King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) by Michael John Grist

men replace them. If you can't kill men inside, you wait until they come outside- they always do- where you pump all you can out of them, then you kill them." He holds up his right hand. "It's where I first learned about how badly a rusting nail hurts under the skin."
    I see jagged scar lines along the base of each of his fingers. "The mayor of Calico back then was a hard man," he goes on, "and he taught me this. Scars didn't heal so neatly then as they do now. Naturally, I nailed him by the fingers to his own fucking wall."
    I nod. "Naturally."
    "Now I have an agreement with the new mayor. Everybody benefits."
    I consider. The Don is a criminal genius, after all. "Work," I murmur.
    "Work," he repeats.
     
     
    I sit again with Mr. Ruins, looking into his dead eyes. I hate this bastard. Still I hold his hands. I get into the rhythm of his pulse, monitored by the machines. I get into synchrony with the deep thrum of his cocooned mind.
    This is high-risk. I Lagged every link between Mr. Ruins and myself that I could think of, cutting them off at the root. He cut all my ties himself, and I cut any more that I made afterward.
    But many remain, out there in the world. To find them is hard and dangerous work. I'll have to reach out through the aether, making traces of my own while I search. They'll be slight, barely visible, lines of thought only and not experience, but they might be found.
    I prepare for that eventuality too.
    Then I dive, outward.
    His trail back through space and time is ragged where I have cut it. Almost all of the last year is gone, chopped with the axe-head precision of my anger. There are glimpses of him only, in the weeks he was not with my family in the Reach, when he was at large in Calico, sometimes on the skulks, but nothing concrete.
    He met with no one of apparent significance. I feel nothing unusual, no men on the inside whom I can follow and track. So I reach wider, stretching out of the Don's bunker to track his fading pattern back through time.
    Ten years elapsed since I told him never to come see me again, in CANDYLAND. The beginning and end of that time are cut off, wherever I was involved, but most everything in between remains, growing fainter with age.
    I follow him back. When he wasn't watching me, he voyaged beyond the confines of the Calico isthmus, to the shores of proto-Rusk and across those Siberic wheat-fields, down through the old Aleut nation, over the broad expanse of the Auropan tundra, stopping in various great ruined cities to reminisce on times gone by.
    On the isle of Elba, now a desert atoll barely poking its rocky tuft above the salty tides of the Mediterrane, he languished and lolled in the memory of Napoleon's anguish. It is a powerful memory still, stretched out over the thousands of miles, but in it he is alone.
    His trail leads further back, and I follow, tracking him from the bitter mountain coasts of New Armorica down to the island chains of Abindian. Atop the Himalay archipelago he bedded down with Pidgin tribes come aboard to hunt stork, and regaled them with tales of how he led a hundred mountain climbers astray with dreams of their lovers voices in the snow and dark. He told them of the items he stole from each, a snow-axe here, a necklace, a crampon.
    In the ruined towers of Jodhpur, he sat with monkeys amidst the arboreal jungle canopy and ticked off the number of pilgrims who had come to sacrifice their girl-children for him in days gone by, believing he would bring them boys. He knew the names of dozens, kept a snippet of their birth-clothes in a chest, over which he knelt and warmed himself as though from hot coals.
    I begin to glimpse what this trip is, and come to understand better what I was to be.
    Trophies, all. I would have been just another trophy in his case, like the misery of Napoleon, to keep him warm in the long dark furloughs in his hunt.
    I sink further back still, immersing myself in years of travels from sites of war and pestilence to natural