“It is not my will that speaks, Lord, but rather the spirit of my duty to the Children of the Sun and you, their Lord. By the might of your arms and the wisdom of your counsel you have enlarged the borders of the empire that your fathers gave you and brought many new peoples under its sway. Your throne has been higher, and your rule wider, than those of any that have gone before you. In this you have done well and fulfilled the commands that have been obeyed by twenty generations of the Children of the Sun, yet the last act of your royal power will undo in its evil all the good that you have accomplished. “When the Divine Manco left the world to return to the presence of his Father he left, as his last charge, the command to all who should come after him to keep the empire that he had given them one and indivisible for ever. “Yet, by your last act, you have divided it. Nay, more, you would set on the throne of the North a prince whose blood is not of the pure and holy strain, and you have taken the sceptre of empire far away from the City of the Sun, and in so doing you have made those to lie who said that the Son of the Sun can do no wrong. Lord, it is not yet too late to undo this and save the empire of your fathers from the doom that will surely fall upon it when the laws of its Creator cease to be obeyed.” “And would you have me disinherit my son Atahuallpa, the darling of my old age, the gallant lad who has followed me to battle and fought by my side, and who, under my own eyes, has grown to be a man and a warrior, while Huascar, to whom you would give the lands that are his by right of birth, has been dallying with his women and his courtiers amidst the delights of Cuzco and Yucay, never giving anything but an unwilling hand to the work that I have spent my own life in? Would it not be a greater wrong to do this--to rob my warrior-son of his right?” “The laws of the Divine Ones are above all human rights, Lord!” the priest replied, looking steadily into the eyes of the man whose word could send him instantly to a death of torment. “Though I never speak other words on earth, though to-morrow’s light may shine upon my ashes, yet I must speak what long and lonely vigils and many ponderings on this matter have taught me. “The empire that the great Yupanqui gave you, and which you have made so mighty and so glorious, can only subsist as one. To divide it is to destroy it, for it is not in the hearts of princes to live at peace when their borders touch. Nay, more, Huascar, your son and your firstborn, is of the Divine descent, pure and undefiled, and the ancient laws will tell him that the realm is his from end to end and from the mountains to the sea, and think you not that our Lady, his mother, and the nobles of the Blood will not urge him to claim his right when the hand of Death has taken the borla from your brow?