A Mighty Fortress

by David Weber

  He still didn’t know who’d done that, and not for lack of trying to find out.

  The ruthless, meticulous investigation had turned up all sorts of interesting things—from minor peccadilloes, to bribery, to extortion—on the parts of his nobles and officials. That had undoubtedly been useful, he thought. At least he’d hammered his nobility and bureaucrats so hard the survivors were deeply dedicated to doing their jobs efficiently—and, above all, honestly—in a fashion Tarot hadn’t seen in de cades. Probably in generations, really. Yet all his efforts had failed to unearth a single clue as to how the Group of Four’s plans had reached Charis.

  Gorjah had respectfully pointed out in his correspondence with Vicar Zhasyn that his investigations had been personally assisted by Bishop Executor Tyrnyr and by Father Frahnklyn Sumyr, his intendant. For that matter, the full resources of the Inquisition here in Tarot had been thrown into the task, and none of that effort had found even a trace of whoever had done the leaking. Perhaps, the king had suggested as diplomatically as possible, that indicated the security failure hadn’t, in fact, occurred in Tarot after all?

  As far as Gorjah could tell, Failyx Gahrbor, the kingdom’s archbishop in far distant Zion, supported his argument. Gahrbor certainly had plenty of personal reasons to do so, at any rate. And officially—officially—Chancellor Trynair had cleared Gorjah himself of any wrongdoing. It had been a grudging clearance, however. Gorjah couldn’t say that surprised him. For that matter, if he’d been in the Chancellor’s cassock, he probably wouldn’t have gone even that far. Because the damning truth was that the only royal court which could have leaked the information upon which Haarahld of Charis had acted so decisively was Gorjah’s own. There simply hadn’t been time for the information to reach Charis from anywhere else speedily enough.

  Given that, he supposed, and especially in light of how devastating the Charisian ambush off Armageddon Reef had been, it wasn’t surprising it had taken Trynair over a year to go even as far as he had. During that year, unfortunately, Gorjah and his entire kingdom had languished under Mother Church’s disapproval. His shipyards had been deliberately and pointedly excluded from the Church’s original building program, for example. Which, given the fact that virtually the entire Royal Tarotisian Navy had been destroyed, had made Gorjah even more unhappy than he might have been otherwise. He’d needed new ships, and almost as badly as he’d needed them, he’d needed access to the rivers of gold the Church had poured into its new galley fleet.

  As a matter of fact, he’d needed the money even more badly, given the ruinous economic consequences his ill- advised decision to betray Charis had produced. At the time, everything had seemed extremely simple. The Group of Four had decreed Charis’ destruction, and so Charis was going to be destroyed. The possibility that the Church might fail of its purpose had never crossed his mind. And why should it have? No one— well, no one outside of Haarahld of Charis, perhaps—could have seriously entertained such a preposterous notion for a moment! And with Charis destroyed, Tarot would almost inevitably have absorbed a comfortable chunk of the onetime Charisian maritime monopoly.

  That rosy road to the future, unfortunately, had encountered a minor pothole when Charis declined to perish on schedule. Not only had the pestiferous kingdom been gauche enough to survive, but its navy had emerged even more powerful than it had ever been, and a plague of Charisian privateers had amused itself eliminating all the rest of the world’s merchant shipping for fun and profit. Tarot’s merchant marine had come in for special and loving attention, and the privateers’ depredations had been followed up by coastal raids by Charisian Marines, under the cover of Imperial Charisian Navy galleons. And then, to make bad worse, Empress Sharleyan had ordered the official ICN blockade of Thol Bay.

  Rather than improving its position, the Tarotisian merchant marine had become extinct, with catastrophic consequences for the kingdom’s revenues. Even that wasn’t the worst of it, however, because there was still a substantial flow of Charisian goods into Tarot, although Gorjah had been careful to ensure that he had no official knowledge of that state of affairs. None of it was legal, of course. Charis had declared a blockade, and Mother Church—or, at least, the office of the Grand Inquisitor—had officially closed all of the world’s ports to Charisian merchant ships. Obviously, therefore, no one could possibly be delivering the products of Charisian manufactories to a law- abiding kingdom like Tarot!

  Unfortunately, Tarot needed those products. No one in the kingdom could produce them in sufficient quantity—or cheaply enough—to meet the needs of Gorjah’s subjects, and the last thing he needed was the resentment of subjects who couldn’t provide their families the necessities of life because their king was worrying about pettifogging legal technicalities about closed ports and embargoed goods. And so he winked at the bustling clandestine commerce of the smugglers landing cargoes all along the southeastern coast of the Duchy of Tranjyr.

  But, in many ways, the smuggling only made things worse. None of the smugglers were especially interested in charity. They demanded—and got—cold, hard cash for their wares. Which meant Tarot’s limited (and dwindling) supply of hard currency was steadily hemorrhaging its way into the very pockets of the kingdom’s enemies! The Temple’s refusal to extend its largess to Gorjah had been a particularly painful blow under those circumstances.

  And things aren’t a lot better now,he thought moodily. Not that I can blame all of it on the Group of Four.

  After Trynair officially absolved Gorjah of having betrayed the Group of Four’s plans, the kingdom had finally been grudgingly included in the Church’s building plans. Probably even that had happened only because of how much revision those plans required once that incomparable military genius Allayn Maigwair finally figured out that they should have been building galleons all along. Gahvyn Mahrtyn, the Baron of White Ford, had made that point rather strongly in his own initial report on the Armageddon Reef campaign. That report had been summarily ignored, of course. In fact, there’d been some pointed comment about defeated, incompetent admirals offering up excuses for their own failures. There was a certain bitter satisfaction in seeing White Ford vindicated, although Gorjah wasn’t especially surprised when no one in Zion bothered to make that vindication official. And there was no doubt that the change in the Church’s plans, with the sudden need for even more shipyard capacity, had quite a lot to do with the fact that it had finally begun placing orders even in Tarot.

  The grudging nature of Tarot’s inclusion was evident in the number of ships the kingdom had been assigned, however. Of the two hundred forty- plus new- build war galleons the Church had ordered laid down, only twenty- two had been ordered from Tarot, despite the fact that Tranjyr, alone, could have built half again that many. And the kingdom had been directed to convert less than twenty merchant galleons for naval purposes, as well. Even the Desnairian Empire, which had never really had a navy before, had been assigned twice as many vessels . . . and paid the absurdly inflated prices the Desnairian yards had demanded. For that matter, the Church had helped build their damned yards in the first place!

  Unfortunately, Gorjah couldn’t pretend the Church’s decision to throw such a small piece of the pie in Tarot’s direction had been motivated solely by pique. The unhappy truth was that Tarot was the only one of the Church’s building sites which wasn’t connected to the mainland. Charisian privateers and cruisers had stung, hampered, and pillaged the coastal shipping carrying naval materials to the mainland yards badly enough; their ability to dominate the Tarot Channel between Tarot and Siddarmark’s Windmoor Province had put a virtual stranglehold on any effort to get those same materials to Tranjyr. Timbers could be cut domestically and dragged, if slowly and laboriously, overland to the shipyards. Hulls could be built. Sails could even be woven, and rigging could be set up. But no foundry in Tarot had the expertise to produce naval artillery. All of the Royal Tarotisian Navy’s pre- war guns had come from Charisian foundries, which—for some peculiar reason—seemed m
oderately disinclined to deliver their wares to Tranjyr just at the moment.

  In many ways, Charis had been ironmaster to the world, for not even Siddarmark or the Harchong Empire had truly rivaled the output of her foundries. Not only had it been far cheaper to buy ironwork, including artillery, from Charis, but the expertise, as well as the foundries’ physical plant, had been overwhelmingly concentrated in Charis, as well. So even if Gorjah had possessed unlimited financial resources (which he most definitely did not), he had no experienced foundry masters who knew how to build cannon that didn’t blow up the second or third time they were fired. A couple of small domestic foundries were making some progress in acquiring the needed skills, but it was frustratingly difficult and agonizingly slow.

  And as White Ford’s pointed out, it’s probably not totally unreasonable for crews tobe just a tad leery of guns that have demonstrated such a pronounced tendency to kill or mangle their gunners,he thought disgustedly.

  Well, perhaps this morning’s meeting might usher in some improvement in that situation. It was unlikely, but a man could always hope.

  “All right,” he said as he settled himself more comfortably into the cushions of his father’s chair, turning his head to look at the chamberlain standing just inside the council chamber’s door. “Tell Sir Ryk he may come in now.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty.”

  The chamberlain bowed, opened the door, and stepped out into the hallway. A moment later, a stout, stocky man somewhere in his late sixties entered the chamber. He was mostly bald, and his remaining fringe of hair had gone entirely gray, but his eyebrows remained bushy and black, and his full beard was only lightly streaked with silver. His eyes were a very dark gray, and his nose was decidedly crooked, having been broken in a shipboard brawl in his youth. He also walked with a pronounced limp, courtesy of the fall from aloft which had ended his career at sea and sent him into an apprenticeship in a Charisian foundry. In the de cades since, Sir Ryk Fharmyn had become one of the wealthier foundry masters of Tarot . . . until the majority of his wealth—like that of quite a few other Tarotisian subjects—had been largely destroyed as a consequence of the Charisian blockade.

  Fharmyn was still much better off than most of those other subjects of Gorjah’s. In fact, he was in a position to recoup much of what he’d lost, because he was also one of the handful of people in the entire kingdom who had any experience at all in casting and boring artillery.

  “Your Majesty,” the foundry owner said, bowing respectfully. “Sir Ryk.” Gorjah acknowledged the courtesy with a nod, then waved for the older man to straighten up once more. Fharmyn obeyed the gesture, and Gorjah leaned back in his oversized chair. “Tell me,” the king said, “to what do I owe the plea sure of your company this morning?”

  “First, Your Majesty, let me thank you for agreeing to see me. I realize I made the request for an audience on rather short notice.”

  Gorjah’s left hand made a waving- away motion, and Fharmyn dipped his head slightly to acknowledge the king’s graciousness.

  “Second, Your Majesty,” Fharmyn continued, “I’ve come to invite you to join Baron White Ford at the foundry in a couple of days—Tuesday, I think—for the proof firing of our latest attempt to produce a satisfactory thirty- six-pounder.” The ironmaster’s lips twitched a bit sourly. “I hope this one will go a little better than the last. Having said that, though, I’m not about to let you—or Baron White Ford—get anywhere near the thing when it’s actually loaded, Your Majesty.”

  “I’m sure Queen Maiyl will appreciate that,” Gorjah murmured with a slight, whimsical smile.

  “I always try to stay on the Queen’s good side, Your Majesty,” Fharmyn assured him, and there was a gleam of answering humor in his gray eyes.

  “A wise decision, trust me,” Gorjah replied. Then he cocked his head. “And were those your only reasons for asking to see me this morning?”

  His tone was still pleasant, yet it carried a distinct edge of hardness, as well. Not anger, but an indication that he was fairly certain those weren’t the only reasons for Fharmyn’s request . . . and a suggestion the foundry owner get on to his other, and presumably more important, motivations.

  “No, Your Highness,” Fharmyn acknowledged, and his tone had shifted a bit, as well. In fact, to Gorjah’s surprise, it had taken on a hint of... tentativeness. That wasn’t the exact word the king was looking for, and he knew it, but it came closer than anything else he could think of.

  The foundry owner paused—one might almost have said he hesitated—for an instant, then shrugged ever so slightly.

  “As I’m sure you know, Your Majesty,” he went on then, a bit obliquely, “I was originally trained in Charis. Over the years, I’ve done quite a bit of business with Charisian manufactories, as well. Or, perhaps I should say that I did do quite a bit of business with them before the present . . . unpleasantness.”

  He paused again, watching the king’s expression, and Gorjah nodded. “Of course I’m aware of all that, Sir Ryk,” he said just a little impatiently. “And you’re scarcely alone in having had financial relationships—or, for that matter, personal relationships—with Charis! I don’t imagine there’s anyone involved in our current building programs who didn’t, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

  “I’m not concerned about it, precisely, Your Majesty, but it does have a certain bearing on the reason I asked to see you this morning.” Fharmyn looked at the king levelly. “It happens, Your Majesty, that a letter was recently delivered to me by someone who, alas, I suspect acquired it from a Charisian smuggler.”

  Gorjah’s eyebrows rose, and Fharmyn coughed delicately into a raised hand.

  “I don’t say he acquired it directly from a smuggler, Your Majesty,” he said then. “I only say I believe that was how the letter in question originally entered the Kingdom. It was, however, addressed to me, which—as I’m sure Your Majesty will appreciate—caused me quite a bit of anxiety.” He shrugged again. “My first thought was to deliver it directly to Father Frahnklyn, although I will readily confess to Your Majesty that I wasn’t at all happy about the prospect of directing the Inquisition’s attention to the man who had handed me the letter.”

  Well, I’m not surprised to hearthat, Sir Ryk, Gorjah thought dryly. And not simply because you didn’t want to get the other fellow—whoever he may be—into trouble. Oh, I’ll do you the courtesy of believing you thought about that, but I’m certain keeping yourself out of the Inquisition’s sights wasn’t exactly a minor factor in your decision not to go pestering the Intendant, as well!

  But Fharmyn wasn’t quite finished yet.

  “Nor was I happy about the prospect of directing the Inquisition’s attention to the addressee of the letter which was enclosed in the one to me,” the older man went on. “Because that addressee, Your Majesty, was you.”

  Gorjah’s eyes went wide, and he leaned forward in his chair.

  “I beg your pardon?” he said in a very careful tone, and Fharmyn smiled humorlessly.

  “That was rather my own reaction, Your Majesty. I opened my own letter only because I’ve known the man who sent it to me for so long and because, frankly, I wanted to judge the extent to which it might compromise me in the Inquisition’s eyes.” He made the admission calmly. “So far as I was aware, I’d done or said nothing which might have created a legitimate problem for me, but one can never be too careful about things like that in times like these.”

  He held the king’s gaze unflinchingly, and Gorjah nodded slowly as the other man’s implication sank in. The king could think of quite a few possible consequences of the Inquisition’s discovering that anyone in Charis was addressing correspondence directly to him, as well. Oddly enough, not one of those consequences would have been pleasant.

  “Once I found the enclosure,” Fharmyn continued, “I seriously considered burning both letters. On more mature consideration, however, I realized I had no way of knowing if additional letters would be sent if this one d
idn’t produce what ever outcome its sender had in mind. The idea of having an unknown number of Charisian letters addressed to me—and, quite possibly, to Your Majesty—floating around the Kingdom didn’t appeal to me. And, frankly, the thought that the letter- sender might attempt to reach you through a different channel—one which could end up bringing all of this to the Inquisition’s notice after all—was even less appealing.”

  The foundry owner hadn’t mentioned the probability that “a different channel” wouldn’t have known the initial letter had come by way of Fharmyn. Which would have meant, presumably, that the other man wouldn’t have been implicated, so far as the Inquisition knew, in the effort to set up some sort of clandestine communication with the king. Fharmyn was far too astute not to have thought of that, and the fact that he hadn’t chosen to say a word about it suggested many things to King Gorjah of Tarot.

  “Should I assume, Sir Ryk,” he said, carefully, after a trickle of seconds, “that you’ve brought that letter to me?”

  “I have, Your Majesty.”

  Fharmyn bowed gravely, then extracted a large envelope from inside his tunic. Gorjah held out his hand when he saw it, and Fharmyn limped around the table to lay it in his palm. But he paused before he handed it to his king.

  “Your Majesty, I’ve brought you both letters,” he said, looking Gorjah in the eye. “Obviously, I haven’t opened the one addressed to you. I have no idea what it contains. If you choose to place all of this in the Inquisition’s hands, I will cooperate in any way they—or you—require. Indeed, if you wish it, I’ll take both of them to Father Frahnklyn immediately, without ever mentioning this meeting.”

  “I appreciate the generosity of your offer, Sir Ryk,” Gorjah replied, and he meant it. “Nonetheless, as yourself, I believe it behooves me to see what this letter contains first.” He showed a flash of white teeth, and his dark eyes glinted with genuine, if sardonic, humor. “I can think of quite a few ways in which a letter could be crafted to create all manner of suspicion in someone’s mind.”