The little speck of fire moved up the fuse in a thin plume of smoke, burning its steady way towards its rendezvous with the ironclad’s magazine.
Just my luck the damned fuse’ll go out.
He considered climbing back aboard, ordering Sahlahmn to stand off while he made certain the fuse reached its destination. Unfortunately, he doubted that was an order the coxswain would obey, and Kylmahn was even more problematic.
Besides, Muhlkayhe knows his business, he told himself, and he knows how important this is. That’s why he laid five separate fuses.
Ahbaht lingered just long enough to see the climbing eye of fire reach the junction point of those five fuses and go hissing along each of them. One of them was certain to reach the magazine, he told himself, and dropped down into the waiting boat.
“All right, Ahgustahs.” His voice was harsh, angry, although he was confident Sahlahmn knew that anger wasn’t directed at him. “Get us away.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Sahlahmn said quietly, then raised his voice. “You heard the Admiral, boys. Put your backs into it!”
The oarsmen knew where those fuses were headed and needed very little encouragement. The oar blades dug deep and the cutter went scooting towards one of the waiting schooners.
Sir Bruhstair Ahbaht sat facing aft, watching his magnificent ironclad as she lay forlorn and abandoned behind her fleeing crew and five fiery worms ate their way into her belly.
* * *
“It is the ironclad, by Langhorne!” Captain Tymythy Snelyng muttered to himself in disbelief. HMS Lance was close enough to Shingle Shoal for him to be certain of that now, however impossible it might seem. And the heretics had clearly abandoned the ship, which meant—
“They must’ve set a fuse, Sir.”
Snelyng looked over his shoulder at Ahldahs Zhaksyn, Lance’s gunner. Zhaksyn was at least twice Snelyng’s age, but he also held a warrant rather than a king’s commission, which meant he would never command a ship of the Royal Dohlaran Navy. That didn’t mean his brain wasn’t just as keen as the next man’s, however, and Snelyng fully realized how valuable a resource Zhaksyn and his experience were.
And he wasn’t saying anything Snelyng hadn’t already deduced for himself. On the other hand.…
“But how long a fuse?” he said. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Too damn short for what you’re thinking, Sir,” Zhaksyn said bluntly. “They’d be keeping closer to her, elsewise.”
Snelyng knew the gunner was almost certainly correct. The grounded Charisian vessel was still at least two thousand yards distant, and the closest enemy schooner was a thousand yards farther away from it than Lance, on the far side of the shoal. In fact, the entire heretic squadron was headed up the Egg Drop Passage directly away from the ironclad. Snelyng very much doubted they’d have been doing anything of the sort if they’d thought there was a single chance in Shan-wei’s hell that anyone could get boarders onto the ship before the fuse undoubtedly burning in her magazine blew her to perdition. Heretics or no, no one who’d been at the Battle of the Harchong Narrows—or who’d seen the state of the ships who’d fought there afterward—would ever make the mistake of doubting Charisian courage, and the Charisians had to be even better aware than Snelyng of how vital a prize one of their ironclads would prove.
There was no question what a Charisian captain would have done before abandoning a ship like that. Unfortunately, there was no question in Tymythy Snelyng’s mind about what he had to do anyway.
“Hold your course,” he said to the helmsman, and looked at Lieutenant Seevyrs, his first officer. “Drop the gig. I want a volunteer crew—real volunteers, Alyk, and make sure they understand what they’re volunteering for.”
* * *
“They’re dropping a boat, Sir,” Daivyn Kylmahn said quietly, lowering his double-glass and looking at Ahbaht.
“Gutsy bastards,” Ahbaht muttered with a bitter scowl far removed from his normal expression. Then he raised his voice. “Captain Cupyr!”
“Yes, Sir?”
Lieutenant Commander Aizak Cupyr, HMS Sojourn’s commanding officer, was a fellow Emeraldian. He was also barely half Ahbaht’s age, with the sort of corsair confidence the commander of a sixteen-gun schooner required. There was a difference between “confidence” and “recklessness,” however, and young Cupyr had demonstrated that it was a difference he grasped. Thunderer’s ship’s company had been split between three of the squadron’s schooners, and Sojourn had taken aboard the last sixty men and officers. She was packed to the gunwales—this time the phrase was literally correct, not figurative—and low in the water with all the extra weight, and he obviously had no desire at all to expose that vulnerable, fragile target to the heavy guns aboard the rapidly approaching screw-galley.
Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t do it anyway if he had to.
“Clear away your pivot, Captain,” Ahbaht said flatly. “We may need it.”
* * *
“You’re in command now, Alyk,” Snelyng said as the last of the volunteers scrambled down into the boat towing alongside. “Don’t bring her within a thousand yards. That’s an order.”
“But, Sir—!”
“There’s no time,” Snelyng said sharply, chopping off Seevyrs’ protest as he strode towards the ship’s side himself. “And I’m not interested in any arguments. Understood?”
“But—” Seevyrs began again, then cut himself off.
Clearly, there was no point in reminding Snelyng that this sort of lunatic adventure was why captains had first lieutenants. The captain understood just how little chance there was of getting aboard that ironclad in time to extinguish any fuses … and how good a chance there was of getting himself and his entire boat’s crew blown up for his trouble. And Tymythy Snelyng agreed with Earl Thirsk: a good officer led his men, he didn’t drive them.
“Understood, Sir,” he said heavily, instead. “A thousand yards. Langhorne bless, Sir.”
“I won’t say it wouldn’t be welcome.”
Snelyng smiled tightly, clapped Seevyrs sharply on the shoulder once, and dropped over the side. The bowman unhooked almost before the captain’s feet hit the floorboards, and the coxswain put his helm over, veering sharply away from the still-moving screw-galley. The five oarsmen were poised and ready, and the oars bit deep the instant they were far enough clear of the ship.
The captain didn’t have to tell them how short time might be, and they pulled their oars as if they were in one of the fleet-wide rowing races. Four or five knots was normally a realistic sustained speed for the twenty-four-foot boat, but twice that was possible for short bursts, and it cut through the water like a kraken, spray flying despite the light breeze and short, gentle waves.
* * *
“Fire!”
Sojourn twitched as the pivot-mounted thirty-pounder just forward of her foremast belched a bubble of flame and a cloud of smoke. The round shot screamed away, cutting a line of white across the wavelets. It missed the Dohlaran boat by a generous margin, and Sir Bruhstair Ahbaht made himself stand motionless instead of slamming the schooner’s rail with a frustrated fist.
Thunderer’s orphans were packed belowdecks like sardines to clear Sojourn’s deck, and he considered instructing Cupyr to engage with his broadside guns. Unfortunately, the carronades on the broadside carriages were shorter-ranged, and closing to use them would have required the schooner to close to no more than five hundred yards or so of her target. Her draft was shallow enough she could probably get that close without taking the ground herself, but there was no certainty of that. It would also require her to close Thunderer once again, which would have been risky enough, given the lit fuses burning away aboard her. Perhaps even more to the point, however, it would have required her to close with the oncoming screw-galley, and that would have been little short of suicidal. The two vessels were very nearly the same size, and Sojourn was far more seaworthy and carried twice as many guns, but she was much slower than Lance under the
current conditions, and her guns would be effectively useless as long as the screw-galley kept its bow towards her.
Ahbaht frowned as the Dohlaran boat seemed to accelerate. It had well over a mile to go, yet at its present speed, it would reach Thunderer in no more than another ten or fifteen minutes.
“Fire!”
* * *
Snelyng swore as the second round shot slashed through the waves just astern of the boat, close enough to soak them all with spray.
“Lucky shot, boys!” he called, hoping to Langhorne it really had been.
If that was one of the Charisians’ rifled pieces, though, luck might have had very little to do with it. Reports said they were fiendishly accurate, and in calm conditions like this, with so little ship’s motion to throw the gunners off.…
“Pull, boys—pull!”
Fresh, deeper thunder rolled, and he darted a glance back at Lance as the screw-galley disappeared behind a thick cloud of gunsmoke.
* * *
Ahbaht’s eyebrows rose as the screw-galley fired. The range was at least three thousand yards, and Dohlaran gunpowder and gunfounders alike were inferior to their Charisian counterparts. Despite that, three massive projectiles came bounding across the waves towards Sojourn. None of them passed within fifty yards of their target … but they continued skipping from wave crest to wave crest for almost five hundred yards beyond the schooner. There were no explosions; either they’d been round shot or their fuses had been extinguished. If it was the latter, the same thing was likely to happen to any additional shells that ricocheted into their target, but there was no reason Ahbaht could see for them to be using shells. Projectiles that size didn’t need to explode to inflict devastating damage on a ship Sojourn’s size.
And if the bastards really want to bring us into their range, they damned well can, he thought grimly, watching the screw-galley slice through the waves.
At least those mammoth guns had to be slow-firing, and Cupyr’s gun crews were displaying the practiced gun drill which was a Charisian hallmark. They were getting off three aimed shots every two minutes, and the Dohlarans would be fortunate to manage half that rate of fire.
With three guns instead of one, of course, he reminded himself.
He dragged out his pocket watch and checked the time.
* * *
“Come on, lads! Move your frigging arses!” Ahldahs Zhaksyn shouted. “The Captain needs us, damn your eyes!”
Lieutenant Seevyrs was a devout man and something of an oddity in naval service in that he never swore. He felt no temptation to rebuke Lance’s gunner in this instance, however. He stood on the screw-galley’s quarterdeck, peering at the heretic schooner through his spyglass while he raged inwardly against Captain Snelyng’s order to keep Lance at least a thousand yards clear of the grounded ironclad. His heavy guns’ maximum range was a bit over twenty-five hundred yards. With seas this calm, they could reach out another thousand or even another fifteen hundred yards with ricochet fire, but the ironclad lay almost directly between him and the schooner.
“Come another point to larboard!” he snapped.
“Aye, aye, Sir!”
Lance angled a bit farther away from the ironclad, circling around it along the thousand-yard arc Captain Snelyng’s orders imposed. There were limits to how far round her guns could train, even on their Zhwaigair-designed carriages, and the angle meant Seevyrs’ larboard hundred-and-fifty-pounder could no longer bear on the enemy, but it let him take advantage of the screw-galley’s greater speed—she had to be moving two or three times as fast as the schooner—without transgressing the captain’s limit.
The Charisian’s pivot gun roared again, spurting smoke that was darker and far browner than Lance’s, and another round shot went ripping through the water, missing the cutter by little more than its own length.
* * *
“Enough,” Ahbaht said.
He had to repeat himself in a far louder voice before Cupyr heard him and turned to face him.
“That’s enough, Captain,” Ahbaht said then. “It’s time to go.”
Lieutenant Commander Cupyr’s expression turned mulish. For a moment, Ahbaht thought he was going to argue, but then Cupyr looked at the screw-galley cutting through the water and grimaced.
“Yes, Sir,” he said quietly.
* * *
Seevyrs grunted in mingled satisfaction and disgust as the Charisian turned away. He’d more than half expected it, and he was grateful that the enemy could no longer fire on Captain Snelyng’s boat on her new heading. Unfortunately, that same heading also meant the schooner would rapidly draw out of Lance’s range. He was sorely tempted to turn straight after her in pursuit, but that would have required him to pass within much less than a thousand yards of the ironclad. Even if that hadn’t been true, the Charisian was on the far side of Shingle Shoal. At high tide, Lance could have passed directly over the mudbank; at the moment, she’d probably run aground the instant she tried to cross it.
“Avast cranking,” he ordered. “Bring her hard to larboard.”
* * *
“Good lad,” Tymythy Snelyng murmured as he watched Lance turn farther away.
Young Seevyrs had come perilously close to the thousand-yard limit he’d set, but he supposed he shouldn’t complain about that, since Lance’s fire had probably contributed to the Charisians’ gunnery problems. With that threat alleviated, Seevyrs was doing the smart thing and putting additional distance between his ship and the enormous potential bomb waiting on the mudbank.
If I had the sense God gave a wyvern, I’d be doing the same thing, the captain thought. Unfortunately, I don’t.
“Come on, boys!” he called. “I thought you lads could row!”
Two of the panting, red-faced oarsmen bared their teeth at him in fierce grins, and he grinned back, then returned his attention to the ironclad. They were close now. No more than another two or three minutes.
* * *
“Yes!”
Alyk Seevyrs snatched off his hat to wave it overhead as Captain Syngyltyn’s boat went alongside the ironclad. He didn’t need a spyglass to know who the first man up the Charisian ship’s side was, and he bared his teeth in a fierce grin of satisfaction. They’d done it! Now if there was just ti—
* * *
HMS Thunderer lived up to her name one final time.
She vanished in an enormous blast of fire, smoke, spray, and mud. It wasn’t a single explosion; it was a chain of them, so close together they sounded as one savage drumroll of detonations. Wreckage arced high above the water, reaching out, plummeting back down into the sea in an irregular circle of white splashes, and the column of smoke towered against the sky, standing for long, dreadful minutes before the light breeze began to disperse it.
Sir Bruhstair Ahbaht closed his watch with a snap and returned it to his pocket. He stood staring at his ship’s funeral pyre until the smoke began to fray. Then he drew a deep breath, shook himself, and looked at Lieutenant Kylmahn.
“Less than a minute off,” he said quietly. “Remind me to compliment Master Muhlkayhe.”
.III.
South of the Kaudzhu Narrows, Hahskyn Bay, Shwei Province, South Harchong Empire
“Our friends still there, Master Trymohr?” Kahrltyn Haigyl asked as Ahlyn Trymohr stepped past the Marine sentry into HMS Dreadnought’s day cabin with his hat under his arm.
Sweat gleamed on the fair-haired midshipman’s forehead, and Haigyl wiped sweat from his own forehead as young Trymohr came to attention. The cabin skylight was open, wind scoops had been rigged, the stern door and scuttles—and every internal doorway and scuttle, as well—stood wide, and the cabin was still hotter than the hinges of Shan-wei’s hell.
“I’m afraid they are, Sir.” Trymohr grimaced. “In fact, the lookout thinks there may be at least one ship beyond them. It’s awfully hazy, though, Sir.”
Haigyl grunted in sour acknowledgment and pushed his chair back from his desk. It wasn’t as if he’d found the ro
utine paperwork enthralling, and his sweaty hands were sticking to it. The paper didn’t seem to want to take the ink, and the ink seemed determined to transfer itself to his hands anyway, so the hell with it. He’d deal with it later … if he absolutely had to and couldn’t find a semi-legitimate way to dump it on Zhasyn Skryvnyr, his clerk, instead. Skryvnyr had been a tutor for over fifteen years before joining the Navy after the Battle of Darcos Sound, and Haigyl was guiltily aware that the clerk had found himself saddled with more responsibility than he really ought to have.
Of course, I don’t feel all that guilty about it, he acknowledged. Hell, Zhasyn’s a lot better at it than I’d be, anyway!
He started to reach for his tunic, then thought better of it. His dignity would survive going on deck in his shirt sleeves, and there’d probably be at least some breeze on deck, despite Dreadnought’s tall, armored bulwarks. He was damned if he’d miss out on any of it if there was.
“After you, Master Trymohr,” he said gruffly, and the midshipman headed for the cabin door.
There was at least a bit of breeze across the deck. It wasn’t much—as Haigyl had expected, the seven-foot bulwarks blocked a lot of its strength—and the canvas overhead seemed weary, hanging heavily from the yards. There was little wind to fill the sails, and it came fitfully, letting the canvas go slack entirely too often for Haigyl’s peace of mind. Dreadnought had set a veritable mountain of canvas … and it was doing her damned little good. In fact, he doubted they were making much more than three knots with all sail set to the royals and studding sails rigged, as well.
He gazed up in disgust. If he could have found a place to set a single additional scrap of canvas without blanketing another scrap, he damned well would have. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one.
He stepped to one of the after angle-glasses and raised it, and his lips tightened as he peered aft. There was no question that Dreadnought was being shadowed now. The head of the angle-glass was no more than twenty-five feet above sea level, but even from that low a vantage point, he could see the topsails of what had to be a fairly large schooner and what looked like a brig in company with her. They were even closer than they’d been yesterday, and in airs this light they could run down the bigger, heavier ironclad easily.