“Except,” Ryan said, “a queen to share it with.”
“You’re far more astute than I gave you credit for. Perhaps a brain does lurk inside that grubber’s shell.” Akhnaton paused and added, “You’re right, Cawdor. I have no queen. You can help me to rectify that.”
Ryan’s carefully maintained neutral expression slipped for a moment. “How?”
“I want you to tell Krysty Wroth that you understand she and I are fated to be together and you are releasing her from whatever vows she may have made to you. In exchange for that, I will grant you and your companions safe conduct back to the redoubt and the gateway. I will give you anything you need.”
Ryan stared at the bronze mask, his mind awash with conflicting emotions. He said nothing for a very long time. Finally, he surprised Akhnaton and, to an extent, himself. He laughed, loud and scornfully.
“My proposition amuses you?” Akhnaton’s tone was cold and hard.
“Deeply. I thought you were some kind of super mind mutie. Why don’t you just mentally force me to do your bidding?”
Akhnaton didn’t answer.
“Could it be,” Ryan continued sarcastically, “that Krysty would instantly sense that you had me in your power and tell you what I’m telling you now…to go fuck yourself?”
The shock was so unexpected, so terrible that Ryan nearly collapsed. Time, space, the universe darkened and turned. His surroundings shattered into a kaleidoscope of flying fragments. He drifted among them, and the sudden terror of it dragged a scream up his throat. He clamped his jaws shut on it. The swirling fragments coalesced into the same image, infinitely repeated—a grinning, malevolent skull, the fires of hell erupting from the eye sockets.
Ryan had engaged in hundreds of battles in his life, but never one where a powerful will tried to beat down his spirit. But the image of Krysty and Dean were his anchors in reality. Ryan forced himself to stare at the hundreds of thousands of fiendish, grinning skulls. His love for Krysty and his son was a chain that a psychic assault couldn’t break. He willed the skulls to fade, demanding that the world steady around him.
Quite suddenly, he was in the pavilion again, standing before Akhnaton. His heart trip-hammered in his chest, his head ached and his body was filmed with cold sweat. But he smiled, a contemptuous twist of his mouth.
In a low voice, Akhnaton said, “You stinking scavenger. You dung beetle of a man. I could kill you where you stand, give you a cerebral hemorrhage, cause your aorta to burst.”
Breath rasping between his bared teeth, hands quivering, Ryan demanded, “Why don’t you do it, then?”
Akhnaton didn’t answer.
“You won’t do it because Krysty will know. And if she doesn’t hate you now, she will when she finds out.”
“Listen to me, Cawdor. I was created to impose order on chaos. All of man’s old social arrangements were destroyed. Lawlessness, terror, anarchy run unchecked. Only my vision and my resolve can prevail to restore a measure of peace and harmony on the world.”
“By imposing a new form of terror,” Ryan retorted.
“Don’t goad me. I don’t really expect you, a wandering, landless killer, to understand a fraction of my dream, a dynasty dedicated to virtue, as my namesake was dedicated to peace and justice. It is the only rational means to bring order out of chaos.”
“I’ve heard similar speeches before,” the one-eyed man scoffed. “Distill it all down and it’s nothing more than a cheap justification for tyranny.”
“You’re a fool. A venal, dirt-grubbing scavenger.”
“And you’re just another fucking mutie with an attitude.”
Ryan shot out his left leg in a sweeping kick that caught the underside of the table and heaved it upward into Akhnaton’s face. He and the camp chair tipped over amid a heavy thud and a bellow of outraged surprise.
The one-eyed man was atop him in a shaved slice of a second, his warrior reflexes and fury driving him forward, knees slamming solidly into the man’s flat stomach.
He pistoned both fists into the bronzed face beneath him in a flurry of jabs and left and right hooks. Akhnaton’s head rocked back and forth under the steady tattoo, blood springing from his nostrils, flying from split lips.