1636 The Kremlin Games – Snippet 32
Chapter 27
Andrei had it. He was sure now that after months of experimentation, he had the right chamber shape. The outside of the chamber was shaped like a long barn with a peaked roof. The inside, of course, was a round hole of the same size as the barrel. After the chamber was loaded, it simply inserted into the rifle, roof down and muzzle forward, which put the touch hole on the right side, aligned with the pan. He had tested it on the firing bench, fired dozens of rounds through it with no real problems. He reported to Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev that they were ready to go into production. Granted, Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev wasn’t the official person he was supposed to report to, but he was Andrei’s patron, so he was who Andrei told first.
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Midst Toil And Tribulation – Snippet 06
“That is not the story you’re going to hear from Shan-wei’s slaves and servants.” Lainyr told them. “Already Shan-wei’s claim that the prince and princess were ‘rescued’ rather than kidnapped has set its poisonous roots in the credulous soil of parts of Delferahk. In due time, no doubt, it will become the official lie spread by the so-called Charisian Empire and its eternally damned and accursed emperor and empress. Yet the truth is far different. The Earl of Coris, charged to protect the Prince and to guard his sister, instead sold them to the same Charisians who murdered their father in Corisande. Indeed, some evidence has emerged to suggest it was Coris who provided the blasphemer, excommunicate Cayleb’s assassins with the means to enter Manchyr without detection in the first place. The Inquisition and King Zhames’ investigators have yet to determine how he communicated with Cayleb and Sharleyan of Charis from Delferahk, yet the proof that he did is self-evident, for the ‘guardsmen’ King Zhames allowed him to recruit to protect the legitimate ruler of conquered, bleeding Corisande instead aided in his kidnapping.
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1636 The Kremlin Games – Snippet 31
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“Thank God,” Bernie said when Natasha handed him the latest batch of letters. “There wasn’t anything about plumbing in those books. I hope I’ve got an answer to that problem.” Natasha had made a rare foray into the kitchen, searching for him. He was having his usual sandwich lunch.
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War Maid’s Choice – Snippet 18
Still, he’d been confident of regaining all the ground he’d lost, and then some, when Tellian “surrendered” over four thousand of his men to less than eighty hradani. The hatred between the Sothōii and their hradani “neighbors” was deep as the sea and bitter as brine, and Tellian had passed up the perfect opportunity to ride down into the Horse Stealers’ lands and burn their cities behind them while their own warriors were off battling their Bloody Sword enemies. He’d been right there, poised to carry through the attack, with plenty of reinforcements available to follow his original spearhead down The Gullet. He could have destroyed “Prince” Bahnak’s alliance, prevented the Phrobus-damned abortion of a unified hradani “Confederation” on the Wind Plain’s very flank before it even began, and he’d let eighty of the barbarians stop him! And, even worse in some ways, he’d actually accepted the blasphemous claim that Tomanāk Orfro could conceivably have chosen a hradani as one of His champions! For that matter, he’d accepted Wencit of Rūm’s preposterous lie that it was the Sothōii who’d begun the millennium and more of bitter, brutal warfare between themselves and the hradani.
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Midst Toil And Tribulation – Snippet 05
.IV.
Gorath Cathedral,
City of Gorath,
Kingdom of Dohlar
“Therefore, with angels and the Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we glorify your glorious Name, evermore praising You and saying, holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, creator of all the world, Heaven and earth are full of Your glory. Glory be to You, O Lord, our maker. Amen.”
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1636 The Kremlin Games – Snippet 30
Chapter 26
“Why not an airplane, Pete?” Bernie asked.
“We’re not sure of the math, Bernie,” Petr Nickovich said, and then grinned when Father Kiril held up his cross as though fending off an evil. Father Kiril, Bernie had long since learned, was quite good at history, language and medicine. But math, especially algebra, gave him the heebie-jeebies.
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War Maid’s Choice – Snippet 17
“Wonderful,” Yeraghor said bitterly. “Things are bad enough the way they are. The last thing we need is Tellian getting Crown approval for that kind of boost to his revenues!”
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War Maid’s Choice – Snippet 16
We should have thought of it years ago, he reflected now, clasping his hands behind him as he strolled down the brink of the canal cut. Except for the minor matter of its being impossible until Bahnak came along!
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1636 The Kremlin Games – Snippet 29
Chapter 25
Moscow
September, 1632
The older he got, the less he slept. Filaret paced around his room, thinking. God had made his presence known. In that other history, Russian forces would even now be moving toward Smolensk and that whoreson, Sigismund III, would be dead this last half a year. That the war Filaret urged on Russia would have ended in disaster wasn’t something that the patriarch doubted, much as he wanted to. God had spoken though the histories of that other time.
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Midst Toil And Tribulation – Snippet 04
The treasurer’s stomach twisted with familiar nausea as he thought about the other reports, the ones Clyntahn hadn’t had time to “adjust.” The ones about the atrocities, the rapes, the murders not simply in the Republic’s communities of expatriate Charisians, but across its length and breadth. The churches burned with priests — even entire congregations — inside them because they carried the taint of “Reformism.” The food stores deliberately burned or contaminated — or outright poisoned — in the teeth of winter. The sabotage of canal locks, despite the Book of Langhorne‘s specific prohibitions, to prevent the western harvests from being transported to the eastern cities. Clyntahn could pass all of those off as “unfortunate excesses,” unintended but unhappily inevitable in the face of Mother Church’s loyal sons’ fully justified and understandable rage, but it had happened too broadly — and far too efficiently — not to have been carefully orchestrated by the same people who’d given the order for the uprisings in the first place.
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