The Changer's Key

by Kent Davis

  The moon was high, though, and whether by luck or bird savvy they came upon no patrols. It led them ever higher and higher into the foothills until it came to rest on the limb of a great hickory tree, perched right on the edge of a high cliff.

  Lady Athena peered over the edge. “Nothing. Just a drop.” She sighed.

  The professor looked about, confounded. “But . . .surely one would not go to the incredibly difficult lengths involved in constructing this journal just for—”

  “A jest?” Athena said, puzzled.

  At that moment the bird, at the very edge of the tree limb that hung over the chasm, began to peck the air.

  “Mad as a hatter, I tell you. Its thinker is busted,” Cram said.

  “No, wait. Look,” said the professor.

  And indeed, at the spot where the birdie pecked, a sliver seemed to be opening up in the air. It kept growing downward until it hit the ledge of the cliff. The line opened like a curtain to reveal, on the other side, what was most definitely not a bone-shattering drop.

  It was a meadow.

  “Ocular septum,” the professor whispered in awe.

  “What?” Cram said.

  Henry blinked. “An illusion, Cram. So people who come up here don’t see what lies beyond this doorway.” And with that the paper bird burst into flame. The tear in the air began to close up.

  “Oh, my,” Athena said. Then she was moving. “Come on.”

  No time for woolgathering. The three of them tumbled through the curtain.

  The moonlight shone down into a meadow out of a storybook. A little lake gleamed like polished mercury, and a huge willow dipped its branches into the water like a high lady’s hair. Next to the willow sat a two-story cottage, but in the colonial style and equal parts wood and metal. Its fine circular windows reckoned Cram uncomfortably back to the ones on HMS Grail. A little stone path led from a dock on the lake through the grass to the door of the house, and at the door, limned in silver, stood Ruby Teach.

  No. Cram shook off the shock. Not Ruby, but the woman was the spitting image of her: her stance, her face, the danger in her eye. Except this Ruby’s skin glowed pale as ivory, and her hair shone corn yellow, not raven black. She wore a sensible frock, with a stained leather apron over it, and weathered boots.

  She was also pointing something at them, a wicked-looking sliver of black iron.

  “You’re not Ruby,” she said. And then she twitched the rod, and the ground turned to mud under their feet. All three of them sank in an instant. The rod twitched again, and the ground was solid again, except they were buried up to their waists in the ground. She strode toward them with purpose.

  “Milady,” Cram muttered under his breath.

  “Yes, Cram?”

  “I believe we should be most polite with this one,” he said.

  Athena cleared her throat. “Agreed.”

  And then the woman was there. Close up, there were crow’s-feet around her eyes, but she still was a fair ringer for Ruby. She tapped the rod against her thigh.

  “Where is Ruby?”

  “Madam—” Henry began.

  The woman pointed at the journal. “That is mine.” She aimed the rod at him. “Give it to me.”

  “Of course.” Henry handed it over, fairly bursting with scribblings, paper, and bark.

  She grabbed it and immediately opened it and paged through it furiously, turning it this way and that. Seconds turned into minutes.

  Athena cleared her throat.

  The woman’s head snapped up. She turned back to Henry. “These are your notations?”

  The professor swallowed. “Yes.”

  She looked him over for a moment, like a prize heifer. “Good work.”

  The professor swelled in spite of himself.

  “And she gave this to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?”

  Aha. Time for a tale, Cram thought. An exciting recounting of their adventures, pitched just right to convince this powerful woman to aid us in our hour of need! He said, “It all began on a street in Boston—”

  “The Reeve have her,” Athena said.

  The woman’s face fell. She looked back and forth among them. “Well then,” she said, “my name is Marise Fermat, we should get you out of that dirt, and you had better come inside, hadn’t you?”

  The three of them, awkward, confused, covered in dirt, stood in the middle of a well-appointed sitting room. The windows sported frilly lace curtains, a nice warming touch. Cabinets filled with silver and china, comfy (but not overdone) furniture, a circular rug sporting pink cabbage roses. Lady Athena picked up a small needlepoint cushion, taking care not to dirty it. It read, “Half of science is putting forth the right questions,” in badly hand-stitched letters. She looked up. “I thought it would be more . . .”

  “Mad chemystish?” Henry supplied.

  “Yes,” she said. “And less . . .”

  “Cozy?” Cram said.

  “Indeed.” She laid the pillow carefully back onto the velvet sofa.

  All around them, a never-stopping whirlwind of motion, Marise Fermat strapped things down.

  They looked at one another.

  “Madam?”

  “What is it?” the woman said as she maneuvered a heavy leather strap across the face of a cabinet. She didn’t wait for an answer and hurried down the hall, whence the sound of buckling and clanking commenced.

  Athena blinked several times. “Madam, do you wish us to tell you how—”

  Marise’s head popped back into the room from the hallway. “My daughter is taken, yes?”

  “Yes,” said Athena.

  “By the Reeve?”

  “Yes,” said Cram.

  She turned to Henry. “And they know that she carries the formula from this?” She held up the journal.

  “It is quite possible,” Henry said.

  Passing through the sitting room and up a green metal circular staircase, she said, “Then we have no time to waste.” Her feet disappeared upstairs before she finished her sentence.

  Athena looked between Cram and the professor. “I think I like this woman.”

  The professor shook his head and then called up the empty stairs, “Do you even know where we are headed?”

  Marise Fermat’s head popped back into view. She had some kind of smoky red lenses strapped across her eyes. “Of course!” She waved about aimlessly. “Strap yourselves in!”

  The professor said, “But—”

  “Best hurry.”

  There were little hinged panels all about the walls of the main room that folded down into stools, with leather belts hanging about each of them.

  Cram’s sat next to one of the windows. A moose and two mooselings stood out by the lake.

  Marise said, “We have little time, Ham.”

  “Cram.” He strapped himself in.

  Marise Fermat turned to Henry. “Come with me. I want to show you something.” The tall boy nodded, eyes wide, and followed her up a circular stairway and out of sight.

  Her voice called down from atop the stairs, “Please do not touch this!”

  With a tink, tink, tink, a ceramic flask dropped down the steps and broke on the floor. Something like red water flowed out of it, far more than could be in the little bottle. It moved, spreading itself over the floor and up the walls until it covered everything.

  Cram turned to Athena. “Did she mean do not touch the vial, or do not touch the juice?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is happening, milady?”

  Lady Athena shook her head, exasperated, and pulled her legs up onto the seat. Cram did the same.

  The rumbling intensified, and then the room lurched. The red, covering the walls, floor, and ceiling, flashed gray and then disappeared. There was a mighty crack and then quiet. Cram felt seasick. The room was very slightly swaying. Outside the window the trees were sinking into the earth.

  No, the house was rising!

  Below, thro
ugh the window, lay the meadow, growing smaller by the second. The moose and mooselings all looked up at Cram. One of the little ones was chewing on a mouthful of watercress. Cram waved. The moose didn’t wave back.

  The trees quickly turned from single trunks into a wide carpet of forest. The . . . house? laboratory? carriage? . . . slowed until it swayed just ever so slightly. Lady Athena unbuckled herself from the straps holding her in place. Cram assumed it was to head up the stairs and assess the situation, to talk strategy, to discuss their options. Leading them was her task and her duty, and nothing took precedence over that. Instead, she lay down on the cabbage rose rug and promptly fell asleep. What a mad idea. He perched his chin upon the rim of the porthole and took in the tapestry of treetops below.

  Could she not see that they were flying?

  CHAPTER 31

  Liberty cannot be established without morality,

  nor morality without Science.

  —Elizabeth de Toqueville, Travels in the Colonies

  Athena opened her eyes.

  The sitting room was empty. She still lay curled on the rug, but someone had brought her a quilt with little sparrows on it. It was warm but hideous. The gloaming light of sunset crept through the window, and all was still. How long had she slept? She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and, after grabbing her blade, stumbled up the circular stairs. A maze of passages and pipes led to one spacious room cluttered with stools, a bank of levers, wheels, gauges, and a wide window. But no people.

  She went back down the stairs and out the door. The cottage sat in a small clearing at the top of a bluff, a steep drop on all sides. They all were there, sprawled on blankets in the grass, huddled around a merry campfire as if they were on some sort of mad hunting trip. Cram waved at her and pointed to a bubbling stewpot, set up in the little clearing. She ambled over and sat down next to Henry. “A picnic? Should our progress be perhaps a bit more stealthy?” she asked no one in particular.

  Marise Fermat looked up from a bowl of something steaming that smelled of armpit. “It’s a lovely night, and speed is our aim now, not stealth. Besides”—she waved her hand about the bluff—“no one down there to see us but Algonkin, and they have no quarrel with me. They leave me alone, and I leave them alone. We’ll start at first light, as soon as I can see to steer.”

  Cram quirked his head like a dog who had just heard a far-off thing. “But where?”

  “I have a way to find my daughter.”

  “What is it?”

  Instead of answering, Marise took a big spoonful of porridge and nodded to Cram. “Your servant prepared this for us. I have some corn in my stores. Take some. It’s hot.” She forced it down with a gulp, keeping her face remarkably still. “And . . . hot.”

  Athena took a bowl and found that indeed, she was hungry. “Thank you, Cram.”

  The servant boy nodded, eyeing her.

  Athena looked over her shoulder at the cottage. Its structure was unchanged, save a blanket of patched-together canvas almost its size again. The blanket sprawled across the roof and the ground behind, connected by a neck of canvas down into the building. “That’s not something you see every day. And thank you, Madam Fermat, for the transport. Even if we found you, I despaired of making it back across the wilderness.”

  The woman smoothed the panels of her dress and tapped her scuffed boots together. “No thanks are necessary. You came all that way for love of my daughter.” She looked down at her food. “I daresay that makes you more family to her than I am.”

  The fire crackled.

  Henry Collins waded into the silence. “Boyle, you should see the artifice when it is filled! It is an amazing feat of chemystral and natural engineering. The mechanisms alter the air to a lighter gas and then push it into the vesica, the cloth ball. The control room alone is—”

  “So why did you leave?” It stuck in Athena’s craw. This woman had abandoned Ruby in the cradle.

  Marise Fermat gave her a tight grin. “You are not polite, sir.”

  “Not particularly.”

  Marise took a deep breath and met Athena’s gaze with steel of her own, mixed with sorrow. “Something was more important.”

  “Than your child?”

  “Do you think me one of your servants? To order about and question at your leisure?” The alchemyst’s hand tapped her temple, dangerously close to the iron rod bound up in her hair. “You know not of what you speak, milord. Your role here is complete. You have fetched me, and you are unnecessary. Would you like to know what it is to hurtle through the air at high speeds? Or to have your body turn to liquid, to seep into the earth? Because if you persist in goading me, that is exactly what will happen.”

  Athena swallowed her words, but that just made her anger eat at her stomach. “As you say. My apologies if I offended.”

  Cram cut in. “Milord, more porridge? I found some crispy bits that had fell off the pot, and the crunch is brilliant—”

  Athena stared into the fire.

  “You know, Athen Boyle, the Grocers are a joke.” Henry and Cram had gone to sleep in the house, and it was just Athena and Marise about the fire.

  Athena adjusted a log, looking away. Ruby’s mother had a way about her. She invited conflict. She reveled in it. It was at turns terrifying and refreshing, but that made Athena oddly shy. “I don’t know anything of the kind.”

  Marise’s teeth glittered in the firelight. The cold rage from before had disappeared as if it had never existed. “Of course you do. You are a journeyman of the order, are you not?” Athena nodded. “Well then, you have seen your share of the program. Tell me of a Grocer plot that changed the world for the better, and I am happy to retract my assertion.”

  Athena’s duty warred with her own reservations. “It is not so simple. Small actions can have large impacts, but only after a certain amount of time can one see—”

  “Fine. What about Ruby then?”

  It brought Athena up short. “What about her?”

  “You were sent to secure Ruby and her secret by the Grocers, and you ended up where?”

  “Well, currently in a little magic house perched on the side of a mountain in the middle of the wilderness.”

  She laughed, a musical sound. “Is that what Godfrey Boyle planned?”

  Athena’s head was spinning. “Well, no, but that is not his fault.”

  “Balance, twisting, pushing, pulling? Meddling with this queen to keep her armies at bay. Strong-arming this king for a few more crusts of bread for his nobles? And all for naught. Great powers and great people will not be managed, no matter how secret your society. The interference just makes things worse.”

  “So the answer is to run away? Across the mountains?”

  Marise Fermat stared at her across the flames. “I left to keep it safe.”

  “What?”

  “The secret.” She tapped her forehead. “The one in here. The one that my daughter carries even now.”

  “But why did you leave it with her if you did not want it to be discovered?”

  Fermat shrugged. “Because I wanted even more for it not to be lost.”

  CHAPTER 32

  What makes a real trapper? Love. I loves them critters. But don’t get me wrong. Love don’t get in the way of killin’. This is a hard piece of thinking for some to untangle.

  —Jimmy Two Hands, tracker

  The next night they landed in a different, equally remote clearing. Ruby’s mother disappeared down a long hallway behind a stout iron door. Much later, unable to sleep, Henry found himself knocking at the door. Marise Fermat eased it open, and heat billowed out, revealing a riot of pipes and instruments gathered around a small forge that looked as dense as the Grail. In a corner bubbled an angry yellow liquid trapped behind a sealed leaded glass vat. “Ah, the chemyst! You are up late, or is it early? We still have a few hours yet before dawn. Come in. Don’t touch the container,” she said over her shoulder to Henry. “Or the forge. Just . . . don’t touch anything.”

  Henry
clasped his hands behind his back just to make sure. They had a mind of their own when it came to chemystral artifacts, and the workshop beyond was packed with them. He eased inside. “Aqua regia?”

  Marise straightened an alembic on the scarred stone worktable and flicked her finger on one of the heavy metal pipes that ran onto the table from the forge. The pipe rang, off-key. “We have a winner, ladies and gentlemen! Aqua regia it is! Aaaah-stonishing!”

  Henry laughed. The captain had said she had left when Ruby was a baby. Across the years and the mountains, how was she so like her daughter? But not like as well. The mother was the same, but more . . . concentrated. Where Ruby was turbulent, Marise was volatile. If Ruby was vital, her mother was manic. Excitement fired Henry when Ruby was about, but the woman in this laboratory emitted effervescent danger. It was more than a little intoxicating.

  The laboratory itself was a jewel box. The racks of instruments hung cleverly on screens, hinged like the pages of a book. The tables and stools moved on tracks laid into the floor. And the reagents! Oh, the reagents! The key to any Tinker’s prowess was a ready supply of the chemystral components for her craft, and this little room had barrel after barrel and crystal after crystal of the rarest of rare ingredients. Blue vitriol. Mountain’s Veil. Cuprite.

  She was watching him.

  “I’m sorry, I— It has been some time since I have been in a laboratory this well equipped.”

  “Not at all. I have been thirteen years without a trace of Science talk. I have missed it.” She smiled. It was infectious, and he found himself smiling as well. “Who was your teacher before this?”

  The old man had told Henry of Marise Fermat, that they had parted on bad terms and that she was interested only in her own self. This woman did match that description. Cautiously he offered, “Pierre de Fermat is my master.”