“No,” said Ruiz.
“All right,” said Publius. “I’ll tell you anyway; why not? My Yubere, before you murdered him… he was telling me an interesting thing. He was telling me that one of your slaves had already been down to the Gencha.”
Ruiz felt abruptly sick. He shivered, but made his voice light and unconcerned. “Sure, Emperor Publius. Which one?”
Publius stretched his bloody lips in a dreadful parody of a smile. “That’s the amusing part, Ruiz. You killed my Yubere before he could tell me which one! Hah! Hah! Hah!”
Then he passed out again.
No, Ruiz thought. It surely wasn’t true, just a clever Publius lie, carefully calculated to damage him. It was only Publius trying to get even, in the only way left to him. It was possible the false Yubere might have had time to acquire that information from his people, between the time Ruiz had reactivated him and their arrival in the stronghold… but why would he have bothered?
No, it was almost certainly a lie.
On the morning of the third day, Publius died. Ruiz felt a pang of annoyance at this event, since he had hoped to use Publius’s influence among the Blades of Namp to smooth their escape from Sook.
But as he rolled the heavy body over the rail into the sea, his deepest emotion was a vast relief.
Biographical Notes
Ray Aldridge was born in 1948. He has published a three-volume series, The Emancipator, featuring ex-slave investigator Ruiz Aw. The volume titles are The Pharaoh Contract, The Emperor of Everything and The Orpheus Machine. Short stories by Aldridge appeared in Full Spectrum 4 (1993) and The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: A 40th Anniversary Anthology. Among his shorter works are Steel Dogs (1989), Gate of Faces (1991), a Nebula Best Novelette nominee (1992) and The Beauty Addict (1993), a Nebula Best Novella nominee (1994).