A Riddle in Ruby by Kent Davis Read Free Book Online

Athen immediately closed it and covered it with the tarry glue.
    They waited.
    Voices and activity buzzed like a hive of far-off bees. After a few minutes the bees subsided, but the Thrift jolted, and they braced themselves against the bulkheads. The impact was brief but felt like a giant had reached down and nudged their little ship to the side with a flick of its massive finger.
    Athen leaned over and turned down the wheel of the tinker’s lamp.
    Darkness and oakum seeped into her head.
    Shortly thereafter, after two more muffled thumps,feet came onto the deck. Then there was talk. The sounds were far off, like termites, and Ruby wondered in the fumy darkness if she was a termite. At rest in a tiny corner of the Thrift , taking a break after a hard day of chewing before making her way down the beam roadways back to her termite family, who would be waiting at home with Gwath’s Sawdust Pudding and her father’s tales of termite pirates from the olden days.
    Voices tugged her out of her oakum dream. She couldn’t make out who was speaking but thought one voice might be her father’s deep rumble. Muted conversation became sharp words. She pressed her ear to the stained wall to try to hear a little bit better but only got a sticky ear for the trouble. The argument deepened and quickened.
    A pistol shot rang out.
    She pulled her head back and reached out instinctively to grab Athen’s gloved fingers. After the first shot, a wave of sound crashed down upon their heads: the clash of blades, the pop of muskets and pistols, the cries of men. There were other, deeper roars that sounded like metallions. Ruby stared up through the darkness, willing herself up through the deck so that she could see, so that she could help.
    She had no idea how long it lasted, though she suspected it wasn’t all that long, but the battle slowed and then stopped. The wall of sound faded away, replaced by a strange, tense quiet, punctuated by flurries of running, a musket, a yell, the clash of swords, back to silence.
    Then something landed in the hold outside the boarded-up door. Something metal, like a sledgehammer dropped from a height onto the planks. There was a whirring, slower, and then more quickly, into a steady ticking, like the sound of a music box. But this was deeper. Tock, tock, tocktock, tocktock, tocktocktocktock. Athen let go of her hand in the dark and drew his sword. She reached into the scabbards Gwath had sewn into her dress and pulled out her two knives. They were fine ones, blister steel, that Skillet had given her special from his trip back to England, and they sometimes gave her courage. Not today.
    The whirring and tocking had stabilized into arhythm, and then there was a metallic sound, like shaking out an iron sail. Ruby’s hands hurt from gripping her knives. She found herself staring at the door, even in the pitch-darkness. On the other side, whatever was out there was moving around the hold. The underlying tocktocktock of clockwork gears was peppered with a rhythmic clacking that she knew her ancient ancestors would recognize as claws. There was another sound, like a harsh wind forced through a teakettle. The thing was sniffing. Smelling. Hunting.
    Minutes went by as the creature searched the room. It stopped right outside the door. It sniffed more persistently, and it growled a jangling snarl. A man asked something in a low voice, but it was lost under the tocking of the thing’s innards. A metal claw slowly rasped down the walled-up portal like a file, mere inches from her face.
    Ruby bit her lip so hard it bled.

CHAPTER 8
    Them smelly little jangling demons, puttin’ me right out of business, they are. They ain’t purr, they ain’t yowl proper, and they just gives me the woolies. ’Tain’t even real cats!
    â€”Maisie Fallows, ratcatcher
    A then put his hand on Ruby’s shoulder. In the tense quiet of the hidey-hole, she thought that even the sound of his glove on