Hell's Foundations Quiver (124 page)

“I see what you mean,” he said.

He stood beside Nimue for several minutes, watching the galleon fade into the rain in the darkness. Then, once it had disappeared completely, beyond even the reach of his enhanced vision, he turned to Stefyny, Hailyn, and Zhoahna. The sisters stood side by side, facing him warily, and he bowed.

“I wish your children had never had to see or experience any of this,” he told them quietly, sincerely. “In the end, however, what they would have seen—what they would have experienced at Clyntahn's hands—would have been far worse. And as my companion's already told you, you have Emperor Cayleb and Empress Sharleyan's personal guarantee of your safety.”

“She also promised we wouldn't be used against our father,” Stefyny said, and Merlin's enhanced vision saw the fear, the despair, in her eyes despite the darkness. “And maybe you won't actually
use
us against him. But how do you think Clyntahn's going to react when he hears you've ‘rescued' us? He's certain to assume you
will
use us … and that Father will do whatever you tell him to to keep us safe.”

“But Clyntahn won't hear anything of the sort,” Merlin assured her.

“Don't
lie
to me!” Stefyny snapped, her sudden fury fanned to a white heat that astounded even her as all of the night's terror and fear whiplashed through her. “Of course he'll hear! As soon as that ship makes port—”

The night turned into terrifying dawn.

*   *   *

NGS
Saint Frydhelm
was three miles away from the fishing boat, her surviving crew creeping cautiously back up onto her decks. They went warily, expecting another deadly fusillade of shotgun blasts, but there was nothing, and their surviving officers and petty officers began shouting orders. Discipline reasserted itself, order grew out of chaos, and men ran to the braces while the galleon's fourth lieutenant gathered his helmsmen. They had no idea where their attackers had gone—none of them had actually seen the fishing boat—but unless they truly had been assailed by Shan-wei's own demons, there had to be a boat out there
somewhere
in the darkness. If they could find it, all the shotguns in the world wouldn't protect it from a forty-gun galleon's broadside.

Unfortunately, none of them noticed the stealthed recon skimmer hovering far above them.

Merlin Athrawes had learned a bitter lesson in helplessness when Sir Gwyllym Manthyr's men were consigned to the Punishment. He'd been unable to sink the ships on which they were transported for the over-water portion of the trip, unable to give them the far more merciful death of drowning. There'd been several reasons for that, but one of them had been the very high probability that the emissions of his skimmer's normal energy weapons would have been detected by the sensors serving the orbital bombardment platform. There'd been no way to predict how the bombardment system might have reacted to that, and so he'd been powerless to intervene. But he'd also been determined that would never happen again, and so the remotes in Nimue's Cave had built the skimmer an anachronistic nose gun—a multi-barreled auto-cannon—to replace its original internal weapons. And to go with it, those same remotes had produced a small stock of ancient, laser-guided bombs. They were loaded only with old-fashioned chemical explosives, but Owl had built them in several sizes … including a two-thousand-pound version filled with half a ton of explosives far better than anything Sahndrah Lywys had ever produced.

In this instance, however, a rather smaller weapon would do.

*   *   *

Stefyny and Hailyn, and every member of their families, whirled back to the north as the five-hundred-pound bomb punched through
Saint Frydhelm
's decks as if they'd been made of paper. It detonated squarely in the galleon's magazine, surrounded by fifteen tons of gunpowder, and a pillar of fire raged into the heavens.

The long, echoing roll of thunder rolled over them fourteen seconds later.

*   *   *

“That's what we been waiting for, boys!” Lieutenant Aplyn-Ahrmahk announced as the column of flame flashed against the darkness.

The rain reduced visibility, but not enough to keep
Fleet Wing
's company from seeing the explosion when he'd been able to con the schooner to within five and a half miles before the bomb struck. And not when the explosion was that vast, that brilliant.

“Come to north-by-northeast, Master Slokym,” he said, bending over the compass card and then straightening.

“North-by-northeast, aye, Sir!” the sailing master responded, and Hektor turned to Zosh Hahlbyrstaht,
Fleet Wing
's first lieutenant.

“Go forward and … encourage the lookouts, Zosh,” he said with a smile. “I'm sure they're already as alert as we could possibly ask for, but it never hurts to show them we care.”

“On my way.” Hahlbyrstaht agreed with a nod and an answering grin, and Hektor turned back to his helmsman. It wouldn't do to steer
straight
to Merlin and Nimue's fishing boat, but his lookouts were just as alert as he'd suggested. It was unlikely they'd miss the boat's masthead light, even in the rain, when he swept past within a few hundred yards or so … and if they did, Merlin had three of the Imperial Charisian Navy's signal rockets on board.

You're not the only one on your way, Zosh
, the Duke of Darcos told himself silently.
You're not the only one
.

 

OCTOBER

YEAR OF GOD 897

 

.I.

The Earl of Thirsk's Townhouse, City of Gorath, Kingdom of Dohlar

The rain pounded down as winter extended its grip over the city of Gorath. The drops hammered on slate roofs and clay shingles, and waterfalls cascaded from the eaves. Rivers ran down gutters and downspouts and gurgled down street drains. The torrents poured into the Gorath River, carrying refuse and debris with them, swelling the river dangerously toward the top of its confining embankments, and the night was a black, wet mystery that swallowed the feeble illumination of oil-fed street lamps like a monster.

The raw, drenching chill was worse, more enervating, than a fiercer, harder cold might have been. Not that there wasn't more than sufficient cold and the first heavy snows of winter farther north, where the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels hunkered in its entrenched positions and the Imperial Charisian Army and Republic of Siddarmark Army settled into winter quarters of their own. Behind the advanced Charisian and Siddarmarkian positions, engineers and fatigue parties continued to labor frantically, racing the inevitable frozen ground of October in their efforts to complete repairs to the canal system and high roads the Church's retreating armies had destroyed in their wake. Along the line of the Sheryl-Seridahn Canal, shoulders hunched in rain-lashed, muddy misery, the dug-in Royal Dohlaran Army faced the steady, pounding pressure of the Earl of Hanth's reinforced Army of Thesmar.

And in the study of a Gorath townhouse, a man who'd lost everything he'd loved sat staring into the fire on his hearth with a half-empty whiskey bottle at his elbow.

It was very quiet. He heard the crisp, steady ticking of the clock even through the drum of rain, and the fire crackled and seethed softly. Those were the only sounds, a background that perfected the vaster, echoing stillness behind them. The voices of his daughters, his sons-in-law, and—always and especially—his grandchildren haunted his memory, but those voices would never stir his house's silence again. The residual pain in his shoulder, the dull and unyielding ache of knitting bones that would never be quite the same again, was nothing beside that deeper, infinitely more bitter anguish.

The Earl of Thirsk closed his eyes, raised his glass, and threw back another swallow. The expensive whiskey, undiluted by water or ice, might have been the cheapest rum from some tumbledown dockside tavern. Its false promise of oblivion seared its way down his throat, but he'd always had a hard head. When he'd been younger and more foolish, he'd prided himself on his ability to drink other men, men twice his size, under the table. Now, when he longed for the forgetfulness—or at least the stupor—of drunkenness it was hard to come by.

“Will there be anything else, My Lord?” a quiet voice asked.

The earl hadn't heard the study door open. He didn't turn his head as the voice spoke. He only swallowed more whiskey.

“No, Paiair,” he said flatly.

Paiair Sahbrahan stood in the open doorway for a long, still moment gazing at the man sitting before the fire. No one who'd ever had the misfortune to deal with the Earl of Thirsk's irascible valet would have accused Sahbrahan of sensitivity or anything remotely approaching sentimentality. But the look in the sharp-edged little valet's eyes at that moment might have given those people pause. There was helplessness in those eyes, and grief. Not simply for the man he'd served for so many years, either. His memory, too, heard those youthful voices neither of them would ever hear again in this world, and he longed—needed—to comfort the earl.

And he couldn't. No one could, not where this wound cut into the very soul of him.

“I'll be in the pantry, My Lord. If you need me, just ring.”

“No,” that stark, defeated voice said. “Go to bed. There's no point your sitting up, too.”

“I—”

“I said go to bed!” Thirsk flared suddenly, never looking away from the fire. “I'm not in the habit of repeating myself. Do I need to find myself a valet who
understands
that?!”

“No, My Lord,” Sahbrahan said after a moment. “No, you don't. Good night, My Lord.”

He withdrew, closing the door soundlessly behind him, and Thirsk finished the whiskey in his glass. He set it on the table beside his chair, uncapped the whiskey bottle with his good hand, poured, and set the bottle back down. He took another swallow, and a corner of his mind jeered at him for taking out his own pain, a tiny fraction of his vast anger, upon Sahbrahan.

Tomorrow
, he told that corner drearily.
You'll have to make it up to him somehow tomorrow. Assuming you're unfortunate enough to be sober in the morning
.

The self-pity in the thought cut deep, but he'd taken too much at last.

He'd given all he had to the resurrection and the re-creation of his navy. He'd fought the bureaucratic battles, made the enemies, known the men he'd infuriated would turn upon him and repay all his effort and labor with his own destruction the instant the Jihad no longer required his services. He'd sent the men and officers under his command off to fight an enemy whose weapons were always superior to their own, and they'd won the victories no other navy had. He'd risked the Inquisition's ire to protect men like Dynnys Zhwaigair because of how desperately his navy—and Mother Church herself—needed them. He'd sacrificed even his honor, standing by, acquiescing in the shameful surrender of honorably surrendered men to the vindictive savagery of Zhaspahr Clyntahn because his fealty to his king, his obedience to God's Church, had required even that of him.

And now, at the end of it all, he sat broken and alone, wishing with all his heart and soul that the bullet fired by the most gallant and loyal man he'd ever known had killed him where he stood. That it had spared him the knowledge of the price Ahlvyn Khapahr had paid to protect him, to
cover
for him. If it had, if he'd died that day with Ahlvyn, then perhaps the family Ahlvyn had given his own life trying to save might have survived. If he'd died, Clyntahn would have required no lever to use against him, and so his daughters could have buried him with honor in the family tomb, beside his beloved wife, and they would have been
safe
.

He swallowed more whiskey, cradling the memory of his dead, mourning the sacrifice of honor, integrity, and love Mother Church had inflicted upon him, and wondered why he hadn't ended his own life.

Stywyrt Baiket and
Chihiro
had personally led the squadron which had been sent to search the waters of the Fern Narrows. Thirsk had wanted to lead the search himself, but the horrendous damage to his shoulder had prevented that. The healers wouldn't hear of his leaving their care, and he'd been too weak, too diminished, to fight them over it. Besides, as Baiket and Staiphan Maik had pointed out when they joined their arguments to the healers', there was absolutely no proof—then—that anything was truly amiss. All they had was the unsupported report of a single fisherman that a ship had blown up in the Narrows. They didn't even have the man who'd supposedly seen it happen.

The fisherman had given his report to the commanding officer of the battery—if it wasn't abusing a perfectly good noun to call a half-dozen twenty-five-pounders and a garrison of old men and boys, all under the orders of a fifty-year-old lieutenant with one leg and one eye, a “battery”—placed to protect the small fishing town of Azhinkor. Thirsk couldn't think of a single reason Azhinkor might need protecting, any more than he could think of a Charisian threat which might be deterred by that pathetic defense, yet it was still a military outpost—of sorts, at least—and most fishermen had as little as possible to do with the military or any other branch of officialdom. Yet this one had sought out the lieutenant to inform him that he'd seen an “explosion like one o' the Rakurai its own self, if you take my meanin', Sir” through the previous night's rain.

Azhinkor was too small to be tied into the Church's semaphore chain, but the lieutenant had sent a runner to the nearest station of the coastal chain and the report had reached Gorath within hours. By the time instructions to query the fisherman for more details had gotten back to Azhinkor, of course, the man had disappeared out to sea once more, duty done and probably congratulating himself for having made a clean break of it.