Wow! I thought.
My three companions were already climbing over the doorsill into the secure chamber beyond. I hurried after them. It felt quiet in there, and safe, and it was almost dust-free. I took my handkerchief off my face and used it to clean my glasses again. After that I could look properly at the ranks of screens, keyboards and computers which the Emperor had used to control the eleven worlds straddling the waist of Infinity.
“We’re going to have to blow all these up before we leave,” the General told me gloomily, “in case someone gets in and tries to use them. This one seems to be the one we need. It won’t let Jeffros divine its purpose.”
“And I was told he kept information about the succession separate from everything else,” the High Lady Alexandra explained.
I slid into the red leather bench in front of the machine the General pointed at. It started up fairly readily. There was some kind of emergency battery in it. “Explain the problem,” I said as I watched the basic programming coming up on the screen. “It’s not harmed in any way. It’s just told me so.”
“We got that far too,” the General said, with a touch of sarcasm.
“I wouldn’t let him go beyond that,” Jeffros said. He looked strained and ill. “You’ll find it’s got magic protections.”
I had already seen those. They did not seem very formidable. I boxed them out and typed in a command for the names and whereabouts of the Emperor’s children. Nothing. I tried ‘HEIRS’ for ‘CHILDREN’. Again nothing. Then, with memories of that mock trial last November, I typed ‘TIMOTHEO’. And got a response.
MALE BORN 3392 CODENAME TIMOTHEO DELETED 3412
“Deleted!” I said. “That’s a fine touch. What was his real name then?”
“We don’t know,” said the General.
Well, at least this did seem to be the machine that had the answers, I thought. “Tell me the codenames for the other children, then, and how many of them there are.”
“Again we don’t know,” said the General. “We’re not even certain there are any.”
“Oh, I think there were,” said the High Lady Alexandra. “There were rumours of at least five.”
I swivelled round on the red bench. “Look here. I got a fax two years ago, just after I took over as Magid for the Empire. It recorded the birth of a girl to… to… um… a Lesser Consort called Jaleila. That’s one at least.”
“Wasn’t true,” said the General, and the High Lady added, “Poor Jaleila had been dead nearly fourteen years then.” The General gave me a look that was more than a touch sarcastic. “Beginning to see the extent of our problem, eh, Magid?”
I was. My face must have been expressive. Jeffros looked up at me from stringing lengths of flex between his wands. “This Empire,” he said, “was built of planks of delusion across a real cesspit. You don’t have to tell us, Magid. The Emperor was so scared of being tossed off the planks that he did a great deal more than just hide his children.”
“Hid them even from themselves and issued false bulletins about new births,” Dakros said. “Cut the moral stuff, Jeffros. That’s our current problem. Thanks to Lady Alexandra we’re fairly sure there are some heirs and the question is, can you find them, Magid?”
I looked him directly in his weary face. “Do you really want to find them? Since they don’t know who they are and you don’t either, wouldn’t it be better just to start all over again with a new Emperor? You seem to have made a start yourself—”
He had grown more outraged with every word I spoke. He interrupted me vehemently. “Great and little gods, Magid! Do you think I want to deal with this mess for the rest of my life? I want to go home to Thalangia and run my farm! But I know my duty. I’ve got to leave the Empire in order with the proper person on its throne. That’s all I’m trying to do here!”
“All right, all right,” I said. “It needed to be asked. But let’s hope this proper person of yours has a watertight birth certificate, or a birthmark or a tattoo or something, or half the Empire is going to say he’s a fraud if we do find him. Do they?” I asked Lady Alexandra. “Get some kind of mark at birth?”
“I’ve no idea,” she said.
“Then I take it you’re not the proud mother of an heir yourself?” I said.
Even in the queer, flaring light of the wands, I saw how she coloured up, and she wrung her hands in an involuntary, distraught way. Dakros made a movement as if he was going to hit me, but stopped as she answered sedately, “I’ve never had the honour, Magid. My sense was that the Emperor didn’t like women much.”
“And thought he was going to live for ever,” I said disgustedly.
“He was only fifty-nine,” she told me.
“Oh, what a mess!” I said. “So what do you know?”
“Only rumours, as I said,” she answered. She shamed me. She was being polite and she was trying to help, and here was I getting progressively ruder and more irritated. But then the Empire has an atmosphere and always gets me down, and it was worse then, in that dusty ruin with tons of masonry hanging over our heads. “I heard,” Lady Alexandra said, “of at least two girls. And there may have been two boys besides the one who was executed recently. I think Jaleila may have had a son before she died, but I wasn’t a consort then, so I don’t know for sure.”
“Thank you, lady,” I said. I turned back to the computing machine. Beside me, Jeffros crawled to attach a wire to its cabinet, awkward and one-handed. He shamed me too. He was getting ready to explode the place as soon as I came up with something and all I was doing was getting waspish with the General and the lady. I had better come up with something quickly. The thing that was making me most irritable was the way I could feel the ceiling, despite its magic, creaking and faintly shifting above us.
I typed away unavailingly for a minute. The screen kept giving me the news that Timotheo was deleted. I scowled at it. Surely even a paranoid fool like Timos IX must have envisaged a situation like this. There had to be some reasonable way to locate and identify his heir. Even if he had thought that whichever Councillor or Mage also knew the secret was going to survive him, there still had to be a way. The ceiling creaked again as I tried a new way. Ah. A new message.
ENTER CORRECT PASSWORD OR PENALTY ENSUES.
I tried the Infinity sign, but that was too obvious. I tried ‘KORYFOS’, since someone had just mentioned him. No luck.
It was Lady Alexandra who had mentioned Koryfos. Something about Koryfos the Great coming back to rule the day the Imperial Palace fell.
As I tried the word ‘TIMOS’, I heard the General say, “Stupid story.”
“It isn’t all down yet,” Jeffros put in.
While he was speaking, the machine whirred and came up with another message:
THREE PASSWORDS INCORRECT. PENALTY ENSUES.
The ceiling creaked once more, loudly.
“Someone find me a copy disk,” I said. “Several. We need to get out of here.” I could feel the magics up there shredding away as I spoke. A safety device. Anyone not in the know queried this machine and down it all came on top of him. The Emperor didn’t care. If that happened, he knew he’d be dead. Of all the stupid, selfish – “Quick!” I said.
The High Lady Alexandra arrived at my side with a box of copy disks. She wasn’t just a pretty face, then. But I had begun to realise that anyway. On my other side, the General proffered two more. I snatched one, snapped it in and commanded the machine to copy.
“Do you think it will?” the General asked dubiously.
“No,” I said. “But I’m going to make it!”
I have seldom worked so hard or so fast as I did then. With one mental hand, as it were, I held together the unravelling magics overhead. With the other – with everything else I had – I forced that damned machine to copy its entire contents at speed, high speed, on to disk after disk. I had only managed four when I felt the overhead magics escaping me. I left the fifth disk in there and swung off the bench.
“Come on. Run, all of you
!”
They had all been staring upwards uneasily. They did not need to be told why. The General left at a sprint, managing to call into his battle-com as he ran, “Clear the building. Roof’s about to go.” Jeffros and I took the High Lady Alexandra by an arm each and hammered desperately after him. We chased across the ruined mosaic floor with slow-motion landslides beginning on both sides of us, and tore along a stone passage that seemed endless. Long before the end of it, I was hawking for breath, far worse than the lady, far too breathless even to try to stop the palace going. I just ran, hearing the long slow grinding of a mountain of building collapsing overhead, forcing myself to run faster, swearing to keep myself in better condition if I ever got out, and running, running.
We pelted out on to a terrace of steps above a vast courtyard. All along the length of these steps, shabby uniformed figures shot out of other doorways and ran too. The General, and everyone else, wisely kept running, down the flight of steps and on out into the courtyard. We panted after them, with chunks of stone crashing and bouncing at our heels.
The General stopped in the middle of the courtyard beside the huge statue of Koryfos the Great. The rest gathered in a ragged group around him, no more than a couple of hundred or so – surprisingly few people to hold down an empire.
“The Emperor had just cut back on the Army,” the General said sourly, seeing my surprise, and swung round to look at the palace.
I was beyond speech by some way. My chest burned. I could only heave up breath that hurt and stare at that huge building folding in on itself and the dust boiling up from it. Jeffros, who looked as if he felt far worse than I did, shot me a look that said, Why not? and snapped his fingers. There was a sulky boom somewhere in the midst of the vast grinding, and the dust boiling out sideways was suddenly orange with fire.
“Oh – oh!” Lady Alexandra cried out.
As the building spread itself majestically into a heap of scorching rubble, the General put an arm round her. “You’ll find a new life, my lady,” I heard him say through the astonishing noise of it all. And I thought that when General Dakros finally went home to Thalangia – wherever that was – he would not be going alone.
I don’t know how long we stared at the palace. I remember we all seemed to want to wait for the outlying wings, each of them with a row of vast turrets, to collapse with the rest and that these took quite a time to go. More people came running into the courtyard from there, so that by the end we were quite a large crowd of shivering, orphaned, dusty folk, all staring at the end of the seat of a government we had thought would never end, I know I felt as stunned as the rest. The Empire I had loved to hate was simply not there any longer.
My breath came back in slow stages. When I had merely trembling legs and a sore chest, and the ruin in front of us seemed to have stopped moving, I turned to General Dakros and passed him two of the four copy disks. “There you are,” I said. I was hoarse as a crow. “One to work on and one backup. Warn whoever works on it to have a magic user standing by. That programme is almost certainly designed to wipe if anyone tries to use it anywhere but on that machine.” I pointed my filthy thumb at the rubble. “I’ve done what I can, but it will need reinforcing when you try to run it.”
I was, to tell the truth, quite worried about that. I’d wrapped all four disks in every protection I could think of, but I didn’t have exact enough knowledge of the Emperor’s methods to know what to protect them from.
“What are you going to do?” Dakros added.
“I’m going to take the other two disks home and work on them there,” I said. “Could you let me know anything – anything – that you find out from yours? You have local knowledge I don’t. And I’ll fax you when I’ve got something.”
He responded by pointing his thumb at the vast heap of rubble and gave me a wry look. I remembered that the fax machine to which I was tuned was somewhere under there. So was my overnight bag.
“I’ll call you,” I amended. “Give me your battle-com number and I’ll tune it to my fax machine at home.”
He gave me the number, looking doubtful. “But how will you get home now the Magid Gate has gone?”
“That was only used by custom,” I said. “I can go from anywhere.” He looked so surprised and respectful that I felt that I had been boasting – and I had, a little. Some places you can’t make transit from. But there was no problem with the courtyard. I said, “See you soon, I hope.” Then I walked out across the court, the uphill Naywards way home.
The first thing I did at home was to put the two disks into plastic with magically enhanced protection and then lock them in a drawer. I did that even before going to the bathroom and coughing up what felt like two pounds of brick dust. Then I showered and changed my clothes. By that time I felt slightly less shaken, but still too shaken to get back to work. I decided to take my filthy clothes to the cleaner instead and buy a new razor on the way. I was on my way out of the house when I heard piano music, loudly, from the living room.
I opened the door. The Diabelli variations were coming over my CD player, quite thunderously. “I don’t remember leaving that on,” I muttered, going to turn it off.
“You didn’t,” Stan’s voice said. He sounded slightly ashamed. “It was in there and I found I could do that – turn it on. It’s the kind of brain-music I seem to fancy in this state. I can turn it down if you’d rather.” The music became suddenly blessedly faint.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m going out. Enjoy yourself till I get back.”
When I got back, the same CD was still playing. It finished, and started all over again, while I was in the kitchen finding something to eat. I stood it for half an hour and then went in there. “Want me to put a different CD on for you?” I asked.
“No, no,” Stan said. “This suits me fine. But I’ll lower it right down while you tell me what’s been going on.”
The Diabelli variations once more sank to a distant tinkling. Invitation hung in the air. It seemed pretty clear that Stan was bored. It had not occurred to me before that a disembodied person could be bored – but why not? “There was a bomb in the Throne Room,” I said, and sat down and told him the rest.
“Those disks’ll wipe,” he said decidedly, when I had done. “If there are any kids, no one will find them and that will be that. There’ll be six trumped-up Emperors in the next year, and then the whole thing will fall apart. No more Empire. Just what’s supposed to happen.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m professionally bound to try to help – even though it almost certainly means ruining a computer over it.”
“You can do that in your spare time if you want,” he said. “Don’t forget your main job is to find a Magid to replace me. You’d better go to Bristol tomorrow.”
“No,” I said. “Not with a computer puzzle like this one hanging over me. I couldn’t concentrate.”
I did not want to say I was sick to death of the fruitless Magid hunt. I thought of every other possible excuse instead. Stan protested. We argued for the entire length of the Diabelli variations. As they started yet again, I said, to placate him, “All right. I’ll write the four we know about a letter, asking them to get in touch with me. How does that grab you?”
“I’d be surprised if anything grabbed me in this state,” Stan retorted. “Fine. What are you going to tell them?”
“Different things, depending,” I invented. “Thurless is a writer. I can send him a fan letter. Mallory’s a student. She’ll want money. I’ve already told her mother she’s got a legacy. I can write about that. Fisk sounds as if she would be interested in a new miracle cure, and Kornelius Punt…”
“Yes?” said Stan.
My invention, which had been flowing so freely, dried up on Punt.
“He’s been travelling. Ask him if he’s interested in doing a travel book,” Stan suggested.
“Good idea!” Because I knew he’d give me no peace until I did something. I wrote the letters then and there. I was rather please
d with my artistry. Regardless of the fact that I had never even seen a book by Mervin Thurless, I wrote lyrically of the beauties of his style. To Mallory, I wrote that she had inherited £100. I reckoned I could just about afford that much. To Tansy-Ann Fisk, I was the friend of a friend of a friend who had heard that she was in a clinic and wanted to tell her about the marvels of the Stanley Diet. To Kornelius Punt, I was a small publisher touting for interesting books.
“What’s this Stanley Diet?” Stan said at my shoulder.
“Airy nothing, like you,” I said.
“I thought so,” he said. “Go on. Take the mickey. I don’t care.”
I posted the letters and then, at last, Stan allowed me to get on with the Empire disks. It took me the next three days.
I started studying one of the disks by every Magid means that were relevant. When I thought I knew enough about the nature of the program and the safeguards implanted in it, I stripped down my oldest computer and started forcing it to become Empire-compatible. This was a major task in itself. The Empire used a different size and shape of copy disk, different power and a more streamlined approach to programming. I had to render the metal and plastic of my poor old Amstrad into a sort of jelly and then harden it into the correct form. I had to create a power adapter. Then I had to program it to reflect, as near as I could conjecture, the nature of the machine I had copied the disks from. This was the hardest and most finicky part of all. I can safely say that only a Magid could have done it. I remember remarking to Stan, “Lucky I’m in practice with this sort of thing. It’s probably cheating, but I use Magid ways a lot in my ordinary programming. Did you use Magid methods with your horses?”
There was no reply. I heard the Diabelli variations again, coming from my living room.
“I bet he did,” I murmured. There is almost no way not to. It seems to permeate everything you do, being a Magid. Sometimes it’s so nebulous as to seem like intuition. Sometimes, when you hit a fierce problem, there seems no way forward without, and you push, the way I was pushing that program then.