How firm a foundation s-5

by David Weber

  They halted in front of her, and to their credit (she supposed) five of them looked her squarely in the eye. The sixth, Sir Zher Sumyrs, the Baron of Barcor, refused to raise his own eyes and she saw the gleam of perspiration on his forehead.

  Ahrnahld pushed back his chair and stood, taking the top folder from the stack in front of him and opening it before he looked at Sharleyan.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, “we bring before you, accused of treason, Wahlys Hillkeeper, Earl of Craggy Hill; Bryahn Selkyr, Earl of Deep Hollow; Sahlahmn Traigair, Earl of Storm Keep; Sir Adulfo Lynkyn, Duke of Black Water; Rahzhyr Mairwyn, Baron of Larchros; and Sir Zher Sumyrs, Baron of Barcor.”

  “Have these men been given benefit of trial? Have all of their rights under the law been observed?” Her voice was chill, and Zhandor stood beside Ahrnahld.

  “They have, Your Majesty,” he replied, his deep voice grave. “As the law requires, their cases were heard before a court of Church, Lords, and Commons which determined their guilt or innocence by secret ballot so that none might unduly influence the others. Each had benefit of counsel; each was allowed to examine all the evidence against him; and each was permitted to summon witnesses of his choice to testify on his behalf.”

  There was no hesitation or question in that voice, and Sharleyan heard one of the accused-Barcor, she thought-inhale sharply. Father Neythan Zhandor wasn’t just any law master. He’d been picked by Maikel Staynair for this mission because of his reputation. A Langhornite, like most law masters, he was (or had been, before the schism, at least) widely acknowledged as one of Safehold’s two or three most knowledgeable masters of admiralty and international law. If Father Neythan said all of their rights had been observed, that was that.

  “Upon what grounds were they accused of treason?”

  “Upon the following specifications, Your Majesty,” Zhandor said, opening a folder of his own. “All stand accused of violating their sworn oaths of fealty to Prince Daivyn. All stand accused of violating their sworn oaths to the Crown of Charis, freely given after Corisande’s surrender to the Empire. All stand accused of raising personal armies in violation of their oaths to the Crown of Charis and also in violation of the law of Corisande limiting the number of armed retainers permitted to any peer of the realm. All stand accused of trafficking and conspiring with the condemned Tohmys Symmyns of Zebediah. All stand accused of plotting insurrection and armed violence against Prince Daivyn’s Regency Council and against the Crown of Charis. In addition, Earl Craggy Hill stands accused of violating his personal oath and abusing and betraying his authority and position as a member of the Regency Council in the furtherance of their conspiracy and his own quest for power.”

  Stillness crackled in the ballroom, and Barcor licked his lips. Craggy Hill glared at Sharleyan, but it was an empty glare, little more than surface deep, for something darker and far less defiant lived behind it.

  “And has the court which heard their cases reached a verdict?”

  “It has, Your Majesty,” Ahrnahld said. He turned the top page in the folder before him.

  “Wahlys Hillkeeper, Earl of Craggy Hill, has been adjudged guilty of all charges brought against him,” he read in a flat, carrying voice. Then he turned a second page as he had the first.

  “Bryahn Selkyr, Earl of Deep Hollow, has been adjudged guilty of all charges brought against him.”

  Another page.

  “Sahlahmn Traigair, Earl of Storm Keep, has been adjudged guilty of all charges brought against him.”

  Another whisper of turning paper.

  “Sir Adulfo Lynkyn, Duke of Black Water, has been adjudged guilty of all charges brought against him.”

  “Rahzhyr Mairwyn, Baron of Larchros, has been adjudged guilty of all charges brought against him.”

  “Sir Zher Sumyrs, Baron of Barcor, has been adjudged guilty of four of the five charges brought against him, but acquitted of the charge of personally trafficking and conspiring with Tohmys Symmyns.”

  The last page turned and he closed the folder. Then he turned and looked up at Sharleyan.

  “The verdicts have been signed, sealed, and mutually witnessed by every member of the court, Your Majesty.”

  “Thank you,” Sharleyan said and sat back in her throne, laying her forearms along the armrests as she gazed at the men before her. The ballroom’s tension crackled higher now that the formalities were out of the way, and she felt the witnesses’ focused attention like the rays of the sun captured and concentrated by a magnifying glass. But not quite like the sun, for this focus was cold and sharp as a Cherayth icicle, not fiery.

  It ought to be fiery, she thought. I ought to feel passionate satisfaction and justification at seeing these men brought to the end they deserve. But it isn’t, and I don’t.

  She didn’t know precisely what she did feel, and it didn’t matter. What mattered was what she had to do.

  “You’ve heard the charges against you,” she said in a voice of ice. “All of you have heard the verdicts. All of you have had ample opportunity to see the massive weight of evidence which was brought to bear against each of you. No honest-minded man or woman on the face of this world will ever be able to dispute the proofs of your crimes, and the records of your trials are open to all. Every step of the process which brings you here this day has been in accordance with the law of your own princedom, as well as the law of Charis. We will entertain no pleas or protests against the justice of the court which tried you or of the scrupulous observation of the law, your rights, or the verdicts. If any of you have anything you wish to say before sentence is passed upon you, however, now is the time.”

  Craggy Hill and Storm Keep only glared, helpless fury burning in their eyes. Deep Hollow’s facial muscles quivered, although Sharleyan couldn’t have said what emotion woke those spasms. He pressed his lips together without speaking, however, and her eyes moved to Black Water. The duke’s face was dark with anger and curdled with hate, yet she actually felt a flicker of sympathy in his case. His father’s death at Darcos Sound was what had brought him into the conspiracy. At least he had the excuse of honest anger, honest outrage, not solely the cynical ambition which had served Craggy Hill and Deep Hollow.

  “I wish to speak,” Baron Larchros said after a moment, and Sharleyan nodded to him.

  “Then do so.”

  “I can’t speak for all of my fellows,” he replied, raising his chin and looking her in the eye, “but I did what I did because I will never acknowledge the authority of the craven lickspittles of this ‘Regency Council’ of traitors you and your husband have foisted upon this Princedom. It was their willingness to sell themselves to you Charisians for personal power and advantage, not ambition on my part, which brought me to resist them! You may call it ‘treason’ if you please, but I say the treason was theirs, not mine, and that no man of conscience can be held to any oath sworn to traitors, regicides, heretics, and excommunicates!”

  A stir went through the witnesses, and Sharleyan gazed back down at him for several seconds without speaking. Then she nodded slowly.

  “You speak clearly, Baron of Larchros,” she said then. “And you speak with courage. You may even speak truthfully of your own motives, and we grant you their sincerity. Yet you did swear the oaths you violated. You did grant your allegiance to the Regency Council-the legally selected Regency Council, chosen by your own Parliament-as Prince Daivyn’s representatives and the guardians of his interests and prerogatives here in Corisande. And you did violate the laws of Corisande, as well as conspiring to unleash warfare here in the heart of your own Princedom. We may concede that you acted out of what you believe to have been the best of motivations. We will not concede that your motivations justify your actions, nor will we retreat one inch from the authority which is ours under the accepted law of nations by right of victory, fairly and openly won upon the field of battle, and by acknowledgment of your own Parliament following that victory. We will say this much-you, more than any of your fellows, have our respect, b
ut respect cannot stay the demands of justice.”

  Larchros’ jaw clenched. He seemed to hover on the brink of saying something more, but he stopped himself and simply stood meeting her gaze with hot-eyed defiance.

  “Please, Your Majesty!” Barcor said suddenly into the silence. “I was carried away by patriotism and loyalty to Mother Church-I admit it! But as the court itself determined, I was never party to the core of this conspiracy! I-”

  He broke off as Sharleyan looked at him with undisguised contempt. His eyes fell, and she smiled coldly.

  “The fact that cowardice prevented you from openly declaring yourself as Baron Larchros did is no defense,” she said flatly. “You were prepared to take your share of the spoils when Craggy Hill and Storm Keep divided the new ‘Regency Council’ between themselves. You preferred to spend gold instead of blood or steel, perhaps, but you cannot separate yourself so easily from ‘the core of this conspiracy,’ My Lord. I told you we would hear no pleas, no protests of innocence. Have you anything further to say?”

  Barcor’s lips trembled. His face was ashen, and his head swiveled, eyes imploring the members of the Regency Council to intervene in his behalf. There was no response, and he swallowed convulsively as his eyes came back to Sharleyan.

  She waited another measured thirty seconds, but none of the convicted men spoke again, and she nodded. It was time to end this, and she could at least give them the mercy of swiftness.

  “It is our judgment that, for the crimes of which you stand convicted, you be taken from this place immediately to a place of execution and there beheaded. You will be granted access to clergy of your choice, but sentence will be carried out within this very hour, and may God have mercy on your souls.” . VIII.

  City Engineer’s Office and Royal Palace, Princedom of Corisande

  “That was a good job you did on the Guildhall, Bahrynd,” Sylvayn Grahsmahn said as Bahrynd Laybrahn (who didn’t look a thing like Paitryk Hainree) stepped into his office. “That cistern’s been nothing but a pain in the ass for as long as I can remember.”

  “It wasn’t hard once I realized the pump casing had to be leaking,” Hainree replied. He shrugged. “Actually finding the leak and getting to it was a bitch, but fixing it once I found it was pretty routine, really.”

  “Well, I’ve been sending people over to look at it for the better part of half a year now,” Grahsmahn grumbled, “and you’re the first one to find the problem. I know you’re still new, Bahrynd, but if the Master Engineer will go along with me, you’re going to be a supervisor by this time next month.”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence,” Hainree said, although he was fairly certain the promotion wouldn’t come through. “I just try to do my job.”

  He gazed out of Grahsmahn’s office window. Dusk was coming on quickly, and he and the supervisor should already have left for the evening. In fact, they would have if Hainree hadn’t gone to some lengths to arrange otherwise. He’d known Grahsmahn would want a detailed report on how he’d solved the problem, and he’d manipulated his own schedule to ensure he’d be late getting back to the large, rambling block of buildings on Horsewalk Square which housed the city engineer’s offices. Grahsmahn had waited for him in order to get his report firsthand, and the supervisor had listened carefully as Hainree ran through everything he’d had to do to fix it.

  The truth was that he’d enjoyed the challenge, and it had been the biggest job he’d been assigned since he’d started working his way up in the city’s engineering and maintenance services. He’d begun as little more than a common laborer-a necessity, if he wanted to be certain no one asked any questions about his previous employers. It wasn’t as if the work were exceptionally difficult, however, especially for a man who’d run his own business for so many years. And the Guildhall plumbing system’s mysterious water losses had at least offered a puzzle sufficient to distract him from the future rushing rapidly towards him.

  As he’d told Grahsmahn, figuring out what had to be wrong hadn’t been hard.

  The city reservoir, just northwest of Manchyr’s walls, was fed by the Barcor River before the river flowed on through the city itself (becoming distinctly less potable in the process, and not just from storm runoff), and feed pipes from the reservoir flowed under the city itself. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough head pressure in the system to move water higher than the first floor of most of the city’s buildings, which was one reason for the picturesque windmills spinning busily away on the rooftops of so many of the taller buildings all across the capital. They powered pumps which lifted water from the low-pressure mains to rooftop or water tower cisterns high enough for gravity-feed systems to develop reasonable pressure throughout the city.

  The problem at the Weavers Guildhall was that the cistern level had been far below design specifications and still dropping. Obviously, there was a problem somewhere between the main and the cistern, but the pump itself had been operating perfectly. It was an ancient design, with an endless chain of flat, pivoted links traveling in a loop through a pair of shafts. Lifters-bronze saucers closely fitted to the diameter of the shafts-were set every foot or so along the chain, which traveled between the water main and the cistern. Water flowed into the inlet chamber at the bottom, which was slightly larger in diameter than the lifters. The lifters, however, formed a sort of moving cylinder inside the outflow shaft, capturing and lifting water as they moved through the inlet chamber and upward. With a good head of wind, a large enough windmill, and a wide enough pump shaft the system could move hundreds of gallons of water very quickly. Floats in the cisterns raised interrupter rods to disengage the windmill’s steadying vanes when the holding tanks were full, letting the windmills pivot off the wind and go idle to prevent the pumps from raising too much water and simply wasting it, and most of the cisterns were large enough to meet demand in their buildings for at least a couple of windless days in a row.

  It was a simple, reliable arrangement whose greatest vulnerability was the possibility that the chain might break. The gearing needed a change of lubricating oil about once a year, but aside from that the only other real maintenance concern was the durability of the flexible gaskets fitted to the edge of each lifter to ensure a good seal with the sides of the lift shaft. The gaskets were made from the sap of the rubber plant with which the Archangel Sondheim had gifted mankind at the Creation (and whose cultivation was a major income source for Corisande) and wore out only slowly, but eventually they did have to be replaced.

  The Guildhall pump had shown no signs of excessive wear, however, even though it was delivering progressively less water despite running almost constantly. So the answer had to be that the water was escaping somewhere between the inlet and the cistern, but where? A diligent search had revealed no obvious leaks, but Hainree had known there had to be one, so he’d persevered until he finally found it. What had made it so difficult was that it was quite high, yet there’d been no signs of leakage… because the break in the shaft wall had occurred where it passed through a stone wall directly adjacent to the roof drainage system. Given the intensity of the rainstorms which frequently smote Manchyr, the Guildhall’s downspouts and gutters were designed to handle a lot of water, and at the point where the break had appeared one of the main drain channels had been separated from the shaft only by a single relatively thin layer of cement. Once the shaft started leaking through the dividing cement, it had simply discharged itself down the drain, where no one ever saw it and there was no telltale seepage on any walls or gathering in the cellars.

  It had also happened to be one of only two sections of the shaft which couldn’t be eyeballed in a routine inspection, which ought to have suggested something to someone, since “routine inspections” had so singularly failed to find the problem. Hainree had been forced to lower himself down the outer edge of the building, pry loose two large building blocks, and then chip his way through the drainage channel’s inch-thick wall before he could confirm his suspicions. Actually getting to th
e problem and fixing it had been relatively straightforward after that, although that didn’t mean it hadn’t still required plenty of hard work and sweat. In fact, he damned well deserved Grahsmahn’s praise.

  “Well, I just wish more of our people tried as hard to do their jobs as you do,” the supervisor said now. “We’d be in a lot better shape, let me tell you! Not that we’re having much luck getting the budget we need out of the Regency Council.” He shook his head disgustedly. “We need someone on the Council who understands engineering problems-the kind that keep cities like Manchyr running and not just the ones that go into making newfangled weapons!”

  Hainree nodded vigorously. It was one of Grahsmahn’s recurrent refrains, and the supervisor probably had a point, although Hainree’s own problems with the Regency Council focused on rather different concerns. However…

  “I meant to ask you for your impression of this Empress Sharleyan,” he said, forcing himself to speak the hated name in an almost normal tone.

  “I think she’s… impressive.” Grahsmahn leaned back in his chair, scratching the back of his neck, and shook his head slowly. “Somebody said she was beautiful, but me, I’m not so sure. She’s a handsome woman, I’ll give her that, but beautiful?” He shook his head again. “Too much nose, and those eyes of hers… Trust me, Bahrynd-she’s got a temper that would make a slash lizard run for cover!”

  “So was she ranting and raving?” Hainree asked.

  “No, no, she wasn’t.” Grahsmahn stopped scratching the back of his neck and looked up at Hainree, his eyes unfocused with memory. “In fact, that’s the reason she’s so impressive, if you ask me. It’s not natural for a young woman that age, and one who’s hated the House of Daykyn so long, to not lose her temper at a time like this. I mean, here she’s in a perfect position to hammer us after what those idiots tried to pull, and she’s cool as a cucumber. Not wishy-washy, don’t misunderstand me. I think she was madder than Shan-wei’s Hell at Craggy Hill, at least. But she didn’t scream, she didn’t shout, and she just ordered them beheaded. Didn’t have them tortured, didn’t send their family members after them on general principle, didn’t even have them hanged. Just a short, sharp appointment with an ax and it was all over.” He shook his head again. “I’ll be honest with you, Bahrynd, I can’t see the Old Prince letting them off that easy. I’d say she’s got a short way with people who cross her, but she’s not going out of her way to be any nastier about it than she has to.”