A Mighty Fortress

by David Weber

  “Oh, by no means,” Duchairn said calmly. “What I do find a bit amusing, though, is that you—well, you and Zahmsyn, I suppose—should be more concerned with scoring points off of one another here in the council chamber than in keeping all of us fully informed on what ever information comes into our hands.”

  Trynair’s eyebrows rose. Clyntahn’s didn’t, and an ugly light flickered in his eyes. He started to open his mouth, but then he stopped. He glowered at Duchairn for a moment, and then, to Trynair’s surprise, he actually chuckled.

  “Point taken,” the Grand Inquisitor said, and turned his gaze to Trynair. “Rhobair’s right. And I’ll admit there’s a part of me that wants to rub everyone else’s nose in it, if it turns out Gorjah really is turning his coat . . . again. Because the truth is I never did trust the slimy little bastard, and I did let myself be overruled by the rest of you. So, yes, I guess I would take a certain satisfaction if it turns out I was right about him. Which, as Rhobair has just pointed out, isn’t really all that smart of me.”

  Trynair managed not to blink, although the sight of Zhaspahr Clyntahn in reasonable mode wasn’t one that had come along all that often of late.

  “I don’t imagine any of us are really at our best these days,” the Chancellor said after a moment. “I know I’m not, at any rate. And you’re right, Narth didn’t mention anything about blockade runners. To be fair, though, matters of trade and shipping have always been rather outside his area of expertise.”

  “I know.” Clyntahn waved one hand. “In fact, I knew it when I was twisting your tail. But my point stands. I think we have to take this sudden shipping upsurge in and around Tarot seriously. I think it’s possible—even probable—that Gorjah has worked out some sort of under- the- table deal with Cayleb.”

  “What sort of a deal?” Duchairn asked. “I don’t know,” Clyntahn said thoughtfully, pursing his lips. “It could be something as simple as an unofficial, effective neutrality. Or it could indicate he was the one who passed our original plans along and that he’s reopened that channel of communications. In either of those cases, the Charisians might let enough shipping through to ease his own shortages without either side making any official admission about what they were up to.”

  “But what you’re really afraid of is that he’s becoming a second Nahrmahn,” Trynair said.

  “Yes.” Clyntahn shrugged his beefy shoulders. “That would be the most damaging thing he could do to us, at any rate, so on the theory that it’s best to assume the worst, that’s exactly what I’m afraid he’s doing.”

  “In that case, why don’t we arrest him?” Allayn Maigwair asked. All three of the others turned to look at the Temple’s Captain General, and Maigwair raised his hands a bit defensively. “I mean, if we’re afraid he’s going to betray us, why not have the Inquisition take him into custody while we investigate?”

  “Under other circumstances, that might not be such a terrible idea, Allayn,” Trynair said almost gently. “If Gorjah’s really planning on emulating Nahrmahn, though, and if his plans are so far along Cayleb and Sharleyan have already eased their blockade, we have to assume Gorjah’s also following Nahrmahn’s example in terms of covering his back. Let’s face it, that far from Zion, the Inquisition relies more on its moral authority and its power to require the secular authorities to support Mother Church rather than on the Temple Guard. You know—better than anyone else, probably—that we’ve never had anything remotely like enough guardsmen to cover everything that needs to be covered all over the world! I doubt there are more than a couple hundred guardsmen in all of Tarot. So if Gorjah has a few thousand men who are prepared to follow his orders and defy Mother Church, actually arresting him would be almost impossible.”

  “And trying to arrest him and failing would be even worse,” Duchairn pointed out. His colleagues swiveled their gazes to him, and he shrugged. “Think about it. If we order him arrested when we don’t have any evidence he’s done anything wrong, we hand him a ready- made pretext to turn against Mother Church. Faced with such serious ‘false accusations,’ he’d simply be reacting in self- defense . . . and claiming our decision to arrest him as yet one more example of the corruption and capriciousness of Mother Church.”

  “I really hate to say it, but I think Rhobair has a point,” Clyntahn said heavily. “As a matter of fact, it occurred to me to wonder if that wasn’t exactly what Gorjah was trying to provoke me—us—into doing. If he really is ready and waiting, I mean. And let’s face it, as Rhobair says, Tarot is a long way from Zion. Father Frahnklyn’s a good man, but we can’t possibly read the situation in Tranjyr from here without better information than he’s been able to give us . . . so far, at least. If I were Cayleb, and if I could manipulate things to create a situation in which Mother Church ‘drives’ Gorjah into his arms—for general consumption, at least—I’d damned well do it. It would be one more way to make everybody who’s still loyal to Mother Church nervous ... not to mention the way it would play into that son- of- a-bitch Stohnar’s hands.”

  Duchairn squelched his smile before it ever got anywhere near his lips. He’d wondered how long it would take for Clyntahn’s compulsive suspicion of Greyghor Stohnar to surface.

  “But if we don’t arrest him, what do we do?” Maigwair asked.

  “I don’t think we can do a great deal inside Tarot,” Trynair said thoughtfully. “About all that’s really available to us, I think, is to encourage Father Frahnklyn to pursue this matter—discreetly, of course. I’ll send a message to Bishop Executor Tyrnyr instructing him to assist Father Frahnklyn, as well. And I think it might be a good idea to transfer a few more agents of inquisition into Tarot from Desnair and Siddarmark, Zhaspahr. Let’s get some more eyes and ears into Tranjyr. If we can find evidence Gorjah’s already in contact with the Charisians, I’d be a lot more inclined to try to arrest him, even if the attempt is likely to fail.”

  “You know,” Duchairn said pensively, “I have to wonder—aside from the example of yet another secular ruler deserting Mother Church, how much would losing Tarot really hurt us? You haven’t actually been counting on the galleons they’re building being available in our order of battle, have you, Allayn?”

  “Not really,” Maigwair admitted unhappily. “We went ahead and ordered them, but the chances of Tarot’s actually getting them completed, manned—and armed—and then getting them to sea past the Charisians are pretty damned slim.” “That’s what I was thinking,” Duchairn said, and looked at Trynair and Clyntahn. “As Mother Church’s Treasurer, I may be more aware than the rest of you of how much money we’re putting into Tarot . . . and for how little return. That blockade’s been damnably effective, and Tarot’s paid less than a third of its usual tithe ever since the war began. For that matter, this year the Exchequer doesn’t expect Gorjah to be able to pay at all! To be brutally frank, losing the Kingdom completely would be barely a bump as far as our finances are concerned. So I think what we really need to think about are the political and military consequences. And as Allayn’s just said, losing Tarot from our side would have very little impact on our capabilities. So how much would gaining Tarot help the other side?”

  “An interesting point,” Clyntahn said thoughtfully. “The political damage would be worse, I think, if only as an example of ongoing erosion. Militarily, I doubt Tarot would add much to Cayleb’s capabilities. In fact, it would give the Charisians still more territory to protect, which would spread their forces even thinner.”

  “By the same token, though,” Maigwair pointed out, “it would give them a naval base right off the Siddarmark coast. It would dominate the Gulf of Tarot and close off the Tarot Channel, which would pretty much isolate the Gulf of Mathyas.”

  “Drive a wedge between our northern squadrons and Desnair, you mean?” Trynair asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “But how realistic a concern is that?” Duchairn asked. “I mean, if Rock Point’s already basing his squadron in Thol Bay, then they’ve already got a ‘nava
l base’ right there on the Tarot Channel, don’t they?”

  “Well . . . yes,” Maigwair admitted slowly.

  “Then the only real difference is that it would become an official naval base,” Duchairn pointed out.

  “So what you’re suggesting, Rhobair, is that we not act precipitously and give Gorjah a pretext for deserting us, but continue to investigate cautiously,” Trynair said. “If we find proof—real proof, or at least strongly suggestive evidence—we can go ahead and try to arrest him. And if it should happen he either surprises us by actually changing sides, or goes over to Cayleb after we give him that ‘pretext,’ it’s not really going to hurt us that much militarily or economically?”

  “More or less.” Duchairn shrugged. “This is your area of expertise—yours and Zhaspahr’s, where the politics are concerned, and Allayn’s, where the military’s concerned. I’m simply trying to examine this question from all perspectives. It’s not,” he finished dryly, “as if we haven’t gotten ourselves into trouble upon occasion by acting too precipitously.”

  Clyntahn flushed at the none- too- oblique reference to his own “final solution to the Charisian problem.” He chose to let it pass, however. At the same time, his eyes took on a thoughtful look. He sat silently pondering for several seconds, then nodded to himself and refocused his eyes on the other three.

  “I’m not sure keeping our hands off Tarot is the right way to proceed. On the other hand, I’m not sure it isn’t the right way, either.” He shrugged. “Under the circumstances, I think a wait- and- see attitude’s less likely to go catastrophically wrong, though. At the same time, I think we ought to think about ways to... disaster proof our position, as it were, if Tarot does switch sides.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Trynair sounded a bit cautious, and Clyntahn smiled.

  “I’m not planning on running off in a bout of excessive enthusiasm, Zahmsyn! I was just thinking about what Allayn said about Tarot’s strategic position. About its offering the Charisians a naval base between our northern squadrons and Desnair.”

  “And?”

  “And it occurred to me that one way to prevent that from becoming a problem would be to concentrate our forces in the Gulf of Mathyas right now. Before Tarot does what ever it is Gorjah’s planning to do.”

  “What?” Trynair blinked. “Look, it’s already September,” Clyntahn said, and twitched his head in the direction of the council chamber’s window. Icy rain pounded down outside, and nearly leafless branches swayed in the wind. “It won’t be long before Hsing- wu’s Passage starts to freeze over again. When that happens, our northern squadrons—the ones we’ve built here in the Temple Lands and all the ships Harchong’s built in her northern ports—are going to be stuck. If we get them out now, before the ice closes in, and send all of them to Desnair, we’ll have all seventy- four Desnairian galleons and at least fifty or sixty each from Harchong and the Temple Lands—that’s between a hundred and seventy and two hundred galleons—in one concentrated force, less than two thousand miles from Tarot and barely three thousand from Charis. If we get them there before Gorjah changes sides, it might suggest to him that treason would be a bad idea. And even if they don’t get there until after he changes sides, or if he goes ahead and betrays us despite their presence, we’d have a serious force in place both to threaten Tarot and Charis and to force them to redeploy against it. After what Thirsk did in the Gulf of Dohlar, they’d have to take that threat seriously, don’t you think?”

  Trynair and Duchairn were both looking at him in surprise now. As a general rule, Clyntahn didn’t much concern himself with military movements. Partly, Duchairn thought cynically, because it had been his breezy confidence where military affairs he’d known nothing about were concerned which had launched this entire disaster in the first place.

  “I don’t know, Zhaspahr,” Maigwair said slowly. “The new construction’s scattered up and down the length of the Passage. We’d have to get it all into one place, first. And a good quarter of the ships we’ve managed to launch and rig still don’t have their artillery.” He grimaced. “I’m afraid our foundries have been slower to really hit their stride than we’d anticipated, and, frankly, Harchong’s foundries are nowhere near as efficient as they could be, either. They’ve got a lot of them, but their output’s lower even than ours. For that matter, their best ones are in South Harchong—in Shwei and Kyznetsov. And before Thirsk ran the Charisians out of Claw Island, they put a major hole in the delivery of the guns South Harchong had managed to produce.”

  “Well, Desnair’s foundries are doing pretty well, aren’t they?” Clyntahn ri-posted, and cocked an eyebrow at Duchairn.

  “Production numbers are rising,” Duchairn acknowledged. “It’s not that their individual foundries are particularly big or especially efficient, but they do have a higher output per furnace than Harchong, and they’ve been establishing a lot of little cannon foundries. They’re still having problems with iron guns, though. Everybody is”— except for Charis, he carefully did not say out loud—“but even more of Desnair’s iron pieces seem to be failing when they’re proofed.”

  “That’s just a matter of experience,” Clyntahn said dismissively. “Of course they’re not going to get it right the first few times they try! But if they’ve got the foundries, sooner or later they’ll be able to produce the guns we need.”

  “Why not send them to Dohlar, instead?” Duchairn suggested. Maigwair and Trynair looked thoughtful, but Clyntahn’s face turned expressionless as the shutters went up behind his eyes. “Thirsk seems to’ve straightened out the Dohlaran foundries—at least, he’s been able to compensate for the Harchong guns the Charisians took. By now, according to the invoices I’m getting, he’s actually far enough ahead of his own demand that he’s in a position to export guns to Harchong, instead of the other way around.”

  “Dohlar’s too far from Tarot and Charis,” Clyntahn said flatly, and Duchairn felt one eyebrow arch.

  He glanced at Trynair and saw the same speculation on the Chancellor’s face.

  Just as Clyntahn had never truly been prepared to give Gorjah of Tarot a clean bill of health over the betrayal of the Group of Four’s original plan of attack, he’d never forgiven Thirsk for first losing the battle of Crag Reach and then surrendering his surviving ships to Cayleb Ahrmahk. The Dohlaran ought to have fought until every one of his galleys went to the bottom, in Clyntahn’s opinion. The fact that he hadn’t—that he’d put the lives of his men above his service to Mother Church—made him automatically and permanently suspect to the Grand Inquisitor. Clyntahn had acquiesced only grudgingly in Thirsk’s appointment to his present post, and only when all three other members of the Group of Four had voted against him. And he’d bitterly resented Thirsk’s “demands” that Mother Church pay the wages of his sailors. As far as Clyntahn was concerned, those sailors should be eager to volunteer in God’s Own cause! Besides, the Church had dozens of other things it could have used that money for. And that didn’t even consider Thirsk’s ridiculous insistence that the Church ought to pay pensions to the survivors of men who were killed in her ser vice.

  The Grand Inquisitor hadn’t been happy when Duchairn supported Thirsk’s policies. Having the Church’s Treasurer agree that the outrageous demands were “reasonable” and “manageable” had cut the ground out from under his own arguments. Maigwair’s unusually stubborn insistence that Thirsk had the best grasp of the new naval tactics hadn’t made him any more cheerful. And rather than agreeing with Duchairn and Maigwair that Thirsk’s performance in the Harchong Narrows demonstrated that the earl had been right all along, Clyntahn sided with the opinion (coming, Duchairn suspected, from Duke Thorast) that Thirsk had simply been lucky. Lucky in the weather, lucky in outnumbering the Charisians by such a huge margin, and—probably—lucky the Charisians had withdrawn from Claw Island before he was finally ready to attack it, since they would undoubtedly have defeated him— again—if he’d actually had to fight to evict them.

&nbs
p; Only the fact that the Duke of Fern and Bishop Staiphan Maik, Clyntahn’s own intendant for the fleet, strongly supported Thirsk had held the Grand Inquisitor’s ire in check. Well, that and the fact that Thirsk’s victory was the only victory any of the Church’s squadrons had so far achieved.

  And as far as I can tell, the fact that Thirsk allowed the Charisians to surrender has only pissed him off even more. Duchairn very carefully did not grimace. As far as Zhaspahr’s concerned, the only good Charisian is a dead one. He sees absolutely no reason Thirsk should have let them surrender. Even Allayn understands that if our admirals don’t allow them to surrender, then their admirals won’t allow our crews to surrender. I don’t think Zhaspahr really cares about that, though. In fact, I wonder if he wouldn’t actually prefer a situation in which the other side flatly refused to give quarter. He probably sees it as the best way to motivate our people to fight to the bitter end . . . exactly the way Thirsk didn’t do at Crag Reach.

  “I admit Dohlar’s a long way from Charis and Tarot,” the Treasurer said out loud. “On the other hand, as Allayn says, our ships are scattered all over the Passage . . . and nothing the Charisians have is close enough to threaten the Passage. We could send them all the way to Gorath Bay without having to worry about their being intercepted. And Dohlar’s much closer to Chisholm—and Corisande, for that matter—going west.”

  “Of course it is.” Clyntahn waved an impatient hand dismissively. “And the Charisians who evacuated Claw Island went straight to Chisholm to reinforce the ships they already had there. In fact, that’s another reason to send our ships to Desnair.”

  Duchairn looked at him quizzically, and he snorted.

  “They’ve had to disperse strength to cover Chisholm and Corisande, Rhobair.” Clyntahn was back to that adult- lecturing- a-particularly- slow- child tone of his, but Duchairn was too accustomed to it to rise to the baiting. For that matter, he wasn’t even certain Clyntahn was still doing it on purpose. “Our best estimate is that Rock Point has about twenty or twenty- five galleons based on Thol Bay, and Lock Island has another thirty- five or forty operating out of Rock Shoal Bay. That’s sixty- five total. The rest of their galleons are dispersed protecting Chisholm and Corisande. What I’m proposing is that we take advantage of that dispersal to punch our ships through to Desnair. By the time they can redeploy the ships they have on distant stations, we’ll be concentrated in the Gulf of Mathyas and there won’t be anything they can do about it.”