The Emperor of Everything

He gripped her arm tightly. “Apparently not, eh? I don’t control them; I’m just a middleman. I don’t even furnish their guards… did you know that they have hundreds of people down there, folk who’ve lived in the enclave for who knows how many centuries? They’re not human anymore, how could they be?” He spoke with such hot-eyed distraction that her annoyance mutated into a stronger uneasiness. “No, not human but they will make it very difficult for the pirate lords to take the enclave, no matter how many soldiers they send down there. They’re not human, those people; they would be no better than a Gench at doing my job. So the Gencha, they use me as a go-between, an intermediary with the human city of SeaStack. They don’t trust their ability to deal with the city, but they feel sufficient congruency with me. They trust me.”

At that moment, with his face thrust close to hers, and some strange compound of desperation and pride glittering in his flat eyes, Yubere looked believably alien.

“I see,” she said.

He released her and jerked away, walking fast. “No, you don’t. Still, they do as I ask, they pay me by using their grand machine to make our puppets for us, so never complain.”

She hurried to keep up. “I’m not complaining,” she said in a subdued voice. “But… what are they doing down there?”

His voice had a curious lightness. “They say they are Becoming. What they are Becoming, I cannot guess. Gods, perhaps, or demons.”

These were Yubere’s dungeons, she eventually understood. They began to pass doorways blocked with painfields and bars. From some of those dark mouths came the rattle of chains, moans, curses. Yubere’s enemies?

When they reached their destination, she was growing tired, and oppressed by the antiquity of the dungeons. She felt the great mass of the stack over her head as a physical weight, pressing her down toward the Gencha enclave and its unpleasant mysteries. She found that her curiosity was also exhausted; all she wanted was to get her slayer and be gone.

Yubere touched a switch, and the cell lit up.

A man lay in a muscle-stimulator, eyes closed, body jerking and bunching as the machine exercised his body. His skin was stretched tight over a massive musculature; no fat masked the striated tissue. His face seemed ordinary enough, perhaps a bit small for that impressive body, but she saw something disturbing in it. She still had not decided what it was that had that effect, when Yubere spoke. “My brother Remint.”

Then she saw the resemblance, and wondered why she had not immediately noticed it.

“He was once my most valuable and trusted lieutenant,” said Yubere, almost dreamily. “Oh, what a pair we were — my intellect and his perfect murderous strength. But he lost his way, he allowed his imagination to betray his intellect. He turned traitor. I’ve saved him for special jobs, since the day he finished his processing — his first assignment was to destroy his fellow conspirators, which he did with admirable efficiency. I order him to maintain his skills, to be ready to serve. I keep him here not to imprison him, of course — what would be the point of that — but to protect him from his enemies, who are many and persistent.”

“How competent is he?”

Yubere glanced at her; he seemed a little annoyed. “There never was a slayer to match Remint. Only an unlikely stroke of fortune saved me from him, and delivered him to my vengeance.”

“So he is unlucky?” She recalled what Marmo had said about Ruiz Aw’s luck.

“Only that once,” said Yubere. “It was then, in fact, that I knew that I was a being of destiny.” For a moment he glowed, he even smiled — the first smile she had ever seen on his face.

He touched the switch again, and the bars slid aside, the painfield dimmed and faded away. “Remint,” Yubere said. “I need you.”

Remint shut off the machine and unstrapped himself. He slid out of its embrace and came toward them. He moved with a graceful economy that reminded her a bit of Ruiz Aw. His expression was distant, heavy with restrained power, taut with arrested violence — and suddenly she accepted Yubere’s evaluation of his brother’s abilities.

Remint stopped a pace away from his brother, and hatred made his face hideous.

“Yes,” said Yubere to Corean. “He still hates me — but he must serve me. Oh, of course the hatred is as synthetic as everything else that fills his head, but it feels as hot as ever, to him. And the synthetic humiliation he suffers when he must serve me… well, it’s the best the Gencha could do, which after all is quite satisfactory.”