author : Victoria Goddard

A impulsive action can start a war.
A timely word can end one.
One gesture of friendship can change history.

Cliopher Mdang knows all about consequences. He is the Secretary in Chief of the Offices of the Lords of State: the official head of the Imperial Bureaucratic Service of Zunidh, unofficial head of the government. He spends his days dealing with all the manifold results of enormously complicated systems.

He is also the personal secretary to his Radiancy Artorin Damara, Last Emperor of Astandalas, Lord of Zunidh: the Sun-on-Earth, the Lord of Rising Stars, worshipped as a god.

Cliopher has never touched his lord, never called him by name, never initiated a conversation. He would never say aloud that he loves him, but it is for his lord, and not his own power or prestige, that he has spent his life far from home and the family who have never quite forgiven him for leaving.

It is blasphemy to suggest that the Sun-on-Earth might need something as ordinary and human as a break. But one day Cliopher turns to his lord and invites him on a holiday to his homeland, the tropical paradise of the Vangavaye-ve, which is as far from the court as it is possible to be. It is a place where pretension is soundly discouraged and pretences are undone, and where the divine is never very far from the human.