Ruby Ruins

said. He glanced down at his black gloves. Wearing such an ill-omened color was a self-imposed mark of his past crimes. Now he was Dualayn’s chief guard. By protecting the man and his employees, Avena included, Ōbhin had unburied some of who he’d used to be before he’d destroyed his life. He no longer walked through the dark, but twilight.
Maybe one day, I’ll find that path back to Qoth, he thought.
The street led to a square. A public house, the original that had dominated the heart of Greenlet before Kash invaded with its cheap buildings and rapacious factories, stood on one corner. It was built in the old style, its wooden beams strong, if stained, walls painted a deep green. Each of its three floors was wider than the one Below it. A sign swung above, marking it the Green Grasser.
The door opened and a laborer sauntered out in a patched overcoat, a dark-blue felt hat perched on his head. It was shabby, old and worn. He slouched down the street and spat on the cobblestones. Ōbhin’s eyes slid past him to examine the intersection. One of the many rickety tenements rose on the other side of the public house.
“Across the street,” Ōbhin said as the pair entered the intersection, “that’s the house Runty Ed said he’s in.”
“Can you trust that sneak thief?” she asked.
Ōbhin shrugged. “We’ll find out. The boy’s pretty scared of me.” Ōbhin had caught Runty Ed and a friend trying to rob Dualayn’s manor house a few months back. The thief ran with the Breezy Hill Boys, one of the many street gangs populating the overcrowded city. “He said a man with a runny nose and who’s as skinny as a broom has been shacked up in there.”
Several youths lounged on the steps of the tenements. All of them wore patched pants and ratty shirts, none tucked in. They had green bandannas tied about their throats. Wearing green, white, or blue was a statement in Kash. A hundred or so years ago, a civil war had split the nation. The Blues had won. In the past few months, the Greens and Whites had been rioting in Kash. Sometimes it seemed like a mob erupted every other day as they protested the newest tax passed by Parliament and signed into law by King Anglon Exustin.
One of the boys whistled as they approached the house across. Ōbhin ignored them and threw open the rickety fence with a loud clatter and creak of rusting hinges. He marched for the front door, Avena at his side. Her face held the fierce expression of a wolverine.
She was the only person he could trust on this raid. He didn’t want word getting back to the Brotherhood. He couldn’t trust any of his men. One of them was worse than a spy. A changeling who’d killed and replaced one of Ōbhin’s new friends and now pantomimed as him.
“There’s a jewelchine lock,” Avena said, nodding to the amethyst jewel set in the door. “It’s warded.”
He drew his resonance blade, a curved tulwar with a single edge. A graceful weapon with an emerald, wrapped in gold wire, was set in the pommel. The jewel wasn’t for decoration but powered the sword. He pressed a spot on the crossguard with his gloved thumb.
The sword hummed to life as the emerald shone with verdant light.
“Won’t work,” she said.
“Resonance blades can cut through anything.”
“Not amethyst barriers.”
He grunted. He’d learned that fighting the monstrosity who’d used to be his old bandit leader, Ust. “Then the wall. I can cut through it fast.”
Avena punched the door with her gloved hand. The emerald flared bright as she struck the amethyst set in the door. Purple energy rippled over the door, flashing into existence. The amethyst flared at the same time it popped out and clattered on the floor inside. The barrier died.
She smiled in delight. “It worked.”
“That’s impressive, Avena,” he said in awe. It took a brawny man, someone stronger than Ōbhin, to do that.
She thrust the door open. The jewelchine alarm blared, the sound deafening Ōbhin’s ears.
*
The howling of the heliodor alarm slammed into Avena’s ears, her cheek muscles tightening in a wince. Barely heard over the caterwaul, someone cursed upstairs. The excitement of danger ignited her veins, that thrumming rush. The emptiness that liked to lurk inside of her, the guilt from surviving when her twin sister had not, drank it in.
She always found exhilaration around Ōbhin. A thrill always tingled through her soul. Whether from whispering their shared secret of the true nature about the thing that had replaced Smiles or fighting to protect Dualayn from the machinations of the Brotherhood, she savored the rush. But that wasn’t the only reason she enjoyed spending time with Ōbhin.
He trusted her strength.
He didn’t look down at her for the weakness other men saw in her sex. She was the one person he trusted to accompany him on the raid to capture Creg, to find answers in the events that happened leading up to Ust’s attack.
“Let’s go!” she shouted as footsteps thudded upstairs. “Elohm’s Colours, let’s grab him.”
Ōbhin led the way while her exhilaration surged even hotter through her. They would finally have a source to learn what Ust had known. Concrete and certain answers to questions. No more floundering in the fog.
Her right hand seized her binder from her belt, drawing a steel rod the length of her arm. The pulsing of the emeralds through the long-sleeved glove she wore gave her the strength of a brawny strongarm, but it had its limitations.
It didn’t strengthen her back or legs. She’d almost broken her spine discovering that.
Ōbhin burst into the house, disturbing the dust drifting through the air. A couch rested in a sitting room to the right, old and neglected, the horse-hair stuffing bursting out of the cushions. Its