Through Fiery Trials

by David Weber

  He shrugged bitterly.

  “The distrust is spreading way beyond just the bonds Qwentyn was involved with,” he continued. “All the bonds are being dumped on the market for a quarter of their face value, with damned few takers. Not only that, but don’t forget that over a third of the Consortium’s total capitalization is supposed to be in the form of private direct investment, not the Exchequer’s bonds. That stock’s getting dumped, too. It looks to me like the entire Consortium’s going down, and until—and unless—they can reconstruct their records, nobody really knows who owns what or who owes who how much, which is only adding to the panic.”

  “And what’s happening to the Consortium’s really secondary, at this point,” Nahrmahn put in. “Like Ehdwyrd says, the real problem’s the banks. Even the members of the Guarantee Trust are getting hit, and a bunch of them ended up holding worthless paper, too, despite the Central Bank. The Exchequer’s on the hook for those banks’ direct deposits, but nobody’s going to cover their other debts. At this point, I’m not prepared to offer any hard predictions on how many of them will go under before it’s done, but Owl and I will be amazed if it’s not something like fifty percent of the total banking industry.”

  “And outside the Guarantee Trust, not even the depositors will get a tenth-piece back,” Delthak added glumly. “Absent a miracle, the Republic’s entire economy’s going down the drain, and there’s not a damned thing we can do to stop it.”

  “Or to prevent Hygyns’ election,” Nynian said. “Sharleyan’s right about that. He was the only serious opposition candidate Myllyr faced before the crash. There’s no time for anyone else to get into the race now, and the panic and the fear play directly into that jingoistic hatred he spews. Clearly, this is all our fault.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Aunt Nynian,” Alahnah said from her own room. It was a very nice room, the same one she’d had since she was twelve, but she hated it, because there was no convenient tunnel between it and Lywys’ room. “How could this possibly be our fault?”

  “Because anything that goes wrong anywhere on the face of Safehold is our fault, sweetheart,” Cayleb said resignedly. “That’s what happens when you’re the biggest kid on the block and you keep insisting on making waves.”

  “And when so many people want to see you stop being the biggest kid on the block,” Sharleyan added, and he nodded.

  “But it doesn’t make any sense,” Alahnah protested. “We weren’t even involved in the bonds—or the Consortium, for that matter!”

  “Since when do paranoia and scapegoating need to make sense, Lahna?” Elayn Clareyk asked. Duchess Serabor and her husband sat on the veranda of their comfortable mansion in the Maikelberg suburbs. “No good conspiracy theory in history—here or on Old Terra—ever worried about logic or making sense! Victimology’s all about emotions and finding someone—anyone—else to blame for your situation. And of course, that ‘someone’ has to’ve done it out of pure malevolence! After all, you’re the victim, the pure and innocent injured party who never did a single thing to deserve what’s happened to you.” She shook her head, her expression bitter. “Trust me, sometimes it really works that way. God knows Lyzbyt and Hairyet—I mean Krystin—saw enough of that during the Jihad. But by the time it comes to explaining why everything else has to be someone else’s fault, reason and sanity have left the building.”

  “A little bitter, but true,” Duke Serabor said, reaching out to take her hand. “And separating someone from their sense of victimhood is one of the hardest things in the world to do, Alahnah. Because it takes the onus off of them. If it’s not their fault, then it’s manifestly unfair to expect them to do anything about it, and they’ll fight like hell to avoid giving that up.”

  “That’s all true, and I hate what’s happening, and I hate the fact that Myllyr’s almost certainly going to lose the election now,” Cayleb said. “Even more, I hate thinking about all the innocent bystanders who’re about to find themselves wiped out, especially all those people who bought the special class of bonds. If the Consortium goes under, they’ve lost all of their investment, as well, and it was a hell of a lot bigger investment for most of them, too. That’s one reason the panic’s spreading so rapidly, cutting so deep.

  “I hate all of that, and most of all, I hate the fact that there’s not a single, solitary damned thing we can do about it. But the truth is, right this minute it’s secondary. Families’re going to be ruined, people are even likely to die before this is over, but it’s not truly the end of the world. Ultimately, one way or the other, Siddarmark will recover. It may take a long time and it’s almost certain to inflict a ton of suffering and bitterness in the process, but eventually it will happen.

  “Unless something even worse happens to the rest of the world, first.”

  There was silence over the com net. In less than three five-days, it would be God’s Day of 915. And if the “Archangels” were returning on the actual thousandth anniversary of the Day of Creation.…

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said now, sliding closer to Sharleyan, putting his arm around her, “but for the next five-day or so, Safehold can look after itself. Even in the Republic. We’ve made all the plans we can make, done everything we could think of to do, taken all the precautions we could think of to take, and it all comes down to the fact that the dice may be about to stop tumbling, and we don’t really have a clue which way they’ll land. So I advise all of us to spend the next three days with the people we love most. Never hurts to tell them you love them, even if there aren’t any fake archangels coming out of the woodwork.

  “And if those dice come down wrong, we may not get another chance.”

  .III.

  Siddar City, Republic of Siddarmark.

  “And who d’you think let them steal everything that wasn’t nailed down?!” the leather-lunged man on the platform demanded. “Who?! I’ll tell you who—it was that worthless son-of-a-bitch Myllyr, that’s who! First he crams his Shan-wei–damned ‘Central Bank’ down our throats, then he signs on with frigging Charis to completely wreck an economy that was just fine before he started fucking around with it! And now this! He’s stolen the bread right out of your children’s mouths, people!”

  An ugly chorus answered him as the flambeaus fumed, spilling their smoky, bloody light across the audience that packed the square around the platform. Saint Cehseelya’s Square always saw healthy crowds during elections, but seldom like tonight’s. And seldom when such fury floated in the air along with the flambeaus’ smoke.

  “And another thing!” the orator shouted. “How many people have that butcher Parkair’s thugs shot down right here in Siddar City? You think it’s just a coincidence that we’re coming up on an election and he and Myllyr are flooding the capital with troops?! Please!”

  The answering shouts were louder and uglier, and he nodded.

  “Exactly!” He told them. “Exactly! And it’s not getting any better, friends. Oh, no. Not one bit better! This is going to go right on snowballing until it rolls over everything in its path and nobody in the entire fucking Republic has a pot to piss in. And when that happens, the Shan-wei–damned Charisians will step in and offer to ‘save’ all of us by buying up every goddamn thing in sight for a fucking tenth-piece on the mark! And that son-of-a-bitch Myllyr will hold the door open for them when they walk in and then kiss their arses when they walk back out of it with everything they can stuff in their goddamned pockets.”

  “Damned right he will!” a voice shouted from the depths of the crowd. “I say we go to Protector’s Palace and sort his arse out right now!”

  A thunderous shout of agreement went up.

  “Yes!” someone else shouted. “And I’ll bring the rope! And after we drag his worthless arse out into the street, we should—!”

  He chopped off in mid-sentence as the sudden clatter of iron-shod hooves on cobblestones rose behind him. The crowd turned and saw the mounted city guardsmen walking their horses down two of the st
reets which fed the square. They were grim faced, those guardsmen, and they wore full riot gear, which would have been difficult to tell apart from a cuirassier’s armor. They carried riot batons, but this time there were revolvers on their hips and a third of them had shotguns in their saddle scabbards, as well, and there were over fifty of them.

  The crowd seemed to settle in upon itself, gather itself, but a lane parted as half a dozen guardsmen moved straight towards the speaker’s platform. They reached it, and most of them stayed mounted, turning their horses to face the crowd, while the captain in command of the detachment dismounted and climbed the stairs to the platform.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” the speaker snarled, careful to pitch his voice loud enough for the crowd to hear.

  “I’m dispersing this gathering,” the Guard captain replied flatly.

  “You can’t ‘disperse’ a political rally! That’s against the law!”

  “I can when the speakers at that rally start inciting violence.”

  “I haven’t said a single word suggesting violence against anybody!”

  “Well maybe you haven’t been listening to what the people you’re talking to are saying back to you, then. I have been, and it’s gone past peaceful criticism. A hell of a long way past.” The captain turned to face the crowd. “Now disperse, all of you!”

  “No fucking way!” someone shouted from the safe anonymity of the crowd.

  “Trust me, a lot of people are likely to get hurt in the next little bit if you don’t,” the guardsman warned.

  “Including you, arsehole!” the other man shouted back defiantly.

  “Not as bad as the people you’re about to get into a world of hurt with that mouth of yours, friend,” the captain said flatly.

  “Screw you!”

  Some of the crowd stirred uneasily, starting to drift away towards the edges of the square, but far more of it snarled agreement with the speaker.

  “All right,” the guardsman said. “Looks like we do it the hard way.”

  He looked across the sea of heads at the mounted men who’d drawn up in a two-deep line that stretched across two-thirds of the square’s width.

  “Clear the square, Lieutenant!” he shouted, and those mounted men moved forward at a slow walk, riot batons swinging in gentle arcs as they came.

  * * *

  “Disgraceful,” Zhermo Hygyns said to his well-groomed audience, shaking his head in mingled sorrow and anger as he stood at the podium at the head of the vast, luxurious banquet hall. No one would have guessed, looking at the elegant china and glittering silverware that the entire dinner had been organized in less than two days’ time.

  “It’s just disgraceful,” he continued to the crowd of well-heeled potential donors. “There’s no other word for it! Lord Protector Klymynt’s reaction from the very beginning of this crisis has been … clumsy, to say the least. Completely leaving aside the question of how Qwentyn and his co-conspirators were able to defraud so many people on the Lord Protector’s watch—he is an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, after all; how could he miss seeing something like this coming?—what are we to make of the hundreds of people who’ve been killed or injured—or the thousands who’ve been arrested!—in the middle of an election year? How can that not be seen as an effort to intimidate his political opponents?”

  Hygyns paused to sip water and the silence was deafening.

  “I’m not prepared to accuse the Lord Protector of deliberately suppressing the vote,” he resumed in a tone of voice which said exactly the opposite. “I am prepared to say it will have that effect, however, and that runs counter to every principle of our constitutional Republic! The free exercise of the franchise by every qualified voter is absolutely sacred in Siddarmark … or it’s supposed to be, at any rate. But then, we’re also supposed to be a government of laws. Of laws which are enforced free of any foreign influence, free of any favoritism towards realms who clearly don’t have the Republic’s best interests at heart. We haven’t seen that over the last five years, so why should we expect the rest of the Republic’s laws—the fundamental principles of our Constitution—will survive the next five years of a Myllyr protectorship? Whether or not he’s Charis’ willing dupe, the consequences will be the same. If we ever hope to recover our economic footing, we must do it the Siddarmarkian way, remembering the values and the strengths which once made the Republic the greatest single realm on the face of Safehold. We need to return to those strengths and—”

  “He’s doing well,” Ghustahv Phaiphyr murmured in Zhaikyb Fyrnahndyz’s ear as Hygyns continued with his speech. “In fact, he’s doing better than just ‘well.’ I can already hear the marks ringing in the collection boxes!” The Siddar City Sentinel’s publisher smiled. “I’d written my editorial for tomorrow before I headed over here, but I may need to go back to the office and rewrite it before I turn in!”

  “He is doing well,” Fyrnahndyz agreed. “I do hope he’s not pushing the personal condemnation of Myllyr too hard, though.”

  The banker, who’d quietly rented the banquet hall through no less than three cutouts—and whose bank happened to be surviving the current economic crisis far better than most because it hadn’t held a single scrap of Braisyn Qwentyn’s valueless collateral—allowed his face to show an edge of worry.

  “He can’t push too hard,” Phaiphyr replied. “Not against Myllyr and his crowd. And not at a time like this. All my reporters agree that the vote’s turned completely around since the Consortium Scandal hit, and public opinion’s getting nothing but worse where Myllyr is concerned. This is the time, Zhaikyb—the time for him to bring the hammer down with everything he’s got!”

  The publisher didn’t even try to hide his satisfaction, Fyrnahndyz noticed. That wasn’t very surprising, perhaps, given everything the Sentinel was doing to fan the fury against the Myllyr protectorship.

  It was all coming together nicely, Fyrnahndyz thought. The consequences had already proved worse than he’d anticipated, and it was obvious the economy’s headlong tumble was still gathering speed. That could be … unfortunate, even for him, despite how carefully he’d buttressed his position. From a political perspective, however, the timing had worked out far more fortuitously than he’d ever dared to hope.

  It wasn’t as if he’d put Braisyn Qwentyn up to it; he simply hadn’t said a word about it once he realized what was happening. He’d always known about the corruption in the Trans-Siddarmark purchasing process, of course, but he’d carefully gotten out of that, as well, months before he started building his pro-Hygyns political machine. He had used a carefully concealed contact to make the first call on collateral he knew was worthless, however. And he’d arranged for Qwentyn to learn the call would be placed a day and a half earlier. As he’d hoped, Qwentyn had been aboard a fast ship, headed for Desnair the City, where all of the gold he’d already shipped out of the Republic awaited him, by the time the authorities began to discover what had happened.

  And it was all coming together so nicely, he thought again, sitting back with his brandy while he listened to the man he fully intended to make the next Lord Protector of the Republic of Siddarmark.

  .IV.

  Cherayth Cathedral and Imperial Palace, City of Cherayth, Kingdom of Chisholm, Empire of Charis.

  “Rejoice, my children!” Archbishop Ulys Lynkyn proclaimed, raising both hands in blessing. “Rejoice and be glad in the Lord on this day of all days!”

  “We rejoice in the Lord!”

  The response rumbled back from the packed pews through the tendrils of incense, the shafts of multicolored light spilling through the stained glass. The weather was perfect, and this was a particularly important Wednesday. It was July 13, 915—God’s Day, the most holy day of the year. The day which celebrated the Day of Creation itself. The traditional God’s Day feast waited, and many of the city’s wives and mothers had attended early mass so they could return home to have those feasts ready to serve when their families returned.


  “It is right and good that we should rejoice in Him and in the work of His and His Archangels’ hands,” Lynkyn continued.

  “It is right and good,” the congregation responded.

  “As the bounty and the beauty of the world He has given us through Them enfolds us, so His love uplifts and strengthens us. We are the first fruits of His love, and so we give Him our praise and our worship.”

  “We praise and worship Him with all of our hearts and all that is within us!”

  “As children we are taught, as children we are loved, and as children we come to know the One who is parent to us all. And so—”

  Cayleb Ahrmahk tuned out the familiar liturgy and reached out to take his wife’s hand. She turned her head to smile at him, but he saw the same tension, the same worry in her eyes.

  The last month or so had been hard on every member of the inner circle. The ongoing meltdown in Siddarmark would have been bad enough under any circumstances, but it was barely even on their radar, a useful concept they’d picked up from Merlin and Nimue, under these circumstances. Their anxiety had coiled tighter and tighter as they approached today, and now it was upon them.

  Every sensor Owl had been able to get into orbit was focused on the Temple and the city of Zion. So far, none of the power sources they could detect from the outside had shown any fluctuations or spikes. Of course, as Merlin had discovered during Tymythy Rhobair’s investiture, there were a lot of power sources they couldn’t detect from the outside. The best they could say was that they hadn’t seen any overt evidence of anything ominous emerging from the Temple’s cellars … yet.

  In some ways, that lack of evidence actually made things worse, though. It encouraged them to hope … and along with hope came the fear that they were setting themselves up for an even more crushing hammer blow if that hope proved unfounded.