Unfortunately for all that unrealized potential, it belonged to Desnairians, whose scorn for seafarers—not to mention merchants, manufactory owners, and bankers—knew no bounds. Worse, perhaps, for all its imposing length, the Osalk-Sherkal barely met the Writ-defined minimum standards for a secondary canal, far less a primary canal, like the Holy Langhorne or the Guarnak-Ice Ash. Its largest locks were barely eighty feet long and twenty feet wide, its maximum depth was barely eight feet, and its tow paths were poorly laid out and maintained, totally unsuitable for the sort of heavy, sustained traffic the primary canals routinely handled.
It was just like Desnairians, he thought disgustedly, to do a half-arsed job on something which might have provided such an enormous benefit to their economy. The Osalk-Sherkal was quite adequate for the needs of Eastern Desnair’s serf-owning agrarian overlords, and those overlords weren’t concerned about meeting anyone else’s needs. The only real exception to that was the Duke of Shairn. In addition to the rich fisheries in the waters east of Shairn, the locks in the Varna and Shairn rivers offered the sole water transport link between Eastern and Western Desnair. Those locks weren’t up to the really heavy traffic of northern Haven, either, but they could handle much larger barges than the Osalk-Sherkal could. As a consequence, Shairnians were a less lubberly lot than Desnairians in general, which was undoubtedly the reason Duke Shairn had ended up running the Imperial Desnairian Navy.
Desnair’s misfortune had been Charis’ good fortune, however. The Osalk-Sherkal was virtually useless when it came to moving the quantities of timber, artillery, anchors, masts, and all the other paraphernalia which went into building ships of war. (Masts and spars were especially problematic, given their length, but they were scarcely the only bottleneck.) That, in turn, had split Desnair’s shipbuilding capacity up between the Acorn Bay yards at Desnair the City, the Malyktyn yards on Harless Bay, and Iythria on the Gulf of Jahras. (Why no navy yard had been built at Shairnport initially was an interesting question whose answer undoubtedly had something to do with typically convoluted internal Desnairian politics, but Zhaztro wasn’t about to complain about it.) Thanks in no small part to the ICN, the squadrons built in those widely separated yards had never managed to combine into a single unified force, and the systematic elimination of all shipbuilding capacity in the Gulf of Jahras had disposed of everything north of Malyktyn and Geyra.
Disposing of the threadbare remnants of the Imperial Desnairian Navy promised to be a somewhat more difficult task, however. The interconnected waterways of Geyra Bay, Harless Bay, Hathor Sound, and—courtesy of the Empress Alysahndra Canal, the one real (if short) canal east of the Desnairian Mountains—Acorn Bay were one enormous maze, its flanks riddled with potential hiding spots for galleons, galleys … and privateers. (Shairn Bay, three hundred miles farther south and without the same plethora of islands and coves, was a separate problem which would have to be settled later.) The twenty-odd miles of the Empress Alysahndra Canal were too shallow for blue-water galleons, but it was more than adequate for small coasters and privateer schooners. And, just to make Zhaztro’s task more interesting, the Desnairians had scattered dozens of pocket-sized building yards over the entire area to produce even more privateers.
Of course they have. Not even the Church could really interest Desnairian noblemen in building a navy, but privateers—! Ah, that’s different, isn’t it? After all, that’s a way for those same noblemen to make money without demeaning themselves by actually building up their own country or dirtying their hands with anything reeking of “trade.”
It was possible he was being unfair to the Empire’s aristocracy. Possible … but not damned likely.
At the moment, however, he and his squadron were about to begin divesting those privateer-building nobles of their assets. It was a long overdue task, and the fact that he got to start with Geyra was simply icing on his personal cake. Emperor Mahrys II, the current emperor’s great-grandfather, had decided to make the City of Geyra his winter capital eighty-two years before, when he married the grandmother of the current Duke of Harless. Zhaztro had visited both Geyra and Desnair the City during the winter in the service of Prince Nahrmahn, and he had to acknowledge that there’d been much to recommend Mahrys’ decision from the viewpoint of both architecture and climate. Many of his imperial advisors had been adamantly opposed to the move, mostly because of the huge increase in prestige and political power it had bestowed upon the House of Gahrnet. Desnair the City had been even more bitterly opposed, for obvious reasons, but at least the imperial court had been located in Geyra for only three months a year.
Mahrys IV, however, had been raised in Geyra, not Desnair the City. His mother, the daughter of the previous Duke of Traykhos, had been the first cousin of Sir Ahlvyn Gahrnet, and she’d spent much of her own girlhood in Geyra. Not only that, she’d detested Desnair the City for a host of reasons, and she’d instilled the same feelings into her son. Emperor Mahrys vastly preferred his hometown to the official capital, and he spent no more than two or—at most, kicking and screaming the entire time—three months a year in Desnair the City. There were those who argued—very quietly and privately; they preferred their heads where they were—that Mahrys’ preference for Geyra had directly contributed to the disaster the Army of Shiloh had suffered, since the present Duke of Traykhos, his maternal uncle, was his first councilor and he and Traykhos between them had selected their mutual cousin Sir Ahlvyn, the recently deceased Duke of Harless, to command the Emperor’s armed forces in Siddarmark.
That move, unfortunately, had worked out poorly for a great many people, not all of them Desnairian. Now it was time to make the Empire of Charis’ displeasure with such ill-considered decisions clear, and Sir Hainz Zhaztro had been chosen to deliver the message.
I do hope His Majesty’s in residence to receive it personally, he thought cheerfully. I’m pretty sure he won’t like it. And I doubt the new duke’s going to be any happier with Charis than the old one was, for that matter. Pity about that.
The double-glass showed flickers of movement along the city walls and along the batteries built to cover the Geyra waterfront. His ships were still too far away for him to make out any detail, even through the double-glass, but that was fine. His targets weren’t going anywhere.
He swung away from the city, making a quick but thorough survey of the rest of his command. Geyra Bay stretched over three hundred miles from east to west and was almost a hundred and twenty miles deep along its north-to-south axis. That offered plenty of scope for naval maneuvers, and his schooners and supporting galleons—and the trio of bombardment ships—lay hove-to like a vast, untidy gaggle of sea wyverns a good ten miles southeast of his abbreviated line of ironclads. They were waiting, handy if he needed them but safely out of harm’s way in the meantime, and he nodded in satisfaction.
“We’re coming up on the designated range, Sir Hainz,” Lieutenant Ahdym Stormynt, his flag lieutenant, reminded him tactfully, and he snorted.
“Always a good thing to remember,” he acknowledged, dropping the double-glass to hang from the strap around his neck. He dug into his tunic pocket for the earplugs and fitted them into place. He didn’t like the sound-deadening effect, but he liked the thought of what Eraystor’s heavy guns would do to his hearing without them even less.
Once they were settled as comfortably as possible, he raised the double-glass once more, gazing at his intended target and licking his mental chops.
* * *
Sir Haimltahn Rahdgyrz stood atop Duke Wahlys’ Tower, feeling the ache in his neck as he bent over to peer through the powerful, tripod-mounted spyglass at the quartet of black, evil-looking vessels forging steadily closer to Geyra. The smoke streaming from them amply confirmed their heretical—and no doubt demonic—origins, yet other than that they didn’t seem to match the descriptions he’d received. He couldn’t tell anything about dimensions at this range, but the reports from Siddarmark all agreed that the ironclads looked like floating barn roofs with
conventional gunports cut into their sides and paired smokestacks. These ships had definite superstructures, set back at least a few feet from the outer edge of the hull at deck level, and only a single smokestack each. Not only that, they had no gunports at all. Instead, the deckhouse which extended for three quarters of their length had … scalloped-looking sides. The black feelers of preposterously long guns projected from the scallops, and his mouth tightened as he abruptly realized what he was seeing.
He had no idea how anyone could load such ridiculously long weapons from the muzzle, but if the rumors about the heretics’ new rifles—their newest rifles, he corrected himself grimly—were correct, he supposed there was no reason they couldn’t load cannons from the breech end, as well. And the angled superstructure was shaped almost like a pair of triangles placed base-to-base while the gun barrels sticking out of those “scallops” disappeared into what appeared to be solid, rounded … shields, for want of a better word. If it was possible for them to be trained from side to side—and it certainly looked as if it was—then all of the guns on either side could be fired in a single broadside and half the guns on either side could be fired at a target which lay well ahead or astern of the ship.
And there were a lot of guns poking out the sides of those ships.
He straightened, rubbing the small of his back, and glanced at the youthful IDA lieutenant standing beside him. Sir Rhobair Gahrnet, the new and youthful Duke of Harless, had reconfirmed Rahdgyrz as the duchy’s seneschal. As such, all Army units in Harless came under his control, and the present duke’s father had chosen Sir Haimltahn for his duty less because of his distant kinship to the House of Gahrnet than because he’d known Rahdgyrz took his responsibilities seriously. A direct Charisian attack on Geyra or Desnair the City hadn’t seemed very likely until the Empire began building and basing so many privateers and Navy commerce-raiders along the coast between there and Desnair the City, but Rahdgyrz believed in being prepared. Desnair the City’s defenses hadn’t been his responsibility, but he’d worked hard for over four years to improve Geyra’s coastal batteries and train their gunners.
To be honest, those gunners hadn’t been very good in the beginning. The heretics were said to be able to fire three broadsides in two minutes, and that was twice the rate of fire the Geyra artillerists had been able to attain. That was no longer the case, however, and the twenty-five-pounders and even heavier forty-pounders were lavishly supplied with exploding shells. And while there might be a lot of guns aboard the approaching ironclads, there were better than four hundred in Rahdgyrz’s eighteen carefully sited defensive batteries, and all of those guns were on solid, steady, unmoving mounts. There was a reason warships had historically avoided well-sited land batteries, and while it was possible the heretics’ introduction of armor plating might have changed that, it was unlikely it could have changed the balance between shore and ship enough. Especially given how much more powerful the forty-pounder was than anything they’d faced in any of their operations in Siddarmark. It had almost three times the range of the Army’s twelve-pounder field guns, threw a solid shot more than three times as heavy, and would penetrate over four feet of solid oak at a thousand yards.
He was tempted to open fire as soon as they approached within four thousand yards—at five degrees’ elevation, the forty-pounders reached to two thousand yards, but his gunners were well practiced at using ricochet fire to reach twice that far—yet he made himself suppress the temptation. Each bounding contact with the water would reduce the round shot’s velocity and striking power, and he was going to need as much of that as he could get to deal with an armored target. Given the deep, soft earth berms of his batteries, his guns should be better protected than the ironclads, and—
* * *
“Six thousand yards, Sir Hainz,” Lieutenant Stormynt said.
“Very well.” Zhaztro stepped back and around the solid horseshoe of armor which protected Eraystor’s conning tower. “Captain Cahnyrs, you may open fire,” he said formally.
“Aye, aye, Sir. Lieutenant Gregori, open fire!”
“Aye, aye, Sir!”
HMS Eraystor’s fifteen-hundred-ton bulk heaved as she belched a huge bubble of fire that sent eleven six-inch shells sizzling across the water at twice the speed of sound—a far, far higher velocity than any Desnairian would have believed possible.
* * *
Rahdgyrz stiffened in disbelief as the lead ironclad vanished into a vast, dense, brown cloud of smoke. What in Shan-wei’s name could the heretics think they were doing opening fire at that range?! They had to be three and a half miles from their target! Surely they couldn’t—
The other three ironclads belched fire and smoke, and then the first of the heretics’ shells came screaming out of the sky ahead of the noise of their own passage. There was no rumble, no warning sound. One instant, Rahdgyrz was staring at the cloud of smoke, trying to understand what had happened. Six and a half seconds later the sixty-eight-pound shells reached their targets and the seneschal stumbled three steps backward in simple, unadulterated shock as they exploded.
The range was long, even for Charisian gunners equipped with the first axial telescopic sights ever affixed to Safeholdian artillery. And, for all their advantages over the defenders, the ironclads’ artillery and ammunition only began to approximate the weapons of the last decade or so of Old Earth’s nineteenth century. Pinpoint accuracy was beyond them, especially with each gun crew firing individually, relying upon its gun captain’s judgment of the ship’s roll.
Despite that, only two rounds went long. Three more slammed into the water short of the battery and exploded, throwing up huge mud-tinged columns of white, but the other six found their target.
* * *
Sir Haimltahn Rahdgyrz was over two miles away from the point of impact as the heretics’ fire smashed into the St. Gwythmyn battery, but his eyes went huge as the pattern of volcanoes erupted. He’d seen the explosion of his own forty-pounder shells, but that was nothing compared to these! Most of them were absorbed by the protective earthen berm, yet that was scant comfort, given the vast craters they ripped out of it. Two of them, though, cleared the berm and landed among the battery’s guns. Rahdgyrz groped for the spyglass—not because he wanted to see the carnage those two hits had wreaked, but because he needed to—and then, just under ten seconds behind the shells, came the rolling thunder of the guns which had fired them.
* * *
Riverbend, Cherayth, and Bayport opened fire as well, and Admiral Zhaztro bared his teeth in satisfaction. Even with the earplugs, the bellow of Eraystor’s guns was like being clubbed across the head, and the enormous banks of smoke turned the bright afternoon into twilight before the brisk breeze cleared them, but what was happening where those shells landed was far, far worse, and he knew it.
On the gundeck, behind the four-inch armor, the massive guns recoiled, but only for about four feet. Smoke swirled inboard, yet there was far less of it than the choking clouds of smoke which had filled Delthak’s gundeck whenever she fired her thirty-pounders. The guns returned to battery, the breech blocks spun and opened, soaked swabs extinguished any embers, fresh shells and bagged powder charges slid into the breeches, the blocks closed, and each gun captain bent back to the sight mounted to the recoil cylinder. Crewmen bent over the big brass traversing handles, following the captains’ hand signals as they compensated for Eraystor’s forward movement through the water.
“Clear!” the gun captain shouted, simultaneously waving his right arm in the signal to clear the mount’s recoil path. His Number Two checked visually to be sure the rest of the crew had obeyed the signal, then slapped him on the shoulder in confirmation. The captain waited an instant longer, peering through the sight, waiting for the roll to be exactly right. Then he straightened and jerked the firing lanyard.
The gun roared and recoiled, the deck surged underfoot, and the deadly ballet began yet again.
* * *
“Sir Haimltahn!”
&nb
sp; It was the Army lieutenant, and Rahdgyrz turned like a man in a nightmare to face him. The other three ironclads’ broadsides had arrived, each of them seeking out a separate defensive battery. The pattern of their shells’ explosions didn’t seem quite as tight as for the first ironclad, but the explosions echoed and roared, and the heretics were firing not simply from an impossible range and with impossible accuracy, but with equally impossible speed.
“What are your orders, Sir?!” the lieutenant asked urgently, and Sir Haimltahn Rahdgyrz stared at him, wondering what order he could possibly give in the face of such unmitigated disaster.
* * *
Hainz Zhaztro watched those savage explosions, remembered the day when the corrupt butchers who’d seized control of Mother Church had sent his flagship and seventy other Emeraldian galleys into the nightmare cauldron of the Battle of Darcos Sound. His flag captain—his younger brother, Ahntahn—had died that day, along with more than two hundred and thirty of the galley Arbalest’s seven-hundred-man crew. He and Arbalest’s fourth lieutenant, her senior—and only—surviving officer, had somehow sailed that shattered wreck seven hundred miles home to the city his current flagship was named for … and once they reached it, despite all they could do, she’d slowly settled to the bottom, too exhausted to fight any longer after the bitter struggle to bring her surviving people home.