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of smile, as if she’d been caught stealing the jam or something. Perhaps one would feel guilty, I thought, when others of much higher rank had died. The Mage Jeffros evidently did. As we all hurried away down another long stone passage, he told me, “I was just left sitting in the rubble. All the senior mages around me were killed. I feel really bad about that. It was so senseless that it should have been just me left.”
    The passage led us to a sort of canyon open to very blue sky. Broken building towered on either side – sliding, I could feel it sliding. I hastily did a lot more shoring. Then I looked at the canyon floor and, with difficulty, recognised the Imperial Throne Room, mostly by the shattered patterns on the floor, the remains of age-old mosaic littered with its own little stones and fragments of stained glass. The remains of the dais were at the other end. There was a black bowl scooped in the dais where the throne had been. Otherwise nothing. I whistled. They must have collected the Emperor and his staff in shreds, if at all.
    “How on earth did you escape this?” I murmured to the High Lady.
    “I was in the toilet,” she murmured back. She said it with defiance, but defiance that was in some way worn out. Poor girl, I thought. She’s been having to admit to it for hours, to soldiers.
    “Don’t talk here,” Jeffros whispered.
    “And don’t walk in step,” the General added.
    He stepped carefully into the middle of the skylit canyon and walked lightly and swiftly towards the dais. The rest of us pattered after him, stepping in blank areas that had once been priceless designs in semi-precious stones, crunching through rubble and glass shards, and setting little cubes of mosaic rolling. Meanwhile, the cliffs of masonry on either side grumbled softly and, in places, suddenly subsided, letting out squirts of dust. I found it terrifying. But halfway along I was distracted by something worse. It was the smell of – well, sewage, garbage, butcher’s shop and gunpowder, I suppose, with a strong reek of ozone. I gagged quietly into my handkerchief. Ozone? I thought. Ozone is frequently an aftermath of magic. I felt about mentally, as far as I could bear to. Yes, the bomb that did all this had been guided and triggered by magic. It must have been one of the Emperor’s senior sorcerers on a suicide mission, I guessed, who had done it. A brave man. Or maybe a desperate one.
    We mounted the dais beside the scooped hole, where the smell was nearly unbearable, and I found there was a roof over the back of the platform and a wall behind that which seemed almost intact. Though the roof bent and creaked and sifted dust on us, my instant, anxious probing revealed that this part of the building was immensely strong, reinforced with girders, granite and magic. Good. We could relax a little. If the Emperor’s throne had been set just two feet further back, he could have been relaxing too.
    It was dark under there. All I could make out was the black hole of a doorway, with a hugely thick door hanging out of it. Jeffros reached out with his good hand to touch a wand that had been rammed upright into a crack in the dais. It flared like a torch, and so did a line of such wands, into the distance beyond the door. I could see glimpses of some kind of installation in there. The light also showed the door to have buckled in foot-thick waves, as if it had been under the sea.
    Wow! I thought.
    My three companions were already climbing over the doorsill into the secure chamber beyond. I hurried after them. It felt quiet in there, and safe, and it was almost dust-free. I took my handkerchief off my face and used it to clean my glasses again. After that I could look properly at the ranks of screens, keyboards and computers which the Emperor had used to control the eleven worlds straddling the waist of Infinity.
    “We’re going to have to blow all these up before we leave,” the General told me gloomily, “in case someone