There was another concept to try, though. Jurtan rose back to a crouch and edged carefully around the camouflaged door. Chittering away in the underbrush up ahead was a muskrat or some such small animal. Not that Jurtan claimed to know much of anything about small animals, but weren’t they supposed to quiet down when a larger animal who might potentially use their noisemaking to guide itself toward lunch happened by? A larger animal like, say, Jurtan? He headed toward the sound of the animal, whatever it was.
There was indeed a continuation of the path. Around the next stand of grass and through another patch of standing water that seemed home primarily to a horde of hungry gnats, Jurtan’s music was now picking up tempo expectantly. He could almost hear something sizzling. Sizzling? No, that much must have been his imagination, but here on the ground was a nest, and within the nest, eggs. The nest’s guardian was not in evidence. The subliminal sound of frying did persist, though, and now with it was the gentlest whiff of cooked breakfast. Tentatively, Jurtan reached out for the nest, rolling first one egg, then (at the urging of his accompaniment) a specific second. With only a puff of displaced air and lacking the slightest sound, a section of the grassy knoll beyond the nest dropped smoothly away, revealing a stairway leading downward. The treads glowed faintly past the range of the lantern.
“There was another entrance?” Svin asked from behind him. “What was the problem with the first one?”
“It was a decoy,” Jurtan explained. “It would have led us to ruin.”
“It is good you realized it, then,” said Svin. “I will fetch Dortonn.” Svin clapped him lightly on the shoulder. Jurtan was amazed not to find himself driven into the ground; Svin obviously did know his strength, and could be delicate when the need arose. “We will see the value of your work when we travel below,” Svin added, then disappeared silently back up the path.
Jurtan was still trying to decide if that remark had been a kudo or a warning when an equally hushful Svin made his return, again toting Dortonn. Jurtan had also used the time for additional reflection, however. “This is the door,” he reaffirmed. “But should we be using the door? What about guards and retainers?”
“For any problems that lie ahead,” said Svin, “you will detect them, Dortonn will blast them, and I will slice them. Then there will be no problems.”
“I guess that sounds like a plan,” Jurtan had to acknowledge.
The Emperor-designate’s box of office occupied an expansive dais atop an uncomfortably slender pillar at the stage-edge of the parade ground of the Stadium of State. They had reached its pinnacle using an elevator lift within the pillar. The elevator’s motive power had been concealed either atop or below, but its progress in jerks and starts, the ferociously thrumming vibrations of its floor, and a wholly perceptible lateral swaying behavior made Leen wish she was taking the service stairs that wound about the lift’s open shaft in coil after apparently endless coil, regardless of the distance to the zenith. Still, the Emperor-designate must have traveled this route himself, and even though he was given to the display of a certain obtuse nature on occasion, he had never engaged in out-and-out recklessness or an obvious bent toward suicide. Furthermore, in light of the events of the Running of the Squids - remarkably, that calamitous midday was still only hours past - the Imperial engineers must have been over the entire vicinity with a paranoid sieve. Regardless of all this rationality, however, Leen was mightily relieved to disembark, all in one piece, on the observation gallery level below the open-air box itself.
The captain of her guard-escort trotted up the grand stair to determine the Emperor’s proximate pleasure, leaving Leen, her guardians diligent around her, to take in the spectacle through the broad open windows. The expansive parade-ground was a carpet of torches and the globes and streamers of wizard lights, illuminating the throngs of Imperial office-holders and functionaries, Bones and Ligaments and Muscles, Nerves and Vessels and Viscera, both Lesser and Greater; constituent parts of the Corpus galore. It was one measure of them to see them on a daily basis scurrying around the palace grounds or executing the required annual Organ System maneuvers - there were always so many of them underfoot even as it was - but to have them all assembling in a single place for a unified purpose, rank upon rank and legion upon legion, was enough to make one consider just what all these people actually did, and wonder whether the Empire might be better served by posting more of its staff abroad or divesting itself of them entirely.
Merely thinking those sentiments now and here, though, was probably treasonous enough to warrant some severe and unimaginative decree, and was plainly out of keeping with the mood of raucous revelry; better to just goggle at the spectacle and tip any errant philosopher over the guardrail to be devoured by the masses below. Although below was not the only option - the same result could be achieved by heaving the soothsayer off to the side. As tall as this pylon was - five stories? ten? - the grandstands surrounding the field mounted even higher. Tier upon tier, their stone benches groaning beneath the stamp of the thronging spectators still flooding in for this climactic official ceremony, their waving banners and frothing kegs at every hand, sparklers and small skyrockets waving and arcing in hazardous defiance of all regulation, the bleachers would have unquestionably collapsed at some Knitting long before this if the entire stadium had not been built sunken into the ground, with the grandstands supported on berms of earth.
Between Knittings the hippodrome was used for sporting events and the occasional pageant, and Leen was aware of at least three sorcerous duels in the last fifty years fought within its confines (although surprisingly enough not one had led to its ruin), but the real reason for its existence, right and truly enough, was on display all around her now. Or to be precise in a different direction, the reason was walking around in the crow’s-nest above her head. Having been instrumental in heading off the latest surge toward reforming the traditional system of nepotistic succession several years before, the Emperor-designate (then merely a Ventricle-in-Waiting rather than the full Heart he would thereafter assume, of course) had secured his prospects of being here today, and had wasted no time in setting in motion certain tasteful, if surreptitious, preparations. But then that was merely traditional as well. He had not done anything so blatant as to urge his uncle onward toward his retirement - in either a conversational or a more lethal manner - but his uncle had been no fool either, and had acted to declare himself dead-in-state after waiting a decent interval and playing up a series of small strokes, but before his total incapacitation or out-and-out demise. That previous Emperor was now holed up somewhere on the continent with his personal troops and his sinecure and his gradually unspooling memoirs, and of course his not inconsiderable residual deterrent capabilities, leaving behind him the still-circulating speculations concerning why he had broken with tradition to this extent, leaving on his own feet rather than with those extremities preceding him.
Ah, politics. Leen might hate it but you couldn’t ignore it, because it wasn’t about to ignore you. And neither was the Emperor-designate, apparently, for here came her captain to usher her up the stair and into the presence of the great man himself. He was not yet occupying the central throne on its final sky-reaching spire, but rather circulating among his intimates and raising an occasional benedictory hand to the mob in the stands around them. To Leen’s eye he did not look particularly nervous, which is to say his demeanor did not reflect at the moment an appreciation of the larger hazards at hand. But then he had come down to the dungeon to consult Max, of course, and he had had her brought here as well. It would be wise, therefore, she had already decided, to treat him as though he knew what he was doing.