He has a deadly secret, but it is not one of the ordinary species. He is not incestuous. He’s never been caught conducting an affair or taking the woman’s place in sex, nor documented in an unhygienic fetish like necrotica or bestiality. He has no strange compulsion, nor any illness which would oblige him to seek treatment. The fevers and parasites of the tropics were repulsed by his youthful vitality. His finances are now in order, and he has gone unindicted for his crimes.

Very few know his secret.

But all the nation knows his deepest hope.

This is his hope, as he has expressed it in that Manual of Expedition. He wishes to unite the entire world in a perfect meritocracy, a republic in which the worthy may rise from wherever they begin, whether it is a nursery in Falcrest’s Suettaring or a plague hovel in the faraway Camou where buboes fester and they whisper of older plagues that weep green blood from swollen eyes. Genius, he says, may be discovered anywhere, and our Imperial duty calls us to discover that genius and to save it from decay.

Isn’t that a hopeful dream?

Hope. Hope keeps Farrier moving, through those early days of heady adventure and then the pitifully wasteful and terribly necessary crisis of the Armada War, on into the compromise and digestion of Aurdwynn and Taranoke. Hope sustained him even as he pretended to languish on Taranoke, as he prosecuted the awful, soul-rotting business of sowing civil war among the Oriati, sending his best student into the Mzilimake jungles and the bloodstained grasses of the Occupation, stirring up the Invijay and the pygmies against their Oriati “friends.” Hope sustained him as, one by one, his protégés fell away from the designs he had instilled in them. Chaos infected his students, just as it infected all the great races who rose and fell in ages past. The world distorted the laws that he had insinuated into his chosen few. They returned abominable.

Farrier needs his protégés to triumph. For time is almost out.

Ten years, maybe: the next ten years will decide the future of all human life. The course of history will be set. Will the Republic select the true method of eternal, perfect rule? Or will humanity collapse into a final spiral back down to the seabed ooze? It all depends on the confrontation between Falcrest and the Oriati Mbo, and the choices made as a result.

He will be sixty-four in ten years. In Falcrest they don’t believe the old can do much work beyond the archive and the teaching stand. It’s the fear of monarchy, you see. A king holds his power unto death, but the republican should abdicate young.