The Emperor of Everything

The guidemech conducted Ruiz to a large rotunda, where the lights were even dimmer than in the entrance hall. In the center of the rotunda was an artificial pool, where luminescent night eels swam beneath cerise water lilies, leaving glowing trails in the black water. The pool exhaled a scent of decay and feverish life. Far above, Ruiz sensed the presence of automated weapons emplacements, tracking the languid movements of the patrons.

“This is the Hall of Pain and Renewal,” said the guidemech, and rolled away.

Around the perimeter were a hundred or more trapezoidal openings, each of which housed a mythagogue. Some of the openings were curtained, indicating that the mythagogue was already occupied with a customer or otherwise unavailable. But most of the beings who staffed this section of the Celadon Wind sat at their doorsteps, awaiting a client. A few other potential customers wandered the perimeter, including the tall woman he had followed into the Celadon Wind.

The first mythagogue to his left was an old scar-cheeked man who bore the shoulder tattoos of a Retrantic enforcer and affected a shock of thin white braids. He glanced at Ruiz with an inquisitive expression. Ruiz looked back, waiting for the tug of recognition that he expected to feel from Remint’s personal myth-maker. He felt nothing beyond a mild revulsion.

Ruiz began to stroll the perimeter, examining each mythagogue as he passed, still wrapped in the chill purposefulness he had assumed in the fabularium’s entrance hall. Some of them met his gaze with a brightly predatory look, some looked away, unease darkening their fey eyes. He passed a spiky-haired woman of the Buffalo Wailers, a blue-scaled Dalmetrian renegade, and a marine-adapted boy with ancient eyes, floating in a giant brandy snifter of murky green fluid — then dozens of others as strange. None of them spoke to him; apparently the management considered the Celadon Wind to be an upscale place and proscribed any undignified hawking of wares.

Still, he sensed a ripple of interest following him around the rotunda, an interest that seemed to be communicated ahead of his slow ambling progress. More curtains popped open in a sudden flurry, and mythagogues craned their necks to get a glimpse of him.

This unexpected attention stimulated him to a higher level of alertness, and he felt more keenly purposeful, more his former self.

He strolled on. Most of the myth-makers seemed to take great pride in their eclectic eccentricity, as though the quality of their fables had anything to do with the originality of their fashion sense. Decadence was in vogue, Ruiz thought — tiresomely so. Some of the mythagogues winked at him, leered expressively, made silent gestures of welcome. None of them seemed to possess the sort of style that would attract the patronage of a man like Remint.

Ruiz began a second circuit of the rotunda.

Remint switched the spyscreen to a different remote. Corean saw a small man with a face prosthesis of hammered silver, who looked up with unfocused eyes and said nothing.

“He is here,” said Remint.

“How will I know him?” asked the man through his metal lips.

“How do you know me?”

The man sighed and nodded. He bent his head for a moment, so that Corean could not see him. When he raised his head, he was wearing a crude skinmask in the likeness of Remint y’Yubere.

Remint switched off the spyscreen. “Now we wait.”

Ruiz was a quarter of the way ‘round the rotunda when a curtain drew back two doors ahead — one that had been closed on his previous circuit.

When he reached the opening and saw the mythagogue, sitting on a tall wooden stool, he felt an unpleasant shock of recognition, and skipped back a step. Above, the automated weapons shifted and whirred, alerted by his too-rapid movement.

Then he saw that it was not his enemy — it was only a small, poorly maintained cyborg, wearing a skinmask. The cyborg took no notice of him; he stared out at the pond, motionless.

Ruiz felt the attention of the other mythagogues and patrons intensify, and he felt a bit unnerved. He stepped closer and peered at the mythagogue, who continued to ignore his presence. What was the proper formula for invoking the mythagogue’s services? At first Ruiz could not remember; he had never quite understood the fascination of the synthesized myths available in the fabularia of Dilvermoon, and thus had rarely patronized them.

Then he remembered. “To whom do you speak, teller?”

The mythagogue’s face shifted toward him slightly. Ruiz realized that the cyborg was blind, an eccentric affectation indeed, when no pangalac need be sightless, except by choice.

The mythagogue spoke with casual unforced eloquence. “I speak to the Wielders of the blade, to the soldiers of the night, to the keepers of propriety, to the righteous scourgers of the flesh. To those who hold murder safe in their hearts.”