How Firm a Foundation

by David Weber

  He raised his eyebrows, and Yairley heard something suspiciously like a snort of amusement from Zhastrow Tymkyn’s direction.

  “Yes, Sir. I think I’d agree with that,” the newly promoted admiral replied.

  “I’m glad to hear that. Because, next month, you’re going to help me take advantage of that little fact. In fact, you’re going to be carrying my dispatches to Admiral Shain ahead of the rest of the fleet … and I’m sending some new ships with you. Which is why you got that memo about the high-angle guns you were wondering about.”

  Rock Point smiled, and this time there was no humor at all in the expression.

  .IV.

  Royal College, Tellesberg Palace, City of Tellesberg, Kingdom of Old Charis

  Dr. Rahzhyr Mahklyn looked up as someone knocked on his office door.

  “Yes?”

  “Father Paityr is here, Doctor,” his senior assistant, Dairak Bowave, announced through the closed door.

  “Ah! Excellent, Dairak! Please show the Father in!”

  Mahklyn stood behind his desk, beaming as Bowave escorted Paityr Wylsynn into his office. It was the first time the intendant had actually visited the Royal College, and Mahklyn knew most of his colleagues were a little nervous about his decision to do so now. They’d skirted the edge of what Mother Church deemed acceptable knowledge for so long that having the official keeper of the Inquisition in Old Charis actually in their midst was … disconcerting.

  Of course, those worried colleagues of his didn’t know everything he knew about Paityr Wylsynn.

  “Come in, Father!” Mahklyn held out his right hand. “It’s an honor to welcome you.”

  “And it’s a privilege to be here, Doctor.” Wylsynn took the proffered hand, and Mahklyn surveyed the younger man’s expression carefully. Wylsynn was obviously aware of his intense regard, but he only looked back, meeting the older man’s eyes levelly. “I’ve been away from my own office too long,” he continued, “but there are times when anyone needs a bit of a sabbatical. A retreat to think things through and settle oneself back down, you might say.”

  “I understand entirely, Father. Please, have a seat.”

  Mahklyn escorted Wylsynn to the armchairs arranged across a small table from one another near one of the large office’s windows. They sat and Bowave set a tray on the table between them. It held two tall, delicate glasses and a crystal pitcher beaded with moisture, and Wylsynn’s eyebrows rose as he beheld it.

  “A sinful luxury, I know, Father,” Mahklyn said wryly. “For decades I was perfectly happy living a properly ascetic scholarly existence in the old College down by the docks. Then it burned to the ground and His Majesty insisted we relocate to the Palace. Little did I realize that would be just the first crack in my armor of austerity!”

  He poured chilled lemonade into the glasses, and ice—actual ice, Wylsynn realized—tapped musically against the inside of the pitcher.

  “His Majesty insists we take advantage of his hospitality,” the doctor continued, handing a glass to his guest, “which includes the royal icehouse. I tried manfully, I assure you, to resist the temptation of that sinful luxury, but my younger granddaughter Eydyth discovered its existence and I was doomed. Doomed, I tell you!”

  Wylsynn laughed and accepted the glass, then sipped gracefully. Ice and icehouses had been much more easily come by in the cool northern land of his birth than in excessively sunny Charis. There was ice on the very tallest mountains even here in Charis and even in summer, but getting to it was far more difficult, and there were no conveniently frozen winter lakes from which it might be harvested, either. That made it a scandalously pricey luxury in Tellesberg.

  “Will there be anything else, Doctor?” Bowave inquired, and Mahklyn shook his head.

  “No, Dairak. I think the Father and I will manage just fine. If I do need anything, I’ll call, I promise.”

  “Of course.” Bowave bobbed a bow in Mahklyn’s direction, then bowed rather more formally to Wylsynn. “Father Paityr,” he said, and withdrew, closing the door behind him.

  “This is good,” Wylsynn said, taking another swallow of lemonade. “And I do appreciate the ice, although it’s really too expensive to be wasting on me.”

  “That’s what I told Eydyth when she discovered it,” Mahklyn said dryly. “Unfortunately, young Zhan was in the vicinity at the time.” He rolled his eyes. “I think Princess Mahrya’s a very good influence on him in most ways, but he’s acquiring the habit of largesse, especially when she’s looking and he can impress her with it. Mind you, she isn’t impressed by it—she’s too much her parents’ daughter for that sort of nonsense—but he doesn’t realize that yet, and he’s a teenager who’s discovered just how attractive his fiancée actually is. So when he heard me telling Eydyth I thought it would be a bad idea, he insisted we make use of it. And, to be fair, if you pack it in enough sawdust you can actually ship ice all the way from Chisholm to Tellesberg in the middle of summer and get here with as much as half of your original cargo. Which, given the price in Tellesberg, is enough to make a very healthy profit!”

  “I suspect there’s going to be an even stronger market for ice-makers in Charis than there is for air-conditioning, when the time finally comes,” Paitryk said, looking across at his host.

  Mahklyn sat very still for a moment, looking back at him thoughtfully. Then he gave a slow nod.

  “I imagine there is, Father. And we could probably actually get away with a compressed-air plant to manufacture it without worrying about the Proscriptions. I’m sure Edwyrd could even power it with one of his waterwheels.”

  “Please, Doctor.” Wylsynn closed his eyes and shuddered theatrically. “I can already hear the Temple Loyalists’ outrage! Much as I like cold drinks, I’d really prefer to avoid that battle if we can. After all,” his eyes opened again, meeting Mahklyn’s, “we’re going to have so many others to fight first.”

  “True.” Mahklyn nodded again. “May I ask how you feel about that, Father?”

  “About kicking over the traces where the Proscriptions are concerned?” Wylsynn gave a short, sharp crack of laughter. “That doesn’t bother me at all, trust me! Not now. But if you mean how do I feel about discovering the truth about the Church and the ‘Archangels,’ that’s a bit more complicated. There’s still a part of me that expects the Rakurai to come crashing through the window any minute now for my daring to even question, far less reject, the will of Langhorne. And there’s another part of me that wants to march straight into the Cathedral next Wednesday and proclaim the truth to the entire congregation. And there’s another part of me that’s just plain pissed off at God for letting all this happen.”

  He paused, and then sat back in his chair and laughed again, far more gently, as he saw Mahklyn’s expression.

  “Sorry, Doctor. I imagine that was a little more answer than you really wanted.”

  “Not so much more than I wanted as more than I expected, Father. I’m relieved to hear you’re angry, though. It certainly beats some other reactions I could think of … as long as the anger’s directed at the right targets, of course.”

  “It took me a while to accept that same conclusion, Doctor, and I won’t pretend I’m as comfortable as I was back in the days of my blissful ignorance. But I’ve also discovered at least a shadow of Archbishop Maikel’s serenity lurking in the depths of my own soul, although it’s going to be a while yet before I can be as … tranquil about all of this as he is. On the other hand, I realized I wouldn’t be angry at God as I am unless I still believed in Him, which was something of a relief. And along the way, I’ve also discovered my belief is even more precious, in some ways, because it no longer rests upon the incontrovertible proof of the historical record. I almost suspect that that’s the true secret of the Archbishop’s faith.”

  “In what way?” Mahklyn asked with genuine interest. He’d found himself slipping into what Owl’s library records would have described as a Deist mindset, and he didn’t know whether or not to envy
Maikel Staynair’s fiercer, more personal faith.

  “The real secret of the strength of Archbishop Maikel’s faith is almost absurdly simple,” Wylsynn told him. “In fact, he’s explained it to us dozens of times in sermons, every time he tells us there comes a point at which any child of God has to decide what he truly believes. Decide what he believes, Doctor. Not simply accept, not simply never bother to question, based on ‘what everyone knows’ or on The Testimonies or ‘the Archangel Chihiro’s’ Holy Writ, but decide for himself.” The young man who’d been a Schuelerite shrugged. “It’s that simple and that hard, and I’m not quite there yet.”

  “Neither am I,” Mahklyn confessed.

  “I suspect very few people in history, whether here on Safehold or back on Old Terra, have ever matched our Archbishop’s personal faith,” Wylsynn pointed out.

  “A personal faith which, thank God, doesn’t prevent him from being one of the most pragmatic men I’ve ever met,” Mahklyn said.

  “As long as we’re not talking about something which would compromise his own principles, at least,” Wylsynn agreed.

  “And you feel the same way?” Mahklyn asked quietly.

  “And I’m trying very hard to feel the same way.” Wylsynn quirked a brief smile. “I’m afraid I haven’t quite decided where my principles are going to settle now that I’ve learned the truth. In fact, I’m afraid I’m discovering that I have very few principles—or hesitations, at least—when it comes to considering things to do to those bastards in Zion.”

  “I can work with that,” Mahklyn said with an answering and far colder smile. “Of course, I’ve been thinking about it for a while longer than you have.”

  “True, but I have a very personal motivation for seeing every one of them dangling at the end of a rope, just like those butchers in Ferayd.”

  “By the oddest turn of fate, I believe that’s precisely what Their Majesties and Captain Athrawes have in mind, Father.”

  “In that case, why don’t we see what we could do to expedite that moment?” Wylsynn’s naturally warm eyes were as cold as the gray ice of Hsing-wu’s Passage in winter. “I’ve been giving some thought to Commander Mahndrayn and Baron Seamount’s more recent ideas, and even more to Master Howsmyn’s. I don’t believe the Baron’s notions are going to present any serious problems, but Master Howsmyn’s getting close to the Proscriptions’ limits. I can probably cover his interest in hydraulics by an extension of my attestation for his accumulators, but his proposed steam engines clearly cross the line into exactly the sort of knowledge Jwo-jeng and Langhorne wanted to make certain we’d never go anywhere near.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “In my present mood, that’s actually a powerful recommendation for building the things tomorrow,” Wylsynn said dryly. “Nonetheless, we’re obviously going to have problems if we don’t prepare the ground carefully. Fortunately, all the years I spent condemning intendants and inquisitors who connived at getting around the Proscriptions in return for the proper considerations gave me all sorts of examples of logic-chopping when I approached my new task, and it occurred to me that if I simply borrowed a page from their book, the steam engine problem might not be so insurmountable as I’d first thought.”

  “Indeed?” Mahklyn leaned back and raised his eyebrows hopefully.

  “Of course not!” Wylsynn assured him. “It’s very simple, Doctor! We’ve used steam and pressure cookers since the Creation in things like food preparation and preservation. There’s nothing new or tainted about generating steam! Who could possibly object to someone’s doing that? And when you come right down to it, producing steam the way Master Howsmyn is proposing is simply a way of generating wind pressure on demand, isn’t it? Of course it is! And we’ve used windmills since the Creation, too. For that matter, wind is one of Jwo-jeng’s allowable trinity of wind, water, and muscle! So except for the novel notion of making wind where and how it’s most urgently required, I see no barrier under the Proscriptions to the development of Master Howsmyn’s new device.”

  He leaned back in his own chair and smiled broadly at his host.

  “Do you?” he asked.

  .V.

  King’s Harbor, Helen Island; Navy Powder Mill #3, Big Tirian Island; and Tellesberg Palace, City of Tellesberg Kingdom of Old Charis

  “Have you got those new fuse notes for Master Howsmyn, Urvyn?”

  “Right here, Sir,” Urvyn Mahndrayn said patiently, tapping the leather briefcase clasped under his left arm with his right forefinger. “And I also have the improved high-angle gun sketches, and the memoranda High Admiral Rock Point wants me to deliver, and the memo from Baron Ironhill, and your invitation for him to dine with you when he visits Tellesberg next month.” He smiled at his superior and raised his eyebrows innocently. “Was there anything else, Sir?”

  “You,” Sir Ahlfryd Hyndryk, Baron Seamount, said severely, swivel chair squeaking as he leaned back, the better to contemplate the commander, “are an insubordinate young whelp, aren’t you?”

  “Never, Sir!” Mahndrayn shook his head, expression more innocent than ever. “How could you possibly think such a thing?”

  “After working with you for the last couple of years?” Seamount snorted. “Trust me, it’s easy.”

  “I’m shocked to hear you say that, Sir,” Mahndrayn said mournfully.

  “Disappointed if I didn’t, more likely!”

  Mahndrayn only grinned, and Seamount chuckled.

  Sunlight poured into the baron’s office. He had a marvelous view out over King’s Harbor from his windows, although some people might have felt just a little uncomfortable knowing that the fortress’ main powder magazine was directly underneath them. The slate wall panels were covered with their usual smudgy chalked notations, at least a quarter of which were in Mahndrayn’s handwriting, not Seamount’s. Stacks of memos and folders of correspondence littered the baron’s desk in seeming confusion, although Mahndrayn knew they were actually carefully organized.

  “Are you sure my absence isn’t going to knock anything off schedule, Sir?” the commander asked more seriously, and Seamount shrugged.

  “I realize this may come as another shock to you, Commander, but I’d been looking after myself on my own for quite some time before you happened along. I imagine I’ll be able to fumble through somehow until you get back,” he said dryly.

  Mahndrayn nodded, although he and Seamount both knew he’d been gradually assuming more and more responsibilities as Seamount’s assistant and executive officer—what High Admiral Lock Island had called a “chief of staff.” And a trip to Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s massive foundry complex wasn’t exactly a jaunt to Tellesberg, either; it was well over eight hundred miles, which would take a full five-day each way. That was going to take a serious bite out of Mahndrayn’s usual schedule, and a lot of additional work was going to end up dumped back on Seamount’s desk while he was away.

  “I think we’ve got everything covered,” the baron went on, more serious now. “I won’t pretend it’s not going to be a pain, and I don’t want you away any longer than you have to be, but we’ve been letting stuff that needs to be handed off to Master Howsmyn pile up too long because both of us were too busy to make the trip. If we’re going to meet High Admiral Rock Point’s schedule, we can’t afford to let that go on. Which means one of us has to go, since no one else is cleared for all of this material, and I just plain can’t. Which is why—”

  He gestured at the briefcase under Mahndrayn’s arm, and the commander nodded again.

  “Yes, Sir. I think Master Howsmyn and I can probably cover everything in one day. And I promise I’ll get back here as quickly as I can.”

  “Quickly is good, but the whole point of this trip is to give Master Howsmyn the chance to ask any questions he needs to face-to-face. Don’t rush your meeting with him. Better to take an extra day, or even two or three, than for one of us to have to make the same trip again.”

  “I understand, Sir.”

&
nbsp; “I’m sure you do. And give your cousin my regards.”

  “I will, Sir.”

  “Good. Now go.” Seamount pointed at the office door, and Mahndrayn smiled, saluted, and obeyed the command.

  * * *

  “Urvyn! This is a surprise,” Trai Sahlavahn said as the yeoman ushered his cousin into his office. “I didn’t know you were coming!”

  “I’m on my way to see Master Howsmyn,” Mahndrayn explained, crossing the office to clasp Sahlavahn’s offered forearm. “Big Tirian’s not very far out of the way, so I thought I’d drop by.”

  “I see.”

  Sahlavahn tilted his head to one side, regarding his cousin speculatively. Mahndrayn’s intensity and energy frequently fooled people into thinking he was impetuous, or at least impulsive, but Sahlavahn knew better. While he might be prone to rushing off in two or three directions at once, the commander had a remarkable ability to keep everything he was doing organized, balanced, and far more tightly scheduled than anyone else realized. The term “multi-tasking” was one of many which had been lost on Safehold, but if there’d been anyone on the planet it applied to, it would have been Urvyn Mahndrayn. That was something he had in common with Baron Seamount, which was one of the many reasons the two of them complemented one another so well.

  But it was also the reason Sahlavahn rather doubted his cousin had “just decided” to drop in on him. True, Big Tirian Island did lie about midway between Helen Island and Port Ithmyn, but Mahndrayn wasn’t the sort to take time off for personal visits when he was on official business. Besides, he and Sahlavahn exchanged letters on a regular basis, so it wasn’t as if they had a lot of private family matters to catch up on.