They didn't hit the towers, though. It was the walkway that exploded into Red's back.
The impact was awful. Red's vision sparked to black, pain erupting through every part of her. The broken rib was a blowtorch in her side, joining up with fires in her back, her limbs. She screamed, weakly, blood and bile choking her.
Hermas had rolled away, and was getting to his knees. He staggered up, standing over her, then slowly reached around his own back.
"I saved this for you, Blasphemy," he gasped, and then tensed the muscles of his arm. There was a slick, grinding sound, a sucking, and the point of the staking pin disappeared back into his chest.
Blood came, filling the space it had vacated. Drops fell onto Red, striking her in the belly, and they began to burn. Unable to move, barely conscious, she moaned as the pain of the corrosion added itself to the symphony of hurt already playing upon her nerves. It was all she could do to keep her eyes open, to watch Hermas drop to his knees and raise the staking pin, two-handed, above his head.
The point of it was aimed at her heart, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it. Unlike Hermas, a stake through the heart would finish her once and for all.
At least it was traditional.
"In the name of the Patriarch," Hermas breathed. He swept the stake back, readied himself for the blow.
A thread of light touched him between the eyes, and his head exploded.
The detonation was instantaneous, utterly without warning. Everything above his lower jaw was gone, a cloudy shower of crimson steam and debris. Red found enough strength to jerk back from it, as the scarlet cloud started to rain blood and pulverised tissue down over the walkway. Hermas sank forward, his emptied neck spilling ruin onto the mesh. He toppled.
The staking pin, still clutched in his two hands, struck the metal between Red's knees.
She staggered up. "D'Isis?"
"Right here." His voice, so close to the source, reverberated with power. "A communications laser. I had it installed a very long time ago, and then made sure it was forgotten about. I'm so glad it still works."
"Me too." Red paused, wincing, then straightened herself up in one sharp heave. Agony flared at more points in her than she could count, but then began to fade. "I wish you'd just say what you mean once in a while. 'Get him close to the big black thing. I've got a laser' would have been a start."
"And imagine our mutual disappointment if it hadn't worked."
"True." She moved closer. "So, do we do this face to face, or what?"
"It's always been my favourite method. But be warned: I'm not the man I once was."
There was a sound, a heavy metallic thump. Red felt it through the mesh. It was followed by another, and another, accelerating, and as the sounds came, so the metal cylinder at the heart of the Keep began to open up. Each thump was a bolt unlatching, and each allowed a section of the casing to hinge upwards, until they hung above Red like the petals of some outlandish flower.
She walked forwards, towards the massive tank of fluid that the petals had revealed. And there, finally, she saw the Gothking.
He filled the tank, parts of him pressing against its sides, bobbing in a vile soup of nutrient fluid. Pulpy folds of grey tissue, shot through with pumping veins, slid greasily past the glass as the currents within moved him.
There were still a few scraps of humanity in the muck. A withered twist of limb, an eye milky with multiple cataracts, a tooth or two. But in essence, Red was looking up at a brain tumour the size of a house. Its constituent mess must have weighed tonnes.
"Oh sneck," she breathed.
"Nice to meet you too," the Gothking replied. "Now, I think it's time we had a chat. There's still a little time before the end."
19. DECODED
"I warned you," the Gothking told her.
Red shook her head. "I've seen worse. Believe me, I really have. That thing in Lavannos..." She stepped right up to the glass, and put her hand on it. It was warm. "I still don't understand, though."
"There's no way you could." The thing in the tank moved, fitfully. "And now that you are finally here, I'm not even sure how to explain it all. So much happened after we met on Lethe, Durham Red. And I don't know how much time we have."
"I've worked one thing out for myself. The Board were keeping you alive."
"That, and the myth of the Magister. Every now and then they would find some poor devil, have him killed, and sorrowfully announce to the citadels that another glorious ruler was dead. They'd give him a new name, paint a portrait, and the job was done for another decade or two. No one wanted to reveal that the Prime Magister was still alive." He sighed. "If you can call this living."
Red most definitely did not. "So what happened? Who did this to you?"
"You did," he said simply, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
"I think I'd remember."
"Not really. You were asleep."
She nodded. "I get it. Whatever happened, happened after I got frozen."
"Some years after, from what I can gather. Although it all started on Lethe. Once you'd won your contest with me, and I took the price from your head. I didn't realise how much face I would lose on account of that, until it was too late."
"And I thought it was just the money."
"Oh no, my dear, it was never just the money. After Lethe, my whole empire fell. It took a decade or two for the rot to really set in, but the decline was inexorable. When the profits stopped coming, the protection stopped, and the forces of law began to close in. By the time the authorities had me where they wanted me, everything I'd had was gone. Because of you."
Red had started to pace around the tank. D'Isis didn't look any prettier from a different angle, but she needed to keep moving. To stop her injured joints from seizing up, if nothing else.
"So I won after all. I finally brought you down."
"You did. All it needed was patience, a quality that you rather lacked until the lid of your cryo-tube closed. But yes, you won in the end."
Red had reached Hermas again. He didn't look any prettier either. "What happened?"
"They parcelled up the remnants of my empire, all my Gothlords and their families, the few chattels I could legally hold on to, and they banished us here, to Magadan. In a way, we were lucky. Execution had gone out of style."
Red frowned. "They didn't put you in prison?"
"There were a hundred thousand of us. Few prisons have such capacity. Anyway, they didn't want us to get out. We were to be wiped from the face of the universe, and that's exactly what they did. Look on any star chart, Red, and you'll find no trace of Magadan."
Red felt a hard spike of panic at her very core, ice-cold and shuddering. "What do you mean?"
"There were two worlds in this system's biozone, Ashkelon and Magadan. Now there's only one. They put us here, and then..."
The voice trailed off. Red stepped forward and slapped the glass, hard. The talk of vanishing worlds was bringing back memories she didn't want in her head any more. "What, D'isis? Tell me what they did!"
"They encoded us."
It wasn't the answer she was expecting. "Come again?"
The transcendant remains of the Gothking gave that breathy, metallic sigh. "We were encoded. They confined us to one part of the planet at first, an island. We thought it was going to be some kind of prison camp, but there was more to it than that. We saw them setting machines up around us. It took a year for them to finish doing that, and another to calibrate the system. And then they switched them on... Dear God, the panic!"
"What happened?"
"We were turned inside out." There was a chill to his voice, now. The memory of what he was relating must have been torturous. "Every one of us, unmade, in front of each other. We were reduced, folded, crushed so small, but conscious of it the entire time. They reduced us to symbols of ourselves, and then wrote us down where no one would ever find us." He must have seen the blank incomprehension on Red's face. "Don't you see, girl? I
f you want to store a mass of data, what do you do?"
"Compress it," she replied, her voice weak. "Encode it."
"Everything. The very stuff of us, our flesh and bones, our thoughts and feelings, the ground beneath our feet. The air we breathed. The entire centre of the island was encoded."
"They zipfiled you?" Red scraped her hands back through her hair, her mind spinning. How could a world, a people, be reduced to code? It was deranged, impossible. And yet...
All she could think about was the hilltops, and the mist that covered them. She hadn't been able to cross to the other side of the hill because they didn't have another side.
Dear God, he was telling the truth. For a thousand years or more, the Gothking and his people had been reduced to data.
She stumbled away, turning her back on the tank and its ancient occupant. Her mind was reeling. It was bad enough that entire worlds could be moved, sent off to hell, and then retrieved with living cancers at their core. It was bad enough that her home planet had been torn from its orbit and sent away into the depths of space. But now, to discover that the world she now stood on was no more than an encoded representation of itself, a series of symbols that walked and talked and thought themselves real...
Durham Red herself no longer existed, except as code.
The Gothking must have suppressed the knowledge from those that came after. He invented myths about the outside world being diseased, so that no one would travel to the end of the world and find out how close it was. He told his engineers to build upwards, rather than outwards, because there was no territory to colonise beyond their immediate field of vision. "This code. They must have hidden it somewhere."
"From what I've been able to work out, about a cubic kilometre of active silicon is buried somewhere on Ashkelon, transported by some new technology of theirs."
"But you found a way out. The Logic Gate."
"It took a long, long time. Longer than I would have lived."
"So you changed yourself." She stared into the tank, through the greasy nutrient soup to the pulsing matter beyond. "It started small, didn't it? A drug to make you smarter, another to get an extra few years. But you couldn't stop. You got addicted."
"You've got it half right. Once the Logic Gate opened, that first time, I was ready to stop. But the Gate relies on me. Without my control, it's nothing."
Suddenly, the machines around them grew dim, and then brightened again. The very structure of the Keep seemed to groan. Red backed away, looking wildly around her. "That's you, isn't it? The systems failures, the power outages, this is because of you..."
"They wouldn't let me die," he whispered. "I've been like this a thousand years, and they wouldn't let me go. I had power over nothing but the gate, so I couldn't stop them, couldn't kill myself or allow myself to die. I've not slept in ten centuries..."
And then Durham Red finally realised what was happening. Why she'd been brought to the Keep, why the power was failing, everything.
The Gothking wanted to die.
The Board had kept him in suspension for a thousand years, just so they could continue to use his Logic Gate. They had preyed on their own people, feeding them to him, and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it. All he could do was control the Gate.
Maybe they gave him a little light interrogation every now and then. He'd always been subtle, and he'd manipulated Losen and Sorrelier somehow. All it must have taken was a few scraps of advice in the right places.
D'Isis had learned that she was still alive somehow. "You keyed the Logic Gate to me, didn't you? So things would start to go wrong once I came through it."
"You always were brighter than you gave yourself credit for, Red. And yes, it was the only choice I had. The Gate is as much a part of me as I am of it - there was nothing else I had power over. But I did have a piece of your genetic code."
Red closed her eyes. There were a thousand places he could have stolen it from. "The Gate's allergic to me."
"Crudely put, but more or less true." The mass in the tank seemed to settle, and as it did the lights dimmed again, and fluttered. "I'm sorry, Durham Red. You were the only weapon in the universe I could use."
In the silence, footsteps sounded on the walkway. Red turned, and saw Matteus Godolkin striding toward her.
For a moment she was so stunned to see him that she couldn't even speak, so pleased that she could have rushed forward and hugged him. And then she realised it wasn't the real Godolkin she was looking at, any more than she was the real Durham Red. He was an encoded version of himself, a symbol, a few scraps of code enscribed into a block of active silicon somewhere under the crust of Ashkelon.
He was looking down at the corpse. "Impressive. I can only assume, Blasphemy, that your weaponry is more effective than your tailor."
"Nice to see you too," she said thickly. "I mean it. Really."
"Hmph."
She turned back to D'Isis. "How long?"
"I can't say." His voice was faltering. Red saw Godolkin frowning at the ceiling, trying to place the source of it.
"Blasphemy?"
Red patted Godolkin's shoulder. "I'll tell you later. Just watch my back, okay?"
"Thy will be done."
"D'Isis, listen to me. The people in the Keep, they don't deserve this. The Board did, but you've had your revenge on them. You can stop this now."
"It can't be stopped. It never could. Soon the first gravity nullifier will suffer a failure, and then it's all over. The Grand Keep will implode."
"You'll kill thousands!" She flung her arms wide. "There are children out there, scared stiff, wondering why the lights are going out! Are you going to slaughter them, just so you can die?"
There was silence. Below her, the walkway shifted and groaned.
"Please," she breathed, moving close to the tank again. "You've got what you wanted. If it's going to come down, then so be it. But please, don't take them all with you."
For a long time, all she could hear was her own heartbeat, and the groan of the failing machines around her. Then the Gothking spoke.
"What have we become, Durham Red?" D'Isis whispered at last. "A frozen bounty hunter and a drug dealer in a tank. How did it come to this?"
"I wish I knew."
Something was moving on top of the tank. It was the communications laser, the one that had taken Hermas's head off. Red saw it swing up, swivelling on its gimbals until it was pointing directly upwards.
A dish was dropping from the ceiling, far above. A second later, a thread of crimson light connected the two, flaring off the dish like a minor sun.
"People of the Grand Keep," the sounders roared.
The voice was deafening. Red had to clap her hands over her ears to shut it out. She could feel the hammer of it coming up from the walkway, vibrating the glass in the windows, shaking her in her boots. Even Godolkin was wincing.
"People of the Grand Keep, this is your Magister. Hear me!"
The voice must have been echoing around the entire Keep, thought Red. Only with the systems failing could the Gothking make this connection - the Board would have stopped him in an instant, had they been in control.
"By order of the Magister, Lord High Knight of the five Citadels, all citizens of the Grand Keep are ordered to evacuate by any possible means! The outside world will not harm you, its diseases have been conquered. But power failures are causing the Keep's structure to collapse, and the end is at hand. Get to your ships, my people! Flee while you can!"
The laser dimmed, and when the Gothking next spoke it was to Red alone. "I'll warn them for as long as I can," he said.
"Thank you."
"Don't be so quick with your thanks, girl. Most won't go, they'll be too afraid. But we'll save some. Oh, and by the way..."
"What?"
"I'd start running, if I were you."
Running wasn't easy, but it was all she could do. Red didn't know how long it would be before the gravity nullifiers gave out - it might be hours, or just
minutes. But the Keep was moaning and shivering like a beast in pain, and Red certainly didn't want to be around when the ceilings started to come down.
By the time she reached the service elevator she was almost totally out of breath. Godolkin, in contrast, looked as though he had been out for a stroll. "We need to go up several strata," he told her. "The hangar deck. During my pursuit of Hermas I noticed towers there that are twin to those on Ashkelon."
Red nodded. It made sense. Assuming the Logic Gate acted as its name implied, the ships on that stratum would only have to launch forward to be swallowed, decoded and spat back into the real, solid universe.
Godolkin eyed the lift carefully as she slid the hatch aside. "This was how you arrived, Mistress?"
"Yeah. What about you?"
"Other methods. However, this would seem more sensible, considering your injuries."
"I'm fine. Just get in and scooch over, okay? This is going to be a bit cramped."
All things considered, Matteus Godolkin's body was not the worst thing Red had ever found herself crushed up against. The pressure of her body against his gave a welcoming warmth, even though it made her broken rib ache. Once they were ascending she took the opportunity to smile up at him. "It's good to see you, Godolkin."
He snorted, but kept his silence. Red realised that he was embarrassed.
She grinned, and increased the pressure, just for the hell of it.
The elevator reached its destination a little soon for her liking, but not soon enough for the Iconoclast. Red opened the hatch and stepped out. He followed, keeping his face impassive but obviously relieved. "What?" she grinned. "My deodorant not making the grade any more?"
"Harrow is waiting for us on the other side of this Logic Gate, Blasphemy. Considering that Major Ketta and a large number of Omega warriors are there with him, haste would seem more appropriate than humour."
"Okay, okay. Don't rush me." She glanced around, looking for the best ship to steal, and then noticed Godolkin's attention wasn't on her any more. He was walking slowly away, his gaze fixed on something she couldn't see. "What?"
The Encoded Heart Page 21