Prologue

(The first part of this prologue also served as the epilogue to From Admiral to Emperor)

The lessons in the Courani language were, Piett thought, coming along nicely. The lessons in governing a huge, intricate, and perpetually dissatisfied foreign culture went a little more slowly. He was learning their laws, learning their history, learning their economy and trade balances, their political ambitions, the things they despised and the things they desired.

The first thing he had set to doing was to memorize the duties and obligations of the Courani Emperor. There was a list, carefully itemized, eighty-two primary items long. It began with the duty to maintain the unity of the Empire, then the obligation to provide an heir to continue the royal line, and so on. The first thirty items were obvious, common-sensical, and had been established in the Charter, the document that Courani government and law were based upon. The remaining fifty-two were more specific, things that had been written into this treaty or that treaty with this or that Viscount or colony, after this service to the Empire was performed, or that concession to the greater good was made. He only knew the first three of those, regarding taxation, and taking up nearly eight pages.

He would have memorized more if there had been time, but there were always a thousand other things that needed doing, things he did not yet understand, but which his subordinates dared not do without his endorsement and approval.

There were other things as well: the repairs to the fleet, for instance, or re-opening lines of communication with Tanroial- Vice Admiral Hayden must still be preparing for an invasion of Ssi-Ruuk that would never come. That was a priority, then- that, and then, a promotion for the man was certainly in order. Admiral would be enough for the moment, but thinking ahead, the man needed something higher, something that set him above the other Admirals. A decision on that, however, could wait. It was the communications that were important.

There was a state dinner that night- though the battle had ended two weeks ago, he had not yet had a chance to confer with Viscount Irivas, or with the Viscounts of the heartworld. The delicate political balance which his arrival had disrupted needed to be restored, hopefully in some more stable, peaceful form. He also needed to meet with his surviving adoptive relatives.

The though of dinner put him off-track, though. There was something else he needed to make time for. Over a month ago, Vice Admiral Litsen had accepted an invitation to dinner- a dinner they had yet to share.

The door to his ridiculously large office opened, and, bowing, Emparl Tanchis stepped in. Tanchis had been Cassian's primary advisor, and Piett relied on him to deal with all the organizational details, and the matters of state he could not yet understand well enough to handle.

"What is it today, Tanchis?" he asked, smilingly.

Tanchis cleared his throat before speaking. "Today, we must address a new topic. I think that it is time to discuss the matter of His Majesty's impending marriage."

(And now, the continuation)

"My what?" Piett asked, starting from his chair.

"Marriage," Tanchis said. "The second duty of an Emperor is to provide an heir. I need hardly to remind your Majesty that these are… unsettled times. Should you die without an heir, the result would be anarchy."

Piett opened his mouth to answer, closed it, then opened it again and spoke. "Cassian has a daughter still living, doesn't he?"

"Yes." Tanchis said. "This solves nothing. The people are patriarchal and superstitious here. They would not tolerate an Empress leading. Not in times like these. However foolish we may know that to be, it is nonetheless true."

"All right then," Piett said, settling back into his seat. "But you said impending marriage- not impending betrothal."

"Under normal circumstances, one of the Emperor's sons would be betrothed to a Comtessa from the colonies, to maintain solidarity. But you are the only surviving male of the royal line. And Dajicor Irivas preserved your place on the throne. He has put forth his eldest daughter as a candidate."

"So I'm betrothed, just like that?"

"Under ordinary circumstances, yes. However, none of this would be happening if these were ordinary times. There is a rather large party of heartworld patriots at the moment. They accept that Cassian made you his heir, so you can rule them- but they want your heir to have heartworld blood. They insist that you must marry Her Highness, Princess Alycinthara."

"But- by law, she's my sister." And, he added silently, I'm old enough to be her father.

Tanchis frowned. "That is no barrier if you share no blood."

Piett shook his head. Different peoples, different taboos.

"So, which one am I to marry?"

"That is what we must discuss, Majesty. You cannot afford to lose the support of either Irivas or the Heartworld Party. We must devise… some sort of compromise."
Part One: Negations and Negotiations

Chapter One

Somewhere in this blasted city, M'thas told himself, there had to be someone who could help him find her. He'd spent two weeks of his long-hoarded shore leave haunting the bars that Courani pilots frequented, looking for her- that heart- shaped face, those dark eyes, that hair- a shade of scintillant gold that only the Courani had- and had found nothing except raucous war stories and half a dozen very intriguing sorts of drinks.

He'd started to pick up on a little of the language, as few of the pilots he spoke with knew more than a dozen words in Basic. They'd laugh, point at something, and name it, and he'd sear the word and its definition into his memory.

After all, he didn't know if she spoke Basic, either, and he had to find a way to talk to her. He hadn't composed a word of poetry since he left Kuat to join the Navy- until two weeks ago. Now datapads with dozens of clumsy, strained verses saved on them were scattered liberally around his quarters, and he'd stolen the best of the classic, lyrical literature from the Phantom's data library to try and improve it- Kaespershae and Ucerach and the others like them. He stayed up late, re-reading them- it took him four days to get through Kaespershae's Liet and Moreo, and when he finished it was an effort not to speak in rhyming iambic pentameter.

Once he'd started understanding bits and pieces of Courani- mostly action verbs and maledictions- he realized there was a lot more going on around him than he had thought. The coup had been crushed before it could become civil war, but there were currents of opinion and tides of politics that pulled the populace in different directions. Everyone but the pilots he drank with had some worry or concern or prejudice or desire with a political slant to it- some of them favored their new emperor, and some did not. Some welcomed the presence of the Imperial fleet, and others were xenophobic in the extreme.

The most outspoken protestors almost always belonged to the Heartworld Party. Their concerns were the concerns of the local aristocracy, the more conservative of the priests, and the ignorant who disliked outworlders- Dajicor Irivas and his Navy almost as much as M'thas's fellow Imperials.

On his fourteenth day of semi-nomadic drinking contests, M'thas found himself being thrown out of a bar early in the morning by three wiry-looking men wearing slogans on their shirts that M'thas could not read, but which he had seen worn by other Heartworld supporters before. They looked rich, angry, and half- drunk, and they followed him into the alleyway.

It was bound to be an interesting morning.

~~~~~~~~~

They shoved him against the far wall, let him rebound, then pressed him against it once more. The largest of them bent in close, the bitter scent of the Courani rum on his breath half-gagging M'thas, and stirring something akin to outrage inside of him. It was a familiar feeling in an unfamiliar place- he hadn't felt it outside of a cockpit in over a month.

"Stay out of our bar, roundtooth," the man said in slurrily accented Basic. "We don't want you in our bars, we don't want you in our city, we don't want you on the heartworld. Fly back up to your thin-hulled ships, and stay there."

The three Courani stepped back, ready to leave now that their threat had been delivered.

"Roundtooth? Was that meant to be an ethnic slur?" M'thas asked as they turned away, sarcasm and mock-dismay thick in his voice.

With a ponderous slowness that was meant to be intimidating, the trio's spokesman turned back to face him.

"If it was," M'thas said, "it was a little off, anatomically speaking."

"Are you looking for a fight, roundtooth?"

M'thas's voice had become a little cooler now, a little considering- but there was an edge to it, a little tremble that showed he was hiding some deeper, more intense emotion.

"Well, yeah," he said. "I guess that would be a reasonable assumption."

They charged him. As they did, what he was done and what he was doing sunk in, through the haze of outrage he was thinking through, and he rethought his position.

M'thas caught the first punch thrown easily, and hit his attacker with considerably more vigor, rocking the man back on his heels. Before he could steady himself, or before his friends could catch up, M'thas said "My teeth are square, laser- brain," and ran.

He was, of course, at a disadvantage- he didn't know the streets he ran through half as well as they did, and- like most fighter jocks- he was short. Their strides were longer than his. Then, too, they were used to the taste and the weight and the oxygen ratio in the air here, and he was not.

He ran a different way at every corner he came to, winding through the irregular streets, hoping that if he ran long enough they would fall farther back, at least far enough to drop out of sight. If they did- even for an instant- he felt sure he could think of something, pull some trick, that could turn the tables.

They did not fall further back. They did not drop out of sight. With every block they drew a little closer- one step, maybe, or two, or five.

When- if- _if_ they caught him now, it would be worse than if he had stayed to fight. Far worse than if he had just kept his mouth shut- but his tongue, his temper, and his reflexes had always operated at hyperdrive speeds, while his brain followed sluggishly at sublight.

He should have known better anyway- or at the least, worn his blaster. Not expecting a fight was no excuse, not for someone who grew up next the ghettos on Eriadu. There was always a fight brewing somewhere, and it was usually someone with a mouth as reckless as his who touched off the sparks that would make it explode.

He ran until his lungs burned, and the cool, brisk air felt like molten lead. He ran until his legs felt like lumps of _solid_ lead, heavy and half-numb and aching as though his skin would slough away, his muscles loosen and slide apart, and the rest of his innards would collapse in a steaming pile onto the street.

The more rational portion of his brain found this unlikely, but he never really listened to it anyway, so the image stayed in his mind as a possibility- painful, but the imagined damage to his body if he kept running was less than the damage to his pride would be if he gave up.

As always, failure was not an option.

His pursuers closed, step by step, inch by inch, breath by breath coming nearer and nearer, half a block, a quarter of a block, ten steps behind. Traffic on the streets was thin and mostly pedestrian, and it parted to let them pass.

He couldn't outrun them. He wouldn't stop running. He refused to believe that they could catch him.

That ruled out everything except finding a weapon and dispatching them as they closed. Not a lethal weapon- whether they were bigots or not, he'd provoked them. And he'd rather be beaten to within an inch of his life than kill because of wounded pride. It was beneath him. It was something one of his pursuers might do to someone, and he would not sink to their level.

Of course, if he'd sufficiently wounded their pride and inflamed their prejudice, they might choose to make it a matter of life or death. The possibilities were endless.

The one he liked best came into shape in his mind as he ran, and as a street vendor came into view up ahead, hawking some sort of pottery- the Courani seemed fixated with ceramics- to passerby. It was beautiful- bright paints and enamels traced shapes with such clarity that the images seemed to have depth, as if the man's wares were not jars and flasks but holograms.

It was, he knew, going to cost him a fortune to pay the vendor back for all the things he planned to break.

He seized a double handful of what he hoped were the less expensive bowls, scanned the street ahead of him, then turned so that he was running backwards. Quickly, with the eye of a pilot who aimed his guns with instinct instead of sensors, he threw them.

His nearest pursuer was almost too close- seven steps, perhaps six. The first bowl fragmented on the man's forehead in an ugly spray of potsherds and blood, and the second caught between his ankles. M'thas hoped, as the man fell, that he wouldn't break his neck. When the man caught himself before falling all the way, M'thas cursed and threw a third bowl, striking the man's back, driving the air from his lungs, and forcing him the rest of the way to the ground.

Three bowls gone, three left. He aimed lower as he threw at the next man, and the bowl did not break, but impacted somewhere soft between the man's stomach and his groin. Doubling him over to the point where he tripped and fell to his knees.

The third man caught the bowl M'thas threw at him- but in doing so, he stopped running.

M'thas dropped the last one back onto the vendor's stall as the man began screaming Courani imprecations at him, and M'thas had time only to say what he hoped meant "My oath- will pay" to the man, before turning to run again.

He dodged through three almost-straight streets and three crooked alleys in different directions without seeing a sign of his pursuers.

He made a quick turn, and doubled back through one of the alleys he'd passed through before, counting on his memory of it to guide him as he scanned the street behind him. Halfway through it, he tripped, falling flat on his face, skinning not only his knees and the palms of his hands, but his chin as well. He cried out, briefly, more in shock than pain, and leaped to his feet, spinning to see what he'd fallen over.

A body lay across the alleyway. At first, he thought that it must be a bum, sleeping- then, he saw the armor of a Royal Guard. At first, he thought the body lay with its face in shadow- then, he saw that the man's head was a mass of black, burned carbon, unrecognizable as human or even once-alive had it not been attached to a body.

Then, he saw the chevron-markings on the armor's chestplate, and the lightsaber lying dead in the man's hand.

Someone had killed a Jedi, silent and unnoticed, in the last two minutes, and whoever it was had done it with some weapon horrific enough to vaporize flesh and contort bone into twisted, fragmentary shapes.

As he stood, staring at the corpse, his pursuers skidded to a halt not ten feet before him, appearing around a bend in the alleyway.

They took the scene in with a glance- the foreigner that had disturbed them, the corpse of a man who should've been able to subdue him in an instant lying at his feet- and leaped to conclusions.

They screamed and ran, leaving M'thas to wait over the corpse for the officer of the guard he knew would come to arrive, arrest him, beat him almost cursorily, and throw him in a cell in the darkest, filthiest corner of the Courani Palace Gaols.

to be continued...