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
