The Reformer g-4 Page 11

  "Steam engine."

  "Steam engine, then. Not a toy model, although that was useful. A working model, enough to drive a small launch, of the type rowed by ten men?"

  probability of success of steam ram project has increased to 61 % ±7, Center said. as always, stochastic analysis cannot fully compensate for human variability.

  Adrian smiled; if that had been a human voice speaking aloud, and not a supernatural machine whispering at the back of his mind, he'd have sworn there was a rasp of exasperation in it-rather the way one of the professors of Political Theory in the Academy had spoken of the Confederacy of Vanbert's Constitution; it should not work, but it did.

  "I think you are right, Marzel," he said. "If you could bring me the costed estimates, in. ."

  "Three days time, honored sir."

  "Three days, that would be excellent."

  They parted with the usual flowery Islander protestations of mutual esteem; this time they were sincere. As the Islander left, Adrian rose to circle the ship model on the table once more. It showed a craft halfway between a galley and a merchant ship, perhaps five times longer than it was wide. The bow ended in a ram shaped like a cold chisel, and there were neither oars nor sail. Instead two great bladed wheels revolved on either side, and the hull was covered over wholly by a turtlelike deck. Octagons covered that in turn like the scales of some great serpent, marking where the hand-hammered iron plates would go. The upper curve was broken by two smokestacks, one to the left and one to the right; between them was a low circular deckhouse, with slits all around for vision.

  Esmond rose from the corner where he had been sitting silently. "Brother," he said gently. "Will this really work?"

  "I don't know," Adrian said. "I think it will. The gunpowder worked. ."

  "Yes." Esmond paused. "I know I haven't been much help to you. . much help since Vanbert," he said hesitantly.

  Adrian turned and gripped his shoulders. "Oh, no-just saved my life half a dozen times in the retreat, got us all out alive, got us a ship, rushed around like Wodep would if he had enough sense to listen to the Gray-Eyed. ."

  "Brother, I'm worried about you," the taller of the Gellerts said bluntly. "I don't. . I've known you all my life. Yes, you're the smarter of us, and yes, you're a Scholar the Grove could be proud of-but all these, these things you've been coming up with since Father died. ."

  "These things are our only chance of revenge on the Confederacy," Adrian said, with a peculiar inward wrench. I cannot tell the truth even to my brother, who is not only the brother of my blood but the brother of my heart, he knew. First, Esmond would simply be horrified that his brother had gone mad. And even if he believed, would he understand? The concepts had been hard enough for Adrian, and he had two disembodied intelligences speaking directly to him.

  He thrust aside certain fears that had come to him in the night, now and then. What if I am truly mad? What if these are demons, such as the ancient stories tell of?

  Esmond's face hardened. "You're right," he said. "I thank the gods that you've stumbled on these things." A smile. "Forgive my weakness."

  "I'd forgive you far more than a concern for me, Esmond."

  The cry was a huge shout, like a battle trumpet. Adrian Gellert shot out of the low soft bed as if he had been yanked out with cords, not fully conscious until he realized he was standing barefoot on cold marble with the dagger he kept under the pillow naked in his hand.

  Nothing, he thought. Nothing but the night sounds of Chalice, insects, birds, the soft whisper of water in the fountain that plashed in the courtyard below, a watchman calling out as his iron-tipped staff clacked on paving stones.

  Then a woman screamed; that was close, just down the corridor. Adrian was out the door of his bedroom in seconds, feet skidding on the slick stones of the floor. One of the Lowissons' guards was there not long after him, likewise in nothing but his drawers, looking foolish with his shaved head showing-no time to don the turban-but a curved sword ready in his hand. Adrian ignored him, plunging into his brother's room. The door rebounded off his shoulder and crashed against the jamb and Adrian's gaze skittered about. The room was dark-even the nightlight in the lamp by the bed had gone out. Then it grew a bright greenish cast, as Center amplified the light that was reaching his retinas. Even then Adrian's skin crawled with the revulsion that brought, but there was no time for anything but business now.

  Esmond Gellert was sitting up in bed, his muscular chest heaving and sheening with sweat. His eyes were wide and staring, and cloth ripped in the hand that held a pillow. An Islander woman crouched naked against the far wall, sobbing.

  "He was asleep!" she cried, looking blindly to the door. "I did my best, I swear!"

  "Go," Adrian said gently in her language, rising from his crouch and letting the dagger fall along one leg. "Go, now. This is not your fault."

  She scuttled out, scooping up clothing as she went. Adrian moved over to the bedside. "Esmond," he said sharply. "Esmond, it's me. What's the matter?"

  His elder brother shook himself like a dog coming out of a river. "A dream," he muttered softly. "It must have been a dream. My oath, what a dream. ."

  "What dream, Esmond?" Adrian said carefully.

  "Nanya," he said. "The fire. ." His face changed, writhing. "They'll burn."

  "Who will burn?"

  "Vanbert. The Confeds. All of them. They're going to burn, burn."

  "Esmond, it's late. Do you think you can sleep now?"

  Esmond shook himself again, and something like humanness returned to his eyes. "What. . oh, sorry, brother. Bit of a bad dream. Yes, it's going to be a long day."

  * * *

  "The man will be impaled, otherwise," Casull said. "He is a criminal."

  Adrian sighed; it was not something he wanted to do, but on the other hand. . well, he'd rather be shot than have a sharpened wooden stake up the anus, if he had to choose.

  King Casull was present, and his eldest son Tenny-a twenty-year-old version of his father, except that there was a trace of softness around the jaw, of petulance in the set of his mouth. There were a scattering of Islander admirals as well, ships' captains, mercenary officers, and an interested score or so of Adrian's own Emerald slingers. Three of them were serving as the arquebus' crew. Adrian squinted against the bright sunlight; the first target was floating on a barge twenty yards away, tied to a stake and with a Confed infantry shield set up before him. Royal guardsmen kept the crowds well away from this section of the naval dockyards.

  "These have two-man crews," Adrian went on. "They load. . thus."

  He nodded to his men. The weapon was clamped into a tripod with a pivot joint. The gunner pushed on the butt, and the weapon spun around. He seized and held the muzzle, while the loader bit open a paper cartridge and rammed it and the eight-ounce lead ball down the long barrel. Then he spun it again, taking a horn from his belt.

  "You see, lord King, the small pan on the right side? That is where the fine-ground priming powder goes. Then this hammer with the piece of flint in its jaws goes back. ."

  "Ah, yes," Casull said. "A flint-and-steel-the sort travellers use."

  "Yes, lord King. The flint strikes this portion of the L-shaped steel, pushing it back from over the pan-the sparks fall down onto the powder-the powder burns, the flame goes through a small hole into the barrel and ignites the main charge."

  He raised his voice a little. "Gentlemen, there will be a loud crack, a little like thunder."

  There were alert nods, dark eyes bright with interest. You know, he thought, this Kingdom of the Isles would seem to be a better place to start "progress" than the mainland. They're a lot less. . hidebound, I think you'd say.

  no, Center said. There was more than the usual heavy certainty to its communication. this culture is too intellectually amorphous.

  Adrian felt a familiar baffled frustration. Raj cut in: Sure, they'll take and use anything that looks useful. But they're pure pragmatists. Your Emerald philosophers have gotten themselves int
o a trap-staring up their own arses and trying to find first causes in words, in language. But at least they think about the structure of things; so do the Confeds, when they think at all-they caught it from you. The Islanders just aren't interested; to them, everything you've shown is just a wonderful new trick, to be thrown into the grab bag.

  accurate, if loosely phrased, Center said.

  Hmmm, Adrian thought. This time he felt the wonderful tension-before-release mental sensation of almost grasping a concept; it was like sex just before orgasm, only better. But they have a lot of. . what was that phrase? Social mobility?

  correct, Center said. if anything, an excessive amount.

  Sure, you can get ahead, here, Raj said. But you can't stay ahead. Everything here turns on the fall of the dice; the ruler's favor, a lucky pirate raid. This place is as unstable as water, while the mainland's set in granite. You can carve granite into a new shape, though; water will just run through your fingers.

  Adrian shook himself back to the world of phenomena; the mental conversation had only taken a few seconds, but he was attracting looks. Most of them were tolerantly amused; the Scholars of the Grove had a solid reputation for otherworldly abstraction.

  If only they knew, he thought to himself. Aloud: "Fire!"

  The gunner carefully squeezed the trigger. There was a chick-shsss as the hammer came down and the priming caught in a little sideways puff of fire and dirty-white smoke. Then: Bdannggg as the arquebus fired; the cloud of smoke from the main charge was enough to hide the target from Adrian's eyes for a second. Esmond gave a silent whistle of relief beside him; the bullet hadn't missed. Casull's eyebrows went up as well, and the Islander grandees were laughing and slapping Adrian on the back; eight ounces of high-velocity lead had smashed a hole the size of a fist through the Confed shield, through metal facing and plywood and tough leather, and then removed the entire top of the target's head in a spatter of pink-gray froth and whitish bone fragments.

  Adrian swallowed. "So, you see, my lord King," he said. "Many such arquebusiers could sweep the decks of an enemy ship, beyond the effective range of archers."

  "But not beyond the range of catapults and ballistae," Casull said. "Still, a dreadful weapon, yes. These. . arquebuses? Arquebuses, yes-they can fire faster than catapults, and we can put more of them on a ship. The Confed marines have always been our problem, the Sun God roast their balls; we're better seamen, but as often as not they swarm aboard and take the ship that rams them."

  "Lord King, I'm just getting started," Adrian said with a grin. "Next is a much larger version of the arquebus, for use against ships and fortresses."

  The King's dark eyebrows looked as if they were trying to crawl into his widow's peak. "Show me!" he commanded.

  "This is the weapon," Adrian said, signalling. A half-dozen of his men dragged it over; a bronze tube seven feet long, mounted on a low four-wheeled carriage of glossy hardwood. "I call it a cannon."

  The barge teams in the military harbor were busy again; this time they towed out a small and extremely elderly galley. It was listing, and the dockyard workers had stripped it of most of its fittings; they anchored it to a buoy two hundred yards out in the harbor.

  Meanwhile Adrian's men were busy around the gun. Adrian gave Casull a running commentary: "First, as you see, lord King, a linen bag full of the gunpowder is pushed down the hollow-the barrel. A wad of felt goes in next, to hold it in place."

  The crew shoved the bag home with a long pole, grunting in unison as they slammed it down. "Now the gunner runs a long steel needle through the touch-hole, to pierce the bag, and fills the touch-hole and this little pan on top of the gun with priming powder-finely ground."

  "And here is what the cannon will hurl," he said. The team paused for a second to let the King see what they were doing.

  "A bronze ball?" Casull said. "Wouldn't stone do just as well, and be much cheaper?"

  "We will use stone balls to strike fortress walls," Adrian said. Cast iron would have been better still, but the only furnaces capable of making it were in Vanbert, and not many of them. All the ironworks in the Islands were what Center called Catalan forges, turning out wrought iron.

  "But this is a shell, lord King," Adrian amplified.

  "You mean it's hollow?"

  "My lord sees as clearly as the eye of the Sun God. It is filled with the gunpowder, and this"-he pointed to a wooden plug in the side of the metal ball, with a length of cord through it-"is the fuse. It is a length of cord soaked in saltpeter; when the cannon fires, the main charge lights it. Then in ten seconds, the cord burns through to the charge in the middle."

  While they spoke the crew had been fixing the cannon's tackle to bollards sunk in the stone of the dock, and aiming it with handspikes and main force. The gunner glared down the barrel with its simple notch-and-blade sights, then stepped back and adusted the wedge under the breech of the cannon that controlled its elevation.

  "If my lord wishes, he may fire the first shot," Adrian said, bowing. "If it please my lord King, please stand well to one side-the cannon will move backward rapidly when it is fired. And," he went on, raising his voice for the assembled dignitaries, "this time the noise will be much louder."

  Casull was grinning like a shark as he brought the length of slowmatch at the end of the long stick down on the little pile of fine powder. It caught with a long sssshshshshs, and an appreciable fraction of a second later. .

  BAMMMMM!

  This time some of the Islander magnates took startled steps back, mouthing curses or prayers. The gun leapt back until the breeching ropes brought it up with a twang, belching a cloud of smoke shot through with a knife blade of red fire. The wind had picked up, and the smoke swept to one side in good time to see splinters and chunks of frame pinwheeling up from the target galley. Then three seconds later there was another crack, muffled by the wood the shell was embedded in. A quarter of the light galley's side exploded outward; when the smoke cleared from that, it was already listing to one side. . and burning.

  Casull gave a whoop and hiked up his robe in one hand, snapping his fingers and hopping through the first steps of a bawdy kodax dance; one could see he'd been a sailor long before he was King. His son stood blinking, red spots on pale cheeks; the buccaneer admirals and mercenary commanders were swearing, spitting, thumping each other on the back.

  The King stopped first, pausing to turn and shake a fist to the east. "Now see who goes to the bottom, you turnip-eating peasants!" he shouted.

  Then he turned to Adrian, eyes snapping. "What else have you for me, O Worker of Wonders?"

  Adrian smiled thinly; the problem with getting the reputation for being a magician was that he had to live up to it, and when they expected him to be infallible. . Esmond was looking hungrily at the burning galley and a slow, deep smile was spreading over his face.

  "There are two other types of shot the cannon can fire, lord King," he said. "Solid stone balls, heavy basalt or granite. Those will pound down the walls of forts, as catapults might, but since they strike much harder from further away, they do it quicker. The other is case-shot. It's a leather bag full of lead balls, like the arquebus fires, but a hundred of them. Imagine them flung out in a spray, into a dense formation of men-a Confed infantry battalion, or a section of marines about to board."

  Casull nodded hungrily. Esmond, from his expression, was imagining precisely that.

  "Why didn't you make these for the Confed nobles you were working for?" the monarch asked.

  "First, lord, I didn't have time. Second, they didn't take me seriously enough to give me what I needed. These cannon take a lot of bronze, and bronze is expensive-this one twenty-four pounder takes more than two tons of bronze."

  Casull grunted as if belly-punched, losing a little of his joy. "That is something to think on," he said. "Not just the money, but the bronze itself-there isn't all that much around, we'll have to import. ." He clapped Adrian on the shoulder again. "Still and all, you've done all that you promised an
d more. And there is still another wonder to lay the world at my feet?"

  Hardly ambitious at all, all of a sudden, isn't he? Raj observed.

  Adrian nodded-to both the entities he was communicating with. "Yes, my King. The next is a small taste of what a full-scale steam-propelled ship will be. ."

  He heard a chuff. . chuff. . chuff . . sound. The twelve oar launch he'd converted came into view. Murmurs arose from the Islander chiefs; they understood the sea and ships. He could see them pointing out the rudder and tiller arrangement he'd rigged, debating its merits, and then there were louder murmurs as they realized that the launch was heading directly into the wind at seven knots, throwing back white water from both sides of its prow as well as the wheels that thrashed the harbor surface to foam on either side. Black smoke puffed in balls from the tall smokestack secured like a mast with staywires to fore and aft.

  "Think of a full-sized ship, my lord," Adrian said. "Her decks covered over with a timber shell and iron plates, and with an iron-backed ram. No vulnerable oars, impossible to board, free of wind, tide and current. ."

  Casull was a fighting man who'd spent most of a long life waging war at sea, or preparing to.

  "Tell me more," he said, breathing hard.

  SIX

  "Pity you didn't get an opportunity to try out your new toys at sea," Esmond said.

  "This will do," Adrian said.

  The archipelago ruled-ruled more or less; from which they collected protection money, at least-by the Directors of Vase was considerably smaller than the one centered on Chalice. Few of the islands in it had enough area to grow crops, and they were low-lying and therefore dry, covered in open forest and scrub rather than jungle. To balance that there were mines, the fishing in the shallow waters round about was excellent, and they were a very convenient location for raids on the mainland. Vase was the largest, and the only one which looked like giving the Royal forces any sustained resistance.