The Imperium Game (10 page)

“Well, what is it, girl?” snapped the younger man. “Can’t you see that we’re deciding the future of Rome right this very minute?”

“A thousand pardons, masters.” Her gaze remained floorward. “Prisius sends his regards to General Catulus and begs that he examine this new bodyguard for suitability.”

“Bodyguard?” Catulus ran a hand back over his silver hair. “Well, it’s about time. I had to dispatch two assassins myself not more than an hour ago. They were hiding in the War Room latrine, waiting to garrote me.”

“Too bad they weren’t better at their jobs,” the younger man muttered.

Catulus smiled thinly. “That’s what comes of being so cheap, Titus. Open your purse a little wider next time and you might have more luck getting rid of me.” He waved an arm at Kerickson. “Come here, lad. Let’s have a look at you.”

For a second Kerickson hesitated, then sighed. People entered the Game all the time to play someone they could never be in real life. His lack of training in the martial arts was probably no worse than that of the average Game bodyguard.

Catulus studied him for a minute. “Pitiful, just plain pitiful. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the Game computer had it in for me.”

“Do you accept this slave, Oppius Catulus?” Menae asked in her quiet, unassuming voice.

“Do I have a choice?” Then he shook his head as she started to answer. “Never mind. Just tell Prisius I expect to have my man—” He broke off and turned to Kerickson. “Your name, son?”

“Gaius, sir.”

“I expect to have my man Gaius, here, suitably outfitted by tomorrow morning.”

“As you wish, master.” Menae bowed her dark-haired head, then drew a gleaming dagger from her bodice and leaped straight for the commander’s throat. Dodging, Catulus struck her wrist and deflected the knife to one side. Without even stumbling, the girl reoriented herself.

His eyes on the dagger, Catulus motioned at Kerickson. “Time you started earning your pay, boy.”

“I don’t get paid,” he replied, feeling the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Play or not, the edge of that dagger looked finely honed.

“Fancy having your fingernails removed one by one?”

Kerickson had never heard of that alternative, but players did have a certain amount of latitude in filling in the blanks. Sweating, he stepped between Catulus and the girl. “Menae, go back to Prisius and put yourself on report.” He edged in closer and kept his eyes on the dagger. Something about it looked familiar, something . . . Who else had threatened him with a dagger like this?

“I have to kill General Catulus,” Menae said reasonably. “But there is no need for you to be hurt or lose points.”

He was within her reach now, close enough to see her perfect eyelashes, thicker and darker than a human’s, and her cocoa-brown eyes, so solemn and calm in this moment when a real assassin should be panicked and sweating. She had to be a robot surrogate.

He eyed her upraised hand still holding the dagger; as a robot, her strength would be totally beyond him even if he worked out every day, which he did not. She feinted to one side and slipped around him, the dagger extended at Catulus’s throat. Without thinking, Kerickson closed with her, grasping her wrist with both hands.

It was like a flea trying to hold back a power crane. She carried him with her as she advanced on the general. Digging his heels in, he tried to remember the proper override code from the programming language for robot surrogates—indeed, any Interact code word at all—but most of his experience was in working with the big mainframe systems. His brain felt like it was packed in dandelion fuzz.

“That’s it, boy, get her in a hammer lock!” Catulus reached for a bowl of grapes and popped one in his mouth.

“Code five override!” Kerickson managed between gritted teeth. Menae never took her eyes off the general.

“Code five-A override!”

Without even straining her servo motors, she continued forward, dragging Kerickson like an afterthought, the dagger dead on target.

“Bloody hell!” Catulus began to inch backward. “The computer’s sent me another dud.”

“There goes half of your Third Legion—marched right off a cliff.” Titus studied the bank of screens, intent on the fate of the make-believe troops. “Maybe after you’re forcibly retired, they’ll let you attend my triumph.”

Frowning, Catulus turned back to the screens, then bent down to tap in a set of instructions. At that second Kerickson’s foot slipped on the tiled floor. Menae stepped hard on his prone body as she lunged for the general’s unprotected back.

Feeling as though he’d been squashed by an airhopper, he fought for breath. “Code . . . four . . . A . . . override!” he wheezed after her. For an instant she seemed to hesitate in midair, then crashed to the floor with a heaviness that spoke of durallinium and steel.

Startled, Catulus whirled around and stared down at the stiff, motionless robot at his feet. “Well,” he said, “effective, if not exactly Game legal. Still, it’s your butt and not mine if you offend the computer.” He rearranged the heavy folds of his toga over his shoulder. “But you’ll never get to be Emperor using computer access codes, boy, and that’s a fact.”

Breathing hard, Kerickson pushed himself up from the floor.

“A BRAVE MOVE, MY HERO.” Just above his head a patch of shining blueness shimmered, then resolved itself into a small, ragged-looking brown owl. It fluttered its wings, then perched on his shoulder. “BUT A FUTURE EMPEROR SHOULD PLAY BY THE RULES.”

The goddess Minerva in her most mundane form . . . but according to Wilson, that particular Game program was still down. “And what if I don’t want to be Emperor?” he said.

“OH.” The owl scratched at its head with a taloned foot. “IN THAT CASE I SUPPOSE YOU CAN DO ANYTHING YOU WANT, UNTIL MARS CATCHES UP WITH YOU.”

“Mars?”

The owl ruffled its dull brown feathers. “MARS SAYS THIS GAME IS GOING TO BE PLAYED RIGHT FROM NOW ON. AND OF COURSE, THE FIRST ONES TO GO WILL BE THE PROGRAMMERS.”

THE WORST
thing about the Underworld
, Demea told herself, was the terrible, unremittingly dim light that never changed, no matter what time of the day or night it was.

A close second, however, were the omnipresent viewing screens that dominated the landscape. On the face of every nobly Roman statue, on the side of every building, in the branches of every tree, screens stared back at her like one-eyed monsters, filled with various real-time scenes from the playing field above.

Popping a bite of spicy grilled lamb into her mouth, she studied the spacious plaza, the whispering fountains, the benches of gleaming black marble. The whole effect was depressing. “Yes, it’s all quite interesting,” she lied to Publius Barbus, who bobbed at her side with a tray of hors d’oeuvres like a poorly trained butler. “But I simply must go back now. They’re sure to be looking for me at the Palace.”

“At the Spear and Chicken, too.” He poked her in the ribs with his elbow and beamed. “Can’t say when we last had an Empress in the digs.”

High above her on the side of a dark building, giant toga-draped figures moved across a huge screen. She found herself watching them, trying to place the faces.

“But we can’t go yet, you know,” Barbus confided in a whisper. “Someone down here is ever so anxious to meet you.”

She sniffed, and even that faint sound seemed to echo endlessly through the empty plaza. For some reason, Hades was very underpopulated at the moment. Since she and Barbus had entered this thoroughly depressing place, she’d seen only a few people, and those in the distance. “You’ve been saying that for hours now, but there’s no one here.”

“SO YOU’VE COME AT LAST, MY BEAUTY, MY LOVE . . .” Vibrating with the undertone of some unimaginably vast organ, the overwhelming voice was almost too loud to bear. “MY QUEEN.”

Demea pressed her hands to her ringing ears.

“HERE IN THE DARK DEPTHS HAVE I WAITED, KNOWING THAT YOU WOULD BE MINE.” An inky blackness shimmered on the other side of the plaza, then resolved itself into a two-story-high man in shining black armor. “OF COURSE, IN THE END, THEY ALL COME TO ME.”

The heavily loaded tray of food clinked as Barbus set it down on the long, curving side of a fountain. “I’ll just let you two get acquainted.” He winked, then scurried around the corner of the nearest building.

“MY HEART, MY OWN.” The oversized face studied her with eyes black as pools of oil. “LONG HAVE I AWAITED THIS MOMENT.”

Pluto . . . that had to be Pluto, god of the lower realm and monarch of the dead. She straightened her back.. “Must you be so loud? You’re giving me a miserable headache.”

The figure walked across the empty plaza toward her, shrinking in size with each step until it was only seven or eight feet high. “IS THIS BETTER, LIGHT TO MY DARKNESS?”

“I—I’m quite sure we’ve never been introduced.” She raised her chin.

He was olive-complected, with thick, jet-black hair that tumbled heavily about a clean-shaven, high-cheekboned face. His black, black eyes were deeper than the heart of space itself. “YOUR COMING HAS BEEN FORETOLD SINCE THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS. NOT ONLY HAVE WE ALWAYS KNOWN EACH OTHER, WE ALWAYS WILL.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” She forced her hands down to her sides, suppressing the urge to run her fingers through that magnificent hair. “I’m not dead. That toad, Publius Barbus, lured me down here on some pretext of meeting his associates.” She crossed her arms. “Obviously, he was lying through his nasty little teeth. I demand to be returned to the city immediately!”

“SUCH FIRE, SUCH SPIRIT.” Pluto moved closer, bringing with him an air of electricity so intense she felt her hair stir. “INDEED, A CONSORT FIT FOR A GOD.”

“Consort!” She detected a pattern in his ravings. “I am certainly not your consort, or, for that matter, anyone else’s.” Forcing her eyes away from his hypnotic gaze, she twitched at a fold in her tunic. “I am in mourning for my beloved Micio.”

“THE FALLEN ONE, YES, I KNOW.” The figure shrank even further, now only head and shoulders taller than Demea. “HE DID NOT PASS THROUGH MY REALM, ALTHOUGH I SHOULD HAVE BEEN GLAD TO ACCOMMODATE HIM. FOR A MORTAL, HE HAD AN INTERESTING TURN OF MIND.”

That was one name for it, she thought. “So you see, Lord of the Underworld or not, we can be nothing to each other at this particular time. Perhaps in a year or so, when my period of mourning is ended; we could talk about it then.”

“RULES FOR THE CONDUCT OF MORTAL AFFAIRS MEAN NOTHING TO SUCH AS WE.” His finger grazed her cheek, and even though she knew he was nothing more than a carefully plotted holographic projection of the Game computer, she flinched from a chill as intense as the Arctic plains at midnight. The special effects certainly were impressive down on this level.

“MY WAITING IS AT AN END. TOGETHER WE SHALL RULE THIS REALM AS IT HAS NEVER BEEN RULED BEFORE!” Throwing his arms back, Pluto grew again, until his muscular legs dwarfed the temple across the plaza “I PROCLAIM A HOLIDAY IN HELL!”

The full force of his voice startled her. She fell backward and tumbled into the fountain. Across the plaza all the viewing screens switched to the same picture: herself seated on a black throne at the side of the darkly handsome monarch of the dead, a shining crown of ebony perched upon her brow.

Soaked and sputtering, she climbed out of the fountain and began to wring the water out of her dress. Getting out, it seemed, was not going to be so easy a thing as getting in.

* * *

After General Catulus chained him at the foot of his bed, Kerickson realized he was not going to get any sleep. For some reason, everyone in the Palace, from the chamberlains to the bath attendants and on down to the kitchen maids, seemed bent on murdering the general. In the space of six hours, and armed with only a club, he fought off two Praetorian Guards, three assorted dagger men, and an unarmed woman, all of whom had been subsequently declared dead and escorted away by a bemused Mercury.

Obviously, Catulus stood head and shoulders above the rest of the generals in ability, and was so far ahead on battle points that the others were willing to undertake any expense to eliminate him from the Game. In the feeble gray light of the new day, Kerickson wrapped the long chain around his arm and examined it for defects, but each link was perfect. Of course, Catulus would free him as soon as he awoke—if he managed to survive that long.

But then there remained the additional problem that he was not the back-ordered bodyguard, who could show up at any moment and spoil his cover. He needed to move on.

Blueness quivered above Catulus’s bed, then solidified into a small brown owl. “STILL HERE?” It flapped its wings several times, then settled on his shoulder.

“Not so loud!” Unwrapping his chain, Kerickson walked to the end of it, then held his breath as Catulus stopped snoring. After a few seconds, though, the General resumed his steady buzz. “Why don’t you just beat it before you get me in trouble?”

“LEAVE?” The owl cocked its head and regarded him with one round gray eye. “BUT YOU ARE IN GRAVE DANGER.”

“Thank you so much.” Kerickson walked back to the bedpost and examined the ring anchoring his chain. “I’m sure I would never have realized that without your help.”

“IT IS PART OF MY FUNCTION TO ASSIST HEROES IN THEIR QUESTS.”

“Heroes?” Sunk deeply into the wood, the ring showed definite signs of wear. Evidently old Catulus had chained more than one bodyguard here. “I’m just a servant, disposable protection for the night. What makes you think I’m a hero?”

“YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU SEEM.” The owl hopped from his shoulder to the foot of the bed, then preened at its feathers. “BUT YOUR PURPOSE IS NOBLE.”

“And what purpose is that?” He worked the ring back and forth in its hole and was rewarded with a few grains of sawdust.

“TO RESTORE ORDER.”

Up on the bed, Catulus flopped over, muttering, “Macedonian idiots!”

The ring’s base wobbled. “Listen,” he said through gritted teeth, “it’s really very kind of you to be interested, but we heroes are proud. We like to do things ourselves.”

“BUT THERE MUST BE SOMETHING I CAN DO TO HELP.” The owl craned its head. “SOME BOON I COULD GRANT, SOME WISH I COULD FULFILL? PERHAPS A NICE MORSEL OF MOUSE OR SNAKE TO CHEER YOUR EMPTY STOMACH?”

The ring came free in his hand. He fell back with a clatter of chains. The snoring broke off; the general bolted up, gazing about him with a baffled look. The owl walked from the foot of the bed onto the general’s stomach and stared him in the eyes. “GREAT DEEDS WILL COME TO YOU, GENERAL OPPIUS CATULUS, FAVORED OF THE GODS, BUT THE TIME IS NOT YET RIPE. RETURN TO YOUR DREAMS.”

“What . . . ?” Catulus blinked, then sank back against the pillow.

“DREAM OF CAPTIVES AND BOOTY AND TRIUMPHS NEVER-ENDING.” The owl bent its beak close to his ear. “DREAM OF BRIGHT GREEN LAUREL WREATHS AND SMOOTH-SKINNED EGYPTIAN MAIDS TO SOOTHE YOUR OLD AGE.”

The General’s eyelids fluttered.

“DREAM OF GERMAN BODIES PILED AS HIGH AS THE ENDLESS SKY. SEE HOW YOUR TROOPS COLLECT THEM FOR THE BURNING? ONE . . . TWO . . .”

“Three . . .” Catulus whispered, “four . . . fi—” He resumed snoring.

The owl shook itself. “NOW, WHERE WERE WE?”

Kerickson slid a blanket off the bed and wrapped the chain in it to muffle the noise. “I was leaving.”

“A SENSIBLE GOAL. THE PRIZE YOU SEEK LIES NOT HERE.”

He got to his feet. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me who killed Micio and Wilson so I could forget this nonsense and go straight to the police?”

The owl nibbled at its tail feathers for a moment. “VICTORY LIES IN THE SEEKING, NOT THE DESTINATION.”

“Yeah, I thought not.” He paused at the door. “Well, if you’re not going to help, at least stay out of my way.” Glancing down the hall to reassure himself that it was empty, he started in the direction of the Emperor’s quarters.

The owl flew down the corridor, gliding just above his head on soundless brown wings. His arms full of chain, Kerickson glared up at it. “Get out of here and leave me alone! Beat it!”

“OH, WHAT FOOLS THESE MORTALS BE,” the owl intoned, then disappeared with the slightest hint of static.

* * *

The Nubian maid’s black eyes regarded Amaelia reproachfully, as though it were her fault the Saturnalia would begin tomorrow and she had nothing to wear. “All my clothes are at the temple,” Amaelia said from the middle of the big canopied bed, “but it wouldn’t make any difference if I had them here. Vestal Virgins wear only simple white gowns.”

“Perhaps some of the Empress’s clothes, then.” The maid’s eyes narrowed. “She was, of course, much taller than you, but we could alter something by tomorrow.”

“Was?” Amaelia sat up. “Has there been news of her, then?”

“No, mistress.” The maid gazed back at her stolidly. “Still, when a person’s been missing this long, it usually means only one thing.”

“The Underworld.” Amaelia stared down at her clenched hands in her lap. Even though she and Demea had never gotten along, it was unsettling to face her stepmother’s disappearance so soon after her father’s death.

“I will go through the Lady Demea’s things and see if there isn’t something that will suit you.” The maid picked up a steaming cup from the silver tray she had brought and handed it to her. “You’re a great lady now, probably the next Empress. You can’t appear at the feast in rags.”

Amaelia sniffed the cup, then put it down in disgust—hot watered wine again. If she never saw another grape after she left this stupid game, it would be just fine with her. What she wouldn’t give right now for a cup of tea or even—she closed her eyes—sparkly dark cola like they sold down in the amusement sector. “Take this away.”

“You have only to tell Flina what you desire and it will be brought.”

“Tea?” Amaelia ventured, feeling excessively wicked. “The real kind, with caffeine?”

Flina smiled serenely. “I think that can be arranged. Lady Demea did have a personal supplier of certain luxury goods from the outside, although you must not speak of it to others.”

“What about a doughnut?” She hesitated. “With real chocolate?”

“A perfect choice, lady. Chocolate is just the sort of thing to lift a young wife’s spirits.” Flina turned for the door.

A young wife . . . Amaelia pulled a pillow over her head. She didn’t want to be a wife, not even the pretend sort that Gracchus seemed to require from her. At least he hadn’t touched her last night, hadn’t even come in her room. If he had, she would have killed him, or failing that, at least killed herself. Somehow, she had to contact the computer and get herself released from the Game. There was no law saying a person had to go on playing once they wanted out.

She threw the pillow aside and padded barefoot across the rug-covered floor to look out the window at the red-tiled roofs of the city. Maybe she could disguise herself as a slave and run away. Everyone knew the Interface lay somewhere in the middle of town. If she searched, surely she would be able to find it and get out of this farce.

“Uh—hello,” said a voice from behind her back.

“What?” She whirled around to see a man in a plain gray tunic watching her from the doorway. He had a quiet face, topped with straight blond hair, and an unassuming, most decidedly un-Roman nose, not at all the sort of biosculpted face she was used to seeing.