Ruby Ruins

by J M D Reid

  “I had a wife,” Fingers said, his words slow. He broke the silence of the room.

  “I know,” Avena said. “She cheated on you. I’m sorry.”

  “No, she didn’t,” he said, his words creaking like a rotten floor devoured not by worms or beetles but by grief and pain. “Not ever once did she betray her promise to me. She loved me fiercely, but I hurt her. Bad.”

  Avena looked up at him. Anguish gleamed in his haunted eyes. “How bad?”

  His body shook. “I killed her.” He sniffed as he fought back his emotions, fighting to keep his pain bottled up. “I didn’t mean to. I’ve been pretending that she’s alive, that she just cuckolded me because it made it easier to live with it. I loved her so much. I still do. No matter how much she hurt me or how angry she made me. No matter what she forced me to do that day. I loved her so much, the only way I can live with myself is to make myself hate her. She left me no choice. I need to pretend I was doing the right thing when I hit her. That I’m a good husband.” He snorted with disgust. It almost became a choking sob. “I even pretend that I send her money.”

  “Fingers,” she whispered, confused. Shocked.

  “But I’m not a good husband.” He broke away from her and stepped back. She swayed, off-balance. “Not in the least, Avena. I killed her. I cracked her in the head with my hoe so hard I broke the haft. She collapsed. Dead.”

  Avena stiffened. She stared at the man before her. A sudden fear seized her, a dread to know the answer mixed with a glimmer of hope. A shining diamond beckoning her through the darkness always lurking in that empty place in her soul.

  “Did you . . . have any children?” Avena asked, her voice raw and hoarse. “Daughters?”

  Fingers looked away from her. “No.”

  Avena struggled with her memories to remember her father. In her mind, he was young and fit, tall and strong. He wasn’t this heavyset man crushed by the weight of years. Her memories were blurry. She’d been so young, only seven, when her mother had drowned Evane in the whitewash and was about to do the same to herself. So young when her father had to swing his hoe out of fury.

  “Are you . . . my father?” Avena asked. She trembled there, knowing the truth. She wanted to reach for him.

  “No,” Fingers said. “We didn’t have any children.” He sank down to the dusty floor, his back still to her. “Get some sleep, Avena. We got to keep going on.”

  “But . . .” She swallowed. “My father killed my mother like that. With a hoe. She made him furious because—”

  “I’m not your Black-damned father!” He scrunched himself tighter and then the sounds of exaggerated snoring rumbled from him.

  Avena’s legs buckled. She sank down by the lantern. She turned it off, plunging them into silent darkness. She could feel him nearby as her mind struggled to process this revelation. She’d thought her father hated her for being too weak and helpless. For just standing there while Mother had drowned Evane. When he’d walked away after killing his wife, Avena had understood it was all her fault. By not acting, she’d forced Father to kill Mother.

  Of course, he’d despised her. Hated her.

  But now . . .

  Fingers had come to work for Dualayn not long after she started as a maid. Had he been watching her from afar? Had he tracked her from her time at the orphanage with Daughter Heana and then to her new home at Dualayn’s? Had he been close by her all this time?

  Did her father not hate her? Was he merely a man destroyed by the fact he’d killed the woman he loved?

  She felt too drained from her grief over Bran and Smiles to cry. She stared in her father’s direction, listening to his breathing become regular, for his snoring to become real. She fell asleep listening to his breathing, and though she was in ruins, hunted by automatons, separated from the man she loved, she felt safe.

  For the first time in fourteen years, her father was nearby to protect her from the monsters of the world.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Ōbhin kicked Dualayn awake the next “morning.” Time had lost all meaning in the ruins of Koilon.

  The old man started awake. He rubbed at his face, blinking in the diamond light shining down on him. He groaned and sat up. The others were already awake. Ōbhin felt rested enough. He couldn’t just stay down here and do nothing. They had to find Avena and shut down the crystalmen before they all died in the dark.

  “Break your fast then we’re leaving,” Ōbhin said.

  Dualayn rubbed his rib. “Was it necessary to kick me awake?”

  “Yes.” Ōbhin faced the exit. “You’re a heavy sleeper.”

  “We definitely tried to wake you up gentler,” Miguil said.

  Dajouth fought to contain a laugh.

  “I am starting to realize there is nothing I can do to ever win back your good graces. If you could just imagine how things would be better if—”

  “Don’t.” Ōbhin’s shoulders rolled. “You’re lower than a pus-filled roach scurrying through dog shit. You’re a worm, Dualayn. You feed off everyone else and what you crap out is even worse.”

  Dualayn muttered about all the lives he saved as he readied himself to continue on.

  Ōbhin tested out the healer. Aliiva’s soothing Tone flooded through Ōbhin’s ankle. The topaz had regained enough energy to operate while they rested. Dajouth held his own to his arm. Out of the sling and splint, he looked almost a hundred percent.

  Not that they could do anything against the crystalmen.

  Except collapsing ceilings. Ōbhin was lucky not to have died. If he did it again, others would be hurt.

  They crept out of the house onto the crystallized streets. They soon found another transmuted crowd fleeing the destruction of the Wave Resonance Beacon. He couldn’t help but stare at their frozen faces and wondered if they’d known they were about to die. There were so many families. The park nearby must have been full of parents and their children enjoying a leisurely day. Perhaps it was some sort of holy day.

  A surcease from their labors.

  They left the frozen crowd behind where the ruby transmutation petered out. Only strong lines radiated out after a certain point, like the energy bursting out had started out as violent spurts of focused change firing off in a hundred different directions before an explosion of transmutation engulfed the area. When they crossed the boundary out of transmutation, the ruins became choked off with rubble.

  Ōbhin wondered if those past here had survived. Or were they the owners of the bones they’d found throughout the city? Had they escaped one catastrophe only to be slain by the lizard demons?

  “That building, perhaps,” Dualayn suggested, pointing to their left.

  Outside of the transmuted area, traveling through the buildings made the most sense. They were connected by subbasements and utility tunnels that had survived the city’s burial. As they traversed through a winding path, rats and other things scurried through the darkness. Perhaps some of those feral dogs watched them from hidden crevasses, waiting for the light to pass.

  Perhaps an hour into their walk, a crystalman thudded on the level above them. They all froze, staring up at the ceiling of the tunnel they crawled through. Yellow centipedes scurried along it, wiggling out of cracks like they were fleeing the thing stomping above them.

  “Think it knows we’re down here?” Dajouth whispered.

  Ōbhin had no idea. Every step prickled his skin. Avena was out there. If she ran into one of those things . . . He had to believe she was safe. That the thing posing as Fingers wouldn’t harm her. It would need her to find Dualayn at the Hall of Communication. She wouldn’t retreat from the ruins. She would keep looking for them.

  He would keep looking for her.

  When the crystalman had passed, they continued on. The tunnel soon ended at a set of concrete stairs. The strange materials used—metal pipes and railings, stone poured to make bricks and floors—no longer astounded him. They had become his mundane existence so fast. They swept through the spiderwebs, finer
than the ones created by the crystal spiders, and headed up the stairs.

  It was another tenement building. They were common. They had to break through the door. They found it blocked by a pile of bones. They clinked and clattered as they pushed them apart. Devastation abounded. Parts of the walls had been battered down. Some showed signs of ancient fires. The bodies of three demons, their scales rotted black, lay scattered amid the remains of the humans. The heat bleeding from their bones suffused the air in suffocating currents.

  How can they still be warm after all these years?

  They crept through the room. Dajouth neared one of the dead demons. He prodded it with his binder.

  “Black piss!” he yelped and jumped back.

  Something hissed. Then a large, red-black snake crawled out of the body. It had an angular head marking it as a viper. Venomous. Dualayn recoiled back, bumping into Miguil. The pudgy man’s lantern swung before him, sending shadows dancing.

  Following the snake boiled out smaller ones. Little worms that scurried after the larger. Dajouth backed up more, his face pale. Ōbhin’s muscles tensed as the larger snake slithered towards a pile of debris. Its snakelets followed and they all vanished into a hole in the wall.

  “The heat,” wheezed Dualayn. “They would enjoy the heat.”

  Dajouth shuddered, his arms shaking with violence like a dog trying to rid fur of water. “I hate snakes. Worse part ‘bout goin’ in caves.”

  Ōbhin eyed the demon corpse by him. Did its scales just move? Was another viper lurking inside? He gave it a wide berth as they crossed the room.

  Hidden by a staircase, they found a crystalman had melted before cooling and solidifying. The concrete floor beneath it had cracked and warped, sagging in places. Another demon lay dead by the jewel slag. The outer layers of amethyst had melted enough for some of the emerald jewelchines inside to also run like wax across the purple gemstone. It formed strange patterns.

  “Another way to fell them,” Dualayn said.

  “Just need a lizard demon,” muttered Miguil. “‘Course, you’ll probably die yourself. Look at this room.”

  The walls were blackened with soot. The ceiling above was gone, the second floor burnt as the first. Charred bones, bits of femurs or cracked ribs, lurked in the piles of ash. Ōbhin hoped the owners had been already dead before being cooked to such temperatures.

  They passed through the apartment building into another store. This one appeared to have sold clothes. Half-rotted scraps of silk or linen hung off corroded hangers. There were strange statues that had no features, only the suggestion of them. Decayed cloth draped them, appearing to display the wares. Through the center was a wide path cleared of any debris that led to a large hole battered through the wall. It opened onto a large space.

  They stepped out onto a street. There appeared to be a glass roof over it. Surprisingly, it held up the weight of the earth and rubble that had buried Koilon. It spread far, supported by slender columns of rusting iron.

  “Remarkable,” said Dualayn. “It goes far. Hear the way our voices echo. This is bigger than the carriage house.”

  “What is it?” Ōbhin asked.

  “Perhaps a plaza.” Dualayn looked out into the darkness. “I think we are close. If I am correct, the Crystal Sheriff Hall lies in that direction.” He pointed out into the murk. Their light didn’t fall on anything.

  “Look at the ground,” muttered Dajouth. “I think he’s right.”

  Ōbhin did, too. There was a path worn into the black, tar-like stone of the plaza, a smooth depression like a rut in a road. Something polished into the hard, rough surface by eons of travel. The width reminded Ōbhin of a crystalman’s width. He took off his glove and bent down. He touched the surface.

  He felt the distant thuds of heavy steps.

  “At least one patrols here,” said Ōbhin. “Three thousand years walking the same path.”

  “It’s not the only one,” Dajouth said. “Look at that path leading to that hole in the building. They must have battered their way through the city, making their own streets to keep it safe.”

  Miguil groaned. “I can hear one. It’s coming closer.”

  The thudding steps grew louder and louder.

  *

  It was quiet when Avena and Fingers broke their fast the next morning. They cut off slices of dark rye bread and ate it with the smoked chicken they’d packed. She washed it down with water from her aquifer.

  Fingers wouldn’t look at her. He had a tense wariness in his face, the look of an animal cornered in a trap and terrified there was no escape. She wanted to press him for knowledge about her mother and why he’d abandoned her. She feared to clutch too tight. Fingers’s normal tough facade had been stripped away to reveal a fragile core, as delicate as a robin’s egg.

  Grasp it too tight . . .

  Avena would be patient with her father. Just knowing that he had stayed close to her all this time had eased so much guilt from her. She felt lighter knowing that he had never hated her. That he still loved her.

  After all, he’d descended into a black ruin to help her. He still walked with her even though he could find his way back out.

  Instead, Fingers asked her about Bran. As they shouldered their packs, she explained all she and Ōbhin knew, their theory on how Dje’awsa had created him with sorcery, a subtler craft than the crude work the dark man had performed on Ust. The impostor worked for the Brotherhood, a guardian sent to watch over Dualayn. It could mimic a person so well it became them.

  “Injuries are the only thing it can’t fake,” she said. “I don’t think it can control its healing. It happens automatically. It’s fast and strong, but I think becoming Bran has affected its personality. We can use that to kill it.”

  “Smiles is truly dead?” asked Fingers.

  Avena nodded. “The night you went drinking with the new guards . . . We think it replaced him then.”

  Fingers spat out a string of curses. “Poor Jilly. A month with that thing pretendin’ to be her husband. Wot, sixty or more days?”

  “Yeah,” said Avena, her voice tight. “I’ll have to tell her and Joayne when we return . . .” She scrunched up her eyes. “She loved Bran.”

  “Doted on her youngest son,” he said. Knuckles popped. “When we find that bastard, I’ll help you wring its scrawny neck.”

  She smiled, feeling comforted by his presence. She wanted to take his hand like a little girl, to be that innocent child once again. To hold the doll he’d made for her with a face stitched on by her mother. To run through the fields with Evane laughing at her side. The other half of her stolen away.

  You would have liked Ōbhin, Evane, thought Avena. The emptiness inside of her didn’t feel so wide today. Fingers’s revelation had filled in the pain in ways that Ōbhin couldn’t. He could make her forget, but he couldn’t help her forgive herself.

  As they moved through the transmuted ruins in the direction of the Hall of Communication, she felt eyes watching her. She shuddered, fearing Bran lurked just out of sight. She didn’t know what the thing’s capabilities were. How far its abilities stretched. Did it need to eat and drink? To sleep? Could it see in the dark?

  She kept glancing around, searching for the impostor. She never saw a sign, just felt that prickle at the back of her neck.

  “This isn’t good,” she said as they reached the edge of the ruby transmutation. The debris held up by the streetlamps and transmuted buildings crashed across the road before them. “We’re so close to the Hall. Another few blocks that way.”

  “Can’t help but detour around it,” said Fingers. He nodded to a building to their right. It would take them north. “That one?”

  She sighed and nodded.

  They ventured into the building. The collapsed floors above forced them into the basement. They found another carriage house full of the horseless carriages. A few lines of ruby transmutation knifed throughout while the floor boiled with cockroaches. They were big and brown, running across the debr
is in a vast wave.

  She grimaced with each crunching step across the tide of the filthy things. She kept having to kick her boots to knock them off of her. Fingers slapped at his calf. One must have crawled up beneath his trouser leg.

  Relief burst from Avena’s lungs after crossing the far end of the disgusting migration. Here a set of stairs led upward. To reach them, they had to wade through knee-high water. It spilled over the cuff of her boots, her wool stockings absorbing the brackish liquid. It smelled worse than a swamp, all rotten muck and filth.

  I’ll need to take a bath for a month once we’re out of here. Two full turnings of all seven moons!

  She climbed out of the foul liquid onto the stairs. It led to an underground path that took them almost in the direction they needed to go. One of the lizard demons lay dead in it, head crushed by a half-melted pipe. Bones lay scattered around it. Scavengers seemed to avoid eating the demons while having no qualms about humans.

  The tunnel ended at another set of stairs that led to an alley between two buildings. The debris loomed over her head. A rusting girder thrust down before them out of the stone. She slid past it and frowned at a sound drifting through the air.

  Whispers.

  It was like people were talking just a room over. Her head cocked to focus on the noises. Fuzzy tingles prickled the tips of her toes and fingers even as hope surged through her. Talking meant other humans. Her friends.

  “Ōbhin!” she shouted.

  “What?” Fingers asked.

  She darted forward down the alley to where it opened onto a narrow street that seemed mostly clear of rubble. A few large piles of it had crashed down from above, but it seemed to go for blocks. The prickling spread up to her hands and itched at her legs.

  “It’s Ōbhin and the others!” she shouted, excitement mounting.

  “Wait, Avena!” Fingers growled. “I don’t think that’s them!”

  She burst out onto the street and held her lantern up high in her left hand. Brilliant light shone across the neighborhood. The buildings here were close enough together to provide the support to keep this area from being entirely swallowed.