Deep Secret. Diana Wynne Jones

      “Probably,” he replied.

      Gloomily, I went through the faxes. Two-thirds of them were from General Dakros. Typically, he said nothing about war, or worlds seceding from the Empire. To him, this was military business and nothing to do with a Magid. The first few faxes were jubilant. He thought he was on the track of Knarros; he had found him; through Knarros he now had a line on the Babylon heirs. By the sixth fax, he had found two more people claiming to be Knarros and the number of putative heirs had trebled. After that it was exponential. Lost Emperors had poured in on him while I was otherwise engaged – hundreds of them, and several score Knarroses. The latest fax said,

      I’ve weeded it down to eight men who may possibly be Knarros.

      The Empire would appreciate your help in this.

      “What do you think I should do?” I said to Stan.

      “Lad, I’m supposed to be advising you about sponsoring a new Magid, not about this,” he answered. “What do you think?”

      “I… think…” I said slowly, trying to get at the right gut feeling on this, “that the Empire is breaking up as was intended all along – and this is why they always put the newest Magid on to it. He or she will make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes. I could have saved that poor sod Timotheo – OK, OK, Stan. It’s done. I won’t beat my breast about it any longer. But to judge from the history of this world, when a big Empire breaks up, there’s usually one or two last rulers at the head of it who are either very weak or very young, to, to…”

      “Sort of guide it down the drain?” Stan said.

      “Exactly,” I said. “So I imagine it’s my job to go and pick a Knarros – any old Knarros – to provide Koryfos with a weak ruler. Stan, this is the part of being a Magid that’s not pleasant.”

      “I know,” he said. “I’ve done some dirty things too.”

      I got through to Dakros, sighing rather, and was directed to meet him in a distant suburb of Iforion. Just arrive in the road, he said. Someone would be looking out for me.

      They were.

      I stepped out into a chilly, rubble-covered street between two rows of small houses, and something went whee past my head and whang into a low brick wall. In fact, whatever-it-was only missed me because I stumbled on the rubble as I arrived and twisted my ankle. I dived into the garden behind the low brick wall, ankle and all, and crouched there, watching the opposition retaliate. One of their queer beam-guns yammered from the next house along from my garden. A flaming bundle with arms but no legs toppled from behind a chimney across the street and plumped down somewhere out of sight. The stench of it streamed across me. I felt ill. I know this kind of thing happens all the time in my world – in most worlds – but I still felt sick, and weak, and hot round the eyes. I also wondered, with some earnestness, which side was whose.

      General Dakros settled that by coming out of the next-door house at a run. “Are you alive there, Magid?” he shouted. He looked like the Big Bear in the Goldilocks story, coming out of that small house in a great furry hooded coat which did not look like army issue.

      I managed to smile at his bearish look. I rolled on to my knees and shouted back that I was fine.

      “Sorry about that. We never get to the bottom of the sniper problem,” he said. He came and helped me scramble over the wall and hobble into the house. The air smelt horribly of soot. I thought it was from the dead sniper, until he helped me through into a back room. This street of houses was built on a hill. Through the back window was what ought to have been a fine view of the city. Now it was a panorama of drifting smoke, high buildings with black empty windows, two ruined bridges and one stately climbing cloud of fresh new grey-blue smoke with a tower burning in the midst of it. There were bright red flags of flame in the rolls of smoke. “Insurrection in the city,” Dakros explained as he put back his furry hood. He had lost weight. He looked far more tired and harrowed than when I had last seen him. “The poorer classes don’t like the way everything’s getting so expensive.” He ran both hands through his black wriggly hair, which had definitely become thinner since the Palace fell. “I can’t understand it myself,” he added. “Money just seems to be worth nothing suddenly. I’ve had to issue a list of what things are supposed to cost – bread and so on – with penalties for overcharging, but it’s made no difference. Goods just vanished overnight. Some of them have to be sold in secret or bartered, but I don’t see why at all.”

      I felt acutely sorry for him. Things like this might be intended, but Dakros was the one who had to cope with it all. “Inflation,” I said, “happens when times are unstable. The Emperor kept things stable, if only by consuming most of the valuables he could get his hands on.”

      “Then let’s get another Emperor quickly!” he said, with vehemence. “I’m sick of all these frauds, Magid. Did you know there were over a thousand of them?”

      “What have you done with them all?” I asked him.

      He was surprised I should wonder. “Executed them.”

      “Bad idea,” I said.

      They committed treason and fraud,” he said. He shrugged. “You can’t let people get away with that.”

      “True,” I admitted. “But there are alternatives. Talking of which, where are all these other people who say they’re Knarros?”

      “Oh, I’ve got them all lined up for you in the next room under guard,” he said. “I’ll have them marched in one by one and you can look them over in here. That suit you?”

      The straightforward, soldierly method, I thought. It did not surprise me that things were falling to pieces here. Still, I was glad that I was not going to have to travel about the place to interview the claimants. The chances of getting shot seemed quite high. And my ankle still hurt, and both knees, where I had hit the ground. “Wheel them in, then,” I said.

      I do not wish to dwell on those eight interviews with eight doomed men. They were all middle-aged and all looked rather imposing. You felt each one of them must have looked in the mirror at some point and thought, I look like someone the Emperor would trust. One was more or less in rags, one in the soutane of one of the travelling religions, and one seemed to be a minor noble. Two of them were school-teachers. God knows why those two had put themselves forward, unless it was looking in a mirror, as I said, and knowing they had care of the young – so why not the Emperor’s young? The other three were a grocer, a farmer and a poet. All these were mad. So, I discovered after a while, was the preacher. The one in rags was a sly rogue, the noble a blatant one. Most of them looked bewildered or shifty when I asked them about the youngsters supposedly in their charge, though the noble talked glibly of “the Emperor’s five fine boys”.

      It did not take very deep Magid work to ascertain that every one of them was another fraud. And the worst of it was I could not bring myself to pretend about any one of them. I looked at Dakros’s strained face. I looked at the poet as they marched him away. I could not do this to him. Bugger the Empire. Bugger what was Intended. Dakros deserved some honesty.

      “Sorry,” I said, when the door had shut behind the poet’s escort. “None of them is Knarros. But you could do yourself and the Empire a bit of good if you put them on trial publicly. Let justice be seen to be done. Expose them. Prove the mad ones are mad. Then imprison the sane ones and put the loonies in an asylum.”