The most useless things that the world has ever known are male teats, women's tears, and a man who used to be a sailor.
—Sir Simon Tremaine DuPuy
He was holding onto the wheel, but he wasn't a sailor.
Not anymore.
Officially, of course, he had been placed on the Retired List at the pleasure and for the convenience of HM the king, and he doubted that it was accidental that the wording of his orders had been as little like those of a beached officer being put on the Inactive List and half pay as was possible. His Majesty was a kind man, when he could be, after all.
But the truth was that DuPuy wasn't a sailor anymore. The best thing to do would have been to let the damned steersman do his own job—which, at the moment, would have probably been locking the wheel down, rather than holding onto it—but the truth was that, as frustrating as it was to be what he had become, the feel of the spokes of the wheel in his hand was an unadulterated pleasure, and gave some balance to his humiliation. You could feel the sea through the wheel, after all; holding onto it made him a part of the ship, if only for the moment.
The steersman stood by, carefully not watching the admiral, having apparently interpreted an order of "stand easy" to mean "assume a rigid brace of parade rest," and it didn't escape DuPuy's notice that the steersman was but a quick lunge away from the wheel, ready to take over his responsibilities the moment that the useless old man stopped playing sailor.
Well, enough of that. "You may resume your post, Steersman," he said.
"Aye, aye, sir." As DuPuy stepped away, the steersman took the wheel, and gave a quick glance at the locking pedal, but didn't either touch it or ask permission.
Hmmph. It was like the boy was afraid of him, or something equally preposterous.
Simon Tremaine DuPuy—he had had to continually remind himself not to think of himself as Admiral Sir Simon Tremaine DuPuy over the past year, and was finally getting the hang of it, despite the almost constant, false reminders to the contrary—stalked the quarterdeck like a, well, like a plump, soft, old, useless man.
Which he was.
Emmons was standing by, just below the quarterdeck, waiting. He had, as usual, risen before DuPuy, and was quite properly arrayed in his Second Class uniform, entirely suitable for a naval officer at sea, even if he wasn't technically in service aboard the ship, but seconded in service to Commissioner Sir Simon Tremaine DuPuy. If the uniform was just a touch threadbare at the knees of the trousers, that was something that only a superior officer would take note of, and not a despicable old man who merely carried a title had any business noticing. Besides, it was preposterous what the cost of uniforms could to do an honest officer's finances, and if DuPuy wasn't sure how honest Emmons would be under the right temptation, that temptation had clearly had not happened while Emmons had been serving DuPuy.
DuPuy shook his head, scowling to himself. It wasn't as though there was any suggestion aboard the ship of his shame.
Quite the contrary, and it shamed him all the more.
Whenever he came up the ladder from what should have been the captain's quarters, "Admiral on deck!" was always sung out by whoever—officer or man—noticed first, and DuPuy had as of yet never managed to actually plant even so much as a single foot on the wood of the deck without hearing those words.
On the rare occasion that he could bear to approach the quarterdeck, he always made it a point to ask for permission to mount the deck, of course. The Lord Fauncher wasn't his ship, after all; it was Winters'—and, also of course, the permission was always granted, whether by whichever officer or middie had the deck, or by Winters himself.
And if it was Winters who had the deck—and Winters took the deck himself routinely, quite possibly not aware of how that relatively recent tradition had entered HM Naval custom—DuPuy tried to stay below, as Winters always seemed to be looking for an opportunity to invite him up, and more than once had asked if "the admiral" would be kind enough to take the deck.
That was something Winters surely had the right to do, and a request from a captain was only a hair's width away from being an order, after all. Hell, the man could have explicitly ordered it, just as he could have ordered DuPuy to take sand and stone to the main deck, although, of course, he never even suggested such a thing.
If he had, DuPuy would have had to comply. Although, of course, there could be an accounting later on. While it perhaps would not have been a trivial thing for Commissioner DuPuy to have had Winters relieved of his command—the Lord Fauncher had been seconded into the commissioner's service, yes, but it was still, by God, a ship of the royal navy, and part of the Home Fleet, not DuPuy's private yacht—if that could be done, it could be done in Portsmouth, not here.
In law, DuPuy was every bit as much at the captain's command and under his authority as the meanest, lashed prisoner-at-large seaman mucking out the lower hold while still groaning from the fresh weals across his back.
DuPuy wasn't quite sure why he found that thought as pleasing as he did. Maybe it was just because of the rightness of it.
Winters emerged from the for'ard hatch, and mounted the ladder to the quarterdeck without so much as a by-your-leave, as of course was also utterly appropriate. The captain didn't require permission to mount his own quarterdeck, after all.
" 'Morning, Admiral."
It was a fine point of etiquette. Nobody else aboard ship had the right to correct the master and commander; it was a matter of privilege, and Winters had never explicitly granted DuPuy that privilege.
A good man, Winters, more or less.
"Good morning, Captain," DuPuy said. "Request permission to go below, sir? There's some paperwork I should be doing."
"Of course, Admiral," Winters said, formally. Give him that; he was unfailing cooperative. "I have the deck, and I thank you for taking it for me, sir, to give me a little time below." He patted at his stomach. "I think that last night's mutton didn't quite agree with me, sir."
DuPuy didn't respond to that. If he had still been an admiral, he would have pointedly suggested that a ship the size of the Lord Fauncher should have had easily a dozen officers and middies capable of taking the quarterdeck while out at sea, with no shoaled waters to worry about, and no other ships in sight—and, to be fair, it did—and that there was no need whatsoever to rely on a useless old man who had once been a sailor.
But, of course, that was the sort of thing that even an admiral would have been on legally shaky ground to address directly to a master and commander, and DuPuy was not an admiral any longer.
Winters, of course, called him "Admiral," although DuPuy would have much preferred to have a stick stuck in his good eye instead of being addressed by the rank that he no longer held.
Retired. He could have billed himself as Admiral Sir Simon Tremaine DuPuy, Retired.
Well, at least His Majesty ordered him to take retirement, along with his new post, instead of merely putting him on half pay and beaching him. And he couldn't complain about the salary, either, not even to himself—HM had explained that if the post paid a shilling less than that of any minister of the Privy Council, the word would get out, and it would encourage a lack of respect for the post, and—
Ah. To hell with the money. He should have been enjoying this, not thinking like a Marseilles wine merchant, gloating over his riches.
There was something about the particular way that the rolling of the ship felt from the quarterdeck that was as much a drug for him as opium would have been for a weaker man.
He forced himself not to give a last, longing look at the wheel, but let himself walk down the steps, make his way aft, and down to the captain's quarters, past the two Marines who came to attention, but quite properly didn't open the door for him.
Nothing had changed, of course.
The last mail call had been in Pironesia, and while they'd flagged down the Cowperstown just as much for resupply as for the possibility that it was carrying a copy of the scattershot dispatches that chased the Lord Fauncher everywhere it sailed, the only dispatches has been duplicates of the ones that had been picked up in Pironesia, and didn't even require decoding, just—careful—disposal.
He put the duplicates into the wooden box that Emmons—more reliable than Scratch—would take up to the deck to burn, and then stir the ashes before throwing them overboard. The chances of some useful fragment washing up on the wrong shore were small, and the chances of them falling into the hands of somebody who could make sense of the code was even smaller, but what of that?
He uncovered the map that he had hung on the captain's wall, after quickly checking that the wax seals were still in place before breaking them.
The map covered the Med, from Gibraltar to Seeproosh, and a bit beyond. Yes, the source of the new live swords could in theory have been anywhere, but there was plenty of evidence that it was somewhere east of Pironesia, and west of Syryah, and—at least so he hoped and thought—north of the Med, rather than in the Dar itself. For all he knew—as opposed to concluded—the wizard who had figured out how to create live swords with the souls of infants could have been quietly ensconced in a flat in East Londinium, or somewhere in New England, or Darmosh Kowayes, or Inja or any other godforsaken place, but there were hints to the contrary.
Many hints. The race of the girl, Nadide, whose soul had been imprisoned in the sword that that Hellenic boy carried; the words of al-Bakalani's servant, who had been placed as a spy, giving a lie to the cleverness of al-Bakalani; the location of the one lost sword that had been brought to shore by a fisherman in that offshore Pironesian island, the one marked with a red pin—none of it was proof, but all of it were clues.
And not the only clues, at that. When given this assignment by HM, DuPuy had as quickly as he could seconded every available beached officer on half pay, had Dougherty put them on full pay, and sent them across the northern arc of the Med to try to investigate, doing the best he could to have them assume local garb and disguise, although a scant tenth of them, if that, spoke any of the local languages.
It wouldn't have been what he would have wanted to do, but in this life, a man made do with what he had. He would have preferred to have a thousand spies, each well-trained in the local usages, speaking a dozen local languages, each with a well-developed background—say, as merchant trader seamen—that would have given them some protection from being identified as what they indeed were, as many had.
Some had managed to make it back to a Crown port; many hadn't.
The blue pins on the map showed where men had been sent to. Whenever a new batch of dispatches showed a report of one of his spies coming back, they were replaced by green pins. When a report was more than a month overdue, the blue pin was replaced by a yellow one, and a month after that, by a red.
What did it all mean? It meant that DuPuy had sent men ill-equipped for any task but to be stalking horses to their deaths, but that wasn't important. They were, to use the technical term, expendable, and DuPuy had expended them. DuPuy had, in his lifetime, expended many more men than that. Seaman—able and ordinary—officers, supplies, rigging, launches, and even ships themselves were all expendable. The Crown was not.
But that the men had died was not important; it was where the deaths occurred that was perhaps indicative.
The black pins were even more interesting. Darklings hadn't been spotted south of Aba-Paluoja in more than a generation until recently—now reports of them were springing up from eastern France almost all the way to Inja, but spottily, as though they kept a low profile until they moved southward far enough from the Zone.
But as much as DuPuy tried to apply some system to his investigation, it was all haphazard and improvised.
Deviousness didn't come naturally to the English, alas, and deviousness was what was called for. Crown Intelligence, such as it was, had traditionally been involved in keeping track of ship and troop movements. You could tell quite a lot about what somebody was planning by where he put his soldiers, and his ships.
That was easy enough, and there was no deviousness required. British merchantmen made calls on all the open ports, of course, and there were few such ships with at least one officer who didn't have a naval portfolio, and an assignment to log ship names and movements. An officer might be beached on half pay for any number of reasons that wouldn't make him unsuitable as a sailing master or loadmaster for a merchantman.
Very good for keeping track of others' ship and troop movements, and utterly useful for this, whatever this really was.
Yes, there were spies of all sorts operating out of Crown Intelligence in Londinium, but their traditional brief was to supplement the ambassadors in the various courts. The Frisians were, of course, technically allied with the Crown, but there were constant intrigues around the Ostfriesische Landschaft, and they were no better than the damned Portugees—pity that the assassination attempt on Henriques IV had failed—or any number of other supposedly aligned or neutral states where the flag of the Crown didn't fly.
And not that that was the only problem, of course. Intrigues weren't unknown in the lands of the Crown itself, and it was DuPuy's opinion that His Majesty should have long ago invited Monsieur Le Duc du Borbonaisse to take up regular residence in the Tower, an opinion that he had not been asked to share, and hadn't.
The really interesting pins were the gold- and silver-tipped ones.
Those came from al-Bakalani.
Details? Al-Bakalani was preposterously generous with details, apparently working under the theory that a new source of live swords—and who knows what else?—could end up being as much of a threat to the Dar Al Islam as to the Crown. If the smooth-faced bastard was capable of being frightened, the affair on Pantelleria had frightened him mightily.
As it would have any sober man, and most drunk ones. A sword with the soul of a saint or a sinner trapped within it had great power, even so long after the Age.
What could such a sword with what passed for the Soul of the Wise have done?
DuPuy was sure that al-Bakalani had no more idea on that than he himself did, other than it could be incredibly bad, for Crown, Empire, and Dar, and everybody else. Expand the Zone? Restore Avalon? Make the horrible magics of the Kali-worshipers in the Kush seem mild by comparison?
What?
Well, if they could find and extinguish the source, they'd never have to know.
His opposite number from the Dar—more or less—the despicable Abdul Ibn Mussa al-Bakalani, seemed to have ample spies able to work from at least Syryah to Gibbie, and he had deviousness to spare. From his quarters in Londinium, where he had been, alas, accepted as an exotic oddity among society, al-Bakalani had received reports from the Commission for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue from all around the Med, as well. Coded, too, DuPuy presumed; certainly the two cases that DuPuy had had intercepted had been coded, and indecipherable by both Crown Intelligence and His Majesty's College.
It would take years—decades, perhaps—for a well-hidden spy to search out every village and croft (or whatever the accursed local called their crofts) even along the northern coast of the Med, but al-Bakalani had reported some similarities to DuPuy's own researches.
Izmir. It pointed to Izmir. Better than half of the men DuPuy had sent out had eventually reported back—with information that might have been useful to Crown Intelligence on other matters, although not this one.
It was the silence that was deafening. Izmir. Southern Izmir, to be specific. That was in accord with the Turkish ancestry of the girl Nadide, who had been imprisoned in the sword, and while the late unlamented Efik had claimed to have come from Anatalya, DuPuy took what he had said with rather more than the traditional grain of salt.
None of the men DuPuy had sent into that territory had returned. One explanation of that is that the Izmiri were a particularly violent people, suspicious of strangers who they would, no doubt, generally suspect as advance scouts for the pirates from Seeproosh. Seeproosh seemed to treat much of Izmir, Antalya, Balakazir and Koosh as a a harvesting ground for slaves for the New World. Yes, in theory, Musselmen were prohibited from enslaving other Musselmen, but that was only theory, and, after all, Izmir was under the theoretical control of the Empire, and Musselman worship, when it happened, a secret affair. In any case, the plantations of Darmosh Kowayes were filled with slaves taken from at least theoretically Musselmen kingdoms along the African coast, and it was the rare Darmosh Kowayes reis who wouldn't find an Izmiri concubine worthy of purchase; the frequent local combination of black hair and blue eyes seemed to be almost irresistible there. It was hard to imagine that all of the agents DuPuy had sent in had run afoul of Seeproosh pirates, after all.
It wasn't just DuPuy's agents. Just a few weeks before, al-Bakalani reported that the Commission for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue had lost agents in that territory, as well—and had done so without it being a confirmation of any of DuPuy's previous suspicions, which made it more likely to be true. DuPuy had a grudging respect for al-Bakalani, but trust was another matter entirely.
There was a knock on the door.
"Stay," he said, and covered up the map with its sheet. Then: "Come."
It was just Emmons, with a mug—a mug, thankfully, and not a cup and saucer—of coffee. Emmons carefully latched the door behind himself, then set the coffee on the appointed spot on the captain's—on DuPuy's desk, then drew himself up to a stiff brace.
"Oh, sit down," DuPuy said, as he always did. "And feel free to light your pipe, if you're of a mind to," he said, taking up his own.
Emmons was probably too young to take up the pipe—he should really still have been a midshipman, rather than a junior lieutenant; DuPuy was to blame for that too, among his other sins—but it had been almost a year since he'd been seconded as DuPuy's aide, and it had taken him but a day or two since he had first been given the offer to acquire a pipe, and little longer to acquire the habit.
He fussed about for a few moments with his pipe and pouch, and DuPuy busied himself with his own pipe, and the coffee. Good navy coffee it was—brewed strong enough to peel barnacles off a hull, and with a pinch of sea salt—and it went well with the tobacco.
"Rail talk?" he asked, as he always had before.
"None first hand, sir," Emmons answered, as usual. "To the extent that Tiptree's accurate, there's been quite a lot," he said, as he set his pipe down and started fiddling with the admiral's clothes, pointedly setting out the Class Two uniform that DuPuy had no intention of wearing, with or without his medals.
Emmons didn't need to mess with the chamber pot; he had emptied and replaced it at daybreak, and without a whimper of complaint.
In addition to his other duties as his clerk and aide, Emmons served as DuPuy's valet. An ordinary seaman would, of course, snoop if given the opportunity, and it was a lot more convenient to station a couple of Marines at the door to the cabin than to, every time that he took the air topside, lock away every bit of paper that DuPuy wouldn't want to share with every manjack aboard the ship—and probably from Hull to Mumbai, indirectly.
DuPuy handed over the last of the packet of dispatches. "See to them, please," he said.
"There's one left," Emmons said. "Begging the admiral's pardon."
"I know. I'll handle it myself."
It wasn't actually a dispatch, not really. It was the latest letter that was the source of the unmarked pins on DuPuy's map.
Randolph. Still Randolph. Formerly Lieutenant Lord Sir Alphonse Randolph; formerly the second son of the Earl of Moray; at present the likely heir to Moray, what with his elder brother having died in what was believed to be a hunting accident.
Randolph, who had sworn on Pantelleria to track down and kill the traitor knight, Alexander Smith, now known as Abdul Ibn Mahmoud, who now served the Dar with presumably better bought loyalty than that which he had served the Crown.
What was most interesting in al-Bakalani's own dispatches was the singular omission of any reports on where Smith was, or what he was up to. It was a virtual certainty he was on what trail there was leading to the source of the swords, but the only word that DuPuy had had come from Randolph, who was on his own, very personal crusade, a matter that no doubt had been less than well-received in the Earl of Moray's court.
He started to pick up Randolph's letter, but changed his mind. He had already memorized it, after all. How Randolph had managed to avoid capture during his travels throughout the region was something that he hadn't detailed in his uncoded letters, of course, and DuPuy just chalked it up to what a fat purse could do. Noblemen tended to have more money than sense.
Which was unfair, but DuPuy didn't mind being unfair.
No.
It was time to face his daily temptation again. He removed the thin chain from around his neck, and brought the key over to the strongbox. A duplicate of the key hung on the wall, but anyone who used it would have had quite a surprise when he turned it in the lock that had been prepared by a senior wizard of HM College of Wizardry.
He turned it slowly in the lock, and opened the strongbox.
There the letters were. Dozens and dozens of them. Written by His Majesty in his own hand, and sealed with his own seal, they were uncoded duplicates of the coded, sealed orders that had been passed to every master and above in the Mediterranean, as well as to the every subject court across the coast, with the strict admonition that the seal would be checked, repeatedly, even though the code sheets for their contents were in this very box, and without them the orders would be incomprehensible.
If action were to need to be taken, it might well need to be taken as quickly as was humanly possible, and HM had given DuPuy authority that no man subject to the king should have: to commandeer any man or force, royal or ducal, navy or army, into service under the command of Grand Admiral Sir Simon Tremaine DuPuy, by the Grace of God and Appointment of His Majesty, Mordred V, the Commander in Chief of all of His Majesty's Forces.
"Use the tools you need to do the job, Admiral," the king had said. He hadn't mentioned that to pick up this set of tools would have huge risks, and horrible consequences, even if they were properly used. Strip away what there was of the Med Fleet? Take the King's Own and Red Watch from Gibraltar and leave Gibbie ripe for the plucking by the Portugees or the Dar—or possibly the Portugees and the Dar? Strip away the Duke of Napoli's forces and thereby persuade the Sharif of Tunisia that he could now conquer his way up the peninsula, planting his filthy foot on Crown territory and reinforcing with the endless swarm of soldiers that the Dar had at its disposal, while the Empire swept down from the north?
Any of that could happen.
Any of that could be why al-Bakalani was being so bloody helpful.
No. DuPuy would continue as he had, as long as he could, until he had more than clues and suspicions, but certainty, and a way of dealing with that certainty. And that he had sent more and better men than the likes of Sir Simon Tremaine DuPuy to their deaths bothered him, and would again, well, if that interrupted his sleep, that would be his problem.
DuPuy locked the box, trembling, then put the key back around his neck, downed his coffee, and spent the annoying moments covering and sealing the map before he went up to take the air.
The damned cabin, despite the good salt air flowing through the portholes, was too stuffy.
Again.