Synopsis: It began with the Rea Clan - it began with murder. And Birkaj - or Birk, as he came to be known on the worlds of the Consortium - was both killer and thief. He slew his clan leader and he stole the artifacts that gave the Rea their power. Then he fled, fled further through space than the ships of warrior people could track him. Or so he hoped. But Akras, leader of the Rea since her father's and her husband's deaths, would neither forget nor forgive. Over the years she molded her clan and her own two sons into a powerful juggernaut of vengeance. And a generation after the Rea clan fell from greatness, their vendetta as about to be fulfilled, their honor reclaimed. On the planet of Stromvi, Birk had built himself a new identity and a new empire. Yet neither his own safeguards, nor the unexpected presence of an Inquisitor, the highest judge and enforcer within the Consortium-governed worlds, would keep the enemy from striking. And unless the Inquisitor found a means to halt the Rea's vendetta, Strmvi's entire population might be destroyed in payment for one man's crime... (from the back cover of the DAW Books first edition)