Yena steps closer and plunges the blade deep into my belly. The pain rush is sudden, sharp and obscene. I am too shocked even to scream.
"Why didn't you go through?" she repeats. "You were right there. How can you defy me even now?"
Through the agonizing pain I begin to understand again what this is, just another of King Ruin's lies. It is all a trick, engrams implanted to make me believe one thing when it was never true.
"Oh it was true," Naji says. Through the fire in my belly I can now sense the faintest outline of King Ruin's broad beam reaching into them, more an absence than a presence, something I would never have noticed if I hadn't thought to look for it. "Yena and Naji were real, and they're still alive. They are my martyrs, Mr. Goligh, locked in a glass box with no room to shit or eat or breathe, where you'll end up between riding the pole at parades, if you don't tell me how you resisted. How did you know?"
My eyes stream and I cry out as he twists the knife. The skin of my stomach rumples and flows with blood, with the worst pain I've ever felt.
I lash out. With all my strength, I strike through the bonds, try to tear back this hand and reach through to King Ruin beyond, but I can't latch on to anything solid. All sense of him is missing, and there's nothing to strike.
Naji shakes his head. "Did you think we would give you a loaded gun, Mr. Goligh? Your new transponders won't allow it. But they do allow us to control you with ease."
Yena twists the knife again, then rips it out of my stomach in a gross, eviscerating sweep. I watch as my innards burst open, spray blood and twisted intestines gushing outward.
My vision immediately begins to grey. I'm dying.
"You will do as I ask, even if you have to crawl over your own steaming entrails to do it. Didn't I warn you, Mr. Goligh? Didn't I tell you? Now crawl."
I'm dying, but it doesn't matter. I don't want to, but that doesn't matter either.
I begin to crawl.
DOE E
Doe wraps Mr. Ruins up with an elasteel loop around his waist, pinning his elbows to his sides, and runs the leash back to her grapnel.
"Like a pet," Ruins says, with an odd smile.
"Like a criminal psychopath," Doe answers.
He shrugs. "This way."
He scampers ahead, venturing in amongst the tight rows and stacks of hoarded bric-a-brac. Doe follows, sidling around a headless Grecian statue, past the orrery, stepping over a low wall of canned tomatoes.
"Actually they're hearts," Mr. Ruins calls back to her. "Pickled in brine. They keep forever."
They weave through a wood, plastic and enamel maze of old record-players stacked atop each other, bathtubs filled to the brim with old papyrus scrolls, closets stocked with many-badged uniforms and fluttering with moths, until they reach a spiral staircase. The last remaining obstacle is a tall heap of molding fur coats spattered with shards of broken glass horses.
"Russian cavalrymen," Ruins says by way of explanation, as he kicks his way to the top. "Very bitter, an acquired taste."
Doe frowns, but climbs the mound after him. The stairs are pearly white marble and rise in a graceful arc behind a wall, entering an enclosed stairwell. Of course they have to go up. In the Solid Core, it was in. In the White Tower, it is up. The bridge is always at the end, and she needs the bridge to fight King Ruin.
In single file, their feet clapping rhythmically off the stone, they begin the ascent.
"Tell me about you," Mr. Ruins says, as they walk. "What is it like to be a piece of Ritry Goligh?"
"Tell me how to kill the Suns, and I'll tell you whatever you want."
They walk on for a few moments, up the stairs, before Ruins replies.
"I don't really know how to kill him. Nobody does. Anyone who tried before, they thought the way was through the bridge too. It's banned to dive even attempt to dive it, unless you're working in one of his experimental Courts. The Suns takes any attempts on it as mutiny, and installs them in its parade."
Doe pops open her HUD to rub a trickle of sweat from her brow. "What's his parade?"
"It's awful," says Ruins. "It's a litany of shame, made up of all the ones who failed. He keeps them as a warning to the rest, and the warning gets worse every time. I heard he used to be happy to cut off their arms and legs and put them in a hessian bag, which he'd have carried around at the scene of a Court and shown to everyone. That might have been a thousand years ago, I don't know. Since my time it's always been much more complicated. Occasionally he does the bag, but they've had their eyes cut out, tongues, genitalia, ears, noses. Usually they're lofted on poles or crucifixes and carried around, like a parade. That's the most basic, though. More advanced are the ones he plays with inside their minds, cutting them up and remixing them, making monsters. He makes them do obscenities, a lot of cannibalism, sexual contortions, depravity, and invites anyone to feed from their suffering."
"It sounds disgusting."
"Oh, it is. That is quite the point. It can take a lot to disgust his own children, but he invariably succeeds. He has a fertile imagination."
Doe walks on, and up, considering. Already she's breathing hard with the exertion.
"How does that help me to kill him?"
"It doesn't. It's just a warning of what you will face if you fail. But I do have some ideas."
"Go on."
"There may be two ways, one of attrition, the other of overload. Attrition is entropy, as when a sun finally consumes everything in its orbit. Perhaps if you could starve him of all his Courts, he would weaken and die. But that would take years, a concerted effort on a thousand fronts at once, one we can never do from here."
"So what's the other?"
"Nova. Suns explode when they reach a critical mass. If we could tip him over the limit somehow, it might be enough. He could erupt."
Doe thinks about this, until the stairs ahead of her stop in a wall. It is smooth as ivory, just like the steps, and it reaches up and up so high it's out of sight.
Mr. Ruins catches up to her, panting. In the pristine white stairwell he looks like a homeless crull, ready to be baked.
"What is this?" Doe asks.
"It's a step," he says. "Just a very big one."
Doe runs her hand over the wall. It is solid. "It doesn't make any sense. Why would a step be this big?"
"To slow us down," he pants. "It's a simple kind of defense. Use your grapnel."
"It's attached to you."
"Well un-attach it."
She studies him. Earlier the grapnel would have taken the weight of them both, but some of the threads inside have been stripped with that overuse. It won't carry them both.
She has to go alone, and then send it back for him. It is not an appealing prospect. There is every chance he will run, or take his opportunity some other way. He wouldn't get far, but it would slow her down more, and she knows time is running out, for her, for Ritry Goligh, for this Sunken World.
"You can trust me," says Mr. Ruins. "I never lied to you, did I? I did many other things, but I never lied."
Doe snaps the grapnel off him. "Stay here," she says, then fires it upward.
The wire shoots up for a long time, before biting into something. Doe presses the reel, and it yanks her up after it. The white wall flashes by like a featureless landscape. By her side, openings begin to appear, windows out to the Sunken World beyond.
Through them she sees the courtyard and sky like captured postcards. First is a glimpse of Ti and Ray squatting at the base of the ramparts, scraping out mortar. In the next, they have separated and Ray is on the wall, pointing out into the distance. In the next she sees only Ti at the howitzer, and twenty black combat helicopters flocking close through the reddening sky, like grit in a bloodshot eye.
Then she reaches the top, and takes the step.
The enclosing stairwell wall has fallen away, so now she can see clear across the White Tower, to the path the spiral staircase takes as it circles around. But there is not only one staircase, there are many.
>
What she's looking at baffles her. The space down the middle of the Tower is hollow, but it's not. There is one staircase, but she sees ten, twenty, a hundred. They spin off at strange angles, tight spirals and lazy arcing ones, ones with tiny little stairs and ones where every step is another wall.
Too many, all running through the same space.
She turns away, and shoots the grapnel back down to Mr. Ruins. If he runs with it, she'll have no way to climb any higher, except to take the stairs. But which stairs?
She blinks.
"Hurry," she shouts down.
Long moments pass. She thinks about the time lag as she passed the windows, how Ray and Ti leapt from place to place like gaps in memory. There were twenty helicopters, and if they've come from King Ruin, they'll be coming for the same thing as her.
Mr. Ruins, and the bridge.
She leans out over the edge but sees no sign of him. He isn't coming. She considers dropping onto the wire and hunting him down, but there is no time
She can only wait.
Ray will slow them down, she thinks. Ti will set up traps. They know what to do.
Do I know what to do?
Then Ruins appears, shooting up towards her like a dark blot. In seconds he is by her side, and she clips him back on to her belt.
"You didn't think I was coming, did you?"
Doe ignores him. "What are all these?" she asks, pointing at the staircases.
Ruins looks, then belts out a laugh.
"What?" she asks.
"Defenses," he says. "How many do you see?"
Doe tries to look, but can't focus. Before there had seemed to be at least one central staircase, with hundreds of imitators spreading out from it. Now she can't even pick out the central path.
"How many do you see?" she snaps back.
"Only one, dear Doe. One alone, and I'll take you there, if you do one thing for me."
"What thing?"
He smiles, an earnest, simpering smile that turns Doe's stomach.
"Kiss me."
She considers. It is repellent, but it is nothing. Logic dictates.
She whips off her HUD and kisses him on the lips. When he holds her in place, pressing his blood-grimed chin against hers, it is disgusting, but she tolerates it. She needs him, and it is only a momentary discomfort.
When he finally lets her go, she can see he has started crying. Thick mucusy tears run down his cheeks.
"I'm sorry," he says. "For what I am."
He turns and starts up one of the staircases, running into space that moments ago was a blur of possible pathways. The grapnel leash tugs at her waist, and Doe runs after him.
Up, up they go in silence. There are no more windows, only a dizzying array of intercrossing stairs, more stairs than there seem dimensions to accommodate. As she climbs Mr. Ruins sobs carry back to her, thick bursts of sadness in the air she has to run through continually. In one burst she remembers the list of ruins he compiled for Ritry, and left packaged for him to find on a corpse of Napoleon. It was a present, intended to help him.
In another she remembers choosing Don Zachary's son carefully, just enough to pull Ritry out of his pointless skulk life. She remembers waiting at the shark arena for them to return, feeling the joy there was in saving Ritry's life from men who would certainly kill him, in showing him the power of the Lag.
It was love, after a fashion. He cared for Ritry, needed him, but when he showed that, all Ritry did was reject him.
Everything was emptier after that. Ten years of emptiness followed, stalking the world for something to take away his pain. He visited sites of old conquest but they were stale. So he returned. He made Ritry suffer, but even in the closeness that tender horror evoked, something was missing.
The bonds of suffering weren't enough.
His misery washes back through Doe so deeply she barely notices when the door far below blows open, and the faint sound of marines storming into the White Tower rises up.
Rather she feels it through Mr. Ruins' misery, as he realizes what is happening and increases his pace. The memories fade and all their effort focuses on the ascent.
They climb until Doe's legs throb with the effort, and every step is matched by the drumbeat of footsteps from below, as the enemy rushes to fill in the gaps they've left behind.
"We broke the path," Mr. Ruins' says. "They'll come faster. Hurry up, Doe, please."
They run on and on, and then they emerge, from the top of the stairs into a pearl white landing. Across from them stands a beautiful pearl-white door.
"It's so clean," says Mr. Ruins. There is a strange kind of yearning in his voice. "I didn't think that was possible."
"It's the bridge," says Doe, reaching into her belt for the scrap of candlebomb scavenged from the helicopter.
"It's more," says Ruins. "It means I wasn't always like this."
Doe starts toward the door, splitting the meager waxy bomb into pieces which adhere to the pearl-white easily. Seven blobs of dirty black against the white, for seven tones in all.
But there is no fuse.
Ruins holds out his left hand. "Take them all," he says. "I won't need them."
Doe pulls out clippers and snips his fingers neatly away, then lines them up along the wall leading to the first blob.
"There isn't much time," Mr. Ruins says. "They're almost there, so let me tell you what you have to do."
"I have to kill King Ruin."
Ruins shakes his head. "Not only that. He has Ritry now, Doe, your Me, and you must rescue him too."
"How do you know that?"
"It's the only thing that makes sense. Ritry split himself into pieces, and hid you and your team in me. He left part of himself behind, Me, to keep the Suns occupied. It's the only thing that makes sense."
"Why would he do that?"
Ruins gives a kindly smile. "So you can save him, dear. So you can kill the Suns from inside me. He can't do it himself. Now blow the fuse."
The thought of Me in King Ruin's hands terrifies her more than anything, because without Me there can be no Ritry, and without Ritry what is she?
What is she?
She sparks the fuse and dives to the side.
BOOM
The explosion is shallow, cut off by her HUD, but enough. Leaning forward through the remnants of the shockwave, she peers beyond the pearly wall and into the vibrant purple flux of the aetheric soul.
Ruins stands before it, gazing in, weeping openly.
CRACKAKAKAKAKAKAK
The howitzer bullets strafe across Doe's back and fling her hard flat onto her face, smashing her HUD. More stunning impacts follow, biting into her suit and chipping at the flesh underneath. Flashing red alarms blare across the broken screen, of internal injury and shattered bones, as she manages to turn herself in place.
She has no weapon, only a knife. Ruins is at her side, his grey suit shredded by the bullets, his bright red blood spreading out across the pearly floor.
No, she thinks. Not now, not so close.
Craning to look back, she sees there are five of them, ten, black-clad marines pouring up the stairs, all with buzzing EMR-helmets and weapons trained on her. One of them steps forward and flips up his HUD. He has dark copper-skin, a black trident beard, and the fire of twin blazing Suns in his eyes.
"Hello, Mr. Goligh," he says. "I am surprised to find you here."
"King Ruin," Doe manages. Speaking makes something come loose in her chest, and she coughs up blood.
The man smiles. "Thank you for opening the bridge. Thank you for leading the way. Now, goodbye."
He lowers the howitzer to train on her face. With a high whine, the barrels begin to spin.
THE ESSENCE F
I am organs and blood, floating in oil.
There is a mirror so I can see what I have become, and no way to close my eyes. I don't have eyelids anymore. I don't even have arms to cover my face. I don't have a mouth to scream with, though I have ears to hear.
Seven tones, of this artificial womb. Seven tones that mean something but I don't know what, that are so familiar but so meaningless. So I was born, so shall I die.
I look at myself in the silvered glass, this exploded galaxy of brain, nerves, senses, spools of guts, muscles and shedded skin, floating in the humming liquid, and wonder. I am like a galaxy, hollow at the core. Now I am living, thinking matter, but completely devoid of motive force. I am entirely at King Ruin's whims.
"You were always at my whims, Mr. Goligh," says King Ruin. The words warble through the glass tank, muted. He is standing before me as Yena now, listening to my thoughts. I can't turn away, can't cover my ears, can only watch and listen.
"All things are ultimately my hands," he goes on. "I use them as I see fit. Some I slough off, some I retain. You realize this now. Should I wish it, you will have a new body. I could strip you over again, top to bottom. We can repeat it. We may do that, out of curiosity if nothing else. How long can you hold, I wonder? How many bodies would I need to take from you, piece by piece, before you finally break?"
I can't speak, can only think. I imagine my organs leaping out of the womb and choking him. They wrap around his neck and wring the life out of his eyes.
"You won't help me, I know," he says. "So you believe. But it may not be necessary that you do. I have almost reached the center of your friend, Mr. Ruins. There is something strange at work inside him, it has taken many of my hands to breach his Solid Core. Now though they have. I believe the secret to crossing the bridge is held inside him."
I Lagged it, I think. I remember Lagging it.
King Ruin shrugs. "Perhaps you should hope you did not. Maybe then I would forget you, and leave you behind. Your suffering may end, or at least allow a fall into madness. Because if I do not find what I seek in Mr. Ruins, I will extract it from you. There will be no more relief. I don't mind if it takes decades, Mr. Goligh. Centuries. You see I am old, so you will be old too. I will strip you back to raw genetics and rebuild you in my image, if that's what is required. We will become old companions, in this endeavor."
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 22
