The Emperor of Everything

Chapter 22

As far as Ruiz could tell, the woman did not follow him, though he thought he sensed her interest as he left the rotunda.

He moved as quickly as he could without attracting unwelcome attention. As he trotted along, he gave thought to the spy bead the mythagogue had mentioned. Surely it was still locked on him; how could he rid himself of it before he entered the joypalace?

He left the Celadon Wind by a back way provided for those who wished to keep their entertainments private. As soon as he had emerged from the exit, he turned and reentered the fabularium.

As he had hoped, the parallel ingress was equipped with surveillance stripping gear, available to patrons for a price, and he waited in the security lock while the lock’s devices combed three spy beads from the air. A mech arm gathered up the deactivated devices and handed them to him, sealed in a plastic bag.

He examined them with some surprise. Three? He wondered who else was monitoring his movements. Publius owned one of the beads, almost certainly. Perhaps Diamond Bob was the other watcher. He shrugged, tossed the beads down a disposal slot, and left the fabularium again.

Two levels up from the Celadon Wind, he found a market in a low-ceilinged hall. The floor was crammed with tents and booths and kiosks, selling food, fashion, weapons, and various of the cruder forms of entertainment: drugs, wiregames, flashdeath, personality implants.

Ruiz wandered about until he noticed a booth that purveyed information. There he bought a current map of the stack.

Across the hall Ruiz found a cafe. A dozen small tables were scattered about under a canopy of Old Earth plants, gene-tailored to survive under the bluish artificial light. He sat down close to the solid metal at the hall’s perimeter, where he could watch the few other patrons without worrying overmuch that someone might sneak up behind him.

The waiter was a brainchopped woman of great apparent age, who showed him a menu and accepted his order silently, then shuffled back to the little black tent that held the cafe’s machinery. She returned with his meal almost instantly; it consisted of a platter of gray textured protein and vatted fungi in various fluorescent hues, sliced into bite-size pieces and covered with a thick bluish sauce. It tasted marginally better than it looked, and he ate it while he examined his map.

The map, installed in a disposable dataslate, allowed him to scroll crudely through the stack, level by level. The major features were represented by wireframe diagrams and touch-dot labels. When he located the Sweetshimmer, three levels below the Celadon Wind, he was immediately struck by its suitability for an ambush. There were only two entries into the joypalace, according to the map, and one watcher could cover both of them. The corridor that led to Suite B-448 served only a half-dozen other suites, and was accessible from a single elevator bank.

He finished his meal and looked out at the people passing through the market. He watched for a few minutes; none of the shoppers resembled the woman with the steel slippers.

He slipped out of the cafe and found a shop specializing in full bodymasks. The shop was housed in an inflatable structure covered with anodized alloy scales, so that it looked like a giant lavender artichoke. The clerk, another elderly brainchopped woman, served him without detectable interest, and a few minutes later Ruiz left the shop disguised as a fat merchant. He wore a poisonous-green puffsuit, gold-mirrored ankle boots, and a stylish pink visor. He’d also purchased a somatic inductance overlay, which lay against the nape of his neck and changed his gait into a mincing waddle, made his arms flip about in a disarmingly frivolous manner, and raised his voice an octave.

He was confident no one would recognize him, though he feared that if he ran into one of the muggergangs which infested the city, he would be attacked. The bodymask restricted his movements and prevented access to most of his weapons, and the face-covering restricted his vision. Worse, he had been forced to leave his armor behind, in a public locker that would surely be broken open and emptied as soon as he was out of sight. He felt naked and vulnerable, protected only by a layer of spongy synthetic flesh.

But he could think of no better plan, so he went to the public lifts and dropped down to the level of the Sweetshimmer.

At the moment Remint lay back on the couch, eyes closed. Corean was reminded of a mech recharging its batteries — the slayer’s face seemed even less human in repose, the grotesquely muscled features even more like some murderous alien mask. She wondered how he could sleep with Ruiz Aw so close to his trap. Probably, she thought, he wasn’t asleep, but only resting, husbanding his energies in a wholly logical manner. She wondered what would happen if she were to go to his couch and touch him. Would she survive the experiment?

She returned her attention to the spyscreen, which now displayed a view of the corridor outside the suite. In the last few moments the traffic in the corridor had picked up. A fat man in a ridiculous green puffsuit simpered and clung to the arm of a rather homely albino joyboy in a leather whipping jumper. A few paces behind the fat man, a tall cadaverous man in the dull black shipsuit of a Dead God acolyte trudged along, face solemn; he was trailed by a brightly dressed covey of preadolescent girls, all of whom wore identical looks of unchildlike resignation.

The lights in the corridor went out.

Corean sat in bemusement for an instant, before she realized that something was wrong. She opened her mouth to shout for Remint, when the red emergency lights strobed on, then off. In that blink of time, she saw the fat man moving with astonishing speed up the corridor, a look of wooden calm on his doughy face. The albino sprawled on his back, legs kicking, and the tall acolyte was soaring over the fallen joyboy in a tigerish bound.

She turned and shrieked a warning at Remint, who was already rising from his couch, when the suite’s door shattered and the fat man burst through, a splinter gun in his hand.

In that transparent slice of time, she saw that Remint — for all his inhuman speed — would be too slow, that the fat man would kill or disable Remint before the slayer could reach his weapons or get his feet sufficiently under him to take evasive action.

But then a slender hand reached through the shattered door and sank a stun needle into the fat man’s neck. The fat man spasmed and flung his arms wide… then toppled over, helpless.

Ruiz regained consciousness as two of Remint’s hired slayers were cutting him out of the bodymask. He couldn’t completely stifle a groan as his injured nervous system reacted to the rough handling.

Corean’s face floated above him, transfigured with vengeful joy. “Oh, how I’ve waited for this moment,” she said, in tones vibrant with pleasure.

He knew better than to attempt speech until he had further recovered from the stun; his muscles were still useless. He looked around, and saw the tall naked woman with the steel slippers removing the last piece of her acolyte bodymask. She favored him with a nod and a cool smile. “Not a bad try,” she said. Apparently she was not in the employ of the pirates, as the mythagogue had told him. Other things were also apparent: principally, that Ruiz Aw was an idiot who richly deserved his fate. He sighed.

Remint y’Yubere sat on the couch, hands folded, looking remarkably placid. Ruiz could observe none of the intensity he had expected to see in the slayer’s face. The man seemed unaffected by the recent violent events. Genched, Ruiz thought, and shuddered. He would be just as placid in a little while.

“That’s right,” burbled Corean, as if she had added mind-reading to her skills. “You’re all mine now.” She reached out and touched the madcollar Ruiz wore. “Whose is this? No matter.” She clamped a decoupler module to the collar’s control linkage, and adjusted the damping field until it resonated with the linkage. The collar clicked open and dropped away. “There,” she said brightly. “Remint!”

The slayer looked up incuriously.

“Take us back to your brother’s stronghold,” she ordered.

Remint nodded. “As you say.” He rose from the couch and glanced around the suite. The joyboys, who were still huddled on the bed, both shrieked thinly when his gaze rested on them; he killed them with two brief touches of his pinbeam.

A look of uncertainty flickered across the face of the tall woman; immediately she suppressed it. The other two slayers laughed and brought out a control harness, which they began strapping to Ruiz. It was a device somewhat like the corpse-walker Publius had used; when it was activated Ruiz would be unable to make any movement except those specifically directed by the controller of the harness.

When they had finished fastening the control harness to Ruiz, they rolled him over and sat him up.

“Give me the controller,” said Remint.

“Sure,” said one slayer, and passed it over. Remint touched the controller’s finger pad, and Ruiz’s leg and arm muscles locked tight. The intensity of the pain astonished him; his abused nervous system was protesting vigorously. He clamped his jaws shut. For some reason he didn’t want to admit how much it hurt.

Remint took one last slow look around the suite, and then he cut down the rest of his people. The two male slayers fell before they could react; the tall woman, who was very quick, had time only to jerk aside slightly as Remint’s pinbeam cooked through her breastbone.

Ruiz took a sort of hopeless satisfaction in the terror that filled Corean’s face as she waited to find out if she were scheduled to die too. But Remint turned toward the door and said, “Come. Alonzo is waiting for us.”

Some sort of terminal bravado caused Ruiz to speak then. “Alonzo Yubere is dead,” he croaked.

If Ruiz had thought Remint a terrifying creature before, that pale perception faded to insignificance, seared away by the white-hot intensity that filled Remint’s face now. “What?” asked the slayer breathlessly.

Ruiz drew a deep breath. “Yubere is dead.”

“Who killed him?” asked Remint, stepping closer and pushing his terrible face into Ruiz’s, as if he wished to peer through Ruiz’s eyes into the hidden darkness at the back of Ruiz’s brain.

Had he not been paralyzed, Ruiz would have flinched away. “I did,” he answered.

“Ah, ah…. “The slayer rocked back and forth, shaking his massive head, very carefully, as though it might otherwise burst from the pressure of his thoughts. “You killed him? Why?”

“I was paid to do so.”

“Ah? By whom?” Remint’s lips writhed back and exposed his teeth in a hideous grimace that seemed to carry no identifiable emotional content.

Ruiz could hardly find the breath to reply, but he forced out the words. “Publius the monster-maker commissioned Yubere’s death; it was the price of his help, which I needed.” At least Publius would not escape unscathed; his machinations had led Ruiz to this sorry ending, and Ruiz found an unambiguous pleasure in the thought of Publius’s eventual meeting with Remint.

Remint stepped back, and calm rationality fell over the slayer’s features. “Ah. Publius. We know that one, an ancient enemy and colleague.” He looked away, and was silent for a moment. Then he asked, in gentle tones, “You would not lie to me, Ruiz Aw?”

“No.”

“No, I think not. What would be the point, now?” Remint paused, then spoke in the same soft voice. “You are too much like me, just a tool, sharp steel for the use of weaker hands.”

“May I ask you a question?” Ruiz found that he was still driven by his own purpose, even in this hopeless moment.

Remint nodded gravely. “Ask.”

“What have you done with my people… the Pharaohan slaves?”

“I delivered them to my brother’s stronghold. Beyond that I know nothing.” Remint turned to Corean, handed her the controller. “You must now proceed as you think best.”

Corean recovered her power of speech. “Wait! We still need to get Ruiz Aw back to the stronghold.”

Remint shook his head. “My directives in the event of my brother’s death take precedence over all other instructions; I must go now to punish his murderer.” The slayer started toward the door.

Corean made a serious mistake, then. She stepped in front of the slayer, and, in an attempt to detain him, put a hand on his chest. “Now wait,” she said, just before he snapped out his armored forearm and knocked her across the room. She hit the wall with the back of her head, and the controller went flying. She slid down the wall into a boneless heap, unconscious or dead.

Remint was gone, and Ruiz was alone in the suite full of corpses, unable to move a muscle below his neck.

Time passed, and the agony in his limbs eased somewhat, as his peripheral nerves adapted to the harness. He watched Corean, and wondered if she was alive and if so, how long it would take for her to awaken. The management of the joypalace seemed in no hurry to investigate the trouble in Suite B-448; hours might pass before they sent up a security team.

After a long while, he heard a faint scrabbling sound from an unexpected direction, and he snapped his head around.

To his astonishment, he saw the tall woman attempting to drag herself along the wall. Her face was white, and the wound in her chest made an ugly sucking sound. Apparently Remint’s beam had not quite ruptured her heart. It had apparently severed her spinal cord; her legs trailed uselessly. She was making slow progress, pulling with clawed hands at the dirty carpet, her bulging eyes fixed on the harness controller that still lay a good two meters away.

Ruiz couldn’t bring himself to hope that she would succeed. His mind seemed to have taken a turn toward cold introspection, and he was unable to take much interest in the woman’s efforts.

In a few minutes he fell into a philosophical mood, and began to examine the woman’s continued survival in those terms. At one time, both Remint and Ruiz Aw had espoused a philosophy of Perfect Violence. If he could act with Perfect Violence — he had once thought — then no one could obstruct or withstand him. But here was concrete evidence of the flaw in that philosophy. Not even violence was perfectable… not even Remint, as perfect a slayer as Ruiz had ever met, was perfect in his violence. The woman still lived, still hitched her painful way toward the controller!

He began to hope again, faintly — a hope that glimmered away each time the woman paused to gather her waning strength. The pauses grew longer as she approached the controller.

When her outstretched hand was only a few centimeters from the controller, she collapsed and twitched with what Ruiz took to be terminal spasms. He ground his teeth and his eyes filled with hot tears. He thought of Nisa, but only for an instant; his mind was too full of despair to hold anything so sweet.

But the woman’s head came slowly up again, and she made one last lunge.

Her trembling finger touched the controller, the harness released Ruiz, and he collapsed backward. The sudden freedom shocked him, so that he lay there for a long moment, mind blank, unable to act.

Then he jumped up and tore at the harness straps, ripping them away joyfully. When he was completely free, he seized the closest weapon, a splinter gun that had belonged to one of the dead slayers — and only then turned to the woman who had released him.

She lay motionless, and only her eyes, which followed him as he crossed the room toward her, showed life.

He knelt beside her, examined her wounds. Her exertions had evidently worsened the damage; bright arterial blood pulsed from the exit burn under her shoulder blade. Her face was bluish; she tried to speak and failed.

“Yes,” he said, wanting to comfort her. “I’m going now. I’ll put him to death, if I can.”

Her eyes showed doubt, but it was a strangely unreproachful doubt. She almost smiled.

Her breathing ceased and her eyes stopped seeing.

He gathered up the rest of his weapons and the madcollar, then ran from the suite, lurching on uncertain legs.

It was only after he had left the joypalace and was on his way up to the lagoon that he realized he had failed to make sure of Corean. He paused, tempted to go back, but if she had recovered and called her people, the suite would still be a perfect trap.

He went on. His head buzzed with bitter thoughts about the imperfect quality of his own violence, and he cursed himself for a fool.

Ruiz was still busy criticizing his performance as he strode up the ramp toward the quay. A faint unpleasant sound penetrated his thoughts; he stopped abruptly and forced his attention back to the business at hand.

He listened. After a while it came to him; someone was screaming, far across the still waters of the lagoon. The sound was as regular as breathing, as if the screamer paused only long enough to fill his lungs for the next scream.

In all likelihood, the screamer had nothing to do with Ruiz Aw. SeaStack was full of torment. Even so, he thought, he had been gone a long time, several hours, and who knew what mischief Publius might have accomplished in that time?

He touched the madcollar, which he had tucked into his belt. If Publius had arranged a surprise for him, it might involve the collar, which Publius obviously found a demeaning constraint, a severe assault on his dignity. Had Publius given up hope of regaining control of his puppet Yubere? Possibly…. Or Publius might consider the situation too volatile, now that Remint was involved. Or he might know of some time limit to his scheme, now passed.

Did Ruiz still need Publius? The stronghold might have fallen into a state of disorganization with Yubere’s inaction, which might make it possible for him to sneak in through the same route as before. The possibility of doing without Publius had an undeniable appeal. Ruiz shook his head regretfully… he still needed Publius.

Another possibility suddenly occurred to Ruiz. Perhaps the screamer was Publius, perhaps Remint had already found him.

No. No, he was somehow certain that Publius was safely gone, that he had decided to cut his losses and retire from the field.

He took the collar and hefted it, then threw it high into the air, so that at the top of its arc, it cleared the lip of the ramp.

It detonated with a bright flash and a report that made his ears ring. A second later, the sound of another explosion reached him.

He noticed that the screaming had stopped.

Long before he reached the sub, Ruiz knew what Publius had done. Albany’s head was a pale splotch against the black metal of the conning tower; his blood made a darker pattern where it had spattered and run down.

When Ruiz drew alongside, he saw Albany’s body, floating in the currentless water of the lagoon, the bound limbs still twitching rhythmically in the grip of the nerveburner Publius had attached to him.

Ruiz went aboard. Publius had suspended Albany by his ponytail, which was secured to the conning tower rail with a metal clamp. Then he’d left him to scream out his life, until Ruiz had returned and detonated the collar around Albany’s neck.

Albany’s eyes were full of blood.

Ruiz went slowly up the ladder. He took out his knife and cut through Albany’s ponytail, so that the head fell, bounced once on the deck, and splashed into the lagoon.

Then he went below and set a course for Publius’s maze. He still had a use for Publius.

Corean returned to consciousness as her Moc carried her from the joypalace. She breathed in the welcome stink of its body, for the moment empty of all emotion but the pleasure of being alive. Her ribs ached; perhaps Remint had broken a couple. No matter; she would heal.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Marmo, floating along silently, holding a graser.

“Marmo…” she whispered in a voice that offended her by its weakness.

“Corean?” The old pirate swiveled toward her. “It’s almost daylight. I began to worry about you, so we followed.”

She smiled fondly at his battered half-mech face. “A good thing you did. Where is Ruiz Aw?”

Marmo didn’t answer for a moment. “Your enemy was missing, Corean. There was a disengaged control harness lying on the floor of the suite; it appeared to me that one of Remint’s slayers punched it off, just before she died.”

The pleasure of survival was suddenly tarnished. “Again?” She could not believe it.

“Never mind. It’s time to go to ground, Corean, until this blows over. SeaStack is shrieking; the lords are in a great panic. It is most unsafe. Fensh is waiting above with the airboat, to take us to a secure hiding place until we can leave the city.”

She tried to summon enough rage to resist his sensible urging, but between Remint’s machinelike ruthlessness and Ruiz Aw’s incomprehensible determination, she had somehow been frightened into passivity. She hoped it was a temporary frailty.

“Yes,” she agreed, and lay back in the Moc’s hard arms.