King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (19 page)

Doe and Mr. Ruins climb over the pile of blown-up bodies in the trench. She sees him picking up pieces of meat and shoving them into his pockets, but says nothing. It is himself.

"You think I'm mad," he says by her side.

"I don't think anything," Doe says. "Can you walk a little faster?"

"I might be mad, but what about you?" he asks. "You're hollow, I can see it so plainly. You're three sevenths of what you should be, like a hollow star. Do you know that a star consumes itself? Every day of burn it's consuming itself from the inside, until there's nothing left. It eats itself, you're eating yourself, I'm eating myself too. It's what we all do."

Doe takes hold of his good hand and pulls him along.

"You were talking about suns, now it's stars. Which is it?"

Mr. Ruins laughs, as she drags him along. "Sun and stars are stars and suns," he says. "Meteors, now that is another thing. Asteroids. Did you ever ride a comet's trail across the sky?"

Doe stops listening. She clicks into blood-mic.

"I've got him," she says. "He's totally mad. We're going into the keep. Over."

Ray's voice when it comes back is scratchy and obscured by static. "…… careful …… battlements rigged …… signal…."

"No read on that, Ray. It's OK. I'm going in. There may be no signal inside. Stay with the plan. Over."

"………… Over."

She clicks blood-mic off. They separated back on the wall, anyway. This is the Solid Core, now.

"Here," says Mr. Ruins, "right here, albino."

The door to the keep stands before them, as large as the blast-door to the aetheric bridge. It is made of planks of dense-looking red-brown wood, banded by black iron straps that bed into massive black hinges in the white stone.

"This isn't Napoleonic," she says, turning to Mr. Ruins. "It's medieval."

He shrugs.

"Can you open it?"

"It's just a door," he says, grinning. "Not a bridge." He steps up and takes hold of a large black ring on the left side, and turns it. A locking mechanism clicks, the door starts to swing open, and Doe notices the grin widening on Mr. Ruins blood-plastered face.

She dives to the side.

A flurry of musket fire pops out from the interior, as the door swings all the way open. Mr. Ruins is standing in the thick of it, grinning still, and offers her another shrug.

She swings on the door handle and into the opening of the keep.

Inside it is dark, fumey with gunpowder smoke, and absolutely crammed with stuff. There is too much to take it all in at once, stacked up in piles and rising to the ceiling, made up of mahogany cabinets, baize card-tables, bookshelves overstuffed with vellum scrolls, reams of film canisters, a grand bronze scale, several grandfather clocks, a ticking planet orrery, miters, three life-sized wooden Indians, three hanging chandeliers, and every nook and cranny crammed full of thousands of ornamental decorations in the shape of crystal horses.

Waving their hands in the smoke, there are five soldiers holding muskets. Two of them are reloading, working at stuffing tines and pouring in powder.

Doe grapnels Mr. Ruins to the trench wall by his neck, then plunges into the smoke. The first doesn't see her and takes her leaping knee in the face, crunching through his plastic cheek and dropping him to the floor.

"Grenades!" comes Mr. Ruins voice from behind, and as she turns to the next Doe gives the elasteel line a sharp tug to silence him. He gives a strangled bark while she rolls behind the group of four remaining soldiers.

She impales one through the back with his own musket, elbows the next in the throat, then takes a bayonet drive on the chest. It scratches into the crack Ruins' musket-ball made, twinges against flesh, and she twists away with a spinning reverse kick that catches the perpetrator in the head and somersaults him in place.

There is then a raspy click, the thunk of metal, and Doe throws herself for cover behind an ancient cedar armoire.

BOOM

The grenade sends a tide of sparkling glass horses outward like a halo tide. They ricochet tinkling off the room's hoarded treasures, clattering down like hailstones.

The armoire tips, and Doe scurries out from behind it. The man who dropped the grenade is gone, as are all his fellows, except for one of their legs. One has been blown out the door and lies prone in the mud at Mr. Ruins feet.

Doe's ears ring. She spins around, running a quick gamma scan of the interior and finding no more men waiting.

"It was a joke only, just a joke," Ruins is saying, from his position still wedged into the trench wall, his hands up defensively.

Doe stalks toward him, the blast still ringing in her ears. He flinches as she draws near.

"Please," he says. "Please understand. It's the heart of my mind."

Doe doesn't hit him. Instead she unloops the elasteel from around his neck.

"I know that," she says. "I'm not here to hurt you any more."

He breathes a cautious sigh of relief.

"Good, good," he tries. "Well, would you like a cup of tea?"

"That sounds perfect. Lead the way."

He does. The little old man faltering step is gone now, and he strides confidently into the vestibule of his inner Solid Core.

In the middle he spreads his arms, proudly displaying his collection.

"Here you'll find all the greatest treasures of my life."

"I don't care about your life," says Doe. "I want to know about the Suns. But what's with all the horses?"

Ruins looks back at her. "I like horses. And if you want to know the Suns, you need to know about me too."

"Why?"

"Because they made me."

Doe frowns at this. "What does that mean?"

"It means I was made. Here, can we watch the film?"

He points to a dusty old projector, stacked amongst other assorted display and recording devices. Doe counts three CRT television screens with cracked screens, an LCD, a recording deck from a studio, and a large console in olive-green metal, studded with a dizzying array of metal switches, plastic buttons, and multi-colored lights.

"What is that?" Doe asks, pointing at the console.

"That? It's broken. It's part of the controls for my left hand." Ruins laughs. "I don't really need it in here, not without any wires going out, but I couldn't bear to leave it outside."

Doe turns around, taking in the junk-packed space again. "Is all of this your wiring?"

"Most of it," he says. "Treasured memories too. Various people. You see I am dressed as my greatest possession, Napoleon."

He gives a bow.

"You're a killer and a torturer, and all of these are your victims."

He shrugs. "To put a fine point on it. But it's what I was taught. You really should watch the video. Besides, you may remember I tried to make you part of this, too. If only you'd said yes, dear Ritry. Dear, sweet albino Ritry. Now the Suns are at my door, and they won't stop 'til they harvest me too."

"Tell me about the Suns."

"The Suns are a god, and they rule on high. They eat bonds, which means people. They've been alive for thousands of years. What else do you want to know?"

"Thousands of years?"

"Yes, thousands. They're like an oversoul for the world, think of them that way."

"Who feed on pain."

"And death," says Napoleon. "Plus there are many shades of psychological suffering, all of which taste very sweet."

"Why are they here, attacking your Tower? Why do they want you?"

Mr. Ruins bats her hands away. "My dear, I do not know. I only know what Ritry did to me, and that soon I will be erased forever, if I'm not eaten by the Suns first. I'd prefer erased, which is why I've decided to help you."

Doe frowns. "Help me how?"

"You'll see. Now I must insist that you watch my film. I have been curating it for days."

He moves over to the projector and starts rustling about, trying to extract it from the pile.

"It's difficult with only one hand," he says, looking back. "Perhaps you might help."

There is no time for this, Doe thinks. And yet, there may be time for anything. The last command she got through the suit was to TAKE THE WHITE TOWER. She has taken it. She is here, inside it. What else ought she do, but listen to its master?

She goes over to help. Together they dig the projector out, and set it up on a rickety darkwood coffee table which Mr. Ruins steadies with a stubby piece of wood.

"Looks like a chair leg, but actually it was a peg leg," he says brightly. "Of a pirate."

He bustles with the cord, and plugs in the projector somewhere amongst the trash. It flickers to life, and a faint image appears on the closed inner doors of the tower. Ruins hurries over and tugs down a white screen, then hurries back to pull up a chair.

"I'll stand," Doe says.

"Of course you will," chuckles Mr. Ruins. "This is my Tower."

He sits down in his chair, presses a button on the projector, and the image starts to move.

It is a burnt-orange room, and there is a figure moaning in the dark. The walls are some kind of reed-grass and mud-wattle, with chinks of light shining through. The figure is a woman, her legs spread wide, panting and breathing hard.

"My mother," says Mr. Ruins, from Doe's side. "She dies soon."

Moments later, she does. But not before giving birth to a screaming son.

"That's me," says Mr. Ruins. "Not so dissimilar to you, shallow Ritry. No one to love me. No one to care."

The baby cries, until it stops. The bars of light revolve across the room, then sink, and the space grows dark.

"A baby born alone in a cowshed," says Ruins. "I suppose I had my first taste of death right then, as I tried to sup from the dying umbilicus. Her pulse was gone, and I was alone."

Doe turns to face him. "You can't possibly remember this."

He shrugs. "I salvaged it, once. I think it was some kind of training. Everything gets stored somewhere. This was stretched tight as a balloon across the skin of my outer cortex. I gathered it up and brought it here."

"How did you survive?"

"It wasn't anything I did. It was the Suns."

The screen changes, as the bars of light die away and it grows dark. There is a rickety sound of wind rattling the old shed.

"It was a Court," Mr. Ruins says. "Outside, beyond the frame of this memory, the Suns was judging my whole town. Somewhere in Gaul, perhaps four hundred years ago."

Doe stares. Four hundred years? "What's a Court?"

"Oh, you don't remember. The Suns takes people, and he turns them into food. It's simple, and he really always does it the same way, because it breaks the most bonds, which squeezes the most juice out. That way is to force humans to dehumanise themselves. Make them break taboos, and do things against their instincts. It's quite effective."

"How?"

"Usually it's simple compression. You've heard of the Black Hole of Ilculla? Of deathships across the Pacifac? I think you know the concentration gulags of the last great war, before the tsunami. You put people together, then more people, then more, and you deprive them of light, and food, and air, and space. They begin to rot, even while they're still alive. It's like fermenting a wine. The Suns has taken it to stunning extremes."

Doe shudders. Some faint memory from Ritry Goligh creeps in, of a death fort upon the water, filled with those kinds of memories.

"Then he eats them?"

"Their bonds. It's hard work, running the world," says Ruins. "Many he stores. He is the world spider, and he's got this kind of food everywhere, left to mature over time, buried in bunkers, hidden in abandoned mines, trapped in manned torpedoes sunk to the bottom of the ocean. He is the world's greatest connoisseur of human suffering, and his hunger is endless."

The image flickers, and it is daylight again. A man enters, and stands beside a rusted ploughshare, looking down at the baby in its congealed blood and hay, barely alive.

"It happens sometimes, that souls slip through the Court," Ruins says. "The Suns is superstitious about these. Perhaps it was the great pain of the birth that shielded my mother, or perhaps she was simply special, like you. But the Suns favors these infants. In a way, we become his children."

"So that's him?" Doe asks. "The Suns. Why do you call him that?"

"That is one of his hands, a soul he has taken as a vessel for his thoughts. I have never seen the real man, or woman. I only know the thought he leaves behind in the minds of all those he takes, like a brand. Two burning red stars, endlessly revolving."

The figure on the screen draws a curved tulwar sword, and strikes downward. The rotten umbilicus is cut, and he picks the child up tenderly in one hand.

"So he raised you?" Doe asks.

The image changes. Years have passed, and there is a new room, arrayed like a classroom, though at the head of the class where a board should be, there is the hanging carcass of a skinned man, opened at the gut and spread-eagled. There are children at their desks before it, while the dead man speaks to them of the bonds.