by David Weber
He stopped for a moment, looking around, making sure the rest of his people were with him. There were only ten of them, and he bared his teeth while the muskets continued to fire out of the darkness. He saw the blink-lizard glow of slow matches scattered under the trees, and his eyes narrowed.
“Matchlocks, boys,” he told them in a low voice. “Nice little lights to help us find the bastards, and it sounds like they’re loading loose powder. They’re going to be slow. Get in close and rip their guts out, got it?”
A chorus of growls answered him, and he nodded sharply.
“And while you’re at it, howl like you’re all damned Marines!” he said with a savage grin. “Now- after me, lads! ”
His boat crew exploded out of the water, vaulting over the conewood trunk with naked steel in hand. Aplyn-Ahrmahk carried his sword in his right hand and a wicked, spike-backed boarding tomahawk in his left, and the high, baying warcry of the Imperial Marines came with him. It sounded as if there were at least fifty of them, he thought wildly, and then a figure loomed up in front of him.
A cavalryman, he thought, taking in the dimly seen helmet. But armed with a matchlock. That meant a dragoon, not a lancer or a hussar, probably, and Delferahkan dragoons didn’t have breastplates, and that meant Charisian cutlasses had chisel points, as well adapted to thrusting as to slashing, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk felt the jerking quiver of someone else’s muscles transmitted up the blade as he drove a foot of steel into the man’s chest. The dragoon shrieked, clutching at the impaling blade, but Aplyn-Ahrmahk kicked him away and went charging past him, screaming like a madman just like the rest of his boat crew.
The dragoons who’d been waiting in ambush reared up from their firing positions, turning towards the demons who’d suddenly materialized in their midst, and shocked astonishment turned almost instantly into panic. It was impossible for either side to know how many enemies it actually faced, and surprise-and fear-didn’t lend themselves well to making accurate estimates.
Aplyn-Ahrmahk hacked down another opponent. A third man came at him desperately, matchlock clubbed, completely forgetting the sword at his own side in his panic. The lieutenant ducked under the musket, but the dragoon was on the wrong side for his cutlass. The tomahawk lashed out, coming up from below, driving its sharpened, spur-like hook up through the man’s jaw and into the roof of his mouth. The Delferahkan’s scream chopped off in a hot spray of blood, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk lost his grip on the suddenly slippery tomahawk as the body fell.
Another dragoon loomed up-this one an officer who’d remembered his sword. It was several inches longer than Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s cutlass, but the lieutenant had served under Sir Dunkyn Yairley. That meant every midshipman (and ensign) spent a solid hour at sword drill every single day, and the instincts Sylvyst Raigly had helped pound into Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s muscle memory took over. He twisted away from the Delferahkan’s frantic, clumsy thrust and his left hand lashed out, capturing the wrist of the dragoon’s sword arm. The Delferahkan was bigger, taller, and broader-shouldered than Aplyn-Ahrmahk, but the lieutenant’s wiry strength and the advantage of surprise were enough to shove the other man’s arm almost straight up as they slammed together, chest-to-chest. At which point Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s cutlass drove into his belly with all the elegance of a meat ax.
The officer went down with a bubbling scream, and suddenly there was no more fighting. Instead, there were only moans, sobs, and-in the distance-the thud and thunder of galloping hooves disappearing into the darkness.
“Anybody with a prisoner, hang on to him!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk barked, and then turned back to the river.
***
“That’s the best I can do, Sir,” Lywys Taibor said. The healer’s mate looked drawn and weary, and well he should. The ambush had cost the boat party heavily, with five dead and twice that many wounded. Now he stood up, rubbing his back, and looked glumly down at Lieutenant Fairghas Gowain, who lay unconscious on the rough pad made of captured Delferahkan saddle blankets.
“How soon is he going to wake up?” Aplyn-Ahrmahk asked. He felt as tired as the healer’s mate looked, but he couldn’t afford to admit it.
“Dunno, Sir,” Taibor said honestly. “Head wound like that, he may never wake up. Or he could come to in the next ten minutes. If you want me to guess, probably not for a day or two. And I don’t know if his wits’re going to be wandering when he does come to or not.”
“I see.” Aplyn-Ahrmahk gazed down at the lieutenant for several moments, then patted the healer’s mate on the shoulder. “Thank you,” he said sincerely. “And not just for the prognosis. The lads are lucky they had you along.”
“Did what I could, Sir,” Taibor replied in an exhausted voice. “But I’d be lying if I said I was happy about ’em. Got at least four we need to get to a proper healer fast as we can, or we’ll lose them sure as Shan-wei.”
“Understood.”
Aplyn-Ahrmahk patted him on the shoulder again, then walked to the riverbank and stared out across the cold, clear water.
Lieutenant Gowain, HMS Victorious ’ first lieutenant, was in command of the entire operation. But now he was unconscious indefinitely, and Lieutenant Bryndyn Mahgail, the senior Marine, was dead. Which left Lieutenant Aplyn-Ahrmahk-all sixteen years old of him-in command and the next best thing to two hundred miles from the nearest senior officer.
At least they’d taken three of the dragoons alive, and the Delferahkans had been so shocked by the abrupt reversal of their ambush that their tongues had wagged freely. It was also possible the sight of Stywyrt Mahlyk contemplatively sharpening a knife as he smiled evilly in their direction might have had some bearing on their loquaciousness, of course.
Aplyn-Ahrmahk had kept them separated from one another to deprive them of any opportunity to coordinate their stories, yet all three of them had told basically the same tale.
Word of the attack on Sarmouth had spread even faster than Admiral Yairley’s plan had allowed for. Worse, some idiot upriver from the port had actually believed the boat expedition’s warnings that the horrible Charisian heretics were sending an entire invasion fleet up the miserable Sarm River! Aplyn-Ahrmahk couldn’t understand how anybody with the sense to pour piss out of a boot, to borrow one of Mahlyk’s favorite phrases, could have credited that story, but according to all three of their prisoners, one of the Earl of Charlz’ bailiffs had actually believed the Charisians were burning both banks of the river as they advanced deep into the heart of Delferahk. He’d sounded the alarm and sent out parties of dragoons to scout for the invaders.
The one good aspect of the entire comic-opera farce was that the dragoons in question were militiamen, not regulars. The bad news was that this particular lot of them had spotted the Charisian boats the previous evening and shadowed them from shore. Working against the current, the boats were actually slower than the horsemen, which was how the Delferahkans had been able to get into position for the ambush. And an unknown number of them had gotten away. By now, they had to be raising the alarm, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk doubted the number of “Charisian invaders” was going to decline when they started explaining how they’d gotten their asses kicked. Which meant every man the Delferahkans could scrape up would be hunting for his people by late afternoon.
So what did he do? If there were more dragoons available, it wouldn’t be hard for them to repeat this bunch’s tactics. And even if there weren’t, the word had to be going out by semaphore (if it was available) and by runner and courier (if the semaphore wasn’t available) even as he stood here. He knew how important this mission was, but if he continued, the odds were overwhelming that he’d simply lead his own pursuers straight to the people he was supposed to be rescuing. And that didn’t even consider those badly wounded men Taibor had mentioned.
He looked out at the slowly flowing water and tried to think. . VI.
Sunthorn Mountains and Royal Palace, City of Talkyra, Kingdom of Delferahk
Lazy wings of snow drifted almost silently on the wind sighing among the peaks
of the Sunthorn Mountains ninety-odd miles northwest of the city of Talkyra. The temperature hovered at a brisk six degrees below zero on the old Fahrenheit scale, and the stars showing through the cloud rifts overhead were huge and bright… and icy. Technically, it was spring south of the equator, but at these elevations that meant very little, especially in the small, still hours of the morning just after Langhorne’s Watch.
The single Imperial Charisian Guardsman sat in a lotus position atop an ice-crusted boulder. He’d been sitting there for three days now, ever since his conversation with Baron Coris, and there was snow drifted on his hair-and on his skin, for that matter-but he seemed unaware of it. Because he was unaware of it. He’d allowed his body temperature to drop to that of the air about him, and after he’d caught up on some of the SNARC reports he’d been unable to give proper attention to when they first came in and spent a day or so contemplating future possibilities, he’d actually put himself on standby and taken the equivalent of a lengthy nap. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to be wandering around four thousand feet above the permanent snow line to stumble across him while he was “asleep,” and it would probably make Cayleb happy.
And if it didn’t, at least it would offer him a handy bit of ammunition to toss back at the emperor the next time Cayleb decided to lecture him about the need for “down time.”
It wasn’t often Merlin Athrawes had the opportunity to simply sit and think, which made him value those rare chances even more when one of them came along. For the most part, he was far too visible (aside from those “retreats to meditate” which had become a more frequent part of his life of late) for something like this. If “ Seijin Merlin” dropped out of sight, even briefly, people started wondering where he was and what he was up to and, as a general rule, he tried very hard to avoid having people wonder about things like that.
In this instance, however, it was going to be necessary to explain how Captain Athrawes had gotten to the city of Talkyra. Or, to be more accurate, it was going to be necessary to allow time for him to have made the trip. Everyone knew seijins moved in mysterious ways and at speeds few other mortals could match, so the exact details of his travel arrangements could be glossed over. But it still took them at least some time to make a journey of over six thousand miles, which was why he’d left Tellesberg five five-days earlier.
He’d spent most of that time in Nimue’s Cave, going over reports, discussing the events racing towards a violent confrontation in the Republic of Siddarmark with the rest of the inner circle, refining the propaganda Owl’s remotes were distributing across all three continents, catching up on some reading, and working with Owl on a couple of private projects he’d been unable to give proper attention before.
In particular, he and the AI had the Class II VR unit almost up and running. Owl still didn’t have the specifications he needed to build another PICA, and Merlin was no more enthusiastic than he had been about letting the computer take apart his own cybernetic housing to find out how it worked. But at least if he had to, he now had a refuge for his and Nimue’s memories and personality. A Class II VR wasn’t as big and capable as the massive virtual reality computers the Terran Federation had used as “homes” for electronic iterations of their top R amp;D, military analysts, and pure researchers. It simply didn’t have the memory and the processing power to maintain two or three dozen fully aware personalities in detailed virtual environments indistinguishable (from the inside) from reality. A Class II could handle no more than three or, at the outside, four virtual personalities if it was going to give the VPs a fully developed world in which to live. There’d be plenty of room for Nimue/Merlin, though. If worse came to worst, he could set up housekeeping in there even if “Seijin Merlin” became totally inoperable, and at least one other possible use had occurred to him, although he still wasn’t at all certain that one was going to work out.
In addition, he’d decided it was time to take advantage of Commander Mahndrayn’s work with his breech-loading rifle and the percussion caps he’d developed for it, and he and Owl had used some of the free time to redesign his own sidearms. Those were going to come as a nasty surprise to someone-possibly sometime soon-he thought, and they wouldn’t violate a single clause of the Proscriptions. Father Paityr had already made that abundantly clear, although none of the Empire’s gunsmiths had yet come up with the design he and Owl had built.
The truth was, though, that as much as he’d enjoyed having time to tinker and putter, he’d gotten bored. Unfortunately, he’d had no choice but to go on marking time for at least another five-day or two if he didn’t want to raise all sorts of eyebrows about the truly miraculous, not simply mysterious, speed with which Seijin Merlin could cover distances of six or seven thousand miles. That was why he’d landed here in the mountains after Zhevons’ chat with Coris, sent the recon skimmer back to Owl, ordered his nannies to regrow Seijin Merlin’s hair, and then gone to standby mode for fifty minutes of every hour.
Of course, even with that, if anyone ever started adding up times, they were bound to come to the conclusion that seijins must know some magic spell to give them command of wind and wave.
In theory, he’d sailed from the Earldom of West Harding, the Island of Charis’ westernmost headland, rather than Tellesberg, which had at least reduced the length of his supposed voyage to the Desnairian Empire’s Crown Lands from over ten thousand miles to “only” fifty-seven hundred. He’d actually turned up in West Harding, publically (and noisily) “borrowed” a forty-foot single-masted schooner, and put to sea in order to make sure everyone “knew” how he’d gotten where he was going in the fullness of time.
That schooner, unfortunately, was now on the bottom of the Parker Sea. He regretted that. It had been a sweet little craft, and Nimue had always loved single-handing her sloop back on Old Terra whenever she’d had the chance. In fact, he was increasingly irked with himself for having abandoned the schooner as quickly as he had. With so much time to kill, he might as well have spent some of it doing something he’d always enjoyed so much before.
You need a vacation, he told himself. Well, to be fair, I guess you needed a vacation. You’d really have to call the last month or so something like a vacation, after all, but you’re just too damned contrary to actually take time off, aren’t you? Always have to be doing something. Everything depends on you. He snorted mentally. You need Sharley or Cayleb closer to hand to kick you in the butt when you get too full of your own importance.
It was amazing how comforting it was to be able to think that. The loss of so many colleagues left a special aching wound at the center of the theoretically immortal “ seijin ’s” heart, yet the inner circle had survived, even continued to grow. Best of all, he wasn’t indispensable any longer, and that was a greater relief than he’d ever imagined it might be. If something happened to him, the others would still have access to Owl and the technology hidden away in Nimue’s Cave. Not that he planned on anything happening to him, of course. It was just “Excuse me, Lieutenant Commander Alban.”
Merlin twitched internally, although his physical body never moved, as Owl’s voice invaded his thoughts.
“Yes?”
“The sensor net deployed to cover Talkyra has reported a situation which programming parameters require me to call to your attention.”
“What sort of situation? No, scratch that. I assume you have the raw take from the sensors for me, yes?”
“Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander Alban.”
“Then I suppose you’d better show it to me.”
***
“Tobys.”
Tobys Raimair looked up from the dagger edge he’d been carefully honing and cocked an eyebrow at the man who’d just poked his head into his spartan little bedchamber. Corporal Zhak Mahrys was one of his small guard force’s noncoms. Normally a calm, almost phlegmatic sort, he looked more than a little anxious at the moment.
“What is it, Zhakky?”
“There’s something going on,” Mahrys said.
“You know Zhake Tailyr?”
“Sure.” Raimair nodded; Tailyr was one of King Zhames’ guardsmen. He was also a drinking buddy of Mahrys’, and Raimair and Earl Coris had encouraged the corporal to pursue the friendship. “What about him?”
“He says there’s been a lot of going back and forth between Colonel Sahndahl’s office and Father Gaisbyrt’s office since lunchtime. A lot, Tobys.”
Raimair’s face stiffened. Father Gaisbyrt Vandaik was a Schuelerite upper-priest attached to Bishop Mytchail’s office in Talkyra.
“What kind of back and forth?” Raimair asked.
“Dunno. He said it was Brother Bahldwyn mostly, though… and Vandaik came back to the castle with him about an hour ago.”
Better and better, Raimair thought. Bahldwyn Gaimlyn was attached to the king’s household-technically as a “secretary,” although there was precious little evidence King Zhames had requested his services.
“Did Tailyr have any idea what it was about?” he asked.
“If he did, he wasn’t telling me.” Mahrys looked even more concerned. “He’s somebody to hoist a few beers with, Tobys, not my blood brother. He may know-or suspect-a lot he’s not telling me. On the other hand, at least he dropped some warning on me.”
Raimair nodded, although he had to wonder if Tailyr’s decision to “warn” Mahrys had really been his own. Raimair could think of a couple of scenarios in which a particularly devious Schuelerite-and they were all devious, sneaky, underhanded bastards-might arrange to have a “warning” passed in order to manipulate someone he suspected into incriminating himself.
“Thanks, Zhakky,” he said now, standing and sliding the dagger into its belt sheath. “Pass the word to the rest of the lads. No one makes any moves, no one does anything to suggest we’re worried, but check your equipment and be sure you keep it handy. I want them ready to move fast and hard if we have to. Got it?”
“Got it.” Mahrys nodded and disappeared, and Raimair walked down a short hallway, up a half-flight of stairs, and knocked on another door.