Storm breaking (36 page)

His enforced idleness gave him plenty of time to think about the Imperial agent's report. Tremane had shown more intelligence and initiative than Melles would ever have given him credit for, and on the whole, Melles was impressed. He would never have gotten the troops to stand by him, if he had not come up with a story to convince them that it was the
Emperor
who had deserted
them
. It was an adept use of polarity. And to somehow manage to make peace with the Alliance and convince the very people he had been fighting against to make him their new ruler—well, that was nothing short of a miracle. Melles would have given a great deal to know how Tremane had managed that particular feat.

Despite the fact that he hated Tremane with an unholy passion and would happily have seen him slowly drawn and quartered over the course of a lengthy dinner, Melles knew that in Tremane's position he would have done exactly the same things. For all the faults that Tremane had, stupidity wasn't one of them. He wasn't as brilliant as Melles, but he was not stupid either. He was lucky, though, and he had used all of the facts he had to make some reasonable conclusions. Melles had access to all the Imperial records, and he knew for a fact that Charliss had not given Tremane support or orders for months before the looting of the Imperial depot. Once Tremane's magics began to fail, he would have found himself fighting an unsupported war in unfamiliar territory—surrounded by enemies. He would have had no advantage over the enemy without magic to help. By the time the winter storms began, it would have been impossible to retreat across country to the Empire. So just what
did
Charliss expect Tremane to do at that point? Die in place, like a loyal fool out of the old Chronicles? Men like that had gone extinct in the days of the First Emperor, probably because they kept doing stupidly loyal things that bought them early graves. Charliss could not have concocted a better scheme to get rid of Grand Duke Tremane if he'd tried—except, of course, if he had appointed Melles to do away with him.

Not that Melles would have minded at all if Tremane had been such a loyal fool, but the fact was that he was loyal, like most men, only to a point. And after that point, he saw no reason to repay betrayal with more loyalty. And his luck must be phenomenal, for he had managed to pull an amazing victory out of a well that looked to hold only the bitter water of defeat.

But then, Tremane always had been unaccountably, inexplicably lucky. Fortune always smiled on the man and doubled the effects of his adequate competence. That was part of the reason why Melles hated him.

The liquor had enough effect on Charliss to get him to stop babbling; he still pounded the arms of his chair, but now he focused on Thayer, detailing the excruciating punishments he wanted Tremane and his men to endure before they died. Thayer did not bother to point out that Tremane and his men were quite out of reach of any Imperial punishments; he simply nodded gravely, pretending to pay attention, when in fact he was probably just hoping that Charliss' Healers would arrive before the Emperor erupted into incoherence again. Finally the physicians did arrive, and in a moment they had taken over from Thayer, swarming over the Emperor, pressing medicines on him, urging him to calm himself. Since Charliss' energy had been fading as the strong dose of liquor took effect, he was finally ready to listen to advice, to take those medicines, to allow his servants to take him to his bedroom and put him to bed. Thayer and Melles took the opportunity then to make their escape.

Thayer was in no mood to talk. "I was dragged away from writing out orders for troop movement in the provinces," he told Melles brusquely. "And I need to get those orders out, whether or not Emperor Charliss has other duties he needs me for."

Melles nodded, hearing and understanding the things that Thayer had not said. It would be best to get as many orders out as possible, quickly, while Charliss was otherwise occupied. It was all too clear that the Emperor 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.

The real challenges would come in dealing with those local leaders, people who had made themselves the top wolf in their own little territories, and would not care to hear from a bigger, tougher wolf than they were. Somehow he would have to persuade them that he had authority and power, perhaps in excess of what he
really
had, and that it was in their best interest to begin taking orders from him.

If he couldn't achieve that objective, he was going to have to eliminate them without direct confrontation, and put someone more amenable to authority in their places.

He put the cup down, out of the way, while he contemplated his options.

The real trick would be to get rid of them in ways that would not be traced back and connected with him. Getting rid of people was never difficult. It was doing so without leaving any tracks or signs pointing to who was responsible that was the hard part. Those clever, perceptive, and skilled enough to trace blame were few but devastating, and all plans had to be made with the assumption that such a sleuth would be investigating, though the odds were slim.

As with cards, duels, and death sports, look at the odds—but consider the stakes.

He picked up the report, leafed through it, and scanned the list of those local leaders and their brief dossiers again; his agents were good, and it was possible to get some idea of who would cooperate and who would not just from the thumbnail sketches of their personalities that had been provided to him. He had a short list of assassins to chose from, "special agents" who were adept at making deaths look like accidents or illness. It was going to be difficult to get them into place, given the current conditions, but it would not be impossible. With the help of the Army, he ought to be able to get any individual to the right location within a few weeks.

It would probably be a good idea to place his best agents on his most likely targets immediately, rather than waste time attempting to persuade some provincial idiot with an overblown sense of his own competence. If the blow came before he even contacted a given fool, it definitely wouldn't be connected with him. That would leave the agent free to take on a second target if a at persuasion of someone worth saving failed.

He switched ink and paper, to the special colors of both that would tell these operatives that he had a job for them. The note he sent would be commonplace greetings, of course; no special agent would ever trust primary instructions that came written. This was a gamble on his part, for many of these people were free-lance workers. When they heard what he had to say, they might even turn
him
down; although they would be paid more for these targets than any of them had ever gotten for a job before, getting to their targets through the miserable conditions that existed now could be a real problem. And again, that was the privilege of an agent who was as good as these were; you couldn't persuade an artist to make a masterpiece by standing him in front of an easel and threatening him with death. It might be possible to pick off one or two of these provincial leaders with ordinary assassins, and if he came up short on the number of agents he needed, that was what he would do.

But he really would prefer it if all of these operatives found the jobs enough of a challenge to take them on. They were very good. He, above all, should know; he used to be one of them, as did Porthas, and he had even trained some of them in technique.

There was nothing like being able to call on old school ties...

As he wrote out his list of "invitations," it occurred to him that he actually did have a way to fulfill the Emperor's demands and "bring Tremane to justice," provided that the "justice" came in the form of a swift, sure blade or the sharp bite of poison. There were three of these assassins—four, if he counted Porthas, though he did not intend to do without that worthy's talents right here, who could and possibly
would
go to Hardorn and eliminate Tremane. Magical assassination being out of the question, physical assassination would take a year or more, but it could be done.