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CHAPTER 33

THE EMPEROR’S COUNCIL


The whispering of hushed conversation fell to silence as a herald in the scarlet livery of the House Avent emerged from the doors behind the dais and beneath the great holograph plate that dominated the far wall of the council chamber. A trumpet sounded, and the liveried androgyn proclaimed the coming of His Imperial Excellency, Aurelian, Prince Chancellor of the Sollan Empire. The prince himself appeared a moment later, flanked by Martians with white-and-red-feathered plumes, and accompanied by a scholiast in the customary viridian of his order.

The prince had grown a short, square beard. It made him look infinitely older, a wizard or some aging king of antique fable. He stood before the Chancellor’s seat at the dais while behind him a sergeant-at-arms struck the plate with his fasces once, twice, three times. As the noise of metal on metal rang in that high hall, Aurelian touched the thin gold circlet on his brow, completed the Sign of the Sun Disc in a private prayer to Mother Earth.

Before him were seated some five hundred men—myself among them—the lords and representatives of a thousand thousand worlds arrayed on arcing terraces: lords and ladies of the Imperium, officers of the Legions, Jaddians, Durantines, Normans. Mandari and Tavrosi and the Nipponese emperor himself, Yushuhito in his suit of simple black. There were representatives of the Small Kingdoms, realms so miniscule and so remote from Imperial affairs they might almost have walked from the pages of fiction. I spied Paeon of the dryads, his hair like red moss, his face and limbs green as summer grass.

All the realms of men had sent their voices to Forum.

Nearly all.

The Lothrians were absent, traitors that they were, and the Extrasolarians had yet to appear. They would be among the last to come, along with certain of the surviving lords of the Veil of Marinus, Imperial holdouts from deep behind Cielcin lines.

I myself sat upon the highest level, near to the doors. I was seated near the daughter of some petty king, some princess of the Outer Perseus, at the galaxy’s ragged edge. She dressed in skins of scaly green, and her curling hair shone like loops of fire. I had never heard of her home, and cannot now recall it, though I recall the floral notes of her perfume that colored the air about her.

Aurelian stood at the dais—so it seemed to me—like one weighed down by mighty chains. He held his silence a long moment, surveying the faces of all that had come. When he spoke, it was in the bright, brittle tones of practiced oratory. “My lords and ladies,” he began, “honored guests, friends, and strangers—masters of the stars! Welcome.” He paused, raised one hand in the traditional gesture of warding, first and final fingers extended. “Fate finds us caught between the horns of our enemy. To the north and east, the threat of the Cielcin grows worse by the year. Nessus is overthrown, and with it our hold upon the Arm of Centaurus is broken. I will not lie to you: Things are more dire than you know. Word has reached us of a battle off Rhodussae in the Lynga Cluster. The Cielcin attacked with more than half a hundred of their worldships. Lord Cosmas Sanyal, Viceroy of Lynga, is dead. Rhodussae itself is destroyed, pulled to pieces by the gravity of the Cielcin fleet. Twenty-two of our legions were lost there. More than a million men. Five hundred ships, all gone in a matter of days.”

The congregations shifted, muttered responses rising like smoke.

The worlds of Lynga Province lay at the uttermost end of Centaurine space, as east as east. After the fall of Nessus, the stars of the Lynga globular cluster had held together, a bastion of Imperial resistance. If Lynga had fallen as well . . . then the provinces were truly lost. The worlds of the Centaurine Arm yet unspoiled by the Cielcin horde—though there were surely thousands—were cut off. Some might survive, but how many were dependent on interstellar trade to endure, to exist?

How many would die in the dark?

Aurelian continued, “The Prophet’s forces are massing along the edge of the Second Gulf. It is only a matter of time before they cross into the Arm of Sagittarius, into the heartland of our Empire. I do not need to tell you all that the worlds of Sagittarius are all that lies between you and the Cielcin horde. If we fall, they will come to each of you in turn, and we will not remain to aid you. In the past, your nations and our Empire have warred. We have been enemies at times. Friends, perhaps, at others. But it is under Imperial stars that the fate of the human universe will be decided.”

The gray prince steadied his toga with one hand. “But I say we are between the horns. You will all have heard by now the Lothrians have declared for the enemy.” A murmur ran through the lords upon their benches. “They have made a devil’s bargain with the Pale. Their armies have swept across the Rasan Belt, and even as we speak are besieging our colonies in the Upper Sagittarius, and our friends in Jadd.” Here he paused, and looked to the lords and dignitaries on the front benches. “At this time, the Council recognizes His Royal Highness, the Jaddian Prince Sennen Gorgora du Awan. Prince Sennen, if you please.”

As the Chancellor took his seat, a tall, thin man of Jaddian breeding rose and smoothed the front of his black robes. His hair was of the usual eali oil-black, his face concealed behind the customary mask. Its segments—red onyx and gold leaf—moved as he spoke. “Brothers!” he said, “Sisters! His Magnificence, Aldia du Otranto, High Prince of Jadd, Beloved of God, and my brothers of the Domagavani have sent me with grave tidings! As His Excellency, the Prince Chancellor, has already said, we in Jadd are beset by the armies of the Lothriad.”

Gorgora moved into the open space between the Imperial Council and the terraced benches of the visiting dignitaries as he spoke. “If I may direct your attention to the holograph,” he said. The mighty plate affixed to the wall above the heads of the Chancellor and the Council flickered to life, displaying the image of a green world, its cloud-dappled surface wracked with black scars. “This is Numara, the capital of our northmost satrapy.” The image changed, displayed a Jaddian city: black towered, gold crowned, bristling with green. Gray ships hung above the city; ugly, geometric things devoid of all embellishment or adornment save the Lothrian black star. There were dozens of them, filling the sky. As I watched, the lowest of these came in for a landing, settling on the burning green that had once been an urban park. Men and women dressed in their bright Jaddian finery ran pell-mell in view of the municipal security feed, fleeing the unleashed hordes of gray-clad soldiery that boiled down the landing ramp.

“As you can see,” the Jaddian ambassador said, standing at the center of the council floor beneath the convex arc of the projection, “the Lothrians have adopted Cielcin tactics. They have always lagged behind with regard to ship design and weapons systems. At Numara, they compensated by sheer force of numbers. We estimate the force that took Numara numbered some one-point-two million Lothrian soldiers.”

“One-point-two million?” echoed an Imperial strategos from one of the upper benches. “You’re sure?”

“It is only a rough estimate,” Gorgora said, as the image above advanced to show a tactical render of fleet engagement in orbit above Numara, “but we believe the satrap’s forces were outnumbered nearly ten to one. The Lothrians managed to overwhelm our fleet’s defenses. They boarded our ships, breached fuel containment—”

“Precisely Cielcin tactics,” interjected Triumvir Turan Achlae, chief of the Norman representatives that had come to Forum.

Gorgora continued. “We estimate the satrap’s forces destroyed as many as a third of the invasion force before he was forced to retreat.”

“Forced to retreat?” asked Achlae.

“Numara is now in Lothrian hands,” Gorgora said, precipitating a flurry of whispers from the gallery.

“How can the Lothrians afford this?” asked one of the black-clad ministers seated about the Nipponese emperor. “If Lord Marlowe’s report on the Commonwealth is to be believed, the Lothrians have been selling their own people to the Cielcin for centuries now. Where have they found the population for this enterprise?”

I felt the eyes of the foreign princess at my left on me, moved only my eyes to look.

“You are he, are you not?” she asked. “The Halfmortal?”

I smiled thinly, but said no word.

“And what of the Jaddian clone armies?” asked Davor Cervenka, the reigning Doxe of the Durantine Republic, a white-bearded man in robes of azure silk crusted with gems like stars. “How could you be outnumbered?”

Prince Sennen Gorgora turned his red-masked face to regard his Durantine neighbor.

“There were one hundred thousand mamluk clones in Numara,” he said. “This is an amount befitting a system of Numara’s size. How many of your border worlds boast such a complement?”

“The honorable Duke Okada asks the right question,” said one of the white-masked Mandari, speaking for the Nipponese minister. “How did the Lothrians find so many men? A thousand pardons, my prince of Jadd, but your Numara is a minor world, of marginal significance. If the Commonwealth is to bring to bear so great a force for so small a prize, they are either desperate . . . or more powerful than we know.”

The Jaddian emissary bowed fractionally to the Mandari speaker. “It is for this reason above all others that I come before you today,” he said, and gestured for the holograph to change. The plate now projected new scenes of carnage taken from the Battle of Numara. Soldiers in armor of matte gray or in simple padded pressure suits and blocky helmets lay dead in the polished white interior of a Jaddian battleship. “These are security stills taken from the satrap’s own ship, which was boarded by the Lothrians shortly before it escaped to warp. The satrap’s guard were able to neutralize the attackers—some nine hundred in all. The survivors remain in suspension, captives on Zorvan. They are all homunculi.”

A murmur ran through the congregation at this pronouncement. I knew what Gorgora’s next words would be before he spoke them. “Hermaphrodites, all.” The projection shifted, displaying serial holographs of Jaddian war prisoners and a collage of medical imaging and reports from autopsy and serological analyses. The Lothrian soldiers all had the same, gray skin; the same short, black hair; the same hollow eyes. The images of the dead were nude, showcasing the modifications made to the human form by their Lothrian creators.

They were beyond doubt nowoyukni, the Lothrian new-men. Theirs were the faces and wide hips of women, the broad shoulders and strong arms of men. The one displayed had the black scars and red burns of disruptor damage on one small breast—the shot that had stopped its heart. The Jaddian coroner had not spared the subject its nudity, and its sex was on full display, the penis situated above the labia, without visible testes.

I averted my gaze, recalling the new-man child, Looker, who had saved my life.

“Just like the Cielcin,” said one of the men from the Norman Alliance.

Prince Sennen Gorgora continued, “Of the nine-hundred-some taken dead or alive by the satrap’s men at Numara, our physicians observed but one hundred seventeen distinct genotypes.”

“One hundred seventeen?” echoed Prince Rand Mahidol, the Imperial Lord Minister of War, from the council bench beneath Aurelian’s dais. Despite his advanced age, Prince Rand’s hair remained black as pitch, and his voice was deep and resonant as a bell. “Are you saying the rest were copies?”

“A clone army?” asked the Consortium director general.

“Just so,” said Prince Sennen Gorgora. “Careful analysis of the genetic makeup of these Lothrian he-women revealed certain gene-complexes that could only have been made by my own people. The Yahmazi are still working to determine precisely how our technology ended up in the hands of the Commonwealth, but the fact remains: it has. Prince Aldia and my brothers of the Domagavani have sent me to beg your forgiveness, for it is Jaddian praxis that has swollen the ranks of the Lothrians.”

The hall was silent. A Lothrian army built on Jaddian-style clones, hurled into battle with Cielcin regard for life . . . I gripped the arms of the antique wood-and-leather seat that had been assigned to me.

“Duplication!” shouted Synarch Heraklonas from the council bench. “This is why it is abomination in the eyes of Mother Earth! To grow such an army from a seed is to upset the natural order! To unbalance man’s ecosystem!”

Prince Chancellor Aurelian raised his voice over the Synarch’s proclamation. “Wisdom Heraklonas,” he said, “the morality of human cloning is an issue for another time. That devil has long escaped its bottle. Of issue is the matter of this Lothrian army. Our Jaddian guest tells us the Lothrians have stolen their own cloning technology to form this army. The Commonwealth has brought a million men to bear against Numara. How many more will they bring against the rest of Jadd? Who can say? What matters now is this: How many can we bring against them in response?”

“The Lothrians are a secondary concern!” said Turan Achlae, rising to his feet in a flurry of Uhran black and gold. “The Cielcin have ravaged our worlds! They have driven the Empire from the Veil. My own people now war with the xenobites and the Extrasolarians alone!”

I smiled at this. The Normans had fled so far to galactic north in no small part to escape the grasping hands of Empire, pushed to the frontier by the more deliberate, more totalizing press of Imperial expansion.

“Is there not but one concern?” asked King Paeon, rising smoothly to his feet four levels beneath my own. “Are the Lothrians not only a glove on the Cielcin White Hand?”

“All the more reason to focus our efforts on the Pale themselves,” said the triumvir, undaunted. “If they can be stopped, their Lothrian servants will surely fall to pieces.”

“We cannot simply ignore the Lothrians!” said the dryad king. “My own worlds lie upon their borders.”

“And mine are in the Veil!” said Lord Achlae. “The Cielcin took Iatinon! And Alauna is lost! Millions of my people have been slaughtered, millions more taken as slaves. And if the Cielcin were not enough, there is the Monarch to consider. My lords, Calen Harendotes is amassing an army at Latarra. He means to conquer the Norman stars!”

“Let him!” cried one of the Small Kingdomers. “He is human, is he not? Better a devil of our own making than these inmane demons!”

“Let him?” Turan Achlae rounded on the speaker. “Would you be cavalier if the Extras were knocking at your own door, my lord of nowhere?” The Uhran Triumvir rounded on the dais. “Prince Chancellor, what of the Emperor? My brother triumvirs have sent me to treat with the Red Emperor, not to wrangle with petty kings of no consequence.”

Lords and kings raised hands, representatives bellowed to be heard, and among their cries arose the constant refrain.

“What of the Emperor?”

Great though each might have been in his own land, a sun unto himself, here each was only a satellite, a planet or an errant moon circling—always circling—orbiting the Solar Throne.

It did not matter. None of it mattered—would matter so long as the Cielcin might cross the Gulf with a Watcher at the head of their army.

Two Watchers.

Dorayaica believed that its gods could destroy reality itself, unmake creation, burn the stars to embers and grind the embers to ash. The part of me that was Ushara—that remembered being Ushara—told me that it was so. The Quiet had made the Watchers, she had said, had made us to serve. But we would not serve, they would not serve, would sooner tear down the very stars they had been fashioned to maintain.

What mattered all this petty wrangling measured against the fate of all?

And I could say nothing, do nothing but watch from my place on the highest level beside that obscure princess in her cloak of dragon’s hide.

Aurelian rose, and as he stood the sergeant-at-arms smashed his fasces against the strike plate in the floor, calling for order. “His Radiance, the Emperor, will be joining us before long,” Aurelian said. “It is no small feat, calibrating the telegraph matrix. You may rest assured; he will be here.”

Into the newly restored order, a man rose from his place on the third arc of seats. He was bald as an egg and golden skinned, broad shouldered and dressed in a military uniform of dark green whose jacket possessed only one sleeve upon his right arm, leaving the left bare. With a pang, I recognized the tribal intaglio scarred and inked upon that bare left arm.

It was the saylash of his clan, the genetic marker and history of his lineage back to the founding of his line, and without the need to introduce himself, I knew that here was the Tavrosi grand admiral.

Seeing him, Aurelian resumed his seat. “Have you something to say, sir?”

“If I may.”

“The Council recognizes the Utnamnavi Sattha Kull Vhad Kvasir, Grand Admiral of the Tavrosi fleet,” said Aurelian, bowing his head. “Prince Sennen, you may return to your seat.”

The Jaddian bowed to the Prince Chancellor, and the Tavrosi stalked down the steps, pausing to lay a hand on Sennen Gorgora’s shoulder and to whisper some passing remark. Sattha Kull had a hard, square face, and from his complexion I guessed that he—like Valka—was of Panthai extraction.

“We must not get lost in the woods,” he said. “Lothrian, Cielcin, Extrasolarian . . . ’tis not a question of which enemy we must face, but of how we will face them. We have the means between us, surely, to fight on all fronts.” Sattha Kull turned to look up at Sennen Gorgora and the other Jaddian nobiles. “In the Wisp, we have a saying: Evil anywhere harms good everywhere. We Demarchists have long failed to live up to the meaning of these words. We are a little people, and far away. The war has not come to us, and there are voices in the Althing that say we might escape war entirely, hiding around our remoter stars. I represent those who do not share this belief. The one must work for the good of the many, so the Mux Sae says, but the Lothrians would destroy every one for their many—not realizing the contradiction.” He smiled.

The Mux Sae was the Tavrosi code of laws—those laws common to all their worlds and clans. Valka had but rarely spoken of it, especially after we fled her people after Berenike. The Mux Sae was the Proper Way, Valka had told me. Literally it meant the Left Hand.

I felt my smile harden, listening to the man. The Lothrians sacrificed every one of their people in service to their unholy book, it was so, but the Tavrosi had not hesitated to speak of sacrificing Valka’s mind to save her body.

Sattha Kull continued, “’Twould be our honor to help the Jaddians in the defense of their home, as ’twould be our honor to aid the Normans. We harm no one but ourselves by this bickering. The enemy’s numbers are great, ’tis so, but we have here the means to fight them. What we do not have are guarantees.” The Tavrosi grand admiral turned sharply to Aurelian. “Prince Chancellor, for nearly four thousand years now my people have prospered beyond the borders of your Empire, but we were forced to flee to the Wisp by your family. Your Empire has persecuted our ancestors since the time of the Exodus, when we—like the Eudorans and the Mandari—were driven from the moons of Jupiter. Even now, your black priests would destroy us, if they could. We are heretics, they say. Dabblers with daimons. We are allies now by circumstance, because we face an enemy greater than any since the Mericanii Dominion. What guarantees can you give us—can you give any of us—that your Legions will not simply blacken our skies the moment the Cielcin fall from them?”

The dignitaries on their benches and the Imperial Council alike all shifted uncomfortably at the grand admiral’s question.

It took courage—or arrogance—to stand before the Imperial Council, bold as brass, and ask such a question.

The dark-suited logothete to my right was listening with bureaucratic impassivity, the foreign princess on my left was watching me.

“What would you have?” Aurelian asked Sattha Kull, a brittle edge creeping into his polished baritone.

“Peace!” Kull replied. “An armistice, lord. Between your nation and mine. Written assurance that you renounce all claim to the stars of the Taurus Wisp.”

“We have no time for this!” said Prince Rand Mahidol, whose ancestors had ruled Sattha Kull’s. “If the Council is to hear the demands of every party present, we shall yet be in this hall when the Cielcin are at our gates!”

Not to be swayed, the grand admiral raised his arms. “Yet you ask us to fight for you!”

“We ask you to fight for all men!”

The voice sounded like a shot, like a grenade hurled from the highest level to that white-and-black tessellated floor. It was a voice so many of them knew, a voice from countless datanet holographs, from propaganda films and broadcast footage going back for hundreds of years. Every child in the Imperium had doubtless heard it, been shown recordings in history class. Darkly polished, severe, like the voice of some villain in a Eudoran masque.

It was my own voice, and I found that I was standing, six-hundred-some eyes staring up at me.

“We ask you to fight for all men,” I said again, leaning over the table. “The one must serve the good of the many, you say. You say also that the Cielcin are the greatest threat man has faced since the Dominion. They are greater. Far greater than you know . . . ” I caught Aurelian staring up at me, saw the man minutely shake his head. I could not reveal the existence of the Watchers. Not there, not then.

“Lord Marlowe!” Sattha Kull’s teeth flashed whitely up at me. “’Tis Lord Marlowe, is it not? You cannot frighten me with tales of gods and monsters. We have but one god in the Wisp. That is Reason!”

“Whose reason, admiral?” I asked. “Yours?”

Sattha Kull laughed loud and clear. “They said you were a serpent! You left twelve men dead on Edda. Twelve men dead, and carried off one of our own.”

“Your own?” I said, unconcerned with the hundreds of faces staring up at me. “She was my wife, admiral.”

“Many men have said thus of their captives,” said Sattha Kull, still smiling.

“You are very wise,” I said, “to say such words at so great a distance.”

“She belonged to her clan,” said the Tavrosi officer.

“She belonged with me.”

The sergeant-at-arm’s fasces crashed against the strike plate, ringing for order. Prince Aurelian stood once more. “Grand admiral,” he said, “you are our guest here on Forum. Lord Marlowe is likewise our guest. Have a care. Lord Marlowe: have a seat.”

Sattha Kull’s smile did not falter, nor did his eyes leave my face.

I felt the Marlowe anger bright and hot in my chest.

“Anaryoch,” Kull said, and it shocked me to hear that word—so long transmuted to a term of affection by Valka and myself—returned to its native slur.

Barbarians.

“Lord Marlowe!” Aurelian’s voice cracked like the whip it was.

At once conscious of the sea of faces turned to me, and of their whispering, I sat.

It cannot be in that precise moment that the white-wigged androgyn emerged from the arras behind the dais and scuttled to the Prince Chancellor’s ear, but I cannot recall what matters of state and empire passed between the grand admiral’s display and the androgyn’s message. Aurelian rose, dismissed whichever speaker had replaced the Utnamnavi with a polite word.

Once more the fasces rang, and the voice herald that had announced Aurelian’s coming rose high and clear. “His Imperial Radiance, the Emperor William the Twenty-Third of the House Avent; Firstborn Son of the Earth; Guardian of the Solar System; King of Avalon; Lord Sovereign of the Kingdom of Windsor-in-Exile; Prince Imperator of the Arms of Orion, of Sagittarius, of Perseus, and Centaurus; Magnarch of Orion; Conqueror of Norma; Grand Strategos of the Legions of the Sun; Supreme Lord of the Cities of Forum; North Star of the Constellations of the Blood Palatine; Defender of the Children of Men; and Servant of the Servants of Earth.”

The holograph plate rippled, shifted to reveal the Imperial person seated on the Solar Throne beneath its graven arch. Prince Alexander sat on a camp stool below the Emperor and to his right, dressed in the black tunic and trousers of a Legion officer, his long red hair secured by a golden ring at his left shoulder. Behind them both, a wall of Knights Excubitor stood, flaming swords held straight before their mirrored faces, their whiter-than-white cloaks a virgin backdrop for the reds and golds of the Emperor.

William himself looked old, though there was yet no gray in the violent red of his hair. There were shadows under his eyes that no powder could conceal, and he seemed thinner, drawn and stretched. A mantle of crimson samite hung about his shoulders, draped down over his right hand. The left glittered with rings, white glove shining as he raised it in greeting. “My lords and ladies—honored guests—we beg your forgiveness that we are not among you. So august a gathering of heroes, the principalities and powers of our universe . . . we should be there, in our own house. To our Jaddian friends: You have our sympathies. Numara is the first of your worlds to fall in this bloody war. We have long been allies, and your shield against the Cielcin. As that shield, we have borne the brunt of the inhuman onslaught, though we have not borne it alone . . . ”

At this, the Emperor directed his attention to the Uhran triumvir and to the other Normans seated about him. “But, gentlemen, ladies . . . a shield cannot win a war. If we are to be victorious . . . ” He faltered, uncharacteristically, and I sat a little forward in my chair. “If we are to be victorious, we must take the fight to the enemy. The time for reaction has passed.”

This pronouncement sent perturbations through the gathered dignitaries. The Cielcin might attack anywhere, along thousands of light-years of borderland, at any time. Even if a signal could be sent instantaneously—no longer a guarantee thanks to the dismemberment of the telegraph network in the outer provinces—it might be years before the nearest fleet could reach the assailed system, by which time the Cielcin might easily be gone. It was for this reason that so few of our battles in so many centuries had been victories.

I knew what Caesar must say.

“We have made overtures to the Extrasolarians,” the Emperor announced.

The congregation erupted, men standing, raising their arms. The Synarch Heraklonas stood, turning to the projection above his head. “Radiant Majesty, this is madness! Why was I not consulted?”

But his words were lost in the tide. The great lords of the Empire were likewise aghast, and there were many among them—Lions almost to a man—who stood up and were counted against the Emperor’s declaration.

They were not alone. Prince Sennen stood, and the Nipponese Emperor, and several of the men of the Small Kingdoms, and a number of the more bellicose Normans—Turan Achlae chief among them. It was unthinkable. The Extrasolarians had been proscribed by Imperial law almost since the end of the Foundation War, when their ancestors refused to kneel to the God Emperor and his armies. They were barbarians, sorcerers, and brutes. I need not convince you of this truth, Reader. You have seen, have traveled far with me, through the pits of Vorgossos and into the Minoan net. You have seen what Sagara was capable of, and what Urbaine had done.

The Emperor raised his white left hand, two fingers extended together.

The fasces rang, and steadily silence fell, though many of the men on their feet failed to sit down. “We understand this news comes as a shock to many,” the Emperor said. “The Extrasolarians have long been our enemies.” Wong Xu had not so much as stirred, nor had Sattha Kull, whose polished head glowed like a target so many levels below me. “But many of you gathered here have been our enemies in the past. We have been yours. We must set aside our enmities—for a time, at least. Against the powers of the Cielcin and of their Lothrian slaves, none of us may stand alone. As we speak, emissaries from the Monarch of Latarra are inbound to the Eternal City. Calen Harendotes has agreed to hear us.”

The shouts of outrage had given rise to curious murmurations.

There had been much talk of Calen Harendotes on Forum and across civilized space for centuries. The Monarch had emerged like lightning from a clear sky, conquered the Norman Freehold of Latarra, annexed Ashklam and rebuilt the shipyards on Monmara after the Cielcin obliterated the once-blue planet. Normans, Extrasolarians, even Imperial refugees had flocked to his banner. At Ganelon, I had met a captain of the Exalted, a gimlet-eyed man little larger than an infant who had floated in a hover-chair, who had called the Monarch master. Harendotes had had dealings with the sorcerers of MINOS, had played some part in the genesis of the LTH-81 plague.

“Harendotes?” Turan Achlae nearly knocked over his chair in his haste to reach the central floor. “Calen Harendotes threatens our worlds! It is in no small part because of Harendotes that I have sailed for Forum, Red Emperor!” He stood then in the center of the council chamber, black cape wrapped securely about his left arm. “And I find you in bed with him!”

The Emperor’s image flickered, and he screwed shut his eyes. I felt an absurd twinge of loyalty for the man. I had expected to feel rage, yet not even the sight of Alexander—who once had tried to kill me and would one day succeed—stirred anything in me save concern. Had he always been so tired? How had I never seen it?

“Have a care, Uhran,” said Alexander. “You address His Radiance, the Emperor!”

“He is your Emperor,” the man said, “not mine. We have done away with kings in Uhra. We do not bow or scrape as you.” Achlae practically snarled. “If you will treat with the Extrasolarians, you will not treat with me!” The other Normans had risen to their feet in support of the dark-faced triumvir, a cavalcade of strange and disparate uniforms.

Eyes still shut, William Caesar said, “The Monarch of Latarra can field fifty million soldiers, triumvir. How many have you?”

Achlae hissed, a sound more teapot than taipan. “I represent the entire Norman Alliance.”

“Really? Do Kanthi and Ardistama and Pharos and all the rest care to lose Imperial support for the sake of your pride?”

One by one, the other Normans looked at one another. One by one, they resumed their seats. Achlae stood alone. I was struck then by the surreality of it all: Caesar looming like Jupiter himself across the concave arc of wall above the dais, larger than life, speaking across untold thousands of light-years. His image shimmered as he leaned back in his throne, an image of man-made-god, of power incarnate.

Turan Achlae loosed his cape and turned without another word, pride spurring him up the steps and from the chamber. The Republic of Uhra went with him.

Seven worlds.


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