King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (20 page)

"His favorite tuition," says Mr. Ruins. "He taught us with corpses."

Out of a roughly plastered stone window, Doe can see a stark cliff-face, dropping away to a troubled gray-blue ocean, crashing against distant rocks.

"A promontory off Afric," Ruins says. "Once a monastery. Here there is a whole breed of us. Some of these have gone on to become great craftsmen. They have architected slaughters the like of which you could not imagine."

Doe looks into the eyes of the children, as they listen to their gory teacher. None of them are upset in the slightest. Several appear bored.

"But not you," says Doe.

He sighs. "I was great, once. But not any more."

The image changes, to something strangely familiar. There is a younger version of Mr. Ruins walking across a spent battlefield, littered with corpses of both sides. Doe recognizes the scene from the barrier in Ritry's Solid Core, placed by Ruins. It is a scene of revolution. Even the placement of the cottages, the tipped-over carts and cannon-stands, the gouts of ruptured earth, are familiar.

"What you saw was a living memory of this day," he says. "And that is me. I have just orchestrated my first Court, with the Suns' guidance. I did well, better than many of my peers. I herded nations to their own pointless, debauched destitution, and under my touch they went."

The Ruins figure however looks maudlin. He does not look down at his victims, but out to some unseen distance.

"You weren't happy."

Beside her he shrugs. "Ah Ritry, you see through me so easily. I was not happy. I should have been. There was so much to feast on. I had made my father proud. But I was not happy, until he gave me Napoleon."

"And that made you happy?"

"It is the only thing that did."

The projector clicks, and next there is the dysenteric, green-cheeked figure of Napoleon, kneeling in the dirt. Vomit stains his white tunic, and there is filth mired around his mouth.

"Coprophagia," Ruins says. "A favorite, but very challenging. In front of his wife and children, too. This, the man who crowned himself Emperor of Gaul. Such colossal arrogance. I loved him dearly."

"But you did this."

"I did. My father again was proud. I had a special touch. He watched over me perhaps more than the others. Over the years some of them turned against him, and were punished, or made into examples. Many of them became merely the attendees of Courts he held himself, hoping for handouts, too afraid to take risks of their own. He allowed this, tolerated it. But for me, ah…"

He goes quiet.

"You fell from grace."

The next image is of Ruins, standing on a beach with the sun setting behind him. The corpse of Napoleon lies beside him. He is dressed in different clothes. There is a pipe sticking gaily from his lips. But he is dead.

"My greatest shame," says Ruins, "is that I never wanted him to die. It is a weakness, and also how you were able to beat me. I realized then, at that time, what I wanted more than anything. A partner. All the joy I had taken from Napoleon was not in his pain, but in the closeness the pain allowed for us. We were doing everything together, all of it new and exciting, building these stunning new memories. I loved him, and I believe he came to love me too, in a way."

Here Ruins turns to Doe, with limpid eyes. "I believe you loved me too."

"I hated you," Doe says. "I killed you in the worst way I knew."

He smiles. "That's why I know it is true. Great hate stands next to great love. The two are adjoining ventricles of the same heart."

Doe shudders. Looking at the comical figure of Napoleon, she spots make-up decking his face. Ruins played with his food.

"You never moved on."

"No. My father tired of my depression. His gaze moved on to others. I was left to do as I wished, out of the glow of his gaze, with no prospect of ever reaching those dizzy heights of attention again. Of course I tried. I walked thousands through the same path I took Napoleon, but it was never the same. Until there was you."

The image changes, to one familiar to Doe. It is a dark incubator room, where an artificial womb wheezes out its seven-tone pulse, and within, bathed in a thick purple liquid, lies the baby Ritry Goligh.

"I felt you from across a city. I had to come see, and when I found you I knew I'd found the one who would save me. I guarded you jealously. I kept you hidden from my father and all the others. As you grew I watched. I protected you in the skirmishes, and when the time came I prepared a new way, that we might walk together."

Now he is weeping silently.

"And I was right. You are special above all. I don't want to give you to my father, Ritry." Here he reaches out and grasps at Doe's sleeve. "I don't want him to take you, and have everything. It wouldn't be fair. You belong to me."

Doe doesn't pull away. She watches the womb and listens to the pulse, thinking of each tone as a member of the chord she knows.

Doe, Ray, Me, Far, So, La, Ti.

The more she listens, the more she begins to understand.

Me sent her here. Me needs her help. She's come this far, now she must go all the way. She will do anything for Me, for Far, for Ritry Goligh, just to keep the chord alive.

She turns to Mr. Ruins, looks into his mad, foamy, weepy face, and tells him exactly that.

"I'm going to kill King Ruin," she says. "That's what I'm here for. And you're going to help me."

I'm in a different place.

I feel white sheets and warmth, bandages on my skin, a deep ache in my head, and warm golden light rinsing in through large open windows.

This is not the Allatanc. We are far from Calico now.

My eyes are numb and bleary, but I can make out the room around me, an older man and a woman around my age standing nearby.

"He's awake," comes the man's voice.

It is a shock when I feel their minds in my own. The buzz of transponders is back, and through the bonds I sense who these people are.

Arenes. 

Flashes come back to me, of the assault on King Ruin's compound. Black-clad figures with EMR-buzzing helmets stabbed the last hands between me and freedom, and they carried my bloody body out into the light.

The woman lays a hand on my shoulder. Through her touch I feel the war they've been fighting for years. They are the resistance against King Ruin, and they are hopelessly outmatched.

"Wha.." I begin, but the pain in my jaw is too strong. I remember losing teeth. I remember losing hands.

"It's alright," says the woman. "You're safe. I'm Yena, and this is Naji. We pulled you from a mobile Court, of the one you call King Ruin. We've been hunting you ever since you broke through the aetheric bridge. Do you remember that? You don't need to speak, just think it to us."

I feel both their minds lean in for the answer. I try to find the answer myself. I remember the bridge, faintly, and a sea fort filled with bodies. I remember two days spent with one of the King's hands, trying to break me down.

My frontal lobe.

A shiver of panic runs through me, and I dive my Molten Core to search it out. My Bathyscaphe feels curiously hollow, echoing with my commands to the ship's subsystems, but it cleaves smoothly through the flows.

In the place that it should be, I find my frontal lobe intact. The breaks where it was detached are clear still, like gaps between the barge-skulks of proto-Calico, but bridges have already grown across the lavic floes, and more are growing still.

"We put it back," says the man. "We implanted your transponders too." 

I reach wider, and feel there are other such healing wounds, holes where the faint residue of frames once hung, washed away now by the healing turn of my mind's single tone, smoothed by magma. I don't remember their content, though I remember Lagging myself.

Yena, she said. Naji.

"Do you remember the bridge?" Yena asks again.

"No," I say. It is hard to speak, though I feel fresh teeth implanted in my jaw, taking root. I remember this much. "I Lagged it."

Yena breathes a sigh of relief.

"Thank the soul," Naji says. "If the Suns had harvested that, we would all be his slaves."

Then I remember something else. Something important.

"We know," Naji says. "Brother, we were hunting him too, but the Suns took him. Mr. Ruins. We could only extract you."

I lie back and breathe.

If I have left any trace in Mr. Ruins' mind, he will find it. But there's nothing I can do about that now.

I reach out. I run the fingers of my mind across these two, commanders in their guerrilla army, and further. I feel people moving without, through the hallways of this mobile hospital. Now I know to look for it, I feel the tremor as its caterpillar legs lead us on, through the sand.

A suprarene carrier-tank.

"There's so much you need to know," says Yena. "And so much we need from you. You don't remember the bridge, that's alright. But you dived it three times. We believe you can do it again, and with our help, we believe you'll destroy King Ruin for good."

I look up at her. She is dark-haired, dark-skinned, exotic and beautiful in an angry, weathered way. I don't trust her. I don't trust any of these people, though I can feel their war stretching back decades in their minds, through the skirmishes and the tsunami, back to before I was even born. It is a war they've been waging all my life, though I never knew it.

"It's alright," says Naji. "We'll show you. There's so much you need to know."

"So show me," I manage. My voice is a croak. My head throbs, but I have to understand.

Yena smiles, and opens her mind to me. I step inside. 

Her war began with genocide.

She fought in the skirmishers, as an arene aboard a sand-crawling carrier-tank. She was in charge of mapping the underlands, all the cities and roads that lay deep beneath the sand, long-shifted by tsunami and rocking tectonic plates. Like every other arene stacked atop the coalition nation tanks, she was hunting for buried fissiles, old-AI, and essential rare-earths.

It was all about resources, for them and us both.

She grew up on the sand, knew its warp and its weft better than any. She understood how to gamma its depths with the greatest precision, how to use radar and sonar to sweep the land below for the things they sought.

And she fought, just like I did. When a rival coalition hove into view, in suprarene battle-tanks or carriers, helicopters flurrying the sky, she donned her suit and took to the air or the sand, shooting them down. She survived.

Then she found the city of Memphen.

It stood at the head of a once-mighty river, a hundred feet below the sand's surface. It was untouched by skirmisher bore-holes, too deep to be seen by most.  

They dug in. A camp of five carriers gathered around the bore-hole they dug, defending it. It took a month, and throughout Yena refined her measurements, working every minute of her waking day to analyze the structures far below and determine the best ones to drill.

But there were strange inconsistencies. The city had not fallen the way it should have, considering a tsunami wave of water and sand swept in from the west. Its skyscrapers were toppled against the flow, and its buildings were crushed in places they should have remained strong.

As the bore-hole sank, and Yena sank with it, her findings grew more precise, and she began to chart even more bizarre details. The density of the skyscrapers was high, but not consistent with sand. The same went for the buildings. It could be earth, she reasoned, and said as much to her commander. Perhaps a vast earthquake came first in this geological region, and filled so many buildings with soil.

But she'd never seen that before. It was impossible, barring a large number of geyser upsurges that shot mud directly up through so many buildings with enough pressure to rupture all the floors and fill them to the brim. But that too was impossible. The buildings weren't strong enough. Quakes didn't produce geysers.

So they sank. She hunted the outcrops where fissiles, AI, and rare earths would remain, though gamma gave her no confirmations. Perhaps they were shielded, she told her commander. There was no way they weren't there. No skirmishers had been there first. It had to be a trove.

They dug. They bored. And eventually, they broke through into one of the fallen skyscrapers.

What they found was bodies. Millions of bodies.

They were crammed into every fallen floor of the building, floor to ceiling, thousands to a room, largely preserved by the tight pack of the sand.

They began to pull them out.

The ones on the bottom had been crushed. The ones on the top asphyxiated or starved. Many had wounds in their flanks, dug by the ones nearest to them. There was blood on so many hands and teeth.

It was revolting. It was overwhelming. They began to clear a path, digging into their ranks, only to find more, and more. Every building they searched was overstuffed with bodies. Every building in the city was.

So Yena drank, whatever she could find. It was the only way to numb what they were seeing. All of them drank, clustered around that open bore-hole wound in the earth. There was no explanation for this mass grave, for this kind of torture. There was no way to understand it.

They sent their graysmith down, and she came up from screaming. She babbled until they sedated her, and had another graysmith come in to Lag the memory away. Still, she was never the same.

When she wasn't drunk, Yena hunted. She scanned the city below repeatedly, searching for some clue as to how this had happened. She ran calculations on the buildings and why they toppled, and concluded it was the weight of all those bodies. When the first tremors that presaged the global tsunami rippled through the earth, the buildings were not strong enough to take the sway.

They fell. The sands and water rushed in to bury them.

Yena gagged. Yena drank. Still they expanded their core to the other buildings. Memphen was once a grand city, and there had to be some treasure to bring up.

But there wasn't. Memphen was a corpse, with every single piece of usable matter looted. Gone.

Her nation ordered the bore-hole filled in. Their carrier moved on.

But Yena could not forget. Other members of her carrier could not forget either. She could not stop thinking about how it could even be done. How could a thirty story skyscraper be filled with bodies, every floor and every corridor, stacking up in the lift shafts and bathrooms, filling it out until there was barely an inch of space left.

They haunted her dreams. She remembered coming up against windows of other buildings, and the faces within staring out at her, forever frozen, stacked like missiles. There hadn't even been enough space for them to crack the glass. They could only look out, and strain to breathe while the weight of more bodies pressed down.

It gave her nightmares. She drank harder, along with a hardened cadre of others like her. Next to the scale of this murder, the million dead beneath the ground, the skirmishes seemed unimportant. At least they were all human. They killed each other, but not like this.

This was wrong. 

She began to search for other sites like it, hidden deep beneath the sand, instead of the treasures she was tasked to. She found them. She sent bores down, and found the same thing, not always on the same scale, but the same thing. Buildings packed with bodies, left to fight each other and die.

In Napli there was a stadium completely filled with the dead. It was like a vast crater in the sand, a bowl filled with bodies.

Her commanders told her to stop. This was not the target.

With her cadre of drinkers and believers, she took over the carrier. They changed their call-sign on the airwaves, and ran up a flag of truce. They began to broadcast details of what they'd found- great cities already emptied of everything but the dead.

Other nations came, and looked, and they did not fight. There was nothing to fight over. When they saw the graves, some of them joined Yena.

So she met Naji. Naji was a graysmith who had been able reach beyond his own thoughts since he was a child. He dove the weave of tangled lines between minds, and he'd seen something like Memphen, in the hours before the global tsunami that turned the world.

He'd been in the middle of a city when it happened. He was a young boy who spent his free days jumping from mind to mind, exploring what he could for profit, using his knowledge to steal from unknowing souls. He did not think about the coming end of the world, because he did not know it was coming.

But he felt the wave of thought as it took over the people nearest him. He evaded it as he'd learned to evade the thoughts of all those he dived. He hid within a deeper layer of himself, and watched.

Abruptly all the cars in the street stopped running. The people got out, and all started walking in the same direction. They formed vast long lines at the doorways to buildings.

Naji ran amongst them, amused at first, soon terrified. They didn't hear him, didn't see him. their eyes were glassy, and they did not look where they walked. Their bodies moved with stiff jerks.

And they filed in.

He followed them, up the stairs of the skyscraper where his father worked. He climbed up twenty stories to the top with them, as the fear settled hard in his stomach like a cold white egg. At the highest floor he watched the people walk into the room, and simply begin to lie down.

It was silent. It horrified him. Already they were walking across a carpet of bodies two of three thick, each to reach their spot at the furthest edge. The bodies beneath didn't cry out or complain. It was all done in silence, but for all of them breathing. 

Naji screamed. He ran amongst them, pulling at their bodies, trying to stop them, but he couldn't. He was a small boy, and there were thousands of them. Instead he sat in a  corner and sobbed while they piled themselves up, until the flow of them grew so thick he couldn't sit there any more.

He had to fight his way down the stairs. He followed the line back out of the building, and saw other lines stretching out in front of every building.

He ran. He ran past the edge of the lines and out into the desert, into the dunes, but he couldn't outrun the screams, when they began. The collective wail that went up from his city deafened his ability to travel between minds for days.

In the days that followed, the world ended. He survived when a helicopter of his nation picked him up walking a road alone. They took him to a roving carrier-tank, and taught him how to be a graysmith.