LITMIR.BIZ

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Intention, more of a suggestion – to leave the place to go to hell in its own sweet way.”

      “It can, for me,” I said. “What directive is this? A deep secret you forgot to tell me, or what?”

      “No, it’s something I picked up after I – while I was – was over there – negotiating with the Lords of Karma and so on,” he confessed. “I had to go even higher up in the end. It came from a long way up. Them Up There want the Empire left alone.”

      “Happy to oblige,” I said, hurling my washing things into my bag. I zipped it up and set off downstairs. “Are you coming to Iforion with me?”

      There was an unhappy pause. It lasted while I hurried from the stairs and into the living room. Then Stan’s voice husked, “I don’t think I can, lad. I think I’m fixed on Earth. I may even be stuck to this house of yours.”

      “That’s boring for you,” I said.

      “There’s no rule that says life – I mean afterlife – has to be interesting,” he said ruefully.

      I sensed him hovering wistfully in the middle of my living room as I set out for the Empire. It took several moves, from lattice to lattice, with its attendant feeling of being a pawn on a chessboard hopping from square to square – but downhill, since I was moving Ayewards. I thought as I went that Lewis Carroll got it right in Alice Through the Looking Glass. No one had ever told me, but I have always suspected that Carroll was a Magid. It is a very influential thing to do, to write books like the Alice books; and influence is what being a Magid is all about. Subtle influence.

      I emerged in Iforion, as before, in the small cubicle in the palace they call the Magid Gate and found myself in a roomful of dust – pungent, old, bricky dust. My eyes and nose instantly streamed. I got my handkerchief out, started to blow my nose, and then changed my mind and held it over my nose and mouth as a filter. While I was dumping my bag in a corner, two soldiers edged into the tiny room.

      “Posted to take you to General Dakros, sir,” the man said hoarsely.

      They surprised me, and not only because they appeared so suddenly out of the dust. One was a woman and both were younger than me. Their uniforms were of a very low-ranking kind, dark blue and grey, such as I had seen only in the far distance before, herding aside those of the common people who were allowed within (or probably just beyond) shouting distance of the Emperor. Both looked deeply weary. It was in the way they moved, as well as their pale faces and dark-circled eyes. The man had clearly not shaved for several days. The woman’s hair was clotted with grey-red dust.

      “If you’ll keep close to us, sir,” she said, as hoarse as her companion. “Parts of the building are dangerous.”

      I saw what she meant as we set off into the fog of brick dust. Almost at once we turned sharply into a domestic-seeming corridor, a low, stone-floored passage I had never seen before. When I craned back to look at the corridor I was used to, I had a glimpse of sky there among bent and splintered girders. I could hear quite heavy pieces of masonry dropping from higher up. I jumped at the first crash, but the soldiers took no notice. It was happening all the time and they had obviously grown used to it.

      “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,

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