A sample chapter of Garth Nix's Confusion of Princes

This is a sample of Confusion of Princes a book written by Australian author Garth Nix. The rights belong to him and to the publisher Allen&Unwin. This is just the first chapter, the book will be out in April 2012.
I divided the chapter into 3 pieces. It makes it easier to read it.
Part 1

Chapter One

I HAVE DIED THREE times, and three times been reborn, though I am not yet twenty in the

old Earth years by which it is still the fashion to measure time.
This is the story of my three deaths, and my life between.
My name is Khemri, though this is not the name my parents gave me. I do not know who
my parents are, and never will, for I was taken from them as a baby.

This is one of the secrets the Empire keeps well. No Prince may ever know his or her

parents, or the world of their birth. Even trying to find out is forbidden, which just about
sums up the paradox of being a Prince. We have vast power and seemingly limitless
authority, except when we try to exercise that power or authority beyond the bounds that have
been set for us.
It’s still about a million times better than being an ordinary Imperial subject, mind you. It
just isn’t everything that I thought it was going to be when I was a child, a Prince candidate
being carefully raised in considerable ignorance in my remote temple.

So I’m one of the ten million Princes who rule the Empire, the largest political entity in

recorded history or current knowledge. The Empire extends across a vast swath of the galaxy,
encompassing more than seventeen million systems, tens of millions of inhabited worlds, and
trillions of sentient subjects, most of them humans of old Earth stock.
It is Imperial policy that all these mostly planet-bound yokel types know as little as
possible about the apparently godlike beings who rule them. Even our enemies—the alien
Sad-Eyes, the enigmatic Deaders, and the Naknuk rebels—know more of us than our own
people.

The ordinary folk think we’re immortal. Which is natural enough when they typically

have something like their grandfather’s grandfather’s grandmother’s nice commemorative
stereosculpture of a good-looking young Prince on the family mantelpiece and then they see
the same Prince handing out Grower of the Month awards at the annual harvest festival or
whatever.
It would be the same Prince too, because while we’re not actually immortal, if we get
killed we do mostly get reborn into an identical adult body. It’s a technical difference, I
guess.

And it’s only mostly reborn. Our enemies know that we do not always come back from

the dead. To have died three times like me is no big deal for a Prince of the Empire. There are
others who have died nine, twelve, twenty times and still walk among our ranks. There are
even Princely societies where you have to have died a certain number of times to join. Like
the Nine Death Lifers. Bunch of idiots if you ask me. All suicidal for eight deaths and then
supercautious afterward? Who’d want to join that society?
Particularly since you never know if you are going to be reborn. It’s up to the Emperor,
and every now and then a dead Prince’s name just vanishes from the lists without
explanation, and if you’re dumb enough to make inquiries, you meet a lot of blank-eyed
priests who don’t know anything and a weird kind of absence of anything about that dead
Prince if you directly ask the Imperial Mind.

But before I get into my whole life story and all, let me take you through the bare facts of
my childhood. I am presuming you’re not an Imperial Prince, which you’d better not be or
I’ll have wasted all the careful preparations that are supposed to make this record detonate
with a ridiculously large antimatter explosion if it is accessed by any kind of Princely sensory
augmentation.
I guess not recording it in the first place would be more secure. But I have my reasons.

So. I would have been close to a year old when I was taken from my parents. Though I

have no recollection of my early life, it is likely that I was born on a typical Imperial world of
the outer quadrants, a planet once marginal for human life but long since remade by the
trinity of Imperial technology: the machines of Mektek, the biological agents and life-forms
of Bitek, and the wide-ranging and powerful mental forces of Psitek.

This is important, because if there’s anything that makes the Empire what it has become,

it is these three teks. Sure, the Sad-Eyes have better Psitek, but then we kick their parasitical
little guts in with Mektek and Bitek. The Naknuks have taken Bitek further than we have, so
we do them in with Psitek and Mektek.
The Deaders . . . it’s a bit hard to know exactly what their primary tek is since they
always blow themselves up when they’re beaten, but certainly the trinity of teks works
against them as well.

All Imperial tek is managed and controlled by priests, who are divided into orders that

worship different Aspects of the Emperor. They serve Princes in all technical roles, but it’s
worth remembering that they also get orders directly from the Imperial Mind. Princes forget
that sometimes, usually to their cost.

Okay, where was I? Getting taken from my parents. Here we go.

On a day like any other day, my parents would have had no knowledge that by nightfall
their infant son would be gone forever.
The first sign would have been a gathering darkness, a vast shadow too sharp edged to be
a cloud. Looking up, they would have seen an Imperial battleship glide across their sky, an
enormous, jagged flying mountain of rock dotted with structures built to the fashions and
whims of the Prince in command.
Under the shadow of the ship, bright spots of light would suddenly spark, thousands and
thousands of them, that a moment later would fall like brilliant rain.

They would know then, I suppose, my parents of long ago. Imperial battleships do not

drop thousands of mekbi troopers on rural villages without reason.
Sometimes I wonder what my parents did as the first wave of troopers descended, and
the wasp-ships launched as well, spiraling down to establish a perimeter to make sure no one
tried to evade the opportunity of giving their children to the Empire.

I suppose they did nothing, for nothing could be done. But unlike most other Princes, I

know something about ordinary children. I have seen parents and their children together
when they are not awed or terrified by the presence of a Prince. So I know that the bond
between them is stronger than Princes— who have no parents and are not allowed to have
children—can imagine. So perhaps they tried to escape, desperation driving them to flee or
hide.

But with a perimeter established and search squads armed with advanced scanning tek,

there could be no hope of evasion. My parents must have eventually joined the lines of
people waiting for the troopers to check everyone against the census while the Priests of the
Aspect of the Inquiring Intelligence mentally investigated any anomalies. Maybe there was a
Sad-Eye infiltrator lurking inside a host body, or a Naknuk spy, or some small domestic
criminal or terrorist, but these would be rare excitements. Mostly it would be routine.

Then, finally, at the head of the line, my parents would meet the Priests of the Aspect of

the Weighty Decision Maker, priests with glittering eyes, blue fluid swirling behind the
transparent panels in their shaven skulls, all attention focused on the approaching couple and
their child.
The genetic testing would have taken only a few minutes, using Bitek viral assays and
ultrascopic Psitek scan. Then the terrible news, presented as an opportunity for joy and
delight in being able to serve the Empire.

‘Your child is accepted as a Prince candidate.’

Sometimes I think about what it must have been like for my parents to hear those words.

I also wonder what choice they made next, for the Empire in its great compassion does allow
such parents one choice.
Not to keep the child, of course. The Empire needs Princes and so must take the
candidates. But it does allow the parents some small mercy. They can be made to forget they
ever had that child, their memories thoughtfully rearranged by the Priests of the Aspect of the
Emperor’s Loving Heart, before they are physically relocated to another world to begin anew.
Or they can choose death. As with all Imperial justice, this is done on the spot. It would
be fast, faster than they might expect. Mekbi troopers stand behind the parents when they
state their choice. Accelerated muscles and monofilament blades act upon the mental
command of the presiding Prince, and it is all over in a moment.

I do not think of my parents often, for there is no point. But I do have some reason to

hope that they chose memory erasure and a new start, and that somewhere out among the farflung
stars they live still and have new children. Children who were not taken away to be
made into Princes.

That is how I became a Prince candidate of the Empire and embarked on my candidacy,

being shipped from temple to temple as each stage of my remaking was successfully
completed.
For Princes are made, not born. The genetic testing is merely to see if we have the
potential for all the meddling that is to come, and a reasonable probability of surviving it.

I don’t really remember the first decade of my candidacy. I only know what I was told

about it later. For many years I was kept in a dream state, in a bath of Bitek gloop, my mind
directly stimulated with educational and developmental programming, while viruses rewrote
my DNA and changed and improved every part of my body.