Off Armageddon Reef (58 page)

“So what's this all about?”

Zhaspahr Maysahn knew he sounded just a bit testy as he sat across the table from Zhames Makferzahn, but that was perfectly all right with him. Makferzahn hadn't been due to make contact with him for another two days under their agreed-upon schedule. Given Oskahr Mhulvayn's hasty departure and the fact that he and Maysahn had met fairly regularly—and publicly—Maysahn had ample reason to feel decidedly unhappy at the prospect of frequent meetings with Makferzahn.

“I know we're off schedule,” Makferzahn said now, “but this is important, I think.”

“I hope so, anyway,” Maysahn grumped, then shrugged.

Part of it, he knew, was that he and Makferzahn sat in the same sidewalk café—at the exact same table, in fact—as they had on the day of Cayleb's attempted assassination. That struck him as a potentially bad omen, but he told himself he was being silly. In fact, he'd picked the site and the table deliberately. It was one of the places he used regularly for business meetings in his shipping house owner's persona, after all, and Makferzahn—whose cover was that of a purchasing agent for a Desnairian merchant house which was constantly hiring cargo vessels—had a perfectly logical ostensible reason for meeting with him.

“All right,” he said after moment. “What's so important it couldn't wait two more days?”

“I finally got one of my people into the King's Harbor dockyard,” Makferzahn said, and despite himself, Maysahn sat a bit straighter, eyes narrowing. “I know it's taken longer than either of us hoped it would,” Makferzahn continued, “and he was only there for a few hours, but he managed to pick up at least a little information.”

“And?”

“And I'm not sure what to make of it,” Makferzahn admitted.

“Well don't just sit there,” Maysahn commanded.

“Sorry.” Makferzahn gave himself a little shake and sipped from his chocolate cup. Then he set the cup back down and leaned a bit closer to his superior.

“They've got half a dozen new ships under construction in the yard,” he said. “Not galleys—galleons.”

“Galleons?” Maysahn frowned in perplexity. What in Langhorne's name could the Royal Charisian Navy want with
galleons?
”

“I know.” Makferzahn's small shrug was eloquent with frustration. “It doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's what they're doing.”

“Did your man manage to pick up any indication of why?”

“No one's talking about it very much, even in the taverns and bars,” Makferzahn said. “But according to the gossip he did overhear, they're arming them with cannon.
Lots
of cannon. According to one fellow he got drunk enough to risk pumping a bit, they're putting as many as thirty or even forty guns aboard some of them.”

Maysahn's frown deepened. That was as silly as anything he'd heard lately. Oh, it might explain why they were building
galleons
, since he couldn't think of any practical way to put that many guns aboard a galley. But it didn't explain why they wanted to mount that many guns in the first place. No doubt they'd be able to fire a devastating broadside before boarding, which would certainly be worthwhile. But they wouldn't have time for more than a single broadside each, and given how clumsy and unmaneuverable galleons were, closing with a galley in the first place would be all but impossible.

“Whatever they're up to,” Makferzahn continued, “they seem to think it's pretty important. My man managed to confirm the rumors about Cayleb. He's taken personal charge of their efforts out there, and he's pushing hard. Seems to be doing a damned good job of it, too, I'm afraid.”

“I wish I could say I was surprised by that,” Maysahn said sourly. “Unfortunately, he's a lot like his father in that regard. Life would be so much simpler if they were both just idiots. But then the Prince probably wouldn't need us here, would he?”

“Probably not,” Makferzahn agreed. “But what do you make of it?”

“I'm not at all sure, either,” Maysahn admitted.

He leaned back in his chair, drumming lightly on the tabletop while he watched the hucksters in the square across the street hawking their wares. A huge, articulated eight-wheeled freight wagon rumbled past, big enough to require two draft dragons, and one of the big six-limbed lizards snuffled wistfully as it smelled the fresh vegetables on display.

“You're right about the importance they must attach to whatever it is they're doing, especially if that's where Cayleb's disappeared to,” he said finally. “And I suppose those new rigging plans Olyvyr has introduced could have something to do with it, too. Every report about them indicates that even the square-riggers he's been experimenting with are lots more maneuverable. Maybe they actually think they can get a galleon into effective artillery range of a galley.”

“I just don't see them doing it without getting swarmed,” Makferzahn objected. He wasn't rejecting Maysahn's theory out of hand, but clearly he wasn't convinced, either. “I could believe they thought they could get into range to smash
one
galley, but an entire fleet? What do they think all the
other
galleys are going to be doing in the meantime? And how do they expect to coordinate their own galleys with galleons?”

“I didn't say
I
thought they could do it.” Maysahn shrugged. “I'm just trying to figure out what they could possibly be thinking. And,” he continued a bit reluctantly, “the fact that I can't makes me very nervous. Whatever else the Charisian Navy may be, it's not exactly run by fools.”

Makferzahn nodded in emphatic agreement. Like Maysahn, the more Makferzahn saw of the Royal Charisian Navy, the more he came to appreciate its quality. The Corisandian navy was one of the best in the world, but it wasn't in the Charisian Navy's league. No one else's Navy was, and Makferzahn had found himself sharing Maysahn's concern over the fact that not even Prince Hektor seemed to realize just how true that was.

But the immediate point, he reminded himself, was that Charisians normally didn't do stupid things where their navy was concerned.

“There were two other tidbits of information,” he offered. Maysahn quirked an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. “First, Olyvyr seems to think he's finally worked out a way to sheath a ship in copper without having it fall apart. At any rate, according to my man, the ships they're building are all supposed to be coppered when they're finished.”

He and Maysahn looked at one another thoughtfully. Sir Dustyn Olyvyr's mania for finding some way to protect his ships' hulls from the depredations of borers was well known. Not that he was alone in that, of course. The several varieties of shellfish and worms which fell under that general heading could literally devour a ship's timbers in a matter of only a few months, and every attempt to stop them with pitch or some other form of protective coating had failed. If Olyvyr truly had managed to solve the problems which had so far stymied his efforts to use copper, the long-term implications would obviously be significant. But at this particular moment, Zhaspahr Maysahn was rather more concerned with
short-term
implications.

“You said two tidbits,” he observed. “What's the other one?”

“The minor fact that they appear to have assembled a squadron of galleons to practice whatever it is they're up to,” Makferzahn said grimly. “It's only five ships, but it seems to spend a fair amount of time out on exercises. And it anchors in the Citadel Basin, well away from any other shipping, whenever it's in port. According to the fellow my man got drunk, it's commanded by a Commodore Staynair.”

“Staynair?” Maysahn repeated slowly. The last name was scarcely unique in Charis, but it wasn't especially common, either. “Would that be Sir Domynyk Staynair?”

“The Bishop's younger brother,” Makferzahn agreed with a nod.

“Now
that's
interesting,” Maysahn murmured while his brain raced.

On one hand, it was reasonable enough, he supposed. If this mysterious project of theirs was important enough for Cayleb to take personal command of it, then they'd want one of their best naval officers working with him on it, and everything he'd ever heard about Commodore Staynair suggested the commodore certainly fell into that category. But there was also the connection to Tellesberg's bishop. Rumor had it that Bishop Executor Zherald had been known to express more than a few qualms about Staynair's ultimate loyalties. If his younger brother was this deeply involved in whatever Haarahld and his son were up to, then Bishop Maikel probably knew all about it, too. Which meant the Church—or, at least, the
Charisian
branch of the Church—also knew about it. Although that didn't necessarily mean the bishop executor did.

“I wonder,” Makferzahn said. His thoughtful tone drew Maysahn's attention back to him, and the younger man shrugged. “I was just wondering,” he continued once he was certain he had his superior's ear, “about those galleons Olyvyr is building right here in Tellesberg.”

“What about them?”

“Well, it just occurred to me while we were sitting here that he has a dozen of them under construction for eight different owners. That's in addition to all these ‘schooners' of his, of course.”

“Every shipyard in the Kingdom's laying down ships right and left,” Maysahn pointed out dryly. “The yards that aren't actually building are all busy rerigging existing ships to take advantage of the new sail plans. And it's all Olyvyr's fault, one way or another. Well, his and Howsmyn's.”

“I know. But apparently all these new galleons of his are identical to one another. And according to a couple of carpenters working in Howsmyn's Tellesberg yard, there are some significant changes in their design. For one thing, they're a good twenty or thirty feet longer and a hell of a lot more heavily built than any galleon those carpenters have ever worked on before. I know Olyvyr's reputation, and I know these new rigging notions of his have only strengthened that reputation. Still, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that eight different shipowners should simultaneously order a dozen new ships, all built to a new and untested design?”

“That does sound a bit peculiar,” Maysahn acknowledged. He sipped chocolate thoughtfully, gazing out at the busy street scene once more.

“You'd think they'd be a little bit more conservative, wouldn't you?” he mused aloud. “Maybe let Olyvyr build a couple of these new designs of his, get them into service and see how they actually performed, before they sank that much money into them.”

“That's exactly what I was thinking,” Makferzahn agreed. “At the same time, as you just pointed out, he has stood the entire Charisian shipbuilding business on its ear. At the moment, people are so busy throwing money at him if he'll just design a ship for them that these people may've simply decided that if they want an Olyvyr-designed a ship at all, they have to take what they can get. And,” the younger spy admitted, “they've already seen plenty of evidence that his new ideas about rigging work pretty much as advertised.”

“That's all true enough. But I think the possibility that he's actually building them for the Navy needs to be considered seriously,” Maysahn said. “And if that's true, we'd better report that possibility to the Prince while we work on either confirming or denying it.”

He sat for a moment longer, contemplating the news, then shrugged.

“It may not make a lot of sense to us right this minute, but at least we know a bit more than we did. Good work, Zhames. I'll get a dispatch off to Manchyr with Captain Whaite tomorrow morning.”

“—with Captain Whaite tomorrow morning.”

Merlin Athrawes frowned as Owl played back the day's take from the bug assigned to follow Zhaspahr Maysahn around.

The endless hours he was investing in what he'd come to think of as “Project Bootstrap” left him far less time than he would have preferred to deal with things like monitoring Maysahn's whereabouts. He'd had to leave virtually all of that sort of activity up to Owl, and that made him nervous.

To be fair, the AI seemed to be handling the task adequately so far. It was Owl who'd identified Makferzahn as Mhulvayn's replacement, and the computer did an excellent job of keeping anyone in its sights after Merlin had tagged that individual for surveillance. But Owl remained hopelessly literal-minded and unimaginative, and Merlin had no choice but to allow the AI to sort and analyze the take from the majority of the SNARCs and hope nothing critical got lost. Some of the SNARCs Merlin continued to monitor personally—those watching Hektor, Nahrmahn, and Archbishop Erayk, for example—but even there he was forced to rely on Owl's recognition of critical keywords to direct his attention to relative bits of information.

Which category the afternoon's conversation between Maysahn and Makferzahn certainly fell into.