How firm a foundation

FEBRUARY, YEAR OF GOD 896

Nimue’s Cave, The Mountains of Light, The Temple Lands, and Tellesberg Palace, City of Tellesberg, Kingdom of Old Charis

“So just exactly how was it you were planning to get home again without raising any eyebrows?” Cayleb Ahrmahk asked, leaning back in the rattan lounge and gazing up at a spectacular sunset.

His daughter lay curled on his chest, her nose pressed into the angle of his neck while she slept with the absolute limpness possible only for small children and cat-lizards, and Empress Sharleyan’s crochet hook moved busily as she looked across at him and smiled.

“Why should I get home without raising any eyebrows?” Merlin responded over the com plug in his ear. “I’m a seijin- the mysterious, deadly, probably magical Seijin Merlin!” There was a clearly audible sniff. “I come and go, and no man sees me pass.”

“You’re getting remarkably full of yourself, aren’t you?” Sharleyan inquired sweetly.

“Well, I think I’ve done fairly well the last few five-days,” he pointed out.

“That’s true, I suppose,” Cayleb said judiciously. “I especially liked the bit with the voices shouting to each other there at the end, on top of the gunshots. No wonder they thought all of you were right in front of them!”

“If you’ve got a programmable vocoder for a voice box, you might as well use it,” Merlin replied smugly, but then he sighed. “Actually, though, I think I’m blowing my ego out of my ears because I’m bored and I want to come home.”

Sharleyan looked across at Cayleb, and her expression softened.

“We’re looking forward to seeing you at home,” Cayleb assured him, speaking for them both. Then he shrugged-very gently, so as not to disturb the sleeping child next to his heart. “I agree sending you personally to oversee Irys and Daivyn’s rescue was the right move, but having you operate openly that far away’s inconvenient as hell in a lot of ways.”

“I’ve noticed that myself,” Merlin said dryly. “I’m thinking about adding a few extra members to Master Zhevons’ ensemble cast. It can be a pain covering for absences on my part while Zhevons-or someone else, for that matter-runs around in the middle of Howard, but it saves us from having to account for all of this damned ‘transit time’!”

“I see your point, but I think it was a good thing you were ‘running around in the middle of Howard’ this time,” Sharleyan said soberly, and Merlin shrugged.

“I’m inclined to agree, given my own modest contribution to getting them out of Talkyra and delivering them to the rendezvous, but Hektor did pretty well himself, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Cayleb agreed. “Yes he did. Especially for someone as young as he is.”

“This from the gray-bearded septuagenarian sitting on the throne of Charis, I see,” Merlin replied, and Sharleyan giggled.

“All right, so I was only a couple of years older than he is now when you took me in hand,” Cayleb acknowledged. “But he still did a damned good job.”

“No question about that,” Merlin acknowledged, and there wasn’t.

Faced with the loss of all of the expedition’s senior officers, Aplyn-Ahrmahk had decided to continue the mission, despite the risk of additional encounters with the Delferahkan militia. So he’d transferred all his wounded into four of the six boats and sent them back downstream with orders to remain in the middle of the current as much as possible. The Sarm wasn’t an enormous river, but it was broad enough that troops armed with the relatively short-barreled, smoothbore matchlocks dragoons carried would play hell trying to hit a target in midstream. Artillery would have been a different matter, but the Royal Delferahkan Army had no new model field artillery. For that matter, it didn’t have very much artillery at all, and the cumbersome, slow-firing pieces it did possess lacked the mobility to intercept boats moving at the better part of twelve miles an hour under sail and oars while the river’s current worked for them instead of against them.

He’d also ordered the boats to travel in daylight to make it abundantly clear to any observer that they were straggling back to Sarmouth in disorder as quickly as they could get there. As he’d hoped, the Delferahkans had pursued the retreating boats with their cargo of wounded and clearly dispirited passengers as vigorously as they could all the way back downriver. Meanwhile, he and the remaining two boats had continued upstream unnoticed, moving only under cover of darkness, and with Stywyrt Mahlyk’s cutter towing the second boat all but empty. Proceeding with barely thirty men was an obvious risk, but it had let him save room in the second boat for the passengers he’d intended to collect.

It had also left him far shorter-handed than he could have wished when he encountered the unfortunate Lieutenant Wyllyms’ dragoons. Luckily, he’d arrived at the rendezvous fifteen hours before Colonel Tahlyvyr’s regiment moved into the area and he’d posted pickets well out from his carefully hidden boats. They’d spotted Wyllyms’ troopers moving into position early enough for Aplyn-Ahrmahk to arrange his own counter-ambush. Even so, he’d had to wait for the dragoons-who’d still substantially outnumbered his own people-to emerge from the woods and bunch up before he could pounce. In the end, he’d ordered the attack with impeccable timing, and, frankly, the cold-blooded patience with which he’d waited for exactly the right moment was even more surprising out of someone his age than the initiative, in Merlin’s opinion.

“What do you think about Bishop Mytchail’s reaction to what happened to that poisonous piece of work Schahl?” Cayleb asked after a moment.

“I think it was inevitable.” Merlin shrugged. “I happen to agree with the policy, but it was obvious from the get-go the inquisition was going to take the view that all of its inquisitors were purer than the new fallen snow, the blameless, stainless victims of those vicious, vile, Shan-wei-worshipping, baby-murdering Charisian heretics.” His mouth twisted in distaste. “The farther away people are from where the atrocities take place, the more likely they are to buy that line of dragon shit, too. Owl’s remotes are still getting our version tacked up on convenient walls all over both continents, but the Church is going to have the inside track when it comes to convincing the faithful for quite a while. Look at the way they’re handling that business in Siddarmark!”

Cayleb made a harsh sound in his throat, and Sharleyan kicked him gently on the outside of his right thigh.

“You wake her up,” she said, twitching her head in their daughter’s direction, “and you get to sing her back to sleep, Cayleb Ahrmahk!”

“I’ll be good,” he promised with a penitent smile. “But it’s Merlin’s fault for bringing up things like that.”

“Tell me you’re not going to be discussing it with Trahvys, Bynzhamyn, and Maikel first thing tomorrow morning,” Merlin challenged.

“But that’s then, not now,” Cayleb retorted.

“True.” Merlin nodded, leaning back in his own chair deep under the far-off Mountains of Light. “It’s going to be ugly, however it finally works out,” he said somberly, and it was Cayleb’s turn to nod.

“What I’m most worried about at this point, to be honest, is food,” he said. “Clyntahn timed it entirely too well from that respect, damn him to hell.”

“Agreed. But if Stohnar can hold out through the winter, our good friend the Grand Inquisitor may just find the wheels coming off his little wagon.” Merlin’s expression was no less somber, yet there was a note of grim satisfaction in his voice. “I think he actually expected to sweep the board, and it didn’t quite work out that way, did it?”

“Thanks in no small part to your friend Ahnzhelyk. Or I suppose we should call her Aivah, now.” Cayleb smiled in simple admiration. “I’ll guarantee you none of Clyntahn’s agents guessed for a moment that she had fifteen hundred trained riflemen right there in Siddar City. Which doesn’t even count the sixty-five hundred rifles hidden aboard those ships of hers on North Bay. She more than doubled the total number of modern firearms available to Stohnar.”

“Not to mention rescuing the Lord Protector’s august posterior on the very first day,” Merlin agreed. “Without her, they probably would have taken the capital, you know.”

“And massacred every Charisian and Reformist they could get their hands on,” Sharleyan put in grimly, her eyes shadowed. “It was bad enough even with her preparations, and I get sick to my stomach every time I think of what happened in so many other places.”

“I know,” Merlin said softly.

Siddar City’s Charisian Quarter was the largest, richest, and most densely inhabited in the entire Republic, but almost all of Siddarmark’s coastal cities had boasted their own Quarters. For that matter, even the larger inland towns had been home to expatriate Charisians who’d married Siddarmarkians or simply located in the Republic because of the financial opportunities.

Outside the capital, most of those Charisian communities had been effectively wiped out. Even in Siddar City, despite Aivah Pahrsahn’s preparations and Lord Protector Greyghor’s decision to divert over half his own available strength to protecting its Charisian inhabitants, over two thousand people had been killed. Rape and torture had run rampant as the rioters slaked their hatred in the blood of their victims. Nor had they restricted their activities to Charisians. Reformist churches had been burned throughout the Republic. Reformist priests had been murdered-in some cases burned to death inside their own churches-and Reformist congregations had been killed or driven into headlong flight from towns in which their families had lived for centuries.

It had been worst in the Republic’s western provinces, partly because of those provinces’ deep, often bitter resentment of the eastern provinces’ greater wealth, but also because Clyntahn and Rayno had devoted the most attention to making sure they would succeed in the provinces closest to the Temple Lands. There’d been some notable exceptions, however. In Glacierheart and Cliff Peak, the militia had turned on the insurrectionists and rabble-rousers in its own ranks and crushed the uprising within days. The same thing had happened in Icewind Province, although the situation looked much grimmer there. No one was moving any troops now that winter had closed down, but the provinces of Tarikah, New Northland, and Westmarch were all firmly in the hands of Temple Loyalists who’d denounced the Republic’s elected government as a “lackey, tool, and minion of the accursed and excommunicate Charisian heretics.” Between them, those provinces formed a blade thrusting into the Republic’s heart, and Icewind was completely isolated from the rest of the country.

The outcome was still very much in doubt in Hildermoss Province, as well, and what happened there might well be critical. If Hildermoss remained loyal to the Lord Protector, it would shield Glacierheart from any attacks out of Westmarch and protect Old Province from attacks out of Westmarch and Tarikah. More to the point, Mountaincross Province was one of the eastern provinces which had gone over to Clyntahn. If Hildermoss held, a counter-attack out of Northland and Old Province could almost certainly retake Mountaincross; if Hildermoss fell, the rebels would be able to strike directly at the capital all along Old Province’s northern frontier by early summer, at the latest.

Farther south, the Southmarch Lands were a nightmare. Clyntahn and Rayno had devoted special attention to the huge, sparsely populated area, but they’d been less successful than they’d hoped in bringing the regular Army units over to their side. The entire “province” was actually one huge military district, divided into regional commands and administered by Army officers. Indeed, one of the grievances Rayno and Laiyan Bahzkai’s agitators had appealed to was the Southmarch’s resentment that it hadn’t yet been organized into provinces with representation in the Chamber of the Senate. At least a third of the Southmarch commands had remained staunchly loyal to the Lord Protector and the central government, however, and the fighting was turning increasingly vicious.

The rebels had also managed to seize control of the southwestern portion of Shiloh Province, although it seemed unlikely they’d be able to hold on to it if Stohnar survived the winter. Unfortunately, the rebels appeared to be aware of that, and the pogroms and killings in Shiloh were brutal almost beyond belief. If southwestern Shiloh was retaken by the government, it was going to be mostly one huge sea of gutted farms and burned-out ruins.

For the moment, Southguard, Transhar, and Windmoor Provinces were at least provisionally in the Lord Protector’s column, although the situation in Southguard was confused and turning increasingly bloody. Atrocity begat atrocity, and bushwhackers and arsonists stalked one another mercilessly through the cold, rainy winter. The hate those attacks and counter-attacks were generating was going to grow nothing but uglier, Merlin thought sadly. Indeed, it was the kind of violence and brutality that were likely to bequeath a multi-generational legacy of hatred among the survivors and their children.

Malitar Province had gone against the pattern for most of the rest of the Republic-the insurgents inside Marik, Malitar’s provincial capital and Siddarmark’s second largest seaport, had seized control of the entire city, and it had been the militias from the surrounding countryside which had fought their way back into Marik and crushed the rebels. Unfortunately, the city’s entire Charisian Quarter had been burned to the ground before the militias could retake Marik. There’d been very few survivors, and the Reformist churches had suffered almost equally severely.

Markan and Transhar had held successfully for the Lord Protector and the government, and things were actually fairly quiet there. The same was true in Rollings Province, in the extreme northeast, although the coastal area of Midhold Province, between Rollings and Old Province, had been the scene of some ugly fighting. The extreme western portion of Midhold was dominated by the successful rebels in Mountaincross, at the moment, as well, which had to be causing a certain amount of anxiety in Siddar City.

As far as anyone could tell, almost two-thirds of the regular Army had honored its oath to the constitution and the Lord Protector. Several of those units which had remained loyal had been overwhelmed by the insurgency, unfortunately, and very few of those men had survived, since the Temple Loyalists weren’t very interested in taking prisoners. Between defections, desertions, and combat losses it was unlikely Stohnar could call on more than a third-possibly as little as a quarter-of the once mighty Siddarmarkian Army. Worse, the Grand Vicar had proclaimed Mother Church’s support for the “valiant children of God warring against evil and corruption” in the Republic and extended the jihad to anyone who supported “the apostate and accursed Greyghor Stohnar and his minions.” As a consequence, “volunteers” were prepared to pour into the western Republic from the Border States as soon as weather permitted. For that matter, it was only a matter of time before actual contingents of the Temple Guard turned up.

And, as Cayleb had pointed out, Clyntahn had timed his uprising to coincide with the final stages of the Siddarmarkian harvest. The southern provinces harvested later, of course, but his attack had come before the produce from the agrarian west had been shipped east for the winter, and part of his strategy had included the deliberate destruction of foodstuffs-warehouses, farms, granaries-throughout the eastern provinces, as well. By Owl’s estimates, those provinces had lost almost half the food which would normally have carried them through the winter months. And at the very time the food supply had been interrupted, Reformist and Charisian refugees from the west were pouring east in a desperate search for safety.

“Do you think Stohnar’s going to make it through the winter, Merlin?” Sharleyan asked after a moment.

“I think he’s got a good chance,” Merlin replied. “I don’t know what’s going to happen come spring, though. We’re seeing an awful lot of orders from Maigwair to the Border States and the various Temple Lands military commands. I imagine he’s planning on moving east to steamroller Stohnar as soon as he can put an army in the field. And I expect Clyntahn’s going to be ‘suggesting’ to the Silkiahans that they’d better toe the line on the embargo from here on out if they don’t want the same treatment the Republic just got.”

“What’s driving me and Domynyk, Trahvys, and Bynzhamyn crazy is the fact that we still ‘don’t know’ what’s going on up north!” Cayleb growled. “We can’t do a thing-can’t even establish contact with Stohnar about this!-until we ‘find out’ it’s happening!”

“It won’t be much longer, love,” Sharleyan said, reaching out to lay a comforting hand on his shoulder. “We’re already starting to ‘hear rumors,’” she pointed out, “and all the world knows what a wonderful spy network we have!”

“I know.” Cayleb smiled crookedly at her. “That’s what Trahvys and Bynzhamyn and I are going to be talking about tomorrow morning. We’re going to haul Ahlvyno in, as well, and begin assembling relief shipments of food ‘as a precaution’ at Maikel’s suggestion.” He grimaced. “Our economy’s going to have the crap kicked out of it by the loss of so much Siddarmarkian trade, and if Silkiah does decide it has to start paying attention to Clyntahn’s embargo, that’s only going to get worse. On the other hand, we’ll suddenly have a lot of spare merchant galleons we can snap up to help ship in food and medical supplies.”

“Maybe it won’t be quite that bad,” Merlin said encouragingly. “I’ve got a feeling something may turn up, despite the embargo. And if Stohnar does make it through the winter-and next spring-we may finally have the mainland ally we need.”

“And if he doesn’t make it through the winter-and next spring-it’s going to be at least ten years before any other mainland realm is willing to stand up with us,” Cayleb said sourly. “Assuming, of course, that those ‘returning Archangels’ give us that long.”

“My, you are in a testy mood,” Merlin observed mildly.

“I’ve got a lot to be testy about,” Cayleb shot back. “This hasn’t exactly been the easiest year we’ve ever had, you know.”

“Yes, I do know,” Merlin said more gently. “But Hektor has Irys, Daivyn, and Coris safely back aboard Destiny. They’ll be headed home soon, and it should be interesting to see how Corisande reacts when Coris and Irys tell them it was Clyntahn who had Hektor murdered… and tried to murder Daivyn, as well. And for better or worse, Clyntahn’s come out into the open on the mainland. This isn’t just an overseas war for Howard and the Havens anymore, and that was his decision, not ours. In the long run, I think it’s going to come home to roost with a vengeance, as long as Stohnar does manage to hold. And Ehdwyrd and Seamount have the new rifled guns in production, not to mention Mahndrayn’s breech-loaders. I know we all miss Mahndrayn, but that was a brilliant design approach, and the Church isn’t going to like it one bit when it runs into them in the field. Kynt Clareyk’s about to suggest infantry mortars, as well, and that’s going to come as an unpleasant surprise to our friend Clyntahn, too. And then there’s Ehdwyrd’s first steam engine. That’s going to be a game-changer, especially since we won’t have to waste all that time tinkering and experimenting to improve it into a working proposition like they did back on Old Terra.”

“Are you trying to cheer me up by pointing out that the momentum is on our side?” Cayleb asked dryly. “Because, if you are, allow me to point out that for the next several months, at least, the momentum’s going to be rather solidly on Clyntahn’s side in Siddarmark. And if he knocks off the Republic, we’ll be a long time looking for another opportunity to establish a foothold anywhere on the mainland.”

“You are determined to be gloomy,” Merlin said in a gently teasing voice. “And, no, I wasn’t trying to tell you the momentum was on our side. I’m not even going to argue at this point that history is on our side, although I think it probably is. No, I’m just thinking about something you said a while back, Cayleb. This has been a bad year in a lot of ways… but we’re still here, and we’re stronger than we were the year before. And the reason we are is that you and Sharley and Maikel have laid a foundation here in Charis that someone like Zhaspahr Clyntahn will never be able to appreciate or match. Charis understands what this is about, and that’s our strength, the bedrock that Clyntahn doesn’t even begin to understand. These people- your people-recognize evil when they see it, and they’re not willing to let it triumph. They refuse to see it triumph. They may not know all that we know, and they’ve damned well never heard of the Terran Federation or the Gbaba, but they’re ready to pay the price to buy their children’s and their children’s children’s freedom from what Clyntahn represents, whatever that price is. And when you come down to it,” Merlin smiled crookedly, “we can work with that, you know.”

“You do have a way of finding a bright side, don’t you? What was it they called that back in the old days-a Pollyanna, I think?” Cayleb replied, but he was looking at his wife as he spoke, and he, too, smiled. He cupped one hand over the back of his sleeping daughter’s head and hugged her gently, and then he nodded.

“But you’re right, Merlin,” he said softly. “We can work with that.”