She looked at herself in the mirror, and in that still beautiful but slightly haggard young woman found it difficult to recognize Nisa the favored daughter of the King. What had changed? The eyes were deeper, somehow, as if they had seen more strangeness than a person of her station should ever be expected to endure. The mouth was as soft and lush as before, surely — though something about it looked bruised, and the curvature was ambiguous, neither a smile nor a frown.
She thought about Ruiz Aw, that oddly wonderful man. Did she indeed trust him, as she had claimed when he asked her? He was such an enigma; sometimes she thought that his motives were mysterious even to himself.
“Just like everyone else,” she said out loud. “Nothing so remarkable about that.”
An ugly suspicion had crossed her mind more than once since she had stood looking into his hard expressionless face, as the door to her cell closed. Each time she thrust it away from her, ashamed; still, it wouldn’t go away. What if Ruiz had chosen this way of getting rid of her and the others?
“No!” She would not believe it.
Not yet.
Ruiz slowed the boat, and picked his way through the corroding remnants of some ancient girderwork. Blackened metal snags rose from the oily water, thrusting jaggedly into the night mists. He was in the decaying center of SeaStack, where its most depraved and least fashionable denizens laired. The stacks here were in bad condition, some half-collapsed into the sea, others leaning together, supporting each other in precarious stability. Almost no lights showed above the water, though occasionally the boat slid across a patch of sickly luminescence shining up from the depths.
Ruiz looked for landmarks, trying to match his memory of his last visit here with the confusing shapes he moved through.
There! That snag; its outline vaguely reminiscent of a man crucified upside down — he remembered that. He turned the boat toward a low tangle of rusting beams and saw the opening where he expected it.
He passed under a rough arch of skeletal alloy beams, into an anchorage occupied only by an armored gunboat, its gleaming hull half-submerged, moored to a snag.
He swung the boat and circled the airboat, admiring its bulbous engine pods, its three dorsally mounted graser turrets, its midships row of missile launchers. If only he had the equipment to disable the boat’s security system, his troubles would be over. But that was wishful thinking, he reminded himself. If the boat belonged to Publius, as he suspected, it would be protected by cunning wards indeed.
He sighed and let his boat drift toward the makeshift dock at the innermost edge of the anchorage. He could only hope that Publius still controlled the stack, and that his creatures would allow Ruiz to enter unmolested. Perhaps they would mistake him for a customer — in a way, he was a customer.
The boat kissed the dock with a small clang of metal, and Ruiz stood up. He raised the boat’s armorglass bubble and set its security monitors. He was painfully aware of the boat’s inadequacies in that respect, but he had no time to upgrade its alarms and traps. The first competent thief who happened along would steal his boat — he could only trust that it wouldn’t matter — one way or another.
He chained the boat to the dock, and trotted off into the cave-riddled darkness beyond the anchorage, looking for the monster-maker.
Publius’s labyrinth was as eerie as ever. The walls were carved of ancient meltstone, a rusty black veined with thin ribbons of some murky crimson glass. The low ceilings supported a patchy growth of luminescent moss, which shed an uncertain blue light on the dank floor, its pools of stagnant water and slime-slick stone.
Ruiz moved as silently as he could, ears straining for any evidence that one of Publius’s monsters lurked in a nearby passage. But at first all he heard was the drip of water, and very faintly the rumble of vast engines deep below. Still, he carried the splinter gun in one hand and kept his energy tube ready.
As he penetrated farther into the labyrinth, the passages grew narrower, the junctions more numerous and confusing, the light dimmer. He hoped he hadn’t forgotten the safest route; it had been a long time since his last visit.
In some places the luminescent moss had died out entirely, and Ruiz moved through the velvet blackness with exquisite caution, fearing with every step that he might put his foot down on something that would bite it off. He began to hear unpleasant sounds: faraway roars, the pad of heavy feet, the sigh of things breathing in the darkness. None of the sounds necessarily meant anything dire; the labyrinth had erratic acoustics, and it was possible that none of Publius’s monsters were close to him.
He began to feel oppressed by the weight of the stack above him; to worry that it might choose this moment to yield to gravity. He knew it was an irrational fear; the stack had stood at its present precarious angle for a million years.
The air was hot and steamy, thick with stinks. As he went deeper he more frequently came across small heaps of carrion rotting here and there along the corridors — unsuccessful monsters, or the remains of other visitors, perhaps. Fresh droppings were a continual hazard; Ruiz could ill afford slippery boots.
He was beginning to wish that a monster would appear, so that he could stop anticipating and act.
When the thing came rushing out of the side passage, he realized what a foolish wish that had been.
It was tall and muscularly slender, with a vaguely humanoid torso and the head of a long-jawed reptile. Its arms were oddly articulated, with too many joints, but its claws were long and sharp, and it leaped toward Ruiz, arms reaching out to tear at him.
He snapped up the splinter gun and squeezed off a burst that tore diagonally across its chest. It fell forward, still intent on grabbing Ruiz, but he ducked under its arm and dodged to the side.
The splinters must have severed its spine, because it could only drag itself after Ruiz, scrabbling with its claws for purchase on the floor. It tried to speak, cursing or praying. The half-formed words were almost understandable.
Feeling a little sick, Ruiz put another burst between its yellow eyes. It died slowly; after he had left it behind, he could still hear the slow scrabble of its claws, the scrape of its scaly limbs against the stone.
He tried not to think about what he himself might become if Publius was in a bad mood, as he often was. Ruiz had no great claim on Publius’s charity, if indeed it existed. He could only hope that the monster-maker would be willing to grant him a favor, or to sell him one at a price he could afford.
He had never understood Publius’s devotion to his lunatic art — Publius appeared to be human, but Ruiz couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live inside Publius’s head. And the last time Ruiz had seen Publius, the monster-maker had entertained himself by telling Ruiz what interesting creatures he might carve from the raw material of Ruiz’s body.
Ruiz shuddered. Until this instant, he had forgotten just how much he detested and feared his old comrade-in-arms.
Corean could not sleep, so she sat up in her luxurious bed and ordered Lensh to bring her a flagon of soporific-laced hot milk and a plate of butter cookies. While she waited for the drug to take effect, she occupied herself by running the bedroom holotank through the offerings on the public slave market, beginning with the merchandise to be offered the following day.