Kylmahn nodded. He suspected that Sir Bruhstair would have already sailed into Saram Bay and reduced it to rubble if he’d been allowed to. Unfortunately, Admiral Rohsail was clearly determined to protect what had become his primary forward base after the loss of Claw Island. Their most recent spy reports indicated that he had several score of the Dohlarans’ new “spar torpedoes,” and he’d placed batteries on every rock and islet—and on floating batteries with massive bulwarks reinforced with anchor chains and sandbags—to cover the bay’s entrances. The lieutenant knew Earl Sharpfield wasn’t especially concerned by the possibility that even the heaviest Dohlaran guns could penetrate his two ironclads’ armor, but he had a very lively concern over what might happen if the enemy managed to dismast one of them with spar torpedoes in the vicinity.
And the fact that Captain Haigyl damned nearly lost Dreadnought in that gale doesn’t help any, he reminded himself grimly.
There were those in the Imperial Charisian Navy—including himself, Kylmahn admitted—who were less than impressed by Captain Kahrltyn Haigyl’s abilities as a seaman, yet he’d done himself and his command proud last month. The storm had moved in far too quickly for anyone to seek shelter, especially when the nearest available harbor had been Claw Island itself, and more than one of the Charisians in Earl Sharpfield’s squadron had remembered the disastrous hurricane which had doomed Sir Gwylym Manthyr the last time a Charisian squadron entered the Gulf of Dohlar.
This one hadn’t been as bad as that one, according to the handful of officers who’d survived both, but it had been quite bad enough for Daivyn Kylmahn. Two of Sharpfield’s galleons had been lost. One had gone down with all hands, which meant no one knew exactly what had happened to her. The second had been driven ashore on Martyn’s Point, barely three hundred miles from Saram Bay, with the loss of eighty-three men, although her consorts had rescued the rest of her company before the Harchongians realized what had happened. A third galleon, so badly damaged she’d had to be towed back to Claw Island, had been effectively written off Earl Sharpfield’s effective strength. Unwilling to risk her at sea in her crippled state, he’d stripped her of her guns and turned her into an anchored receiving ship. One of the earl’s schooners had vanished at sea in the same storm, along with her entire crew, and another had lost every spar, although she’d survived.
Dreadnought had also survived, despite having found herself trapped in the gale’s direct path. She had, however, suffered heavy damage aloft, and her armored hull had strained badly. All her damage was repairable, and the service galleons Sharpfield had brought along for the purpose were confident they’d have her back in full commission shortly. In the meantime, however, the earl’s available strength had been severely reduced. He’d already dispatched five of his original unarmored galleons back to Chisholm, escorting his withdrawing transports to protect them against privateers, as his original orders had required. That had reduced his total galleon strength to twenty-eight, counting both ironclads. After the storm, he was down to only twenty-five, at least a half dozen of which had to be kept at Claw Island, and he had no intention of running any avoidable risk with his single remaining ironclad.
“I really hate to ask this, Sir—given how smoothly the landing seems to be proceeding, and all—but how soon do you think you’ll be able to hand matters over to Commander Makgrygair?”
“Not soon enough to make me happy,” Ahbaht said a bit sourly.
The captain, Kylmahn knew, had a lively respect for Commander Symyn Makgrygair, the officer Sharpfield had selected to command the base facilities on Rahzhyr Bay. He also liked and respected Major Qwentyn Ohmahly, who would command the Marine garrison. It was scarcely their fault that things were proceeding … less than smoothly, but Sir Bruhstair’s irritation was apparent.
“Actually,” Ahbaht said, stopping and peering up at the sodden masthead pendant, “I imagine we’ll have most of the Marines landed by evening. Another five-day or so to sway the guns ashore and land supplies. Then another five-day, say, to get the batteries emplaced and make sure the anchorage’s been properly surveyed. So I could probably make a fairly good case for turning command over to Makgrygair by the twelfth, let’s say.”
Kylmahn brightened slightly. That was better than he’d expected, and he wondered if Ahbaht’s own desire to be off and about was influencing the captain’s estimate. He dismissed the thought almost instantly. Sir Bruhstair Ahbaht wasn’t the sort to engage in wishful thinking, no matter how great the temptation.
The lieutenant pulled out his pocket watch and checked the time.
“With your permission, Sir,” he said, snapping the case closed, “I promised the Bo’sun I’d oversee that sail room survey this morning. I think he’s concerned about the storm sails after last month.”
“I find myself in rather strong agreement with him on that particular point,” Ahbaht said with a smile.
“Then I’ll be about it, Sir.”
Kylmahn touched his chest in salute and strode off briskly. Ahbaht watched him with an approving smile, then shrugged and resumed his pacing once again.
In all fairness, Kylmahn had a point—it wasn’t really going as badly as it seemed to him it was—and he strongly suspected that the real reason for his disgruntlement were the orders keeping him tethered here until the defensive batteries were in place, sighted in, and fully manned.
But once I can sign off on their readiness.…
His lips twitched in a hungry smile at the thought.
Sir Dahrand Rohsail, in Sir Bruhstair Ahbaht’s considered opinion, had entirely too good a grasp of his own responsibilities and his resources. Nothing he had could possibly stand up to Thunderer or Dreadnought in a ship-to-ship action. By the same token, any attempt to retake Claw Island could end only in disastrous defeat, and once Major Ohmahly’s batteries were in place, any attack on Talisman Island would be equally costly. But if Rohsail wasn’t stupid enough to match his own unarmored ships against heavy batteries, and if he couldn’t engage the ironclads at sea, nothing prevented him from engaging any other Charisian ship he encountered, and he’d already destroyed three of Sharpfield’s schooners. There were no reports of survivors from any of them, which might say something about Rohsail’s willingness to offer quarter. It might just as easily say something about the Charisian Imperial Navy’s unwillingness to ask for quarter from the Navy which had delivered Sir Gwylym Manthyr and his crews to the Inquisition. Ahbaht’s mental jury was still out on that point, but there was no denying that Rohsail’s ships’ companies were well drilled and tough. And unlike any other Safeholdian fleet, they respected the Charisian Navy’s reputation without being overawed by it. They were quite prepared to engage on anything remotely like equal terms, and that aggressiveness had severely hampered Earl Sharpfield’s operations against the Gulf of Dohlar’s merchant shipping.
Once Talisman was secured and ready to support the earl’s light cruisers, and once Dreadnought was returned to service, Ahbaht and Haigyl would take themselves off to Saram Bay to do a little something about that unhappy state of affairs. With Talisman to fall back on for supplies, fresh water, and shelter from bad weather, they should be able to maintain an effective blockade of the bay. For that matter, one of them might keep watch over Saram Bay while the other did the same for Jack’s Land. With any luck, they’d catch all or a substantial portion of Rohsail’s galleons in the harbor when they began patrolling the approaches. If the Dohlaran wanted to come out and fight, that would be fine with Ahbaht. And if he didn’t want to come out and fight, his ships could sit at anchor and rot while Sharpfield’s cruisers wreaked havoc on the commerce they were supposed to be protecting.
We’ll get the job done, one way or another, the captain promised himself. It may not be pretty, and it damned well won’t be as quick as we’d hoped it would, but we’ll get it done. And once the King Haarahlds are ready, that won’t be the only thing we get done, either.
.III.
The Temple, City of Zion, The
Temple Lands
“Archbishop Wyllym, Your Grace,” the Schuelerite under-priest murmured as he ushered Wyllym Rayno through the mystic sliding door of Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s office. The office walls’ ever-changing mirror of God’s handiwork showed a forest glade today, the straight white and gray trunks rising from a drift of ground mist as golden bars of sunlight shone down through holes in the canopy. Another golden streamer, from no discernible source, struck down to illuminate Clyntahn’s actual work space, distant birdsong and wyvern whistles came quietly, quietly from the forest, and every so often a nearbadger or some other small creature scurried through the hushed stillness of that woodland cathedral.
No one seemed to notice. The Grand Inquisitor only responded to the announcement with his customary grunt of acknowledgment and jabbed an index finger at the chair on the other side of his desk. The under-priest disappeared, the door closed once more behind him, and Rayno seated himself obediently, folded his hands in the sleeves of his cassock, and regarded his superior calmly.
“You wished to see me, Your Grace?”
“No, I damned well didn’t wish to see you,” Clyntahn growled. “There are a hell of a lot of other things I’d wish for before that! Unfortunately, what I wish and what I need are two different things at the moment.”
Rayno allowed himself a slight nod of acknowledgment. The Grand Inquisitor snorted, yet he seemed uncharacteristically loath to come to the reason he’d summoned the archbishop. He straightened a sheaf of notes on his desk, then adjusted the pen holder on his blotter, before he finally tipped back in his chair and regarded the Order of Schueler’s adjutant.
“I’m worried about Maigwair,” he said abruptly, and paused, obviously inviting a response.
“In what way, Your Grace?” Rayno asked obediently, and Clyntahn’s face tightened.
“He’s accepted that Wyrshym can’t retreat—for the moment, at least—but he’s one hell of a long way from being happy about it and I’m none too sure he won’t do what he can to get Wyrshym’s orders changed. Or even to quietly circumvent them, if he thinks he can get away with it! And he might just decide he could get away with it, because I doubt he’s the only member of the Army of God who feels that way, and he knows it. All any of them can see is the frigging battlefield. Not one of them seems to understand what’s really at stake here, not the way you and I do! For all I know, it might even make some sort of military sense to let Wyrshym retreat—assuming he could, under the circumstances, and I’m not so sure it would be possible in the first place!—but giving that ground would be disastrous for the cause of crushing the heresy in Siddarmark. What really matters beside accomplishing that?”
Rayno nodded, partly in sincere agreement and partly in understanding of the real cause of at least half of Clyntahn’s ire. Despite any effort on Inquisitor General Wylbyr’s part to put a good face on things, the Inquisition’s own internal reports all pointed to the extent to which the inquisitor general’s own inquisitors had allowed the rigor with which they approached the heretics in his holding camps to … erode. That was bad enough in the Grand Inquisitor’s view; the possibility that every unsifted heretic in one of those camps might be rescued by their fellow heretics was intolerable.
“You’d never guess from his deployments that that was important to Maigwair, though,” Clyntahn continued in a tone that was more than half a snarl. “He spends a lot of time talking about reinforcements and replacements, but he never seems to do anything with them! Just look at the way the Army of Tanshar’s sitting on its arse—and not because Bishop Militant Tayrens wants to be sitting there, either!”
Rayno’s expression never flickered, but his jaw clenched. Tayrens Teagmahn commanded the Army of Tanshar, the reserve army Allayn Maigwair had raised over the past fall and winter and drawn upon for the reinforcements sent forward to Cahnyr Kaitswyrth’s Army of Glacierheart. At the moment, it was located in the Princedom of Tanshar, from which it took its name, just over the Temple Lands border from the Episcopate of Klynair, where the relatively moderate climate had allowed the needed drill and training even in the heart of winter. Unfortunately, it had critically few rifles and field guns at the moment for the very good reason that Maigwair had stripped out its best trained and equipped formations to reinforce Kaitswyrth.
It was perhaps unfortunate that the Grand Inquisitor had never let his ignorance of the realities of finance or logistics get in the way of his demands for weapons and equipment. He deeply resented any niggling reality that thwarted his desires, and the fact that Teagmahn, like any good general, wanted his troops to be properly equipped only increased the Grand Inquisitor’s frustration. The bishop militant had submitted request after request to Allayn Maigwair and Rhobair Duchairn for the weapons to arm his entire command, and when they informed him that the weapons he wanted simply weren’t available, he hadn’t been shy about turning to his intendant, Auxiliary Bishop Rhobair Makswyl. Makswyl was as fervent an intendant as a man could wish for, and he’d passed every one of Teagmahn’s requests along to his own superiors, which had brought Clyntahn into repeated conflict with his fellow vicars even before Teagmahn was forced to disgorge Kaitswyrth’s reinforcements.
Normally, Rayno found his superior’s tendency to brush over the Jihad’s physical limitations one of the most frustrating aspects of serving him, but in this case he was even angrier than the Grand Inquisitor, if not for exactly the same reasons.
The Rayno family was powerful enough—and had sufficiently distinguished itself in Mother Church’s service—that Mother Church had set aside her customary policy of assigning senior priests or bishops to parishes and bishoprics outside the lands of their birth in the case of one Wyllym Rayno. That was how he came to be Archbishop of Chiang-wu … and it was also why he’d been bitterly opposed to rearming and—especially—retraining the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels. The last thing he wanted to see was an army of experienced, well-trained serfs returning to his family’s ancestral home polluted by all sorts of radical ideas picked up from other lands … and equipped with the military training to do something about them.
The Grand Inquisitor, unfortunately, saw only the monumental reliability of Harchong. He was delighted by the sledgehammer into which Allayn Maigwair and Rhobair Duchairn had transformed the Mighty Host, and Rayno knew better than to argue the point with him. Instead, he’d limited his opposition to quiet, covert efforts to undermine the Earl of Rainbow Waters while making certain any intendant assigned to the Mighty Host had the proper fire in his belly.
Still, he understood the point Clyntahn was making, and if it offered an opening.…
“Do you believe Vicar Allayn and Vicar Rhobair are deliberately starving Bishop Militant Tayrens of weapons, Your Grace?” he asked carefully.
“I believe Vicar Allayn is deliberately withholding as much of Teagmahn’s entire army from Siddarmark as he can get away with,” Clyntahn grated. Despite himself, Rayno felt his eyebrows rise slightly, and Clyntahn glowered at him. “Think about it, Wyllym. If Teagmahn had received forty or fifty thousand of the new rifles, Maigwair would have had an effective reserve sitting there in Tanshar instead of the miserable thirty thousand he came up with to send the Army of Glacierheart! He could’ve sent all of it across the Gulf of Tanshar and up the Fairmyn River to reinforce Kaitswyrth, or he could’ve sent Kaitswyrth the troops he’s actually getting and used the Dairnyth-Alyksberg Canal to send the rest of them south to hit that bastard Hanth in the rear. Either of those would put more pressure on the heretics and draw at least some weight off Wyrshym, wouldn’t it?”
“I see your point, Your Grace,” Rayno murmured.
The truth, of course, was that it would have accomplished nothing of the sort. An advance south might have compelled the heretic Hanth to abandon his steady, grim advance along the Sheryl-Seridahn, but it would never have diverted Greyghor Stohnar and Cayleb Ahrmahk’s unwavering determination to destroy Bahrnabai Wyrshym’s army once and for all. The Army of the Sylmahn was sim
ply too vulnerable, especially now, and Cayleb and Stohnar were resolved to liberate the Inquisition’s camps in northern Siddarmark at the earliest possible moment. However.…
“I see your point,” he repeated. “Unfortunately, you’re also correct that, at the moment, Bishop Militant Tayrens could accomplish very little simply because his men lack the arms to meet the heretics in battle. Perhaps it would be wiser to transfer at least some of the rifles and field pieces en route to Earl Rainbow Waters to the Bishop Militant, instead.” He shrugged. “I’m no military man myself, Your Grace. Nonetheless, it seems evident to me that there’s little point in raising and training an army if you then fail to arm it.”
“Exactly the point I’ve been making to Maigwair and that sniveling cretin Duchairn!” Clyntahn growled. “And I intend to go on making it, I assure you. But the truth is I’m actually more concerned about Bishop Militant Ruhsail. I have some nasty suspicions where he’s concerned.”
“I beg your pardon, Your Grace?”
Rayno cocked his head in genuine surprise. Bishop Militant Ruhsail Symmyns’ command, in winter quarters in the Episcopate of Schueler on the southeastern shore of Lake Pei, was far smaller than the Army of Tanshar. In fact, he commanded barely thirty thousand men, and he was one of the most ardent supporters of the Jihad Rayno could think of.
“Oh, I’m not concerned about Symmyns’ loyalty.” Clyntahn waved a beefy hand. “I’m a little less confident about some of his regimental and division commanders, though. His intendant’s reports seem to indicate all of them—even Symmyns, to some extent—are strongly in agreement with Maigwair’s desire to pull Wyrshym back. None of them are actively criticizing the decision not to withdraw the Army of the Sylmahn, but it strikes me that they have just a bit too much confidence in the ‘Captain General’ and his judgment.”