The sky was dark grey; black at the horizon. Away to one side there was a small, vaguely purple disk in the sky, which he realised was the sun. He stood up.
The grey ash was being covered up with inky soot, falling from the dark overcast like negative snow. He walked across the heat-warped, flaking flagstones towards the edge of the balcony. The parapet had fallen away here; he kept back from the very edge.
The landscape had changed. Instead of the golden yellow wall of cinderbuds crowding the view beyond the curtain wall, there was just earth; black and brown and baked-looking, covered in great cracks and fissures the thin grey ash and the soot-rain had not yet filled. The barren waste stretched to the distant horizon. Faint wisps of smoke still climbed from fissures in the ground, climbing like the ghosts of trees, until the wind took them. The curtain wall was blackened and scorched, and breached in places.
The castle itself looked battered as though after a long siege. Towers had collapsed, and many of the apartments, office buildings and extra halls had fallen in on themselves, their flame-scarred windows showing only emptiness behind. Columns of smoke rose lazily like sinuous flagpoles to the summit of the crumbling fortress, where the wind caught them and made them pennants.
Gurgeh walked round the balcony, through the soft black snow of soot, to the prow-hall windows. His feet made no noise. The specks of soot made him sneeze, and his eyes itched. He entered the hall.
The stones still held their dry heat; it was like walking into a vast, dark oven. Inside the great game-room, amongst the dim shambles of twisted girders and fallen stonework, the board lay, warped and buckled and torn, its rainbow of colours reduced to greys and blacks, its carefully balanced topography of high ground and low made a nonsense of by the random heavings and saggings induced by the fire.
Buckled, annealed girders and holes in the floor and walls marked where the observation galleries had been. The screening gear which had fallen from the ceiling of the hall lay half-melted and congealed in the centre of the Azad board, like some blistered travesty of a mountain.
He turned to look at the window, where Nicosar had stood, and walked over the creaking surface of the ruined board. He crouched down, grunting as his knees sent stabs of pain through him. He put his hand out to where an eddy in the firestorm had collected a little conical pile of dust in the angle of an internal buttress, right at the edge of the game-board, near where a fused, L-shaped lump of blackened metal might have been the remains of a gun.
The grey-white ash was soft and warm, and mixed in with it he found a small, C-shaped piece of metal. The half-melted ring still contained the setting for a jewel, like a tiny rough crater on its rim, but the stone was gone. He looked at the ring for a while, blowing the ash off it and turning it over and over in his hands. After a while he put the ring back into the pile of dust. He hesitated, then he took the Orbital bracelet out of his jacket pocket and added it to the shallow grey cone, pulled the two poison-warning rings off his fingers, and put them there too. He scooped a handful of the warm ash into one palm, gazing at it thoughtfully.
"Jernau Gurgeh, good morning."
He turned and rose, quickly stuffing his hand into his jacket pocket as though ashamed of something. The little white body of Flere-Imsaho floated in through the window, very tiny and clean and exact in that shattered, melted place. A tiny grey thing, the size of a baby's finger, floated up to the drone from the ground near Gurgeh's feet. A hatch opened in Flere-Imsaho's immaculate body; the micromissile entered the drone. A section of the machine's body revolved, then was still.
"Hello," Gurgeh said, walking over to it. He looked round the ruined hall, then back at the drone. "I hope you're going to tell me what happened."
"Sit down, Gurgeh. I'll tell you."
He sat on a block of stone fallen from above the windows. He looked dubiously upwards at where it must have fallen from. "Don't worry," Flere-Imsaho said. "You're safe. I've checked the roof."
Gurgeh rested his hands on his knees. "So?" he said.
"First things first," Flere-Imsaho said. "Allow me to introduce myself properly; my name is Sprant Flere-Imsaho Wu-Handrahen Xato Trabiti, and I am not a library drone."
Gurgeh nodded. He recognised some of the nomenclature Chiark Hub had been so impressed with, long ago. He didn't say anything.
"If I had been a library drone, you'd be dead. Even if you'd escaped Nicosar, you'd have been incinerated a few minutes later."
"I appreciate that," Gurgeh said. "Thank you." His voice sounded flat, wrung out, and not especially grateful. "I thought they'd got you; killed you."
"Damn nearly did," the drone said. "That firework display was for real. Nicosar must have got his hands on some equiv-tech effector gear; which means — or meant — the Empire has had some sort of contact with another advanced civilisation. I've scanned what's left of the equipment; could be Homomda stuff. Anyway, the ship'll load it for further analysis."
"Where is the ship? I thought we'd be on it, not still down here."
"It came barrelling through half an hour after the fire hit. Could have snapped us both off, but I reckoned we were safer staying where we were; I had no trouble insulating you from the fire, and keeping you under with my effector was easy enough too. The ship popped us a couple of spare drones and kept on going, braking and turning. It's on its way back now; should be overhead in five minutes. We can go safely back up in the module. Like I said; displacement can be risky." Gurgeh gave a sort of half-laugh through his nose. He looked around the dim hall again. "I'm still waiting," he told the machine.
"The imperial guards went crazy, on Nicosar's orders. They blew up the aqueduct, cisterns and shelters, and killed everybody they could find. They tried to take over the Invincible from the Navy, too. In the resulting on-board firefight, the ship crashed; came down somewhere in the northern ocean. Biggish splash; tsaunami's swept away rather a lot of mature cinderbuds, but I dare say the fire'll cope. There was no attempt to kill Nicosar the other night; that was just a ruse to get the whole castle and the game under the control of guards who'd do anything the Emperor told them."
"Why, though?" Gurgeh said tiredly, kicking at a blister of board metal. 'Why did Nicosar order them to do all that?"
"He told them it was the only way to defeat the Culture and save him. They didn't know he was doomed too; they thought he had some way of saving himself. Maybe they'd have done it regardless, even knowing that. They were very highly trained. Anyway; they obeyed their orders." The machine made a chuckling noise. "Most of them, anyway. A few left the shelter they were supposed to blow up intact, and got some people into it with them. So you're not unique; there are some other survivors. Mostly servants; Nicosar made sure an the important people were in here. The ship's drones are with the survivors. We're keeping them locked up until you're safely away. They'll have enough rations to last until they're rescued."
"Go on."
"You sure you can handle an this stuff right now?"
"Just tell me why," Gurgeh said, sighing.
"You've been used, Jernau Gurgeh," the drone said matter-of-factly. "The truth is, you were playing for the Culture, and Nicosar was playing for the Empire. I personally told the Emperor the night before the start of the last match that you really were our champion; if you won, we were coming in; we'd smash the Empire and impose our own order. If he won, we'd keep out for as long as he was Emperor and for the next ten Great Years anyway.
"That's why Nicosar did all he did. He wasn't just a sore loser; he'd lost his Empire. He had nothing else to live for, so why not go in a blaze of glory?"