A Riddle in Ruby (20 page)

You gravely mistake our nature. We are neither witches nor warlocks. We are men and women of science who eat with you, study with you, pray with you. If the purges continue, however, then we are no longer your countrymen, and we will have no choice in our own defense but to seize our liberty. This country will suffer.

—Pierre de Fermat, testimony to
Académie de Philosophie, Paris, 1653

T
he faintest of sounds fluttered about the edges of her sleep. Scratching, a mouse or . . . no. Paper. Fingers moving across paper, then wrapping around the corner of a page, then turning it. Again and again.

Her body did not feel burned. She pressed her palm down with the lightest of force, and it pushed back against a cushioned floor. She was still in the cage.

She opened her eyes.

Tinker's light poured blue through the iron latticework, painting crosshatched shadows on her hand. In the space beyond, an ancient man in a ridiculous sleeping cap hunched in a great chair, long legs folded every which way and peeking out of a lush dressing gown. Her things were piled neatly next to the chair on a small table: the bag, her picks, the journal, the wallet. Her mother's button was still on its rawhide around her neck. He was paging through her copy of
Bastionado
in the light of the tall, thin lamp behind him.

“I have always felt the villain does not get a fair shake in this one.” His was the voice from beyond the door, deep and French. “He was trying to do what he thought was right, you know.”

“Kidnapping the hero's love to a prison tower on their wedding day?”

“According to the hero. The true Duc de Nantes always said that he and Mirabelle loved each other with secret fire.”

Ruby snorted.

“So did Mirabelle.”

She snorted again.

He glanced up from the book, and his gaze pinned her to the floor. His eyes were quicksilver spheres, without a hint of white. “She did not?”

“No,” she said.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“How do
you
know? Are you a historian?”

“No.” He smiled.

“How do you know then?”

“I have a special connection to that period.”

“What special connection? Did you steal her diary like you stole my book?” She turned her head onto the other ear, and the automaton cabinet sat there unopened and quiet, just as before.

The old man continued. “You do not agree that the villain told the truth as he knew it or you do not agree that Mirabelle loved him?” He flipped through the book, troubled, as if he were searching for evidence.

Ruby levered herself upright with both hands. “That is my favorite book, and I believe you are wrong, but I will not argue with you because more important things
are at hand. Sir,” she added belatedly.

“Indeed, more important things!” He agreed. “For example, are you being followed by intrepid chemystral mice?”

“Mice? No.” The man was mad. “Are you mad?”

He waved the question away. “I am Fermat.” He stared at her with his silver eyes. Or he might have been looking out of the corner of them at the side wall, for all she knew.

“Why didn't you have that thing burn me?”

He smiled.

“I don't think it's funny,” Ruby said. “It was here, in this cage with me. I blacked out. But there is not a mark on me. Was it all a bluff?”

He shook his head with care, as if it might topple from his gaunt neck.

“Then what?” Anger burned the cobwebs aside, and she was fully awake. “Do with me as you will, but stop playing with me! And stop looking through my things. They are mine.” It was absurd to make demands from the inside of a birdcage, but the contents of that bag were all
she had in the world of her former life.

He nodded and closed the book. “My apologies. It was certainly impolite, but I wanted to discover more about you, and you were inaccessible.”

“I would not have passed out if you had not released a demon from the lower depths upon me.”

“Agrippa is hardly a demon from the lower depths. Beware of hyperbole,
ch
é
rie
. Did I say ‘passed out'?”

“What?”

“Did I say ‘passed out'?”

“No, you did not. Why does it matter?” He was playing word games again, and she wanted to burst through the cage and shake him by his bony shoulders.

“It matters a great deal.” He closed the book and placed it with care on the pile of her things. “You did not pass out, Ruby Teach, for I judge you may be Aruba Teach, indeed, though we thought you were lying, an agent of sorts. You did not pass out.” He made a pulling motion with his hands, like kneading dough. “You
changed
.”

“Changed.”

“Virez
à
barrique
, yes? Into a barrel.”

“What?”

“A barrel. They are used for storing liquids, grains—”

“Well, yes,” she said.

“Mostly cylindrical.”

“I know what a barrel is!”

“Very well.”

It was difficult to breathe. She had to hold herself up with both hands.

“You seem shocked, which one could understand. But you accept the news more readily than another might,” he said.

Cram had said that Gwath had somehow been a barrel. She could not imagine this old man knew Cram or had heard from him. “How could that be?”

He leaned forward. “Directly to the question, I see. I approve. I see two possibilities. One, that you are some sort of barrel automaton engineered to look and act like a human girl. Is this the case?”

She did not know whether to laugh or cry. “I don't think so.”

“Very well. I agree it is unlikely. The second possibility is that you are the direct descendant of a Changer.”

Ruby felt the capital letter. “A Changer?”

“As the word, so the action. Changers alter their shapes, like molding clay or carving stone.”

“Into barrels?”

“Not just, girl. The most skilled can craft themselves into replicas of objects like a door or an armoire.”

“Or a barrel.”

“Yes, or a barrel, though I suggest you avoid fixating there.”

“It happens to be at the front of my mind, for reasons you might well understand.”

“Touch
é
. Shall I continue along this line then?” She nodded, pulling herself into sitting. “Master Changers also adopt the seeming of other people: blacker hair, lighter skin, sharper face. Some even can move about and take the shape of beasts.”

Gwath. He was talking about Gwath. She flushed. But was he also talking about her? “How do they do it?”

The old man clacked his teeth in agreement. “Yes. To
capacity. The ability to change is a family affair. It passes from parent to child, though it also is finicky. It skips generations; perhaps a great-uncle may be one, and no one else in the family except a favorite niece.”

Family. Was Gwath related to her somehow? Her father had never said anything about that. A secret brother to her mother? Or to her father? But this was missing the point.

“I did this?” He nodded. “I . . .
changed
. . . into a thing?”

She placed herself in the middle of the cage and flexed her hands. She turned back to Fermat. “How do I do it?”

He shrugged. “I do not know. It is amazing, yes? If we ever advance past our current state of relationship”—he waved his hand at the cage—“there are a few rare texts in particular to which I might point you.”

She ignored him and centered her breath, as Gwath had taught her. The old man's voice receded into the distance. She focused on her heartbeat. Though she was not sure what she was looking for, deep in her spine she
felt something move. A spot or a nubbin. A feeling more than anything else.

There were barrels all over the
Thrift
. Nail barrels and flour barrels and barrels of pickled fish. She summoned a clear picture into her head, threw all her focus onto that weird place in the small of her back, and, for lack of a better word for it,
nudged
.

She opened her eyes. The old man was staring at her. His whiteless eyes were wide. “Did it work?” he asked.

“Does it look like it did?”

“No, not really. I still see a young girl in a cage. Was that what you were trying for?”

“No!”

He shrugged. “Well, then. I do not know much about Changers, but I do know that their first shifting experiences can be in response to some imminent danger. Perhaps I should release Agrippa again?”

She shuddered. “No, thank you.”

He tapped the arm of the chair with the tip of his finger. “Those other things we must discuss?”

“Like what?”

“How you came to be in my spice shop?”

She shook her head. The ground had shifted, and now she had something he wanted. She was willing to trade. “Where do Changers come from?”

“The west. The people there tell stories of them.”

His answers made things more confusing, not less. “But what does that have to do with me?”

He clicked his teeth. “Perhaps you come from the west. Your parents?”

“Father from Bristol, mother from France, somewhere.”

“She claimed to be from Le Mans, I believe.” She gaped, and he waggled his eyebrows at her.

“You know my mother?”

“And Wayland Teach as well, little intruder.”

Barnacled barnacles. Did everyone in the world know her parents? “Then why am I still in this cage?”

He shrugged. “Your parents and I did not part on the best of terms, I fear.”

She found herself kneeling at the iron bars, staring through at Fermat. “If you knew my parents, why did
you ask if they came from the west?”

He shrugged again, more quickly and more dismissively. “Marise was a private girl and an even more private woman. She clad herself in secrets. When I knew her, our whole life together was built on them. I would not presume that what she had told me was the fact of the matter.”

He clacked his teeth and rose, taking care to keep his wobbly head on the top of his neck. The old man shuffled toward the door. “Our exchange of information does not appear to be equal at this moment. You need time to sit with all of this, I think. I will return.”

Suddenly the rest of her world came rushing back: Wisdom Rool, Athena, her father still missing. She was in a cage, by damn. “Wait! There is no time!”

He fiddled with the iron door without turning. “I agree, but I cannot honor reckless decision making, and you are not being forthcoming with me. I will return anon, Mademoiselle Teach. Change is like a rich meal. It needs silence to digest fully.”

What could she say to get him to stay? What could
she do? There was something here, some piece of the fabric of her life. She was holding it in her hand, but it was slipping through the fingers like so much cinnamon from one of the drawers upstairs.

“I never knew her.” The words snuck out of her mouth, like a dirty fly. Fermat looked back at her, quicksilver eyes glittering. “She left when I was very young.” And then she told him the other story, the one that started with that perfect morning in Boston and ended with her caged in a basement with an old man who asked no more questions and said nothing as she sobbed the long truth out to him.

. . . with regard to Rebellious Sentiment in our colony, I fear you have only yourself to blame. The conditions in UnderTown are savage, at best, and many who live here have not found the Fresh Start that was promised them in your leaflets.

With regard to your suggestion, I shall not offer my resignation, and if I am removed from my post, I wager Some Consequence may occur.

I hope you will act in temperance.

—Letter from Robert McKinnon, governor, Pennswood Colony, to

Everett Baldwin, Master Tinker, Benzene Yards, November 4, 1718

A
t some point in her story, Fermat knocked twice on the door, and the leathery old woman, the one from the spice shop upstairs, brought a key into the room. She opened the cage, wrapped Ruby in a warm blanket, and carried her down a narrow stone staircase. Fermat followed, and the woman—her name was Nasira—clucked and hummed into her hair as you might to a madwoman or a three-month-old puppy. The humming crept down
Ruby's spine and sparked a warm glow in her chest, and she felt safe. It was the most natural thing in the world. Was this what grandparents felt like?

They took her down one flight of stone stairs into a little bedroom, just a bit larger than the bed and a single chair. Fermat eased himself into the chair, and Nasira helped her up into the bed, clothes and all. She drew a wonderfully soft quilt up to her neck. It was embroidered with elk and swans.

Fermat stared at her for a long time. What had happened to make his eyes silver? “Rest now. We will speak when you wake.”

And she did sleep. Even before Fermat reached the door.

When she awoke, it was wonderfully quiet. She lay there for a good while, and the only sounds were her breath and the faint rustle of her hair against the pillow when she moved her head. Her arm no longer hurt. The acid-eaten, filthy dressing had been changed, and her arm was wrapped tightly with white linen and smelled vaguely of garlic. It was sore, but she was thrilled she
could move the fingers and flex the wrist.

Blackberry tea and mushroom soup, still hot, lay on the bedside table, and spiced nuts in a little wooden bowl carved with strange, beautiful numbers and symbols. She inhaled the lot.

In the corner there was a deep bronze tub, filled with steaming water, two fresh towels, and a bar of soap that looked like honeycomb and smelled like almonds. The water was just hot enough. It
stayed
warm, by means of some clever tinker's device. It was silver and slid along the rim of the tub. Each side was carved with a head: a woman with flames for hair and a man with ice in his beard. She scrubbed, splashed, and dunked herself within an inch of her life. If she did not need to save her father, it might be fine to stay there forever. By the time she finished, the water in the tub was deep gray and had a thick film on its top. It was like scrubbing off an old skin that she never wanted back again.

Two sets of clean clothing were set out on the chair: a smart checked frock and men's clothing as well—a white shirt and gray breeches, vest, and coat. The breeches
fitted as well as or better than her stolen maid's dress, and Robby Thatch had never been so sharp. There were boots. A ribbon was laid out as well, and she used it to tie her hair into a tight queue. She sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes, but no one arrived, so she moved through the door. She was on a small landing, and the narrow stair spiraled up and also down, out of sight. She went down.

The circular stairs were many, but the stairwell was well lighted with tinker's lamps built into clever little shelves, which illuminated the carving-covered walls. Whatever this place was, it was much more than a spice shop and ruffian trap. And she, who had spent time in Philadelphi on and off all her life, had never heard of it. Every inch of the seamless granite was covered with enigmatic, flowing inscriptions. They were numbers, and letters, and odd squiggles and lines. As she followed the steps, deep into the ground—perhaps even past the floor of UnderTown by now—Ruby could not help thinking that she was in some kind of wizard's tower, except in reverse. She passed two more landings, with a locked
door on each of them. On the next landing an archway opened into a very tall library. It was a circle, much like the cage room, except this was filled all the way around with shelves of books and scrolls, creeping up into the darkness. She had never seen so many books. She had never known so many books existed.

Fermat craned over a long, scarred worktable in its center. It was a huge slab of raised black marble, far too large to have ever gotten through the door. He said, “Have a look at this,” and waved her over without a glance away from the table. It was covered in strange instruments and all manner of powders and crystals, rocks and liquids, tiny tools and measuring cups.

Ruby said, “I wanted to thank you for the bed and for—”

“Yes yes yes.” He raised the mast of his index finger. “You are welcome, and now we are friends that once were enemies. I will ask Nasira to make you more of her favorite tea and perhaps bring you another snuggly blanket later. But that is not why we are here, and as you have told me on several occasions, you have little time.”
The thing he could not take his eyes off was her mother's journal. “The clasp is a sophisticated chemystral device. Pick the lock, and the journal will be destroyed. Fire, or acid, or some such. Very dramatic. Can you help me understand this?”

Ruby nodded. “I think I can.” The ivory button around her neck fitted perfectly into the clasp, and it opened silently.

They stared at each other for a moment.

Fermat inclined his head to Ruby. “It is yours, of course.”

She did not know what to expect, but it certainly was not page after page of tightly packed symbols and equations. “Do you know what these mean?” she asked.

“Gibberish,” he said from over her shoulder. “These look like chemystral formulae, but they do not add up.” He shook his head. “Marise was never a trusting sort.”

“So, a cipher?” Ruby asked.

“Indeed, Ruby Teach, indeed.”

“Do you have the key?”

He paged through the web of symbols. “No. No, I
do not. And if it is possible to decipher, I think it would take weeks, if not months. Your mother was . . . very clever.” He ran his finger along the binding. “You know who might be helpful with this? My apprentice, Hermes. Ah, you know him as Henry Collins.”

“Hermes?”

“Yes, Hermes Cestus. Henry Collins is a false name we dreamed up for him as part of his disguise. He has a gift for ciphers, and this sort of puzzle bores me to tears.”

She stopped herself from wondering what his tears looked like. “Why a false name?”

“Oh, you know, infiltrating the Royal Navy, vengeance for a father terribly wronged, standard sort of thing.”

“Vengeance? For what?” Ruby asked.

“That is not my secret to give. You'd have to ask him, I'm afraid. Very private boy. Quite serious, you know. Promising chemyst. It was he who discovered news of your father in a mousey automaton tossed in a rubbage bin outside the Benzene Yards.”

Her pulse quickened. “My father? How is he?”

“Our last news is from a few days ago, but he was all
right, though somewhat the worse for wear.”

“Can you help me rescue him?”

He frowned. “I cannot. I will try to help you understand your predicament, but I cannot leave this place, on pain of my life. And then I would be of very little help to you.”

Ruby picked up a platinum stylus. “What about Nasira? Or Hermes? Has he returned?”

“Please be careful with that,” Fermat said. “No, Nasira is as bound to this place as I am. And Hermes has not returned. I am worried for him.”

She placed the tool down carefully, so as not to throw it.

And so there it was. The clothes were nice, and the bath was wonderful, and the food, and the comfort, but this was merely one more place where there was no help for her. “I see,” Ruby said. “I must be on my way then.” She picked up the journal and turned to go.

Fermat chuckled. Then he stopped chuckling. “
Attend.
Wait. You are truly leaving? So quickly? Where will you go?”

Ruby said over her shoulder, “I don't know. But I have to get him back.”

“Very well,” Fermat said with a sigh. “If you must. Please don't forget that gearbeasts bite and chemystry is very dangerous and reeves can do amazing things with their bodies—”

“I won't,” Ruby said. “Farewell.”

It was a dramatic exit.

Except the door wouldn't open.

It was no longer even a door. The handle was still there, but the seams around the stone door had melded seamlessly into the wall. Anger boiled up from her new boots. Fermat was leaning against a bookshelf, paging through a musty old book. “Open it,” Ruby growled.

“Open what?”

“Open the door, you old coot!” Ruby yelled.

He fluffed up like a startled grouse. “But it is a wall,” he said.

“Well, make it back into a door and let me go!”

“I will make it back into a door and let you go.” Fermat said.

“Good.”

“If you pass but one small test for me.”

Ruby could not believe his gall. Her father was dying somewhere, and he wanted to
teach
her something. “Very well,” she said. “Get on with it.”

The old man clacked his teeth. “What do you see?” He pointed to one side of the worktable, to a padlock fully the size of Ruby's head. The shackle shone in the blue light of the tinker's lamps. Its loop was as thick as her wrist.

“What kind of mad, huge chest is this for?” she asked.

He rotated the tip of the finger until it pointed straight down at the lock. “What do you see?”

Ruby's fingers tingled, as they always had when Gwath started a lesson. Perhaps he was testing her reason. Perhaps he was testing her resolve. Whatever he was testing, he was absolutely as annoying as Gwath had ever been, and she felt something stir inside her that she had not felt in weeks: the fervent and absolute desire to wipe a smug smile from a mentor's face.

“It is apparently made from some sort of metal.”

He nodded. “Why do you say ‘apparently'?”

She rolled her eyes. “Because I have not tested it for metallic properties, and I will draw no premature conclusions.”

His mouth made an
O,
which she took as permission to continue.

“May I touch it?” He nodded again. She passed her fingers over the dark, mottled surface. It felt sturdy. The scratches around the sizable keyhole indicated that it had endured numerous attempts at picking. The size of the mechanism meant it would be heavy on the inside as well, and her picks would have as much luck with this thing as a paring knife with a crocodile. The joins were very fine around where the loop of the shackle rejoined the body of the lock. Too fine, while the seam where the halves of the thing came together was far too rough for such otherwise fine worksmanship.

“It is not a lock,” she said.

His eyebrows crept into his nightcap. “Why do you say that?”

“It is not a lock,” she said, “because it is a chest.”
And she pushed the block that held the keyhole. It moved smoothly, there was a click, and the too-rough seam opened up, revealing a velvet-lined interior. A sealed letter sat inside.

Fermat yawned.

“I bore you?” she said.

“I asked you what you saw. I did not ask you to open the box.”

“Opening the box naturally follows from solving the puzzle, does it not?” This
was
some sort of test. She broke the seal on the letter and opened it. Two short sentences were written on the page, in a neat, cramped hand: “I am a serpent. And you are dead.”

Blood rushed to her face.

“Of course it follows,
ch
é
rie
.” Fermat chuckled. “The best bait for a quick mind is to present an obvious solution to a seemingly difficult problem.”

“So I need to be more careful.” She refolded the paper and put it back in the lock-chest. “Lesson learned, ready for another thank-you.”

“No, girl,” Fermat snapped. “The lesson is not ‘Take
great care.' The lesson is ‘Assume not that you understand the problem.'”

She bit her lip. “And this is supposed to apply to me?”

He matched her sarcasm with his own. “Perhaps. The subject for application is currently in doubt. Let us test the hypothesis, shall we? You are rushing off to solve your problem.” He produced a slate from under a pile of tiny springs. “But what is your problem?” Every inch the attentive student, he poised a piece of chalk over the slate.

Ruby had had enough. “All right, all right! I did your fool test! Don't yammer at me like I am your four-year-old pupil.”

“I am not instructing. By the way, you failed the first test, so I am generously giving you another. I have asked you a question, and by refusing to answer, you are being an impolite guest.” He tapped the slate three times. “What is your problem?”