The Thousand Emperors

Joe. Luc blinked, realizing with a start Ruy must be referring to Joseph Cheng. It felt strange to hear a man of such enormous power referred to in so avuncular a fashion.

‘Mr Gabion is here because Zelia made an excellent case why he should be present, Mr Borges,’ said Cheng, opting to speak out loud. ‘I hope you’re not questioning my judgement in this matter?’

Ruy Borges’s face went from red to white in a matter of moments. He turned towards Cheng, first glancing quickly at Luc with the expression of a man who had just trod on something unpleasant.

‘My apologies,’ Borges said to Cheng. he added.

Borges nodded, suddenly submissive where he had been demanding. why he’s here?>

De Almeida turned to Luc. ‘Mr Borges is curious to know why I had you brought here,’ she told him. ‘I’m sorry for bringing you here with such little warning, but I’m sure you understand why it was necessary.’

‘The victim – was it a member of the Council?’

‘It was, yes. A man called Sevgeny Vasili. Are you familiar with the name?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I assume you also understand what would happen to you if anyone outside of this room were ever to discover the purpose or details of our meeting here?’

Luc nodded uneasily and swallowed. ‘I can make an educated guess.’

‘No one is allowed on to Vanaheim except for members of the Council and their guests, all of whom are strictly vetted and closely watched at all times. You can understand this presents us with some difficulties when it comes to figuring out who might be responsible for Sevgeny’s murder.’

‘You mentioned “guests” – are there any on Vanaheim at the moment?’

‘Apart from yourself?’ asked de Almeida. ‘A few, all of whom are being detained until we can be absolutely certain they were not involved in any way. No one apart from yourself is being allowed to pass through the Hall of Gates. Even so, the circumstances of Sevgeny’s death mean that we’ve been forced to some uncomfortable conclusions.’

Luc met her eyes, and had a fleeting mental image of something dark and winged, with outstretched talons, swooping down from out of the sky. ‘You think Vasili was killed by another Councillor?’

‘No.’ Victor Begum stepped forward. ‘It’s ridiculous to suggest any one of us could have done such a thing to one of our own. It has to be someone from outside the Council.’

de Almeida scripted, her tone weary.

Somewhere beyond the high narrow windows, Luc could hear waves crashing on the island’s shore. His lungs felt like they had turned to granite in his chest, fear sharpening his senses. He was unpleasantly aware that any one of the men and women before him could order his death, without reprisal or consequences, and at a moment’s notice, if he failed to satisfy them.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

They all looked over at him.

‘If I were to hazard a guess,’ he said, feeling cool sweat trickle past one eyebrow despite the chill air, ‘I’d say your biggest worry is whether you can trust each other since, technically, any one of you could be responsible for Vasili’s murder.’

There; he’d said it. He waited, breath catching in his throat, fully expecting to die at any moment for words that sounded wildly heretical even as they emerged from his mouth.

‘He’s right,’ said de Almeida, turning to the rest. ‘This is why Father Cheng agreed to my proposal – we need the perspective of someone from outside of the Council, someone who couldn’t possibly have an axe to grind with the victim.’

‘Yes, all very good,’ said Ruy Borges irritably, ‘but why him?’

Good question, thought Luc, turning his gaze back to de Almeida.

‘Luc Gabion has entirely proven his loyalty, and his skill, by almost single-handedly apprehending the criminal Winchell Antonov,’ she replied.

‘Oh,’ said Borges, regarding Luc with new eyes and nodding slowly. ‘Him.’

Cheng clapped his hands together, almost as if he were hosting a dinner party. ‘I think it’s about time we took a look at the deceased, don’t you?’

Luc’s feeling of being out of his depth intensified as de Almeida beckoned him through a side-door. The smell of putrefaction, mixed with the scent of smoke, hit Luc as soon as he passed through it. Sevgeny Vasili’s death had clearly not been a recent one.

Luc found himself standing inside the entrance to a library filled with two rows of tall bookcases. The shelves of the bookcases were lined with actual physical, bound volumes, and each bookcase rose to well above head height, terminating just beneath a ceiling four or five metres overhead. Reading tables and thickly upholstered furniture on ragged and dusty-looking rugs filled the space between the two rows, while the walls of the library appeared to have been cut from the same unadorned stone as the hall.

A body lay slumped a few metres from a pair of glass-panelled doors at the far end of the library, beyond which lay an outside patio with a view over the rest of the island. Two mechants hovered near the corpse, presumably set there to guard it.

Luc stepped forward, then glanced back to see Zelia de Almeida and the rest of the Councillors gathered by the entrance to the library. De Almeida fluttered one hand towards Vasili’s inert form as if to say go on.

Luc stepped around the body where it lay sprawled across a patterned rug. Part of Vasili’s head, along with much of his torso and almost the entire pelvic region, had been burned to ashes. The rug beneath the body was crisped black.

Luc tried to keep his breathing shallow as he knelt on one knee by Vasili’s remains. He glanced toward the patio doors, thinking.

Vasili had hit the floor face-down, but the blackened remains of one arm reached towards the patio. Luc put one hand on the scorched rug near what remained of the head, then leaned down until his cheek almost touched the floor, trying to get a better look at the dead man’s face without disturbing the body. One side of the skull had melted, exposing the brain, but the side of the face that had been facing away from the blast that killed him was recognizably that of Sevgeny Vasili. That, at least, removed any doubts about who had been killed.

Luc sat back up and looked towards the patio doors, noting that the glass panels nearest the ground had melted and shattered.

He glanced back down at Vasili, and spotted something he’d missed at first glance. Leaning down again, he saw that a book lay wedged just beneath the body, and by some miracle appeared to be intact. It lay partly open beneath Vasili’s chest, and what pages Luc could see had a slight metallic lustre to them, as if they were formed from sheets of some metallic composite instead of paper. That, at least, might explain why the book had survived as well as it had.

He reached down to see if it was possible to carefully tug the book out from under the body without disturbing it too much. As he did so, his fingers brushed the edge of one page, and what happened next took his breath away.

He stumbled into the library, frightened and alone. Beyond the patio, the sun cast long streaks of fire across the evening sky as it sank towards the horizon. He searched frantically for what he needed.

There. He raced towards a shelf and picked out the book, catching sight of the lettering on the spine: A History of the Tian Di, by Javier Maxwell.

Stepping towards the glass doors, he peered out to see a flier drop towards the courtyard outside. Fear clutched at his heart, but then he took a deep breath, pressing trembling fingers against the pages, desperate to record one last message . . .

‘Winchell,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘I was wrong, so very wrong. I see that now.’

Luc gasped, and rocked back onto his haunches, pulling his fingers away from the book and pressing them against his chest as if he had been scalded.

Just for a moment, he had been Sevgeny Vasili.

‘Mr Gabion? Are you all right?’

Luc turned to see Cheng standing halfway between the entrance to the library and the corpse. The rest remained huddled together by the door.

Luc glanced down at Vasili’s body, the book still mostly hidden beneath it. From where he stood, Cheng couldn’t see it.

‘I’m sorry, I guess this is all just a little . . .’ Luc shook his head, struggling to regain his composure and unsure what to say. Some instinct prevented him from mentioning anything about the book.

jeered Borges.

‘Did you note anything of interest?’ Cheng pressed.

Yes. ‘If I may speak candidly once more . . . ?’

‘You may,’ Cheng rumbled, regarding him curiously.

‘Forensic investigation isn’t exactly my forte,’ he explained. ‘I’m not sure just how much good I can do you here without the help of someone who might be better qualified.’

Cheng regarded him with mild amusement. ‘Zelia showed me the details of your record of service for Security and Intelligence’s Archives Division, Mr Gabion. It was all very impressive. As Zelia already pointed out, you managed to track Winchell down essentially single-handed, not even counting several other lesser but nonetheless equally impressive triumphs earlier in your career. Under the circumstances, I think she’s entirely right to think you’re more than sufficiently qualified to give us an objective opinion regarding what took place here.’

It further occurred to Luc that if Vasili’s killer really was a member of the Temur Council, he could well be amongst those standing arrayed behind Father Cheng. And given the power of life or death any one of them had over him – or, indeed, over almost anyone throughout the worlds of the Tian Di – there was a real chance he’d be putting his own life in serious danger if he did mention the book. Nor had he missed Ruy Borges’s comment about Zelia’s need to be exonerated – but exonerated from what? From suspicion of murdering Vasili, or something completely unrelated?

Whoever turned out to have killed Vasili, the last thing he wanted to do, should the killer prove to be present, was blurt out that he’d found a piece of evidence. For the moment it was best to leave the book where he had found it, tucked out of sight beneath Vasili’s corpse. Fortunately, none of those present appeared to have the least interest in getting close enough to the body to see the book wedged beneath it.

‘Those mechants,’ said Luc, nodding up at the machines floating just overhead. ‘Did they belong to Vasili?’

‘They did,’ said de Almeida, stepping up beside Cheng, one hand covering her mouth and nose. ‘They’re linked into the security network for the whole island.’

‘Any sign of them having been compromised?’

Zelia nodded. ‘Someone figured out how to erase the house records going back for some days. The mechants’ memories are linked into those records, so any data that might have told us who’s responsible for this was also wiped.’

‘Why haven’t you just gone ahead and re-instantiated Vasili from his backups?’ asked Luc. ‘Surely you could just ask him who did this?’

Zelia’s lips tightened. ‘All his backups were erased remotely, presumably by whoever was responsible for his murder.’

Luc stared back at her, shocked. ‘Would that have been easy to do?’ he asked carefully.

‘No,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘Not easy at all.’

Luc glanced at the Councillors clustered by the entrance. All of them, except for Cheng and Cripps, the latter regarding him with an openly malevolent expression, looked scared. Instantiation technology had kept them all alive for centuries, but when Vasili had died, he had died forever, and none of them wanted to share in his fate.

‘Are the backups centrally located?’ he asked.

‘No, they’re widely distributed,’ Zelia replied. ‘Their locations are a carefully kept secret, for obvious reasons.’

‘But somebody must know where they’re all located.’

Zelia sighed and shook her head again. ‘No, I’m afraid not. We programmed AIs to take care of placing them in secure but unknown locations. Nobody has the right to know where anyone else’s instantiation backups are located. The only thing I can tell you is that as far as I know, they’re all located somewhere in this star system, but not necessarily on Vanaheim itself.’

‘Whoever did this, then,’ said Luc, ‘must have had an unprecedented level of access to your security systems.’

‘I think,’ muttered Cripps, ‘that’s what I’d call stating the fucking obvious.’

Borges sniggered. ‘Any other incisive observations you’d like to make, Mr Gabion?’

Luc felt heat rise in his face, but knew the danger of responding directly to such an insult. ‘Vasili was running away from something when he died,’ he said, turning his attention back towards the corpse and pointing towards the glass doors. ‘He was running from someone standing at the entrance to the library. As for the murder weapon, it’s pretty obvious it was a plasma beam of some type, set to tight focus.’

Borges scripted.

Cheng threw a fierce look at Borges, who fell immediately silent.

‘Please continue,’ said Cheng, turning back to Luc.

‘If the weapon used to kill Vasili had been set to wide-focus, or aimed at him while he was standing, it would have shattered the rest of the glass in those doors,’ he said, nodding towards the patio. ‘The angle of the scorch-marks shows the weapon was aimed downwards. Vasili was already on the ground when he died, although it’s anyone’s guess whether he fell or was pushed down.’ He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Did anyone find a weapon?’

‘No, but the radiation levels in here are sky-high,’ said the second, unnamed woman in the group. ‘We’re all going to need immediate cell-regeneration therapy. I can arrange for you to receive medical attention before you return to Temur.’

‘An excellent suggestion, Alicia,’ said Cheng. ‘Is there anything else you can tell us?’ he asked Luc.

Luc tried not to think about the deadly radiation already seeping into his bones and muscles. ‘Has anything been touched or moved since he was found here?’

Victor Begum spoke up. ‘Not a thing. Zelia can vouch for that.’

‘Who actually found him?’

‘No one,’ said Zelia. ‘His home security network alerted us, but only once it rebooted itself a little over two days ago.’

Two days ago? ‘And that’s how long he’s been lying here? Two days?’

‘Criminal investigations are not our area of expertise,’ said the woman named Alicia. ‘Given the sensitive nature of things, it took us . . . some time to reach a collective agreement on a way forward.’

Luc stared at her. In other words, they’d spent the past forty-eight hours squabbling about what to do before bringing him here.

‘So far I’d say he’s making a better initial assessment than your own, Bailey,’ said Cheng, with an air of joviality that seemed misplaced given the surroundings. ‘Maybe we should give Mr Gabion your job?’

Nothing like making a very dangerous enemy, thought Luc, as Cripps’ hawk-like glare settled on him once again. The sweat had dried on his skin, coating him in a chill clamminess.

Luc glanced towards the nearest bookshelf, as much to avoid looking at Cripps as anything else. Many of the volumes there had become spotted with ash. He reached out and touched the spine of one, his fingertips black when he studied them.

‘Did the house put the blaze out?’ he asked.

‘Obviously,’ snapped Cripps.

Cheng scripted.

‘How could it do that, if the house’s AI systems had been shut down?’ asked Luc.

‘Only the house’s higher cognitive functions were affected,’ Zelia explained. ‘Something like the sprinkler system wouldn’t have been affected by the sabotage.’

‘Would the killer have known that?’ he asked.

‘Why do you ask?’ Cripps demanded, his voice taut.

‘Maybe whoever did this meant for the library to burn down,’ said Luc. ‘Maybe they thought that when they disabled the house’s systems, that would stop it putting the fire out.’ Luc’s eyes darted nervously towards Cheng, then away again.

‘Why would they want to do that?’ asked Cheng.

‘If it looked like Vasili had just died of an accident, it might have taken you a lot longer to work out he’d been murdered.’

‘This is idle speculation,’ Cripps protested.

‘But very interesting idle speculation,’ said Cheng, eyeing Cripps carefully. ‘Surely,’ he said, turning back to Luc, ‘there would be no point to covering up Sevgeny’s murder, since we would inevitably have discovered both the sabotage to the house AI and to his instantiation backups?’

‘There’s no point,’ Luc agreed, ‘unless the killer was operating under a time restriction. For some reason, he or she wanted to delay the discovery that Sevgeny had been murdered.’

‘And why in God’s name would they do that?’ Cripps protested.

Luc forced himself to meet the man’s eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But it’s worth thinking about.’

It occurred to Luc that Cheng and his cronies could decide to blame him for Vasili’s murder, and no one would ever dare challenge it or demand supporting evidence of any kind. The idea squeezed his lungs like a steel vice, making it hard to breathe.

‘Before I go any further,’ he said, ‘I need to know who you think could have done this, whether or not you think you can prove it?’

It was almost comical, the way they regarded each other furtively.

‘That’s a very nearly endless list,’ said Zelia, her voice impatient. ‘Enmities can run pretty deep here.’

‘Zelia,’ said Karlmann Sandoz, a note of warning in his voice. ‘He’s a stranger here.’

‘He needs to know these things if he’s to do his job properly,’ Zelia snapped.

‘Without wanting to distract you from your purpose here, Mr Gabion,’ said Cheng, ‘I understand you’re something of an expert on Black Lotus. Perhaps I could ask you for your opinion concerning them?’

‘Of course, Father Cheng.’

‘How much, if at all, have Black Lotus been harmed by Winchell Antonov’s death?’

‘There are still too many variables as yet to be able to say in the short-term, Father Cheng,’ Luc replied. ‘At the very least, Aeschere constitutes a major propaganda coup for us.’

‘And in the long-term?’

‘In the long-term, I don’t think they can really survive without his guidance.’

‘Yet Black Lotus retains considerable popular support on both Benares and Acamar. In the days following the announcement of Antonov’s demise, fresh atrocities were carried out against Sandoz peacekeeping forces on both worlds. The reports I receive from SecInt tell me that new Black Lotus cells are popping up all across Temur at an increasing rate, some within view of the White Palace itself. What would you say if I were to suggest that they are, in fact, stronger than they have ever been?’

‘Father Cheng, this man does not have clearance to be cognisant of the full facts concerning—’

Cheng shot an angry glare at Karlmann Sandoz, who had spoken up. ‘I want his answer, Karlmann,’ Cheng snapped, interrupting him. ‘Do you have an objection?’

Karlmann shook his head and said no more.

‘Well, Mr Gabion?’ Cheng continued. ‘I’m concerned that Antonov’s death has done nothing more than turn him into a martyr.’

Luc ran his tongue around his lips. ‘The problem lies in the underlying root causes of the dissatisfaction that Black Lotus feeds on,’ he said. ‘The unrest on Benares, the failure of the artificial ecosystem on Acamar . . . people want someone to blame.’

Luc felt suddenly dizzy, and stepped closer to one of the bookcases in order to support himself. Everything was turning bright, while a tiny point of fire in the centre of his skull slowly expanded outwards.

‘Surely the fact that we’ve enjoyed unprecedented peace for centuries counts for more,’ Cheng demanded.

‘I . . .’

‘Mr Gabion?’ Zelia stepped forward and grabbed his arm. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m not sure. I . . .’

The fire expanded to fill the interior of his skull. He lurched, feeling a surge of bile rush up the back of his throat.

Not now. He reached out to the bookcase, trying to steady himself. His hand clutched at several heavy volumes, and they clattered to the floor around him as he sank to his knees.

Alicia scripted.

Zelia replied.

‘Gabion?’

He opened his eyes and saw de Almeida kneeling beside him, a look of alarm on her face.

This can’t be happening again, he thought. Somewhere inside him, something was seriously wrong.