Through Fiery Trials

by David Weber

  Mahrys nodded thoughtfully, and Gahrnet hid his satisfaction. He was a loyal servant of the Crown, but he wasn’t blind to the opportunities which would fall his way if he was made the official custodian of any such plan. The pecuniary possibilities alone were enormous. Although what was even more important, he told himself virtuously, was that that sort of centralized control would leave him far better placed to produce the “industrialization” Desnair required.

  “In the short-term,” he went on more confidently, “I believe we need to look very closely at adopting the concept of these ‘railroads’ of the Charisians, Sire. As I understand it, no individual rail wagon can carry as much cargo as a large barge, but each automotive can pull scores of wagons and we can build the damned things anywhere. We don’t need rivers, and if we made them a Crown monopoly, I imagine they’d bring in enormous amounts of revenue to help fuel our other efforts.”

  Mahrys nodded again, far more enthusiastically. The Holy Writ prohibited secular rulers from charging for the use of the canals it was the godly’s responsibility to build and maintain. That didn’t mean it didn’t happen. The Canal Service cut across all national boundaries, at least in theory, and was responsible for levying the service fees which helped pay for the canals’ maintenance. Those fees were supposedly earmarked solely for canal maintenance, but they had a persistent way of hemorrhaging into the local authorities’ coffers. It was all very sub rosa, however, and discretion required that the pilferage be reasonably modest lest Mother Church’s auditors be forced to take notice.

  But the Holy Writ didn’t cover “railroads.” Their revenues belonged to whoever owned them, and if every Desnairian railway belonged to the Crown.…

  “For now,” Gahrnet said, “we’d have to buy our automotives, and probably our rails, direct from Charis. The good news is that those moneygrubbing bastards would cheerfully sell us the rope to hang their own grandmothers if the price was right, so I don’t see any problem with the purchase itself. Once we have an automotive or two of our own, we can take them apart and see if our mechanics can figure out how to build more of our own. I don’t see why that should be impossible, Sire, especially if we insist that our mechanics have to be trained in Charis to keep them in service once we get them home.”

  “That will cost a lot of marks,” Pearlmann pointed out. His tone was more that of a man making an observation than someone raising an objection, and Gahrnet nodded.

  “It will, but we still have the gold mines. And,” he turned to face the Emperor more squarely, “once we begin building our own railroads and demonstrate how useful they are—for farmers, not just manufactory owners—and start charging to transport freight and passengers, I expect it would turn quickly into a net profit maker, not an ongoing charge on the Exchequer.”

  “Anzhelo?” Mahrys looked at the chancellor, one eyebrow raised.

  “I can’t guarantee that, Sire,” Pearlmann said. “I’d be extraordinarily surprised if Symyn isn’t right, though. It’s one of the reasons those frigging Charisians like Delthak are dragging in marks hand over fist!” He glowered at the thought. “Frankly, it’s about time somebody else invaded their trough.”

  “There’s something to that,” Mahrys agreed. “On the other hand—”

  The Emperor broke off, looking up with a frown as the door to the council chamber opened.

  “I beg your pardon, Your Majesty,” the uniformed footman said, bowing deeply. “A messenger has just arrived for Duke Harless. He says the matter is urgent.”

  “Urgent enough to interrupt this meeting?” Mahrys asked coldly.

  “So he says, Your Majesty,” the footman replied, still bowing.

  The Emperor cocked a rather fulminating eyebrow at Harless, then grimaced.

  “Very well,” he said. “Send him in.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty!”

  The footman disappeared, to be replaced a moment later by a tallish, dark-haired man in the expensive but sober tailoring of an upper-level government bureaucrat.

  “A thousand apologies, Your Majesty,” he began, “but—”

  “Yes, yes!” Mahrys waved an impatient hand. “I know—it’s urgent. And,” he relented slightly, “you don’t normally waste our time, Sir Hyrmyn. But get to it, please.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty,” Sir Hyrmyn Khaldwyl, who was effectively Harless’ senior deputy, bowed almost as deeply as the footman had. Then he reached into his tunic, withdrew a large envelope, and passed it to the duke.

  “This just arrived from our embassy in Yu-kwau, Your Grace,” he said. “I took the liberty of reading it as soon as it was delivered.”

  “Yu-kwau?” the Emperor repeated sharply, and Khaldwyl nodded.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” His expression was grave. “I’m afraid it’s been confirmed. Emperor Waisu is dead.”

  Someone inhaled sharply. Not in surprise, but in consternation, and Mahrys’ jaw tightened. He’d never much cared for Waisu, or for Harchongians in general, for that matter. But he’d always recognized a certain commonality of interest between his own crown and that of Harchong, because both had been bastions of stability against the steadily encroaching madness out of Charis, Siddarmark, and the Reformists. In fact, Mahrys and Harless had tried for the last couple of years, with a uniform lack of success, to inveigle Waisu into a post-Jihad alliance, or at least into an agreement to coordinate policy with Desnair.

  But if events in North Harchong were as bad as preliminary reports suggested—and as this one seemed to confirm—the situation was even worse than Mahrys had believed. If Harchong went down, Desnair truly would be alone against all of the “progressive” forces seeking to destroy the order and stability God and the Archangels themselves had established here on Safehold.

  Waisu never listened to us, the Emperor thought grimly, and look what that got him!

  In reality, Mahrys knew, it had been Waisu’s ministers, like Grand Duke North Wind Blowing, who’d refused to listen with all the traditional—and invincible—arrogance which made Harchongians so universally detested. Although, to be honest, North Wind Blowing had probably been more concerned about getting too close to someone whose social policies were as “liberal” as Desnair’s. Now, though—

  “Has Zhyou-Zhwo taken the Crown yet?” he asked.

  “Not as of yesterday, Sire,” Harless replied, looking up from the dispatch he’d been rapidly scanning. “And while Hyrmyn’s right that the Emperor’s death has been confirmed, it hasn’t been officially announced yet. The confirmation is solid, Sire, but it was made unofficially to our ambassador. Probably by someone in Yu-kwau but not in the Crown Prince’s inner circle, if you take my meaning.”

  Mahrys grunted in understanding. No doubt a lot of South Harchongians were less than enthralled by what the imperial family’s abrupt arrival entailed for local power arrangements, especially if the Hantais’ exodus ended up being more prolonged than anyone had initially predicted.

  “I wonder what he’s waiting for?” Pearlmann murmured, and Traykhos shrugged.

  “I don’t have any idea, but he can’t wait too long. Not without risking a serious threat to the continuity of the Crown’s power. They can’t afford anything remotely like an interregnum with things going as badly in the North as they appear to be going.”

  “Agreed,” Mahrys said, sitting farther back in his chair and stroking his mustache in thought. He stayed that way for several seconds, then leaned forward and planted his hands on the conference table.

  “Agreed, and given what’s happening in the North, he may be more amenable to our diplomatic viewpoint than his father was.”

  “Forgive me, Sire,” Gahrnet said dryly, “but is Zhyou-Zhwo likely to be any freer to ignore his ministers than his father was?”

  “That is an interesting question,” Mahrys acknowledged with a bleak smile. “On the other hand, our earlier reports indicate that quite a few of those ministers didn’t make it out of Shang-mi, either.”

  “No, they didn’t,
” Harless agreed. “They have to be doing a lot of … reorganization, and according to my agents in Shang-mi, Zhyou-Zhwo’s been resentful of the bureaucrats’ influence for a long time.”

  “So he may see this as an opportunity to ‘reorganize’ things on a basis more to his liking.” Mahrys nodded. “And even if he doesn’t, even Harchongese bureaucrats have to be shaken by what’s happened to them and their families. And who are they going to blame for it?” The Emperor smiled coldly. “I’ll tell you who they’re going to blame. They’re going to blame Charis and the Reformists for provoking the Jihad and they’re going to blame the Grand Vicar for ending the Jihad. And they’re especially going to blame him—and Maigwair—for what happened to the Mighty Host.”

  His smile turned even thinner and colder as he met his advisors’ eyes.

  “I believe it might be time for a personal message of condolence from one Emperor to another,” he said.

  MARCH YEAR OF GOD 904

  .I.

  Shan-Zhi Forest and Pauton Cathedral, City of Pauton, Boisseau Province, Harchong Empire.

  Bairahn Mahgynys peered through the eyepiece and turned the adjusting screw with finicky precision. The marker on the graduated rod came into sharp focus and he nodded in satisfaction. He straightened, checking the numbers on the survey transit’s graduated base ring, then carefully recorded them on his log sheet.

  He stowed the logbook in his rucksack and looked up, listening to the work crews widening the muddy cut through the fringe of the unconsecrated Shan-Zhi Forest. The sharp, crisp sounds of axes and the steady rasping of long, two-man crosscut saws were overlaid by shouting voices, whistling dragons, the occasional crack of a drover’s whip, and the crashing sound as trees toppled to the ground. It was a far, far cry from what Mahgynys had witnessed upon his arrival here in Boisseau, just over a month ago.

  “Time to move,” he said. “How are the trail-breaking crews coming?”

  “You’re catching up to them,” Hauzhu Shozu told him with a crooked grin. “You’re only a couple of miles behind now. Your part seems to go a lot faster than their part.”

  “Why His Grace pays them so much,” Mahgynys replied with a broader smile.

  “He does, really,” Shozu said more soberly, and it was true. Oh, by the standards of someone like Mahgynys—a trained and highly skilled professional—the peasants and escaped serfs swinging those axes and saws weren’t paid very much at all. By the standards of the Empire of Harchong, however, Duke Delthak’s wages were scandalously high. In less than two months, every man in one of those crews would earn better than a year and a half of anything he’d ever earned before. That was why attitudes had changed so much over the past six five-days. What had been sullen, half-unwilling wariness—the sort of wariness serfs and peasants always showed someone who promised something good in their lives—had transformed itself into enthusiasm. The thought of money in a man’s pocket, of the promise that they—peasants, even serfs—would be trained to operate and maintain the steam automotives which would someday snort their way through the forest along the roadway they were clearing.…

  Shozu shook his head mentally, still unable to fully process it himself.

  “We get this project finished,” Mahgynys went on, collapsing the legs of the transit’s tripod while one of Shozu’s assistants began rolling up the surveyor’s chain, “and the pay’s getting better all around.” He looked at Shozu steadily. “Of course, getting it finished’s going to depend on a lot of things the Duke can’t control.”

  “We’re doing our best.” Shozu shrugged rather more philosophically than he actually felt. “It helps that so many people trust Bishop Yaupang. And Baron Star Rising’s always been fairer with the common folk than a lot of nobles. I’d be lying if I said I was positive they could make it work, though.”

  “Going to depend a lot on people like you,” Mahgynys said quietly, and Shozu nodded.

  Unlike two-thirds of the Harchongians Duke Delthak had hired for his survey crews, Shozu was a free peasant. In fact, by the standards of a Harchongese commoner, he was a significant landowner, with over twelve hundred acres under the plow. It had taken his family the better part of two centuries to put together a parcel that size through marriages, purchases, and land swaps, but it had made Hauzhu Shozu a man of influence in the community around Rwanzhi. He was also fully literate and remarkably well-educated for a Harchongese peasant … and his third eldest son had actually been accepted by one of the small, secular academies in Shang-mi.

  Which was why he had no idea whether or not Zhyqwo was still alive.

  “Like I say, we’re doing our best. And, to be honest, having you people here surveying the right-of-way is the best argument in favor I could give any of my neighbors!”

  It was Mahgynys’ turn to nod and hope his expression concealed his own doubts. Not as to whether or not this was a good idea, but whether or not it was going to work. It was just like Duke Delthak to jump in before anyone could have guessed either way about that. Overall, the duke had a pretty fair record of guessing right, but there’d been a few disasters, like the bath his investments had taken in Siddarmark following the collapse of the House of Qwentyn. Mahgynys didn’t have access to the actual numbers on that, but if the ones he’d heard bruited about were anywhere near accurate, they would have wiped out many a lesser individual’s fortune. Of course, no one else on Safehold, aside from the emperor and empress, had ever amassed a fortune remotely as vast as the duke’s. If anyone could afford to back a hunch, it had to be him, and his investment partners were generally willing to follow his lead. It might have taken a little more argument this time to bring them around. Then again, it might not have. When Their Majesties politely suggested to one of their most loyal cronies that an investment would be welcome, it would have taken a board member with balls of steel to argue with the duke’s decision to make that investment.

  It was just that at the moment the jury was very much out on whether Baron Star Rising and his ramshackle coalition of aristocrats, rogue clerics, townsmen, peasants, and—God help them all—serfs was going to pull it off. The anathemas being thundered at Bishop Yaupang and the churchmen who dared to support him from Yu-kwau and the bloodthirsty threats of wholesale executions for any secular “traitors” following in their wake did not bode well.

  On the other hand, he reminded himself, Their Majesties—and the Duke—have a habit of succeeding however bad the odds look, don’t they? It’s only that just looking at this place makes me cringe inside.

  He shrugged, shouldered the tripod, and started hiking along the muddy trough being carved through the forest. Someday soon—if Duke Delthak’s current gamble paid off the way his gambles had a habit of paying off—that trough would be the roadbed for the Rwanzhi-Zhynkau railroad, connecting the Bay of Pauton to the Yalu Inlet. That was over four hundred miles as the wyvern flew, and it didn’t count the other lines which would tie the major towns of Boisseau together in a way which had never been possible before.

  He wondered if even Shozu began to understand what that would mean for West Harchong’s economy and people.

  Assuming they could keep the wrong people’s fingers out of the pie, at least.

  * * *

  “My Lord, My Lord Bishop, I understand how important this is,” Mayor Yingcho said, looking back and forth between Baron Star Rising and Bishop Yaupang Lyauyan. “And I know how important the Charisians’ offer is. Don’t think I don’t, and don’t think I’m not in favor. But we all need to be aware of how His Majesty’s bound to react when he hears about it.”

  The mayor had a point, Baron Star Rising reflected. In fact, he had a very good one. The problem was that this was a classic case of damned-if-they-did-and-damned-if-they-didn’t. And the pressure wasn’t getting any lighter.

  “You’re right, Faizhwan,” he said, turning away to gaze out the office window across the square at Bishop Yaupang Lyauyan’s palace on the other side of Cathedral Square. It was a very modest palace for one
of Safehold’s oldest dioceses. For that matter, even the cathedral was decidedly “modest” by the Harchongese Church’s standards.

  “We do need to be aware of that,” he continued, “especially because the best word for how he reacts is going to be ‘poorly.’”

  “Ever the master of understatement, my son,” Lyauyan observed in a dry tone. The bishop was six years younger than Star Rising, but the baron felt no patronization in the younger man’s choice of address. Yaupang Lyauyan was one of the unfortunately few Harchongese clerics in whom personal piety always trumped political considerations. In fact, he regarded politics, and especially political expediency, secular or temporal, with unmitigated loathing. What he cared about were people and souls … which was how he found himself up to his neck in the bitterest political struggle to wrack Harchong since the Creation.

  “Well, that’s how he and the Court have reacted to everything else we’ve done, My Lord,” Star Rising pointed out, “and none of the rest of it approaches this.”

  “It’s an act of open rebellion,” Tahnshwun Zheng-chi, Baron Crystal Fountain, said. The other three looked at him, and he shrugged. “I didn’t say I’m against it. I only said it’s an act of open rebellion, and let’s be honest—it is.”

  “Trying to prevent the complete collapse of central authority in His Supreme and Most Puissant Majesty’s western provinces is scarcely an act of rebellion, My Lord,” Bishop Yaupang retorted. “Only the most benighted and shortsighted of individuals could think it was!”

  “Forgive me, My Lord,” Crystal Fountain said, cocking his head, “but don’t you think that rather describes the people around His Majesty at this moment?”