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going to hit me, but stopped as she answered sedately, “I’ve never had the honour, Magid. My sense was that the Emperor didn’t like women much.”
    “And thought he was going to live for ever,” I said disgustedly.
    “He was only fifty-nine,” she told me.
    “Oh, what a mess !” I said. “So what do you know?”
    “Only rumours, as I said,” she answered. She shamed me. She was being polite and she was trying to help, and here was I getting progressively ruder and more irritated. But then the Empire has an atmosphere and always gets me down, and it was worse then, in that dusty ruin with tons of masonry hanging over our heads. “I heard,” Lady Alexandra said, “of at least two girls. And there may have been two boys besides the one who was executed recently. I think Jaleila may have had a son before she died, but I wasn’t a consort then, so I don’t know for sure.”
    “Thank you, lady,” I said. I turned back to the computing machine. Beside me, Jeffros crawled to attach a wire to its cabinet, awkward and one-handed. He shamed me too. He was getting ready to explode the place as soon as I came up with something and all I was doing was getting waspish with the General and the lady. I had better come up with something quickly. The thing that was making me most irritable was the way I could feel the ceiling, despite its magic, creaking and faintly shifting above us.
    I typed away unavailingly for a minute. The screen kept giving me the news that Timotheo was deleted. I scowled at it. Surely even a paranoid fool like Timos IX must have envisaged a situation like this. There had to be some reasonable way to locate and identify his heir. Even if he had thought that whichever Councillor or Mage also knew the secret was going to survive him, there still had to be a way. The ceiling creaked again as I tried a new way. Ah. A new message.
    E NTER CORRECT PASSWORD OR PENALTY ENSUES.
    I tried the Infinity sign, but that was too obvious. I tried ‘K ORYFOS ’, since someone had just mentioned him. No luck.
    It was Lady Alexandra who had mentioned Koryfos. Something about Koryfos the Great coming back to rule the day the Imperial Palace fell.
    As I tried the word ‘T IMOS ’, I heard the General say, “Stupid story.”
    “It isn’t all down yet,” Jeffros put in.
    While he was speaking, the machine whirred and came up with another message:
    T HREE PASSWORDS INCORRECT. P ENALTY 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