By Schism Rent Asunder (3 page)

Sawal had never before encountered one of the Charisians' new schooners, and he was astonished at how close to the wind the thing could sail. And by the size and power of its sail plan. His ship had the same number of masts, but the Charisian had to have at least twice the sail area. It also had the stability and size to
carry
more sail, and it was driving far harder under these conditions than his own ship could manage.

The number of gun ports arranged along its side was at least equally impressive, and he felt his stomach muscles tighten as the stubby muzzles of cannon poked out of them.

“Father?”

He glanced at his own second-in-command. The one-word question made the other priest's tension abundantly clear, and Sawal couldn't blame him. Not that he had an answer for what he knew the man was actually asking.

“We'll have to see what we see, Brother Tymythy,” he said instead. “Hold your course.”

*   *   *

“He's not changing course,” Urvyn said.

As redundant statements of the obvious went, that one took some beating, Hywyt thought.

“No, he isn't,” the commander agreed with massive restraint as the range fell steadily. It was down to less than three hundred yards and still dropping, and he wondered how far the other skipper was going to go in calling what he undoubtedly hoped was
Wave
's bluff. “Pass the word to the Gunner to stand ready to fire a shot across his bow.”

Urvyn hesitated. It was a tiny thing. Someone else might not have noticed it at all, but Urvyn had been Hywyt's first lieutenant for over six months. For a moment, Hywyt thought he would have to repeat the order, but then Urvyn turned heavily away and raised his leather speaking trumpet.

“Stand ready to fire across his bow, Master Charlz!” he shouted, and
Wave
's gunner waved back in acknowledgment.

*   *   *

“I think he's—”

Brother Tymythy never completed that particular observation. There was no need. The flat, concussive thud of a single gun punctuated it quite nicely, and Sawal watched the cannonball go slashing across the waves, cutting its line of white across their crests as cleanly as any kraken's dorsal fin.

“He's
fired
on us!” Tymythy said instead. His voice was shrill with outrage, and his eyes were wide, as if he was actually surprised that even
Charisians
should dare to offer such insult to Mother Church. And perhaps he was. Sawal, on the other hand, discovered that he truly wasn't.

“Yes, he has,” the under-priest agreed far more calmly than he felt.

I didn't really believe they'd do it,
he thought.
I'm sure I didn't. So why am I not surprised that they have? This is the beginning of the end of the world, for God's sake!

He thought again about the dispatches he carried, who they were addressed to, and why. He thought about the whispered rumors, about exactly what Prince Hektor and his allies had hoped for … what rewards they'd been promised by the Church.

No, not by the Church
, Sawal told himself.
By the Knights of the Temple Lands. There
is
a difference!

Yet even as he insisted upon that to himself, he knew better. Whatever technical or legal distinctions might exist, he knew better. And that, he realized now, with something very like despair, was why he truly wasn't surprised.

Even now, he couldn't put it into words for himself, couldn't make himself face it that squarely, but he knew. Whatever might have been true before the massive onslaught Prince Hektor and his allies had launched upon the Kingdom of Charis, the Charisians knew as well as Sawal who had truly been behind it. They knew the reality of the cynical calculations, the casual readiness to destroy an entire realm in blood and fire, and the arrogance which had infused and inspired them. This time the “Group of Four” had come too far out of the shadows, and what they had envisioned as the simple little assassination of an inconvenient kingdom had turned into something very different.

Charis knew who its true enemy had been all along, and that explained exactly why that schooner was prepared to fire on the flag of God's own Church.

The schooner was closer now, leaning to the press of her towering spread of canvas, her bow garlanded with white water and flying spray that flashed like rainbow gems under the brilliant sun. He could make out individuals along her low bulwarks, pick out her uniformed captain standing aft, near the wheel, see the crew of the forward gun in her starboard broadside reloading their weapon. He looked up at his own sails, then at the schooner's kraken-like grace, and drew a deep breath.

“Strike our colors, Brother Tymythy,” he said.

“Father?”
Brother Tymythy stared at him, as if he couldn't believe his own ears.

“Strike our colors!” Sawal repeated more firmly.

“But, but the Bishop Executor—”

“Strike our colors!”
Sawal snapped.

For a moment, he thought Tymythy might refuse. Tymythy knew their orders as well as Sawal did, after all. But it was far easier for a bishop to order an under-priest to maintain the authority of Mother Church “at any cost” than it was for Father Rahss Sawal to get the crew of his vessel killed as part of an exercise in futility.

If there were any hope of actually delivering our dispatches, I wouldn't strike,
he told himself, and wondered whether or not it was the truth.
But it's obvious we can't keep away from them, and if those people over there are as prepared to fire into us as I think they are, they'll turn this entire vessel into toothpicks with a single broadside. Two, at the outside. There's no point in seeing my own people slaughtered for nothing, and we aren't even armed
.

The flag which had never before been dipped to any mortal power fluttered down from the courier boat's masthead. Sawal watched it come down, and an ice-cold wind blew through the marrow of his bones.

It was a small thing, in so many ways, that scrap of embroidered fabric. But that was how all true catastrophes began, wasn't it? With small things, like the first stones in an avalanche.

Maybe I
should
have made them fire into us. At least then there wouldn't have been any question, any ambiguity. And if Charis is prepared to defy Mother Church openly, perhaps a few dead crewmen would have made that point even more clearly
.

Perhaps they would have, and perhaps he
should
have forced the Charisians to do it, but he was a priest, not a soldier, and he simply couldn't. And, he told himself, the mere fact that Charis had fired upon the flag of Holy Mother Church should be more than enough without his allowing his people to be killed, on top of it.

No doubt it would, and yet even as he told himself that, he knew.

The lives he might have saved this morning would be as meaningless as mustard seeds on a hurricane's breath beside the horrendous mountains of death looming just over the lip of tomorrow.

.II.

Royal Palace,
City of Manchyr,
Princedom of Corisande

Hektor Daykyn's toe caught on the splinter-fringed gouge a Charisian round shot had plowed across the deck of the galley
Lance
. It was one of many such gouges, and the Prince of Corisande reached out to run his hand across a shattered bulwark railing where the mast had come thundering down in splintered ruin.

“Captain Harys had his hands full bringing this one home, Your Highness,” the man walking at his right shoulder said quietly.

“Yes. Yes, he did,” Hektor agreed, but his voice was oddly distant, his eyes looking at something only he could see. The distant focus in those eyes worried Sir Taryl Lektor, the Earl of Tartarian, more than a little bit. With the Earl of Black Water's death in battle confirmed, Tartarian had become the senior ranking admiral of the Corisandian Navy—such as it was, and what remained of it—and he didn't much care for the way his prince seemed to occasionally … wander off into his own thoughts. It was too unlike Hektor's normal, decisive manner.

“Father, can we
go
now?”

Hektor's eyes blinked back into focus, and he turned to look at the boy beside him. The youngster had Hektor's dark eyes and jawline, but he had the copper-bright hair of his dead northern mother. He was probably going to favor his father in height, too, although it was a bit early to be sure about that. At fifteen, Crown Prince Hektor still had some growing to do.

In more ways than one
, his father thought grimly.

“No, we can't,” he said aloud. The crown prince frowned, and his shoulders hunched as he shoved his hands into his breeches' pockets. It wouldn't be quite fair to call his expression a pout, but Prince Hektor couldn't think of a word that came closer.

Irys, you're worth a dozen of him,
the prince thought.
Why, oh
why,
couldn't you have been born a man?

Unfortunately, Princess Irys hadn't been, which meant Hektor had to make do with his namesake.

“Pay attention,” he said coldly now, giving the boy a moderately stern glare. “Men
died
to bring this ship home, Hektor. You might learn something from their example.”

Hektor the younger flushed angrily at the public reprimand. His father observed his darkened color with a certain satisfaction, then reminded himself that publicly humiliating the child who would someday sit on his throne and rule his princedom was probably not a very good idea. Princes who remembered that sort of treatment tended to take it out on their own subjects, with predictable results.

Not that the odds of this particular crown prince having the opportunity to do anything of the sort were particularly good. Which had quite a lot to do with the damage to the battered galley on which Hektor stood.

He turned in place, looking up and down the full length of the ship. Tartarian was right, he reflected. Getting this ship home must have been a nightmare. Her pumps were still working even now, as she lay to her anchor. The long, crawling voyage home from Darcos Sound—almost seven thousand miles—in a ship which had been holed at least a dozen times below the waterline, and a third of whose crew had been slaughtered by the Charisian artillery, was the stuff of which legends were made. Hektor hadn't even tried to count the shot holes
above
the waterline, but he'd already made a mental note to have Captain Zhoel Harys promoted.

And at least I have plenty of vacancies to promote him
into,
don't I?
Hektor thought, looking down at the dark discoloration where human blood had soaked deeply into
Lance
's deck planking.

“All right, Hektor,” he said. “We can go, I suppose. You're late for your fencing lesson, anyway.”

*   *   *

Some hours later, Hektor; Admiral Tartarian; Sir Lyndahr Raimynd, Hektor's treasurer; and the Earl of Coris, his spymaster, sat in a small council chamber whose window overlooked the naval anchorage.

“How many does that make, My Prince?” Earl Coris asked.

“Nine,” Hektor said, rather more harshly than he'd intended to. “Nine,” he repeated in a more moderate tone. “And I doubt we're going to see many more of them.”

“And according to our latest messages from the Grand Duke,
none
of the Zebediahan-manned galleys have made it home even now,” Coris murmured.

“I'm well aware of that,” Hektor said.

And I'm not very surprised, either
, he thought.
There never were many of them, and despite anything Tohmys may have to say, I'll wager his precious captains surrendered just about as quickly as Sharleyan's Chisholmians.
He snorted mentally
. After all, they love me just about as much as Sharleyan does
.

Actually, that probably wasn't
quite
fair, he reflected. It had been over twenty years since he had defeated and deposed—and executed—the last Prince of Zebediah. Who hadn't been a particularly good prince before the conquest even when he'd had a head, as even the most rabid Zebediahan patriot was forced to admit. Hektor might have displayed a certain ruthlessness in rooting out potential resistance and making sure the entire previous dynasty was safely extinct, and he'd been forced to make examples of the occasional ambitious noble since then. But at least they'd gotten honest government since becoming Corisandian subjects, and their taxes weren't actually all that much higher than they had been. Of course, more of those taxes were spent in Corisande than in Zebediah, but if they insisted on losing wars, they couldn't have everything.

And whatever the common folk might think, Tohmys Symmyns, the Grand Duke of Zebediah, and his fellow surviving aristocrats knew which side of their bread the jam was on. Symmyns' father, for example, had been a mere baron before Hektor elevated him to the newly created title of grand duke, and the current grand duke would retain the title only as long as he retained Hektor's confidence. Still, there was no denying that his Zebediahan subjects were somewhat less enthusiastic than his native-born Corisandians about shedding their blood in the service of the House of Daykyn.

Something about how much of their blood had been shed
by
the House of Daykyn over the last few decades, probably.

“Frankly, Your Highness,” Tartarian said, “I'll be astonished if we see any more of them, Corisandian-crewed
or
Zebediahan-crewed.
Lance
is the next best thing to a wreck. Given her damage and casualties, it's a miracle Harys got her home at all, and he didn't set any record passage doing it.” The admiral shook his head, his expression grim. “If there were any of them with worse damage, they almost certainly went down before they could reach Corisande. Either that or they're beached on an island somewhere between here and Darcos Sound, at any rate.”