Gold Throne in Shadow (5 page)

It was late that night before he could sit down in his chapel, put up his feet, and nurse a fine light lager. The calluses were still coming in. He'd earned a really beautiful set on that terrible march out of the Wild, and now he had to start all over.

“We have to start all over,” he complained to Karl. The men didn't have enough ammunition to fight a single battle, not to mention the cannonry and other hardware that needed replacing. The regiment wasn't fit for combat, and their posting in Carrhill weighed heavily on his mind.

“Food and clothing they could not deny me,” said Karl, “and your witch makes bullets as fast as she can. But your shop master claimed he was busy with other things. In truth he waited for your return.”

That was intolerable. When Karl had served the Saint, no one had doubted his authority.

“I'll speak to them. They have to learn you are in command.”

“But I'm not,” Karl replied.

The smiths had ranks, even if they were only craft-ranks. Tradition would not let them take orders from an unranked man. But they should know by now that Christopher had no patience for tradition. He tried to think of a suitable punishment for their recalcitrance and decided that the new designs he was going to dump on them would be enough.

Jhom was definitely nervous. He shouldn't be; as the manager of Christopher's machine shop, and the son of the local Vicar, the man had as much prestige as it was possible to get without a noble rank. But Christopher could tell he was nervous from the obsequious way the smith talked to him, working his new title into every sentence. To these people, that was the greatest compliment they could pay you.

“Enough,” Christopher said, “I can see you were busy with useful work while I was gone.” The Franklin stoves were sure to please the peasantry, once they understood that they would use half as much wood through the winter, but Christopher hadn't come here to save trees. “We need to talk about guns, Jhom. I need lots of them.”

“About that, Curate. I did the experiments you suggested. I thought to suggest some changes, if you would be so kind—”

Christopher cut him off. “Yes, of course. Just get to the point.”

Jhom winced but took him outside to the firing benches, where a rifle was locked down into a stabilizing block. He started to babble about it while Christopher removed the gun and inspected it carefully.

They had cut four inches off the length and thinned the barrel, reducing the weight by a third. It was in all ways superior to the weapon Christopher had designed. So this was all Jhom had wanted: approval.

“This model performs virtually the same in tests of accuracy, and the breech can stand a triple charge without bursting.” Jhom was still pitching, even while Christopher smiled in satisfaction.

“It's excellent, Jhom. Better than mine. Do you still have the targets?” He had taught them the scandalous practice of firing the gun at a paper target, so you had a permanent record of the test. Scandalous because paper was almost literally worth its weight in gold. Or had been; now that Fae made paper industrially instead of ritually, the stuff was as cheap as silver.

“So we should begin producing these, my lord?” Jhom finally looked ready to be relieved.

“Begin?” Christopher complained, just to be difficult. “You should have started making them weeks ago.”

“I did not know how many you would require,” Jhom answered. Now that the quality had been approved, the smith seemed prepared to forget he had ever doubted it. Christopher let it go, because he had plenty of other things to annoy his engineers with. “How many should we make?” Jhom asked, already calculating his share of the profits in his head.

Christopher grinned. “All of them.”

“Come again, my lord?”

“How many can you make? We need two hundred for the men; we'll retire the old rifles as soon as we can.” After carrying the heavy rifles back on that long march, they deserved a break. “We need two hundred more for the next regiment. And I'd like hundreds more. Maybe we can start selling them.”

The quantities made John's eyes go starry. Christopher went on. “And we need cannon, both replacements and more. And grenades. Lots of grenades.”

“We do not have enough machines,” Jhom reluctantly objected.

“Then you'll have to make more. Oh, and I have some new things I want you to build, too.”

“We do not have enough men,” Jhom said with finality. “And I cannot hire more. There are barely enough smiths to do your work and the ordinary work of the town.”

This would not do, not at all.

“Can we import them? From other towns?”

Jhom was dubious. “Ask a man to leave his home and kin, just for a job? It seems unlikely that established craftsmen would respond.”

Christopher sighed. He was pretty sure he knew what the solution was, because it was always the same. “Then we'll make new craftsmen.” Opening the little silver vial he carried—an affectation of the wealthy, like a money belt or a watch pocket—he poured a purple pea out into his palm. It represented a fortune in gold, thirty pounds of the stuff.

To Jhom's wide eyes he said, “I can afford to make five Novices into Journeymen. Will that draw men of quality to us?”

“They'll drag their families with them,” Jhom grinned, “uncles, cousins, dogs, and all.”

“What about our men? Won't they be unhappy about outsiders getting promoted first?” He'd always hated that in the companies he had worked for.

Jhom considered this angle only briefly before dismissing it. “We can't promote our own men, that won't draw new ones in. It is your tael, Curate, and you have the right to spend it as you will. The men will accept this.”

That excuse would get Jhom off the hook, in exchange for leaving Christopher holding the bag. Jhom was a decent man, and he took good care of his employees, but he still was ready to increase his influence at the expense of Christopher's reputation.

Or perhaps that was being unfair. These people were used to making hard choices and living with the results, and they were used to unchecked authority. “Necessary” was whatever the guy with the superpowers said it was.

“Would this work? Announce the promotions and let everyone compete for it, including the out-of-towners. Promote the five best. Then, offer the others a job, since they're already here.” Christopher was feeling pretty pleased with his plan, until Jhom drilled it full of holes.

“That will just aggravate everyone, for little gain. Our men will expect to be favored, for their loyalty and time served; the out-of-towners who don't win will just go home. Those who do win will be resented and constantly challenged, since it is only their skill and not your authority that grants them their place.”

Jhom took a little pity on him. “The best I can suggest is that you promote one of ours for each new man you bring in. That would please everyone, except your purse.”

He shook his head. As rich as he was, he could not afford that. Now he had to choose between fairness and effectiveness, something he had never had to do back on Earth. But then, the society he had lived in was not at perpetual war with inhuman monsters.

“Do what you must,” he said, closing his eyes in dismay.

“Can I at least tell them that next year, you will promote five of ours?” asked Jhom, trying to give him an out.

But the Church he served did not tolerate dishonesty. “No, I don't know that is true. If anything, we'll need even more new people. And we can't promote from within and hope that draws more, because we need them now.”

“Everyone will assume that eventually you will promote your own, anyway,” soothed Jhom, “so this will be almost as good.”

Except that Christopher didn't want to promote anyone. Other than a handful of Seniors required for their magical abilities, the machine shop could be run by mere mortals. The men didn't need tael, just training. That was a concept more foreign than the rule of fairness.

Which brought up another point. “What about Seniors? Do we have enough of them?”

Thankfully, Jhom nodded the affirmative. “They need but do a single step, mating the breech to the block.” Using the power of their craft-ranks they made the metal run like oil, forming a perfect fit between the machined surfaces and neatly solving one of the worst problems of paper-cartridge firearms. This did mean that the barrels and breeches were not interchangeable, but Christopher was the only one who thought that mattered. Mass production was another foreign concept.

“They'll need to do more than one step for these,” Christopher said, pulling out his latest design. The other problem with paper cartridges was the loading time. One solution was a revolving rifle, a cylinder with six breeches mated to a single barrel. A number of them had been manufactured in the American Civil War just before the metal cartridge made lever-action rifles possible. But Christopher's industry could barely make enough paper and lead bullets as it was; the technology required for stamping out thousands of brass cartridges was out of reach for now, even if he could figure out how to afford that much metal.

Jhom was fascinated with the drawings of the cylinder action, so Christopher had to warn him. “We'll not make hundreds of these.” They would cost a fortune, since they would require multiple steps from the expensive Seniors for each chamber in the cylinder. “We'll call them carbines, because of the shorter barrel.” He'd cut a dozen inches off of the barrel; the weight of the fat round cylinder added to an ordinary rifle would make the thing unbearable.

He had another new design for Dereth. He found the Senior smith where he belonged, in front of their primitive Bessemer furnace, supervising a smelting. He had made a sword for Christopher once, the old-fashioned way, by hammering carbon into iron to make a few pounds of steel. Now he poured steel by the ton.

“Isn't it beautiful?” the smith said, watching the fiery liquid run into molds. “We rarely miss the mark now, my lord.” Dereth used his craft-rank magic to get the precise amount of carbon in, though he would not tell Christopher how he did it. Just being “my lord” was not enough to make one privy to guild secrets.

“Can you double production?” Christopher shouted over the clatter of bellows and hammers.

“I am not the neck of the bottle,” Dereth replied, still enraptured by the glowing steel. “Your Tom cannot dig fast enough for me.”

Christopher gave up trying to talk and just shoved some papers into the smith's hands. “Only two or three,” he shouted, as he lost the smith's attention to the schematics of his new toy. The little two-inch guns were nice, but having seen the quality of the monsters, he wanted something monstrous, like the five-inch Napoleon sketched out on his papers. Hopefully Dereth had enough experience with casting to bring the beasts to life.

Tom should be the easy part; all he would need was more unskilled labor. Dealing with the irreverent second son of a farmer made into the head of the Teamsters Union was always a joy, so he decided to save it for last, and steeled himself for meeting with Fae, the inscrutable and provocative apprentice witch who ran his chemical industry. Walking through town to her building, the fresh spring air did its part to undo the lock he had placed on all things amorous.

“Shut up,” he told a chirping cardinal, preening from a branch in boastful glory. “You're not helping.”

4

CHANGING WIZARDS

“I
mpossible,” Fae said. “I already use my magic to the fullest to make your sulfur. I cannot do more with what I have.” She was doing that subtle flirting, the kind where if you draw attention to it, people raise their eyebrows at your vanity.

Fae was only the first wizard's apprentice-rank, the equivalent of a smith's novice and thus a fairly cheap employee. “Can we hire others?” he asked, hoping she would give him a different answer than Dereth had.

“No other apprentice would surrender a career in wizardry for you,” Fae said, callously dismissive of his stupidity.