King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2)

by Grist, Michael John

  "Then maybe we're not supposed to escape," Ray says. "This could be our last stand."

  This drops a silence over them all. Doe wonders what it might mean, to truly die. No more magmic floes, no more of Ray's touch in the dark, no more Bathyscaphe or missions.

  What would it mean for Ritry Goligh?

  She lays a hand on Ray's good shoulder. "If it's our last stand, we'll make it a good one. I want the mud outside this wall littered with helicopters and bodies."

  Ray winks. "I'll pile them up to the sky."

  Almost with that, the decision is made. They help Ray to stand, letting his new bones flex beneath half of his full weight. Walking back along the rampart together, they talk about strategy.

  "They obviously didn't expect us," Ti says. "They approached in wide-formation, three abreast, which would only make sense when anticipating fire from only one direction. It's part of how you were able to take them out, the element of surprise."

  "Then we need a new element," Doe says.

  "I'll have surprises for them aplenty," Ray says. "Don't worry on that."

  "How?"

  "Well, first I'll crack open some of these musket magazines, and with the powder I'll rig this whole wall to fall. Once the helicopters land and they're inside the courtyard, they won't expect that. I think I can get the worms involved too. Next I can drain off some of the flamethrower's gas and make IED incendiaries. That's just what comes to mind immediately." He pauses for a moment. "It'll be a big party."

  "Good," says Doe. "Ti, I want you to stay with Ray and help set up a warm welcome. Whatever you can do to hold them off, I need you to do."

  "And you'll inveigle the Solid Core," Ray says.

  "White Tower," Ti corrects.

  "I will. I'll hunt down that rat, and I'll find out what we're here for."

  Ray nods. They reach the flamethrower, and she leans him against it, then carefully steps away.

  His hands shiveringly grip the triggers, and his legs tremble. Reading his HUD, Doe watches his pulse throb faster.

  "You look terrible," Doe says. "Like you're having an aneurysm."

  Though he's sweating with the effort, Ray manages a grin. "Don't worry about me, little lady. I'll be skipping around this shit in no time."

  "Then clean up a little, will you," says Doe, kicking at a soldier's corpse. "It's a mess."

  "Aye aye, captain."

  She wants to touch him again, even through the suit, but that would be too much. This is a chord, and propriety is key to discipline.

  Still she steps forward, pulls off his HUD, and kisses him hard on his tooth-pierced, dark-purple lips.

  He kisses back. It sends a thrill all through her body.

  "Stay alive," she whispers, holding his strong black face.

  "And you."

  She turns to Ti. "Stay alive, that's an order."

  "Yes ma'am."

  It's already embarrassing enough. They've wasted enough time. She turns and walks away. Five steps on she grapnels to the keep wall, and swings down to the mud-courtyard below, into the squalid dark of a tunnel-trench.

  At once, she's cut off from the world behind.

  The mud underfoot is boggy, with oil-skinned puddles glinting in the shallow troughs left by past footsteps. The trench walls rise either side taller than she is, leaving an avenue barely two bodies wide. In that narrow space the air is hot and close, rank with fresh peat and acrid powder smoke.

  There is no sound, but the soft bubbling of mud as her feet sink in, and a faint scratchy wail of old music, muted by the damp-sighing walls.

  She starts forward, each step tentative, sucking out of the mud then slipping in again.

  "Ruins," she calls softly ahead. "I don't want to hurt you."

  Ahead the trench branches at a T, which she doesn't remember from above, but of course this is a Core and anything can change.

  At the T she looks both ways. To the right there is a dead-end scattered with shreds of torn paper ammunition cartridges. To the left is a grotesque tableaux. In the middle of a clearing in the trench lies a heap of bloody, ruptured naked bodies. They are soldiers that have been blown into pieces. Here a pale leg juts from the wall, there a torso lies forlorn like a belly-up turtle.

  Doe counts ten dead in the carnage.

  Either side of the oval clearing, in stark contrast, the uniforms of these dead men hang neatly from bayonet 'hooks' driven into the walls. Their muskets are arrayed in a smart lean-to A-frame, with all their magazines of shot and powder looped together and hanging from the crux, like a pot suspended above a fire.

  Beside that are the soldiers' boots, laid out in a neat line. At one side of the oval there is an old gramophone placed in a dug-out culvert in the trench wall, like a hearth. The record deck slowly turns, producing an ethereal, corrupted classical ballad from its tarnished brass trumpet. Beside that is a table laid out with notes, each written with a single pen. A thin tendril of bluish smoke rises from a solitary cigar.

  "They all jumped on a grenade," comes a voice from behind.

  Doe turns, and sees Napoleon standing in the right turn of the T. He is holding a musket trained on her chest, balancing the stock across his bloody fore-arm.

  "What hole did you crawl out of?" Doe asks.

  "A deep one," he answers, and fires.

  POP

  The musket ball flies slow and cracks off Doe's chest armor, spiraling away to slot into the trench wall with a sizzle.

  Doe glances down at the crack in her suit. No serious damage.

  "Your muskets aren't as strong as they used to be," she says.

  "They were never that strong," Ruins as Napoleon answers. "You were just weaker."

  Doe stares at him. He stares back. His eyes are rimmed with yellow and dartingly feral, like a wild animal caught in a snare.

  "I was caught in a snare," he says. Then he grins widely, to show blood-clotted molars, and holds up his amputated hand. "I dug my way out."

  "You're dying," says Doe calmly. "Let me help you."

  He laughs high and loud. "Help me? You did this to me! I ate my own hand because of you, bitch. You fucking little bitch, Goligh, I hope the Suns gobble you down forever."

  POP POP POP

  The musket balls crack off Doe's armor until she closes the distance between her and Ruins and yanks the musket out of his one good hand. He reeks of piss, shit, and stale gunpowder.

  "What do you mean, the Suns?" Doe asks.

  "Get off me, albino!" he shouts, twisting and tugging at his one good arm. Doe holds it locked. He laughs then squeals as she tightens her grip.

  "Ha ha, you bitch! Fuck you, Ritry, arrgh! Aargh, stop it please! Ritry, please!"

  Disgust ripples through Doe. Guilt comes quickly with it, and she eases up the pressure on his arm.

  "Stop what, the flood? It's too late. Besides, you were going to do this to me," she says.

  "No, no I wasn't, that's different," whines Ruins. "You don't know. You don't know what I wanted, and you ruined everything."

  He starts to sob. He wraps his arms around Doe, presses his head against her chest, and weeps.

  "Are the Suns the ones here?" Doe asks. She'd point but Ruins isn't looking. "In the sky here?"

  "Uuurgh!" he groans into her chest-plate. "You don't even know that. You don't know anything at all. How was I beaten by you? How?"

  Doe feels a sharp rap in the small of her back, and spins Ruins away, twisting his damaged arm until he starts to hop, and he drops the dagger.

  "I only stabbed you a little bit," he pouts, a strangely childlike grin on his face. "Only a little, you barely felt it."

  "I'm wearing a lavic suit," she say. "I heard it more than I felt it."

  "Ha ha ha ha," he says, grinning again. "Ha ha, I'm such a fool. Let me go now, please. Come on, sweetheart, dearest Ritry, let me go."

  "I'm Doe," she says. "Ritry isn't here. It's just you and me."

  Ruins stops hopping and looks at her with sudden interest. His head co
cks to the side. "You're a woman. You're so pale."

  "I'm Doe."

  He nods eagerly. "Yes yes, that's how! Clever Ritry! Oh I knew he was so clever. Seven-tones, who would have thought of it? An army of plastic soldiers is one thing, but seven minds in one? Only the Suns ever came close."

  "You keep saying the Suns, what does it mean?"

  "What does the Suns mean? Doe, my darling, where are the others? I'd like to meet them. Ritry always respected me, I know that. We were good friends, really. Where are the others? I want to meet Me. I want to see the little boy, Far. Yes!"

  "They're not here."

  "Oh," says Ruins, then narrows his eyes suspiciously. "I saw others, though, with you. Two others. The black one and one of the twins. Where are the rest?"

  Doe says nothing. She contemplates beating him but doubts it would help. Instead she merely tightens her grip on his arm.

  This time he doesn't squeal. He doesn't leap, and instead only looks her dead in the eye, through the faceplate of her HUD, with the light of understanding growing in his eyes. When he speaks it is with surging happiness.

  "He's abandoned you, hasn't he? Ritry sent you here alone. Half of you are dead, and Me and Far never came. I can feel it. You're alone! He's not anywhere near. He abandoned you!"

  "He didn't abandon us."

  "He abandoned you!" Mr. Ruins crows. Tears of joy leak out of his crusted-yellow eyes. "Oh it's delightful. Thank the Suns, to send me such as this. I was so hungry, and there was nothing to eat, and now Ritry has provided. Bless you child, bless you."

  Doe feels some shade of his certainty leak into her, and begin to corrupt. This mind is dying around them, Ruins is a bitter ghost haunting his past glory, and Me and Far really are gone.

  "What are the Suns?" she asks again.

  A slow smile spreads across Ruins' face. "I'll tell you. You'll love it. It means he has him. Ritry. It means he's going to suffer."

  Doe shakes him. "What are they?"

  "Only a god," Ruins snarls back at her. His spit flecks her helmet. "The holiest of them all. I'll show you, if you want. I'll show it all, so you know what fate your dear Ritry is facing. He sent you here to die, little Doe, you little bitch, so I could eat your brains out of your white little head."

  She slaps him, then, hard. He wails, laughs, then starts shouting for more. She slaps him until he stops, and a fresh run of blood trickles down from his nose.

  "I was so hungry, you see," he says softly, looking down to the mud. "That's why. That's only ever why. I was so hungry."

  "So show me," Doe says.

  He starts to shuffle around her. His feet take tiny steps, like an old man's, squelching in the mud. When he sees the pile of dead bodies in the left branch of the T, he starts to cry harder.

  "They dived on a grenade for me," he says, in a tiny voice Doe can barely hear. "All for me."

  "Why?"

  He looks up at her. The madness is back in his eyes.

  "I was so hungry."

  She holds him at arms length. While he mutters about putting on a suit, and taking off a suit so he wouldn't have to dig his way through buttons, leather and thread to get at the meat, she lets him putter slowly forward, toward the keep.

  NOT THAT B

  not that

  After more sobbing, reeling, feeling lost to myself, I sit with my shattered hand and broken foot before me, and only look at them.

  In moments he changed who I am. I am thin, now. I am so thin I barely know what I am. I dare not dive into memory, try my graysmith's trick again, lest he take whatever I come upon.

  Their names pop up like fireworks, those so far beyond his touch. Ven, Heclan, Tigrates, Ferrily. That's all I have now. Before that there were parents, some kind enough, some cruel, but none like this. I hide them as deeply as I can. Perhaps I should have Lagged them all.

  not that

  says something in the back of my head. I don't know what it is. I don't even know if it's a thought put there by King Ruin. I don't know if anything I think now is my own.

  My foot looks like a ball of dark rotten kelp. Where his bat struck the bones shattered, driving shards through the skin. It has swollen up in a heavy lump, trickling out blood and dribbles of yellow pus in turn. It aches like a phantom limb.

  My hand I can barely stomach to see. I force myself to. The missing fingers have left snapped tendons and muscles behind, dangling purple and pink like disconnected cables on a skulk, like a building with its façade torn away.

  They won't re-attach, I'm fairly certain. I've set the shorn fingers near to the place where they ripped from, and already they've turned a gray shade of pink. They don't belong, because they are dead.

  I am dead too. This is how I should begin to think of myself. A plaything for the King, a symbol of his power. I don't like to say it, don't like to think it, but I am terrified.

  I am terrified.

  not that

  says some voice in my head. Not that, and I want to rip it out too. It's too soon, like King Ruin said. It's too soon to make me eat my own vomit, too soon to make me chew down my own fingers.

  But he could. It's what he could make me do that is the worst. And I would do it. He could make me enjoy it. He could wire me all around to love it.

  I shudder. I tremble. The fear doesn't go away, at what I might become.

  not that

  says the voice.

  On the sublavic with Heclan, sometimes I thought about the end of the world. We'd lay back on the smithing benches with the EMRs powered down, sipping mind-numbing CSF liquor, and talk about what the world might be.

  "I'll grow water plants in the desert," Heclan said once. "I'll engineer them to suck it out of other molecules and farm it chemically. It's simple."

  I laughed. Heclan was always saying ridiculous things like that.

  "Plants need water, they don't make water," I said.

  "And do brains need thoughts, so they can make thoughts? Do you have to put one in to get one out?"

  "Yes."

  "Maybe, but it's not zero-sum. It's more like perpetual motion, or transmutation. Take a baby; you put in food and water, and you grow this little person that becomes a soul, add some starter thoughts to get it going, and pretty soon it's churning out ideas all of its own. It's writing engrams all over the cortex out of nothing, transmuting mind out of vapor."

  "You make it sound like alchemy," I said.

  "Isn't it?" he asked. "We do alchemy everyday, turning ice into water, turning water into life, turning living people into dead people. It's all transmutation."

  Looking at my hand and my foot, I wonder what Heclan would say to this.

  "Some guy ripped out my fingers," I tell him. "He broke my foot. He's going to make me eat my own vomit."

  Heclan laughs. "He's helping you transmute, Rit. You can be something new."

  "But I won't get to choose what I am."

  Heclan frowns. "Is he writing inside your mind?"

  "He's erasing it all."

  "But you're still in there. You still get to be you, in some basic, fundamental way."

  "He controls that too."

  "All the time?"

  "No. I don't know."

  Heclan laughs. "Not possible. He has to be himself too. He can't be you all the time. You get to be yourself, even just a little."

  "But that's nothing. What am I, without knowing who I am? He could take my name. He could take everything I've ever done. He could take you. What am I then?"

  Heclan toasts me with the CSF. "True, that does sound pretty shitty. But even then, you'll still have your mind. You'll still be able to transmute, to filter to make your experience what you want. That's a miracle right there."

  Here I may be crying. "But it hurts, Heclan," I say. "It already hurts so much."

  He takes a long smacking suck of his CSF. "Life is pain, Rit. Pain is transmuting us all the time, into something better."

  "How is it better?"

  "It's better because it's
harder. It's forged. You come through it, the steel doesn't falter, and you're really somebody then."

  "But I can't fight back."

  Heclan sets his glass down.

  "You're thinking on the wrong battlefield. We're not above the ice here, that war is already lost. We're below it, where the waters are murky. We don't move the pole around, do we? We hide like guerrillas beneath it. We're skirmishers. You don't own your body any more, so stop pretending that you do. It's just a dying animal you're tied to. You don't own your mind any more, fine, let it go. It's postcards of a life you don't need. You had that life, and it's over now. Now you're a new you, forging in the fire. Fight for what you'll become, in the moments you have. Everything else is vanity."

  My feet and hand blur before me. I've lost a lot of blood, spilled across this white floor.

  I wonder if Heclan would really say any of that. He wasn't philosophical. He was fat, drunk, and incompetent.

  I look up. Now King Ruin is standing before me. He's every bit as handsome as he was before. He looks curious.

  "This is your partitioning, isn't it?" he asks. "What you're doing now. This is how you Lagged your parents."

  not that

  "I'm having a nice conversation," I say, a slur. "Would you please fuck off."

  That.

  He kneels down and picks up one of my fingers. He turns it slowly on his palm.

  "Perhaps it's time," he says.

  I imagine pushing my broken fist into his face. Perhaps I could spear one of his eyes. Give me another moment, and my teeth would find his throat.

  "Very well," he says.

  I think of that, while my own hand picks up the finger, and guides it to my mouth. I think of him sucking helplessly at the air, while it crunches in my mouth. I think of standing above him in the dirty gray light of my home on the skulk, looking out to the sky, and seeing two red suns burning paths across the sky.

  In the brightness of the white room, I do as he asks.

  not that

  says the voice.

  I know, I tell it. It's this.

  Hours later, I lie clutching my arms to my gut in the semi-dark of my white room. The lights have been dimmed. I want to vomit but I don't want to have to eat it again. I have to keep it in.