This was always King Ruin's dream, to shave the whole of the aether through the bridge. Now it's happening. The people don't feel it, they don't see it, but their lives are gradually being emptied out. I can reach no further than the bubble around me, not beyond the wall of my HUD's shielding EMR, but I can imagine their Soul-trails lines sucking up through the bridge in every direction, in every part of the world.
The power of them must be immense. Is it enough to become a god?
Somebody laughs from a second-floor window to my right, and I look up. Purplish smoke and the scent of old liquor wafts outward. A swarthy red-faced man leans on the rusted sill looking down at me, a leering grin on his face.
"War's twenty years over pal," he calls, pointing at my helmet. "What you wearing that for?"
He is within my EMR shield and I read his thoughts with ease; a proto-Rusk on a freighter run from the great hydrate dust-bowl out east. There is a prostitute in the next room he longs to have sex with, but he's already dreading looking into her face and seeing the fakery. He's planning to look away at just that moment, so it can seem more real.
He'll suffice. I reach out to either side and feel many more Souls, some of them his fellow crew, some of them the prostitutes, barmen and masseuses that will cater to their wants. They are exactly the people I am here to save, and exactly the kind of people I need.
Sacrifices, Far wrote in the pack. I am ready for this now.
With a thought, I core them. All consciousness fades from their heads. I erase them in a blink and send their Souls spiking into the aether. If anyone across the bridge should notice, they will probably think it's just more Don-wannabes cleaning house.
But who would care?
It is awful, but I can't think about that. This is a Soul-jack to save us all, as Far reminded me. I cannot be weak anymore.
I reach into these new hands. At my call they come out from their rat-warrens of lean-to acrylic and ruptured boat-hulls; junkies and dealers, whores and hustlers and johns. There are almost forty of them, the largest chord I have yet controlled; dressed in ragged lingerie, in oil-stained canvas freighter-wear, in the pressed seaweed cloth that passes for summer clothes here. They are young and old, men and women, all fragile loners looking for something.
It's awful, how easy it is.
We move together like a lava flow up the narrow alleyways of this Skulk. In the shadow of the tsunami wall we head along the walkway toward the mid-Skulk off-load pumps. Perhaps a hundred freighter ships are moored there, surrounded by gantries and jetties and the towering hollow horse-frames of loading cranes.
We walk into it; this gap in the Skulks like a cankered open mouth that serves to feed Calico's fuel and food needs. Hundreds of smaller boats bob between the giant tankers like nesting crulls, from tiny fishing junks with reams of net to whale harvesters, their decks stained black with rendered blubber-soot and blood.
The raucous cries of drunk freighters beset us as we pass, asking if we are some kind of parade. "Are you a guru?" One of them asks me, staggering near. "I always wanted a guru."
I Lag only his memory of me. I have enough hands for now.
We pass through makeshift markets, where despite the late hour Skulk-workers are tramping their feet in large plastic paddling pools filled with whale blubber, grinding it to paste for packaging in old tin cans. We pass down interwoven alleyways where all manner of misshapen fish, manta rays and sharks hang to dry like cast-off clothes. I smell salt and fish blood and the grimy tang of rotting sawdust, used to pack whale meat into crates.
I Lag all memory of us as we pass, until we reach the proto-Rusk's freighter.
RACHRANIKA
From the Molten Core of one of my new chord, an engineer, I learn this name is a portmanteau meaning 'early spring'. It is beautiful. The ship is not, a towering wall of flaking red paint and rust, laden down with perhaps two hundred long metal shipping canisters, only half-unloaded. These will be carrying Arctic hydrates, probably unrefined, and highly explosive.
This whole ship is a bomb. I can smell the nitric stink of the hydrates in the air, which taking me back to the War.
We climb into the ship. I send those already on board back out and Lag them of the memory of it. They will wonder where their ship has gone, shortly. I ascend to the captain's bridge, in a forecastle two stories above deck. It is not like a subglacic at all, and there is no periscope, only windows. I have never captained a ship this size before, but it is not so hard now that I have access to the memories of all these freightermen and women. They already know their roles.
We ease out of our berth without commotion. At some point a man on dock waves a red flag at us, but it doesn't concern me. He is too far away to Lag, outside of my Wall. This kind of piracy happens all the time. I have stolen their goods, and perhaps they will commission a war party to follow me. That would not be so bad. If they send military hardware in my wake, even better.
I'd like a helicopter, a Dactyl if they have any. I'm too far away to place the order on the bonds. I'll find one if I need it.
Flanking engines steadily turn us until we face the open ocean. The route ahead is long and arced, bringing us down around the sunken hub of old Europa to the Black Sea. At full speed I estimate it will take seven days.
I need seven days to prepare. I sit back in the captain's chair, behind the polished rosewood wheel. I have just killed forty people, forty votive sacrifices, but I can't think about that now. I am on my way to becoming a god.
I order food from the kitchens. My EMR Wall is large enough to encompass most of the ship, so I can control my hands most of the time. I put the ex-junkies to work peeling potatoes and the ex-whores to work grilling old whale meat. It'll be a welcome feast.
15. RAGE
We glide over the ocean; down the jagged curves of proto-Rusk, around the bomb-shelled coastline of Europe, all vast lakes and upheaved coral beds, and circle the great horn of Portugal. From there we cross the Mediterranean, where the thick salt water buoys us tall.
We pass other tankers, steamers, whalers, fishing fleets. A crop of pirate junks pass us by in the second night, eleven men and three slave women below decks, hungering for some shallow kind of conquest. I Lag the men absently, leaving the women in control of their own fate.
We pass up the Bosporus causeway, once a strait but now a wide channel cleared by years of tsunami. Few others pass this way, as the Black Sea basin is now a morphological wasteland. There is only sand, and dust, and no rain falls.
Three days pass. I work my crew, my new batch of hands, and when the work is done I shut them down. At times they all sleep, while I walk the decks and halls of this vast tanker alone. In the belly I tap the hydrate tanks and listen to the dull echo of the condensed fuel sloshing like the tides. In the outdated Soul-jack room I roll flasks of CSF in my hands, sitting in the EMR-chair and thinking about the future. In the large canteen amidships I sit amongst my hands like a King, while they lie unconscious about me like snakes, sunning themselves.
I wonder at the temptations King Ruin felt at such power, at how easy it was for him/her to do the things he did, once he/she'd taken that first step. Sitting there surrounded by these unfeeling bodies, I measure the distance between myself and such deeds.
It is not so great, and that surprises me. One different choice and I might have become the predator Mr. Ruin wanted me to be. I am glad that there is no appeal in such cruelties for me. Even if I enjoyed them they would still be self-harm, slitting my own Soul along with theirs just to feel something, when I feel plenty already.
I feel rage.
For three days I take the air and I plan. Standing on top of the containers, these faded red, blue and green metal boxes rising ten stories tall off the deck, I look out to the Hollow Desert far to the south and east. Out there lies the remnant of my army, in smoking, ideation-broken ruin. Out there lies a subglacic with a Lagged Court in it, and a shattered suprarene with the dregs of King Ruin. Out there lies Ray, and So, and L
a and Yena.
The air is different here. I can taste it in the wind, blowing sultry and salty over my skin. The sand smells of desolation. On the Arctic it is sadness, tinged enough with a human touch that there is emotion attached still. Here there is not even that. This is a world reclaimed a long time past, taken from us by the sand, the wind, the dust.
I reach out within the EMR bubble that walls me in and feel the death of the bonds accelerate. The brood-King is drawing more power. I can feel him faintly at the border of the Wall, like a black hole sucking everything in. His fish-hook lines have become a flood, a tsunami flowing toward Iquliat. He is surely building something there, a tower large enough to jack through even the deepest bridge.
Sitting in the captain's open cabin, my hand resting on the Engine Order Telegraph lever while the ship hums and buzzes with cleaning, cooking, eating and shitting like an ant farm below, I think about why.
Why.
I could go to Iquliat, I could raise an army large enough to fill my bubble and I could try to fight, but against the power that he has? It would be like trying to fight the magnetic pole with iron filings. He has the direct route to every Soul, and all I have is this pillar of silence filled with sacrificed slaves that do my bidding. I wonder if it would be worth it if I core half the world, and he cores the other half, so that we could fight.
Yena saw this coming.
I think back to what Far wrote about him, and wonder what he wants. I felt him in the aether, and there was no joy in the moment he killed me. He isn't angry and vengeful like King Ruin. He isn't lonely and lost like Mr. Ruin. I remember the feel of his mind in mine, as he thanked me.
At the time it felt like gloating, a final twist of the spear, but now I see it wasn't intended to be cruel. It was sincere. The brood-King wanted to thank me for helping him to kill my world, for helping him become a god.
Perhaps all the times I died really did help him. Perhaps he saw something in those deaths that not even Far could see.
I look over Far's notes again, riffling in the dry wind, though already I've memorized every word. If I cross the bridge it can only be once, but the bridge is the only possible path to becoming a god, so at some point I must cross it.
Now the brood-King stands guard. To pass through, I must pass through him.
How long do I have? I do not know. Ten days have passed since he raided my army. His draw on the world grows stronger and his apotheosis could come at any moment. There is no more time for delay.
So, we arrive.
16. MONASTERY
The monastery is as I remember it from Mr. Ruin's memories, displayed for Doe on a projector screen in the White Tower. It is set into a sheer white limestone cliff, above which lies a blue sky and below which surge deep blue breakers.
The monastery complex hugs the cliff some five hundred feet up; three interconnected structures with open-face cloisters poised near the top, arched out of travertine lime and dressed with faded veiny marble. There is no telling how deeply they press into the rock. They stretch half as long as my tanker, rising to a large circular tower like a conning tower atop a sharp jut of cliff, capped with light red terracotta slates.
It is from within that circular turret, in one of many classrooms given over to lessons, that Mr. Ruin's projector-screen memory comes. There he listened to the lecturing corpse of a skinned cadaver along with all the King's brood, dreaming of the day he would do worse deeds himself and earn his father's pride.
Even from here I can feel the residue they have left in the bonds, like rat poison. Thousands have passed through here, all children found in Courts who survived one way or another and became his brood. Every one of the brood I have met and killed in the Hollow Desert, in Saunderston, on the Arctic waters passed through this place at some point.
The tanker grinds closer, scratching its hull on rocks in the shallow water, and I reach for some sign of the brood-King. If all the brood came this way, leaving their bond-lines stretching away in every direction, then so did he; but I don't feel him. I would know him, I feel his signature on the wind as he drains us all, but he is not here.
There is no trace.
Standing at the base of the cliff, my tanker close to foundering on the dark red sandstone crags jutting through the water, I look up at the monastery. It is suspended on stone trellises emerging from the cliff, like a barnacle clinging to life. I can feel from the bonds that it has clung here for over a thousand years, populated for most of that time by ancient men and women of some long-dead god, who came to this remote, inhospitable place searching for some kind of meaning.
I feel them strongly, beneath the thick cladding of muck the brood have laid over them like shit and straw on a stable's solid flagstones. Here hundreds of holy seekers once lived in cenobitic, communal perfection, each one an experiment in how humans might best exist.
Scattered about the cliff-face I pick out the pockmarks of their tiny shallow caves, each one a cell that once held anchorite hermits; those whose faith was so strong they sought to live only for prayer, confining themselves to a solitary life for decades at a time. In their tiny self-imposed culverts in the rock, they ate what food and water was passed down by their brethren, each one a mind steeping in its own juices and living full in the face of god. Some of them even had themselves immured, bricked-in to their cells, with only the tiniest slit through which they could see the world without and receive their sustenance.
I look out over the sky and ocean and wonder where their god is now. Is it me? Were they waiting for me, or the brood-King? I wonder what they saw in all this blue that made their strange and lonely lives worthwhile, that prevented them from hurling themselves out of their cells to die on the rocks below.
Meet your maker, my darlings, meet the one who made you.
The echoes of their minds are alien to me. As for the killings and the torture of the brood that lie above them like sedimentary clay, that I am used to; I have lived through, I have seen a thousand times before. But this faith, the same glory I felt in the battered godships, stymies me and defies all explanation. What they did seems to have no meaning but at once has all the meaning I can imagine. They thought for us all. Their minds ran calculations that informed everything that came after.
Even these thoughts confuse me. I feel they come from without, involving ideas I did not initiate; that leap and tumble free of logic or the laws I understand. Perhaps something Far saw in the depths has altered me. Perhaps he learned something after all.
Still there is no sign of the brood-King.
The tanker halts, drops anchor, and we climb. Grapnels would help but we have none, so we gather rope and begin the ascent by hand, ten of my chord and me operating as one organism, all arms and legs propelling us upward. For climbing stays we use bolt guns from the tanker's engine-room, fixing a pinball-pattern of nails into this ancient cliff-face. As I climb, controlling twenty arms and twenty legs beyond my own, I imagine a great metal ball tumbling down and striking off these tiny pins we have left behind, scoring points before splashing massively into the ocean.
Halfway up we come upon a ladder carved into the rock, its stone rungs worn slippery and shiny with a thousand years of climbing. The rungs simply begin at a point in the middle of the cliff, below which there are no more. Perhaps this was the work of the monks above, to climb up and down ceaselessly. Perhaps when their time came they simply climbed down and dropped off the bottom, and that was their end.
We climb it like ants along a trail of honey, still shooting bolts into the rock for safety. I have only this body now, and this one EMR helmet that traps me within it. I cannot afford to lose either.
The ladder leads into a small cell cantilevered out from the main cloister and we emerge within it, into a cool room blackened with old blood. In single file we emerge through the opening in the floor, and I catch glimpses of the varied ways King Ruin's initiates would eviscerate their subjects here.
I shut them off. Deeper back in time I see the m
onks passing through this space, painstakingly chiseling the ladder's rungs out of stone.
From the cell we enter into a long stone-ribbed cloister hall. To the left is the cliff-face and to the right are open walls held up with thick columns, providing a balcony on an amazing view of the blue Black Sea.
We walk on; five of my hands ahead, five behind. Now there are numerous archways carved into the raw rock on the left, their wooden doors long rotted to dust, each leading into small cells. Sunlight floods into each, illuminating the dried-up husks of mummified bodies on the floor. A few still hang pinned to the walls where they were left by the brood, but most have crumbled to the floor and lie in the dust of ancient desks, beds and scrolls.
I lean in to one cell and rub the dust between my fingers. I can feel its history through the bonds, a compost of memories like my tower of memory in Candyland: a dissolved holy script one man spent a lifetime etching with gold, desiccated lice eggs, rough-wool blankets, human skin and bone, the many tortures the brood brought in latter days.
It has no smell or special sense. It is dust only, like all the dust of the world, but even in it I can feel the fishhooks of the brood-King. This too he is drawing on and thinning out.
We move on. At the end of the first cloister a stone bridge carries us to the next. Here the wall on the right is limited to slitted windows in the lime and the ceiling vaults upward like a cathedral, half built of stone blocks, half carved into the cliff, though the line where one gives over to the other is unclear. The craftsmanship is unadorned but startling in its perfect fusion. I see on the floor the marks where long mahogany pews imported from Africa once stood, the pulpit where the abbot once gave sermons. The central aisle is marked by a wide, shallow channel in the stone where ages of penitent feet have worn it away.
There is a sense of old reverence here still which even the debaucheries of the brood have been unable to remove. I see more of their nails stippling the walls, where they strung up their victims to practice a mockery of ancient religious figures, but they could not touch the deep communal Soul of the place; that sense of endless striving for something pure and holy despite the pains and pangs of the flesh.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 50