How Firm a Foundation (10 page)

“In another couple of months, I’ll have nine of them up and running,” Howsmyn continued. “I’d like to have more, honestly, but at that point we’ll be getting close to the capacity the river can supply. I’ve considered running an aqueduct from the mountains to increase supply, but frankly an aqueduct big enough to supply even one accumulator would be far
too expensive. It’d tie up too much manpower I need elsewhere, for that matter. Instead, I’m looking at the possibility of using windmills to pump from the lake, although there are some technical issues there, too.”

“I can imagine,” Wylsynn murmured, wondering what would happen if the accumulator he could see sprang a leak.

The use of cisterns and water tanks to generate water pressure for plumbing
and sewer systems had been part of Safehold since the Creation itself, but no one had ever considered using them the way Ehdwyrd Howsmyn was using them. Probably, Wylsynn thought, because no one else had ever had the sheer audacity to think on the scale the ironmaster did.

Howsmyn’s new blast furnaces and “puddling hearths” required levels of forced draft no one had ever contemplated before.
He was driving them to unheard-of temperatures, recirculating the hot smoke and gases through firebrick flues to reclaim and utilize their heat in ways no one else ever had, and his output was exploding upward. And it was as if each new accomplishment only suggested even more possibilities to his fertile mind, like the massive new multi-ton drop hammers and the ever larger, ever more ambitious casting
processes his workers were developing. All of which required still more power. Far more of it, in fact, than conventional waterwheels could possibly provide.

Which was where the concept for the “accumulator” had come from.

Waterwheels, as Howsmyn had pointed out in his patent and vetting applications, were inherently inefficient in several ways. The most obvious, of course, was that there wasn’t
always a handy waterfall where you wanted one. Holding ponds could be built, just as he’d done here at Delthak, but there were limits on the head of pressure one could build up using ponds, and water flows could fluctuate at the most inconvenient times. So it had occurred to him that if he could accumulate enough water, it might be possible to build his
own
waterfall, one that was located where
he needed it and didn’t fluctuate unpredictably. And if he was going to do that, he might as well come up with a more efficient design to use that artificial waterfall’s power, as well.

In many ways, vetting the application in Wylsynn’s role as Intendant had been simple and straightforward. Nothing in the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng forbade any of Howsmyn’s proposals. They all fell within the Archangel’s
trinity of acceptable power: wind, water, and muscle. True, nothing in the
Writ
seemed ever to have contemplated something on the scale Howsmyn had in mind, but that was scarcely a valid reason to deny him an attestation of approval. And wearing his hat as the Director of Patents, rather than his priest’s cap, Wylsynn had been more than pleased to grant Howsmyn the patent he’d requested.

And
tomorrow morning I’ll inspect one of them with my own eyes,
he reflected now.
I hope I don’t fall into it!

His lips twitched in an almost-smile. He was quite a good swimmer, yet the thought of just how much water a structure the size of the accumulator might hold was daunting. He’d seen the numbers—Dr. Mahklyn at the Royal College had calculated them for him—but they’d been only figures on a
piece of paper then. Now he was looking at the reality of a “cistern” fifty feet tall and thirty-five feet on a side, all raised an additional thirty feet into the air. According to Mahklyn, it held close to half a
million
gallons of water. That was a number Wylsynn couldn’t even have thought of before the introduction of the Arabic numerals which were themselves barely five years old. Yet all
that water, and all the immense pressure it generated, was concentrated on a single pipe at the bottom of the accumulator—a single pipe almost wide enough for a man—well, a tall
boy
, at least—to stand in that delivered the accumulator’s outflow not to a waterwheel but to something Howsmyn had dubbed a “turbine.”

Another new innovation,
Wylsynn thought,
but still well within the Proscriptions.
Jwo-jeng never said a
wheel
was the only way to generate water power, and we’ve been using windmills forever. Which is all one of his “turbines” really is, when all’s said; it’s just driven by water instead of wind
.

Locating it
inside
the pipe, however, allowed the “turbine” to use the full force of all the water rushing through the pipe under all that pressure. Not only that, but the accumulator’s
design meant the pressure reaching the turbine was constant. And while it took a half-dozen conventional waterwheels just to pump enough water to keep each accumulator supplied, the outflow from the turbine was routed back to the holding ponds supplying and driving the waterwheels, which allowed much of it to be recirculated and reused. Now if Howsmyn’s plans to pump water from the lake proved
workable (as most of his plans seemed to do), his supply of water—and power—would be assured effectively year-round.

He’s got his canals completed now, too,
the priest reflected.
Now that he can barge iron ore and coal directly all the way from his mines up in the Hanth Mountains he can actually
use
all of that power. Archangels only know what
that’s
going to mean for his productivity!

It was
a sobering thought, and the fresh increases in Delthak’s output were undoubtedly going to make Ehdwyrd Howsmyn even wealthier. More importantly, they were going to be crucial to the Empire of Charis’ ability to survive under the relentless onslaught of the Church of God Awaiting.

No, not the
Church,
Paityr
, Wylsynn reminded himself yet again.
It’s the Group of Four, that murderous bastard Clyntahn
and the rest.
They’re
the ones trying to destroy Charis and anyone else who dares to challenge their perversion of everything Mother Church is supposed to stand for!

It was true. He
knew
it was true. And yet it was growing harder for him to make that separation as he watched everyone in the Church’s hierarchy meekly bend the knee to the Group of Four, accepting Clyntahn’s atrocities, his twisting
of everything the Office of Inquisition was supposed to be and stand for. It was easy enough to understand the fear behind that acceptance. What had happened to his own father, his uncle, and their friends among the vicarate who’d dared to reject Clyntahn’s obscene version of Mother Church was a terrible warning of what would happen to anyone foolish enough to oppose him now.

Yet how had he ever
come to hold the Grand Inquisitor’s office in the first place? How could Mother Church have been so blind, so foolish—so stupid and lost to her responsibility to God Himself—as to entrust
Zhaspahr Clyntahn
with that position? And where had the other vicars been when Clyntahn had Samyl and Hauwerd Wylsynn and the other members of their circle of reformers slaughtered? When he’d applied the Punishment
of Schueler to vicars of Mother Church not for any error of doctrine, not any act of heresy, but for having the audacity to oppose
him
? None of the other vicars could have believed the Inquisition’s preposterous allegations against their Reformist fellows, yet not one voice had been raised in protest. Not
one
, when Langhorne himself had charged Mother Church’s priests to die for what they knew
was true and right if that proved necessary.

He closed his eyes, listening to the shriek of the blast furnaces, feeling the disciplined energy and power pulsing around him, gathering itself to resist Clyntahn and the other men in far distant Zion who supported him, and felt the doubt gnawing at his certainty once again. Not at his faith in God. Nothing could ever touch that, he thought. But his
faith in Mother Church. His faith in Mother Church’s fitness as the guardian of God’s plan and message to His children.

There were men fighting to resist the Group of Four’s corruption, yet they’d been forced to do it outside Mother Church—in
despite
of Mother Church—and in the process they were taking God’s message into other waters, subtly reshaping its direction and scope. Were they right
to do that? Wylsynn’s own heart cried out to move in the same directions, to broaden the scope of God’s love in the same ways, but was
he
right to do that? Or had they all fallen prey to Shan-wei? Was the Mother of Deception using the Reformists’ own better natures, their own yearning to understand God, to lead them into
opposition
to God? Into believing God must be wise enough to think the same
way
they
did rather than accepting that no mortal mind was great enough to grasp the mind of God? That it was not their job to lecture God but rather to hear His voice and obey it, whether or not it accorded with their own desires and prejudices? Their own limited understanding of all He saw and had ordained?

And how much of his own yearning to embrace that reshaped direction stemmed from his
own searing anger? From the rage he couldn’t suppress, however hard he tried, when he thought about Clyntahn and the mockery he’d made of the Inquisition? From his fury at the vicars who’d stood idly by and watched it happen? Who even now acquiesced by their silence in every atrocity Clyntahn proclaimed in the name of his own twisted image of Mother Church, the Archangels, and God Himself?

And,
terribly though it frightened and shamed him to ask the question, or even dare to admit he could feel such things, how much of it stemmed from his anger at God Himself, and at His Archangels, for
letting
this happen? If Shan-wei could seduce men through the goodness of their hearts, by subtly twisting their faith and their love for their fellow men and women, how much more easily might she seduce
them through the dark poison of anger? And where might anger such as his all too easily lead?

I know where my heart lies, where my own faith lives
, Paityr Wylsynn thought.
Even if I wished to pretend I didn’t, that I weren’t so strongly drawn to the Church of Charis’ message, there’d be no point trying. The truth is the truth, however men might try to change it, but have I become part of the
Darkness in my drive to serve the Light? And how does any man try—what
right
does he have to try—to be one of God’s priests when he can’t even know what the truth in his own heart is … or whether it springs from Light or Darkness?

He opened his eyes once more, looking out over the fiery vista of Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s enormous foundry complex, and worried.

.II.

HMS
Royal Charis,
58, West Isle Channel, and Imperial Palace, Cherayth, Kingdom of Chisholm

The cabin lamps swung wildly, sending their light skittering across the richly woven carpets and the gleaming wood of the polished table. Glass decanters sang a mad song of vibration, planking and stout hull timbers groaned in complaint, wind howled, rain beat with icy fists on the skylight, and
the steady cannon-shot impacts as HMS
Royal Charis
’ bow slammed into one tall, gray wave after another echoed through the plunging ship’s bones.

A landsman would have found all of that dreadfully alarming, assuming seasickness would have allowed him to stop vomiting long enough to appreciate it. Cayleb Ahrmahk, on the other hand, had never suffered from seasickness, and he’d seen heavy weather
bad enough to make the current unpleasantness seem relatively mild.

Well, maybe a bit more than relatively
mild,
if we’re going to be honest,
he admitted to himself.

It was only late afternoon, yet as he gazed out through the stern windows at the raging sea in
Royal Charis
’ wake it could have been night. True, by the standards of his own homeland, night came early in these relatively northern
latitudes in midwinter, but this was early even for the West Isle Channel. Solid cloud cover tended to do that, and if this weather was merely … exceptionally lively, there was worse coming soon enough. The front rolling in across the Zebediah Sea to meet him was going to make
this
seem like a walk in the park.

“Lovely weather you’ve chosen for a voyage,” a female voice no one else aboard
Royal
Charis
could hear remarked in his ear.

“I didn’t exactly
choose
it,” he pointed out in reply. He had to speak rather loudly for the com concealed in his jeweled pectoral scepter to pick up his voice amid all the background noise, but no one was likely to overhear him in this sort of weather. “And your sympathy underwhelms me, dear.”

“Nonsense. I know you, Cayleb. You’re having the time of your
life,” Empress Sharleyan replied tartly from the study across the hall from their suite in the Imperial Palace. She sat in a comfortable armchair parked near the cast-iron stove filling the library with welcome warmth, and their infant daughter slept blessedly peacefully on her shoulder.

“He does rather look forward to these exhilarating moments, doesn’t he?” another, deeper voice observed over
the same com net.

“Ganging up on me, Merlin?” Cayleb inquired.

“Simply stating the truth as I see it, Your Grace. The painfully
obvious
truth, I might add.”

Normally, Merlin would have been aboard
Royal Ch
a
ris
with Cayleb as the emperor’s personal armsman and bodyguard. Circumstances weren’t normal, however, and Cayleb and Sharleyan had agreed it was more important for the immediate future
that he keep an eye on the empress. There wasn’t much for a bodyguard to do aboard a ship battling her way against winter headwinds across nine thousand-odd miles of salt water from Cherayth to Tellesberg. And not even a
seijin
who was also a fusion-powered PICA could do much about winter weather … except, of course, to see it coming through the SNARCs deployed around the planet. Cayleb could
monitor that information as well as Merlin could, however, and he was just as capable of receiving Owl’s weather predictions from the computer’s hiding place under the far distant Mountains of Light.