"Strip his HUD," she says.
Ti does, scraping the guts out of the helmet and stacking them with the relay. "That's it."
"Any more guns?"
Ti runs a quick circle of the helicopter then leans in and attempts to pry the cab-pupa open. "None. I could try to blow it open, but is that the best use of this candlebomb?"
"Save it. Check the other rotors. I'm getting something on the markings."
"What is it?"
"They're hieroglyphics," Doe says. "That's about as good as the HUD can distinguish. Ancient and indecipherable without a key."
"On the rotors," Ti says drily, as she leans in to peel back a second blade from the cab. "There's more here."
"Get a good look at them all, I'm collating. There was something like this on the pyramid walls, but they were corrupted."
"Something like this?" Ray asks. "How much like this?"
"The suit couldn't make sense of it, but these markings were everywhere. Why?"
"I think it's a votive," Ray says.
"A what?"
Ray's mind races, bringing up old knowledge he didn't know he had. "A votive; a kind of sacrificial marking. Something you write on an offering to a god."
Doe gives him an odd look. "Why would you think that?"
"Because it was bleeding even before it got dissociated; marked with the words of its sacrifice. If I'm right, it means that helicopter expected to die from the outset."
Ti sucks in a breath. "A suicide mission."
Doe drags his locked suit in silence for a few moments. Ray turns the new data fast but she beats him to it. "We're dealing with an army. Faith-based, with Souls willing to die for the cause. More will follow."
"How many?" Ray asks.
"No way to know. A lot, I expect."
A shudder passes down Ray's back. "Shit."
"Indeed. Ti, get back here. We need to break inside that Tower fast."
K. RAY
Ti returns to the traces and picks up the slack. Ray tries to lie back and plan for what is going to come, but planning was never his strong suit. Most of the time he spends fending off the pain while watching the suns through gaps in the scabrous black cloud. The red is getting fiercer, like lava flows in a sick Molten Core.
They run on until the next tsunami tips up at the far edge of the world, and the White Tower dawns before them within QC range.
"How long until the wave hits?" Doe asks, and Ray can hear her teeth gritted through the drain of dragging him.
"T-minus five," Ti answers. "There's nothing to slow it down now; just a barren plain."
"And to the Tower?"
"Five again, give or take."
Doe swears under her breath and charges ahead harder.
Ray cranes his neck to study the White Tower wall. Its marble blocks seemed so white from afar but now they're yellow like decayed teeth, and the mortared gaps between them are dark with mold. The hole the helicopter's missiles chewed into the rampart looks to be equally infected, drooling a thick brown discharge that stains a wide streak down the wall. At the base where it meets the mud there are bubbles and steam.
He catches a flicker of movement on the rampart. "There's someone up there."
"Where?" Doe snaps back.
"On the left side, looking at us through an arrow-slit."
"Hand me the howitzer, Ti."
Ti does and Doe readies to fire on the run, then the thump thump sound of incoming rotors cuts across the steady grumble of the nearing tsunami.
"Three of them," Ray barks, zooming in on the horizon behind them. "They're just above the tsunami."
"This could be the invasion wave," Doe says. "Ti, get an elasteel cradle ready for Ray and give me your grapnel."
Ti unlatches her gun and hands it to Doe.
"I'll clear the way," Doe says, then drops her elasteel leash a final time and sprints ahead on bounding exos. Ray tracks her progress on her HUD video; she covers half the distance to the Tower wall firing the howitzer as she goes.
CRACKACRACKCRACKA
A stream of supersonic bullets tears out of the spinning weapon's barrels and rakes into the rampart arrow-slit.
A scream rings down and Doe runs on in great hazardous strides, launching her grapnel at the same moment she leaps. The anchor head bites into stone and the tracer begins a fast incoil immediately, yanking her up toward the wall. A spurt of purple fire puffs out from the rampart top to greet her with projectile QCs, but Doe fires the second grapnel before they can strike. It bites on one of the guard towers and hauls her off-line on a sharply different angle, soaring up toward the wall.
Bondless atoms fizz out in the clay and the jet of flame tries to track her but her incoil is too fast; Doe sweeps over the rampart edge with her howitzer shrieking-
CRACKACRACKCRACKA
T-minus three.
Ray sidelines her feed and zooms in again on the helicopters and the tsunami wave gaining on them. The air cavitates with the drumbeat of so many rotor-blades; he can feel it through his re-bonding bones and in his blood.
"Hurry, Ti," he calls.
"Lose some weight," she gasps back at him.
He laughs and it hurts. There's another burst of howitzer fire from the wall then Doe's voice comes over blood-mic. "You're not going to believe who I'm looking at right now."
"Cover us," Ti calls and grunts into a final exofuelled charge as the shadow of the tsunami wall swells up over them. A helicopter screams by overhead, launching rockets that are met by a fresh hail of howitzer fire and projectile QCs from Doe up on the rampart.
Ray watches agog as the supersonic bullets shred the Dactyl missiles and burst them in air, followed by the helicopter frothing into a purple frenzy from the bondless QCs.
The machine drops. At the same moment Ti snatches Ray's grapnel off his belt, hooks him into her suit and fires, then they're shooting up on a tracer toward the diseased rampart wall with the wave at their heels
T-minus one, and the tsunami of churning mud closes so fast Ray can almost reach out and touch it. One of the helicopters swerves to avoid Doe's hail of shells and is caught by the tsunami tide and folded in without a sound. The one remaining machine yaws up and away, its front guns hammering off the wall and into the red-veined sky, and for a moment seems to have escaped until an instant later a vast white shape, as big as the Bathyscaphe and ringed with creamy-brown lines bursts out of the frothing tsunami. Its huge dark mouth clamps down on the Dactyl's cab and drags it down; a missile releases and explodes immediately but too late, and the two fall down to the surging wave below...
The incoil finishes and they hit the wall's peak hard; Ray's vision darkens with dislocating pain in his shoulder and hip.
"I've got you," Ti shouts and drags him over the peak just as the tsunami strikes. The wall cracks and teeters under the immense onslaught, vibrating like all the trim tanks venting at once. Mud sprays everywhere, the sound is all-encompassing and then Ti is running away from him down the rampart, shouting out for Doe.
Beneath and behind Ray the flood pummels the wall mercilessly, and through the drilling of fresh pain he sees dead figures lying to either side, wearing torn blue tunics with tarnished brass buttons and filthy once-white pantaloons, clasping ancient muskets in their flaccid hands.
He remembers this from another place and another time. Of course. It makes sense.
"Mr. Ruin's here," he says, then the pain swallows him down.
RITRY GOLIGH
18. WONDERS
I am Me.
I move in darkness, in light. I dream of a tsunami of mud come to sweep me away, within which are people I remember the shapes of, people who are important to who I am, but what does that mean if I can't remember their names?
Who is Me? I don't know. Who is Ritry Goligh? I'm not sure.
I open my eyes in a white cell, imprisoned on the bonds. I reach out but my own thoughts echo back to me. There are no doors or windows in this place, and no escape. Curled up in a ball I begin to
sob for the emptiness inside. I have been hollowed out and it hurts badly. I want to cry for my mother but I never had one, so I can only cry for the parts of myself I have lost.
Doe. Ray. Far. So. La. Ti.
A door opens in the wall and a man enters the cell. He is a splash of dark color against the white, with skin a rich copper-brown and long black hair tied back in a glossy ponytail. He is handsome, with a sharp black goatee beard framing perfect lips, shining blue eyes and dark thick brows. There is a golden circlet resting atop his temple and a flat wooden sheath at his belt.
He looks down at me curled on the floor, utterly vulnerable, and I barely resist the urge to flinch. Instead I reach out to Lag his mind, but get no further than the border of my own Molten Core. The rebound is painful. I try again and fail again; it means something has been altered, there's some kind of EMR shell I cannot see.
I am helpless. He stands beside me long enough for this power difference to become abundantly clear, then he speaks in a languid bass voice reminiscent of the old Moor Republic.
"Ritry Goligh. The man who walked the aetheric bridge."
There is little to say to this. "King Ruin."
He gives a slight bow. "I am but one hand in a thousand," he answers, the words practiced and smooth. "I serve at the King's pleasure."
I stumble on the word 'hand'. I've never heard it used this way, but instinctively I understand what it might mean, drawing on memories that don't feel like my own. I imagine thick bands of control arcing across the distance, plugging into minds and running them like Ritry Goligh ran his Hawk chord. "Where's your EMR helmet? I don't hear any buzzing."
He smiles. "As you well know, there are other ways beside a field of electromagnets to connect across the bonds." A pause. "And other ways to cut someone from them. There is no field here, yet you cannot feel my thoughts, can you? You cannot feel the bonds at all. It must be disconcerting."
I glare up at him. After a moment he taps his own temples softly twice, on the left and right hemispheres, then draws a line in the air between them. The meaning is clear enough, and I reach up to touch my own forehead. The stitches from recent surgery spike stiffly through my hairline.
"You cut the callosum," I say, unable to hide my shock. I hadn't expected this; a kind of lobotomy. Severing the thick raft of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain can lead to drastic changes in personality, recall, and ability. It helps explain why I feel this way, so dislocated within myself. It also amounts to the same thing as an EMR shell, trapping me in my own bisected mind.
"We did. You will not use the bonds again, except at my request. You will not do a thing that is not by my request."
I push myself to my feet. My mind may be pinioned but my body isn’t, but somehow standing does not make me feel strong. If anything I feel weaker for it, because it is a futile gesture and both of us know it. This is his cell, not mine.
"You are right," he says, answering my unspoken thoughts. "It is futile. Everything you do from now on is futile."
He's jacking into me already. I can't feel it because of the cut callosum, not as anything more than an uncertain tingle, but I'm certain he's reading every thought I have. So I stop myself from thinking. It's a Soul Jacker's trick to evade the Lag, achieved by mentally chanting a fixed phrase. Only one comes to mind; the names of my chord.
He smiles as he notices.
"Singing won't shield you, Mr. Goligh. Nor does it mask your emotional state. You're afraid."
Of course he's right. I'm terrified. But I have tricks for that too.
In place of the fear I force a surge of adrenaline. It's no easy feat, but as captain I've done it numerous times before. I imagine myself lashing out with a right cross, breaking his jaw and dropping him to the floor. A kick to his belly flips him wheezing to his back and a stamp on his neck kills him.
CRACK
The thought floods my body with aggression, and now he studies me with interest. "Would you care to try that?"
"If I did, you wouldn't see it coming."
"Please," he says, gesturing.
I do nothing. There is nothing to be gained here. He can halt me with a thought at any second.
"You want the bridge," I say. "I don't have it. Do what you're going to do."
He gives a puzzled smile. "Are you giving me permission? Yet I did not ask for the bridge. I will not ask for anything from you for a long, long time, and by the time I do ask, if that day ever comes, you will be so keen to please that you'll crawl over your own steaming entrails to give it to me."
That bloody image hangs in the air before us.
Doe Ray Far, I think, So La Ti.
"Let's begin," he says casually, and Lags me on the bonds so I cannot move. He then draws a flat wooden club from the sheath at his belt.
The first strike breaks my left hand against my thigh. The pain comes and I lean into it. I've felt worse before on a thousand different missions, losing pieces of the chord like pieces of myself. He hits me again on the same hand, powdering the breaks.
I sing their names like a mantra. I can endure this.
"You will endure," he says calmly. Two blows have not ruffled him at all. "You will endure until madness comes, but it will be no relief because I will bring you back from the edge. I have done this so many times, Mr. Goligh. You saw my work on the Crag. Harim Ongshoy. My Court. There is no Soul more skilled at breaking a mind than I."
He sheathes the bat and takes my wounded hand in his own.
"You think you are special," he says, as he runs a perfectly manicured finger down the bloody skin, now lumpy with breaks. "Yet all of you are the same, believing you are the first. Do you know how many Souls have breached the aetheric bridge in all the time I have been King, Mr. Goligh? It is not only you and I. Perhaps ten then, a hundred?"
He smiles, and with a firm yank pulls my broken little finger out of the glove of my palm. The pain is indescribable, and I sing in to it.
"Thousands," he says. "Can you imagine that? Thousands of men and women who saw the aether before you. All so special, such graceful beings, and every last one of them is here with me now, singing at my whims. Can you comprehend this? None of them die and none of them go mad, no relief will ever come for them, because this is a very special Court, Mr. Goligh. This is the world's crucifix, where I string up my cautionary tales. You are just the latest in a long line of martyrs who will bleed as a warning to the rest."
I sing their names. His brows knead together. He takes another finger and pulls. His words still carry through the pain.
Doe Ray Far, I sing, So La Ti.
"Stop that," he says, and abruptly cuts my thoughts. At once, I cannot think. No words come. No ideas come. It is like being unable to breathe and I am just eyes staring, nerves fraying with pain, a frozen mind unable to do anything but exist.
"I'll show you depths you hadn't thought possible," he says gently, pressing close so I feel his soft, cardamom-hinted breath. "For your arrogance. You will ride a pike like the rest for all my Court to enjoy. It is the role you were born to play. Through you they will learn to stay far away from the aetheric bridge, because that territory belongs solely to me."
Abruptly he lets go of my thoughts, and they burst out of me like a swollen tide: terror, horror, disgust and fear all blurring together. I hate him more than anything, now. If I could jack into him I would rip out his Solid Core.
"But you can't, can you?" Another sad smile. "Tell me, Mr. Goligh, did you truly think you were the first?"
He doesn't know who I am. This is something at least; an advantage I no longer understand, but an advantage still.
"Then who are you?" he asks, reading my surface thoughts.
"Call me Ritry," I slur.
He reaches up and drags my head down to bounce off the blood-slick floor. "Clever, I'll give you that. You were the first to stumble upon the bridge in such a way." He kneels beside me. "The others were all usurpers bent on wresting the crown from my head. For th
is accident of your crossing, it may please me to give you special attention."
Doe Ray Far, I think through the dizziness. So La Ti.
He squats beside me. "Your mind is quite intriguing. These notes mean so much to you, but I cannot see why." He sounds distant, jacking in even now. "This will be a highly experimental Court, I think. Upon you I will exercise the full gamut of suffering. Your friend Mr. Ruin exercised rare judgment when he made his selection."
I can't hide my surprise at hearing Ruin's name. He savors it fondly.
"He was interesting too, in his day. A man of some creativity on the bonds. I am jacking the remnants of his mind too, as we speak. What you left of him. There will be secrets inside his Core still, I think. Perhaps even a key to who you really are."
The thought chills me. What do I remember about Mr. Ruin? I don't know. It's all a blur, Lagged and gone. "I have no secrets."
He tuts. "Liar. Now stand up."
He helps me up. He holds me in position with his mind, searching for the weak points.
Doe Ray Me, I sing, Far So La Ti-
"Truly, now, stop that."
I stop it, because suddenly they are gone. Lagged.
My eyes widen. The weight and frame of something vast is suddenly missing, and now there is only this great wound inside me, without name or feeling, a gouge where something important once was but I do not know what.
Tears spring into my eyes. I cannot help it. It was something real and essential. Every second that passes takes me further from what I was before. I look at him desperately and he looks back, drinking this in.
What was it? How much have I lost?
"Better," he says, and smiles. "There is much more to come. It could take years, Mr. Goligh. Centuries. I can be patient. You see I am old, so you will be old too. We will become lifelong companions in this endeavor. I have such wonders to show you."
A sob croaks out of me.
"No clever retort?" he asks.
I have nothing at all.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 32
