The map says we go through it, beyond to an Inward corridor leading to the triangle, but there isn't time. I shoulder my musket and fire a continuous stream of lead balls forward at the lips, peppering them with purple weals that spit dark blood, even as I run along the spongy organic flooring, spinning So's sphere in my HUD as I go and searching for another way out.
I find it fifty yards ahead, and already hidden by the fleshy walls. Thump thump, smack the lips, one thump at each end like an echo, sucking closer to us. I sprint toward it with the others at my back, the occasional BOOM from Doe winning us quavers of time, until the red dot that is us is standing beside the space an Inward path should be, leading up toward a circular cross-section.
It is not the solution to the maze, it is merely a place that is not here. I stab my musket into the heaving purple wall and unleash a shower of gore.
"Here," I shout to Ray, and he dives in beside me. The lipless orifices are smacking closer, so near I can feel the wind of their exhalations. He drops Far into the hip-holster and thrusts his bayonet into the wall, spilling more clotted purplish matter to the bucking floor.
The lips scream as we both tear at the same time, two parallel lines like we're disemboweling an enemy top and bottom. Vileness oozes out, the thump thump ratchets to a constant hammering, and we make the final slice each, horizontal top and bottom.
Ray tears the thick flap of veiny organics away, revealing a dank metal-walled corridor on the other side.
"Get through," I shout, "for the circle," and Ray dives into the gap, squirming and kicking through to clang down on the other side.
"Go, Doe," I shout, and she follows, her shoulder-cannon almost catching on the mucal membrane wall. The oozing wound paints her with gelatinous slime. Then the lips are upon me, and for a moment I know what they are, emissaries of the Lag sent to hunt me down, and I know what I have to do. I toss the memory of Ti into them like a grenade.
For a moment they halt, and it is the moment I need, enough to dive through the slippery gap and into the corridor beyond. Doe yanks me upright and we speed clattering up the steeply inclined Inward path after Ray, until we reach a dead-end door, which Ray rams open.
I stagger through last, into a field of light, just as one of the duodenal lips slips itself through the wound in its own cell-wall, and slaps wetly up the RG-imprinted metal toward me.
Ray slams the door closed, and I am overwhelmed briefly in the white light.
"Who is Ti?" Far asks, while my HUD makes sense of the ganglial node we have burst into.
I have no answer for him, as the circular space renders out to a large room filled with an enormous leather-bound book, so massive that its face fills the floor, and its width rises up to my waist. The title across the front written in gold-leaf print reads
VEN
But who is Ven? And who is Ti? I do not know, I can't remember.
The lips smack at the door, but there is no sign they can come through. We are safe for now.
SKULK 47 B
I have lost everything, but I feel better than I have in years. Standing at the highest point of the godship complex, at the top of an impromptu crow's nest tower cobbled together out of metal strips and old decking riveted to the sharp keel of the Ylep, I feel alive.
The Allatanc sea swirls in the Arctic basin, spinning in the plug-hole we dug with all our mines and depth-charge explosions, and I feel good. The sky is gray, the sea is gray, and I can never go back to the skulks again. I have lost Carrolla who was the closest thing I had to a friend, I have lost the routine that saved me when the tsunami never came, and I feel like a weight has been lifted off.
It feels like forgiveness, for all my many crimes.
Tears roll down my cheeks, as I breathe in the fresh rain and salt air. There used to be ice in all these places, I think. We are not only saprophytes come to consume the decay we have left behind, we are predators too, come to take that which is ours. I am a predator, and always have been.
The cathedral ship lifts me. I can feel it, the waves of memory Mr. Ruins spoke of. I can ride them, if I try.
I leaf through the folder he left behind, pressed to the dead flesh of a faux-Napoleon, and read the story of the godships written in Mr. Ruins' hand. I know most of it already, though it all happened before I was born. These were history engrams injected into my brain the old-fashioned way, back when I was leap-frogging from school to school.
The cathedral ships were arks bought up by the richest religions in the world, old cruise-liners repurposed to carry some 5,000 people each along with thousands of animals. I've seen footage of them in their prime, vast city-states drifting serenely over the rising tides like mini-Calicos, each geared with the best flood-defenses and buoyancy aids possible.
They roamed the empty middle oceans, far from any land, on the theory that they were unsinkable by any tsunami in water, and too heavy to carry far enough to dash upon the rocks.
Back when the wall around Calico was half its current height, and few cities had walls that were higher, they seemed like paradise. The cathedral ships were safer than anywhere, and added to that they were godly. Of course there were the rich and poor on ship, there were servants, but even the lowest oilsman to work the bilge rooms had proven his or her faith through a three-year interview, before being allowed to sail in god's ark armada.
Their sermons became legendary, broadcast around the narrowing, shrinking coastal cities of the world. They were a light that people looked to, the hope to restart creation if the flood they forecast for so long truly came about. We had torn up the sky and torn up the sea, and their god's wrath was coming to strike us all down.
It struck the cathedral ships first. They were at their yearly plenum in the mid-ocean when the great Allatanc fault broke. The global tsunami hit, and kept hitting, as the fault continued to vent massive internal pressures, like a hemmorhage. Wave after wave lofted them and shifted them, inexorably, toward coastal barriers.
The chaos lasted for days, and they broadcast throughout, confident in their faith. But the waves kept on coming, and coming, and as the whole world watched, safe from their evacuation mountaintops, they saw every last godship in the world swept inexorably away, carried thousands of miles to crash on rocks and break on mountain slopes a dozen miles inland.
There was no escape for them, and scarcely any survivors. Their gods' flood which they thought would save them and scour the world only scoured the world of them and their gods.
I can feel them still, rising beneath me. Not only their growing terror as the last days drove them to their death, but everything else as well: the ties of love and faith between lovers and families and friends, all the good times and bad collected and collated as memories and layered upon each other like all the layers of cells in the brain, stretching out forward and backward, massed around this spot where their threads in the grand aetheric weave were finally pinched off.
It makes me strong. Both the good and the bad lift me up, like poisonous radioactive isotopes that can be harnessed for enormous power. I only need to sink in amongst this weave like I would sink into a graysmithing dive, take it into the hands of my mind, and squeeze.
Well-being floods out. I have never felt so strong, so confident, so self-assured. I know that this is my place, and this is my world, and I cannot be stopped. I not only feel smarter, more capable, more reliable, I am those things. I belong in a way I never have, to this world that never wanted me. I am more real now than I ever was. I am really here, and indestructible.
I wander along the keel, feeling like I could spread my wings and fly if I chose to. From the colossal tip of the Ylep's broken-off middle, a single pair of thick ropeway wires shoots off and down, to anchor in the wreckage of another ship. I set my feet upon the lower wire, take the upper one in my hands, and begin to make the traverse.
As the ship fades behind me and I hang swaying above a vast fall to the spuming rocks below, I feel more vibrantly alive than I have since I was just a chi
ld. The wire is cold but solid in my palms, and the thrill of fear is more than matched by the simple knowledge that I will never fall. My hands and feet will not slip, because I am their master. I am master of all of this.
Halfway down I let go of the hand-wire. My balance is under my complete control. I could never have done this before, but now it is so simple.
At the bottom, I step off onto a hammer-beaten metal plate used as a landing gantry lifted off the rocks. The second ship before me has no name, is a section of forecastle split off from its hull like a pebble sheared along geological lines. I climb up into it with ease, avoiding broken glass and toothy snarls of metal, onto a dead-level corridor thousands of people once walked, all the bonds between them branching out like a web.
I enter the cathedral ship's innermost temple through a large and door-less metal archway, twisted to the side like a dislocated shoulder. Before me stretches a vast and towering space filled with hundreds of long wooden pews, all lined up before that strangest of holy images, the man who let himself be killed upon a cross.
The weight of belief here drops me to my knees and forces tears from my eyes. Light streams in through high broken windows, painting the central aisle's carpet a vivid red, turning the pews a welcoming warm mahogany. It is beautiful, holy, and the mass of intersecting bonds is beyond overwhelming. It is rapture.
When I come back to myself the bars of light have shifted, and I am full to the brim. Everything I'd hunted for in the days after Ven and the skirmishes, scrounging round the skulks hunting for a place to be, a thing to be, a reason to be, fighting for scraps in brothels and bar-fights, fighting against others just to get a taste, is here in abundance. I can feel them all, every soul who passed this way, who left their trace like an individual harmonic in this vast and grand orchestra of bonds. They are imprinted in me now too.
And I didn't break a single bond, didn't harm a single memory, no more than a crull riding thermals diminishes the heat of the sun or the power of the wind. I could live here for a thousand years and never need anything else.
But I can't stay. Being here has changed me, and Mr. Ruins was right about what he promised, because now there's something I want.
More.
I walk the seemingly endless corridors of the godship fleet, climbing floors when I feel like it, moving in and out of rooms strewn with mementoes of past lives. I cross wireways to other ships when they present themselves. One ship stands on its end out of the water like the dolmen of some ancient druidic stone circle. Another lies sheared all along its side like the jagged teeth of a saw, cutting at the sky.
There are thousands of rooms. Thousands of memories. I dive deeper, outward, and feel the second layer of life frosted over the depths of faith like a delicate patina of ice, the scavengers who came to live here after it was dead. I can feel the difference in the traces they have left, lines darting off across the ocean, to other cities and skulks.
They are alive still. I recognize them, the trails of wanderers and the lost, people like me. I realize I have felt them before, the faintest of whispers as I worked in my rut on the skulk. They are the shallow sense that other people were existing nearby me, like the homeless man in the blue-tarp park, like Carrolla with his dream of a subglacic-themed bar.
I suppose I drew some strength from them then, but there was far too much noise to really feel it. Too much clamoring of us all for something more, feeding off each other. Now I have only silence, and myself.
Back at the Ylep as the sun sets, I siphon gas from the jet-skis, the catamaran. I find a flashlight and go down the barred-off corridor, to find the torn-off remnants of the engine room, a jerry-rigged gas-pump set to haul oil up from the hull's depths. I plumb it with a long coil of hosing, and find there is still some left. This too I siphon, enough to fill all the cans and barrels there are.
I load them into Don Zachary's speedboat, along with a hundred cans from the Canteen. The boat sits low in the water, and its dark, but I have never felt less tired.
Easing the boat out of the interior garage is so easy, I feel I could do it with my eyes closed, as though I can sense the outline of rocks beneath the water through some private sonar.
Full dark falls, as I pull back onto open ocean and accelerate over the low breakers. Wind streams through my hair, and for the first time in years I see the sky full of stars. The bonds of the godship fleet snap away from me one by one, but the charge they left remains.
I stand up before the wheel and holler into the sky. Everything is open, and everything is to play for. Like this I could change the world. Mr. Ruins' folder of locations is warm at my chest, and I wonder if I really am the predator he named me to be, if I would ever deign to break living bonds, and how that would feel if I did.
I cannot imagine it. In all my years as a graysmith, I have built connections. Even when I dived men's minds for information, I never destroyed what I found, merely brought it to the surface. I fought the Lag, staved it off where I could, always trying to build.
What strange power there must be in destruction, I wonder. In consumption. I tear into the night, following the trails hanging in the air around me, hungry to find out.
Docking at skulk 47, everything feels different. The tawdry neon alley I walked every day for ten years is now a tangled knot of intersecting traces, hot and cold with passion, anger, the stinging efflorescence of sex, the bile of violence, addiction, ownership, pain, love, loss, loneliness, and hunger.
The godship has made me see in technicolor. All these threads are distinct, and I can pick through them in my mind, recognizing some. Here are my old traces, a solitary line woven back and forth and back and forth a thousand times. Here is Steny of the red hair brothel, here is Tofu from the node shop noodling along thinking of hard rock, here is Habeas who used to be my receptionist, Carrolla my assistant, Don Zachary's hot line, his son's, Mei-An's.
The alley is aglow with them, burning like a furnace. I could thrive off these, if only they'd stay as clear as they are right now, but I know they won't. They'll muddy down with time and rewriting, and without the godship boost I won't be able to pick them apart.
I dock the boat and drag a molding, half-disintegrated green canvas sheet out of the sea-foam muck and cover it as best I can. Then I start up the alley.
I can see my graysmithy has been repossessed. The door is fenced off, and the trail of Don Zachary goes in and out freshly like a bright purple slug-line. There'll be nothing for me inside.
So I follow the Don. He leads me down the alley, through the pimps and whores and masseuse boys and girls and touts, still out parading their wares at this early hour of the morning. They all stare at me, like I am a conquering hero. I am Napoleon, come for his second resurgence, ready to bring the world to its knees.
I smile at them. I'm sure they have heard of what happened to Carrolla. They know Don Zachary. And here I come by with a smile. I am radioactive, and they shrink away.
The Don's line follows mine and Mei-An's, back through the skulk slums and skirting the sagging pond in the blue-tarp park. In the darkness I spy the homeless marine, and he looks back at me with eyes that burn with a hundred dead in the Arctic depths. A skirmisher too, he fought in the blue-ice tunnels after we drained them, I can feel his trace arcing thousands of miles away, to a place his mind dwells even now.
He nods at me, and I nod at him.
The Don leads me up the stairs to my apartment. Standing in the doorway, I look in at a ransacked wreck. The mattress has been torn into foamy pieces, my breakfast chair and tables have been violently disassembled, the walls have been battered back to wooden scaffold with a sledgehammer. The alarm clock no longer sheds red light, the white shell fractured in a puddle of moonlight through the broken window, its innards crunching underfoot. My clothes lie tossed around like sun-dried kelp, my seaweed bread has had chunks bitten out of it, my toaster is dented.
It looks like one of the storm-tossed rooms in the godships, all the belongings left behind as t
hough the owner thought one day to come back. I see my own pattern with a halcyon clarity, focused around the few places I stayed, where I felt anything. The bed, the space in air where the breakfast table had been, hot zones of thought, activity, my track through time.
Now a ruin, tied only by the most gossamer thread to a living man, completely transformed. Tied to Don Zachary, who came here looking for me, for money, for a destination.
The stash hidden in my wall is gone. I had a few 1000 saved against a rainy day, against the time I figured out what to do with it. Zachary will have it now.
His track glows hotter as I focus on it. I dive back along it as I have always dived the mind, seeking him out, until I find him ten skulks over, hidden in the depths of his estate surrounded by his men, and his harem, and his children both adult and infant, asleep. He dreams about revenge.
So do I. I stride out of my old apartment like a butterfly pupating from its cocoon, hard upon the trail of Don Zachary.
VEN B
"It eats memory," I say, as we stand gasping at the brim-edge of the enormous book. "I gave it something, but I don't remember what."
Doe and Ray are staring at me.
"Ti," says Far.
I look at him. I have some recollection of the word, but no sense of what it really means. "What is that?" I ask.
He shakes his head, too deep in shock to say anymore.
"Shock-jacks," I say, and we all take them. The tension alleviates, and now we are just four people standing in a room with a huge book on the floor.
"That looked like an intestine," says Doe. "With a sphincter for each mouth."
Ray shudders. "Things aren't supposed to go in."
"If it wants memory, then we have to muster enough to stop it," Doe goes on, business-like as ever. "What have we got? Let's pool everything we remember."
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 15