Frequently Asked Questions

Okay, I haven't read the entire thread about the possibility of additional "secret brotherhoods," but the dispute going on in it is one reason I said that I didn't really want to get into the history that I ended up giving you in response to another question. On the other hand, maybe it's a good thing I did, because you have pointed me at a couple of problems which I'm pretty sure (comparing my rough drafts to final versions) were introduced in the copy editing process. Mind you, one of them is at least partly my own fault.

I'm not going to talk here about whether or not there might or might not be other "secret brotherhoods" out there in the weeds somewhere. I will say that if there ever had been one and if it ever had come to the notice of Mother Church and been dealt with, Clyntahn certainly would have known about it and would undoubtedly already have labeled all of the Reformists as heretics who probably had been exposed to the same pernicious lies Grand Inquisitor Stomp Them out had been forced to deal with however many centuries earlier. IF any similar "secret heresy" had ever been discovered, the Church would be watching for others like a hawk.

Having told you what I'm not going to tell you, let us now continue.

One of the problems I've discovered as a consequence of the discussion about "secret brotherhoods "— and the one which wasn't my fault (except in as much as I failed to catch the change when I went through the copyedited manuscript — is the dating in Saint Zherneau's journal. I should clarify things a little bit by pointing out that I've had problems with my Tor copy editor on every one of these books so far. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of technical terms used in the books (as, for example, were sailing ships are concerned) and that Off Armageddon Reef was my first Tor novel. As a result, I didn't have a "history" with any of their copy editors, and their copy editors didn't have an "author's stylesheet" on me. For those not familiar with the editing process, a stylesheet is a set of notes for the copy editor telling him (or her) how the author's style differs from the "standard." All of us differ at least somewhat, and in fairness, I'm rather less "standard" than most. I won't say that that explains all of the problems I've had, because, frankly, it doesn't, and the process has been very frustrating for me in some respects. (For example, in one of the books the copy editor decided that I couldn't possibly be speaking of "white horses" sweeping across a bay. The fact that a "white horse" describes a very specific type of wave formation obviously eluded him. So he changed it to "white houses" sweeping across the bay. Exactly how having a house float across the bay was better than having a horse do the same thing eluded me, so I went ahead and changed it back, but this is the sort of thing I've been dealing with.) Mind you, they've caught a lot of things which were errors, and I won't pretend that they haven't. At the same time, the irritation quotient for some of the more . . . less than brilliant changes, shall we say, has been high. At any rate, all of my manuscripts have come back with a lot of copy editor marginal notations, queries, "corrections" (the majority of which I've reversed), etc. My point here being that there are so many of them that they have a tendency to blur together and things get lost in the underbrush.

One such thing which got "lost" was the fact that the copy editor had taken it upon himself (or herself) to "reconcile" the dates in Saint Zherneau's Journal, and I didn't notice it until after the book was printed. He assumed (or she assumed; I don't know who it was) that if Jeremy Knowles was writing in the 140th year since the Creation, that he also had to be writing in the 140th Year of God, or vice versa, and made the dates "fit." That is the reason for the discrepancy in the journal's internal dating. So far, you guys have seen only a handful of words out of his entire journal, none of which include his version of the extended fighting lumped together as "Shan-wei's Rebellion" by official Church rheology and history. If I'd included more of that information at that time the copy editor might not have taken it upon himself to "reconcile" the dates, since it would (hopefully) have injected an awareness of the times and dates involved in the process. On the other hand, given some of the other things that have been changed, I wouldn't want to bet anything important on the possibility.

Okay, the discrepancy in the dating on Nimue's "wake-up call" is more complicated than that, and reflects two errors, one mine and one the copy editor's. The book as published says that Nimue is set to wake up 750 years after Pei Kau-yung's decapitation of the command crew. It then has her waking up in the Year of God 890. Now, 750 standard years is approximately 824 Safehold years so, if we assume that we're dating from the beginning of Shan-wei's Rebellion, not the end, and that it took approximately 60 standard years after the Creation for that rebellion to begin, the number 890 is about right. After all, 60 standard years are about 66 Safehold years, and 66 plus 824 equals 890.

The problem is that in my original manuscript (checked from my file copy on the hard drive) Pei Kau-yung says to her "I've set the timer to activate this . . . depot, I suppose, eight hundred and twenty-five standard years after I complete this recording." Originally, I had intended to date from the Creation; I changed my mind about that when I was around 75% of the way through the first book. At that point, I decided that there'd been a war of succession among the surviving members of Langhorne's command group, that there needed to be more time for that to take place, and that the Church would begin dating from the end of that war. It seemed to me that adding 75 standard years or so to my timeline would cover things.

(As an aside, some people seem to be assuming that the aforesaid war of succession started as soon as Langhorne was killed; actually, it took a few years for the tensions among the survivors to reach the point of open conflict, at which point a very complicated situation [which I am not going to go into at this time] came about in the various enclaves. Those of you who are assuming the general use of advanced weapons are mistaken. As far as the command crew were concerned, there was a lot of "taking to the hills," hiding from each other, ambushing each other, etc., but all of the surviving command crew were dedicated to the notion that the Church of God had to be preserved, at least in the short term, and they were very careful about the terms in which they couched the conflict among the "mortal" factions in the enclaves and about using "divine weapons" even against other mortals. I'm not saying there wasn't any use of advanced weapons; only that those weapons weren't in general use.)

Getting back to the dating conflict.

At any rate, there I was, having changed my original plan three quarters or so of the way through the first book. As I say, I had originally had Commodore Pei set the timer for 750 standard years before I decided to add the additional 75 years and have him set it for 825 standard years, instead. I changed the text to reflect that change. Unfortunately, I apparently didn't remember to change the standard year dating on Nimue's "wake-up scene." I had intended to move it up from 3249 to 3324 to reflect the extra 75 years of Nimue’s nap, but checking my file copy of the rough draft, I found that I actually left it at the original 3249. When the copy editor came along, he "checked my math" using the unchanged header dates for the two scenes and came up with the original 750 years between them. He then changed the "eight hundred and twenty-five standard years" in Kau-yung's final message to Nimue to match the header dates. Now, in fairness to the copy editor, 750 is a much "rounder" number than 825; I'd originally used that number (before the change) and it worked very well with the rest of the text; he did have the interval between the dates I had changed to indicate that there was a problem between the text and the dates; and he probably specifically noted and queried the change on the manuscript. Unfortunately, probably largely because he didn't have that stylesheet I mentioned above, he was also marking everything else in sight, querying word choices, querying nonstandard grammatical usages, changing completely correct grammar that apparently didn't match his usage manual, even rewriting some of the sentences entirely (remember those white houses?). My point is that while there isn't any excuse for my not having noticed if he did, in fact, note the change from 825 to 750, it's very probable that I simply "lost it in the underbrush."

The way that it actually works is that approximately 70 standard years (around 77 Safehold years) elapsed between the Day of Creation and the end of Shan-wei's Rebellion. As of How Firm a Foundation, the date is Year of God 895, and it's been 979 Safehold years since the Creation. Nimue's last update was in year 54 after the Creation (16 years before the end of the Rebellion, if any of you are counting), and she woke up in Year of God 890, 906 or so Safehold years later, which is roughly the 825 standard years to which I had changed the date in the first book. The fact that my change got "corrected" back to 750 in the copy editing process accounts for the confusion. Unfortunately, I wasn't aware of the problem until you people started checking the math. I had to go back and reconstruct what had happened by comparing my electronic file of the original draft for Off Armageddon Reef against the printed version to figure out what had happened. And, since I already have the 70 year interval between the Creation and the end of Shan-wei's Rebellion in How Firm A Foundation and it's too late to adjust it at this point, I'm going to have to figure out how (or if) to deal with it for the general readership who might/might not pick out what you eagle eyed . . . people have picked up on.

No, you don't mean that the events are "incredulous," you mean that you are "incredulous." I believe the word that you actually wanted was "incredible," as in impossible/difficult to credit. [G]

If you do, then you do, and there have been events in books I have otherwise very much enjoyed over which I have been incredulous, or at least left considering that they represented major plot holes. In this case, though, I don't think that "no one in government had a real clue what was going to happen" is precisely accurate. They knew perfectly well that something — and something they weren't going to like one bit — was going to happen. They knew that the Temple loyalists were organizing an anti-Stohnar movement, they knew it was aimed at the overthrow of the Republic, and they knew the basic structure and shape of the agit-prop being used to fuel it. They even knew enough about the nature and shape of the Sword of Schueler to have deployed more of their available strength in the capital than it turned out they could afford to protect the Charisian Quarter. What they didn't know was exactly when/how soon the attacks would kick off, although they clearly had enough warning for Stohnar and the seneschal to have coordinated plans for reinforcements to enter the city. Remember that Stohnar wasn't thinking "it may be days before the troops get here;" he was simply thinking that it was going to take time that he and the defenders of Protector's Palace were going to turn out not to have for the seneschal to complete the troop movements which had already been ordered and that they had underestimated the forces available to the attackers. There was, of course, an additional problem (which I'll probably address below) about how preemptive they could afford to be about what they did see coming.

As the situation in Siddarmark progresses, you may very well get a better look inside the admitted intelligence failure which led to the extent to which Stohnar and his most trusted allies in government were taken by surprise on The Day. You may not, too. I know what they were and why they occurred, but the reader won't find out about them unless the characters find out about about how they happened.

Now, as far as what Merlin and Charis knew and did not know.

Merlin was aware of what was going on in Siddarmark. He was also aware that the Lord Protector was aware of what was going on in Siddarmark. Neither Merlin nor the Lord Protector were aware of many of the details . . . including — and, indeed, especially — the execution date of the operation. And the reason they didn't that particular minor fact was that the folks on the ground responsible for carrying the operation out didn't know the execution date. I will give you a hint (and this may or may not be brought out in the books eventually) but if you'll recall there was another operation that Clyntahn wanted to correspond in time with the uprising in Siddarmark. And when he told Rayno that, Rayno pointed out that the schedule might have to be adjusted slightly. Until Rayno transmitted the actual execution order, the troops on the ground hadn't been told exactly when they would be ordered to move but it had been clearly (and deliberately) implied to them that it would not be until after winter had closed down the ability of the Lord Protector to move troops around to counterattack their successes. They were to be ready to rise against the "apostate traitors and Charisian lackeys" any time from late summer on, but the emphasis was placed on a rising later in the year as a cover against those infernally effective Charisian (and Siddarmarkian) spies Clyntahn and Rayno have been worrying about for quite some time now. (Hmmmm . . . I see I'm giving away some of those things the characters may/may not learn the books after all.)

There were, obviously, instructions in the pipeline that had to reach all of the various groups before they acted. One thing which I see I did not make sufficiently clear in Cayleb's mental summarization of what happened in Siddarmark, however, is that not all of these risings and attacks occurred simultaneously with one another. Looking at Cayleb's reflections on what happened, I can see where it could be reasonably assumed that they did, since Cayleb never reflects specifically that they didn't. In fact, however, the uprising in the capital was the first, and the order was transmitted to the Inquisition's agents in place using the Church's semaphore system (which is faster than anything on Safehold except Owl's coms . . . which, of course, Stohnar and his subordinate, local military commanders didn't have access to). As a result, the insurrectionists were inside Stohnar's communications loop, and would have been no matter what Merlin might or might not have been able to pass on to him the instant in which that order was transmitted from Rayno in Zion, inside the bubble which is closed to Owl's remotes, to the agents in place in Siddarmark. The orders to the other Inquisition "cells" which had been set up for the Sword went out in a cascade at the same time, which put all of them inside Stohnar's communications loop. In addition, there were standing orders about how cells were supposed to react when news of "spontaneous uprisings" elsewhere reached them. And, you may recall, at the very moment that all of this was happening, Merlin was rather occupied down in Delferahk. His ability to go gadding about in Siddarmark — even as Zhevons — was . . . restricted.

The bottom line, however, is that Merlin and Co. were focused on the consequences of the Rakurai and Charis, on operations against Desnair, and on getting Irys and Daivyn out of Delferahk. They knew that Stohnar knew Clyntahn and Rayno were using the Inquisition and the Levelers to foment unrest/rebellion/insurrection. There really wasn't anything they could have told him (that he didn't already know) without at the very least raising questions they couldn't answer about how they might have come to know it and how they could conceivably be moving information around that rapidly. Don't forget their problems communicating with Coris in Delferahk in some explainable fashion. And, of course, they knew Aivah Pahrsahn also had an eye on the situation and was making plans of her own. I suppose I could've dwelt on that awareness of theirs at an earlier point at I did. For example, I could've actually shown you Aivah training her riflemen on her various farming operations. I could have actually shown you a discussion between members of one of the Inquisition's cells. There were a lot of things I could have shown you, but I decided I'd rather have the reader wondering about the same things Stohnar and his henchmen were wondering about.

To be honest, from a writer's perspective, Merlin's ability to find things out can be a distinct liability, not so much from a plot perspective as from a storytelling perspective. It's hard to legitimately blindside (I mean, of course, "surprise") the reader when one of the characters in the story, not simply the narrator, becomes effectively omniscient. If I write a scene in which I deliberately distort what Merlin "knows" in order to . . . misdirect the reader's attention, I'm not playing fair with the reader. In effect, I'm lying to him, and he has every right to feel cheated when he realizes that I did. At the same time, if I tell him everything that's coming before it happens, then I'm shortchanging him. So sometimes what has to happen is that I simply don't tell the reader at all before the event takes place. In some cases I may go back and explain to the reader how that happened, what people actually knew or didn't know that the reader wasn't told about at the time, or how something fell through the cracks without being picked up upon at all. Sometimes that doesn't happen, either.

I will say this. Even if Merlin had had access to Clyntahn's entire playbook, and even if he'd handed that information over to Stohnar (assuming there was some way he could possibly explain how he'd come into possession of it . . . and how he could expect Stohnar to believe that such an incredible treasure trove of information wasn't deliberate disinformation on Charis' part, designed to draw him into an open break with the Church), Stohnar could not have prevented very much what happened from happening anyway. He couldn't openly challenge what the Inquisition was doing ahead of time without an open breach with the Church. In fact, he couldn't be positive that that wasn't what Clyntahn was really after: creating a situation in which Stohnar became the aggressor against Mother Church, exactly as Clyntahn had been warning his colleagues in the vicarate was inevitably going to happen one day. That's the main reason he had to be so cautious about troop movements and warning orders before the nickel actually dropped; the last thing he could afford was to give Clyntahn a plausible (or even semi-plausible) provocatory pretext. So there was very little he could do prophylactically that he hadn't already done, and as long as he wasn't in a position to take powerful, suppressive action — with an army he could be certain would take his orders to move preemptively against Mother Church in the middle of Mother Church's first true jihad — there was no way he could take the initiative away from Clyntahn. When you add to that that Clyntahn and Rayno had succeeded in confusing him as to the actual timing of the Sword, perhaps you begin to see how the situation could go as far south as it went.

I deliberately structured the book so that all of this came at the reader fast and hard — and so that the extent of Clyntahn's success clearly came as a surprise both to Stohnar and his supporters and to Charis. Hopefully, as the conflict in Siddarmark comes to be more fully developed in the next book, some of the factors leading up to the deliberately administered shock factor at the end of this one will become fully developed, as well.

I'm sorry? I'm painting too pessimistic a picture? Gosh, and here I thought I was the one person who actually knows who's building what, where, and why! [G]

More seriously, I don't know why you think I'm painting too pessimistic a picture. What I'm saying is that Charis does not have an unlimited cornucopia of production capacity; that the Church's capacity is higher than some people seem to be assuming; and that the Church's strategists are not all idiots who are going to fail to recognize (a) strategic opportunities and (b) strategic necessities (as in "necessary for our survival, you idiot!" necssities). I don't believe I ever indicated that the Church wasn't going to experience some of those ugly times in Siddarmark of her very own, either.

The Church is not going to drop dead tomorrow; there is still a huge reservoir of religious and political loyalty to the Church even in the provinces which remained loyal to Stohnar; between them, the continents still have an enormous aggregate productive capability (which may or may not be in the process of being successfully tapped); and no matter how qualitatively superior your forces may be, you still need a sufficient quantity of them if you intend to maintain sufficient force density for a strategy of persistence to work.

It might be worthwhile to consider just what Charis' strategic options ultimately are.

Most satisfying to the reader and to Charisians in general, undoubtedly, would be Cayleb and Sharleyan dictating terms to the Church of God Awaiting in the smoldering ruins of Zion, surrounded by their victorious army. Of course, the question is where they get an army big enough to do that.

There are two basic strategic approaches: raiding and persistence. You can apply either a raiding or a persistent approach to almost any strategic equation; the one a successful strategist chooses is dictated by his tactical tools, his strategic resources, the exact nature of his objective, and how well the force he can project matches up with the opposition he faces.

In a raiding strategy, you operate by launching attacks (which are hopefully carefully targeted) on your opponent's critical resources, thus weakening him to the point at which he collapses or at least is forced to accede to your demands. In this type of strategy you don't seek to occupy your enemy's territory on a permanent basis. Instead, you're concentrating on in-and-out operations as precisely aimed as you can manage to inflict crippling damage. A strict naval blockade which cripples your opponent's economy or starves your opponent's population is also an example of a raiding, rather than a persisting, strategy, despite the fact that it requires a long-term commitment of your forces.

In a persisting strategy, you physically occupy enemy territory, either to compel him to counterattack you to regain critical resources (population, oil, food, whatever), or to establish your permanent control over it by replacing the government or groups which previously controlled it (the English policy in building castles all over Wales would be an example of that sort of strategy).

The two types of strategy can be combined. For example, the Union was waging a persisting strategy against the Confederacy, since its objective was ultimately to physically occupy (or reoccupy, if you want to adopt that terminology) the states which had seceded. Grant pursued a persistent strategy in his Western campaigns and in his drive into Virginia with the Army of the Potomac in the last months of the war; his operational objective was the Army of Northern Virginia, but only because its destruction would give him his ultimate strategic objective of conquering the Confederacy's critical territory. Sherman, on the other hand, pursued a raiding campaign in his March to the Sea. Arguably, he was pursuing a persisting strategy until he actually took Atlanta, although I think even then he was basically following a raiding strategy, but his march from Atlanta to Savannah was clearly a raiding strategy, aimed at destroying the logistical support base for Lee’s army and also at destroying Confederate morale, rather than remaining in place and permanently occupying the territory upon which his army stood at any given moment.

The problem with a persisting strategy is that you have to be able to achieve a favorable ratio between the area to be persistently occupied and the forces available to occupy it. Put another way, you have to have sufficient density of force to cope with opposition to your presence, which may come in the form of organized hostile armies, or simply a hostile presence conducting either organized or freelance guerrilla warfare against you, or (even more ominously) a combination of the two.

The Group of Four hoped for a situation in which Corisande would become a hotbed of resistance to Charisian occupation. That was a major factor in Clyntahn's assassination of Hektor and his older son — the hope he could so inflame the Corisandian population by murdering a popular monarch that popular resistance would lead to Charisian overreaction which would, in turn, lead to still more resistance. The way he saw it, if everything worked properly, Charis' military "conquest" of Corisande would become a deadly trap from which it could not extract itself (à la Napoleon in Spain). At the very least, he hoped for a "quagmire" situation which would impose a steady, debilitating drain on Charisian resources. It was only Cayleb's and Sharleyan's careful management of the situation, coupled with the existence (in Anvil Rock and Tartarian) of a power bloc with Corisande's best interests (as opposed to the Group of Four's best interests) at heart, which prevented that from happening.

(As an aside, it also forced a situation in which no one in Corisande has yet sworn loyalty to the Crown of Charis as Charisians. They have sworn loyalty to Prince Daivyn as Hektor's heir, and they have sworn obedience to the Crown of Charis, but they are still Corisandians and not Charisians, which was not what Cayleb had in mind when he invaded. If Hektor had lived, he would have been required to swear the same oath Nahrmahn had sworn and which Gorjah was later required to swear, but Daivyn has not yet sworn that oath, leaving Corisande's relationship with the Empire unresolved. That may ultimately actually prove beneficial to both Corisande and Charis, but it could also still very well go the other way. And Cayleb's intention of extracting that oath of fealty from Hektor, by the way, was another reason why it would have been remarkably stupid for him to have Hektor killed before he could swear it . . . a point Earl Coris is going to be making to Irys and Daivyn in the not too distant future, I suspect.)

To return to my main thread, however. If the Corisandian situation had not been handled with extraordinary care, by a viceroy who'd been carefully selected, and if there hadn't been a competent, sane group of candidates for a Regency Council (and candidates who strongly doubted that Cayleb had actually ordered Hektor's assassination in the first place), Clyntahn would have gotten what he wanted. He very nearly got it anyway, only it came not in the form of the general uprising and insurrection he'd hoped and aimed for, but rather in the form of an aristocratic plot and cabal . . . which, in turn, lent itself to being identified as such when the conspirators were arrested, tried, and executed. Sharleyan and the Regency Council managed to accurately portray it as a top-down plot orchestrated by self-seeking opportunist, rather than a popular uprising. Another factor which worked critically in Charis' favor in Corisande, was the strength of the underlying Reformist attitudes of a significant percentage of the Corisandian population. In regard to that factor, it's also worth noting that despite Clyntahn's best efforts, the "religious fervor" quotient of the jihad hadn't been cranked up in Corisande to anywhere near the strength he desired before Charis was able to get in and defeat Hektor in what just about everyone recognized was actually the final stage of a secular conflict which had been initiated by Hektor. (It has been ratcheted up to very nearly those levels in most of the mainland realms by now, however; also a factor in Our Heroes'™ thinking.) If those factors hadn't broken in Charis' favor, then even with the advantage of Merlin's SNARCs, it is highly unlikely that Charis could have found the manpower to hold down Corisande in the face of a general resistance while simultaneously continuing the buildup of its navy and an army which could possibly afford to divert any of its deployable strength to the mainland.

What would have been a serious problem in Corisande (whose population was roughly 49% that of the combined populations of Old Charis, Chisholm, and Emerald) would become a nightmare on the mainland, where the population (even excluding Siddarmark from the equation) would be 10.6 times the entire population of all the territory currently controlled by Charis. (As a relative yardstick, Germany in 1941 had a population of 110,000,000 in all of its home and occupied territories while the USSR's population in all of its home and occupied territories was 181,000,000, or a ratio of only approximately 1.65-to-1, and we all know how well that worked out. The ratio for a Charisian Empire trying to occupy the mainland would be 6.5 times worse than that, although a Siddarmarkian alliance would help those numbers somewhat.)

From a combat perspective, Charis might well be able to hack numbers like that, if it can stay sufficiently far ahead of the mainland in terms of quality of weapons and if the evolving nature of its industry allows it to free up a significantly higher proportion of its far lower overall manpower totals. From a persisting perspective, however, Charis is hopelessly outnumbered. It doesn't matter if you have Abrams tanks and M-16s while the opposition has only 1903 Springfields and horsed cavalry if you cannot deploy your forces in sufficient density to prevent those mounted troops from using those Springfields to shoot up your supply convoys and massacre anyone in the countryside who show signs of supporting The Heretical, Demon-Worshiping, Baby-Eating Occupation™. You just can't be in enough places at once.

That's the real problem Charis faces with imposing any sort of permanent, lasting peace on the Church. Unless Clyntahn's excesses become sufficiently blatant, and/or unless the propaganda being distributed by Merlin's remotes can (a) succeed in distinguishing between the Group of Four and the Church in the minds of a majority of Safeholdians outside the Empire and (b) actually convince the majority of Safeholdians outside the Empire that the propagandists are telling the truth in the first place, the level of bone-deep resistance from the bulk of the mainland population will be widespread, powerful, and probably inextinguishable. As a case in point, I give you British efforts in Ireland, which was an island surrounded (and isolated from outside support) by the most powerful navy in the world, rather than the entire continent of North America and Europe and Asia and India and — well, perhaps you see my point. [G]

Even if Charis succeeds in toppling the Group of Four, or even if the Group of Four is removed from power by some internal faction within the Church, so long as faith in the archangels persists, the Church, and not Charis, holds all the trump cards in creating and sustaining the sort of moral authority and support which can (and will) inevitably defeat any Charisian effort at occupation or the installation of "puppet regimes" which can be delegitimized by the Church. The Brits couldn't defeat Gandhi in India without resorting to tactics which would have delegitimized Great Britain in the eyes of the world and — even more importantly — its own population. Charis would face very much the same situation on the mainland, following even a crushing outright military victory, despite the fact that readers would realize that, ultimately, it was actually Charis which held the moral high ground.

Cayleb, Sharleyan, Merlin, and their advisers are all aware of this. At the moment, while they are absolutely dedicated to the defeat and destruction of the Group of Four, they recognize that in the long-term they're fighting for survival and to provide a base from which an effort to eventually successfully debunk the entire theology of the archangels can be waged. Ultimately, they recognize that they cannot defeat the Church of God Awaiting by force of arms. They may be able to defeat the Group of Four and hopefully clear the way for a Reformist takeover of the main Church, but that's really the best they can shoot to accomplish militarily.

In the long term, a Charisian Empire which is able (thanks to its access to Merlin and Owl) to stay ahead of the curve of industrialization and technology uplift would probably present a challenge to the Church's more moribund technology which would result in the gradual decay of the Church's authority to forbid change and control thought. Of course, that supposes that the kinetic bombardment system can somehow be taken out of play.

I'm not saying that there aren't factors that could dramatically change the strategic realities of Safehold in a relatively short timeframe. For example (and I'm not saying this is going to happen), if it should happen that a handful of "archangels" were to awaken under the Temple and ride out to smite the ungodly in their kyousei hi only to be shot down by Merlin's recon skimmer, the archangels' prestige would be severely dented. Even then, however, the Church might not be turned against them, since according to the Church's own history of Shan-wei's Rebellion, many angels and archangels were "slain" in the fighting.

Nor am I saying that the removal of the Group of Four wouldn't bring the present war to a conclusion, because it almost certainly would lead to at least a temporary break in the fighting. But what happens then? If the Church of Charis immediately denounces Langhorne and his fellow archangels, the war begins again instantly, and on a far more ugly basis, with the Reformists who might have thought reasonably well of the Church of Charis faced with the incontrovertible truth that Clyntahn was right all along in denouncing the Charisians as heretics of the worst possible stripe. And, if the Church of Charis doesn't immediately denounce Langhorne and his fellow archangels, the presumably Reformed Church gradually reasserts its control over the faithful since the Holy Writ itself defines the proper state of affairs as a theocracy in which the secular realms are controlled by the Church. It may well be that the Church of Charis is recognized as equally holy, possibly even a recognized branch of Mother Church, when the smoke clears, but the pressure for the schism to be healed and the ascendancy of Mother Church will still gradually regenerate a level of hostility between the Empire and the mainland realms.

To attain Merlin's goals, Charis has to sweep the board. It has to militarily defeat the Group of Four; it has to permanently defang the bombardment platform's threat to re-emergent technology; and it has to permanently and effectively destroy the theological and doctrinal basis of the Church of God Awaiting. Even having the Republic of Siddarmark fully restored to pre-Sword of Schueler status and firmly allied with the Charisian Empire won't accomplish any of those goals. A Siddarmarkian alliance, even with a grievously wounded Republic, may be a major step in the direction of those goals, but there is a very, very long road between where Charis is right now and where it needs to be to redeem Merlin's promise to Pei Kau-yung and Pei Shan-wei's memories.

There are things going on, especially in Charis, that I haven't been telling you about primarily because of space limitations. However difficult it may be to believe this, I've actually been trying not to bury the reader in too much "Hey, isn't this neat?" rediscovery of technology, so quite a few things have been happening offstage. (I haven't told you about the sea dragoning industry of Charis, either, at least until the current book, and I haven't really discussed distillation processes available, or crop yields, or quite a few things which have a pronounced significance for where Safehold is going . . . and can go.)

In the current book, Amid Toil and Tribulation, you're going to meet some of the other faculty members of the Royal College, most of whom have been there all along, doing their things — and, in some cases, being added to the inner circle — even though I haven't spent a whole bunch of time with them. For example, Doctor Dahnel Vyrnyr, who's been working out gas and pressure laws, with an occasional small assist from certain parties. And you haven't begun to see everything that even some of the people you have met have been up to. For example, Rahzhyr Mahklyn and Sir Dustyn Olyvyr (who is now a member of the inner circle) have been working on applying mathematics to calculations of sail area, stability, displacement, metacentric height, prismatic coefficients, etc. Ehdwyrd Howsmyn's senior engineers and artificers have been applying more of the new math in planning the construction of new canal systems, designing pumps to extract water from deep mine galleries, etc.. Primitive hydraulics have been a part of Safeholdian plumbing basically since the Creation (I did give you just a hint of some of that in Manchyr in the last book), and combined with Doctor Vyrnyr's work, much more advanced applications are quickly becoming available. Even before Howsmyn came along, Safehold's basic metallurgy was rather more advanced than many of you seem to have been assuming, as well, even before Nimue Alban woke up. Production techniques were suited only to relatively small volume quantities, but the alloys themselves (mostly, again, because of "recipes" left by the Archangels) were quite good. In Post-Merlin Charis, of course, Houseman, especially with Owl to help him out, has been pushing metallurgy even harder, especially in terms of production but also in terms of quality, and is, in fact, in the process of introducing nickel steel. (Safehold's known how to extract nickel — in relatively small quantities — from laterite soils for a long time; it just didn't have a lot of use for it . . . until now. Oh, and while I'm on the subject, for you metallurgists out there, Safehold in general and Charis in particular has used "red lead" as a pigment in paints for a long, long time. I understand that one of Howsmyn's ironmasters is presently experimenting with heating its oxide in a charcoal oven for some reason, though. Not sure where that might lead, of course. [G]) And then there's "stone wool" . . . a.k.a. chrysotile, whose production and use is permitted by the Archangels, although hedged about with various laws to minimize the worst of the potential health consequences.

In general, you can think of Howsmyn's metallurgy as approaching very nearly to the capabilities of, say, 1900, with the proviso that his "power budget" is still limited. As he acquires the capability to supply ever greater amounts of power and apply it in ever more sophisticated fashion, his capabilities will increase geometrically. And, of course, he's currently building at least two additional industrial works, each of which are ultimately intended to be at least as productive as his Delthak Works.

I think people persist in thinking that they've successfully pigeonholed Safehold's technical sophistication without realizing that there is a difference between process and understanding. For example, Safeholdians understand the process of pasteurization — called Pasqualization, on Safehold — even though they don't really understand why it works. It's a "dispensation of the Archangel," just as the use of pressure cookers and canned (mostly in glass, not metal) food preservation is something "taught by the Archangels." And I trust you did notice when we were visiting Manchyr and the last book that they use rubber gaskets in their plumbing? Safeholdian agriculture understands four-crop rotation, fertilizers, and other "advanced" farming techniques (although there are still some curious holes in what they know), but it's all applied by hand, fertilizers are manufactured in "kitchen sink" quantities, nitrates are mined (think Chilean saltpeter) and nobody's ever heard of Wilhelm Ostwald, etc. In other areas, the porcelain and ceramic producers of Safehold long ago developed/were gifted with pyrometers which allowed them to measure and gauge temperatures far more precisely — and at significantly higher levels — than I suspect most readers are allowing for . . . which has significant consequences in metallurgy, as well (for obvious reasons), once people like Howsmyn begin applying them. Indeed, for those among you of a historical bent in naval matters, the term "Howsmynized" is going to find itself applied to armor plate produced at the Delthak Works in the not too distant future. (There's a reason, other than a desire to rehabilitate the name "Houseman” for a friend of mine, that I gave Howsmyn his name. It seemed to form a not-too-convoluted homage to Hayward Augustus Harvey.)

Safehold is not seventeenth-century Earth, or even eighteenth-century Earth, despite the relative primitivism of aspects of its capabilities — like artillery, small arms, sailing ships — at the time Merlin comes on the scene. There are, in fact, large reservoirs of capability built into existing Safeholdian processes, and the planet has some truly stupendous engineering works in the form of canals and high-quality transportation networks. (You might want to remember Earl Coris' thoughts during his journey to Zion and the sophistication of the transport arrangements which were made in his case.) In many ways, even before Merlin came along, Safehold was beginning to "slip through the cracks" of the proscriptions in places other than Charis alone, and that's one of the things that makes the rest of Safehold still quite dangerous to Charis despite Charisian innovations in productivity. The reason Merlin, Howsmyn, Cayleb, and others keep talking about the absolute productivity of the rest of Safehold is because it's actually quite significant, despite its limitation to wind, water, fire, and muscle power. In many ways, all that the Royal College needs to do is to determine the underlying principles governing things Safeholdians have been doing for centuries and to codify them to kick off a genuine scientific revolution . . . and that's precisely what it's been doing.

Now, that doesn't mean Merlin, the inner circle, and Owl aren't cheating just a bit. [G] For example, a native Safeholdian, not a member of the inner circle, came up with the concept of the "crush gauge" for measuring bore pressures in artillery pieces. Obviously, the inner circle was delighted with it, and that "mathematical genius" Mahklyn and some of his students helped handle the math for it. But in addition to that, Owl produced the base, indexing copper inserts for the gauges and substituted them for the ones which had been produced on the shop floor at the Delthak Works, with the result that the pressures which can be extrapolated from later crush gauge tests happen to be quite amazingly accurate. And the ballistic pendulum has also been invented (math courtesy of the Royal College), which means the Imperial Charisian Navy is able to measure bore pressures and muzzle velocities with the same degree of accuracy that was possible here on Earth prior to the introduction of electricity-based measuring instruments. You think that's not going to have an impact on the design of artillery and small arms? Machine tools — especially Howsmyn's — remain clunky and huge and bulky because they have to operate under direct drive power from (currently) hydro-sources, but the precision of what they can turn out has advanced very significantly. Tolerances in the Delthak Works are achieving a degree of precision people probably aren't thinking about, and Howsmyn's tool steels are attaining early twentieth-century levels of quality.

As I say, there are lots of things going on, and I will simply add for those of you out there who are really into steam plants and steam engineering that Safeholdian riveting, welding, and metallurgy — at least as practiced by one Edwyrd Howsmyn at his Delthak Works, and coming soon to another Charisian foundry complex near you — is sufficient and adequate to produce watertube boilers operating at pressures of up to around 290-300 psi. What that means for, oh, triple expansion engines, shall we say, I leave for your own consideration.

Couple of points. Well, three points, actually. [G]

First, the hull is very nearly rectangular. This is a converted canal/river barge, not an oceanic hull, which is the main reason such an absurdly overpowered hull isn’t capable of more than 17-18 mph in calm water.

Secondly, 951 metric tons is 1,048.3 short tons, which are the only tons available on Safehold, courtesy of Eric Langhorne, and it was short tons I was citing, so the difference in tonnage from my figures to your “rectangular hull” is only 151 tons, or roughly 7.5%, which very probably occurred in my original rounding and is close enough for me to feel perfectly happy using.

Third, the 6” BL gun you cite is a heck of a lot bigger than the gun I am citing. Your gun was a 6”/44 — that is, it was 44 calibers long, making the tube right on 22’ long; the 6” for the river class are black powder weapons, and longer tubes don’t give black powder cannon the same velocity advantage they give with nitro cellulose propellants because of the difference in burn time. A black powder weapon gives all of its acceleration almost instantly; after that point, friction with the barrel liner becomes a factor (especially in rifled guns, with their reduced windage) which actually reduces muzzle velocity in a longer tube. The 6” BL for the River class is a 6”/18, with a 9’ tube, just over 40% the length of your weapon, and a muzzle velocity of roughly 1,350 fps compared to the 2,700+ fps of the 6” you cite. Total weight of the gun on a wooden truck carriage is only about 2.5 tons and the new mount is based on the Marsilly carriage with a very simple hydro-pneumatic recoil system, so total weight per piece is only going to be in the 4-ton range. I also gave you 2 too many gun ports per broadside in my original notes (I forgot I’d shifted 4 broadside guns to bow and stern positions when I went with a homogenous 30-pounder/6” armament on a 140’ hull rather than having a single 8” fore and aft on a 160’ hull as in my original rough design), so the actual total armament is 22 guns, not 26, giving a weight of around 104 tons, not 195.

Armor (I’m shooting from memory here, rather than going back and hunting up my exact calculations) works out at about 280 tons, hull structure works out at around 250 tons, guns come in at about 100, and machinery (with all liquids aboard) is about 250 tons, for a total of 880 tons, or 1,360 with 480 tons of coal on board. I allowed myself the extra 160 tons as a wiggle-room number, given that all of the figures are approximations. (Besides, I thoght “twelve hundred tons” sounded better than “thirteen hundred and sixty tons,” so I exercised a little authorial license. [G])

If the weight of the machinery seems low, I would point out that the triple-expansion machinery of USS Maine (6,650 long tons [7,448 short tons]; 1895; fire tube boilers; 135 psi steam; trial speed 17.45 Old Earth knots [20.08 Safeholdian knots]) weighed about 700 short tons, whereas these ships have double expansion machinery, small water tube boilers, and 290 psi steam, so the 250 tons number is actually probably high. The third cylinder — the one these ships don’t have — is usually around 3 times the diameter of the first cylinder, so the weight of the engines themselves is cut approximately in half, while Maine had 8 boilers, all of which were bigger and heavier than any of these ships’ 4 boilers.

As another indicator of the difference between water tube and fire tube boilers, the weight of HMS Invincible's machinery (1907) was about 20% of her total displacement, or around 3,925 short tons, and developed 41,000 shaft horsepower. HMS Hood (designed 1917) devoted only 13% of her much greater displacement to machinery (around 6,800 short tons) but developed 144,000 SHP. This means that the earlier ship (with 31 fire tube boilers) developed 10.44 SHP per ton of machinery, whereas Hood (with only 24 water tube boilers and higher pressures) generated 21.22 SHP per ton of machinery, better than twice the efficiency. Both of these ships used turbines rather than reciprocating machinery (as in the River class or the Maine), but the decrease in weight per SHP (which was really pretty astonishing in only a decade) was due to the greater efficiency of the water tube boilers. That same efficiency curve, only greater, would be in play in comparing Maine's machinery weights to the River class'.

For anyone interested in real esoterica, USS Iowa's machinery weight in 1943 was 4,423.8 long tons (dry) and 4,815.8 long tons (with liquids) and generated 212,000 SHP. That comes to 39.3 SHP per short ton weight of machinery, which explains why a ship with a standard displacement 116% that of Hood was 10% faster than Hood's highest attained speed and 16% faster than her best speed in 1941. I don't know what Hood's steam conditions were, but Iowa's plant operated at 600 psi, which was 210% of the 280 psi of the Colorado class, the last USN BBs built before the Washington Naval Disarmament Treaty.

Returning to Safehold, one recurrent problem people seem to be having when they look at Safeholdian technology is an effort to pick a period of Old Earth technology and then use it as a yardstick for Safehold. The difficulty is that they appear to be picking the wrong periods rather than looking at the numbers I’m actually giving them, as when it was assumed in another post that Empress of Charis was basically a 16th century galleon with all guns on a single deck instead of, effectively, a 19th century double-banked frigate design. In this instance, for example, you were selecting guns which are much more advanced than (and more than twice as heavy as) the ones actually being mounted, while I suspect most people are looking at machinery weights in terms of around 1850-70 tech when they are actually far more comparable to those of around 1915 (USN service) in terms of steam pressures and weights and hence efficiency.