How Firm a Foundation

by David Weber

  “Yes, Your Grace. In fact, if she’s kept to the schedule which was reported to us, she’s already there. She may actually be ready to depart by now.”

  “So what you’re saying is that they have been announced by now. And, presumably, carried out, as well.” Clyntahn bared his teeth. “The bitch isn’t going to leave without the satisfaction of seeing them all killed, now is she?”

  “Presumably not, Your Grace.”

  “Do we have any indication of how the population in general’s responding to all of this?”

  “Not … really, Your Grace.” Rayno twitched his shoulders unhappily. “So far there haven’t been any indications of organized protest or outrage, but, again, all our reports are months out of date by the time they get here. It’s always possible people have been waiting for confirmation of the verdicts before they reacted.”

  “And it’s always possible they’re just going to sit on their asses and let it happen, too,” Clyntahn said flatly.

  “I’m afraid so,” Rayno admitted.

  “Then it may be time to stiffen their spines.” Clyntahn’s expression was ugly. “What’s the situation with Coris?”

  “Nothing seems to have changed in that regard, Your Grace. As you know, I’ve got one of our best men planted on him, and Bishop Mytchail has his own agent in King Zhames’ household, as well. Both of them agree Coris is doing what he was told to do.”

  “And that he will do what we need him to do?”

  “Almost certainly, Your Grace.”

  “Only almost?” Clyntahn’s eyes narrowed.

  “I doubt he’d hesitate for a moment, Your Grace, if it weren’t for the fact that everyone knows he was Hektor’s spymaster—the man who managed Hektor’s assassins, among other things. He has a reputation for personal ambition, and it might occur to him that if anyone was going to be blamed as Cayleb’s tool in Daivyn’s assassination, it would be him. Under the circumstances, I think he’d probably prefer not to give any additional credence to that kind of charge. That assessment is based at least in part on reports from Master Seablanket, our agent in his household.”

  “Hmmmmm.” Clyntahn frowned, stroking his chin meditatively, eyes half-closed, for several seconds. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “that might not be such a bad idea. Letting Coris carry the blame for it, I mean.” He smiled thinly. “He and Anvil Rock and Tartarian all worked together with Hektor, after all. Saddling him with responsibility—because he saw it as an opportunity to buy Cayleb’s favor the same way they have, no doubt—would smear the two of them by association, too, wouldn’t it?”

  “It certainly might, Your Grace.”

  “Do you think Seablanket could handle it?”

  “I think he could, but I’d rather not use him, Your Grace.”

  “Why not, especially if he’s already in position?”

  “Because he’s too valuable, Your Grace. If I’m following your logic properly here, we need for the assassin—or for an assassin, at any rate—to be taken or killed after the boy is dead. Preferably killed, I should think, if we don’t want any inconvenient interrogations. I’d hesitate to use up someone as capable as Seablanket if we don’t absolutely have to.”

  “So who would you use instead?”

  “My thought at this moment is that we might use a team from the Rakurai candidates you approved but haven’t assigned, Your Grace. I’m sure we could select men who would be prepared to see to it that they weren’t taken alive. In fact, we have several more native-born Charisians available.”

  Clyntahn cocked his head, then nodded slowly.

  “That would be a nice touch, wouldn’t it?” He smiled unpleasantly. “Of course, it would tend to direct suspicion away from Coris.”

  “Only in the sense that it wasn’t actually his hand on the dagger, Your Grace,” Rayno pointed out. “As you suggested, even if he didn’t strike the blow himself, he might have connived with Cayleb. In fact, we might be able to help that perception along a little bit. At the appropriate time, we could instruct him to … creatively weaken Daivyn’s security to let our assassins in. Seablanket’s in a perfect position to pass him the message when we need to, and it won’t hurt a thing at that point for Coris to realize we’ve been watching him more closely than he thought. And after the fact, if we decide to throw Coris to the slash lizard, the fact that he did let the assassins—the Charisian-born assassins—into Daivyn’s presence would be the crowning touch. And if we decided not to throw him to the slash lizard after all, we simply wouldn’t have to mention what he did.”

  “I like it.” Clyntahn nodded. “All right, pick your team. We’ll see how public opinion in Corisande reacts to Sharleyan’s executions before we actually order them to proceed, but it won’t hurt to have the pieces in position when the time comes.”

  .II.

  Twyngyth, Duchy of Malikai, Kingdom of Dohlar

  Sir Gwylym Manthyr’s eyes opened as the hand shook his shoulder.

  On the face of it, it was ridiculous that such a gentle summons could rouse him. Over the last five-day and a half, he’d learned to sleep despite the bone-jarring, jouncing, swaying, rumbling, grating progress of their mobile prison. Just the mind-numbing sound of steel-shod wooden wheels grinding over the hard surface of the royal high road should have been enough to make anything like sleep impossible, but Manthyr was a lifelong seaman. He’d learned to steal precious moments of sleep even in the teeth of a howling gale, and sheer exhaustion made it easier than it might have been otherwise. He’d never been so tired, so worn to the bone, in his entire life, and he knew it was even worse for many of his men.

  He looked up into Naiklos Vahlain’s face and opened his mouth, but he had to stop and swallow twice before he could moisten his vocal cords enough to speak.

  “What is it, Naiklos?”

  “Begging your pardon, Sir, but we’re coming into a town. A big one. I think it’s Twyngyth.”

  “I see.” Manthyr lay still for another moment, then reached up and grabbed one of the wagon’s iron bars and used it to haul himself to his feet. He balanced there, despite the shock waves which exploded up his legs and jolted painfully in his spine with the wagon’s motion.

  It was odd, a corner of his mind thought. Charis’ highways were adequate to the kingdom’s needs, but nothing like most of the mainland realms boasted. The reason for that, of course, was Howell Bay. Charis didn’t need the sort of road network the mainlanders required, because water transport was always available and far more economical and speedy than even the best of road systems. Despite himself, Manthyr had been impressed by the sheer engineering ability and years of labor it must have taken to build the Dohlaran royal high roads, and their surfaces were hard and smooth, made of multiple layers of tamped gravel rolled out and then covered with slabs of cement.

  And that was what was odd. One wouldn’t have thought a surface that smooth could still be uneven, yet judging from the prison wagon’s painful progress, it obviously could.

  He rubbed his aching, gummy eyes and peered through the bars.

  Naiklos was right; they were approaching a sizable town or city. Once upon a time, Manthyr had been accustomed to judging the size of the cities he encountered by comparison to Tellesberg, yet he’d discovered there were others which were larger still. Cherayth, in Chisholm, for example, or Gorath here in Dohlar. This town was much smaller than that—barely a third the size of Tellesberg—but it boasted fortified, bastioned walls at least twenty or thirty feet tall, and there was obviously artillery atop those walls, which argued for a certain importance. And if Manthyr’s memory of the maps of Dohlar were correct (which it might well not be, since he’d been primarily interested in Dohlar’s coasts), this almost certainly was Twyngyth.

  And won’t that be fun, he thought grimly, knees flexing as his weary body anticipated the jolts. It wasn’t like being at sea, but there were some similarities. You had to go and help His Majesty kill that asshole Duke Malikai off Armageddon Reef, didn’t you, Gwylym?
I’ll bet his loving family’s been just praying for the opportunity to entertain you on your way through.

  * * *

  “Keep the crowd moving, Captain,” Father Vyktyr Tahrlsahn said. “I’m sure everyone wants to see these bastards, and I want to make sure everyone gets to see them, too. See them from close enough they can smell the vermin’s stink!”

  “Aye, Sir.” Captain Walysh Zhu touched his breastplate in salute, but behind that façade of stolid acknowledgment, his brain was busy.

  Over the last several days, Zhu had realized Tahrlsahn was even more … zealous than the captain had originally thought. Zhu was as orthodox and conservative as only a Harchongese could be, and he saw no reason heretics should be accorded the protections of honorable prisoners of war. Anyone who gave his allegiance to Shan-wei deserved whatever came his way, after all. On the other hand, Zhu took no particular pleasure from seeing them abused without some specific reason. He’d ordered his Guardsmen to show them why they’d be wise to cooperate that very first day, but there’d been a purpose to that beating, a way to establish discipline without actually killing anyone. And, if he was going to be honest, there had been a certain personal satisfaction in it, as well. Payback for what their bastard friends had done to the Navy of God and the Imperial Harchongese Navy in the Markovian Sea, if nothing else.

  But Tahrlsahn sometimes seemed to have trouble remembering they were supposed to deliver their prisoners intact to the Temple. Personally, Zhu estimated they were likely to lose perhaps one in five from sheer exhaustion and privation even under the best of conditions. But they weren’t getting the best of conditions, were they? They’d been scrawny as skinned wyverns when he’d collected them from the prison hulks in Gorath, and Tahrlsahn wasn’t going out of his way to fatten them up since. Zhu suspected there was sickness among them, as well, helping to gnaw away at their reserves of strength, but Tahrlsahn had endorsed Bishop Executor Wylsynn’s ban on providing the “malingering bastards” with healers. And the prison wagons’ jarring ride was far more debilitating than Tahrlsahn seemed to realize.

  Now they were coming into Twyngyth, the biggest city they’d passed through yet, and Tahrlsahn’s instructions made him a little nervous. It had been bad enough in some of the other villages and small towns. Zhu remembered the village where twenty or thirty men and adolescent boys had jogged along beside the prison wagons, pelting the Charisians with stones picked up from the roadside. At least one prisoner had lost an eye, and another had gone down unconscious when a rock hit him in the head. Zhu didn’t know how much the blow to his skull had to do with it, but the same man had gone berserk the next afternoon and attacked a Guardsman with his bare hands when he and his fellows were released from their wagon for a latrine break. Tahrlsahn would just as soon have left them to foul the wagons with their own wastes, but Father Myrtan, his second-in-command, had convinced him that at least the rudiments of Pasquale’s laws of hygiene had to be observed if they didn’t want the Guardsmen to come under the Archangel’s curse, as well.

  Zhu didn’t know about that, but he had a pretty fair notion how foul the prison wagons would smell to anyone unfortunate enough to be escorting them from downwind. That was more than enough to put him on Father Myrtan’s side of that debate, although Tahrlsahn had almost changed his mind and prohibited the stops after all when the screaming Charisian got both hands around a Guardsman’s throat and started beating the man’s head on the ground. Three more Charisians had turned on their captors, as well—less from any real hope of achieving anything, Zhu thought, than out of pure instinct to aid their fellow—and despite the prisoners’ half-starved condition, it had taken over forty guardsmen to subdue the single unlocked wagon’s twenty Charisians.

  When it ended, two Guardsmen were seriously injured and the first Charisian and one of his companions were dead. Two more had died over the next day and a half, and six more had received broken bones … not all of them before they were subdued. Sergeant Zhadahng came from the Empire’s Bedard Province in far western West Haven. Nobody was more orthodox than someone from Bedard, especially someone who’d been born a serf like Zhadahng. And no one was more accustomed to receiving—and meting out—brutality than a Bedard serf. There was no doubt in Zhu’s mind that Zhadahng had seen to the administration of a little additional “discipline” on his own initiative.

  The captain had chosen not to make an issue out of it in this instance. First, because a little extra emphasis for the prisoners probably wouldn’t hurt anything … except the prisoners, who were heretics and deserved it anyway. And, second (and more to the point), because he had no doubt Tahrlsahn would have supported the sergeant’s actions. He’d certainly brushed aside Father Myrtan’s earlier efforts to convince him to make at least some improvements in the prisoners’ condition. The argument had become heated—dangerously so, Zhu thought—before Father Vyktyr sharply ordered Father Myrtan to be silent. He was hardly likely to support Zhu if he disciplined Zhadahng for something as minor as beating a heretic or two to death. And Tahrlsahn was one of the Grand Inquisitor’s favorites.

  Yet what worried him at the moment was less what Zhadahng or his own men might do than what the good citizens of Twyngyth might take it into their minds to do. The convoy’s progress was slow—deliberately so, to make sure there was time for crowds to gather properly in the towns along its route—and that meant there was plenty of time for broadsheets and posters to go up along the way. Literacy was much more common in Dohlar than in Harchong, and even the most ill-educated villager could always find someone to read the latest broadsheet to him. Which meant there’d also been ample opportunity for everyone along the route to discuss all the inequities of the Charisian heretics about to be found—briefly—in their midst. And as they’d drawn gradually closer to Twyngyth, Zhu had noticed a steadily rising level of vituperation and hatred in the broadsheets nailed to the milestones they’d passed along the way.

  I wonder how much of that is the Ahlverez family’s doing? he thought. From everything I’ve heard, they wanted the Dohlarans to string these bastards up for what happened to Duke Malikai at Rock Point! And they know we’ve got our hands on “Emperor” Cayleb’s flag captain from that battle, too. I’ll bet they really want to get their hands on him! Stupid of them, of course—nothing they could do to him would be a patch on what the Inquisition’s got waiting in Zion. But none of these damned Dohlarans seem overly blessed with logic.

  On the other hand, the Inquisition wanted to make sure it got its hands on Gwylym Manthyr. It wouldn’t thank Tahrlsahn—or Captain Walysh Zhu—if it didn’t, and Zhu rather suspected the Grand Inquisitor himself would make his displeasure known if that happened, even if Tahrlsahn was one of his favorites.

  “Forgive me, Father Vyktyr,” he said after a moment, “but I’m a little concerned over the prisoners’ security.” He’d started to use the word “safety” but stopped himself in time.

  “What do you mean?” Tahrlsahn’s eyes narrowed.

  “Twyngyth is a larger city than any we’ve stopped in so far, Father,” Zhu said in his calmest, most reasonable tone. “The crowds will be a lot thicker, and we’ll be inside the city proper, surrounded by buildings and narrow streets.”

  “And your point is, Captain?” Tahrlsahn prompted impatiently.

  “As I’m sure you’re aware, Father, the natural anger heresy always arouses seems to be burning especially high here in Malikai. I imagine that has a lot to do with what happened to Duke Malikai at the Battle of Rock Point. What I’m afraid of is that someone carried away by that anger might feel compelled to take God’s justice into his own hands.”

  “What do you mean ‘carried away’? Carried away how?”

  Zhu wasn’t even tempted to roll his eyes, but he found himself wishing—for far from the first time—that Father Myrtan was in command of the convoy. Tahrlsahn’s burning hatred for any heretic seemed to get in the way of his logical processes from time to time.

  Like every time he thinks a
bout them at all! the captain thought dryly.

  “Father, it’s my understanding that we’re supposed to deliver the heretics alive and intact to the Inquisition in Zion.” Zhu’s rising inflection and raised eyebrows made the statement a politely phrased question, and Tahrlsahn nodded impatiently.

  “What I’m afraid of, Father, is that feelings are running so high here in Twyngyth that someone’s likely to stick a knife into one of them if he gets the opportunity. And in a built-up area like a city, there’s a lot better chance that if some kind of mob mentality builds, they’d be able to rush my men and get through to the heretics. In that case, we could lose dozens of them, Father, in addition to the ones we’re losing from … natural attrition. We’ve already lost eight since leaving Gorath; at that rate, we’ll be lucky to get twenty of them as far as Zion to face the Inquisition.” Zhu was afraid he might be being dangerously blunt, but he saw no other option. “I simply don’t want to lose any of them here by allowing the crowds to get too dense or too close to the wagons.”

  Tahrlsahn glared at him for a moment, but then his eyes narrowed, and Zhu could almost see the wheels inside his brain beginning to turn at last. Apparently the captain had finally found an argument Father Myrtan’s appeals to The Book of Pasquale and the Holy Writ had failed to present.

  “Very well, Captain Zhu,” the upper-priest finally said. “I’ll leave the security arrangements in your hands. Mind you, I want the Dohlarans to have ample opportunity to bear witness to what happens to heretics! I’m firm on that point. But you’re probably right that letting them too close to the wagons would constitute an unnecessary additional risk. I’ll send a messenger ahead to tell the city authorities we need to clear one of their larger market squares as a place to bivouac overnight. Then we’ll set up a perimeter of—What? Fifteen yards? Twenty?—around the wagons themselves.”

  “With your approval, Father, I’d feel more comfortable with twenty.”