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
