Ruby Ruins

alive?”
“She just is!” growled Ōbhin, exhaustion burning through his body. “Get Dualayn! Now!”
Smiles bolted across the wilting grass and up the hill towards the large manor house. Ōbhin followed after, Fingers jogging at his side. On the slope to his left, Joayne stopped pushing her charge’s wheelchair. The withered Bravine, Dualayn’s long-invalid wife, slumped uncomprehending in her seat.
Avena thrashed hard in Ōbhin’s arms. He stumbled, clutching desperately to her.
“We’re almost there,” he said, terrified of dropping her. He didn’t understand how she could be still alive after the half-hour it had taken him to run here. He pushed himself as fast as he could, so he couldn’t lose her now. “Just hold on. Aliiva, sustain her with your Tone a little longer.”
Smiles threw open the new doors of the manor house, replaced when Ust had battered them down. He rushed inside, his shouts echoing. Fingers muttered prayers to Elohm, the singular god revered by the Lothonians and others who dwelt on the Arngelsh Isles.
As Ōbhin neared the doors, the manor house’s marble exterior rising above him, relief surged through him. Dualayn crossed the entrance hall from his laboratory, Smiles trailing behind him like a frightened puppy.
The rotund, older man wore his usual dark waistcoat, this one a blue verging on midnight. He rubbed his soft hands before him, his plump face paling as Ōbhin slowed to a stop on the porch. He sucked in breaths while Dualayn pulled out his monocle to study Avena’s injury.
“Colours, no,” he said. “That is deep in her brain.”
“Can you . . . help her?” Ōbhin snarled through his exhaustion. A dizzy wave swept through him.
“I will do my best,” Dualayn said. “Oh, child, what have you done to yourself?”
He touched her forehead with a gentle caress, a father stroking his daughter. A scream echoed from upstairs. One of the maids, Smiles’s wife Jilly, raced down them while a pile of laundered linens spilled around her feet.
“Avena!” Jilly cried and threw herself at the thing pretending to be her husband. Smiles wrapped her up in an embrace, comforting his “wife.”
“This way,” Dualayn said. “Hurry.”
Ōbhin followed the scholar and healer across the repaired entrance hall and around the base of the staircase to the open door to his lab. Avena jerked again, her body twisting. She let out a terrible groan of pain.
“Why is she thrashing?” Ōbhin asked.
“She’s bleeding in her brain,” said Dualayn. “The fluid can’t escape the skull, so it’s putting pressure on her brain which, in turn, is affecting her body. She’s lucky she was hit so high up. Lower down, near the back of the neck, is where her breathing and heartbeat are controlled.”
“What’s up here?” asked Ōbhin as he followed Dualayn into the lab.
“Emotions, memories, personalities. She might never recover. I have been reading the Recorder on brain regeneration—for my wife—and I’ve found out much, but there are still things I don’t understand. I have ideas, things I shall try, but . . .” Worried pain flashed across Dualayn’s face. “I want her to recover, too. I do, but you must be prepared for a suboptimal outcome.”
“She’ll die?”
“Perhaps. Or she might never fully recover. One half of her body might be paralyzed. Look at her face. You can see the right side is drooping with palsy.”
Ōbhin stared in horror at how the muscles on half her face seemed to have relaxed, growing soft like rain-sodden clay. It pulled at her eyelid and cheek, her lower lip tugged down.
“Her personality might never be the same. Blows to the head are never simple, but I think I can repair her. I need your help with the first stage.”
“Anything.”
“Set her with care on my table, then we’re going to wash our hands. Thoroughly. You’ll have to remove those gloves.”
Ōbhin nodded. He set Avena down on the wooden table, covered with a white sheet, that dominated the center of the lab. The air smelled heavily of lye, the scent almost burning his nose. Ōbhin pulled his hands away from Avena, her left side, opposite from her brain injury, twitching more than her right. He swallowed and glanced down at his gloves. Some of her blood had stained them, gleaming bright and crimson.
This is all my fault.
 

Chapter Four
Dualayn emerged from the vault at the end of his lab holding two of the topaz healers, each the size of a woman’s fist, and a handful of other topazes that were the size of marbles. Beyond, Ōbhin glimpsed shelves covered in all manner of gems: diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, amethysts, heliodors, and topazes. The seven wholesome jewels. Some were cut, others rough, and a few were wrapped up in wire, some sort of jewelchines.
Panic gripping him, Ōbhin was finding his mind seizing on anything to focus upon but Avena. He stared at the healers. Each was bound in gold wire, the best of the seven metals you could use with them. The cheaper the metal, the lesser the effect. Ōbhin didn’t know what the smaller topazes were for. He was under the impression that healers required a big stone to put out enough power to do anything.
Dualayn set the gems on a cloth beside Avena’s twitching body. He glanced at Ōbhin. “You didn’t wash your hands. Come on, we don’t have time for dawdling.”
“Then let’s do it,” Ōbhin growled.
“We can’t let any microbial into her,” Dualayn said, his tone cracking. “What is the point in saving her if we deliver an infection that could kill her? Wash!”
Ōbhin had never heard the man sound so commanding. Dualayn marched towards the washbasin, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. It had an aquifer jewelchine inserted into a porcelain spigot. Dualayn tapped the top and water gushed from the sapphire. He plunged his hands in them, wetting them, and grabbed a bar of