The Thousand Emperors fd-2 Read online

  He stopped and regarded him with a shocked expression. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, his tone apologetic.

  ‘What?’

  Hetaera’s grin grew wide once more. ‘I should have addressed you as Master Archivist Gabion, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Luc will do just fine. And I’ll have the same as you’re having,’ he said, gesturing to the glass in the other man’s hand.

  Hetaera glanced down at the glass he held as if he’d forgotten it was there. ‘It’s just kavamilch,’ he said. ‘Sure you don’t want something stronger?’

  ‘Kavamilch will be fine.’

  Hetaera shrugged and picked up a pot, pouring some of the warm brew into a second glass and handing it to Luc.

  ‘I got your request,’ said Hetaera as they sat down opposite each other on couches by the window. ‘But there might be a problem,’ he added with a grimace.

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘The author of the book you’re looking for,’ Vincent explained. ‘Javier Maxwell. He never wrote a book by that name, at least not that we know of.’

  ‘A History of the Tian Di?’ The book Vasili had taken hold of in the last moments before his death. ‘How sure are you about that?’

  Hetaera raised an eyebrow. ‘Very sure. Where did you hear about it?’

  ‘I saw a copy,’ Luc replied, ‘a physical, printed copy, with my own two eyes. Is it possible we just don’t have records of it?’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible, but ever since Father Cheng locked Maxwell away and took control of the Temur Council, his name’s had restricted access flags attached to it wherever it turns up in our files. Even with your recent promotion, I doubt you’d be able to get permission to find out if it ever did exist without petitioning Father Cheng himself directly.’

  Luc nodded tiredly. He’d come across any number of such restricted access flags during his years of researching Winchell Antonov’s endless tangle of connections with terrorist groups scattered far and wide across the Tian Di.

  ‘May I ask,’ said Hetaera, ‘how you came across this book?’

  Luc had been dreading the possibility he might be asked precisely this question. ‘It’s a confidential source,’ he replied carefully.

  ‘Then if the book ever existed, it’s more than likely been wiped from the official records.’ Hetaera spread his hands. ‘If it was a printed book, how old would you say it was?’

  ‘I couldn’t begin to guess.’

  ‘Pre-Schism old?’ Hetaera hazarded.

  Luc shrugged. ‘Maybe. I guess it could have been.’ He studied Hetaera, wondering just how much he could get away with telling him. ‘It was part of someone’s personal collection.’

  ‘Well, there you go,’ said Vincent. ‘We all know how much turbulence the Tian Di went through following the Schism. A lot of things were lost forever back then, and not just books.’

  ‘But I saw this book. It exists.’

  ‘Yes, but not as far as Archives is concerned, unfortunately.’ Vincent gave him an apologetic smile. ‘Seems to me that your life hasn’t got any less interesting since you got back from Aeschere.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Luc. ‘That’d be an understatement.’ He’d almost forgotten about the kavamilch in his hand, and swallowed it down. It tasted sweet and warm.

  ‘And what about Archives?’ asked Hetaera. ‘I know you turned down a promotion to the Security Division before. Now that Antonov’s gone, do you think you’ll change your mind and move upstairs?’

  The corner of Luc’s mouth twitched. ‘We’re on the top floor, Vincent. There is no upstairs.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Luc sighed. ‘To be honest, there’s nothing to stop me retiring right now. Never do another damn thing for the rest of my life.’

  Hetaera watched him for a moment. ‘Sitting around and doing nothing isn’t your style.’

  ‘No.’ Luc played with his empty glass. ‘Staying in Archives feels like the best option. I feel at home here, and now at least I can pick and choose what work I do.’ His eyes flicked towards his superior. ‘Right now, I’ve been asked to consult on something on behalf of a member of the Council.’

  ‘Ah.’ Hetaera nodded, regarding him shrewdly. ‘That would explain the sudden interest in officially non-existent books, so I’ll ask no more.’ He gestured with his drink. ‘There are a thousand jobs in Archives needing investigating, once you’re done with this. Tying up the loose ends from Antonov alone could take a lifetime.’

  Luc nodded. ‘Is Offenbach in the usual place?’

  Hetaera laughed. ‘Where else would he be? Good to have you back, Luc.’

  Luc smiled. ‘Good to be back, Vincent.’

  ‘There you go,’ said Jared Offenbach, leaning forward in his chair. ‘Dummy corporations, black market accounts, traceable and currently non-traceable funds, as much as you could want. A lot of it doesn’t even go anywhere: it’s chaff, designed to lead you far away from where the real money is going. Which is Black Lotus, of course.’

  Cascades of colour-coded financial information filled the office of Senior Archives Librarian Offenbach, swarming around both men. The office itself was only dimly visible with the windows opaqued, but Luc could just about make out shelves filled with antique reading devices used to recover legacy data from obsolete hardware.

  Luc shifted in his own seat, causing nearby strands of information to ripple in the air as they attempted to maintain their integrity. He watched Jared pull yet more data from out of deep virtual stacks. Flags indicated that some of the information flowing around them hadn’t been accessed, in certain cases, for more than a century, perhaps longer. Offenbach gestured expertly with his fingers, untwining dense braids of data into finer and finer branches, rapidly surrounding himself in a glowing tapestry of light. His nearly hairless pate gleamed under the constant assault of visualized data.

  For reasons that remained obscure to Luc, Offenbach preferred to maintain an outward physical appearance considerably more advanced than most. Liver spots dotted his hands, while a hawklike nose that always made Luc think of a half-opened flick-knife jutted from the centre of his face.

  ‘I’m looking for something very specific,’ said Luc, grasping at a set of brightly coloured filaments just within his reach. Tiny clumps of words, names and reference numbers pulsed like jellyfish as his fingers brushed against them. He made a claw of his hand, then flung his fingers wide, causing the clumps to suddenly expand, revealing more details, along with the broad outlines of the financial links that connected the filaments together, almost fractal in their compact density. He performed another deft sleight of hand, and the filaments of data shrank once more.

  To one side of the two men floated several dense clusters, rendered in luminous orange and green, representing the financial concerns of more than a dozen Benarean resistance movements. Dark nebulae of restricted or missing data weaved in and out of these brightly glowing clouds, but Luc knew that even this vast quantity of interconnected data represented only one very minor sub-branch of the complete Black Lotus data-set.

  ‘Something specific?’ Offenbach spluttered. ‘Well, I should hope so.’

  Luc leaned back. ‘The focus I want is on a medium-broad spectrum of interconnectivity, representing whatever relationship existed between Winchell Antonov and Sevgeny Vasili.’

  Offenbach blinked a couple of times, clearly choosing his next words carefully. ‘I can tell you right now that any such records are likely to be heavily flagged and restricted.’

  ‘That’s hardly news to me, Jared.’ Luc’s work on the Black Lotus data-set had been a constant struggle with restricted-data flags. If Offenbach hadn’t been able to help him circumnavigate a number of them in the past, he might never have succeeded in tracking Antonov down. Offenbach was, in many ways, Archives’ unsung hero.

  Offenbach gave him a look of wry amusement, then reached out, manipulating the data before him with practised ease. The entire set rotated on an invisible axis, bring
ing clusters representing the relationships between the Temur Council and Sevgeny Vasili into clearer focus. Luc could see that most of the clusters reached back for centuries, all the way to the pre-Schism days. Many of the strands were colour-coded brown and grey, to indicate their special restricted status.

  ‘Strange,’ Offenbach muttered.

  ‘What?’

  The librarian shook his head. ‘Your revised security rating should have gone through now you’ve been promoted to Master of Archives, but these data-sets simply won’t respond to your new rating. They still appear restricted to your eyes, don’t they?’

  Luc glanced again at the brown-and-grey coded links and nodded. Each member of SecInt, depending on their personal security ratings, saw different things even when looking at the same visualized information. What might appear restricted to Luc might instead show as fully available to Offenbach, and vice versa.

  Luc reached out and touched a grey strand, but it vibrated without expanding.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, staring at the restricted strands. ‘I can’t access a lot of these.’ He glanced at other, neighbouring strands, which appeared not to be flagged in the same way. ‘But I can see others that look like I could access them, if I wanted to.’

  Offenbach nodded distractedly. ‘But all of these should be accessible to you now.’ He tapped one finger against the arm of his chair. ‘Maybe your new rating is taking time to percolate through the system.’

  ‘That sounds like bullshit even to me, Jared.’

  Offenbach sighed and nodded. ‘A lot of these threads were capped following Antonov’s death. If that much has propagated through the data-sets, then your new rating should have taken effect, unless . . .’

  ‘Unless what?’

  Offenbach looked suddenly uncomfortable. ‘Usually, when something like this happens, it’s because of orders coming from way, way up the food chain.’

  A member of the Council, in other words. Luc had a mental flash of Cripps, standing in his apartment.

  Offenbach raised one magnificently hairy eyebrow. ‘You mentioned when you came in that you were asked to help in an investigation of some kind. Would that investigation perhaps be connected to stories I’ve been hearing about your trip up to the White Palace?’

  Luc made a face. ‘I see I’m the talk of the town.’

  Offenbach let out a half-muffled giggle. ‘Yes. So much intrigue.’

  Despite his outward appearance, Luc sometimes wondered if Offenbach might actually be a good deal younger than himself. He certainly acted like it at times.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ said Offenbach, his face lit up with nearly palpable excitement. He sent data-sets flying by with disorienting speed, galaxies of information vanishing into the darkened recesses of his office in rapid order. Finally a single, vast constellation appeared, orbited by dozens of other, smaller clusters.

  ‘What you’re looking at here,’ said Offenbach, ‘is the total data-set for the preparations for Reunification. I don’t need to tell you the predictive power of a set like this, do I?’

  No you don’t, thought Luc, his eyes automatically tracing lines of real and potential influence. ‘You don’t need to work in Archives to guess a lot of things are going to change following Reunification, Jared.’

  ‘But look here at these subsets. They show regions of unusually high activity surrounding Sevgeny Vasili over just the last few days, considerably more than might be expected even given his role in making Reunification a success. Clearly something is up.’

  Luc tried not to show his surprise. ‘You were already looking into Vasili?’

  Offenbach clapped his hands in excitement, his eyes glittering from across the room. ‘Not officially, no. But that level of activity naturally draws our attention and raises flags. Now, as for Vasili’s links to Antonov, all we really have to go on is a relatively scant quantity of publicly available data. You know, of course, that they were both on the Committee for Reconstruction following the Abandonment.’

  Luc nodded. ‘I know that before Antonov turned against the Council, the two men had worked together.’

  ‘In the early days,’ Offenbach agreed. ‘And later, of course, they became diametrically opposed when Father Cheng took power.’

  Luc nodded. ‘I’m looking for something deeper than that,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you might be,’ Offenbach replied. Screeds of text appeared, flickering by at a speed even Luc, despite his experience, found difficult to follow.

  For the thousandth time, Luc recalled Vasili’s last message to posterity, recorded on the pages of a book the head of Archives couldn’t prove existed: Winchell, I was wrong, so very wrong. I see that now.

  A lifetime of questions were contained within that one simple statement.

  ‘What I can tell you,’ said Luc, ‘is that there should be a recent connection between the two men, possibly as recently as within the last year.’

  Offenbach raised his eyebrows in surprise, suddenly sober. ‘That recent?’

  Luc nodded slowly and Offenbach whistled. A moment later the window de-opaqued, letting afternoon light seep in. A thin layer of dust became evident, coating many of the ageing data-readers stacked around them.

  ‘My guess,’ said Offenbach, ‘is that whoever decided to restrict your access to some parts of the data-sets doesn’t want you to find something out.’

  ‘They might stop me from finding those things out,’ Luc agreed, ‘but clearly that’s not a concern for you, since they can’t lock everyone out of those data-sets without attracting too much attention. So anything you feel like telling me,’ he said, glancing again at the restricted threads, ‘is just between us.’

  Offenbach’s fingers tapped at the arm of his chair. ‘All right,’ he said, as if coming to a decision, ‘then let me ask you a question. Were you aware that no one has seen Sevgeny Vasili for days?’

  Luc did his best to keep his face impassive. ‘How did you find that out?’

  Offenbach gave him a sly look. ‘By inference, as well as observation. You know how we work: intelligent filters identify trends and highlight nodes of activity that at first glance might only appear circumstantial or unconnected. Once Reunification gets rolling, there’s going to be a massive exchange of cultural and scientific data between us and the Coalition, all mediated by Vasili. And Vasili has been at the heart of the preparations for Reunification for a very, very long time.’

  ‘And your point is?’

  ‘Up until several days ago,’ Offenbach continued with a note of triumph, ‘Vasili was all over Archives like a rash. That exchange of data I mentioned can’t take place without Vasili’s direct involvement. But now Vasili’s vanished from sight, on the cusp of something he’s been working towards for longer than most of us here have even been alive. And yet there hasn’t been a single adequate word of explanation from anyone in the Council.’

  Offenbach shifted in his seat before continuing. ‘Now, I know you’ve been out of the loop since they brought you back from Aeschere, Luc, but you have to understand that unless he pops up again sometime very soon, there is going to be a major stink. And then you turn up here asking about connections between Vasili and Antonov. I think that’s what any self-respecting Master of Archives would call a significant correlation.’

  Luc sighed and let his shoulders sink in defeat. ‘Fine, now that you put it that way, I suppose it’s obvious I’m interested in Vasili’s . . . recent absence.’

  Offenbach leaned towards him, his manner theatrically conspiratorial. ‘This isn’t official Archives business, is it, Luc?’

  ‘No, it’s a commission, from a member of the Temur Council.’

  ‘And of course you can’t talk about it. Am I right?’

  Luc shook his head ruefully. ‘I know you’re itching to find out the details, because all your stats indicators are saying something significant is up.’

  ‘Well, that much is obvious,’ the other man huffed. ‘A word of warning for y
ou. Sometimes, when ordinary people get caught up in Council intrigue, their strings get yanked so hard their heads get pulled off.’

  First Eleanor, and now Offenbach was taking the trouble to give him essentially the same warning. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for that delightful image.’

  ‘Just an observation.’ Offenbach fidgeted for a moment, and Luc sensed he was leading up to something. ‘You know, a lot of the data recovered from your trip to Aeschere is still strictly embargoed, despite our department’s protests. It leaves us just as handicapped in the fight against Black Lotus as we were before, and I have no idea just how long it’s going to be before we can get our hands on that data – assuming the Sandoz ever let us have access to it.’

  Luc nodded. Offenbach wanted something in return.

  ‘I think I can do something for you, Jared.’

  Offenbach’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Such as?’

  ‘I still have special access privileges to Sandoz’s own archives.’ Those privileges had been hard-won on Luc’s part, and had fostered what Vincent Hetaera had hoped would become a new era of inter-agency cooperation. From what Luc had been hearing since his recovery, that era was already proving short-lived.

  ‘You can get hold of the Aeschere data?’

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ said Luc. ‘Is there anything else you can think of that might be useful to me?’

  Offenbach thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps. But it’s not something that can necessarily be corroborated. You’d just have to take it at face value, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Rumour, then.’

  Offenbach moved his head from side to side. ‘More than rumour, less than verifiable fact.’

  ‘Listening at doors, in other words.’

  Offenbach leaned forward, his voice dropping to a husky half-whisper. ‘It’s my understanding that over the past several decades, Vasili became isolated not only from Father Cheng, but from the rest of the Eighty-Five. A pariah within Cheng’s inner circle, essentially.’

  Luc thought about it for a moment. ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ he said.