He lies there for what feels like hours. They took his watch away when they tied his wrists together, and in any case he wouldn’t be able to see it with this hood on, but he knows that the day is moving along and in a matter of hours the interface between the Empire and Chicago is going to close. So even if they don’t behead him he’s going to be stranded here, the dumbest fate a crosser can experience. The ropes that encircle his wrists start to chafe his skin, and he feels nauseated by the increasingly stale, moist air within the hood covering his face.
Eventually he dozes: sleeps, even. Then he wakes suddenly, muddle-headed, not knowing where he is at first, feeling a little feverish, and starving, besides; he’s been cooped up in here, he figures, twelve or eighteen hours, or even longer than that. The interface certainly has closed by now. Stranded. Stranded. You goddamned idiot, he thinks.
Footsteps, finally. People coming. A lot of them.
They pull him to his feet, yank the hood off, untie his wrists. He sees that he’s in a big square stone room with a high ceiling and no windows. On all sides of him stand guardsmen in terrific Arabian Nights uniforms: golden turbans, baggy scarlet pantaloons, purple silk sashes, blousy green tunics with great flaring shoulder-pads. Each of them carries a scimitar big enough to cut an ox in half at a single stroke. Right before him is a trio of cold-eyed older men in the crimson robes of court officials.
They’ve brought him a hard crust of bread and some peppery gruel. He gobbles it as if it’s five-star-quality stuff. Then the chilliest-looking of the officials pokes him in the belly with an ornate wooden staff and says, “Where are you from?”
“Ireland,” Mulreany says, improvising quickly. Ireland’s a long way away. They probably don’t know much more about it here than they do about Mars.
The interrogator is unfazed. “Speak to me in the language of your country, then,” he says calmly.
Mulreany is utterly innocent of Gaelic. But he suspects that they are too. “Erin go bragh!” he says. “Sean connery! Eamon de valera! Up the rebels, macushlah!”
There are frowns, and then a lengthy whispered conference among the three officials. Mulreany is unable to catch a single word of it. Then the hood is roughly pulled down over his head and everybody leaves, and once more he is left alone for a long hungry time that feels like about a day and a half. Finally he hears footsteps again, and the same bunch returns, but this time they have with them a huge wild-eyed man with long, flowing yellow hair who is wearing rawhide leggings and a bulky woolen cloak fastened across the breast by a big metal brooch made of interlocked flaring loops. He looks very foreign indeed.
“Here is a countryman of yours,” the chilly-faced court official informs Mulreany. “Speak with him. Tell him where in Ireland you are from, and name your lineage.”
Mulreany, frowning, ponders what to do. After a time the newcomer unleashes a string of crackling gibberish, utterly incomprehensible to Mulreany, and folds his arms and waits for a reply.
“Shannon yer shillelagh, me leprechaun,” Mulreany offers earnestly, appealing to the Irishman with his eyes for mercy and understanding. “God bless St. Paddy! Faith and begorrah, is it known t’ye where they’d be selling the Guinness in this town?”
Looking not at all amused, the other says in thick-tongued Greek, “This man is no Irishman,” and goes stalking out.
They threaten him with torture if he won’t tell them where he really comes from. He’s cooked either way, it seems. Tell the truth and go to the block, or keep his mouth shut and have it opened for him by methods he’d rather not think about. But he knows his imperial law. The Emperor in person is the final court of appeal for all high crimes. Mulreany demands then and there to be taken before His Majesty for judgment.
“We will do that,” says the frosty-faced one. “As soon as you admit that you’re from Chicago.”
“What if I don’t?”
He makes disagreeable racking gestures.
“But you’ll take me to him if I do?”
“Most certainly we will. But only if you swear you are from Chicago. If you are not from Chicago, you die.”
If you are not from Chicago you die? It doesn’t make any sense. But what does he have to lose? One way they’ll rack him for sure, the other there’s at least a chance. It’s worth the gamble.
“I am from Chicago, yes,” Mulreany says.
They let him wash himself up and give him some more bread and gruel, and then they take him to the throne room, which is about nine miles long and six miles high, with dozens of the ferocious Arabian Nights guardsmen everywhere and cloth-of-gold on the walls and thick red carpeting on the floor. Two of the guardsmen shove him forward to the middle of the great room, and there, studying him with an intent frown as though he is looking at the Ambassador from Mars, is the Emperor Basil III.
Mulreany has never seen an emperor before. Or wanted to. He comes over twice a year, does his business, goes back where he came from. It’s merchants and craftsmen he comes here to see, not emperors. But there’s no doubt in his mind that this is His Nibs. The emperor is a trim, compact little man who looks to be about 99 years old; his skin has the texture of fine vellum, and his expression is mild and benign, except for his eyes, which are dark and glossy and burn with the sort of fire that it takes to maintain yourself as absolute tyrant of a great empire for forty or fifty years. He is dressed surprisingly simply, in a white silk tunic and flaring green trousers, but there is a golden circlet on his brow and he wears on his chest a many-sided gold pendant, suspended from a heavy chain of the same metal, that bears the unmistakable crossed-thunderbolt symbol of the imperial dynasty inlaid upon it in lapis lazuli. Standing just to his right is a burly florid-looking man of about forty, imposing and almost regal of presence, garbed in an absurdly splendid black robe trimmed with ermine. Dangling from his hand, as casually as if it were a tennis racquet, is the great scepter of the realm, a thick rod of jade bound in gold, which, as Mulreany is aware, marks this man as the High Thekanotis of the Empire, that is to say, the prime minister, the grand vizier, the second-in-command.
There is a long, long, long silence. Then finally the Emperor says, in a thin, faint voice that seems to come from ten thousand miles away, “Well, are you a sorcerer or aren’t you?”
Mulreany draws a deep breath. “Not at all, your majesty. A merchant is what I am, nothing but a merchant.”
“Would you put your right hand on the holy altar and say that?”
“Absolutely, your majesty.”
“He denies that he is a sorcerer,” the Emperor says pleasantly to the High Thekanotis. “Make note of that.” There is another great silence. Then the Emperor gives Mulreany a quick lopsided smile and says, “Why does the sorcery-fire come so often and take the city away?”
“I don’t know,” Mulreany says. “It just does.”
“And when it does, people like you step through the sorcery-fires and move among us bringing the magical things to sell.”
“Yes, your majesty. That’s so.” Why pretend otherwise?
“Where do you come from?”