He stood that way for the better part of another minute, then shook himself and looked back at Hahlbyrstaht.
“Send Lawrync up to the crosstrees for another count. We’re damned well not seeing all of them from here, but I want the numbers we can see confirmed as definitely as we possibly can. Then I think we’d best send Sir Dunkyn another note while there’s still light for Sojourner to relay our signals.”
* * *
“Lad’s got a talent for this, doesn’t he, My Lord?” Captain Lathyk observed, looking down at the written signal. “To the point, tells you what he knows, and tells you what he knows he doesn’t know, too.” He looked up, shaking his head. “I know captains three times his age who don’t bother with that last bit!”
“Well, I suppose he got a fairly competent grounding in his profession’s responsibilities in his previous ship,” Admiral Sarmouth acknowledged with a wry smile. He stood gazing down at the chart on the desktop between them while the lamps swung gently on their overhead chains. “Always nice when the other fellow seems to be doing what you want, too.”
“I guess you could call it that,” Lathyk said a bit sourly, then waved the signal. “Doesn’t seem to be showing a lot of imagination, though. Just sail straight down the channel to us?” He shook his head. “Best way I can think of to get a lot of his own fellows killed.”
“Fair’s fair, Rhobair,” Sarmouth chided, tapping the chart with a pair of brass dividers. “It’s not like he’s got a huge number of options. Unless you’d like to be the galleon skipper who finds himself dancing with Sir Hainz?”
Lathyk’s expression made his opinion of any such goings-on abundantly clear, and the baron snorted.
“That’s what I thought. And don’t forget that all he’s seen so far are schooners keeping an eye on him.” Sarmouth shrugged. “He’s got to assume the rest of us are out here somewhere, but he doesn’t have any proof of that, he can’t know exactly what our numbers are, and he doesn’t know where ‘out here’ we might be. For all he knows, he could smack into us in the next quarter hour … or we could be running a bluff and those schooners are just pretending to be talking to a squadron of galleons which are really somewhere else doing something entirely different. Wouldn’t be so different from what you and I did to the Desnairians before the Markovian Sea, now would it? I’ll guarantee there were some red faces when that got out! You don’t suppose Thirsk and Raisahndo haven’t bothered to study their opposite numbers’ records, do you?”
The admiral smiled, and the flag captain chuckled and shook his head.
“Not bloody likely, My Lord. If they were that stupid, the kraken’d already be flying over Gorath!”
“Exactly,” Sarmouth said. “I don’t think he believes for an instant that that’s what we’re actually doing, but he has to at least bear the possibility in mind, especially when the entire world knows we did it before … and he damned well does know where the ironclads were when he left port. And even though we have the advantage of all-coppered hulls and he still doesn’t, the difference between our speed and his has to be a lot less lopsided than the difference between sailing galleons and steamers. Unless he simply chooses to scuttle them without ever leaving harbor, he has to take his galleons somewhere, Rhobair. Without knowing where we’ve placed our major strength, about all he can do is pick an escape route and hope he’s guessed right. And the last thing he could afford to do was to vacillate until those ironclads rolled into range of his anchorage. Better to bash on—try to fight at least some of his squadron through to Gorath, even if it means taking on this entire squadron in confined waters—than try to avoid action and find himself caught between us and Sir Hainz.”
“Well, put that way, I suppose he isn’t being quite as … unimaginative as I might’ve thought,” Lathyk admitted. “I think I’d still’ve tried to time things to make it out to sea in darkness, though, Sir.”
“Now there you may have a point. On the other hand, he will clear the Cutfish Narrows before dawn, and that’s the narrowest part of his entire passage. He’ll still have to weather Broken Hawser Rock before he reaches the Gulf, and if I were in his boots, I might prefer to have darkness for the last eighty or ninety miles of that run on the theory that it would be easier to give our schooners the slip in the dark with that much more open water to work with. But it’s not an easy choice. Does he try to evade us in daylight on this side of the Narrows after he clears the channel, or does he worry about our jumping him here in the dark?”
Sarmouth tapped the chart again, the points of his dividers on the Cutfish Narrows, between Tybor Rock, at the southern tip of Shipworm Shoal, and the northeastern arc of Shyan Island Shoal.
“What he’d really prefer would be to get through the channel and out to sea—and home to Gorath—without ever sighting a single one of our galleons. There’s no way he could believe that’s going to happen, though, and if he has to fight his way past us, he’d probably prefer to fight at the shortest possible range. Which is a pretty fair description of any action in the Narrows, when you come down to it. They’re only about fifteen miles wide, even at high water, which I expect his screw-galleys would like. They’re designed to get to knife-range as quickly as possible, not fight ships like Lightning and Seamount—or Zhenyfyr Ahrmahk and Iceberg, for that matter—in open water when we’ve got a wind to work with. So, yes, it could work out for Hahlynd and his boys if we were foolish enough to take him on there, especially in the dark. But those same tight quarters mean he wouldn’t have a lot of room to evade us, and his ability to control his ships would be a lot poorer in the dark. Nobody would be seeing any signal flags, that’s for damn sure! And don’t forget how badly the Temple Boys and their friends have gotten hurt in night engagements in the past. Like, oh … the Markovian Sea, for example.”
The baron’s smile was much colder this time.
“Still, I think he’ll figure tight quarters—like the Narrows—and poor visibility would cramp our maneuverability as much as it would his, and that means it would give him the best chance if he actually has to fight us. That’s why he’s making his approach so late in the day and passing through them in the dark. I suspect one reason he’s timed his passage this way is to offer me the opportunity to sneak in under cover of darkness and ‘ambush him’ in the hope I’ll take it.
“Our options are different, of course. If we didn’t have entirely coppered bottoms—and if Hektor and the other scouts weren’t keeping such a close eye on him—I might well try to jump him there, daylight or not, to keep the cork in the bottle and keep him from breaking out into the Gulf and making us chase him. But he’s not getting away from us even if, by some miracle, he does make it to the Gulf. Given that, I’m not in all that big a hurry to finish the business—unlike him we’ve got all the time in the world to do this right—and frankly, there’s no way in hell I want to tangle with those screw-galleys in the dark. They’ve never managed to use one of Zhwaigair’s ‘spar torpedoes’ on us yet, and damned if I see any reason to give them the opportunity to use one now!”