The Emperor of Everything

He shook his head violently. Maudlin useless thoughts. He felt a sudden fierce annoyance with himself. If he couldn’t focus his energies any better than that, he deserved failure.

The anger washed through him in waves, cleansing away all those soft emotions that were of no use to Ruiz Aw now — leaving in their place nothing but a cold hard knot of purpose.

Nisa sat on her thin mattress and wistfully remembered the luxurious apartment she had enjoyed in Deepheart. Her present accommodations didn’t delight her. The cubicle walls were barren steel. A single overhead glowplate shed a harsh light on the few furnishings: a straight-backed chair, a dry cleansing stall in one corner, a screened toilet in the other, a food hopper and water tap next to a small mirror. Another locked door was set into the rear wall. Above the mirror was a flatscreen vid — a few minutes before, an androgynous face had appeared in the screen and explained the room’s facilities, then informed her that twice a day she would be permitted to exit her room through the back door, to mingle with her fellow prisoners for a supervised social period.

She looked at herself in the mirror, and in that still beautiful but slightly haggard young woman found it difficult to recognize Nisa the favored daughter of the King. What had changed? The eyes were deeper, somehow, as if they had seen more strangeness than a person of her station should ever be expected to endure. The mouth was as soft and lush as before, surely — though something about it looked bruised, and the curvature was ambiguous, neither a smile nor a frown.

She thought about Ruiz Aw, that oddly wonderful man. Did she indeed trust him, as she had claimed when he asked her? He was such an enigma; sometimes she thought that his motives were mysterious even to himself.

“Just like everyone else,” she said out loud. “Nothing so remarkable about that.”

An ugly suspicion had crossed her mind more than once since she had stood looking into his hard expressionless face, as the door to her cell closed. Each time she thrust it away from her, ashamed; still, it wouldn’t go away. What if Ruiz had chosen this way of getting rid of her and the others?

“No!” She would not believe it.

Not yet.

Ruiz slowed the boat, and picked his way through the corroding remnants of some ancient girderwork. Blackened metal snags rose from the oily water, thrusting jaggedly into the night mists. He was in the decaying center of SeaStack, where its most depraved and least fashionable denizens laired. The stacks here were in bad condition, some half-collapsed into the sea, others leaning together, supporting each other in precarious stability. Almost no lights showed above the water, though occasionally the boat slid across a patch of sickly luminescence shining up from the depths.

Ruiz looked for landmarks, trying to match his memory of his last visit here with the confusing shapes he moved through.

There! That snag; its outline vaguely reminiscent of a man crucified upside down — he remembered that. He turned the boat toward a low tangle of rusting beams and saw the opening where he expected it.

He passed under a rough arch of skeletal alloy beams, into an anchorage occupied only by an armored gunboat, its gleaming hull half-submerged, moored to a snag.

He swung the boat and circled the airboat, admiring its bulbous engine pods, its three dorsally mounted graser turrets, its midships row of missile launchers. If only he had the equipment to disable the boat’s security system, his troubles would be over. But that was wishful thinking, he reminded himself. If the boat belonged to Publius, as he suspected, it would be protected by cunning wards indeed.

He sighed and let his boat drift toward the makeshift dock at the innermost edge of the anchorage. He could only hope that Publius still controlled the stack, and that his creatures would allow Ruiz to enter unmolested. Perhaps they would mistake him for a customer — in a way, he was a customer.

The boat kissed the dock with a small clang of metal, and Ruiz stood up. He raised the boat’s armorglass bubble and set its security monitors. He was painfully aware of the boat’s inadequacies in that respect, but he had no time to upgrade its alarms and traps. The first competent thief who happened along would steal his boat — he could only trust that it wouldn’t matter — one way or another.

He chained the boat to the dock, and trotted off into the cave-riddled darkness beyond the anchorage, looking for the monster-maker.

Publius’s labyrinth was as eerie as ever. The walls were carved of ancient meltstone, a rusty black veined with thin ribbons of some murky crimson glass. The low ceilings supported a patchy growth of luminescent moss, which shed an uncertain blue light on the dank floor, its pools of stagnant water and slime-slick stone.