Off Armageddon Reef

by David Weber

  "Actually, Your Grace, he's been trying to get to me for over two months now, but it hasn't been easy. The Charisians have put an iron clamp on traffic through The Throat and around Lock Island, and they've got light units patrolling the Charis Sea north of Rock Shoal Bay. He had to travel overland to avoid The Throat, then find a smuggler willing to run him across to Emerald. In fact, it took him three tries to get across, because the smuggler in question turned back twice after sighting a Charisian schooner.

  "But you're quite correct that he didn't come on a whim. In fact, he came to tell us the entire Charisian galleon force left Charis, under Crown Prince Cayleb's personal command, in October."

  "What?" Black Water blinked in surprise, then half-glared at the ambassador. "That's ridiculous! Our scouts have seen their topsails behind Haarahld's galleys!"

  "Not according to this man, Your Grace," White Castle said diffidently. "He's been a ship's chandler, supplying ships in the Royal Dockyard in Tellesberg, for over five years. And according to what he's picked up from 'friends' he's cultivated in their navy, thirty of the galleons the Charisians have been working so hard to arm sailed from Lock Island five-days before you reached Eraystor Bay. And," the baron said, "also according to what he's learned, the Charisians still haven't activated their reserve galleys. Not only that, but King Haarahld's chartered two or three dozen merchant galleons for unspecified purposes. While he wasn't able to absolutely confirm that, he did observe himself that at least a dozen merchant ships which had been idled by the war have left Tellesberg flying the royal banner. No one seems to know exactly where they are."

  Black Water's jaw clenched. Was it truly possible—?

  "You say he says they sailed in October. He doesn't have any idea where?"

  "None," White Castle admitted.

  "Well, they wouldn't have sailed without some destination in mind," Black Water said slowly, thinking aloud. "I wonder . . ."

  He glowered at the floor, rubbing his chin, then shook his head and looked back up at White Castle.

  "We've all been assuming Haarahld didn't know what was coming until shortly before we sailed. But if he got those galleons to sea that early, he must have known something, and he probably knew it almost as soon as we did. But he couldn't have found out about it from spies in Corisande; there wasn't time for anyone to get a message to him all the way from Manchyr that quickly. And he couldn't have found out about it that early from spies in Emerald, because Nahrmahn didn't know that soon, thanks to those lost dispatches. Which means he could only have found out from Tarot."

  The ambassador frowned for a moment, obviously considering Black Water's analysis, then nodded.

  "I think you're right, Your Grace. But how much did anyone in Tarot know?"

  "I can't answer that," Black Water admitted. "Obviously, Gorjah had to know at least the bare bones of what we were going to be doing, because he had to coordinate what he was supposed to do with it. But I don't have any idea how fully informed he may have been about our plans. And," his mouth tightened, "it doesn't really matter. Not if the galleons sailed that long ago and Haarahld's been using the sails of chartered merchantships to fool our scouts—and me—into thinking they're still with him."

  "Your Grace?" White Castle looked confused, and Black Water laughed harshly.

  "He sent his galleons off somewhere his galleys didn't have the seakeeping ability to go, My Lord," he said. "And if he learned what was happening from agents in Tarot, I can only think of one thing that would have taken them away so soon and prevented them from returning by now."

  The duke shook his head, his expression bemused, almost awed.

  "He's decided to risk an all-or-nothing throw of the dice," he said. "He's sent his galleons—and his son—off to intercept the Tarotisians and the Dohlarans. He doesn't have them here, not protecting Rock Shoal Bay. They're off somewhere with Cayleb in the Sea of Justice, or the Parker Sea, depending on how good his spies' information really was, hoping to find Duke Malikai and stop him from ever getting here."

  "That's cr—" White Castle began, then stopped. He cleared his throat. "I mean, that strikes me as a very risky thing for him to have done, Your Grace."

  "It's an insane thing for him to have done," Black Water said flatly. "At the same time, it's the only possible answer for where his galleons have really been all this time. And . . ."

  His voice trailed off again, and his expression darkened.

  "Your Grace?" White Castle said quietly after several moments.

  "It's just occurred to me that there could be one way for him to pull it all together with a fair degree of confidence." Black Water's lips twitched in something that was much more snarl than smile. "If his spies in Tarot were good enough, or if someone highly enough placed were deliberately feeding him information, he could have learned from the Tarotisians where they were supposed to find the Dohlarans."

  "Your Grace, are you suggesting Gorjah himself might have delivered the information to Charis?" White Castle asked in a very careful tone.

  "I don't know." Black Water shrugged. "At first glance, I can't see any reason for him to have done it—certainly not to have risked angering Vicar Zahmsyn or the Grand Inquisitor! But that doesn't mean someone else highly placed in his court couldn't have done it."

  The duke glowered at the deck again for several more seconds, then gave his entire body a shake.

  "We may never know the answer to your question, My Lord. But if your man's report is accurate, what matters is that at this moment there are only eighty galleys or so between us and control of Rock Shoal Bay. And if we can defeat those galleys and take control of Rock Shoal Bay, we can both hold it against his galleons, if and when they finally return, and bring in troops to besiege the Keys from the land side."

  "Those numbers assume their reserve fleet truly hasn't been activated, Your Grace," White Castle pointed out, and the duke snorted.

  "If I'm prepared to believe this spy of yours really knows his business and risk trusting what he's said about the galleons, I may as well believe him about the galleys, as well!" Black Water shrugged. "And, to be honest, we've seen no sign of the Charisian reserve galleys. I've been assuming all along that the manning requirements of their galleons prevented them from manning the galleys, as well. So I'm strongly inclined to believe he is right about that."

  "And what do you intend to do about it, if I may ask, Your Grace?" White Castle asked. The duke quirked an eyebrow at him, and it was the baron's turn to shrug. "I am Prince Hektor's ambassador, Your Grace. If whatever you decide to do requires Prince Nahrmahn's support, then I may be in a position to help nudge him into doing what you want."

  "True enough," Black Water conceded. "As for what I intend, though, that's going to depend on what I can talk my gallant allies into."

  III

  HMS Dreadnought,

  The Cauldron

  Crown Prince Cayleb sat up in the box-like cot suspended from the low beams of his sleeping cabin's deckhead as someone rapped sharply on the cabin door.

  "What?" he said, rubbing his eyes before he glanced out the opened stern windows into the warm, clear night. The moon hadn't even risen yet, which meant he'd been in bed only an hour or so.

  "I'm sorry to wake you, Cayleb," a deep voice said, "but we need to talk."

  "Merlin?" Cayleb swung his legs over the side of the cot and stood. There was a note in Merlin's voice he'd never heard before, and he crossed the cabin in two strides and yanked the door open. "What is it? What's happened?"

  "May I come in?"

  "What?" Cayleb gave himself a shake, then grinned crookedly as he realized he'd opened the door without bothering to dress. In fact, he was stark naked, the way he habitually slept on such warm nights, and he stepped back with a chuckle, despite the tension in Merlin's voice.

  "Of course you can come in," he said.

  "Thank you."

  Merlin stepped past Sergeant Faircaster, the sentry outside Cayleb's door, bending his head to clear th
e deck beams, and closed the door quietly behind him.

  "What is it?" Cayleb asked, turning away to pick up the tunic he'd discarded when he turned in and drag it over his head.

  "I've . . . just had a vision," Merlin said, and Cayleb turned back quickly at his tone, waving sharply at a chair.

  "What sort of vision?"

  "A vision of Duke Black Water in Eraystor Bay," Merlin said, his voice almost flat as he settled into the indicated chair. "It seems Bynzhamyn and I missed at least one of Hektor's spies, and he's just reported to Black Water that—"

  * * *

  "—so that's about the size of it," Merlin finished grimly several minutes later.

  Cayleb sat on the edge of his cot, his face almost totally expressionless, as he concentrated on what Merlin had just told him.

  "What do you think he's going to do?" the prince asked now, and Merlin shook his head.

  "I think he was right when he told White Castle that depends on what he can convince his allies to do, Cayleb. All I can tell you right now is that Corisande's finally managed to get practically its entire reserve sent forward. Emerald has about sixty of its galleys into full commission, too, and despite everything Sharleyan, Sandyrs, and Sharpfield have been able to do, they've been forced to send another twenty of their galleys forward to Eraystor, as well. Even with the losses Bryahn and your father inflicted on them, that brings them up to a hundred and eighty to your father's eighty. Well, seventy-six, given the four he lost on the reef off Crown Point last five-day."

  "Better than two-to-one," Cayleb muttered.

  "And," Merlin added, "given that Black Water knows—or strongly suspects—that we're somewhere else, he's almost certainly going to be tempted to try to strike before we can get back. If he can talk his 'allies' into it."

  "Fifteen days, if the wind holds steady," Cayleb grated. "Three five-days." He slammed his right fist into his left palm suddenly. "Damn! I should have started home without making repairs!"

  "Remember what I said about hindsight," Merlin told him. The youthful crown prince glared at him, and he gave a small shrug. "You made a decision. You didn't know this was going to happen. Right now, you need to concentrate on what we do next, not on what we've already done."

  "What I've already done, you mean," Cayleb said bitterly. Then he threw back his shoulders and inhaled deeply. "But whoever did it, you're right. The problem is, there doesn't seem to be a lot we can do."

  Merlin tried to think of something to say, but there wasn't much he could. The surviving galleons were already making their best speed, driving hard as they close-reached across the Cauldron on a steady wind out of the east-northeast at almost ten knots. They might be able to squeeze a little more speed out of some of the ships, but the merchant conversions had the typical high-capacity hulls of their merchant ancestry. They tended to be shorter and tubbier than naval galleons—especially Olyvyr's designs, like Dreadnought. They were already carrying virtually all the canvas they had, just to stay with their special-built consorts. If the fleet tried to sail faster, it could only be at the expense of leaving its slower ships behind. And it probably would shave no more than a day or two off its total transit time, anyway.

  "If only Father knew about this," Cayleb said softly to himself, pounding his fist gently but rhythmically into his palm once more. "If only—"

  His hands suddenly stopped moving, and his head came back up, his eyes locking on Merlin in the dimly lit sleeping cabin.

  "Can you tell him?" he asked softly, and Merlin froze.

  He looked back at the young man sitting on the cot, and his thoughts seemed to grind to a complete halt.

  "Cayleb, I—" he began, then stopped.

  How much was Cayleb truly prepared to accept about him? The prince had already taken far more in stride than Merlin would ever willingly have shown him, but where were the limits of Cayleb's flexibility? He might half-jestingly refer to Merlin as his "wizard," and he might have accepted Merlin's more-than-human strength and vision. He might even have recognized the inevitable clash between his kingdom and the corrupt men sitting in power in the Temple. But he was still a Safeholdian, still a child of the Church of God Awaiting, which was the very reason he was so angry about the corruption which afflicted it. And he'd still been steeped from birth in the belief that Pei Shan-wei was the mother of all evil and that the angels who'd fallen into evil with her had become demons, determined to tempt humanity into following Shan-wei's thirst for forbidden knowledge into damnation.

  "Do you really want me to answer that question?" he asked after a long, still moment. Cayleb started to answer, but Merlin raised one hand. "Think first, Cayleb! If you ask and I answer it, you'll never be able to un-ask it."

  Cayleb looked at him for perhaps three heartbeats, then nodded.

  "I want you to answer it," he said steadily.

  "All right, then," Merlin replied, just as steadily. "The answer is yes." Cayleb's expression started to blossom in relief, and he opened his mouth once more, but Merlin shook his head. "I can tell him this very night, even though he's four thousand miles away," he continued, "but only by physically going to him."

  Cayleb's mouth snapped shut.

  Silence hovered once more in the sleeping cabin. A taut, singing silence, enhanced but not broken by the background sound of water sluicing around the hull, the bubble of the wake below the opened stern windows, the creak of rigging and hull timbers, and the occasional sound of the rudder.

  "You can go to him?" Cayleb said finally.

  "Yes," Merlin sighed.

  "Merlin," Cayleb said, gazing at him levelly, "are you a demon, after all?"

  "No." Merlin returned his gaze just as levelly. "I'm not a demon, Cayleb. Nor am I an angel. I told you that before, in King's Harbor. I'm—" He shook his head. "When I told you then that I couldn't explain it to you, I meant I literally can't. If I tried, it would involve . . . concepts and knowledge you simply don't have."

  Cayleb looked at him for fifteen endless, tense seconds, his eyes narrow, and when he spoke again, his voice was very soft.

  "Would that knowledge violate the Proscriptions?" he asked.

  "Yes," Merlin said simply, and if he'd still been a creature of flesh and blood he would have held his breath.

  Cayleb Ahrmahk sat very, very still, gazing at the being who had become his friend. He sat that way for a long time, and then he shook himself.

  "How can you say you stand for the Light when your very existence violates the Proscriptions?"

  "Cayleb," Merlin said, "I've told you before that I've never lied to you, even when I haven't been able to tell you all the truth. I won't lie to you now, either. And if there are still things I simply can't explain, I can tell you this: the Proscriptions themselves are a lie."

  Cayleb inhaled sharply, and his head flinched back, as if Merlin had just punched him.

  "The Proscriptions were handed down by God Himself!" he said, his voice sharper, and Merlin shook his head.

  "No, they weren't, Cayleb," he said. "They were handed down by Jwo-jeng, and Tsen Jwo-jeng was no more an archangel than I am."

  Cayleb flinched again, and his face was pale. Merlin's eyes—his artificial eyes—could see it clearly, despite the dim light.

  "How can the Proscriptions be a lie?" the prince demanded hoarsely. "Are you saying God lied?"

  "No," Merlin said again. "God didn't lie. Jwo-jeng lied when she claimed to speak for Him."

  "But—"

  Cayleb broke off, staring at Merlin, and Merlin held out his right hand, cupped palm uppermost.

  "Cayleb, you know the men who currently rule the Temple are corrupt. They lie. They accept bribes. They use the Proscriptions to extort money out of people who try to introduce new ideas, or from people who want new ideas suppressed. You yourself told me, standing on top of the citadel with Rayjhis, that the vicars are more concerned with their secular power than with saving souls. They're willing to destroy your entire kingdom—burn your cities, murder and terr
orize your subjects—when you've done nothing at all wrong! Is it so inconceivable to you that other men have also used God, and twisted His purpose, for ends of their own?"

  "We aren't talking about 'men,'- " Cayleb said. "We're talking about the archangels themselves!"

  "Yes, we are," Merlin acknowledged. "But the beings who called themselves archangels weren't, Cayleb. They were men."

  "No!" Cayleb said, yet his voice's certitude wavered, and Merlin felt a small flicker of hope.

  "If you want me to, I can show you proof of that," he said gently. "Not tonight, not here, but I can show it to you. You've seen the things—some of the things—I can do. The men and women who claimed to be archangels could do the same sorts of things, and they used that ability to pretend they were divine beings. I can prove that to you, if you're willing to let me. The problem, Cayleb, is that if your faith in the lie you've been taught all your life is too strong, you won't believe any proof I could show you."