He cupped her cheek with his black-gloved hand. “Be safe. We’ll be within shouting distance.”
She grinned. “You’re the one who needs to watch out. Dualayn might decide to carve out your kidney and stick it into a bucket so you can piss better.”
“Piss?” Ōbhin asked in amusement.
“I’ve been spending too much time with coarse and vulgar men.” She raised up on her toes and brushed his lips with hers. Heat sparked in him.
Bran sniggered.
Avena broke away and marched to the left. “Remind me to laugh hard the next time you flirt with a tavern maid. I remember a host of stories from when you were younger. I’m sure they would love to hear about them. Like the time with the ducks.”
Bran’s chortles cut off. “You wouldn’t.”
Avena shrugged as she passed between two carriages, one of the dogs snarling from beneath it.
“Dualayn, lead on,” Ōbhin said. “Dajouth and I will make sure none of the dogs bite your ankles.”
Dajouth snorted with quiet laughter. He wiped a hand through his blond hair, dust spilling off the fine strands. “Yep, we’ll keep those intact at least.”
“You two are droll,” Dualayn said and headed in the opposite direction.
Ōbhin glanced a final time at Avena. Every instinct told him to go with her, but she had Miguil, and if Ōbhin were wrong about Dajouth being the impostor, then she’d have either Fingers or Bran to protect her. But none of the three objected.
Dajouth must be the one who’d been killed and replaced.
Maybe I’ll have an opportunity to do something about you, Ōbhin thought, his insides hardening like an aardvark’s plates. Dajouth had been one of his men no matter how annoying his flirtation was. A reckoning was fast approaching with the changeling.
*
The dogs growled and snarled around Avena’s group. They scurried through the dark, desiring to protect their territory. But the humans were bigger and had lights. She shuddered, realizing generations upon generations of these dogs had existed in the dark. Breeding, living, dying in oppressive black. Their eyes must have atrophied to the point that the lanterns were as blinding as the sun. Their world had been turned upside down with the invasion of light and the intrusion of strange creatures their ancestors had once loved.
She worked her shoulders. Humans do not belong here. We fled this place during the Shattering. We left it to the bugs and rats and these dogs, abandoning them to their own affairs. We’ve only returned because now it matters to us.
It reminded her of the same arrogance of King Anglon and his taxes. How he’d exploited his people suffering in the drought to finance his ambitions to control the Border Fangs. How many wars had Roidan and Lothon fought over those mountains? Some of the bloodiest battles in her nation’s history had been in those passes. Thousands dead, choking the mountains to serve the vain ambitions of men.
These dogs suffered from their light. She wanted to apologize to them as they moved deeper.
The light from Ōbhin’s group dwindled to a faint glow, like the sun about to peek over the horizon. The darkness of the vast carriage house pressed around them, wanting to swallow them. They followed the wall, the stone buckled and cracked in places. Broken pipes ran along the ceiling, some burst open, others dripping water from seams. Corroded masses of wires snaked above. Some went to lights, but others led to hybrid gems of topaz and amethyst. They were nodules twisted around each other.
Healing and protection? She couldn’t understand why the wires would run to them from the lights. How would a network of jewelchines like those work?
After perhaps a quarter-hour of moving through the rotting carriages and occasional blocks of rubble, the wall glittered ahead. Something made of scarlet glass flashed, reflecting their lanterns’ lights. She gasped to see a vein of red passing through the wall. It continued along the floor and ceiling. It crossed one of the carriages, transforming the metal and interior upholstery into ruby. The rest of the vehicle had rotted, but the ruby sections had remained perfectly shaped, untouched by the ravages of age beyond a coating of dust.
“Elohm’s Colours,” Bran muttered, studying it. “Wot caused that?”
“Reality warped,” Avena said, remembering her dream of the experiment and the tears of Black rending and melting the room around her. Had something happened here like that, only with rubies? What had she witnessed in her dream? The moment of hubris when mankind had unleashed the Black? Then why is it ruby here?
“Is this wot’s stained the trees above?” asked Miguil. He prodded the vein of ruby running across the floor, scuffing away the dust coating it.
“I don’t know,” Avena said. “Maybe.” She struggled to get her bearings, to follow the twisting path that they’d journeyed to reach here, but she was hopelessly turned around. She had no idea how far they were from the library. Did this garage run back underneath it? Away from it? This room was larger than the building that they had passed through to find it. This underground structure, this carriage house, must support multiple buildings.
“Don’t matter,” Fingers growled and stepped over it. He didn’t touch it, his longer stride clearing the cubit-and-a-half-wide strip. “Let’s keep movin’.”
Avena nodded while her curiosity itched at her. She glanced to her right and spotted the distant glow of Ōbhin. For the first time in days, she wished to hear Dualayn speak. Would he know what had caused this . . . rubyification? How did it happen? He’d taught her so much, how to heal, how to build jewelchines, how to think through problems. He’d understood
