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Imperators. He had enough objectivity to admit that in defending the Imperialate, he was capable of acts many would consider oppressive. They needed temperate voices. Roca offered a counterbalance. The day he rejected that balance was the day he became a tyrant.

    "You have a plan?" he asked.

    "I'm going early to the session," she said. "See if I can sway votes. It would help if you attended in person. Spend time softening up delegates with me."

    "I couldn't soften a pod fruit."

    "You're damned effective when you want to be."

    He glowered at her. "Doing what? I hate public speaking."

    "I'm not asking you to speak in the Assembly." She smiled with that too-reasonable expression that always meant trouble. "I just plan to give some dinners. Small, elegant, elite. People consider it a coup to be invited. They will think it even more so if the Imperator attends. We wine them, dine them, and convince them to support us."

    Kelric stared at her. "You want me to attend dinner parties with the Imperial court?"

    "Yes, actually."

    "I would rather die."

    Exasperation leaked into her voice. "It's not a form of torture, you know."

    "It's not?"

    "Do you want to win the vote or not?"

    I'm going to regret this, he thought to her. "Fine," he growled. "I'll do it."

    "Good." Then she thought, The dinners will be fun.

    Gods forbid. He had never understood how she thrived in the universe of politics and the Imperial court, but it gratified him that she did it so well. Someone in his family had to deal with the politicians.

    Her sudden smile dazzled. Which ones would forbid it?

    Kelric glared at her. He had grown up on the world Lyshriol, steeped in its mythology of deities for the moons, suns, and mountains. He was named after Kelricson, the god of youth, though he hardly felt young anymore. He had become more pragmatic after he left home, but deep inside, a part of him still remembered when he believed those luminous stories.

    All of them. He let his thought grumble. Especially Youth.

    Roca laughed good-naturedly. Maybe even he will enjoy himself.

    He had never understood how she thrived in the universe of politics and the Imperial court, but it gratified him that she did it so well. Someone in his family had to deal with the politicians.

    After Roca left, Kelric returned to his office and gazed at the dice on his desk. He thought of his children on Coba, the only he had ever fathered. In standard years, his son would be twenty-six now and his daughter sixteen. Ixpar was forty-two. She wasn't the mother of either child; she had only been fourteen when Kelric met her, and twice that age when she married him. He had never been allowed to see his son, and he had known his daughter only a few months after her birth. The ache of that lack in his life had never stopped, even after all this time.

    Kelric often wanted to go to them. Then he would remember the devastation he had wrought on Coba, how cities had roared in flames while windriders battled in the skies. He had brought death and ruin to their world.

    He would die before he let that happen to his children.

III
The Guards

     

    A natural arch of black marble domed the mausoleum. It was set in cliffs high above the city of Qoxire on the planet called Eube's Glory, named by Jaibriol's unsubtle ancestor, Eube Qox, the monumental egotist who had founded the Concord. The crypt had stood for centuries, sheltering the ashes of the Qox Dynasty.

     

    No wall blocked Jaibriol's approach to the crypt; nothing separated the inner sanctum from the chill morning except a row of black columns. In some ways, the vaulted spaces reminded him of Saint John's Church in the Appalachian Mountains on Earth. Seth Rockworth had taken Jaibriol and his siblings there each Sunday during the two years they had lived with him. But Saint John's had filled Jaibriol with warmth, with its stained-glass windows, graceful arches, and wooden pews. For all the majestic elegance of this mausoleum, its black