She paused once again, waiting while the repeaters relayed her words, and her voice was hard when she resumed.
“Yes, they surrendered … but their captors ignored the very laws recorded in the Holy Writ to prescribe the treatment of prioners taken in open combat, captured in time of war. They were treated as criminals—as worse than criminals—and after they’d surrendered, after they’d been denied the rights and protections the Writ itself guarantees to prisoners of war, after they’d spent a bitter winter in captivity aboard prison hulks in Gorath Bay—denied winter clothing, blankets, an adequate diet, or even minimal healers’ care on the direct orders of the Intendant of Dohlar—after a quarter of them had died, the survivors of that ordeal were delivered into the hands of the butcher who calls himself Mother Church’s Grand Inquisitor. They were delivered to Zion, where three-quarters—more than three-quarters—of those who’d managed to survive that far were brutally tortured to death. Where the pitiful handful who’d survived battle, survived cold, survived starvation and illness and exposure, survived the brutality of their journey to Zion, survived even the Inquisition’s savage torture, were given to the Punishment—burned to death, after all else they had suffered. And lest they denounce their torturers, lest they proclaim the truth of why they’d fought and of what had been done to them, their tongues were cut out before they faced the flame!”
She paused once again, and her eyes were brown fire as the distant voices of the repeaters came through the ringing silence. A silence so deep, so profound the distant cries of gulls and wyverns came clearly through its crystal heart.
“That is why we remember them,” she said then, and even her superbly trained voice wavered around the edges, frayed by remembered pain and present grief while tears blurred her vision. “That is why I remember them. Why I will tell my daughter the story of their courage, of their devotion, of their sacrifice. Why I will teach her to never—ever—forget what those husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons did for each and every one of us.”
Again, the repeaters carried her words to the farthest fringes of the crowd, and here and there in that vast stillness single voices were raised in agreement. She waited until they’d faded, and when she spoke again, the tears in her voice had become steel.
“And that is why we will never forget or forgive what was done to them,” she told her subjects. “There is a price for what was inflicted upon them, what they suffered. A penalty for those who would turn their hands to such acts—who would acquiesce in them! A penalty which goes beyond simple vengeance for those we’ve lost, those who have been so foully and brutally murdered. One which goes even beyond justice. A penalty which will serve not simply to avenge them, but to teach the world that no one will ever—ever!—torture and murder Charisian subjects with impunity. That there will be a reckoning for anyone who would commit such actions. That the Empire of Charis will come for them—that we will always come for them, whoever they may be, wherever they may hide—and that we will not rest until they pay for their actions. The men who ordered and carried out the Ferayd Massacre have already learned that lesson; the inquisitors with the Group of Four’s armies have learned that lesson; now the time has come for those in Gorath who supinely yielded our sailors, our Marines—our brothers, fathers, and sons—to the Butcher of Zion to learn it. And, in the fullness of time, Zhaspahr Clyntahn will learn it!”
The shouts of agreement were sharp-clawed with anger this time. There weren’t very many, and yet the fury in them swelled like the sea. They were the first tremors, the earthquake’s precursor shocks, and they cut off instantly when she leaned over the rail towards her audience once more.
“Every one of you knows what’s happened in the Gulf of Dohlar since the Battle of the Kaudzhu Narrows,” she told them. “You know that this time, our Navy rescued the men who’d been destined for murder in Zion. You know Earl Sharpfield, Baron Sarmouth, Admiral Zhaztro have annihilated the squadron which hurt us so badly in the Narrows. And you know that now—today—this ship—” she thrust out an arm, pointing at the enormous vessel floating in the harbor behind her “—departs for the Gulf, as well. Departs to join Earl Sharpfield and Baron Sarmouth. She will make that voyage in less than one month, and when she arrives, they will move against the Kingdom of Dohlar itself.
“Charisians, there’s a reason this ship bears the name she does! There’s a reason she will be our Navy’s spearhead—and the hammer that reduces the City of Gorath’s walls to rubble. There’s a reason her very name will terrify Zhaspahr Clyntahn and every single one of his butchers!
“My friends—my brothers and my sisters—” tears fogged her voice and she could barely see, yet somehow her words rang clear, each one of them forged of steel and fire, of grief and pride, and of the fierce, unyielding purpose which made Sharleyan Ahrmahk—and the people of Charis—what they were “—the murderers who tortured and killed our people, our friends, our warriors and protectors, may have cut out their tongues. They may have silenced them before the hour of their deaths. But today—today—we give them back their voices! Gwylym Manthyr will speak again in Gorath, and the words we will give him—the words he will deliver for us, and for himself, and for his men—will echo far beyond Gorath, far beyond the borders of Dohlar. They will echo in Zion itself, within the walls of the very Temple of God! And the men who hear the thunder of those words will know the day is coming very soon when, as God is our witness, we will come for them, as well!”
The earthquake broke free at last. It rose above the city of Tellesberg, and it was the voice not just of a crowd, not just of a city, but of an empire. Of an entire realm—a people—for whom she’d found the words, the promise, to speak not just what was in their hearts, but what was in their souls.
By rights, Zhaspahr Clyntahn should have heard that fierce, hungry, implacable roar even in Zion.
.XI.
Seventy-Foot Hill,
Cahrswyl’s Farm Road,
Duchy of Thorast,
Kingdom of Dohlar.
“Sweet Bédard. If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it!” Rohsyndo Mylyndyz said almost prayerfully.
“See what?” Corporal Ahskar Mahkgyl, section leader of 4th Platoon’s first section, demanded irritably. No one was shooting at them for the moment, and the corporal had been hunkered down in his lizardhole—what the Imperial Charisian Army would have called a “foxhole”—trying to gnaw his way through a particularly well petrified piece of hardtack. So far, success had eluded him.
“That.”
Mylyndyz pointed down the southwestern slope of the hill upon and around which 2nd Company of Colonel Mahryahno Hyrtatho’s sadly battered infantry regiment was dug in. Mahkgyl sat up in his lizardhole and shaded his eyes against the steadily setting sun with a filthy hand as his gaze followed the private’s pointing hand. He squinted against the brilliant horizon for a moment, and then his eyes widened.