“Take me there at once, do you hear?” said Count Calmar.
It was perhaps an hour and a half later that, as they strolled on through the Sunken Square (Ignats-Salvador had intended a palace but died just as the excavation was completed), a large old woman performed a full- formal curtsey of archaic manner as she came upon them; and Magnus, automatically, gave her a full-formal bow. He had taken a number of steps before he gave a start, started to turn around, caught his new friend’s amused eye, and asked, “Who was that?”
Down deep in a dungeon ... that is, down deep in what had long ago been a dungeon for the confinement of forgers of the petty currency (and served them right) but was now a cellar for the storage of merely moderately harsh wine — the sort which corner grocers fix up with sugar syrup and advertise as From Our Own Vineyard in the Country... a device which fools no one but indicates that the stuff is not too bad: the worst poison almost invariably being labeled as Imported From Oporto in the Land of the Portagews, DELICIOUS!... three men sat at a bench before a table spread with machinery. Presently, “The works is almost ready,” said one of the men. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of the denim jacket he wore.
“And then,” said another .. . pausing, as if he relished the words .. . “and then: Ka-BOOM!”
“Death to the tyrant!” cried a third. They returned to their employment.
After but a moment, one of them said, “One hears . . . One hears rumors . . . one hears rumors that the tyrant may already be dead —”
“Nonsense!”
“Lies, spread by the tyrant’s toadies!”
“The works! Let us get on with the works, and not dawdle over granny-talk!”
For a while they toiled on, jewelers’ loupes in their eyes, so cautiously weighing gunpowder, so carefully adjusting clock-work, so deftly fastening wires, turning tiny screws — “But why, if the tyrant is not dead, has he not been seen riding his Whitey horse as always? One hears that, for days now, he has not been —”
“Enough, babbler! The works!”
The room was large and dark; only where they worked was there light. Somewhere, neither near nor far, water dripped. Another man spoke. Diffidently. “It is of course essential that the tyrant be destroyed. But he is not trustworthy. Suppose that just at the time the works go off, just at the door of the Infants’ Infirmary in the Hospital for Children of Palace Servants, the tyrant is up in the throne room, trying on crowns — and not bringing sweets to the invalid infants?”
There was a murmur. There was a voice saying firmly, “ ‘Suppose?’ suppose. We shall suppose he will be there.”
Gaslight hissed.
Now in lower voice the same one resumed the same theme. “It is a terrible thought that the children would have died in vain. ...”
Once more the firm voice. “That would be the tyrant’s fault. If he had no servants they would have no children. It is the enemy who determines the conditions of the war.”
They all nodded, bowed their heads, worked on. There were no further interruptions.
In a room in a tower not more than a kilometer away, three other men glanced up from their map and looked out the window. One of them gestured with his pointer. “The vehicle in question will at the time appointed cross over the Italian Bridge disguised as a fruit-and-vegetable wagon. They expect to enter the Royal and Imperial Palace grounds without trouble via the back central passageway, and to stop just at the door of the Infants’ Infirmary in the Hospital for Children of Palace Servants. There several crates of produce will be unloaded in order to add an air of verisimilitude to the scene. Then, one by one, the men are going to leave the scene. The brakes and wheels will have already been tampered with so the vehicle cannot easily be moved. At three o’clock, as usual, the King-Emperor enters the Hospital to visit for fifteen minutes, said visit includes the Infirmary, and the infernal machine is to be set to go off at a quarter after three.” He gestured towards a clock.
The men were all in uniform; but it was a curious sort of uniform, entirely bare of any adornments whatsoever. One of the men asked, “How accurate is the report?”
“Our secret agent assures us that it is quite accurate.”
There was such silence as was not dispelled by the sounds of the great capital city below, muted by distance into one continual murmur, like that of some far-off and unbroken surf. Then someone said, “This is a terrible vision.”
Someone else slightly shrugged, said, “All the visions of the Jacobins are terrible. That is why they must all be destroyed, they and their visions together, whatever names they employ: democrats, socialists, republicans, reformers, anarchists, conservatives — as though the present system were worth conserving! It is re-action which alone may save us all. A reaction which will totally sweep away such diabolisms as representative government, religious toleration, and all the rest of it. Mud! Mud! Every change which has come about since 1789 has come up from the mud, and back down into the mud it must go.”
Someone cleared his throat. “You are quite sure then, companion, that it is not our duty to inform the August House?”
“Certainly not! The Jacobins must be destroyed and it is by exactly such an action on their part that shall come about a reaction, a revulsion which shall destroy them. All of them! They shall all die! Let the mobs arise and do this; then we shall destroy the mobs!”
The view from the tower window encompassed all the nearby Gothic Lowlands; one of those present said: “I see the Gothic Lowlands in flames ... then all Scythia . . . Pannonia, too: then Transbalkania —”
“Scholars say,” another murmured, “that it was the Gaetae of Dacia who were the ancestors of the modern Scythian Goths and thus neither the Visigoths nor Ostrogoths; but scholars also say the descent is from the Gauts of South Scandia... and do not scholars also connect the Getae of Ovid’s lines, Haec mihi Cimmerio bis tertio ducitur aestas Litore pellitos inter agenda Getas with those Geats which the Beowulf informs were centuries before encountered on the North and Baltic Seas? Scholars do“
“Damn all scholars! Let the scholars bum, too!”
A throat was cleared. “The Emperor is not a scholar ... what of the Emperor?”
The reply was brief. “The Emperor is a saint and has a place prepared for him in Heaven. Let the war go on.”
“But —”
“It is the enemy who determines the conditions of the war. Let the war go on.”
“Who was that?” asked Magnus.
The young Cornet-Equerry smiled. “That? That is Emma Katterina.” “Who?”
Emma Katterina. Her mother may have been “the barmaid of Bratislava,” for that matter the mother of Don John of Austria had been “the laundress of Regensburg”: unlike Don John, whose father was Holy Roman Emperor, Emma Katterina’s father was merely a backwood noble in a barely united severalty of backwood thrones — again, however, and unlike Don John: she was of legitimate birth.