How Firm a Foundation

by David Weber

  And how much of his own yearning to embrace that reshaped direction stemmed from his own searing anger? From the rage he couldn’t suppress, however hard he tried, when he thought about Clyntahn and the mockery he’d made of the Inquisition? From his fury at the vicars who’d stood idly by and watched it happen? Who even now acquiesced by their silence in every atrocity Clyntahn proclaimed in the name of his own twisted image of Mother Church, the Archangels, and God Himself?

  And, terribly though it frightened and shamed him to ask the question, or even dare to admit he could feel such things, how much of it stemmed from his anger at God Himself, and at His Archangels, for letting this happen? If Shan-wei could seduce men through the goodness of their hearts, by subtly twisting their faith and their love for their fellow men and women, how much more easily might she seduce them through the dark poison of anger? And where might anger such as his all too easily lead?

  I know where my heart lies, where my own faith lives, Paityr Wylsynn thought. Even if I wished to pretend I didn’t, that I weren’t so strongly drawn to the Church of Charis’ message, there’d be no point trying. The truth is the truth, however men might try to change it, but have I become part of the Darkness in my drive to serve the Light? And how does any man try—what right does he have to try—to be one of God’s priests when he can’t even know what the truth in his own heart is … or whether it springs from Light or Darkness?

  He opened his eyes once more, looking out over the fiery vista of Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s enormous foundry complex, and worried.

  .II.

  HMS Royal Charis, 58, West Isle Channel, and Imperial Palace, Cherayth, Kingdom of Chisholm

  The cabin lamps swung wildly, sending their light skittering across the richly woven carpets and the gleaming wood of the polished table. Glass decanters sang a mad song of vibration, planking and stout hull timbers groaned in complaint, wind howled, rain beat with icy fists on the skylight, and the steady cannon-shot impacts as HMS Royal Charis’ bow slammed into one tall, gray wave after another echoed through the plunging ship’s bones.

  A landsman would have found all of that dreadfully alarming, assuming seasickness would have allowed him to stop vomiting long enough to appreciate it. Cayleb Ahrmahk, on the other hand, had never suffered from seasickness, and he’d seen heavy weather bad enough to make the current unpleasantness seem relatively mild.

  Well, maybe a bit more than relatively mild, if we’re going to be honest, he admitted to himself.

  It was only late afternoon, yet as he gazed out through the stern windows at the raging sea in Royal Charis’ wake it could have been night. True, by the standards of his own homeland, night came early in these relatively northern latitudes in midwinter, but this was early even for the West Isle Channel. Solid cloud cover tended to do that, and if this weather was merely … exceptionally lively, there was worse coming soon enough. The front rolling in across the Zebediah Sea to meet him was going to make this seem like a walk in the park.

  “Lovely weather you’ve chosen for a voyage,” a female voice no one else aboard Royal Charis could hear remarked in his ear.

  “I didn’t exactly choose it,” he pointed out in reply. He had to speak rather loudly for the com concealed in his jeweled pectoral scepter to pick up his voice amid all the background noise, but no one was likely to overhear him in this sort of weather. “And your sympathy underwhelms me, dear.”

  “Nonsense. I know you, Cayleb. You’re having the time of your life,” Empress Sharleyan replied tartly from the study across the hall from their suite in the Imperial Palace. She sat in a comfortable armchair parked near the cast-iron stove filling the library with welcome warmth, and their infant daughter slept blessedly peacefully on her shoulder.

  “He does rather look forward to these exhilarating moments, doesn’t he?” another, deeper voice observed over the same com net.

  “Ganging up on me, Merlin?” Cayleb inquired.

  “Simply stating the truth as I see it, Your Grace. The painfully obvious truth, I might add.”

  Normally, Merlin would have been aboard Royal Charis with Cayleb as the emperor’s personal armsman and bodyguard. Circumstances weren’t normal, however, and Cayleb and Sharleyan had agreed it was more important for the immediate future that he keep an eye on the empress. There wasn’t much for a bodyguard to do aboard a ship battling her way against winter headwinds across nine thousand-odd miles of salt water from Cherayth to Tellesberg. And not even a seijin who was also a fusion-powered PICA could do much about winter weather … except, of course, to see it coming through the SNARCs deployed around the planet. Cayleb could monitor that information as well as Merlin could, however, and he was just as capable of receiving Owl’s weather predictions from the computer’s hiding place under the far distant Mountains of Light.

  Not that he could share that information with anyone in Royal Charis’ crew. On the other hand, the Imperial Charisian Navy had a near idolatrous faith in Cayleb Ahrmahk’s sea sense. If he told Captain Gyrard he smelled a storm coming, no one was going to argue with him.

  “He may not mind weather like this,” a considerably more sour voice inserted. “Some of the rest of us lack the sort of stomachs that seem to be issued to Charisian monarchs.”

  “It’ll do you good, Nahrmahn,” Cayleb replied with a chuckle. “Ohlyvya’s been after you to lose weight, anyway. And if you can’t keep anything down, then by the time we reach Tellesberg you’re probably going to waste away to no more than, oh, half the man you are today.”

  “Very funny,” Nahrmahn half growled.

  Unlike Cayleb, who was gazing out into the dark the better to appreciate the weather, the rotund little Prince of Emerald was curled as close as he could fold himself into a miserable knot in his swaying cot. He wasn’t quite as seasick as Cayleb’s rather callous remark suggested, but he was quite seasick enough to be going on with.

  His wife, Princess Ohlyvya, on the other hand, was as resistant to motion sickness as Cayleb himself. Nahrmahn found that a particularly unjust dispensation of divine capriciousness, since she’d said very much the same thing the emperor just had to him that very morning. At the moment, she was sitting in a chair securely lashed to the deck, knitting, and he heard her soft chuckle over the com.

  “I suppose it really isn’t all that funny, dear,” she said now. “Still, we all know you’ll get over it in another five-day or so. You’ll be just fine.” She waited half a beat. “Assuming the ship doesn’t sink, of course.”

  “At the moment, that would be something of a relief,” Nahrmahn informed her.

  “Oh, stop complaining and think about all the scheming and planning and skullduggery you’ll have to keep you occupied once we get home again!”

  “Ohlyvya’s right, Nahrmahn,” Sharleyan said, and her voice was rather more serious than it had been. “Cayleb’s going to need you to help sort out the mess. Since I can’t be there to help out myself, I’m just as happy you can be.”

  “I appreciate the compliment, Your Majesty,” Nahrmahn said. “All the same, I can’t help thinking how much more comfortable it would have been to provide all that assistance from a nice, motionless bedroom in Cherayth.”

  “Coms are all well and good,” Sharleyan replied, “but he’s going to need someone to obviously confer with instead of just listening to voices out of thin air. And having another warm body he can send out to do things isn’t going to hurt one bit, either.”

  “I have to agree with that,” Cayleb said. “Although trying to picture any Charisian’s reaction to the notion of using Prince Nahrmahn of Emerald as an official representative and emissary a couple of years ago boggles the mind.”

  “I’m sure it boggles your mind less than mine,” Nahrmahn replied tartly, and it was Cayleb’s turn to chuckle. “On the other hand, it’s worked out better—and a lot more satisfyingly—than several alternatives I could think of right offhand,” the Emeraldian continued a bit more seriously.

  “I’d have to agree
with that, too,” Cayleb acknowledged. “Although I wish to hell you and I didn’t have to go home and assist each other with this mess.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to either,” Sharleyan agreed somberly, “but this mess is a lot less ugly than the one we could’ve had.”

  Cayleb nodded, his expression sober, at the accuracy of her remark.

  The Navy of God had outnumbered the Imperial Charisian Navy by a terrifying margin when they met in the Gulf of Tarot barely two months ago. Of the twenty-five Charisian galleons who’d engaged, one had been completely destroyed, eleven had been reduced to near wrecks, five more had lost masts and spars, and only eight had emerged more or less intact. Charis had suffered over three thousand casualties, more than half of them fatal … including Cayleb’s cousin, High Admiral Bryahn Lock Island. Yet hideously expensive as the victory had been, it had also been overwhelming. Forty-nine of the Navy of God’s galleons had been captured. Fourteen had been destroyed in action, another seventeen had been scuttled after their capture as too damaged to be worth keeping, and only nine had actually managed to escape. Forty-one Harchongese galleons had been captured, as well, and the blow to the Church’s naval power had been devastating.

  Cayleb Ahrmahk had never felt so useless as he had watching that titanic engagement through Merlin’s SNARCs. He’d seen every moment of it, including his cousin’s death, but he’d been the better part of eight thousand miles away, unable to do anything but watch the death and destruction. Almost worse, there’d been no acceptable way for him and Sharleyan even to know the battle had been fought. They’d had to pretend they knew nothing about it, had no idea how desperate it had been or how many men had died obeying their orders. Even when Admiral Kohdy Nylz had arrived with the reinforcements dispatched to Chisholm when they’d anticipated the Church was sending its ships west to join Admiral Thirsk in Dohlar instead of east to the Desnairian Empire, they’d been unable to discuss it with him in any way.

  It had taken another full two and a half five-days for a weather-battered schooner to arrive with Admiral Rock Point’s official dispatches, and the only good thing was that their inner circle had had plenty of time by then to confer and make plans over their coms. Which was why Cayleb was already on his way back to Tellesberg, despite the fact that he and Sharleyan had been scheduled to remain in Cherayth for another month and a half. And it was also the reason Sharleyan wasn’t headed back to Tellesberg with him.

  One of them had to return. In theory, they could have used their coms to coordinate responses with Rock Point, Archbishop Maikel Staynair, Baron Wave Thunder, and the inner circle’s other members in Tellesberg from Cherayth. In fact, that’s what they’d been doing, in many ways. But there were limits to what their subordinates could do on their own authority, which meant either Cayleb or Sharleyan had to be there in person. For that matter, the entire world would be expecting one or both of them to return to Old Charis after such a cataclysmic shift in naval power. They couldn’t afford the sort of questions not returning might arouse, and the truth was that Cayleb wanted to be there. Not that he was going to get there in any kind of hurry. This time of year, they’d be lucky if Royal Charis could make the crossing in less than two months, although Cayleb expected they’d be able to shave at least a five-day or so off of the time anyone else might have managed.

  Unfortunately, Sharleyan couldn’t come with him. He was just as glad to spare Alahnah the roughness and potential hazards of this particular winter voyage, but that wasn’t the main reason she and her mother had remained in Cherayth. Nor was it the reason Merlin had remained with them. Sharleyan would be making a voyage of her own soon enough, and Cayleb didn’t envy the task she was going to face at the end of it.

  Well, no one ever told you it was going to be easy … or pleasant, he reminded himself. So stop thinking about how much you envy Nahrmahn and Ohlyvya for at least being together and concentrate on getting your job done. Sharley will handle her part of it just fine, and the sooner she does, the sooner she will be joining you.

  “I agree things could be a lot worse,” he said in a deliberately more cheerful tone, then smiled wickedly. “For example, I could be just as bad a sailor as Nahrmahn!”

  .III.

  The Temple, City of Zion, The Temple Lands

  And aren’t we four poor miserable looking sons-of-bitches for the most powerful men in the world? Vicar Rhobair Duchairn thought sourly, gazing around the conference chamber. None of the other faces were gazing back at him at the moment, and all of them wore expressions which mingled various degrees of shock, dismay, and anger.

  The atmosphere in the sumptuously furnished, indirectly lit, mystically comfortable chamber was like an echo of the bitter blizzard even then blowing through the streets of Zion beyond the Temple’s precincts. Not surprisingly, given the message they’d just received … and the fact that it had taken so long to reach them. Poor visibility was the greatest weakness of the Church’s semaphore system, and this winter’s weather seemed to be proving worse than usual. It certainly was in Zion itself, as Duchairn was all too well aware. His efforts to provide the city’s poor and homeless with enough warmth and food to survive had saved scores—if not hundreds—of lives so far, yet the worst was yet to come and he knew he wasn’t going to save all of them.

  At least this year, though, Mother Church was actually trying to honor her obligation to succor the weakest and most vulnerable of God’s children. And seeing that she did was eating up a lot of Duchairn’s time. It was also taking him beyond the Temple far more frequently than any of his colleagues managed, and he suspected it was giving him a far better perspective on how the citizens of Zion really felt about Mother Church’s jihad. Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s inquisitors circulated throughout the city and Clyntahn had access to all of their reports, but Duchairn doubted the Grand Inquisitor paid a great deal of attention to what Zion’s poorest inhabitants were saying. Duchairn’s own activities brought him into much more frequent contact with those same poor, however, and at least some of what they truly felt had to leak through the deference and (much as it distressed him to admit it existed) the fear his high clerical rank inspired. He might have learned still more if he hadn’t been continually accompanied by his assigned escort of Temple Guardsmen, but that was out of the question.

  Which says some pretty ugly things about how our beloved subjects regard us, doesn’t it, Rhobair? He felt his lips trying to twist in a bitter smile at the irony of it all. All he really wanted to do was reach out to the people of Zion the way a vicar of God was supposed to, yet trying to do that without bodyguards was entirely too likely to get him killed by some of those same people. And it would make sense from their perspective, I suppose. I don’t imagine some of them are differentiating very much among us just now, and given Zhaspahr’s idea of how to inspire obedience, somebody probably would put a knife in my ribs if only he had the chance. Not that there’s any way Allayn and Zhaspahr would let me out without my keepers even if everyone loved and cherished all four of us as much as Charis seems to cherish Staynair.

  Duchairn knew perfectly well why Allayn Maigwair and Zhaspahr Clyntahn regarded Captain Khanstahnzo Phandys as the perfect man to command his bodyguard … and keep an alert eye on his activities. As the officer who’d thwarted the Wylsynn brothers’ escape from the Inquisition—and personally killed Hauwerd Wylsynn when the “renegade” vicar resisted arrest—his reliability was beyond question.

  Of course, these days things like reliability and loyalty were almost as subject to change as Zion’s weather, weren’t they? And not just where members of the Guard were concerned. All he had to do was glance at the ugly look Clyntahn was bending upon Maigwair to realize that.

  “Tell me, Allayn,” Clyntahn said now. “Can you and the Guard do anything right?”

  Maigwair flushed darkly and started to open his mouth quickly. But then he stopped, pressing his lips together, and Duchairn felt a spasm of sympathy. As the Captain General of the Church of God Awaiting, Mai
gwair commanded all of her armed forces except the small, elite armed cadre of the Inquisition. That had made him responsible for building, arming, and training the Navy of God, and it had been commanded by Guard officers on its voyage to Desnair.

  A voyage which, as the dispatch which had occasioned this meeting made clear, had not prospered.

  “I think that might be a bit overly severe, Zhaspahr,” Duchairn heard himself say, and the Grand Inquisitor turned his baleful gaze upon him. Clyntahn’s heavy jowls were dark with anger, and despite himself, Duchairn felt a quiver of fear as those fuming eyes came to bear.

  “Why?” the inquisitor demanded in a harsh, ugly tone. “They’ve obviously fucked up by the numbers … again.”

  “If Father Greyghor’s dispatch is accurate, and we have no reason yet to believe it isn’t, Bishop Kornylys clearly encountered a new and unexpected Charisian weapon … again.” Duchairn kept his voice deliberately level and nonconfrontational, although he saw Clyntahn’s eyes narrow angrily at the deliberate mimicry of his last two words. “If that weapon was as destructive as Father Greyghor’s message suggests, it’s hardly surprising the Bishop suffered a major defeat.”

  “Major defeat,” he thought. My, what a delicate way to describe what must’ve been a massacre. It seems I have a gift for words after all.

  The fact that Father Greyghor Searose, the commanding officer of the galleon NGS Saint Styvyn, appeared to be the senior surviving officer of Bishop Kornylys Harpahr’s entire fleet—that not a single squadron commander seemed to have made it to safety—implied all sorts of things Duchairn really didn’t want to think about. According to Searose’s semaphore dispatch, only seven other ships had survived to join Saint Styvyn in Bedard Bay. Seven out of a hundred and thirty. The fact that they’d been anticipating a very different message for five-days—the notification that Harpahr had reached his destination and united his forces and the Imperial Desnairian Navy into an irresistible armada—had only made the shock of the message they’d actually gotten even worse. No wonder Clyntahn’s nose was out of joint … especially since he was the one who’d insisted on sending them to the Gulf of Jahras in the first place instead of to Earl Thirsk in Gorath Bay.