The drop of clear matter oozing from Esme's right eye twinkled as the opening door made the lamps gutter.
There was a brief discussion. Baron Weast turned from the messenger. "Your majesty?" he said. "Lord D'Auber is here. He says that the Mirala forces are marshaling and the battle will surely begin at dawn."
Venkatna made no response. The only sound in the audience hall was the hiss of the lamps and D'Auber's harsh breathing. Rather than send a courier with this warning, D'Auber had run from the palisade marking Frekka's municipal limits.
Weast's face twisted into a caricature of pleasantry. "Lord D'Auber is of course concerned that your majesty be with his armies during the battle. . . ."
No response. It was like talking at a pair of corpses. The emperor's chief aides rotated night duty in the audience hall among themselves, but each further exposure to silence and the glittering Web was a closer approach to Hell.
"Or that you depute the command to, ah, one of your companions, your majesty."
He heard low voices out in the corridor, Bontempo and Kleber and the rest—being careful not to enter the presence unless they were summoned.
The presences. Weast wondered how the guards stood it. Perhaps their battlesuits protected them from the miasma that permeated the audience hall. More than death and madness; but certainly including death and madness.
Emperor Venkatna roused suddenly. His eyes had been open, but he blinked to clear them. Venkatna's cheeks were hollow and his eyesockets looked bruised. "No," he said wearily. "I'll—"
He shook himself and stood up, kicking aside the rug that humped at his feet.
"But perhaps we won't have to fight," Venkatna resumed. He spoke in the strong, determined voice of past years. That was the part that Weast found most disconcerting: the real man, the king and emperor, was still present—the way a skeleton lurks within a liquescent corpse.
The emperor walked over to the Web. Instead of boots, he wore felt slippers, like those a warrior dons before getting into his armor. "You there!" Venkatna called. "Slaves! Rouse and listen to me!"
An underchamberlain sat on the stone floor beside the Web, cradling his head in his hands. "Race and Julia," the man muttered in a sing-song. "They have names. Julia and Race."
Nobody paid any attention to him. The guards and councilors rotated night duty in the audience hall. This underchamberlain, Brett, had somehow gotten a permanent assignment, and by now he was quite mad.
Despite that, Brett's plight was less horrific than that of the slaves within the Web.
"Your orders are our fate . . . ," Race whispered from her bench as light faded from the device she used and which used her up. She had been a tall, muscular woman. Now she looked like something found in an unsealed sarcophagus. Her joints stood out from spindly limbs, and for some moments she was unable to lift herself upright.
Servants with milk and sponges scuttled to the women's sides. Brett watched the activities apathetically. Julia did not speak or rise. The violent shudders which shook her emaciated frame indicated that she too had returned from her trance within the probability generator.
Weast could not keep from glancing toward Empress Esme's bier. He trembled and locked his attention back on Venkatna.
The Empire had remained in perfect internal peace since the two slaves were put to work in the Web. The processes of corporeal decay, however, were more difficult to chain than those which afflicted political entities.
"This will be simpler than fighting them," Venkatna said confidingly—to Esme. "I won't need to leave you after all, my dearest."
Venkatna's expression hardened as he returned his attention to Race and Julia. "You two," he said crisply. "I want you to pacify the Mirala confederates. They're right outside the city. Make them all surrender."
"We can't do that, your majesty," Julia said. She managed to wipe her mouth. A palace servant, his fear overcome by pity, reached through the series of looped crystals. He held the woman upright while another servant fed her spoonfuls of thick gruel.
"You must do it!" Venkatna shouted. "I order you to do it!"
"M-m-mirala isn't part of your domains, majesty," Race whispered. Her tongue slurred through a mouthful of warm milk. She seemed unaware that droplets spattered as she spoke. "We cannot affect that which is beyond your rule."
"What use are you, then?" the emperor screamed. He spun on his heel. "Go on back to your work. I'll take care of these scum another way. Somebody bring my armor, but—"
A look of forceful cunning claimed his pallid face.
"But I won't leave here, ah, just now," he continued. "I'll stay with, with, here, until later. Weast, you take care of the army."
"Him?" blurted D'Auber, the first words the warrior had uttered since his whispered conversation with Weast at the door to the hall.
"Please, your majesty," Julia said. Her eyes were closed. Servants held a bison robe around her, but its thickness could not prevent the tremors shaking her wasted body. "We will do your work, but give us a little peace, just an hour . . . ?"
The clerestory windows of the dome brightened with a hint of dawn, though they did not yet illuminate the hall below.
"We are your slaves," Race echoed, "but give us peace. . . ."
"You'll have no peace, none!" shouted the emperor. "You let my darling die, you bitches!"
"Your majesty, you didn't tell—" Julia said. Her voice was too weak and toneless to be called a protest.
"No peace!" Venkatna cried. "Get back to your work, I order you! No peace!"
The slave women sighed together. The sound was like that of the last breath oozing from a dead ox.
Servants scrambled to get out of the hemisphere of the Web. Race and Julia lay back down on their filthy benches.
And there, in accordance with the orders of Emperor Venkatna the First, the two Searchers began to grind out No Peace.