Off Armageddon Reef (89 page)

“Then put it on your palm, please, Your Majesty. No, with the flat side down. That's right. Now—”

Merlin used his internal com to trigger the pager, and the king's hand jerked as the vibration tingled sharply against the palm of his hand. He looked up at Merlin, and his eyes were wide—with as much delight as surprise, Merlin realized.

“You felt that, Your Majesty?”

“I certainly did!”

“Well, what I'd like you to do, is to carry that under your clothing somewhere,” Merlin said. “I was thinking you might use the wristband—its adjustable, Your Majesty, like this”—he demonstrated—“to wear it on your forearm, under your tunic. If you do, then I can signal you when we sight Black Water's ships. I was thinking I might cause it to vibrate one time when we first sight one of his scout ships, then twice when we sight his main body, and three times when we're prepared to engage.”

“That sounds as if it should work quite well,” Haarahld said, gazing down at the pager now strapped to the inside of his left forearm.

“Next time,” Merlin said dryly, “I'll try to provide something a bit more…exotic, Your Majesty.”

Haarahld looked up sharply, then laughed.

“Point taken,
Seijin
Merlin. Point taken.”

He gave the pager one last look, then smoothed the sleeve of his tunic over it.

“I suppose it's time you were getting back to Cayleb now, Merlin.” He reached out, resting his hands on Merlin's shoulders. “Tell him I'm proud of him, very proud. And that I love him.”

“I will, Your Majesty. Not that he needs to be told.”

“Maybe not, but sometimes it's as important to say it as to hear it. And,” Haarahld gazed directly into Merlin's sapphire eyes, “for yourself, accept my thanks. The thanks of a king, for helping him to protect his people, and of a father, who knows you'll do all you can to keep his son safe.”

“Of course I will, Your Majesty.” Merlin bowed again, more deeply than ever, then straightened. “And now, as you say, it's time I was getting back to Cayleb.”

He boosted himself up to the sternwalk's rail, gazing down at the water below.

“Do you really have to leave that way?” Haarahld asked.

“Excuse me, Your Majesty?”

Merlin looked back over his shoulder in surprise, for the king's tone had been almost wistful.

“I was just thinking it would be marvelous to see someone fly,” Haarahld said in an undeniably wheedling tone.

“I wish I could do that for you, Your Majesty,” Merlin said, and almost to his surprise, he meant every word of it. “Unfortunately, I'm afraid your officers and seamen aren't quite ready for flying
seijin
. Maybe another time, but if one of them happened to look in exactly the wrong direction at exactly the wrong moment tonight…”

He shrugged, and Haarahld nodded.

“I know, and you're right,” the king said. “But one of these days, when there's no one else about, I'm going to hold you to that ‘maybe' of yours!”

“Somehow, I'm sure you will, Your Majesty,” Merlin said with a laugh, and dropped into the night with a quiet splash.

Duke Black Water sat in his chair at the head of the table in
Corisande
's great cabin, his face impassive, as he listened to Sir Kehvyn Myrgyn's voice. After careful consideration, he'd decided to allow his flag captain to present the new information to his allies instead of doing it himself. He couldn't change the fact that it was coming from one of Prince Hektor's spies, but he could at least try to minimize the sense that he was personally ramming it down their throats.

Not that he expected to fool anyone about that.

He considered the faces of his two fellow admirals. Sharpfield looked skeptical, but then, Sharpfield
always
looked skeptical. None of Black Water's spies had been able to intercept any of Queen Sharleyan's dispatches to her fleet commander, despite their best efforts, but the duke was privately certain of what he would have found if he had been able to read any of them. And, to be honest, he didn't blame Sharleyan a bit. In her shoes,
he
would have done everything he thought he could get away with to minimize his own exposure and losses in the service of one of his most bitter enemies. Not that understanding her motives made their consequences any more pleasant.

Still, Sharpfield was also a considerably more experienced naval commander than Prince Nahrmahn's Earl Mahndyr. And however unwillingly his queen had been compelled to support this entire campaign, Sharpfield was far too intelligent to do anything overt to which the Group of Four might take exception.

Mahndyr was another matter. Unlike Sharleyan, Nahrmahn had every reason to want this campaign to succeed. Well, to see it avoid
failure
, which wasn't precisely the same thing, perhaps. Black Water, now that he'd met the Prince of Emerald, had come to the conclusion that his own ruler had underestimated him. Nahrmahn was anything but the fool Black Water had been warned to expect, and, the duke was quietly certain, he'd made arrangements of his own to protect himself from the consequences of a victory by Prince Hektor. Whether or not those arrangements would work was another matter, of course. But, either way, he was even more certain Nahrmahn would prefer to take his chances against a victorious Hektor rather than against a victorious—and enraged—Haarahld.

That would definitely appear to be the case judging by the way Nahrmahn's navy had responded to Black Water's orders in the two months since the destruction of Baron Tanlyr Keep's squadron, at any rate. Mahndyr had pitched in and goaded his own captains and crews into energetic—if not necessarily wildly enthusiastic—cooperation with Black Water's rigorous training exercises.

Sharpfield's cooperation had been less enthusiastic than Mahndyr's, but, by the same token, his captains had been better trained to begin with. And Black Water had taken Sharpefield's own experience into consideration and sought his advice in planning the fleet's exercises, which actually appeared to have gotten the senior Chisholm officer actively involved in the process. The duke had also been careful to stay fairly close to home during those two months, unwilling to offer the Charisians the opportunity to lure another detachment into a trap until he'd whipped his command into something a bit more cohesive, and his efforts had borne fruit.

There were still weak spots, of course. Black Water suspected there would have been in any coalition this diverse, even if all of its members had wanted to join it in the first place.

The worst weakness of all was that the components of the fleet were still organized on a national basis. Black Water would really have preferred to break up all three of the allied fleets and recombine their units into integrated squadrons. Not even Mahndyr was going to agree to
that
one, though.

Short of achieving that particular impossible goal, the duke was about as satisfied with his command as he had any right to expect in this less-than-perfect world. It wasn't going to get much better, at any rate, and at least he could count on its doing pretty much what he asked it to at sea. The problem was convincing his fellow admirals that what he wanted to do needed doing before they
put
to sea.

“Thank you, Sir Kehvyn,” Black Water said as the flag captain completed his briefing. Then he looked down the table at Sharpfield and Mahndyr.

“I believe this information puts rather a different complexion on our own situation,” he said. “Clearly Haarahld's known a great deal more about our plans—and our capabilities—than any of us had believed was possible. Exactly how that information came into his hands is something I'm sure all of us would like to know. What matters for our purposes right this minute, however, is what we do now that we know what he's apparently done on the basis of his knowledge.”

“With all due respect, Your Grace,” Sharpfield said, “do we
really
know what he's done? We have a single report from a single one of Prince Hektor's spies. Even granting that the man is completely honest, and that the information he's reported is true to the best of his own knowledge, he could be in error on some—or all—of the points in his report. And even if every word of it's completely accurate, we have no way of knowing what's come of Haarahld's actions.”

The Chisholm admiral shook his head with a half-snort.

“Personally, I think Haarahld would have to have been out of his mind to try something this idiotic, and I can't remember the last time someone accused Haarahld of Charis of stupidity. The chances of his even
finding
Malikai and White Ford at sea, whether he knew the originally proposed location for their rendezvous point or not, would be minute. And, even if Cayleb did find them, his galleons would have been outnumbered by something like six-to-one when they engaged.”

He shook his head again.

“I simply can't see Haarahld taking that sort of chance with that big a piece of his total navy—and his own son's life—when he'd have to be shooting almost completely blind.”

“Then what
do
you think he's done, My Lord?” Black Water asked courteously.

“I don't have the least idea,” Earl Sharpfield said frankly. “I suppose it's remotely possible he's trying some sort of complicated double bluff. If he ostentatiously sent his galleons off early, counting on us to still have at least some spies in Charis to report the fact, he could want us to believe the topsails we've been seeing belong to merchantmen, when they're actually the sails of his war galleons. On the other hand, I'd have to admit that trying something like that doesn't strike me as a great deal more reasonable than sending his entire force of galleons haring off into the middle of the Parker Sea!”

“Well, he's obviously done
something
with them,” Mahndyr said, “and I, for one, am inclined to trust your man's information, Your Grace.” He inclined his head in Black Water's direction. “I'll defer to Earl Sharpfield's greater experience at sea and agree it seems like a remarkably foolhardy risk on Haarahld's part. Still, if he did have better knowledge of our plans than we believed he did, he must have known the odds, the forces being assembled against him. He may have calculated that he couldn't hope to defeat our combined forces after all of them were joined together and decided that
some
chance—even if it were a slim one—of preventing us from ever uniting all of our ships at all was better than a certainty of seeing his own fleet destroyed after we did.”

“That's certainly possible,” Sharpfield acknowledged a bit grudgingly. “It just seems so…unlike Haarahld. He's very like his father was. I met the old king when I was a captain. The Queen's father chose my ship to transport a diplomatic mission to him, and my impression of him was that he was always ready to take chances, even bold ones, but only when the possible return outweighed the risk and the odds were in his favor. Everything I've ever heard about Haarahld says he thinks exactly the same way, and that isn't—can't—be the case here, whatever this report seemed to indicate.”

“I would tend to agree with you, under normal circumstances, My Lord,” Black Water said. “In this case, though, I believe we have to at least tentatively accept that the information is correct. And if it is, then I think we must also assume that either Cayleb managed to intercept Duke Malikai, or else he didn't. If he did, they've fought a battle, which one of them won. If Cayleb won—or even if he simply failed to make contact at all—he should be back sometime in the next two to four five-days. If Duke Malikai won, he should be here within the same time-frame. If he slipped past Cayleb without making contact at all, he should be here within no more than the next two five-days. What we have to do is to decide how to proceed until one or the other of them turns up.”

“I'm very tempted to suggest we do nothing to bring on a general engagement until Duke Malikai arrives,” Sharpfield said. “That was the original plan for the campaign, and it would offer at least some protection against the possibility that Haarahld truly is trying some sort of complicated misdirection with the movements of his galleons. And,” he added, looking Black Water straight in the eye, “if Duke Malikai and Baron White Ford
don't
arrive, that should be a fairly pointed indication of what will happen to our galleys in a battle against these new galleons of theirs.”

“I disagree, Sir Lewk,” Mahndyr said in a courteous tone. “I believe we should do our very best to provoke, even force, a general engagement as soon as possible. If Duke Malikai won against Cayleb, then we'll be in an even better position to proceed after his arrival if we've managed to defeat Haarahld, in the meantime. If he lost, but still managed to inflict heavy losses on Cayleb, then it's important that we neutralize Haarahld's galleys to prevent them from supporting and covering Cayleb on his return. And if Cayleb won without suffering significant losses, it's more important than ever that we not have to worry about facing Haarahld's galleys at the same time we confront him.”

“I find myself in agreement with Earl Mahndyr, My Lord,” Black Water said to Sharpfield. “I'll confess that I myself would feel much more comfortable if we had some independent confirmation of this single report. Nonetheless, it seems to me we have to at least probe to see whether or not Haarahld's galleons are in company with the rest of his fleet.

“If it turns out they are, our information is obviously in error. If it turns out they
aren't
, then I think Earl Mahndyr's suggestions will have considerable merit. While it's true the original plan for this campaign required us to wait for the arrival of the Tarotisian and Dohlaran squadrons, it's also true the reason we were waiting for them was to attain a decisive numerical superiority over the Charisians. If all we face is the eighty galleys of Haarahld's peacetime navy, then we
have
a decisive superiority at this moment.”

There was silence for a moment, and then, almost as if against his will, Sharpfield nodded slowly.