“Captain Athrawes does seem to have a talent for that sort of thing, doesn’t he?” Sharleyan observed, deliberately pitching her voice to lighten the mood as she turned her head to smile at the sapphire-eyed Guardsman standing just inside the council chamber door.
“He has proved a moderately useful fellow upon occasion, I suppose,” Cayleb agreed in a judicious tone.
“One tries, Your Majesty,” Merlin replied respectfully, and the entire council laughed. A mere bodyguard might not have been expected to reply to an emperor that way in most realms, but this was Charis, the bodyguard was Merlin Athrawes, and they needed that cleansing laughter.
“At any rate, Your Majesties,” Wave Thunder said, “the one man we’ve managed to capture hasn’t been the least bit reticent about who he is or why he’s here, or even who sent him. In fact, Master Ahndairs is proud to have been personally selected by the Grand Inquisitor as one of his ‘Rakurai.’ His only regret seems to be that he was captured before he killed himself blowing up the Patent Office and as many people who worked in it as possible-and Father Paityr, in particular-and he’s boasted to anyone who would listen that he and his companions were only the first wave of the attacks Clyntahn intends to launch.”
There was no laughter this time, and faces hardened all around the table.
“I suppose something along these lines was only to be expected, eventually, given how uniformly unsuccessful they’ve been in regular military confrontations with us,” Pine Hollow said quietly. “Given the timing, it was probably the Markovian Sea that actually pushed Clyntahn into this strategy, I expect.”
“I agree, Your Majesties,” Baron Ironhill said, his expression grim. “Granted, it never occurred to any of us, since we tend to think of wars as something in which you try to minimize carnage among civilians and innocent bystanders. We should have remembered that as far as Clyntahn’s concerned, there are no ‘innocent bystanders’ in Charis. He doesn’t give a damn who he slaughters.”
His voice went hard and ugly with the last sentence, and not just because of the carnage Clyntahn’s “Operation Rakurai” had wreaked. The official report of the murder of Sir Gwylym Manthyr and his remaining men had reached Tellesberg, as well. In fact, the version of their deaths the Inquisition was trying hard to suppress across Haven and Howard had come to Tellesberg, courtesy of the tiny, highly stealthy, purely passive remote Merlin Athrawes had deployed to within visual range of the Plaza of Martyrs. That remote had seen Gwylym Manthyr’s final gesture of defiance, and the propaganda broadsheets going up throughout the mainland realms contained a detailed etching of Manthyr’s spittle hitting Clyntahn in the face to give the lie to the Grand Inquisitor’s claim that Manthyr had confessed to all of the crimes and blasphemies charged against him.
Yet that remote had also recorded the agony in which those Charisians had died. Ironhill hadn’t seen it, but he didn’t need to. Cayleb and Merlin had seen it, driven by their loyalty to Gwylym Manthyr, and wished with all their hearts they hadn’t. Sharleyan-wiser, perhaps, than either of them-had refused to look. She honored Manthyr’s dauntless courage, yet she preferred to remember him as he had been, unshadowed and unmarred by the hideous death he’d died.
“You’re right, of course, Ahlvyno,” Cayleb said now. “And we’ll be watching for similar attempts, I assure you. I just pray we can protect ourselves against this kind of thing without turning into some kind of suppressive tyranny ourselves.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to put at least some additional precautions in place, Your Majesty,” Wave Thunder replied unhappily. “They succeeded in large part because we weren’t expecting it, and I think future attacks on the same scale are unlikely. I doubt they’re going to be rolling around the city with wagonloads of gunpowder again, for example, especially with our new licensing and inspection systems in place. No system’s perfect though, and we obviously can’t guarantee they don’t have the men and materials in place to keep testing it for weak spots when we still don’t even know how they got the gunpowder into the assassins’ hands to begin with!”
“We still don’t have any clues about that, My Lord?” one of the other councilors asked, and Wave Thunder grimaced in disgust.
“No,” he admitted flatly. “And I’m reasonably certain the one ‘Rakurai’ we managed to capture doesn’t know how they did that, either. No one’s going to torture any confessions out of him, but we haven’t been especially gentle and understanding about questioning him.” He smiled thinly. “He’s told us where he went to collect his explosives, but they were delivered to him by another of Clyntahn’s agents-the one who detonated the Gray Wyvern Avenue bomb, unless I’m mistaken. He got the gunpowder from a source-a pickup point-here in Old Charis, but our prisoner doesn’t know where that was. What we do know, unfortunately, from examining the wagon Merlin kept him from blowing up in Queen Frayla Avenue is that the powder originally came from us.”
“What?!” the other councilor demanded, sitting up sharply in his chair, and Wave Thunder grimaced.
“Forty pounds of it were still in its original kegs,” he said, “and they carried the markings of the Hairatha Powder Mill. I think we have to assume that’s why the powder mill was blown up. My current theory is that Commander Mahndrayn, Baron Seamount’s assistant at King’s Harbor, noticed a discrepancy somewhere in one or more of the shipping manifests from Hairatha. Most of you may not know that Captain Sahlavahn, the commanding officer at Hairatha, was Commander Mahndrayn’s cousin. It would have made a certain degree of sense for him to take any suspicions to his cousin in an effort to handle things as quietly as possible, and it seems likely that whoever was responsible somehow realized Commander Mahndrayn and Captain Sahlavahn had become aware he’d diverted powder from the mill. I don’t know how that happened, how the Commander and Captain Sahlavahn might have given away their suspicions, but if I’m right about what happened, he blew up the entire powder mill to conceal his actions.”
“That’s speculative,” Cayleb observed, “but it does make sense. And it suggests that getting large quantities of gunpowder into the Empire isn’t going to be as easy for Clyntahn as simply sending in lunatics willing to blow themselves up as long as they get to kill as many Charisians as possible. Of course, the reverse side of that mark is that we don’t know how much powder was diverted from Hairatha. There could still be tons of it sitting around somewhere.”
“Indeed there could, Your Majesty.” Wave Thunder nodded. “Which is why I have my best agents and all of our resources looking for it.” He didn’t add that “all of our resources” included Owl’s SNARCs. “In addition, we’re trying to make all City Guardsmen aware of the need to look for anything out of the ordinary. They don’t have to use wagons to get bombs into position, especially if they can work out some reliable way to set them off with a delayed timer of some kind, and even a fairly small explosion in a crowded market square will inflict a lot of casualties. This time around, Clyntahn ordered his ‘Rakurai’ to specifically target senior clergy and secular leaders; all the dead and maimed civilians were simply a happy side effect of that, according to Master Ahndairs. Next time, the bastards may simply choose to go for as much death and destruction as they can inflict.
“At the same time, we have to be on the lookout for completely different techniques. For example, if they could get their hands on our own gunpowder, they may manage to get access to our grenades, as well. For that matter, they could make grenades or similar small explosive devices of their own without much trouble. An attack like that couldn’t kill anywhere near as many people as their… wagon bombs, but they’d also be harder to detect, and they’d probably be better at penetrating any security we set up.”
Heads nodded soberly, and Cayleb’s expression was grim. He wondered how the rest of his councilors were going to react when they discovered that a “Rakurai” with four grenades under his tunic had entered Cherayth Cathedral less than twenty-six hours before this very meeting, waited for Archbishop Pawal Braynair to arrive to celebrate mass, and then seized one of the processional candles and used it to light the fuse. He’d managed to kill only three people… but that was only because Braynair and two other men had tackled him and smothered most of the explosion with their own bodies.