Conqueror

Why?'

'Well, I don't want to take any cannon off the walls,' Raj said thoughtfully. 'Here's what we'll do.' He took a sketchpad from an aide and drew quickly, weighting the paper against the merlon of the wall with the edge of his cloak.

'Make a raft,' Raj said. 'We've got half a dozen shipyards, that oughtn't to be any problem. Protect it with railroad strap-iron from one of the foundries here, say fifty millimeters on a backing of two hundred millimeters of oak beam. No loopholes for cannon. Put one of the mortars in the center instead, with a circular lid in segments. Iron segments, hinged. Make three or four rafts. When they're ready, we'll use the same kedging technique to get them in range of those Brigadero cheeseboxes, and see how they like 200mm mortar shells dropping down on them.'

'Ispirito de Persona,' Dinnalsyn said with boyish delight. 'Spirit of Man. You know, that'll probably work?'

He looked at the sketch. 'Mi heneral, these might be useful west of the city too-the river's deep enough for a couple of kilometers, nearly to the bridge for something this shallow-draft. If I took one of those little teakettles they use for locomotives here, and rigged some sort of covered paddle. .'

Raj nodded. 'See to it, but after we deal with the blockading rafts. Muzzaf, in the meanwhile cut the civilian ration by one-quarter, just in case.'

'That will be unpopular with the better classes,' the Komarite warned.

'I can live with it,' Raj said.

The laborers would still be better off than in most winters; a three-quarter ration they had money to buy was considerably more than what they could generally afford in slack times. Of course, the civilian magnates would be even more pissed off with Civil Government rule than before. . but Barholm had sent him here to conquer the Western Territories. Pacifying it would be somebody else's problem.

'Hmmm. Commodore Lopeyz, do any of your men have small-boat experience?' Two of the rams were tied up by the city docks, upstream of the enemy rafts and unable to move while they blocked the exit to the sea.

'A lot of them were fishermen before the press-gang came by,' the sailor said.

'Gerrin, I want a force of picked men from the 5th for some night work. The Brigaderos don't seem to be guarding that boatyard they built the rafts in. Train discreetly with Messer Lopeyz' boatmen, and in about a week- that'll be a two-moons-down night, and probably overcast-we'll have a little raid and some incendiary work.'

'General Whitehall, I love you,' Gerrin said, smiling like a downdragger about to bite into a victim.

'On to the next problem,' Raj said. 'Now-'

* * *

'Whitehall will get us all killed,' the landowner said. 'We'll starve.'

His Holiness Paratier nodded graciously, ignoring the man's well-filled paunch. He knew that Vihtorio Azaiglio had gotten the full yield of his estates sent in to warehouses in Old Residence. Whatever else happened, nobody in his household was actually going to go hungry. Azaiglio was stuffing candied figs from a bowl into his mouth as he spoke, at that. The room was large and dark and silent, nobody present but the magnates Paratier had summoned. That itself would be suspicious, and Lady Suzette and Whitehall's Komarite Companion had built a surprisingly effective network of informers in the last two months. They must act quickly, or not at all.

A man further down the table cleared his throat. 'What matters,' he said, 'is that the longer we obey Whitehall, the more likely Ingreid is to cut all our throats when he takes the city. The commons have made their bed by throwing in with the easterner-but I don't care to lie in it with them.'

'Worse still, he might win,' a merchant said. Paratier recognized him, Fidelio Enrike.

Everyone looked at him. Azaiglio cleared his throat. 'Well, umm. That doesn't seem too likely-but we'd be rid of him then too, yes. He'd go off to some other war.'

'He'd go, but the Civil Government wouldn't,' Enrike said. 'The Brigade are bad enough, but they're stupid and they're lazy, most of them. If they go down, there'll be a swarm of monopolists and charter-companies from East Residence and Hayapalco and Komar moving in here, sucking us dry like leeches-not to mention the tax-farmers Chancellor Tzetzas runs.'

Azaiglio sniffed. 'Not being concerned with matters of trade, I wouldn't know,' he said.

It had been essential to invite Azaiglio-he was the largest civilian landowner in the city-but Paratier was glad when one of his fellow noblemen spoke:

'Curse you for a fool, Vihtorio, Spirit open your eyes! Carson Barracks always listened to us, because we're here. East Residence is a month's sailing time away if the winds are favorable. Why should they pay attention to us? What happens if they decide some other frontier is more important a decade from now when they're fighting the Colony, and pull out their troops and let the Stalwarts pick our bones?'

Everyone shuddered. An Abbess leaned forward slightly, and cleared her throat.

'Seynor, you are correct. No doubt the conquest was a terrible thing, but it is long past. The Brigade needs us. It needs our cities-' she nodded to Enrike '-because they have no arts of their own, and would have to squat in log huts like the Stalwarts or the Guard otherwise. They need our nobility because they couldn't administer a pig sty by themselves.'

'They are heretics,' another of the nobles said thoughtfully.

'They may be converted in time,' the Abbess said. 'East Residence would turn all of Holy Federation Church into a department of state.'

There were thoughtful nods. The civilian nobles of the Western Territories in general and the provinces around Old Residence in particular had turned having the second headquarters of the Church among them into a very good thing indeed.

'The Civil Government was a wonderful thing when it was run from here,' Enrike said. 'As I said, being the outlying province of an empire run from East Residence is another matter altogether. Effectively, we run the Western Territories under the Brigade-who provide us with military protection at a price much more reasonable than the Governor's charge.'

'Not to mention the way Whitehall's stirred up the commons and the petty-guilds against their betters,' someone said irritably. 'The Brigade always backed us against those scum.'

Paratier raised a hand. Silence fell, and he spoke softly into it: 'These temporal matters are not our primary concern. Love for Holy Federation Church, the will of the Spirit of Man of the Stars-these are our burden. Raj Whitehall is zealous for the true faith, yet the Handbooks caution us to be prudent. If General Ingreid takes this city by storm, he will not spare the Church.'

Needless to say, he wouldn't spare anyone else either.

'However, if he were to receive the city as a gift from us-then, perhaps we might appease him with money. This war will be expensive.'

The Brigade troops had to be paid and fed from the General's treasury while they were in the field. It was full right now, Forker had been a miser of memorable proportions and had fought no wars of note, but gold would be flowing out of it like blood from a heart-stabbed man. The conspirators looked at each other uneasily; there was no going back from this point.

'How?' Enrike asked bluntly. 'Whitehall's got the militia under his control.'

'His officers,' the head of the Priest's Guard said. 'But not many of them.'

'The gates are often held by these battalions of paid militiamen he's raised,' the Abbess said thoughtfully.

There were forty thousand of the militia, but most of them were labor-troops at best. Half of them had volunteered when Raj Whitehall called; a thousand of the best had gone into the regular infantry battalions. From the rest he had culled seven battalions of full-time volunteer troops, uniformed and organized like Civil Government infantry but armed with captured Brigaderos weapons. The training cadre came from his regulars, but the officers were local men.

The Priest's Guard officer snorted. 'Every one of the battalion commanders he appointed is a rabid partisan of Whitehall's,' he said. 'I've checked, sounded a few of them out very cautiously.'