At the Sign of Triumph

by David Weber

  He snorted again, then blew a smoke ring towards the overhead. He watched it drift upwards, then looked back at Skaht.

  “Well, in that case, I suppose I should tell the High Admiral we’re ready to leave, shouldn’t I?”

  * * *

  My God, that’s a beautiful ship, Sharleyan Ahrmahk thought as she descended from the carriage into the golden flare of trumpets and the massed, deafening thunder of her waiting subjects. She started down the double line of saluting Imperial Guardsmen towards the waiting platform, Edwyrd Seahamper at her heels even here, but her eyes clung to the ship lying to a single anchor off the Tellesberg seafront, and she knew she’d never seen a more magnificent vessel.

  It was true, although Gwylym Manthyr’s beauty was quite different from that of the galleys which had preceded her or the galleons dwarfed by her stupendous presence. It was an angular, severe beauty—rearing out of the water like a floating cliff. Or like an island crowned by fortress walls and towers. Her single mast thrust up with only one yard, intended solely to display signal flags, not to carry canvas. The fat pod of the lookout’s position was over a hundred feet above water level, and her funnels rose with the clean, arrogant severity of a great dragon’s spinal plates. Unlike the traditional stark black of the ICN’s galleons or the earlier ironclads, her hull and gunshields were painted a dark blue gray while her upperworks and funnels were painted in what Ahlfryd Hyndryk and Ehdwyrd Howsmyn called “haze gray,” although the funnel caps and her mast were an unrelieved black. Probably because that was the color her funnel smoke was going to leave them anyway, in the end.

  The guns in her barbettes, thrusting from her casemates, or in their shielded deck mounts promised unyielding death and destruction, yet they, too, had their own beauty—the beauty of function, of purpose. And so did her long, graceful sheer, the sharply raked prow and flared bows, the way she sat in the water, a living creature in her own element.

  The Tellesberg sky was a blue dome bounded by dramatic banks of cumulus cloud. They piled against the southern and eastern horizons, rolling slowly, almost imperceptibly to the northwest, brilliant white above and shadowed gray below. The harbor’s seabirds and wyverns rode the breeze, calling to one another, diving for particularly tempting bits of flotsam, and small craft bobbed around the waiting warship, keeping a respectful distance and yet somehow like the harbor’s winged citizens.

  Twin columns of smoke rose from Gwylym Manthyr’s funnels, and steam plumed white against it as relief valves vented. She was ready—eager—to go, Sharleyan thought as she ascended the platform’s steps.

  Makel Staynair, his brother, and Halcom Bahrns—the last two in dress uniform, dress swords at their sides—were already there. They bowed profoundly to her, and then it was her turn to kiss the archbishop’s ring.

  She straightened, turning to face the crowd that packed the waterfront, and stillness radiated out from the platform as the spectators closer to it shouted for those farther from it to be still and listen.

  She let that stillness settle, then held out one hand to Syaynair.

  “If you would, Your Grace,” she said into the stillness, and the archbishop moved forward to stand beside her and raised his hands.

  “Let us pray,” he said, and a stir rippled through the crowd as caps were remove and heads were bowed.

  “Oh God,” he said then, his voice rising clear and clean against the sound of the wind, the pop of the platform’s banners, the distant cries of gulls and wyverns, “we come to You this day to ask Your blessing upon this ship, upon her crew, and upon her mission. We know how You must weep to see Your children shed the blood of any of Your other children, yet we also know You understand the test to which we have been called. You know the task before us, and we thank You for having been with us so far, walked at our side in our battle for survival, our struggle to serve Your will as You’ve given us to understand it and to defend those who the corrupt, vile men in Zion would torture and murder in Your name, just as they tortured and murdered the man for whom this ship is named. We ask You to walk with us for the rest of our journey, as well, and we beseech You to keep, guard, guide, and protect these, our protectors, in the five-days and months to come. Be with them in the furnace, give them victory, and grant that—in that victory—they do not forget that even their mortal foes are also Your children and our brothers. Let no unnecessary bloodshed, no cruelty, mar their actions, and preserve them from the hatred that can poison even the cleanest soul. We ask this as You have taught us to ask, trusting in Your goodness as we would trust in the love of any father. Amen.”

  “Amen!” the response came back from the crowded quay and the streets behind it like a grumble of thunder, and Sharleyan took one more stride forward, resting her hands on the platform’s flag-draped railing, while hats and caps were replaced amid a brief, fresh susurration of conversation. But that conversation faded quickly as all eyes turned attentively, expectantly, towards her. She let the stillness settle once more, let the anticipation build—waited until the vast crowd was ready—and then squared her shoulders.

  “Charisians!”

  Her voice was far sweeter—and lighter—than Maikel Staynair’s. Yet it had been trained from childhood for moments just like this one and it rang out with astonishing clarity. Even so, those farthest from her couldn’t possibly hope to hear her. The crowd which had come to witness Gwylym Manthyr’s sailing stretched for hundreds of yards along the waterfront, thrust tendrils up the approach streets. No one’s voice could have carried to its fringes, but the highly trained priests and lay brothers the archbishop had seeded throughout it were prepared to relay her words to those distant ears. She would have to time her delivery, leave spaces for those repetitions, but that, too, was something in which she’d been trained since girlhood.

  “Charisians!” she repeated. “Three and a half years ago, four ships of the Imperial Charisian Navy fought to the death against impossible odds. Crippled by storm damage, facing a squadron—a fleet—which outnumbered them many times over, they chose not to surrender unharmed, but to fight. To fight against those impossible odds to protect their undamaged consorts who might yet avoid destruction … but only if those four ships fought and died to buy them the time they needed. And so those ships fought—fought just as every ship in our Navy fights to protect every Charisian, every child of God who defies the savagery and the arrogance and the ambition of the men who have perverted all Mother Church means and is.”

  She paused to let her words be repeated … and to let them sink in.

  “We’ve remembered those ships in memorial masses every Wednesday in each month of September since that day … and we will remember them in every September to come. We will remember HMS Rock Point, HMS Damsel, HMS Avalanche, and—especially!—HMS Dancer for as long as there is a Charisian Navy, a Charisian Empire, and a Church of Charis, because the men aboard those ships—your brothers, your husbands, your fathers, your sons—fought for us, for every single one of us. And when they’d fought their ships into sinking wrecks, when three-quarters of them had fallen in combat against an entire fleet, the wounded, bleeding survivors surrendered honorably to their foes.”

  She paused once again, waiting while the repeaters relayed her words, and her voice was hard when she resumed.

  “Yes, they surrendered … but their captors ignored the very laws recorded in the Holy Writ to prescribe the treatment of prioners taken in open combat, captured in time of war. They were treated as criminals—as worse than criminals—and after they’d surrendered, after they’d been denied the rights and protections the Writ itself guarantees to prisoners of war, after they’d spent a bitter winter in captivity aboard prison hulks in Gorath Bay—denied winter clothing, blankets, an adequate diet, or even minimal healers’ care on the direct orders of the Intendant of Dohlar—after a quarter of them had died, the survivors of that ordeal were delivered into the hands of the butcher who calls himself Mother Church’s Grand Inquisitor. They were delivered to Zion, wh
ere three-quarters—more than three-quarters—of those who’d managed to survive that far were brutally tortured to death. Where the pitiful handful who’d survived battle, survived cold, survived starvation and illness and exposure, survived the brutality of their journey to Zion, survived even the Inquisition’s savage torture, were given to the Punishment—burned to death, after all else they had suffered. And lest they denounce their torturers, lest they proclaim the truth of why they’d fought and of what had been done to them, their tongues were cut out before they faced the flame!”

  She paused once again, and her eyes were brown fire as the distant voices of the repeaters came through the ringing silence. A silence so deep, so profound the distant cries of gulls and wyverns came clearly through its crystal heart.

  “That is why we remember them,” she said then, and even her superbly trained voice wavered around the edges, frayed by remembered pain and present grief while tears blurred her vision. “That is why I remember them. Why I will tell my daughter the story of their courage, of their devotion, of their sacrifice. Why I will teach her to never—ever—forget what those husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons did for each and every one of us.”

  Again, the repeaters carried her words to the farthest fringes of the crowd, and here and there in that vast stillness single voices were raised in agreement. She waited until they’d faded, and when she spoke again, the tears in her voice had become steel.

  “And that is why we will never forget or forgive what was done to them,” she told her subjects. “There is a price for what was inflicted upon them, what they suffered. A penalty for those who would turn their hands to such acts—who would acquiesce in them! A penalty which goes beyond simple vengeance for those we’ve lost, those who have been so foully and brutally murdered. One which goes even beyond justice. A penalty which will serve not simply to avenge them, but to teach the world that no one will ever—ever!—torture and murder Charisian subjects with impunity. That there will be a reckoning for anyone who would commit such actions. That the Empire of Charis will come for them—that we will always come for them, whoever they may be, wherever they may hide—and that we will not rest until they pay for their actions. The men who ordered and carried out the Ferayd Massacre have already learned that lesson; the inquisitors with the Group of Four’s armies have learned that lesson; now the time has come for those in Gorath who supinely yielded our sailors, our Marines—our brothers, fathers, and sons—to the Butcher of Zion to learn it. And, in the fullness of time, Zhaspahr Clyntahn will learn it!”

  The shouts of agreement were sharp-clawed with anger this time. There weren’t very many, and yet the fury in them swelled like the sea. They were the first tremors, the earthquake’s precursor shocks, and they cut off instantly when she leaned over the rail towards her audience once more.

  “Every one of you knows what’s happened in the Gulf of Dohlar since the Battle of the Kaudzhu Narrows,” she told them. “You know that this time, our Navy rescued the men who’d been destined for murder in Zion. You know Earl Sharpfield, Baron Sarmouth, Admiral Zhaztro have annihilated the squadron which hurt us so badly in the Narrows. And you know that now—today—this ship—” she thrust out an arm, pointing at the enormous vessel floating in the harbor behind her “—departs for the Gulf, as well. Departs to join Earl Sharpfield and Baron Sarmouth. She will make that voyage in less than one month, and when she arrives, they will move against the Kingdom of Dohlar itself.

  “Charisians, there’s a reason this ship bears the name she does! There’s a reason she will be our Navy’s spearhead—and the hammer that reduces the City of Gorath’s walls to rubble. There’s a reason her very name will terrify Zhaspahr Clyntahn and every single one of his butchers!

  “My friends—my brothers and my sisters—” tears fogged her voice and she could barely see, yet somehow her words rang clear, each one of them forged of steel and fire, of grief and pride, and of the fierce, unyielding purpose which made Sharleyan Ahrmahk—and the people of Charis—what they were “—the murderers who tortured and killed our people, our friends, our warriors and protectors, may have cut out their tongues. They may have silenced them before the hour of their deaths. But today—today—we give them back their voices! Gwylym Manthyr will speak again in Gorath, and the words we will give him—the words he will deliver for us, and for himself, and for his men—will echo far beyond Gorath, far beyond the borders of Dohlar. They will echo in Zion itself, within the walls of the very Temple of God! And the men who hear the thunder of those words will know the day is coming very soon when, as God is our witness, we will come for them, as well!”

  The earthquake broke free at last. It rose above the city of Tellesberg, and it was the voice not just of a crowd, not just of a city, but of an empire. Of an entire realm—a people—for whom she’d found the words, the promise, to speak not just what was in their hearts, but what was in their souls.

  By rights, Zhaspahr Clyntahn should have heard that fierce, hungry, implacable roar even in Zion.

  .XI.

  Seventy-Foot Hill,

  Cahrswyl’s Farm Road,

  Duchy of Thorast,

  Kingdom of Dohlar.

  “Sweet Bédard. If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it!” Rohsyndo Mylyndyz said almost prayerfully.

  “See what?” Corporal Ahskar Mahkgyl, section leader of 4th Platoon’s first section, demanded irritably. No one was shooting at them for the moment, and the corporal had been hunkered down in his lizardhole—what the Imperial Charisian Army would have called a “foxhole”—trying to gnaw his way through a particularly well petrified piece of hardtack. So far, success had eluded him.

  “That.”

  Mylyndyz pointed down the southwestern slope of the hill upon and around which 2nd Company of Colonel Mahryahno Hyrtatho’s sadly battered infantry regiment was dug in. Mahkgyl sat up in his lizardhole and shaded his eyes against the steadily setting sun with a filthy hand as his gaze followed the private’s pointing hand. He squinted against the brilliant horizon for a moment, and then his eyes widened.

  “Schueler’s bones,” he muttered. “I see it and I still don’t believe it! How in Shan-wei’s name did he manage that?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell not going to complain!” Mylyndyz replied almost prayerfully.

  “For a worthless city boy from Gorath, you do get it right once in a while,” Mahkgyl told him.

  The hill was scarcely a towering mountain—according to the maps, its crest rose a whole seventy feet above its surroundings, although Mahkgyl figured that was an exaggeration—but it passed for a commanding height in these parts. The hill three miles to the northwest, where Wahlys Sahndyrsyn’s 4th Company was dug in, was half again as tall, but despite its less lofty height, “Seventy-Foot Hill” was actually the steeper of the two.

  Now Mahkgyl and Mylyndyz watched the black silhouettes of the eight-man party struggling up the slope. The silhouette at its head was huge, at least six feet tall, and wore the kilt of a Salthar mountaineer. There was only one man that size in 2nd Company, and the kilt was a dead giveaway of his identity. Besides, there was also only one man in the entire company who could have organized the miracle they saw approaching them.

  It took that miracle quite a while to arrive, since the hill’s western face was even steeper than the eastern side. That was unfortunate for several reasons, the biggest of which was the little matter of who lay hidden beyond the scrub woods on the eastern side … and who’d made three determined attempts in the last two days to come up that side of the hill. Several dozen of those who’d made those unsuccessful attempts still lay out on the slope, stiff and stark, and the sickly smell of decay wafted up the hill on the gentle easterly breeze. From behind the hill, an occasional salvo of angle-gun shells landed in those woods at random intervals. Not because any heretics were visible at the moment, but to discourage them from massing for yet another attack.

  Mahkgyl had his doubts about how effec
tive that would be if the heretics decided to make another serious try, especially since they seemed willing enough to put snipers into the woods, despite the harassing fire. On the other hand, it sure as Shan-wei couldn’t hurt!

  Second Company—and, in particular, 4th Platoon—was here to keep the road from Cahrswyl’s Farm to the Saiksyn Farm open, although calling that sandy, unpaved country track—suitable (barely) for farm wagons—a “road” was a bit of a stretch. That unprepossessing dirt lane had acquired an importance far beyond its grubby appearance, however, when the heretic advance cut the high road between Bryxtyn and Waymeet eight days ago. Scuttlebutt had it that in the last five-day they’d also taken the town of Mahrakton, thirty-plus miles northwest of Bryxtyn and cut the Sairhalk Switch Canal south of Waymeet, as well. That made the miserable strip of dirt running up the southern end of 4th Platoon’s hill the only lateral connection north of Kettle Bottom Swamp between the Waymeet-Fronzport High Road and the Bryxtyn-Shan High Road, and if the heretics really were sweeping around the fortresses’ flanks.…

  Neither Mahkgyl nor Mylyndyz really liked to think about that, although it did explain their present position. Colonel Mahryahno Hyrtatho’s regiment had been ordered to dig in hard to hold the road. It had done just that for the last three days, and at least the heretics in front of it seemed almost as exhausted as its men were. Unless Mahkgyl missed his guess, the heretics were moving up fresh troops beyond those damned woods, though. In theory, an entire fresh regiment was on its way to relieve Hyrtatho’s Regiment, as well, but Ahskar Mahkgyl would believe that when he saw it.

  In the meantime, half the regiment was deployed farther north along the road, leaving 2nd Company to hold Seventy-Foot Hill while Captain Tybahld Hwairta’s 1st Company and Captain Daivyn Sebahstean’s 3rd Company held Cahrswyl’s Farm and anchored Hyrtatho’s right flank. Their companies were even more understrength than 2nd Company, which was why they’d been brigaded together under Captain Hwairta to hold the farm. Well, the fact that Captain Sebahstean had been carried to the rear on a stretcher before the sixty remaining men of his command were handed over to Hwairta probably had a little to do with it, as well, Not that 2nd Company was in much better shape; 4th Platoon was down six of its thirty-seven men, but that still made it 2nd Company’s strongest platoon. In fact, Hyrtatho’s entire regiment had been badly mauled during its fighting withdrawal from the Stryklyr’s Farm-Atlyn line.