Occasionally she wondered if she were dead and in Hell. Perhaps all that had gone before had been a sort of purgatory. Had she failed that test and been condemned to this eternity of grayness? Ruiz Aw might well have been a demon of destruction, sent to beguile her. It seemed to her there was a good deal of evidence to support such a view.
To escape the dreams, she slept rarely and spent her artificial nights sitting in the darkness, remembering the blazing light of Pharaoh.
It was at such a time that the door groaned and slid back and Ruiz Aw stood there looking in at her.
The lights came up and her eyes watered, so that she could not see him clearly for a moment; he was only a shape against the brighter light of the corridor.
“Nisa?” he said, in a soft uncertain voice.
Her eyes grew used to the light, and she could make out his face. He was shockingly haggard, with thick stubble in the hollows of his cheeks and dark circles under his eyes. He looked much older. He wore the sort of rough garments a slave might wear, and the sleeve of his jerkin was crusted with dried blood.
In that instant of dismayed recognition her heart softened just a bit and she wanted to go to him.
But he held a long-barreled weapon in his hand, so he was not a prisoner. The situation seemed full of dangerous ambiguity. She couldn’t imagine where safety lay, here on this terrible world where evil seemed extravagantly magnified and treachery had been raised to a high art. Ruiz Aw had returned, but what did that mean? And was he to be trusted? She feared him almost as much as she loved him — and her heart was still sluggish with some cold burden.
She lifted her chin and did not speak.
When he saw her, Ruiz felt an almost-physical pain. She was white-faced and drawn. Her beautiful hair was a wild tangle, and she sat slumped over, as if ill. For a moment her eyes were dull and faraway, but then her head came up and her eyes filled with evaluation. She seemed damaged in some unknowable way — still lovely, but a stranger. His fault.
“Nisa,” he said again. “It’s all right. We’ll be leaving now.” He held out his free hand.
She stood slowly. She looked down at his hand, her expression shifting toward a painfully cautious hope. “Where will we be going?” she asked. “Am I allowed to ask?”
“Of course… we’re leaving SeaStack. We’ll find a launch ring downcoast, and get off Sook.”
Disbelief fell across her face like a dusty veil. “The others?”
“Them too, Molnekh and Dolmaero. We can’t leave them.”
She walked past him, her body taut with unhappy expectation, as though she expected him to hurl her back into the cell and laugh at her disappointment. He felt a terrible pressure in his chest, and his eyes watered. How could he explain? There was no time now; every minute they spent in Yubere’s stronghold increased the danger that Publius would find a way to thwart their escape.
When she came from her cell, Nisa saw an injured man on a slab of metal, floating unsupported in the corridor. His wounds were beginning to stink; he wouldn’t live long. Standing beside the man was another stranger, a small man with a closed face. The wounded man was whispering urgently to the other, who nodded.
“Who are they?” she asked.
At her question, Ruiz turned to look at Publius and the false Yubere… and saw that some murderous plot was being hatched.
A consuming rage filled him, blowtorch hot, fueled by all the awful things Publius had done to him and to others. He felt his vision grow dim with it, and it hammered in his head, demanding some release.
His finger spasmed on the trigger and Yubere’s head vaporized. The body fell across Publius and then slid to the floor.
“No,” said Publius feebly, wiping Yubere’s blood from his face. “Why did you do that? I was just asking him about your slaves… what had happened to them….”
Ruiz turned back to Nisa, who had become even more pale. “Always be vigilant around that man. He is the most wicked person you will ever meet; he is as devious as a snake and as cunning as a Dilvermoon herman. Presently he is blind and crippled and chained to the floater — and probably dying — but never forget that he is also the most dangerous person you will ever meet.”
She nodded and didn’t speak, but he could almost imagine her thought: Could he be worse than you, Ruiz Aw?
Ruiz found the cells in which Dolmaero and Molnekh were being held, and released them. They stumbled into the light, and greeted Ruiz with no more warmth than Nisa had.
What had they been told? He shook his head in frustration. Time was passing, and they would have to hurry or risk missing Lord Tildoreamors’s men, who would costume them for their trip on the Immolators’ barge.
“Come,” he said brusquely, and herded them on their way.
Epilogue
Only when they were at sea and the peaks of SeaStack had begun to drop below the horizon did Ruiz begin to believe that they might escape. The motion of the old barge wasn’t too bad yet; the breeze was a moderate offshore one, and they still moved in relatively flat water. No doubt it would worsen.
Publius lay on an improvised litter, alternately raving and torpid. The others were already seasick and spent most of their time at the rail, trying to purge their already-empty stomachs. Their upbringing on a desert world had not equipped them to deal with ocean voyaging. Between the pervasive smell of vomit and the horrible stink of Publius’s infected wounds, Ruiz was feeling a bit queasy himself.
Most of the Immolators were in little better shape, and Ruiz could hear the bargemen shouting whenever too many went to the lee rail and their weight threatened to capsize the overloaded vessel. Above the shouts and the sounds of retching came the low buzz of neuro-whips, which the bargemen used to drive the seasick dedicants back into the tweendecks area.
The white robes of the Immolators were not so white anymore, but their dedication was undiminished; the healthier ones sang songs lauding the nobility of suicide and wandered about reading aloud from their sacred book. Though Ruiz fended off their frequent efforts to involve him in this religious fervor, they seemed undiscouraged.
It struck Ruiz that the discomforts of the voyage probably accounted somewhat for the willingness with which the Immolators sought the abattoirs of the Blades.
He hadn’t yet explained the events in SeaStack to the Pharaohans, and Nisa still treated him with brittle formality. Exhaustion made him feel clumsy, and he was afraid he might say the wrong thing. Or that she wouldn’t understand, no matter what he said. So he kept putting off the explanation and no one pressed him, not even Dolmaero.
Publius woke and thrashed his arms about. “Emperor of Everything,” he shouted. “Everything!”
He drew a ragged breath. “Ruiz?” His voice was abruptly lucid. “Ruiz? I know something you don’t. Want to know?”
“Why not?” Ruiz said. He hoped Publius wouldn’t start shrieking; it undermined their roles as humble Immolators on their way to the suicide fields. Publius tended to shriek in a less-than-humble style.
“Hah! You’ve never even asked about my secret… and a time will come when you’ll wish you had, when everyone will wish someone had, everyone. But I won’t tell you my Big Secret; you’ll find out soon enough, and so will everyone else.” Publius smiled with as much malignant relish as ever. “I might tell you a Tiny Secret, if you’re a good boy and get me a medical limpet or at least a drink of water.”