For Rho Merrick who fled Inferno as a youth, the war he led meant the end of slavery on the world of his birth. For Anara who financed the war, it meant freedom for the peoples of Inferno but especially for the Tachean savages in the desert wastes. A designer clone, the peoples of the wastes were the only family she had ever known. For Septien, premiere gladiator on Inferno, and perhaps in all the Milky Way, it meant the only thing left for him to attain: the chance to die well. Manipulating these and others, the Emperor of two worlds played with the lives dedicated to him as well as those opposing him. His grandson and heir would never see the throne if the Emperor had his way. Known only to himself and his subaltern, the heir was not his grandson but a clone, designed for one purpose: to die. He would join five hundred years of previous Emperors in the mausoleum on Inferno's twin world, Moon Aura. All of them clones like himself. Entangled in each of these lives was the life and spirit of one man, Sko Chohst, a Tachean warrior dead on the sands of Inferno's maximum security prison #6, slain by Septien, a boy he had taken as his son, taught and trained in the ways of the desert warrior.