“Damn and blast!” He shook his head angrily. Problems in elevation were one thing; being that far off in deflection was something else entirely.
“I want that frigging ship hit, not the Shan-wei-damned water!” he snarled. “Anybody not understand that?!”
He glared at his own gun crew for a moment, then swiveled the same fiery eyes to the other crew and held them for a pair of heartbeats. Then he inhaled sharply.
“Load!”
* * *
“Fire!”
The 14-pounder lurched back on its slides, coming up against the breeching tackle, and the smoke cloud—not the dirty gray-white of conventional gunpowder but the dark brown of the much more powerful Charisian chocolate powder—blasted up and out. The shell shrieked across the water between the two ships and landed perhaps thirty feet short of its target.
* * *
The deck jerked under Mahkluskee’s feet, and he threw out a hand to the compass binnacle for balance.
The Charisian shell had hit the water and continued forward. Its down-angle had been too sharp to actually hit Serpent’s hull below the waterline, but the fuse had activated just as it passed under the brig’s keel. Fortunately, it was too far away and the charge was too light to break the ship’s back or stave in her planking, but the caulked seams between those planks were another matter. Half a dozen of them started, and water began spurting into the hull. It wasn’t a dangerous flow—not yet—but there was time for that to change.
“Fire!”
* * *
The 18-pounders thundered again … and this time, Jyrdyn Klynmywlyr found his mark. A single 4.6-inch round shot slammed into Fleet Wing’s hull right at the waterline and continued onward through one of the schooner’s iron water tanks before it lodged in her timbers on the far side of the hull.
“Hands below!” the ship’s carpenter snapped, sending his assistants below to check for leaks. Hektor absorbed that information, but his attention remained fully focused on Serpent.
The only man aboard his ship more focused on the brig than he was, was Wyllym Ruhsyl.
“Fire!”
* * *
Serpent bucked as a 4.5-inch shell slammed squarely into her hull, punched through her planking, and exploded in her cable tier. The tightly coiled hemp absorbed much of the explosion … but it was also flammable, and smoke began wafting upwards.
“Away fire parties!” Oskahr Fytsymyns bellowed, and half a dozen men vanished down the forward hatch.
The Royal Dohlaran Navy’s firefighting techniques had improved radically over the last couple of years, especially once Earl Thirsk started contemplating the ramifications of explosive shells hitting wooden hulls. Serpent’s firefighters dragged a canvas hose behind them, and four more men tailed onto the forward pump, ready to send water surging through the hose when—if—they reached the source of that smoke.
The smoke rose through the hatch behind the firefighting party, rolling along the deck like ground fog, wreathing around the gunners’ knees before it topped the bulwark and the wind snatched it away, but they ignored it.
“Fire!”
* * *
The two ships forged through the water as the minutes dragged past and the artillery duel raged.
The carronade gunners on both sides stood watching, rammers and handspikes in hand, waiting until the moment might come for them to join the exchange. But Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk had no intention of giving Serpent’s shorter-ranged weapons the opportunity to fire upon his ship. Mahkluskee’s gunners were better than he’d anticipated, and they’d managed to hit Fleet Wing three more times over the past twenty-five minutes. In absolute terms, that was a dismal percentage of the shots they’d fired; in terms of gunners aboard a small ship in eight- or nine-foot waves, it was a very respectable accomplishment, and the last thing he wanted was to let the rest of Serpent’s gunners join the fray.
Wyllym Ruhsyl’s gun crew, however, was even better. They’d fired barely more than half as many shots and hit their target five times. Fleet Wing had suffered six casualties, none of them fatal; Serpent had seven dead and eight wounded, and she’d been hit twice below the waterline. Her pumps had kept pace with the inflow handily … until six minutes ago, when one of Ruhsyl’s shells had landed with freakish perversity right on top of her forward pump.
With only the after pump still in action, the water was gaining, slowly but inexorably. The brig had also lost half the pumping capacity dedicated to her firefighting teams, and although the fire in the cable tier had been contained, it hadn’t been extinguished. It continued to smolder, and another shell had exploded in Mahkluskee’s cabin, starting a second fire. That one had been smothered quickly, but the Dohlaran skipper could feel his people’s growing desperation. They’d hit the Charisian several times—he knew they had—yet there was no external evidence of it, and that accursed pivot gun continued to flash and thunder with metronome precision.
“Hit ’em, lads!” he heard himself shouting. “Hit the bastards!”
A rigging hit, he thought bitterly. That’s what we need—one hit on the bastard’s rigging!
That was the schooner rig’s one weakness as a man-of-war; it was more vulnerable than a square-rigger to damage aloft. If they could only bring down a mast, or even shoot away the foresail’s gaff! Anything to slow the Charisian, give Serpent a chance to break off. It would have to be a truly devastating hit to give the brig any hope of clawing upwind into carronade range, but at this point, he’d be more than willing to simply run.
I don’t care how accurate those bastards are, we could take them if they weren’t firing shells while we fired round shot! Who ever thought of fitting a gun that small with shells? And how did they get so damned much powder inside them? Why the Shan-wei can they do things like that, and we can’t? Which side are the Archangels really on?!
Something quailed inside him at the blasphemy of his own question, but that didn’t rob it of its point. Dohlar was the one fighting for God and Langhorne, so why was it that—
* * *
“Fire!”
Wyllym Ruhsyl yanked the firing lanyard for what seemed like the thousandth time. The 14-pounder bellowed, smoke blossomed … and HMS Serpent disintegrated in a massive ball of fire, smoke, and hurtling splinters as a 4.5-inch shell drilled straight into her powder magazine and exploded.
.III.
Lake City
and
Camp Mahrtyn Taisyn,
Traytown,
Tarikah Province,
Republic of Siddarmark.
“It would appear all is in readiness,” Captain of Horse Medyng Hwojahn, Baron of Wind Song, remarked. His breath rose in a cloud of steam as he gazed through the tripod-mounted spyglass at the formidable lines of snow-shrouded fortifications. They stretched as far as he could see, even with the spyglass, and he straightened and turned to the tall—very tall, for a Harchongian—officer at his right shoulder. “Whenever seems best to you, Lord of Foot Zhyngbau.”