A Riddle in Ruby (11 page)

After quite a long pause the apprentice said, “Nothing.”

“You have questions.”

“I do.”

“What are they?”

The apprentice began to pace.

“Remain still. Pacing shows a lack of discipline.”

The apprentice stopped, though he still moved his toes in his boots.

“Your questions? I don't have all day, boy, and you are due back at your post.”

The apprentice straightened. “One. Teach claims there were no passenger lists on his passenger ship. But
ships of that class almost always carry logs of some type. Why would he hide them or destroy them unless there were passengers?”

“Interesting. What else?”

“Why was MacDevitt so interested in the passengers unless they were searching for them in the first place?”

“Indeed.”

“If the finest ship in His Majesty's Navy and its elite crew were hard-pressed to subdue a ship full of mismatched scalawags, who are these scalawags?”

“One more, I think.”

The apprentice straightened a button on his frayed but spotless uniform jacket.

“Who and where are these most important missing passengers? And why is the combined power of military and chemystral England searching for them?”

RULES

   
1. All iron to be checked at the door.

   
2. All flasks to be checked at the door.

   
3. Civil discourse at all tymes.

   
4. Any body scraps or scuffles, yew shall exit the back way.

   
5.
We take pounds sterling, manufactory marks, or horn silver.

   
6. England, Frenches, or Other Continentals are UNWELCOME. Yew shall exit the back way.

Posted at the Alembic Coffeehouse, UnderTown

I
t was Philadelphi. Of course it was. A tinker tug
would
be towing the
Thrift
toward the city that had become the center of the colonies. It was almost too cruel that they had been headed there to begin with. As Cram and Athen rowed the leaking lifeboat up the river toward the steamy, glistening shoreline, Ruby cradled her wrist and tried to keep what they were fleeing out of her head. So she filled it with old, familiar landmarks.

To the south squatted the ever-expanding maze of the Benzene Yards. Even in the dark of the earliest morning, the great wheels, towers, chutes, and steam stacks were lit orange and purple from odd angles, shimmering in the heat of the great chemystral furnaces, pulsing from fairyland to nightmare and back. To the north, its dark mass blocking out the sky, loomed the Great Keep of the Rupert's Bay Company, with its fancy shops and fancier folk.

They were headed for the center, the valley between those two mountains on the shore of the Delaware River. The heart of Philadelphi, called the Shambles, was a bubbling cauldron of hard work and hard times.

There were two cities, one stacked on top of the other one. The old town was built on the earth of the shore, and the other hung above it, resting on an artificial shelf built by the Tinkers. The whole thing looked like the mouth of some gigantic beast sticking up out of the river, and their little rowboat was headed straight down its gullet.

There had been little time to talk as they fled the
Thrift
. Cram and Athen had both set to their oars as if the devil himself were chasing them, and perhaps he was. Ruby had sat in the prow of the boat, ankles slowly going numb in the frigid standing water. Whatever Athen had done to seal the hole had worked. She had poked at the spongy mass stopping it up until he had whispered at her to stop it.

It did not feel sturdy. She thought about just reaching for the stopped-up hole, ripping up a handful of the stuff, and sending them all down into the dark water. That was what she had done to Gwath, however you wanted to paint it. She had spent the first minutes of their flight staring over her shoulder at the receding mass of the
Thrift
, desperate to sight a big, friendly shape diving over the side and then strongly pulling for the boat triumphant and spent from whatever savage duel he had undergone to guard their escape.

That did not happen.

Indeed, the tug continued toward the Benzene Yards docks as if nothing at all strange had occurred. Not being chased was welcome but confusing. Why was there
no alarm? Why did Rool not descend on them like a tidal wave? But he did not.

After that there was only the pain in her wrist, the haggard breathing of the two young men, and the hole in her heart.

Cram finally broke the silence. “Where we goin'?” he asked through gritted teeth. He had begun grunting with each pull, though to his credit he had not slowed.

The sun would be rising soon. Athen, just as winded, covered in sweat, was waiting for her to answer. They would soon be in and among the ships, where too many might note the passage of an odd boat. Her instincts clicked. She needed to curl up in a quiet dark place. She needed to go to ground. In the back of her head Gwath told her to blend in.

“Slow down,” Ruby muttered.

“What?” Athen looked up. “Ruby—”

“Slow down,” she chattered through chilled teeth. Cold was creeping up through her legs. “We look like we are running. This needs to be an early-morning delivery. We're three errand makers who just got up. We have to
blend in. Sleepy, slow, and forgettable.”

Cram almost stopped rowing altogether. “As your ladyship wishes,” he gasped. They moved slowly into the landscape.

According to her father, the docks had once been a single level, close to the water, but UpTown had changed that. A little girl sat on the edge of the overhang high above, legs sticking out into the air. She was blond and was wearing a pretty little frilly dress. At this distance Ruby couldn't see what it was, but she was eating something, probably something sweet, and she was tossing pebbles over the edge into the water below. It had to be a hundred feet to the water, but the girl didn't seem the least bit concerned and was kicking her legs with that slow consistency that indicated the deepest of pleasures. A pebble splooshed into the water, and the girl noticed them. Ruby waved. She waved back, tossed another stone into the drink, and started kicking her legs again. She obviously had much more important things to think about.

They crawled past the new docks that had grown
up underneath the edge of Uptown, rowing between the massive stone and carbon pillars that supported the platform of streets, houses, and money above their heads.

The air under the overhang was reassuringly thick, like bean and bacon soup with the spicy tang of metal. Ruby breathed deep. Athen coughed and scrunched his lips. Cram perked up like a hungry puppy.

They pulled the boat up on the gravel shore in a deserted shadow between two of the house-thick pillars.

“Where are the clear skies and coonskin caps?” Athen pulled his clinking bag out of the boat. “Where are the beasts of the wild? I thought this was the land of fresh air and indomitable spirit?” He reached over to help her out of the boat as Cram stowed the oars.

“Tinkers and Rupert's Bay needed to build close to the shore and their manufactories. And then there are the Algonkin in the woods. They couldn't build inland and stay close, so they built straight up. They put another town on top of the old one, like a layer cake.”

“Amazing,” Athen said.

“Isn't it? All you Euros, you have no idea what's
happening over here.” She reached down into the lifeboat and ripped the gray, gooey seal off the hole in the bottom like a scab.

Athen grabbed her arm. “What are you doing?”

Cram said, “I think she be sinking the evidence, sir. We don't want no one picking up our trail.” Athen nodded.

Ruby turned to Athen. “Give me your cloak.”

He hesitated, “I need it, Miss Teach.”

“For what purpose, to protect me?” The boy nodded. “If I need someone to crumple at the feet of a brigand, I know where to turn.” Cram coughed. Athen blushed in the dim.

He threw it at her. She reached out her hand and grabbed it out of the air. It would have been impressive, but she used the hand with the bad wrist. The cloak dropped to the ground and lay there. The other two looked at her, and no one bent down to help. After a moment she picked it up with her good hand and wrapped it about her face.

“Welcome to Philadelphi,” Ruby said. They pushed
the boat back into the river. It sank into the dark. “Come on,” she said, and started down the strand. “It's not far.” Thankfully they did not argue.

Ruby had faint memories of sun on the cobblestones in New Market, which is what the neighborhood had been called before they put a roof on it.

Now it was the Shambles. Away from the harbor opening, it was always just past dusk. The constant half-light came from cheap, smoky chem pots hanging from pillars or pipes on the main streets. In the alleys, well, you took to the alleys at your own risk. They were clogged with pipes and steam holes and refuse and chem waste. The pots hung farther apart, and danger lurked in the dark. If you brought your own light or weren't from the neighborhood? Well, the runagates and bullyboys would thank you kindly for pointing yourself out to them and offering them the bounty of your purse. If you were lucky, that was all they took.

The lifeblood of the docks and the Benzene Yards lived in the Shambles, crowded together, scrapping and
fighting. People here lived on top of one another in makeshift shacks at the end of blind alleys or in camps on old rooftops with the Lid (that's what they called the roof) as a ceiling. Two, three, four families in flats built for one. Boardinghouses for thirty in mansions abandoned by the high folk who now lived Up There.

Very fine neighborhoods had been covered by the Lid. Instead of relocating, some of the most influential families had been allowed to stay, and their big houses went all the way up, through attics and storerooms dug right into the Lid.

Above the Lid were salons, bedrooms, dining rooms, and great halls, and below was everything that made all that possible. Down here the kitchens cooked, the shoes were shined, and the gears were greased. In a way, Ruby thought, it was like other cities, just more so: a few folk that sat in the wheelhouse, and a whole mess of people down below, rowing as fast as they could.

She cut right and led them between two swanky town houses into an ill-lit alley. Haphazardly placed chem pots hung from support pillars or the corner of a fence.

On this particular block the people had abandoned their houses and gone who-knows-where or had just closed up below and built anew on top of the Lid. But they had closed them up tight with solder and chem, with bars on the windows and stout locks on the doors. It was still deserted.

Ruby led them to a gap in a high brick wall. A wheelless carriage was the only occupant of the back lot on the other side of the crack, and an empty town house loomed, waiting for them.

“Welcome to our home,” she said as she slipped through the gap.

Gray lung, black scale, pickle, and sweat,

Lost them fingers to the saw today,

Save your pennies and duck your head,

So your boys and girls climb UpTown way!

—UnderTown drinking song

T
he next morning Ruby struggled up to the roof and shouldered the trapdoor open with her good arm. Cram was there in the dim half-light of UnderTown, pushing against the sky of stone hanging above his head. He looked a bit like a dignified monkey poking at the lid of a trap. The canopy of rock spread from horizon to horizon, except for back toward the harbor, where the pink edge of dawn crept through.

“What is it?” He kept probing at the ceiling with a pointer he had found in the music room.

Ruby sat straight in the great chair she and Gwath had dragged up when they first found the abandoned town house years ago. “It's called the Lid. It is the roof the Tinkers put on top of this city, so they could build a better city on top of it.” She reached out her arm. “Hold this steady, will you, please?”

She held out a brace, pieces of a picture frame she had found in the dining room. He abandoned his poking and eyed the two spars of wood next to her wrist. He was not her favorite at the moment, but asking a favor of Athen would be worse. He grabbed the sticks like oars.

“Ow!” she said. “Gently, you oaf.”

He grinned. “Mam says never look the other way when a jug of rye drops off the back of a wagon.”

“Just hold it. Like that.” She began carefully wrapping the napkins around the frame, immobilizing her wrist.

He was looking up at the Lid again. “It's tinkercraft, you say?”

“Yes.”

He whistled. “Foreman Jecked never made nothin' this big.” He squinted into the distance over the railing on the rooftop. “How far does it go?”

“Two miles in, to the banks of the Schuylkill River. Grab this bit here. Good.” She pulled the other loose end around her wrist and looped it around with the bit the boy was holding. “They say it was like God ripped a curtain of rock out of the ground and pulled it over the town like a good-night blanket. The strain of pulling it up wrecked two Tinker grandmasters for good and all—they burned from the inside, like quick pitch—and almost killed the eight teams of foremen that grew the pillars up to meet it on its way to the Delaware.”

Cram whistled again and stared into the distance. “Never thought I would see nothing like this. You want me to hold that bandage for yuh, Ferret?”

“I have it. Do not call me that.”

Cram grinned. “What, Ferret?”

She pulled the knot closed with her teeth. “If you want to slander me, why not Kitty Cat or Ladybird or Countess?

He snickered. “'Cause you ain't a kitty cat or a ladybird or a countess.”

“What about Rabbit?” Athen popped his head through the trapdoor in the roof.

The air felt prickly, or tight, or something. Ruby pulled herself into motion.

“Because I run and hide in the bushes? I like that.” She moved past the trap and knelt next to the chimney, pulling at a loose stone with her good hand.

“I was trying to say ‘agile' or ‘stealthy,' but suit yourself.” Athen sort of flowed up through the trap and lounged in the chair. Cram clammed up and was staring at his shoes.

“As requested, the door below is as secure as my modest talents can make it.”

“You shook up a jar and sprayed goo on it?”

“Something like that. I jammed it by filling the lock with sawdust and then hardened the mass with a thickener.”

“Exciting.” The stone dropped with a thump to the roof. “Why didn't you change it into a mirror of liquid
gold or set a lightning trap?” Ruby fished about inside the hole and produced a bundle of lumps.

“
Primus
, because I have not the skill or the inner fuel to create such a thing but,
secundus,
because it was not necessary. When I am sewing, I use a needle, not a cannon.”

“Right now I could fancy a cannon to address your
secundus
.”

“The practice of chemystry is not all sprays of fire and ripping up battlements from the unsuspecting earth. Much of it is simply understanding the properties of the world around us and employing them creatively.”

“Have you ever thought about teaching school?” Ruby asked as she unrolled her bundle of tools, checking through the small array of picks and wires and stranger things—bulbs, levers, and oils.

“No, no, I have not,” Athen said, softening. “Why do you ask?”

“You remind me of this governess I had once. She was truly gifted at boring me to tears.”

“My apologies. Sometimes I have trouble remembering that the simple lose interest when their betters speak of things they cannot understand.”

“Betters?”

Athen smiled. “Did I stir up your humors? Have I your attention now?”

“Oh, indeed.”

“Good.” Athen perched on the edge of Ruby's chair and began unloading his pockets with the things he had saved from his chest. “A council regarding our options?”

“Fair,” Ruby said. The sooner they could get her father back, the sooner she could rid herself of these chowderheads. “There is a man I know—”

“This is an affinital.” Athen started to speak at the same time, holding up a small square of red clay.

“I was talking,” Ruby said.

“Were you?” Athen eased back into the chair. “My apologies. Please proceed. I will offer my plan after.”

“All right.” Ruby felt flustered. “There is a man I know who has the ear of the city. His name is Fen. He
runs a tavern not far from here, and if anyone can, he will be able to help us find my father.”

“That is all?” Athen said after a moment.

“Yes. Well, it won't be as simple as that,” Ruby sputtered. “He is a wily—”

“Excellent.” Athen cut her off. “As I was saying, this is an affinital—”

“Do not interrupt me.”

“I am sorry. I thought you were finished. Please continue. He is wily?”

“Yes, a wily one, and well, that's all.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“Well, thank you.” Athen leaned forward with the square of clay. “This is an affinital. It is an alchemycal method of communicating with others, and now that we are in the city and closer to its mate, this one should function.”

“That looks like a lump of clay to me, sir,” Cram offered.

“Yes, Cram, but it has a unique makeup. It is half of a whole piece of clay. For lack of a simpler way of
explaining it”—he nodded to Ruby, and she rolled her eyes—“the clay is still connected to its sister earth. This can speak to its sister.”

“You can talk to that and someone answers on the other end?” Cram's eyes widened. He leaned in to address the lump. “Hello?”

Athen pulled the cube away. “In a manner of speaking. May I have my bag, please?” Cram handed it over. “Please observe.”

Athen produced a small iron apparatus, which held a saucer-size plate over a small burner. Once the flame was going, he teased a small dollop of what looked like runny lard out of an ampule and dabbed it onto the clay, which he then put on the saucer.

They began to melt.

“Amazing.” Ruby shook her head with wonder. “It communicates to me that it is a gooey cake on a tea plate.”

“Wait,” Athen said, and then he produced a grease pencil and a few pieces of parchment, which he set on a flat section of the roof. By this point the clay and the
slime had melted, filling the saucer with orange soup. He carefully painted the substance onto the entirety of the pen with a fine brush. “There is a stand somewhere in this city, holding a pencil like this, covered with the affinital clay, just like this one. When I move the pencil, the other one will move with it in tandem, inscribing the message onto the other paper. Then, I hope, there will be a response.”

Ruby snorted. “Well, get to it.”

Athen thought for a moment, then wrote in a brisk, concise hand:
A. BOYLE, IN CIT
Y.

They waited two minutes before Athen's hand moved. The handwriting seemed different.

HAVE YOU DISCOVERED THE QUARRY?

Athen responded:
YES. SMALL PACKAGE IN POCKET, LARGE ONE STOLEN.

There was a short wait.

WE HEARD. PITY. DELIVER SMALL PACKAGE TO SMOKEHOUSE, ARCHER FARM, DREGS. WITH HASTE. TAKE PRECAUTIONS. YOU ARE HUNTED.

Athen thought for a moment.

PLACEMENT OF LARGE PACKAGE?

The response was quick:
CROWNED. PACKAGE CAGED. PRIORITY SMALL PACKAGE DELIVERY TO SMOKEHOUSE. THAT IS ALL.—HEARTH

“‘Small package.' That would be me, yes?” Ruby said.

“And ‘large package' your father. Correct.” He looked up at her, his eyes wary.

Ruby could not speak for a moment. “You did not just happen to be on our ship! You came looking for us. And they came looking for you.”

He flattened his lips. “We should be going to the safe house, the smoker. I will need your help in locating it. We need to protect your secret.”

“What secret?”

Athen shook his head. “I don't know.”

“You led them to us!” Ruby yelled at him.

“I did not know they were following me!”

“You led them to us!” She struck the stone with each word. “And now my father is taken, as are the rest of my family, and Gwath is dead.” Saying it out loud made it
real, and her chest hurt and her throat burned.

“You ain't knowin' that, Ferret.” Cram cut in, trying to keep the peace.

She grabbed her picks and headed for the door. She did not need these people. They were the cause of the problem.

“It is not safe for you out there,” Athen called.

“Safer than it will be with you.” As she passed through the trap, something glass broke on the edge. It was one of Athen's flasks. Thick tendrils of green stuff shot across the opening and splattered across her back. Ruby ran. She ducked down the stairs and out the third-story window, then down the rope ladder.

They were calling for her and hurrying after, but she was too quiet and too fast. “You are as much a failure at holding on to me as you are keeping me safe,” she whispered to the shadows.

And then she was gone.