Ruby Ruins Read online

  Ruby Ruins

  Secret of the Jewels Book Two

  by

  J.M.D. Reid

  Copyright © 2020 by J.M.D. Reid

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Published in the United States of America, 2020

  Cover art by Steam Power Studios

  Edited by Poppy Reid

  Dreaming Between Worlds Publishing LLC

  www.JMD-Reid.com

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  Ruby Ruins

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Exciting Peek at “Dual”

  About the Author

  Dedication

  To my Uncle Dave for slipping me a copy of the Hobbit and opening up my love for fantasy!

  Chapter One

  Forty-Third Day of Forgiveness, 755 EU

  Ōbhin’s black-gloved hands flexed and relaxed with building excitement.

  He marched along the sluggish flow of the Greenwine through the northwestern neighborhood of Kash. The stench of the waste dumped into the river from the canneries on the west bank filled his nose. The day’s heat, summer having started three days earlier with the Feast of Restitution, ripened the foul odors. His boots thudded on the uneven cobblestones, his chainmail coat ringing about him. The locals, the poor who lived in the slums, gave him strange glances. His eastern blood, giving him dusky-brown cheeks, caused him to stand out in the mostly Lothonian neighborhood of pale faces.

  The woman at his side didn’t help him blend in.

  Avena had eschewed the traditional garb of women in Kash and the rest of the Kingdom of Lothon. She didn’t wear one of her dresses—dark brown or blue or soft gray—with their layers of rustling petticoats. She wore a man’s trousers, hand-me-downs from Bran, and a man’s long shirt beneath a padded gambeson. The quilted tunic was often worn under armor. However, its layers of cloth provided some protection against weapons both edged and blunted.

  “Do you really think Creg knows something about what happened to Carstin?” Avena asked as she pulled out the heavy linen glove from a satchel she wore on her left hip. A binder, a rod of metal, hung on her right. The glove was long, its cuff extending to well past her elbow. It had small emeralds embedded in it, and a mesh of copper wire woven into the fabric’s weave to connect the gems.

  “Don’t know,” Ōbhin said as he marched with purpose. His face was set, the scar on his right cheek stretched taut. She matched his stride. “But only he and Handsome Baill will know, and Creg’s the one we’ve found.”

  For nearly a Lothonian month, the last fifty-two days, Ōbhin had been looking for the survivors of his old gang of bandits. Most were dead, killed when their leader, Ust, had attacked Dualayn’s manor that terrifying night. A few had escaped. Whiner Creg, as the skinny man was nicknamed, might be stained Black with his crimes, but he was a survivor.

  Facing pain, he’d talk. Give answers.

  Avena pulled the glove over her right arm. It was her prototype, a jewelchine invention of her own. They both worked for one of the most renowned inventors of jewel machines in Lothon. His skills had embroiled him in the machinations of the Brotherhood crime syndicate when he’d uncovered a lost relic from the blood-stained ruins. The organization needed something from that Recorder.

  Ōbhin feared what would happen to his employer when Dualayn found it.

  Avena worked the glove up beneath the sleeve of her long shirt, tugging with care as they marched ahead. The road left the Greenwine behind as they moved deeper into the heart of Greenlet, as the slum was called. It was one of the many villages the expanding borders of Kash had swallowed in the last few decades. Remnants of the original buildings, made of frames of wooden beams with wattle and daub walls covered in whitewash, stood between cheap tenements raised of mud-fired brick and factories belching black smoke into the air as they produced everything from textiles to canned food.

  Jewelchines revolutionized the world with a headlong rush.

  “I hope that works as you promise,” Ōbhin said.

  “It has its limitations,” she said, “but it’ll make my arm as strong as yours. Stronger.” She flashed him a broad grin, her cheeks pale and fair. She was Lothonian and went around with her face uncovered like it was nothing improper.

  In Ōbhin’s distant home of Qoth, women guarded their faces with the same modesty a Lothonian lady did her breasts.

  Avena wore her brown hair in a braid down her back, mauve ribbons entwined through them, leaving her round features exposed. She was youthful, twenty springs, a few years younger than Ōbhin. Her girlishness faded as she pressed two fingers into the heel of her palm. Green light glowed from the network of embedded jewelchines.

  “I never would have thought of connecting a chain of smaller jewelchines to make a unified effect,” she said. “The Recorder holds so much. Dualayn is so close to unearthing something important.”

  “Good,” Ōbhin 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 snea
k 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 frame was dented and gouged, the shine vanished. Stairs lay to the right, runners battered by years of use. Ōbhin pivoted for it. She raced after him.

  A face appeared at the top of the stairs, nose running. A slender figure with a wild look, skin pale, a jerkin of studded leather armoring his torso. Rust tarnished the steel rivets. He raised a crossbow.

  Ōbhin cursed in his native tongue and dived right. Avena’s body moved before she could even recognize the threat held in the bandit’s arms. She threw herself to the left, her feet acting by instinct. A loud twang snapped through the air over the blaring alarm.

  A dark shape blurred through the air and slammed into the wooden floor. She hit the floor on her shoulder, her padded gambeson blunting the impact. She rolled up into a crouch and activated her binder. Purple light burst from the gem set in the weapon’s recessed butt.

  “No need for this, Creg,” Ōbhin called. He stood to the right of the stairs, a stoic warrior. He had the brown skin of an easterner. Not one of the Tethyrians, who abounded in Kash, but from the more distant Qoth, a land of mountains. A scar twisted his right cheek. He wore his black hair cut short, face shaved smooth.

  Sable gloves still adorned his hands.

  “We’re just here to talk. Find out what Ust knows.”

  “Suck on a pus-filled roach, traitor!” Creg growled. “I don’t answer to the Brotherhood no more. Black-filled bastards want my head. I ain’t givin’ it to ‘em.”

  “We’re not with the Brotherhood,” Avena called, feeling dirty just at the thought. The Brotherhood of Masons and Builders were one of the two major crime syndicates plaguing the city of Kash. They and the Free Associate of Rangers warred through street gangs for control of all manner of illicit activities from Tethyrian narcotics to trafficking girls and boys for their customers’ dark appetites. Their tendrils spread out across the Kingdom of Lothon.

  “That fat healer you work for’s bendin’ over and takin’ it up the arse from the Boss. So you’re as good as workin’ for those pus-infected spawn! So you want me, gotta come up here and take my Black-damned head yourself!”

  Avena hated how right Creg was. Dualayn had made a deal with Grey Kalon, the current leader of the Brotherhood. Early spring, a band of highwaymen had abducted Avena and Dualayn. The thugs had brought them to speak with Grey and his unusual associates. It had been how Avena met Ōbhin.

  He’d killed Dualayn’s bodyguard because he fought with Ust’s band. Now Ōbhin was polishing his soul clean of the Black crimes he’d committed, finding the gleam that all humans possessed. Any could reflect Elohm’s Colours if the grime was scoured clean.

  Even that odious Creg upstairs.

  “We have to rush him,” Ōbhin whispered. “Ideas?”

  She glanced around the room, not spotting any other stairs. The ceiling looked rickety. With Ōbhin’s resonance sword, he could quickly cut a hole through it, but it would be hard to scramble up it. The ceiling was out of her reach though Ōbhin’s greater height might let him snag it. Before any more ideas popped into her head, the blaring alarm ran out of power.

  Used a small gem, she thought, her ears ringing.

  Shouts echoed outside. Boyish. Enthusiastic. She glanced at the door to see a group of the youths, some almost her own age, forming up outside, a dozen or more holding makeshift weapons and all sporting green bandannas.

  She realized why they wore green. Not to mark them as loyal to the Greens political faction, desiring a return of a dynasty of kings who had extinguished their bloodline in a civil war over eighty years ago, but to mark them as the local str
eet gang. They pulled their bandannas up to cover their noses and mouths.

  “Green-Face Boys!” she hissed to Ōbhin.

  “Niszeh’s Black Tone.” He cursed to one of the pagan gods his people worshiped. “He paid them off.”

  “We’re in Rangers territory,” she said.

  Ōbhin scowled and spat. “Can you hold them?”

  He could do it with ease. A dozen boys against a resonance blade wielded by a trained swordsmen would be cut to ribbons. They’d be left bleeding and dying, limbs severed, bodies hacked apart with the same ease she’d find in slicing through warm cheese.

  Ōbhin didn’t want to kill these boys. The horror lurked in his eyes. He trusted her to find him another solution.

  “Yes!” She glanced at the stairs. “What about the crossbow?”

  Ōbhin darted into sight of Creg at the top of the stairs.

  TWANG!

  Ōbhin already moved, ducking back into cover as the crossbow hurtled down and impaled the floor near its brethren. Ōbhin pounded up the stairs before Creg could reload. She heard a vile curse from above. A crossbow hurtled down at Ōbhin. He raised his left arm in warding. The heavy, wooden stock slammed into the chain covering his forearm. Metal rattled. He grunted, kept running.

  She scrambled to the right and rushed at the door, gripping her binder tight.

  It would be an effective club even without her enhanced strength. However, its amethyst jewelchine had an additional effect that triggered on a hard impact. It tangled up those struck in bonds of purple energy for a quarter of an hour or so, squeezing limbs tight to torso and tripping up legs.

  It took a great level of strength to break free.

  She reached the front door and faced the mass of ruffians and young hooligans rushing at her. She kicked the door shut and fell into the fighting stance Ōbhin had taught her; weight on her back foot, her right foot pointed towards the direction of attack, her body turned sideways to provide the smallest profile to her enemies.

  Boys shouted outside as she raised her binder into a guard position.

  Chapter Two