Hell's Foundations Quiver (122 page)

“If we do it any other way, the consequences for Thirsk will be as bad as they'd have been if he'd tried to fight Clyntahn on this one. I don't say I like it, because I don't, but I understand why it has to be this way.”

That wasn't precisely what Nimue had asked, and she studied his expression—daylight clear to her enhanced vision despite the rain and darkness. The basic idea had been hers, but it had been Merlin and Nahrmahn Baytz who'd recognized the most critical component of the entire operation, and she wondered if subconsciously she'd deliberately missed recognizing it herself from the beginning. For that matter, she wondered how much of her concern for Merlin was actually concern for herself. Despite the fact that both of them remembered being Nimue Alban, they were different people now, and she'd seen at least some of what the brutal demands of fighting the Group of Four had cost Merlin Athrawes. Had her subconscious tried to keep her from recognizing the costs of her own plan? To protect her from assuming her share of Merlin's crushing weight of responsibility and regret? And was that the real reason she was so worried about whether or not
he
could deal with it? Or—

Stop that
, she told herself.
Stop worrying about whether you're projecting things onto him and remember that
he
faced up to the implications squarely as soon as you opened your mouth. If he says he's ready to live with it, then he's ready to live with it, and you damned well owe him the respect of taking his word for it
.

“All right,” she said aloud. “In that case I suppose we should be about it.”

Merlin nodded, then looked up at the recon skimmer.

“Time to go, Owl,” he said.

“Acknowledged, Commander Athrawes,” the AI replied, and the fishing boat shuddered as the skimmer's tractor beam eased it into the water.

The tractor didn't release the boat, however. Instead, the skimmer used it to tow the boat through the four-foot seas. With the skimmer's assistance, the forty-foot craft sliced through the waves in a cascade of blown spray, moving twice as rapidly as
Saint Frydhelm
. The fishing boat overtook the galleon rapidly from astern and the two PICAs checked their equipment one last time.

*   *   *

“It looks thoroughly unpleasant out there,” Lieutenant Zhurgyn Ahlzhernohn remarked, shrugging into his oilskins as he joined Ahntwahn Kuhlhani on the quarterdeck. The tall, narrow poop deck was a roof overhead, protecting them and the helmsmen from the rain—for now, at least—and Kuhlhani nodded in greeting as he turned to Ahlzhernohn and sketched Langhorne's scepter in salute.

“It's not all
that
bad,” he said, “but it's miserable enough if you stand around in it for an hour or two. Which is why I'm so delighted to see my relief arriving promptly, Sir.”

“If Captain Hainz didn't snore so loudly, you probably wouldn't have,” Ahlzhernohn said acidly, and Kuhlhani chuckled with remarkably little sympathy.

Gyairmoh Hainz commanded the fifteen-man detachment of the Gorath Temple Guard which had been assigned to escort Earl Thirsk's family to Zion. A native Dohlaran, he was in his mid-thirties, tough-minded, disciplined, a pleasant dinner companion, and always perfectly turned out and professional on duty. And at night, he sounded like a sawmill with a faulty waterwheel that stopped and started unpredictably. When Father Syndail handed his quarters over to their passengers, he'd appropriated Ahlzhernohn's cabin. Ahlzhernohn, in turn, had appropriated Ahntwahn Kuhlhani's, and Kuhlhani had moved in with the third lieutenant. Captain Hainz, however, shared the cabin which had once been Kuhlhani's with the first lieutenant.

“Far be it from me to say there's such a thing as poetic justice,” Kuhlhani said now, “but if there
were
such a thing as poetic justice, then—”

He broke off, expression puzzled as he heard a sound. Sailing ships underway in a seaway were much noisier places than most landsmen would have believed, but sailors learned to recognize all of those noises. They knew what they were, why they were there, and what caused them. And when they heard one they couldn't identify, it got their attention quickly.

In this case, the sound Lieutenant Kuhlhani couldn't identify was the clatter of a pair of grappling hooks as they arced into the air from astern of the galleon and hooked their prongs over the taffrail on the poop deck above him.

As in most of the Navy of God's galleons,
Saint Frydhelm
's poop deck was fairly short, forming a roof above the after part of the quarterdeck in a feature adopted from merchant galleon design. In a merchant ship, it provided a raised platform from which to con the ship but, even more importantly, it protected the quarterdeck-mounted wheel from the effects of rain, wind, and—especially—waves in heavy weather. If a ship was pooped, overtaken from astern by a heavy sea, the wave could sweep the full length of her decks, causing serious damage and washing men overboard. It could also wash away the men on the wheel, with potentially catastrophic consequences for control of the ship, especially in the midst of stormy weather. There'd been no galleon warships in the days of pre-Merlin Athrawes artillery, but the war
galley's
sterncastle had served much the same function as the merchant galleon's poop deck and, in addition, protected the men on the wheel from enemy fire.

As galleons were adapted for war, replacing galleys and growing rapidly larger on the seas of a post-Merlin Safehold, average freeboard had increased, raising the level of the quarterdeck (and so decreasing the likelihood of being pooped) while retaining the massive sterncastles could only have made the ships far less weatherly and maneuverable. Charisian naval architects had simply deleted them completely, but the Church's more conservative designers had substituted the merchant galleon's lighter poop deck as a compromise. Charisian experience with captured Church galleons suggested that the poop decks offered little practical defensive advantage and had a measurable negative impact on maneuverability, but the Church and her subject navies had stuck with them.

Most merchant galleons used their longer poop decks as the roofs of cabins built at the quarterdeck level. In
Saint Frydhelm
it simply formed a space—open at the front, closed at the back—almost like a cave, over the wheel, the stern chasers, and the last two guns in each broadside. There was no sternwalk at that level, but there were no lids on the quarterdeck gunports, any more than there were on the spardeck broadside ports. Now the grappling hooks sank their points firmly into the wood of the taffrail at poop deck level, and two figures in the blackened breastplates and hauberks of the Imperial Charisian Guard sailed in through those open stern gunports feet-first, hit the deck, rolled, and came smoothly upright.

If anyone had been watching at that moment, they might have noticed that the guardsmen had actually made no use at all of the grappling hooks. Tractor beams were so much more convenient, after all. Those hooks, like the lines attached to them and the fishing boat towing at the ends of those lines, were there for an entirely different reason.

But no one had been watching. Indeed, Kuhlhani was just beginning to turn towards the rather louder sound of their arrival when Merlin Athrawes squeezed his trigger.

The shotgun in Merlin's hands would have been called a 10-gauge on Old Earth, because a spherical lead bullet for it would have weighed one-tenth of a pound. Its bore was just over three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and each shell was loaded with sixteen of what had once been called “double-ought buckshot.”

Each pellet was a separate .32 caliber lead ball, traveling at just over fourteen hundred feet per second. All of them hit the lieutenant squarely in the chest, and he flew backward without even a scream.

Ahlzhernohn whirled. He hadn't heard the grappling hooks, but the thunderous shotgun blast, trapped under the poop deck “roof,” hit his ears like a sledgehammer.

He'd made it less than halfway around when Nimue Chwaeriau squeezed
her
trigger.

There were shouts in plenty now. The men on the wheel turned, staring in disbelief at the smoke-shrouded apparitions behind them, and metal clicked as the PICAs worked the shotguns' slides smoothly. Their weapons and ammunition had been manufactured not by the Delthak Works, but by an AI named Owl, and they boasted certain refinements Taigys Mahldyn's designs had not yet attained. One of those refinements was a box magazine which contained eight rounds, and as long as the firer held the trigger back, the Owl-built weapon fired each time the slide was worked.

The amount of carnage a pair of 10-gauge shotguns could wreak, each firing once per second, was indescribable. Every man on the quarterdeck was dead or dying before Ahlzhernohn's body hit the deck and stopped rolling, and Merlin and Nimue stepped across the corpses with faces of stone.

*   *   *

“Mommy!”

Stefyny Mahkzwail thrashed upright in her hammock as thunder exploded overhead and Lyzet screamed. The other girls jerked awake right with her, and she heard their panicky cries, as well.

“It's all right, Lyzet!” she called, fighting the confinement of her hammock. “It's all right! Mommy's here!”

“What is it?!
What is it?!
”

“I don't know, honey, but Mommy's here!”

She half fell to the deck as she finally escaped the hammock. All three girls were already out of theirs, and they hit her like hunting wyverns striking a rabbit. She staggered at the impact, but she got her arms around them as she went to her knees, hugging them tightly.

“I'm here!” she told them again and again. “
I'm here!
Be brave!”

*   *   *

Gyairmoh Hainz was a landsman. He'd never claimed or wanted to be anything else, and while he had to admit free-swinging hammocks were far more comfortable than beds would have been aboard a ship, he hadn't yet acquired the knack of climbing in or out of one of them gracefully. Now he tumbled out of his hammock with all the grace of a pig in swamp mud and landed flat on his backside, but he hardly noticed the impact. He was too busy springing back upright and snatching for his sword belt.

The sounds which had awakened him were the stuff of nightmares, and his blood ran cold as the cacophony of gunfire and the screams of the wounded and dying crashed over him. There'd been rumors that Earl Thirsk's family was being moved to Zion on the Grand Inquisitor's orders because Vicar Zhaspahr was less than confident of the earl's total loyalty to Mother Church and the Jihad. They'd been very quiet, those rumors, whispered only in dark corners, and Father Aimohs had addressed Hainz' entire detachment on that very subject before they ever boarded ship. The rumors, he'd said, were simply untrue. They were to convey the earl's family to Zion because of specific threats against their safety made by the infamous terrorist Dialydd Mab and his murderers, apparently because of the Royal Dohlaran Navy's successes against the heretics. That was the only reason Vicar Zhaspahr and Vicar Allayn had decided they must extend Mother Church's protective hand over them.

To his shame, Hainz had been less than positive Father Aimohs was telling them the truth. He'd hated admitting that to himself, but he couldn't help remembering the stories about how Earl Thirsk had resisted delivering captured heretics to the Inquisition to face the Punishment. And, whether Mother Church wanted to admit it or not, Hainz knew the Jihad was going badly—
very
badly—in Siddarmark. Under the circumstances, Mother Church had to be alert for any sign Dohlar might try to follow Desnair's example. In which case, he'd thought, it was only too possible, even likely, that the rumors about Vicar Zhaspahr's suspicion of the earl were entirely accurate.

Now, as he heard the impossible rapidity of that thunderstorm gunfire, he knew he'd been wrong to doubt.

He flung the sword belt across his shoulder like a bandolier, snatched up the pair of loaded, double-barreled pistols he'd laid ready with his uniform, and dashed for the cabin door barefoot, wearing only the boxer shorts in which he customarily slept.

*   *   *

Merlin stepped down the short quarterdeck ladder to the main deck, shotgun held hip high and belching flame. The muzzle flashes were enormous, huge bubbles of blinding light in the darkness and the rain, but they had no effect on
his
vision. He swept the deck with a broom of fire, ejected an empty magazine, slapped in a loaded one, and opened fire once more as the first members of
Saint Frydhelm
's off-watch crew erupted from the main hatch.

Behind him, Nimue followed down the ladder but turned aft, towards what should have been the captain's quarters. The single rifle-armed Temple Guardsman posted in the vestibule outside the passengers' cabins—solely to protect their privacy, of course—was waiting when she kicked open the doorway under the break of the quarterdeck. He fired as the door flew open and a sledgehammer struck her chest. But the flattened bullet whined viciously as it ricocheted from the battle-steel breastplate, and her PICA's strength shrugged off the impact.

The guardsman goggled in disbelief as his short, obviously female target ignored a direct hit and continued straight towards him. He had time to get his rifle up, to begin a bayonet thrust, but Nimue's left hand darted out. Her right retained its grip on the shotgun; the left twisted the guardsman's rifle, and he started to cry out in shock as she snatched it effortlessly from his grip. He never completed the exclamation; the butt plate of his own rifle, driven horizontally with pile-driver force in a one-handed blow, shattered his forehead and killed him in mid-syllable.

*   *   *

Syndail Rahdgyrz erupted from his cabin, one deck below Nimue, sword in hand, and almost collided with Gyairmoh Hainz. For an instant, Rahdgyrz glared at the Temple Guardsman.
He
was
Saint Frydhelm
's captain; it was
his
job to get on deck first! But Hainz wasn't slowing down, and he had a pistol in each hand. Rahdgyrz had only his sword, and the cascade of gunfire told him a sword alone wasn't going to be enough.