Deep Secret

“Was the place bombed?” I croaked.

“Big bomb in the Throne Room,” the man replied.

“Blew a hole through the middle. Weakened the structure,” the woman added. “Took out all the Chiefs of Staff and the Council too.”

“And all the Imperial Wives,” said the man. “Lot of important clerks killed when the service rooms caved in.”

“Lot of military too,” said the woman.

“Elite guard was surrounding the Throne Room,” the man explained. “Nearly all got crushed.”

Not to speak of the Emperor too, I thought. Bull’s-eye. Nice timing, whoever you were. All the top echelons of the Empire at one stroke, by the sound of it. It made me shiver and want to laugh at the same time. I put on a suitably grave face under my handkerchief and stepped cautiously after the two uniforms. Even in this safer corridor, the flagstones had heaved up here and there. In places, the stone ceiling bulged downwards. We kept close to the walls where that happened.

At length, after a long and roundabout walk, we arrived in the doorway of an arched stone vestibule. It glared with some kind of emergency lighting, making the hanging dust into a sort of bluish pea-souper. My glasses were coated by then. I had to take them off and clean them before I could see anything through that fog. While I wiped at them with my gritty handkerchief, I was aware of my two soldiers pulling themselves into smart attention with an evident effort and snapping slightly flaccid salutes. They said, in hoarse unison, “Magid Venables has arrived, sir.”

Inside the light, a tenor voice said, “Thank goodness!” Another person coughed hackingly, and a third, deeper voice said, “Great. Get him in here.”

I put my streaky glasses back on and advanced. Considering what the soldiers had said, I suppose I should not have been surprised by the people currently in charge of the Empire. But I was. They sat, the three of them, in various attitudes of deep weariness, at a table crowded with stuff. The tenor voice belonged to a wizard – mage, or whatever they call themselves in the Empire – who looked younger than I was. His eyes were so red with dust that I thought at first they were bleeding. One of his arms was actually bleeding, or had been. He was using the pompous short cloak the Empire decreed for its magic users, very sensibly, as a sling. Its gilded Infinity sign glittered off his left elbow. The one coughing was female, a very pretty lady even through streak upon streak of soot and brick dust, most oddly dressed in a pair of striped drawstring trousers and a blouse-thing sewn with sapphires and pearls. The third one was clearly General Dakros.

He wore the blue and grey uniform of the second-grade soldiery, as far as I could see it. It was torn and dusty and, in places, burnt. Like his private soldier, he had not shaved for some time. His chin was blue-black, matching his close-cut wriggly black hair. He was evidently from one of the swarthier races of the Empire, those not selected for the elite troops or high responsibility, and though this had saved his life, it had thrust upon him the shattering demands of running the Empire. His face, as he turned to me, had a hunted, nightmare look, hollowed at the temples and with muscles clumped at the blue jaw. But his eyes, I was glad to see, looked at me and appraised me quite sanely. He was older than the rest of us, but young for a General, from which I deduced that he was good at his job.

He turned away almost at once. There was a second arched doorway across the vestibule and several figures emerged from it as I walked to the table, materialising out of the dust fog with quiet urgency. Two laid faxes on the table. One, in the gold and royal blue of the elite soldiery, but looking drab and strained, came and muttered respectfully in the General’s ear. I was glad to see that respect. It proved that this Dakros really was in charge. It was some urgent talk about a captured World Gate. While it went on, I examined the table, which carried swathes of dust-covered faxes, several portable battle computers, a mind-speech receiver (something I wouldn’t have minded owning myself) and more empty plastic coffee cups than I could count.

The elite guard left and Dakros turned back to me. By this time I was coughing nearly as hard as the pretty woman. I said, “General, you have to get out of here before you ruin everyone’s lungs!”

“I know,” he said. “There’s just been a new fall. We’ll get out as soon as you’ve helped us solve our problem.”

“It’s in the Throne Room vault, you see,” the woman said.

The young wizard put in, in a tone of fretful pride. “I am doing what I can to keep it all up.”

He was, too, I realised when I sent my senses upwards. There were tons of masonry and it was half killing him to support it. I did what I could to help shore it up. Stan might have objected, but I didn’t care. The whole broken palace seemed to be on the slide. The young wizard gave me a grateful grimace as I slid my supports in around his.

“We’d better make it quick, then,” I said. “Which way is the Throne Room?”

The General heaved himself to his feet. He was a fine, tall fellow, even sagging with weariness as he was then. “We’ll show you.” As the other two stood up too, he seemed to recollect the manners of yesterday’s Empire. “Oh. Sorry. This is Junior Mage Jeffros and this is the High Lady Alexandra. The High Lady is the only one of the Emperor’s consorts who survived the blast.”

At this, the High Lady gave me a shamed sort of smile, as if she’d been caught stealing the jam or something. Perhaps one would feel guilty, I thought, when others of much higher rank had died. The Mage Jeffros evidently did. As we all hurried away down another long stone passage, he told me, “I was just left sitting in the rubble. All the senior mages around me were killed. I feel really bad about that. It was so senseless that it should have been just me left.”

The passage led us to a sort of canyon open to very blue sky. Broken building towered on either side – sliding, I could feel it sliding. I hastily did a lot more shoring. Then I looked at the canyon floor and, with difficulty, recognised the Imperial Throne Room, mostly by the shattered patterns on the floor, the remains of age-old mosaic littered with its own little stones and fragments of stained glass. The remains of the dais were at the other end. There was a black bowl scooped in the dais where the throne had been. Otherwise nothing. I whistled. They must have collected the Emperor and his staff in shreds, if at all.

“How on earth did you escape this?” I murmured to the High Lady.

“I was in the toilet,” she murmured back. She said it with defiance, but defiance that was in some way worn out. Poor girl, I thought. She’s been having to admit to it for hours, to soldiers.

“Don’t talk here,” Jeffros whispered.

“And don’t walk in step,” the General added.

He stepped carefully into the middle of the skylit canyon and walked lightly and swiftly towards the dais. The rest of us pattered after him, stepping in blank areas that had once been priceless designs in semi-precious stones, crunching through rubble and glass shards, and setting little cubes of mosaic rolling. Meanwhile, the cliffs of masonry on either side grumbled softly and, in places, suddenly subsided, letting out squirts of dust. I found it terrifying. But halfway along I was distracted by something worse. It was the smell of – well, sewage, garbage, butcher’s shop and gunpowder, I suppose, with a strong reek of ozone. I gagged quietly into my handkerchief. Ozone? I thought. Ozone is frequently an aftermath of magic. I felt about mentally, as far as I could bear to. Yes, the bomb that did all this had been guided and triggered by magic. It must have been one of the Emperor’s senior sorcerers on a suicide mission, I guessed, who had done it. A brave man. Or maybe a desperate one.

We mounted the dais beside the scooped hole, where the smell was nearly unbearable, and I found there was a roof over the back of the platform and a wall behind that which seemed almost intact. Though the roof bent and creaked and sifted dust on us, my instant, anxious probing revealed that this part of the building was immensely strong, reinforced with girders, granite and magic. Good. We could relax a little. If the Emperor’s throne had been set just two feet further back, he could have been relaxing too.

It was dark under there. All I could make out was the black hole of a doorway, with a hugely thick door hanging out of it. Jeffros reached out with his good hand to touch a wand that had been rammed upright into a crack in the dais. It flared like a torch, and so did a line of such wands, into the distance beyond the door. I could see glimpses of some kind of installation in there. The light also showed the door to have buckled in foot-thick waves, as if it had been under the sea.

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.