The Stablemaster ducked a stiff knee and left, too.
So far so good, Titus thought. Nothing had been out of the ordinary yet. The next part would be. Titus was relying on his usual mild, courteous manner to carry him through that. He beckoned the Imperial Steward aside and turned apologetically to the rest, all of whom, including half the scribes, were paid followers of the Senate. “Would you gentlemen mind waiting for me in the large office? I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”
Knees ducked. A chorus of “Pleasure, Imperial Majesty” was uttered, and everyone except the servants turned to leave. The servants hovered doubtfully.
“Please go on with your work,” Titus told them pleasantly. He swept the pigeon up into a fold of his wrap and approached the steward, while the servants busily cleared the table, well within hearing. “Sempronius,” he said to the steward, “would you mind terribly sending my healer to me?”
The steward went white with concern. “Your Imperial Majesty is unwell? I swear, Majesty, that the utmost precautions against poison are taken at all times.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing like that,” Titus said truthfully. “I just don’t feel quite the same today.”
“I’ll fetch the healer at once, Majesty.” The steward hurried away, bustling the listening servants with him.
Titus allowed himself a small grin. Now there would be an obvious explanation when he failed to turn up at any of his appointments. He strolled out of the arbor and along the garden in the mild autumn sunlight, while he waited for the healer and General Agricola, and his anger continued to grow. Claudia was practically his only friend in the Empire, and the Senate was trying to kill her! Titus had had a miserably solemn and lonely childhood until his Imperial father had married again and Claudia had been born. Titus could hardly remember laughing at all before he was nine years old, when the small greenish baby lying in the Imperial cradle had crowed with delighted laughter when he bent over her. And from the moment she was a year old, Claudia had been his friend and ally, the person he told things to, the person he could laugh with. For this he had forgiven her the fact that she came with a strange, discontented stepmother whom he still very much disliked. For this, too, he had covered up for Claudia when she was in trouble, particularly when her strange jinxed magic started to cause peculiar things to happen. Then he found that Claudia was covering up for him in return. By the time Claudia was grown up, they were firmer friends than ever. Titus had defended Claudia in the Senate when it tried to declare her a public enemy, with her jinx as its excuse, and had made sure that the Personal Guard held their tongues in front of her. The Personal Guard had total contempt for Claudia’s mixed blood and made no secret of it. And for this, Titus promised himself, his Personal Guard was going to stand waiting, to attention, in full polished kit, drawn up in ranks in the exercise yard, for as long as he could contrive to leave them there. He was glad to see that the day promised to be nice and hot.
The healer approached and coughed. Titus whirled around, with the pigeon clutched to him. Planning the sort of things he was planning made even an Emperor nervous. “Your Imperial Majesty asked for me?” the healer said.
Titus, who was hardly ever ill, barely knew the man. He had no idea if he was a follower of the Senate or not, but he had an idea that healers were forbidden to take sides, and he hoped this was the case here. The man was tall, thin, and haughty, which did not promise too well. Too bad. Reminding himself that he was still the Emperor, Titus said, “Yes, I did, but not for myself. I want you to heal this pigeon, please.”
The healer started backward, disdainfully. “Imperial Majesty! I heal people, not birds!”
“Well, it can’t be that different,” said Titus, “can it? And this is a valuable pigeon, one of Wizard Derk’s clever ones. I don’t wish the Empire to cause offense to Wizard Derk.”
The healer compressed his lips irritably. “This brings the gods into it, so I dare not refuse. Let me see the creature, Majesty.” Titus carefully passed the pigeon over. The healer took it in his cupped hands and bent over it. “But this bird is bleeding all over! It should never have been sent out in this condition.”
“My feeling exactly,” said Titus. “I shall send a strong reprimand to the Senatorial Office. Whoever sent it out is going to feel my extreme displeasure.” He thought the pigeon rolled an approving pink eye at him for saying this.
The healer brought the pigeon level with his chin and concentrated for half a minute. “There,” he said, clearly trying not to look surprised at how easy it had been. “No problem at all, Majesty.” He passed the pigeon back, brighter-eyed and no longer bleeding.
“Thank you,” the pigeon crooned.
The healer jumped. “I didn’t know they talked! Will that be all, my Emperor?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Titus, who could see General Agricola advancing through the garden. “And of course I won’t mention that you had to stoop to bird healing. People might laugh if it got about. Please feel yourself free to say that I had a trifling sore throat.”
“Thank you, indeed, my Emperor.” The healer bowed, most gratefully, and hurried away.
That seems to be all right! Titus thought. He put the pigeon carefully into the fork of a tree, where it started to preen vigorously, and strode to meet the general of his Imperial legions.
“My Emperor!” General Agricola said, almost before they were within hearing distance of one another. “I was going to try to see you if you hadn’t sent for me.” Agricola was one of the very few Empire veterans left over from the days of the tours. Titus had personally promoted him from the ranks when King Luther had declared war on the Empire at the end of the last tour. Agricola was wide and thick-legged, with a scar across his big nose, and not tall, in the way ordinary soldiers tended to look, but he was a very good general. Titus hoped he was loyal to the Empire. The trouble was that “the Empire” could as easily mean the Senate as well as the Emperor. The next few seconds would show just which Agricola was loyal to. “So what did you need me for?” Agricola asked.
“A number of things,” said Titus, “none of them to do with the southern legions, actually. First, the noble senators Antoninus and Empedocles are on their way back to the Empire from the University. I would like you to have trusted men patrolling the northern border to arrest them as soon as they appear.”
A slight smile began to spread on Agricola’s tense face. Titus saw it and began to hope. “On what charge should the noble senators be detained, my Emperor?” Agricola asked.
“High treason, of course,” said Titus. “If they happen to resist arrest and happen to get killed, it won’t bother me. But if the bast—er, noble lords come quietly, I want Antoninus put in the dungeons at Tivolo and Empedocles at the top of the tower in Averno, and anyone who tries to bring them messages or help them in any way to be executed out of hand. The noble lords will be there awaiting trial, you see.”
Agricola’s smile spread a little. Titus began to believe that the man might really be loyal to the Emperor. “How long are they to wait until they come to trial, my Emperor?”
“Let’s see.” Titus was surprised, in a remote way, at how vicious he was feeling. “Antoninus is seventy, and Empedocles is sixty-eight. Let’s have them wait twenty years. That should do it. The second thing I want is a troop of cavalry loyal to me personally. Have I got anyone who is?”
The smile was all over Agricola’s face now. It was going to be all right. “All the legions are loyal to you personally, my Emperor, except the senatorial legion, of course. Where and when do you want your cavalry?”
“Waiting for me in half an hour at the north gate of the city. Tell them to bring supplies for a week’s fast travel,” Titus said, “and a spare mount each. I’ll join them with mine. And they’re to tell the gate guards they haven’t seen us.”
Agricola’s smile faded a little. “May I ask where—”
“The University,” said Titus. “I’ve got to make sure Claudia’s safe. I’ll go by bac
k roads so as not to run into the senators. The third thing is, Can you tell me what the Senate’s doing at the moment?”
Agricola’s smile was gone, replaced by the tense look with which he had arrived. “They’re in full session as I speak. They called all the senators in, even sick old Silvanus.”
“Oh, good!” said Titus. “I was sure they must have had a pigeon, too.”
The tense and worried look Agricola gave him was also a little puzzled. “I can’t say that I’d call it good, my Emperor, with respect. Rumor is that they’re debating impeaching you. They called in the lawyers and the judges, too, to make the things legal, I hear. That’s why I wanted to see you, Majesty.”
So that’s it! Titus thought. This wasn’t just aimed at Claudia. They’ve been after me as well, all along. What a fool I’ve been! “Impeachment of me on the ground that I’m secretly training a wizard with the aim of becoming a tyrant?”
Agricola nodded. “Something like that. Whatever sticks, I think.”
“Then come with me,” said Titus. He strode out of the garden and crosswise through the Imperial Palace, taking a route through unfrequented courts and little-visited parade grounds, where he and Agricola were least likely to be seen or overheard. “The fourth thing I was going to ask you for,” he said as they strode, “is that I want the Senate House surrounded while they’re all in there and everyone inside it put under arrest. I want them all in solitary confinement—no calls for lawyers or family visits permitted—until I get back from the University.”
Agricola was grinning again. “One slight problem there,” he said, marching beside the Emperor. “Senate’s been arresting hundreds of tax dodgers lately. Prison’s nearly full.”
“I know,” said Titus. “Set them free. Put all the senators in their place. I want martial law declared until I get back, with you in command, so you have full authority to do it. We’re on our way to get the proper documents for it now.”
“This,” said Agricola, marching like clockwork, “is beginning to be the best day of my life. I’ve been praying—everyone’s been praying—that you’d get around to doing this before the Senate got around to deposing you. But it would help to have some crime to charge the senators with, something to stop them from screaming too loudly.”
“We’re on our way to get that now, too,” said Titus.
They crossed the final, smallest courtyard and went toward the dilapidated building in its corner. It was built of marble, like the rest of the palace, but the marble was yellow and rusty in streaks where the stone had cracked and the roof had leaked. Titus pushed open the plain wooden door and ushered Agricola into a plain wooden room where a hundred depressed-looking clerks sat at long tables, each with an abacus and a pile of papers. Titus sniffed the air. He loved the warm smell of wood and dry rot in here. He had come here most days as a boy. Claudia had learned to calculate here and made her first attempt at magic in this room, which had somehow managed to twist half the abacuses into knots.
The rattle of beads and the scratch of pens stopped as they came in. Heads turned respectfully, not to the Emperor—to Titus’s amusement—but toward Agricola, the Imperial General in Chief. The head of this place, Titus’s old friend Cornelius, approached doubtfully, scratching his bald patch with a quill pen, which was a well-known habit of his. “The General in Chief needs something from the office of the Imperial Auditor?” he asked Titus. “My Emperor, I should add.”
“Yes, something for me,” Titus told him. “I want an exact audit of the accounts of every single member of the Senate. If the accounts look clean, dig. They’ve all been cheating the Empire for years, and I want proof of it.”
Cornelius’s pen paused above his head. “What? Even your uncles?” he said.
“Particularly my uncles,” said Titus. “The general here is going to send a squad of legionaries with each team of accountants. He has my orders to arrest all senators’ bodyguards and any member of a senator’s family who tries to interfere with the audit.”
“Or I have now,” Agricola murmured.
“And I want you to get to work in the next half hour,” Titus finished.
Cornelius tossed his pen aside. He clasped his hands and looked up at the worm-eaten rafters for a moment. “I think,” he said, “that I could cry with joy. But I’ll need documents of authorization.”
“You can write them out for me here,” said Titus, “and I’ll sign and seal them now—and at the same time, I’d like you to write out the Declaration of Martial Law. Could you do both in the short form? I’m in a hurry.”
Cornelius calculated, looking along the rows of his clerks. “We’ll need—let me see—All of you do two copies of both, that’s two hundred of each. Get writing, everybody. Short forms are on the end shelf. Somebody find the Great Seal and the sealing wax. Hurry!”
There was a scurrying for parchment, and for forms to copy, a slapping as parchment went down on the tables, followed by the quiet, swift scritting of pens. Titus caught the boy who fetched the Great Seal and sent him off to lock the door of the large office, where those who had come to him after breakfast were, he hoped, still waiting.
“Nice thought,” commented Agricola. “But I think your cook’s honest, or you wouldn’t be standing here. That reminds me: your Personal Guard. Those boys are bound to make trouble when I start arresting their granddads.”
Titus smiled blissfully. “They’re standing in rows in the exercise yard, waiting for me to inspect them. Just detail someone to keep going to them with a message that I’m on my way. With luck you can keep them there all day.”
Agricola laughed about this all the time Titus was signing the parchments and passing them to Cornelius to have the Great Seal properly affixed to each. He was still grinning as he collected the sheaf of orders for martial law in both his muscular arms, gave them a shake to make sure the red disks with griffin rampant on them all hung down one side, and put his square chin on the heap to hold it down. He looked sideways at the heap of audit orders left on the table. “Squads to accompany the auditors will be here in ten minutes,” he promised Cornelius. He nodded to the rows of grinning clerks. “Good hunting,” he said as he followed the Emperor outside. “Pigeons,” he added to Titus while they hurried across the yard, “to the rest of the legions to get them here soonest, while the home-based legions surround the Senate. Senatorial legion to be confined to barracks now, and the Personal Guard the same as soon as they smell a rat. Criers to announce martial law. Do me a favor, my Emperor, and come back soon, because it’s going to be chaos, rumors, and mayhem until you do.”
“I’ll try,” Titus promised, and pelted for the stable yard. He took both horses, telling the surprised groom that he had still not made up his mind which to ride, and arrived at the north gate almost at the same time as his cavalry escort.
The pigeon meanwhile, having fed and preened and found itself in perfect health, took off for home. It circled the palace once to find its direction, passing over soldiers seething in all directions, except for some finely dressed ones who were standing in rows in a big space, looking rather hot and bored, and then, finding north, it turned toward Derkholm. It sheered away from the Senate building, having no wish for someone to scoop it up in a butterfly net. There were soldiers on its roof by then, and more quietly gathering in the roads all around it, but the rest of the city seemed full of ordinary, busy people in the usual way. Just outside Condita, the pigeon flew over a small troop of Imperial horsemen trotting secretly and sedately through an industrial suburb and dipped its wings in greeting. Titus waved cheerfully back. He was wondering just how long the Personal Guard would stand in the sun before someone came and told them that the Emperor was missing, believed poisoned. That was when Agricola would really have his hands full.
FIFTEEN
AT THE UNIVERSITY Corkoran sat in his ruined lab, wondering whether to end it all. Sometimes he held his throbbing head in both hands—this was on the occasions it seemed about to fall apart in segments, li
ke one of Derk’s oranges—and sometimes he simply stared miserably at the remains of his sabotaged moonship. A lot of the time he just stared at the wall. It seemed a yellow sort of color that he did not remember its usually being. He was thinking that when he had the energy, he would climb to the top of the Observatory tower and throw himself off, when someone opened the lab door.
“I told you I didn’t need you,” he said, assuming it was his assistant.
“You haven’t told me anything yet,” the intruder replied.
It was a much larger voice than Corkoran’s assistant’s, with windy undertones and shrill overtones that made Corkoran shudder. He turned around—too quickly; it made him yelp—and saw the front parts of a strange griffin sticking through the doorway. He remembered uneasily then that Finn had said something about a plague of griffins. But at least the creature was a soothing shade of brown. Even its unusual heavy-lidded eyes were a restful mud color, and its feathers, though crisply glossy, were no harder to look at than the crust of a loaf. “What do you want?” Corkoran said. “Who are you?”
The griffin ducked its great head apologetically. “I’m Flury. I want to join up as a student here.”
“You can’t,” Corkoran told him. Or was it her? It was hard to tell from just the front view. “You’re too late. Term has already started. You’ll have to wait until next autumn now.”
“But I didn’t know. I’m from the other continent,” Flury protested. “Can’t you make an allowance for that?”
The voice grated on Corkoran. It was too big. “No,” he said. “Apply next spring with proof of magical attainments, and we’ll see what we can do. I suppose you do have some magical abilities?”
Flury looked shy. “Some,” he admitted.
“And you’ll find the fees are quite high,” said Corkoran. “Have you money?”
“Quite a lot,” Flury admitted bashfully.
“Good. Then come back next spring,” said Corkoran. “Now go away.”