By Schism Rent Asunder (91 page)

He grimaced and shook his head.

Better not even be thinking that way, Vyk. Whatever else, the Church is still the Church. The fact that the men who serve her at any given moment may be less than worthy of her can't change that. Besides, the way things seem to be headed, there's not going to be any room for divided allegiances
.

He entered his lamplit office and found Captain Kairmyn waiting for him. The captain stood quickly as Lakyr walked into the room, but the garrison commander waved him back into his chair.

“Sit,” he commanded, and grinned sourly. “If you've been as busy as I have today, your feet can probably use the break.”

“That they can, Sir,” Kairmyn acknowledged as he settled back.

“For myself, at this particular moment, it's my arse,” Lakyr confessed, circling the desk and seating himself rather more gingerly in the padded chair behind. Kairmyn cocked his head, and Lakyr shrugged. “I've just completed a circuit of the entire waterfront. We're as ready as we're going to get, and I've ordered the men to get some rest while they still can.”

Kairmyn nodded in understanding, and Lakyr stretched hugely, twisting his shoulders to try to work out some of the tension kinking his spine. Then he looked back at the younger officer.

“I take it your men are ready, Captain?”

“Yes, Sir. They are. But, Sir, I still wish you'd—”

“Don't say it, Tomhys.” Lakyr's raised hand interrupted him. “Someone has to be in charge of the detachment. I picked you because you're one of the best men for the job. If it happens that I have … additional motives for selecting you, that's my business, not yours.”

“But—”

“Don't make me repeat myself, Captain,” Lakyr said, his tone much sterner than it had been.

For a moment or two, Kairmyn seemed to hover on the point of continuing his protest. Then he thought better of it—or, more probably, realized it wasn't going to do him any good—and nodded.

“Yes, Sir. In that case, though,” he stood, “I suppose I'd better be going. Good luck, Sir.”

“And to you, Captain.” Lakyr rose to return Kairmyn's salute as the captain came to attention. Then the younger man nodded once, turned, and left the office.

Lakyr sank back into his chair, gazing at the open doorway for several seconds, then shrugged and turned to the sheaf of messages Lieutenant Cheryng had stacked neatly on his blotter. Most of them were simply readiness reports, and the handful that weren't didn't really require any action or decisions from him. It was too late for anything he might have done at this point to affect what was going to happen come morning.

He finished the last message, set it aside, and tipped back in his chair, thinking about the youthful captain he'd just sent off to take charge of the military escort he'd provided to maintain order among the civilians he'd ordered to evacuate the city. Kairmyn was right about the reason Lakyr had selected him for that duty, of course. What had happened to the Charisian sailors and their families here in Ferayd hadn't been Tohmys Kairmyn's fault. In fact, it had happened because the very careful orders he'd given beforehand had been totally disregarded. Unfortunately, the Charisians couldn't know that.

Lakyr had absolutely no idea how much Cayleb of Charis knew about the details of what had happened here. It was unlikely, to say the least, that there'd been time for the Church's propaganda to reach Charis before this fleet was dispatched. It was remotely possible, however, and if Cayleb had seen the Church's version and compared it to the reports of his own people who had escaped the carnage, he'd be perfectly justified in assuming the massacre had been planned from the beginning. And if it should happen that he had assumed that, and the officer who'd been in direct command of the troops responsible for it fell into his hands, the consequences for that officer might be … severe.

And rightly so, if it
had
been planned
, Lakyr thought.
Which suggests certain unpleasant possibilities for my own immediate future if things go as badly as I'm afraid they may
.

Well, if they did, they did. And at least he'd gotten Kairmyn safely out of the way.

*   *   *

“Sir!
Sir!
”

Major Gahrmyn Zhonair jerked upright, snatching at the hand shaking his shoulder. He hadn't meant to doze off. In fact, he'd expected the straight-backed chair to be uncomfortable enough that he couldn't.

Unfortunately, he'd been wrong. Which didn't mean it hadn't been uncomfortable enough to leave him feeling as if his spine had been beaten with a club.

“What?” he demanded. The word came out sounding harsher than he'd intended, and he cleared his sleep-dried throat and tried again.

“What?” he repeated in a more normal voice.

“Sir, we've seen something—out in the harbor!”

“Show me!” Zhonair snapped, the last rags of sleep vanishing abruptly.

He followed the sergeant who'd awakened him out onto the nearest gun platform. It was still at least an hour or so until dawn, and the largely evacuated city of Ferayd was dark behind him. The sky was crystal clear, prickled with heaps of glittering stars, but there was no moon. Which probably had something to do with the reason the Charisians had chosen this particular night to come calling.

The starlight was too dim to be called illumination, but it was at least a tiny bit better than nothing, and he strained his eyes as he followed the sergeant's pointing finger. For several moments he saw nothing at all. Then his eyes narrowed as they caught the faint, faint gleam of starlight on canvas.

“I see it,” he said quietly. “But where's the guard boat that ought—”

He flinched at the abrupt, blinding flash of lightning as a cannon fired out in the harbor with absolutely no warning.

*   *   *

Admiral Rock Point's head came up as he heard the sudden crash of a firing thirty-pounder. The sound came from the east, somewhere astern of his flagship, and his peg leg clunked on the deck planking as he moved to
Destroyer
's stern rail. He looked out across the harbor, trying to find the gun which had fired, but the night had closed back in.

“Gunfire, one point on the starboard quarter!”

The lookout's cry floated down from overhead, not that it did a great deal of good at the moment. Still, it gave Rock Point an approximate idea of where it had come from, and he frowned as he summoned up a mental image of the harbor and matched it against his detailed sailing instructions.

Probably
Indomitable
or
Justice
, he decided. Assuming they were where they were supposed to be at any rate. And a single gunshot suggested either an accidental discharge, which was going to land someone neck-deep in trouble, or else an encounter with a guard boat.

Well, it's not as if anyone doesn't already know we're out here
, he thought.
The only thing that really surprises me, if it was a guard boat, is that we haven't already run into dozens of the things. For that matter, we may
have
and I just don't know anything about it, assuming they settled the business with cutlasses!

He didn't envy the crews of any launches or cutters ordered to patrol the harbor. To be sure, they had a better chance of spotting a galleon than a galleon had of spotting a single, smallish, low-lying boat. On the other hand, there wasn't very much they could do except run if they did encounter one of Rock Point's ships. As that single cannon shot emphasized, they certainly didn't have the firepower to do anything else.

Actually, Rock Point's greatest concern had been that the Delferahkan Navy might be present in the form of
galleys
being used as “guard boats.” The biggest potential danger of approaching in darkness had been the possibility of its allowing galleys to get close enough to galleons to try ramming or boarding them. The chance of any galley managing that through the accurate fire of a galleon who'd seen it coming was minute; the chance of a galley managing the same feat in the dark was significantly higher.

Given the quality of his own crews, Rock Point had accepted the risk with a fair degree of equanimity. That didn't mean he'd been eager to see what would happen if the Delferahkans tried it, though, and he wondered why they hadn't.

Either they're smart enough to have figured out what would probably happen to any galley which
did
intercept one of us, or else they didn't happen to have any galleys in port when we arrived
.

Personally, he suspected the former. To be sure, a galley might get alongside one of his galleons under these visibility conditions, if its skipper was smart and skilled. But the Delferahkan Navy's galleys were mainland designs—smaller than Charisian galleys, with smaller crews. Rock Point's gun-heavy galleons each carried between eighty and a hundred and twenty Marines, depending on their size, and had more than enough seamen to support them. It would take at least two, more probably three, galleys of the Delferahkan type to overwhelm the crew of one of his ships, and the rest of his squadron wouldn't exactly be standing around twiddling their thumbs while that happened. So unless the Delferahkans had managed to assemble at least twenty or thirty galleys (and the losses their fleet had taken against the marauding privateers who had preceded Rock Point's fleet into these waters made it unlikely that they still had that many in the first place), trying to use them in some sort of nighttime interception would have been an exercise in futility.

On the other hand, it could have been an exercise in futility that was still painful as hell for whichever ship they happened to hit. So
I'm
not going to complain that they didn't do it
.

He snorted and stumped back across the quarterdeck to Captain Darys.

“Well, we've knocked on the door now, My Lord,” the flag captain said wryly.

“And here I was hoping they wouldn't guess we were coming,” the admiral replied dryly. Then he shook his head.

“About an hour or so, I make it,” he said more seriously.

“About that,” Darys agreed.

“In that case, I hope they didn't wait until they heard our ‘door knocker' to start getting people out of harm's way.”

The admiral's voice was much grimmer, and Darys nodded silently. The flag captain, like his admiral, had been pleased by their orders' emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties to the greatest possible extent. That, in fact, was the reason they'd deliberately alerted the Delferahkans to their approach. It was always possible the commander of the port's defenses might be sufficiently stupid to fail to consider the possibility that any attacking Charisian squadron might land troops. Assuming the commander in question had the intelligence God had given a slash lizard, however, it was going to occur to him that simply sending ships to sail up and down in the harbor wouldn't accomplish very much.

What it came down to in the end was whether or not the man in charge of defending Ferayd had a realistic appreciation for the chance that his batteries might manage to drive off the Charisian galleons. And whether or not he had the moral courage to risk being accused of defeatism if he ordered an evacuation before the first shot was even fired.

Rock Point hoped Sir Vyk Lakyr had both of those things. Unlike any of the other officers and men of his squadron, the admiral knew from
Seijin
Merlin's visions that the garrison commander had deliberately sought to minimize casualties. That didn't make the admiral feel any more kindly towards Delferahk, but it did tell him—or, at least,
remind
him—who the Empire's true enemy was. And whether Delferahk had been a willing participant in the massacre, or simply hadn't been able to stop it, it couldn't be allowed to pass unpunished. Emperor Cayleb was right about that, too. Ferayd had to be turned into an object lesson to the Empire's enemies, and for the Empire's subjects, the massacre itself had to be punished.

And that,
he thought grimly, turning back to the east where a hint of grayness was creeping into the heavens,
is exactly what we're about to do.

*   *   *

“Oh,
shit
,” someone whispered.

It took Major Zhonair a moment to realize it had been himself and even then, the recognition was a distant and unimportant thing as he gazed out from his battery's walls.

There were
dozens
of Charisian galleons out there. They obviously had detailed charts of the harbor and its defenses, too, because they'd used the darkness to get themselves perfectly positioned. Twenty-three of them were sailing slowly, in a remarkably neat line, directly across the harbor towards him, while another ten or fifteen hovered farther out, watching over the transports. The approaching line was already little more than three or four hundred yards out, and its ships were angling steadily closer. The rising sun gleamed on their sails, gilding the tan and gray, weather-stained canvas with gold, and what had to be the new Charisian Empire's flag—the silver and blue checkerboard of the House of Tayt quartered with the black of Charis and the golden kraken of the House of Ahrmahk—flew from their mizzen peaks. Hundreds of guns poked stubby fingers out of their opened gun ports, and the utter silence of their approach sent a shiver of dread through Zhonair's bones.

“Stand to!” he shouted.
“Stand to!”

His drummer sounded the urgent tattoo, although it was scarcely necessary, since the guns had been fully manned for the last hour and a half. As he'd expected, though, the drumroll was picked up by the battery to his right, as well, and relayed all along the waterfront and back into the city. His own men crouched over their guns, waiting for the inexorably advancing Charisian line to enter their field of fire, and Zhonair raised his spyglass to peer through it at the enemy.