The Emperor of Everything

Chapter 10

By the time Lensh and Fensh found Corean, two days after the crash, she was thoroughly sick: of the bog, of her companions, of the stink of death that soaked through every rent in the sled’s hull, of the sour odor of her own unwashed body.

The airboat approached cautiously, and though she was pleased to see that the feline brothers were showing signs of prudence, she was also impatient to be done with the bog. No one had molested them and she had seen no sign of life around the manor house… but who knew when the survivors, if they existed, might muster sufficient courage to try to avenge their losses.

“Hurry,” she shouted, waving from the broken lock. But the brothers circled the site once more, apparently scanning for booby traps, before they landed the boat at the edge of the bog, a fastidious distance from the carrion scattered about in front of the sled.

Without waiting for Marmo and the Moc, Corean stepped out and began to wade through the thigh-deep mire. She arrived at the boat’s lock, just as Lensh cracked open the armor and stuck his short-muzzled head out.

His eyewhiskers rose quizzically. “You seem the worse for wear, mistress.”

She snarled wordlessly at him, and shoved past, bound for the closest hygiene station. She wanted a shower, more than anything but Ruiz Aw’s death.

When she discovered that the brothers had yet to fix the boat’s ruptured plumbing, her anger filled the boat, so that no one dared speak, not even the brothers, who ordinarily refused to be intimidated by her displeasure.

“Where to, mistress,” asked Fensh, finally. “Home?”

She turned unbelieving eyes on him. “Are you mad? Home? No, to SeaStack, as fast as you can.”

Ruiz drove through the less-traveled channels of SeaStack, following a dimly remembered route. The channels grew increasingly deserted. They met with none of the common hazards of SeaStack: junior pirates practicing their future trade, press gangs for the pirate fleets, lunatics seeking violent entertainment.

The others had nothing to say, which left Ruiz free to formulate — and then discard — plan after plan. The difficulties were many. The launch rings of SeaStack were controlled by the pirate lords, who exercised a rigorous security. If Ruiz attempted to buy passage on an upbound shuttle, all sorts of uncomfortable questions would be asked. Who are you? What were you doing on Sook? Are you in any way connected with the Art League, or with any other supra-system legal entity? Their brainpeel tech would undoubtedly be better than Corean’s; naive to assume that he could fool them. And what if Corean were to broadcast a reward for their capture? That was not an unusual tactic for slavers seeking escaped property.

The only other launch rings in SeaStack were owned by various alien embassies, who were if anything more paranoid than the pirates.

If they were allowed to leave the city, they might attempt a coastwise journey, west to the Camphoc Protectorate, where a mercantile center and associated launch complex existed. But such a voyage would be dangerous; though some local commerce moved along that route, it was preyed on by pirate trainees in search of on-the-job experience.

They might attempt to steal an airboat, which would convey them to any of a thousand neutral launch rings — but in SeaStack thievery was a way of life, and anything as valuable as an airboat would be elaborately protected. And leaving would still be problematical.

Several overland routes suggested themselves, but they all had their particular hazards — and Corean might more easily find them, outside the protective complexity of SeaStack’s warrens.

Ruiz shook his head wearily. He needed help, as much as he feared the risks implicit in such assistance. He knew of only one place in SeaStack he might look for help — but he would certainly be asked to pay a price for it. He hoped it wouldn’t be too high.

He tried to stop thinking, to give himself to the simple enjoyment of his new freedom. Who knew how long it would last? Gradually he succeeded.

An hour later they pulled under a low broad archway, which spelled out, in letters of wrought iron, “The Diamond Bob Pens.” Inside was an anchorage crowded with a variety of boats, from armored gunboats to sleek speedneedles to ragged wood-hulled junks.

Ruiz turned to the others. “Do you trust me?” he asked.

Nisa smiled. “Of course.”

“Why not?” said Molnekh, and then he shrugged.

After a time, Dolmaero nodded cautiously.

“Good,” said Ruiz. He gestured toward the landing at the innermost wall of the anchorage. Two security mechs stood sentry on each side of a heavy blast door, now closed. “I need to leave you all in a safe place, while I go and try to arrange passage offworld. This is the only such place I could think of.”

“What is it, Ruiz?” asked Nisa.

“It’s a slave pen,” he answered. “It caters to transient dealers who need a place to keep their stock while they make more permanent arrangements.”

Their faces fell. “Oh,” said Nisa in a small voice.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. No one will harm you here, and even if Corean locates you, she’d have to raise an army to get you out. These pens are sanctioned by the pirate lords; she’d have to be insane to antagonize them.”

“She is insane, Ruiz,” said Nisa.

“Not that insane,” he said, and thought: Or so we must hope.

A moment of uneasy silence passed, and then Dolmaero spoke. “And what will happen to us, if you do not return?”

“That’s a possibility for which I have no solution.” The procedure followed by the pen was to keep the merchandise until the prepaid fee was exhausted — and then, after a short grace period, to sell the stock in the open market.

“Is it possible you’ll not return?” Dolmaero spoke with reluctant determination.

“Anything can happen,” said Ruiz. “But truly, Dolmaero, I don’t know what else to do. You don’t understand what a dangerous place SeaStack is; you wouldn’t survive a day unprotected. There are hotels, but their security is a joke — Corean would have no trouble locating and recapturing you, if I left you there. I’ll deposit sufficient funds for a week’s maintenance; I’ll surely be back before that.”

“I believe you,” Dolmaero said heavily. “But I’m worried. To have no control at all over one’s fate… it’s not a happy feeling. Still, I suppose that even in the worst case, we’ll be in no worse condition than we were when Corean had us.”

“Can’t I go with you?” asked Nisa.

“I’m sorry. I’ll probably meet with trouble; I’ll be more likely to deal with it successfully if I don’t have to worry about protecting you.”

She dropped her gaze. “I understand,” she said.

The speedboat drifted toward the landing. “I must ask you all to play the appropriate roles. Speak when spoken to, keep your eyes down, look defeated. Will you do this?” Ruiz looked at each in turn; they nodded. He looked especially long at Nisa, then, concealing the movement beneath the boat’s dashboard, squeezed her hand gently. He dared make no other gesture of affection. They were doubtless being watched by the pen’s security monitors.

“Above all, say nothing that the monitors might interpret as inappropriate for slaves. Be consistent and you’ll be safe.”

The boat touched the landing and attached its mooring linkages. Ruiz drew his splinter gun and made herding gestures. “Out!” he shouted. “All out now!”

The Pharaohans debarked onto the wharf, shoulders sagging believably, faces slack with misery. Ruiz followed, springing nimbly out and pushing them toward the personnel lock set into the wall next to the blast door.

The mechs watched them without interest, stunrods lifted in casual readiness. The lock slid open and they were inside.

A long steel corridor, dimly lit, stretched away into darkness. At ten-meter intervals, flashing signs pointed down side corridors. The signs indicated the quality of accommodations and the availability of vacancies in that area of the pens. At five-meter intervals, surveillance cameras and automatic weapons pods scanned the corridors.

“It’s self-service,” Ruiz said. He moved his group down the main corridor for several hundred meters, until they had passed beyond the minimum-service section of the pen.

The lights were brighter and more frequent, the floor was covered with soft carpet, and soothing music began to play from hidden speakers. But the weapons pods were still in evidence.

Ruiz turned down a side corridor and found three adjacent cubicles. He ushered Dolmaero and Molnekh into the first two, pressing his palm to the green touchplate of the identifier, then offering his eye to the red retina lens. He dropped a half-dozen Dilvermoon currency wafers in each slot.

Lastly, he opened the door to Nisa’s cubicle. She went inside meekly, but then she turned and stood looking at him, hands clasped, eyes huge. She didn’t smile.

When he pressed the door closure, he felt a wound open in his heart. He struggled with a dreadful feeling that he had just seen her for the last time. No, he thought. It’ll be all right.

But his hopeful thoughts had a cold insubstantial texture.

Corean reached SeaStack just before dark. She sent Fensh up to man the ruptor turret; SeaStack was a dangerous place, even for folk in an armored airboat.

As they crossed the invisible border between the coastal plain with its manors and follies, into the thick air of SeaStack, they were hailed by a pirate gunboat, which swooped toward them out of the setting sun and ordered them to heave to.

Fuming at the delay, she told Lensh to comply.

The gunboat slid alongside, all its weapons banks aimed at their flank. The vid chimed and she punched the activate stud.

A scarred old face stared out at her. “Identify yourself,” the pirate said languidly.

“Corean Heiclaro and crew.” She stared back truculently — she had never before been interfered with on her infrequent trips to the pirate city.

“Business in SeaStack?”

“Business,” she snapped.

“Ah,” said the pirate, smiling a wintry smile. “Well, I see by my dataslate that you’re not unknown here in SeaStack — if you’re who you say you are. So you may pass.”

“How gracious of you.”

Now he laughed, as if she were a rude but not very bright child. “I must warn you, we cannot be so gracious if you attempt to leave SeaStack. Conditions are presently unsettled — all departing visitors are subject to brainpeel. Are you certain your business here is compellingly urgent, Corean Heiclaro?”

She snarled and clicked off the vid.

”Are we certain, Corean?” asked Marmo.

She didn’t bother to reply.

“Where shall we stay?” asked Lensh from the pilot’s seat.

“Take us to the Jolly Roger. We may as well plot our revenge in comfort.”

“Excellent choice!” exclaimed Lensh, licking his furry chops.

The Jolly Roger was a hostelry patronized by wealthy pirates and their offworld clients, who might include folk on Sook to ransom kidnapped loved ones, or mercantilists in SeaStack to buy pirated cargoes, or mediafolk there to interview famous marauders for the vid conglomerates. It had a reputation for reasonable safety, as long as patrons maintained their own stringent security.

They left the airboat in a locked, heavily hardened revetment. Corean ordered Fensh to remain on board, to his irritation — but she was taking no chances.

Their suite was satisfactory; with separate bedrooms for all of them, and a separate entryway where the Moc might be sealed away from sight and the worst of its odor.

After her shower, Corean felt a return of confidence and a slight lessening of urgency. She lounged on a large divan, wrapped in a warm robe, while Lensh expertly combed out her hair.

“What now?” asked Marmo.

“In the morning, we’ll visit the slave markets. Ruiz Aw will have sold the others by now; he’ll need cash, and they hamper his flexibility.”

Marmo made a skeptical sound. “Are you sure? When he took the boat, I got the very strong impression he valued the woman.” Marmo rubbed at his neck, as if remembering the touch of Ruiz’s knife.

“Nonsense. He’ll get rid of them — it’s what I’d do, and he’s not so different from me.”

Ruiz drove the boat at its highest speed, westward through the dark labyrinth at the heart of SeaStack. The night concealed him, and turned the waterways into dimly lit canyons, traveled only by other unlighted vessels. Several times Ruiz avoided collisions only at the last instant. He began to worry that his concentration was faltering.

He had hoped that in hiding the Pharaohans in as safe a place as he could find, he would feel a release from the weight of responsibility that had descended on him since he had arrived on Sook. But in fact he felt the burden more heavily than before. He could not completely clear his mind; he kept foreseeing dreadful possible futures. In his mind’s eye, he saw Nisa waiting in her cubicle as the days passed… until one day the guards came to take her to the market. He wondered if she would be angry with him, if he died before he could return for her. He hoped so — it would be easier for her if she could fix her bitterness on him.

He shook his head violently. Maudlin useless thoughts. He felt a sudden fierce annoyance with himself. If he couldn’t focus his energies any better than that, he deserved failure.

The anger washed through him in waves, cleansing away all those soft emotions that were of no use to Ruiz Aw now — leaving in their place nothing but a cold hard knot of purpose.

Nisa sat on her thin mattress and wistfully remembered the luxurious apartment she had enjoyed in Deepheart. Her present accommodations didn’t delight her. The cubicle walls were barren steel. A single overhead glowplate shed a harsh light on the few furnishings: a straight-backed chair, a dry cleansing stall in one corner, a screened toilet in the other, a food hopper and water tap next to a small mirror. Another locked door was set into the rear wall. Above the mirror was a flatscreen vid — a few minutes before, an androgynous face had appeared in the screen and explained the room’s facilities, then informed her that twice a day she would be permitted to exit her room through the back door, to mingle with her fellow prisoners for a supervised social period.

She looked at herself in the mirror, and in that still beautiful but slightly haggard young woman found it difficult to recognize Nisa the favored daughter of the King. What had changed? The eyes were deeper, somehow, as if they had seen more strangeness than a person of her station should ever be expected to endure. The mouth was as soft and lush as before, surely — though something about it looked bruised, and the curvature was ambiguous, neither a smile nor a frown.

She thought about Ruiz Aw, that oddly wonderful man. Did she indeed trust him, as she had claimed when he asked her? He was such an enigma; sometimes she thought that his motives were mysterious even to himself.

“Just like everyone else,” she said out loud. “Nothing so remarkable about that.”

An ugly suspicion had crossed her mind more than once since she had stood looking into his hard expressionless face, as the door to her cell closed. Each time she thrust it away from her, ashamed; still, it wouldn’t go away. What if Ruiz had chosen this way of getting rid of her and the others?

“No!” She would not believe it.

Not yet.

Ruiz slowed the boat, and picked his way through the corroding remnants of some ancient girderwork. Blackened metal snags rose from the oily water, thrusting jaggedly into the night mists. He was in the decaying center of SeaStack, where its most depraved and least fashionable denizens laired. The stacks here were in bad condition, some half-collapsed into the sea, others leaning together, supporting each other in precarious stability. Almost no lights showed above the water, though occasionally the boat slid across a patch of sickly luminescence shining up from the depths.

Ruiz looked for landmarks, trying to match his memory of his last visit here with the confusing shapes he moved through.

There! That snag; its outline vaguely reminiscent of a man crucified upside down — he remembered that. He turned the boat toward a low tangle of rusting beams and saw the opening where he expected it.

He passed under a rough arch of skeletal alloy beams, into an anchorage occupied only by an armored gunboat, its gleaming hull half-submerged, moored to a snag.

He swung the boat and circled the airboat, admiring its bulbous engine pods, its three dorsally mounted graser turrets, its midships row of missile launchers. If only he had the equipment to disable the boat’s security system, his troubles would be over. But that was wishful thinking, he reminded himself. If the boat belonged to Publius, as he suspected, it would be protected by cunning wards indeed.

He sighed and let his boat drift toward the makeshift dock at the innermost edge of the anchorage. He could only hope that Publius still controlled the stack, and that his creatures would allow Ruiz to enter unmolested. Perhaps they would mistake him for a customer — in a way, he was a customer.

The boat kissed the dock with a small clang of metal, and Ruiz stood up. He raised the boat’s armorglass bubble and set its security monitors. He was painfully aware of the boat’s inadequacies in that respect, but he had no time to upgrade its alarms and traps. The first competent thief who happened along would steal his boat — he could only trust that it wouldn’t matter — one way or another.

He chained the boat to the dock, and trotted off into the cave-riddled darkness beyond the anchorage, looking for the monster-maker.

Publius’s labyrinth was as eerie as ever. The walls were carved of ancient meltstone, a rusty black veined with thin ribbons of some murky crimson glass. The low ceilings supported a patchy growth of luminescent moss, which shed an uncertain blue light on the dank floor, its pools of stagnant water and slime-slick stone.

Ruiz moved as silently as he could, ears straining for any evidence that one of Publius’s monsters lurked in a nearby passage. But at first all he heard was the drip of water, and very faintly the rumble of vast engines deep below. Still, he carried the splinter gun in one hand and kept his energy tube ready.

As he penetrated farther into the labyrinth, the passages grew narrower, the junctions more numerous and confusing, the light dimmer. He hoped he hadn’t forgotten the safest route; it had been a long time since his last visit.

In some places the luminescent moss had died out entirely, and Ruiz moved through the velvet blackness with exquisite caution, fearing with every step that he might put his foot down on something that would bite it off. He began to hear unpleasant sounds: faraway roars, the pad of heavy feet, the sigh of things breathing in the darkness. None of the sounds necessarily meant anything dire; the labyrinth had erratic acoustics, and it was possible that none of Publius’s monsters were close to him.

He began to feel oppressed by the weight of the stack above him; to worry that it might choose this moment to yield to gravity. He knew it was an irrational fear; the stack had stood at its present precarious angle for a million years.

The air was hot and steamy, thick with stinks. As he went deeper he more frequently came across small heaps of carrion rotting here and there along the corridors — unsuccessful monsters, or the remains of other visitors, perhaps. Fresh droppings were a continual hazard; Ruiz could ill afford slippery boots.

He was beginning to wish that a monster would appear, so that he could stop anticipating and act.

When the thing came rushing out of the side passage, he realized what a foolish wish that had been.

It was tall and muscularly slender, with a vaguely humanoid torso and the head of a long-jawed reptile. Its arms were oddly articulated, with too many joints, but its claws were long and sharp, and it leaped toward Ruiz, arms reaching out to tear at him.

He snapped up the splinter gun and squeezed off a burst that tore diagonally across its chest. It fell forward, still intent on grabbing Ruiz, but he ducked under its arm and dodged to the side.

The splinters must have severed its spine, because it could only drag itself after Ruiz, scrabbling with its claws for purchase on the floor. It tried to speak, cursing or praying. The half-formed words were almost understandable.

Feeling a little sick, Ruiz put another burst between its yellow eyes. It died slowly; after he had left it behind, he could still hear the slow scrabble of its claws, the scrape of its scaly limbs against the stone.

He tried not to think about what he himself might become if Publius was in a bad mood, as he often was. Ruiz had no great claim on Publius’s charity, if indeed it existed. He could only hope that the monster-maker would be willing to grant him a favor, or to sell him one at a price he could afford.

He had never understood Publius’s devotion to his lunatic art — Publius appeared to be human, but Ruiz couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live inside Publius’s head. And the last time Ruiz had seen Publius, the monster-maker had entertained himself by telling Ruiz what interesting creatures he might carve from the raw material of Ruiz’s body.

Ruiz shuddered. Until this instant, he had forgotten just how much he detested and feared his old comrade-in-arms.

Corean could not sleep, so she sat up in her luxurious bed and ordered Lensh to bring her a flagon of soporific-laced hot milk and a plate of butter cookies. While she waited for the drug to take effect, she occupied herself by running the bedroom holotank through the offerings on the public slave market, beginning with the merchandise to be offered the following day.

She first assumed that Ruiz Aw would be sufficiently clever to offer his wares under false names and provenances, to prevent her from tracing the offerings before he had sold them and gone his way. So she set up the search parameters to select for lowtech Hardworld inhabitants with performance art skills. She was sure that Ruiz would be unable to resist the temptation to get a good price for his prizes, and if he sold them as unskilled primitives, he’d get next to nothing for the men — though the woman would bring a decent price from the downlevel harlotries.

The open market in SeaStack was vast, however, and she paged through a hundred images and stat sheets without success — every slaver in SeaStack seemed to be overstocked on primitive performers: raindancers from Pueblo, flame-singers from Hell II, beastbreakers from Silverdollar, passionplayers from GoldenEye.

Her eyelids were drooping, and she’d seen only a fraction of the catalog. Just before she gave up, she decided to see if for once Ruiz Aw had been stupid. This time she searched with a single new screening parameter: merchandise originating on Pharaoh. Instantly, the hard arrogant face of Flomel appeared in the holotank, gazing disdainfully at nothing.

She clapped her hands in delight, and read the stat sheet. When she reached the ownership line, she frowned. An entity called Deepheart Corporation now owned Flomel — Ruiz Aw had been unnaturally quick again. Still, she would enter a preemptive bid on Flomel, and tomorrow she would wring him dry of any useful information. She tapped the transfer codes into her dataslate, and was rewarded by seeing the ownership line ripple and display her name.

Thus encouraged, she continued her search, and was surprised to find no mention of the others. Was Marmo right, after all? Had Ruiz again done the utterly unpredictable, and set his companions free? Or even more inexplicably, was Ruiz continuing to protect them?

No. She shook her head in vigorous denial. He couldn’t possibly be that foolish, and so she would soon regain her property.

And then she would find Ruiz Aw.