“Sister Klairah didn’t recruit me simply because I wanted Mother Church to be what she’s charged by God to be, Merlin. Many of the Sisters—most of them, really—have been called over the years for the same reason so many of my classmates were sent to Saint Ahnzhelyk’s: because they were rebels. Because they had not simply the faith or the skills the Sisterhood needed, but because they had the fire, the need to do something with that rebellion—that touch of the anshinritsumei that comes down to us from Saint Kohdy. And in my case,” her smile turned almost impish, “there was even more of that fire than I think Sister Klairah realized. I’m afraid I was never the most … dutiful of daughters, whether of my father or of Mother Church. And then, too,” the smile vanished, “I had the example of my own father and of what was happening inside the vicarate.
“I knew better than most what had really happened to Saint Evyrahard, and I’d come to the conclusion there was precious little chance of the vicarate’s ever reforming itself. The rot was too deep, the momentum building too steadily, for that to happen. Not without a little … push, at least. Which is why I became what I became. Oh, I’ll freely admit I took a certain pleasure out of outraging my father and his family connections, especially since he couldn’t openly object without admitting he was my father. But I also knew no one could possibly be in a better position to acquire the sort of … leverage that might inspire better behavior out of the worst of vicars than a courtesan—and later a madame—serving the most rarified heights of the episcopacy.
“Then I became aware of what Samyl and Hauwerd Wylsynn were trying to accomplish.” She shook her head sadly, eyes darkening once more. “At first, I avoided them, since the last thing I wanted was for any of the vicars to see me coming and I was afraid an association with the Wylsynn family might come to light. But then it looked as if Samyl had a genuine chance of becoming Grand Inquisitor, and he was such a good man, and Adorai was already part of his circle. So I made myself a member as well, but only as myself, without ever acknowledging the Sisterhood’s existence to anyone, even Adorai. Only he lost the election—almost certainly because Rayno manipulated the vote, though I could never prove that—and you know what happened from there.”
She fell silent, and Merlin stood for several minutes, considering all she’d said.
“I assume the Sisterhood’s secret investments explain where Ahnzhelyk Phonda found the capital she used to build that empire of hers in Zion? And the one here in Siddarmark, as well?” he asked then.
“You assume correctly,” she acknowledged. “Except that the initial investments in Siddarmark are much older than I am. The Sisterhood’s managed its portfolio well over the centuries, and until very recently its core expenses have been quite low. We’ve been active in charitable work for a long, long time, although we’ve had to be very careful about how we funded them without anyone’s noticing us. The experience we gained in doing that for several hundred years was very useful when we started funding more … proactive endeavors.”
“And your current Mother Abbess doesn’t object to your more … secular activities, shall we say?” he asked, and she chuckled throatily.
“I’m afraid you don’t quite have it straight yet,” she told him. “The Sisters don’t have a Mother Abbess anymore. We have a Mother Superior. She’s the one who determines what the Sisters as a whole do in the world, and, no, she doesn’t object to my ‘more secular activities,’ as you put it. That would be rather difficult for her to do, actually … since for the last twenty years or so, I’ve been the Mother Superior.”
* * *
“Trust me,” Merlin Athrawes told the senior members of the inner circle as his attention returned to the com conversation. “Domynyk never said a truer thing in his entire life. Whatever else we may do, we don’t want to turn this woman into our enemy.”
.III.
HMS Chihiro, 50, Gorath Bay, Kingdom of Dohlar, and HMS Destroyer, 54, Tellesberg, Kingdom of Old Charis, Empire of Charis
“Is that confirmed, My Lord?”
Commander Ahlvyn Khapahr sounded very much as if he hoped it wasn’t, and Lywys Gardynyr, the Earl of Thirsk and the Kingdom of Dohlar’s senior fleet commander, didn’t blame him one bit.
“I’m afraid it is,” he told the man who would have been called his chief of staff in Charisian service, and saw Khapahr’s face tighten. He glanced around his day cabin and saw much the same reaction out of everyone else, as well.
Not surprisingly.
He pushed back his chair, rose, and crossed to the open quarter windows, looking out across the waters of Gorath Bay at the golden stone walls of the city of Gorath with his hands clasped behind his back. The late-afternoon sun hung barely above the western horizon, its rays slanting across the battlements and parapets, painting them with a deeper, more lustrous gold, and the kingdom’s banners flew bravely above them.
Gorath Bay’s temperature seldom fell below freezing, yet it could be bitterly cold in winter, especially for anyone out on its waters. The bay’s cold snaps, with their raw, biting chill, might last for five-days, despite its southern location. That was what had caused so much sickness among Gwylym Manthyr’s half-starved, half-naked crews when they were confined in the prison hulks.
Oh, yes, Thirsk thought. The bay can be cruel, especially when human spite sees a chance to make it worse.
His jaw tightened as he remembered that winter, remembered his shame and the way the Inquisition had countermanded his orders to provide his prisoners—his prisoners—with food and healers. That wind-polished sheet of pitiless winter water danced before his eyes again, and he felt the helplessness he’d felt then. Oh, how he’d hated Gorath Bay throughout that cold, bitter winter.
But not today. He squared his shoulders and drew a deep breath, forcing himself to step back from the familiar rage, and looked out at the capital of his kingdom.
Although it was the middle of winter, the breeze whipping across the bay today was little worse than chilly, cold but not cutting, and the darkening sky was cloudless for the first time in several days. People in the city were enjoying the last minutes of that sunlight, he thought, possibly doing a little shopping as they hurried home. And the painters were probably out along the Gorath River with their easels, catching that golden light across the river that flowed through the heart of the city as the sun gilded the Cathedral’s scepters. He wondered how many of those people had heard the news? If they hadn’t heard yet, they would soon enough, even if Duke Salthar and Bishop Executor Wylsynn attempted to conceal it. That would be not only futile but particularly stupid, in Thirsk’s opinion, yet he’d seen ample examples of Wylsynn Lainyr’s doing equally stupid things. Salthar was probably smart enough to argue against it, but in this case Thirsk could count on his own service superior, Duke Thorast, to support any effort to hide the truth for as long as he possibly could.
Although not, of course, for all the same reasons as Lainyr.
“Do we know how it happened, My Lord?” Stywyrt Baiket, Chihiro’s CO and Thirsk’s flag captain, asked quietly. “I mean, they had over two hundred thousand men and Eastshare had less than twenty thousand!”
“The dispatches are less than detailed,” the earl replied, never looking away from the harbor’s soothing panorama. “Messages tend to be that way when people have to send them by wyvern, and the semaphore line was cut early in the Charisian attack. One thing they do make clear, however, is that the real threat didn’t come out of Fort Tairys. It wasn’t Eastshare; they got an entirely separate force down through eastern Cliff Peak past the Desnairian cavalry at Cheyvair. One big enough to block—and hold—the high road through the Kyplyngyr Forest.” He shrugged heavily. “According to the message I’ve seen”—he didn’t mention that he wasn’t supposed to have seen it … and wouldn’t have, if not for Bishop Staiphan Maik—“Ahlverez did his damnedest to fight his way through them. His attacks obviously hurt the Charisians badly, but they pretty much gutted our part of the army in the process, so Harless fina
lly agreed to pull the majority of his own infantry back from Ohadlyn’s Gap for a second attempt to clear the high road. That’s when Eastshare attacked out of Fort Tairys, and with one hell of a lot more than twenty thousand men.”
He gazed out over the harbor for another moment, then turned on his heel to face his subordinates.
“My best guess, reading between the lines, is that the Charisians and Siddarmarkians must’ve had a lot closer to seventy thousand men, probably more, and too many of the Desnairians were cavalry. Even an admiral knows that’s not the sort of troops equipped or trained to take on entrenched infantry in the damned woods, and the Army of Shiloh was half starved and riddled with sickness. I doubt Ahlverez and Harless between them could actually have put much over half their official strength into the field. And let’s face it—a fight with the Imperial Charisian Army at anything like equal numerical odds is a losing proposition.”
Sir Ahbail Bahrdailahn, Thirsk’s flag lieutenant, looked uneasy at that remark. Not because he disagreed, but because that sort of frankness could be dangerous. Thirsk knew that, but if he couldn’t trust these men there was no one on the face of Safehold he could trust. If one of them was prepared to inform the Inquisition that he was preaching defeatism when he shared the truth with them, there was no point even trying to stem the disaster he saw flowing towards his kingdom like some vast, dark tide.
“Do we have any idea of how severe our losses have been?” Baiket asked somberly, and Thirsk grimaced.
“Not really. Or if anybody does have an estimate, it hasn’t been shared with me. I do know Hanth inflicted heavy casualties on the Army of the Seridahn when he attacked out of Thesmar, though.”
The flag captain’s eyes flickered at that, and Thirsk didn’t blame him. Officially, Sir Fahstyr Rychtyr’s command had been renamed solely as an honor, in perhaps belated recognition of the importance to the Jihad and the Kingdom of its accomplishments. But only an idiot—which Baiket was not—could have failed to note Mother Church’s tendency to rename armies in what certainly looked like efforts to stiffen their morale in the face of unmitigated disaster. And that, the earl thought, did not bode well.
“The heretics’ve driven General Rychtyr almost all the way back to Evyrtyn,” he continued. “I don’t know what his losses were at Cheryk and Trevyr, but it doesn’t sound good. And Ahlverez is probably going to lose a lot of whatever he managed to pull out of the Kyplyngyr. I don’t see how anyone could’ve gotten a message to him yet to warn him Rychtyr’s lost Cheryk, much less Trevyr, so he’s probably marching straight towards Hanth right this minute. And we’ve lost touch with everything east of Syrk on the Saint Alyk, as well.” He shook his head and puffed out his cheeks. “Frankly, I’ll be astonished if we get as much as a third of Ahlverez’s troops back, and I wouldn’t count on any of his artillery making it out.”
The only sound was wind and wave as his subordinates looked at one another in dismay. Clearly the rumor mill had yet to catch up with how bad it truly was. Probably, he thought dryly, because the gossip mongers couldn’t believe even a Desnairian could truly have proved as inept as the late and—in Dohlar, at any rate—very unlamented Duke of Harless.
“The good news—or as good as it gets, anyway—is that about a third of the riflemen headed up to reinforce Rychtyr are equipped with the new Saint Kylmahns,” he wondered if his subordinates found that name as ironic as he did, given who’d actually designed the new rifle, “so at least they’ll have breechloaders of their own. And if he can hang on for another few five-days, he’ll have at least a couple of batteries of the new rifled angle-guns, too. Combined with the weather and his entrenchments, he ought to be able to hold his position fairly well. Certainly against anything Hanth can throw at him.”
The others nodded, as if he’d just said something hopeful, and he bit his tongue against an unworthy temptation to point out that the Army of Shiloh’s disaster had revealed that unlike the Republic of Siddarmark Army or the Earl of Hanth’s force of Marines and seamen, the Imperial Charisian Army was amply provided with the sort of cavalry—and highly mobile, new model field artillery—needed to work around a fortified position and cut the canal in its rear. Once the forces no doubt pursuing Ahlverez at this very moment reached Evyrtyn, Rychtyr was going to find himself in an even more unenviable position than the rolling disaster which had enveloped the Army of Shiloh. Unless, of course, he had both the wit and the intestinal fortitude to fall back along the Sheryl-Seridahn Canal faster than they could cut it behind him.
From what he knew of Rychtyr, he certainly had the wit, and he might well have the moral courage. Unfortunately, he might not have it, either. And even if he did, that was the sort of decision which could have fatal consequences. Lywys Gardynyr had had a little personal experience of his own in that regard, and the Inquisition had grown even less patient with faint-heartedness in the service of Mother Church over the last few years.
“Sir Rainos always was a bit … heedless, My Lord,” Baiket said. “You might say that runs in the family.”
Thirsk’s lips quirked in a sour smile at his flag captain’s none too oblique reference to Rainos Ahlverez’s cousin, Sir Faidel Ahlverez, the deceased Duke of Malikai. Malikai had also been a cousin by marriage of Aibram Zaivyair, the Duke of Thorast, who—like Ahlverez—held Thirsk personally responsible for Malikai’s disastrous defeat off Armageddon Reef. It wasn’t hard to follow Baiket’s logic, and the truth was that much as Thirsk regretted what had happened to the Army of Shiloh, he was far from blind to the way in which any damage to Ahlverez’s reputation and standing had to reflect upon the men who’d made themselves his patrons. And anything that weakened Thorast’s grip on the Navy had to be a good thing from Lywys Gardynyr’s perspective.
“I think we can all agree Sir Rainos was … overconfident before he set out for Alyksberg,” he said out loud. “And if I’m going to be honest, I suppose I should admit the thought of his coming a cropper personally doesn’t fill my heart with dismay,” he added with a generous thousand percent understatement. “But I’ve read some of the dispatches he sent home to Duke Fern and Duke Salthar. On that basis, I have to say that however overconfident he may’ve been before Alyksberg, he did his damnedest to prevent most of Duke Harless’ … questionable decisions, shall we say.”
He decided not to mention the letters he’d received from Shulmyn Rahdgyrz, the Baron of Tymplahr. He hoped his old friend was still alive somewhere out there in the muddy, bloody wilderness of the South March, but according to Tymplahr, Sir Rainos Ahlverez had turned out to be remarkably unlike certain of his kinsmen. He’d actually learned from experience.
“Whatever part Sir Rainos may have played in bringing all this about, what’s happened to his army’s far too serious for me to take any satisfaction from how it may have damaged his reputation,” he went on more soberly. “And not just because of the human cost. He had over half the Army’s total field strength under his command, Stywyrt. That’s probably entirely gone, for all practical purposes. Even if we get some of the regiments back, they’ll have to be completely brought back up to strength, reorganized, and—undoubtedly—reequipped before they can possibly be effective fighting units again. And where do you think they’re going to look for the manpower—and the weapons—for that?”
Baiket’s blue eyes darkened and he nodded soberly. The Navy had been reduced to a much smaller slice of the kingdom’s available resources in order to equip and field the army the Temple had demanded be launched into Siddarmark. Now that so much of that army had been destroyed and the threat of an enemy counterattack across Dohlar’s eastern frontiers had become real, the Navy was only too likely to find itself on even shorter rations.
“My Lord,” Khapahr said carefully, “they can’t reduce our priorities too much. Not on the new projects, especially.”
“They may decide they don’t have any choice,” Thirsk disagreed grimly. “When there’s a slash lizard breaking down your front door, the great dragon raiding yo
ur neighbor’s pasture has to take second priority, don’t you think?”
“My Lord, the Charisians aren’t loose in our neighbor’s pasture; they’re loose in our pasture, or they damned well will be soon enough. The Harchongians’re going to be hit hard enough if they start sending raiding forces into the western Gulf again, but surely the Army has to understand the consequences if we lose control of the eastern Gulf!”
Thirsk nodded unhappily. His reports on the new armored galleons the Charisians had used to retake Claw Island were far short of complete. Out of Admiral Krahl’s entire garrison, less than a dozen men—the most senior an army lieutenant—had escaped the debacle by commandeering a sixteen-foot sailing dinghy, somehow evading the Charisian pickets, and crossing the six hundred and seventy miles of stormy salt water between Claw Island and the Harchongese province of Kyznetzov.
In the winter … in an open boat … without a single trained naval officer to get them through it.
He was astounded they’d survived and profoundly grateful for what little they’d been able to report, but it would have been ever so much more useful if one of the naval officers had gotten away. All the actual escapees had been able to tell anyone was that at least two of the Charisian galleons had been invulnerable to the defending artillery. Obviously, they must have been armored, like the “smoking ships” the Charisians had sent rampaging through the canals and rivers in Bishop Militant Bahrnabai’s rear last summer. The good news was that they’d been galleons, propelled by the masts and sails he understood, not whatever deviltry the river ironclads used. But to offset that smidgeon of sunlight, the artillery they’d ignored had been naval guns equipped to fire not only explosive shells but red-hot round shot—heavy round shot, not the lighter projectiles of the field artillery which had failed to stop the ironclads along the canals.