As usual, the thought made him smile, and he looked across at the hamster cage in one corner of his office. The exercise wheel was squeaking busily, and he shook his head at the sight. He’d never been especially interested in hamsters, although his sister had had dozens of the little critters as a child, until he’d discovered every single one of the fuzz balls was descended from a half dozen who’d come all the way from Old Earth in the personal baggage allotment of none other than Pei Shan-wei herself. That had been more than enough to move them to a place of honor in his personal pantheon.
The thought restored some of his habitual good humor, and he drew a deep breath and looked at the man standing somewhat anxiously in his office doorway. Nahrmahn Tidewater knew better than to waste his time, he reminded himself, and if his work schedule had been interrupted it was his own fault. He’d made it a practice, for very good reasons, to adopt what Merlin called an “open-door policy” where his artisans, mechanics, and workmen were concerned.
“Yes, Nahrmahn. What is it?” he asked pleasantly.
“I know you’re busy, Sir, but I’ve a fellow here I think you’d better talk to. He’s a notion I think might just work out very well indeed, and I’m none too sure in my own mind why it’s never occurred to anyone else.”
“Ah?” Howsmyn tipped back in his chair, and Tidewater shrugged.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, Sir, but I’m thinking you may just be calling on Father Paityr after you’ve had this little talk.”
“I see.”
The ironmaster felt the last of his irritation flicker away. One of the reasons he’d instituted his open-door policy was to encourage the flow of innovation. Quite a few addled notions had walked through that door over the last few years, but so had some very good ideas, and the pace was picking up in satisfying fashion. Tidewater himself, for example, had been instrumental in the development of the sewing machines which were in the process of more than quadrupling the output of Raiyhan Mychail’s clothing manufactories.
“Well, in that case, bring him in!”
“Aye, Sir.” Tidewater leaned back and looked down the hall. “Taigys! Master Howsmyn’s ready to see you.”
There was a moment of silence, and then a small, wiry fellow with graying brown hair stepped just a bit awkwardly into the office. Howsmyn recognized the face and the shrewd dark eyes, but he couldn’t quite put a name to them. Then he saw the left hand, stiff and awkward, its little finger and ring finger missing, and he remembered.
“Taigys … Mahldyn?” he said, standing behind his desk, and the man in front of him beamed.
“Indeed I am, Sir!” He shook his head. “And to think you remember after so long!”
“I try to remember people who get hurt in my employ, Master Mahldyn. Especially when it happens because of my mistake.”
“Ahhh!” Mahldyn waved his good hand in a dismissing gesture. “You’d warned us all about the shafting, Master Howsmyn. ’Twas my own fault I didn’t listen hard enough. And the trade you had me taught, it’s paid well.” He beamed again. “My youngest, Fhranklyn, he’s been accepted to the Royal College, you know!”
“No, I didn’t. That’s good—that’s very good!” Howsmyn smiled back at him and offered his right hand. Mahldyn hesitated for a moment, then clasped forearms with him. “And your wife … Mathylda?”
“Oh, she’s fine, Sir. The patience of a saint! She’s survived three boys—and me—after all!”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Howsmyn released the other man’s arm and stepped back, sitting on the edge of his desk and looking back and forth between Mahldyn and Tidewater. “But I understand from Master Tidewater you have something you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Aye, Sir, that I do.”
Mahldyn seemed to hesitate, then he squared his shoulders and looked Howsmyn straight in the eye.
“The thing is, Sir, the last three years I’ve been one of the barrel makers in the pistol shop. I only need the one hand to turn the barrel under the drop hammer, you know. And then, in November, Master Tidewater promoted me to shop supervisor. And a little after that, you sent round that new pistol—that ‘revolver’—of Seijin Merlin’s, and we started the new tooling.”
Howsmyn nodded.
“I hadn’t realized you were the supervisor, Master Mahldyn, but Master Tidewater obviously made a good choice. Production is up to—what? Forty a day?”
“Almost. It’s a wonderful, clever design, Sir, but we’ve had a few problems with the trigger spring. They’re solved now, and I think we may get up to as many as fifty a day, though we’ll not do better than that without expanding further.”
“I’d love to, Master Mahldyn,” Howsmyn sighed. “But the truth is, revolvers we can live without. It’s rifles we need more than anything else, so when it comes to prioritizing—”
He shrugged, and Mahldyn nodded.
“Oh, I know that, Sir! That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about, although if it should turn out you think there’s anything in this notion that’s occurred to me, we’ll probably have to retool quite a bit.”
“Oh?” Howsmyn cocked his head again, invitingly.
“You see, Sir, when I first saw what the seijin had made, I thought what a clear, wonderful notion it was. It was like having six barrels, not just the two, and each one available as fast as you could cock the hammer and squeeze the trigger. And what a sweet, sweet action it had! But the more I’ve looked at it, the more it’s struck me to wonder if we couldn’t make it even better.”
“Better?”
“It’s clear as Langhorne’s sunlight it’s the most deadly handgun in all the world as it stands,” Mahldyn said soberly. “And with extra cylinders, you’ve Shan-wei’s own firepower for as long as they last. But then it’s a matter of quite some time to reload—longer to reload the cylinder then to reload an old-style pistol, in fact. But what if we were to take the idea behind the cylinder, the extension of the barrel that’s already loaded before ever you cock the hammer, and drill it all the way through?”
“Drill what all the way through, Master Mahldyn?” Howsmyn was careful about his tone, letting it show perplexity and not the sudden sparkle of hope he felt deep inside. If Mahldyn was headed.…
“The cylinder, Sir.”
Mahldyn reached into the pocket of his leather apron and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He waved it in the direction of Howsmyn’s desk, his eyebrows raised, and Howsmyn nodded and stepped aside so the artificer could unfold his sketch on the desk. It was very rough—whatever else he might be, Taigys Mahldyn was no draftsman—but the basic idea was clear enough.
“What I was thinking, Sir, was we’ve gone to the new breech-loading cartridge and percussion caps in the Mahndrayns, and it’s worked well enough. But it struck me to wonder if we couldn’t do the same thing with the seijin’s revolvers? Oh, we couldn’t open and close the back of the cylinder the way the Mahndrayn does, so we couldn’t use the kind of paper cartridge the rifle uses, but you know, Sir, the thing that really makes the Mahndrayn work is that felt wad on the end of the cartridge. The one that crushes up against the breech face and seals the flash. It’s no strength at all, really, when you come down to it. It’s the metal all about it holds it against the pressure when the cartridge fires. All the felt does is seal the crack. And if you can do it with felt, why not another way? And once I was thinking about that, I got to thinking about the crush gauges, and it occurred to me felt’s not the only thing deforms under pressure. So, the long and the short of it is that I found myself wondering why we couldn’t make the cartridge out of metal instead of paper? It wouldn’t have to be all that fearsomely strong or heavy with the cylinder wall to hold it. And if it was made out of copper—or bronze, maybe—why shouldn’t it expand the same way the base of the bullet does when the cartridge fires? If the bullet seals the bore on the way out the front, why couldn’t a metal cartridge seal the flash on the way out the back?”
He was looking at Howsmyn as if he half-ex
pected his employer to decide he was a gibbering idiot, but Howsmyn’s eyes were narrow, intent, and he nodded slowly.
“It just might work,” he said, equally slowly. “It really might. But how do you get the powder inside this … metal cartridge of yours to explode?”
“I’ve two or three thoughts on that, Sir,” Mahldyn said eagerly, the words coming faster, almost tripping over one another, at the evidence of Howsmyn’s interest. “We’d be needing some kind of a ledge or rim on the end of the cartridge to keep it from sliding too far into the cylinder when it was loaded. So if we made the rim hollow, and we put the fulminated mercury into the rim, then hit it with the hammer, that should work. I’m a mite concerned about the possible weakness that could create, though, so I’ve another sketch … here.” He tapped one of the detail sketches on his big sheet of paper. “You see there’s a pin sticking out the side of the cartridge, and the hammer comes down on it from the side. It’s charged with the fulminated mercury, and it flashes over into the cartridge the same as a percussion cap in a Mahndrayn. I’ve done a little experimenting, and it works well enough, but the pins are fragile. There’s precious few things a soldier can’t break, and I’d as soon not give him anything easier to break than needs must. So I think it comes down to putting it into the rim—a ‘rimfire,’ I suppose you’d call it—or figuring a way to crimp something like a regular cap into the base, where it could flash up into the powder. A ‘centerfire’ cartridge, so to speak. I’ve not actually experimented with that yet, you understand, but if you look here, at this sketch—”
“Enough, Master Mahldyn!” Howsmyn broke in on the torrential explanation, and Mahldyn skidded to a halt. He looked at his employer apologetically, but Howsmyn only shook his head with a grin.
“So you think there’s something in it, Master Howsmyn?” Tidewater said, recognizing that grin of old, and Howsmyn nodded.
“Master Mahldyn,” he said, “I think you’ve just become a rich man.”
“Beg pardon, Sir?” Mahldyn looked at him uncertainly.
“Surely you know my policy, Master Mahldyn!” Howsmyn shook his head again at the artificer’s expression. “You thought of it, not me. So as the fellow who came up with the idea, the patent application will list your name as the primary applicant.”
“But—!”
“Master Tidewater, I thought we’d explained this to everyone,” Howsmyn said.
“That we have, Sir. In fact, I’ve personally explained it twice in Taigys’ presence. You may have noticed, though, that there’s a deal going on inside that head of his. Sometimes the latest notion chasing itself through it causes him to … lose touch with the world about him for a while. As he says,” Tidewater smiled broadly, “Mistress Mathylda really does have the patience of a saint!”
“I see.” Howsmyn turned back to Mahldyn. “The way it works, Master Mahldyn, is that while you did come up with the notion in my employ, the idea was yours, not mine. So the patent application will be filed jointly in your name and in mine. I’ll see to the licensing and to the manufacturing, although I’ve no doubt you’ll want to be what a friend of mine calls ‘hands-on’ with that end of things as well. The income from the licensing fees and sales will be accounted, and after production costs have been covered, the net profit will be divided equally between you and me.”
Mahldyn was staring at him now, and Howsmyn smiled. The artificer knew perfectly well that quite a few of Howsmyn’s competitors took a very different view of who owned what if one of their workers devised a new idea while working in their manufactory. And that was fine with Ehdwyrd Howsmyn. If they were stupid enough to rob their own workers of the fruit of their labors rather than making those same workers partners in developing the idea in question, more and more of those workers would be finding themselves in his employ.
“Don’t think you’re done yet, though, Master Mahldyn!” he continued briskly. “I think this ‘centerfire’ notion of yours is definitely the way to go, and I’ll want to be involved in the process, myself. I can think of a couple of other refinements we might want to consider, including finding the fastest way we can come up with to clear the expended cartridges and reload. Then there’s the question of how to manufacture the cartridges—it’s going to have to be a drawing process, I think, but we can handle that. The alloy, though. That’s going to be tricky—too soft and it’s going to jam, too hard and we may split the case after all. And I’ll want to see sketches and ideas about how we go about seating the primer in the base of the cartridge without weakening it.”
His smile grew broader.
“I’m sure you’ll be equal to the task, Master Mahldyn! And as Master Tidewater can tell you, I’m a fair hand at suggesting possible approaches once someone’s aimed me in the right direction. So I’ve no doubt at all you’ll be able to make this work, and if you can make it work for revolvers, then I’ve no doubt you can make it work for a modified Mahndrayn, as well. And if you can do that, Master Mahldyn, with all of the ammunition we’re going to need to deal with those bastards in Zion, you’ll retire a very wealthy man indeed … and no one in this world will deserve it more.”
.XII.
The Temple, City of Zion, The Temple Lands
Archbishop Wyllym Rayno moved quickly across the Plaza of Martyrs towards the Temple’s soaring colonnade.
The Plaza bore little resemblance to the spacious, celebratory garden it had been before the serpent of heresy reared its head in far-off Charis. The majestic sculptures of the archangels continued to look out upon the courtyard from their places around its perimeter, but somehow their expressions were no longer benign and sternly approving. Instead, they seemed harsh, angry—the faces of holy beings who had looked upon the heart of evil and judged it deserving of punishment. Perhaps that was because the reverent statues of the heroic martyrs who’d stood with them against Shan-wei’s deluded adherents after the arch-traitor Kau-yung struck at Langhorne’s own fellowship no longer formed the center of the plaza. Instead, they’d been removed, for fresh evil and corruption had fallen upon Safehold. This was no longer a time for reverent deference; it was a time once more for the hard duty and unflinching, obedient dedication which had inspired those first martyrs in the War Against the Fallen, and in place of their statues stood the grim, blackened reminders of the punishment awaiting Shan-wei’s and Kau-yung’s current servants.
As a general thing, Rayno had little problem with the change. He was no more enamored of the loss of what had been a pleasant, breeze-filled garden than the next man, and he admitted that the fountains the vanished statues had once surrounded looked naked and … forlorn, somehow, despite their dancing, ever-changing lace-work of spray. But he found the message behind the change, the readiness of Mother Church to show her stern, unyielding devotion as the shepherd of men reassuring. It was the evidence that, come what may, God’s Church would never allow herself to be dictated to by the changeable, unpredictable, ephemeral currents of merely mortal prejudices or the transitory enthusiasms of the day. And if Mother Church must make occasional accommodations with the letter of the Writ in order to preserve its spirit and keep herself and her doctrine inviolate, then those accommodations—however regrettable at that moment—must simply be made.
This morning, however, even he felt a shiver as he hurried past those scorched, heat-cracked portions of paving. His superior, the man most responsible for creating that change in the Plaza of Martyrs, was not going to be happy with his report.
* * *
“Not acceptable, Wyllym.” Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s eyes were hard, almost glittering, as he looked across his desk at the adjutant of the Order of Schueler. “Somebody was responsible for these acts of murder.” His index finger tapped ominously on his blotter. “I want whoever it was. I want them captured, interrogated, and punished as their crimes deserve!”
“Your Grace, we’ve tried,” Rayno replied in an unusually humble tone. “Our best investigators have examined every scrap of evidence. Our inquisitors have
pursued every hint of a lead. We’ve doubled the agents of inquisition inserted into potentially heretical groups. And we’ve found nothing more than I’ve already reported to you.”
“Which is that five vicars of Mother Church, all loyal servants of the Jihad and strong supporters of the Inquisition, have been most foully murdered in the last seven months, and that you’re no closer to discovering who was responsible than you were when they first occurred. That’s what you’ve already reported to me, Wyllym!”
“I realize that, Your Grace.” Rayno bowed, commanding his face to remain politely attentive—merely deferential and humbly contrite—for he’d seen what had happened to others who’d shown fear at a moment like this. “And I certainly haven’t abandoned the investigation. But I’d be remiss in my duties as the adjutant of your Order if I didn’t tell you the truth, as frankly and fully as I can.” His eyes showed no awareness of the many times he’d actually … tailored that truth rather carefully. “And the truth is that whoever was behind those murders must have been very tightly organized and, I suspect, sent from outside Zion itself.”
“Oh?” Clyntahn leaned back, his expression dangerous. “And what about your theory that the first two murders were simply outbursts of spontaneous, irrational rage—‘crimes of passion and opportunity,’ I believe you called them at the time.”
“That was only one of several possible scenarios I sketched in my initial reports, Your Grace,” Rayno reminded him respectfully. “And it fitted the evidence then available to us. Vicar Suchung and Vicar Vyncnai were set upon on their way home from … an evening’s entertainment.” They had, in fact, been on their way home from a brothel, and knowing the vicars in question, Rayno was confident both had been thoroughly drunk at the time. “They had only two Guardsmen each in attendance, and that simply wasn’t enough security when they encountered the food riot. Or that’s what it looked like at the time, at any rate.”
“And now?” Clyntahn asked unpleasantly.