Did Ruiz still need Publius? The stronghold might have fallen into a state of disorganization with Yubere’s inaction, which might make it possible for him to sneak in through the same route as before. The possibility of doing without Publius had an undeniable appeal. Ruiz shook his head regretfully… he still needed Publius.
Another possibility suddenly occurred to Ruiz. Perhaps the screamer was Publius, perhaps Remint had already found him.
No. No, he was somehow certain that Publius was safely gone, that he had decided to cut his losses and retire from the field.
He took the collar and hefted it, then threw it high into the air, so that at the top of its arc, it cleared the lip of the ramp.
It detonated with a bright flash and a report that made his ears ring. A second later, the sound of another explosion reached him.
He noticed that the screaming had stopped.
Long before he reached the sub, Ruiz knew what Publius had done. Albany’s head was a pale splotch against the black metal of the conning tower; his blood made a darker pattern where it had spattered and run down.
When Ruiz drew alongside, he saw Albany’s body, floating in the currentless water of the lagoon, the bound limbs still twitching rhythmically in the grip of the nerveburner Publius had attached to him.
Ruiz went aboard. Publius had suspended Albany by his ponytail, which was secured to the conning tower rail with a metal clamp. Then he’d left him to scream out his life, until Ruiz had returned and detonated the collar around Albany’s neck.
Albany’s eyes were full of blood.
Ruiz went slowly up the ladder. He took out his knife and cut through Albany’s ponytail, so that the head fell, bounced once on the deck, and splashed into the lagoon.
Then he went below and set a course for Publius’s maze. He still had a use for Publius.
Corean returned to consciousness as her Moc carried her from the joypalace. She breathed in the welcome stink of its body, for the moment empty of all emotion but the pleasure of being alive. Her ribs ached; perhaps Remint had broken a couple. No matter; she would heal.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Marmo, floating along silently, holding a graser.
“Marmo…” she whispered in a voice that offended her by its weakness.
“Corean?” The old pirate swiveled toward her. “It’s almost daylight. I began to worry about you, so we followed.”
She smiled fondly at his battered half-mech face. “A good thing you did. Where is Ruiz Aw?”
Marmo didn’t answer for a moment. “Your enemy was missing, Corean. There was a disengaged control harness lying on the floor of the suite; it appeared to me that one of Remint’s slayers punched it off, just before she died.”
The pleasure of survival was suddenly tarnished. “Again?” She could not believe it.
“Never mind. It’s time to go to ground, Corean, until this blows over. SeaStack is shrieking; the lords are in a great panic. It is most unsafe. Fensh is waiting above with the airboat, to take us to a secure hiding place until we can leave the city.”
She tried to summon enough rage to resist his sensible urging, but between Remint’s machinelike ruthlessness and Ruiz Aw’s incomprehensible determination, she had somehow been frightened into passivity. She hoped it was a temporary frailty.
“Yes,” she agreed, and lay back in the Moc’s hard arms.
Chapter 23
From the shadow of an adjoining stack, Ruiz analyzed the remaining safeguards at the entrance to Publius’s mooring, taking an ironic satisfaction in using the antisurveillance gear he and Albany had brought back from Yubere’s stronghold.
He had left the sub some distance away; he must now approach Publius with as much guile as he could summon. From one of the stack-side farmers he had purchased — for an absurd price — a small sampan loaded with crates of vegetables. He wore a stained brown jerkin, tattered shorts, and a large straw hat, all from the same source. He made his movements slow and deliberate, and concealed the readout slate of his sensors beneath a heap of pungent thick-leaved cabbages.
While he considered the indications, he consumed the farmer’s lunch, which consisted of a piece of blue-veined cheese, a sweet onion, half a loaf of bread, and a plastic bowl of green-gold spiceplums. It was, Ruiz decided, the best meal he’d had in weeks. He had found an insulated flask of cold water in the bilge, and he took a long swallow, looking up at the green forested ledges of the stack above him. The tide drifted his boat out into the midmorning sunlight for a moment, and the heat soaked into his sore shoulders comfortingly, until he shortened up his lines and returned to the shade. It occurred to him that it was a fine thing to be alive.
The novelty of this notion struck him forcibly — when had he last thought such a thing? On the barge? Perhaps. That joyfully uncertain journey now seemed impossibly distant in time….
He shrugged and gave his attention to the readout slate. Perhaps he was missing something, but he just couldn’t find any unambiguous evidence that Publius’s security systems still functioned. Either his own gear was faulty — or Remint had gotten here first.
Eventually he finished his lunch and cast off his lines. He lifted the sampan’s sculling oar into its fork and propelled the boat across the channel toward the entrance of Publius’s mooring lagoon.
Inside, he saw that Remint, or some other hostile force, had indeed been there. The air was still thick with the stink of discharged energy weapons and vaporized metal. Publius’s big gunboat was awash in the center of the lagoon, and another gunboat was canted onto the quay near the entrance to the maze.
The place was utterly silent, except for a faint sound of frying electronics, which emanated from the sinking gunboat. Ruiz coasted along, watching his readouts for any sign that he was not alone, but everything indicated that he was. The sampan bumped the quay gently; at the same moment his slate indicated that one close-range detector field remained active at the gate. As far as Ruiz could tell, the field was only able to register the passage through the gate of metal, plastics, or other synthetic materials.
Ruiz sighed. He’d expected worse. He divested himself of all his weapons, which he hid under the vegetables. Perhaps the recent fighting had frightened away any scavengers unambitious enough to be interested in a boat full of turnips and cabbages. He cut the decorative alloy buckles off his canvas shoes. He looked at the buttons that kept his shorts closed; they seemed to be carved from thick fish scales. He picked up the farmer’s cudgel, an arm-long piece of dense black wood, capped with a crudely carved margar head. The grip was smooth with use and fit his hand well.
He stepped to the sampan’s bow and hitched its line to a mooring ring, then stepped down to the quay.
“You’re an idiot, Ruiz Aw,” he said to himself. “You’re going after the hardest man in the human universe. With a stick.” He laughed ruefully.
A smell of recent death came from the mouth of the maze, and Ruiz Aw suddenly wanted very badly not to enter that darkness.
But he went in anyway, and found that the maze was now populated only by corpses. He found another one around every corner of the dim passageways — sometimes one of Publius’s failed monsters in a pathetic heap of fur and scales, more often one of the monster-maker’s Dirm bond-guards. The killing, it seemed to Ruiz, had been done with the offhand efficiency that characterized Remint’s approach to his trade. Each burn seemed perfectly placed, each dismembering slash seemed perfectly aimed to destroy some vital function. Ruiz examined each Dirm guard for usable weapons, but in each case Remint, in his thorough fashion, had taken the time to put a pinbeam through each weapon’s mechanism.