hours, five minutes, and twelve seconds had pushed its ingenuity and survival protocols to their limits. The boarding of the
Thrift
by a horde
of thundering boots created an ever-shifting maze of huge soles stomping down from above, punctuated by the bodies of men crashing to the deck. Lord Athen had disappeared, and its secondary target, Captain Wayland Teach, hurtled about the pitched battle with unsettling speed and violence. The fat man was a mobile cyclone.

Trapped on a piece of exposed rigging, one eye clawed out, hiding scripts depleted, the mouse had almost been ready for scrap when an island of safety passed below it. The little mechanical did not hesitate and jumped silently into the shelter of cut-rate pirate finery.

It was not a moment too soon. Captain Teach, half a bloody cutlass in one hand, chair leg club in the other, suddenly relented. He delivered his broken sword to the captain of the huge ship that had grappled onto the
Thrift
.

The mouse's view dropped precariously toward the deck and then righted itself as Teach bowed. The Royal Navy captain, a younger man with a set of rich red muttonchops, returned a bow of his own.

“You have us, sir. We surrender.”

“I accept your surrender, Captain. We will take your vessel as a prize. Please coordinate the movement of your crew and passengers over to the
Grail
. Mr. Flanders here will situate them.”

“Very well, sir.”

Without ready access to the metals that powered it, the mouse went into fuel conservation mode. It captured one frozen image per minute. The following days were a hurried picture book of metal corridors, a spartan cabin, a porthole view of a city at night, more metal corridors, and then a posh stateroom. Captain Teach spent almost the entire time by himself, often on the ample feather bed, where he restlessly failed to sleep.

From the depths of the dark corner, the old man asked, “What stands out to you?”

The apprentice, well past boyhood but still not yet a man, froze the flickering story in the looking glass and made certain that the calipers were secure on the mouse automaton he had liberated from a garbage bin. He stared for a long while at the picture on the screen.

“The captain surrendered too soon,” he said. “They were holding and could have repelled boarders.”

“Did he seem incompetent?”

“Far from it. I have never seen a braver showing. If his cutlass had not broken . . .”

“Then why surrender?”

The apprentice turned to the screen and then back to the corner where the old man crouched in the overstuffed chair like a spider. “I do not know.”

“Good. Neither do I. But if we watch further, perhaps we shall discover it together.”

The apprentice measured out more of the silver gray powder into the hole in the mouse's back. The mechanical jerked once, and the screen flared to life again.

The mouse's iris (singular) opened as a new stimulus jolted it out of hibernation. It was still perched in the hat, which hung from a hat rack in the corner of the room.

The heavy door opened, revealing a tall man flanked by two much larger men. The mouse immediately filed the two big ones, despite their spotless naval uniforms,
into that area of its chemystral brain labeled “Thugs.” They remained in the hallway as the third stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.

It was the captain of the massive tinker ship that had taken the
Thrift
. He was young, but his weathered skin and ropy build told the story of a hard life at sea. His splendid red muttonchops flared below the line of his jaw like dual rudders. A scar peeked out from behind the left one. He was accompanied by a gearbeast crafted from red iron. It had been modeled after an Irish wolfhound and sat poised at his hip. It snuffled through its iron nose. The mouse's eye became very still.

The younger captain removed his hat and tucked it under his arm. “Captain Teach?” he said. Teach had taken up residence in the window seat, leg tucked under him in a pose out of place for such a big man. He was staring out the window but turned and stood after a moment.

“Sir, you have me at a disadvantage.”

“Ah, my apologies. I am Captain MacDevitt of His Majesty's Ship
Grail
. At your service.”

“And I am at yours, for accepting our surrender. It is not an easy thing to curb one's men when there is blood on the decks.”

MacDevitt's eyes flickered about the room. “I trust your quarters are suitable?”

“Indeed, Captain. Will you sit?” Teach motioned to the glass-topped table and the two comfortable chairs in the corner of the room.

“I thank you for your offer, Captain, but I am not a man who spends much time at rest.”

“Well, I am.” Teach flopped into a chair. “I find that sitting improves one's humors, especially when one is carrying around one's own personal ballast.” He patted his not-inconsiderate belly. “Now, how may I help you, Captain?”

“Before we begin, I wonder if you might like some refreshment.” He called to the closed door, “Gregor?” One of the two big men ambled into the room, a tea tray in his massive hands.

“You grow your stewards large in His Majesty's service,” Teach commented.

“Indeed. Gregor and Big Bill are two of my best.”

“Big Bill is the other one?”

“No. That is Saul. You haven't met Big Bill yet.”

“Ah. So Big Bill is even bigger than . . .”

“Yes.”

“Ah.”

The two men sipped their tea.

“How are my men?” Teach asked.

MacDevitt smiled. “They are well. They have quarters befitting their rank, and I have had my people see to the wounded. Some cuts. Your bosun, Skillet, refused to surrender when you ordered your men to stand down, so he is a bit more banged up but will recover. They have asked several times after you. Their respect for you is obvious. You are lucky to command such men.”

“We have been together a long while,” Teach said.

They sipped more tea.

“This is quite a vessel you command,” Teach ventured.

“She is a fine ship.”

Teach laughed. “More than fine. I have never seen anything like her.”

MacDevitt smiled. “I will not disagree with you.”

Sipping.

Teach put his cup down on its porcelain saucer. “Have we finished with the pleasantries?”

MacDevitt sighed. “Yes, Captain Teach. I believe we have.” He replaced his teacup on the table. The gearbeast snuffled and began pacing. “I am intrigued by your passenger manifests, logs, and other papers.”

“What in particular intrigues you about them?”

“We could not find any such item on the entirety of the ship.”

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“Were you carrying any passengers on this trip?”

“No.”

The mouse's eye, which had been following the conversation between the two men, must have been overridden by its danger fail-safes. It was now focused almost completely on the red iron gearbeast's increasingly agitated snufflings around the room.

“Captain Teach, I must tell you I have heard you were a marshmallow of a man, a show captain, a jumped-up
carriage driver who would roll over at the slightest pressure. You seem nothing of the kind.”

“Thank you?”

“Do you know that I am a student of history?”

“Indeed? In what area?”

“My position on this ship allows me to spend a good portion of my shore leave neck deep in the Invisible College Archives, reading accounts of exploits that are kept secret from most eyes.”

“Ha.”

“You chuckle, sir?”

“I mean no offense, Captain MacDevitt. My laughter is to marvel at the vagaries of chance, that is all.”

“Chance that your captor may be in a position to understand your true identity?”

“We are a band of jumped-up minstrels, sir. We pretend to pirate. We chuckle and scrape. We offer an entertaining myth, so that those with too much money may travel from place to place with a sense of adventure.”

“You are not, then, the captain of an infamous crew of scalawags, thought lost on the seas of time?”

“I cannot say.”

“Sir, I must tell you that I am pressed by circumstance toward dishonorable action. If you do not answer my questions, I shall be forced to have Big Bill ask them for me.”

“I understand your position, sir. I have old acquaintance with the Big Bills of the world, though I am somewhat out of practice. I am certain we will get on splendidly.”

“Very well. My apologies for what is to come. Gentlemen? If you would be so kind—”

Snuffling and growling overwhelmed the conversation, as the face and metal jaws of the gearbeast moved toward the camera of the mouse's eye at breakneck speed. There was wild movement, violent shaking, the scream of sheared metal, and then darkness.

“That is the last of it.” The apprentice teased the disconnected mouse tail out of the horn silver vat and replaced it in the padded case with the other parts of the rodent automaton.

He then began to break down the connection between
the vat and the clever tinker's lamp that had allowed them to watch the projections of the little artifact's last moments.

The old man, swathed in blankets even though the heat in the room was stifling, stared at an orrery on a side table next to his overstuffed chair. The planets swung round one another.

The round room had no windows. It was tall, at least three stories high, and floor-to-ceiling shelves covered the walls, filled with apparatuses, devices, and books. There were many, many books. It was the most complete library on the continent, though perhaps only four or five people living knew that it existed.

Finally he rasped, “What do we know?”

The apprentice placed the sensitive connectors in a rack on the wall. He straightened his uniform jacket.

“Very well, Master Fermat—”

“Do not call me Master,” the old man interrupted.

“As you wish, Professor,” the boy began again.

“Or Professor either,” the old man reinterrupted. “It has been forty years since I taught at university, and
I relish every moment I am free from the gabbling and preening of entitled fops. If you insist on giving me formal titles, I shall call you Midshipman Collins, and then where shall we be?”

“But you teach me, do you not, Ma—Pro—do you not?”

The old man's silver eyes gleamed. “Do I?”

“You do.”

“So. What do we know?”

The apprentice spoke slowly, as if examining each word before it came out. “I discovered the remains of a chemystral artifice in a bin at the naval yard. Its rodent appearance suggests that it was a surveillance device of some kind.”

“Why?”

The apprentice chewed his lip. It was a bad habit that he might have attempted to break if he had known he had it. “It requires a large investment of resources and expertise to disguise a chemystral recording device in a mobile platform with some capacity for independent reason.”

“Plus it is sneaky.”

The apprentice chewed harder. “I'm sorry?”

“Mice. They are sneaky. You will discover that metal, wood, and chem, much like flesh, acquire the nature of living things after which they are modeled.”

Eventually the apprentice said, “Why?”

“We do not know,” the old man said.

The apprentice rolled his eyes.

“What else do we know?” the old man asked.

The apprentice ticked off numbers on his hands, which were formally clasped behind his back. “One, that this Captain Teach is resigned to his fate. Two, that his true nature is different from the one he delivers in public. Three, that he holds information desired by the Royal Navy and, perhaps, Royal Society.”

“Why do you say that?”

“MacDevitt, who has captured him, is the captain of the
Grail
, which is a chemystral and martial collaboration between His Majesty's Navy and the Tinkers, who are controlled from Invisible College by the Royal Society. It rests in a secure dock in the Benzene Yards, which is the headquarters of the Tinkers in the colonies.”

“Continue.”

“Four, that he has been tortured before.”

“I would have liked to have had a glimpse of that Big Bill.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do not call me sir, either.”

The apprentice chewed his lip. “Affirmative.”

“What else?”