The Ruby Dice (28 page)

He had come alone into this graveyard. He had evaded his guards by leaving his quarters through a disguised exit Robert had discovered when he swept the room for monitors. Convincing Robert to let him go by himself had been more difficult. His aide feared the Lock and had no desire to enter it, but he had even less desire for the emperor to do so. When Jaibriol told him to remain behind, he had thought for one astonishing moment that Robert would refuse an Imperial order. Then his aide had knelt to him, his face flushed, and Jaibriol had felt smaller than an insect.

No sense of life awaited him. No intellect tugged at his mind. Before Kelric had killed this Lock, Jaibriol had felt its presence. It filled the station. Apparently no one else sensed it, certainly no Aristo or taskmaker, possibly not even a provider. But Jaibriol had known. Now that presence was gone.

Are you dead?
he thought. Maybe he was deluded, to imagine this place as anything more than a big room with defunct machines and a path that led . . .

Where?

He started down the Lock corridor.

Darkness surrounded him. The wan light from the dais dimmed to nothing. It should have trickled down the pathway, yet nothing penetrated the gloom. He walked in blackness.

Jaibriol stopped, uneasy. He looked back the way he had come, but he could see no more in that direction. Turning forward again, he took another step. The darkness drew closer. He knew, logically, that a lack of light wasn't "close." Yet he felt as if it wrapped around him, heavy and dense.

He continued on.

Jaibriol had no idea how long he walked. Unable to see even his hand in front of his face, he felt dissociated from reality. This place between space-time and some other universe had gone wrong. He considered returning to the dais room, but he feared if he walked the other way, he would never reach the end of the path in that direction either. He existed in a limbo of nothing.

His hand hit a surface. With a relieved grunt, he felt along the barrier and found an opening. When he stretched out his arm, his hand hit another side. And archway, perhaps. He leaned against the lintel, his heart beating hard. Although he had no idea where he had ended up or if he could escape this place, at least it
was
a place.

When his pulse settled, he took an exploratory step through the archway. He almost fell; the floor on the other side was a hand span lower than on his side. He felt his way along a cool, smooth wall and figured out that he had entered a small room with eight sides. An octagon chamber. An octagonal depression in its center was about two paces wide.

Jaibriol rubbed his hand over his eyes. Worn out, he slid down one wall and sat on the floor. He was no closer to discovering if the Lock had a connection to the implosions.

"What should I do?" he asked the air.

Silence.

After he rested, he climbed to his feet and made his way along the wall again, headed toward the doorway. Maybe he should go back to his quarters and sleep, before his body gave out.

His knee hit a hard surface.

Jaibriol paused, startled. Then he explored the barrier. It felt like a console. Yes, here was the seat. He sat down and slid his palms over the panels until his fingers scraped a line of engraved hieroglyphics. He felt it carefully. He didn't recognize the language, but it had elements in common with both Iotic and Highton, which derived from the same roots. He pieced out the inscription:

To you, Karj, comes the ward of lives.

Karj? Could it mean Kurj, the man who had been Imperator before Jaibriol's mother? But he had died only twelve years ago, and this inscription was probably thousands of years old. The name Kurj dated from before the time when Skolia and Eube had split apart, back when they had all been one people.

He tried to activate the console, but nothing worked. Finally he gave up and went back to the center of the chamber. Kneeling in the depression, he felt around the floor, searching for clues to understand this place. The sleek surface offered no answers.

Frustrated, he sat with one leg bent and his elbow resting on his knee. His thoughts felt muted, but at least it eased the damage from his exposure to Aristos, especially Colonel Muze, whose mind had grated like sandpaper on a raw wound. The darkness settled over him like a blanket and muffled his brain.

In the darkness of a space that didn't exist, Kelric Skolia strained to keep his identity intact.

Begin.

He shored up Kyle space like the Atlas of Earth's mythology holding up the world.

Begin.

His power beat like a deep pulse.

Begin.

The darkness stabilized, an absence of light but no longer of existence. And Kelric began to understand.

When he had deactivated one of the Locks, he had eliminated one of three nodes that sustained Kyle space. The Locks balanced the Kyle web; with only two operating, it strained and snapped. Humanity had created million of gates that connected the Kyle to space-time, and each one added to the strain. Just as earthquakes relieved pressure in a planet's crust, so the implosions relieved stresses between the two universes. The instabilities had built for ten years, until something had to give. When the disruptions reached the SSRB, they were going to rip apart space-time between the three Locks like fault lines cracking. It would be an interstellar disaster of unprecedented proportions.

Kelric saw no choice. He had to reactivate the Lock. A universe where the Traders had access to Kyle technology wasn't one he wanted to contemplate, but destroying a substantial portion of space could be even worse. Gods only knew how many people would die and star systems perish.

He had no idea if he could restart the Lock from so far away, but as a Key, he had more resources than anyone else, probably more than he had plumbed. The SSRB Lock existed at the fringes of his awareness, quiescent, distant and vague, but alive.

Resume, he thought.

No response.

I am your Key. Come to me.

Like a leviathan awaking, the Lock stirred.

Jaibriol sat in the darkened SSRB Lock and tried to understand its emptiness.

Come to me,
he thought, he wasn't certain why, except that the words felt right.

The Lock stirred.

Jaibriol froze.
Who?
he asked.

NOT KEY. It was as if a distant monolith turned toward him.

I'm not a Key, that's true,
he admitted.

DEATH.

He swallowed, wondering if it thought he had killed it.
Do you mean this Lock?
Uneasily, he added,
Or me?

ALL.

Both of us?

NO.

I don't understand
.

END.

His frustration built.
What ends?
He felt foolish questioning a thought that was probably a figment of his imagination.

THE CORRIDOR OF AGES.

I don't understand.
He didn't know if the thoughts came from the Lock, the machinery, or something else.

Nothing.

You have to help me.
That felt wrong. He delved deeper into his mind—and words came as if Kyle space itself revealed them.

Come to me,
Jaibriol thought.
I am your Key.

Kelric's thought thundered throughout the Kyle.

RESUME.

With a gigantic, shattering surge of power, the Lock awoke.

Light flooded the chamber where Jaibriol sat, brilliant and painful. He cried out and covered his eyes. In that instant, the Kyle singularity shot up through the floor and pierced the chamber—

Right through Jaibriol.

Crush the petals of a night-fragrant vine,
In bitter dreaming sweetness.
Hold its vulnerable, frail beauty,
Cherished beyond all reason.
 
The night offers surcease, heart-aching hope,
Or painful, streaming cruelty.
Pray withhold your chilling blue transcendence
In the deep, purpling dawn.

The singing of the ancient provider broke Jaibriol's heart, for the music was impossibly beautiful and impossibly sad. He grieved for the love of the family he had lost, for the family he would never know, and for the crushing, bitter weight of Aristo cruelty that would be his for the rest of his life.

Deep within the Kyle, the emperor wept.

Jaibriol dragged himself out of the singularity on his hands and knees. He sprawled on the floor while his head reeled with power. It was unbearable. He would drown in the streaming blue of the Kyle.

His fingers spasmed as he clawed the floor. For ten years he had hidden, repressed, constrained, and constricted his mind, and now the Lock had ripped it wide open. Power flooded him as his thoughts encompassed a universe. He wanted to scream, but he could barely breathe.

His muscles clenched as if he were convulsing. It could have been seconds, minutes, hours. Then they released, and he choked out a sob. He crawled another few feet, pulling his body along the floor. Light filled the chamber, mercilessly bright. With tears streaming down his face, he pushed up on his hands—

And stared into the maw of a laser carbine.

Too much in shock even to register fear, Jaibriol raised his head. In the brilliance of the Lock, he could barely see the man who held the gun. But he recognized the eyes. They were the only color in the chamber, red and hard. And when the man spoke, Jaibriol knew his voice.

"The fates of Eube are truly capricious," Colonel Muze said from behind the gun, "that they would give us a Ruby Key in the person of our own emperor."

The Lock had shredded Jaibriol's defenses, and the Aristo mind of the colonel surrounded him in a great icy void that froze his thoughts, his heart, his being. He felt Muze transcending, and he silently screamed with the torment. In one horrifying moment, he had given Eube everything it needed to conquer the Skolians and condemned himself to a life of agony so much worse than what he already lived that he knew he would go insane.

"
No.
" Jaibriol thought he whispered, but the word thundered in the chamber as if he were one of those fates Muze had evoked.

The colonel backed away from him. "Get up."

Jaibriol couldn't move.

"
Get up!
"Muze shouted, and his fear saturated the air.

Jaibriol dragged himself to the console, which glowed like alabaster. Clutching the chair, he pulled up to his knees. With his arms shaking, he struggled to his feet. Then he just stood, staring at Muze. The violation couldn't have been worse than for an Aristo to enter the Lock.

"For ten years, you've corrupted the throne." Loathing filled the colonel's voice. "I always knew you were flawed, but I had no idea just how great the filth you brought among us. We will cleanse Eube of your stain." His voice was harsh with revulsion. "And you will serve us, provider. Have no doubt; you will pay for this crime beyond all crimes."

The light suddenly flared even brighter, blinding him. A backlash of violence hit Jaibriol, not physically, but crashing through his mind. He stumbled away from the console and tried to scream, but no sound came. He teetered at the edge of the pillar of light, the singularity that had thrown him into Kyle space, and he knew without doubt that if he fell into it again, the power would kill him.

The singularity died.

Darkness dropped around Jaibriol. The pillar was gone. He no longer felt the presence of the Lock. The astringent smell of a laser shot and the stench of melted composites filled the air—that, and another smell he couldn't identify but that raised bile in his throat. He couldn't handle the sensory onslaught; his mind was shutting down.

He staggered backward and hit a wall. The blackness wasn't complete; dim light filtered into the chamber from the corridor, enough to see whatever had killed that Lock had also slagged the console. Vatrix Muze no longer stood anywhere Jaibriol could see. He didn't understand why the colonel had fired. Did he sicken Muze so much that the Aristo would seek to destroy a Ruby Key who had joined the Triad? If that were true, Aristo thought processes were even more alien than he had ever comprehended.

He stumbled toward the entrance, a dim octagon of lighter shadows. A towering figure appeared there, silhouetted against the dim light. Jaibriol lurched to a stop, unable to push himself any farther.

A deep voice spoke. "Can you walk, Your Highness?"

Jaibriol wanted to weep. "
Hidaka?
" He barely whispered it, and yet his voice echoed.

"I have stopped the assassination attempt." Hidaka's usually impassive voice sounded shaken. "You must leave this place, Sire."

Jaibriol stared at his bodyguard. Hidaka had to know what he was seeing. He had to have heard what Muze had said. Why would a Razer call a false emperor
Sire
?

Something grotesque lay in a twisted, smoldering pile across the chamber. Then Jaibriol recognized the stench that filled the room. Cauterized human flesh.

Hidaka was holding a laser carbine. His bodyguard had murdered a high-ranking Aristo who had just made possibly the most valuable discovery in the history of the Eubian empire.

"
Ah, no."
Jaibriol swayed, and his vision dimmed.

"Sire!" Hidaka lunged into the chamber.

Jaibriol's legs buckled, and Hidaka caught him as he fell. The giant Razer lifted Jaibriol into his arms as easily as if the emperor were a broken doll, and blackness closed around him.

Kelric slowly lifted his head. He was sitting sideways at a console in the Lock chamber on the Skolian Orbiter. The singularity glowed next to him, but it seemed oddly dim. Although his head throbbed, he sensed no damage to himself. None of his internal warning systems had activated.

Bolt? he asked. Are you there?

Yes. I'm fine.

How did I get here? The last Kelric remembered, he had been deep within a fracturing Kyle space. He had reactivated the SSRB Lock many light-years distant at a Eubian military complex.

I don't know. Bolt, who was supposed to have no personality, sounded bemused. My memory has a gap. I have no other data until you became conscious of sitting here.