"No, he isn't," the commander agreed with massive restraint as the range fell steadily. It was down to less than three hundred yards and still dropping, and he wondered how far the other skipper was going to go in calling what he undoubtedly hoped was Wave's bluff "Pass the word to the Gunner to stand ready to fire a shot across his bow."
Urvyn hesitated. It was a tiny thing. Someone else might not have noticed it at all, but Urvyn had been Hywyt's first lieutenant for over six months. For a moment, Hywyt thought he would have to repeat the order, but then Urvyn turned heavily away and raised his leather speaking trumpet.
"Stand ready to fire across his bow, Master Charlz!" he shouted, and Wave's gunner waved back in acknowledgment.
* * * *
"I think he's—"
Brother Tymythy never completed that particular observation. There was no need. The flat, concussive thud of a single gun punctuated it quite nicely, and Sawal watched the cannonball go slashing across the waves, cutting its line of white across their crests as cleanly as any kraken's dorsal fin.
"He's fired on us!" Tymythy said instead. His voice was shrill with outrage, and his eyes were wide, as if he was actually surprised that even Charisians should dare to offer such insult to Mother Church. And perhaps he was. Sawal, on the other hand, discovered that he truly wasn't.
"Yes, he has," the under-priest agreed far more calmly than he felt.
I didn't really believe they'd do it, he thought. I'm sure I didn't. So why am I not surprised that they have? This is the beginning of the end of the world, for God's sake!
He thought again about the dispatches he carried, who they were addressed to, and why. He thought about the whispered rumors, about exactly what Prince Hektor and his allies had hoped for . . . what rewards they'd been promised by the Church.
No, not by the Church, Sawal told himself. By the Knights of the Temple Lands. There is a difference!
Yet even as he insisted upon that to himself, he knew better. Whatever technical or legal distinctions might exist, he knew better. And that, he realized now, with something very like despair, was why he truly wasn't surprised.
Even now, he couldn't put it into words for himself couldn't make himself face it that squarely, but he knew. Whatever might have been true before the massive onslaught Prince Hektor and his allies had launched upon the Kingdom of Charis, the Charisians knew as well as Sawal who had truly been behind it. They knew the reality of the cynical calculations, the casual readiness to destroy an entire realm in blood and fire, and the arrogance which had infused and inspired them. This time the "Group of Four" had come too far out of the shadows, and what they had envisioned as the simple little assassination of an inconvenient kingdom had turned into something very different.
Charis knew who its true enemy had been all along, and that explained exactly why that schooner was prepared to fire on the flag of God's own Church.
The schooner was closer now, leaning to the press of her towering spread of canvas, her bow garlanded with white water and flying spray that flashed like rainbow gems under the brilliant sun. He could make out individuals along her low bulwarks, pick out her uniformed captain standing aft, near the wheel, see the crew of the forward gun in her starboard broadside reloading their weapon. He looked up at his own sails, then at the schooner's kraken-like grace, and drew a deep breath.
"Strike our colors, Brother Tymythy," he said.
"Father?" Brother Tymythy stared at him, as if he couldn't believe his own ears.
"Strike our colors!" Sawal repeated more firmly. "But, but the Bishop Executor—"
"Strike our colors!" Sawal snapped.
For a moment, he thought Tymythy might refuse. Tymythy knew their orders as well as Sawal did, after all. But it was far easier for a bishop to order an under-priest to maintain the authority of Mother Church "at any cost" than it was for Father Rahss Sawal to get the crew of his vessel killed as part of an exercise in futility.
If there were any hope of actually delivering our dispatches, I wouldn't strike, he told himself, and wondered whether or not it was the truth. But it's obvious we can't keep away from them, and if those people over there are as prepared to fire into us as I think they are, they'll turn this entire vessel into toothpicks with a single broadside. Two, at the outside. There's no point in seeing my own people slaughtered for nothing, and we aren't even armed.
The flag which had never before been dipped to any mortal power fluttered down from the courier boat's masthead. Sawal watched it come down, and an ice-cold wind blew through the marrow of his bones.
It was a small thing, in so many ways, that scrap of embroidered fabric. But that was how all true catastrophes began, wasn't it? With small things, like the first stones in an avalanche.
Maybe I should have made them fire into us. At least then there wouldn't have been any question, any ambiguity. And if Charis is prepared to defy Mother Church openly, perhaps a few dead crewmen would have made that point even more clearly.
Perhaps they would have, and perhaps he should have forced the Charisians to do it, but he was a priest, not a soldier, and he simply couldn't. And, he told himself, the mere fact that Charis had fired upon the flag of Holy Mother Church should be more than enough without his allowing his people to be killed, on top of it.
No doubt it would, and yet even as he told himself that, he knew.
The lives he might have saved this morning would be as meaningless as mustard seeds on a hurricane's breath beside the horrendous mountains of death looming just over the lip of tomorrow.
.II.
Royal Palace,
City of Manchyr,
Princedom of Corisande
Hektor Daykyn's toe caught on the splinter-fringed gouge a Charisian round shot had plowed across the deck of the galley Lance. It was one of many such gouges, and the Prince of Corisande reached out to run his hand across a shattered bulwark railing where the mast had come thundering down in splintered ruin.
"Captain Harys had his hands full bringing this one home, Your Highness," the man walking at his right shoulder said quietly.
"Yes. Yes, he did," Hektor agreed, but his voice was oddly distant, his eyes looking at something only he could see. The distant focus in those eyes worried Sir Taryl Lektor, the Earl of Tartarian, more than a little bit. With the Earl of Black Water's death in battle confirmed, Tartarian had become the senior ranking admiral of the Corisandian Navy—such as it was, and what remained of it—and he didn't much care for the way his prince seemed to occasionally . . . wander off into his own thoughts. It was too unlike Hektor's normal, decisive manner.
"Father, can we go now?"
Hektor's eyes blinked back into focus, and he turned to look at the boy beside him. The youngster had Hektor's dark eyes and jawline, but he had the copper-bright hair of his dead northern mother. He was probably going to favor his father in height, too, although it was a bit early to be sure about that. At fifteen, Crown Prince Hektor still had some growing to do.
In more ways than one, his father thought grimly.
"No, we can't," he said aloud. The crown prince frowned, and his shoulders hunched as he shoved his hands into his breeches' pockets. It wouldn't be quite fair to call his expression a pout, but Prince Hektor couldn't think of a word that came closer.
Irys, you're worth a dozen of him, the prince thought. Why, oh why, couldn't you have been born a man?
Unfortunately, Princess Irys hadn't been, which meant Hektor had to make do with his namesake.
"Pay attention," he said coldly now, giving the boy a moderately stern glare. "Men died to bring this ship home, Hektor. You might learn something from their example."
Hektor the younger flushed angrily at the public reprimand. His father observed his darkened color with a certain satisfaction, then reminded himself that publicly humiliating the child who would someday sit on his throne and rule his princedom was probably not a very good idea. Princes who remembered that sort of treatment te
nded to take it out on their own subjects, with predictable results.
Not that the odds of this particular crown prince having the opportunity to do anything of the sort were particularly good. Which had quite a lot to do with the damage to the battered galley on which Hektor stood.
He turned in place, looking up and down the full length of the ship. Tartarian was right, he reflected. Getting this ship home must have been a nightmare. Her pumps were still working even now, as she lay to her anchor. The long, crawling voyage home from Darcos Sound—almost seven thousand miles—in a ship which had been holed at least a dozen times below the waterline, and a third of whose crew had been slaughtered by the Charisian artillery, was the stuff of which legends were made. Hektor hadn't even tried to count the shot holes above the waterline, but he'd already made a mental note to have Captain Zhoel Harys promoted.
And at least I have plenty of vacancies to promote him into, don't I? Hektor thought, looking down at the dark discoloration where human blood had soaked deeply into Lance's deck planking.
"All right, Hektor," he said. "We can go, I suppose. You're late for your fencing lesson, anyway."
* * * *
Some hours later, Hektor; Admiral Tartarian; Sir Lyndahr Raimynd, Hektor's treasurer; and the Earl of Coris, his spymaster, sat in a small council chamber whose window overlooked the naval anchorage.
"How many does that make, My Prince?" Earl Coris asked.
"Nine," Hektor said, rather more harshly than he'd intended to. "Nine," he repeated in a more moderate tone. "And I doubt we're going to see many more of them."
"And according to our latest messages from the Grand Duke, none of the Zebediahan-manned galleys have made it home even now," Coris murmured.
"I'm well aware of that," Hektor said.
And I'm not very surprised, either, he thought. There never were many of them, and despite anything Tohmys may have to say, I'll wager his precious captains surrendered just about as quickly as Sharleyan's Chisholmians. He snorted mentally. After all, they love me just about as much as Sharleyan does.
Actually, that probably wasn't quite fair, he reflected. It had been over twenty years since he had defeated and deposed—and executed—the last Prince of Zebediah. Who hadn't been a particularly good prince before the conquest even when he'd had a head, as even the most rabid Zebediahan patriot was forced to admit. Hektor might have displayed a certain ruthlessness in rooting out potential resistance and making sure the entire previous dynasty was safely extinct, and he'd been forced to make examples of the occasional ambitious noble since then. But at least they'd gotten honest government since becoming Corisandian subjects, and their taxes weren't actually all that much higher than they had been. Of course, more of those taxes were spent in Corisande than in Zebediah, but if they insisted on losing wars, they couldn't have everything.
And whatever the common folk might think, Tohmys Symmyns, the Grand Duke of Zebediah, and his fellow surviving aristocrats knew which side of their bread the jam was on. Symmyns' father, for example, had been a mere baron before Hektor elevated him to the newly created title of grand duke, and the current grand duke would retain the title only as long as he retained Hektor's confidence. Still, there was no denying that his Zebediahan subjects were somewhat less enthusiastic than his native-born Corisandians about shedding their blood in the service of the House of Daykyn.
Something about how much of their blood had been shed by the House of Daykyn over the last few decades, probably.
"Frankly, Your Highness," Tartarian said, "I'll be astonished if we see any more of them, Corisandian-crewed or Zebediahan-crewed. Lance is the next best thing to a wreck. Given her damage and casualties, it's a miracle Harys got her home at all, and he didn't set any record passage doing it." The admiral shook his head, his expression grim. "If there were any of them with worse damage, they almost certainly went down before they could reach Corisande. Either that or they're beached on an island somewhere between here and Darcos Sound, at any rate."
"That's my opinion, as well," Hektor agreed, and inhaled deeply "Which means that whenever Haarahld gets around to us, we're not going to have a navy to fend him off."
"If the reports are accurate, no conventional galley fleet would be able to stop him anyway, Your Highness," Tartarian said.
"Agreed. So we're just going to have to build ourselves a 'new model' galleon fleet of our own."
"How likely is Haarahld to give us the time to do something like that, My Prince?" Coris asked.
"Your guess is as good as mine, Phylyp. In fact"—Hektor's smile was alum-tart—"I rather hope your guess is better than mine."
Coris didn't quail, but his expression wasn't particularly happy, either. Phylyp Ahzgood, like his counterpart in Charis, had not been born to the nobility. He'd received his title (following the unfortunately deceased previous Earl of Coris' involvement in the last serious attempt to assassinate Hektor) in recognition of his work as Hektor's spymaster, and he was probably the closest thing Hektor had to a true first councilor. But he'd slipped considerably in the prince's favor as the devastating degree to which Haarahld of Charis' naval innovations had been underestimated began becoming painfully clear. It was entirely possible that his head was still keeping company with the rest of his body only because everyone else had been taken equally by surprise.
"Actually, I think we may have at least a little time in hand, Your Highness," Tartarian said. The admiral seemed blissfully unaware of the undercurrent between his prince and Coris, although Hektor rather doubted he truly was.
"As a matter of fact, I think I may agree with you, Admiral," the prince said. "I'm curious as to whether or not your reasoning matches mine, though."
"A lot depends on Haarahld's resources and how focused he can keep his strategy, Your Highness. Frankly, from the reports we've received so far, it doesn't sound as if he lost very many—if any—of those damned galleons. On the other hand, he didn't exactly have a huge number of them before the battle, either. Let's say he has thirty or forty. That's a very powerful fleet, especially with the new artillery. In fact, it could probably defeat any other fleet on the face of Safehold. But as soon as he starts splitting it up to cover multiple objectives, it gets far weaker. And despite what's just happened to all of our navies, he has to take at least some precautions to cover his home waters and protect his merchant shipping.
"As I see it, that means he probably only has the capability to launch one effective offensive at a time. I'd love for him to try to conduct multiple campaigns, but I don't think he's stupid enough to do that. And while we're thinking about the sorts of campaigns he can fight, let's not forget that he doesn't really have an army at all, and Corisande isn't exactly a small piece of dirt. It's over seventeen hundred miles from Wind Hook Head to Dairwyn, and more like two thousand from Cape Targan to West Wind Head. We may be a lot less densely populated than someplace like Harchong or Siddarmark, but that's still a lot of territory to cover. He can raise an army big enough to meet his needs against us and Emerald both, if he really tries, but that's going to take time and carry Shan-wei's own price tag. And it's going to cut into his ability to continue his naval buildup, as well.
"Even in a best-case situation—best case from his perspective, I mean—it will be five-days, or even months, before he's prepared to launch any serious overseas attacks. And even when he is, Emerald is much closer to him than we are. He's not going to want to leave Prince Nahrmahn unneutralized in his rear while he sends the majority of his fleet and every Marine he can scrape up to attack us. That probably means he'll deal with Emerald first, and while I don't think much of the Emeraldian Army, it does exist. If it decides to fight, it's going to take him at least another couple of months, minimum, to take just the major ports and cities. Subduing the entire island, assuming Nahrmahn's subjects decide to remain loyal to him, is going to take even longer.
"So, if he pursues a conventional strategy, I doubt very much that he's
going to be able to get around to us at all this year."
"Cogently argued," Hektor said. "And, overall, I find myself in agreement with you. But don't forget that Haarahld of Charis has already demonstrated that he's perfectly prepared to pursue conventional strategies, Admiral."
"Oh, I won't, I assure you, Your Highness. No one associated with the Navy is likely to forget that anytime soon."
"Good." Hektor smiled frostily, then waved one hand.
"For the moment, though, let's assume your analysis is reasonably accurate. Even if it's not, we undoubtedly have at least a month or two before Haarahld's going to be able to come calling. Oh, we may see some cruisers prowling around the coast, snapping up any merchant shipping foolish enough to cross their paths, but it's going to take him longer to put together a serious expedition. And if it takes him long enough, we may have a few nasty surprises of our own for him when he gets here."
"What sort of surprises, My Prince?" Coris asked.
"At least Black Water's dispatches with the sketches of the new Charisian guns got here safely," Hektor pointed out. "It's a pity the actual prize ships managed to end up in Eraystor for some mysterious reason, but thanks to his sketches and Captain Myrgyn's accompanying report, we know about the new gun mounts and carriages and the bagged powder charges. I'd love to know more about this new gunpowder of theirs, as well, but—"
Hektor grimaced and shrugged slightly. That was the one part of Myrgyn's report which had been less than rigorously complete.
"I think we can still take advantage of what we do know about their artillery improvements even without that, though," he continued after a moment. "The question is how long we'll have to put them into effect."
"I've already discussed the new guns with the Master of Artillery, Your Highness," Tartarian said. "He's just as upset as I was that the same ideas never occurred to us. They're so damned simple that—"
The earl stopped himself and shook his head.
"Sorry, Your Highness." He cleared his throat. "The point I was going to make is that he's already making the molds for his first pour of new-style guns. Obviously, he's going to have to do some experimenting, and the new guns are going to have to be bored and mounted. All the same, he's estimating that he should be able to deliver the first of them within a month and a half or so. I told him"—Tartarian looked Hektor in the eye—"that I understood it was only an estimate and that there'd be no repercussions if it turned out that, despite his best efforts, his estimate was overly optimistic."