David Weber - How firm a foundation

And won’t that be fun, he thought grimly, knees flexing as his weary body anticipated the jolts. It wasn’t like being at sea, but there were some similarities. You had to go and help His Majesty kill that asshole Duke Malikai off Armageddon Reef, didn’t you, Gwylym? I’ll bet his loving family’s been just praying for the opportunity to entertain you on your way through.

“Keep the crowd moving, Captain,” Father Vyktyr Tahrlsahn said. “I’m sure everyone wants to see these bastards, and I want to make sure everyone gets to see them, too. See them from close enough they can smell the vermin’s stink!”

“Aye, Sir.” Captain Walysh Zhu touched his breastplate in salute, but behind that facade of stolid acknowledgment, his brain was busy.

Over the last several days, Zhu had realized Tahrlsahn was even more… zealous than the captain had originally thought. Zhu was as orthodox and conservative as only a Harchongese could be, and he saw no reason heretics should be accorded the protections of honorable prisoners of war. Anyone who gave his allegiance to Shan-wei deserved whatever came his way, after all. On the other hand, Zhu took no particular pleasure from seeing them abused without some specific reason. He’d ordered his Guardsmen to show them why they’d be wise to cooperate that very first day, but there’d been a purpose to that beating, a way to establish discipline without actually killing anyone. And, if he was going to be honest, there had been a certain personal satisfaction in it, as well. Payback for what their bastard friends had done to the Navy of God and the Imperial Harchongese Navy in the Markovian Sea, if nothing else.

But Tahrlsahn sometimes seemed to have trouble remembering they were supposed to deliver their prisoners intact to the Temple. Personally, Zhu estimated they were likely to lose perhaps one in five from sheer exhaustion and privation even under the best of conditions. But they weren’t getting the best of conditions, were they? They’d been scrawny as skinned wyverns when he’d collected them from the prison hulks in Gorath, and Tahrlsahn wasn’t going out of his way to fatten them up since. Zhu suspected there was sickness among them, as well, helping to gnaw away at their reserves of strength, but Tahrlsahn had endorsed Bishop Executor Wylsynn’s ban on providing the “malingering bastards” with healers. And the prison wagons’ jarring ride was far more debilitating than Tahrlsahn seemed to realize.

Now they were coming into Twyngyth, the biggest city they’d passed through yet, and Tahrlsahn’s instructions made him a little nervous. It had been bad enough in some of the other villages and small towns. Zhu remembered the village where twenty or thirty men and adolescent boys had jogged along beside the prison wagons, pelting the Charisians with stones picked up from the roadside. At least one prisoner had lost an eye, and another had gone down unconscious when a rock hit him in the head. Zhu didn’t know how much the blow to his skull had to do with it, but the same man had gone berserk the next afternoon and attacked a Guardsman with his bare hands when he and his fellows were released from their wagon for a latrine break. Tahrlsahn would just as soon have left them to foul the wagons with their own wastes, but Father Myrtan, his second-in-command, had convinced him that at least the rudiments of Pasquale’s laws of hygiene had to be observed if they didn’t want the Guardsmen to come under the Archangel’s curse, as well.

Zhu didn’t know about that, but he had a pretty fair notion how foul the prison wagons would smell to anyone unfortunate enough to be escorting them from downwind. That was more than enough to put him on Father Myrtan’s side of that debate, although Tahrlsahn had almost changed his mind and prohibited the stops after all when the screaming Charisian got both hands around a Guardsman’s throat and started beating the man’s head on the ground. Three more Charisians had turned on their captors, as well-less from any real hope of achieving anything, Zhu thought, than out of pure instinct to aid their fellow-and despite the prisoners’ half-starved condition, it had taken over forty guardsmen to subdue the single unlocked wagon’s twenty Charisians.

When it ended, two Guardsmen were seriously injured and the first Charisian and one of his companions were dead. Two more had died over the next day and a half, and six more had received broken bones… not all of them before they were subdued. Sergeant Zhadahng came from the Empire’s Bedard Province in far western West Haven. Nobody was more orthodox than someone from Bedard, especially someone who’d been born a serf like Zhadahng. And no one was more accustomed to receiving-and meting out-brutality than a Bedard serf. There was no doubt in Zhu’s mind that Zhadahng had seen to the administration of a little additional “discipline” on his own initiative.

The captain had chosen not to make an issue out of it in this instance. First, because a little extra emphasis for the prisoners probably wouldn’t hurt anything… except the prisoners, who were heretics and deserved it anyway. And, second (and more to the point), because he had no doubt Tahrlsahn would have supported the sergeant’s actions. He’d certainly brushed aside Father Myrtan’s earlier efforts to convince him to make at least some improvements in the prisoners’ condition. The argument had become heated-dangerously so, Zhu thought-before Father Vyktyr sharply ordered Father Myrtan to be silent. He was hardly likely to support Zhu if he disciplined Zhadahng for something as minor as beating a heretic or two to death. And Tahrlsahn was one of the Grand Inquisitor’s favorites.

Yet what worried him at the moment was less what Zhadahng or his own men might do than what the good citizens of Twyngyth might take it into their minds to do. The convoy’s progress was slow-deliberately so, to make sure there was time for crowds to gather properly in the towns along its route-and that meant there was plenty of time for broadsheets and posters to go up along the way. Literacy was much more common in Dohlar than in Harchong, and even the most ill-educated villager could always find someone to read the latest broadsheet to him. Which meant there’d also been ample opportunity for everyone along the route to discuss all the inequities of the Charisian heretics about to be found-briefly-in their midst. And as they’d drawn gradually closer to Twyngyth, Zhu had noticed a steadily rising level of vituperation and hatred in the broadsheets nailed to the milestones they’d passed along the way.

I wonder how much of that is the Ahlverez family’s doing? he thought. From everything I’ve heard, they wanted the Dohlarans to string these bastards up for what happened to Duke Malikai at Rock Point! And they know we’ve got our hands on “Emperor” C ayleb’s flag captain from that battle, too. I’ll bet they really want to get their hands on him! Stupid of them, of course-nothing they could do to him would be a patch on what the Inquisition’s got waiting in Zion. But none of these damned Dohlarans seem overly blessed with logic.

On the other hand, the Inquisition wanted to make sure it got its hands on Gwylym Manthyr. It wouldn’t thank Tahrlsahn-or Captain Walysh Zhu-if it didn’t, and Zhu rather suspected the Grand Inquisitor himself would make his displeasure known if that happened, even if Tahrlsahn was one of his favorites.

“Forgive me, Father Vyktyr,” he said after a moment, “but I’m a little concerned over the prisoners’ security.” He’d started to use the word “safety” but stopped himself in time.

“What do you mean?” Tahrlsahn’s eyes narrowed.

“Twyngyth is a larger city than any we’ve stopped in so far, Father,” Zhu said in his calmest, most reasonable tone. “The crowds will be a lot thicker, and we’ll be inside the city proper, surrounded by buildings and narrow streets.”