.I.

HMS Delthak, Charis Sea

“It looks like not everybody got the word, Sir,” Lieutenant Pawal Blahdysnberg said dryly as yet another schooner put her helm hard over and sheared off wildly. He shook his head, his expression a mixture of amusement and resignation. “I wonder if this one thinks we’re demon spawn or just hopelessly on fire?”

“Judging by how hard he jibed, my money’s on demon spawn.” Captain Halcom Bahrns’ tone carried more disgust than amusement, and he shook his head. “He almost had the mast out of her. And that’s a coaster, not somebody who’s been off in Siddarmark or Chisholm for the last six months. Haven’t the idiots spent any time getting drunk ashore and listening to the sea stories about us?”

Blahdysnberg suppressed a chuckle. He didn’t think the captain would take his head off if he laughed, but he wasn’t positive. Still.…

“Actually, you know, Sir, at least at first, this”—he jutted his chin at the thick plumes of smoke rising from HMS Delthak’s twin, tall funnels—“is probably going to work for us the first time the Temple Loyalists see us coming.”

“And they will see us coming,” Bahrns replied. He, too, looked up at the smoke. “That’s got to be visible from twenty miles in good weather.”

“Well, Sir, they didn’t exactly design these for sneaking up on people,” Blahdysnberg said cheerfully. “And to tell the truth, seeing us coming won’t help the sorry bastards much, when you come down to it. They won’t be able to outrun us, that’s for sure, and when we catch up with them.… “

He let his voice trail off, then rapped his knuckles on the steel armor and shrugged.

“Once we’ve got some damned guns on board, anyway,” Bahrns growled, but he was forced to nod. And the truth was, he was nowhere near as affronted by the uninformed’s reaction to his smoking, snorting command as he might choose to sound. There were, however, appearances to be maintained.

He turned forward and found himself looking directly over the ship’s bow, which was just plain wrong. And that was only one of the … unconventional things about his new vessel. Ships were supposed to be conned from aft, from the quarterdeck, where the officer of the deck and the helmsman could see the sails and know what the ship was doing. But not in HMS Delthak or any of the other river-class gunboats. No, he and Blahdysnberg were standing on a narrow, bridgelike platform wrapped around an armored wheelhouse—what Sir Dustyn Olyvyr called a “conning tower”—located at the front of the ship’s slab-sided casemate. It was a profoundly unnatural place from which to command a vessel at sea, much less to locate the ship’s helm, but that was where they were. And the truth was, it actually made sense, however bizarre it felt.

His new command had no sails, so there was no need for anyone to be stationed where he could keep an eye on them. In fact, it had only a single mast—one spar, standing on end, supporting a single fat pod ninety feet above the casemate for the ship’s lookout. And locating the wheel and “conning tower” so far forward and at such a height above deck level at least gave him excellent visibility ahead. Considering the speed of which Delthak was capable, that was scarcely a minor consideration.

She was squat, unlovely, and had all the grace of an old barn, he thought, and yet she also had an undeniable presence. A hundred and forty feet overall, she would have displaced just over twelve hundred tons (according to Sir Dustyn’s new way of calculating) with her weapons and normal load of coal and feed water on board. At the moment, she displaced rather more than that, and with her hundred-and-twenty-foot casemate—angling inwards at a sixty-degree angle, each side broken by eight gunports, and painted solid black, without the customary white strake—she seemed to sit heavily in the water, her shoulders hunched. She lacked the graceful bow of a galleon, with no cutwater and no flare, her stem rising straight and uncompromising out of the water, butting its way through waves in stubborn clouds of spray. They were scarcely thirty minutes out of The Throat into the Charis Sea, and the wind was barely a moderate breeze, raising waves no higher than four feet. They happened to be steaming directly into that wind, however, and water was already breaking white over Delthak’s short foredeck. When they met anything resembling a real wind, that water was going break white and green across the curved face of the casemate, and he hoped to hell those three forward gunports were as solidly built—and securely fastened—as Olyvyr and the Delthak Works foreman had assured him they were.

The truth was, he’d expected her to be an absolute pig in any sort of seaway, but it didn’t look like she was going to be anywhere near as bad as he’d feared. For one thing, she had a very low freeboard compared to any true oceangoing vessel. She didn’t look that way, given her angular profile, but the reality was that she sat much lower in the water than any galleon her size. That was going to make her wet, as her current behavior already demonstrated, but combined with her lack of masts, it also meant she exposed less area to the wind, which meant, in turn, that she was far more weatherly than he’d feared from her shallow draft. There simply wasn’t much for the wind to push against, compared to a galleon’s higher sides and lofty rig, when it tried to force her to leeward. For another thing, she answered the wheel with remarkable speed—far more rapidly than any galleon he’d ever served aboard. Indeed, she answered more quickly than most galleys had, when the Charisian Navy had still possessed galleys. She was still going to heave her guts out if the weather blew up, but for all her squattiness, she was actually remarkably maneuverable.

And she was fast. Langhorne, she was fast! In smooth water, at least. The resistance of those bluntly rounded bows was going to slow her down in any sort of heavy weather, but they were making well over twelve knots, and the engines weren’t even straining.

I suppose putting in the extra engine has a little something to do with that, he reflected. God knows I never would’ve expected “propellers” to be able to drive a ship this size this way, though, even with two of them.

He reflected on how many oar blades it had taken to drive a considerably smaller and far more lightly built galley—or the sail area it took to drive a galleon—and shook his head. Admittedly, the three-bladed propellers on Delthak’s shafts were almost eight feet across, and they turned remarkably quickly—as many as two hundred and twenty revolutions in a single minute. He didn’t even want to think about the amount of water they were moving at that speed, but he’d had her up to seventeen knots over a timed distance on Ithmyn’s Lake. In fact, he’d exceeded seventeen knots according to the “pitometer” Ehdwyrd Howsmyn and Sir Dustyn Olyvyr had devised. He might even have been able to force her higher (at risk of overstraining her machinery) and that was just insane. He’d never heard of any other ship coming remotely close to that kind of speed, even with the most favorable possible combination of wind and wave.

She might be ugly, she might smoke like an out-of-control furnace, and her stokehold might reach temperatures that would make Shan-wei sweat, but the sheer exhilaration of speeding across the lake that quickly, watching the great white waves rolling away on either side of her blunt bow, the wake trailing away behind her.… that was something he’d never experienced before. Yet even at its most thrilling, there was something subtly wrong about the whole thing. Ships were supposed to have masts and sails—even galleys had them. That was the real reason Delthak and her sisters looked so unfinished—so incomplete—and where was the seamanship in simply standing on this “conning tower” bridge and telling the helmsman to come to starboard or to larboard?

Oh, stop it! Pawal’s right, and you know it! Once you get the guns mounted, you’ll command one of the four most powerful—and fastest—warships in the history of the world, and all you can do is moan about how it doesn’t have masts?

His lips twitched in an unwilling grin at the thought. He was pretty sure High Admiral Rock Point hadn’t picked the captains for his first four ironclads at random, which made his assignment a huge professional compliment, as well. And he was young for his rank. That might have something to do with the high admiral’s choice, actually; he might have figured a younger officer, less set in his ways, might be more adaptable to the novel requirements of this entirely new sort of warship.

And be reasonable, Halcom. It was only five or six years ago the Navy didn’t even have galleons. I don’t suppose anyone’s really had a lot of time to get “set in his ways,” given how things keep changing.

He thought about that as the wind hummed around his ears with the speed of Delthak’s thumping, thrashing progress. Looked at from that sort of perspective, maybe the skipper of that schooner could be forgiven—or at least excused—for his panicky reaction. To suddenly find four iron monsters steaming at impossible speed almost directly into the wind had to come as a shock to anyone who’d never seen them before. Perhaps that schooner’s master had seen Mule working in King’s Harbor or off the Tellesberg waterfront, but the tug had only a single funnel, never moved at more than five or ten knots, and—aside from the smoke—was a remarkably tame introduction to the new generation of ships Ehdwyrd Howsmyn and Sir Dustyn were about to introduce.

He stepped around to the protruding wing of the bridge and looked aft, past the banner of smoke trailing from Delthak’s funnels, to where HMS Saygin followed in her wake. HMS Tellesberg and HMS Hador brought up the rear, visible more as additional smoke clouds than ships, but he knew exactly where they were. One thing they’d already discovered was that steam-powered vessels could maintain far tighter formation than sailing ships. Indeed, in some ways they could keep better formation than galleys, and that was going to have tactical implications of its own when the time came.

At the moment, however, what he felt most at knowing those other three ships were back there was relief. They’d just set out on a six-thousand-mile voyage, and they didn’t have a single sail amongst them. He did have Shan-wei’s own piles of bagged coal stacked all over his gundeck as well as crammed into the official bunker space, however. The absence of guns made that practical, but getting the coal dust out of the ship after they’d expended all the fuel wasn’t going to be enjoyable. In fact, the worst aspect of this newfangled teapot was the need to feed it regularly with fresh heaps of coal. It was going to be a backbreaking job, he could already see that, although Master Huntyr and Sir Dustyn had worked hard to come up with clever ways to ease the task. Worse, it was going to be filthy, with clouds of coal dust everywhere.

He did feel naked without a single gun mounted, although he couldn’t really think of anything any hypothetical opponent could do to them, given their preposterous speed. And the haste with which this whole project had been completed had required more than a little improvisation. The ships were intended, ultimately, to mount the new “recoil-system” guns Admiral Seamount and Captain Rahzwail were muttering about. Bahrns didn’t know much about them—just that they were supposed to be a lot more powerful than the existing thirty-pounder kraken yet required much smaller crews—but it didn’t matter, since they didn’t exist yet. Instead, Delthak and her sisters would each be armed with twenty-two thirty-pounders once they reached their destination, although no one had explained exactly where the guns in question would be coming from.

In the meantime, aside from that mountain of coal, Delthak carried very little except replacement parts for her engines, boilers, and all of what Lieutenant Zhak Bairystyr, her engineer—a brand-new position, filled by an officer who had very little seagoing experience and looked as if he were about fifteen—called “the fiddly bits.” Bahrns was accustomed to thinking in terms of ships being completely dependent upon their own resources while at sea, but thinking in terms of replacement parts to repair broken machinery was something else entirely. The notion that a ship’s carpenter and blacksmith couldn’t find or fabricate anything they’d need if they did have a failure was a sobering reflection on the fragility at the heart of this hulking, armored monster. In theory, a pair of galleons fitted out as repair ships and tenders would be following along behind them with complete crews of artificers from the Delthak Works, although they’d make a much slower passage, so the repair problem shouldn’t be insurmountable in the long run, but it was all very bothersome at the moment.

So was the fact that at this particular moment, his entire ship’s company consisted of only fifty-three men: him; Blahdysnberg and two other watch-keeping lieutenants; Bairystyr and his assistant engineer; eleven deck hands; twelve “oilers” to tend the two engines and their complex pistons, crankshafts, and bearings; and twenty-four stokers to keep the four boilers fed. That was a tiny complement compared to the four hundred men serving aboard his last ship, and even after they’d added gun crews and the ship’s surgeon, they’d have only a hundred and ninety-seven. That was only enough manpower to work the ship and man half the thirty-pounders she’d be receiving, and he had no idea what the rest of the crew would look like, since it was going to be made up out of drafts from warships operating out of Bedard Bay. That meant it was going to be catch-as-catch-can, with the three other ironclads in competition with Delthak and every galleon skipper doing his damnedest to hang on to his best men. Bahrns had a very unhappy suspicion that they were going to end up drafting landsman, probably from the army, to make up the necessary warm bodies.

In which case, not having sails to worry about will turn out to be a very good thing, he thought grimly. Even a soldier can swing a shovel, and with our armor, we ought to be able to get too close to an enemy for even an Army gunner to miss.

He thought about that for a moment, reflecting on the shots he’d seen trained naval gunners miss, even at point-blank range, and shuddered. Then he reached out and rapped the conning tower bridge’s wooden planking for luck.

After all, he thought, raising his spyglass and sweeping it around the horizon, it couldn’t hurt, could it?