by David Weber
“Does that mean you’re buying when we get back to the ship, Sir?” he asked, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk laughed.
“For you?” The lieutenant shook his head. “I’d rather buy water for fish at whiskey prices. It’d cost me less!”
Braisyn’s grin got even bigger, and then he slipped over the side of the boat, hanging on to the gunwale while his feet felt for the bottom.
“Don’t like my beer quite this cold, Sir,” he informed Aplyn-Ahrmahk. “And it’s a mite—Ow!” He yelped, hauling himself higher in the water and shaking his head. “Found the bottom, Sir. Little rocky for my taste!”
“Then next time, keep your shoes on, you stupid bugger!” Stywyrt Mahlyk suggested helpfully.
“Don’t like squelching around in soggy shoes, Cox’in,” Braisyn replied cheerfully.
“Just take us in, Mahlyk,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk said in a tone of exaggerated patience. “Lieutenant Gowain wants us hidden again before sunrise.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Mahlyk said. “Give way all. And you, Braisyn—keep your damned delicate tootsies out of the rocks so you don’t bruise ‘em!”
“Keep that in mind I will, Cox’in,” Braisyn assured him with another grin.
Aplyn-Ahrmahk shook his head, yet the banter between Mahlyk and the members of his boat’s crew was the best possible (and welcome) proof that the men’s morale was doing just fine.
They were just over a hundred and eighty miles up the Sarm River, two-thirds of the way across the sparsely populated Earldom of Charlz, and that was a long, twisty way from the salt water that was a Charisian sailor’s natural element. True, rivers were full of water, but they were also full of rocks, bugs, and shallows where boats had to be dragged across sandbars or portaged around rapids. Fortunately, they hadn’t encountered any waterfalls—yet, at least—but they’d done extraordinarily well to average three miles per hour during the fourteen or fifteen hours of darkness and twilight available to them each day. He was glad they weren’t doing this later in the spring, when the days would be longer, but there were downsides to rowing and sailing your way up an unknown river in the dark … especially for the boat Lieutenant Gowain had decided should scout ahead for the others. They seemed to spend a lot of time hopping in and out of it when it went aground, for example.
Still, everyone seemed cheerful enough so far, and unusually (in Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s experience) everything was actually going according to plan and more or less on schedule.
Which obviously means something’s bound to go wrong sometime soon, he reflected, glancing over his shoulder at the silhouettes of the other, larger boats behind them.
No one had noticed them when they first started upriver. The sun still hadn’t risen when they went rowing past the Sarmouth waterfront, and given the dozens of other boats from the squadron which had been headed towards the waterfront with fell intent, it probably wasn’t too surprising no one had paid them any attention.
As an added touch, Admiral Yairley had ordered the boats repainted in mismatched shades of dirty white, gray, and black, and then scuffed the new paint in ways no Navy boatswain would ever have tolerated. They’d passed several small towns and isolated farms as they headed upstream from Sarmouth, and every time they’d shouted their warning that the Charisian heretics were attacking up the river. Sarmouth was on fire! Sarmouth Keep had been reduced to rubble! Run! Run for your lives, the Charisians are coming!
Frankly, Aplyn-Ahrmahk had thought that particular touch would be too much when Sir Dunkyn came up with it. In fact, it had worked beautifully. It had allowed them to row straight through the daylight hours for the first day and a half and get over a hundred miles upriver without anyone wondering what six ship’s boats were doing that far north of the port.
After that, they’d restricted themselves to the night hours and progress had slowed, but even so—
His thoughts chopped off as something flashed blindingly in the shadows ahead of them. There was a solid, meaty thumping sound and Braisyn grunted explosively, then turned his head and looked up at Aplyn-Ahrmahk with an incredulous expression. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but all that came out was a gush of blood and then he disappeared into the river as his hands released the gunwale.
“Out of the boat!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk heard his own voice bark even before the topman lost his grip. “Cutlasses and tomahawks! No muskets! Move, damn you!”
He was talking to an empty boat by the time he got to “move,” and he heard another bullet “thunk” into the wood as he snatched up his own sword baldric, then rolled over the side into the icy water. They’d gotten closer to the shore, and the water was less than armpit deep, but he crouched, keeping just his head above the surface as he hurriedly slung the baldric over his shoulder.
“Stywyrt, hang on to the painter—don’t you dare lose this boat!” he hissed at the coxswain. “The rest of you—with me!”
More gunshots exploded out of the darkness ahead of them, and he swore silently as he heard screams from farther out on the river. He had no idea who was behind those shots or what in God’s name anyone was doing out here on the riverbank in the middle of nowhere an hour before dawn. What mattered was that the boats on the open river were far more visible than the men hiding in the impenetrable shadows under the willows, alders, and conewood along the bank.
“Stay low!” he commanded, pitching his voice as low as possible. “Keep in the water as long as you can and follow me!”
Wading through ice-cold, neck-deep water would have been a slow, exhausting process even without the current. They couldn’t possibly move as quickly as he wanted to, and with gunshots continuing to crack from the darkness, it seemed to be taking even longer. Then someone in one of the boats managed to begin returning fire, which added the delightful possibility of being shot in the back by their own people. The good news—for Aplyn-Ahrmahk and his people, at least—was that there seemed to be at least three times as many bullets headed out from the bank at the other boats and away from them.
He felt the river bottom underfoot smoothing as it shallowed, more sand mixed among the rocks and gravel, and breathed a silent prayer of thanks as the footing improved. He’d picked his destination more by instinct than by anything resembling deliberate thought, but that instinct had served him well, he realized. He and his boat crew were coming up on the river side of a huge, fallen conewood trunk that screened them completely from anyone on shore.
He stopped for a moment, looking around, making sure the rest of his people were with him. There were only ten of them, and he bared his teeth while the muskets continued to fire out of the darkness. He saw the blink-lizard glow of slow matches scattered under the trees, and his eyes narrowed.
“Matchlocks, boys,” he told them in a low voice. “Nice little lights to help us find the bastards, and it sounds like they’re loading loose powder. They’re going to be slow. Get in close and rip their guts out, got it?”
A chorus of growls answered him, and he nodded sharply.
“And while you’re at it, howl like you’re all damned Marines!” he said with a savage grin. “Now—after me, lads!”
His boat crew exploded out of the water, vaulting over the conewood trunk with naked steel in hand. Aplyn-Ahrmahk carried his sword in his right hand and a wicked, spike-backed boarding tomahawk in his left, and the high, baying warcry of the Imperial Marines came with him. It sounded as if there were at least fifty of them, he thought wildly, and then a figure loomed up in front of him.
A cavalryman, he thought, taking in the dimly seen helmet. But armed with a matchlock. That meant a dragoon, not a lancer or a hussar, probably, and Delferahkan dragoons didn’t have breastplates, and that meant—
Charisian cutlasses had chisel points, as well adapted to thrusting as to slashing, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk felt the jerking quiver of someone else’s muscles transmitted up the blade as he drove a foot of steel into the man’s chest. The dragoon shrieked, clutching at the impaling blade, but Aplyn-Ahrmahk kicked him away and went chargi
ng past him, screaming like a madman just like the rest of his boat crew.
The dragoons who’d been waiting in ambush reared up from their firing positions, turning towards the demons who’d suddenly materialized in their midst, and shocked astonishment turned almost instantly into panic. It was impossible for either side to know how many enemies it actually faced, and surprise—and fear—didn’t lend themselves well to making accurate estimates.
Aplyn-Ahrmahk hacked down another opponent. A third man came at him desperately, matchlock clubbed, completely forgetting the sword at his own side in his panic. The lieutenant ducked under the musket, but the dragoon was on the wrong side for his cutlass. The tomahawk lashed out, coming up from below, driving its sharpened, spur-like hook up through the man’s jaw and into the roof of his mouth. The Delferahkan’s scream chopped off in a hot spray of blood, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk lost his grip on the suddenly slippery tomahawk as the body fell.
Another dragoon loomed up—this one an officer who’d remembered his sword. It was several inches longer than Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s cutlass, but the lieutenant had served under Sir Dunkyn Yairley. That meant every midshipman (and ensign) spent a solid hour at sword drill every single day, and the instincts Sylvyst Raigly had helped pound into Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s muscle memory took over. He twisted away from the Delferahkan’s frantic, clumsy thrust and his left hand lashed out, capturing the wrist of the dragoon’s sword arm. The Delferahkan was bigger, taller, and broader-shouldered than Aplyn-Ahrmahk, but the lieutenant’s wiry strength and the advantage of surprise were enough to shove the other man’s arm almost straight up as they slammed together, chest-to-chest. At which point Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s cutlass drove into his belly with all the elegance of a meat ax.
The officer went down with a bubbling scream, and suddenly there was no more fighting. Instead, there were only moans, sobs, and—in the distance—the thud and thunder of galloping hooves disappearing into the darkness.
“Anybody with a prisoner, hang on to him!” Aplyn-Ahrmahk barked, and then turned back to the river.
* * *
“That’s the best I can do, Sir,” Lywys Taibor said. The healer’s mate looked drawn and weary, and well he should. The ambush had cost the boat party heavily, with five dead and twice that many wounded. Now he stood up, rubbing his back, and looked glumly down at Lieutenant Fairghas Gowain, who lay unconscious on the rough pad made of captured Delferahkan saddle blankets.
“How soon is he going to wake up?” Aplyn-Ahrmahk asked. He felt as tired as the healer’s mate looked, but he couldn’t afford to admit it.
“Dunno, Sir,” Taibor said honestly. “Head wound like that, he may never wake up. Or he could come to in the next ten minutes. If you want me to guess, probably not for a day or two. And I don’t know if his wits’re going to be wandering when he does come to or not.”
“I see.” Aplyn-Ahrmahk gazed down at the lieutenant for several moments, then patted the healer’s mate on the shoulder. “Thank you,” he said sincerely. “And not just for the prognosis. The lads are lucky they had you along.”
“Did what I could, Sir,” Taibor replied in an exhausted voice. “But I’d be lying if I said I was happy about ’em. Got at least four we need to get to a proper healer fast as we can, or we’ll lose them sure as Shan-wei.”
“Understood.”
Aplyn-Ahrmahk patted him on the shoulder again, then walked to the riverbank and stared out across the cold, clear water.
Lieutenant Gowain, HMS Victorious’ first lieutenant, was in command of the entire operation. But now he was unconscious indefinitely, and Lieutenant Bryndyn Mahgail, the senior Marine, was dead. Which left Lieutenant Aplyn-Ahrmahk—all sixteen years old of him—in command and the next best thing to two hundred miles from the nearest senior officer.
At least they’d taken three of the dragoons alive, and the Delferahkans had been so shocked by the abrupt reversal of their ambush that their tongues had wagged freely. It was also possible the sight of Stywyrt Mahlyk contemplatively sharpening a knife as he smiled evilly in their direction might have had some bearing on their loquaciousness, of course.
Aplyn-Ahrmahk had kept them separated from one another to deprive them of any opportunity to coordinate their stories, yet all three of them had told basically the same tale.
Word of the attack on Sarmouth had spread even faster than Admiral Yairley’s plan had allowed for. Worse, some idiot upriver from the port had actually believed the boat expedition’s warnings that the horrible Charisian heretics were sending an entire invasion fleet up the miserable Sarm River! Aplyn-Ahrmahk couldn’t understand how anybody with the sense to pour piss out of a boot, to borrow one of Mahlyk’s favorite phrases, could have credited that story, but according to all three of their prisoners, one of the Earl of Charlz’ bailiffs had actually believed the Charisians were burning both banks of the river as they advanced deep into the heart of Delferahk. He’d sounded the alarm and sent out parties of dragoons to scout for the invaders.
The one good aspect of the entire comic-opera farce was that the dragoons in question were militiamen, not regulars. The bad news was that this particular lot of them had spotted the Charisian boats the previous evening and shadowed them from shore. Working against the current, the boats were actually slower than the horsemen, which was how the Delferahkans had been able to get into position for the ambush. And an unknown number of them had gotten away. By now, they had to be raising the alarm, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk doubted the number of “Charisian invaders” was going to decline when they started explaining how they’d gotten their asses kicked. Which meant every man the Delferahkans could scrape up would be hunting for his people by late afternoon.
So what did he do? If there were more dragoons available, it wouldn’t be hard for them to repeat this bunch’s tactics. And even if there weren’t, the word had to be going out by semaphore (if it was available) and by runner and courier (if the semaphore wasn’t available) even as he stood here. He knew how important this mission was, but if he continued, the odds were overwhelming that he’d simply lead his own pursuers straight to the people he was supposed to be rescuing. And that didn’t even consider those badly wounded men Taibor had mentioned.
He looked out at the slowly flowing water and tried to think.
.VI.
Sunthorn Mountains and Royal Palace, City of Talkyra, Kingdom of Delferahk
Lazy wings of snow drifted almost silently on the wind sighing among the peaks of the Sunthorn Mountains ninety-odd miles northwest of the city of Talkyra. The temperature hovered at a brisk six degrees below zero on the old Fahrenheit scale, and the stars showing through the cloud rifts overhead were huge and bright … and icy. Technically, it was spring south of the equator, but at these elevations that meant very little, especially in the small, still hours of the morning just after Langhorne’s Watch.
The single Imperial Charisian Guardsman sat in a lotus position atop an ice-crusted boulder. He’d been sitting there for three days now, ever since his conversation with Baron Coris, and there was snow drifted on his hair—and on his skin, for that matter—but he seemed unaware of it. Because he was unaware of it. He’d allowed his body temperature to drop to that of the air about him, and after he’d caught up on some of the SNARC reports he’d been unable to give proper attention to when they first came in and spent a day or so contemplating future possibilities, he’d actually put himself on standby and taken the equivalent of a lengthy nap. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to be wandering around four thousand feet above the permanent snow line to stumble across him while he was “asleep,” and it would probably make Cayleb happy.
And if it didn’t, at least it would offer him a handy bit of ammunition to toss back at the emperor the next time Cayleb decided to lecture him about the need for “down time.”
It wasn’t often Merlin Athrawes had the opportunity to simply sit and think, which made him value those rare chances even more when one of them came along. For the most part, he was far too visible
(aside from those “retreats to meditate” which had become a more frequent part of his life of late) for something like this. If “Seijin Merlin” dropped out of sight, even briefly, people started wondering where he was and what he was up to and, as a general rule, he tried very hard to avoid having people wonder about things like that.
In this instance, however, it was going to be necessary to explain how Captain Athrawes had gotten to the city of Talkyra. Or, to be more accurate, it was going to be necessary to allow time for him to have made the trip. Everyone knew seijins moved in mysterious ways and at speeds few other mortals could match, so the exact details of his travel arrangements could be glossed over. But it still took them at least some time to make a journey of over six thousand miles, which was why he’d left Tellesberg five five-days earlier.
He’d spent most of that time in Nimue’s Cave, going over reports, discussing the events racing towards a violent confrontation in the Republic of Siddarmark with the rest of the inner circle, refining the propaganda Owl’s remotes were distributing across all three continents, catching up on some reading, and working with Owl on a couple of private projects he’d been unable to give proper attention before.
In particular, he and the AI had the Class II VR unit almost up and running. Owl still didn’t have the specifications he needed to build another PICA, and Merlin was no more enthusiastic than he had been about letting the computer take apart his own cybernetic housing to find out how it worked. But at least if he had to, he now had a refuge for his and Nimue’s memories and personality. A Class II VR wasn’t as big and capable as the massive virtual reality computers the Terran Federation had used as “homes” for electronic iterations of their top R&D, military analysts, and pure researchers. It simply didn’t have the memory and the processing power to maintain two or three dozen fully aware personalities in detailed virtual environments indistinguishable (from the inside) from reality. A Class II could handle no more than three or, at the outside, four virtual personalities if it was going to give the VPs a fully developed world in which to live. There’d be plenty of room for Nimue/Merlin, though. If worse came to worst, he could set up housekeeping in there even if “Seijin Merlin” became totally inoperable, and at least one other possible use had occurred to him, although he still wasn’t at all certain that one was going to work out.
