Through Fiery Trials

by David Weber

  “The ground’s still on our side. Losing Zhyndow exposes us a little more than we were, but we can handle that. What we can’t handle are the numbers, especially if he’s getting more of these new rifles. It’s not just the magazines, either.”

  Heads nodded. The men—and woman—in this room understood exactly what he meant.

  Baisung Tsungshai had, indeed, gotten the rifle manufactory back up and running, although the lack of iron and the fact that he had only charcoal, not coke, made it impossible to produce steel—even if any of them had known how to do that in the first place—and the absence of steel prevented any sort of large-scale weapons production. What he had been able to accomplish was to produce the spare parts to keep all of the rifles they did have in good repair. He’d been able to set up his powder mill, as well, and that was one of the bright spots, because its output met their needs comfortably and had allowed them to build up a substantial reserve. And if the Valley was practically devoid of iron ore, there were significant deposits of lead in the mountains above Haudyn, and they had plenty of bullet molds.

  No, spare parts, gunpowder, and bullets weren’t a problem. Percussion caps, unfortunately, were.

  No one in the Chynduk Valley knew how to make them, and so, Tsungshai and the artisans he’d trained had been forced to convert the caplock St. Kylmahns into flintlocks. There were plentiful supplies of flint in the Valley, and flintlocks at least had the virtue of being simple to build and maintain.

  They also had at least twice as many misfires as a regular St. Kylmahn, and they were virtually useless in the rain.

  That hadn’t mattered while Grand Duke Spring Flower was similarly cut off from new-model weapons. But that clearly wasn’t the case any longer.

  “I’d like to tell you it was only the new weapons we didn’t know they had, but the truth is, they surprised us, too,” Syngpu continued, his voice heavy but unflinching. “We never—I never—expected Qwaidu to throw that big a column straight up the Valley. It cost him. Well, it cost his men, anyway, because Zhouhan and our boys hammered ’em before they broke through. The new rifles were a part of it, because I know Zhouhan didn’t expect them any more than I would’ve. But it was the sheer numbers that did it. We’re just lucky we managed to stop them at the Kwyfan Farm.”

  They nodded in agreement yet again, but Miyang Gyngdau seemed to hover on the brink of saying something in reply. He didn’t, and Syngpu breathed a silent sigh of gratitude. He suspected what the squire had wanted to say, but Tangwyn Syngpu wasn’t the reason the invaders had been stopped at the crossroads twenty-odd miles northwest of Zhyndow. Oh, he’d gotten there in time to take command—and to get his idiot self shot—but it was the lads. It was the men he’d trained, the ones who’d come to the Valley with him and the Valleyers who’d been prepared to die where they stood. The man who’d stood at his back like a stone wall. A stone wall that screamed and bled and died but would not retreat. They were what had stopped the bastards.

  “We’re not getting Zhyndow back, though,” he continued grimly, hoping he didn’t show how grateful he was for Gyngdau’s silence. “I’d like to, but we’re not. And truth is the Valley’s narrower at Kwyfan’s. We can put a better cork into it there. And even if we wanted Zhyndow back, Qwaidu at least is smart enough to not let us have it. It’s too good a staging point, and it cuts us off from the mountain lizard paths going east. With him holding Zhyndow and Syang—I guess he’s officially ‘Baron Cliffwall’ these days—blocking the northern end at Ky-su, we’re screwed.”

  He looked around the study again, saw the tightness of the expressions, the shadows in the eyes, and shook his head slowly.

  “Wish I didn’t have to say that. Wish it wasn’t true. But the one thing I’ve always promised you was to be honest. They aren’t coming through next five-day, or the one after that. They got hurt too bad themselves to try again for at least a month or so. But they’ll be back. When they do decide to come through, we’ll hurt them even worse’n we did this time. But they’ve got a lot more men than we do, and now it looks like they’ve got the new-model weapons to give ’em, we can’t stop them forever. We can bleed ’em, and we could probably hold out—some of us—for months, even longer, up in the high coves. But that might be the worst thing we could do.”

  “Why?” Father Yngshwan asked quietly.

  “Because the only bargaining point we have is to turn me and my boys over to Qwaidu and Spring Flower,” Syngpu said bluntly. “We do that, he might be willing to settle for making the examples out of us. But if we try to hold out, fight some kind of guerrilla war, he’ll burn this Valley from one end to the other, if that’s what it takes. We’ve pissed him off too much, and we’ve been too much of an example—too much proof he’s not some Archangel who can do whatever he wants with the wave of a hand. Bastard can’t have that.”

  “We’re not handing you—!” Yanshwyn began hotly, but Gyngdau stopped her with a raised hand.

  “We’re not handing anyone over to anyone anytime soon, Yanshwyn,” he told her quietly, firmly. “And, if it comes to handing people over, Tangwyn, I don’t think you’re in any position to claim all the honors.” He smiled thinly. “I’m pretty sure Spring Flower has a thought or two in mind for me, too. And Zaipu and Yngshwan, come to that. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong to be thinking about that possibility. But not yet. Not yet.”

  “I’m not educated,” Syngpu said, reaching out to take Yanshwyn’s hand. “Yanshwyn—she’s been working on that, but seems to me she’s still got a ways to go. But I can hear thunder and see lightning. My boys and I, we’re ready to fight if there was even a chance we could hold in the end. Problem is, I don’t think there is.”

  “Perhaps we could send for help?” Father Yngshwan said.

  The others looked at him, and he raised both hands almost as if in a gesture of blessing. His eyes were much calmer than anyone else’s, too. It would have been too much to call them serene, but there was … an acceptance in them Syngpu knew he couldn’t have matched.

  “Send where?” Gyngdau asked almost gently. “To whom? And how?”

  “If what we’d heard about the ‘United Provinces’ before Cliffwall closed the passes is accurate, they have to be expanding our way,” the priest said in a reasonable tone. “It would make a lot of sense for them to secure enough of Tiegelkamp to control everything west of the Chiang-wus, and controlling Cliffwall Pass and the Valley would be a very good way for them to do that.”

  “Even if they’re expanding our way, they aren’t here yet, Yngshwan,” Ou-zhang pointed out. “I’m sure they have their own priorities closer to home, too. And even if they didn’t, how are we supposed to invite them to come rescue us?”

  “There are those lizard paths Tangwyn mentioned,” Father Yngshwan pointed out. “They lead west, as well as east. And it’s still only June.”

  “You’re serious,” Gyngdau said.

  “Of course I am,” the priest said calmly, and smiled. “First, because I’m a priest! I’m the sort of fellow who looks for miracles. Second, because the people of this Valley are too good and care about each other too much for me to believe God and the Archangels aren’t going to remember that bit about helping those who help themselves. And, third, because I will be damned if I sit here and listen to people I love talk about handing themselves over to that butcher Spring Flower just to buy a little more time, a little mitigation, for the rest of us.” He shook his head. “Believe me, if you don’t want to hear anathemas thundered from my church, you’re not going to even think about that possibility until we’ve tried everything else.”

  He looked around the faces, and his eyes were as hard and as stubborn as anyone else in that study had ever seen as he let the silence linger for a good ten seconds.

  “I trust all of that was clearly understood. Or do I need to go back and explain the hard words?”

  “Yngshwan, it’s not that we want—” Gyngdau began, then broke off as someone rapped lightly on the study door.


  He and the others looked at each other. It was very late, only a few hours until dawn, and everyone knew how little they needed any interruptions while they coped with the oncoming tide of disaster.

  Whoever it was rapped again, and the squire sat back, shook his head, and waved at the mayor.

  “What?” Ou-zhang called, raising his voice.

  Then the door opened, and every person in that study froze as a man stepped through it. They’d never seen him in their lives, yet they recognized him instantly. It wasn’t very difficult, because he was very tall, with black hair lightly dusted with silver, and his eyes were impossibly dark in the lamplight. He wore a blackened breastplate badged with the black, gold, blue, and white of the House of Ahrmahk, and he swept a graceful bow into the stunned, motionless silence. Then he straightened, stroking one of his fiercely waxed mustachios.

  “I apologize for interrupting without any warning, but I believe we may need to talk,” Merlin Athrawes said.

  .II.

  A Recon Skimmer, Over the Sea of Harchong.

  “You think Star Rising and the others are really ready to move that much farther east?” Cayleb Ahrmahk asked over the com as Merlin leaned back in his flight couch. The imperial family was back in Chisholm, accompanied by Lywys Whytmyn, and Merlin shrugged as the recon skimmer sped west to rejoin them.

  “I think they’ll be more than a little surprised by the timing, but it’s not like this isn’t something they’ve been talking about—with us, as much as with each other—for a while. We’ve been talking about it amongst ourselves even longer than they have, if you’ll recall, but their parliament’s been putting the pieces together for almost three years now!”

  “Yes, but while they were talking about it and putting pieces together, Spring Flower wasn’t handing out modern weapons to his thugs, either,” Cayleb pointed out. “And they just got finished ‘digesting’ Shang-mi and the Show-wan Hills. That gives them rail communications that far east, which is nothing to sneer at. But it also means they’re still a good three hundred miles west of Jai-hu at the other end of a high road that hasn’t been properly maintained in almost fifteen years, Merlin. And that’s at the western end of the Cliffwall Pass. Which is still a good four hundred twenty miles—air-miles—from Ky-su. That’s close to a thousand miles beyond Jai-hu, given the way the road twists and turns, and it’s going to be a long time—probably years—before they could get a rail line that far forward! Will they really want to go that far east to get involved in somebody else’s fight now that it’s not just an academic proposition? Especially when the somebody else in question’s opponents have modern rifles now?”

  “Only for some values of ‘modern,’ Cayleb,” Nahrmahn pointed out. Cayleb snorted and glanced across the bed chamber to where Sharleyan sat slowly, steadily, brushing her dark black hair. She saw him in the mirror and shook her head with a reflected smile.

  “They’re a hell of a lot more ‘modern’ than anything the folks in the Chynduk Valley have at the moment,” he told Nahrmahn.

  “And they’re either locally produced versions of the St. Kylmahn from South Harchong or that half-arsed Desnarian version of the Mahndrayn Showail ripped off for Mahrys,” Sir Koryn Gahrvai put in.

  He and Nimue had just finished tucking the five-year-old twins into bed and young Alyk Gahrvai, who would be two years old next month, sat in his mother’s lap as Nimue leaned back in the enormous recliner Delthak Enterprises had designed and built to her specifications. Gahrvai stood looking out the window at the gaslit palace grounds, and his eyes were sober.

  “And your point is?” Cayleb asked slowly.

  “I have several of them really,” Gahrvai said. “First, the reason we sent Merlin to talk to them in the first place was that Syngpu’s right. If we don’t intervene—if the United Provinces don’t intervene—the Valley’s going down. We’re in agreement that that would be a Bad Thing, yes?”

  He looked around at the circle of faces projected into his vision, eyebrows arched.

  “Of course it would,” Maikel Staynair said from Tellesberg, where it was bright daylight. “We’ve been watching that island of stability for years now. Just look at all the good they’ve done. We can’t let that be torn down and thrown away, even irrespective of the human cost!”

  Several other people nodded, and Gahrvai snorted.

  “All right, that brings me to my second point. If we’re going to get involved, then it only makes sense to get the United Provinces involved for a lot of reasons, but two of them seem especially important to me. First, Merlin’s plan to keep the Valley alive will work even better than I expected it to, but we simply can’t give them enough help that way to prop them up forever. So we need the UP to be the foundation for the sustainability of whatever we do. And my second reason’s just as sound, I think. We’ve been working with Star Rising and the others for years now, and one of the reasons we have is that we want the United Provinces as big as we can get them, whether they know it or not.”

  More nods, and Merlin smiled up at the stars through his skimmer’s canopy. He was pretty sure Star Rising, at least—and almost certainly Bishop Yaupang, as well—recognized precisely what their Charisian friends wanted to happen to their borders. They might not realize just how far Charis wanted them extended, and the thought of reaching all the way across Central Harchong to make contact with Baron Wind Song’s East Harchong probably would have frightened them to death. But Tangwyn Syngpu wasn’t the only person who recognized the defensive bulwark the Chiang-wu Mountains would provide to the United Provinces.

  “Third point,” Gahrvai continued, almost as if he’d been reading Merlin’s mind, “this is the smartest thing the United Provinces could possibly do for their own security, especially now that Zhyou-Zhwo’s finally getting better weapons into Central Harchong. He’s out of his mind if he thinks that this will magically give him back control of Harchong—or even just Central Harchong—but that won’t keep people like Spring Flower from being a hell of a lot more dangerous after he gets done ‘enabling’ the bastards. Keeping them on the far side of the Chiang-wus was already high on the United Provinces’ to-do list, and it’s damned well just gotten higher. Or will as soon as our siejin spies tell them about it, anyway!”

  Merlin stopped smiling and nodded. Zhyou-Zhwo had finally established a conduit to Spring Flower and a dozen other “great nobles”—most newly created—fighting to “restore the imperial authority” in North Harchong. In fact, the last thing they wanted was the imperial authority restored, especially after so long. None of them had any desire to find his own ambitious growth constrained until he’d gobbled up as many of his competitors as he could and established the broadest possible borders for the new, independent kingdoms they fully intended to declare as soon as the pretence of loyalty to the crown was no longer useful to them.

  Zhyou-Zhwo appeared blissfully unaware of that, however. Merlin doubted he actually was, although he might be wrong about that. Earl Snow Peak certainly understood it, but he much preferred to allow the endless dogfight and bloodletting to continue as long as possible before getting involved in it—assuming he got involved at all—with the new-model imperial army he was still building.

  “Fourth point, this is our fault,” Gahrvai’s eyes had hardened. “We’re the ones who let that bastard Fangzhin take over at Laichyng, and that means we’re the ones who opened the door for Zhyou-Zhwo.”

  Merlin’s non-smile went even flatter, because that was an excellent point. Yinzhung Fangzhin was another of the seemingly unending supply of warlords and brigands out to seize any territory he could get. He’d been more successful than most, however, although not yet on the scale of someone like Spring Flower. Partly that was timing, partly that was cunning, and partly that was luck. He’d been on the eastern fringe of the warlords fighting over the territory south of Spring Flower at the time of the ill-advised attack on the Zhyahngdu relief area. He’d seized the opportunity when his three unfortunate neighbors paid
the price for challenging the Army of God and the Imperial Charisian Navy on the same afternoon and consolidated his own territory around the relatively small seaport of Laichyng, which lay just under three hundred miles from Saram Bay. It wasn’t much of a seaport, although it was respectable in size, but he’d added the large farming town of Mangchu and reached an “understanding” with the smaller port of Dauku on the western flank of Cape Samuel.

  Laichyng’s total territory stretched three hundred and eighty miles, east to west, and about a hundred and seventy-five miles north to south, at its deepest. Despite its impressive dimensions, its population wasn’t enormous, but it gave Zhyou-Zhwo and Yu-kwau an actual foothold in North Harchong, and both Cayleb and Sharleyan and Tymythy Rhobair had hesitated to crush Laichyng before he’d firmly established himself. It wouldn’t have been much of a challenge to either the Army of God or the Empire of Charis, but they’d chosen to avoid providing Zhyou-Zhwo with a clear and unambiguous reason for war, and Baron Wind Song had been too busy expanding to the northeast and east to take his own forces that far south. For that matter, he didn’t want to goad Zhyu-Zhwo into finally launching the invasion he’d promised for the last fifteen years, either. He was no more afraid of Snow Peak’s army than the inner circle or Tymythy Rhobair, but, like them, he hesitated to inflict still more bloodshed, if it was avoidable.

  Unfortunately, their restraint had allowed Laichyng to secure his control, and Grand Duke North Wind Blowing, Earl Snow Peak, and Zhwyfeng Nengkwan had found a way to get some of their more modern weapons into the hands of “their” nobles at last. Those newer weapons were finally beginning to accumulate in useful numbers and the rate of increase continued to grow. They—and Desnair—remained woefully short of Charis’ production rates, but in certain areas—like rifles and ammunition—they’d almost equaled Delthak’s wartime production rate from the Jihad. And since they were acquiring the weapons, they’d decided to charter third-party merchant ships, usually flagged in one of the Border States, to transport some of them to Laichyng. The newly fledged grand duke must’ve been sorely tempted to keep all of them for himself, but unlike many of the other “nobles” professing their loyalty to Yu-kwau and their distant emperor, he actually meant it. Not because he loved Zhyou-Zhwo, but because his coastal position meant the emperor was far better placed to give him genuine assistance … or cause him genuine grief if he got out of line. And so he’d kept enough of them to arm all of his own troops, with a ten percent reserve or so, and then begun shipping the rest overland to people like Spring Flower.