By Heresies Distressed

by David Weber

  A hole opened in the square’s front as Windshare’s third line slammed home. One of the reserve platoons moved quickly to seal the gap, but half a dozen Corisandian horsemen burst through it before they could. Brigadier Clareyk’s command group were the only mounted troops under his command, and he slapped home his heels, spurring to meet the breakthrough with his staff officers.

  One rider had started moving an instant before the hole actually opened, however. He wore the black and gold kraken on the blue checkerboard shield of the Charisian Imperial Guard, and his katana flashed in his hand. He went into the oncoming Corisandians like a battering ram, and a head flew. Before that first head hit the ground, Merlin’s blade had claimed a second.

  He passed through them like the archangel of death, then drove his horse directly into the gap and flung himself from the saddle to wield his sword two-handed while Clareyk and his staffers dealt with the two Corisandians he hadn’t killed on his way through. In the handful of seconds it took for the reserve platoon to reach him, he killed another nine men.

  The Earl of Windshare found himself unhorsed once more, and this time with no dislocated shoulder. The bayonet wound in his right thigh bled badly, and he sat up, squeezing the leg with both hands, trying to staunch the flow of blood. Horses stamped and reared and screamed all about him, steel beat on steel with the dull, hideous blacksmith sound of a battlefield’s death mill in full production, but he could feel the battle’s tempo. When the hole had opened, he’d hoped they might still at least break this square. Now he knew they wouldn’t. The shock of the Charisians’ preposterously rapid response—the fact that they’d been able to fire after all, and the effectiveness of their fire—had broken his men’s resolve, and he could already hear additional rifles, and artillery, firing from farther down the slope, where two more Charisian battalions had deployed into a standard firing line to cover the square’s flanks with their preposterously long-range fire. He could also make out the sound of his own bugles, still blowing the charge, sending more of his men forward into the maelstrom, and something inside him cringed at the thought. Even if his men kept trying, all they could accomplish would be to die in even greater numbers, and—

  Some instinct warned him, and he looked up just as one of those shrieking horses reared high and then came toppling down straight at him. There was nothing he could do, but then a human-shaped hand closed on the back of his weapons harness, and his eyes went wide as it effortlessly yanked him out of the falling horse’s path.

  He found himself being supported with one hand by a tall, broad-shouldered Charisian in the black-and-gold of the House of Ahrmahk. He had no idea what an Imperial Guardsman was doing in the midst of this insane carnage, but however the man had gotten there, he’d just saved Windshare’s life. And, as the earl watched, the sword in the Charisian’s other hand cut off one man’s arm and took another’s head.

  Don’t be silly, a corner of his brain told him. No one can do that one-handed! You’re wounded. Blood loss can make a man imagine all kinds of things.

  Then, charging out of the confusion, a platoon of Charisian Marines appeared to seal the opening in the square’s front, and Windshare felt himself being dragged back from the fighting.

  “I apologize for the rough treatment, My Lord,” the man hauling him to safety said, “but I think General Gahrvai would prefer you alive.”

  . III .

  Tellesberg Palace,

  City of Tellesberg,

  Old Kingdom of Charis

  “Well, I’d say we have our work cut out for us, Your Majesty,” Rayjhis Yowance said quietly as he stood beside Empress Sharleyan and watched the ballroom fill.

  The two of them were ensconced in a waiting room off Tellesberg Palace’s grand ballroom. They’d chosen this particular waiting room because the artfully arranged and wrought ornamental grillwork in the wall between it and the far larger ballroom allowed someone inside the waiting room to watch the ballroom without being seen in return. And they’d chosen the grand ballroom for today’s assembly because there wasn’t another room in the palace large enough for their requirements.

  “I don’t understand why you should take that position, My Lord,” Sharleyan said with a slightly lopsided smile. “Surely all these loyal servants of the Charisian and Chisholmian crowns couldn’t possibly have assembled in anything less than the wholehearted spirit of cooperation! I certainly don’t expect anything less out of them!”

  She elevated her nose with a slight but clearly audible sniff, and Earl Gray Harbor turned to smile up at her.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, “I trust you won’t take this in the wrong spirit, but I don’t think you should consider changing vocations. You’d make a very poor salesman if you can’t learn to lie better than that.”

  “For shame, My Lord!” she scolded.

  “Oh, trust me, Your Majesty,” he assured her with a gracious bow, “no one will ever be able to discern the way I really think about these . . . people. Unlike you, I’d make an excellent salesman.”

  Sharleyan chuckled and shook her head at him, but when she turned back to the grill covering their peephole, she had to admit Gray Harbor had a point.

  And the reason he does is mainly thanks to Chisholm, she acknowledged sourly.

  She had no fears where the Charisian delegates to the new Imperial Parliament were concerned. Well, very few fears, at any rate. There were a handful of them she could have done without, but all of them had been selected by a joint committee of the Lords and Commons. In Charis, those two bodies had a tradition of actually working together cooperatively, and their members, by and large, considered themselves accountable to their colleagues, so it was unlikely any of them would ignore their official instructions. There’d been some tiffs, and one or two knock-down, drag-out fights, especially over which of the Kingdom’s nobles should be seated in the new Imperial House of Lords. And there’d been a few disagreements (and quite a bit of political dragon-trading) over who would replace the representatives named to the new Imperial House of Commons in the Charisian House of Commons. For the most part, however, all of those disputes had been settled relatively amicably. No one was completely happy with the final list of selections, but no one was completely unhappy with it, either, and that was almost certainly the best anyone could reasonably have expected.

  Chisholm, however, hadn’t done things quite the same way.

  The letter from Green Mountain and Sharleyan’s mother had apologized profusely for that, but she knew she couldn’t really blame them. For that matter, she couldn’t blame Cayleb, either, though a part of her was just a bit frustrated because she couldn’t. His decision to stay out of the selection process had undoubtedly been the correct one, even if it had left her with a sticky, potentially nasty mess.

  The Chisholmian Commons had been quite willing to cooperate with their own Chamber of Lords, but the Lords had flatly refused to cooperate with the Commons. They, and they alone, would decide which of their members would be sent to Tellesberg to represent them in the new Parliament.

  And that’s exactly why they’re going to be such a pain in my posterior, Sharleyan thought grimly. They aren’t here to represent Chisholm; they’re here to represent themselves.

  Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d crossed swords with the Chisholmian nobility, and this time she had some truly formidable allies.

  “—and so, My Lord Speaker, I most urgently request that this body give its immediate attention to this matter.”

  Sharleyan grimaced as she leaned back in the comfortable chair in the same waiting room she and Gray Harbor had occupied that morning. There were a great many other urgent tasks upon which she could have been spending her limited time, but she badly wanted to hear at least the first day’s deliberations with her own ears. She trusted Gray Harbor and Archbishop Maikel—both of whom were formal members of the Imperial Parliament the delegates were attempting to organize—and for the most part, she would be completely satisfied with their
reports as the organizational meetings proceeded. For now, though, she wanted to get a feel for the delegates’ mood and where those deliberations of theirs were likely to go.

  What I really want, she admitted to herself grumpily, is to be in there, kicking their posteriors—or possibly shooting one or two of them out of hand—to get this job done right!

  In the end, she and Cayleb would almost certainly get pretty much what they wanted. She knew that, and if anyone in that ballroom-turned-meeting-chamber thought otherwise, they would soon discover differently. Unfortunately, she couldn’t just dictate her own terms and decisions—not if she wanted this new Parliament’s legitimacy to be fully accepted by its own members, much less the rest of the Empire. These people, however irritating some of them might be, were the representatives of the Empire’s subjects. If they were truly going to represent Lords and Commoners, then they must be allowed to voice their own opinions, organize their own affairs, and reach their own decisions. If the Crown disagreed with those decisions, then it was clearly the Crown’s job to do something about that, but not by brazenly setting aside or openly trampling upon them. And not without listening to them and attempting to work with them first, since it was highly likely that they had something worth saying, even if it wasn’t what the Crown wanted to hear.

  No matter how exhausting, frustrating, and just plain irritating it could be.

  For that matter, Sharleyan reflected with a lopsided smile, sitting out here instead of in there may actually be doing me some good. I can work off—or at least work through—the worst of my temper tantrums before I have to start dealing with them.

  That wasn’t a minor consideration, and the man who had just finished speaking and resumed his seat was an excellent example of why it wasn’t. Pait Stywryt, the Duke of Black Horse, had ambitions (which were less well concealed than he apparently thought) to succeed where the previous Duke of Three Hills had failed. Nor was he alone in that. He and the man seated next to him—Zhasyn Seafarer, the Duke of Rock Coast—were close allies in the Chisholmian House of Lords. Not too surprisingly, Sharleyan supposed, given the fact that their dukedoms neighbored one another in southwestern Chisholm and their families had been intermarrying for generations. Or that both of them were about as stubborn, pigheaded, and shortsighted as it was possible for a breathing human being to be. For that matter, she suspected most corpses were less pigheaded than they were! And yet, by the oddest turn of fate, both of them, and the almost equally revolting (from Sharleyan’s perspective) Earl of Dragon Hill, had been chosen by their fellow peers to represent them in Tellesberg. Fortunately, Sir Ahdem Zhefry, the Earl of Cross Creek, had also slipped through the selection process somehow. Cross Creek was the Earl of White Crag’s brother-in-law, and one of the senior members of the Chamber of Lords who was actually a stalwart ally of the Crown.

  At the moment, Duke Black Horse was staking out the grounds for what Sharleyan had anticipated from the beginning would be one of the Chamber of Lords’ tactics. There were far fewer dukes and earls and far more barons in Charis than in Chisholm, and the marriage contracts which had created the Empire had specified that all preexisting patents of nobility would remain unchanged and, upon the formal merger of the two crowns, would become imperial titles. Now the Chisholmian peers were taking the position that seats in the new Imperial Parliament’s House of Lords should be assigned strictly on the basis of precedence of title, without regard as to the kingdom from which the holders of those titles might come.

  It was a brazen attempt to ensure that the Chisholmian aristocracy would dominate the new Parliament’s upper house, and while Sharleyan had anticipated a move in this direction, she hadn’t expected them to try pushing it this quickly. Admittedly, Black Horse had much in common with a dragon in a glassworks, but he’d learned at least a modicum of tactical timing in Chisholm. Surely he should have had the wit to realize it would only be prudent to at least test the waters here in Tellesberg before he plunged in headlong. And to remember that the heraldic symbol of Charis was a kraken.

  Apparently not, she thought tartly. Which doesn’t exactly break my heart. If there are any Charisian nobles with delusions of power-grabbing, this should at least ensure that they don’t think they can cut some sort of deal with my idiot aristocracy!

  In fact, she could already see quite a few fulminating Charisian peers. Obviously, the Chamber of Lords’ tactic hadn’t come as a complete surprise to them, either. Not that having anticipated it made the Charisians any less . . . irked when their anticipation was confirmed. And not that realizing Black Horse had jumped too quickly made what he was saying one bit less irritating to Sharleyan.

  He and his allies had wrapped their proposal up in the camouflage of her own and Cayleb’s insistence that there was no “senior” or “junior” partner in the merger of their two kingdoms. If Chisholm and Charis were truly going to merge into a single entity, Black Horse was arguing, then the national boundaries which had once separated them would no longer exist. All of their peers should be considered members of a single unified peerage, just as all of the commoners from both of the now legally deceased realms should be eligible for election to the new House of Commons. And if that was the case, then, obviously, the seats in the new House of Lords ought to be assigned strictly on the basis of precedence of title without regard to whether it was a Chisholmian or Charisian title. After all, were they not all to become the loyal servants of a single, united Crown?

  Just like that lying cretin, she thought waspishly. But does he actually think this noble patriot act is going to fool anyone? I’d like to “loyal” his “servant”! And I’ve got a dungeon cell somewhere which would fit him just fine. I’m sure I do, even if Cayleb did forget to tell me where it was. Maybe if I ask Rayjhis he can—

  “My Lord Speaker,” another voice said, and Sharleyan’s grimace eased just a bit as Samyl Zhaksyn, the Duke of Halleck, asked for recognition.

  Halleck of was one of the relatively small handful of Charisians whose titles would take precedence over virtually any Chisholmian. Indeed, he, the Duke of Korinth, and the youthful Duke of Tirian were three of the four most senior noblemen of the entire Old Kingdom of Charis, and all three of them had been chosen as delegates, despite the fact that young Rayjhis Ahrmahk, the Duke of Tirian, was barely twelve years old. Obviously, the choices had been made expressly because the Charisians had expected something like this. Although, Sharleyan smiled rather nastily, the fact that young Rayjhis’ regent was his grandfather, the Earl of Gray Harbor, had probably had a little something to do with it, as well.

  “His Grace, the Duke of Halleck, is recognized,” the Speaker announced, and Halleck nodded gravely in thanks.

  “While I feel confident that I speak for most of my fellow Charisians—I beg pardon, for my fellow Old Charisians, for as His Grace of Black Horse has just pointed out, we are all Charisians today—when I say that I wholeheartedly approve of our Chisholmian fellow subjects’ willingness to accept that we are all now a single Empire, and no longer separate kingdoms, I fear Duke Black Horse may be getting just a bit ahead of himself. With all due respect, and while fully agreeing that the Empire has already come into existence, I invite His Grace’s attention to the marriage agreement between His Majesty and Her Majesty. In particular, I note in section four that it is specifically stated that the crowns of Chisholm and Charis will not be formally united until both of them are inherited by Their Majesties’ heir. As every patent of nobility in Old Charis is currently held in fealty to the King of Charis, and every patent of nobility in Chisholm is currently held in fealty to the Queen of Chisholm, we cannot, however much we might wish to, consider them to be part of a seamless whole at this time.”

  Black Horse scowled. Rock Coast didn’t seem much happier, although Edwyrd Ahlbair, the Earl of Dragon Hill, was actually nodding gravely, his lips pursed in obvious thought. Then again, Dragon Hill had always been a smoother operator than either of the two dukes.

  “Indeed,” Halle
ck continued, “unless I misread section three of the marriage contract rather badly, the function of this assembly is to organize our new Imperial Parliament with what might most accurately be described as a House of Lords and a House of Commons, each of which has two chambers: one whose membership is drawn from Old Charis, and one whose membership is drawn from Chisholm. All of the members of that new Imperial Parliament will, of course, be equal colleagues of one another, regardless of the kingdom from which they may come, but my own strong feeling at this time is that the membership of those two chambers in each House ought to be determined by the parliament of the kingdom which they will be representing. I believe it would be presumptuous of us at this time to make any attempt to dictate to either of those sovereign bodies. Surely it would constitute an unjustified infringement upon their prerogatives and ancient legal rights and responsibilities.”

  Halleck seated himself, and there was a buzz of side conversations. The majority of them were approving, judging from their tone, and Sharleyan chuckled as she watched Black Horse’s expression.

  Did he really think Charisians were too stupid to have anticipated something quite that obvious? she wondered scornfully. Of course, he—and Rock Coast and Dragon Hill—are all three stupid enough to go on hoping that they’re going to be able to wiggle out from under the foot Mahrak, Mother, and I have firmly on the backs of their necks in Chisholm. So maybe they were dumb enough to think they could get away with something like this so quickly.

  She shook her head, and then her eyes narrowed as she saw Black Horse’s head twitch in the direction of yet another Chisholmian nobleman. Sir Paitryk Mahknee, the Duke of Lakeland, was gazing attentively at the Speaker, apparently oblivious to Black Horse, but Sharleyan felt an abrupt prickle of suspicion. At thirty-six, Lakeland was no callow youth, yet he was very new to his title. His father had been killed in a fall from a horse when Lakeland was only eleven, which had made him his grandfather’s heir. But that grandfather, who had died less than a year ago, had been well over eighty, and still vigorous, still fully in charge of his duchy and all its responsibilities, up to the very day of his death. The previous duke had also been closely allied with Black Horse and Rock Coast, longing for the “good old days” of Irwain III, which he had remembered only too well. Despite his mental vigor, however, he’d been understandably frail, no longer up to the demands of making long journeys to the capital, and Sir Paitryk had always been a dutiful grandson, carrying out his grandfather’s instructions to the letter whenever he had deputized for the old man in Parliament Hall. The assumption had been that he agreed with those instructions, but Sharleyan was suddenly less certain of that.