The Fourth Ruby

by James R. Hannibal

  Shaw stared up at the elevator. “The pr’fessor’s gettin’ away. If anyone cares.”

  “Quiet, Shaw,” said Gwen, glowering at the warden. “Give us a minute.”

  “I’m just sayin’, is all.”

  Neither Ash nor Jack paid him any heed. The quartermaster wrapped Sadie’s forearm with a silk handkerchief, tying it tight. “This will slow the spread of the poison. But it won’t stop it.”

  Gwen pressed a hand to Sadie’s cheek. “She’s cold. She needs a hospital. Fast.”

  Jack’s mind was spinning. His face and limbs tingled with a thousand pinpoints. He had to get himself together. He draped his sister’s arm over his shoulder. “Help me get her up. I’m getting her out of here.”

  Ash helped him lift her, but he placed a gentle hand on Jack’s arm. “You can’t be the one to take her, Jack. The Russians are still looking for you, remember? You won’t get anywhere near a hospital.”

  “A hospital won’t do her no good, anyway,” added Shaw. “It’s poison. In the blood. Nothin’ll stop it but an antidote.”

  Gwen glared at him. “I told you to be quiet, Shaw. You’re not help—” She stopped, the frustration in her eyes fading. “No. Wait. You are helping. Well done, Shaw.”

  Jack watched her carefully, grasping at the hope in her voice. “What do you mean?”

  “Tanner said those spiders came from a ‘benefactor.’ ” Gwen made air quotes with her fingers. “That has to be Gall, a spook, and spooks have rules just like trackers. Mo-Mos, book two, chapter eleven: Assassination, Subterfuge, and Sabotage. Rule twenty-six states that any agent carrying poison must always carry the antidote, for their own protection.”

  “The case in Arthur’s quarters,” said Jack, nodding slowly. “The one he got from Gall. There were pockets in the foam—square cutouts for the spider-cubes and an equal number of circle cutouts for the vials of green poison . . . but there was an extra pocket.” He closed his eyes, trying to remember what he had seen Arthur handing to Tanner when he spotted them in the arena—the gold control cylinder for the spiders and . . . “The antidote is a vial of blue syrup. Tanner has it. I know he does.”

  He started for the steps with Sadie, Ash supporting her on the other side. “Get my sister to a hospital,” he said to the quartermaster. “Maybe they can stabilize her—delay the poison while we go after Tanner.”

  Ash narrowed his eyes. “Shaw can do that. I should go with you.”

  Jack shot a glance back at the warden, whose thick lips spread into a forced helpful smile. Jack shook his head. “Uh . . . no.” He pointed at the dome of the Tomb Room. “The rest of the Crown Jewels are over there. I’ll trust Shaw with those but not my sister.”

  Shaw’s smile dropped away. “Too funny.” He tromped back to the dome to recover the case. “An’ ’ow do you propose to go after the pr’fessor, eh?” he called over his shoulder. “Airport? Trains? Buses? Wherever you go, the police’ll be waitin’. You can’t leave the city.”

  “Yes we can.” Gwen followed the others up the steps with Marta beside her. “As I told Jack when the hyperloop exploded, there’s another way out of Moscow.” They reached the top and she nodded to the wooden girl, whose bronze plating was in the process of flipping out of sight. “Marta, we need to borrow Count Bruce’s flying machine.”

  Chapter Fifty

  JACK STEPPED OUT of the way as Marta marched over to the corner beneath the upside-down rocking chair.

  “Margery won’t be happy,” she said, holding up her index finger. The tip folded back, revealing a brass key. “She hates it when the count and I disturb her garden.” Marta inserted the key into a keyhole and turned it. The wall split and slid open, exactly as the opposite wall had earlier, and Jack caught his breath.

  More liquid lanterns roiled to life, illuminating an underground hangar far deeper than the library. A zeppelin hovered at the center, straining against its lines as if the long dead count had taken it for a spin the night before. A great band of some copper alloy formed the central fuselage, with bundles of flared pipes for thrusters and a long, sleek gondola beneath. The gas envelope, pointed at both ends, was made of ribbed purple fabric and decorated with gold geometric figures.

  “The counts were nothing if not flamboyant.” Gwen started down a wrought-iron staircase that joined a catwalk several flights below.

  “Wait,” Jack called after her. “Do you even know how to fly that thing?”

  “It’s an airship, Jack. How hard can it be?”

  Marta turned a crank fixed to gears and chains hanging down from the ceiling, and Jack finally understood the purpose of the rusted rail in the garden above. It was the seam of a retractable roof. Two huge panels folded back like accordions, letting in the moonlight and dropping dirt and shrubs into the bay. “Oh dear,” said Marta, locking the crank in place. “Margery has let her garden go.”

  The wrought-iron staircase Gwen had taken down to the catwalk also had a flight going up to the garden. Shaw was already on his way up. Ash, one arm supporting Sadie, offered Jack a hand. “I’m sorry I doubted you.”

  “I gave you every reason to.” Jack clasped his forearm, gripping his shoulder with the other hand. He gave Ash the coordinates of the tomb and made him promise to bring Sadie to him if and when the Russian doctors got her stabilized.

  “Are you sure you won’t let Shaw do all of that? I should be with you, Jack. Tanner is dangerous, and I guarantee you that tomb is booby-trapped. You’ll need a quartermaster.”

  Jack looked down at Gwen, who was unraveling a mooring line as if she had launched an airship every day of her life.

  She glanced up at him and offered a crisp British salute.

  He saluted her back. “I’ve already got one.”

  A few minutes later, Marta released the final line and waved from the bottom of the hangar. Jack and Gwen waved back from the flight deck, and the airship rose into the night. Once they were well into the air, the garden roof closed beneath them, cutting them off from the warm yellow light of the count’s library. And with a burst of blue flame from the pipes, they were off.

  Jack walked aft along the cabin’s deep bay windows, watching the count’s estate pass behind. When they were high enough, he found the main road and Ash’s car speeding toward Moscow with his sister. He pressed a hand against the glass.

  Once the car was out of sight, he lowered his hand again, and it came to rest on the golden hilt at his belt. “Huh,” he said, glancing down absentmindedly. “I forgot to put the sword back in the jewel case.”

  “Not to worry. You might still have a use for it.” Gwen looked back at him as she adjusted the big navigation wheel. “Come up front and help me search for Tanner. He’ll be headed southeast—perhaps making for a train station or an airfield. If we can intercept him, we can get Sadie the antidote that much sooner.”

  Jack nodded and took a few steps toward the flight deck, but the tingling he had first felt when Sadie collapsed was back. A million silvery pinpoints pressing into every square inch of him, as if his whole body was phasing away. His knees buckled and he had to catch the rail that ran along the windows.

  “All right. All right.” Gwen ran back to catch his elbow and guided him the rest of the way. “Are you sure you weren’t nicked by that spider? You look worse than ever.”

  He looked up at her, scrunching up his face. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  “You know what I mean.” She lowered him into the plush captain’s chair behind the wheel. “I’m serious, Jack.”

  “It wasn’t the spiders.”

  “No. You’re right. You were like this before we got to Count Bruce’s library. You had that nosebleed at the cathedral. What’s going on?” She stared at him hard, waiting for a response.

  He didn’t give her one.

  Beyond the windscreen lay the empty, snow-covered forests of eastern Russia, colored pink by the sun peeking over the horizon. The view would have been breathtaking if Jack didn’t have so much riding on
his shoulders and so little of himself left to face it. He saw no cars on the few winding roads ahead—no sign of Tanner.

  “Jack.” Gwen folded her arms, still waiting.

  “There’s something I’ve never told you, something about the night we rescued my dad from the Clockmaker.” He drew the zed from his pocket, letting its gold lace catch the light coming in through the window. The image of his dad returned to him, slumped over in that wheelchair at the top of Big Ben, face burned and swollen. “He spoke to me.”

  “You thought he spoke to you, Jack. I was there. Your dad was already in his coma.”

  Jack set the zed down on a flat leather pad that ran along the base of the controls. “Through this,” he continued, ignoring her argument, “the zed. It connected us, Gwen. My dad talked to me. He told me to leave him there and go stop the Clockmaker. Since then, it’s helped me boost my fading abilities, but every time I use it, I get . . .”

  Gwen touched his shoulder. “Weaker.”

  He nodded.

  “Where does it come from, Jack?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “You must know something. You know its name.”

  “No. I don’t. I mean . . . I made it up. There was a funny sort of Z drawn on a folded paper in the spot where I found it.”

  “A funny Z?” Gwen snapped up a piece of chalk from a small blackboard embedded in the control panel and pressed it into Jack’s hand. “Draw it. Now.”

  He leaned over the wheel and did as she asked.

  She shook her head. “No. No. That’s not right.” Gwen erased the symbol with her sleeve and snatched the chalk away, drawing her own version. It looked the same, except canted sideways. “Like this. Right?”

  Jack didn’t see much difference. “Um . . . sure.”

  “That’s not a Z, Jack. It’s a symbol, one that trackers and quartermasters use all the time.”

  Jack was tired. His sister was on the edge of death. And he and Gwen were drifting toward a confrontation with a maniacal tracker bent on channeling the spirit of the world history record-holder for most millions slaughtered. At that particular moment, he didn’t need Gwen’s condescending everyone-knows-this-but-you attitude. “Fine. You’re smarter than me. I get it. So enlighten me. What does this oh-so-common symbol mean?”

  Gwen let out a huff at the rebuke, and then she turned and hovered over the blackboard, making an exaggerated tap, tap, tapping with her chalk as she drew another symbol. “Only this.”

  Jack stared at the board.

  She had drawn a skull and crossbones.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  JACK SANK BACK against the cushion. “Poison?”

  Gwen flung the chalk at him. “It means danger, you wally—as in dangerous bend, watch out, use caution. Scientists and mathematicians use it in proofs to say, ‘Something here is not what it seems.’ As you can imagine, the Ministry of Trackers finds uses for it all the time.”

  “ ‘Not what it seems,’ ” he repeated, eyeing the zed.

  “Exactly. You think that stone boosts your abilities, but what it’s really doing is taking them. Jack, that thing is eating you alive.”

  He grimaced, wondering how close eating you alive came to the truth. The winter hills outside had turned from gray to white as the sun climbed higher. The shadows of the trees had shortened, and he felt the passage of time closing in on him like a vise. Jack put the zed away, out of sight. “Let’s focus on Tanner. How do you think he plans to get to the tomb?”

  “As I said before, a train—a plane, perhaps. The distance is too great for an automobile. Eastern Russia doesn’t have too many petrol stations. What we need to do is determine his jumping-off point, so to speak.” She bowed her head, drumming her fingertips against her temples. “Tanner claimed he’s been guiding our steps, right? He steered us to Count Bruce’s estate.”

  “If that was his game all along, he would have had transportation ready somewhere near . . .” Jack’s eyes drifted across the hills. “There.” He pointed at a swath cut through the trees, just coming into view. An airfield lay nestled in a shallow valley.

  Gwen slapped the arm of his chair. “Private jet. That’s how Tanner is getting to the tomb.” Even as she spoke, a little black aircraft lifted off, cleared the hilltops, and turned southeast. “That has to be him.” She punched Jack’s arm. “We’re right on his tail.”

  He winced, rubbing the spot. “You really have to stop that.”

  The aircraft pulled away in its climb, leaving the count’s centuries-old zeppelin crawling behind. Jack shook his head. “We’re moving at the speed of a flying turtle here. We’ll never catch him.”

  “Is that so?” Gwen reached up and grabbed the lever of a circular control that hung down from the ceiling, with labels like all stop and cruise. She shifted a big brass arrow all the way to ahead full, causing a quaint little ching.

  The airship continued its slow crawl across the landscape.

  Jack opened his mouth to say something snide, but then a chunk, chunk, chunk filled the cabin. Air hissed through the spaghetti of pipes in the rafters above them.

  Turning in his seat, he could see the zeppelin’s fabric envelope expanding. The aft section of the copper fuselage shifted back, lengthening the central section. And from the pocket behind the separating halves, great bat wings folded down. The dark blue fabric on the underside of the left wing was painted with a red griffin. The right wing bore a silver hound. The airship had transformed into a sleek, winged hybrid.

  “From the second Count Bruce’s coat of arms,” said Gwen, nodding at the giant creatures painted on the wings. “On top of the flamboyance, he was a bit of an egomaniac.”

  Jack stood and leaned into the windscreen to check Tanner’s progress. The black jet was barely a speck. “Great,” he said. “We look a whole lot cooler now. But we’re still—”

  A light ding from the console interrupted his complaint. A green placard flashed READY.

  Gwen placed five fingertips on his chest and shoved him back into the captain’s chair. She flumped down beside him, scooched him over with her hip, and rested her thumb against a big brass toggle.

  She pumped her eyebrows. “I wasn’t finished yet.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  GWEN FLIPPED THE TOGGLE, unleashing a roar from the pipes and a burst of acceleration that pressed them both back into the cushion.

  With his jumbled tracker senses, the roar of the thrusters came to Jack as a hundred ribbons of blue and gold. He strained to look back and saw that the flames streaming behind appeared little different. The bat wings shuddered in the wind. “Can the silk handle this kind of speed?”

  “That’s not silk.” Gwen flopped her scarf at him. “It’s Tibetan yak’s wool. Finely woven. Tough as Kevlar.”

  She pulled the throttle back to high cruise, narrowing the jets of blue down to fine points. The airship had climbed and gained on the black jet, but the gains didn’t last. The modern aircraft could climb higher and take advantage of the upper-level winds. Soon Jack could only find it with the help of some brass and ivory binoculars he had found beneath the control panel. After a while, even those were not enough.

  “We’re nearly keeping pace,” Gwen assured him as he shoved the binoculars back into the compartment. “Tanner will have to land at an airport and hire a helicopter, or find some other means to continue on. But our airship can go straight to the tomb site. We’ll catch him, Jack. Trust me.” She jerked a thumb aft toward the cabin. “There’s a couch back there, and we’ve a long way to go. You could use some rest. Why don’t you lie down for a bit?”

  He didn’t argue. Jack wandered back into the cabin and collapsed onto the blue quilted cushion, laying the sword on the floor beside him and watching the hills and valleys float past the windows. The buzzing in his head lessened. The tingling faded.

  He closed his eyes and let the low drone of the thrusters become a field of blue crystals in his subconscious. They grew and split, replenishing the
mselves.

  Over and over.

  Over and over.

  After a time, Jack noticed the crystals were no longer a field. They had become a chamber, broad with tall, arched windows. The crystals above him grew down into the shape of five giant bells hanging from the ceiling. He was at the top of Big Ben—at least, some odd dream-world version of it. At the far end, more blue crystals stacked one upon another until they formed the silhouette of a man in a long overcoat and bowler hat.

  Jack found his voice. “Dad?” He crept closer, trying to make out the features on the crystal face. “Dad, is that you?”

  In answer, the thing exploded into green flame, forcing him to raise his arms against the heat. When he looked again, he saw a man dressed head to toe in blue-green armor. Jack reeled back in horror. “No. It can’t be.”

  “Hello, Lucky Jack,” said the Clockmaker. “How I’ve missed you.” He grinned, the way he had grinned when he had first told Jack how he had wounded and kidnapped his father.

  “You’re dead. You fell from the top of Big Ben.”

  “Am I?” The Clockmaker raised an arm and a swarm of clockwork beetles flew in from either side, hovering at his shoulders. “Are you certain of that, mon ami? I have so many helpers. And my body was never found.”

  The spiders came next, copper, silver, and gold—just like the spiders from the library—gathering at the Clockmaker’s feet. Jack looked away.

  “Oh, Jack.” The Clockmaker clicked his tongue. “What good will it do to hide your face from the truth, eh? You know my handiwork when you see it.”

  Jack wanted to run, to escape. But he forced himself to hold his ground. “What did you do to my dad?”

  “Only what my master asked of me. He wanted access to your father. I obliged him.”

  “What master?”

  The Clockmaker ignored the question. “In exchange for my efforts, he told me how to use you to get the Ember, so that I might create a masterwork of fire.” His smile twisted into a scowl and he thrust out his right forearm—a stump capped with bronze. “And you stole it from me.”