Or, as his chosen verse from The Book of Langhorne said, "The inheritance of the wicked is the whirlwind, and I will cast down all the works and strong places of those who would oppress the people of God."

Sir Vyk Lakyr climbed down off his horse and watched the groom lead it away.

I really ought to be in bed, he reflected. The one thing I know I'm going to need is rest. Unfortunately, his lips twitched in a humorless smile, sleep is also the one thing I know isn't going to happen.

Actually, he thought as he turned and headed into his office in the city's citadel, that wasn't the one thing he knew was going to happen. Reports had come in over the course of the day as lookouts spotted the steadily moving sails drawing inexorably closer to Ferayd. The semaphore system had kept Lakyr informed of that implacable approach, although that was a mixed blessing. It hadn't done a great deal to inspire peace of mind, and he was also aware that his lookouts hadn't seen anything the Charisians hadn't chosen to let them see. Once they had cleared East Pass, they hadn't had to pass close enough for any shore-bound lookout to see and report them. For that matter, most of the semaphore posts themselves were effectively defenseless against naval landing parties. The Charisians could have cut the signal chain at any of several points . . . if they'd chosen to.

The only question in Lakyr's mind was why any of them had allowed themselves to be seen. He supposed it might be simple arrogance, but somehow he doubted that.

I suppose it's possible they're deliberately letting us know they're coming so we can get the civilians out of the way, he reflected. I'd like to think that was the case, at any rate. Even if it is better than the bastards who ordered the slaughter of their civilians deserve.

He grimaced and shook his head.

Better not even be thinking that way, Vyk. Whatever else, the Church is still the Church. The fact that the men who serve her at any given moment may be less than worthy of her can't change that. Besides, the way things seem to be headed, there's not going to be any room for divided allegiances.

He entered his lamplit office and found Captain Kairmyn waiting for him. The captain stood quickly as Lakyr walked into the room, but the garrison commander waved him back into his chair.

"Sit," he commanded, and grinned sourly. "If you've been as busy as I have today, your feet can probably use the break."

"That they can, Sir," Kairmyn acknowledged as he settled back.

"For myself, at this particular moment, it's my arse," Lakyr confessed, circling the desk and seating himself rather more gingerly in the padded chair behind. Kairmyn cocked his head, and Lakyr shrugged. "I've just completed a circuit of the entire waterfront. We're as ready as we're going to get, and I've ordered the men to get some rest while they still can."

Kairmyn nodded in understanding, and Lakyr stretched hugely, twisting his shoulders to try to work out some of the tension kinking his spine. Then he looked back at the younger officer.

"I take it your men are ready, Captain?"

"Yes, Sir. They are. But, Sir, I still wish you'd-"

"Don't say it, Tomhys." Lakyr's raised hand interrupted him. "Someone has to be in charge of the detachment. I picked you because you're one of the best men for the job. If it happens that I have . . . additional motives for selecting you, that's my business, not yours."

"But-"

"Don't make me repeat myself, Captain," Lakyr said, his tone much sterner than it had been.

For a moment or two, Kairmyn seemed to hover on the point of continuing his protest. Then he thought better of it-or, more probably, realized it wasn't going to do him any good-and nodded.

"Yes, Sir. In that case, though," he stood, "I suppose I'd better be going. Good luck, Sir."

"And to you, Captain." Lakyr rose to return Kairmyn's salute as the captain came to attention. Then the younger man nodded once, turned, and left the office.

Lakyr sank back into his chair, gazing at the open doorway for several seconds, then shrugged and turned to the sheaf of messages Lieutenant Cheryng had stacked neatly on his blotter. Most of them were simply readiness reports, and the handful that weren't didn't really require any action or decisions from him. It was too late for anything he might have done at this point to affect what was going to happen come morning.

He finished the last message, set it aside, and tipped back in his chair, thinking about the youthful captain he'd just sent off to take charge of the military escort he'd provided to maintain order among the civilians he'd ordered to evacuate the city. Kairmyn was right about the reason Lakyr had selected him for that duty, of course. What had happened to the Charisian sailors and their families here in Ferayd hadn't been Tohmys Kairmyn's fault. In fact, it had happened because the very careful orders he'd given beforehand had been totally disregarded. Unfortunately, the Charisians couldn't know that.

Lakyr had absolutely no idea how much Cayleb of Charis knew about the details of what had happened here. It was unlikely, to say the least, that there'd been time for the Church's propaganda to reach Charis before this fleet was dispatched. It was remotely possible, however, and if Cayleb had seen the Church's version and compared it to the reports of his own people who had escaped the carnage, he'd be perfectly justified in assuming the massacre had been planned from the beginning. And if it should happen that he had assumed that, and the officer who'd been in direct command of the troops responsible for it fell into his hands, the consequences for that officer might be . . . severe.

And rightly so, if it had been planned, Lakyr thought. Which suggests certain unpleasant possibilities for my own immediate future if things go as badly as I'm afraid they may.

Well, if they did, they did. And at least he'd gotten Kairmyn safely out of the way.

"Sir! Sir!"

Major Gahrmyn Zhonair jerked upright, snatching at the hand shaking his shoulder. He hadn't meant to doze off. In fact, he'd expected the straight-backed chair to be uncomfortable enough that he couldn't.

Unfortunately, he'd been wrong. Which didn't mean it hadn't been uncomfortable enough to leave him feeling as if his spine had been beaten with a club.

"What?" he demanded. The word came out sounding harsher than he'd intended, and he cleared his sleep-dried throat and tried again.

"What?" he repeated in a more normal voice.

"Sir, we've seen something-out in the harbor!"

"Show me!" Zhonair snapped, the last rags of sleep vanishing abruptly.

He followed the sergeant who'd awakened him out onto the nearest gun platform. It was still at least an hour or so until dawn, and the largely evacuated city of Ferayd was dark behind him. The sky was crystal clear, prickled with heaps of glittering stars, but there was no moon. Which probably had something to do with the reason the Charisians had chosen this particular night to come calling.

The starlight was too dim to be called illumination, but it was at least a tiny bit better than nothing, and he strained his eyes as he followed the sergeant's pointing finger. For several moments he saw nothing at all. Then his eyes narrowed as they caught the faint, faint gleam of starlight on canvas.

"I see it," he said quietly. "But where's the guard boat that ought-"

He flinched at the abrupt, blinding flash of lightning as a cannon fired out in the harbor with absolutely no warning.

Admiral Rock Point's head came up as he heard the sudden crash of a firing thirty-pounder. The sound came from the east, somewhere astern of his flagship, and his peg leg clunked on the deck planking as he moved to Destroyer's stern rail. He looked out across the harbor, trying to find the gun which had fired, but the night had closed back in.

"Gunfire, one point on the starboard quarter!"

The lookout's cry floated down from overhead, not that it did a great deal of good at the moment. Still, it gave Rock Point an approximate idea of where it had come from, and he frowned as he summoned up a mental image of the harbor and matched it against his detailed sailing instructions.

Probably Indomitable or Justice, he decided. Assuming they were where they were supposed to be at any rate. And a single gunshot suggested either an accidental discharge, which was going to land someone neck-deep in trouble, or else an encounter with a guard boat.

Well, it's not as if anyone doesn't already know we're out here, he thought. The only thing that really surprises me, if it was a guard boat, is that we haven't already run into dozens of the things. For that matter, we may have and I just don't know anything about it, assuming they settled the business with cutlasses!

He didn't envy the crews of any launches or cutters ordered to patrol the harbor. To be sure, they had a better chance of spotting a galleon than a galleon had of spotting a single, smallish, low-lying boat. On the other hand, there wasn't very much they could do except run if they did encounter one of Rock Point's ships. As that single cannon shot emphasized, they certainly didn't have the firepower to do anything else.

Actually, Rock Point's greatest concern had been that the Delferahkan Navy might be present in the form of galleys being used as "guard boats." The biggest potential danger of approaching in darkness had been the possibility of its allowing galleys to get close enough to galleons to try ramming or boarding them. The chance of any galley managing that through the accurate fire of a galleon who'd seen it coming was minute; the chance of a galley managing the same feat in the dark was significantly higher.

Given the quality of his own crews, Rock Point had accepted the risk with a fair degree of equanimity. That didn't mean he'd been eager to see what would happen if the Delferahkans tried it, though, and he wondered why they hadn't.

Either they're smart enough to have figured out what would probably happen to any galley which did intercept one of us, or else they didn't happen to have any galleys in port when we arrived.

Personally, he suspected the former. To be sure, a galley might get alongside one of his galleons under these visibility conditions, if its skipper was smart and skilled. But the Delferahkan Navy's galleys were mainland designs-smaller than Charisian galleys, with smaller crews. Rock Point's gun-heavy galleons each carried between eighty and a hundred and twenty Marines, depending on their size, and had more than enough seamen to support them. It would take at least two, more probably three, galleys of the Delferahkan type to overwhelm the crew of one of his ships, and the rest of his squadron wouldn't exactly be standing around twiddling their thumbs while that happened. So unless the Delferahkans had managed to assemble at least twenty or thirty galleys (and the losses their fleet had taken against the marauding privateers who had preceded Rock Point's fleet into these waters made it unlikely that they still had that many in the first place), trying to use them in some sort of nighttime interception would have been an exercise in futility.

On the other hand, it could have been an exercise in futility that was still painful as hell for whichever ship they happened to hit. So I'm not going to complain that they didn't do it.

He snorted and stumped back across the quarterdeck to Captain Darys.

"Well, we've knocked on the door now, My Lord," the flag captain said wryly.

"And here I was hoping they wouldn't guess we were coming," the admiral replied dryly. Then he shook his head.

"About an hour or so, I make it," he said more seriously.

"About that," Darys agreed.

"In that case, I hope they didn't wait until they heard our 'door knocker' to start getting people out of harm's way."

The admiral's voice was much grimmer, and Darys nodded silently. The flag captain, like his admiral, had been pleased by their orders' emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties to the greatest possible extent. That, in fact, was the reason they'd deliberately alerted the Delferahkans to their approach. It was always possible the commander of the port's defenses might be sufficiently stupid to fail to consider the possibility that any attacking Charisian squadron might land troops. Assuming the commander in question had the intelligence God had given a slash lizard, however, it was going to occur to him that simply sending ships to sail up and down in the harbor wouldn't accomplish very much.

What it came down to in the end was whether or not the man in charge of defending Ferayd had a realistic appreciation for the chance that his batteries might manage to drive off the Charisian galleons. And whether or not he had the moral courage to risk being accused of defeatism if he ordered an evacuation before the first shot was even fired.

Rock Point hoped Sir Vyk Lakyr had both of those things. Unlike any of the other officers and men of his squadron, the admiral knew from Seijin Merlin's visions that the garrison commander had deliberately sought to minimize casualties. That didn't make the admiral feel any more kindly towards Delferahk, but it did tell him-or, at least, remind him-who the Empire's true enemy was. And whether Delferahk had been a willing participant in the massacre, or simply hadn't been able to stop it, it couldn't be allowed to pass unpunished. Emperor Cayleb was right about that, too. Ferayd had to be turned into an object lesson to the Empire's enemies, and for the Empire's subjects, the massacre itself had to be punished.

And that, he thought grimly, turning back to the east where a hint of grayness was creeping into the heavens, is exactly what we're about to do.

"Oh, shit," someone whispered.

It took Major Zhonair a moment to realize it had been himself and even then, the recognition was a distant and unimportant thing as he gazed out from his battery's walls.

There were dozens of Charisian galleons out there. They obviously had detailed charts of the harbor and its defenses, too, because they'd used the darkness to get themselves perfectly positioned. Twenty-three of them were sailing slowly, in a remarkably neat line, directly across the harbor towards him, while another ten or fifteen hovered farther out, watching over the transports. The approaching line was already little more than three or four hundred yards out, and its ships were angling steadily closer. The rising sun gleamed on their sails, gilding the tan and gray, weather-stained canvas with gold, and what had to be the new Charisian Empire's flag-the silver and blue checkerboard of the House of Tayt quartered with the black of Charis and the golden kraken of the House of Ahrmahk-flew from their mizzen peaks. Hundreds of guns poked stubby fingers out of their opened gun ports, and the utter silence of their approach sent a shiver of dread through Zhonair's bones.

"Stand to!" he shouted. "Stand to!"

His drummer sounded the urgent tattoo, although it was scarcely necessary, since the guns had been fully manned for the last hour and a half. As he'd expected, though, the drumroll was picked up by the battery to his right, as well, and relayed all along the waterfront and back into the city. His own men crouched over their guns, waiting for the inexorably advancing Charisian line to enter their field of fire, and Zhonair raised his spyglass to peer through it at the enemy.

"Very well, Captain Darys," Rock Point said formally. "I believe it's time."

"Aye, aye, My Lord," Darys replied, then turned and raised his voice.

"Master Lahsahl! Open fire, if you please!"

"Aye, aye, Sir!" Lieutenant Shairmyn Lahsahl, Destroyer's first lieutenant, acknowledged, and drew his sword.

"On the up roll!" he barked, raising the sword overhead.

The ship leading the Charisian line, the one flying the command streamer of an admiral, disappeared behind a sudden wall of flame-cored smoke.

Zhonair ducked instinctively, and something large, iron, and fast-moving whizzed viciously over his head. More iron crashed into the face of his battery, and he heard someone scream. And then, as if the first broadside had been a signal-which it undoubtedly had been-every other ship in that line seemed to spurt fire and smoke virtually simultaneously.

The concussion of that many heavy cannon, firing that closely together, was indescribable; the impact of that many tons of iron was terrifying.

The battery's protective stonework was the better part of two centuries old. It had originally been intended to protect catapults and ballistae from similar engines and archery, before cannon had even been thought of. Its replacement with more modern fortifications had been discussed off and on for decades, but the expense would have been enormous, and the dozens of guns behind the stonework had been judged sufficient for security's sake.

But that had been before those dozens of guns found themselves opposed to hundreds of guns, each of which fired far more rapidly than the defensive batteries could possibly hope to match. The twenty-three ships in Admiral Rock Point's line mounted over thirteen hundred guns. Almost seven hundred of them could be brought to bear on the harbor defenses simultaneously, and Rock Point had planned his approach carefully. Although Ferayd's defensive batteries mounted a combined grand total of over a hundred and fifty guns, only thirty of them would bear on his line as he approached from one end of the waterfront's fortifications.

In the first six minutes of the engagement, each of those thirty guns fired once. In return for their thirty round shot, Rock Point's line fired almost three thousand back.

The aged stonework, never intended to withstand that sort of punishment, didn't simply crumble. Huge chunks of stone and mortar flew under the savage impact of better than forty tons of iron, and rock dust erupted from the fortifications' face like a second fog of gunsmoke. And even though the guns' individual embrasures were relatively small targets, obscured by the flying rock dust and the firing ships' own powder smoke, there was no way they could all be missed in that torrent of Charisian fire.

Zhonair crouched behind the battlements, his mind cringing as the incredible bellow of the Charisian artillery seemed to consume the world. Smoke and dust were everywhere, catching at his throat, choking him. The solid stone under his feet quivered, vibrating like a frightened child as the brutal storm of iron scourged it. He couldn't even hear his own guns firing- assuming they were-but he heard the shrill shrieks as a gun less than thirty yards from him took a direct hit.

The Charisian round shot came in just below the muzzle, striking the solid timber of the piece's "carriage," and the entire gun flew into the air. The tube separated entirely from the carriage, most of which disintegrated into splinters as long as a man's arm. At least a third of the crew was killed outright when the round shot continued on its way, plowing right through their midst. Most of the others were crushed to death when the ten-foot gun tube came smashing down across them once more.

The major stared at the tangled, shattered bloody wreckage which had been eighteen human beings only an instant before. More Charisian fire slammed into his position, again and again. The outer face of the battery wall literally began to disintegrate with the third salvo, and as the range dropped, at least a half dozen of the Charisians began firing grapeshot, as well, sweeping the wall. Dozens of the small, lethal shot came whipping in through the embrasures, and more of Zhonair's gunners disappeared in gory sprays of blood, torn flesh, and shattered bone.

Zhonair thrust himself back to his feet, charging into the midst of the chaos, shouting encouragement. He didn't know exactly what he was shouting, only that it was his duty to be there. To hold his men together in this hurricane of smoky thunder and savage destruction.

They responded to his familiar voice, laboring frantically to reload their slow-firing guns while the Charisians slammed broadside after broadside into their position. One of the crenellations shattered under the impact of enemy shot. Most of the stone tumbled outward, crashing down the face of the battery into the water at its foot, but a head-sized chunk of it flew through the air and struck a man less than six feet from Zhonair. The gunner's blood erupted across the major, and he scrubbed at his sticky eyes, trying to clear them.

He was still scrubbing at them when the incoming round shot struck him just below mid-chest.

"Sir, their Marines are ashore in at least three places."

Lakyr turned towards Lieutenant Cheryng. The youngster's face was white and strained, his eyes huge.

"Only one of the batteries is still in action," the lieutenant continued, "and casualties are reported to be extremely heavy."

"I see," Lakyr said calmly. "And the enemy's losses?"

"One of their galleons has lost two masts. They've towed her out of action, and another was apparently on fire, at least briefly Aside from that-"

Cheryng shrugged, his expression profoundly unhappy, and Lakyr nodded. The Charisians had worked their way methodically along the waterfront, concentrating their fire on one defensive battery or small group of batteries at a time. Traditional wisdom had held that no ship could engage a well-sited, properly protected battery, but that tradition had depended upon equal rates of fire. He had no doubt that the Charisians had suffered damage and casualties well beyond those Cheryng had just reported, although they obviously hadn't suffered enough to decide to break off the attack. Which was scarcely astonishing. He'd hoped to do better than that, but he'd never had any illusions about successfully standing off the attack.

And I'm not going to get any more men killed than I have to trying to do the impossible, he thought grimly, and looked at the clock on his office wall. Three hours is long enough-especially if they've already got Marines ashore, anyway. It's not like the King gave me more infantry along with the gunners, after all.

"Very well, Lieutenant," he said, speaking more formally than he normally did when addressing Cheryng. "Instruct the signal party to raise the white flag."

November, Year of God 892