At the Sign of Triumph

by David Weber

  Yet it could happen. Charisians were as mortal and as fallible as anyone, whatever Clyntahn might say about demonic intervention. What had happened to them in the Kaudzhu Narrows demonstrated that clearly enough! And if anyone could hand them another defeat, this time on land, that anyone had to be Rainbow Waters. Yet in Rhobair Duchairn’s estimation, even he had only an even chance—at the very best—of pulling it off. And if he failed, if the Charisians destroyed the Mighty Host the way they had every other army they’d faced—or even if they only drove it back with heavy casualties and the loss of much of its equipment—the Jihad was over.

  They might find millions more men prepared to die in Mother Church’s defense, men willing to charge into the enemy’s guns with no more than raw courage, sheer faith, and their bare hands. But bare hands would be all they’d have, because Mother Church simply couldn’t replace the weapons of the armies she had in the field now. Not again. Win or lose, live or die, her purse was effectively empty. They were at the last stretch of her resources, and if those resources weren’t enough, her defeat was certain.

  “Well,” he sighed, draining off the last of his own beer and setting the stein back on his desk, “I suppose we’ll find out whether or not the Earl can pull it off soon enough. In the meantime, I wonder what the Desnairians are up to?”

  “Nothing good,” Maigwair growled.

  “Well, they did get badly burned in Shiloh,” Duchairn pointed out more judiciously. “What happened to them at Geyra Bay didn’t make it any better, either. I’m sure—” the irony in his tone glittered like a bared razor “—they’re doing their very best to get back into the field against Mother Church’s enemies.”

  “And if you really believe that, I’ve got some bottomland to sell you,” Maigwair said dryly. “Just don’t ask me what it’s on the bottom of.”

  “Oh, I agree they’re planning on keeping their heads as far down as they can—up their own arses, actually, as far as I can tell,” Duchairn replied. “They are still getting at least some of their tithes through, though. In fact, they’ve even turned up the wick. I’m not sure exactly how they’re managing it, but they’re actually eleven percent ahead of their tithe obligations, even on the new, steeper schedule. Not only that, the Desnairian crown’s bought something like twenty million marks of the new bond issue, too.” The treasurer shook his head. “Must be even more gold in those mines than I thought there was.”

  “Trying to buy off Zhaspahr’s inquisitors, are they?”

  “Pretty much.” Duchairn nodded. “On the other hand, you know, it’s remotely possible you and I are a little too cynical where they’re concerned. Zahmsyn keeps telling me that, anyway.”

  “Zahmsyn’s telling you anything he thinks will keep Zhaspahr from deciding he’s expendable,” Maigwair said cynically. “Especially because, frankly, he is. Expendable, I mean.”

  And that, Duchairn reflected, was brutally true. Vicar Zahmsyn Trynair, who’d once been the mastermind of the Group of Four that truly plotted Mother Church’s course—whatever canon law might say—had become little more than a cipher. Of course, looking back, Duchairn had his doubts about the degree to which Trynair (and everyone else) had always thought he was the Group of Four’s mastermind in the first place.

  Over the last year or so, especially, the treasurer had come to realize Clyntahn had been heading towards the destruction of Charis long before Erayk Dynnys’ supposed failures gave him the excuse he needed. The only question in Duchairn’s mind was his motive for deciding Charis must die. It was always possible, given the Grand Inquisitor’s blend of gluttonous hedonism and fanaticism, that he truly had distrusted Charisian orthodoxy. Yet it was equally possible—and, frankly, more likely—that he’d seen the Jihad—or at least a jihad—as the strategy which would finally give the Inquisition total and unquestioned control of Mother Church and the entire world from the very start.

  He doubted Clyntahn had ever imagined Mother Church’s inevitable victory would be as costly as the Jihad had already proven, far less that it might not be quite as inevitable as he’d thought, but the cost in blood and agony—in other people’s blood and agony—wouldn’t have fazed him for a moment. If a few million innocent people had to die in order for the Inquisition—and Zhaspahr Clyntahn—to secure absolute power, that would have struck him as a completely acceptable price.

  If Duchairn was right, Clyntahn had been pulling the rest of the Group of Four’s puppet strings all along. And whatever the Grand Inquisitor’s secret agenda might have been, Trynair had depended upon the twin strengths of his control of Grand Vicar Erek XVII and his ability to orchestrate smooth, skillful diplomatic strategies and policies, both within and without the ranks of the vicarate. To the secular rulers of Safehold, he’d been the face of Mother Church’s will in the world; to the rest of the vicarate, he’d been the suave diplomat who adroitly balanced one faction of prelates against another. Yet now even the Grand Vicar was too terrified of Clyntahn’s Inquisition to defy him, and all those other machinations, all that diplomatic footwork, meant absolutely nothing. At bottom, diplomats operated on credit, and if there was anyone in the world who understood the limitations of credit, Rhobair Duchairn was that man. When diplomacy failed, when your bets and your hedges and bluffs were called, only raw power truly counted, and Trynair was no longer a power broker.

  I guess the Group of Four really has become the Group of Three, because there are only three poles of power left: the Army that has to fight the Jihad; the Treasury that has to somehow pay for the Jihad; and the Inquisition that has to keep people willing to support the Jihad. So it comes down to Allayn, Zhaspahr … and me. But at least Allayn and I recognize—or are willing to admit we recognize, anyway—that there are limits to the power we control. I truly think Zhaspahr isn’t … and what’s going to happen when he finally comes face-to-face with the truth?

  Rhobair Duchairn had asked himself many questions over the past five years.

  Very few of them had filled his blood with as much ice as that one did.

  .VI.

  HMS Eraystor, 22,

  Wind Gulf Sea.

  There was no dawn.

  Somewhere above the solid cliffs of lightning-shot cloud the sun had no doubt heaved itself back into the heavens. Below those cliffs, the midnight gloom simply grew marginally less dark and visibility increased to a slightly greater circle of wind-driven, tortured white. It was possible to see the oncoming wave crests loom up above the solid, seething surface of blown spray at least a little sooner, even without the stuttering flash of Langhorne’s rakurai, but the jarring, bone-shaking impact as each furious mountain of water slammed home was no less vicious. Belowdecks, the stench from backed up heads and the vomit of desperately seasick men was enough to turn a statue’s stomach, and green-gray water roared along the decks, seeking voraciously for any loose gear, clawing at the heavy gaskets of Corisandian rubber that sealed the casemates’ gun shields. Some of that water spurted past the gaskets, spraying inboard in fans of icy brine and then sluicing along the decks until it found its way into the bilges where the humming pumps could send it back overside.

  HMS Eraystor drove onward, climbing each thirty-foot wave in turn, lifting her sharply raked stem towards the heavens while water thundered green and white and angry across her foredeck, charged headlong down her narrow, gangway-like side decks, flowed in solid, angry sheets across her quarterdeck. Higher and higher she climbed, spray cascading from her flared bows like some demented waterfall until she reached the crest and her forefoot thrust free of the water. Then her bow came down once more in a fresh explosion of spray, landing like the hammer of Kau-yung, and she went charging down into the valley, while the smoke pouring from her single funnel vanished almost before it could be seen, torn apart by the sixty-mile-an-hour wind that screamed around her upper works like some lost demon, seeking its way home to Shan-wei.

  “Thank God we didn’t wait for the colliers, Sir!”

  Dahnel Bahnyface, Eray
stor’s third lieutenant, didn’t—quite—have to shout in Zhaikyb Gregori’s ear, but it was a near thing even in the shelter of the ironclad’s conning tower. On the open bridge, conversation would have been flatly impossible.

  “I hope they’re well clear of this,” Gregori agreed.

  Bahnyface had been a little surprised to see the first lieutenant in the conning tower when he climbed up the ladder from below. Vyktyr Audhaimyr, Eraystor’s second lieutenant, had the watch for another—Bahnyface checked the bulkhead chronometer—seven glorious minutes, and Gregori wasn’t the sort of worrier who typically checked up on his watch standers as if he didn’t trust them.

  On the other hand, this wasn’t exactly typical weather.

  At five-eleven, Gregori was tall for a native Old Charisian, and he was forced to bend slightly to peer through one of the conning tower vision slits. In calm conditions, that slot was forty feet above the ship’s waterline; in the current conditions, a constant spatter of spray blew in through it on the fringe of the howling wind. Now he straightened, wiped his face, and shook his head, his expression grim.

  “With any luck, they saw this coming in time to take shelter in Shepherd Bay,” he said. “Just pray to God they weren’t trying to round Hill Island when it hit!”

  Bahnyface nodded soberly. Of course, while he was praying for the coal-laden galleons following in the squadron’s wake, he might just have a word or two with the Archangels on Eraystor’s behalf, as well. Langhorne knew the four-thousand-ton ironclad was incomparably more survivable than the original jury-rigged Delthak-class or the shallow-draft riverine ironclads which had followed them. She’d been designed for blue water—or to survive crossing it between bombardment missions, at least—with a raised forecastle and a gracefully flared bow. At right on three hundred feet in length, her hull was an immensely strong iron and steel box, and the great, throbbing engines at the heart of her made her independent of any galleon’s canvas.

  Of course, if anything were to happen to those engines or the whirling screws they drove.…

  Don’t even go there, Dahnel, he told himself firmly as he settled the hammer-islander on his head and tied the strings tightly under his chin.

  The waterproof headgear would be little enough protection, but its back flap might at least keep solid sheets of water from running down his neck. Like many professional seamen, Bahnyface favored the stiffened version made of heavily tarred canvas, although others preferred the softer oilskin version. Personally, he wanted as much protection against the force of the spray coming at him as he could get, although he had to admit the stiffer versions tended to catch the wind better. He’d had half a dozen of them blown away over the course of his career, no matter how tightly he tied their laces.

  And if there’d ever been a wind suitable to blow away hats, this was it, he reflected glumly. He didn’t normally envy Anthynee Tahlyvyr, Eraystor’s chief engineer. He didn’t really understand Tahlyvyr’s fascination with steam and coal and oil, and the noisy, vibrating clangor of an engine room under full power—with pistons, crankshafts, and Langhorne only knew what else whirring and driving in every conceivable direction while oilers squirted lubrication at all the madly spinning bits and pieces—struck him as a near approximation of hell. Nor did he envy the sweating, swearing stokers feeding the voracious furnaces, especially in weather like this, when just staying on one’s feet, much less avoiding serious injury while heaping shovels of coal into a roaring firebox, became a serious challenge.

  Today, he’d have changed places with Tahlyvyr in a heartbeat, however. Failing that, he would really have preferred to stand his watch from inside the conning tower. Unfortunately, visibility was far too limited from in here. Even more unfortunately, while the bridge lookouts would be rotated into the conning tower’s protection every half hour or so, the officer of the watch—who would very shortly be named Dahnel Bahnyface—had no one with whom to rotate. And about the best anyone’s oilskins could manage on a day like this was to limit the influx of fresh, cold seawater. The water already inside his foul-weather gear would gradually warm to something more endurable if he could only avoid fresh infusions.

  Not a chance in Shan-wei’s hell, he thought philosophically. Still, a man has to hope.

  He finished fastening the hammer-islander and bent over the deck log, scanning it for any special notifications or instructions which might have been added. It was up-to-date, he noticed, checking the time chop on the duty quartermaster’s most recent entry. He took special note of the damage report about the scuttle which had been stove in amidships. He’d have to keep an eye on it and make sure the repairs were holding … although he rather suspected that if they gave way and a solid stream of ocean water seven inches in diameter came roaring through the opening someone in the vicinity was likely to notice even without his keeping a wyvern’s eye on it.

  “Anything special I should keep in mind, Sir?” he asked, tapping the deck log and raising an eyebrow at the first lieutenant. Gregori shook his head.

  “No. I just came up to take a look before the Captain and I sit down with the Admiral for breakfast.”

  One of the telegraphsmen made a soft, involuntary gagging sound, and the first lieutenant chuckled.

  “Trust me, Symmyns,” he said, “Eraystor’s like riding a kid’s pony beside what a regular galleon would be doing in seas like this!”

  “Oh, I know that, Sir!” Zhak Symmyns was a Chisholmian, with a pronounced Harris Island accent, and his family had been fishermen for generations. “Reason I joined the Navy, though, was to get away from little boats.” He grimaced. “M’ stomach was never up t’ the fishing, really—no matter how many times m’ Da beat me for it. An’ Langhorne knows, he tried hard enough t’ beat it out of me!”

  The other duty telegraphsman chuckled. Symmyns’ susceptibility to seasickness was well known throughout Eraystor’s company, and Bahnyface wasn’t at all surprised it was giving him problems in this. On the other hand, the fact that he and his messmates could joke about it probably said volumes about their estimate of Eraystor’s ability to survive conditions like these.

  “Well, anyway,” Gregori said with the callousness of a man who enjoyed a cast-iron stomach as he clapped Symmyns on the shoulder, “I’m looking forward to a nice, greasy rasher of bacon, fried eggs sunny-side up, and a fresh pot of cherrybean to wash it down.”

  The petty officer looked distinctly green around the gills, and the first lieutenant laughed again, then shook his head.

  “All right, Symmyns! I’ll stop giving you a hard time. And in case you hadn’t heard, the cooks are serving as much hot, sweet oatmeal as you can hold for breakfast. Maybe you’ll be able to keep that down.”

  “Sounds better nor eggs an’ bacon, an’ that’s a fact, Sir,” Symmyns said fervently.

  “Just make sure you eat something,” Gregori said more sternly. “I know it’s not the easiest thing in weather like this, but you’ve been at sea long enough to know it’s as important to keep your belly filled as it is to keep a boiler stoked.”

  “Aye, Sir.” Symmyns nodded, and Gregori glanced at Bahnyface.

  “I’ll leave her in your hands, Dahnel. Besides,” he chuckled again, “I’m pretty sure Vyktyr’s counting the minutes out there on the bridge wing waiting for you.”

  “I’m counting them, too, Sir. Just not with the same sort of enthusiasm.”

  “Dahnel, if you were enthusiastic about going out there, I’d be sending you to the Bédardists, not the bridge. Trust me on that.”

  He nodded and headed down the conning tower ladder. Using the exterior ladders to climb down the superstructure was … contraindicated in the current sea state.

  Bahnyface watched him go, then drew a deep breath, nodded to the glum-faced lookouts waiting in their own foul-weather gear, and undogged the armored door to the starboard bridge wing.

  The wind’s howl intensified abruptly as it tried to turn the heavy door into a hammer and the bulkhead into an anvil, but he
managed to control it and stay un-crushed. Then he bent his head and shouldered forward, leaning into the teeth of the storm like a man leaning against a wall.

  Vyktyr Audhaimyr looked just as soaked, cold, miserable—and delighted to see him—as Bahnyface had expected.

  “Langhorne!” The second lieutenant had to lean forward, his mouth inches from Bahnyface’s ear. “Am I glad to see you!” he continued, as if he’d read Bahnyface’s mind.

  “I can imagine!” Bahnyface bawled back as he clipped his canvas safety harness to one of the rigged lifelines. Those normally weren’t required on the bridge, but today wasn’t normal, and Captain Cahnyrs was strict about things like keeping his crew both aboard and undrowned. “I checked the log! Anything else you need to pass on to me?!”

  “Not really!” Audhaimyr turned and pointed to the northeast, water pouring from his outstretched, oilskin-covered arm like a cataract. “We lost sight of Cherayth’s running lights about two hours ago, but she didn’t seem to be in any trouble and we haven’t seen any signal rockets! I figure she’s out there somewhere and we just can’t see her anymore!”

  Bahnyface nodded in understanding … and hoped to hell Audhaimyr was right. There were almost two hundred and fifty men aboard each of the City-class ships.

  “Bayport’s still where she’s supposed to be!” Audhaimyr continued, pointing aft this time, and Gairmyn’s on station to starboard! Haven’t actually seen Riverbend in an hour or so, but Gairmyn signaled about fifteen minutes ago and Riverbend was on station astern of her then!”

  Bahnyface nodded again, even more vigorously. If four of the 2nd Ironclad Squadron’s five ships had actually managed to remain in such close company in weather like this and after a night like the one just past it damned well proved miracles still happened. And Audhaimyr was almost certainly right about Cherayth.