Lywys Gardynyr sat in his own chair, across the table from the man who was his superior … nominally, at least. Aibram Zaivyair was the Duke of Thorast, effectively the Kingdom of Dohlar’s Navy Minister, and the senior officer of the Royal Dohlaran Navy. Of course, he hadn’t been to sea in almost thirty years, and even when he had, he’d been a “navy” officer in a navy which still thought assigning army officers to command ships and fleets made sense.
And he hasn’t learned one Shan-wei-damned thing about the difference between armies and navies since, the Earl of Thirsk thought coldly. No reason he should, really. He’s got the birth and the political allies to pretend he knows his arse from his elbow where ships are concerned. And the son-of-a-bitch’s been in Clyntahn’s hip pocket from the minute this whole rolling disaster started.
“Well?” Thorast snapped. He’d been even more belligerently antagonistic since Thirsk had returned to limited duty. Probably, the earl thought, because the “death” of his family—and its circumstances—suggested to him that the patronage which had supported and protected Thirsk was about to disappear. Assuming it hadn’t already completely vanished, that was.
“I asked you a question, Earl Thirsk!” he barked now, and Thirsk cocked his head slightly, as if considering some minor source of annoyance. There was no point pretending anything he did could placate the duke, after all.
“I realize that, My Lord.” Thorast’s face turned darker, his expression thunderous, at Thirsk’s cool reply. “I assumed it was a rhetorical question, since the reports we’ve received from the Harchongians make it abundantly clear how it happened. The heretics sailed into Rhaigair Bay aboard the same ironclads that blew Geyra apart and did exactly the same thing to us. Exactly the way Admiral Raisahndo and I had been warning they were almost certain to do, sooner or later, if we left the Western Squadron exposed in such proximity to Claw Island. Given that they sailed straight through the fire of a couple of hundred heavy guns—a lot of them the new Fultyn Rifles—and completely demolished Rhaigair’s waterfront, the dockyard, and every defensive battery without losing a single ship, I would’ve thought you’d understand what happened.”
“Listen, you goddamned—!”
“That’s enough, Aibram!”
The three words weren’t all that loud, but they cracked like a whip, and Thorast reared back in his chair, staring at the man who’d spoken. Samyl Cahkrayn, the Duke of Fern and Dohlar’s first councilor, glared right back.
“Our situation’s too grave for me to indulge you,” Fern said. “Everyone in Dohlar knows how much you hate Earl Thirsk. But this isn’t about him, and it isn’t about you. It’s about what just happened to our Navy and what’s going to happen next to the entire damned Kingdom! If you can’t get that through your head and contribute something constructive to this discussion, I suggest you go find something else to do while the rest of us get on with it.”
Thorast’s eyes went wide. Then they narrowed, blazing with fury, and he leaned aggressively forward once more. His index finger stabbed the tabletop, and he opened his mouth, but another voice intervened before he could speak.
“His Grace may not have phrased himself as … diplomatically as he might have, Duke Thorast,” it said. “He does have a point, however. At this moment, trying to fix fault for something that happened three thousand miles from here isn’t going to help decide what to do about it.”
The navy minister shut his mouth, and his face turned into stone.
“I … beg your pardon, Your Eminence,” he said after a long, tense moment. “In my opinion, understanding the towering degree of incompetence—if not outright treason—which allowed this to happen is essential if we’re going to prevent it from happening again. That’s the only reason I’ve … pressed the point as warmly as I have.”
“No doubt.”
An unbiased observer might have been forgiven for concluding from Bishop Executor Wylsynn Lainyr dry tone that he was less than convinced by Thorast’s last sentence. The duke’s eyes flickered, but he forbore any direct response, and Lainyr reached out to rest one hand on his own copy of the report. His ruby ring of office gleamed in the lamplight, and he turned his gaze to Thirsk.
“I’m sure we all understand why Duke Thorast, as the councilor responsible to His Majesty for the Navy, should be concerned about … procedural matters, My Lord. And no doubt a formal board of inquiry needs to be assembled, in the fullness of time, to consider all of the decisions and policies which led to the current situation. At the moment, however, I’m rather more concerned with what we do about it. May I ask for your thoughts on that?”
Thirsk gazed back at the tallish, black-haired Langhornite who was Mother Church’s effective day-to-day administrator for the entire Kingdom of Dohlar. Archbishop Trumahn Rowzvel might actually occupy the see of Gorath Cathedral, but Lainyr was his executive officer and, like all bishops executor, he knew far more about the actual operations of his archbishopric than its archbishop did.
He was also a consummate professional, highly skilled in the management of the Church bureaucracy. Unfortunately, he was very much a part of the Church establishment, as well. He was far more concerned with keeping her up and running—with maintaining the Church’s continuity and authority, and his own personal power as part of that—than with addressing her possible faults. And he’d been sent to Gorath as Bishop Executor Ahrain Mahrlow’s successor, upon Mahrlow’s death, because he could be relied upon as a loyal and obedient cog in Mother Church’s machinery for fighting the Jihad.
Thirsk wasn’t surprised Thorast was nonplussed by Lainyr’s intervention in his favor. He and the bishop executor had been at loggerheads, to put it mildly, ever since Lainyr’s arrival in Gorath. The prelate made little secret of his … impatience with Thirsk’s unwillingness to hew to Mother Church’s version of events when she twisted the truth—or even manufactured new truths out of whole cloth—to serve Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s purposes. Yet despite that, he’d never seemed to actively hate Thirsk the way Father Ahbsahlahn Kharmych, Archbishop Trumahn’s intendant, clearly did. Kharmych—a Schuelerite, like all intendants—made no secret of his distrust for Thirsk’s zeal in Mother Church’s service and he’d been furious at the very suggestion that prisoners captured by Thirsk’s navy might not be transported to Zion to suffer the full rigor of the Punishment. Only Staiphan Maik’s reports, with their stress on how badly the RDN needed his expertise and leadership, had delayed the Grand Inquisitor’s decision to move against him and his family as long as it had, and Thirsk knew Kharmych’s reports to his superiors in the Inquisition had only fed Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s distrust and venomous hatred for him.
Which made Kharmych’s absence from this meeting even more interesting. Thirsk had wondered about that, when he arrived and realized the intendant wasn’t attending, but he hadn’t been prepared for Lainyr to take his part against Thorast, one of the Jihad’s strongest Dohlaran supporters.
He must be even more scared than I thought, the earl thought dryly. It sounds as if he wants actual advice, not just more sycophancy. That’s novel.
“Your Eminence, what we do—what we can do—really depends on our ability to understand what happened. We can’t devise an effective defense against a threat we don’t understand. That’s something which has been demonstrated with unfortunate frequency over the course of the Jihad.”
Thorast’s expression could have curdled fresh milk, but Lainyr nodded.