The Emperor of Everything

The Emperor of Everything by Ray Aldridge

Can you ride

the horses of the heart

by some sacrificial art

or the keenness of your wits?

No.

See the blood on the bits.

— Carved on the gatepost of the Celadon Wind, a SeaStack fabularium

Chapter 1

The stolen airboat followed its preprogrammed course, flying ten meters above the pink veldt of Sook, toward the distant blue mountains.

Ruiz Aw watched the control panel. All seemed to be well; the engines hummed, the compass was steady, the communit was blessedly silent. His Pharaohan passengers had fallen asleep, exhausted by the previous night’s violent events. He turned and regarded them. He took particular pleasure in watching Nisa, who slept with her head tipped to the side, a strand of black glossy hair caught in the corner of her rich mouth. Three Pharaohan men with tattooed faces slept in the other acceleration seats; a fourth sat chained in the hold below, still wearing his explosive slave collar and suffering from culture-shift psychosis.

Ruiz felt an odd mixture of cheerful lassitude and anticipatory terror.

On the one hand, he was putting distance between himself and the slaver Corean Heiclaro, which was very good. On the other hand, he expected her to call the boat presently — and that was very bad. She would be expecting to speak with her lieutenant, an ancient cyborged pirate named Marmo, whom Ruiz had disabled and dumped from the boat as they fled across the veldt, or to Banessa, her giant enforcer, whom Ruiz had killed in the course of capturing the boat.

Corean would soon be very angry with Ruiz, and Corean was a person whose rages were to be feared. Ruiz had seen her dispose of substandard slaves with no more emotion than an ordinary person would display at the uprooting of a weed.

Still, his fortunes had undeniably improved. The previous night he’d been a prisoner in the airboat’s hold, tethered among his fellow slaves. This morning his neck was pleasantly unconstricted. Even though he couldn’t alter the boat’s course, he could adjust its speed, and he was almost certain that he could cause it to land if an alternative means of escape presented itself. He believed that he had disabled the boat’s remote handling circuits, so that Corean couldn’t regain control — though he couldn’t be sure, since the boat was equipped with an unfamiliar biomech guidance system.

Time passed and the communit remained quiescent. Ruiz gradually relaxed. The blue mountains grew closer, and it became obvious that they were headed for a notch between two craggy peaks.

He had almost surrendered to a cautious optimism by the time the communit lit up and sounded a soft chime. Terror returned immediately, even though he was almost sure that the boat was unequipped with a remote destruct. Almost.

He had considered and rejected the idea of attempting to conceal his capture of the boat. He could have disabled the video and degraded the voice transmission, but he assumed Marmo and Corean employed some code phrase to establish identity under such circumstances. By immediately confronting the slaver with his deed, he thought it possible she might be usefully startled.

Ruiz reached out with a trembling finger, touched the channel-open switch.

The vidscreen bloomed into life, a swirl of primary colors that swiftly resolved into Corean’s perfect face. For a long instant she stared into the pickup, motionless, apparently stunned to see Ruiz Aw looking back at her. Her wonderful eyes widened slightly, her skin went pale, and then her mouth writhed. “You,” she said, loathing distorting her voice. “You. I should have killed you the first moment I saw you.”

“Probably so,” Ruiz said, in as agreeable a voice as he could manage.

“I don’t know why I ever thought you pretty,” she said. “You’re a worthless creature. I’ll never make such a mistake again.”

“Probably not,” Ruiz said, and sighed. Corean owned a face designed by one of the pangalac worlds’ greatest linea-mentors; even the ugly emotions struggling across those marvelous features couldn’t wholly conceal the artist’s brilliant work. There was, Ruiz thought, something terribly perverse about a woman so lovely that he couldn’t help admiring her, even when she was wishing him a painful death.

She regained control. “Where is Marmo?”

“Somewhere on the veldt.”

“Dead?”

“I don’t know,” Ruiz answered, and smiled with as much charm as he could muster. “Does he bounce?”

She turned whiter, and for an instant her eyes burned incandescently. She muttered a Dobravit curse under her breath.

Ruiz waited, wondering if he dared provoke her further. Why not? “But Banessa’s dead, if that helps. I strangled her with this.” He held up the explosive-collar controller by its ribbon.