How Firm a Foundation

by David Weber

  He turned away from the burning shop, reaching into his satchel, and heard a shrill scream. He looked up just in time to see three or four more young men—his age or a little older—run down a girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. They trapped her against the wall of a building, and she cowered back against it, head darting around frantically, looking for any escape. Then she made a desperate dash for an alley mouth, but one of her pursuers caught up with her first. She cried out again, in mingled terror and pain as he wrapped his hand in her hair and jerked her off her feet. Naigail heard her crying out—begging, pleading, imploring anyone to help her—and he smiled. He watched them dragging her by the hair down the alley where the little Charisian bitch had thought she might find safety, and then he drew another bottle from his satchel, lit the rag, and threw it through another shop window.

  * * *

  “Behind me—now!” Sailys Trahskhat snapped.

  Myrahm Trahskhat looked up, then gasped and stumbled back behind her husband. She clutched three-year-old Sindai, their youngest in her arms, while seven-year-old Pawal clung to her skirts, their eyes huge with terror as the bedlam thundered around them. Thirteen-year-old Mahrtyn pushed himself in front of her, behind her father, his face white and frightened but determined. Behind the boy, Myrahm darted her head around, looking for any escape, but with two small children, outdistancing pursuit was out of the question.

  Trahskhat knew exactly what was going through his wife’s mind, and his own terror was as deep as her own. Not for himself, but for her and the children. Only he couldn’t let that terror paralyze him, and he glared at the three men sauntering arrogantly towards them. He knew two of them—longshoremen, like himself, but definitely not Charisians, and both of them with knives thrust through their belts. The third was a stranger, but he carried a sword and there was a cruel, eager glitter in his eyes.

  “Stay with your mother, Mahrtyn,” he said quietly, his voice iron with command, never taking his own eyes from the other men. “Whatever else happens, look after your mother and the babies.”

  “Well, well, well,” the sword-armed man called mockingly. “What do we have here?”

  “Pretty wife you’ve got there, Trahskhat,” one of the longshoremen said, reaching down and rubbing his crotch suggestively while his fellow leered and drew the foot-long knife from his belt, testing its edge with a gloating thumb. “Gonna enjoy showing her a really good time.”

  Trahskhat’s face tightened, and he brought up the baseball bat. He’d had that bat for more years than he could remember. He’d broken plenty of others over the years, but never this one. It had always been his lucky bat, and he’d brought it with him from Tellesberg when he left the Krakens behind with the rest of his heretical homeland.

  Somehow, he didn’t feel lucky today.

  “Ooooh! What’s he gonna do with the big bad baseball bat?” the sword-armed man taunted in a high-pitched falsetto. He raised his own weapon, smoky light gleaming on its point. “Come on, baseball man! Show us what you’ve got.”

  “Sailys?” Myrahm’s voice was frightened, and he heard his younger children weeping in terror. But he never took his eyes from the men in front of him.

  “Now!” the swordsman shouted, and the hunting pack charged.

  Sailys Trahskhat had a lifetime professional batting average of .302. He’d always been a strong man, but not especially fast, so he’d been forced to hit for power rather than rely on speed on the bases. Over the years, he’d developed rather amazing bat speed, and the longshoreman with the drawn knife made the mistake of getting a little in front of the others.

  The same bat which had hit twenty-three home runs in Sailys Trahskhat’s last season with the Tellesberg Krakens hit him squarely in the forehead with a terrible crunching, crushing, squashing sound. He didn’t even scream; he simply flew backward, knife spinning away through the air, blood spraying from his shattered forehead, and Trahskhat stepped to his left.

  The baseball bat slashed over and around in a flat, vicious figure-eight. The other longshoreman saw it coming. His eyes flared with sudden panic as his right hand fumbled frantically at the hilt of his knife and the other arm rose to fend off the blow. But he was too slow, and the panic in his eyes disappeared as they went unfocused and forever blank as the end of the bat caved in his right temple with contemptuous ease.

  That quickly, that suddenly, Trahskhat found himself facing only one opponent, and the swordsman looked down at the two corpses sprawled untidily in the street. His eyes darted back up to Trahskhat and the blood-dripping bat poised in the big Charisian’s powerful hands, and Trahskhat smiled at him.

  “That’s what I’m going to do with the big bad baseball bat, you bastard,” he said, all the resentment and anger he’d felt since coming to Siddar City roaring up inside him with his terror for his family’s safety. “You want a piece of me? A piece of my family? You bring it on, goddamn you! You bring it on!”

  The swordsman stared at him, then stepped back, retreating. But it was only a feint. The instant Trahskhat’s bat started to dip, the man threw himself forward again.

  Yet he wasn’t the only one who’d been capable of feinting. As he came forward, the bat which had been waiting the entire time came up again, arcing from below belt level, catching his sword on the flat of the blade and flinging it to one side, then crunching into the underside of his jaw. The swordsman screamed, teeth and blood flying. He dropped the sword, clutching at his shattered face with both hands as he stumbled the rest of the way forward, and Trahskhat stepped out of his path. The man lurched, starting to go to his knees, and that terrible baseball bat slammed into the back of his skull like the Rakurai of Langhorne.

  He hit the pavement in a puddle of blood, and Trahskhat looked down at him, breathing hard.

  “Threaten my family, will you?” he hissed, and kicked the dead man in the ribs. Then he looked at his wife and children. “Are you all right?” he demanded.

  Myrahm nodded mutely, her eyes huge, shaking with terror and reaction. Mahrtyn, he saw, had already pounced on the knife his first victim had lost, and if the foot of steel shook in his hand, his eyes were grim and determined. Those eyes were shocked by what they’d just seen, but they met his father’s levelly, and Trahskhat’s heart filled with pride.

  And then young Pawal, still clinging to his mother’s skirt with one hand, pointed with the other.

  “Daddy,” he said, seven-year-old voice quivering with fear and yet reaching for some comforting familiarity in a world which had gone insane. “Daddy, you broke your bat!”

  * * *

  “Come on!” Major Borys Sahdlyr barked. “We’re behind schedule already!”

  “So what?” Kail Kaillyt shot back. He waved his sword at the smoke belching from burning shops and tenements, the motionless bodies littering the streets and sidewalks, and laughed drunkenly. “This is the most fun we’ve had in years! Give the lads a little slack!”

  Sahdlyr glared at him, but Kaillyt only looked back at him unrepentantly. The major’s second-in-command was intoxicated with violence and the release of long-held hatred, and in some ways that was worse than anything wine or whiskey might have produced.

  Damn Father Saimyn! Sahdlyr thought bitterly, even though he knew he shouldn’t. But still.…

  He made himself draw a deep breath of smoky air. As one of the handful of Inquisition Guardsmen who’d been smuggled into Siddar City as part of the planning for the Sword of Schueler, Sahdlyr had done his best to instill some sort of discipline into the volunteers Father Saimyn and Laiyan Bahzkai were recruiting. Unfortunately, his superiors had been too enthralled by Father Saimyn’s reports to listen to his own warnings that the loyal sons of Mother Church were far more enthusiastic than organized … or experienced. It was one thing to smuggle in weapons; it was quite another to train civilians in their use. Even people like Kaillyt, who’d served as a member of the Capital Militia, had strictly limited training compared to their regular army counterparts.
<
br />   Nor had it been possible for Sahdlyr to rectify those shortcomings. Actually training any large body of men required space and time, and it wasn’t something which could be done in secret in the middle of a Shan-wei-damned city. He’d done his best, but the unfortunate truth was that he’d been largely restricted to lecturing Father Saimyn’s “officers” on theory, and that was no substitute for hands-on time working with their weapons and their troops. He’d deeply envied his fellows who’d been sent to less citified parts of the operation. Scattered around the estates of Temple Loyalists in the Republic’s central and western provinces, where farmers, foresters, miners, and rural craftsmen already resented the wealth of the eastern provinces’ urban populations, they’d been able to actually drill the men they were responsible for leading. They’d been able to put them together and train them as units, accustomed to taking orders and obeying them.

  Sahdlyr had warned Father Saimyn—and even Father Zohannes—that without the same opportunity, he and his subordinate commanders were unlikely to retain control of their units here in the capital when the day finally came. It wasn’t the men’s motivation he mistrusted. It wasn’t even their willingness to take orders; it was their … reliability. They’d never been given the chance to acquire the habit of obeying their officers when the violence actually began.

  But had Father Saimyn listened? Of course he hadn’t! And neither had Father Zohannes. Or Sahdlyr was confident neither of them had allowed it to color any of their reports to Archbishop Wyllym or the Grand Inquisitor, at any rate. And Father Saimyn was probably—probably—right that it wasn’t going to matter in the end.

  It had become apparent over the last few five-days that the government had started to realize, at least dimly, that trouble was brewing. They obviously hadn’t guessed how deep their danger truly was, however, or they’d have taken more precautions. True, Daryus Parkair’s decision to empty most of the Capital Militia’s arsenals and send the weapons to be held under guard at Fort Raimyr, the main Army base north of the city, had deprived the insurgents of arms Father Saimyn had assumed would be available. But Fort Raimyr was fifteen miles from the capital and the Army was understrength at the moment. Despite a few belated troop movements, there couldn’t be more than five thousand men stationed at Raimyr, and they were peacetime soldiers with a peacetime mentality. They’d need time to get themselves organized and move, and they’d be badly outnumbered if even two-thirds of the men Father Saimyn had promised would join the insurgency actually turned up.

  There was time, Sahdlyr told himself, and so far the uprising’s sheer suddenness and ferocity were carrying everything before them, but it was messy. And it was throwing him behind schedule. He should already have reached Constitution Square and the Lord Protector’s Palace, and here he was instead, trying to drag his men away from the arson and looting—and, undoubtedly, rape, he thought bleakly, looking at a half-naked young woman lying sprawled in death almost at his feet—going on throughout the Charisian Quarter.

  Damn it, Father Saimyn and Bahzkai had other groups poised and ready for that part of the operation, and they were doing it. The smoke and screams—and bodies—were proof enough of that! He was supposed to be making certain Stohnar and his accursed minions didn’t manage to escape. The last thing they needed was for those bastards to get away to someplace like Charis and try to foment trouble back here on the mainland from their safe, comfortable exile!

  “They can have all the slack they want once we’ve got Stohnar and his Council in the bag!” he snapped now, glaring at Kaillyt. “Are they here to do God’s will, or simply to steal anything they can’t burn?!”

  The question came out with deliberate, sneering contempt, and Kaillyt’s eyes flashed with anger. Which was exactly what Sahdlyr had wanted.

  “We’re not just a bunch of thieves!” he shot back furiously.

  “No?” Sahdlyr matched him glare for glare for a moment, then allowed his own expression to soften … slightly. “I don’t think you are,” he said, “but that’s what we’re acting like, and we’ve got more important things to do!” He held the other man’s eyes for another heartbeat, then hardened his voice again. “So let’s get them moving again, shall we?”

  Kaillyt looked around, as if truly seeing the confusion and the chaos for the first time. Then he gave himself a visible shake and looked back at Sahdlyr.

  “Yes, Sir!” His sword flipped up in salute. “I’ll do that little thing.”

  He turned away and started bellowing orders at their smaller unit commanders, and Sahdlyr nodded in satisfaction.

  * * *

  “Langhorne!” Greyghor Stohnar muttered, standing on the balcony of one of the Lord Protector’s Palace’s ornate towers.

  The official seat of the Republic’s government had never been designed as a serious fortification. Its defense was the Siddarmarkian Army and its pikemen, not stone and mortar. Now, as he watched smoke rising over the city—and not just over the Charisian Quarter, any longer—he found himself wishing its architects had given just a little more attention to stopping blood-maddened street mobs short of the Chamber of the Senate and the Hall of Records.

  And don’t forget about short of your own hide, Greyghor, he reminded himself grimly.

  “Where the hell are they all coming from?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Henrai Maidyn admitted. The Chancellor pointed out across the city at the scores of smoke columns rising from the Charisian Quarter. “I didn’t think they had enough manpower to do that and come after the Palace.” He shook his head, and his expression was grim.

  Stohnar nodded. Part of him wanted to lash out at Maidyn and point out that it had been his job to determine what was actually coming, but it would have been pointless. It would have been unfair, too, for that matter. The Chancellor had brought Stohnar regular reports, and the Lord Protector had agreed with his conclusions. Only it appeared they’d both been wrong.

  “We should have detailed more troops to protect the Palace,” Maidyn continued. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who—”

  “It’s not ‘your fault,’ Henrai,” Stohnar interrupted. “I agreed with you and Samyl that we had to give priority to protecting the Quarter.” He laughed harshly. “Not that it appears we’re doing a lot of good over there, either!”

  “Where the hell is Daryus?” Maidyn demanded, wheeling to glare towards the north. “What the hell is taking him so long?”

  “Probably more of that,” Stohnar replied, gesturing disgustedly at the burning tenements of the Charisian Quarter. “Or more crap like it.” He shrugged angrily. “I was wrong not to go ahead and muster the Regulars right here in the city and the hell with keeping them out at Raimyr.”

  “Without a better indication the wyvern was about to take flight, you couldn’t risk warning—”

  “Spare me the excuses,” Stohnar said wearily.

  Unlike Maidyn, the Lord Protector had risen to regimental command before he left the Army, returned to his native Siddar City, and entered politics. He should have remembered, he told herself. Whatever the arguments in favor of making certain Clyntahn was clearly guilty of the first move, he should have paid more attention to Daryus Parkair’s argument that it was even more important they hang on to the capital in the first place. They could always argue over who’d started what later—assuming they survived to do the arguing—the Seneschal had observed acidly. And nobody who was inclined to believe Clyntahn in the first place would be impressed by any claims the Republic was an innocent victim of the Grand Inquisitor’s lust for vengeance, no matter how truthful they were.

  And I shouldn’t have detailed so many of the troops we do have in the city to protect the Quarter, he told himself even more grimly. He hated to even think thoughts like that, yet there was a cold, bitter edge of truth to it. You wanted to prevent massacres? Well, holding on to the damned capital would have helped a lot in that little endeavor! Instead, you parceled your troops out in tenth-mark packets trying to protect t
he Charisians, and look at it! Accomplished one hell of a lot, didn’t you? Now you’re going to lose both of them!

  He forced himself to straighten his shoulders as he looked down into Constitution Square at the single regiment of pikemen deployed to cover the approaches to the Palace. There weren’t enough of them to cover all the entrances into the square, so they’d been stationed along the huge plaza’s eastern edge to protect the enormous arched gate through the Palace’s ornamental outer wall. The wall would probably help some, but that regiment simply wasn’t big enough to cover its entire length, and then there was that damned, wide-open gate. If enough rioters came storming across the square—

  It’s not as bad as you think it is, Greyghor, he told himself harshly. You don’t have a single reliable report about what’s going on out there. Daryus could be a lot closer than you think he is, and all that smoke is bound to make the situation in the Quarter look worse than it really is. And however many men they may have in the streets, most of the population’s staying home and keeping its head down. It’s not like the entire damned city is really up in arms, so if you can just hang on long enough for Daryus to get here.…

  * * *

  Byrk Raimahn looked back and swore with bitter, savage venom. They’d been lucky so far, but their luck had just run out.

  The outriders of the mob had spotted the small band of refugees he and his grandfather had collected on their flight towards the docks. Part of him had never wanted to slow down for a moment, but he’d been unable to harden his heart enough to ignore the tattered drifts of terrified people—more often than not women or children—who’d clustered around them. He suspected they’d been drawn by his grandparents’ well-to-do appearance and the general aura of composure and command they couldn’t help projecting even in the middle of a murderous riot. But perhaps it had simply been the fact that the Raimahns were obviously going somewhere, not simply fleeing. It certainly couldn’t have been because of how well armed and numerous they were!