Ruby Ruins

brilliantly.
I can’t have killed her.
The darkness pressed in on him as he ran. He could feel it threatening to devour his world. He’d returned to Niszeh’s Black Tone, allowing disharmony to control his life again. Becoming a cold killer ruled by apathy, a sword swinging without any care. A pawn of men like Ust and Grey.
He reached Greenway Bridge and raced over the stone structure built across the Ustern. He heard shouts from the guardsmen wearing the white stag on their green and blue tabards. They chased after him, shouting at him to stop.
“Filthy Tethyrian! What did you do to that girl?”
Killed her, thought Ōbhin. His eyes flicked down to her. More blood trickled out to stain her face. She still bled. That had to be a good sign.
Her body twitched as he ran. The spasms rippled down her arms and torqued her body in his grip. He pounded across the bridge with long strides. The guards were shouting behind him, their voices growing distant. He passed wagons, the teamsters, wearing white or green armbands, glancing at him with bored ease.
None helped the guards. They were seen as extensions of the Blues who’d won the war and ruled the country.
He crossed the bridge into the Slops, another slum created when Kash spilled out of its ancient walls and sprawled up the Ustern from the bay. The stench of pig dung filled his nose, wafting from the holding pens where sounders of swine awaited slaughter in the new assembly line abattoirs.
The lanes wound through this district, a mad meander. Children playing in the street shrieked as he rushed by. Boys waved sticks and girls clutched skirts to hide their faces. He could see the first hint of green hills. Lake Ophavin lay to the south. The pastoral areas were where many of the wealthy built homes and complained about the encroachment of the city’s slums.
It had been a quarter of an hour since she’d been injured, and his leg muscles had transmuted into heavy lead. Halfway there. Now he raced through the Slops. Laborers stared at him with exhausted expressions, faces smeared with soot. Women gasped as they gossiped on the porches of rickety tenement buildings.
He hardly noticed any of it. He raced through the city, passing shops and carts selling wormy turnips or day-old fish. Her spasms worsened as he neared the edge of the slum, the buildings thinning into houses with small gardens, the homes whitewashed and mostly in good repair. The women here shrieked as they hung laundry on lines or beat dusty rugs. Children peered at him through the gap between fence slats.
When he entered the familiar lane that wrapped around Lake Ophavin and led to the south shore where Dualayn’s estate lay, he fought to hold onto her spasming form. He passed the high fences of the wealthy, walls made of river stone or high-quality brick. Cultivated vines grew up some, and all were topped by rows of spiked wrought iron, deadly obstacles for any would-be thief despite the artistry many possessed.
Guards at the gates peered at him with suspicion before relaxing. A few cried out to Ōbhin, recognizing him. He knew most of the guards of Dualayn’s neighbors. He ignored the offers for help as he raced down the hard-packed dirt lane.
He darted around the approaching carriage of Lord Dynith Marey who sat high in the Parliament’s House of Nobles. The groom wore a stiff coat of dark-red with a blue ascot about his throat.
Ōbhin counted houses now. He passed the Chabrith House then the Marey Estate.
Three to go.
He raced past the Vinhastin Estate with its walls made of pink stone and grounds dotted with white geese that filled the air with their honking.
Two to go.
The estate of Lady Demett flashed by, walls covered in a thick layer of cream ivy, iron spikes poking through the foliage.
One to go.
He pushed through the last reserves of his stamina, sweat pouring down his brown face. It stung his eyes. He kept running as Avena’s spasms worsened. Froth beaded her lips. Fright clutched at his chest as he raced past the Tophreyn Estate. Then there was a gap filled with the blackberry hill, a small tor topped by trees and covered in the eponymous bushes. They were in full flower, a riot of pink blossoms dotting the thorny slope.
Ōbhin focused only on the brick walls and the large main gates. Fingers lounged out front. The older guard had become Ōbhin’s second-in-command. He was smoking a blackroot cigar and staring down at his boots. The man looked up.
Avena bucked hard in Ōbhin’s arms, almost spilling from his grip.
Horror crossed the older guard’s bluff face and bulbous nose. The dark cigar fell burning from his lips. It struck his jerkin and spun off in a shower of sparks. He straightened up as Ōbhin closed the distance between them.
“Elohm’s Colours, what happened to her?” Fingers asked, voice half-strangled. “Smiles, get the Black-damned gate open!”
He rushed towards Ōbhin and then stopped a few paces away. He opened his mouth to say something then snapped it shut as he whirled around. “Smiles, I said to get this Black-damned gate open!”
The wrought iron gates of the estate swung outward, pushed open by the thing masquerading as Smiles, a guard Ōbhin’s age. Ōbhin feared his friend was dead, his body dumped in a shallow grave. The thing pretending to be Smiles looked like him, even acted like him down to the man’s jovial manner and easy smiles.
The creature’s grin melted away in a simulation of horror and fright so honest and real that Ōbhin almost believed it was the real Smiles.
“Avena,” the fake-Smiles gasped, his dark eyes widening. He had a mop of light-brown hair, a tall man with a narrow nose. “Elohm’s Colours, there’s a half-cubit of steel in her head. How is she