Hell's Foundations Quiver (86 page)

He shrugged, and Stahdmaiyr nodded. Then he touched his chest in salute and headed for his normal battle station at the foot of the mainmast.

Haigyl watched him go, then glanced up at the pale streaks beginning to appear in the eastern sky. Dawn came quickly in these latitudes, once it started, and he spent a moment hoping to all the Archangels that most of the Charisian ships would be at least approximately where he wanted them to be when that happened. Frankly, it was unlikely, given the difficulties sailing ships faced in just finding one another, far less keeping station on each other, in a pitch-dark, moonless night, but he could hope.

He'd managed to get his signals passed before darkness closed in, and Captain Ahbaht had acknowledged them. Given what he knew of Ahbaht, Haigyl was certain the other captain hadn't liked his orders, but that was too bad. Haigyl didn't much like his own part of the proposed battle plan, either. In fact, he'd have given just about anything he could imagine to avoid it.

He inhaled deeply and looked around
Dreadnought
's immaculately neat and tidy deck once more, realizing how much he loved this ship and her crew. Then he nodded to Ahmbrohs Lywkys, the ship's chaplain.

“I think it's time, Father,” he said softly, his voice almost lost in the sounds of wind and water, and the Bédardist under-priest nodded and signed himself with Langhorne's scepter.

“Let us pray, my sons!” he called. The deck went silent but for that same sound of wind and wave, and a single, lonely wyvern whistled somewhere in the darkness above the ship's wake as heads were bared and bowed and he raised his hands in benediction. “Oh God, we ask Your blessing upon us this day as we face the enemies of Your will. The battle will be hard. Losses will be heavy, and we are but mortal. We are sore afraid of that to which we are called, yet we know what it is we must do, and we face it supported by the knowledge that You will be with us, whatever the cost, and that there is no better cause for which those who love You could contend. Be with us in the dark valley of death as You are always with us, and welcome into Your loving arms those who this day give up their lives in Your service. Amen.”

*   *   *

“Sunrise in another twenty minutes, Sir,” Lieutenant Traivyr said.

Pawal Hahlynd nodded, and the flag lieutenant handed him a hot cup of tea. Nights were seldom what one might call “cold” on Hahskyn Bay—they were less than five hundred miles below the equator—yet the darkness was cool and breezy, and the admiral took a grateful sip. The wind had gathered strength steadily during the night. By now, it was a stiff topgallant breeze, blowing out of the northwest and raising four-foot waves. It wasn't enough to worry him—yet, at least. What
did
worry him was that that westerly wind carried clouds on its breath. The stars to the west had disappeared steadily over the last few hours, and the glass was still falling.

Sword
rolled uncomfortably as she moved through the steeper waves with the rest of her squadron close about her. Hahlynd hadn't liked breaking off the action to reassemble his formation, but sometimes discretion truly was the better part of valor. He'd caught up with the Charisian galleons later in the day than he'd anticipated, and he blamed himself for reducing the crank tempo to rest his cranksmen earlier. The wind had come up more quickly than he'd expected, which had allowed the Charisians to make more speed. Coupled with his own decision, that had stretched out the time until his ships could come in range of the heavily armed galleons, and HMS
Sickle
's decision to turn directly into the pursuing galleys had stretched it out still longer.

The screw-galleys' armored citadels had been sorely tested as the galleon poured twenty-five-gun broadsides into them—firing solid shot, not shell. They'd stood up to the punishment better than Hahlynd had really expected, but that didn't mean they hadn't suffered broken plates and shattered bolts or that their supporting timbers hadn't been wracked and twisted by the pounding. Only
Carbine
had actually been penetrated, but he suspected some of the others had taken more structural damage than their captains were prepared to admit. The delay to deal with
Sickle
without exposing their unarmored sides to the galleon's grimly determined gunners had cost at least another full hour—more like an hour and a half—of daylight and badly disordered Hahlynd's formation.

It had also taught the screw-galleys the limits of their armored protection when one of them
had
inadvertently exposed her flank.
Sickle
's captain had obviously reserved at least a few guns, loaded with shell rather than shot, for exactly that chance, and a pair of thirty-pounder shells had ripped effortlessly through
Bayonet
's larboard side and exploded inside her.

She'd survived the experience, but the damage had been brutal and the resultant fire had been extinguished only with difficulty. She was clearly unfit for further action after only the two shells, yet
Sickle
had taken at least twenty direct hits from the screw-galleys' massive forward guns before
she
'd finally been driven out of action. Despite the screw-galleys' tough iron carapaces, their opponents could clearly withstand far more damage than they could once enemy fire got past—or around—that protection. The lesson had reinforced Hahlynd's determination to present nothing but the armored aspects of his vessels to the enemy, and if that slowed the pace of the battle, so be it. His screw-galleys were too effective, too expensive, and too damned hard to replace for him to take avoidable losses.

He'd caught up with the enemy's main body just before dark, despite the delay
Sickle
had imposed, and two of his columns had gotten in among the rearmost galleons. Moonless night had fallen before they could drive home their attack, however, and the engagement had come apart in a wild confusion of guns firing at point-blank range. The incandescent fury of heavy guns fired in near-total blackness had made it almost impossible for cringing human eyes to actually
see
anything, and the choking palls of powder smoke had obscured what little they might have seen anyway. The fact that
Sword
and her column had fallen behind the others hadn't helped, but even if he'd been right in the heart of the action, no one could possibly have kept track of the furious melee under those conditions, far less exerted any sort of control. Unfortunately, his smaller, more agile screw-galleys
required
more control at the best of times, and especially when they had to engage at such brutally short ranges. They needed to work as coordinated teams, combining their firepower and protecting one another's vulnerabilities.

That was why Hahlynd had fired the signal rockets, calling the rest of his ships back to rendezvous with
Sword
and regain their formation. He'd seen yet another enemy galleon turned into a torch, blazing against the darkness behind them until the flames reached the waterline, as they fell back, and he knew many of his captains had obeyed his signal only with rebellion in their hearts. He didn't fault them for that … but he'd also declined to renew the action until he could sort out the state of his own squadron and at least see the enemy once more. He had enough speed advantage to overtake them by midday, no matter what they did, and he intended to be able to maneuver effectively against them when he did.

Bayonet
was in danger of sinking by the time he recalled his other units, and her captain had jettisoned her guns in his struggle to keep her afloat.
Dagger
and
Halberd
had taken damage as well, although in their case it was minor.
Carbine
, on the other hand, was taking on water forward. Not only had her armor been breached by at least three round shot, but the recoil of her guns appeared to have started her seams badly. He was fairly certain her captain, like several of his other captains, had ignored his standing orders
not
to fire all three of her heavy guns simultaneously. He couldn't say he was surprised they had—or that he wouldn't have done the same thing in their places—but the screw-galleys really were ill suited to stand that sort of repeated recoil force again and again. Whether or not that was what had opened
Carbine
's seams, however, her pumps were hard-pressed to keep ahead of the flooding, and it was only likely to get worse if she reengaged the enemy.

He'd decided to send her and
Bayonet
back to Ki-dau, which had left only eleven ships under his command. They'd spent most of the night regaining their formation—now only three columns, with just three ships in the one to windward. Just finding one another had been a challenge, even with the section command ships in each column showing different colored lanterns at masthead and stern to help sort things out, and he blessed the endless hours of drill they'd carried out in Gorath Bay before ever starting out.

Now it was time to do something with them once again.

“Deck, there!” the cry floated down from above. “
Waraxe
is signaling!”

Hahlynd turned reflexively towards the east, where Captain Haarahld Stymsyn's
Waraxe
led his outermost column, a thousand yards to starboard and a mile or so ahead of
Sword
. He realized he was straining his eyes against the darkness, and snorted at his own foolishness. At that distance, especially from deck level, no one short of an Archangel could have seen the signal lantern flashing laboriously from
Waraxe
's maintop!

The RDN's lantern signals, adapted from the army's heliograph, were short-ranged and even more cumbersome than flag hoists, and the brightness beginning to streak the sky beyond
Waraxe
made it no easier for anyone to read the feeble flickers of light. Hahlynd knew all of that, yet he found his toe tapping the deck as he waited impatiently for the signal midshipman of the watch to decipher this one. Finally, after what seemed far longer than he knew it actually was—

“
Waraxe
signals ‘One enemy galleon in sight, bearing northeast-by-north, range five miles,' Sir!”

“North
east
,” the admiral repeated. He turned to Captain Mahgyrs with raised eyebrows and realized the flag captain's frown was actually visible in the gathering predawn light.

“Does seem a bit reckless of them, Sir. Assuming they're all still in company and didn't just scatter overnight, that is,” he said, and Hahlynd nodded in agreement.

The Kaudzhu Narrows were forty-four miles wide at their southwestern end, but they narrowed steadily. They were barely eighteen miles across at their northeastern end, and the southern side of the passage was lined with treacherous shoals and shallows. He would have expected the Charisians—especially after losing one of their precious ironclads to grounding—to have stayed as far as possible from that hazard to navigation. Apparently he'd been wrong. And it wasn't all bad. If they were to the east, they'd be silhouetted against the dawn whereas his own ships would be much more difficult to pick out against the darker western sky.

For a while, anyway.

“Well, we know where at least one of them is,” he told Mahgyrs, “and I doubt they scattered.” He shook his head. “No,
Waraxe
's found a trailer, not a stray. The rest of them are ahead of us somewhere fairly close to hand, and I think it's just about to be light enough for us to go find them.”

*   *   *

Sir Bruhstair Ahbaht stood on HMS
Broadsword
's quarterdeck and drummed the fingers of his left hand slowly, steadily on the hilt of his sword.

He stood in the bubble of open space his rank created as the galleons' officers and men prepared for what all of them knew was coming. They'd been fed a hearty breakfast, in keeping with the Charisian tradition, but the messdecks had been unusually quiet. Now he heard muted voices as orders were passed—and as friends spoke softly to one another—and heard the knowledge in them. They were grim, those voices, yet they were far from defeated, and he wondered how much of that was genuine confidence and how much was a thin shell of false bravado over something very different. In fact, he wondered how much of his own confidence—the confidence it was his duty to project, whatever he actually felt—was exactly that.

It doesn't matter
, he told himself. Y
ou know what your job is now. The least you can do after getting all of them into this crack is to pretend you know how to get them back out of it
.

He grimaced at the thought, and again, more deeply, as he contemplated Kahrltyn Haigyl's orders. He didn't like them, not one bit, but there'd been no time to debate them, especially when the argument would have depended on passing signals slowly and cumbersomely by signal flag to a ship he hadn't even been able to see. Besides, under the circumstances, those orders had made sense, however bitter that sense might be … and he'd been too busy executing his part of them to argue.

Thank God the wind had strengthened! With that stronger northwesterly coming in across his ships' larboard quarters, his copper-bottomed galleons could make good better than five knots—almost six. The screw-galleys would still be faster, but their speed advantage had probably been cut by at least a third and the squadron's galleons would be far more maneuverable than they'd been the day before. That was going to make the Dohlarans' task much harder.

With the loss of
Sickle
and
Relentless
, the squadron had been reduced to eleven galleons and
Sojourn
, his sole surviving schooner, and he was grateful the enemy had given his ships time to find one another and settle into something approaching the formation Haigyl had wanted. There'd never been much chance of achieving exactly the desired alignment—not in the dark with wind-powered ships. But
Relentless
' blazing funeral pyre had provided a grim yet useful navigation beacon, and at least she hadn't exploded. There'd even been time for some of her people to take to her surviving boats and find refuge aboard her consorts, and
Broadsword
was approximately where she was supposed to be, the second ship in Ahbaht's line.