It is so hard, to be like this.
"A reward," King Ruin said, as he dimmed the lights on his way out. "For eating so well."
I am different, again. There are a dozen tortures and humiliations behind me. I have done things I never thought I would, everything he demanded. I am broken and bloody.
not this
says the voice.
The pain is all around me. It is inside me. I remember the soft touch of his hand and it sickens me more than anything else. His hand stroking my brow with my head in his lap, after taking away pieces of me I'll never get back. He striped my body with scars I'll never remove. He pulled out half of my teeth.
I taste salt, urine, vomit.
"You'll be so beautiful," he said softly to me. "When you ride."
not this
I shudder and shiver. I have learned so many terrible things about myself. I have learned the color of the insides of my bones. I have learned what suffocating on my own screams feels like. I have tasted what despair feels like.
"We can be like this forever," he said. "You and I and all the others, together. I'll string you up like holiday decorations at every Court. You'll parade. I'll be so proud."
Not this.
At the end, he fed me like a baby. It was the head of a sheep, raw, brought in by another man who looked just like him.
"One of my hands," he said proudly, pointing to the new man. "I breed them here. They are clones, raised in an artificial womb, just like you. It makes them easier to control. They have no mind of their own, but for when I reach out to control them. they make no demands, they don't open their mouths wide when they're hungry. I love them for it."
As the man set the silver platter down beside us, I looked into his eyes and saw the emptiness within, enlivened only by the King's touch, like a marionette.
I remember that emptiness.
The sheep's head still had wool on it. The eyes were blue and filmy.
"No," I murmured, through my bloody mouth.
"It's alright," he said. "I'll feed you."
He opened the sheep's head with a saw he'd just used on me. He peeled back the skull, revealing the stringy white membranes of the cortex. Using his thumbnail he scraped them back.
"You're hungry," he said, "I know you are."
So he fed me. He made me eat. Spoonful by spoonful, I ate all of the brain. I ate the eyes. I ate every part.
"Can you imagine the ones in the fort?" King Ruin asked me. "Can you imagine how that must have felt for poor Harim?"
I am too hungry to be disgusted. I have eaten nothing but fingers for days.
Before he left, he laid me down with my head in his lap, stroking my hair gently.
"You understand, don't you?" he asked softly. "Mr. Goligh, I can't allow any others to rise."
Now I think back on that. In the sickness of my pain and misery, I turn it over.
not this
These are the moments I have to myself. He may be watching, he may be listening, but I'm here. Fuck him.
This.
I call up Heclan. I let him go. I call up Ven.
She sits on the bed beside me.
"You're crying," she says. "Ritry."
I stop myself from crying.
"I love you," she says, which starts me crying again.
"He might take you," I tell her. "He could come at any minute."
"Then we should make this count," she says. "Tell me, what can I do?"
I remember how much I loved Ven. I remember how broken I was, when I woke from the EMR to find them all dead. I was half-alive for a very long time, as my Molten Core regrew.
"Help me think," I say. "I can't think. I can't stop feeling him."
"He isn't here," she tells me. She touches my chest, in all the places King Ruin wounded me. She caresses my chin. She leaches out some of the pain he put in. "I'm here. I'm always here."
"Like Far," I murmur.
"Like Far," she answers. "He can strip us, but we won't be gone. We always will have been. Even if you don't remember me, we always will have been together. Whoever else you've loved, they always will have loved you. You always will have loved them. He can't take that away."
I sob. "He can make me forget."
She holds me close. "I'm here now. Remember Heclan. Fight the battles you can. Remember me now."
I loved her. Gods, I loved her. In her arms, I grow calm.
And I think.
And slowly, I begin to understand.
It doesn't change anything, not at first. But as Ven breathes in my ear, as the glow of it spreads wider, it begins to.
RAY B
The twin suns glow red overhead.
"They're getting nearer," Ti says, as they work on levering bricks out of the lower wall with bayonets.
Ray looks up. Sitting by the wall's base, he works one-handed with a bayonet, taking frequent breaks. On his own he would have scraped away the mortar for perhaps one stone. With Ti they have cleared five.
The suns are hotter.
"Not colliding," Ray says. "That's what I first thought."
"They might collide with us. They're already splitting a corona effect around the bubble of the Sunken World."
Ray looks wider. Beyond the heap of piled up dead soldiers on the mud, beyond the stack of stones they've emptied, beyond the garbled trenchlands of the courtyard, pitted now with sink-holes they've dug and covered over, past the line of trebuchet spikes, he sees the sky.
The gray clouds have a red tint. There is a clear pink haze rising from where the horizon would be, cut off now by the edge of the wall.
"What does it mean?" he asks.
"Fusion," says Ti. She throws an image over to Ray, which he can barely focus on through the sweat in his HUD. He thinks back to another raid, when Me's vacuums stopped working by the blast door. His suit has see some stress.
"Looks like, blotchy eggs," he hazards. "And bacon?"
Ti chuckles. "It's a new bond forming. Whatever that thing is, it's coming so close gravometric bonds are going it start pulling it in. That's what the bacon is."
Ray studies the image more. "Then where did we go?"
"Into the bond," says Ti. "Look at the mass of this place, then look at the size of those suns. We're emptying out, losing mass to entropy constantly, while that double system is massive. If it gets close enough, we'll get sucked up into it."
Ray considers this. Perhaps that would be a good thing, he wonders. "What will happen to us?"
"Spaghettification," says Ti. "Acceleration far beyond terminal velocity. We'd be strained to ribbons."
"Oh."
"It's not ideal."
He thinks about this for a time, while scratching at the wall. "Is that where the helicopters are coming from?"
"From the surface of a sun? I don't know. It's possible, I suppose. Then those are no suns like I've seen before."
"So maybe we won't be spaghettified?"
"Maybe it would be worse, if the helicopters come from there. We still don't know what they want."
"We don't know what we want."
This drops them both silent for a time, bar the scratching, and the outside baying of the worms.
"They're hungry," says Ray. "Would you mind?"
"No problem."
Ti gets up from her seat by the wall, and goes over to the pile of dead soldiers. She affixes one by the ankle to the trebuchet they rigged out of cross-beams buried in the mud, exposed by gamma scans as part of a stables. Three stones sit in the weight carriage. She unhooks the tether, and lets it go.
The stone blocks drop slowly. The long lanyard arm travels fast, yanking up the soldier with a crunch of joints coming out of place, then hurls him out over the wall.
The howls grow louder. The baying of the worms is more like a shouty bass whisper though, Ray wonders, all grind and no substance. Just feeding the Lag.
From without there is a sploosh, a long wait, then another sploosh.
Ray raises one eyebrow, impress
ed. "They're jumping higher."
"That was the longest airtime yet," Ti says. "Maybe fifty feet."
"High enough for helicopters."
"High enough to get over the wall," she counters.
Ray smiles. "They won't. Not while there's anything out there to eat. This isn't like the dive we did. This mind has turned on its own Molten Core."
"This mind may only be held together by those suns," she says. "The corona suggests that. The bond is already happening, the bacon, and that's what's keeping the sky over our heads, instead of crushing our heads."
"Hmm," says Ray, thinking back to So's complex diagrams about a squashed orb, that wasn't really squashed. Too much, really.
He finishes scraping out the last bit of mortar round his stone, even as Ti finally winches the trebuchet weight back up.
"I think that's enough to fell it," he says, "when you finish yours."
"Roger that," says Ti. "Where will you run the fuse to?"
Ray points to the keep. "There. Last fallback."
"We should check the way. Be sure it's clear."
It has been hours since Doe last checked in, a garbled message to tell them she was with Ruins, and heading in to the keep. Ray only caught half of the words. Already the Solid Core was working its interference.
"We will," says Ray. "Now, incendiaries."
He slowly, slowly pushes himself to his feet. His right side feels stronger now, enough to take his weight, though the freshly broken left side less so.
"How does it feel?" Ti asks.
"Like a jigsaw," he grunts. "I have to stand up just right."
"It felt like it too, putting you back together. It was gross."
Ray laughs. "I owe you. Plus you did it in a pyramid."
He starts toward the stone steps, leading back up to the rampart. The incendiaries will go there, he thinks, hidden in the clothes of the bodies they've propped up against the wall, to make it look like the Tower is fully manned. Boom, any helicopter flying low overhead gets a bellyful of improvised napalm. For anyone who follows and lands, the wall crashes underfoot and their helicopters get eaten by worms.
"I've been thinking about the pyramid," Ti says, as Ray starts the slow process of lifting himself up the stairs.
Too heavy, he thinks to himself. Need to lose a little weight.
"What did you come up with?"
"The votive thing. The hieroglyphs. Is there anything to suggest Ruins was into that?"
"Not that I know of."
"So what is it? And the Suns. You've heard of Ajyptia?"
Ray screws up his eyes in concentration. "Some kind of disease?"
"Ha ha, no. It was a nation before the fall, in Ritry Goligh's world."
"Well, good."
"It had pyramids, and hieroglyphs, and votives. Also a sun god."
"Two sun gods?"
"Just one. Maybe this thing is the sequel."
Ray reaches the top. All along the rampart there are bodies and bits of wood scavenged from the mud. Hidden amongst them are a dozen IED incendiaries, triggered by motion springs.
Burn baby, burn.
Looking out over the wall, he sees the scored mud left by the ten or so worms gathered outside. Every now and then one of them shuffles to the surface, snouts at the air with its yellowy proboscis face, then sinks down again.
They're digging their own trenches, Ray thinks.
They're bigger than they were. It will take more than howitzer fire to burst them. The helicopters will need rockets.
The dying mind of Mr. Ruins is aggregating here.
"Sequel," he says, looking up at the sky. The heat from the Suns is palpable. "Maybe you're right."
"Maybe we have to kill them," Ti says.
"Maybe," Ray agrees. "But how? Before we get spaghettified?"
"There's really only one way to kill a sun," Ti says. "Run it dry. All suns die that way, they core their own insides for energy, and eventually they implode into black holes."
"How would we accelerate that?" Ray asks.
"No idea," Ti says. "Normally it takes millions of years. It might be possible to overload it too, and force an early supernova, but the energy required would be enormous."
"I don't think we have millennia," Ray says. "And Doe took all our candlebomb."
He scans the horizon line. It is utterly flat now, leveled by the tsunamis.
"Any idea when the next wave comes?"
"I'd wager after the next troop of helicopters. We have until after that. Probably hours. I don't think the passage coming through is easy."
Ray pats the rampart top. Good solid stone, that will drop tumbling down soon enough.
He thinks back to a time a day or so ago, waking in the forging tube of the Bathyscaphe, and not wanting to get out. There was no Me to get them started. So was so cold, and the twins didn't want to wake.
"We barely made it when we passed through," he says. "But we came through the skin, through the mud. We lost our ship. How is this thing sending ship after ship?"
"At great cost," Ti says. "And they will come through the mud, whether its mud or not I don't know. Maybe a storm, if they arrive by air. Dense thunderclouds."
"I don't see any."
"You wouldn't have to see them. It's So's squashed, un-squashed sphere. Everything we are, and everything around us, is just a representation of the Molten and Solid Cores, trying to collapse."
Ray grunts. Once there was a time none of that meant anything to him. That changed though, after they blew open the aetheric blast-door. He still remembers Far putting the bayonet into his chest, and being reformed in the blast of power that followed.
Before he was just a sublavic marine, following orders. Missions followed missions, and that was enough. Now he knows he is part of a god-like creature called Ritry Goligh, one member of a seven-tone chord birthed from the pulse of an artificial womb.
It is odd. It is a strange kind of coming of age. He can accept he was never a child, as that was Far's role. He is something in between, an aspect or a facet. What that says about him loving Doe, even making love to her, he prefers not to think about.
"What are you chuckling about?" Ti asks.
"Nothing. Something, I suppose. What it means to be a marine in this chord, now. Do you remember when I woke you up in the Bathyscaphe?"
"Yes," says Ti. "I didn't want it."
"Neither did I. They say babies have to be smacked after they're born, to get them to breathe."
A pause, while the sound of Ti finishing up her scraping grinds through on blood-mic. "Who says that?"
"I don't know. It's something I know, though."
"Hived off Ritry Goligh, no doubt."
"I expect. Did it feel strange to you, to be woken by me? To wake out of sequence like that?"
"It's a becoming," Ti answers. "Becoming something new."
"New demands," says Ray.
A moment passes, then Ti speaks again. "It's all finished down here. All the stones are out, and there's powder lodged where it'll do the most damage. Fuses strung. Every trebuchet has a body looped in, and they're all wound. What now?"
Ray turns and looks back over the courtyard. The stubby arms of five trebuchets rise just above the ramparts, loaded with the grimy white stones.
"I think we can manage one more surprise," he says, as the idea comes.
"What is it?"
Ti pops out from below the rampart's shadow, walking on the mud-top, looking up at him.
Ray grins. It's a new idea, something he'd never have thought of before, something only this new Ray would even imagine.
"Have you heard the story of the Iovian horse?"
"Of course."
"Well, it's that. And I think we better hurry, because-"
His suit alarms him first, set to gamma-radar. He turns back to the rampart and looks out over the mudflat distance, tightening the resolution on his HUD. There is a line of black grit rising over the horizon.
"Because what?" Ti asks.
On the deepest zoom, Ray patches the image over to Ti, to Doe if she has any signal, and makes a quick count.
There are twenty helicopters. They have Bofors guns on their bellies. They all have double-pulse chords aboard, two leaning out manning missiles and howitzers, two in the cab.
They all drip blood from their rotors.
"Incoming," he says. "Ti, it's on."
ARENES C
For a time, I sleep. I dream of the chord lost in mud, slopping their way through a swamp without me.
"Where's Far?" I ask them. "Where is he, Ray? Doe?"
They don't hear me. They don't see me.
Around me the world changes. I'm yanked up as though on a grapnel line, out of the mud and up until I'm somewhere very high, looking down on a globe wrapped up with the shimmering bond-lines of King Ruin. They are everywhere, so thickly nested I can scarcely see through to the earth below, like dense Allatanc clouds pregnant with rain. From up here they look beautiful, like the world is turning to crystal.
Every one means suffering. Every one is a feeding tube linking out to a Court, like the sea-fort, like the Rock, like so many others. The entire planet is wrapped up like a fly in a web, with digestive juice slowly eating it away, and I wonder, if he has the bridge, why does he need these at all?
I try to pick out the center of the bonds, the hub they all link into that might give away King Ruin's location, but there is no central place. Instead I feel the heat on my back as his twin suns burn closer.
I try to spin to see them, try to move so I can escape, but it's a dream and I have no control of my body. I can only watch the glow of them reflect red off the silvery planet, making it glitter and glow like a Molten Core. The heat becomes intense, piercing, frying every axon and cell in my mind at once in endless, relentless pain.
Then I am consumed.
I wake with a violent start, to my battered body, and to King Ruin. He's sitting beside me, cross-legged on the floor. There is a skinning knife on the floor between us, threatening what will come.
I glare at him. The pain is everywhere now, the ache insistent. Echoes of a hideous death ring in my mind, along with memories of all the tortures he's inflicted already. How long has it been, a few days? Is that all? Do I have a lifetime of this to come?
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 17
