The Emperor of Everything

Chapter 23

From the shadow of an adjoining stack, Ruiz analyzed the remaining safeguards at the entrance to Publius’s mooring, taking an ironic satisfaction in using the antisurveillance gear he and Albany had brought back from Yubere’s stronghold.

He had left the sub some distance away; he must now approach Publius with as much guile as he could summon. From one of the stack-side farmers he had purchased — for an absurd price — a small sampan loaded with crates of vegetables. He wore a stained brown jerkin, tattered shorts, and a large straw hat, all from the same source. He made his movements slow and deliberate, and concealed the readout slate of his sensors beneath a heap of pungent thick-leaved cabbages.

While he considered the indications, he consumed the farmer’s lunch, which consisted of a piece of blue-veined cheese, a sweet onion, half a loaf of bread, and a plastic bowl of green-gold spiceplums. It was, Ruiz decided, the best meal he’d had in weeks. He had found an insulated flask of cold water in the bilge, and he took a long swallow, looking up at the green forested ledges of the stack above him. The tide drifted his boat out into the midmorning sunlight for a moment, and the heat soaked into his sore shoulders comfortingly, until he shortened up his lines and returned to the shade. It occurred to him that it was a fine thing to be alive.

The novelty of this notion struck him forcibly — when had he last thought such a thing? On the barge? Perhaps. That joyfully uncertain journey now seemed impossibly distant in time….

He shrugged and gave his attention to the readout slate. Perhaps he was missing something, but he just couldn’t find any unambiguous evidence that Publius’s security systems still functioned. Either his own gear was faulty — or Remint had gotten here first.

Eventually he finished his lunch and cast off his lines. He lifted the sampan’s sculling oar into its fork and propelled the boat across the channel toward the entrance of Publius’s mooring lagoon.

Inside, he saw that Remint, or some other hostile force, had indeed been there. The air was still thick with the stink of discharged energy weapons and vaporized metal. Publius’s big gunboat was awash in the center of the lagoon, and another gunboat was canted onto the quay near the entrance to the maze.

The place was utterly silent, except for a faint sound of frying electronics, which emanated from the sinking gunboat. Ruiz coasted along, watching his readouts for any sign that he was not alone, but everything indicated that he was. The sampan bumped the quay gently; at the same moment his slate indicated that one close-range detector field remained active at the gate. As far as Ruiz could tell, the field was only able to register the passage through the gate of metal, plastics, or other synthetic materials.

Ruiz sighed. He’d expected worse. He divested himself of all his weapons, which he hid under the vegetables. Perhaps the recent fighting had frightened away any scavengers unambitious enough to be interested in a boat full of turnips and cabbages. He cut the decorative alloy buckles off his canvas shoes. He looked at the buttons that kept his shorts closed; they seemed to be carved from thick fish scales. He picked up the farmer’s cudgel, an arm-long piece of dense black wood, capped with a crudely carved margar head. The grip was smooth with use and fit his hand well.

He stepped to the sampan’s bow and hitched its line to a mooring ring, then stepped down to the quay.

“You’re an idiot, Ruiz Aw,” he said to himself. “You’re going after the hardest man in the human universe. With a stick.” He laughed ruefully.

A smell of recent death came from the mouth of the maze, and Ruiz Aw suddenly wanted very badly not to enter that darkness.

But he went in anyway, and found that the maze was now populated only by corpses. He found another one around every corner of the dim passageways — sometimes one of Publius’s failed monsters in a pathetic heap of fur and scales, more often one of the monster-maker’s Dirm bond-guards. The killing, it seemed to Ruiz, had been done with the offhand efficiency that characterized Remint’s approach to his trade. Each burn seemed perfectly placed, each dismembering slash seemed perfectly aimed to destroy some vital function. Ruiz examined each Dirm guard for usable weapons, but in each case Remint, in his thorough fashion, had taken the time to put a pinbeam through each weapon’s mechanism.

Ruiz found it almost inconceivable that Remint had managed to penetrate Publius’s stronghold alone, but the evidence was compelling. He didn’t want to think about what it must have been like during the night, when Publius had sent his people into the maze.

Ruiz moved more cautiously as he neared the center of the maze, pausing frequently to listen for any sign that any of Publius’s defenses remained active. He detected nothing to alarm him, a condition he found intrinsically alarming.

The devastation at the security ingress was even more impressive. Apparently Remint had fought his way through the maze carrying racks of searbombs and ladder-charges. The ingress was split open, its armor ripped up into long splinters around a hole where the elevator had been.

Ruiz crept to the edge of the hole and peered over. The alloy of the shaft bore the indentations of scaling hooks, which evidently Remint had used to climb down to Publius’s labs. Ruiz took a deep breath. He had no hooks; his only way down appeared to be a slender maintenance ladder, severely damaged by the blasts that had opened the shaft. In places it hung loose, twisted and broken. In other places it had half-melted and sagged against the wall.

He wanted to give up, to go back out to the sunlight and the crates of turnips, to forget everything that had gone before, to change his name and become another person, someone who wouldn’t have to go down to whatever waited at the bottom of the shaft.

But the way to Nisa led down; Publius was still his prime ticket into Yubere’s stronghold. He wondered if she still lived, and if she did, what she thought of Ruiz Aw. Did she hate him, as seemed most likely?

He shook his head, thrust the cudgel through his belt, and started down.

Ruiz could scarcely believe that he had survived the descent when he finally reached the bottom of the shaft. Twice he had slipped and caught himself after a short fall. Once a section of ladder had broken away from its supports and smashed him against the shaft wall, almost shaking him loose. But none of his scrapes seemed serious, though his injured shoulder was throbbing again.

The shaft wall was ripped open at three levels, as if Remint had set his charges to distract Publius’s remaining people and divide their attention. From the perfect stillness of Publius’s formerly busy laboratories, Ruiz deduced that Remint’s ploy had succeeded.

He began to worry that Remint had already killed Publius, or tormented him into uselessness. “Now you think of this?” he whispered to himself.

Pointless, he thought wryly, to start relying on logic at this late date.

So he entered the dead laboratories.

The silence was intimidating. Ruiz moved stealthily through the level, slipping from one place of concealment to the next, pausing frequently to strain his senses for any indication that Publius’s security forces were still functioning. He heard nothing.

Here and there he saw the bodies of technicians, who had evidently been armed with makeshift weapons — knives and clubs — and sent against Remint. From one of these he retrieved a knife with a long thin blade, which he bound to his forearm with a rag, so that the hilt lay above his wrist. None of the clubs seemed as suitable as the farmer’s cudgel, so he kept it ready in his hand.

A few of these latest victims had lived long enough to drag themselves under lab benches, or behind concealing machinery. Had Remint lost some fraction of his efficiency… was he beginning to tire? Might he have taken wounds? This seemed a cheerful conjecture, and Ruiz’s spirits rose slightly.

When he heard the ring of steel on steel, he became even more cautious, but he soon discovered that the sound came from the sunken amphitheater that Publius had pointed out on his first visit. The little ursine warriors still slashed at each other with dazzling speed; evidently the events in the laboratory had not distracted them from their inbred ferocity. There were still quite a lot of them; perhaps this was a later generation of the elimination trials.

He looked down at them for a moment, almost envying them their uncomplicated passions.

Ruiz went on a few steps, and then paused by the tanks that held Publius’s insurance clones. On an impulse, he slid up the screen that kept the tanks comfortably dark.

The three copies of the monster-maker stirred uneasily, flexing their soft bodies and pawing clumsily at their eyes. Ruiz felt an intensity of hatred that made it difficult for him to draw a breath. That the three clones were in the strictest sense innocent of Publius’s crimes seemed an insignificant and abstract fact.

He considered the possibility of taking one of the clones — but the clone would have no knowledge of Publius’s current arrangements, nor would it look like Publius. Almost certainly the false Yubere wouldn’t recognize the clone’s authority.

He bent and touched the control slate, and the nutrient fluid that kept them alive started to drain silently into the sump.

They began to writhe and then to pound at the thick glass that trapped them. The nearest one forced his puffy eyes open and glared at Ruiz, mouthing words that Ruiz could not hear.

He slid down the screen and left them to expire in the dark.

He heard the thud of Remint’s boots against the tiled floor just in time to dart behind a nearby lab bench.

From that doubtful concealment, he watched, heart pounding, as Remint appeared from an access corridor, towing a floater on which a man lay, bound with wide straps. Ruiz couldn’t identify the man at first, but then the man lifted his hands as high as the straps would permit, and made a theatrical gesture that belonged unmistakably to Publius. So the monster-maker still lived.

Ruiz was pleased to see that Remint appeared seriously battered. The slayer’s armor was shattered and bloody over his left thigh, and he walked with a perceptible limp. The armor had separated slightly over his left shoulder, and his left arm hung stiffly, as if the armor had locked at the elbow, though the hand still clutched a splinter gun. He carried a sonic knife in his right hand, and the floater’s tow line was hitched to a ring at his armored waist.

Even damaged as he was, Remint still possessed that unstoppable quality. Compared to the Genched slayer, Ruiz felt himself puny, a negligible opponent. What could he possibly do against such a dire creature?

An idea came to Ruiz, just as Remint passed between him and the sunken amphitheater. Ruiz had no time to carefully consider the idea’s merits and pitfalls. He had to act instantly, and almost before the idea had fully formed, he sprang from his hiding place and dashed toward the floater.

Remint began to react to his charge when he was still two meters from the head of the floater. The slayer twisted back toward Ruiz, his gun arm rising with only a bit less than his usual uncanny speed. Ruiz ignored the gun and concentrated on hitting the floater with all his power and weight, getting his forearm up to cushion some of the shock of the blow against his shoulder, driving through the floater with his legs even after the blinding pain of the impact.

The floater jolted forward, striking Remint first on his gun arm, throwing off his aim, so that the burst of splinters went wide. Then the floater’s chrome chassis smacked into Remint’s midsection, driving him back, and his calves caught the low wall around the sunken amphitheater.

Ruiz vaulted onto the floater, swinging the cudgel with all his strength. Remint was toppling backward, but brought the gun down as he fell.

The cudgel caught the back of Remint’s hand before he could fire. The gun flew away in a high arc and dropped into the pit.

Ruiz looked into his enemy’s face, just for an instant. Remint wore a look of disinterest, his eyes dead and cold and far away.

Ruiz flung himself farther onto the floater, sprawling across Publius, who waved his arms and squeaked. Ruiz squirmed forward.

Remint had finally surrendered to gravity, was falling into the pit. His reaching fingertips had just missed the floater’s chassis, or else the blow to his hand had weakened his grip.

When he hit the end of the tether, his great weight overpowered the floater’s equilibrium compensators for a moment, and it dipped violently, almost dumping Ruiz off. Ruiz slashed at the tether with his knife, as Remint swung up his good arm and sonic knife.

The tether parted.

Pain seared across Ruiz’s bicep, and he looked to see if his arm was still attached to his shoulder.

The floater bucked and leveled. Ruiz flexed his arm in grateful amazement, ignoring the blood that sheeted down.

Ruiz looked down, to see Remint land on his feet among the little warriors. One of them, with a quickness the eye could not follow, turned and drove his long knife through the gap in Remint’s left shoulder armor.

Remint flicked his own knife and the small head spun away. The slayer flexed his knees, then sprang upward, gripping the knife handle in his teeth. His good hand caught the rim of the pit.

Ruiz’s heart slammed. The man was a monster; nothing human could have made such a leap. He rolled off the floater, his heel aimed at Remint’s fingers.

It was almost a fatal mistake. The slayer gave a heave and his hand jumped up off the rim and grabbed for Ruiz’s ankle. Only by a great gut-wrenching effort was Ruiz able to divert his kick, so that Remint’s fingers only brushed his foot.

“Ah…” gasped Ruiz, horrified.

Remint fell back into the pit again, and this time the little warriors were ready for him. Two of them stabbed at the opening in his thigh armor, and the slayer’s leg buckled.

Ruiz didn’t wait to see what would happen. He scrambled away from the edge, pulling the floater with him, then he began to run toward the exit shaft, shoving the floater as fast as it would go.

“Wait,” said Publius in an unfamiliar voice, weak and plaintive. “Who is it?”

Ruiz really looked at the monster-maker for the first time, and saw that Remint had cut away his eyelids, and put some caustic substance in his eyes. He noticed blood puddled under the monster-maker’s thighs; perhaps Remint had hamstrung his captive.

“Me,” said Ruiz, saving his breath for running.

Astonishingly, a smile spread over Publius’s face. “Ruiz Aw? You’ve defeated Yubere’s vengeance? My. God.” He coughed and spit up a little blood, prompting Ruiz to wonder what other injuries he had — and if he would live long enough to be useful.

“Maybe,” Ruiz said. The dark jagged opening to the shaft was close, and Ruiz slammed the floater inside, scraping the sides. He set the controls to lift and climbed aboard as the floater began to rise up the shaft. He held on tight, his hands clutching the straps that held Publius down, and his heart didn’t slow until they were well above the height that Remint had leaped.

“You killed him?” Publius still sounded terribly uncertain.

“Maybe.”

“You must have killed him; he’d never have let us get away if he were alive. If he’s dead, he can’t hurt us. Can he?”

“I’m not so sure,” said Ruiz, and found that he was shivering, though the air in the shaft was hot and damp.

“Um,” said Publius. “Where are you taking me?”

Ruiz laughed. “Do you really care, as long as it’s away from here?” He no longer felt the consuming anger toward the monster-maker that had driven him since he had found Albany. The encounter with Remint had somehow exhausted most of his capacity for emotion, and a dangerous numbness was invading him. He examined the cut on his upper arm, and found it relatively shallow; the bleeding had slowed to a slow seepage. “We still have a deal, don’t we, Publius?”

“Oh, yes,” said Publius fervently.

“A problem has occurred to me, Publius. How can I be sure Tildoreamors will do as you ask, now that your power is destroyed, and the pirates are in such a froth about anyone leaving the city?”

Publius laughed, a thin mad sound. “Because — oh, this is a ripe irony — Tildoreamors belongs to me wholly, a Genched double, just like my Yubere.”

“I see,” said Ruiz. “Then we will go to your Yubere and release him and you will instruct him to do my bidding in every respect.”

As Ruiz had hoped, the sampan was still moored to the quay. He moved a few of the crates, and made a place for Publius’s floater.

When he guided it aboard, the monster-maker reached out and patted at the produce with uncertain hands. “Vegetables? This is the best you could do, Ruiz?” His voice was still thin.

“Don’t complain,” said Ruiz, arranging the crates to hide the floater. “If I didn’t still need you to get out of SeaStack, I’d cut your throat and feed you to the margars.”

“Would you indeed? I don’t know… you’ve changed, gone soft, for all that you’ve bested Remint. You must have tricked him somehow….”

“How else?” said Ruiz sourly. “How badly are you hurt?”

“I’ll live, if you get me to a medunit. Would you moisten my eyes? They feel very strange.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. And we’ll see about the medunit after you’ve fulfilled our bargain. Meanwhile, I like to see you suffer.”

Publius giggled. “No matter. And even if I die, I have my clones, who’ll surely get even for all this destruction. I confess, I’d prefer to keep this old brain; I’m comfortable in it. But times change and we must adapt, eh?”

Ruiz looked down at the blood-smeared face, the dull eyes, the still-arrogant mouth. “Don’t be so cocky, Publius. I drained your clones.”

A stricken look clouded the monster-maker’s face. He clamped his lips shut and said no more.

Nisa lived in grayness. Her cell was gray: the door, the walls, the floor, the narrow bench where she sat, the cot where she lay. The light that seeped from the ceiling was gray, neither bright nor dim, except for those times when it grew very faint and she slept. Even the food was gray and tasted of nothing.

She had grown listless in the days since the terrible Remint had thrust her into the cell and locked the door. She had lost track of time, or rather had abandoned it. On several occasions, she had awakened without a memory of falling asleep, and assumed that she had been drugged. She had no way of knowing how long those periods of unconsciousness had lasted, so she stopped caring. She drifted into an almost-comfortable apathy, which was easier than wondering if her mind had been altered in the awful manner Ruiz had described.

She rarely thought of Ruiz and his inexplicable treachery, preferring instead to dwell on happier times on Pharaoh, when she had been the favored daughter of the King. She remembered her father’s garden, and the pleasure she had taken with her many lovers, and the various delightful sensations of her patrician station: fine food, the best wines, silks and jewels, the worshipful attentions of her slaves.

After a while Pharaoh seemed more real than her present dull circumstances. It was only when she slept and dreamed that she was unable to maintain her carefully cultivated detachment. In her dreams, Ruiz Aw came to her and pleaded for forgiveness, and she pretended to accept his apologies. In dreaming, she concealed her hatred and led him on skillfully, so that she might make him vulnerable and wreak a dreadful vengeance on him. But the dreams were frustrating because she always woke before she could shatter his heart as he had shattered hers.

The worst thing of all was that she sometimes woke crying weak tears, sad that the dream was over, that he had slipped away again, even though she hated him and hoped never to see him again.

Occasionally she wondered if she were dead and in Hell. Perhaps all that had gone before had been a sort of purgatory. Had she failed that test and been condemned to this eternity of grayness? Ruiz Aw might well have been a demon of destruction, sent to beguile her. It seemed to her there was a good deal of evidence to support such a view.

To escape the dreams, she slept rarely and spent her artificial nights sitting in the darkness, remembering the blazing light of Pharaoh.

It was at such a time that the door groaned and slid back and Ruiz Aw stood there looking in at her.

The lights came up and her eyes watered, so that she could not see him clearly for a moment; he was only a shape against the brighter light of the corridor.

“Nisa?” he said, in a soft uncertain voice.

Her eyes grew used to the light, and she could make out his face. He was shockingly haggard, with thick stubble in the hollows of his cheeks and dark circles under his eyes. He looked much older. He wore the sort of rough garments a slave might wear, and the sleeve of his jerkin was crusted with dried blood.

In that instant of dismayed recognition her heart softened just a bit and she wanted to go to him.

But he held a long-barreled weapon in his hand, so he was not a prisoner. The situation seemed full of dangerous ambiguity. She couldn’t imagine where safety lay, here on this terrible world where evil seemed extravagantly magnified and treachery had been raised to a high art. Ruiz Aw had returned, but what did that mean? And was he to be trusted? She feared him almost as much as she loved him — and her heart was still sluggish with some cold burden.

She lifted her chin and did not speak.

When he saw her, Ruiz felt an almost-physical pain. She was white-faced and drawn. Her beautiful hair was a wild tangle, and she sat slumped over, as if ill. For a moment her eyes were dull and faraway, but then her head came up and her eyes filled with evaluation. She seemed damaged in some unknowable way — still lovely, but a stranger. His fault.

“Nisa,” he said again. “It’s all right. We’ll be leaving now.” He held out his free hand.

She stood slowly. She looked down at his hand, her expression shifting toward a painfully cautious hope. “Where will we be going?” she asked. “Am I allowed to ask?”

“Of course… we’re leaving SeaStack. We’ll find a launch ring downcoast, and get off Sook.”

Disbelief fell across her face like a dusty veil. “The others?”

“Them too, Molnekh and Dolmaero. We can’t leave them.”

She walked past him, her body taut with unhappy expectation, as though she expected him to hurl her back into the cell and laugh at her disappointment. He felt a terrible pressure in his chest, and his eyes watered. How could he explain? There was no time now; every minute they spent in Yubere’s stronghold increased the danger that Publius would find a way to thwart their escape.

When she came from her cell, Nisa saw an injured man on a slab of metal, floating unsupported in the corridor. His wounds were beginning to stink; he wouldn’t live long. Standing beside the man was another stranger, a small man with a closed face. The wounded man was whispering urgently to the other, who nodded.

“Who are they?” she asked.

At her question, Ruiz turned to look at Publius and the false Yubere… and saw that some murderous plot was being hatched.

A consuming rage filled him, blowtorch hot, fueled by all the awful things Publius had done to him and to others. He felt his vision grow dim with it, and it hammered in his head, demanding some release.

His finger spasmed on the trigger and Yubere’s head vaporized. The body fell across Publius and then slid to the floor.

“No,” said Publius feebly, wiping Yubere’s blood from his face. “Why did you do that? I was just asking him about your slaves… what had happened to them….”

Ruiz turned back to Nisa, who had become even more pale. “Always be vigilant around that man. He is the most wicked person you will ever meet; he is as devious as a snake and as cunning as a Dilvermoon herman. Presently he is blind and crippled and chained to the floater — and probably dying — but never forget that he is also the most dangerous person you will ever meet.”

She nodded and didn’t speak, but he could almost imagine her thought: Could he be worse than you, Ruiz Aw?

Ruiz found the cells in which Dolmaero and Molnekh were being held, and released them. They stumbled into the light, and greeted Ruiz with no more warmth than Nisa had.

What had they been told? He shook his head in frustration. Time was passing, and they would have to hurry or risk missing Lord Tildoreamors’s men, who would costume them for their trip on the Immolators’ barge.

“Come,” he said brusquely, and herded them on their way.