How Firm a Foundation (82 page)

“Prince Daivyn?” Rayno asked, tilting his head while he considered options and possibilities.

“Exactly. And I want it to coincide with the Sword. I want those bastards in Tellesberg to take as many good, heavy kicks in the balls, from as many directions as we can manage, in the shortest time period possible.”

“If you actually want to coordinate the two operations, Your Grace, we’re going to have to tinker with the timing.”

“What do you mean, ‘tinker’?”

“Forgive me, Your Grace. That was the wrong word. I should have said we’re going to have to consider the timing carefully. If we hold to our current planning and send in a team of ‘Charisian’ assassins, it’s going to take at least a few five-days—possibly
an entire month—to get them into position in Delferahk, so the question becomes how closely we want the assassination to coincide with the Sword. Do we want to delay events in Siddarmark in order to coordinate them with the assassination, or do we want to move as quickly as possible in Siddarmark and settle for
approximate
coordination between the Sword and the assassination?”

“I want them to
happen as close to simultaneously as possible,” Clyntahn said after a moment’s thought. “I want Cayleb and Sharleyan to
know
we timed them to happen that way.” He smiled unpleasantly. “After all,
they’re
going to know they didn’t kill Daivyn, no matter what happens. So let’s just underscore the statement for them and see how they like that!”

“Of course, Your Grace.” Rayno bowed across the table
again. “I’ll get started on that immediately.”

.IX.

Queen Frayla Avenue, City of Tellesberg, Kingdom of Old Charis

“I have a priority alert, Lieutenant Commander Alban.”

Merlin Athrawes’ head snapped up as Owl’s voice spoke calmly over his built-in com. He stood in the window of his palace bedchamber, looking out into the steadily gathering twilight, and his expression was grim. Tellesberg—even Tellesberg, the city which never slept, which
was never quiet—seemed hushed and somber. Lanterns and lamps were already beginning to illuminate the oncoming night, and his enhanced vision could see the longshoremen and the ships still loading and unloading cargo along the waterfront. But the city’s tempo had clearly dropped, and people went about their business more quietly than usual, with a degree of fearfulness which grieved his heart.

The Gray Wyvern Avenue attack wasn’t the only one Tellesberg had endured, although it had been the most costly of them all.

Another wagon loaded with explosives had been intercepted as it rolled through the gates of the Tellesberg dockyard. In the wake of Gray Wyvern Avenue, an alert Marine sentry had taken it upon himself to question all incoming deliveries unless the driver was known to him
personally. His initiative had irritated the dockyard authorities immensely, since it had resulted in confusion and delays in the dockyard’s always bustling movement of supplies and deliveries. In fact, his company commander had dispatched a sergeant with orders for him to cease and desist. Fortunately, the sergeant hadn’t arrived yet when the officious sentry stopped an articulated freight wagon
almost as large as the one used in Gray Wyvern Square.
Unfortunately
, that wagon driver had arranged one of the flintlock pistol-based detonators where he could reach it from his high box seat.

The explosion had killed another fifty-six people, including the sentry, and wounded over a hundred more, but it would have been far worse if the driver had managed to reach his intended destination.

Two more, similar explosions had racked Tellesberg in the next twelve hours. Fortunately, they’d been smaller, but they’d created something entirely too much like panic for Merlin’s taste. They’d also led to the declaration of martial law and a decree freezing all wagon traffic until the authorities could put some sort of security system into place.

The attackers’ tactics had been shrewdly chosen
to hit Tellesberg where it was most vulnerable, Merlin thought grimly. Not only had they targeted the leaders of the Empire’s government—what had happened to Gray Harbor, Waignair, and Nahrmahn was proof enough of that—but Tellesberg’s commerce was its very life’s blood. The city’s coat of arms, quartered with galleon and freight wagon, was nothing but accurate in that regard, and the grating,
rumbling roar of those heavy wagons was both the bane of Tellesberg’s repose and the source of a perverse pride.

Now those wagons had become a source of fear, not civic pride, for who knew which of them might be yet another bomb rolling towards its destination?

Cayleb and Sharleyan had seen no option but to impose unprecedented controls on the movement of freight through the city. No system
could be perfect, but they’d moved quickly to begin issuing permits and licenses which were to be carried at all times and displayed upon demand. Moreover, every cargo load would now have to be documented, with a detailed bill of lading that would be inspected before it was allowed into the waterfront area or access to any cathedral, church, or public building.

Fortunately, the majority of the
capital’s freight was moved by professional drayage firms, all of which were already required to be bonded and inspected twice a year. Given those records’ existence, they’d been able to move far more rapidly than someone like Clyntahn probably would have expected, and at least limited wagon traffic had been allowed to resume within two days of the initial attack. The smaller independents, who hadn’t
been in the records, were another matter, and some of them were suffering severe economic hardship while they tried to get the documentation and licensing which had never before been required. Baron Ironhill, aware both of the hardship for them and the consequences for the city’s economic sector in general, had already set aside a fund to help reimburse some of those independent drayers’ losses.

Even under the best circumstances, however, all the new inspections and regulations and licenses had begun imposing a significant drag on the Tellesberg economy. The cost of stationing City Guardsmen and Marines to do the inspecting was going to be a non-trivial budget item, as well. Yet even worse was the pervasive apprehension, the fear that yet another attack was inevitable. Tellesbergers refused
to be cowed, and their anger at the indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children far eclipsed their fear, yet that fear was there, and Merlin was sadly certain it wasn’t going away anytime soon.

“What sort of priority alert?” he asked Owl tersely now.

“A wagon has just entered one of the primary surveillance zones,” the AI replied in that same calm tone. “As per your standing instructions,
I have placed a parasite sensor in the wagon bed. It confirms the presence of high concentrations of gunpowder.”

*   *   *

Tailahr Ahndairs suppressed a highly inappropriate urge to swear as he turned the wagon down Queen Frayla Avenue and one wheel bumped jarringly over the cut-granite curb between the roadway and the sidewalk.

He’d been selected for his mission because of his religious fervor
and his Charisian accent, both of which were completely genuine. Unfortunately, he was a tinker by trade, not a drayman, and there’d been less time to teach him the rudiments of managing a heavy freight wagon than he might have wished. The traffic in Tellesberg was also far, far heavier than he’d ever really anticipated, which only made things worse, but at least there were some advantages to
the controls on movement the heretics had slapped down. Operation Rakurai’s planners hadn’t counted on their being able to do that as quickly as they had, and Tailahr was unhappily aware that he had neither permit nor license. If he was stopped, there was no way he could pretend to be anything but what he was. On the other hand, there was far less traffic than there had been, so even if he had no
license, he also had fewer other wagons to contend with and—hopefully—his own poor driving would be less of a problem.

It had been so far, at least, and he didn’t have much farther to go.

He looked along the street ahead of him. Quite a few heads turned, eyes watching him warily as he rumbled past, and he exulted inside at that proof the heretics had been hurt. They were
afraid
now, and well
they should be! It bemused him that they should go through their lives showing so little concern for the eternity of punishment their actions were storing up in Shan-wei’s hell, yet react so strongly—exactly as Archbishop Wyllym and Vicar Zhaspahr had predicted they would—to a threat to their merely mortal, transitory bodies. He didn’t—couldn’t—understand that sort of thinking, but he didn’t have
to understand to recognize the effect, and he smiled grimly at the proof of what he and his fellows had already accomplished.

Lights were beginning to glow in the establishments around him. Most of them were shops or eateries, and he saw couples and families gathering around the tables of the open-air cafés in the comfort of the cool, breezy evening. The traffic around him was primarily pedestrian,
with a smattering of private vehicles and an occasional dragon-drawn streetcar. There were very few freight wagons in the area, however, which made Tailahr’s wagon stand out even more. That was also the reason his wagon was so much smaller than the others had been, because there was nothing here to justify the presence of one of the huge, articulated vehicles. The fact that he only had to manage
a simple pair of draft horses instead of one of the dragons was an additional plus, but mostly it was because he needed to appear as unthreatening as possible until the moment came. He was simply one more driver, obviously there to drop off deliveries of fresh vegetables for the restaurants, and he reminded himself to smile and wave reassuringly at the pedestrians who stopped as they saw him
passing.

Ahead of him, on the left, he saw the sentry box and the Imperial Charisian Marines standing guard at the open wrought-iron gate of his target. He wasn’t going to be able to get as close as he would have liked, but that had been factored into his plan. His wagon wasn’t loaded just with gunpowder; it had been packed with bits and pieces of scrap iron, old nails, cobblestones, and anything
else he could find to use as projectiles. When he set off the charge, it would turn the vehicle into an enormous shotgun, hurling its improvised grapeshot for hundreds of yards—inaccurately, but with lethal power.

He felt the tension coiling tighter at his center as the moment approached. To be chosen for this particular attack had been an enormous honor. His chances of successfully killing his
primary target were probably less than even, given how far from the building he’d be when he detonated his weapon, but he could always hope. And according to their best information, the apostate traitor’s office faced on the street and he normally worked far later into the night than this. So there was at least a chance, and even if he missed Wylsynn, he’d get scores of the bastard’s assistants.
He was about to strike a devastating blow at the center of all those accursed perversions of the Proscriptions, and that—

Tailahr’s thoughts broke off abruptly as a man materialized out of nowhere. One instant he wasn’t there; the next he was reaching up, catching the driver’s seat’s grab rail, and vaulting up beside Tailahr with impossible, fluid speed.

Tailahr flinched away, instantly and
automatically, instead of immediately reaching for the cocked and ready pistol grip concealed in the seat beside him, and before he could even begin to recover, a hand moving with blurring speed had caught his left wrist. He screamed as that same hand effortlessly twisted his arm up until the back of his wrist pressed his shoulder blades; then another demonically strong hand gripped the nape of his
neck, and Tailahr screamed again as his captor stood upright on the wagon seat, dragging him with him.

Even through the pain in his arm and shoulder, the anguish of the iron vise locked around the back of his neck, Tailahr’s eyes bulged in disbelief as he realized the man who’d leapt into the wagon with him was actually holding him at arm’s length with his toes an inch in the air. Then, without
even a grunt of effort, the monster who’d sprung upon him leapt effortlessly down from the high seat.

Tailahr’s scream was a shriek this time. Something crunched noisily and agonizingly in his shoulder socket, sending lightning bolts exploding through his entire body, as they hit the ground and his hand was wrenched abruptly even higher. And then the hand on his neck was driving him down. He
found himself flat on the paving stones, his useless left arm thumping down beside him with a fresh stab of agony, as if it belonged to someone else, and a knee slammed painfully into his spine while his right arm was captured and twisted up behind him as casually as the other one had been.

Voices were beginning to shout in alarm, and he heard the clatter of boots as at least one of the Marine
sentries ran towards them, shouting a challenge, but he managed somehow to turn his head. He looked up, and his entire body jerked in disbelief and terror as he saw the sapphire eyes, gleaming in the glow of his own wagon’s driving lights, and recognized the livery of the Imperial Guard.

“I think you and I have a lot to talk about,” Captain Merlin Athrawes told him coldly.

OCTOBER,
YEAR OF GOD 895

.I.

Tellesberg Palace, City of Tellesberg, Kingdom of Old Charis

“I, Nahrmahn Gareyt Baytz, do swear allegiance and fealty to Emperor Cayleb and Empress Sharleyan of Charis,” the young man said, kneeling before the side-by-side thrones with his hand on the cover of the
Holy Writ
, “to be their true man, of heart, will, body, and sword. To do my utmost to discharge my obligations and duty to them,
to their Crowns, and to their House, in all ways, as God shall give me the ability and the wit so to do. I swear this oath without mental or moral reservation, and I submit myself to the judgment of the Emperor and Empress and of God Himself for the fidelity with which I honor and discharge the obligations I now assume before God and this company.”