The Emperor of Everything

He wanted to give up, to go back out to the sunlight and the crates of turnips, to forget everything that had gone before, to change his name and become another person, someone who wouldn’t have to go down to whatever waited at the bottom of the shaft.

But the way to Nisa led down; Publius was still his prime ticket into Yubere’s stronghold. He wondered if she still lived, and if she did, what she thought of Ruiz Aw. Did she hate him, as seemed most likely?

He shook his head, thrust the cudgel through his belt, and started down.

Ruiz could scarcely believe that he had survived the descent when he finally reached the bottom of the shaft. Twice he had slipped and caught himself after a short fall. Once a section of ladder had broken away from its supports and smashed him against the shaft wall, almost shaking him loose. But none of his scrapes seemed serious, though his injured shoulder was throbbing again.

The shaft wall was ripped open at three levels, as if Remint had set his charges to distract Publius’s remaining people and divide their attention. From the perfect stillness of Publius’s formerly busy laboratories, Ruiz deduced that Remint’s ploy had succeeded.

He began to worry that Remint had already killed Publius, or tormented him into uselessness. “Now you think of this?” he whispered to himself.

Pointless, he thought wryly, to start relying on logic at this late date.

So he entered the dead laboratories.

The silence was intimidating. Ruiz moved stealthily through the level, slipping from one place of concealment to the next, pausing frequently to strain his senses for any indication that Publius’s security forces were still functioning. He heard nothing.

Here and there he saw the bodies of technicians, who had evidently been armed with makeshift weapons — knives and clubs — and sent against Remint. From one of these he retrieved a knife with a long thin blade, which he bound to his forearm with a rag, so that the hilt lay above his wrist. None of the clubs seemed as suitable as the farmer’s cudgel, so he kept it ready in his hand.

A few of these latest victims had lived long enough to drag themselves under lab benches, or behind concealing machinery. Had Remint lost some fraction of his efficiency… was he beginning to tire? Might he have taken wounds? This seemed a cheerful conjecture, and Ruiz’s spirits rose slightly.

When he heard the ring of steel on steel, he became even more cautious, but he soon discovered that the sound came from the sunken amphitheater that Publius had pointed out on his first visit. The little ursine warriors still slashed at each other with dazzling speed; evidently the events in the laboratory had not distracted them from their inbred ferocity. There were still quite a lot of them; perhaps this was a later generation of the elimination trials.

He looked down at them for a moment, almost envying them their uncomplicated passions.

Ruiz went on a few steps, and then paused by the tanks that held Publius’s insurance clones. On an impulse, he slid up the screen that kept the tanks comfortably dark.

The three copies of the monster-maker stirred uneasily, flexing their soft bodies and pawing clumsily at their eyes. Ruiz felt an intensity of hatred that made it difficult for him to draw a breath. That the three clones were in the strictest sense innocent of Publius’s crimes seemed an insignificant and abstract fact.

He considered the possibility of taking one of the clones — but the clone would have no knowledge of Publius’s current arrangements, nor would it look like Publius. Almost certainly the false Yubere wouldn’t recognize the clone’s authority.

He bent and touched the control slate, and the nutrient fluid that kept them alive started to drain silently into the sump.

They began to writhe and then to pound at the thick glass that trapped them. The nearest one forced his puffy eyes open and glared at Ruiz, mouthing words that Ruiz could not hear.

He slid down the screen and left them to expire in the dark.

He heard the thud of Remint’s boots against the tiled floor just in time to dart behind a nearby lab bench.

From that doubtful concealment, he watched, heart pounding, as Remint appeared from an access corridor, towing a floater on which a man lay, bound with wide straps. Ruiz couldn’t identify the man at first, but then the man lifted his hands as high as the straps would permit, and made a theatrical gesture that belonged unmistakably to Publius. So the monster-maker still lived.

Ruiz was pleased to see that Remint appeared seriously battered. The slayer’s armor was shattered and bloody over his left thigh, and he walked with a perceptible limp. The armor had separated slightly over his left shoulder, and his left arm hung stiffly, as if the armor had locked at the elbow, though the hand still clutched a splinter gun. He carried a sonic knife in his right hand, and the floater’s tow line was hitched to a ring at his armored waist.