The Dance of Time: Chapter Twenty Two

Bharakuccha

    Early the next morning, Damodara commanded Sanga to meet him in the radio station.

    “Why here, Emperor?” Sanga asked, as soon as he arrived. The room was empty, except for the two of them and the bizarre equipment. “I thought you planned to use the telegraph.”

    Damodara looked a bit haggard, as if he hadn’t slept well. “I did,” he said, tugging at his chin. “But I thought about it most of the night. And I think...”

    He was interrupted by a small commotion at the door. A moment later, two burly Ye-tai came in, with a much smaller man between them. They weren’t guiding him in so much as simply carrying him by the armpits.

    Once in the room, they set him down. “Lord Toramana says this one, Emperor.”

    Damodara nodded. “Leave us, then.”

    For a moment, the Ye-tai seemed taken aback.

    Damodara smiled, looking upon the radio operator. He was but a few inches over five feet tall, and couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and twenty pounds. Wearing nothing but a loincloth, it was also obvious that he was scrawnily-built.

    Damodara flicked his fingers toward Sanga. “I dare say that with the Rajput king present, this desperate fellow will restrain his assassin’s impulses.”

    He gave the radio operator a winning smile. “Am I not correct?”

    The man bobbed his head like a small bird pecking at grains.

    “You will make no attempt upon my life?”

    The man shook his head so fast it seemed to vibrate.

    “I thought not.” He gave the two guards a cold eye, and they departed.

    After they were gone, Damodara pointed to the chair in front of the complex apparatus. “Sit,” he commanded.

    The operator did so.

    “Is there a code you must use, when you transmit?”

    Again, that vibrating head-shake.

    “I’d really much prefer it if you spoke, man,” Damodara said mildly.

    The operator swallowed. Then, managed to croak out: “No, sir. There’s no code.”

    Sanga frowned fiercely. “None? I warn you not to lie! It makes no sense to me—”

    “But there isn’t, Lord,” the operator protested desperately. “I swear it. She—”

    He broke off. Almost seemed to be choking.

    Damodara sighed. “As I suspected. And feared.” He leaned forward a bit. “I want nothing but the truth. This ‘she.’ Of whom do you speak?”

    The operator stared at him, his eyes very wide with fear. He looked more like trapped rodent than anything else.

    “You’re speaking of Great Lady Sati, yes?”

    The operator swallowed again. “Yes,” he whispered. “But that’s supposed to be a secret. I’m not supposed—”

    He broke off again, this time because of the sight and sound of Sanga’s sword coming out of the scabbard. The Rajput king held the sword blade in front of the man’s face. So close he had to look at it cross-eyed.

    “I suggest you have much deeper concerns now than whether you are violating an oath of secrecy,” Damodara pointed out. “Tell me.”

    Still looking cross-eyed at the blade, the man began to speak softly but quickly.

    “All the operators know it, Lord. We do, at least. I don’t know about the telegraph men. When we make the transmissions, Great Lady Sati is always at the other end. Herself in person. She—she—she—”

    “Yes, I know. She’s a witch. A demoness.”

    “She is,” he half-moaned. “It was part of our training. We had to spent a few minutes with her. She—she—she—”

    Careful to avoid the blade, he brought up a shaky hand to wipe his brow. He was sweating profusely.

    Damodara straightened up. “Put away the sword, Sanga. He’s telling the truth.”

    Sanga did as commanded. His own face was very stiff. Like Damodara—and now, it seemed, this insignificant radio operator—Sanga had spent time alone in the presence of one of the females of the dynasty who served as the vessel for Link. Great Lady Holi, in his case. But he knew it made no difference.

    Damodara went to the door and opened it. The two Ye-tai were standing just beyond. “Take the operator elsewhere, for a time. I need to speak with Sanga in private. Don’t take him far, though. And summon Narses.”

    After they were alone, Damodara sat in the chair. He stared at the mechanism whose workings he barely understood at all.

    “Now you understand the problem. It came to me in the middle of the night. Like a nightmare.”

    “Yes, Emperor.”

    When Narses arrived and was informed, he shook his head.

    “No, I had no idea. They always kept the radio men carefully sequestered. I was able to suborn most of the telegraph operators, but I couldn’t even get close to these fellows. That’s why Toramana and I finally decided just to use their Ye-tai guard contingent to secure the radio.”

    Damodara nodded. He hadn’t thought Narses had known, or the shrewd old eunuch would long since have seen the problem. Their entire plan had just gone up in smoke.

    For his part, Sanga grunted sourly. The look he gave Narses was more sour still. The Rajput king was still angry at the Roman traitor for the way he’d manipulated all of them. But after he’d learned from Narses that the eunuch had been instructed by Skandagupta and Great Lady Sati to murder his family outright, his sheer fury toward him had dissipated.

    He didn’t doubt the eunuch was telling the truth, either. Link was the ultimate source of that plot, and Sanga had met the monster. The plot Narses described was exactly the sort of thing it would have designed. It was cold-blooded beyond any sense of the term “cold” that either a reptile or a glacier would have understood.

    Narses glared at the radio apparatus. “Maybe we could just use the telegraph—”

    But he was already shaking his own head when Damodara interrupted him. “No point in that,” the new emperor said. “Link will expect a radio transmission also. The fact that none took place last night will make it suspicious already. Perhaps there was a thunderstorm, of course, even if that’s unlikely this time of year. Two nights in a row, impossible. It will immediately known something is wrong.”

    The eunuch took a deep, almost shuddering breath. “Damnation. It never occured to me that she might personally take the transmissions.”

    Damodara shrugged heavily. “There’s a logic to it. I always wondered, a bit, why we were putting so much effort into these huge radio towers. The telegraph works well enough, for most purposes—and has fewer security problems. Now I know. Look where they are: Kausambi, the Punjab, and here. Nowhere else.”

    “Are we sure of that?” asked Sanga.

    “Yes,” growled Narses. “That much I am sure of. They’re planning two more. One in Amaravati and one in Tamralipti. But they haven’t even started building them yet.”

    “It makes perfect sense, Sanga,” Damodara continued. “The basic function of these towers is to enable Link to control the empire. Well, not ‘control’ it so much as enable it to be sure if rebellion has begun.”

    Narses was still glaring at the apparatus. “I fooled that stinking bitch once. I bet I can...”

    The words trailed off.

    “Don’t be stupid, old man,” he muttered, to himself as much as to the other men in the room. “First, you don’t know how to use the gadget. Even if you tried to learn—in a few hours?—you’d fumble something. The bitch would know right away someone other than one of her operators was at the other end. And even if you could do it, the last time you weren’t trying to lie to her.”

    Sanga frowned at the door. “If we calmed down the operator...”

    But, like Narses, he rebutted his own half-advanced plan. “Impossible. There’d be some sign of his agitation. Nothing we’d notice—or he himself, even—but the monster would.”

    He ran fingers through his thick, still-black hair. “Yes, that explains the radio towers. The telegraph is now too common, too widely spread. There’s no way she could personally monitor even most of the transmissions, much less all of them. But with a few towers, located only in the empire’s critical regions, she can. And there is no way—no way—to lie to her. To it, that is both greater and less than human.”

    He fell silent. Damodara rose from the chair he’d been sitting on and began pacing. He, also, was silent.

    Eventually, Narses spoke.

    “No help for it, then. We were planning to begin the march upcountry tomorrow, anyway. We’ll just have to send telegraph messages saying there’s a terrible—very unseasonal—storm, and the radio won’t work for a while. She’ll suspect something, of course. But with the problems she has in the Punjab anyway, she won’t know.”

    He spread his hands. “I grant you, it won’t buy us more than a few days. But it’s the best we can do.”

    Damodara stopped his pacing. “No.”

    He strode over to the apparatus, moving almost eagerly. “Your man Ajatasutra had it right. Then—and now. We will do this like an assassin, not a torturer. Quick and deadly, in the sunlight, not lingering over it in a cellar.”

    Narses frowned at him. “What are you talking about?”

    Sanga was frowning also. Suddenly, his brow cleared, and he barked a laugh. Again, hissing its way like a snake, the blade came out of the scabbard.

    “Yes!” the Rajput king bellowed. He tilted the sword toward Damodara in a salute. “Emperor of Malwa! True and pure!”

    Narses looked from one to the other. “Have you both gone mad?”

    Damodara gave him an impassive look.

    “Ah. Sorry. Your Majesty, have you gone mad?”

    “I don’t believe so,” replied the new emperor cheerily. “And if I am, you have only yourself to blame. Aren’t you the one who told me, after all, that there is another radio in India?”

    After a second, Narses shot to his feet. “You’re out of your fucking mind!”

    The look Sanga gave him was not impassive in the least. Even Narses shrank a little.

    “Ah. Sorry. Your Majesty, I submit to you that you need to consider the possibility that when the traitors substituted the false emperor in the crib of your grandfather, that they also poisoned him.”

    Damodara, fortunately, was in an expansive mood. “I see. Some slow-acting poison, I take it? Doesn’t show its effects for two generations, when the grandson turns into a blithering fool.”

    “Yes, Your Majesty. That one.”

    Ajatasutra, on the other hand, thought it was a marvelous plan, when it was explained to him less than an hour later.

    “Don’t see why not,” he commented, smiling at Narses. “Stop glaring at me, old man.”

    “How many times do I beat you at chess?”

    “The game of thrones is not really a chess game—a saying, as I recall, that you are quite fond of.” The assassin shrugged. “Narses, what does it matter? Even by the old plan, the people in Kausambi would have been in danger long before we could arrive.”

    “This will strike them even quicker and harder,” Narses pointed out darkly.

    Since the people involved were not his—except, perhaps, the two girls, in a way—Ajatasutra looked at Damodara and Sanga.

    Damodara’s face was tight, but Sanga seemed quite relaxed.

    “I fought the Mongoose, remember. He will react quickly enough, I think. And if he can’t, no man can anyway.”

    Damodara wiped his face. “True. I watched from close by. He is very, very, very quick. And what’s probably more important, he’s ruthless enough not to hesitate.”

    He dropped the hand. “We have no real choice, anyway. Narses, your alternative has only negative virtues. My plan, risky at it is, brings us something.”

    “Maybe,” Narses said gloomily. “Maybe.”

    “We’ll know soon enough. Sanga, make sure the army is ready to leave at daybreak. We’ll start sending the messages at dusk.”

    “Yes, Emperor.”