The Ruby Dice by Catherine Asaro Read Free Book Online

marble spaces felt cold.

    Accompanied by his Razers, he walked between two giant columns. Mist curled around the pillars and shrouded their tops. He pulled his jacket tighter, grateful for its warmth. With the climate controls in his clothes, he could survive almost anything, even a blizzard. But no climate system could protect him from the snowfall of his emotions.

    Inside the mausoleum, light orbs glowed above him and dimmed after he passed. Pearly mist softened the marble statues and wreathed the orbs, giving them an ethereal quality, as if he had entered a realm of translucent life. The obelisks he sought stood together, two thin pyramids of marble, all slanted lines, no square corners. They guarded the ashes of a man and a woman: Ur Qox and Viquara Iquar.

    His grandparents.

    The stark monuments mesmerized him. The reign of Ur Qox had been a long one. His son—Jaibriol's father—had spent only two years on the throne, imprisoned by Viquara and her new consort while they ruled from the shadows.

    Jaibriol turned away, struggling with his confused pain. He wasn't certain why he had come here. Leaning against the steep side of the obelisk, he stared into the shadows of the mausoleum. Fog brushed his face with its damp kiss, and he wiped his palm along his cheek, smearing the clammy moisture.

    Viquara Iquar had died in the Radiance War. Some said she had stepped in front of a laser shot meant for her son. Had she saved his life? Jaibriol didn't understand why it mattered so much to him, but he needed to believe she had loved her son.

    Her Ruby son.

    Jaibriol's great-grandfather had sired Ur Qox on a provider so he could breed a psion, an heir with a mind powerful enough to create a Kyle web. But the traits that created psions were recessive; a child had to get them from both parents. So Ur Qox had repeated the process, siring a son on one of his providers. She gave birth to a Ruby psion. Jaibriol's father.

    Ur Qox had been no saint; Jaibriol had no doubt that if the emperor could have impregnated his empress with another woman's child and tricked her into believing it was her own, he would have done it to protect the secret. But no Aristo could carry a Ruby child. The baby needed a psion as its mother, and an Aristo could never be a psion; they considered the traits a weakness and deliberately kept the DNA out of their bloodlines. The fetus of a psion responded dramatically to its environment. Nurturing it in a lab or even within a surrogate proved difficult and clones were rarely viable. The stronger a psion, the greater the problems. Ruby psions were almost impossible to birth except through natural methods. Had Viquara Iquar tried to carry a Ruby child, it would have died. She had to have known her son was another woman's child. Yet she had never revealed him.

    Jaibriol laid his hand against the obelisk. Its polished surface chilled his palm. He was aware of his guards in the shadows, tall and silent, like the marble edifices. Tendrils of fog drifted above him, obscuring the light spheres until they became luminous blurs, as if they were ghosts of the Qox dynasty that had lived and died before him.

    "Could you love him?" Jaibriol whispered. "You called him son, and he called you mother." Only Viquara would ever know the truth.

    And what of his grandfather? Jaibriol knew him only through the eyes of his son, Jaibriol's father. Ur Qox had been a distant parent, chill in his affections. Although Ur had been half Ruby, none of the traits had manifested, for Aristo genes dominated. Ur Qox had been an Aristo. Yet he never harmed his son. He had isolated Jaibriol's father in seclusion to protect him, not only against other Aristos, but even from himself.

    The solitude had left Jaibriol's father craving love. He had only been twenty-four at Jaibriol's birth, three years younger than Jaibriol was now. He had been the finest man Jaibriol had ever known, a loving parent who taught him more than he felt he could ever give