The Great Unravel, page 17
part #3 of Riddle in Ruby Series
“Thank you.” Athena’s jaw was taut, and her eyes were wary. “I do apologize for my . . . impoliteness when last we met.”
Nasira waved it away with a wolfish look. “Bygones. You were only doing what you thought right. Besides, it was nothing a fall through a trap couldn’t cure.” Her gaze slid over the other two, lingering on Ruby, but to her she said nothing. She took another gander at Athena and ambled over to a wall of tiny drawers that rose up into the darkness. Every wall of the little room was covered with the same.
She clambered up a wheeled ladder to its top, opened a drawer with a faint pop, and deftly scooped something into a fold of paper. She directed the ladder to the corner of the room with a push of her toes and rescued something else from a different drawer into another envelope. She was back down the ladder before they could blink.
“Hospitality is important where I come from. Ruby is family, but you two, please. Eat of our salt and rest in our shelter. With a wink she added, “But salt is so boring.” She presented the papers to Athena and Cram. “These are for you. I am never wrong.”
Henry couldn’t see what was in Cram’s. It was in his mouth already. The boy’s eyes first went wide with surprise and then all dreamy.
“Vanilla bean, from the far south,” said Nasira.
Athena stared at a little pile of light green powder in her palm. She looked about before extending a tongue. Her face remained unreadable, but she snorted in surprise. She took another taste, then bowed to the old woman from the waist.
Nasira smiled and bowed in return. “Cardamom. From the Moghul Empire. I hope you will accept my apology. Your last visit I—”
A door behind the counter burst open, and a lanky windmill of ancient man exploded into the room. “Bien-aimée, I am trapped in a torturously delicate experimental quagmire! Can you come down and—” He stopped, staring at the group before him.
He clacked his teeth. His quicksilver eyes whirled. “You are sorely late, apprentice. What have you to say for yourself?”
Henry masked his face, creating an image of smooth professionalism.
But the grin came back, larger than ever.
“That smirk is highly inappropriate, young sir.”
“Yes, I know,” said Henry, and for a moment he set aside the sorrow and the guilt because he was once again in a place where no matter what madness was happening outside, he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was safe. And then he threw himself into Fermat’s waiting arms.
They all stared at Ruby, who stared at nothing.
Fermat had led them all back through the door at the rear of the shop down the great stone spiral staircase that circled the outside of his tower. Henry had never been quite sure how deep the tower went. Certainly through the Lid. Most likely far into the earth below UnderTown. The tinker’s lamps, each one more strangely fashioned than the last, cast a low blue glow over the intricately carved walls, packed with elusive equations and pulsing strata of arcane symbols. Henry had seen many strange and fascinating things in his travels, but Fermat’s tower still filled him with wonder.
Nasira had led them into the sitting room, which Henry had ever been in only to clean. He helped remove the sheets from the old elaborate furniture, while Fermat hurried off to brew some of his famous nettle tea. It was honestly Nasira’s nettle tea, but she allowed him to pretend it was his when they had visitors. Finally they all sat down, and Henry told the story of where they had been and what was happening on the outside. It was hard. He stopped and started several times.
The two old people listened intently. An onyx raven perched above them on a stone outcropping, listening or not, Henry could not tell. It depended on the day.
After Henry had related their arrival at the door of the spice shop, the two looked at each other.
“Marise returned,” Fermat said.
“And also . . .” said Nasira.
“The rising destroyed,” said Fermat.
“The Bluestockings eliminated, or at least declawed,” said Nasira.
“And this Swede running amok with his machine.” As Fermat looked at Henry, the skin around his quicksilver eyes tensed. “You see? You see how this works, Henri? A discovery comes into the light, and then people crush one another to ruin themselves over it.”
Henry said nothing. What could he say? He had been thrilled to translate Marise’s journal, to offer his aid. The possibilities were so great. Machines to harvest crops, putting an end to slavery. Engines to build and make and grow. Happier people living better lives.
How could he have been so stupid?
Fermat stood. Then he began stalking back and forth, muttering to himself in French. It was too growly and too fast, but Henry was able to translate “too much to bear” and “stuck in this great, Science-forsaken rolling pin” before ignoring them, Fermat stalked out of the room.
Nasira flowed to her feet with an apologetic look. “You all are of course welcome,” she said. “Henry, your room is still as it was, and Ruby can have her old room as well. Could you please help situate our guests? Linens are in the usual places, and I think some of my sparring gear will fit Lady Athena,” she said with a bow.
“Of course,” said Henry.
“Thank you,” said Athena.
Nasira paused at the doorway. “I will be upstairs awhile, casting my net to take the measure of the town.” She looked at Henry. “He is upset. He will rally.”
Henry nodded. “He will come back to us when he is ready. I will make sure our guests are well taken care of.” Our guests. Well, this was his locus, he realized. Marise’s cottage had been a resting place of sorts, but this truly was home.
Nasira hesitated, then stalked over to kneel in front of Ruby, her hands on the girl’s knees. “Ruby Teach,” she said, “I am sorry for you. Patience, my girl. Only with patience will your path be revealed.”
Ruby looked up at her, her eyes focusing for the first time. She took great care to enunciate when she said, “Bugger that.”
Nasira blinked.
Ruby stood up. “I thank you for your hospitality, Nasira, but you’re wrong. Patience gets you caught. Patience gets you killed. I will wait, but only because we have nowhere left to go.” And with that, she stalked out of the room.
CHAPTER 22
Let go your grief. It is the weakest of blades.
—Halvard d’Anjou, Bastionado
Despite Ruby’s declaration, the hours turned into days. Four days, in fact, since Nasira had sent her minions—an army of orphans, workers, chambermaids, and chimney sweeps—out to get the lay of the land, and in those four days Ruby’s grief had been replaced by a growing, deliberate rage.
Her room was comfortable enough. The sheets were soft, Evie had found a perch on the intricately carved headboard, and the fancy chemystral bath was just as wonderful as she remembered; but trying to lie still even for a few moments was torture. As soon as she was in the bath, she sloshed back out again. The Thrift had been hired once to transport a panther from the West Indies up to the animalium of some muckety-muck in Montreal; she had spent hours on deck watching it pace back and forth in its cage. It never rested once. It was in the wrong place, and it knew it.
She was that panther. Except her type of panther was apparently caged up by her friends. She flicked at a carving on the door, an eagle whose feathers were all equations. She buckled her belt—Nasira had somehow turned Reginald Shackleton’s ruined, stained party clothes into a serviceable set of breeches and vest—and she wrenched the door open.
“Evie, let’s go.” The ottermaton was fascinated by all things chem, and she currently had her paws wrapped about a clever teacup that somehow kept its insides warm. She gave a little metallic chirp and dropped the cup back onto the tray with a clang. Evie took offense at the noise and began chattering at the tray, giving it what for.
“Evie, come on,” said Ruby.
The otter squeaked and then was pure motion, flowing over the closely set marble tiles and clambering up Ruby’s back to her preferred spot on the shoulders, wrapped about her neck like a high lady’s stole.
“Good girl.” Ruby flourished one of the pig iron nails she had found in a storeroom, and the ottermaton grabbed it eagerly and settled in, gnawing away. Evie didn’t eat as such. She got her energy from the sparkstone Henry said he would eventually need to recharge. But she did love to exercise her teeth on metals of all sorts, and the nails kept her focused for at least a moment or two. Training the little creature had been at turns frustrating and exhilarating. At times it seemed that Evie could read her every thought and nod of the head, seeking out tokens Ruby had hidden about the room or even retrieving a book from the tower library. Other times she was unable (or unwilling) to accomplish the simplest of commands. Perhaps it was simply the little mechanical’s personality, and Evie followed Ruby’s will only when it suited Evie.
She couldn’t blame the ottermaton. Sleipnir and Evram had followed Ruby’s lead. If only the boy and the gearhorse had not encountered her. . .
Best not think about that, Evie clucked in her ear. Or her head.
“Fine,” Ruby breathed, and set off down the stairs.
She wasn’t certain whether Evie was really speaking to her or those were simply her own thoughts, but in a world of changing, and chem, and upside-down towers and dead parents, she didn’t much care.
The circular shelves of Fermat’s laboratory rose into the darkness, packed with scrolls and papers and tomes from a hundred different countries and eras. The room itself was dominated by a scarred black slate worktable, covered by a salvage yard of scales, alembics, and vials. Ruby herself had sat, lain, stood, and—in one highly uncomfortable instance—hung over the thing as Fermat feverishly experimented on her to attempt to discover the secret in her blood.
The secret that was now sowing terror all over Philadelphi and—who knew?—perhaps even the entire continent.
The ancient alchemyst had not had time to ferret out the secret, as Athena and Cram had barged in, and then they all had run off in a dither to save her father. Which led to many other things, none of which was very pleasant. And what good had it done?
Perhaps it would have just been better to stay here.
No. Evie sounded off on her shoulder. You had to try. It would have been worse if you had stayed.
Ruby snorted at that. Evie coiled down her legs and skittered over to a clutter of Fermat’s alchemycal devices. She couldn’t get enough of them, as if they were a kind of strange kin to her.
At the foot of the table stood Fermat and Nasira, talking intently with a third person. Nasira saw Ruby and stood aside, revealing—
Greta Van Huffridge.
Before Ruby could think of what to say or what to do, Cram, Henry, and Athena tumbled down the steps and into the laboratory. “She’s not in her room, she—” said Athena, and then she stopped when she saw Ruby and Greta. “Oh.”
“Oh, indeed.” Fermat’s quicksilver eyes glittered.
Athena started over to Greta, hand outstretched. “Greta, I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t touch me.”
Athena jerked to a stop. At some point since their arrival she had cut her hair short. The fine black strands whispered across her jaw.
They all looked about at one another.
Fermat clacked his teeth, but the sound was different somehow. Impatient. Angry. “All right, my little chicks, settle in and listen, for Nasira and this young lady have news of the outside world.”
“You want me to—” Nasira said.
“You must,” he said.
The old woman sighed and turned to them, brows furrowed. “The city is an armed camp. English forces patrol the streets. Curfews are even more strict than they were. During the day no one can be out in the open without papers, period. If you are caught, you are arrested and detained. Those who are detained do not return.”
The crown tightening the screws. Or the Swede. Who was running the city? “What of the Warren?” asked Ruby, her heart in her throat.
Nasira’s eyes were a dark sea. “My people could not get outside to reach the other entrance, at the smokehouse. There is still a watch on the former tunnel entrance in Bluestone Square. No one is clearing the rubble, and”—she cleared her throat—“my people talked to numerous folk who live in the neighborhood. No one has come out of it.”
Her mother. Her fathers. Los Jabalís. At least fifty other people possibly trapped down in those tunnels or worse. Ruby shook her head. Should they have run? Her mother had said it. People will die. A cold, stinging regret washed over Ruby. She had never truly thought that some of those people might be the ones closest to her.
“Ain’t no one lifted a finger to help?” Cram asked.
Nasira sighed. “They have their own problems. Many of the guests at Lothor Van Huffridge’s party are still missing, taken into custody in the Benzene Yards. The governor has disappeared. Several speeches have been made by a captain with red muttonchops.”
“Torvald,” said Henry. “He commands the Grail. In my time as a midshipman I never heard an ill word said of him. He is well respected, even loved by his command. Is his tinker battleship still in port?”
“Indeed, and armed to the teeth. Anyone approaching within firing range gets a musket ball for their trouble.”
“Are there troops outside the walls?” asked Athena. “What of the French and the other English?”
“No one knows. Philadelphi is an island now. A walled prison.” It was Greta who spoke.
“What of the people?” Cram asked. “The crown just killed one of their own, plus a mess of other folk, and they thrown hundreds in the lockup. Are the rest just sitting on their hands?”
Nasira took a deep breath. “The juicing has spread like wildfire. Much of the city now, and each of those folk do nothing but wear their smiles and do the Swede’s bidding.” She looked down. “The people will not help.”
Greta wiped her nose on her sleeve. The fire had gone out of her, Ruby thought. No, not gone out but changed somehow. Before, she had burned bright with ruthless certainty. The fire was still there, but it was strained, guttering, as if consuming the last of the fuel in a vain attempt to keep burning, right before it flared out. Ruby admired Greta’s gumption, but the look of it and the feel of her desperation felt woefully familiar.
The heir to the Van Huffridge kingdom cleared her throat.
“After I left you all at Reggie’s I made my way back to a house I know off Bluestone Square—the Birnbaums. They are—were allies of my father. They keep a small room in the cellar for Bluestockings who might occasionally need a hiding place.”
Greta blinked as if she were coming up from some kind of dream. “In the middle of the night there was a great commotion in the street. Voices yelling outside, people running, bedlam from all corners. I opened the basement window to see what was the matter. A—A man ran past. He was yelling, ‘They shot Van Huffridge! They shot him!’ and then”—she adjusted her filthy skirts—“everything went dark for a while. Sometime later I heard Swedenborg in his cart—the Birnbaums are on Sauce Street, just north of the square—and then the—” She waved her hand. “Well, the aftermath.” She glanced up at Ruby.
Athena put a hand on Ruby’s shoulder, and she squeezed it. It didn’t stop the ache in her belly, but it helped a little. Ruby nodded for Greta to continue.
The other girl sighed. “Melissa and Ezekiel Birnbaum were huge supporters of my father. They didn’t come back. The house was in chaos. No one knew what to do.” Her lips tightened. “One of the butlers went out to get the lay of the land and came back with money, a smile under his bandaged ears, and black tendrils trailing up his forearm. He started whispering to the others and wouldn’t meet my eyes. Soldiers came the second day and ransacked Ezekiel Birnbaum’s study, looking for papers. They were also looking for me.” She frowned. “The cook didn’t give me away, but after the soldiers left, I had to go.” Her face went flat, her eyes far away. “I went to the square, I didn’t know what else to do, and I saw the—” She covered her mouth with her hand. “I wandered away, through the alleys.” To Athena, she said, “I lost your sword. I don’t know what happened to it. I’m very sorry.”
Athena shook her head. “It is nothing. I can find another.”
Greta nodded. “At some point I just sat down in a doorway. That’s when Ben found me.” She sent a grateful nod over to a young boy Ruby hadn’t noticed, standing quietly in the corner. “He sussed straightaway who I was, and he brought me here.” She blinked and then drew herself up, all four and a half feet of her. “Where are my manners?” She dropped a graceful curtsy to the ground, somehow including both Nasira and Fermat. “I am grateful for this sanctuary. You have my thanks and the thanks of my family for taking me into your home. The Van Huffridges will not forget.”
Cram huffed, like a steer clearing its head after smashing into something. “Any news of Thandie Paine?”
The boy Ben perked up. “Miss Paine, the Reeve took her with the rest of the committee. I watched them carried out, like flies stuck in amber, and loaded into a wagon.”
Cram had taken something out of the bag and turned over and over in his hands: the crown.
There was a clatter from the corner.
Evie looked up, eyes guilty, caught in a tangle of tubes and silver she had pulled down from a shelf.
“Evie!” said Ruby. “Now is not the time for—”
The little ottermaton stared at her for a moment and then turned back to struggling with the artifice, a kind of circular silver mirror.
“Evie, put that down.”
“Oh, Science.” Suddenly Henry was across the room and kneeling next to Evie. The ottermaton looked up at him and pulled uselessly at the heavy thing, chittering in what was obviously a request for help.
“This is—I think that—” Henry looked up at Fermat “Master Fermat—”
Ruby had seen the old man’s face light up like that only once before, when he had so diligently and ferociously experimented on her in this very room. “Excellent, Henrí!” He swept his long arm across the black stone worktable, scattering ancient and delicate devices everywhere. “Here. Set it up here.”
