“I will.”
He stood, crossing the balcony, standing beside her as the sun rose higher and the breeze freshened.
“I will,” he repeated, and reached out to lay a hand lightly on her arm.
“And whatever I decide, there’s no need to ask my forgiveness,” he said gently, and smiled when she looked down at him. “If you hadn’t done what you did, there wouldn’t be any decisions to make, now would there? And wouldn’t that be boring?”
.XXII.
HMS Destroyer, 54, Howell Bay, Kingdom of Old Charis, Empire of Charis, and Lord Protector’s Palace, Siddar City, Republic of Siddarmark
Sir Domynyk Staynair stood on the stern walk of HMS Destroyer, leaning on the railing and watching as the confusion of galleons got underway and sorted itself out. The war galleons, which had been stripped of their armament, floated unnaturally high to his experienced eye, but that would change once they reached Raven’s Land and weighted themselves down with their freight of soldiers. The dozen fully armed galleons who’d been detailed to escort them hovered protectively, awaiting them, and Baron Rock Point stifled an ignoble sense of envy as the transports forged slowly past his anchored flagship and headed out to do so something useful.
“We really do need you where you are, you know,” a voice said over the plug in his ear. “And since we do, you might as well stop lashing your tail like a slash lizard with a sore tooth.”
“I do not have a sore tooth, Kynt,” the high admiral replied more than a bit tartly. “I will concede to lashing my tail,” he admitted after a moment. “I hope that’s not as obvious to everyone else as it appears to be to you, however. I do have a reputation for imperturbability to maintain among my admiring staff officers and subordinates.”
“Oh, imperturbability is the very first thing I’d associate with you,” the Baron of Green Valley assured him, smiling as the image projected on his contact lenses showed him his friend’s expression. At the moment, Green Valley’s horse was picking its way through a particularly wretched sleet storm on its way to yet another inspection and he was scarcely in a position to fully enjoy the imagery. While he trusted the horse, he did like to keep at least half an eye on his environs at moments like this. But Owl was adept at allowing for a recipient’s current lighting conditions when projecting the visual take from his remotes. Rock Point was clearly visible, yet he was also translucent, and despite the brilliant sunlight beating down on Howell Bay, the imagery wasn’t so bright as to inhibit Green Valley’s ability to see his actual physical surroundings.
Just as well, too, he told himself, surveying the truly execrable weather. It’s so nice that we’re officially into spring. Now if only someone would tell the weather that. Soon, I hope.
From his most recent reports, he wasn’t the only one who felt that way. The Imperial Charisian Army’s brigades were almost ready to begin their undoubtedly miserable slog through Raven’s Land, and the quartermaster’s draft dragons seemed to have gotten wind of what was about to be demanded of them. They were being unusually ornery, at any rate, although Green Valley suspected some of that orneriness might be more apparent than real. Or, even more probably, a reflection of the drovers’ attitude towards what was about to be demanded of them. Inspecting the dragons, their harness, and the wagons in question wasn’t likely to change the draft animals’ attitude, but he intended for it to have a pronounced salutary effect on the humans involved.
And my mood when I get there on the other side of all this crap, he thought, glowering about him at the rattling sleet, should give my pithy observations on their state of readiness a certain added panache.
“I guess I shouldn’t complain too much,” Rock Point acknowledged after a moment. “At least I don’t have a saddle punishing my arse like some people do. And the weather’s a lot nicer down here.”
The last sentence came out in undeniably dulcet tones, and Green Valley grimaced at the low blow.
“For that matter,” Rock Point continued more soberly, “it’s not as if they’re really going to need me along, either.”
“No,” Green Valley agreed, guiding his horse around a particularly treacherous looking icy spot, “but I’ll admit I’m glad to see the escort squadron.”
“Probably not necessary, but I’ve never been that happy about words like ‘probably,’” Rock Point said. “Shailtyn should keep anybody from annoying you, though. And until we figure out a way to keep those damned privateers from sneaking by Tyrnyr, we don’t have much choice.”
Green Valley grunted in unhappy agreement, and it was Rock Point’s turn to grimace. Captain Daivyn Shailtyn, promoted to acting commodore—or, to use the term Merlin had gotten introduced, “frocked” to that rank—while still serving as HMS Thunderbolt’s commanding officer, was an experienced seaman. Protecting a gaggle of transports from determined privateers wasn’t as easy as a landsman might assume from the disparity of firepower between a ten- or twelve-gun schooner and a fifty-eight-gun galleon, but Shailtyn was up to the task. And it didn’t hurt that the transports in question were all commanded by experienced naval officers … or that Rock Point had delayed their departure just long enough to put a half-dozen guns back aboard each of them for self-defense. They’d keep as tight a formation as sail-powered ships could expect, and they’d be able to look after themselves reasonably well. They’d better be, at any rate.
Especially, he thought, given what the aforementioned damned privateers did to us last month. Seven galleons might not sound like all that much, but it’s the first sign someone on the other side’s finally tumbled to the one way they can still hurt us. Bad enough to lose the ships, but if the bastards really think about how badly the need to establish some sort of worldwide convoy system’s going to hurt our flexibility, they’ll really push it. And if Maigwair’s actually smart enough to reflect on how providing those convoys with escorts is going to cut into the Navy’s deployable hulls.…
Commodore Ruhsail Tyrnyr, assigned to command the Imperial Charisian Navy’s outpost on Howard Island in the mouth of Howard Passage, had a less enviable task than Shailtyn. Although the Imperial Desnairian Navy’s presence in the Gulf of Jahras had been reduced to splinters after the assault on Iythria, Desnair hadn’t abandoned the notion of making itself a pain in Rock Point’s neck, among other portions of his anatomy. It appeared Mother Church had finally accepted that she wasn’t going to be able to match the Charisian Navy for the foreseeable future, and her naval efforts had taken a different direction since the Battle of Iythria. The schooners and brigs being built by Desnarian carpenters in every bay, inlet, and puddle surrounding the gulf were far too small to challenge Charis’ galleons, but they were going to be big enough to pose a very real threat to merchant shipping. They weren’t being built in handy, centralized locations like Iythria, either, which made the task of just finding all of them, far less raiding in sufficient strength to actually destroy them before they got to sea, problematic at best. And despite Howard Island’s strategic location, the passage it guarded was too broad to prevent small, agile, shoal draft vessels from sneaking past Tyrnyr’s patrols in foul weather or darkness.
And we’ve had plenty of both of those this winter, the high admiral thought glumly. Which doesn’t even consider that the Desnairian Empire runs over four thousand miles from north to south … with better than nine thousand miles of actual coastline completely exclusive of the Gulf of Jahras. They can build privateers in just about any bay or creek, and we don’t begin to have enough ships to watch an entire coast that extensive.
“Pity Tyrnyr doesn’t have access to the SNARCs,” Green Valley remarked, clearly following Rock Point’s own thoughts.
“Wouldn’t help unless all his schooner and galleon captains had coms,” Rock Point pointed out. “All the satellites would do for him in that case would be to make him as frustrated as I sometimes feel!”
“True.” Green Valley nodded. “We do get spoiled by the ability to talk to each other, don’t we?”
“That’s one way to put it.” Rock Point snorted. “I imagine it must be as frustrating to you as it is to me, though.”
“Yes and no.” Green Valley shrugged. “I don’t usually have units scattered over several million square miles of seawater. And”—his tone darkened—“so far, at least, I haven’t had to watch something like what happened to Gwylym Manthyr’s squadron happen to one of my regiments while I was thousands of miles away and couldn’t even warn them what was coming. Don’t think I haven’t thanked God for that a time or two, Domynyk! But ‘frustrating’ is probably putting it a bit too mildly when it comes to tactical situations. The truth is, I think exercising command’s going to be more maddening in Siddarmark, now that I have access to the SNARCs, than it was in Corisande, when I couldn’t be sure what was on the other side of the next hill.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder how Cayleb stood it when he knew exactly what our lead units were moving into and there was no way for him to tell anyone about it!”
“Get used to it,” Rock Point advised harshly, then inhaled deeply. “You’re right about how maddening it is, but it’s a useful capability, too. You’re right about how useless we all felt watching what happened to Gwylym, too, but it had a lot to do with what we managed to accomplish in the Gulf of Tarot, as well.” His mouth tightened as he remembered that nighttime chaos and the loss of Bryahn Lock Island, but then he shrugged. “It’s a hell of a lot more than anyone on the other side has, and it’s likely to save our backsides more than once before this whole frigging mess is over. Just make the best use of it you can, Kynt. That’s all any of us can do.”
“I’ll try to bear that in mind.”
“Do. And now, it’s time for me to get back on deck and do some more admiral things. Have fun floundering around in the snow and sleet.”
“If there’s any justice in the world, you will soon find yourself miserably seasick and half-frozen in the middle of a gale somewhere,” Green Valley shot back.
“Probably,” Rock Point conceded affably. “On the other hand, what could possibly lead you to believe justice has anything at all to do with what happens?”
* * *
“If there were any justice in the world,” Henrai Maidyn observed more than a little bitterly, “Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s spine would be sprouting a dagger about now.”
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Republic of Siddarmark’s treasurer, and the man in charge of all of its spies, glowered down at the map on the huge table, his blue eyes hard. The chancellor had a full head of fair, silvering hair and a far less weathered face than Bynzhamyn Raice, his Charisian counterpart, but both of them took intelligence failures personally, and the unpalatable portrait painted by the tokens on that map depended on information which, all too often, was little better than a guess.
And then there was the fact that if anyone in an official position of authority here in the Republic might have been in charge of seeing that a dagger reached the Grand Inquisitor’s back, it would have been him. The fact that he resented his inability to make that happen was rather obvious at the moment.
“We can only hope someone will get one there eventually, Henrai,” Samyl Gahdarhd said. The Keeper of the Seal, roughly equivalent to the Republic’s first councilor, wore an expression even sourer than Maidyn’s.
“I don’t suppose there’s any prospect of that happening anytime soon, is there?” Daryus Parkair, the Republic’s seneschal and the commanding officer of its army, raised his eyebrows as he looked at the sole woman present. She was a remarkably attractive woman, as it happened, but her eyes were almost as unhappy as Maidyn’s and she made a small moue as she looked back at the seneschal.
“There are things I’d like to be able to accomplish but can’t, My Lord. And getting through Clyntahn’s security is one of them, unfortunately. For that matter,” her expression hardened, “there are distinct limits on what anyone can accomplish in the Temple Lands right now.”
“I know.” Parkair shook his head. “And I apologize, Madam Pahrsahn. It’s just—”
“It’s just that the reward for having accomplished one miracle is to find people demanding still more of them,” Greyghor Stohnar interrupted. The lord protector smiled briefly, although the expression looked strange and out of place on his worn, worried face. “Ungrateful of us, I know, but we’re only human.”
“Which is more than I’m inclined to say for that pig Clyntahn,” Aivah Pahrsahn, who’d once been known as Ahnzhelyk Phonda (and before that as Nynian Rychtair), replied. She looked back at Parkair. “Clyntahn’s ‘sword’ surprised me just as badly as it did anyone else, I’m afraid, My Lord. I knew how bad the Group of Four’s revenue picture was getting, and I made the mistake of believing even he couldn’t be stupid enough to kill the wyvern that fetched the golden rabbit this way. I didn’t expect him to move against the Republic for at least another year or so, and my organization back home was still in the building phase. For that matter”—she showed her teeth in a brief smile—“quite a few rifles I intended to send into the Temple Lands have gone other places, instead.”
“Thank God,” Stohnar said quietly.
“I agree with the Lord Protector,” Parkair said, looking back down at the map, “but I’m afraid we’re still far too short of rifles—or men—for what’s coming at us.”
“We’re lucky we’ve had the winter to build more of them, Daryus,” Stohnar pointed out. The seneschal looked at him, and the lord protector shrugged. “For that matter, we’re lucky we could still find the money to pay for the one’s we’ve managed to build. I wish we’d been able to build a lot more of them than we have, but let’s not turn up our noses at the ones we have managed to get into the troops’ hands.”
“I assure you, no one’s going to do that.” Parkair’s tone was grim. “Unfortunately, it looks like the other side’s got a hell of a lot more of them than we do.”
“That’s true, My Lord,” Brigadier Mahrtyn Taisyn put in, his Charisian accent contrasting strongly with those of the others present. “But one thing we discovered in Corisande was that simply getting your hands on rifles doesn’t necessarily mean you understand all the implications of having them.”
The brown-haired, brown-eyed brigadier, the commanding officer of the Imperial Charisian Marines (and seamen) quartered in and around Siddar City, was a square-shouldered, square-faced man. In fact, he radiated a sense of squareness—of solid, unflappable dependability. Some might have gone so far as to call him stolid.
“We had a significant advantage when we went ashore in Corisande three years ago,” he continued, “because Brigadier Clareyk—I mean, General Green Valley—had spent better than a year experimenting with them first. The Corisandians hadn’t had that opportunity, and I’m not convinced the Army of God’s had it, either. Or that Maigwair’s even recognized the need to consider it systematically.”
“What sort of implications are you thinking about, Brigadier?” Stohnar asked.
“My Lord,” Taisyn looked up from the map, “some of the advantages rifles provide are easy enough to grasp. Skirmishers, for example—everybody’s provided their advanced scouts with missile weapons to harass the other side’s scouts forever. The accuracy and range of a rifle is a natural fit for that sort of mission, so I expect we’ll see the Army of God doing that much, at least. But there’s a natural tendency to think of rifles as simply longer-ranged matchlocks or arbalests, at least at first. Just how much longer ranged—and more effective—they actually are seems to take a little longer to grasp. And one of the things we saw in Corisande was that the other side tended to hang onto dense, shoulder-to-shoulder formations to mass and control their fire long after they should have figured out they were just providing riflemen with better targets. They went right on doing it once they had rifles of their own, despite the fact that we’d gone to open order and skirmishers using individual, aimed fire.”
“Our own formations are pretty damned dense and shoulder-to-shoulder,” Parkair pointed out a bit acid
ly, and Taisyn nodded.
“I realize that, My Lord,” the Marine said unapologetically. “That’s how it has to be with pikes. And to be honest, that’s going to hurt us, especially if these reports about their having new model field artillery are accurate.”
His listeners’ faces tightened in understanding. The semaphore chain from Windmoor to Siddar City remained basically intact, although a handful of stations had required rebuilding after Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s Temple Loyalists had burned them in the opening days of their rebellion. It had taken far longer than any of them liked to remember to find enough semaphore crews to man the chain, however, because so many of the Church’s operators had remained loyal to the Temple. As a result, the semaphore had actually begun passing messages reliably once more only within the last couple of five-days. And one of the first messages they’d received had been a warning from Tellesberg that Charisian agents reported the Army of God had somehow acquired the secret of exploding artillery shells to go with its flintlock rifles.
Unfortunately, as Taisyn and Parkair had both admitted, the Republican Army was likely to provide a painfully good target for those shells and rifles. The professional, superbly disciplined and trained pikemen of Siddarmark had been the terror of the Republic’s enemies for the better part of two centuries, ever since it had evolved a radically different doctrine for their employment.
It was a simple fact of life that horses, wiser and less imbued than their riders with a sense of martial glory, would not charge a wall of pikes. They, after all, were smart enough to recognize a barrier too big and too wide for them to jump across when they saw it. All those nasty, pointy pikeheads on the front of that barrier only added to their distaste for such silly goings-on.