Hell's Foundations Quiver

  “We’re working on improving the shells’ reliability, as well,” Fultyn continued a bit fretfully, obviously unaware of the vicar’s thoughts. “The new fuses give more consistent detonation times, but simply coating the projectiles in lead doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped it would. Quite a few seem to strip out of the lead jackets on their way down the barrel, and they don’t do it uniformly. Some of the lead stays attached on one side or the other, which unbalances them badly, at which point they actually become less accurate than smoothbore shot. I’ve come up with a possible solution—well, actually, Brother Sylvestrai and I have—but I’m afraid it’s going to make them more expensive.”

  “Why?”

  Duchairn tried not to sound wary, but he knew he’d failed when Fultyn’s unfocused eyes narrowed and sharpened. There might even have been the slightest of twinkles in their brown depths, the Treasurer reflected.

  “The cost increase won’t be huge, Your Grace,” the Chihirite soothed. “In fact, it’ll cost less than the improvement Brother Sylvestrai originally suggested to me, although it will add an additional stage to shell manufacture.

  “I think we’re going to have to abandon my proposed lead jackets and go back to a variant of the heretics’ practices. I’d hoped the jackets would let us avoid those ‘gas checks’ of theirs, but it’s clear I was overly optimistic. We’ll have to cast our projectiles with the same grooved bases and fit them with a seal, after all, but Brother Sylvestrai suggested we could still dispense with the rifling studs the heretics rely on if we used a wrought-iron skirt or shoe the same diameter as the shell but stamped around its rim to take the rifling. I suppose you’d call it ‘pre-rifling,’ and his idea was to combine the seal and the rifling in a single shoe. I think he’s on the right track, but the additional wrought iron—though I suppose we could use steel, once it becomes available in quantity—would increase both cost and manufacturing time considerably. So I want to try using a more elastic material—bronze, probably—that expands when the propelling charge detonates. What I’m thinking is that bronze is tough enough it won’t deform and strip the way lead does, especially if it takes the total initial force of the powder charge and transfers it to the projectile, instead of the other way around. On the other hand, it’s enough softer than wrought iron that it should expand into the shallower rifling grooves we’re using without the need for the pre-rifling Brother Sylvestrai’s suggested or the heretics’ studded shell bodies. It should actually produce a tighter seal, as well, which ought to drive up muzzle velocity and give us somewhat better range. Either way, it should be simpler than producing studded shells, and considerably less expensive than using wrought iron.”

  “I see.” Duchairn frowned down into his stein, then shrugged. “I can’t say I’m in favor of spending any more than we have to, but I’ve noticed most of your innovations work out even better than expected. I’ll want to talk to Vicar Allayn about it, but if he agrees, the Treasury will just have to find the marks we need. And by the strangest coincidence,” the vicar smiled suddenly, “you and Brother Tahlbaht are saving enough on the new rifles that I just happen to have quite a store of unanticipated marks on the books.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, Your Grace,” Fultyn said slowly, “because I’m afraid I may’ve come up with yet another way to spend some of them, too.”

  “Oh?”

  Duchairn’s eyes narrowed—more speculatively than repressively—and Fultyn nodded.

  “Some of the alternatives my artisans have suggested as answers to the heretics’ portable angle-guns work, but none of them work as well as the angle-guns do. The spring-loaded catapult works best, but that’s not really saying a lot, to be honest. It’s badly outranged by the heretics’ weapons, and slower firing, to boot. On the other hand, it’s almost silent and there’s no smoke to give away its position when it fires. Vicar Allayn assures me those are important advantages, but I have to confess that none of our original answers come close to matching the performance of the heretics’ weapons.

  “The estimates of steel production you’ve just given me make me more optimistic about our ability to produce the same sorts of angle-guns, eventually at least. On the other hand, a thought occurred to me last five-day. There might be a way to provide an even greater capability for the kind of … indirect fire, for want of a better term, the heretics are using on our own men. Something closer to the capabilities of their regular artillery’s heavy angle-guns, but a lot more portable.”

  “How portable?”

  “Less so than the heretic infantry’s portable angle-guns, I suspect, Your Grace, but much, much more portable than most regular artillery pieces.”

  Duchairn frowned again, wishing Maigwair could have been present after all. The last time he’d spoken to the Captain General, Maigwair had waxed eloquent in his enthusiasm for the full-sized rifled angle-guns Fultyn had designed for the Army of God. Frankly, Duchairn doubted Fultyn’s initial efforts would match the performance of the heretics’ weapons, yet Maigwair obviously expected them to compensate for much of Church’s present inferiority. At the same time, it was unlikely more than a few score of the new weapons could be gotten to the armies in the field before the spring thaw, and even if they could, the heretics and their infantry angle-guns had delivered a pointed lesson in the advantages of mobility.

  “What do you have in mind, Brother Lynkyn?” he asked finally, and the Chihirite opened a desk drawer and extracted a circular disk of what looked like bronze. It was about four inches in diameter, Duchairn estimated, and perhaps a half inch thick, and pierced by a series of angled slots or holes.

  “This is part of one of the heretics’ rockets, Your Grace.” Fultyn laid it on his desktop and slid it across to Duchairn. “One of the Inquisition’s agents managed to … acquire specimens of two or three of their new devices, including a signaling rocket and one that’s probably what they used to illuminate Bishop Militant Cahnyr’s troops on the Daivyn River. I’m not certain about that, but the top portion of it was packed with some compound I didn’t recognize and fitted with a sort of folded parasol. I’ve experimented with it a little, and I think the parasol is what keeps the burning compound suspended as it drops down towards the ground, sort of like a dandelion seed.

  “There are several other interesting aspects of their design,” he continued in a very careful tone—one, Duchairn suspected, which was intended to make it very clear that while those aspects might be “interesting,” they weren’t “fascinating.” The latter was the sort of word the Inquisition found unacceptable when applied to the heretics’ demonically inspired devices.

  “What sort of aspects?” the vicar asked in an almost equally careful tone.

  “Well, I’ve wondered ever since I first heard about the heretics’ rockets how they obtained such uniform performance. Our own efforts to duplicate them have been much more unpredictable and erratic in flight. Some of them have actually come around in complete circles to land right back where they were launched from, in fact! Initially, I assumed that was because our gunpowder burns less consistently than theirs, which means it delivers its pushing power more unevenly, and I still believe that’s probably part of the problem. But when I started looking at this—” the Chihirite tapped the disk on his desk “—I realized that what it does is to … focus and direct the gasses spitting out of the back of the rocket. It shapes and regulates them, and I suspect the reason is to impart a spin to the entire rocket, the way rifling grooves spin and stabilize a bullet or an artillery shell. I’m virtually certain this is the main reason their rockets fly so much farther and so much straighter than ours do.”

  “And what exactly does that mean, Brother?” Duchairn picked up the disk and weighed it in his hand. It was heavy, although it still seemed preposterously light for something that could do what Fultyn had just described.

  “What that means, Your Grace, is that if I’m right, and if we can duplicate this, we can produce rockets of our own … and not just for signalin
g purposes. I understand how important signaling and illumination are, but what I’m thinking about would be an actual weapon in its own right. I’ve sketched out a design for a rocket that would be five inches in diameter. All of my calculations are very rough, of course, because I haven’t had an opportunity to actually try them, but if I’m right, we could put as much as ten pounds of powder into its head and fire it to as much as five or six thousand yards. Possibly even farther. They’d be two or three feet long, and they’d probably weigh somewhere around twenty-five or thirty pounds apiece, so an individual soldier couldn’t carry more than three or four of them, and each of them could only be used once. But I think the rocket bodies could be made out of wood, which would make them much cheaper than any artillery shell. I might be wrong about that, but even if we needed to make them out of iron, they’d still use less of it and require much less labor than any other artillery weapon we have.”

  “I see,” Duchairn murmured. “And how accurate would they be?”

  “Even if I’m right about what the holes in that do,” Fultyn replied, gesturing at the disk in Duchairn’s hand, “and we can produce rockets as stable in flight as the heretics’ are, they wouldn’t be what anyone might call precision weapons, Your Grace. As individual projectiles, they’d be considerably less accurate than the new angle-guns’ shells, for example. But they’d also be much more destructive, and we could produce a great many of them for the cost of a single angle-gun. That would let us use them in greater numbers, and if they were fired at a target in groups—twenty or thirty at a time, let’s say—they could blanket its position even if none of them individually was all that accurate. In fact, a little inaccuracy might actually help by giving us more dispersion to cover a wider area. And if their heads were loaded with shrapnel and equipped with reasonably reliable fuses, they could provide the same sorts of aerial bursts the heretics’ angle-guns are providing but over even larger areas. So if a few hundred of them were fired simultaneously and caught a heretic army in the open.…”

  The lay brother’s voice trailed off, and Duchairn tried not to shiver in a reaction which had nothing at all to do with the snow outside Fultyn’s office as he attempted to envision what the Chihirite had just described. His imagination was unequal to the task, and he discovered that he was just as happy it was.

  “I think I’ll definitely avail myself of Saint Kylmahn’s hospitality tonight, Brother Lynkyn,” he said after a moment, laying the bronze disk back on the desk. “This is clearly something Vicar Allayn and I will need to discuss, and obviously we need you to be part of the conversation.”

  “Of course, Your Grace,” Fultyn murmured, sliding the disk back into his drawer and closing it. There was something a bit odd about his voice, and when he looked up and his eyes met Duchairn’s, the vicar realized what that oddity was.

  He’s been thinking about this longer than I have. That means he’s probably come a lot closer to imagining what those rockets of his might be capable of … and he doesn’t like it one bit more than I do.

  It was strange, the Treasurer thought. The Inquisition would undoubtedly have all manner of reservations about Fultyn’s proposal, since its most important design feature was copied directly from yet another heretical device, but it wouldn’t matter. And the reason it wouldn’t matter was that the one man in Zion who definitely wouldn’t flinch from what the Chihirite was proposing—the one man who would positively exult in the slaughter it might produce, be its origins however heretical—was the head of that Inquisition.

  Oh, yes. Allayn and I won’t have any problem at all convincing Zhaspahr to endorse this one … no matter how many dispensations he has to issue.

  .XIII.

  Daivyn River, Twelve Miles East of Stantyn, Cliff Peak Province, Republic of Siddarmark

  The wind gusted down the long, frozen surface of the Daivyn River in a sullen roar of leafless branches, bitter enough to steal a statue’s breath.

  Well, that might be putting it a bit too strongly, Zhasyn Cahnyr conceded. The temperature was, after all, a mere four or five degrees below freezing, positively balmy after the last few five-days. But it was certainly more than cold enough to burn like an icy blade in the ancient lungs of an archbishop who’d seen more than seventy-five winters.

  Cahnyr rode at the center of a mounted bodyguard much larger than seemed necessary to him. Not that anyone was particularly interested in his opinion. Not after how close he’d come to getting himself killed the previous winter. All very well for him to point out how the situation had changed, how much more secure Glacierheart and the neighboring portions of Cliff Peak Province had become, and how the Temple Loyalist guerrillas had been driven into hiding or killed. No one intended to allow him, even for a single moment, to forget his previous lapse in judgment, and his keepers—“loyal subordinates,” he meant, of course—were none too shy about pointing out how enthusiastically the Inqusition’s Rakurais resorted to assassination. It had been all he could do to exert his paramount authority as God’s steward in Glacierheart and refuse to make the trip along the river’s ice in a snow lizard-drawn sleigh, wrapped to the nose in furs, blankets, and shawls and completely surrounded by a regiment or two of bodyguards.

  Which, he acknowledged very privately, might not have been so terrible an idea after all, deadly assassins or no deadly assassins. I can’t decide whether my arse is frozen to the saddle or simply frozen.

  He grimaced at the thought, although the expression was fortuitously hidden by the thick, triple-knitted Angora lizard wool muffler which swathed his face to the eyes. Sahmantha Gorjah had knitted that muffler for him, and she’d personally wrapped it around his neck and tucked its ends down inside his parka before letting him out of Tairys, escort or no escort. At least this time he’d been able to convince her to stay behind herself … even if it had required him to take unprincipled advantage of the fact that all four of her children had joined their parents over the summer … and that she was three months pregnant with her fifth. It would, he had pointed out, be the height of unwisdom for her to expose herself to the potential rigors of such a trip under those circumstances.

  It had, admittedly, been unscrupulous, but unscrupulous was fine with him, given the underhanded way all of them insisted on managing him. And he hadn’t exactly gotten off unsupervised, anyway. Her husband, Gharth, rode to his left and Brother Laimuyl Azkhat, a very skilled Pasqualate healer, rode directly behind him. Brother Laimuyl was more than thirty years younger than Cahnyr, but age was no more protection against the healer’s tyranny than the fact that he was a mere lay brother whereas Cahnyr was a consecrated archbishop who’d become the second ranking member of the Reformist Siddarmarkian episcopate.

  Personally, Cahnyr was of the somewhat grumpy opinion that the ruby ring on his left hand and the broad, dove-tailed orange ribbon at the back of his priest’s cap ought to have bought him at least a modicum of control over his own comings and goings.

  Oh, stop complaining! he scolded himself. It could be a lot worse, and you know it, you cantankerous old … gentleman.

  His lips quirked under the muffler as he remembered the way Byrk Raimahn had applied that noun to him the previous April. Sailys Trahskhat’s additional adjectives after the near-fatal ambush on the Green Cove Trace had been far more colorful … and, he allowed, no more than he’d richly deserved. So perhaps his subordinates weren’t being quite as unreasonable as it felt. And even if they were, it was no more of a penance than he deserved.

  He reminded himself of that rather firmly as the ridiculous cavalcade trotted briskly along the snowy tow road atop the riverbank, paced by the cargo sleighs on the river ice below them.

  * * *

  “You’d no need to come all this way in person, Your Eminence. I could’ve given you any report you needed by semaphore, or even messenger wyvern.”

  Somehow, Archbishop Zhasyn wasn’t surprised by Ahlyn Symkyn’s first sentence. He’d formed a tentative judgment of the stocky, gray-haired general after h
e’d been relieved as commander of the Charisian 3rd Division and passed through Tairys on his way to assume command of the Army of the Daivyn. Now that judgment was confirmed as the Chisholmian regarded him with exactly the same I-respect-you-but-you-shouldn’t-be-allowed-out-without-a-keeper glower Fraidmyn Tohmys, his valet of far too many years, had bestowed upon him when he announced his intention to visit the front.

  “Yes, my son,” he replied tranquilly. “I’m sure you could have. Unfortunately, I’ve always found it just a bit difficult to visit the sick and bless the dying by semaphore or messenger wyvern.”

  Symkyn’s cheeks colored ever so slightly, and he bent his head in acknowledgment. Cahnyr wasn’t deluded into believing the general’s contrition would last long, however. Best to take as much advantage as he could before it dissipated.