The Changer's Key

by Kent Davis

  Ruby Maxim Four: “No One Rescues Princesses but Themselves.”

  From the hall outside came the call “Reeves in, lights ooot!” Ward Burk was walking the halls tonight. Her Irish lilt rang out, ordering the cadets to sleep. If they caught Ruby out of her room, they might clap her in irons or worse, but she could think of no way that could be worse than Swedenborg’s examination table.

  Ruby secured her improvised picks and kept still at the door for an hour after Burk’s calls ended before she finally eased the door open. The hallway was dark and empty, without even a sconce or tinker’s lamp alight. Small comfort. Ruby had to use her other senses. No one was about, only the faint moan of the wind creeping in through the windows along dim streams of moonlight. Ruby kept to the small passages and out-of-the-way rooms on her way down into the belly of the fort. The fear of punishment faded in the face of the thrill of taking action. A faint red light bled into the storeroom down the hallway from the kitchens. A voice called out in the quiet. Ruby froze. No one came down the hall; somebody told a joke about a honey cake. She moved on.

  Fresh herbs and air braced her as she rounded a corner into the sand room. The neatly raked lines shone in the moonlight streaming through the open windows. The cold wind nipped at her bare toes as she crept around the outer ledge of the sand bath. The lock on the stout door fell easily to her makeshift picks, crude as they were. Stone and iodine pushed peppermint and soapwort out of her nose as she descended into the realm of the Swede.

  The harsh white of Swedenborg’s tinker’s lamps were muted, turned down for the evening. The laboratory lay through an arch at the end of the hall. Light crept under one of the two doors at the far end of the hallway. The near two doors were dark. In one of these four rooms there had to be some record, some clue to the Swede’s experiments. Or at least she hoped so.

  She had never been through any of the other doors. Ruby had no idea what hours Swedenborg kept, nor where he slept (if he even did sleep). She knelt down next to the first portal on her right and listened. It was faint, but there it was: the slow, silvery tinkle of his breathing through the mesh on his neck. She froze. He mumbled in his sleep and then cried out, softly. She could not hear the words, but after that he sobbed.

  Silence. Emptiness. Strange that something so difficult to find in the day came like an old friend at night.

  She eased away from the door and across the hallway. No sound beyond this one.

  She slipped the lock. Inside, it was as dark as the innards of a burlap sack at the bottom of a well. Ruby hesitated. Gwath had taught her how to feel the size of a room with her skin and her breath. It felt close, like a large closet, and dust tickled her nose. She reached out her hand, then pulled it back. Not the wisest notion to paw about in the lair of a master Tinker. There would be stickers and burnies and scaldies and who knew what else. Inside, she cursed. She needed light. She withdrew for the moment.

  She padded down the hall to the next door. Not snoring but a different sort of sound crept with the light from the other side.

  It was singing.

  Ruby put her face down on the cold stone. Evram Hale’s painstakingly polished buckled shoes kicked back and forth in rhythm with an old nursery lullaby. He didn’t really have a sense of pitch, but he was very committed.

  She needed light, and there was light in that room. Could she trust Evram? Or sharp him, at the least? Nothing to do but cast the dice. Very, very softly Ruby knocked.

  The singing stopped.

  “I’m sorry, Doctor Swedenborg. I did not mean to wake you,” Evram said from the other side of the door.

  A brief flame of an image sprang into Ruby’s mind. Using her Changer powers, she transformed into the form of Swedenborg and ordered Hale around, discovering everything she needed to know. After that, in Swedenborg’s posh carriage, stocked with victuals, she made her way back to Philadelphi and her friends in triumph.

  That didn’t happen.

  Instead, Ruby knocked again.

  Silence on the other side of the door.

  It opened just a bit, and the light blinded her. Evram Hale peered out from the other side of the crack, puzzlement in his pale olive eyes.

  He blinked. “Ruby Teach, you are supposed to be in your room,” he whispered. Evram was about her size and about her age, but he carried himself all wrong. As if he were afraid of breaking or were consciously thinking about moving every arm and leg piece by piece. He was wearing smoky quartz lenses and a scorched leather apron, and he held a smoking vial in his hand.

  He didn’t run yelling for the Swede or shoot some Tinker concoction in her face. Score one. Project Hale was moving forward. She did not like thinking about it this way, but he was what Gwath would call a prime mark, gullible and friendless. About the fort Hale was a bit of an outcast himself. He was Swedenborg’s apprentice, damning enough. He didn’t train with the cadets, either, and they respected strength and courage, not attention and smarts. He was quiet, sure. But quiet like a deep pool. Henry Collins quiet. He watched.

  And he was watching her now, waiting for her to respond.

  “I’m sorry, Evram,” Ruby whispered. “Can I come in?”

  Evram blinked again. “Why are you out of your room?”

  Ruby blinked right back. Quick, girl. She fanned the possibilities like playing cards. Feeling ill? He would wake the Swede. Afraid of the dark? Why come down into the dark? Barnacles, there was no good reason. She had to leap straight for sympathy and hope it blocked everything else out. Evram was an outcast. Use that. “I’m hiding from Avid, and I need help.”

  His eyes went saucery. He glanced down the hall and then stepped aside, motioning her in.

  It was a wide chamber. A ragged old sheet hung down from a rod on the ceiling. Hale looked down at his shoes.

  “Would you like to see my horse?”

  It was not what Ruby expected to hear.

  If he had said, “You can’t be here, Ruby Teach.” Certainly.

  Or “How can I help you hide from Avid?” Possibly.

  But “Would you like to see my horse?”

  Ruby punted. “Yes?”

  He moved the iron stool and grabbed the edge of the sheet, a weed doctor ready for the big reveal. His face split into a wide grin. “This,” he said, “is Sleipnir.” He said it like slayp-neer.

  He whooshed the sheet aside. Behind it stood a miracle.

  The horse was tall, as high at the shoulder as Ruby atop Evram, and it was like a gearbeast, except its alloyed bones and gears gleamed burnished copper in the light. Eight legs, not four, came down from its deep barrel chest and muscled hindquarters, standing sturdily on the stone floor of the workroom. Where the gearbeasts were menacing, this automaton somehow conveyed a calm, a safety, that fairly hummed. So beautiful it hurt her heart.

  When Ruby could speak, she asked, “Where are the eyes?”

  Evram kept looking back and forth, between her and the big horse, and he launched into speech. “Doctor Swedenborg has not let me put the eyes in yet. He says that the organic affinity of animal eyes will twist the spirit of the thing into madness, as with the gearbeasts.” Ruby shuddered and nodded. Hale pushed on. “So I am wondering if there is not some way to craft eyes that will speak to Sleipnir in a way that will not drive her mad and will allow the tendency of the alloy to inform her disposition in a more useful manner.”

  “She is . . . beautiful,” Ruby said. The word did not suffice, but it was the one she had.

  He blushed. “It is my apprentice project to make journeyman,” he said. “Doctor Swedenborg says that he works only with the best. He says I am a prodigy.” He said it with no pride, only a relation of fact. “He says that it must be perfect before we attempt to activate it. I am working nights to perfect her.” He stroked the flank of the metal steed.

  “Why does she have eight legs?” Ruby asked.

  “I found a picture in a book of myths in Doctor Swedenborg’s library. She is Odin’s horse.”

  “Who is Odin
?”

  “A one-eyed god from the north. He is very wise.”

  Evram seemed perfectly content chatting about the intricacies of his project until the whole building woke up, but Ruby did not have that kind of time. So she fell back on sharping. The boy was gullible to a fault. She painted on a scared look. “Evram, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have to ask you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Can you help me?”

  His hand stopped moving. “With what?”

  Ruby took a breath. Ruby Maxim Five: “Never Drop the Mask.” “Would any of these other doors lead back to my room? I fear that Avid and her friends will find me if I take the main passages.”

  Evram frowned, working a puzzle. “Not through the doctor’s bedroom. Or his library.”

  His library. That was the other room, the dark one. Perfect. She smiled ruefully. “Very well. Can you lend me a light at least? I was almost lost in the dark on my way down.”

  He frowned again and grew very still. Ruby held her fear in with her breath. Had she exhausted his patience? Would he call for the Swede? He scuttled back to a worktable behind Sleipnir. While he rummaged through a mess of flasks, burners, tongs, and scales, he said, “I cannot give you one of the doctor’s lamps, but I can give you something I made. It is mine to give. Here.” He held out a scarred wooden box, about the size of his hand.

  She took it.

  “Open the slat,” he said.

  One side of the box looked as if it might move. Ruby slid it open. Green light shot out, right into her eyes. “Ow. Thanks, Evram.”

  “I am sorry,” he said. “But here, look.” She blinked her eyes until they adjusted. In the box lay a green glass marble, no larger than her thumb. The light rolled off it, like sun on a lake.

  “It is a marble,” Evram said.

  “. . . Yes,” Ruby said.

  “I like marbles. I made it myself, so that means I can give it to you.”

  There was no guile in him. It made her sad. “Thank you, Evram. This is a fine gift.”

  He nodded. “Do you want to hear about its efflorescent properties and the affinities of the illuminated oil I applied to it?”

  Ruby smiled. “Perhaps another time.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “All right.”

  She slid the slat closed over the light. Here was the hard part. “Evram, do the rules say you need to tell Doctor Swedenborg about this?”

  He thought for quite a long moment this time. He looked at her, and he blushed. “I do not think so. You have disobeyed none of the doctor’s rules, so there is no need to tell him. He has told me many times that I volunteer too much information, so he would most likely not want to hear about your visit.”

  Ruby nodded and turned to ease open the door.

  “Ruby Teach?”

  “Yes, Evram?”

  The boy was blushing again. “Do you want to come back sometime? To help me with Sleipnir?”

  Ruby breathed out very slowly. “Of course, Evram. I would love to.”

  The library door sealed Ruby in the darkness with a hiss and a pop. She slid open the panel on the marble box, and clear green light rolled out.

  It was a low room, like a ship’s cabin, but encircled floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Ancient, moldering volumes and birchbark scrolls crammed together, threatening to fall to the patterned rugs under her feet. In the corner sat the Swede’s desk. It was brass-bound maple, the pale wood stained corpsey in the marble’s light. A roll top covered the entire front, secured by a lock where the roll met the base.

  She slid the probes out of her pocket. She would be through a cute little desk lock before her fingers even knew she was picking.

  Wait.

  She barely stopped herself in time. Ruby crouched down with the marble, and indeed, a nearly transparent trip wire, barely glistening in the marble’s light, ran athwart the room. She had to slow down. Underestimating Swedenborg would be her undoing. He was too devious and too dangerous.

  She eased herself over the wire and fell into the lengthy, painstaking dance Gwath had taught her for such situations. Two more trip wires, one at chest level, one at her waist, crisscrossed the room. A careful examination of the desk lock revealed a clever little needle trap that would assuredly have poisoned her or turned her to stone or set her on fire. The thin probes were not ideal, but Ruby managed to deactivate the trap. The lock opened with a faint click.

  Thankfully the Swede kept his office neat, and the rolltop was well oiled. It opened silently. A stack of papers lay on the left, his journal on the right.

  “Blast,” Ruby whispered. The journal boasted an intricate little lock. The probes were far too blunt for such a delicate task, and there just wasn’t enough time. The clock in her head read, “TOO SLOW,” and Ruby agreed. Sunrise must have been right around the corner. She would have to come back. She riffled quickly through the papers, searching for anything that might refer to her. Letters to other Tinkers and orders for materials mostly. One caught her eye. It was a short note, but its broken wax seal bore the lion of England.

  You must preserve the carrier until you have extracted the necessary information.

  Once you have obtained and tested the complete schematics, I am certain that we need not tell you that any other copy, even the original, is a threat to our interests. Please make certain that it will not fall into other hands. Full authority is yours in this matter.

  By order of His Majesty I am,

  Sincerely,

  James Stanhope, Lord High Intelligencer

  “Carrier,” she whispered. It was Ruby. A threat. “Not fall into other hands.” Swedenborg was going to kill her. After he discovered what she carried, he would make her as dead as that squid in his laboratory. Blood pounded in her ears. She willed her hands to stop shaking. After a few moments, they did. She stowed the knowledge down deep, in the box in her belly. It would not serve her now.

  Ruby forced herself to take as great care leaving as she had when she arrived. She returned the paper to its spot, made certain that all was as it had been before she opened it, reset the trap and the lock, threaded back through the trip wires and out the door.

  She barely made it back to her room in time. She tore a hole in the bottom of the mattress and hid the probes and the marble box deep inside. It would have to do.

  The faintest light hid behind the hills across the river. Dawn was coming, and another day. She collapsed into her bed, but before she even closed her eyes, there was a call from the hall.

  “Reeves up, feet oooooout!” Burk again, making the morning rounds. Ruby sprang up and began doing her stretches. She hadn’t slept a wink, but she felt fresher than she had for a very long time.

  Ruby Maxim Six: “There Is Nothing So Refreshing to the Spirits as Mortal Danger.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The application of force is the Art of the Soldier. It is the application of strategy that is the Art of the Reeve.

  —Training manual, Reeve of England

  Evram Hale opened the little compartment on the gearbeast’s flank. The chemystral “dog” picked up and put down its paws woozily, as if it had just woken up, though its mad, living eyes still rolled about, moving from Ruby to Hale to the walls of the stable and back in a constant loop. The last time Ruby had been this close to a gearbeast, it had been trying to flay her and Cram for dinner. Without the barking and gnashing, the slowing tocktocktock of its insides rang loud in the silence. Somehow helping Swedenborg’s assistant with Sleipnir, the gearhorse, had transformed into helping Evram with many of his tasks. She didn’t mind. The closer she could get to him, the closer she could get to the Swede’s experiments. Two more weeks had passed, however, and she had nothing new to show for it. Several midnight trips to the office had gathered her only two things: frustration at the excellence of the locking mechanism of the Swede’s journal and, through the pile of letters, an annoyingly comprehensive understanding of the Swede’s difficult relationship with his gr
eataunt and her large stable of cats. So she spent as much time as she could with Evram.

  As the little cadet fished about in the gearbeast’s insides, the tocktocktock slowed even further. He did not seem to notice, olive eyes staring upward as if he were trying to fish a lost necklace out of a well. “Almost . . . I have it.”

  There was a faint click, and he pulled something hand-size out of the beast. The gears and pistons wound down to a stop. The eyes, too, staring into a fixed nothing.

  Ruby whistled. “What is that?”

  Evram carried the little metal disk the size of a chicken egg over to a table crowded with beakers and tinker gear. “Sparkstone” was all he said as he picked up a small pitcher full of red metallic powder and carefully poured it into a hole in the top of the disk. He held the circle out. “Will you hold this for me, please?”

  Ruby took it. It was surprisingly light in her hand, cool and smooth to the touch. “What does it do?” she asked.

  Hale put both his hands over hers. “Wait, please,” he said.

  “Evram—”

  “Wait, please, Ruby.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then twisted his head just so, and something happened. Where before, the disk was cool, now it was warm. Hale wobbled. Was he fainting? Ruby grabbed his elbow.

  He took the sparkstone out of her hand and hurried back to the gearbeast, hand back into its innards. He fished about again, and a few moments later another click, and then the gears tock . . . tock . . . tocktocktock wound back up. Evram closed the little door, and the gearbeast gave a whine and shook its head like a puppy.

  It turned its eyes on him, and Hale looked back. Ruby got the shivers all over again.

  “Saunter,” Evram said.

  With a snap, the beast was up on all fours and trotted out the stable door.

  “Are you all right?” Ruby asked to cover her interest. The word had to be a command of some kind. Did it work only for Evram? She filed it away.

  “I apologize for my abruptness,” he said, “but the charging of the sparkstone had to be done quickly, else the lack of energy might have damaged Arcas there.”