A Riddle in Ruby (23 page)

Carboshaeth, White Steel, Friar's Iron: There is no substance, chemystral or otherwise, that cannot be unmade.

—Frederik of Westphalia,
Alchemycal Heresies

T
he hallway beyond the room was empty, and they crept down a narrow circling staircase that deposited them in a comfy little sitting room, surrounded by trim wardrobes, each with a chair in front of it. None of the armoires had doors, and freshly pressed blue uniform jackets hung in each, below a shelf that held smart midshipman's caps, in the new style with small brims and flat tops.

Athena quickly began unbuttoning her waistcoat,
eyeing several of the wardrobes for one that might suit.

Ruby whispered, “What are you doing?”

“I am acquiring a disguise, Miss Teach,” she responded as she pulled on one of the narrower coats. The stitching was exquisite, and the fit as well. She popped on a hat and struck what she hoped was a rakish pose. Cram had left most of his weight in the upstairs hall from sweating it all out, and Ruby was wound tight as a Switz timepiece. Someone had to lighten the mood.

“I see a stilted fop of a boy,” Ruby said. “How is that a disguise?”

Athena ignored her. They could discuss the benefits of living as a gentleman some other time. “We are about to enter into the realm of the navy, and I will tell you this much: In a fort or ship of this size, it is nigh impossible to know everyone. For the whole apparatus to work at all, the uniform must serve as recognition. We shall be officers not too high up the tree, and we shall sail clean through to our goal.” She pulled the next one off its hook. “Cram, I hereby promote you to the rank of midshipman. Your mam would be very proud, I am sure.” The coat's
platinum buttons flashed in the lamplight. They were flash, certainly, and using a precious metal for such a mundane purpose spoke to the importance of this ship. They were sharping their way into one of the most well-funded, expertly staffed places in the empire, and she still could not believe she was taking such a deep risk. She said nothing of that, however. Instead, she said, “Ruby, choose a coat and trousers, please. We have little time.”

The girl shook her head. “No. We do this my way. We sneak in as servants. Nobody notices servants.”

“When servants know their way about,” Athena said. “What happens when you lose our way in yon great stack of metal? Will you ask its captain where you can find the tea and crumpets? Or the first mate the way to the officers' mess? Or the restricted floors?”

Ruby bristled. “This is a ship! I have lived my whole life on ships! Have you? Before you crossed from England, I am certain that your most terrifying sea voyage was capsizing your toy boat in the tub and then crying to your governess!”

It was funny, but Athena had long learned to keep
her smile in check with Ruby. “You may think you travel into familiar territory, captain's daughter, but the
Grail
is as much like the
Thrift
as a castle is to a crofter's hut. What we need is
weight,
what we need is
authority
, and these”—she tossed Ruby a coat—“will give that to us.”

Ruby snorted, but she held on to the coat and went looking for trousers.

Cram piped in, “No boots, milady.” Indeed, there were no boots to be found. Though Ruby had somehow acquired a smart new pair, after days at sea, underground, and in prison Athena and Cram's boots fell on the quality scale somewhere between downright ragged and nonexistent. Two of Cram's toes were taking the air.

“Then don't let them see your feet,” she said, playing jaunty, though she did not feel it.

As Cram and Ruby pulled their uniforms on, Athena cracked the doorway and was assaulted by a wave of sound. It was bustling out there. She had to put her shoulder into a small man wrestling a huge wheel of cheese or else he would have spilled into the sitting room, so great was the press of people outside the door. The
little man's eyes narrowed, and he puffed up, looking for a fight, until he saw Athena's uniform. He tugged his forelock and instead turned back into the crowd, using the cheese wheel like a big round battering ram.

Most of the press were sailors or teamsters with heavy crates and barrels, even a few small wagons, pushing, pulling, cursing, and joking. The door led onto a wide balcony that led down great ramps to the wharf below. Opposite the door, across a wide bridge, a tall portal, twenty feet high, opened in a wall of black metal. The wall soared upward, and Athena had to crane her neck to see a similar bridge onto the deck high above. The collected thunder of hundreds of voices, wheels, and beasts filled the air, trapped between the dock and the ship, so that they could not have spoken to one another if they wanted.

“Come on,” she mouthed, and she plunged into the herd, holding Ruby's hand.

Halfway across the bridge Ruby's grip tightened. Athena swallowed a curse. She risked a look back and followed Ruby's eyes across the water, to a dock down the
wharf, where the
Thrift
floated in the
Grail'
s shadow like a newborn duckling under its great metal mother.

Men were moving on the deck. Ruby, wild eyed, mouth agape, almost pulled Athena over back the way they had come.

Athena dug in her heels and yanked Ruby in close. “What would your father say?” she said in Ruby's ear, as loud as she dared.

The dark centers of Ruby's eyes, inches from Athena's own, narrowed. She closed her lips. She nodded.

They turned and carried on.

And indeed, the two marines at the door barely batted an eye at the three midshipmen floating on the sea of grunts crossing the wide and crowded metal walkway. They were too busy trying to pry the angry little cheese man Athena had met before off the shoulders of a big sailor who was wearing said wheel on his leg like a massive cheesy anklet.

They passed through the doors without a hitch, but all three stopped when they crossed the threshold.

“Mam, that is big,” Cram muttered.

The hold of the
Grail
was a cross between a cathedral and an ancient cave, lit by big, smoky chem-torches and strewn with house-size stacks of boxes, tools, and who knew what else.

Ruby muttered, “Barnacles,” and then she started walking. Athena was with her step by step. She could hear Cram behind them, struggling with his bag. She could not look back, however. Now that they were clear of the press, the three midshipmen needed to be confident and secure of their position and posts. Hesitation would mark them as out of place.

So she walked straight up to two young sailors tipping a massive barrel labeled “Salt Pork” from a wagon onto the floor.

“Men,” she barked.

They came to attention. “Tell me, quickly, where they hold the prisoners. I have not been this far belowdecks, but I bear urgent news for the jailer.”

If they questioned her at all, it would be over. Instead, they barely gave her a glance, straining at the taut rope. “Two decks lower, sir, through that far door and down
the ladders. Turn right at the engine room.”

And that was that.

The bowels of the
Grail
smelled like burned bread, and the air was sodden and hot as a burning lake, but the directions were easy enough to follow. So easy, in fact, that when they turned right at the engine room, she had no idea that the passage would open up immediately into an stark, orderly space, with a desk covered with papers, a startled marine sergeant, and a row of narrow iron cells behind.

Athena exhaled. Only one cell was occupied, and there he was: the prisoner.

Henry Collins.

Your Majesty, I beg you. Leave the Colonies be. Wake them, and Pompeii will be as a child's tantrum.

—Wilhemina Caul, lord captain of the Reeve, 1688–1702

R
uby spoke up. “Sergeant, we require your prisoner for transport.”

At the same moment, Athena said, “Sergeant, I think we have taken a wrong turn. Please point us to the engine room.”

The sergeant, an older man with gray hair only on the sides of his head, had an expressive face. The emotions marched across it. Confusion. Concern. Alarm.

He was very quick, and he would have made it to the speaking tube in the corner of the room if three bodies had not slammed into him simultaneously. He banged his head hard on the bulkhead and passed out cold.

A mad idea came to Ruby. What if she could change, like Gwath? She focused all her will on the sergeant, his bushy gray hair, his bulbous nose, the scar on his neck. She closed her eyes, painted a picture of him in her mind, and she
pushed
with everything she had.

She opened her eyes.

Cram was looking at her.

“Do I look like me?” she asked.

Cram squinted.

He said, “What? Yes. What?”

“Never mind.” Ruby pulled the sheet from a cot in an open cell and began tearing at it, pulling strips from it, and binding the bald man's wrists and ankles. A large ring with a few keys hung from his belt. “See if you can get Henry out of there,” she shot at Cram. “Hurry!” He broke himself out of a stupor, grabbed the keys, and began trying them one by one in the cell door.

Athena just stood there, like a statue, staring at Henry. “
Move,
Athena. Help me with these!” Ruby hissed. The older girl set to it with a will, staring intently at the strips she was tearing from the thin sheets.

The cell door creaked open behind her as she started on the marine's feet, and then a few moments later Cram said. “None of these fit the irons he's wearing, Ferret!”

“Blast it.” She stuffed the rags into Athena's hands. “Can you finish? Can you make a strong knot?” She nodded once, already focused on her task. Athena was cool under pressure, Ruby would give her that. Ruby scrambled over the jailer and into the cell. “Help her ladyship with the knots and his gag. Tie him to something heavy . . . the desk?” Cram nodded and passed her, his face white.

Henry Collins was sitting on the floor, back against the cot, long legs splayed in front of him. The irons held his wrists close to the floor. They were big, thick things, but simple; she could pick through them like a hot knife through lard. She flashed him a quick smile. “Why, hello, Henry Collins, fancy meeting you here.”
And then she knelt down and saw his foot.

She had never seen a broken leg. Sprains, sure, but never broken. It was nothing like the dancing apprentice's foot she and Gwath had made long ago, all flat and bloody and oozing. Henry's foot and ankle were swollen, purple, twisted just so, and inarguably, exactly wrong. He was a stag in a snare: trapped but defiant. “I'm sorry we lost you along the way, Hermes Cestus,” she whispered through clenched teeth, and then she picked the locks, one, two, three, four.

He raised his eyebrows when she used his real name. “As am I,” he said. “But I am glad you are here now, Ruby Teach.”

“I'm going to keep calling you Henry.” He laughed.

“Let me help you,” Ruby said. He leaned forward, but as skinny as he was she could not lift him alone.

It took Ruby, Cram, and Athena two minutes to get him around the desk and to a chair by the door before they had to take a rest. They had bumped him several times, and he was unconscious from the pain and streaming sweat. His foot smelled oversweet, like spoiled peaches.

Cram massaged his own shoulder, muttering to himself.

Ruby whispered to Athena, “Can we take him? If we are slow, we may be caught. Or we may lose my father.”

Athena gazed back at her for what felt like a quarter of an hour. “We must,” she said. “No matter the cost.”

Henry let loose a death rattle. Which turned into a chuckle. He flopped his head around to stare at Athena. “Well, let's get on with it then.”

He turned to Ruby. “I know where your father is.”

Sprawled over the three of them like a rag doll, Henry Collins directed them down shoulder-width back corridors and around hidden bulkheads, all the while slipping in and out of consciousness. Ruby's gut was roiling.

“Insane,” she gasped through clenched teeth. Supporting Henry was like hauling five or six bags of wet flour, any one of which might at any moment fall to the floor, breaking the bag. Or, in this case, breaking the Henry, whose fragility had already been firmly established.

“You know, if anyone, and I mean, anyone sees us . . .” Athena whispered.

“Questions, running, fighting, running, capture,” Ruby grunted.

“Except with this bag of bones we won't be doing much running.”

Ruby nodded. “Fine. Questions, fighting, capture. Better?”

Athena said, “Well, no, not really. Mind that doorknob.”

Their charge chose that moment to wake once again, hissing breath in, and he lolled his head from side to side, taking the lay of the land. “Almost there,” he whispered, “around that corner and then up to the officers' quarters.” He flopped his arm over Ruby's shoulder to point the way. “Careful, this leads back to the main corridors.”

Cram crept up ahead while Ruby and Athena held Henry between them.

“Why did you leave us?” Ruby asked.

Athena turned to Henry as well. His eyes rolled back and forth between them for what seemed like quite a
while. “Angry,” he finally breathed out. “I was angry you weren't following me. I tried to get back to my home and got caught.”

Cram popped his head back around the corner and waved them forward. They shuffled on.

“Capture was not what I'd hoped for, but I still have faith,” Henry said, his eyes never leaving Athena. “You have to believe everyone will get what they deserve. And I believe it. I really do.”

The pain must have been giving him fits. His voice was growing far too loud. “Hsst.” Ruby shushed him. “Henry, please.”

He nodded and stopped talking, the smile still on his face.

As they closed on the corner, a posse of smells pulled Ruby on, odors that she hadn't smelled since Gwath's galley: fresh bread, sizzling onions, an earthy, juicy waft of roast chicken. In the narrow hallway beyond, Cram was using pieces of tablecloth to secure the hands and feet of a little, blond, and very unconscious steward. The only other things in the dim passage were a rolling cart,
groaning with a feast fit for royalty, and a small sliding door with a tinker's lamp perched above it. Besides the bread, onions, and chicken, the serving dishes crowded one another, piled high with pheasant, venison, buttered beets, all manner of greens, and a great peach pie.

“There's a slice missing from the pie,” Ruby said. Cram shrugged and kept to his tying. “Not that I mind. Well done, Cram.” He stood up and smiled, chewing all the while, mouth covered in golden crust and gooey filling. Athena kept watch as they folded Henry into the bottom rack of the cart and rolled him into a small room beyond the sliding door.

“It is a lift,” Cram explained. “They have one in the Tinkers' Guild in Boston. Before he went to sleep, the porter told me this one goes all the way up to the officers' mess. He said the captain's cabin is just a few doors down the hall.”

He slid the gate closed behind them and blew into a small set of whistles hanging from a nail in the corner. After a few moments, hidden gears lurched into motion, and they began rising.

Ruby poked him in the shoulder. “Thank you, Cram,”
she said. “And thank you, Henry,” she said to him.

Cram shrugged and helped himself to another piece of pie.

“One question: How did you get the tablecloth off the cart?”

He winked. “That's a serving man's secret, Ferret.” His face fell.

“What is it?” she asked.

He swallowed. “I been talking this out with my inner voice, and the inner voice has a question.”

“What is it, Cram?” she repeated.

“When we find your pa—”

“Yes?”

“What do we do then?”

They stared at her. Athena with her sword, Cram with his churn, Henry Collins tucked under the cart.

They were looking to her because she was the leader. She was the captain. This was her mission, her father, her story, and they were ready to do what they had to.

She opened her mouth, and nothing came out. Not one blasted thing.

They stood there for a few moments, the gears whirring in the background.

Then the lift came to a stop, and a tiny bell somewhere went
ding.

The gate and a set of sliding doors ratcheted open, and the four of them were staring into a gorgeous, well-furnished, and most definitely occupied dining room.