I remember Ven, and what she said. I remember the planet covered in bonds, and I remember how I felt, in the moments after I exited the bridge. He wants to break me, he said, to dance in his parade, to serve as his warning. But it's not right, I see that now. It's different.
I unstick my teeth from the blood holding them together, putting aside the ache in my jaw, and I glare up into his eyes.
"You lied," I say. The words spit clumsily through the clotted blood in my gums, but they're clear enough. "About this place. There are no thousand others who dived the bridge. You may string up crucifixions, but they never dived the bridge. You can't do it, and you want it from me."
For a moment his expression wrinkles, betraying anger beneath. He must read the understanding in me. I don't need the bonds to know I am right. This thing with a thousand hands cannot dive the bridge. It can crush men's bodies and minds, but it cannot touch their souls.
It seems so plain now. It was lost in the pain before, in his eyes and mind always on me, always witnessing my shame, but now I see.
If he could dive the bridge, he wouldn't need the Courts. Crucifixes would be unnecessary. He could suffer the whole of the soul at once, shave its strength for his own, and crush any revolutions before they began. He would have found me in moments in proto-Calico, as I found his twin suns through the soul. He would not need buzzing EMR helmets to control men over distances, nor mind-bombs, nor hands.
He can hear me think all of these things. His face smoothes out, and he stares off into the distance.
Receiving instructions.
I have tried to take advantage of this before. Now I go for him with what teeth I have left bared, hungry for his throat. Only at the last moment does he stop me. I would have made it, would have ripped out his jugular, if only I had any hands.
He took my hands.
He stops me, and looks down calmly.
"I'm the only one who ever dived the bridge," I say, "and I will never, ever teach you."
He points the skinning knife idly at my head. "I am curious, where does this resistance come from? I hear you talk to your memories, but that isn't enough. I can peel those away, one by one. I've already taken enough to break most men. But then I hear that voice tell you, 'Not this,' and I can't Lag it. I've tried, but I can't see where it comes from. Somewhere in the Solid Core, perhaps even the bridge? Do you even know?"
"It's the voice of god," I mumble. "Coming for your ass."
He frowns.
"So crass, still. Shall I crack you open, then, Mr. Goligh, to root it out? I've refrained so far. In your mind is the capacity for something amazing, and I don't want to risk it. But you're giving me no choice."
"It won't make any difference. I'll never help you."
"Are you sure? You're right, by the way, about how I would use this world. Its people are an endlessly renewable resource, and I am endlessly hungry. We're a perfect match. I've worked up such an appetite, Mr. Goligh, over the millennia. I was there before your people climbed out of their woad-painted infancy, and I'll be here long after they're all buried alive in the sand. It's what you were born for, and what I was born for. When you give me the bridge, my touch will flow through the aetheric soul like a cleansing tsunami, washing away any hope. There will be no god for this world to reach to, only me. I'll put them all to suffer. Your world will be a hell, and I will be its King."
"So crack me open," I say. "See what help you can find in here."
He chuckles. "Too easy. A thousand hands for this, a thousand for that, and you think I'd end your suffering on a whim? Didn't I tell you, this is a very special Court? There are ways to get what I want. If you won't do it for me, you'll do it for you. Vanity, Mr. Goligh. Pride. And after you've betrayed everything you believe in, I'll be sure they all know it was you, in the moments before they die. You'll be the star attraction in my martyr's parade, forever."
I pick myself up. Slowly, I stand. Without hands it is difficult. I stand before this evil fuck, and notice again that he isn't even that tall. I don't feel weak this time. I feel like I'm soaring.
"Stop talking and do it, bitch," I say.
At that, he Lags me to blackness.
I wake laid back in a chair, pinioned knee and elbow, while men and women in white coats drill into my skull.
Vibrations fill my mind. What teeth I have left chatter and burr against each other. There is no anaesthetic, only restraints, and the pain comes in waves with the sound, as the plate-bones of my skull are ground through.
It is a different room, with shelving and various pieces of medical equipment stacked there. I see a large cooled-tank in the corner, which I recognize as a CSF container. It has the same logo in the corner as the ones I used to order in Calico. How odd that King Ruin uses the same company, a reminder of a different world.
It means this is some kind of graysmithing lab. I survey it, and the people within it, through a juddery lens as my eyes tremble in their sockets. The pain is less than this discomfort. There are few nerves in the skull, beyond those in the skin. The shaking though, and the bone conduction deep churn of the drill, are mind-numbing.
Then they stop, and there is relief. The sound ends, followed by some prising and grinding at my skull as they lever off the cap they have drilled out. I imagine how it looks, as my brain opens to the air for the first time.
Inadvertently, I think of King Ruin skimming off the white strands of cortex from inside the sheep's skull. Am I to be eaten?
But there is no sign of King Ruin here. I can't touch the bonds, but I can see the way these people move, jerky and hesitant, as though controlled by a bad connection. The others compensate for them smoothly. All of them though are terrified.
"What are you doing?" I ask, but no explanation comes.
"Where is he?" I try. Now my voice tastes coppery. I know that means they're into my white matter already. Probably spreading the hemispheres of my brain apart with clamps, to get at the core stem and cerebellum.
The Solid Core.
"Be careful," I tell them. "He's watching."
Nobody answers, but I briefly catch a terrified glance from a young woman with curly black hair. She gasps and spins away. A moment later she jerks under King Ruin's invisible touch and walks out of the room.
"Did he do this to you too?" I call after her. "Did he cut off your hands and make you eat them?"
She leaves, and the others continue as if I haven't spoken. I feel strange, like there is nothing to fear. What can they do to me? A lot, of course, but they can't touch my soul. King Ruin doesn't know how. On that battlefield I win.
"Hands," I say aloud. "You're all just hands."
The operation takes what feels like hours. There are no clocks for me to look at. Men and women in white coats come and go. At times I feel sensations in my legs and arms, though I haven't moved them. I feel odd fleeting memories resurge, images from my childhood, from some particular raid on a subglacic compound, taking a hydrate rig.
I lie there and let them wash over me. I imagine they are scanning me while this happens, to see if what they're doing is going well. I can't tell if they're putting something in or taking something out. I feel like me throughout.
At the end, they close me up. Nobody speaks. I imagine the reins of King Ruin's thoughts lying upon them loosely, steering them gently. As they finish, I wonder about Mr. Ruins. Is he dead yet? I wonder if King Ruin is still diving him too, searching for some way into the bridge.
I left no trace of my passage. I think I left none. But then King Ruin had a shield about his twin suns' mind, and I'd never seen that before. I don't understand that.
Could I have left some hint to how the bridge might be opened?
It is my last cogent thought, before everything changes.
BOOM
The door bursts inward, my chair rocks, and then there's smoke and shouting everywhere. Through the thick black drifts I watch a chord of black-clad arenes sweep into the room, clinical as surgeons, shooting the King
's hands dead with Kaos rifles and leaning in to cut me free and scoop me from the chair.
"They've taken his frontal lobe," one of them calls over the ringing in my ears. I barely hear it as they cut me free. Tubes leading into the nubs of my wrists pop out, spilling fluid.
It is almost comical when another one shouts, "Find it!"
They are hunting for my brain.
More explosions rock the room. I don't know what's happening. It feels like I'm back in a place I was before, trying to escape. There was smoke, shaking, and now there is King Ruin, standing in the midst of the smoke. His copper-skin looks pale in the harsh white suit light of the arenes.
He hurls a blade at the nearest black-suited figure, which pierces the helmet-faceplate and drops the man flat to the ground.
"Mr. Goligh," he says, and reaches out toward me through the bonds, then a stream of Kaos bullets cut pebble-sized gouges through his chest. The light fades from his eyes and he sags to the floor.
It makes me happy.
"It's alright," someone says to me, someone carrying me. We're running down a long white hallway and I'm watching the ceiling lights flash by. My head rocks to the side, and I worry that something will fall out of my brain. I wonder numbly what it would be like to lose my frontal lobe.
My head lolls again, this time so I can see the trail of blood leaking behind us, from me, through the smoke. The next arene tramps all over it. Then I pass out.
DOE C
Doe and Mr. Ruins climb over the pile of blown-up bodies in the trench. She sees him picking up pieces of meat and shoving them into his pockets, but says nothing. It is himself.
"You think I'm mad," he says by her side.
"I don't think anything," Doe says. "Can you walk a little faster?"
"I might be mad, but what about you?" he asks. "You're hollow, I can see it so plainly. You're three sevenths of what you should be, like a hollow star. Do you know that a star consumes itself? Every day of burn it's consuming itself from the inside, until there's nothing left. It eats itself, you're eating yourself, I'm eating myself too. It's what we all do."
Doe takes hold of his good hand and pulls him along.
"You were talking about suns, now it's stars. Which is it?"
Mr. Ruins laughs, as she drags him along. "Sun and stars are stars and suns," he says. "Meteors, now that is another thing. Asteroids. Did you ever ride a comet's trail across the sky?"
Doe stops listening. She clicks into blood-mic.
"I've got him," she says. "He's totally mad. We're going into the keep. Over."
Ray's voice when it comes back is scratchy and obscured by static. "…… careful …… battlements rigged …… signal…."
"No read on that, Ray. It's OK. I'm going in. There may be no signal inside. Stay with the plan. Over."
"………… Over."
She clicks blood-mic off. They separated back on the wall, anyway. This is the Solid Core, now.
"Here," says Mr. Ruins, "right here, albino."
The door to the keep stands before them, as large as the blast-door to the aetheric bridge. It is made of planks of dense-looking red-brown wood, banded by black iron straps that bed into massive black hinges in the white stone.
"This isn't Napoleonic," she says, turning to Mr. Ruins. "It's medieval."
He shrugs.
"Can you open it?"
"It's just a door," he says, grinning. "Not a bridge." He steps up and takes hold of a large black ring on the left side, and turns it. A locking mechanism clicks, the door starts to swing open, and Doe notices the grin widening on Mr. Ruins blood-plastered face.
She dives to the side.
A flurry of musket fire pops out from the interior, as the door swings all the way open. Mr. Ruins is standing in the thick of it, grinning still, and offers her another shrug.
She swings on the door handle and into the opening of the keep.
Inside it is dark, fumey with gunpowder smoke, and absolutely crammed with stuff. There is too much to take it all in at once, stacked up in piles and rising to the ceiling, made up of mahogany cabinets, baize card-tables, bookshelves overstuffed with vellum scrolls, reams of film canisters, a grand bronze scale, several grandfather clocks, a ticking planet orrery, miters, three life-sized wooden Indians, three hanging chandeliers, and every nook and cranny crammed full of thousands of ornamental decorations in the shape of crystal horses.
Waving their hands in the smoke, there are five soldiers holding muskets. Two of them are reloading, working at stuffing tines and pouring in powder.
Doe grapnels Mr. Ruins to the trench wall by his neck, then plunges into the smoke. The first doesn't see her and takes her leaping knee in the face, crunching through his plastic cheek and dropping him to the floor.
"Grenades!" comes Mr. Ruins voice from behind, and as she turns to the next Doe gives the elasteel line a sharp tug to silence him. He gives a strangled bark while she rolls behind the group of four remaining soldiers.
She impales one through the back with his own musket, elbows the next in the throat, then takes a bayonet drive on the chest. It scratches into the crack Ruins' musket-ball made, twinges against flesh, and she twists away with a spinning reverse kick that catches the perpetrator in the head and somersaults him in place.
There is then a raspy click, the thunk of metal, and Doe throws herself for cover behind an ancient cedar armoire.
BOOM
The grenade sends a tide of sparkling glass horses outward like a halo tide. They ricochet tinkling off the room's hoarded treasures, clattering down like hailstones.
The armoire tips, and Doe scurries out from behind it. The man who dropped the grenade is gone, as are all his fellows, except for one of their legs. One has been blown out the door and lies prone in the mud at Mr. Ruins feet.
Doe's ears ring. She spins around, running a quick gamma scan of the interior and finding no more men waiting.
"It was a joke only, just a joke," Ruins is saying, from his position still wedged into the trench wall, his hands up defensively.
Doe stalks toward him, the blast still ringing in her ears. He flinches as she draws near.
"Please," he says. "Please understand. It's the heart of my mind."
Doe doesn't hit him. Instead she unloops the elasteel from around his neck.
"I know that," she says. "I'm not here to hurt you any more."
He breathes a cautious sigh of relief.
"Good, good," he tries. "Well, would you like a cup of tea?"
"That sounds perfect. Lead the way."
He does. The little old man faltering step is gone now, and he strides confidently into the vestibule of his inner Solid Core.
In the middle he spreads his arms, proudly displaying his collection.
"Here you'll find all the greatest treasures of my life."
"I don't care about your life," says Doe. "I want to know about the Suns. But what's with all the horses?"
Ruins looks back at her. "I like horses. And if you want to know the Suns, you need to know about me too."
"Why?"
"Because they made me."
Doe frowns at this. "What does that mean?"
"It means I was made. Here, can we watch the film?"
He points to a dusty old projector, stacked amongst other assorted display and recording devices. Doe counts three CRT television screens with cracked screens, an LCD, a recording deck from a studio, and a large console in olive-green metal, studded with a dizzying array of metal switches, plastic buttons, and multi-colored lights.
"What is that?" Doe asks, pointing at the console.
"That? It's broken. It's part of the controls for my left hand." Ruins laughs. "I don't really need it in here, not without any wires going out, but I couldn't bear to leave it outside."
Doe turns around, taking in the junk-packed space again. "Is all of this your wiring?"
"Most of it," he says. "Treasured memories too. Various people. You see I am dressed as my greatest po
ssession, Napoleon."
He gives a bow.
"You're a killer and a torturer, and all of these are your victims."
He shrugs. "To put a fine point on it. But it's what I was taught. You really should watch the video. Besides, you may remember I tried to make you part of this, too. If only you'd said yes, dear Ritry. Dear, sweet albino Ritry. Now the Suns are at my door, and they won't stop 'til they harvest me too."
"Tell me about the Suns."
"The Suns are a god, and they rule on high. They eat bonds, which means people. They've been alive for thousands of years. What else do you want to know?"
"Thousands of years?"
"Yes, thousands. They're like an oversoul for the world, think of them that way."
"Who feed on pain."
"And death," says Napoleon. "Plus there are many shades of psychological suffering, all of which taste very sweet."
"Why are they here, attacking your Tower? Why do they want you?"
Mr. Ruins bats her hands away. "My dear, I do not know. I only know what Ritry did to me, and that soon I will be erased forever, if I'm not eaten by the Suns first. I'd prefer erased, which is why I've decided to help you."
Doe frowns. "Help me how?"
"You'll see. Now I must insist that you watch my film. I have been curating it for days."
He moves over to the projector and starts rustling about, trying to extract it from the pile.
"It's difficult with only one hand," he says, looking back. "Perhaps you might help."
There is no time for this, Doe thinks. And yet, there may be time for anything. The last command she got through the suit was to TAKE THE WHITE TOWER. She has taken it. She is here, inside it. What else ought she do, but listen to its master?
She goes over to help. Together they dig the projector out, and set it up on a rickety darkwood coffee table which Mr. Ruins steadies with a stubby piece of wood.
"Looks like a chair leg, but actually it was a peg leg," he says brightly. "Of a pirate."
He bustles with the cord, and plugs in the projector somewhere amongst the trash. It flickers to life, and a faint image appears on the closed inner doors of the tower. Ruins hurries over and tugs down a white screen, then hurries back to pull up a chair.
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 18