So my breathing calms. The sobs that shake my frame slowly cease. I sit up, and look out to the wall, and wait for it to begin.
Hours pass. I stop thinking of my fantasy family, and think instead of the horrors I saw in King Ruin's Court. I play them out in my mind, to bleach some of the shock away. The pain will always be there, the horror, but at least the shock will be gone. I attempt to inure myself.
At some point, a seamless door in the wall opens. A man steps through, and the door closes behind him. He is wearing white clothes like me, but otherwise he is a splash of dark, exotic color against the white. His skin is a deep copper-brown, and his long black hair is tied back in a glossy ponytail. He is stunningly handsome, with a sharp black goatee beard framing perfect dark lips, shining blue eyes, imperious cheekbones, and dark thick brows. There is a golden circlet worked across his temple, and a flat wooden sheath at his belt.
He stands before me and looks down. I am lying on the floor still, looking up. I am utterly vulnerable. I think that at any moment he might stamp on my exposed stomach, and a stream of reflex impulses urge me to flinch and curl up.
I resist. That would be far too soon.
Instead I look up, and he looks down. I try to reach out to feel his mind, but can go no further than the border of my own thoughts. Something has been altered. He stands long enough for this to become abundantly clear.
At last he speaks, in a languid bass voice reminiscent of the old More republic.
"Ritry Goligh. The man who walked the aetheric bridge."
There is little to say to this.
"And you are King Ruin?" I ask.
"I am one hand in a thousand," he answers, the words practiced and smooth. "Part of the one you call King Ruin."
"Then where's your EMR helmet?" I ask. "I don't hear any buzzing."
He smiles. "You don't feel my thoughts either, do you Mr. Goligh? It must be disconcerting. But then there are other ways beside a field of electromagnets to cut someone from the bonds, and other ways to connect."
He taps the top of his own head softly, twice, for left and right hemispheres. The meaning is clear.
"You took out my transponders," I say. I hadn't expected it, but it is no surprise. It amounts to the same thing as an EMR wall.
"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. He's no taller than me, but that does not make me feel strong. If anything I feel weaker for standing, 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 diving me. I can't feel it, but I know he's reading every thought I have. So I stop myself from thinking. It's a graysmith's trick to evade the Lag, achieved by subvocalizing a circular repetitive loop. I start saying Fara's name, my daughters' names, our address, to the distraction of all else.
He smiles as he notices.
"Simple, but effective," he says. "Sadly it does nothing to mask your emotional state. You're afraid, Mr. Goligh."
He's right. Fuck him that he's right.
In place of the fear I force a surge of adrenaline. It's no easy feat without the transponders, but I know my own mind too well. 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 on his back, and a stamp across his neck kills him.
CRACK
The thought floods my system with aggression, dwarfing the fear.
He studies me with interest. "Would you care to try that?"
"If I did, you wouldn't see it coming."
"Please," he says, gesturing with a hand.
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? So kind, Mr. Goligh. 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, in whatever way you can."
That bloody image hangs in the air before us.
Fara, I think, my daughters Sal, Keryn, Brienne, my friend Levi, a home in Tenbridge Wulls, a life in Calico, back to Fara...
"You're a sick fuck," I say.
His frown becomes a pained smile. "You take great liberties with your speech. There is much you do not realize."
"Enlighten me."
"I will."
My feet root to the spot. My arms pin at my sides. His hand drops to his waist, and from the flat wooden sheath on his belt, he draws a flat wooden club. He turns it so I can see it clearly. He draws it back.
Then he hits me in the left hand, crushing it against my thigh.
The pain smacks into me like the percussive roar of the Calico Helter line. I hear my fingers break. I try to scream but my jaw is locked tight. He hits me again in the hand, there are more snaps as the bones in my palm twist, and the pain becomes the searing hot center of my world.
I can't trick my way out of it. Saying made-up names doesn't help. I only need to endure.
"You will endure," says the man. Two blows have not ruffled him at all. He looks exactly as calm as when he came in. I try to look away, down to my crumpled hand, but I can't even move my eyes. I grit my teeth against the swelling throb pulsing from my mangled hand. Blood drips to the floor where his bat has broken the skin, where my own bones have burst through.
"You will endure until madness comes, but it will be no relief, because I will bring you back. I have done this a thousand times, Mr. Goligh. Do you not remember my Court? Did you not see the men therein, who have given everything for me, again and again? And what are you?"
He sheathes the bat. He reaches down, and takes my wounded hand in his own. It moves for him, and screams with the pain.
"You think you are special," he says, as he runs a perfectly manicured finger over a shard of white bone sticking up through the back of my hand. The serrated pain of it makes me want to vomit. The way it looks makes me want to curl up and cry. "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. He takes hold of my little finger, and yanks.
The finger tears out of the socket with a wrench. It feels like my stomach is being pulled out of my gut. I scream inside. There is a hole where it had been, and blood gushes out to splash on the plain white floor. He tosses the lump of torn meat on the floor. The pain is indescribable.
"It is thousands," he says. "Can you imagine that? Thousands of men and women who saw the aetheric soul before you. All so special, such graceful beings, and every last one of them is here. Can you comprehend this? None of them die, none of them go mad, there is no relief, 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 last in a long line of martyrs who will bleed as an example to the rest."
I get a grip on my self. I stop the screaming. I start saying the mantra again.
His brows knead together. He takes hold of my ring finger, and pulls. His words still come clearly through the dizzy fog of pain, as a second finger crunches out of my hand and drops to the floor.
So much blood pours out of me.
Fara, I think, my daughters Sal, Keryn, Brienne, my friend-
"Stop that," he says, and cuts the thoughts short. Abruptly, I cannot think. I cannot breathe. I cannot move. I am just eyes in the white, a body that is bleeding, and a mind locked up and frozen like never before.
"I'll show you depths you hadn't thought possible," he says. "For your arrogance. For your defiance. You will mulch in the swill like
the rest. You will serve me as a warning, strung up on a pike with the pole in your guts, dancing a jig while everybody in the Court laughs. It is the role you were born to play. And do you know why they'll laugh at you, Mr. Goligh? It's because they're terrified. It's because they see the terror in you, and they learn to stay well away from the aetheric bridge because of it. They don't want a pole in their guts, so they don't dream of going near it. It's trespassing, and they don't want to become a message. Am I making myself clear?"
He lets go of my thoughts, and a flood of them burst out of me like a swollen tide. Terror, horror, disgust, fear, all blurring together after only five minutes in his presence.
He is repulsive. If I could dive him I would rip out his Solid Core.
"But you can't, can you?" he asks.
He takes a step back. "Still, why don't you try?"
I feel the lock on my feet and arms fall away. I try to leap forward and drive an elbow into his throat, but instead I fall to my knees and vomit. I puke into the blood, shivering with shock.
"Was that your plan, Mr. Goligh?" he asks. "Or did your body let you down?"
I hawk and spit. I try to push myself to stand, but the pain in my left hand is too strong, and I fall onto it, into the vomit.
It is hot and acid through my white clothes, and the vapors sting my eyes and burn in my nose.
He squats down beside me. I want to at least slap him, flick some of the stink onto his perfect dark face, but I can't even move for the tremors running through me. I know it is too much blood lost, too much shock, but still I try to fight.
Fara, I think, my daughters Sal, Keryn, Brienne, my friend Levi, my home in Tenbridge Wulls, back to Fara…
"Did you truly think you were the first?" he asks. "Truly, Mr. Goligh."
"Call me Ritry," I slur.
He takes my head and lightly bounces it off the slick floor.
"You were the first to stumble upon it in such a way, I'll warrant you," he goes on. "All of the others have focused themselves on it for years, operating with such secrecy. They all were usurpers, bent on wresting the crown off my head, and not many gave me the run that you did. For that, it may please me to give you special attention."
"Wonderful," I manage to say, through a mouthful of sick and pain.
"It is. Your mind is intriguing. Upon you I will exercise the full gamut of suffering, to better explore it. I think Mr. Ruins made a rare choice when he selected you. Ah, you are surprised to hear his name?"
"I'm not surprised," I say, between sucking gulps at the air. "He was a sick fuck too."
King Ruin laughs, then bounces my head again, almost fondly. "He was interesting, for a time, I grant you. I am diving the remnants of his mind now, as we speak. What you left of him. There will be secrets inside his core still, I think."
"What secrets?"
"Perhaps the name of your partner, and your children? None of this Fara, Keryn, Brienne business."
This thought chills me. "I Lagged them all."
"That may be so. In either regard, there is much for us to look forward to. Now, stand up."
He helps me up. He holds me in position with his mind, studying me.
"No," he says, "I think one more."
He pulls out the bat again, raises it, and brings it hammering down on my right foot.
This time he lets me scream, as the bones crunch and dislocate between the wood and the floor. He lets me hop madly around the room screaming, until I crash into the wall and fall onto my back.
He's standing over me. "I could make you eat the vomit," he muses. "Is that too soon?"
Fara, I think, Keryn, Brienne-
"Truly, now," he says. "Stop that."
I stop it, because they are gone.
My eyes widen on King Ruin's handsome face looming over me, as I slowly understand what just happened. The weight and frame are gone. There is only a deeper hollow inside, without name or feeling, a well where something once was but I do not know what.
Tears spring into my eyes for the loss. I cannot help it. It was something real even if the names were not, and now it is gone and I am so much reduced. Every second that passes takes me further from what I was before, into this new thing that is immeasurably less, in ways I can now scarcely grasp.
What was it? I call out inside. How much have I lost?
I gasp, and a sob croaks out of me.
King Ruin smiles. "I like you better this way, Mr. Goligh. Come now. Have sweet dreams, of riding a pole while the masses laugh. Such wonders."
More sobs follow. The sense of it is already fading, leaving me here alone with this evil, evil man.
"No clever retort?" he asks.
I have nothing. I cannot even breathe.
King Ruin sighs contentedly. "Such wonders," he repeats.
Then he leaves me alone.
DOE A
Over the rampart and running with the howitzer roaring on full blast, Doe takes in the blood-spattered stone, the dead Napoleonic bodies, the muskets.
She runs through them.
To the left the helicopters are nearing, the tsunami flood eclipses half the sky, and Ti and Ray are black smudges far below. To the right lies a mud-buried courtyard, dug through with wet trenches running from the various rampart walls to the keep at the center.
It alone is pure-white still, a circular structure built out of fulgent oblong blocks as big as those used in the pyramid, rising up as high as the ramparts. There are windows carved within at narrow intervals, and within one Doe catches a sliver of movement.
Then she comes to the second rampart pill-box, and sees the man slumped on the dirty stone beside a large vat-fed flamethrower mount.
The sight of him stops Doe in her tracks, and the whirr of the howitzer cycles down.
It is Mr. Ruins, dressed as Napoleon. He is wedged into the crook of the wall, his pot-belly filthy with old blood, his jacket slung back off his shoulders and torn at the cuffs. His face is mired with black bruises and a crust of dark-red blood crusted around his mouth.
He is gnawing at the bloody stump of his right wrist. He looks up as Doe draws near. "I'm so hungry," he says, his voice a Gaullic rasp. "I can't eat any of this."
It is disgusting but fascinating at once.
"You're not going to believe who I'm looking at," Doe calls through blood-mic.
"Cover us," comes the reply from Ti.
Doe leaps forward, kicks the bloody Napoleon in the face, then slotting into his position at the flamethrower. With the howitzer in one hand and the gas-tank muzzle dripping down the other, she takes sight on the nearest helicopter as it drops missiles from its belly.
The howitzer tears them apart. The flamethrower belches out sizzling purple flame with a rush and a rumble, engulfing the insectile machine and fusing it at once. It drops into the mud, just as a faint clicking sound from her leg. She ignores it long enough to drive the second helicopter into the tsunami flow with purple fire, then hazards a glance down
Napoleon is champing at her calf. Again it is repellent but fascinating, and she finds herself wondering that his jaws must be strong to make that much sound. She heaves the barrel of the howitzer back over the rampart and hammers it into his forehead, even as another helicopter bursts somewhere behind her.
He flops unconscious to the side. She spins back to see Ti and Ray launching upward on a grapnel, with the tsunami surging scant inches behind, then there is a thunderclap smack as the mud-front strikes the outer Tower wall, and Doe is rocked off her feet.
Frothing mud splashes over the rampart edge and drenches her, obscuring her HUD. She clicks it off and struggles to stand, snatching up the howitzer and training it again on the skies, but nothing comes. There are no more helicopters, only the burning glow of the twin suns through the clouds.
A second later Ti comes running toward her along the rampart, while the flow of the tsunami is still convulsing the stones underfoot.
"Are you alright?" Ti shouts over the churn.
"A
lright," Doe answers, "but I found someone." She looks down to point at the squirrely body, but he is gone.
She looks back up at Ti.
"Mr. Ruins is here. Somewhere."
They congregate by Ray's side, where Doe dips into his HUD and sees fresh breaks in his left shoulder and leg, though the majority of his earlier injuries have remained sealed. The new cracks are hairline, and ought heal themselves in the existing bath of microbials within the suit.
"It's Mr. Ruins' mind," Ray says, pushing himself up to a seated position.
"We know," says Doe. "I saw him."
Ray raises an eyebrow. "Then where is he?"
"He ran, must have gone inside," Doe says, pointing to the keep. "Which leaves the wall to us."
Ray cranes his neck to look back, out over the rampart. Doe follows his gaze. The new flood is settling outside at a height barely below the rampart.
"The next attack will be hard to stop," Ray says. "They can come up at a crawl, if they want. And what have we got?"
"The fire cannon," Doe says. "The howtizer's almost out."
"Then we need to find more. I don't want to be here when this place gets taken. Whatever those chords want, it's not friendly."
"Agreed."
Doe turns to survey the keep. She'd like to simply grapnel to the top, blow her way in through one of the arrow slits with the knob of candlewax Ti took from the wrecked helicopter, and burn the rest to the ground. But that seems foolhardy. They may need it for something else. They may need the keep itself, as a final fallback defense.
"There might be weapons inside," says Ray. "There could be anything."
"Whatever Ritry Goligh sent us here for," Ti says.
Doe turns back to look at her, this tall blond ex-twin. In other circumstances she might reprimand her for speaking out of turn, but not now. Ti has proven herself beyond any doubt, and there are only three of them left.
"Ritry Goligh or Me," she says. "You're right. There's something inside there that we need."
"Maybe another aetheric bridge," says Ray. "It's the only way out I can imagine."
Doe considers, chewing her lip. "Without Far, I don't know if we can cross it."
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 15