The Fourth Ruby Read online

  To all those with a secret worth keeping: may it remain forever unspoken and lead you to adventures untold

  Chapter One

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN on London’s Baker Street. The orange glow of the streetlamps reflected off pavement that seemed perpetually wet. A good number of pedestrians still walked the sidewalks, mostly heading home from the cafés. Teatime had barely passed, and in London, tea was more than just hot drinks.

  A little south of Regent’s Park and a little north of the Baker Street Tube station—near 221B—one particular pedestrian opened his palm and let an etched gold cube drop to the ground. He kept on walking. No one shouted after the man to tell him he had dropped something. No one noticed at all.

  The cube clinked and clacked like a metal die, only not quite the same, thanks to tiny gems at each of the eight corners. It paused once, balancing on a single jewel for an unnatural space of time, then rolled on for another meter or so before coming to a complete stop. There it sat in the grime, glittering and anonymous, as a group of twenty-somethings strolled by. Their scarves and their laughing faces were reflected in a darkened shop window, amid lettering that read LOST PROPERTY OFFICE.

  Once the laughing pedestrians were safely past, the cube shook and bobbled. Its sides split open, unfolding into eight spindly legs, each crowned with one of the tiny gems. The spider pushed itself up. It lifted a bulbous glass abdomen filled with sickly green syrup and then skittered across the pavement to climb a rainspout, utterly oblivious to the irony of its actions. Reaching the top unscathed, it raced across the roof, spiraled its way up a steaming vent pipe, and disappeared inside.

  The creature descended for what seemed like ages, spiked feet clicking all the way. It took several branches, making lefts and rights into joining pipes, but always it continued downward, deep into a massive, secret underground tower known as the Keep.

  Finally, the spider came within view of a blazing fire and slowed. It crept, inch by inch, to the underside of a great mahogany hearth, training its tiny cameras on a pair of children seated in high-backed velvet chairs in an otherwise dark room. The boy, a teenager, sat staring into the blaze. The girl, younger, her tiny form dwarfed by the Victorian chair, gazed at him with an expression of concern. After a moment, the boy stood to inspect the hearth, and the spider scrambled back out of sight.

  Then again, there might never have been a spider in the first place. Maybe the gold flashes the boy saw in his mind’s eye had nothing to do with a metal cube or tiny gems clacking on pavement. Maybe the silvery spikes had not been the clickety-clicks of a clockwork spider skittering down a pipe. Maybe the glittering confetti he saw had not been pedestrian laughter at all. Maybe the boy had imagined the whole thing.

  Jack Buckles, a tracker by birth, had been struggling with his unusually keen senses. A year before, he had defeated a grown man in a smoky bell tower using only sound and feel to guide his actions. But these days, even the noisy Quantum Electrodynamic Drones—better known as QEDs—that hummed around the Ministry of Trackers could sneak up on him. Jack’s senses had been failing him for months.

  Of course, on the off chance Jack’s senses had been correct, if a clockwork spider had really crawled down into the Keep to look for him, then that would be very, very bad.

  Chapter Two

  JACK RETURNED TO HIS CHAIR, keeping his eyes on the fireplace. He could feel the weight of the inverted underground tower above him, with its black stone walls and unending levels filled with wood-paneled corridors. The Keep had become his prison. The Ministry of Trackers, the youngest of England’s secretive Elder Ministries—behind the Ministry of Guilds, the Ministry of Secrets, and the Ministry of Dragons—had become home for his whole family, whether they liked it or not.

  “You don’t look so good,” said Sadie, watching as he eased himself down in the chair again.

  “I’m nervous. That’s all.”

  Sadie pulled her ankles up into a cross-legged position beneath her dress and leaned her elbows on her knees, auburn hair flopping forward. She stared at Jack as if she could see right through his skull and into his messed-up tracker brain. “No. That’s not it.”

  Jack shot her a frown. “I’ve asked you not to do that.”

  His sister ignored the protest and shifted her eyes to an ornately carved mahogany door looming in the darkness behind his chair. “Is it time for you to go yet?”

  “Yes.” Jack did not stir.

  Sadie seemed unperturbed by the contradiction between his answer and his actions. Her face remained as placid as ever. “Is the professor coming?” she asked, referring to Edward Tanner, the only remaining tracker of the eleventh generation. He wasn’t known as the professor simply because he was Jack’s teacher and mentor. Long retired from the usual ministry work, the elderly tracker now maintained tenure as a history professor up at Cambridge.

  “He’s molding young minds tonight.”

  “What about Gwen?”

  Jack had known that question was coming. He sighed. “I don’t think so.”

  “Because she’s mad at you?”

  “No.”

  “Because you’re working with Ash now?”

  “No.” He gave a little shrug. “Maybe.”

  “Because Ash is a journeyman quartermaster, and Gwen is only a clerk?”

  Jack said nothing.

  “But you’re only a clerk.”

  “Sadie.” He gave her a that’s-enough glare and the room fell silent for several seconds. It wouldn’t last. It never did.

  “Soooo, why can’t she go with you?”

  Jack rubbed his head. It hurt. Gwen hadn’t shown up to see him off—twice in a row now. It wasn’t his fault that he’d been assigned to a real quartermaster. And it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t study with her every day, or eat with her, or do whatever Gwen wanted to do whenever Gwen wanted to do it. His dad needed him. Couldn’t she see that?

  Jack slipped a hand into the pocket of his dad’s leather jacket, the one he had taken as his own when he first found the armory and equipment locker in his dad’s study. He wrapped his palm around a little red sphere with gold latticework, letting the silky pink coolness of the stone seep into his fingers. Feelings, sounds, smells—they all had color and texture to him, a side effect of his crisscrossed tracker senses.

  He closed his eyes and released a long breath through his nose. That same sphere had given him a brief connection to his dad the year before, on the night he had rescued him and confronted the Clockmaker at the top of Big Ben. On his return to the Keep, Jack had found a tiny scrap of packing paper folded up on the sphere’s place in the armory, marked with a curvy Z. So he had named it the zed. After that night, no matter how hard he tried, he had never been able to reproduce the connection with his dad. He kept the zed with him at all times anyway. It calmed him, helped him think, helped him be the tracker everyone expected him to be. He couldn’t say why. Maybe it gave him power. Maybe it gave him a little bit of his dad’s tracker mojo. There were stranger artifacts with stranger abilities everywhere within the Keep.

  The pain in Jack’s head subsided, and he realized Sadie was standing over him. With the zed to settle him, he could see her without opening his eyes—by the blue-gray whisper of her breathing and the tan, sandpapery shuffle of her feet. He looked up anyway, because he wanted her to see the annoyance in his expression. “What, Sadie?”

  “They’re waiting for you.” She glanced over at the big shadowed door. “All of them.”

  It was Sadie who finally opened the mahogany door, leaning her little body back into the pull, with Jack standing reluctantly behind her. He winced as a thrumming white light assaulted his mixed-up senses, along with the bronze hum of the QEDs, and a black murmur of whispers. It was noise, all of it. Bu
t Jack could still make out some of the words.

  Tracker.

  Section Thirteen.

  Freak.

  Didn’t they know he could hear them?

  Jack left his sister in the little room and walked out onto a cobblestone lane. There were quaint cottage facades on either side. French, maybe. He couldn’t tell yet. He crossed over to a broad semicircular platform set between two houses, and stepped up to a bronze rail to get a better look at what he was up against. Below him, level after level of arching bridges, steep stairways, and narrow streets were interwoven to form a village stacked upon itself. English, he thought, scanning the flats and storefronts that formed the circular periphery of every level. Definitely English. What else? Every home and store on the periphery was a mere facade—elaborate set dressings—but the eyes in the windows were real enough.

  Section Thirteen.

  Freak.

  He shook his head, pushing back a creeping pain that shouldn’t have been there—not after a year of training. Gray mist swirled in the light above him and in the darkness of the bottom level far below. The arena was so huge that it had its own weather system, gathering moisture in its upper and lower extremes. Sometimes, according to Gwen at least, it rained. Jack had never seen it. Then again, this was only his second time to enter the crucible. The bronze hum rolling across his brain intensified and two quad-style QEDs descended out of the clouds. Blue light glowed within round engine housings. Their cameras shifted to keep him in focus. Mrs. Hudson’s voice, stern and cold, echoed from an unseen loudspeaker.

  “Attention. The tracker has entered the arena. The Hunt is on.”

  Chapter Three

  THE CLOCK WAS TICKING.

  Jack and his quartermaster had thirty minutes to identify a stolen artifact, track it down within the arena maze, and steal it back again, out from under the wardens’ big noses. This was the second round of the Hunt—the pinnacle of the Tracker Games. It all came back to ministry regulations, volume one, section six, rule nineteen: Competition breeds excellence.

  Four groups comprised the agents of the ministry. Trackers like Jack were the firstborn sons of the four founding lines, the only agents to manifest the unique, hereditary tracker senses. Quartermasters were the Watsons to the trackers’ Sherlocks, well trained in a host of skills and knowledge that came in handy in the field. Wardens guarded the artifacts, and sometimes the people, that the trackers and quartermasters recovered on behalf of the Crown. And clerks pushed paper, managed offices, and generally kept the entire house of cards from falling. All of them, from the lowest apprentice clerk all the way up to the Minister of Trackers, whose identity remained a closely guarded secret, came together each December for the Tracker Games.

  This year’s games were Jack’s first.

  There had been other events like warden wrestling, cane fencing, and the apprentice clerk deduction challenge, but the Hunt was the centerpiece—three rounds of what Gwen liked to call a one-sided game of capture the flag. Traditionally a tracker/quartermaster pair went up against a team of four wardens. The wardens stole an artifact and hid it somewhere within the multilevel labyrinth, and the tracker and his quartermaster had to get it back. Three rounds on three successive nights, best two out of three, and the Tracker Cup was the prize.

  The wardens had claimed it every year for the last decade.

  Thanks to Section Thirteen, no tracker had set foot in the arena for ten years, leaving the quartermasters to fend for themselves. The infamous regulation protected the ministry from the phenomenon of bad luck and the damage it might do when combined with the considerable abilities of a full-fledged tracker. Each of the four members of the thirteenth generation—Jack’s generation—had been exiled to the corners of the earth. At that time, the twelfth generation had been exiled as well, to raise them. The twelves came back to the Keep for the occasional mission, but mostly they lived undercover, waiting for the day when they could return with the fourteens, to teach them the skills they had not been permitted to teach their own sons.

  But Jack had thrown a wrench into the whole plan. He had stumbled—or rather he had been shoved—back into ministry affairs.

  Nearly a year before, a French psychopath calling himself the Clockmaker had kidnapped Jack’s father and threatened to burn London to the ground, forcing Jack to uncover his hidden past. After Jack had stopped the madman, the Ministry of Trackers had grudgingly opted to train him. He knew too much. His abilities had manifested early. Jack was dangerous, and sending him out into the wild unchecked was simply not an option. Now, against what many—including Jack—considered better judgment, someone had opted to throw him into the Hunt as well.

  “Where’ve you been?” Ashley Pendleton pushed off from a stone facade not far from the mahogany door, leaning on a wolf’s-head cane as he stepped down onto the cobblestones. There was nothing wrong with his legs. Canes were a sign of accomplishment among trackers and quartermasters, and at seventeen Ash was the eldest and most accomplished of the journeyman quartermasters. He gave Jack a conspirator’s wink. “I was beginning to think the old girl had changed her mind.”

  “She can hear us, you know,” said Jack, glancing up at the drones.

  Ash scrunched his nose. “She doesn’t mind.”

  “Maybe for you.”

  If Jack was the embarrassing son the Ministry of Trackers kept hidden in the dark, Ash was their poster child—tall and dashing, with a flawless black complexion and a winning smile. Girls swooned when he passed. Boys fell into step behind him. Only Ash with his undeniable charm could get away with referring to Mrs. Hudson—the ultimate clerk, the matron of the ministry—as the old girl. And only Ash could have convinced her to allow Jack to compete beside him.

  The quartermaster wrapped an arm around Jack’s shoulders and hurried him along the curving lane. “Don’t look so worried. No one’s ever been killed in the Hunt.” He grinned, tipping up his newsboy cap with the tip of his cane. “Severely wounded, sure, but never killed. We’ve taken the first round, Jack. Trackers and quartermasters, together again. One more quick win and the cup will finally return to its proper place.”

  “Right. Quick.” Jack let out a nervous chuckle. They had won the previous round, when the arena maze had been a wharf district straight out of Dickens, but there had been nothing quick about it. Ash had recovered the missing artifact at the last second. Jack had been next to useless. He didn’t see this round going any better.

  They passed beneath a wrought-iron arch into a small cemetery, the starting point for the night’s maze. Something there would be missing—something unexpected. Ash paused at the edge of the gravestones and stooped down to Jack’s height. “Listen, I know you’re nervous. Years ago, there would have been four trackers to choose from, and the oldest or the best would have represented our team in the Hunt. But right now, you’re all we’ve got.”

  “You call that a pep talk?”

  “You didn’t let me finish. I don’t care that you’re young, or that you’re a Section Thirteen. I never have. I believe in you, Jack. Now”—Ash swept the newsboy cap from his head and slapped him across the arm with it, gesturing toward the graves—“it’s time to do your thing. Off you pop.”

  Jack returned the quartermaster’s smile—half of it, anyway—and walked among the markers. It took conscious relaxation of his synapses to turn the chaos of his senses into order—the curse of a tracker. He saw, as Gwen called it, with all five senses at all times. Sounds became sights. Smell and taste became feel and sound. And the volume of it was overwhelming. Gwen had taught him to control the flood of data, or rather to master it by letting go of control. But lately that skill had eluded him more and more. He exhaled, concentrated on letting the noise in instead of shutting it out, and watched the data rise from the gravestones like spirits.

  Whispers: still there, black wisps drifting across the cemetery.

  Section Thirteen.

  Freak.

  He pushed them aside.

 
; Scent of hawthorn: dark, antiseptic—the hedges around the garden.

  Scent of grass: prickly and yellow-green—misshapen. That was something.

  Bent and broken blades formed in Jack’s vision, flickering as the static in his brain threatened to wash them away. “Footprints,” he said, beckoning to Ash and pointing down at the trail. “A meter or more for every stride.”

  “Definitely a warden, then,” said the quartermaster, and he had no trouble following the footprints the rest of the way. They led to a black marble obelisk that cast its shadow across a three-foot-long sarcophagus.

  Ash held his cane over the casket, gauging its length. “Kind of short, wasn’t he? Unless, of course, they chopped him up.”

  “Thanks for that mental image,” said Jack, kneeling down beside him. “As if what I have to do next isn’t bad enough.” He cringed, leaving only one eye open—knowing that would not save him from seeing the casket’s gruesome contents. And then he pushed the lid aside.

  Empty.

  So the artifact they had to recover had been inside the sarcophagus. Their next job was to determine what exactly that artifact might have been and where the wardens might have taken it. He pushed the lid the rest of the way off and saw block letters etched into the interior, faded but readable.

  KING OF THE UNWANTED,

  LORD OF THE LOST.

  MAY HE REST IN PEACE

  AND TROUBLE US NO MORE.

  Jack sat back on his heels. “It doesn’t even rhyme.”

  “Doesn’t have to. I know what it means.” Ash left him there and headed for the opposite gate. “It’s Larry,” he said without looking back. “The wardens have taken the clown.”

  Chapter Four

  WELL INTO THE HUNT, Jack stood alone, waiting for what amounted to a spinning blade to come slicing across the arena. It was darker in the lower levels of the maze, away from the mock daylight at the top. The QEDs had installed a few streetlamps but not enough to banish the shadows. Ash had split their two-man team to search for the way down to the next level. They had less than five minutes left to find the clown.