"Oui, mon vieux?"
"What's the point of this dumb game? We both know that Periandros is dead and that you're dealing on behalf of a doppelganger. So why are you bothering to bother me with all this shit now? What good is pretending that a doppelganger can actually function as emperor? Especially in view of the fact that you're getting ready to jump ship anyway and go over to Sunteil's side."
"To Sunteil's side? But I do not understand, Yakoub! What you are saying is incomprehensible to me!"
"Perhaps you might understand it better if I could say it in French. But I can't. Merde is the only word of French I know. What you're trying to tell me is so much merde, Julien. That's a French word, isn't it? If you don't understand it, maybe I should try speaking to you in Romany."
"You are so angry. My old friend, what have I done?"
I didn't want to start in on the whole subject. But he was irritating me at a time when I didn't need irritation.
"You don't know?" I asked.
A pause, minute but revealing.
"Whatever I may have done," he said after a moment, "it was for the sake of the Rom as well as for the sake of the Imperium, Yakoub. N'est-ce pas? It is the truth."
"Whatever you may have done," I told him, keeping tight control over my rage, God knows why, "was probably for the sake of Julien de Gramont, n'est-ce pas? With some slight thought, maybe, for the incidental damage it might cause, but that was purely secondary, I suspect." I amazed myself with my own ability to hold my fury in check. A trick one sometimes learns, with time. And sometimes forgets. "Just tell me this: whose pay are you in today? Periandros or Sunteil?"
Silence. Consternation.
"Both?" I suggested. "Yes. Yes, that would be more like you, wouldn't it? And right now you're calling to do Periandros' work, or what passes for Periandros these days. An hour from now you may be scheming with Sunteil. And-"
"Please, mon ami. I implore you, no more. Truly, I have done you no harm. I feel great love for you, Yakoub. Do you comprehend that? It is the truth. La verite veritable, Yakoub." He held his hands outstretched toward me. "I call you now on behalf of Periandros, yes. He wishes to speak with you. It is what I am asked to tell you."
"Then I ask you to tell him that I can't be bothered with doppelgangers at a time like this. Tell him he can go off somewhere and fart in his hand, for all I care. Tell him-" A stricken look appeared on Julien's face. "No. No. All right, tell him what I told you a minute ago. That I've simply been too busy to decide anything. Just stall him. Sidetrack him. In your slick diplomatic way."
"Until-?"
"Until never," I said. "This struggle is a two-sided triangle now, Julien, and there can't be any transaction between Periandros and me that would mean anything any more, whatever he may think. Doppelgangers fade. Maybe they don't know that about themselves, but I know it. I don't have time for him. The poor unreal bastard. All right? Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
"He may be dead, Yakoub, but he is not yet without power."
"He will be. He'll be nothing at all, very soon. I have to save my energies for dealing with the emperors who aren't dead. I'm working for the long run, Julien. Periandros is already decaying. Whether he knows it or not."
"But while he lives-"
"He
doesn't
live. He's a zombie. He's a walking mulo. And I ask you to keep him out of my hair. For the sake of the great love you claim to bear for me."
"Your voice is so harsh, Yakoub. There is such enmity in it."
"Perhaps you know why that is."
"D'accord," said Julien gloomily. "I will tell Periandros you need more time for your decision."
"About eighty million years," I said. And I broke the contact.
The next moment Polarca came striding into the room, looking distraught, waving a sheaf of reports.
"They're fighting in the Gunduloni district," he announced. "A bunch of Periandros loyalists against a detachment of Naria's militia. And troops wearing Sunteil's insignia have seized a whole block of streets just south of the imperial district, and they're going from house to house, forcing people to swear allegiance to him. And over on the other side of town there's a battle going on and nobody's been able to tell who's on what side."
"Is there anything else?" I asked.
"One thing more," said Polarca. "Naria has summoned you to the palace. He wants a parley right away."
12.
IT WAS INEVITABLE, OF COURSE: THE DROPPING of the third shoe. Periandros and Sunteil had been heard from, and finally the last of the high lords was putting in his bid for my support. Or so I assumed. I was requested-and Naria's adjutant had sounded pretty damned urgent about it, according to Damiano, who had taken the call-to come at once and to bring with me not only Polarca but the phuri dai. Shrewd Naria, angling for Bibi Savina's backing as well: maybe my seat on the Rom throne might be a little wobbly, but Rom everywhere revered the phuri dai, without exception.
We held a conference on the advisability of my accepting Naria's invitation and I got a mixed response. Jacinto and Ammagante, cautious as ever, wondered if it might be some sort of trap, a ploy designed to give Naria control over the entire Rom high command in one swoop. Damiano and Thivt agreed that that was a possibility but they thought the notion was far-fetched. Polarca, plainly itching to get out of this palace in which we had hidden ourselves for what was starting to seem like weeks, didn't care: he was willing to take the risk, such as it was, rather than remaining holed up here any longer.
I looked toward Bibi Savina. "What does the phuri dai say, then?"
She looked at me and through me, into realms far, far away.
"Does the Rom baro refuse the summons of the emperor?" she asked.
"But is Naria the emperor?" Jacinto said.
"He holds the palace," said Bibi Savina. "One of the other two is dead and the third one is in hiding. If Naria is not emperor, no one is. Go to him, Yakoub. You must. And I will go to him with you."
I nodded. The phuri dai and I generally have seen things the same way over the years. To Damiano I said, "Tell him we'll be there in an hour or less."
"He's promised to send an imperial car for you."
"No," I said. "The last thing I want is to go driving around the Capital today in a car that bears the imperial crest. We'll take one of our own cars. Three cars, in fact. Nobody's going to try to get in the way of the Rom baro if they see a whole cavalcade of Rom vehicles."
Bold words. But in fact we were fired on five times during the thirty-minute ride to the imperial palace. There were no hits: our screens were good. Still, it wasn't a good sign. All this artillery action was twentieth-century stuff, and it felt out of place, a thousand years out of place and then some. I hadn't thought that a little thing like a struggle over the imperial succession could have sent the Gaje heading back down the evolutionary trail so fast. War is an obsolete concept, I had been telling Julien de Gramont only the other day-so to speak-during the tranquility of my retirement on icy Mulano. And in the short time since then I had found myself in the midst of a small war on Galgala and now in what had the look of a very large one here at the Capital. First our seat of government and then theirs.
At any rate, we got through the city in the same number of pieces with which we had set out. We never knew which side was doing the firing. Most likely all three factions were taking turns, and nobody having any idea of who it was that they were firing at, any more than we could tell who was shooting. An anonymous war: more twentieth-century stuff. If there has to be fighting, give me the medieval days, when at least you knew your enemy's name.
The city was a tremendous mess. I wouldn't have thought they could smash so much of it up so quickly. At least half a dozen of the loftiest towers had been sheared right off in mid-loftiness. Mounds of rubble strewn high as houses in the wide boulevards. A pall of black smoke staining the sky. Here and there an arm or a leg sticking out of the ruins: death, actual death, irreparable and irreversible. Whole lives cut in half as those towers had been, men and women robbed of a hundred years apiece or even more. And for what? Some petty dispute over whether the Gaje crown should go to a man of Fenix or a man of Vietoris, or perhaps to the animated image of a dead man from Sidri Akrak?
In that scene of devastation there were, nevertheless, incongruous signs of imperial splendor. Sky-banners, symbolic of the presence of the emperor at the Capital, were blazing away in the east, the south, and the north. But it was a display of banners such as never had been seen here before, for they glowed in three different sets of colors, one for Periandros, one for Naria, one for Sunteil. Wherever those warring lights met and clashed overhead, there was such turmoil in the sky that it befuddled and baffled the eye.
And farther to the north, in the city's outer ring-what were those plumes of brilliant purple light there? Why, they were the light-spikes of the Rom baro, of all things, returned at last to their proper place! Naria's doing? Sunteil's? Well, it was all useless flattery now. Did they think my allegiance could be bought with a show of light?
The palace was guarded by level upon level of fantastic defenses. A ring of deflector screens, first, casting a purple glow over the whole place. Within that, a row of gleaming tanks, all eyes and cannons. Then a phalanx of robots. An android militia. A vast host of human soldiers too-or, more likely, doppelganger-soldiers, hastily stamped out to meet the emergency. Scanners. Sky-eyes. Floating clouds of lethal antipersonnel pellets held in check by webs of magnetic force. And more, much more. State-of-the-art stuff, all of it, a wondrous and preposterous array of technological wizardry. Naria's incredible defensive deployment told me as much about Naria as it did about the current state of military preparedness in the Imperium.
It took more than an hour for us to be escorted through all the checkpoints. But at last we entered into the presence of the man who for the moment held the title of Sixteenth Emperor.
No throne-platform now, no crystalline steps. An immense cube of what looked like glass, but probably wasn't, had been set up in the enormous high-vaulted council-chamber of the palace. A warning line of blue fire rose from the stone floor on all four sides. High above, scanner beams searched constantly through the air. And deep within the cube, enthroned like a pharaoh of old in absolute inaccessibility, sat the self-proclaimed Emperor Naria, motionless as a statue, taut and slender as a whip, solemn as a god. Darkness surrounded him but he himself was illuminated by a confluence of spotlights that imparted a fierce blaze to his shoulder-length scarlet hair, his dark purple skin, his implacable yellow eyes. He wore a richly brocaded garment of some stiff green fabric that rose up behind his head like a cobra's hood, and the crown imperial floated above him in holographic projection.
All very impressive. All very ludicrous.
I saw Polarca struggling with a smirk. The phuri dai was smiling seraphically; but then she often does that, in all sorts of contexts.
"We are grateful for your coming here, Rom baro," Naria declared in slow, measured, absurdly pretentious tones. His voice emerged from behind the glassy walls of that cube out of a thousand speakers at once, and went rebounding dizzyingly around the vast room.
Such ridiculous theatricality! Who did he think he was talking to? And the royal
we
again. For century upon century the Empire had managed to survive and even thrive without any such idiotic affectations. But suddenly these uneasy lordlings were reviving it as they made their little snotnosed forays toward the throne. I felt sorry for them. That they should need to inflate themselves that way.
Still, I gave Naria the formal gesture of submission that a Rom baro traditionally makes to the emperor. Even though he had not offered me the traditional wine. It cost me nothing and might win me a point or two with him. And it rarely pays to be discourteous to megalomaniacs when you're standing in their living room.
Then I said, gesturing at the glass cube and everything that surrounded it, "How sad that all this should be necessary, Majesty."
"A temporary measure, Yakoub. It is our expectation that peace will be restored within a matter of days, or even hours. And that there will never again be such a breach of it, once we have completed the task of imposing our authority upon the Imperium."
"Let us all hope so, Majesty," said I most piously. "This war is an agony for us all."
The solemn bastard! Saw himself as savior. Well, meet hypocrisy with hypocrisy, if you have to.
He gave me his grave-and-thoughtful-ruler look. "There is much damage in the city, is there not?"
"Too much, I'm afraid."
"The Capital is sacred. That they should dare to harm it-! Well, we will make them pay for it, every minim, every obol." He studied me in frosty silence for a time. I returned his glare, unfazed. He wasn't a likable man, this scarlet-and-purple Naria. Reptilian. Dangerous. This was the man, after all, who had taken it upon himself to ratify Shandor's unlawful appropriation of my kingship, even while the old emperor still lived. What was it about our unhappy era that had loosed these Shandors and Narias in it?
Then he said, his tone changing entirely, shifting from stiff imperial pomp and bluster to sly and almost intimate insinuation, "Do you know where Sunteil is hiding?"
That was a really unexpected shot. I'm afraid I let myself show my surprise.
"Sunteil?" I said idiotically.
"The former high lord, yes. Who is now in rebellion, as you certainly must know, against the legally constituted government of the Imperium. He's here at the Capital. I wondered whether you happen to know where."
"Not a clue, Your Majesty."