Hell's Foundations Quiver (56 page)

“I hope it won't actually come to that,” she repeated. “But I also believe—no, Cayleb, I
know
—that it's time we cut off every single one of
this
Hydra's heads once and for all. We need to give them enough rope, let them proceed far enough that when we pounce, and when all these traitors face justice, no one will be able to doubt their guilt any more than they could doubt the guilt of Craggy Hill or any of the other conspirators in Corisande. Unless something changes their thinking radically, they aren't going to try anything overt until we actually ship all of General Kahlyns' troops off to Siddarmark next summer, so it's not like I need to rush home to put out any raging forest fires before then. If anything changes in that regard, we'll know about it as soon as they do, thanks to the SNARCs. And, frankly, they're a lot more likely to commit themselves that far, give us the evidence we need to cut out the cancer once and for all, if I'm
not
in Cherayth, and you know it.”

Cayleb looked into her eyes for endless seconds. And then, slowly, he nodded. He didn't like it, but Chisholm was her kingdom. It might be part of
their
empire, but she was the one who'd come to Chisholm's throne as a girl of less than thirteen years. She was the one who'd fearlessly broken Chisholm's nobility to the Crown's bit and bridle once. If anyone on Safehold could do it again—for the last time, this time—it was she. And she was also the one whose judgment he trusted above that of any other human being.

“All right,” he said. “In that case, that's our policy. And that being so, I agree that where you need to be next is in Tellesberg.”

“Good,” she replied in a much gentler tone. Her eyes met his, still dark with the steel which had allowed that long-ago girl child to become a
ruler
, and not just a queen, yet warm. Warm with the knowledge—the understanding—that he wasn't simply acquiescing, not simply abandoning the argument. “I'll leave as soon as we have the Coris situation resolved. And at least once I get there, I'll be six thousand miles closer to
you
, too.”

 

.X.

HMS
Eraystor
, 22, Geyra Bay, Duchy of Harless, Desnairian Empire

“Let's come two points farther to starboard, Captain Cahnyrs.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.” Alyk Cahnyrs glanced over his shoulder at the helmsman. “Two points to starboard,” he said.

“Two points to starboard, aye, Sir,” the man at the wheel responded, and HMS
Eraystor
turned obediently.

Sir Hainz Zhaztro nodded in satisfaction, stepped back out onto his flagship's bridge wing, and looked aft, past the smoke pluming from
Eraystor
's single funnel. His 2nd Ironclad Squadron was still understrength, with only four of its six assigned ships present, but he watched with approval as HMS
Riverbend
, HMS
Cherayth
, and HMS
Bayport
followed his flagship around. He'd had time to drill his command rigorously, if not quite to his own satisfaction. All his captains understood the standard he expected from them, and their precise stationkeeping was all he could have asked for.

He smiled—more of a grimace than a smile, really—at how impossible a conventional squadron would have found it to match that precision. The Imperial Charisian Navy's standards of seamanship were the highest in the world, yet not even their skippers could have held such precise station under sail in such fitful wind conditions. Which was, although it would never do to admit it, why he was so much more comfortable with his present command than he'd ever been with a galleon.

His grimace smoothed back into a smile at that thought, yet it was true. As a ship-handler, he'd never quite made the leap from galleys to square-riggers. That was one reason he'd been so delighted when Prince Nahrmahn Gareyt had insisted on putting his own name into nomination when the Navy went looking for officers to command its new ironclads. He'd been pleased by the implied compliment—both by his current prince's recognition of his service to Prince Nahrmahn, and by Admiral Rock Point's enthusiastic acceptance of the nomination—but the fact that he didn't have to worry about managing sails any longer was a vast relief.

The truth was that galleys were actually better preparation for steamers than galleons would have been, and the fact that he was about to demonstrate just how dangerous the Empire of Charis' newest ironclad class truly was filled him with a solid, vengeful pride. His present objective wasn't
quite
as satisfying as bombarding one of the Temple Lands' port cities would have been, but the
City
-class was too short-legged for that; without additional coaling stations farther west than Claw Island, Zhaztro's ships could have operated no deeper into the Gulf of Dohlar than the western coast of Shwei. Personally, he'd rather have been doing exactly that, range limitations or no, but High Admiral Rock Point had been firm. And, Zhaztro admitted, he'd been right, as well. The privateers operating from the Desnairian coastal enclaves
were
a far greater threat to the war effort in Siddarmark. They needed seeing to, and if that seeing to was the task the Navy needed from him, he damned well intended to do a proper job of it.

Especially given exactly what
else
operated out of the city of Geyra.

He raised his double-glass and gazed through its lenses at the impressive but ancient—and obsolete—walls and battlements. His squadron had passed through the Nearpalm Passage, between Nearpalm Island and the mainland coast, then turned almost due west to steam through the sixty-mile-wide mouth of the magnificent Geyra Bay, at the northern end of a twenty-three-hundred-mile stretch of coastline which ought, by rights, to have made the Desnairian Empire one of the great seafaring nations of Safehold. Protected by a nearly contiguous chain of islands beginning with Nearpalm in the north and anchored by Crab Shell Island at the extreme southern end, it offered scores of protected anchorages, most of them with deep-water access. Three of Desnair's major cities—Geyra, Malyktyn, and Desnair the City itself—lay along that stretch of coast, and the Osalk-Sherkal Canal extended for sixteen hundred miles, connecting all three of them to the Sherkal River, barely four hundred miles from Iythria on the Gulf of Jahras.

Unfortunately for all that unrealized potential, it belonged to Desnairians, whose scorn for seafarers—not to mention merchants, manufactory owners, and bankers—knew no bounds. Worse, perhaps, for all its imposing length, the Osalk-Sherkal barely met the
Writ
-defined minimum standards for a
secondary
canal, far less a primary canal, like the Holy Langhorne or the Guarnak-Ice Ash. Its largest locks were barely eighty feet long and twenty feet wide, its maximum depth was barely eight feet, and its tow paths were poorly laid out and maintained, totally unsuitable for the sort of heavy, sustained traffic the primary canals routinely handled.

It was just like Desnairians, he thought disgustedly, to do a half-arsed job on something which might have provided such an enormous benefit to their economy. The Osalk-Sherkal was quite adequate for the needs of Eastern Desnair's serf-owning agrarian overlords, and those overlords weren't concerned about meeting anyone
else
's needs. The only real exception to that was the Duke of Shairn. In addition to the rich fisheries in the waters east of Shairn, the locks in the Varna and Shairn rivers offered the sole water transport link between Eastern and Western Desnair. Those locks weren't up to the really heavy traffic of northern Haven, either, but they could handle much larger barges than the Osalk-Sherkal could. As a consequence, Shairnians were a less lubberly lot than Desnairians in general, which was undoubtedly the reason Duke Shairn had ended up running the Imperial Desnairian Navy.

Desnair's misfortune had been Charis' good fortune, however. The Osalk-Sherkal was virtually useless when it came to moving the quantities of timber, artillery, anchors, masts, and all the other paraphernalia which went into building ships of war. (Masts and spars were especially problematic, given their length, but they were scarcely the only bottleneck.) That, in turn, had split Desnair's shipbuilding capacity up between the Acorn Bay yards at Desnair the City, the Malyktyn yards on Harless Bay, and Iythria on the Gulf of Jahras. (Why no navy yard had been built at Shairnport initially was an interesting question whose answer undoubtedly had something to do with typically convoluted internal Desnairian politics, but Zhaztro wasn't about to complain about it.) Thanks in no small part to the ICN, the squadrons built in those widely separated yards had never managed to combine into a single unified force, and the systematic elimination of all shipbuilding capacity in the Gulf of Jahras had disposed of everything north of Malyktyn and Geyra.

Disposing of the threadbare remnants of the Imperial Desnairian Navy promised to be a somewhat more difficult task, however. The interconnected waterways of Geyra Bay, Harless Bay, Hathor Sound, and—courtesy of the Empress Alysahndra Canal, the one real (if short) canal east of the Desnairian Mountains—Acorn Bay were one enormous maze, its flanks riddled with potential hiding spots for galleons, galleys … and privateers. (Shairn Bay, three hundred miles farther south and without the same plethora of islands and coves, was a separate problem which would have to be settled later.) The twenty-odd miles of the Empress Alysahndra Canal were too shallow for blue-water galleons, but it was more than adequate for small coasters and privateer schooners. And, just to make Zhaztro's task more interesting, the Desnairians had scattered dozens of pocket-sized building yards over the entire area to produce even more privateers.

Of course they have. Not even the Church could really interest Desnairian noblemen in building a navy, but
privateers—!
Ah, that's
different
, isn't it? After all, that's a way for those same noblemen to make money without demeaning themselves by actually building up their own country or dirtying their hands with anything reeking of “trade
.”

It was possible he was being unfair to the Empire's aristocracy. Possible … but not damned likely.

At the moment, however, he and his squadron were about to begin divesting those privateer-building nobles of their assets. It was a long overdue task, and the fact that he got to start with Geyra was simply icing on his personal cake. Emperor Mahrys II, the current emperor's great-grandfather, had decided to make the City of Geyra his winter capital eighty-two years before, when he married the grandmother of the current Duke of Harless. Zhaztro had visited both Geyra and Desnair the City during the winter in the service of Prince Nahrmahn, and he had to acknowledge that there'd been much to recommend Mahrys' decision from the viewpoint of both architecture and climate. Many of his imperial advisors had been adamantly opposed to the move, mostly because of the huge increase in prestige and political power it had bestowed upon the House of Gahrnet. Desnair the City had been even more bitterly opposed, for obvious reasons, but at least the imperial court had been located in Geyra for only three months a year.

Mahrys
IV
, however, had been raised in Geyra, not Desnair the City. His mother, the daughter of the previous Duke of Traykhos, had been the first cousin of Sir Ahlvyn Gahrnet, and she'd spent much of her own girlhood in Geyra. Not only that, she'd detested Desnair the City for a host of reasons, and she'd instilled the same feelings into her son. Emperor Mahrys vastly preferred his hometown to the official capital, and he spent no more than two or—at most, kicking and screaming the entire time—three months a year in Desnair the City. There were those who argued—very quietly and privately; they preferred their heads where they were—that Mahrys' preference for Geyra had directly contributed to the disaster the Army of Shiloh had suffered, since the present Duke of Traykhos, his maternal uncle, was his first councilor and he and Traykhos between them had selected their mutual cousin Sir Ahlvyn, the recently deceased Duke of Harless, to command the Emperor's armed forces in Siddarmark.

That move, unfortunately, had worked out poorly for a great many people, not all of them Desnairian. Now it was time to make the Empire of Charis' displeasure with such ill-considered decisions clear, and Sir Hainz Zhaztro had been chosen to deliver the message.

I do hope His Majesty's in residence to receive it personally,
he thought cheerfully.
I'm pretty sure he won't like it. And I doubt the new duke's going to be any happier with Charis than the
old
one was
,
for that matter. Pity about that
.

The double-glass showed flickers of movement along the city walls and along the batteries built to cover the Geyra waterfront. His ships were still too far away for him to make out any detail, even through the double-glass, but that was fine. His targets weren't going anywhere.

He swung away from the city, making a quick but thorough survey of the rest of his command. Geyra Bay stretched over three hundred miles from east to west and was almost a hundred and twenty miles deep along its north-to-south axis. That offered plenty of scope for naval maneuvers, and his schooners and supporting galleons—and the trio of bombardment ships—lay hove-to like a vast, untidy gaggle of sea wyverns a good ten miles southeast of his abbreviated line of ironclads. They were waiting, handy if he needed them but safely out of harm's way in the meantime, and he nodded in satisfaction.

“We're coming up on the designated range, Sir Hainz,” Lieutenant Ahdym Stormynt, his flag lieutenant, reminded him tactfully, and he snorted.

“Always a good thing to remember,” he acknowledged, dropping the double-glass to hang from the strap around his neck. He dug into his tunic pocket for the earplugs and fitted them into place. He didn't like the sound-deadening effect, but he liked the thought of what
Eraystor
's heavy guns would do to his hearing without them even less.