Off Armageddon Reef (44 page)

“What do you think?” Prince Hektor asked, glancing at Earl Coris as the door closed behind Mhulvayn and the Guard captain.

“I think we don't have any independent information to confirm a single thing he's said, Sire,” Coris replied after a moment.

“So you think he's lying?”

“I didn't say that, Sire,” the earl said with a calm self-confidence rather at odds with the attitude he normally projected in Hektor's presence when anyone else was present. “What I said is that we don't have any independent corroboration, and we don't. It's certainly possible he
is
lying—the notion that his organization was broken through some sort of fluke circumstance beyond anyone's control would be one way to cover his ass, after all—but I don't know that he is. I'm simply not prepared to automatically assume he isn't. And even if he is, it doesn't necessarily follow that his analysis of what happened is correct.”

“I think,” Hektor said after a long, thoughtful moment, “that I believe him. We didn't pick fools to send to Tellesberg, and only a fool would spin a tale like that, knowing that sooner or later we'd find out he'd lied to us. And I suspect his theory about what happened is also substantially accurate.”

The prince pushed back his chair, stood, and crossed to the chamber window. It was a wide window, set into a thick wall of heat-shedding stone, and it was also open to any breath of breeze, for Corisande's capital of Manchyr was closer to the equator even then Tellesberg, and the midday sun was hot and high overhead. He leaned on the sill, gazing out over the brilliant tropical flowers of his palace gardens, listening to the occasional twitter of birdsong from the flocks of songbirds maintained in the palace aviary.

“Nahrmahn is a fool,” he said quietly, with a dispassion which might have fooled most people, but did
not
fool Phylyp Ahzgood. “Langhorne knows Tohmas is no genius, but he knows better than to cross me, and he's not a total idiot, either. Nahrmahn, on the other hand, can give a very convincing imitation of one. We've always known that. But one works with the tools one has, and, to be honest, I'm afraid, I never realized just how big a fool he is.”

“We already knew his people were involved in the assassination attempt, Sire,” Coris pointed out, and Hektor nodded, never looking away from the gardens beyond the window.

“Agreed. But to have involved himself with Tirian was incredibly stupid. Eventually, one of them would have
had
to turn on the other, and to let himself be talked into attempting to assassinate Cayleb—!”

The prince turned back to face Coris at last, shaking his head, his square jaw tight with anger.

“If the attempt had succeeded, it would only have meant Tirian would betray him even sooner. Surely even he should have recognized that!”

“I agree Nahrmahn isn't especially bright, Sire. At the same time, he has displayed a certain ruthlessness about disposing of tools which become liabilities. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that he'd placed someone with a knife close to Tirian as an insurance policy.”

“You're probably right.” Hektor sounded as if he were conceding the possibility considerably against his will, but then he shrugged and shook his head angrily.

“Even assuming you are, however, any insurance policy he had obviously failed, didn't it? And it would appear from what Mhulvayn has to say that Haarahld is reacting very much as I would have anticipated. This idiot attempt must have cost Nahrmahn the better part of ten years of building up his own network in Charis! Not to mention the effect it's having on our own efforts! And I'm afraid the possibility Mhulvayn raised—that they do know the identities of at least some of his agents and Wave Thunder is simply choosing to leave them in position and watch them now that their master's had to flee for his life—also has to be very seriously considered.”

He glanced back out the window again for a moment, then walked back across to his chair and sat down once more.

“And,” he continued more grimly, “if Haarahld chooses to view this direct attack on the monarchy as an act of war, he may not stop with Nahrmahn's
spies
.”

“Do you really think that's likely, Sire?”

“I don't know.” Hektor drummed the fingers of one hand on the table. “Everyone knows how he dotes on Cayleb and his other children. Obviously, from what he's already done, he doesn't take this little affair lightly. And if he's got sufficient solid evidence, and if he chooses to treat this as an act of war, Nahrmahn may suddenly find the Charisian Navy sailing into Eraystor Bay. At which point we'll have to decide whether to support the idiot—which, by the way, will also associate us with the assassination attempt itself, at least after the fact—or else see a major component of our master plan go out from under us.”

Coris considered the prince's words thoughtfully, eyes hooded.

“I think, Sire,” he said finally, “that if Haarahld were likely to take direct military action, he'd already have taken it. Charis has enough galleys in permanent commission to annihilate Nahrmahn's entire fleet in an afternoon, without our support, and Haarahld wouldn't give him the time to even try to activate his alliances with us.”

“Maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn't,” Hektor said. “Haarahld has to be a bit cautious himself, you know. He's not particularly popular in Zion or the Temple, and he knows it. Besides, everyone knows Nahrmahn—and I, of course—backed Mahntayl against Breygart in Hanth. There are those in the Temple, like Clyntahn and the rest of the Group of Four, who might choose to interpret any action he takes against Nahrmahn as retribution for that. So he's unlikely to launch any quick attacks without first establishing with very convincing evidence that he's completely justified.”

Coris nodded.

“You may very well be right about that, Sire. If so, how do we proceed?”

“We protest our innocence, if he tries to associate us with Nahrmahn's attack.” Hektor smiled thinly. “And we'll actually be telling the truth for a change. That should be a novel experience. And I think we ought to invite several of the more important of our other nobles to a personal meeting…without mentioning it to Nahrmahn. I need to be certain they understand what we're doing—or as much of it as they need to know about, at any rate. And I want Tohmas here, where I can look him in the eye.”

“Sire?” Coris' eyebrows arched. “Do you think Tohmas is thinking about climbing into bed with Nahrmahn?”

“No,” Hektor said slowly. “Not that. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if Nahrmahn isn't trying to
convince
him to. It would be like Nahrmahn to try to weaken my authority here in the League in order to increase his own bargaining strength. I don't think Tohmas is stupid enough to fall for it, but I need to be sure.”

“And if Nahrmahn learns the two of you have met separately, Sire? And that he wasn't invited to send a representative to any of your meetings?”

“It might not be a bad thing if he did.” Hektor smiled coldly, his eyes bleak. “First, Tohmas is one of the highest-ranked nobles in the League, and Emerald isn't even a League member. Nahrmahn has no right to a seat at our table unless we invite him to join us. And, second, it would please me to make the fool sweat a little. Besides,” Hektor snorted, “given his part in the assassination plot, he can hardly hope to switch sides and betray us to Haarahld even if we do hurt his feelings, now can he?”

“I suppose not,” Coris conceded with a thin smile of his own.

“In the meantime, we should probably decide what steps we can take to ratchet up the pressure on Charis while Haarahld's still distracted by his concentration on Emerald. And, of course,” the prince added a touch bitterly, “to keep ourselves occupied while we recover from the damage Nahrmahn's little fiasco's done to our own organization in Tellesberg.”

“What sort of steps did you have in mind, Sire?”

“I don't know that we have all that many opportunities for direct action,” Hektor admitted, “and even if we did, I might avoid them for now. After all, it was Nahrmahn's notion of ‘direct action' that created this mess in the first place! But it occurs to me that one thing we definitely ought to do is immediately step up our efforts to influence the Council of Vicars.”

“Risky, Sire,” Coris observed. Hektor's eyes flashed, but he took the earl's caution far more calmly than most of his courtiers would have expected.

“I know it is,” he agreed after a second or two. “But, I think, riskier for Haarahld than for us. He's got that damned College of his hanging around his neck. With a little luck, we may be able to convince the Group of Four to turn it into an executioner's halter.”

Coris nodded, but the gesture expressed more acceptance than agreement, and Hektor knew why. Corisande was even farther from the Temple than Charis, and the same automatic suspicion that attached to Charis in the Church's eyes also attached to Corisande. But Hektor had been very careful to do absolutely nothing to encourage that suspicion, whereas Haarahld's support for his father's “Royal College,” and for the social policies his great-grandfather had set in motion, did the reverse. And Hektor and Nahrmahn between them had spread a great deal more gold around a great many more hands in the Temple than Haarahld had. Still, Coris had always been rather more ambivalent than his prince about playing the Temple card.

“What do you make of this ‘Merlin' of Mhulvayn's, Sire?” the earl asked, and Hektor smiled thinly at the tactful change of subject.

“At the moment, not very much,” he said. “I don't doubt the fellow really is good with a sword, but it seems fairly evident from what happened to Nahrmahn's organization in Charis that it wouldn't have taken a genius—or a ‘
seijin
,' assuming they actually exist, outside the old fables—to penetrate it. It sounds like he stumbled over something that gave away the attempt on Cayleb, and he's probably been riding it for all it's worth ever since.”

“An adventurer, then, you think, Sire?”

“I think that's the most likely explanation,” Hektor agreed. “At the same time,” he went on a bit grudgingly, “Haarahld, unlike Nahrmahn, is no fool. Given the fact that the man clearly saved, or helped save, his son's life, I'd expect a man like Haarahld to treat the fellow as an honored guest. Probably find him some fairly comfortable slot at court for the rest of his life, for that matter, which is what this ‘personal guardsman' business sounds like. But if this Merlin steps into the inner circle of Haarahld's advisers, then I'll be tempted to believe there's more to him than just an adventurer.”

“Should we take steps to…remove him, Sire?”

“After the way Nahrmahn bungled the attempt on Cayleb?” Hektor shook his head with a hard, sharp crack of laughter. “The last thing we need is to get
our
people—assuming we still
have
any people in Tellesberg by this time, of course—involved in a second assassination! If it worked, Haarahld would probably suspect Nahrmahn, but we've just had rather convincing evidence that assassinations don't always work out as planned, haven't we?”

“I suppose we have, at that, Sire,” Coris conceded with another thin smile.

“No,” Hektor said. “I think we'll wait a while before we decide to have the good
seijin
eliminated. Unless he begins to make himself a significant threat, there are far better targets for us to expend our effort upon.”

“Well, Captain Rowyn? What do you think now?”

Merlin had to shout to make himself heard over the rushing sound of wind and water. Seagulls and sea wyverns swirled in raucous clouds of white feathers and glistening, many-hued hide under the brilliant springtime sun. They dipped and dove about the fifty-foot twin-masted schooner
Dawn
as she drove through the brilliant blue water of South Howell Bay in explosions of scattered, rainbow-hewed spray and left a straight, white wake behind her.

Dawn
was the first schooner ever seen on Safehold. Sir Dustyn Olyvyr was the official designer of the rig, and
officially
Merlin was simply a passenger aboard her. But Horahs Rowyn, the skipper of Olyvyr's personal yacht, the
Ahnyet
, was one of the small but steadily growing handful of people who'd had to be told at least part of the truth about the sudden flood of new innovations. Rowyn knew who'd really come up with the converted coaster's new sail plan, and despite his faith in his patron, he'd been openly skeptical about Merlin's claims.

That was obviously changing.

The captain—a stocky, balding man with a fringe of gray hair around a bare, sun-bronzed scalp and a spectacularly weathered face—stood on the schooner's short, cramped quarterdeck staring in something very like disbelief at the masthead pendant which showed the wind's direction.

Dawn
was sailing close-hauled on the port tack. In itself, that was nothing particularly unique, but as she leaned stiffly to starboard under the press of her brand-new, snowy-white canvas, she was doing it better than anyone else had ever dreamed of.

Even the best square-rigged sail plans yet devised on Safehold were little more weatherly than Columbus' ships had been in 1492, and their version of “close-hauled” was quite different from
Dawn
's. The galleons which plied Safehold's seas could steer no closer than within seventy degrees of directly into the wind, what Nimue Alban would have called little better than a close reach, under even ideal conditions. Indeed, a more realistic figure would have been closer to eighty degrees, and most Safeholdian sailing masters would have settled for that without complaint.

But
Dawn
was sailing within just under
fifty
degrees of the true wind. Even that was far from spectacular by the standards of the sailing yachts Nimue had known on Old Earth's salt water, but
Dawn
had been converted from a typical Howell Bay coaster. She was relatively shoal-hulled and broad-beamed, without the fin keel or centerboard of one of those yachts. Merlin and Sir Dustyn had added leeboards to give her better hydrodynamics, but it was an awkward, makeshift fix, and the schooner rig itself was inherently less weatherly than the sloops or yawls Nimue had once sailed for recreation.

Yet however disappointed Nimue Alban might have been by
Dawn
's performance in those long-ago days on Old Earth's North Sea, Merlin was delighted, and Rowyn was astounded. No ship he'd ever seen could have matched that performance, and if twenty or thirty degrees might not have sounded like all that much to a landsman, it meant a great deal to an experienced seaman.

The only way for a sail-powered vessel to travel to windward was to beat, to sail as close-hauled as possible and swing back and forth across the wind. At the best of times, it was a slow, laborious, hideously inefficient business compared to sailing with or on the wind, or to what a powered vessel could have accomplished. Or, for that matter, a galley…while her rowers' endurance lasted.

Tacking, which was essentially a matter of turning the ship across the wind, was the more efficient way of going about it, but that required the vessel doing the tacking to maintain forward speed—and steerage way—long enough to swing across the eye of the wind. Given how far a typical Safeholdian square-rigger had to turn to swing across the wind, that was usually a…problematic venture at the best of times. Far more frequently, especially in moderate or light winds, a current-generation square-rigger had to wear ship, instead, turning
downwind
, away from the direction it actually wanted to go, through an effective arc of well over two hundred degrees, until it could settle onto its new heading. In the process, it had to give up a heartbreaking amount of hard-won progress as the wind pushed it to leeward during the maneuver.

It was hardly surprising that tacking was the preferred technique, but even there, the square-rigger had to swing through a total heading change of a hundred and forty degrees across the wind each time it tacked.
Dawn
's total heading change, on the other hand, would be little more than ninety degrees. That left her a much shorter “no-sail zone” to cross, and her basic rig was what a sailor would have called much faster in the stays than any Safeholdian square-rigger. Which, basically, simply meant she came about more rapidly, and her sails could be reset on the new tack much more quickly.

Even completely ignoring the fact that she could get around on to the new tack so much more speedily,
Dawn
's twenty-degree advantage over the very best Safeholdian square-rigger ever built (it was actually closer to twenty-five degrees) meant that to reach a point sixty miles directly to windward of her start position, all other things being equal, she would have to sail the next best thing to ninety miles, while the square-rigger would have to travel a hundred and eighty. And that was assuming the square-rigger was able to tack at all, instead of wearing.

Unlike pre-metric Old Earth, Safehold's sea miles and land miles were the same length, which meant that if both
Dawn
and the square-rigger were traveling at speeds of six knots,
Dawn
would make the sixty miles dead to windward in fifteen hours, while the square-rigger would require thirty. Over a voyage of several hundred or even thousands of miles, that would represent a significantly shorter overall voyage time. It also meant the square-rigger could never
catch
the little schooner in a chase to windward, which would be a handy insurance policy against pirates. By the same token, the square-rigger couldn't
evade
the schooner to windward, which had interesting implications for potential warships…or pirates.

It was obvious to Merlin, and—he felt sure—to Horahs Rowyn, that
Dawn
's present sail plan was far from perfectly balanced, and she required far more lee helm than she should have to hold her present course. But no one on Safehold had any notion of how to make proper displacement and stability calculations, far less how to calculate appropriate sail areas. Merlin had access to the necessary formulas, thanks to the library computer tucked away in Nimue's Cave, but despite Nimue's yachting experience, he had only the most limited possible practical experience in applying them. More to the point, there was no way he could possibly hand something like that over to Olyvyr or Rahzhyr Mahklyn without raising all sorts of questions none of them would have wanted answered.

But imperfect or not, it was doing its job, and a designer with Olyvyr's years of experience would soon hit upon a workable rule of thumb for designing proper sail plans for the new rig.

Which
, Merlin thought with a smile,
will only make
Dawn
's successors perform even better
.

Rowyn was still staring up at the masthead pendant. Obviously, he hadn't heard a word Merlin had said, so Merlin thumped him on the shoulder. The Charisian jerked, then turned his head quickly with a questioning expression.

“I asked what you think now?” Merlin repeated loudly, and Rowyn grinned hugely.

“I think I want one of my very own,” he half-shouted back, “and so will everyone else who sees this. Langhorne! Just look at that heading! And the reduction in sail handlers is going to be another big advantage for your typical clutch-fisted shipowner.”

“Agreed.” Merlin nodded vigorously. Any square-rigger was a manpower-intensive proposition, and a schooner-rigged vessel like
Dawn
required a much smaller crew. Conversely, the square-rigger could carry an enormous sail area, and because her sails tended to be individually smaller in proportion to her total sail plan, she could absorb more damage aloft than most schooner rigs could.

“Sir Dustyn tells me he wants
Ahnyet
re-rigged, too,” Rowyn continued, cocking an eyebrow at Merlin, and Merlin chuckled.

“
Dawn
's an experiment, Captain. Now that Sir Dustyn has his hand in, as it were, he's ready to do it right with
Ahnyet
. The fact that he designed her himself should give him a much better feel for modifying her rig, too. And then, of course, he's going to be inviting potential ship buyers aboard for a little cruise outside the Tellesberg breakwater. Just as a purely social occasion, of course.”

“Oh, of course!” Rowyn agreed with a deep, rolling belly laugh. “He's been using that ship for ‘purely social occasions' like that for as long as I've captained her for him. But this—”

He reached out and stroked the quarterdeck rail almost reverently, gazing back up at the masthead pendant and the set of the sails once again, then shook his head and looked back at Merlin.

“I think I'd best be getting a feel for the way she handles, Lieutenant Athrawes.”

It was technically a statement, but actually a request, a recognition that
Dawn
was truly Merlin's ship…and that Merlin would be his real tutor over the next few days.

“I think that's an excellent idea, Captain,” Merlin agreed, and hid another mental smile.

I wonder how Sir Dustyn would react if he knew the real reason I argued in favor of a pure fore-and-aft rig for our prototype?

Despite himself, he laughed out loud, and Rowyn looked at him with an interrogatory expression. But Merlin only shook his head. Eventually, he was certain, the topsail schooner would emerge as the rig of choice. With the addition of square-rigged topsails on both masts, and even a square-rigged course on the foremast, it was probably the most powerful two-masted schooner rig ever devised. It could be driven harder and faster on the wind without sacrificing a great deal of its weatherliness, which would make it highly attractive to anyone looking for speedy passages, although the manpower demands would rise. But Merlin had no more intention of explaining to Rowyn than to Sir Dustyn Olyvyr that the fellow responsible for showing them this marvelous new rig had absolutely no idea how to manage a square-rigger.

That probably wouldn't have done a lot for their confidence in my “suggestions,”
Merlin thought sardonically, then gave himself a mental shake and grinned at Rowyn.

“Why don't you step over here and take the helm yourself for a few minutes, Captain Rowyn?” he invited.