A Riddle in Ruby (2 page)

Sparking fire. The wheel. The written word. Each changed the rules of our world forever. I have newly met a sister to these titans. Her name is Chemystry.

—Sir Francis Bacon, 1626,

Invisible College, London

BOSTON, BRADFORDUM COLONY—1718

N
ever pick a chemystral lock.

Ruby could have yelled those words from the rooftops. But she wasn't on a rooftop. She was halfway underneath a handcart stalled in the mad river of Stout Street shoppers. A squat alloy trunk on sturdy iron wheels, it was strong enough to turn a cannon blast, and the doors on its rear were secured with a devilishly complex lock.

All well and good; Ruby ate devilishly complex locks for breakfast. But this one was stocked with a reservoir of aqua fortis acid. The alchemists' apprentices called the stuff the Tinkers' handshake. At the slightest jiggle, the slightest misstep, acid would bubble out of the lock in a golden wave to devour careless thieves' hands and wrists down to the bone.

Never pick a chemystral lock.

Never, ever pick a chemystral lock on a busy Boston street, at high noon, on your back, with one hand, and blind.

Ruby stretched her arm up from under the cart, playing her fingers across the carved symbols on the rear doorplate until they found a keyhole.

With her thumb and forefinger she slipped her alloyed glass pick out of her sleeve. Any other implement—steel, iron, bronze—would have liquefied at first contact with the lock's deadly insides. Gwath Maxim Fourteen: “Always Use the Proper Tool.”

The other proper tool, besides the pick, was what appeared to be her ruined foot. It was a horrible sight.
She and Gwath had beaten the old shoe within an inch of its life. It looked as if it had been crushed by a team of oxen, and the blood seeping from every corner would have turned her stomach if she had not known that it was nothing more than water, boiled ox hoof, and just the proper sprinkle of powdered rusted iron.

Gwath, playing the part of her master, drew all eyes to her crumpled paw like a mother bear, roaring at the two men at the front of the cart.

This final test was a true challenge, gruesome and grim, but Gwath would not have given it to her if he had not thought she could succeed.

She found the first of five tumblers and teased it open. It felt like old glue in there.

As if he had heard her thinking of him, Gwath launched into another tirade at the men.

She was good at locks. One day she might be great. But Gwath, he was a masterful sharper and in his element. He thundered: “Look at his foot. Look at it! It may well be ruined!” Ruby took the cue and wailed, lifting the injury from the ground. She took care to pitch her voice
low. While her dark hair was pinned under the cap and her wiry frame showed them “apprentice boy,” a girlish wail could give it all away.

“This is no fault of mine, sir,” the Tinker said. “The boy should watch his step. This cart carries a delicate and precious package. We are anxiously expected, and we must, I fear, keep moving forward.” Anger and fear fought for room in the twitchy little alchemyst's voice. Their magic—or science, call it what you will—had fueled the wonders of the Chemystral Age. But Tinkers still were men, and still they could be duped.

Gwath's voice shifted into a kind of gargle—part angry crow, part suffocating fish.

“The boy's fault? Your guard there moves like a drunken oliphant, and your cart has smashed my boy's precious foot to flinders. Look upon it!” Ruby flailed her leg about. “My lad is the assistant to the dancing master at my house. He is one of the most agile young men in Bradfordum Colony. He has played for the governor, even for the foreman of your own guild!”

She grinned.

Something twitched in the lock.

She froze.

She counted to five. Acid did not pour from the keyhole.

Careless. Cocksure. She grinned wider. She might be all of those, sure, but today was her day.

Gwath was too distracting. She blocked him out. Besides, they had practiced the sharp to death. Threats, allusions to powerful friends in the guild, expulsion and ruin for the man, prison and ruin for the guard, tra-la-la, thus was the sharper's task. Distract and worry, screen and sham. And all the while, in the shadows, the picker picked.

The second tumbler fell. Ruby wrapped calm around her like a cloak, and the words, the sounds of the busy street, even her sight, they all receded, leaving only the intricate tactile music of her hand, her pick, and their dangerous chemystral partner.

The third tumbler fell. Then the fourth. The path to glory.

“What have we here, then?”

A harder and leaner voice hauled her attention out of the lock and back to the street. On the other side of Gwath's thick, stockinged legs and gaily buckled shoes sat two pairs of pristine black boots with brilliantly white linen spats. Barnacles. It was Redcoats. The strong arm of the king.

Yet they, too, could see only her feet. She redoubled her efforts.

Gwath bent over her legs and squeezed her ankle twice, the signal for her to stop. Gwath Maxim Five was very clear: “Meddle Not With the Royal Military.” But she was so close! The fifth tumbler had started to dance. A few more seconds and it would be open.

“His Majesty's Finest. You arrive in the very nick of time!” Gwath said. As he labored up to meet the soldiers, he pulled Ruby's leg once, hard. She slid toward him under the cart, her hand at least a foot away from the lock. It might as well have been ten thousand miles. She lay back onto the street with a moan, playing her part. Inside, she blazed with fury.

An hour later Ruby waited in the deserted little walkway between Chubb's Dry Goods and Napper's Pub, just up the hill from Ruck's Wharf. She folded her apprentice clothes into the leather satchel, shoved the whole package into the nook in the wall, then replaced the loose board that covered it. She hitched up her patchwork pants and wrenched the floppy fisherman's cap down over her eyes. With a crane of the neck and a befuddled hunch of the shoulders she changed herself into Stonemason's Boy. Leaning into the shadows underneath the eaves, she waited, hucking pebbles at the wall, as a stonemason's boy might do. The morning had been an utter failure; and when would she have another chance at journeyman?

Gwath was coming up the hill from the wharf, framed by a leafless forest of masts. The one to the far right might be the
Thrift
. He had discarded the merchant's waistcoat and priggish wig for the chalky clothes of a stonemason, and his face was no longer flushed and unhealthy but seamed and leathered.

“Master,” she said. He walked past her.

She followed him down the walkway into the sudden
chaos of Charter Street on a market morning. He bulled ahead with a stark look.

“Master?” she asked again. “What is it?”

“What do you see there?” He nodded at a chemystral meat cart, manned by a frantic little Irishman and fueled by an alchemycal cell hidden in its innards. The pastries turned around on a tinker's wheel, and a small silver flame cooked them from underneath.

“Pies! Pies!” the vendor called. “Meat pies for your sweet love! Bring her these home today and she'll forget where you were last night!” Two Puritan ladies ruffled like partridges as they passed the vendor, all pinched faces and whispered scandal.

Ruby answered Gwath. “A man who fears he has gone too far.”

“Why?”

“He presses. Tattered coat, mismatched boots. He must have bought that cart on credit. I wager he's starting to cotton he won't pay the Tinkers back for that contraption in a lifetime of pies.”

A dock worker, grunting under the weight of two
huge sacks, hands chapped and raw, shouldered his way past Gwath.

Gwath glanced at the teamster; then his eyes bored into Ruby. “Is that what we do?”

“Carry too much weight? Not I.” She patted her stomach. “I almost never eat rice pudding, and with all manner of sweaty work on the
Thrift
—”

He flicked her on the head with his finger. “Do we blindly bull ahead, no matter the risk?”

She rolled her eyes. “Gwath Maxim Two: Use The World As It Is, Not As It Should Be. That hurt.”

“Then dodge.”

“You are too fast.”

“Then keep your sass in the lockup.”

She knew what this was about now. “I almost solved that lock! I did!”

He leaned in, jaw tense. “You almost solved us both into the governor's stockade! Your father would have been wroth, and the
Thrift
would have lost passengers while they tried to get us out. You have not spent time in a Boston jail. They are unfriendly.”

“I will solve for nothing, ever, if you keep making a coward of me! I can handle myself.”

Gwath raised up in the middle of the street to glance about. A large tinker's carriage lumbered around the corner and headed toward them. There was a gleam in his eye that she did not care for. To her credit, she sensed that he was going to reach for her. He was just too fast. He snagged a fistful of her shirt and wrenched her into the air with one hand. Over his shoulder the massive coach bore down on them. Gwath pulled her face close to his, and a forbidding challenge lurked there.

“You think you can handle yourself, monkey? Let us see.”

The carriage was moving faster now. The crowd in the street parted before it like water, but the two of them stood dead in its path.

What Fermat calls Alchemy is no boon to the virtuous. This “science” is a Wolf in the Sheep Pen. No good will come of it.

—Louis de Nogaret, Archbishop of Toulouse,

speech to the College of Cardinals, 1639

C
ram loved every little thing about working for the Tinkers. Ever since he was old enough to hear words and shuck peas, his Mam had sung the praises of their chief, good old Francis Bacon. They say that he changed the world a hundred years ago, when he set snow on fire. Cram didn't know about that, but he did know one thing: A gutter punk like him could never have got what he got and did what he done and been what he now was in the
bad old days of lords and ladies and by-your-leaves.

The coachman's seat sat high above the street, where every John and Judith could see your quality. The livery was flash. The deep blue sash on his shoulder marked him. Not just in Boston, but in Philadelphi and even as far south as Charles Towne, folk would know he was up to snuff. A man of the New World cut his own path and cared not a whit for the tired arguments of the Old. He couldn't give two snaps for what the priests and kneelers called the godlessness of the Tinkers' machines. The carriage had shining, sturdy wheels and a fresh load of chemystral flux to keep it moving, and best of all, it moved
itself
.

He turned the corner with a full head of steam and opened the wheel a bit more, laying into the horn again. The shops and people blurred into glimpses: a silver-nosed tinker; gearcraft harps in a window; a sign that boasted
TINNE SALT—FRESH!
Cram bared his teeth to the wind as the ironshod wheels clunked on the cobblestones of the narrowing street. On the left, a crowd of soot-covered grindshop serfs filled the walk, stumbling
shoulder to shoulder out of a night smithy, blind and blinking in the sun. On the right, a parade of chem carts crept out into the way, hawking nitrate-singed meat and cut-rate mechanicals to the early-morning crowds. A donkey launched itself out of the way and galloped headfirst into a bakery.

Two figures stood unaware, square in the path of the hurtling carriage. A hulk of a fella was taking it to a sprat of a youngun. Cram grabbed a lever carved with the face of a screaming imp and leaned on the gas horn, but they didn't hear. The giant had lifted the young boy up by the collar with one arm and was shaking the feathers out of him, shouts drowned by the heavy clockwork of the carriage's gears.

Crowds left, market right, he could not turn.

Cram pulled on the imp whistle three times hard, and the boy looked up, eyes wide and squirmed more forcefully. The big man, though, stood planted in the street, yelling into the face of this boy, as Cram, his passenger, and eighty stone of metal and gears bore down on them.

Cram lunged for the floor of the bench and threw open the door to the tiny cabinet there. It was intricately carved and bore a red painted legend: “
EMPLOY THEE ONLY IN DYRE AND SINGULAR CIRCUMSTANCE!
” Inside was a red lever.

Cram pulled it.