Storm Breaking

Why am I the Emperor upon whom all this is visited? Why could it not have waited for my successor?

One bizarre effect of these disasters on the citizens of the Empire—as if there were not enough bizarre effects already—was that strange religious cults were springing up all over what was left of the Empire. It seemed as if every city had its own pet prophet, most of them predicting the end of the world—or at least of the world as the citizens of the Empire had known it. Every cult had its own peculiar rites and proposed every possible variation on human behavior as the 'only' means of salvation. Some preached complete asceticism, some complete license. Some advocated a single deity, some attributed spirits to every object and natural phenomena, living or not.

Some sent the most devoted out to sacrifice themselves to marauding monsters in the hopes of appeasing whatever had sent those monsters—but of course nothing was ever appeased but the appetite of the particular monster, and that was only a temporary condition. Needless to say, those cults did not long survive, for either their followers grew quickly disillusioned and abandoned their leaders, or they grew quickly angry and fed their leaders to those same monsters.

The cults neither worried nor really concerned Charliss, even though many of them had recruited untaught or illtaught mages, and were raising impressive, though shortlived, power. He left it to his own corps of mages to deal with that power or drain it. He left the day-to-day emergencies in the hands of his underlings, mostly from the military. He had more personal concerns; most of his attention these days was taken up with his own well-being, even his own survival, both of which were in great jeopardy. He had depended on reliable and consistent magic to maintain those spells keeping him alive and healthy after two centuries of life, and magic was neither reliable nor consistent anymore.

He could die before he was ready, and he had come chillingly close to it more than once. That, above all, was something he wanted no one to learn.

Many of his courtiers were mages, and he wondered how tempting it would be for one of them to take advantage of his precarious situation. He was under no illusions about the ultimate loyalty of his courtiers; he had once been one of them, and like them, his ultimate loyalty had been only to himself. There were two sorts of folk out there in the Great Hall now; those who were still here because they were fools, and those who were still here because they saw opportunities. The latter were drastically more dangerous than the former, and he never forgot that.

He had been able to keep his own existence from being eroded by keeping the heaviest of shields upon himself, but he required an increasing number of lesser mages to do that, and he lost more ground every time another wave of Storms passed. Not even his corps of mages knew just how delicately his life was hanging in the balance.

At the moment, he had managed to keep the fact that there was even the slightest thing wrong with him a secret. His courtiers did not seem to notice any difference in his appearance, but it was only a matter of time before some sharp-eyed individual—or one with a good network of informants—learned that all was not well with the Emperor by assembling all of the small hints into one concise answer. The moment that happened, the panic in the cities would be replicated in miniature in the Court, unless Charliss could quickly exert total control over every courtier here. How could he do that, when every spare iota of time and energy was spent bolstering his failing reserves? He felt events slipping like sand between his fingers, and his very helplessness raised a rage in him that was as powerful as it was futile.

My Empire is disintegrating beneath me. Soon I may not have an Empire; I may consider myself fortunate to still retain a Kingdom—or a city—or my life.

But he did not despair. Despair was an emotion for weaklings and failures, with no place in the heart of the one who wore the Wolf Crown. Anger, a cold fire in his belly, rose in him until he felt he had to find a direction for it or burn away.

The realization of how his anger should be channeled rolled in and struck like a thunderbolt in his mind. He knew precisely where to place the blame for this situation, and his anger pointed like a poisoned arrow into the West and the home of his enemy.

Valdemar.

There could be only one source for his troubles, for the mage-storms and all they had wrought. Nothing like this had ever happened before he sent Tremane to finish taking Hardorn and consider taking the Kingdom of Valdemar which lay beyond Hardorn. Valdemar did not have magic as the Empire knew it, and yet they had defended themselves successfully against all of Ancar's magical attacks. The rulers of Valdemar had prevented his own agents from penetrating its borders for decades with great success; only a handful had obtained any intelligence, only three informants had ever gotten into the Court itself. Two of the three had not been mages, which had seriously hampered their effectiveness, and the third had been forced to forgo magic while she remained within the borders, which had the same effect. Valdemar had allied itself with foreigners as weird as any of the monsters currently springing up everywhere—with the grim Shin'a'in and the alien Hawkbrothers, with the monotheistic fanatics of Karse. Valdemar would be the only power to have come up with so completely unpredictable a weapon. The fact that—at least at last report—Valdemar and her Allies were not suffering the effects of the Storms only confirmed his 'revelation.' Surely only the people who had sent out such an encompassing weapon would know how to defend against it affecting them as well.

Besides, Valdemar had murdered his agents and envoys. That, he had personal proof of, for they had fallen through the Portal from Hardorn with daggers bearing the Royal Seal on the pommel-nuts. His advisers differed in their opinions on whether or not this had represented a deliberate provocation, an act of war, or simply a challenge, but there was no difference of opinion on whose hand had done the deed. It had to be someone actually in the Royal Household, either the Heir or the personal agent of the Queen, not just any provocateur or Herald.

Tremane, parked on the. very doorstep of Valdemar, had agreed with that assessment, but the measures that he had taken to disrupt the Alliance had gone seriously amiss.