“Of course, My Lord,” Baron Wind Song agreed.
.VII.
St. Zheryld’s Abbey, Episcopate of St. Shulmyn, The Temple Lands
“I hope you’ll feel this was worth the trip, Your Grace,” Lynkyn Fultyn said, bending to kiss Allayn Maigwair’s extended ring as the Captain General stepped off the gangplank from the heavily escorted barge. “I know we’re a long way from Zion,” he continued as he straightened, “but—”
“But I’m the one who insisted on moving the project out here for development, Lynkyn,” Maigwair interrupted. “And it’s not that bad a trip by water. I’d hate to make it overland, of course, but the trip across the lake was almost like a vacation of sorts. To be honest, I enjoyed it.”
Brother Lynkyn nodded. The largish town of St. Zheryld’s Abbey lay almost four hundred miles east of Zion. Aside from the modest foundries which had called St. Zheryld’s Abbey home, there’d been nothing particularly worth making the journey before the Jihad. The St. Zheryld River was a brawling and tempestuous stream where it came spilling down from the southern end of the Mountains of Light—well suited to driving the waterwheels of the pre-Jihad foundries but completely unnavigable above the town. Below the town, it was considerably deeper, but also narrow, navigable only by barges far smaller than those which normally plied Safehold’s rivers and canals. That limitation was the reason St. Zheryld’s Abbey hadn’t been chosen as a site for one of Mother Church’s newer, larger foundries, but it also explained why the town—out of sight and out of mind—was ideally suited to Maigwair’s present purposes. He could make the trip across Lake Pei and then up the lower St. Zheryld’s in less than three days (and in relative comfort), but it was isolated enough to allow for tight security, and its existing foundries were fully capable of producing the necessary metalwork under Fultyn’s skilled supervision.
“Well, with that out of the way,” the Captain General continued cheerfully, resting one hand on Brother Lynkyn’s shoulder, “why don’t we get on with the demonstration?”
“Are you certain you don’t wish to go to your quarters, first, Your Grace?” Fultyn looked a bit anxious. “It’s past lunchtime. Couldn’t we feed you and let you rest a bit?”
“Lynkyn, I’ve been sitting on my arse for the last two and a half days,” Maigwair pointed out with a smile. “This barge,” he gestured one-handed at the vessel from which he’d just debarked, “although a bit on the small side, is very comfortably appointed, I assure you. And my cook’s seen to it that I’ve been reasonably well fed since leaving Zion. Unless, of course, there’s some reason you’re trying to delay me…?”
“No, Your Grace! Of course not!” Fultyn began quickly, then paused as Maigwair’s smile turned into a grin.
“Very well, Your Grace,” the Chihirite said after a moment, his own lips quivering on the edge of a smile, “you got me. If you’d be kind enough to step this way, that demonstration is waiting for you.”
“Somehow I was certain it would be,” Maigwair replied, squeezing the lay brother’s shoulder affectionately.
* * *
“As you know, Your Grace,” Fultyn said as Maigwair followed him up the observation tower’s stairs, “getting what we’ve dubbed the ‘exhaust nozzles’ properly designed was a more difficult proposition than I’d hoped, despite possessing the example we’d captured from the heretics. That gave me a model to work from, but actually figuring out how to cast and machine them properly—and uniformly—was rather challenging. In addition, the bronze used in the heretics’ rockets melts or erodes in flight. Clearly, that hasn’t been a problem for them, but since they’ve been using them primarily as signaling devices, whereas we want to use them as weapons, we need a longer … burn time, for want of a better term, out of our rockets. We also need a greater degree of accuracy. Rockets are never going to be as accurate as rifled bullets or shells, but we need to be confident all of them will fly to at least approximately the target we want to hit, and that makes the nozzles’ performance—and durability—even more important. Bronze lasted almost long enough, but in the end, we had to convert to steel. Fortunately, the new hearths are producing so much of that that it’s actually cheaper than bronze would have been. Harder to machine, which costs us a little on the labor side, but overall it costs a lot less.”
“That’s good.”
There was an unwontedly fervent note in the Captain General’s response, and Fultyn glanced back over his shoulder. Maigwair grimaced slightly but said nothing, only waving his hand for the lay brother to continue climbing. There was no point explaining to Fultyn just how parlous Mother Church’s finances had become. The revised revenue measures had increased receipts from the Harchong Empire by almost thirty percent and more than doubled those coming from the Temple Lands. Desnair’s tithes, however, had tumbled disastrously even before the Empire had been driven effectively out of the Jihad, and Dohlar’s had actually been cut to the bone to reflect the enormous amounts Rahnyld found himself forced to spend on his own armed forces. Even the more affluent Border States found themselves in situations very similar to Dohlar’s, and Siddarmark’s were, of course, gone in their entirety. Rhobair Duchairn estimated he could continue to fund the Jihad for perhaps another year, even fifteen months. At that point, however, the Church would be effectively bankrupt.
Clyntahn, predictably, downplayed the Treasurer’s gloomy “defeatist” warnings, pointing out that Duchairn had managed to overcome every one of the other disasters he’d predicted. Besides, the Grand Inquisitor was perfectly prepared to rely on the Inquisition’s ability to impose an economy based upon barter—or even purely upon Church requisitions—if worse came to worst. Personally, Maigwair more than suspected Clyntahn was overestimating the extent to which even the Inquisition could compel men and women faced with feeding their children and providing for their families to cooperate in such a draconian scheme.
And meanwhile, the damned heretics are rolling in gold, he thought resentfully. The Inquisition’s first reports on the massive gold and silver strike in the Mohryah Mountains of Silverlode Island had started coming in last month. Clyntahn was doing his best to downplay those, too, the Captain General reflected bitterly.
Maigwair suspected there were two reasons for that. First, Clyntahn had his blinders on where the simple economic consequences of the newly opened mines were concerned. He didn’t want to admit to himself that even as Mother Church’s economy tottered towards collapse, the heretics—no, the Charisians—were not only finding expanding market opportunities in Siddarmark and throughout their own empire, but now they were literally shoveling gold out of the ground. The implications of that if the war lasted another year or so—especially without Mother Church finding some way to reverse her fortunes on the field of battle—were nothing the Grand Inquisitor wanted to contemplate, so he simply refused to do so.
But secondly, and even more to the point, Clyntahn was determined to avoid any question of divine favor. Mother Church’s children would have been more than human not to question the implications of the new, massive infusion of gold into the heretics’ economy at the very moment when they themselves confronted largely stagnant wages, ever higher tithes, and the ever mounting costs of food, fuel, and clothing. No doubt the Inquisition would eventually proclaim that the newly opened gold mines were Shan-wei’s work, not God’s. Clyntahn would insist it was an indication of her desperation that she’d been forced to shore up her servants by providing them with so much additional gold, whereas God knew His faithful children required no such intervention to accomplish His will. Maigwair expected many of the faithful would find that persuasive, at least initially. But sooner or later, inevitably, someone was bound to point out—very quietly, as far from the Inquisition’s ears as possible—that if God was truly on Mother Church’s side, He could at least have prevented Shan-wei from bestowing such largess upon her servants.
From there to the conclusion that perhaps God wasn’t supporting the Jihad because he wasn’t on the Group
of Four’s side would be only a very small step. And Zhaspahr Clyntahn still wouldn’t—
He shook his head angrily, then made himself inhale deeply as the stairs topped out on the observation tower’s platform. He followed Brother Lynkyn to the sturdy rail and stood gazing out across the foothills which rolled away to the west.
The Army of God sergeant who’d been waiting for them went to one knee, kissing the ring Maigwair extended to him, then stood once more, looking expectantly at Fultyn.
“I think we can begin now, Sergeant,” the lay brother told him.
“Yes, Brother!” the sergeant replied, and reached for the staff of the large red flag leaning against the tower’s railing. He raised it over his head and swept it around in a tight circle.
“There, Your Grace,” Fultyn said, pointing out across the nearest hillside, and Maigwair’s eyes narrowed as he saw what looked like three large, articulated dragon-drawn wagons. They were little more than four hundred yards away, but they were covered in canvas tarpaulins, which would have made it impossible to see into the wagon beds even with the powerful telescope mounted on the observation tower’s rail. They moved steadily, however, and judging by their speed, they were only lightly loaded.
“We’re cheating a little bit here, Your Grace,” Fultyn acknowledged as the dragon drovers maneuvered their vehicles. They were lining up in a straight row, with their left wheels—the ones away from the observation tower—on a broad white line that looked like powdered lime. “In the field, they probably wouldn’t have the advantage of a precisely surveyed firing line or exact range measurements. In this instance, though, I thought we might as well use every unfair advantage we could to impress you with how splendidly our new weapon works.”
The lay brother smiled almost slyly at the vicar, and Maigwair smiled back.
“I promise to be just as trusting and credulous as you could possibly desire, Lynkyn,” he said. “As long as it really works, of course.”
“Oh, I think you’ll agree it works, Your Grace,” Fultyn said, and pointed at the drovers as they unhooked the dragons from the traces. “In the field, we might not have time to unhook the draft animals,” he said in a somewhat more somber tone. “We’ll either have to do that or else put them down before we fire, though, I’m afraid. Any dragon still harnessed to one of those wagons is guaranteed to panic the instant the rockets begin firing, and the firing sequence takes long enough that a panicked dragon could easily disturb the aim of the entire volley.”
“Really?” Maigwair looked down at the somewhat shorter Fultyn. “I know we had that reaction out of all of the dragons—and the horses, for that matter—when we first introduced field artillery. You’re saying we can’t train dragons to stand steady with these rockets the way we already have with the field guns?”
“I don’t think there’s much chance of that at all, Your Grace,” the Chihirite said. “For that matter, it would probably be a bad idea to even make the attempt in this case. I believe you’ll understand why in a moment.”
The dragons and their drovers were over a hundred yards clear of the parked wagons and continued moving steadily away as three-man teams of AOG artillerists swarmed over the vehicles, stripping off the tarpaulins, and Maigwair bent to the telescope, peering through it at what the canvas had covered.
Each wagon consisted of two six-wheeled sections, each of them twenty-five feet long and eight feet wide, but rather than the standard four-foot-tall sides, the wagon boxes were little more than eighteen inches high. Instead of the heavy wooden strakes which would normally have sided them, they’d been fitted with an iron frame that formed cells five or six inches across. Each cellular structure was perhaps five feet tall, with framing members something less than an inch in cross-section, and they were supported on the right side—the near side, from where Maigwair stood—by uprights that could be adjusted to raise or lower that side of it. The far side was hinged or pivoted in some way, so that when the near side was raised, the entire frame changed angle.
Each of the six wagon sections carried twelve rows of cells, thirty-seven cells long, for four hundred and forty-four per section, or a total of just over twenty-six hundred between them. And every one of those cells contained a white-painted object five inches in diameter and six feet in length with a sleek, rounded nose.
“To be honest, Your Grace, we’re using up quite a lot of rockets in this demonstration,” Fultyn said as the vicar straightened and looked up from the telescope. “I wanted to be sure you got to see the full effectiveness. The first few test shots actually seemed a bit disappointing, compared to what I’d anticipated. When they’re used properly, however, in sufficient numbers, well.…”
He shrugged, and Maigwair nodded. He also made a resolution to avoid being overly easily impressed. He wanted—needed—for this weapon to perform as effectively as possible, and he trusted Lynkyn Fultyn completely. At the same time, the Chihirite would have to be one of the true seijins of old if he hadn’t wanted to stack the deck as spectacularly as possible for this demonstration.
The tarpaulins had been removed completely and the soldiers moved smartly away from the wagons, aside from a single noncom who stood waiting with a lit torch in his hand.
“The wagon beds are sheathed in iron, as well, Your Grace,” Fultyn said, “and there’s about ten inches of water in each of them as protection against the backblast.”
Maigwair’s eyebrows rose, but he only nodded for Fultyn to continue.
“If you’ll look to your right, beyond the wagons, I think you can see the target area fairly clearly with the spyglass,” Fultyn said, pointing to the northeast, and Maigwair swiveled the rail-mounted glass to peer in the indicated direction.
The target area—an open field a thousand yards from the launchers—was a rectangle, five hundred yards on a side. A half-dozen additional articulated freight wagons had been parked at its center, surrounded by the square, post-mounted targets used to train the Army of God’s riflemen.
“I see it,” the Captain General confirmed. He left the telescope trained on the target but straightened, returning his attention to the readied rocket wagons, and Fultyn nodded in satisfaction.
“All right, Sergeant,” he said.
“Yes, Sir!”
The sergeant swept his flag in another circle, and the other noncom, standing near the parked wagons, touched the torch to the waiting fuse. Then he dropped it, spun on his heel, and sprinted after the other rapidly departing members of his detachment and the dragons and drovers, who were now close to five hundred yards away.
The fuse burned steadily, branching away from the initial ignition point so that a small, sputtering line of smoke moved towards each of the wagon sections.
“We’ve come up with a better system for firing them in the field, Your Grace,” Fultyn said, gazing through the calm afternoon sunlight at the silent wagons. “Actually, we’ve come up with two. One uses a friction primer, while the other uses primer caps. Both systems use fuse hose, which protects against inclement weather and also speeds up—”
He was still speaking when those burning fuses reached their destinations. They hadn’t been cut perfectly, which meant the rockets failed to fire in perfect synchronization, but it didn’t matter.
Despite himself, Allayn Maigwair stumbled back three full paces as the massive wagons seemed to explode. Only that wasn’t actually what they did. It wasn’t an explosion, it was an eruption, and his eyes went wide as two-thousand-plus rockets screamed out of their launch cells at the rate of three per wagon section every half second. The entire massive volley launched in the space of less than nineteen seconds.
Those nineteen seconds were the longest nineteen seconds Allayn Maigwair had ever experienced. The rockets shrieked into the air with a terrible keening scream, like a thousand demons breaking the chains of hell. They rose in an incredible pillar of smoke—and no doubt steam—on tails of flame that sent more smoke sheeting across the sky in a smothering canopy. A small corner of h
is mind realized that any dragons who’d still been tethered to those wagons would have been killed almost instantly, but it was a distant reflection as he stared at those terrifying rockets. They arced upwards, spreading out slightly as they went, howling through the heavens, climbing higher and higher. Then they reached the top of their arcs, plummeted back towards earth, and landed in a terrible, re-echoing roll of thunder even worse than the fiendish clamor of their passage.
The entire target area simply vanished, disappeared in a maelstrom of explosions, while a hurricane of smoke and pulverized dirt rose like a canopy from a vortex of utter destruction. The dreadful, terrifying sound seemed to continue forever, for the rockets took just as long to land and explode as they had to ignite and launch. The dreadful cacophony lasted almost forty seconds—forty seconds of the pure, unadulterated rage of Shan-wei herself—and then, suddenly, it was over. The final explosions echoed back from the hillsides beyond the target zone, until, finally, silence crept back, hovering in the choking clouds of smoke as if afraid of itself, and Lynkyn Fultyn spoke.
“Maximum range is over four thousand yards, Your Grace,” he said softly while the breeze began thinning the incredible smoke canopy. “Minimum range is approximately eight hundred.” There was something about the Chihirite’s tone. Something Maigwair’s still numbed brain wasn’t quite able to parse. “And as you can see, Your Grace,” Fultyn continued, pointing at the telescope, “it’s … quite effective.”
Maigwair bent back to the telescope’s eyepiece. He was surprised to discover a tremble in the fingers adjusting the focus knob, but he had plenty of time to correct it before the smoke dissipated enough for him to see through it. Finally, it did, rising and lifting like a fog bank, and the vicar inhaled sharply.