Deep Secret (5 page)

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 ‘T
IMOTHEO’.
And got a response.

M
ALE 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.

E
NTER CORRECT PASSWORD OR PENALTY ENSUES.

I tried the Infinity sign, but that was too obvious. I tried ‘K
ORYFOS
’, 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 ‘T
IMOS
’, 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:

T
HREE PASSWORDS INCORRECT.
P
ENALTY 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.”