The Emperor of Everything

Her guide tapped at a scuffed steel door in a long, dimly lit hall, and it opened a crack. An armored man scanned her briefly before admitting her.

Immediately she felt Remint’s increased intensity. He was bent over a spyscreen in the darkest corner of the tawdry suite. He ignored her entrance for a moment, then he lifted his passionless gaze. He made no gesture of greeting.

A pair of joyboys huddled together on the greasy plastic-covered bed, their painted eyes huge with terror, arms wrapped tightly around each other. They looked at Corean with an abject hope, as if they thought she might either release them or use them in their accustomed manner. She wondered why Remint hadn’t simply killed them and stuffed the bodies in a closet. Perhaps he anticipated a long wait and didn’t want to stink the place up. It occurred to her that the joyboys probably thought they were playing some actual part in these events, that their presence here was in some way significant. Something about the thought made her briefly uneasy, for reasons she didn’t care to examine.

“He’s here,” Remint said in his uninflected voice.

She hurried across the room, and tried to shoulder him away from the screen. It was like pushing at a stony mountainside. Then he moved back and she could see Ruiz Aw, walking up a steel ramp behind a beautiful naked woman. His dark face revealed nothing but a calm alertness; she tried and failed to imagine what he was thinking.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked.

“I can’t touch him there, or in the Wind. The Wind caters to the most dangerous beings in SeaStack — they’re ready for anything. Had Ruiz Aw been smart enough to hide his people in the Wind, I could never have taken them from him… though they might have been driven mad by the mythagogues, had he left them there too long.”

“So how do you propose to get him out?”

“I believe I know where he will look for me.”

“And where is that?” Corean asked sharply. She was feeling a growing impatience with Remint’s uninformative pronouncements.

Remint didn’t answer for a moment. “In my old dreams. There I have concealed my hook.”

The Celadon Wind was an impressive establishment, compared to other fabularia Ruiz had visited. The entrance hall formed a long narrow amphitheater. Customers strolled along the white-tiled floor, while pale translucent holoimages of thousands of gods and demons watched silently from the tiered seats that rose up to the ceiling far above. At the far end was a white colonnade through which the customers passed into the area of the fabularium they had chosen. The light was dim and red, and the air was doubtless thick with pheromonic influencers; Ruiz felt his mood become darker and more volatile.

As he approached the colonnade, he shook himself, as if to shrug away all those dangerous virtues he had lately rediscovered: mercy, empathy, loyalty… love. Remint would know none of these, and now he must become as much like Remint as possible, if he hoped to follow the slayer’s path into the fabularium.

Ruiz made his mind cold, his heart small; he tried to turn back time and become again the deadly thing he once had been.

He succeeded, after a fashion.

The colonnade’s seven arches were each topped by an animated holoimage that related to the sort of myths to be found within that section of the fabularium.

Ruiz stopped and looked up at the images.

After a bit he found his attention most strongly attracted to the arch that displayed a Kali-like goddess, whose four hands held a knife, a garrote, a graser, and a pulse gun. The arms waved sinuously, tracing a pattern that soon seemed deliciously seductive, and on the goddess’s black face was a smile that wavered between sweetness and ferocity. Her features were strong, almost crude, and her eyes bulged with a barely contained mania. Her six dark breasts were exposed and exquisitely shaped. They floated entrancingly with her movements, as though they were made of some lighter-than-air substance, much finer than mere flesh.

He stepped through the arch, and a guidemech emerged from a niche to his right. It offered him a tray of assorted intoxicants, hallucinogens, and mood alterants. When he declined these, it said, “Follow please,” and rolled off down the corridor at an easy pace.

“He scents the bait,” said Remint. “He chooses as I would have chosen.”

Corean watched Ruiz Aw, who now moved along briskly behind the guidemech. His face was still unrevealing, but there was now a trace of some additional expression that disturbed Corean by its mysterious familiarity. He seemed even more elementally dangerous than when she had last seen him.

What was the difference? She glanced up at Remint’s face, lit by the greenish light of the spyscreen, and saw that Remint wore precisely the same look.