thinks about it,
because Admiral Shatrak will have you and your accomplices shot in the
Convocation Chamber, where you massacred the legitimate government of
this planet," he barked.

So the real Obray, Count Erskyll, had at last emerged. All the
liberalism and socialism and egalitarianism, all the Helping-Hand,
Torch-of-Democracy, idealism, was merely a surface stucco applied at the
university during the last six years. For twenty-four years before that,
from the day of his birth, he had been taught, by his parents, his
nurse, his governess, his tutors, what it meant to be an Erskyll of Aton
and a grandson of Errol, Duke of Yorvoy. As he watched Khreggor Chmidd
in the screen, he grew angrier, if possible.

"Do you know what you blood-thirsty imbeciles have done?" he demanded.
"You have just murdered, along with two thousand men, some five billion
crowns, the money needed to finance all these fine modernization and
industrialization plans. Or are you crazy enough to think that the
Empire is going to indemnify you for being emancipated and pay that
money over to you?"

"But, Citizen Proconsul...."

"And don't call me Citizen Proconsul! I am a noble of the Galactic
Empire, and on this pigpen of a planet I represent his Imperial Majesty.
You will respect, and address, me accordingly."

Khreggor Chmidd no longer wore the gorget of servility, but, as Lanze
Degbrend had once remarked, it was still tattooed on his soul. He
gulped.

"Y-yes, Lord-Master Proconsul!"

They were together again in the big conference-room, which Vann Shatrak
had been using, through the day, as an extemporised Battle-Control. They
slumped wearily in chairs; they smoked and drank coffee; they anxiously
looked from viewscreen to viewscreen, wondering when, and how soon, the
trouble would break out again. It was dark, outside, now. Floodlights
threw a white dazzle from the top of the Proconsular Palace and from the
tops of the four buildings around it that Imperial troops had cleared
and occupied, and from contragravity vehicles above. There was light and
activity at the Citadel, and in the Servile City to the south-east; the
rest of Zeggensburg was dark and quiet.

"I don't think we'll have any more trouble," Admiral Shatrak was saying.
"They won't be fools enough to attack us here, and all the Masters are
dead, except for the ones we're sheltering."

"How many did we save?" Count Erskyll asked.

Eight hundred odd, Shatrak told him. Erskyll