The Emperor of Everything

Dolmaero shook his head. “Perhaps it’s no trouble at all. Many things I regarded as impossible seem to be easy here: flying, raising the dead…. Perhaps, for these folk, hot muffins and fresh-squeezed juice are as easy to provide as stale bread and water.”

“It’s a possibility,” Molnekh said, looking unconvinced.

Ruiz ignored them and studied the forest. It grew increasingly less wild, interrupted more frequently with cut-over tracts, cultivated fields, manicured pastures. Occasionally they passed habitations. Many were crude huts, some were hunting lodges built elegantly of wood and stone, and once they passed a palazzo built of some glistening blue ceramic material, all slender spires and graceful flying buttresses.

“What is it?” Nisa asked.

“A wealthy house,” he answered absently. Just the place, he thought, to steal a good airboat. A bitter useless pang of regret touched him. Soon Corean would catch up to them, and then what would happen? Even if the containment field operated in both directions, Corean probably carried weapons powerful enough to breach it — certainly her Moc did.

The afternoon passed slowly. After a while, Dolmaero and Molnekh lost interest in their discussion. Molnekh went below to wait for the next meal to arrive, and Dolmaero sat stolidly, staring at the passing sights.

Ruiz felt a sense of dismal failure, and he could think of nothing to say to Nisa. She seemed not to take his silence badly, and he was grateful for her quiet company. He tried to think of a course of action, but nothing came to him, not even the most farfetched of ideas. He wondered if he had at last exhausted his ingenuity — a profoundly depressing possibility.

Finally, he was drawn from his dark mood by a change in the atmosphere, a feeling of imminence, a shift in the movement of the air. He heard an odd sound, like wind moaning through a tunnel. The forest ahead seemed to grow lighter, as if they approached a huge clearing.

Ruiz got up and went forward to the observation pulpit, followed by Nisa.

They were standing together when the forest ended and they emerged into sunlight and space.

His heart fell and lifted in one violent swoop.

“Oh. Oh,” whispered Nisa. “What…?”

Ruiz drew a deep breath. “The locals call it the Edge.”

“You know where we are, then?”

“I think so.”

The barges moved now through a barren rocky zone. Ahead, the world seemed to end, replaced by pale blue sky. The canal continued out into empty air, a long dark finger of still water, leading nowhere, apparently supported by nothing but the monocrete banks.

The barges began to slow, but it was obvious that at their present rate of deceleration, the barges would never stop before they reached the edge. The wind howled, blowing straight up past the lip of the cliff.

Nisa clutched at him. “Are we going to die?”

“Probably not just yet,” Ruiz said hopefully. He was craning his neck, trying to get a glimpse of what lay below the cliff.

The barges slowed a little more, and the first one floated out into space. Nothing happened to it, and he felt Nisa relax slightly. Then the barge directly in front passed the lip of the cliff, also without dire consequence.

When their turn came, Ruiz saw what he expected to see.

Perhaps a thousand meters down and twenty kilometers away across a flat coastal plain a vast cluster of bizarre shapes twisted from the bright ocean far into the sky. They looked like nothing else in the known worlds, misshapen skyscrapers, or horrifically attenuated mountains — sometimes narrower at the base than at the top.

From this distance it was impossible to grasp the scale of these structures.

“What in the world…. How can so much water exist? It is water, isn’t it? And those… are they buildings?” Nisa’s eyes were wide.

“It’s water, though not the kind you can drink. The place is called SeaStack.”

She looked at him. “You’ve been there?”

“Several times.”

“What manner of place is it?”

Ruiz sighed. “It’s a city, of a sort. Or a thousand different cities. But mainly it’s where star pirates are born, and where they go to die.”

By the time the last barge had slid out into nothingness, Molnekh had come pounding up the ladder, pale with terror. Still, Ruiz noted with approval that Molnekh was able to move. Dolmaero clutched at the rail, face frozen and shining with sweat; he looked, for the first time since Ruiz had known him, incapacitated. Perhaps he was afraid of heights.

Looking back at the cliff edge they had passed, Ruiz felt a quiver of the same fear. The slab of black basalt seemed to drop away forever, and the plain was so far below that it didn’t seem real — a panorama in a misty painting.

He took Nisa’s hand and joined the others. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

“Oh, of course not,” Molnekh said, leaning cautiously over the rail. Apparently he was sufficiently in command of himself to be capable of sarcasm.

Ruiz grinned. “No, really. This is a device called a lock, unless I’m fatally mistaken. We’ll be gently lowered to the plain, where we’ll resume our journey.”