More and more of the Temple Lands’ women were moving into manufactory jobs and proving themselves equal or superior to the men who would normally have held those jobs, but that process was in its early stages and there simply weren’t enough women—yet, at least—in the labor force to sustain the necessary production levels. Quite aside from the hands which could be taught the necessary skills “on-the-job,” the steadily expanding numbers of manufactories needed hands which were already skilled. Even more critically, they needed supervisors, people who could teach those skills, who could implement the directives coming down from Fultyn’s St. Kylmahn’s offices.
That was why Maigwair had instituted a draconian manpower allocation policy within the Army of God. Experienced mechanics, and especially experienced master mechanics, who enlisted (or, increasingly, were conscripted) for the AOG, never saw an army parade ground. Instead, they became corporals or sergeants who were handed over to Duchairn and assigned wherever they were most badly needed. The numbers provided that way were lower than one might have thought, given the scale of the Army of God’s rebuilding efforts, but they were a critical component of Duchairn’s weapons production. Yet they would have been almost equally valuable to the Army’s frontline maintenance commands, and even if that hadn’t been true, their education, skills, and intelligence meant they represented a large supply of men who would have made excellent officers. Given the numbers of new formations Maigwair had been forced to stand up, the loss of so many potential officers was painful indeed.
“Allayn, if there was any—” Duchairn began, but Maigwair shook his head.
“I said I didn’t think we could come up with better arrangements, and I meant it, Rhobair. The worst part is the delay in getting our new divisions trained up to something that can hope to face Charisians in the field. The number of experienced officers and noncoms we provided to the Mighty Host a couple of years ago is biting us on the arse in that regard, I’m afraid. But the delay means the Harchongians will have to carry even more of the load in the field longer than my people had originally projected.” The captain general’s expression was grim. “We’d hoped to have them ready for deployment by late November. It looks now like I may be able to get the first new divisions on their way by the end of next month. It’ll be May, at least, and more likely June of even early July before we can get the bulk of them to the front, and I’ll be honest with you, Rhobair. Even when we get them there, they’ll still need a lot of additional training before I’d consider them suitable for anything much more demanding than holding fortified positions. They certainly won’t be equal to Charisian mounted infantry in any sort of mobile battle, that’s for damned sure! But there’s nothing we can do to change that.” He shrugged. “Sometimes your only choices are between bad and worse, I’m afraid.”
“Been a lot of that going around for the last few years,” Duchairn agreed sourly. “But it looks to me like Rainbow Waters has come up with the best way to use what we can give him.”
“Assuming he can put his plans into effect without any more … elbow joggling from certain parties in Zion.”
Maigwair’s tone was even sourer than Duchairn’s had been. But then the captain general shrugged again.
“The truth is,” he told the treasurer, “he’s got a lot better chance of pulling that off than anyone else would. And thank God he’s got a brain that works!”
“From your mouth to Langhorne’s ears,” Duchairn agreed reverently.
Taychau Daiyang clearly intended to fight his own sort of campaign, and taking all of the known factors into account, his was almost certainly the best campaign plan available. As Maigwair had just said, sometimes it came down to a choice between bad or worse, but the Earl of Rainbow Waters clearly understood what was in play—not just on the field of battle, but in the foundries and manufactories.
Despite how steeply Mother Church’s total production of weapons had grown relative to the Charisians over the last year or two, he was not at all confident about the outcome of that side of the Jihad. In fact, Duchairn had no doubt that curve was about to begin reversing itself, and not just because the Treasury was so close to outright collapse.
Both he and Maigwair were convinced Zhaspahr Clyntahn was holding back information the Inquisition had gleaned about the Empire of Charis’ manufacturing capacity. That was ultimately stupid; the reality would become painfully evident on the battlefield sooner or later, and Duchairn couldn’t decide whether Clyntahn was concealing things because he genuinely believed the Charisians were profiting from demonic intervention he didn’t want spreading to Mother Church’s own manufactories or if he was simply in what a Bédardist would have called “denial.”
Given the way he’d twisted the Proscriptions into a pretzel any time he decided it suited his purposes, it was probably the latter.
Whatever else he might try to hide, however, the Inquisitor had been forced to admit that at least a half dozen additional major manufactory sites were about to come on-stream in the Empire of Charis. Three of them, in Old Charis itself, bade fair to eventually rival the sprawling Delthak Works which had spawned so many of the Church’s military disasters, but that was scarcely the worst of it. The Maikelberg Works in Chisholm were also expanding at breakneck speed, and reports indicated that the Charisian Crown was using the windfall of the Silverlode Strike to finance additional works in Chisholm and Emerald, as well. There were even reports of two new manufactories breaking ground in Corisande—and another in Zebediah, of all damned places! And to make bad worse, the majority of Siddarmark’s foundries and manufactories had always lain in the eastern portion of the Republic, which meant they’d been beyond the Sword of Schueler’s reach. Most of them were once again working propositions, and while there was no way they’d be matching Charisian levels of efficiency anytime soon, their productivity was still rising steadily … and at least as swiftly as anything Mother Church could boast.
And if the Imperial Charisian Navy succeeded in its quest to control the Gulf of Dohlar.…
The truth is that no matter what we do—no matter what we physically could do, even if I had an unlimited supply of marks—we’ve lost the production race, he thought bleakly. They’re not simply more efficient than we are in their existing manufactories, the number of their manufactories is increasing more rapidly than ours … and their rate of expansion’s climbing like one of Brother Lynkyn’s rockets. And despite everything Brother Lynkyn and people like Lieutenant Zwaigair can do, the weapons they’re producing—especially their heavy weapons, like their artillery and those damned ironclad warships—are better than ours. And it looks like their rate of improvement’s continuing to climb just as quickly as their manufactory capacity! At the moment, we’re still producing more total weapons—a lot more total weapons—per month than they are, but by midsummer—early winter, at the latest—even that won’t be true any longer.