A Mighty Fortress

by David Weber

  Yes, it is, he thought. And, yes, you’d really like to finish at least one of the bastards off. But Dart ’s been shot to shit; you’ve got more than enough dead and wounded of your own; we’re the better part of a thousand miles even from Trove Island; and there’s no telling when another squadron of these bloody- minded bastards is going to turn up.

  He grimaced unhappily at his unpalatable conclusion. Unfortunately, he couldn’t dispute his own logic.

  Stywyrt watched Guardsman making more sail.

  She was clearly running, and under the circumstances, much as he might have liked to, Stywyrt couldn’t really fault her skipper’s thinking. At the very least, he needed to get clear while he figured out what was going on.

  And when he does, they’re going to go on running, Stywyrt decided.

  Two of their ships had suffered heavy damage aloft, whereas Squall’s and Shield’s rigging was still effectively intact. They’d want to protect their cripples, and Stywyrt had no idea how close Dohlaran reinforcements might be. It was possible this wasn’t the only squadron Thirsk had sent to sea. In which case, their “fleeing” opponents might “just happen” to lead them straight into an ambush.

  Under the circumstances, he was willing to let them run if they were willing to do the running. Besides, he had Dart to worry about, and then there was Prince of Dohlar. She still hadn’t been brought back under control, which suggested Squall’s fire had been even more effective than Stywyrt had been prepared to assume. That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to recover at any moment, though, and if she did, she could well pose a serious threat to the crippled Charisian flagship.

  Best to make sure of her, he decided. She’s our wyvern, after all!

  He grinned at the thought, then gave himself a shake.

  “Very well, Master Mahldyn,” he said. “Prepare to put the ship about, if you please.” He twitched his head in Prince of Dohlar’s direction. “I believe we have a prize to collect.”

  .III.

  HMS Empress of Charis, 50,

  Tellesberg,

  Kingdom of Old Charis

  HMS Empress of Charis was no longer the most powerfully armed warship in the world. In fact, eighteen of her sixty-eight gunports were empty, leaving her with only twenty-eight long thirty-pounders on the gundeck and four long fourteens and eighteen thirty-pounder carronades on her spar deck. Despite the reduced armament, she remained one of the most powerfully armed warships in the world, however, and she also remained Emperor Cayleb’s favorite flagship.

  Which was why she was currently ghosting towards the oared galleys off the Tellesberg seawall. There was very little wind, barely enough to raise a light swell, and with every stitch of canvas set she was making no more than two knots. In fact, probably less. The breeze barely sufficed to occasionally flap the banner at her mizzen peak, but that was enough to display—fitfully, perhaps—the golden Ahrmahk kraken swimming across the silver- and- blue checkerboard of Chisholm quartered with the black of Charis. But this banner was different from any other imperial Charisian banner, for it displayed both a gold and a silver crown above the kraken, indicating that both of the Empire of Charis’ monarchs were aboard.

  Which, in turn, had something to do with the hordes of light craft swarming out to meet her and the deafening cheers rising from them. Almost a full year had passed since Empress Sharleyan’s departure for Chisholm, and it had been a year and a half since Emperor Cayleb had sailed for Corisande. In fact, they’d been officially supposed to return to Tellesberg a full month earlier, and more than one Old Charisian had waxed grumpy—eloquently so, in some cases—over the delay.

  Of course, half the delay was due solely to contrary winds on the voyage home, which not even an emperor or an empress could expect to do anything about. Still, they had been supposed to leave Cherayth a full three five- days earlier than they had, and there was no denying that a certain rivalry had already arisen between the Charisian Empire’s twin capitals. Overall, it was a remarkably friendly rivalry, but that made it no less real, and the more persnickety Old Charisians had taken exception to their monarchs’ decision to extend their stay in Cherayth.

  For the most part, those who complained found scant sympathy from their fellows. For one thing, their youthful monarchs were remarkably popular with their subjects (aside, of course, from the Temple Loyalists, most of whom would have liked nothing better than to see them dead, but one couldn’t have everything). For a second thing, most of their subjects understood that the rulers of an empire fighting for its life against the other seventy or eighty percent of the world might, upon occasion, find themselves involuntarily forced to alter schedules. And for a third thing, as a direct consequence of that need to occasionally alter schedules, Sharleyan had spent three extra months in Tellesberg before she ever left for Cherayth.

  Yet the true reason the complainers were rather brusquely told to shut their mouths was the news that not only was Empress Sharleyan pregnant, but that the heir to the imperial throne would be born right here, in Tellesberg. The child would be not just a Charisian, but an Old Charisian by birth. Doubtless the royal family would be far too tactful ever to say so, but everyone who mattered would know. Hence the wild tide of cheering sweeping over those hundreds of small craft as Empress of Charis furled her canvas and the towing hawsers went across to the galleys waiting to shepherd her to quayside.

  Take that, Cherayth!

  “You know, if all our Old Charisians don’t stop gloating, we’re likely to have a civil war,” Rayjhis Yowance said whimsically.

  The Earl of Gray Harbor sat at the foot of the dining table, looking up its length at Cayleb. Sharleyan sat to Cayleb’s right, facing Bishop Hainryk Waig-nair across the table, and Bynzhamyn Raice sat to the bishop’s right. Rahzhyr Mahklyn, to the empress’ left, completed the dinner party.

  Which seemed—especially to Wave Thunder and Gray Harbor—inescapably incomplete without Merlin Athrawes standing at the emperor’s back.

  “Oh, surely not, Rayjhis,” Waignair responded to Gray Harbor’s statement serenely. He was approaching eighty years of age, with snow-white hair and brown eyes surrounded by smile wrinkles. His slender frame, stooped posture, and the prominent veins on the backs of his hands gave an impression of frailty, but his health was actually excellent, and there was nothing at all wrong with his mind.

  “Oh, no, My Lord?” Gray Harbor smiled. “Perhaps you haven’t been listening to what I’ve been hearing?”

  “I’ve heard as much gloating—excuse me, excessively joyous celebratory comment—as you have,” Waignair replied. “I’m certain, however, that Her Grace’s Chisholmians will never take undue offense. After all,” it was his turn to smile, “the heir may be be born here in Tellesberg, but where was the child conceived?”

  Gray Harbor’s eyes widened and he sat back in his chair, gazing at the bishop for a long moment. Then he shook his head.

  “Do you know, that never even occurred to me.” He shook his head again, his expression bemused. “My, my! They are going to gloat over that, aren’t they?”

  “As a matter of fact, they already are,” Cayleb said in a resigned tone. “Gloating, I mean. And talking about mysterious ‘things’ in Chisholmian water or air.” He smiled crookedly. “I know everyone in the Empire has a legitimate interest in securing the succession. I understand that. I even sympathize with it. But I have to tell you, I’m beginning to feel like some prized race horse or dragon stud.”

  “Which makes me precisely what, if I may inquire?” Sharleyan asked, resting one hand on her swollen abdomen.

  “The other half of the equation?” Cayleb suggested innocently, and she whacked him across the knuckles with her other hand.

  “You see what I have to put up with?” she asked the table in general, and a chorus of laughs answered.

  “Actually, Your Grace,” Gray Harbor said then, his expression more serious, “having your child conceived in Chisholm and born in Old Charis is probably the very best thing that co
uld have happened. With all due respect for His Majesty’s delicate feelings—and your own, of course—this has to be the most widely discussed pregnancy in the history of both kingdoms. And”— his smile turned suddenly gentle—“the vast majority of your subjects are delighted for you.”

  “That, Your Grace, is absolutely true,” Waignair said softly. “We’ve offered Thanksgiving masses every Wednesday afternoon in Tellesberg Cathedral since we received news of your pregnancy. Attendance has been high. And a lot of your subjects have been quietly leaving small offertory gifts—a few coins here or there, sometimes just a spray of flowers or a little note telling you how hard they’re praying for you and your child.” He shook his head. “I very much doubt that any prospective mother in Charisian history has ever been the recipient of as many prayers and blessings as you have.”

  Sharleyan colored slightly, but she met his gaze steadily across the table, then gave a small nod of acceptance.

  “Actually,” Wave Thunder’s brisk tone was that of a man deliberately changing the mood, “the one thing that seems just plain wrong to me is having both Maikel and Merlin someplace else.”

  Heads nodded soberly as someone finally said it out loud. Gray Harbor, the only person present who didn’t know the true story of a young woman named Nimue Alban, still knew about Seijin Merlin’s “visions.” He also knew how close to both Cayleb and Sharleyan Merlin had become. So he wasn’t surprised to hear Wave Thunder include the seijin right along with the archbishop.

  “I agree,” Sharleyan said after a moment, her voice soft. But then she shrugged. “I agree, but we all knew Maikel probably couldn’t get back from Corisande in time, and there was no way we were letting him go there without Merlin. Not after what happened to Father Tymahn.”

  “I don’t see how anyone could fault your priorities, Your Grace.” Waignair’s voice had turned grim. “The murder of any child of God is a thing of grief and horror. To murder anyone—especially a priest—in so hideous a fashion simply to terrify others into obedience goes beyond grief and horror to abomination.”

  There were no smiles now, for no one could miss the bishop’s implication. Reports had amply confirmed what had happened to Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s enemies in the Temple and Zion, and, as Waignair had just said, it went beyond grief and horror to atrocity.

  Thirty- one vicars had been arrested, put to the Question, and suffered the Punishment of Schueler. Including Samyl and Hauwerd Wylsynn, thirty- three of the three hundred vicars of the Church of God Awaiting had died. Eight of the Wylsynns’ fellow Reformists had been fortunate enough to die under the Question; twenty- three had been delivered to the full, hideous cata log of barbarisms the Punishment demanded before their final death by fire. Only sixteen had actually lived long enough to be burned, which seemed a scant enough mercy.

  Fifty- two bishops and archbishops had joined them. As had the personal staffs of almost every one of the condemned prelates. Wives had been put to the Question, as well, and every one of them had been executed, although Clyntahn had extended the “mercy” of merely having them hanged. Children over the age of twelve had been rigorously “interrogated.” Most over the age of fifteen had joined their parents. The Questionings and the Punishments had taken over two months to complete, and the city of Zion was in shock.

  All told, almost twenty- five hundred had been arrested, and over fourteen hundred men, women, and children had died. Surviving infants and babes in arms had been “graciously spared by Mother Church” and consigned to other members of the vicarate to be reared. Children over the age of four—those whose lives had been spared—had been remanded to monastic communities (most in Harchong, the citadel of orthodoxy) with traditions of severe asceticism and discipline.

  Nor had Clyntahn missed the opportunity to trot out the handful of Charisian survivors of the Ferayd Massacre. There weren’t many of them—only seven, in fact—and every one of them had been a tottering physical wreck, eager to “confess” to anything, even knowing they were to be burned, if only that would end the horror their lives had become. And so they had—confessed to every conceivable heresy and perversion. Proclaimed their worship of Shan- wei, their hatred of God, the pacts in which they had knowingly sold their souls to the Dark.

  Against the backdrop of that “evidence” of how deeply the Charisian apostasy had penetrated, that self- confessed “proof” of the Church of Charis’ heretical abominations and the way in which it had sold itself to evil, the Grand Vicar’s long anticipated declaration of Holy War had been almost an afterthought. No one had questioned it, just as there was no voice raised against Clyntahn and the Group of Four in the Temple Lands. Not any longer. There was no one left who would have dared to raise one.

  Yet if there were no raised voices, there were rumors, whispers, that the Grand Inquisitor’s sweep had been less complete than he’d intended. Several of the condemned vicars’ families had mysteriously vanished, and dozens of bishops’ and archbishops’ families had done the same. No one knew how many had escaped the Inquisition’s net, yet the fact that any had managed it chipped away, if only slightly, at the omnipotent aura of Clyntahn’s iron fist.

  There were counterrumors, of course—whispers that the missing families’ miraculous escape was proof of Shan- wei’s influence, proof they’d been her minions in very truth. That only the Mother of Darkness could possibly have whisked them out of the Inquisition’s grasp. There was no doubt in the minds of the people around Cayleb and Sharleyan’s supper table who was responsible for those whispers. Nor did anyone doubt that one reason they’d been crafted was to discredit any testimony those escapees might offer if ever they reached safety in the Charisian Empire.

  “Forgive me,” Waignair said softly, after a moment. “This dinner is supposed to be a celebration. I apologize for darkening it.”

  “My Lord, you’re not the one who darkened it,” Sharleyan told him. “We all know who did that, and I fear thoughts of what’s happened in Zion are never far from any of us.”

  “Nor should they be,” Cayleb said harshly. They looked at him, and he shook his head fiercely. “Those bastards have a great deal to answer for, and we owe it to all their victims to remember that it’s not just what they’ve done—or tried to do—to us. It’s what they’ve done to anyone who dares to get in their way!”

  “Yes, Your Majesty, it is.” Waignair shook his head sadly. “All our priests are reporting they’ve been approached by parishioners trying desperately to understand how even the Group of Four could commit such acts ‘in God’s name.’ We try to comfort them, but the truth is that none of us really understand it ourselves.” He shook his head again. “Oh, intellectually, yes. But inside? Emotionally? Where our own faith in the goodness and love of God resides? No.”

  “That’s because you do believe in God’s love and goodness, Hainryk,” Gray Harbor said. “I don’t know what—if anything—Trynair and Maigwair truly believe in, but I think we’ve all seen what Clyntahn believes. At best, he believes solely in his own power; at worst, he truly believes in some monstrous perversion of God. And in either case, he’s willing to do anything at all to accomplish his ends.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right.” Waignair sighed. “But that doesn’t give much scope for comforting those who are frightened and confused. All we can do is urge them to pray, trust God, and remember the duty of all good and godly people to resist evil wherever it may be found . . . even in the orange of a vicar’s cassock. I’m afraid that can be scant comfort, no matter how strong someone’s faith is. And especially for those who remain ignorant of loved ones’ fates . . . like Father Paityr.”

  He looked across the table at Sharleyan, his eyes dark, and she nodded slightly in understanding. She knew how dreadfully tempted Waignair must have been to reassure Paityr Wylsynn that his stepmother and his brothers and sister had escaped. She was more than a little awed by the way the young intendant had managed to continue discharging his responsibilities in the wake of his father’s and his unc
le’s confirmed deaths . . . and the total silence where the rest of his family was concerned. She also knew how much Waignair, like everyone else who had ever worked with the young Schuelerite, respected and admired and even loved him. Watching him deal with his grief and fear would have been hard enough under any circumstances. Watching him go through all of that when Waignair could have told him the rest of his family would be joining him in Tellesberg only made it even worse.

  But they’re going to be here within another two or three five- days,she reminded herself. Their ship’s already halfway across The Anvil. He’ll know then, God bless him . . . and them.

  “I understand exactly what you’re saying, Hainryk,” she said out loud, meeting those dark eyes head- on. “And I agree. I wish there were a way to comfort all of those fears and concerns.”

  “If you’ll forgive me, Your Grace,” Gray Harbor said quietly, “I think you’re about to do just that for a great many of your subjects.”

  She cocked an eyebrow at him, and he glanced at Waignair.

  “You apologized for bringing the subject up, Hainryk, but the truth is, reminding us of what’s transpired in Zion may not be that bad a thing, especially at a moment like this. I think it helps us here in Old Charis, and throughout the Empire, to realize how blessed we truly are. We, at least, know precisely what we’re fighting for—that God has given us the opportunity to put an end to the butchery of someone like Clyntahn. How often are men and women given the chance to accomplish something that important? I think all our people, even those frightened and confused souls seeking comfort you just mentioned, realize that deep down inside. And that, Your Grace,” he returned his gaze to Sharleyan, “is why your child is so important to all of them. Because they genuinely love you and Cayleb, yes. I believe that, too. But this child represents more than just the securing of an imperial succession. He—or she—is also the symbol of the struggle that empire was forged to fight.”