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.
“I can see why,” Adrian said, bracing a hand against the mast of the transport, where it ran through the maintop. He’d been at sea long enough now to sway naturally with the motion of the ship, exaggerated by the sixty-foot height of the mast. They were both used to the bilge stink and the cramped quarters by now as well, and the unmerciful heat of the reflected sun that had tanned them both several shades darker.
“This is a tough nut,” he said to his brother.
Esmond grunted agreement. “Harbor shaped like a U,” he murmured, half to himself. “Steep rocky ground all around—absolute bitch getting men up those, never mind the walls at the top. Let’s see . . . harbor wall just back from the docks, looks like it started out as a row of stone warehouses. Streets—tenement blocks, mansions, whatever, all bad—then the citadel itself on that low ridge.”
Esmond squinted carefully, then looked down at the map King Casull’s spies had provided. “Now, that’s interesting,” he said.
“What is?”
“This shows a ruined tower back of the rear wall of the citadel—unoccupied. Careless of them.”
Adrian peered over his brother’s armored shoulder. “That commands the citadel walls?” he said.
“Looks like. It’s a thousand yards from the rear wall of the citadel, say a quarter-mile from the inner face of the works facing the harbor,” he said. “Hmmm. Well out of bow and slingshot, of course, and you couldn’t mount a useful number of torsion machines there.”
He looked up, and for a moment his grin made him look young again, the youth who’d stood to be crowned at the Five Year Games. “But they don’t know about your toys, do they?”
Smart lad, your brother, Raj said. He’s got a real eye for the ground. That’s extremely important—nobody fights battles on a tabletop, and a rise of six feet can be crucial.
“No, they don’t,” Adrian said, smiling back. Oh, shit, he thought to himself.
King Casull looked up at the burning fortress at the outer harbor mouth of Vase. It was a low massive blocky building, set cunningly into the rocky crags and scree, well placed to rain down arrows and burning oil and naphtha on any force trying to scramble up the gravel and boulder-littered slopes to its gates. That had helped it not at all when the shells from Adrian Gellert’s mortar landed behind the battlements. A thick column of greasy black smoke rose, heavy with the scent of things that should not burn, a smell he was intimately familiar with comprised of old timber, paint, leather, cloth, wine, cooking oil, human flesh.