Through Fiery Trials

by David Weber

  He stared at her, unable for once to think of a rejoinder, and she punched his biceps lightly.

  “So stop worrying. In fact, if it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll admit the real reason I scheduled this trip to get me here this five-day was so I’d be here when the baby was born.” Syngpu’s eyes widened, and she shook her head. “I don’t just chop people up into little tiny pieces, Tangwyn. As it happens, I’m a pretty damned good midwife myself. Which is why I know Sister Baishan’s doing everything right and that Yanshwyn’s doing just fine. You’re right; it is late for a first pregnancy, and we all expected her delivery to be hard, but if she needs me, I’ll be in that birthing chamber in a skinny Siddarmark minute. So you keep your butt parked in that chair and think tranquil thoughts until I tell you you can get out of it. Clear?”

  “Clear … Seijin,” he said after a moment, and she nodded in satisfaction as he sat back in the chair.

  * * *

  Merch O Obaith watched the big, burly ex-peasant through the eyes of someone who’d never expected to become a mother herself. Someone who understood exactly what this meant to Yanshwyn Syngpu, as well as to him. Someone who Syngpu would never know had covertly injected the Federation nanotech to deal with Yanshwyn’s infertility issues.

  Probably wasn’t really my place to do that, she thought now. It definitely wasn’t my place to do it without at least consulting Yanshwyn, because Tangwyn’s right. It is late for the first pregnancy.

  At forty-six—and she wouldn’t actually be forty-six for another three months—Yanshwyn wasn’t quite forty-two Standard Years old, which was scarcely late at all by the standards of the Terran Federation’s medical technology. It was definitely into the high-risk range here on Safehold, however. That was the reason Nimue Gahrvai had planted the medical remote in Yanshwyn’s bedchamber so that “Merch O Obaith” could monitor the pregnancy she’d sponsored.

  But late or not, this needed to happen. Because every word I told him about being a father was true. And because shared love—shared children—really can heal the heart. Especially if the parents are going to love them for who they are and not as replacements for the ones they lost. And, God bless him, Tangwyn Syngpu couldn’t not love a kid for who she is to save his immortal soul. Somehow, I don’t see Yanshwyn coming up short in that department, either.

  The seijin tipped back in her own chair, watching the take from the remote in the birthing chamber, and smiled at the man she’d come to respect so deeply.

  * * *

  “You have a daughter, Commander.”

  Sister Baishan Quaiho was a small woman, only an inch or two taller than Yanshwyn. There was nothing frail about her, but her still-thick hair gleamed like fresh snowfall in the lamplight, and a face worn by seventy-three years of love and laughter, sorrow and joy, was creased in an enormous smile as she opened the door and stood aside.

  Tangwyn Syngpu felt huge, ungainly, as he stepped past her, and his heart was in his throat and in his eyes as Yanshwyn looked up at him from the bed. He knew Sister Baishan and her assistants had helped her clean up before they allowed him into the chamber, but the air was heavy with the smell of sweat and fatigue, of hard physical work and discharged fluids. He’d smelled the aftermath of childbirth before, and he leaned over her, his calloused hand featherlight as he stroked the side of her face. It was framed in hair still heavy with sweat, that face, and lined with fatigue and the memory of pain, but her eyes glowed as she smiled up at him.

  “Hey,” he said softly.

  “Hay is for horses,” she replied, completing the familiar joke, and he chuckled.

  “Hard day?” he asked.

  “Oh, no! I’ve had much harder days … and for a lot worse reasons,” she told him, and folded back the blanket to show him the screwed-up, red, frowning, beautiful face of their child.

  “She’s beautiful,” he said.

  “Maybe not yet. Let’s be honest here, neither of us is really at our best for you today. But she will be beautiful, Tangwyn. She will be.”

  “With you for her mother? ’Course she will—even with me for her father!” He laughed, touching that tiny, sleeping face with the tip of a finger. She would have fitted into the palm of his hand with space left over, he thought. She was even tinier than Fengwa had been.

  “You do realize that because she’s a daughter, I get to pick the name?” Yanshwyn said. He looked at her, and she looked back with an edge of challenge. “That’s the way we do it, here in the Valley,” she said firmly. “Isn’t it, Sister?”

  “Without a doubt,” Sister Baishan said serenely.

  “Well, who am I to argue about the way we do things here in the Valley?” Syngpu said mildly.

  “Good, because her name is Shuchyng Fengwa Syngpu,” Yanshwyn said very softly. He stiffened, but she shook her head before he could speak. “I never got the chance to know them, Tangwyn, but I know you. And because I do, I know what extraordinary people they must’ve been. So that’s her name, and if we have another child—which, despite the day’s strenuous nature, I happen to be in favor of—and it’s a boy, I hope you’ll name him Tsungzau. Not because I’m trying to give you your family back, but because I want to honor their memories while we build our family.”

  He looked down at her, and then he went to his knees beside the bed. He put his arms around her, and around their daughter, and laid his cheek on her chest beside the baby.

  “Hello, Shuchyng Fengwa,” his voice was husky, quivering around the edges. “I hope someday you realize how special your mother is.”

  SEPTEMBER YEAR OF GOD 914

  .I.

  Conference Chamber, Lord Protector Alvyn Annex, Protector’s Palace, Siddar City, Republic of Siddarmark.

  Safehold had no equivalent of the Terran Federation’s ubiquitous electronic communications network, but it did have its print news media. Locally produced broadsheets festooned bulletin boards outside every major church and even the smallest provincial town boasted at least one newspaper, although the Safeholdian journalistic tradition had never attempted to separate opinion from news. Journalists did seek to differentiate between facts and what those facts might mean … usually, at least, and as long as those facts didn’t gore their own oxen. But the pages of their papers had always forcibly reminded Merlin Athrawes and Nimue Gahrvai of the thousands of “opinion journalism” sites which had populated the Federation’s info net.

  On the other hand, the reporters who wrote for the major newspapers, in places like Siddar City (where there were currently no fewer than sixteen of them), were aggressive in chasing the news. That had become particularly true since the Jihad, partly because the typical Siddarmarkian had become more politically aware than he had been but also—and more importantly—because of the growth of Charisian-style industry. More people were reading papers, and a lot more people were buying goods, and that meant a lot more advertising revenue for those papers, and all three of those considerations were calculated to make their publishers happy people.

  It also meant “yellow journalism” was alive and well in Siddarmark, although it hadn’t yet reached the levels of Old Earth in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, thank God!

  Along the way, however, successful politicians had learned to manage the media, or at least try to, and the large chamber was packed with just over two hundred reporters. They’d been waiting for almost an hour now, and the air was heavy with a haze of tobacco over a surf-like rumble of conversations. All of them knew what they were there to hear, but their employers all expected them to find some small tidbit they could use to pad the release the Exchequer had already prepared. Some small personal observation, comment, or opinion. And if they couldn’t find one, they were damned well supposed to invent one.

  A side door opened, and the hum and rumble of voices faded quickly as Lord Bryntyn Ashfyrd walked in through it with a leather folder under his arm. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was a well-known figure in Siddar City, and the slight stoop to his shoulders
, the way his silvering ginger hair always seemed on the edge of escaping control, and the stiff gait imposed by arthritic knees were favorite hooks for the caricaturists whose engravings populated the capital city’s editorial pages.

  They also explained the less-than-admiring nickname those who disapproved of his handling of the Exchequer had pinned upon him: “the Stork.”

  He crossed to the low dais at one end of the room, climbed the three shallow steps, laid the folder on the single brightly polished table at the center of the dais, and seated himself, all without saying a word. The only thing on the table beside the folder was an even more brightly gleaming silver ink stand, and Ashfyrd reached into an inner pocket, extracted a pair of gold-wire spectacles, and settled them onto his nose and hooked them behind his ears, still without speaking. Then he folded his hands on the folder and looked out at them while the dozen or so sketch artists’ pencils began flying.

  “I’m sure all of you know why we’re here,” he said finally. “Allow me to begin with a brief statement. Then we can get down to the real business of the morning and, after that, I will answer questions. Within reason, of course.”

  His voice, unfortunately, was high-pitched and a bit thin, and he spoke with more than a hint of a lisp. That was another reason his detractors called him the Stork, given the wyvern species’ grating, unpleasant mating call. It was also another reason he’d always been happier in the accounting room than in politics. Today, though, his words carried clearly through the sudden, intense quiet, and he smiled.

  “I’m very pleased to announce that this coming Monday the Exchequer will officially launch the bond issue the Chamber of Delegates has authorized to finance the Republic’s portion of the Silkiah Canal. This project has been delayed far too long, and that delay has been unfortunate not simply because it’s prevented us from meeting our commitments to our treaty partners but also because of the growth potential for our own economy which has been so sadly delayed. I recognize many of your faces,” he smiled briefly, “so I know you’re aware of many of the difficulties which have delayed this issue. I’m happy to tell you those difficulties are behind us, that the Republic’s economy is stronger than it’s ever been, and that the Trans-Siddarmark Railroad gives us a shining example of what the Canal is and can become for all of us.

  “The return rates and maturity dates for the bonds are listed in the handout which my office will make available before you leave the Annex. I would like to point out, however, that the Lord Protector has instructed me to make participation in this project—and in its profits—as widely accessible as we possibly can to our citizens as a whole. To give them a stake in the Canal, as it were.”

  Some of the reporters shifted in their chairs at that, because they knew what he was really talking about. It was true the TSRR was thundering ahead at a frenetic pace. It was true the Republic’s heavy industry sector was expanding in time with the insatiable demand for rails and rolling stock. But it was also true that those who’d been left behind or felt frozen out had become even more embittered in the process. They saw the TSRR not as a harbinger of a new, stronger economy and higher standard of living but as a living metaphor for the way their previously skilled trades had been overtaken and made irrelevant, the way jobs upon which they and their families depended had vanished. The guilds, especially, had grown only more vociferous as their wealth—and that of their members—declined, and the Exchequer’s and Central Bank’s effort to rein in the runaway, undisciplined financial markets had created its own intense dissatisfaction.

  Ashfyrd gave them a few moments for that to roll through their minds while he opened his leather folder and looked down at it for the notes every reporter was confident he didn’t really need. Then he looked up again.

  “There will be multiple classes of bonds,” the Chancellor continued. “They will be issued with maturities of ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, and thirty years, but there will also be a special class with a maturity of only six years. This class will pay a substantially lower interest rate, but individual bonds will cost only fifty marks, as opposed to a range of values from two hundred, four hundred, and eight hundred marks which will be offered in all of the other classes. In addition, at the maturity date, the special bondholder will have the option of converting his bonds into stock in the Silkiah Canal Corporation rather than receiving his payout in cash. The share price for those converting the mature value of their bonds will be eighty percent of the then-current general price.”

  Several people stirred at that, and there was a soft, quiet hum of hushed side conversation.

  “In effect,” Ashfyrd said now, looking up from his notes again, “the purpose of the special class of bonds is to present average citizens of the Republic an opportunity to become stakeholders in what the Lord Protector and the Chamber firmly believe will become one of the most valuable, profitable, and longest-lasting physical assets in the entire world. The most pessimistic estimates of the revenues the Canal will generate are enormous, and it seems fitting to the Lord Protector—and to me—to allow as many of our citizens as possible to participate in that revenue flow. Only the special class will have this conversion feature; the standard bonds will have substantially higher returns, but will not be directly convertible into stock in the Canal Corporation.”

  He paused, looking around the room, then drew a document from it and laid it on the table before him. He reached out to the ink stand and ceremoniously inked the pen, then looked around the assembled reporters’ faces while the sketch artists’ pencils flew.

  “It gives me enormous pleasure as Chancellor of the Exchequer to sign this official directive to release the first flight of the Silkiah Canal Consortium Construction Bond program,” he said then. “It marks, I believe, the dawn of a new day of opportunity and enrichment for the entire Republic.”

  He looked down again, and the scratching of the pen’s nib was clearly audible in the stillness as he signed.

  .II.

  City of Zhynkau, Boisseau Province, United Provinces, North Harchong.

  The airship settled majestically towards the mooring mast which had been erected at one end of the Imperial Charisian Air Force’s now vast and well established landing ground. It was a sight Baron Star Rising had never tired of, yet it was also one which—unbelievable as it would have seemed only a year or two ago—had actually become routine for the citizens of Zhynkau.

  He thought about that, as he watched Aivahn Hahgyz drop the mooring line from her nose, watched the groundsmen pounce, make it fast to the line from the mooring mast. Two of the huge airship’s spinning propellers stopped turning; the other two paused, then began spinning more slowly in the opposite direction, pushing back against the pressure of the steam-powered winch reeling in the mooring line. A dozen other lines, spaced equidistantly along the sides of the airship’s enormous, cigar-shaped envelope, had hit the ground well before the mooring line. Unlike the mooring line—which was a bright green in color—they were red, however, and he felt a brief, familiar qualm as he watched them.

  He’d wondered, the first time he’d watched an airship land, why the groundsmen had stayed so far clear of the lines dropping from Synklair Pytmyn’s cabin. What he hadn’t known then was that an airship could generate the same sort of sparks a comb could generate on a cold day, or as a silk cloth rubbing amber. It made sense once it was explained to him, but he couldn’t quite forget the Holy Writ’s injunctions against profaning the Rakurai in any way. Bishop Yaupang had patiently explained how the use of the Rakurai was an unforgivable and mortal sin but that the natural production of the mortal world’s pale and feeble shadows of Holy Langhorne’s sacred power—as in that same comb, that same rubbed rod of amber, or the rakurai fish, for that matter—was nothing of the sort. That it was, in fact, yet one more example of Langhorne reminding fallen humanity of the Rakurai which still lay ready to his hand if it should be needed.

  Intellectually, Star Rising knew the bishop was correct. It was just a li
ttle difficult to remember, sometimes, when he thought about how a groundsman could be literally knocked from his feet—even seriously injured or killed—if one of those “sparks” leapt from the end of a “grounding cable” to him. That was a bit more potent “reminder” of Langhorne’s majesty than he felt comfortable around. Especially when it was applied to something as … novel and still undeniably unnatural-feeling as human beings floating through Langhorne’s heavens like vast wyverns.

  And especially when he remembered the devastating fire which had consumed the airship Zhenyfyr Kyplyng right here at Zhynkau.

  On the other hand, what had happened to Zhenyfyr Kyplyng made him powerfully in favor of avoiding any possible source of combustion at a moment like this.

  He smiled and gave himself a little shake as the familiar train of thoughts flowed through him. Then, as more hydrogen vented and the airship settled even lower, he started forward in the wake of the mobile gantry rolled out to Aivahn Hahgyz on the bed of its steam dragon.

  After all, if the whole process still seemed … odd to him, what must it have been like for the passengers who’d just flown for the very first time?

  * * *

  Tangwyn Syngpu stood at the circular porthole, looking out at the sprawl of the steadily expanding provincial town which had become, whether it officially admitted it or not, the capital of a new and independent realm.