by David Weber
Than the rifle fire started, right on its heels. The sheer volume, the crackling thunder of so many rifles firing independently as the men behind them picked their targets, was terrible enough. But there was worse. A heartbeat later, he realized there were no clouds of smoke. Which meant—
“Shan-wei take them to hell!” Lwanzhi snarled. Renshwei looked at him, eyes huge, obviously lagging behind Lwanzhi’s thought processes, and the captain of horse managed—somehow—not to punch the man. It would have accomplished nothing, anyway … except to vent a little of his fury.
“Those are fucking new-model Charisian rifles up there!” he snapped instead.
“Charisian?!” Renshwei’s eyes went even larger, and this time Lwanzhi did grab him by the tunic and shake him with one hand.
“Of course, Charisian, you idiot! Who else has ‘smokeless powder’?!”
“B-B-But how?” Renshwei shook his head. “There’s no way into the Valley!”
“No,” Lwanzhi grated in agreement. “No, there’s not, but—”
He broke off, his jaw clenching, then released Renshwei’s tunic.
“There’s no fucking way in on the ground,” he said.
The captain of foot looked at him for a moment longer, then shook himself as understanding finally caught up.
“Those Shan-wei–damned airships!”
“Exactly.”
Lwanzhi looked up the slope where the survivors of his leading companies had shown the good sense to fall back. In fact, at least half the survivors were running flat out, and he couldn’t blame them. Of course, stopping and rallying them at the foot of the slope was likely to be a nontrivial challenge. On the other hand, screaming at them would at least give him something to do, because the one thing he damned well wasn’t doing was to move a single yard farther along this road. If Baron Qwaidu wanted to send an advance up a single roadbed into the teeth of modern Charisian rifles and Langhorne-only-knew how many of those fucking land-bombs, then he could lead it, and this time around, Zhaigung Lwanzhi would tell him so in so many words. It wasn’t as if—
* * *
As it happened, Captain of Horse Lwanzhi was wrong about what he’d be discussing with Baron Qwaidu, because rifles and landmines weren’t the only things which had been delivered to the Valley, nor had Aivahn Hahgyz traveled only by night. Lieutenant Krugair had never—quite—actually landed in the Valley. Without a proper ground crew, it would have been insanely risky to land a hydrogen-filled airship. It was, however, slightly less risky to come in close enough to the ground in daylight, with good visibility, for trained and athletic passengers—like members of the Imperial Charisian Army—to slide down ropes.
Most of those passengers had been experienced noncom instructors, including the training cadre from the Ruhsyl Thairis Center for Artillery at Maikelberg in Chisholm which had been sent in to teach Tangwyn Syngpu’s militia the finer points of the ICA’s M95 three-inch mortar.
Unfortunately for Captain of Horse Lwanzhi, they’d been very apt students.
OCTOBER YEAR OF GOD 913
.I.
City of Yu-Kwau, Kyznetzov Province, South Harchong.
“I take it His Majesty was … unhappy, Your Grace?” Khaizhang Taiyang murmured as he poured tea into Grand Duke North Wind Blowing’s cup.
The first councilor looked up at him with the eyes of a cat passing fish bones.
“I believe you might safely say that,” he replied.
Taiyang dipped his head in acknowledgment and stepped back with the teapot while North Wind Blowing lifted the cup in both hands, inhaling the fragrance of the blend. At least losing the North hadn’t interfered with his few creature comforts, he thought moodily. All the best tea blends had come from the South, anyway. In fact, the more he’d thought about it, the more he’d realized he was perfectly willing to leave the North to the maniacs slaughtering each other there. Everyone who’d ever mattered to him was either already safely in the South or dead, and he knew in his bones that Zhyou-Zhwo was never going to reassert the imperial authority north of the Gulf of Dohlar.
That had been evident even before the latest debacle.
Unfortunately, “His Supreme and Most Puissant Majesty” refused to accept that. After all, he could scarcely be “puissant,” far less “supreme,” with people who ought to be his subjects defying him.
There were times when Ahnhwang Hwei was sorely tempted to lay down the burden of his office. He would turn eighty-six in two months’ time, and that was well past the age at which he should have retired to his estates to enjoy his golden years and his grandchildren. But those estates had been burned to the ground. All he had was what he’d been able to rebuild in the last nine years, and that wasn’t nearly enough to leave to his family. Besides, he had at least some duty to the Empire, which included trying to keep some sort of a bridle on Zhyou-Zhwo’s increasingly autocratic rule.
“I suppose you’d best summon the Earl, Khaizhang,” North Wind Blowing sighed finally. “And remind him we’re currently on the outs again.”
“Of course, Your Grace,” Taiyang bowed a bit more deeply, and his lips twitched ever so slightly. North Wind Blowing saw it, and despite his mood, he smiled back.
Briefly.
“Go—go!”
He took one hand from his teacup, waving it in a shooing motion, and Taiyang bobbed one more bow and vanished. The door closed behind him, and North Wind Blowing climbed out of his chair—cautiously; neither his bones nor his joints were what they had been—and crossed to the window with his tea. He stood sipping it, looking out over the sundrenched roofs of Yu-kwau, thinking about the future.
His own would be brief. Five more years, perhaps. Ten at the outside. That came to all men, in the fullness of time, although he was a bit more concerned than he’d once been about how the Archangels were likely to greet him on the other side. Not that there was much he could do about that at this point.
He grunted at that familiar thought and watched white sails and occasional columns of coal smoke drifting across the Bay of Alexov. Back home, in the North, the snow was probably already a couple of feet deep, he thought, looking at the white beaches, feeling the warmth. Why in God’s name had Langhorne and the other Archangels settled his ancestors in such an … inhospitable place in the first place? There had to have been a reason. When he compared North Harchong’s wheat fields, beet fields, and hog farms to the vista beyond his window, he could only conclude that his ancestors must have truly pissed off the Archangels somehow!
He snorted at the mild sacrilege, but it was true that the South was a much better place to live. And despite the fact that the southern lobe of the Empire contained barely a quarter of its total territory, it had boasted almost half the Empire’s population even before the Rebellion. Given how many had died in the North, and how many had refugeed out to the South, the imbalance in population had to be even smaller than it had been. Indeed, he suspected the South’s total population actually outnumbered the North’s at last.
Of all the mainland realms, only Siddarmark and Desnair had more population than South Harchong, alone, and Desnair’s edge was less than ten million, barely eleven percent of South Harchong’s total.
He needs to be content with what he’s got, he thought now, sipping tea. We’re never going to convince him of that, though.
No, they weren’t, and perhaps Zhyou-Zhwo was right, in some greater sense. Perhaps they did owe it to God to reclaim the ancestral lands of the Harchongese people and restore them to the relationship they were supposed to have with Him and His Archangels. But if that was what God wanted, then He’d best give the Emperor better tools—and better advisors—than he had now.
North Wind Blowing wouldn’t be around to do that advising very much longer, which was why he’d been grooming his distant kinsman Hangwau Ge-yang, Earl of Cinnabar Hill, for the thankless task of replacing him. No doubt Cinnabar Hill would contrive to improve the family fortunes along the way—that was what one did with high office,
after all—but he had more than mercenary motives for assuming North Wind Blowing’s mantle.
Cinnabar Hill was a mere earldom, and in Queiroz, to boot, which had excluded its earls from any hope of wielding serious power in Shang-mi. Times had changed, however, and North Wind Blowing had changed with them, although he’d concealed that as much as possible. The grand duke had contrived to have Zhyou-Zhwo choose Cinnabar Hill as one of his trusted confidants and assign him as his first councilor’s senior deputy despite—or, rather, because of—the “bad blood” between them. No one knew precisely what that “bad blood” stemmed from, but there were enough intrafamily feuds in Harchong to keep a thousand genealogists busy counting the bodies.
In this case, the bad blood was North Wind Blowing’s invention, however. It was obvious Zhyou-Zhwo had retained the grand duke as first councilor mainly because he saw North Wind Blowing as an old, tired man, incapable of seriously restricting the imperial prerogative. Which was true, in many ways. Of course, there were more subtle ways of shaping policy than openly opposing a headstrong and arrogant emperor. And so Cinnabar Hill had been careful to disagree with North Wind Blowing upon occasion, both in public and in private conversation with the emperor, establishing that he was his own man. Or, rather, that he was independent of North Wind Blowing … and Zhyou-Zhwo’s man.
Not even Cinnabar Hill’s wife knew his true relationship with the grand duke, or how closely he and North Wind Blowing coordinated their policies. The only person who did know was Khaizhang Taiyang, who had “secretly” transferred his allegiance to Cinnabar Hill now that North Wind Blowing’s penurious state suggested that Taiyang’s own retirement might be a bit threadbare.
Everyone in Yu-kwau seemed aware of that treason on his part. Except North Wind Blowing, that was. Clearly additional evidence of how the old man’s grip was slipping.
It’s the best I can do, the grand duke thought now, watching those sails, wishing he was sitting on that beach, soaking up that sun. I don’t know if even Hangwau’s going to be able to … restrain Zhyou-Zhwo, but he’s my last gift to the Empire. And to the House of Hantai, come to that. If someone doesn’t keep him from—
The door opened and a tallish, dark-haired man stepped through it. Hangwau Ge-yang was always immaculately groomed, although he eschewed the aristocratic styles of the North in favor of the more comfortable and flowing Southern style. He was almost thirty years younger than the grand duke and he favored his mother’s side of the family; that was where his height came from. He was also a partner in at least half a dozen manufactories, and North Wind Blowing knew he represented the future of the family in more than one way.
“You sent for me?”
“I did.”
North Wind Blowing pointed at a chair, and Cinnabar Hill settled into it while the grand duke turned, still standing by the window, to face him.
“We have fresh messages from Spring Flower,” North Wind Blowing told him with a grimace. “They say much the same thing as the earlier ones, only louder and more emphatically.”
“Wonderful,” Cinnabar Hill sighed.
“In fairness, it seems obvious Cayleb and Sharleyan did provide modern weapons to the rebels.” The first councilor shrugged. “They can’t have come from anywhere else, assuming they truly did use the ‘smokeless powder’ Qwaidu reports. And given his casualties, I’m inclined to think his reports are basically accurate.”
“That would imply these ‘airships’ of the Charisians are less of a novelty and more of a useful instrument than we’d assumed,” Cinnabar Hill observed.
“Among other things, yes.” North Wind Blowing shrugged again. “All of our spies’ reports indicate that even the largest of them can carry no more than fifteen or twenty tons, thirty at most—less than a single dragon can pull along the high road. And they’re obviously hideously expensive—so expensive only a Charisian could afford them!—and fragile. So far, at least two of them have burned on the ground, although they haven’t yet lost any in the air and so far as we know no one was killed in either of the fires. So I still don’t see them having a fundamental impact on the movement of vast quantities of cargo. But sometimes even the largest avalanche can be set in motion by a single stone, and that would appear to be what happened here.”
“I think you’re right.” Cinnabar Hill nodded. “And that leads me to wonder how far behind the airships the United Provinces’ columns are following.”
“Again, our spies indicate Star Rising and the others have no desire to find themselves caught at the end of an extended supply line in the Chiang-wus in the winter, so I think it’s … unlikely we’ll see any United Provinces troops in the Valley until late spring or early summer. But you’re right, it is coming, and His Majesty will be … mildly incensed when it happens.”
“Mildly!”
“Well, compared to how he’s responded to a half-dozen other incidents I could mention.” North Wind Blowing smiled briefly. “But he is decidedly unhappy at the moment. As far as he’s concerned, Charis has just openly declared war upon the Empire.”
“I don’t think he’s wrong,” Cinnabar Hill said.
“Neither do I, but there are wars, and then there are wars, and it would serve the Empire far better to keep this one a war of manufactories and railroads. We’re unlikely, to say the least, to best Charis in a war like that, but given what just happened to Spring Flower, the other sort of war—you know, the sort in which people actually shoot at one another?—would work out rather worse. And probably a hell of a lot more quickly.”
“Uncle,” Cinnabar Hill said, giving him the familial title of respect despite the distance of their relationship, “there’s no way the Emperor will settle for status as the ruler of a secondary power. This is the Harchong Empire, the oldest, most powerful, most advanced, and most artistically talented realm on the face of Safehold!” The earl rolled his eyes. “He can never resign that position in favor of an empire of shopkeepers!”
“And, to be honest, I wish he didn’t have to,” North Wind Blowing said flatly, looking back out the window. “This new world, the one coming to you and my children and my grandchildren—it’s not one I like. But I can’t stop it from coming, either, so perhaps it’s best you’re at least … in alliance with some of those shopkeepers, right here in Queiroz. But someone still has to steer, unless you really like ramming the ship of state into the rocks, so try to at least moderate your view of our glorious historical and artistic legacy where anyone else might hear you.”
“Understood.” Cinnabar Hill bowed without rising.
“All right.” The grand duke crossed back to his desk, set his teacup on the saucer, and seated himself. “As you can imagine, Spring Flower’s messages left him absolutely livid. It only proves once again, even more emphatically, that Charis is the root of all evil in the world. Not just the reason the order God and the Archangels intended was overturned in the first place, but the malign influence determined to stamp out any chance of restoring the rightful order. And, as I say, in his view we’re now actively at war with Charis. Indeed, he’d prefer to commence active operations immediately.”
“Please tell me you’re jesting.”
“No.” North Wind Blowing shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “Fortunately, for once, Snow Peak and I are on the same page. For that matter, Earl Sunset Peak’s at least as aghast at the notion as you and I. In fact,” the first councilor allowed himself a small smile, “I believe the good Earl did himself a certain amount of damage this morning.”
“Oh?” Cinnabar Hill perked up.
“Oh, yes. I fear he allowed his dismay at the thought of open hostilities with Charis to … color his attitude.”
“Well, that was certainly stupid of him.”
“Now, now!” North Wind Blowing shook an admonishing finger. “The news came at him as a surprise.” He smiled again, more broadly. “I fear the memo I sent him before the Privy Council meeting went astray somehow.” He shrugged. “These minor clerical erro
rs do happen.”
“I’m taking notes, Uncle.”
“Good.” North Wind Blowing smiled again, but then his expression sobered. “Fortunately, Snow Peak and I were a bit more adroit. We pointed out to His Majesty the way in which the existence of the Imperial Charisian Navy constrains our ability to take any war to them. He argued in return that Emperor Mahrys would undoubtedly stand with us against the Charisian contagion, but we pointed out that Emperor Mahrys’ navy is almost as nonexistent as our own.”
“And—?” Cinnabar Hill asked as the grand duke paused.
“And so, we decided to divert him into another direction. Mind you, I’m not certain we’ve succeeded in the long-term, but for now it looks promising. You see—”
.II.
City of Tellesberg, Kingdom of Old Charis, Empire of Charis.
“So, what do you think of North Wind Blowing’s brainstorm, Dunkyn?” Duke Rock Point asked as he settled back into his comfortable wingback chair with his whiskey glass.
“I think he’s cleverer than I thought he was,” the Earl of Sarmouth said, dropping into the facing chair across the crackling fire’s hearth with a matching glass. “Whether or not the strategy will work’s another matter. I don’t really have an opinion about that, but he has to’ve been thinking about this one for a while, and as political legerdemain goes, it’s pretty impressive.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Rock Point said dryly. “Although, I’ll grant you that if they can keep Zhyou-Zhwo tied up in it, it will at least keep him from doing anything stupid. Anything else stupid, I mean. I just doubt they’ll be able to do it.”
“I don’t know about that,” Sarmouth said thoughtfully. “There is a certain underlying logic to it.”
“Oh?” Rock Point raised one white eyebrow. “And how well did that work out for Alfred von Tirpitz and Wilhelm II?”
