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.