The Emperor of Everything

Chapter 21

Corean arrived at the adjacent joypalace just before Ruiz walked up the ramp into the fabularium. The joypalace was a run-down operation, its lobby dirty, threadbare, and at that moment devoid of customers. A person of indeterminate species sat behind a cloudy armorglass security enclosure, reading an ancient printed book. It ignored Corean and her guide as they walked toward the elevators.

Her guide tapped at a scuffed steel door in a long, dimly lit hall, and it opened a crack. An armored man scanned her briefly before admitting her.

Immediately she felt Remint’s increased intensity. He was bent over a spyscreen in the darkest corner of the tawdry suite. He ignored her entrance for a moment, then he lifted his passionless gaze. He made no gesture of greeting.

A pair of joyboys huddled together on the greasy plastic-covered bed, their painted eyes huge with terror, arms wrapped tightly around each other. They looked at Corean with an abject hope, as if they thought she might either release them or use them in their accustomed manner. She wondered why Remint hadn’t simply killed them and stuffed the bodies in a closet. Perhaps he anticipated a long wait and didn’t want to stink the place up. It occurred to her that the joyboys probably thought they were playing some actual part in these events, that their presence here was in some way significant. Something about the thought made her briefly uneasy, for reasons she didn’t care to examine.

“He’s here,” Remint said in his uninflected voice.

She hurried across the room, and tried to shoulder him away from the screen. It was like pushing at a stony mountainside. Then he moved back and she could see Ruiz Aw, walking up a steel ramp behind a beautiful naked woman. His dark face revealed nothing but a calm alertness; she tried and failed to imagine what he was thinking.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked.

“I can’t touch him there, or in the Wind. The Wind caters to the most dangerous beings in SeaStack — they’re ready for anything. Had Ruiz Aw been smart enough to hide his people in the Wind, I could never have taken them from him… though they might have been driven mad by the mythagogues, had he left them there too long.”

“So how do you propose to get him out?”

“I believe I know where he will look for me.”

“And where is that?” Corean asked sharply. She was feeling a growing impatience with Remint’s uninformative pronouncements.

Remint didn’t answer for a moment. “In my old dreams. There I have concealed my hook.”

The Celadon Wind was an impressive establishment, compared to other fabularia Ruiz had visited. The entrance hall formed a long narrow amphitheater. Customers strolled along the white-tiled floor, while pale translucent holoimages of thousands of gods and demons watched silently from the tiered seats that rose up to the ceiling far above. At the far end was a white colonnade through which the customers passed into the area of the fabularium they had chosen. The light was dim and red, and the air was doubtless thick with pheromonic influencers; Ruiz felt his mood become darker and more volatile.

As he approached the colonnade, he shook himself, as if to shrug away all those dangerous virtues he had lately rediscovered: mercy, empathy, loyalty… love. Remint would know none of these, and now he must become as much like Remint as possible, if he hoped to follow the slayer’s path into the fabularium.

Ruiz made his mind cold, his heart small; he tried to turn back time and become again the deadly thing he once had been.

He succeeded, after a fashion.

The colonnade’s seven arches were each topped by an animated holoimage that related to the sort of myths to be found within that section of the fabularium.

Ruiz stopped and looked up at the images.

After a bit he found his attention most strongly attracted to the arch that displayed a Kali-like goddess, whose four hands held a knife, a garrote, a graser, and a pulse gun. The arms waved sinuously, tracing a pattern that soon seemed deliciously seductive, and on the goddess’s black face was a smile that wavered between sweetness and ferocity. Her features were strong, almost crude, and her eyes bulged with a barely contained mania. Her six dark breasts were exposed and exquisitely shaped. They floated entrancingly with her movements, as though they were made of some lighter-than-air substance, much finer than mere flesh.

He stepped through the arch, and a guidemech emerged from a niche to his right. It offered him a tray of assorted intoxicants, hallucinogens, and mood alterants. When he declined these, it said, “Follow please,” and rolled off down the corridor at an easy pace.

“He scents the bait,” said Remint. “He chooses as I would have chosen.”

Corean watched Ruiz Aw, who now moved along briskly behind the guidemech. His face was still unrevealing, but there was now a trace of some additional expression that disturbed Corean by its mysterious familiarity. He seemed even more elementally dangerous than when she had last seen him.

What was the difference? She glanced up at Remint’s face, lit by the greenish light of the spyscreen, and saw that Remint wore precisely the same look.

The guidemech conducted Ruiz to a large rotunda, where the lights were even dimmer than in the entrance hall. In the center of the rotunda was an artificial pool, where luminescent night eels swam beneath cerise water lilies, leaving glowing trails in the black water. The pool exhaled a scent of decay and feverish life. Far above, Ruiz sensed the presence of automated weapons emplacements, tracking the languid movements of the patrons.

“This is the Hall of Pain and Renewal,” said the guidemech, and rolled away.

Around the perimeter were a hundred or more trapezoidal openings, each of which housed a mythagogue. Some of the openings were curtained, indicating that the mythagogue was already occupied with a customer or otherwise unavailable. But most of the beings who staffed this section of the Celadon Wind sat at their doorsteps, awaiting a client. A few other potential customers wandered the perimeter, including the tall woman he had followed into the Celadon Wind.

The first mythagogue to his left was an old scar-cheeked man who bore the shoulder tattoos of a Retrantic enforcer and affected a shock of thin white braids. He glanced at Ruiz with an inquisitive expression. Ruiz looked back, waiting for the tug of recognition that he expected to feel from Remint’s personal myth-maker. He felt nothing beyond a mild revulsion.

Ruiz began to stroll the perimeter, examining each mythagogue as he passed, still wrapped in the chill purposefulness he had assumed in the fabularium’s entrance hall. Some of them met his gaze with a brightly predatory look, some looked away, unease darkening their fey eyes. He passed a spiky-haired woman of the Buffalo Wailers, a blue-scaled Dalmetrian renegade, and a marine-adapted boy with ancient eyes, floating in a giant brandy snifter of murky green fluid — then dozens of others as strange. None of them spoke to him; apparently the management considered the Celadon Wind to be an upscale place and proscribed any undignified hawking of wares.

Still, he sensed a ripple of interest following him around the rotunda, an interest that seemed to be communicated ahead of his slow ambling progress. More curtains popped open in a sudden flurry, and mythagogues craned their necks to get a glimpse of him.

This unexpected attention stimulated him to a higher level of alertness, and he felt more keenly purposeful, more his former self.

He strolled on. Most of the myth-makers seemed to take great pride in their eclectic eccentricity, as though the quality of their fables had anything to do with the originality of their fashion sense. Decadence was in vogue, Ruiz thought — tiresomely so. Some of the mythagogues winked at him, leered expressively, made silent gestures of welcome. None of them seemed to possess the sort of style that would attract the patronage of a man like Remint.

Ruiz began a second circuit of the rotunda.

Remint switched the spyscreen to a different remote. Corean saw a small man with a face prosthesis of hammered silver, who looked up with unfocused eyes and said nothing.

“He is here,” said Remint.

“How will I know him?” asked the man through his metal lips.

“How do you know me?”

The man sighed and nodded. He bent his head for a moment, so that Corean could not see him. When he raised his head, he was wearing a crude skinmask in the likeness of Remint y’Yubere.

Remint switched off the spyscreen. “Now we wait.”

Ruiz was a quarter of the way round the rotunda when a curtain drew back two doors ahead — one that had been closed on his previous circuit.

When he reached the opening and saw the mythagogue, sitting on a tall wooden stool, he felt an unpleasant shock of recognition, and skipped back a step. Above, the automated weapons shifted and whirred, alerted by his too-rapid movement.

Then he saw that it was not his enemy — it was only a small, poorly maintained cyborg, wearing a skinmask. The cyborg took no notice of him; he stared out at the pond, motionless.

Ruiz felt the attention of the other mythagogues and patrons intensify, and he felt a bit unnerved. He stepped closer and peered at the mythagogue, who continued to ignore his presence. What was the proper formula for invoking the mythagogue’s services? At first Ruiz could not remember; he had never quite understood the fascination of the synthesized myths available in the fabularia of Dilvermoon, and thus had rarely patronized them.

Then he remembered. “To whom do you speak, teller?”

The mythagogue’s face shifted toward him slightly. Ruiz realized that the cyborg was blind, an eccentric affectation indeed, when no pangalac need be sightless, except by choice.

The mythagogue spoke with casual unforced eloquence. “I speak to the wielders of the blade, to the soldiers of the night, to the keepers of propriety, to the righteous scourgers of the flesh. To those who hold murder safe in their hearts.”

Ruiz hesitated. His deepest suspicions were aroused. How could he meet a man who masked himself as Remint y’Yubere, without wondering if a trap had been set especially for him? On the other hand, could his enemies be so stupid as to assume that he would enter the mythagogue’s den trustingly? That was hard to believe; he had never been a man who attracted stupid enemies, unfortunately.

Furthermore, how could his enemies have known he would appear in exactly this place, so that such a complicated trap could be laid? For all that he thought he understood Remint, he could not bring himself to believe that his motivations could possibly be so transparent to the slayer. Why not? asked a small rebellious voice, but he suppressed it and stepped forward with a credit wafer in his hand.

“I’m such a one,” he said.

The skinmask was not animated, so there could be no expression for Ruiz to read, but he had the eerie sensation that the mythagogue smiled beneath the dead plastic. “I know,” said the man in a soft voice, and held out his hand for the wafer.

He stepped down from his stool and went inside, limping a bit, the servomotors in his legs whining. He paused with his hand on the curtain, and when Ruiz was over the threshold, the mythagogue let it fall shut.

The myth-maker gestured to a straight-backed wooden chair and settled himself on a padded bench. The little chamber was very dark, the walls hung with tapestries so faded and gray that Ruiz couldn’t tell what they depicted, though gold thread occasionally threw back a subdued glitter from the light of the single yellow lamp that burned on a small table set to the side.

A narrow door led to the mythagogue’s living quarters, and Ruiz stepped to it in one swift stride. He listened at the door for a moment, heard nothing, felt nothing.

“He’s not there,” said the mythagogue.

“Who?” asked Ruiz, the hair lifting on the back of his neck.

The mythagogue laughed, a dry scratchy sound. “Who else? Remint y’Yubere, whose blood you seek.”

Ruiz pressed back against the wall, fighting panic and a curious prideful anger. “How could you know this?”

The mythagogue laughed again, this time more wildly. “It boils off you, your need for him, like a great violent stink — as anyone could tell. Your shadow is full of his shape, as only I can sense. Besides, he told me you would come here, and here you are, unmistakable.”

Ruiz drew a pin knife from his boot. “What else did he tell you?”

The mythagogue shook his masked head; once, twice — so violently that the skinmask hung askew, revealing the crudely shaped metal beneath. “He ordered me to hold you here, enthralled by his vast collection of fables, until he could arrange to take you. What else? And I could have done it — have no doubt there! I’d have told you about the Thorn Goddess of Niam and how She found Her heart — rotten though it is. Or why bright flowers spring up in the footsteps of the Cronwerk Demons, and why these cursed blossoms bring madness and death — and why that is good. Or how Thubastable the Loquacious earned His awful name. All of Remint y’Yubere’s favorites.” The blind head came up. “And you’d have listened, if not because of my grand and glorious Voice, then because you hoped to get a clue to his whereabouts, some bit of information that the lords had failed to extract from me.”

A chill moved up Ruiz’s spine. He had the feeling that he was out of his depth, treading water in a murky sea of deception — in which swam an irresistible predator. A sensation of helplessness stole over him, and he felt weak and alone, as though all he could do was kick and flail and wait for the crushing grip of terrible jaws.

No. “And what did the lords learn from you?” asked Ruiz.

The mythagogue shrugged. “Nothing of importance. Listen! Go to the curtain and look out, carefully. Do you see her, a woman with steel feet?”

Ruiz remembered the tall naked woman. He stepped across the room and looked out through a tiny rip in the fabric.

She was on the far side of the rotunda, standing still, looking directly toward him across the pool.

“You see her? She’s a puppet of the lords. She wears steel on her feet, and smells of sex, blood, and some sweet powder — though I cannot describe her elsewise. What does she look like? Is she beautiful? I think she must be…. She was with them when they interrogated me, and I felt her pleasure in it.”

Ruiz drew back and went again to the door to the living quarters. He started to ease the door open.

“No!” said the mythagogue urgently. “He has a spy bead within, and one out in the rotunda. He would also have one in here, except the the Wind places a high premium on client confidentiality, and has installed very good antisurveillance tech in here.”

“Why do you tell me these things?” asked Ruiz.

“Because I hate him with all the bitter emptiness of my heart,” the mythagogue said passionately in a rolling dramatic voice. “He it is who has blighted my life, miserable as it was before he found me. He it is who gave me the neurophage that has forever taken my optic nerve, that still keeps watch, coiled up in my skull, that will never let me see again — for no better reason than his foolish fancy. My blindness gives my tales more ‘mystic weight,’ he says. As if those great blind mythagogues who served the ancients wouldn’t have gone out and bought new eyes in a minute, if they could have.” He spit, narrowly missing Ruiz’s foot.

“Don’t you fear him, as well?” Ruiz was almost whispering.

The mythagogue slumped slightly, as if much of his emotion had suddenly leaked out. “Of course, of course. That’s why I didn’t help the lords, though at the time I didn’t know where he was. But then he came to me, speaking of you and how he would take you. I can’t say how I discovered that he was dead, but I knew it, and I wasn’t quite as afraid. Not quite….”

“Dead?”

“Dead! He’s a machine now, someone’s insensate tool. The Gencha have had their way with him, and he is no more. Perhaps you can destroy him, now that he’s dead. Can you?” The cyborg jerked his head toward Ruiz, and though his eyes were still unfocused, they burned.

“I must try,” said Ruiz.

Somehow the news that Remint had been deconstructed by the Gencha came as no great surprise to Ruiz. The events and circumstances of his visit to Sook seemed to be taking on some great incomprehensible symmetry; he felt like a player in some feverish drama, a performance full of obscure symbolism and contrived irony. “Where is he?”

The mythagogue fell silent for a long minute, until Ruiz began to consider how he might force the information from the man without attracting the attention of the Celadon Wind’s security devices. But finally the man spoke in a thin frail voice, completely unlike the declamatory tone he had used before. “If I tell you, and you fail to destroy him, he will punish me in ways I cannot bear to think of.”

“I won’t fail,” said Ruiz in as positive a voice as he could manage.

The man nodded. “Perhaps. You’re much like Remint, as he was before they killed him.” He seemed to come to a decision; his back straightened and he spoke in a stronger voice. “He told me to call him at the SweetShimmer joypalace, which is just two levels below the Celadon Wind, in this very stack. I can’t guarantee that he’s there, of course, but… look for him in Suite B-448.”

“Thank you,” said Ruiz Aw, and slipped away.

“A FINE PERFORMANCE,” said Remint to the cyborg, who had raised his head inquiringly. Then Remint switched to the outside spy bead, and followed Ruiz on his rapid retreat from the Hall of Pain and Renewal.

Corean shook her head in wonderment. “Doesn’t the mythagogue’s hatred concern you? The emotion was unmistakably genuine. Is it safe to leave such a virulent creature alive?”

Remint looked at her without expression and did not speak.