by Kent Davis
Was this some new drill? Ruby struggled up, hands on knees, and then stumbled up to her cell. Her “things”? She had no things. No books, no possessions, no nothing. Corson had to have meant the lockpicks. What did Corson know, however? Was she on Rool’s side? The very idea of the Reeve arrayed against each other was so odd that it put her even more on edge than she already had been. If this was not the “favor” the lord captain had asked of her, she might have to say good-bye to the picks forever. So she tucked her real picks into the waistband of her breeches and brought the probes along in her hand. Ruby Maxim Ten: “Let Them See What They Want To.”
She headed down to the sand chamber. It was empty save for Corson and Avid. The cadet had just pulled on an old blue shift, with a patched pocket sewn in the front. She was the spitting image of a fresh-faced farm lass.
“Clean up,” Corson said. Ruby managed to mask the sound of the picks with the two metal probes as she disrobed. She thought she saw the ward’s eyes flick to the picks, but Corson said nothing. The two of them watched, silent, as Ruby scrubbed herself clean.
Corson nodded to a pile of old clothing. “Put that on.” There was a shabby pair of brown breeches, a shabbier coat, and a hat whose brim had left it behind. It felt blessedly familiar. Both she and Avid had boots in various stages of disrepair.
The ward said, “Leave your cadet clothes in the basket in the changing room, and then follow me.”
Avid headed to the basket, and Ruby took the moment to sneak her picks into the new getup. They followed Corson out a side door and down a dead-end hallway. She turned to them.
“You have been selected for a significant task.” This was it. It absolutely seemed like Rool’s mission. “I ask a boon of you. You must work together. Your differences must stop. There is no room in your undertaking for petty bickering. You are effectively reeves in this, and you must act as comrades, not foes.” Her gaze flickered between them. Avid nodded, and after a moment so did Ruby. If she was to play this part, she must play it well. “Good,” Corson said.
Corson pressed a few knots, and a hidden door opened. Ruby did her best to seem uninterested as she filed the knots away for the future. The ward led them down a narrow winding stair.
The stair ended in a low cavern, lit by a single chem pot exuding greasy smoke. Three other cadets, all dressed like Avid and Ruby, stood in the shadows. Avid’s beefy minion, Gideon Stump, looked ridiculous in too-small leather breeches, a spattered cook’s hat, and a tattered waistcoat embroidered with turtles. The group was rounded out by the Curtsies, the brother’s and sister’s white hair vivid in the half dark. Ruby still knew very little about them. The Curtsies kept to themselves. They even had a language of their own, nonsense words and hand gestures. But they practiced their exercises with a singular anger, as though they were trying to smash something to bits every run on the stairs or out to the lake. Never, the girl, tugged at the filthiest dress Ruby had ever seen, a high-necked society number that looked as if it had been through a swamp on the back of a hyena. Her brother, Levi, wore something . . . It was— Ruby couldn’t quite tell. He was gifted at standing in shadows. Ruby could never remember getting a good, straight-on look at him. Shadows clung to him.
Ismail Cole held the harness of the last member of their party.
Sleipnir.
The eight-legged gearhorse, equipped with a set of large saddlebags and a workmanlike saddle, stood motionless next to the reeve. The gleaming bronze had been toned down to a scuffed brown. She almost looked like a real horse. If there was any doubt that she was an automaton, however, her eyes ended the argument. They stared straight ahead without blinking, the sapphires identical, each caught in a web of spider silver.
The other cadets could not take their eyes off her.
Ruby imagined, just for a moment, the look on the Swede’s face when he discovered that both she and his apprentice’s prize project had been hijacked.
A voice, razor on slate, scraped from the shadows. “My little dumplings.”
Wisdom Rool came into the light, teeth delicately slicing into a strawberry. The cadets bowed with varying degrees of formality. Rool sighed. “You have been chosen to proceed on a mission that must be kept secret from your companions upon your return. You were selected for your discretion, some for your progress in the ways of the Void and”—his empty eyes brushed over Ruby—“others for your particular skill sets. As you come closer to your destination, Ward Cole will inform you of your task. This is a very important responsibility. I have every confidence that you will exceed our expectations. Good hunting.”
He stood there, staring at them, until he finished the strawberry. He wrapped the stem in a white handkerchief and stowed it in his vest pocket.
“Well?” he said. “Off you go.”
They looked about at one another until Ismail Cole said, “You heard the man. On me.” He smiled at Gideon in a conspiratorial way and said into the gearhorse’s ear, “Gallivant.” It was not the word Evram had told Ruby. Sleipnir gave a steely whicker and nuzzled Cole’s ear. Ruby thought he looked shocked. Cole nodded to Rool as they passed. “Lord Captain.”
“Ismail, take care of the kits,” he said. “I put my trust in you.”
Cole’s smile widened. “Well placed, Lord Captain. We will return triumphant before you know it.” He sparked up a dim chem pot version of a lantern and led them off.
Rool and Corson faded away into the shadows at the back of the cavern. Ruby walked next to the gearhorse. Its breathing had a metallic tinge that reminded her of Swedenborg, but it was deeper, like that of a metal bear. Heat rolled from it. It kept the chill of underground out.
She couldn’t be certain in the dim, but she thought, just for a moment, that Sleipnir looked at her.
At the other end of the cavern a patch of lesser darkness separated itself. The scent of honeysuckle washed the stink of the chem pots from Ruby’s nose. It was a cave opening. Cole stopped right before the exit and gathered them up.
Cole’s bald head glinted in the dim. Ruby felt his smile more than she saw it.
“The lord captain gives me the willies,” he said. The cadets chuckled, and Ruby shook the tension out of her shoulders. “All right, friends, we are taking a little early-summer jaunt, to stretch our legs and perhaps get into a wee bit of trouble. As for our roles in this little mummer’s play? I am an outlaw Tinker, Izzie Coleman, Sleipnir here is my beast of burden, and you are my orphan wards. Not so different from our lives, yes? Now we’re traveling to find somewhere you hungry waifs can get a hot meal and some work, make a place for yourselves in this hard and wicked world. Keep mum; choose names; speak only when spoken to. Questions?”
“Ward Cole?” It was Never Curtsie.
“That’s Izzie to you and me, girl. What do you call yourself?”
“Nell,” she said without missing a beat. “All right, Izzie?” Cole’s shadow nodded in the dark. “What’s all this about?”
“The short of it is that we have a lead on some bad people, and they’ve evaded us several times before. So the lord captain thought you lot might be a bit more . . . unexpected. I’ll tell you more as we get closer.”
Gideon Stump cleared his throat. “Ward?”
“Yes . . .”
“Er, Gabe, I guess.” He studiously looked anywhere but at Ruby. “I thought Teach was a prisoner.”
Cole raised an eyebrow. “Well, the lord captain saw fit to send—”
“Thatch. Robby.”
“—with us, so who are you and I to judge? Anyone else? Excellent. Keep to the path; it’s a long way down. I want to get a good start before daylight.”
They followed him out into the night onto a narrow track that snaked down the side of the cliff. Spruce and fir clustered tall and tight all about them. The path on the right fell down into darkness. A shooting star streaked across the sky. Cole led them down the steep track, only wide enough for single file. Ruby put her hand on Sleipnir’s haunch. Was it moving with the horse’s metal br
eath? She wasn’t quite sure.
It was so dark she could barely see one foot in front of the other.
She tripped over a branch.
It was a little branch, witness to how tired she was, but she lost her balance. She grabbed at the horse, but her fingers slithered over smooth metal. She teetered, one foot in the air.
A voice said, “Careful.”
A hand locked on her arm from behind.
It jerked her back to the path.
From the dark, Avid Wake said, “We can’t have you going over the edge, Sweetling. Not unless I decide I want to push you.” Wake let go of her arm and patted Ruby’s shoulder. “Besides, you’re here for your skills. I want to see what you can do. Hope you don’t muck it up.”
CHAPTER 29
The sickness travels with them, and it lays our people low. If we trade, we fall sick. If we war, we fall sick. Our only recourse, then, is that we must withdraw.
—Mother Green Foot,
Exodus Council, Keepers of the Western Door, 1702
Athena heaved her leg up onto the thick branch of the red oak tree. She changed her grip, and the scaly bark poked through her filthy gloves. Climbing trees in the morning before the others were up had been the only way she could get a moment to herself. Up on the branch now, she put her back to the tree and turned outward.
She almost fell off.
A valley opened up below, and three rivers glittered in the dawn light. They were big, even from a hill so far away, and the forest below petered out into an orderly pattern of fields and houses stretching as far as the eye could see. The city was huge, larger than Philadelphi. It radiated out from a series of islands where the rivers met. Massive low earthen pyramids squatted in the midst of a maze of tracks and buildings. A long wooden palisade surrounded the inner core; but the city must have spilled out of it long ago, and scatterings of long wooden houses and farms dotted the landscape all the way up to the edge of the forest. One lay just a quarter mile or so away, and there were already people moving in the fields.
They were here.
She shimmied out of the tree and hurried back to the camp. Cram and Henry were up and packed, though they had out some acorn bread and honey. The camp was peaceful, reflecting the rhythm they had fallen into after leaving Sutherland’s. It thrilled her a little bit that that was about to change. She nursed her knowledge just for a moment, not yet wanting to let it go.
“What did you see?” Henry Collins massaged his ankle. He seemed to have gotten stronger as they had traveled; but the injury still bothered him, and he worked it every morning. “I wager I know what you spied in your lookout.” He held his hand over his eyes like a mesmerist at a county fair. Then he looked about and fluttered his free hand, as if seeking knowledge from the spheres. He pulled his hand away with a flourish. “Trees!” He bowed from his seat to the imaginary crowd. “Thanks to you, ladies and gentlemen! For my next astonishing trick, I will miraculously tell you what is on the end of your noses!”
“It is the city,” Athena said. “We are here.”
The two of them whooped and danced, little boys chasing a sugar wagon.
“Quiet!” Athena said. “You forget we are intruders here.” But she couldn’t keep the grin from her face. Two months in the wild. They had finally reached their goal.
As one they fell silent. They stared at one another.
Cram finally spoke. “Now what?” He looked at Henry, and she could not help it, she did as well.
He looked as flummoxed as the two of them. He blinked. “I— I do not know.”
Athena let out a long, low breath. She put a devil-may-care grin on her face. “Well then, I suppose we should reconnoiter.”
“But for what?”
“Henry will know it when he sees it, I’m sure.” She felt nothing of the kind.
Henry, however, nodded, relief plain on his face.
They followed Cram through the thick woods, circling the valley, to a little copse of trees. They crept forward on their bellies in the underbrush. He had found a perfect view.
The rivers cut the valley into roughly three parts, meeting in the center. The palisade ran all the way around the central part of the city, even over the water where the walls screened multilevel bridges. The rivers close to the junction were thick with boats and canoes, and the forks to the northeast and northwest were heavily trafficked. Wide tracks left the city to the west and to the south.
People were everywhere: busy ants on the spokes of a giant’s pinwheel. “This is no savage village,” Athena whispered. “This fortress would take an army weeks to conquer, and the plains surrounding it make it even more devilish. The rivers alone would be a nightmare to encircle and control. They are roads in and out for food, reinforcements, messages.”
The tales that had come across the water had been of one-legged, one-eyed giants, howling for colonial scalps. None were to be found in the valley below. People, however? There were plenty of those. Too many. “Can we sneak through?” she said. “Or make contact?”
“None of us speak a word of Algonkin,” said Henry.
A beaten-down longhouse sat a stone’s throw from them across the grass, separate from the other outlying structures. Its fifty feet were smallish compared with others farther down the slope, and the curved roof was dully painted with strange symbols. A small patch of crops lay behind it. Cram pointed at it. “Miss Black said the crops are corn, squash, and beans. Three sisters, they call them.” He blinked his way through a thought. “I have an idea. What if we—” More blinking. “Aha, yes. What if we saunter over there and ask if they seen Ruby’s mam? I know we don’t speak their language, but mebbe signs and gestures? Mayhap they could point us in the proper direction?” He avoided her eyes, as if he knew what she thought of the idea. Good thing, too. He instead turned to Henry. “Professor? What do you think?”
Henry was not looking at them. He had taken out the journal and was flipping through it madly.
“Henry, what is it?” Athena said.
He didn’t look up. “A tug.”
“A tug?”
“Yes, as soon as we crested this hill. I thought I was just imagining it, but it just happened again.”
“From where, Professor?” Cram asked.
“From the journal! Here.” He put his finger down onto a page toward the beginning. “This page. This page is different.”
“How?”
Muttering, he ran his fingers over the tightly packed equations. Suddenly a dotted line marched down the page nearest the binding, as if sketched there by a fine fountain pen.
“Henry, is that writing moving?”
Henry looked up warily. “This may become— I’m not sure how dangerous—” He chewed his lip. “You might want to step back.”
Athena said, “What—”
And then Cram said, “Don’t have to tell me twice,” and he hauled her back into the forest a few yards. Cram hunkered down behind a boulder, fingers in his ears and eyes closed.
Henry and Athena locked eyes. Then he scrunched up his face as if waiting for a blow, and he tore the page out of the book.
Nothing happened.
They hurried back to him. Henry wobbled. “That . . . was powerful,” he said, and then passed out on the grass.
Athena could barely see straight, but whether it was from fear or fury she had no idea. “Henry. Henry!” She bent her ear down to his mouth. At least he was still breathing. “Of all the muddleheaded . . . Cram, help me with him, will you?”
“Milady, look.”
The paper from the journal lay on the ground, fluttering in the breeze. No. It moved.
It moved, and not in a blown-off-into-the-air sort of way. It folded itself. A clean crease appeared on the long edge, and then it folded itself over.
“Get back!” she said, and they pulled Henry back from whatever chemystral apocalypse that was about to be unleashed.
It folded again. And again. It kept folding and adjusting and tucking and preening u
ntil in just a few moments what was standing in front of them was a little paper bird. It stood no more than a finger high. It had no eyes, but the manner in which its head was cocked gave Athena the distinct feeling that it was looking at them.
It fluttered into the air and flew straight toward them.
Cram yelped and dived into the underbrush. But Athena had a feeling. It made no sense to lure someone out into the middle of the wilderness and then to create a foldy weapon to slaughter them. The paper bird flew closer, and closer, and then flew over her and Henry to land a few yards off in the lower branches of an oak tree. It turned its little head over its shoulder back toward them.
“Cram,” she said.
“Shhh! I don’t think it sees me!”
“Cram, it’s to help us, not hurt us.”
“That’s how they always draws you in!”
“Get over here now.”
He stuck his head up from the bushes. A leafy branch had attached itself to his hat. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Next to her, Henry groaned and sat up on a shoulder. “You may be correct, Athena. The journal page was somehow primed to change once we arrived in this valley, and if I’m not mistaken, that little bird artifact will take us where we want to go.”
“To our deaths!” Cram moaned.
They both ignored him. Athena helped Henry to his feet. “About time to see where this leads, don’t you think?”
CHAPTER 30
FARNSWORTH: How fares milady’s fiancé?
CATHERINE: Bumblebuffle? I’m afraid he fell from a dock into a locked crate in the hold of a ship headed for Svalbard. Oopsies.
FARNSWORTH: What is a three-year voyage between friends? And lovely dress, I must say.
CATHERINE: Thank you! Its waterproof qualities are perfect for my laboratory!
—Marion Coatesworth-Hay, A Game of Vials and Vapors, Act V, sc. ii
The bird led them through the forest as patiently and politely as the best of butlers in a high manor house. Cram still didn’t trust the infernal thing, but the Heroes did, so who was he to judge? It took them south. Or . . . north. Well, whatever path of the compass it was, it was exactly away from the valley of the three rivers. Would the little demon lead them straight up to a Algonkin fort? He would just have to be ready to pull the fat out of the fire.
