Storm Breaking

was no longer entirely sane or stable. The problem was not that he was disintegrating; Melles and Thayer between them could very easily take over if he dropped dead this very night. The real problem was that he was not disintegrating fast enough.

Until he either abdicated or died, the Imperial Guards would make sure he remained the Emperor; that was their duty, and not only were they trained and sworn to it, they were geased to it. He would not be the only Emperor to have gone mad in the last few months of his life; the Empire had survived such rulers before, and truth to tell, with the difficulties facing the Empire now, being ruled by a madman was the smallest of its problems. At the moment, his obsessions were harmless enough. As long as he insisted on pursuing the twin goals of the destruction of Valdemar and the punishment of Tremane, Melles would be perfectly content. If all that happened was an occasional interruption of work, it would be a small price to pay to have the Emperor harmlessly occupied and out of the way of real business. Charliss was an Adept, and he did have an entire corps of mages who answered only to his demands—and it was entirely possible, if he decided to sacrifice all attempts to keep his anti-senescence magics working, that he could find some way to destroy Tremane, Valdemar, or both. Granted, such powerful magics would probably kill him and most of his mages, but that was to be expected, and it wouldn't bother Melles in the least. He did not intend to worry about anything as far beyond practical reach as Tremane, and Valdemar was even farther than that.

The real danger to Melles and all he needed to accomplish was that Charliss might recover his senses and his priorities enough to decide to meddle in what Melles had planned. That would mean nothing short of disaster, for the Emperor had his own nets of agents and spies that rivaled the ones Melles had in place, and he would know very soon just what Melles was doing, overtly and covertly. Most of it, of course, was simply good strategy, but there was that tiny fraction designed to make Charliss into a villain and Melles into a hero, and Charliss would probably not care too much for that.

Charliss would also have his own plans—which would not be a bad thing, if the Emperor was still sane. But he wasn't and the situation was only going to get worse as time went on. If he began to meddle, he could easily undo everything that Melles and Thayer had worked so hard to establish.

Something would have to be done to keep that from happening.

All that flashed through Melles's mind as he stood in the frigid hallway with General Thayer. He nodded slowly. 'We both have work to do,' he replied. 'We need to get our structure too solidly in place to dislodge by any force.'

That was an innocuous enough statement, but a brief flicker of his glance toward the closed door of the Emperor's quarters brought an answering glimmer of understanding to Thayer's eyes. 'Jacona's under control,' Thayer replied. 'It's the rest of the Empire that we need to think about now. And with your permission, I'll get to my part of it.'

Melles clapped him on the shoulder. 'And I to mine; after all, what is the Empire but soldiers and civil servants of various rank?'

The General nodded in agreement, and the two of them went their separate ways; Melles hurried his steps to his own apartments with the determination to get enough in place that no matter what mad schemes Charliss came up with, it would make no difference.

He returned to his suite to find the ever-attentive Porthas waiting, ready to remove the uncomfortable court robes and replace them with loose, fur-lined lounging robes and sheepskin slippers. When he raised an eye at that, Porthas shrugged.

'I assumed that my lord would be working late into the night and would not wish to be disturbed. I had arranged for a meal to be brought here, and declined invitations on my lord's behalf for a card party and a musical evening.' Even as Porthas spoke, he assisted Melles out of the heavy over-robe.

The moment that Porthas mentioned the card party and 'musical evening'—the latter of which would probably be some idiot's wife, unmarried sisters, and unbetrothed daughters, all performing popular ballads with varying degrees of success—he shuddered. The card party wouldn't have been much better; when he played cards, he played seriously, and it would be a dead certainty that he would have been paired with an unattached female who either bet recklessly or was too timid to make a bid.

'You were correct, Porthas,' he replied, as the valet eased him into the comfort of loose robes heated on a rack in front of the fire. 'And I do have a great deal of work to do.'

Charliss' actions today had given him the spur that he needed to make some fairly bold moves. That long report on the state of the rest of the Empire had left him with uncertainty earlier, but it was clear now that he had no time to waste.

First, the Empire; second, the Court. Thayer would have no part to play in that second act of consolidation.

He sat down behind his desk, and pulled paper and pen toward him. As he had already anticipated, local leaders throughout the Empire had already secured their immediate territories wherever possible. In places where the situation had not yet been secured, he had only to expand his existing arrangements, and he wrote out those orders first. The drafts would go to Thayer before they went to the clerks for copying, just to make certain that they weren't going to step on each others' feet, but the plans were simply extensions of what was already going on around Jacona.

Porthas placed a cup of hot mulled wine at his elbow; the fragrance of the spices in it drifted to his nostrils. He reached absently for it and sipped it, holding it with one hand while he wrote with the other.