So then what would happen?
Well, the place would be in chaos. There would be no Dolls to serve the Palace, no Trap to make more. Supplies would arrive—and there would be no one to move them to where they were supposed to go. The elaborate meals would be impossible with no one to serve them. No one in the Palace would have servants to wait on them—what would they do?
A lot of them, if they have Gate talismans, will go home. But if they don’t? It was the Dolls that created the talismans. Did the Imperial mages still know how to do that? Probably, but it would take time, a lot of time, and they were probably rusty at it. There’d be no horses to take people home, so they’d have to go home by canal on barges. In fact, the Emperor would probably decree that people who were not actually useful go home, because they would be a drain on the resources of the Palace.
The Emperor would get priority on talismans, and he’d probably use them to bring warm bodies in from one of the legions to serve as servants instead of soldiers.
He might dragoon city folk into being servants. But they don’t know how to do that, and they’d be bad at it, and that would mean more chaos.
There would, of course, be a massive search for the missing, but it would all be centered here. Records would be combed through, but the Dolls were in charge of the record-keeping, and as thorough as they were, he was positive they had either erased those records or never made them in the first place. So actually, the longer he stayed here, the longer it would take to associate Valdemar with the missing.
He’d probably send me home . . . wait, no he wouldn’t. As soon as he got horses into the stables, he’d need someone who knows how to care for them. And that would be me.
He buried his face in his hands, head aching, thinking. But the more he thought about it, the surer he was. The best thing he could do for Valdemar was stay here.
All right; got to think this through. I’d never heard of the Dolls before I got to the City, so it stands to reason they’re never seen outside of it. Everyone is going to be at the Regatta once that yellow toad gets heaved into his golden-chariot-throne and hauled there to observe. And that was when we were going to leave anyway.
So, I’ll be there instead of running off. The Dolls leave, and the only people who notice are the Palace servants. They won’t know what to do about it, or who to report it to. Will the mages go to the Regatta? Probably not, but they won’t notice the Dolls are leaving until it’s too late, and anyway, what could they do to stop them? And who would they tell? Who would they send? They might be able to send a message magically, but would anyone pay attention to it? Probably not; the way things run around here, it would probably get dismissed to be looked at after the Regatta was over.
So far, so good.
At the worst, someone will send one of the people working in the kitchen as a runner with a message. By then, the Trap will be shut down, or even destroyed, the dissidents will be gone, the hostages will be gone, and the Dolls will be gone.
What then?
Well, people being people won’t believe that the Dolls have gone. They’ll probably assume only some of them have left, or that they got herded into a room somewhere in this heap and locked away. Only when they’ve figured out that their slaves have slipped their chains will they look further . . . or will they?
The most likely thing is that people will start blaming each other. And meanwhile, the Emperor will be furious, and the longer he goes without being waited on, the more furious he’ll be.
So assuming that someone actually takes the initiative to get the soldiers garrisoned here to come act as servants—by then people will be getting hungry, and angry, and the soldiers won’t exactly know how to be servants in the first place. And that—their immediate needs—is what people are going to concentrate on. Not on finding the Dolls, not on finding out where they went, or how, or who’s responsible. It will probably take until morning before someone gets the mages to go down to the Fabrication Annex and make more Dolls to serve the Emperor before he starts ordering executions. And that is when they’ll discover they can’t make more Dolls.
By morning, the Courtiers who can leave, or who have figured out some way to leave besides Gates, will be leaving. Any of them who are smart and can go by Gate will promise to send human servants here. So some human servants will start to trickle in. But they won’t know the Palace, they won’t know how to use the Gates to get from place to place within the Palace, and it’s going to add to the chaos, not subtract from it.
Meanwhile . . . meanwhile what I should do is blunder down to the stables, because my first thought will have been to see if the horses are all right, and I’ll just come tell someone that the horses are all gone too.
Then what should I do? Well, supposedly I can’t go home, because I don’t have a talisman. So I guess . . . I know. The Emperor just thinks I’m a farmer, so all right, I’ll tell whoever is trying to be in charge that I’m going to go work in the garden. And I’ll do that. I actually do know how to work in a garden. At least, I can tell what’s ripe from what’s not, and pick it and take it to the kitchen.
Whoever’s in charge by the second day at least will be an officer, probably the ranking officer here. So by the second day, more people will be leaving, “servant recruits” will be blundering around, and I’ll look useful. Which should take more suspicion away from me. But the Emperor is still not going to be doing anything useful in the way of finding out who’s behind the defection. He’s probably going to be furious, and shouting contradictory orders, and generally making things worse.
It occurred to him that it could be weeks before anyone started trying to track down where the Dolls went.
Will they send me home to get more horses?
Would that even be a priority? Horses needed grain and hay, and that needed transporting. Horses were very labor-intensive, and all of the concentration was going to be on getting the Palace running again. Back home, horses were a necessity. Here they were a luxury.
Meanwhile . . . all the time this is going on, I can put myself in charge of the gardens. I can be directing soldiers and the gardeners they pull from the city gardens what to do about the Palace garden. And I can be thinking about who to blame and what to say when someone checks on Valdemar.
I might even be able to slip away—no, I shouldn’t do that, not unless I can’t think of someone to blame. That should be my first priority. I should act as baffled as everyone else to discover that three quarters of the population and all the herds and supplies are gone.
The longer I can keep them from looking at Valdemar, the colder the trail will get.
I’ll do it. But I can’t tell Isla. And I can’t tell Star, either, because the Dolls will tell her. I can’t tell anyone.
Poor Beltran. He’s going to be stuck here, too.
He groaned. This place was as close to hell as anything on earth he had ever seen. And he was consigning himself to it.