Ray Aldridge - The Emperor of Everything

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.

Only when they were at sea and the peaks of Sea-Stack 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.”

“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.

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).