How Firm a Foundation (3 page)

His last sentence managed to sound insufferably smug, and
Merlin chuckled as he visualized the ironmaster’s elevated nose and broad grin.

“Better you than me, for
oh
so many reasons,” he said feelingly.

“That’s all well and good,” Sharleyan put in, “and I agree with everything you’ve just said, Ehdwyrd. But that does rather bring up the next sticking point, too, I’m afraid.”

“You mean how we get
Father Paityr
to sign off on the concept of steam power,”
Howsmyn said in a considerably glummer tone.

“Exactly.” Sharleyan grimaced. “I really like him, and I admire and respect him, too. But this one’s so far beyond anything the Proscriptions envision that getting his approval isn’t going to be easy, to say the least.”

“That’s unfortunately true,” Merlin acknowledged. “And pushing him so far his principles and beliefs finally come up against his
faith in Maikel’s judgment would come under the heading of a Really Bad Idea. Having him in the Church of Charis’ corner is an enormous plus—and not just in Charis, either, given his family’s prestige and reputation. But the flip side of that is that turning him
against
the Church of Charis would probably be disastrous. To be perfectly honest, that’s another reason I’ve always figured keeping
the emitters running for a fairly lengthy period doesn’t have any downside. Now that we know—or if we
decide
we know—the bombardment platforms aren’t going to kill us, we can start giving some thought about how we convince Father Paityr not to blow the whistle on us, as well.”

“And if it turns out the bombardment platforms are going to kill the ‘steam engines’ after all,” Cayleb agreed, “nothing
but a bunch of thoroughly useless, uninhabited islands gets hurt.”

“Useless, uninhabited islands so far away from anyone that no one’s even going to realize ‘Langhorne’s Rakurai’ has struck again if it happens,” Sharleyan said with a nod.

“That’s the idea, anyway,” Merlin said. “That’s the idea.”

.II.

HMS
Destiny
, 54, Gulf of Mathyas

“Well, Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk?” Lieutenant Rhobair Lathyk called through his leather speaking trumpet from the deck far below. “You
do
plan on making your report sometime today, don’t you?”

Ensign Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk, known on social occasions as His Grace, the Duke of Darcos, grimaced. Lieutenant Lathyk thought he was a wit, and in Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s considered
opinion, he was half right. That wasn’t something he was prepared to offer up as an unsolicited opinion, however. And, to be fair, whatever the lieutenant’s failings as a wellspring of humor, he was one of the best seamen Aplyn-Ahrmahk had ever met. One might not think a young man not yet sixteen would be the best possible judge of seamanship, but Aplyn-Ahrmahk had been at sea since his tenth
birthday. He’d seen a lot of sea officers since then, some capable and some not. Lathyk definitely fell into the former category, and the fact that he’d had an opportunity to polish his skills under Sir Dunkyn Yairley—undoubtedly the finest seaman under whom Aplyn-Ahrmahk had ever served—hadn’t hurt.

Nonetheless, and despite all of Lieutenant Lathyk’s sterling qualities, Aplyn-Ahrmahk thought
several rather uncomplimentary thoughts about him while he struggled with the heavy spyglass. He’d heard rumors about the twin-barreled spyglasses which had been proposed by the Royal College, and he hoped half the tales about their advantages were true. Even if they were, however, it was going to be quite some time before they actually reached the fleet. In the meantime youthful ensigns still got
to go scampering up to the main topmast crosstrees with long clumsy spyglasses and do their best to see through haze, mist, and Langhorne only knew what to straighten out a midshipman’s confused report while impatient seniors shouted putatively jocular comments from the comfort of the quarterdeck.

The young man peered through the spyglass, long practice helping him hold it reasonably steady despite
HMS
Destiny
’s increasingly lively motion. A hundred and fifty feet long between perpendiculars, over forty-two feet in the beam, and displacing twelve hundred tons, the big, fifty-four-gun galleon was usually an excellent sea boat, but there seemed to be something about the current weather she didn’t care for.

Neither did Aplyn-Ahrmahk, when he thought about it. There was a strange quality to
the air, a sultry feeling that seemed to lie heavily against his skin, and the persistent, steamy haze over Staiphan Reach made it extraordinarily difficult to pick out details. Which was rather the point of Lieutenant Lathyk’s inquiry, he supposed. Speaking of which.…

“I can’t make it out, either, Sir!” He hated admitting that, but there was no point pretending. “I can barely make out Howard
Island for the haze!” He looked down at Lathyk. “There’s a couple of sail moving about beyond Howard, but all I can see are topsails! Can’t say whether they’re men-of-war or merchantmen from here!”

Lathyk craned his neck, gazing up at him for several moments, then shrugged.

“In that case, Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk, might I suggest you could be better employed on deck?”

“Aye, aye, Sir!”

Aplyn-Ahrmahk
slung the spyglass over his back and adjusted the carry strap across his chest with care. Letting the expensive glass plummet to the deck and shatter probably wouldn’t make Lathyk any happier with him … and that was assuming he managed to avoid braining one of
Destiny
’s crewmen with it. The way his luck had been going this morning, he doubted he’d be that fortunate.

Once he was sure the spyglass
was secure, he headed down the shrouds towards the deck so far below.

“You say the haze is building?” Lathyk asked him almost before his feet had touched the quarterdeck, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk nodded.

“It is, Sir,” he replied, trying very hard not to sound as if he were making excuses for an unsatisfactory report. “I’d estimate we’ve lost at least four or five miles’ visibility since the turn of
the glass.”

“Um.” Lathyk gave the almost toneless, noncommittal sound which served to inform the world that he was thinking. After a moment, he looked back up at the sky, gazing south-southwest down the length of Terrence Bay, into the eye of the wind. There was a hint of darkness on the horizon, despite the relatively early hour, and anvil-headed clouds with an odd striated appearance and black,
ominous bases were welling up above that dark line. Back on a planet called Earth which neither Lathyk nor Aplyn-Ahrmahk had ever heard of, those clouds might have been called cumulonimbus.

“What’s the glass, Chief Waigan?” Lathyk asked after a moment.

“Still falling, Sir.” Chief Petty Officer Frahnklyn Waigan’s voice was unhappy. “Better’n seven points in the last hour, and the rate’s increasing.”

Aplyn-Ahrmahk felt his nerves tighten. Before the introduction of the new Arabic numerals it had been impossible to label the intervals on a barometer’s face as accurately as they could now be divided. What had mattered for weather prediction purposes, however, was less the actual pressure at any given moment than the observed rate of
change
in that pressure. A fall of more than .07 inches of
mercury in no more than an hour was a pretty high rate, and he found himself turning to look the same direction Lathyk was looking.

“Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk, be kind enough to present my compliments to the Captain,” Lathyk said. “Inform him that the glass is dropping quickly and that I don’t like the looks of the weather.”

“Aye, Sir. Your compliments to the Captain, the glass is dropping quickly,
and you don’t like the looks of the weather.”

Lathyk nodded satisfaction, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk headed for the quarterdeck hatch just a bit more swiftly even than usual.

*   *   *

Lieutenant Lathyk’s sense of humor might leave a little something to be desired; his weather sense, unfortunately, did not.

The wind had increased dramatically, rising from a topgallant breeze, little more than eight
or nine miles per hour, to something much stronger in a scant twenty minutes. The waves, which had been barely two feet tall, with a light scattering of glassy-looking foam, were three times that tall now, with white, foamy crests everywhere, and spray was beginning to fly. A seaman would have called it a topsail breeze and been happy to see it under normal conditions. With a wind speed of just under
twenty-five miles an hour, a ship like
Destiny
would turn out perhaps seven knots with the wind on her quarter and all sail set to the topgallants. But that sort of increase in so short a period was most
un
welcome, especially with the barometer continuing to fall at an ever steeper rate. Indeed, one might almost have said the glass was beginning to plummet.

“Don’t like it, Captain,” Lathyk said
as he and Captain Yairley stood beside the ship’s double wheel, gazing down at the binnacle. The lieutenant shook his head and raised his eyes to the set of the canvas. “Don’t usually see heavy weather out of the south
west
this time of year, not in these waters.”

Yairley nodded, hands clasped behind him while he considered the compass card.

As the acting commodore of the squadron keeping watch
over the Imperial Desnairian Navy’s exit from the Gulf of Jahras, he had quite a few things to be worried over. Just for starters, his “squadron” was down to only his own ship at the moment, since
Destiny
’s sister ship
Mountain Root
had encountered one of the Gulf of Mathyas’ uncharted rocks three days before. She’d stripped off half her copper and suffered significant hull damage, and while her
pumps had contained the flooding and she’d been in no immediate danger of sinking, she’d obviously needed to withdraw for repairs. To make bad worse, HMS
Valiant,
the third galleon of his truncated squadron (every squadron had been “truncated” in the wake of the Markovian Sea action), had reported a serious freshwater shortage two days before that, thanks to leaks in no less than three of her
iron water tanks, and Yairley had already been considering detaching
her
for repairs. Under the circumstances, little though any commander in his place could have cared for the decision, he’d chosen to send both damaged galleons back to Thol Bay in Tarot, the closest friendly naval base, for repairs, with
Valiant
escorting
Mountain Root
just in case her hull leaks should suddenly worsen in the
course of the three-thousand-mile voyage.

Of course, a single galleon could scarcely hope to enforce a “blockade” of the Gulf of Jahras—Staiphan Reach was over a hundred and twenty miles across, although the shipping channel was considerably narrower—but he was due to be reinforced by an additional six galleons in another five-day or so, and that wasn’t really his true task, anyway. It wasn’t
as if the Desnairian Navy had ever shown anything like a spirit of enterprise, after all. In point of fact, the Imperial Charisian Navy would have welcomed a Desnairian sortie, although it was highly unlikely the Desnairians would be foolish enough to give the ICN the opportunity to get at them in open water, especially after what had happened to the Navy of God in the Markovian Sea. If, for some
inexplicable reason, the Duke of Jahras
did
suddenly decide to venture forth, it wasn’t Yairley’s job to stop him, but rather to report that fact and then shadow him. The messenger wyverns in the special below-decks coop would get word of any Desnairian movements to Admiral Payter Shain at Thol Bay in little more than three days, despite the distance, and Shain would know exactly what to do with
that information.

In the extraordinarily unlikely eventuality that the Desnairians decided to move north, they’d have to fight their way through the Tarot Channel, directly past Shain’s squadron. That wasn’t going to happen, especially since Yairley’s warning would ensure Shain had been heavily reinforced from Charis by the time Jahras got there. In the more likely case of his moving
south,
down
the eastern coast of Howard to swing around its southern end and join the Earl of Thirsk, there’d be ample time for the ICN’s far swifter, copper-sheathed schooners—once again, dispatched as soon as Admiral Shain received Yairley’s warning—to carry word to Corisande and Chisholm long before the Desnairians could reach their destination.

In effect, his “squadron” was essentially an advanced listening
post … and better than three thousand miles from the nearest friendly base. All sorts of unpleasant things could happen to a small, isolated force operating that far from any support—as, indeed, what had happened to
Mountain Root
and
Valiant
demonstrated. Under the circumstances, the ICN had scarcely selected that squadron’s commander at random, particularly in light of the delicate situation
with the Grand Duchy of Silkiah. Silkiah Bay opened off the Gulf of Mathyas just to the north of Staiphan Reach, and dozens of “Silkiahan” and “Siddarmarkian” merchantmen with Charisian crews and captains plied in and out of Silkiah Bay every five-day in barely sub-rosa violation of Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s trade embargo. Anything so blatant as the intrusion of a regular Charisian warship into Silkiah
Bay could all too easily inspire Clyntahn to the sort of rage which would bring a screeching end to that highly lucrative, mutually profitable arrangement, and Yairley had to be extraordinarily careful about avoiding any appearance of open collusion between his command and the Silkiahans.

In theory his single galleon was sufficient to discharge his responsibilities in the event of a Desnairian
sortie, but in the real world, he was all alone, totally unsupported, and had no friendly harbor in which he could take refuge in the face of heavy weather, all of which had to be weighing on his mind as the implacable masses of angry-looking cloud swept closer. If he was particularly perturbed, he gave no sign of it, however, although his lips were pursed and his eyes were thoughtful. Then he drew
a deep breath and turned to Lathyk.