Ruthless: Path of Conquest

As Mina closed the door, James opened his eyes again.

Time to sleep, he thought.

But there was a Skill he could use in his sleep.

“Hester, are you still ready to Dreamwalk with me?” James asked in a near whisper.

“I am, sir, but are you sure you’re up for this?” she said.

“Yes, why wouldn’t I be?” he replied.

Because your body is death warmed over, master, sent Roscuro in a snarky voice.

James realized he had not heard from the Soul Eater in a while.

Good to know you’re still around, there, he sent telepathically.

“You’re burning up, sir,” Hester said. “I’m no expert in human anatomy, but I know the heat coming off of you now isn’t normal for you, at least.”

You won’t get rid of me, James, Roscuro sent. I’m bound to your soul, remember.

Fair enough, James replied. And do you think me using an ability that involves going to sleep is going to mess me up more, Roscuro?

“It’s just sleeping, Hester. It’s exactly what I’m supposed to be doing,” he said aloud.

Probably not, Roscuro admitted. Remember that I do not truly understand how your Dreamwalk works, though. It is alien to me, since it has little overlap with the forms of magic I used, Soul Magic and Necromancy. From my perspective, you are taking a risk for no reason.

“Are you sure?” Hester asked.

James had to focus a little harder for a moment to keep the two separate conversation threads clear in his mind.

Maybe I am a little too out of it for this, he thought.

He lay very still for a few seconds, breathing in and out slowly and carefully, waiting for his head to clear.

It didn’t.

He knew what he was saying to whom—or he was pretty sure he did, at least—but his mind was still a mess at the moment by his usual standards.

Fuck me. I guess they might be right.

“No, Hester, I’m not sure,” he said.

“Sounds like a compelling reason to wait, then,” Hester said. “I can’t remember the last time you hesitated about doing something.”

“Gosh!” James said, shaking his head with a slightly twisted grin. “You and Roscuro don’t want me to do anything…”

“The Soul Eater agrees with me?” Hester sounded shocked and appalled.

Master, please tell the spider that I agree with her, even though I was nearly fearless in my life as a warrior, Roscuro sent. We must work together to keep you from throwing your life awa—

“He says yes,” James replied, barely restraining a smile.

Some thoughts were lost in translation there, he sent to Roscuro.

Go to sleep, master, Roscuro replied wearily.

I am a lot goofier and more forgetful when I’m tired, James sent back. Yeah, it seems like I actually need the rest…

“So, are you just going to sleep, then?” Hester asked.

“Yes, I am,” James said.

I’m not going to forget about you, Moishe, he thought. I’ll go see you in person in the morning. I probably wouldn’t be much good to you tonight anyway.

He just hoped the Assassin would not take a turn for the worse during the night.

Even if Moishe did experience a sudden, sharp decline in his condition that night, though, James knew he probably couldn’t have done anything about it by being present.

He could feel in his bones that he lacked the power to issue even a single blessing in his present condition. He had worn himself down to a nub, trying to involve himself in everything and make certain that Cyrus and his followers died and that the Fisher Kingdom didn’t lose anyone in the process.

Perhaps tomorrow he would actually be powerful enough to do something for Moishe.

James allowed himself to slip into sleep. Once he lost consciousness, he slept like the dead, a dreamless slumber that felt like it could go on forever.

When he finally opened his eyes, he felt much stronger than he had been—and ravenously hungry.

I’m still not a hundred percent. I don’t want to pick any fights. But sleeping was a good call.

He rose to a sitting position in the bed, and Mina shifted beside him. Her eyes blinked lazily open and shut.

“Oh, you’re awake,” she said, sounding sleepily surprised.

James found her drowsy expression endearing, and he gave her a quick kiss on the lips.

“I have morning breath,” she warned him as they separated.

“When has that ever bothered me before?” he asked, and kissed her again.

“I guess you’re feeling better,” Mina said, waking up a little more.

The baby gurgled from nearby.

James rose and picked Junior up, rocking him back and forth in his arms.

“I am feeling a lot better,” James said. “I wonder what they put in that soup.”

“I think it was the three days of sleep,” Mina said wryly.

James’s eyes widened. “What? I really slept for three days.”

She nodded seriously. “The world did not end, either. You can rest more. As much as you need. You and I were planning on going on an adventure together, I know, but your recovery is much more important.”

“Oh, I could bench press a killer whale right now,” James said, flexing a bicep muscle the size of a grapefruit.

Is Moishe still alive? He could imagine a number of other disasters that could have occurred with him asleep for the last three days.

“Leave the poor whales alone, skapi. What did they ever do to you?” Mina smiled as she made the joke, but James could see she was watching him carefully for any sign of weakness.

“All right, I’ll leave the whales alone,” he said. “I’m just going to go and see Moishe—unless he’s woken up already.”

Mina shook her head. “No word of that,” she said.

“Do I need to make an announcement to the whole country that I recovered?” James asked.

She pulled a face. “Of course not! I made sure that no one found out that you were indisposed except for Rotter, Dave, and Damien,” she said. “Oh, plus your family. Rotter has been handling the administrative stuff that is too boring for me to be interested in it. Everyone else just assumes that they don’t see you because you’re dealing with someone else. They know the King cannot actually be everywhere at once.”

“Not until I create a whole lot more monsters,” James said slowly, stroking his beard.

Mina’s choice of words and his recent experience with the wyverns were giving him some ideas for future experiments.

“Which you will not do until you have fully recovered, right?” she asked in a quietly beseeching tone.

“Absolutely,” James said. “I’ll give it another week before I try Monster Generation or Dominion again. I can’t promise I won’t bless Moishe when I see him, though. The guy deserves it.”

Mina nodded. “I would never tell you to abandon a friend in need. It’s the unnecessary risks that make me lose sleep.” She gave James what seemed to him a feeble smile, and he thought he understood what she was feeling.

I’ve been making you worry, haven’t I?

“They’re not big risks when I have you to take care of me,” he said, pulling her into a group hug with him and the baby.

After some grooming, a heavy breakfast with the whole family to reassure them all that he was just fine, and a change of clothes, James set off for Alan and Mitzi’s place. His Fisher King powers told him that Moishe was still lying unconscious on their spare bed.

Even if Moishe had not still been there, it had been too long since James spoke with the old couple and got their advice.

I have a feeling I’m going to need some good counsel, he thought, recalling the strange events that had occurred when his forces slaughtered the monotheists.

There was definitely a shoe waiting to drop at some point.

As James walked to Alan and Mitzi’s place, he felt eyes on him. He turned his head and caught a dozen people from multiple sides looking in his direction. As he was scanning the environment, most of them turned surreptitiously away, embarrassed at being caught.

The surprising thing for him was that these were people whose names and faces were not familiar to him. They were not outsiders to the Fisher Kingdom—his powers would have detected any intruders—but they were not friends or confidantes of his either. They were ordinary citizens.

Were regular people worried about me? Or just curious what I’ve been up to…?

James imagined that the impression ordinary residents of his land would have of their leader might be that James himself was always the center of exciting events. It certainly felt that way to him at times.

It was harder to imagine that he had become someone whose health and safety was of interest to these practical strangers.

Then again, the Royal Family used to be the concern of everyone in Britain… like their tabloids didn’t have anything real to report on.

A little smile crossed his lips as James remembered something from his childhood.

He turned his eyes on his observers again, raised his hand, and gave them what he thought of as the “Queen Elizabeth II wave.” He had only seen the Queen’s signature move a few times, since she had died only a couple of years before his father. But he remembered that ordinary people had loved that woman—and that wave had always looked very low effort to him, so it was a good gesture to emulate, one that he would be able to perform even if his body was wrecked.

Sure enough, it brought a smile to a few faces—the people who had not been trying as hard to pretend they weren’t looking at him.

James smiled back and continued on his way until he came to Alan and Mitzi’s door.

They had a two-bedroom apartment unit much like most of the others here. In the haste to throw up buildings for all the people who now lived in James’s territory, he had not yet introduced much variety into the pattern of construction in the Kingdom. The residential buildings were all pretty much carbon copies of the housing that had existed in this place before the end of the world.

Which was a shame, upon reflection. James had often thought that many of the buildings around him were ugly and that he would redesign them if given the chance.

But the end of the world had not yet left room for creativity. It sometimes seemed that every day brought some exigent circumstance that made it harder to reshape the world that he now ruled.

He shook his head. That very thought was an indulgence, a distraction from the present vital task.

As he stepped up to the door, James looked around to make sure there weren’t a bunch of people watching him again—in case there was, he would do the wave once more. But there weren’t. He was back to being his pre-System, invisible self for the moment.

He didn’t bother thinking about whether he would prefer to be invisible or royalty. It was a moot point now.

He knocked.

A moment later, he heard footsteps coming down the stairs.

The door opened, and Mitzi stood in front of him.

“It feels like I haven’t seen you in years,” he said, truthfully.

Then Mitzi pulled him into a hug.

“There is a saying that there are years when nothing happens and weeks where decades happen,” she said. “The weeks since you and I met have been the second kind. I’m glad Alan and I were able to live the bulk of our lives in the first sort of time, though. Sometimes I wonder how you’re going to manage a world that seems to be stuck in the second mode.” She shook her head. “But I’m just accentuating your problems. I’m sure you didn’t walk over here for that. Why don’t you come in?”

“I’m happy to,” James said.

As they walked up the stairs, the conversation continued.

“How have you been the last couple of weeks?” Mitzi asked. “Since you woke us up, we’ve had no idea what’s going on.” There was no rebuke in her tone, James noticed, as there once would have been if he kept her out of the loop on decisions he was making.

“The truth is, I’ve been kind of all over the place,” James said. “Just putting out fires. I’m trying to get ahead of things, so I can plan for the future and make preparations instead of reacting. How have you guys been?”

“We’re in great shape, James,” she said, turning and grinning at him. “It’s the most marvelous thing, actually.”

As she had been standing in the stairwell before, Mitzi had been in relative darkness. But with her body turned toward him, silhouetted against the light that came in through the windows behind her, he saw something peculiar.

Mitzi’s hair had been a straight, gray mop since James met her, usually tied up in a ponytail. Now she wore her hair down, and there seemed to be darker strands intermixed with the gray mass.

Is that possible? There’s no way I missed her hair having so much black in it—is there?

His eyes went to her face—and was it just him, or were the laugh lines around her mouth just a little bit softer? He wouldn’t have noticed it at all before, and the lighting still wasn’t very good, but with the hair change, it seemed undeniable that something was going on.

James opened his mouth to make some comment on the change—not something as direct as a question, just a quip of some sort that would imply he’d noticed. Then the ball would be in her court to either explain what he had seen or express ignorance.

He doubted that she had failed to notice what his eyes had picked up on so quickly—and what she had perhaps been hinting at?—but he would know in a few seconds.

It was at that moment, with James’s mouth already slightly agape, that Alan popped his head around the corner—and James’s jaw dropped further. The sight of him confirmed the strange observation that James had been having trouble believing.

Alan’s thin, ivory wreath of hair had grown visibly thicker since James last saw him—and strands of brown intermingled with the white closer to the top.

Alan and Mitzi are aging in reverse…