Book excerpt: After forty years, S.P. Somtow has produced a fifth novel in the Chronicles of the High Inquest, one of the most lauded galactic empire epics of the 1980s. Critically acclaimed yet never previously in print as a complete set, the series has passionate adherents - and they have finally persuaded the author to enrich the universe with more novels. Homeworld of the Heart is the first of a trilogy within a trilogy. The songs of Sajit were known and loved through the million worlds of the Dispersal of Man. He was the favorite of Elloran, most powerful, most compassionate of the godlike Inquestors - even, it was rumored, his lover. In his old age, Ton Elloran visits a backwater planet that purports to contain the tomb of Sajit. A nostalgic visit to his childhood companion birth planet, however, reveals that everything he thought he knew about his closest friend was wrong - and that there were at least two Sajits, their stories bifurcating and melding in an ever more complex skein of memory, desire, and loss. Homeworld of the Heart begins in a small village in a backworld - where a microscopic glitch in Inquestral management has caused two contradictory games of makrúgh to be played out. People bins are raining from the sky, a city is devouring another city, and a goddess must learn to become a whore as cultures and worlds clash. The Inquestor Series is like Game of Thrones - but on a galactic scale. For twenty centuries, the godlike Inquestors have ruled the million worlds of the Dispersal of Man, keeping all its disparate civilizations in precarious balance by playing the star-destroying game of makrúgh. Theodore Sturgeon said "Somtow deals with the greatest magnitude of concept since Stapledon ... I deeply envy anyone who has not read the tale of the Inquestors, for they have before them this transcendent experience." Orson Scott Card said of this series, "he can create a world with less apparent effort than some writers devote to creating a small room ..." and in Homeworld of the Heart Somtow revisits and vastly expands the teeming landscape of the Inquestor series.