deadening herbs. He went back to his seat, let himself down into the embrace of the chair, and tried to convince his heart of what his head knew were facts.
That was something his teacher had told him, and it was as true now as it was then. Tremane might as well be dead; his lands and possessions were confiscated, his name erased from the records, and he could never return here again. He would have to be content with a petty kingdom in a land of barbarians.
Pursuit of Tremane was a waste of resources, which were in very short supply, especially good operatives. There was no point in wasting a man who could serve Melles better elsewhere. It was time to bury the past vendettas with Tremane's name.
There was no point in following the Emperor into madness.
Every time a mage-storm washed over them, anyone with any pretensions at being a magician felt it; there had even been clever daylight robberies timed to coincide with the onset of a mage-storm, when the owner of a building would be incapacitated. The Storms were bad enough when they came during the daylight hours, but when they occurred at night, when everyone was asleep, they were worse, for they became part of one's dream and turned those dreams into nightmares.
Melles woke up in a sweat, clutching his blankets, out of a nightmare of tumbling through empty space. But the waking reality was no better, and he hung onto his bedding with grim recognition of what was behind the dream. Complete disorientation, nausea, the feeling that he was on the verge of blacking out and yet could not have the relief that unconsciousness would bring—this was a mage-storm to him, and he was profoundly grateful that Porthas and his guards were not mages and did not feel these effects.
At that, his own bouts with the Storms were not as bad as those of some of the other mages he knew, though he had not ventured to ask the Emperor how he weathered these things. He had a theory that the amount a mage suffered was directly proportional to the amount of magic he had tried to work in the interval between the Storms. If magic was tied to its caster, and the Storms disrupted magic, it stood to reason that when the Storms hit, they would give trouble to mage and magic together. As a consequence, he had tried to keep from working any magic at all, even giving up his own rejuvenation magics when they had not survived disruption.
When the Storm finally passed, and his dizziness and nausea vanished as they always did, he let go of the covers and tried to relax back into his goosedown mattress. With any luck, the Emperor would be 'indisposed' today after his bout with the storm, and with further luck, the mage-storm would send his mental and physical state plummeting again. It was too much to hope that the Storm had killed him, but it was certainly possible that this time he might wind up bedridden.
That would be an excellent thing, for then Melles would have to stand proxy and speak
He closed his eyes and tried to relax in hope of resuming his slumbers, but it was of no use. He could not get back to sleep again. He opened his eyes and stared up at the canopy of his bed, or rather, at the darkness within the sheltering curtains of the bed. No light penetrated those thick velvet curtains, nor would it until morning, when the servants pulled back both window and bed curtains to wake him. Now that there was no magical way to heat Crag Castle, one needed those heavy curtains around the beds to keep the drafts out, just as one needed goosedown comforters and featherbeds, and many blankets. Even then, he often woke with a cold nose.
He was not a heavy sleeper, nor a long one, and never had been. Some would say that a guilty conscience kept him awake, or the memories of all of his victims, but the truth was simpler than that. Sleep, in his profession, was a dangerous necessity, the one time when he was completely vulnerable and had to entrust his safety to others. He had trained himself to wake completely at the slightest disturbance, and once he was awake, his mind leaped into activity whether or not there was any need for it. Once he was that wide awake, it was difficult to get back to sleep again.
He wondered what time it was. If it was near enough to dawn, it was hardly worth fighting to get back to sleep only to be awakened again.
He shifted his weight, and a scent of pungent herbs filled the still air. Porthas had ordered the servants to add those herbs to the bedding, in anticipation of problems when the vermin-repelling spells failed. That was yet another example of Porthas' foresight; he'd seen some of the Councillors scratching surreptitiously at the last meeting of the Grand Council, and suspected fleas, since these were some of the same courtiers who kept dogs or other pets and insisted on having them here at Court. Vermin spread, with or without pets to spread them, unless one took precautions.
Fleas at Court! Well, they were not the only bloodsucking vermin here, only the most honest about it. In some ways, Melles would have preferred fleas to some of the other vermin he had to deal with on a daily basis.
That led his thoughts immediately to the current problem facing him: the Court. He had always known there would be some opposition to him as the Emperor's Heir, but he had not thought that all of his enemies would forget their own differences to unite against him.
His only solid ally was Thayer; in Thayer he had the Army—but
