The Savior - eARC

by David Drake

  Abel set his cup down on the table, put his hands around it and twisted it in a circle of its own condensation as he considered what von Hoff had said. “What makes you think I can keep the priests from crawling all over the place?”

  Von Hoff shrugged. “You are very clever, Dashian. More clever than you think. Whatever it was you lost, there is still a lot that remains. I know it. You’ll find a way.”

  For a moment, Abel’s eyes felt the animation of his former personality return. His skin flushed with excitement as if his brain were once again churning out plausible but extremely unlikely explanations for all manner of things. Planets. Stars. Automatic weapons.

  “You’ll give me a free hand?”

  “Completely free.”

  “If the priest threaten to burn us all, you’ll be sure to cry a tear at our funerals?”

  “That would be the least I could do.”

  Abel considered. He felt in as sorry a state as before, but the days of inactivity were taking their toll.

  Von Hoff is right. My destiny, whatever it was before, is now fucked. As long as I’m stationed here I have literally nothing better to do than try to protect Landry Hoster.

  “And if we run across a new sort of weapon in there?”

  Von Hoff laughed and shook his head. “There’s nothing new under the sun, Dashian. If there’s a weapon we don’t know about, we also know that somebody somewhere in this universe has used it.”

  “And if it all does go to shit, you promise me I get the blame. Landry gets off scot-free. Understand, General?”

  “I do, Colonel. You’re terms are accepted.” Von Hoff scraped his chair backward and stood up. “If things do go badly, I give you my word that it will be you who hangs and not Landry Hoster.

  “Thanks.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “I want to know one thing first: Why?”

  “I have a bad feeling about those Blaskoye you saw heading south. When we return to the capital, I want to be absolutely certain we can beat them.”

  “Treville stands in their way.”

  “That’s why I’m not rushing back immediately. We have time, and I want those guns if we can get them to protect Lindron.”

  “You may burn for it.”

  “One way or another, cold hell awaits me,” von Hoff said. “At least this way, I get to save Lindron. I do love that city.”

  “Then I’ll do it.”

  Von Hoff reached over and rapped his knuckles against the anvil. “How many will you want?” he said.

  Abel considered. “The whole Third,” he said. “What we have here is something that used to be called a foundry.”

  “You’ll have them.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Abel said, trying to put some heart into it.

  “You can thank me by pulling yourself out of this funk,” von Hoff said. “You may be special in some manner, Dashian. I know you are. But I can tell you you’re not special in one way: catastrophe is always around the corner for all of us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So suck it up as best you can and come back to the human race.”

  * * *

  Von Hoff was right. In the end it was duty that saw him through and brought him back to some semblance of a rational man. Somehow Center and Raj had been discovered and erased by Zentrum. He was sure of that. So be it. Likely Zentrum had found the capsule from the sky and sent his minions to confiscate or destroy it on-site in Treville.

  What else to do but carry on?

  And as he did so, day after day, his resolve grew. Hardened.

  Zentrum killed my friends. Zentrum is going down.

  He didn’t know how or when, and he didn’t have Center and Raj to guide him. Center and Raj had a complicated goal: to end the Stasis and set Duisberg on a path back to civilization. His own task was much more simple: destroy Zentrum. He didn’t have Center around to give him odds, but he knew they were very low.

  But not zero.

  And he had help. He had other friends, human friends. Timon, whose anger toward his false God had turned to a desire to beg, borrow, or steal an army, go into the Redlands, and bring back the children of Orash. Timon, who had lost an arm—his right arm had indeed come off—but learned how to face the truth, even if the truth meant hating what you once adored.

  Then there was Landry, who had never been troubled by belief in Zentrum to begin with.

  His father, the consummate staff commander.

  And Mahaut. His love. A broker who could make or break a city, key factor in one of the most powerful trading houses in the Land—perhaps the most powerful one. House Jacobson controlled the grain.

  No, his chances weren’t good, but they weren’t zero. He would carry on.

  4

  Orash

  Winter Solstice

  476 Post Tercium

  Landry Hoster emerged from the priest-smith’s forge works looking like a soot-covered harbinger of doom. His face, already a dark hue, was now as black as the night. The whites of his eyes were startling in such a background, as were his teeth.

  “It’s working,” he said. “We can cut off the old barrels and convert them. The guns will be shorter and they’re rifled as muzzle-loaders, but that’s not the problem. Well, there’s a lot of little problems, like flash burn to your stock hand when you use a rifle grip, and the fact that there’s a pretty good chance of a chain fire every once in a while. We’ll work around those.”

  Abel didn’t urge him on. Landry had his own way of getting to a point.

  “The cylinders. We make them with a water-powered hammer. Pound it faster and harder than any man could in a thousand years. They beat the metal into a mold. Problem is, this place was originally set up to turn out four or five in a day. I’ve had the boys working, and we can do considerably more than that once we get the hammers on-line.”

  “How many?”

  “Fifty a day.”

  “That’s…a hell of an improvement, Major.”

  “Not fast enough, though. Not with the timetable you gave me.”

  “Can you speed it up?”

  “If you double my manpower, yes.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “Nothing original added to the process,” Landry said. “The men just need a bit of organization is all, each man doing one and only one task, you see. Some work the hammers, some the lathe and drill…you get the idea. We have the manpower, and these boys don’t imagine themselves master smiths, so nobody’s getting bent out of shape. Plus, they’re used to taking orders.”

  “So this is the ramrod. On a levered hinge. Nice.” Abel looked over the backs of the cylinders. “Major, where are the percussion-cap nipples?”

  “Was wondering when you’d notice that. These are not cap-and-ball firearms. We Cascaders are a little ahead of those Progar smiths in that way, as you know,” Landry said. “I thought it was maybe a useless exercise when you set me to it before, but those 469-grain papyrus cartridges we’ve been turning out in the Bruneberg works do just fine in a revolver barrel.”

  “And they’re not nishterlaub, at least not officially. How much of that sort of ammunition do you reckon we have?”

  “I brought along five thousand rounds here to Progar, just in case. We got them off the Rim, too. And at the armories back in Cascade? I’d estimate we have a good fifty to sixty thousand rounds, all told. We’ve got the process down and can make more quickly, too.”

  “Reloading time with the cartridges is much faster. I know that from experience.”

  “Been giving that some thought, too. You don’t just want six shots.”

  “I sure as cold hell will take them over one shot.”

  “What you really want is continuous fire, right? Guns that are machines, like you explained to me that time.”

  “That’s right. That dream I told you about. One of these days.”

  “What if I could get you closer to that day?”

  “How?”

  “Inter
changeable drop-out cylinders. You finish up your six shots, pull an extracting pin and flip out the cylinder. Then you mount another that’s preloaded with six shots. Gives you twelve shots with barely a pause in fire. Potentially as many shots as you want, depending on how many cylinders you have available or want to carry around with you. They’re heavy little bastards.”

  Abel pulled back the hammer and cocked the rifle. As he did so, the cylinder rotated and lined up another cylinder.

  “Beautiful work,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Landry said. He scratched his head. “Yeah, probably best to keep it simple that way.”

  “Don’t tell me you have another idea for the action, too?”

  “Could make it all happen in one move,” Landry replied. “Not hard to do, once you have the idea. Build it into how the trigger works. Two things happening, one pull.”

  “How hard?”

  “It would add months—and lots of playing around and rejiggering.”

  “Single action for now, then. It’s got to be reliable.”

  “As far as that goes,” Landry put in, “remember the black rock we saw piled behind the smithery?”

  “The coal? They mine it in a lot of places around here. The townsfolk use it for heat.”

  As late summer had passed into autumn, and then into winter, Abel had been astounded at how cold it got here in the mountains. Center had made him feel cold before in visions, but to experience it day after day was a different thing entirely. Now he knew what it was like to be cold, and not just momentarily chilly.

  “They sure do, because it burns hotter than wood or even charcoal,” Landry said. “I can get it hotter still with this big enough bellows. Been working on it all day.”

  “Which would explain why you look like you’re covered in dak dung.”

  Landry smiled, and his white teeth flashed. “Coal kicks up a lot of dust,” he said.

  “So what does such a hot fire get you?”

  “It lets me anneal,” Landry said. “Make iron twice as strong. That way when you fire one of my revolving rifles, it’s not going to blow to pieces your face.” Another bright white smile. “Probably.”

  Abel nodded. “Good,” he said.

  “Colonel, I’ve just got one question.”

  “What is it?”

  “You want them done right, and you want them fast. I think I have that right.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you mind telling me what it is you want them for?”

  Abel nodded. “The Blaskoye. They’re going to attack. They might come through Treville; they might try it through Ingres. But there one place everybody agrees they’re headed.”

  “Lindron,” said Landry.

  Abel nodded confirmation. “Those guns may stop the fourth Blood Wind from blowing.”

  PART TEN

  The Consort

  The Present

  1

  Lindron

  477 Post Tercium

  It had ceased to surprise her that Lindron was in so many ways more provincial than Hestinga. What mattered above all in the capital was appearance, propriety—or at least the appearance of propriety. Despite being a big city, or perhaps because of it, a woman could not venture into the streets without male accompaniment unless she wished to be thought either a tradeswoman or a prostitute.

  While Mahaut did consider herself the former, and didn’t have anything against the latter, it wouldn’t do to have the chief consort and land-heiress of Jacobson House traveling without an escort. In fact, in addition to her four chairmen and two torchbearers, she customarily brought an older personal bodyguard in the dress of a second family senior servant. Under his plain tunic, however, he carried an array of weaponry, some for himself and some for Mahaut. She also brought along two guards armed with swords and pistols to stand watch on entranceways of the places she went. And hidden in the crowd, but making their way alongside her, were two shadows, one along to identify threats and the other to serve as a messenger should there be a need for more backup.

  This was not only considered normal for a First Family house factor or consort, but was de rigueur. If anything, Mahaut’s entourage was smaller than most. She was glad of their company as she made her way through the Lindron nighttime through the rich neighborhood known as Esplanade. This was an area just east of the Tabernacle pyramid. It was filled with the residences of First Families, Tabernacle priests, and Second and Third families. Their houses were inevitably the most gaudy, vying for advancement. The Esplanade was allegedly neutral ground among all the Families.

  More like contested territory, Mahaut reflected.

  The city guard kept the area free of cutthroats and robbers, but many an assassination had been carried out on these streets as Families fought for status and sought revenge for insults. The guard pointedly stayed out of such matters, and there was never a formal investigation when the streets ran with the blood of two Firsts.

  Mahaut turned off the main thoroughfare down a side passage packed with large houses whose outer walls were separated by little more than the space of three or four men. There was this much space so that a patrolling guard could walk their perimeters. Behind the entranceways, Mahaut knew, stretched opulent compounds filled with courtyards and water elements—courtesy of the underground plumbing that fed each house its water supply.

  Each house also had its wastes carried away by an army of nightsoilmen who descended on the area in the hours before dawn. There had been an indoor water spigot and flush toilets at the Jacobson compound in Lilleheim. Here in Lindron, she’d had toilets installed at the Jacobson compound that could be flushed, with the waste carried into a tank wagon that was taken away daily to fertilize nearby fields. This arrangement was otherwise unknown in conservative Lindron, where the slightest change in the way things were done was akin to heresy, even if it had official sanction.

  Mahaut had one of her torch runners flank her along the street to illuminate the address glyphs on the houses. She looked from side to side and checked for the correct one as her divan chair moved along. Halfway up Garden Street, she found the stone-carved Family shield that marked the address for which she’d been bound. She ordered a stop and sent her older bodyguard, whose name was Friedman, to announce her arrival. Another thing First Family members would not be seen doing in Lindron: knocking on a door themselves.

  She was admitted along with Friedman, and her men joined the other armed bravos gathered around the entrance. These would talk in low tones throughout the evening, chew nesh, and spit gouts of juice into the street.

  Inside were most of the First Family factors in Lindron. It was a dinner party, but it was also a specially called meeting of merchants. They were people who were considering the daunting idea of petitioning the Abbot of Lindron for more troops to guard the capital while the Guardian Corps was away. Everyone was feeling vulnerable with a garrison force of only two thousand in the city. Most of the Lindron scouts had gone with the Guardians as well, and the few who remained were spread thin. They were not an adequate early warning system for Redlander intrusion. Everyone in the city was feeling as if his or her neck were bared to barbarian attack

  At least everyone with any sense, she thought. Because they’d be right.

  Most of the First houses were represented, including the most powerful of Lindron: Athanaskew, Weatherby, Ziman, Manstein, Freemont, among others—and of course Nikolai Belov, the Lindron House Eisenach Factor, was present. It had been his brother whom Edgar Jacobson had shot and killed. News of Edgar’s subsequent death had reached Lindron along with Mahaut, and the story had grown into a legend.

  Some tales had it that Mahaut had castrated and blinded Edgar, then made him listen as she made love to a teenage boy while he bled to death tied to the base of the bed. Some rumors were even more perverse. Usually the fact that the Land-heiress Widow Jacobson was now available for courting was mentioned in the same breath. A tie to the Jacobsons was a tie, even if you were taking your life into
your hands to make it.

  Mahaut was not bothered by the gossip one bit. It gave her a negotiating advantage if the other thought that there was nothing that she would stop at to have her way.

  Most did not know of her more cold-blooded treatment of Eliot Eisenach.

  She went through a large inner courtyard and into the reception room, where many of the others had gathered. There was a wide archway in the back through which she could see that a table was in the process of being laid with food and drink by an army of servants. Sebastian Ziman, the Ziman House second son, recognized her and came to greet her. The Jacobsons, who dealt in grain and finance, and the Zimans, who were mostly boat makers and shippers, had as tight a relationship as any of the Firsts, although Mahaut would stop short of calling it friendship.

  “Your Grace, Land-heiress Jacobson, I was hoping you’d be here this evening. It’s going to take a lot to wake this lot up to our danger. Some of these old duffers have no clue that their asses are hanging out as big fat Blaskoye targets.”

  “I’m not sure what I could convince them of if they can’t see it for themselves, Land-heir Ziman,” Mahaut replied.

  Sebastian chuckled. “Well, maybe you can scare them into going along with us. You do have that fearsome reputation, your grace.”

  Mahaut nodded. He took her arm and they walked farther into the reception room. A clump of wives eyed her warily from a corner. One said something Mahaut could not hear, and it set them all to laughing.

  In addition to the usual assortment of Firsts, there were several orange-robed and red-sashed priests and temple consorts present, most of them First Family scions as well.

  “I didn’t know we’d have clergy here tonight, Sebastian,” she said in a low voice.

  “The Abbot himself was invited. He’s not here of course, but he felt it politic to send along these up-and-coming young men. There is Budnitz of Manstein. And that handsome tall one talking to Budnitz is a particular favorite of the Abbot’s, and said to be marked for great things.”