Veramus is the emperor who cannot stop, because in Gorath the day you stop winning is the day the marshals elect someone else.
Gorath does not pass its throne down. It elects its emperor from among its generals, and has for three centuries, which means the office rewards conquest and punishes rest. Veramus won it the way a man wins a long campaign: by still being alive at the end of one. He was never the most brilliant general of his generation. He was the one who did not die. The marshals who outshone him died in Nashua's mud, or of fever in the river camps, or with their reputations spent on campaigns that came to nothing, and Veramus, careful and durable and a little lucky, outlasted every one of them. He is sixty-three now. In Gorath that is a kind of victory by itself.
He earned his name long before the throne, at the Esteves Pass, where as a young commander he held the northern gate against a giant assault for forty-three days with no reinforcement coming. The soldiers who survived it called him the Unrelieved. The name has aged into something crueler than they meant by it, because Veramus has not had a quiet year since.
Outsiders misread a Gorathi emperor. The title sounds absolute and is not. Veramus commands the largest army on Alaria and cannot command his own retirement. The army is his only real constituency, and an army votes for the man who brings it new ground. For thirty years he kept the bargain. A fresh campaign every few seasons, a new frontier, a new column of conquered names cut into the Pillar of Conquest at Azantir. Keep the legions moving and they keep you on the throne. Stop, and the next election has a better candidate.
Then the Moon Wilds broke the bargain. Veramus sent three legions west under Drauso to take the jungle on Gorath's own border, and the Vexlings handed him the first frontier in living memory the Eternal March could not advance. Drauso came home the Wilds-Broken. Veramus ordered that campaign, and everyone who can count knows it.
So he is doing the only thing the office ever taught him. He is escalating everywhere at once. He has pressed the Nashua front harder, though he dares not recall Mauros, the marshal who actually holds it, because Mauros is exactly the popular victor the marshals would elect in his place. He has renewed the old bounty on the sea-beast Agtakkeri, who eats his coastal shipping. He has leaned on Slavewatch to wring more bodies and more coin out of the slave-supply. And he has posted an enormous bounty on the Vexling Queen the Gorathi call the Argent Mother, on the theory that killing her ends the threat. The people who actually know the Wilds say this will make everything worse. Veramus does not believe them, or cannot afford to. None of it is strategy. It is motion that looks like winning, ordered by a man who needs to look like he is winning.
The emperor has opened four wars to keep from losing one election. Pray he doesn't think of a fifth. — a remark that circulates in the Azantir markets, never to his face
The succession that everyone frets about is not the disease. It is the fever. No clear heir stands ready because no one follows an emperor who cannot win, and Veramus can no longer reliably win. Esmeraz, who runs the slave-markets and the treasury, argues openly that Gorath has outgrown the rule that only soldiers may wear the crown, and that coin, not another doomed campaign, should choose the next emperor. Veramus has a son, Corvel, a legate with a good name and no victory of his own. But Gorath elects generals, not heirs, and a father cannot will a man the one thing the office requires. Corvel will inherit his father's enemies and none of his father's office.
What gnaws at him in private is smaller and worse. His spymaster, Velisca, brought him proof some time ago that Kassander Volso, the Tribune of Slavewatch, is selling to both sides, taking the empire's coin to police the slave trade and the smugglers' coin to look away from it. Veramus believes the proof. He has done nothing with it. Volso's post is hereditary, his network is wired into the slave-revenue that pays the legions, and pulling down a Tribune now, with the throne already shaking, would tear open a seam the emperor cannot afford to open. So Veramus watches a man he knows is robbing him, and waits, and watches. It is the posture of his whole reign made small.
He is sixty-three. The election he cannot win is coming. Every front he opened to put it off is now a front he has to feed.