uprising at the silver mines had been ambushed and massacred en route.
'This is not looking good,' said Berlin somberly.
'Not at all,' said Hatch.
'I think,' said Berlin, 'I think that the pair of us should reason a little further with our beloved emperor.'
Hatch sincerely doubted the use of this, since Plandruk Qinplaqus ever trusted his own judgment, and was singularly proof against all forms of persuasion. However, Hatch accompanied Berlin, and the pair of them went to hunt out the Silver Emperor.
Which proved harder than expected.
Plandruk Qinplaqus had quit the Hall in which Hatch had seen him last; guards placed outside the Silver Emperor's private quarters declared that he was not to be disturbed, and when the guards had been browbeaten into submission by the combined efforts of Hatch and Berlin, the emperor's private quarters proved to be empty.
Empty, at least, of any emperor.
'He can't have just vanished!' said Berlin.
But the mighty Plandruk Qinplaqus seemed to have done just that. Hatch and Berlin dared their way into the imperial study and found a massive granite desk littered with papers and heavyweight seals. Hatch riffled through the papers in the hope of finding a clue to the emperor's disappearance, but all the documentation was in the High Speech of wizards, which he had no hope of understanding.
'Can you read this?' said Hatch, shoving a parchment under Berlin's nose.
'No,' said Berlin, waving it away. 'But this stuff is so dusty – Hatch, it hasn't been touched for days.'
Hatch and Berlin researched the Silver Emperor's quarters, interrogated guards and slaves, then returned to Berlin's office, baffled.
In Berlin's office, mice – which had somehow become besplattered with vermilion ink, perhaps as a consequence of some secret sadism practiced by Berlin – dwelt inside a wickerwork cage. Hatch thought mice could eat wickerwork. But perhaps he was wrong, or perhaps – and here he began to analyse the situation with the rigor taught to him by the Nexus – the cage was daily renewed, or the bars lacquered with deterrent poison, or a new set of mice procured each time those presently in captivity escaped.
Hatch was struck by the mice, and the way in which their lives continued, quietly and regularly, in complete innocence of the disaster which was mounting to its heights outside the palace of Na Sashimoko. It seemed to Hatch that he himself had much in common with such a mouse.
'So,' said Berlin, taking a chair, 'our emperor has chosen to disappear.'
'You don't seem overly concerned,' said Hatch.
'Not about him,' said Berlin. 'He comes and he goes. He won't say where, but he's never gone for more than ten days at a time.'
'What do you mean?' said Hatch. 'What are you talking about?'
'Just that,' said Berlin. 'Sometimes our emperor leaves his palace, and, for all I know, this very city. I've never found out where he goes. I've never thought it politic to take too keen an interest in the subject.'
'So what do we do?' said Hatch. 'Do we sit and watch the city burn?'
'No,' said Berlin. 'In the absence of our emperor, I'm the acting ruler. That's what the constitution says. I'll order the troops into the streets to put down our revolutionaries as best they can.'
'What about Scorpio Fax?' said Hatch, conscious of his responsibilities to the man who had sought to warn him of the revolution.
'Fax?' said Berlin.
'He reported, he told us – '
'Oh, Fax, Fax, yes. Well. Since his confession was too late to be useful, we should by rights have him executed for treason.
That's what I'd do. But the emperor is usually more merciful than I would be in his place, so – I'll give Fax a provisional pardon, subject to confirmation by the emperor himself. You may tell him that when you see him next.'
With that, Nambasa Berlin dismissed Asodo Hatch, and the Frangoni warrior quit the palace of Na Sashimoko.
It was by then late afternoon on the Day of Three Fishes, just three days short of Dog Day.
Chapter Fifteen
A simple ethic has long ruled Dalar ken Halvar: that the imaginary needs of imaginary people must take tenth place to the demands of those who really exist. Amongst the Pang, the brownskinned people who constitute Dalar ken Halvar's dominant racial group, both Chem and Yara alike have long accepted this dogma. How could it be otherwise, when the poor know from their very language that they are imaginary?
It has long been the case that subversive notions, whether sourced from the Eye of Delusions or from the revolutionary readings of radical Combat Cadets, have found no favor even with those of the Yara who are most bitterly oppressed. After all, if they were to accept their own reality, then their lives would immediately become unbearable, whereas virtually all suffering becomes bearable if it can be shrugged off as but a species of dream.
But now a cunning rabble-rouser has employed the accepted social axioms to produce an unexpected conclusion. He says:
'We are the Yara. We do not exist. Because we do not exist we have no responsibilities to anyone or anything. We are but the waking dreams of the world, and who can hold a dream accountable under law?'
This argument has proved unexpectedly potent. The Yara do not want to increase their own sufferings by acknowledging them, hence have no wish to become Real, but a formula which frees them of all responsibility to the real world has proved potently attractive.
So on the sands a shadow stands
Above a shadow stretched.
And nothing happens – but amok
The tongues demand the teeth,
The steel striking -
Demand that he
Made murderer by skill decree – Fears for his own safety had earlier kept Asodo Hatch away from his own house. For, after all, Dog Java had made a determined effort to kill him, which suggested he might be the target of a conspiracy of murder. And murderers in search of Asodo Hatch would surely and logically look for him under his own roof.
However, now that Hatch had been alerted to the danger of civic disorder in the City of Sun, he thought of his family rather than himself, and hastened back to House Takabaga with a view to securing the safety of his wife Talanta and his daughter Onica.
But on his way back to the Frangoni rock, Asodo Hatch saw precious little in the way of revolution. And on Cap Uba itself, all was peace.
Consequently, Hatch was not alarmed to find his house empty, his wife and daughter gone. He presumed them to be worshipping at Temple Isherzan, or visiting the womenfolk of other households. Or it might well be that Onica was at her knife-fighting classes, and that her mother was there as a chaperone. The Frangoni greatly approved of their womenfolk making an earnest study of the great art of knife-fighting, for amongst the Frangoni this form of athleticism has long been held to improve the physical grace of the female form. However, it would be inappropriate for a young yet nubile girl like Onica to be alone with a knife-fighting instructor, hence her mother always accompanied her to her lessons.
Once Asodo Hatch was safe in the Frangoni rock, and safe in his own house, his fears of civic disorder began to dissipate.
Indeed, he began to think that both he himself and Nambasa Berlin had given way to a certain vapouring panic while in conference in Na Sashimoko. So there had been demonstrations? The 'demonstrations' might well have
