He regretted the necessity of such stern measures, yet the need to win through to the truth had been too great to allow false mercy to stay his hand. And it would have been no kindness to the heretics themselves. Perhaps at least a few had repented at the very end, shown the eternal torment waiting for them by the foretaste of the Punishment’s rigor. It was never too late to return to the Faith and find the cleansing mercy of God. And if they hadn’t repented, by now they’d learned that anything they’d suffered at Mother Church’s loving hands had been but a shadow of the eternal price awaiting those who freely gave themselves into Shan-wei’s service.
Someone knocked on his cabin door, although calling this undersized closet a “cabin” seemed a gross exaggeration. The knock came again, quietly, and he laid his pen in the inkstand and sat back.
“Enter!”
The door opened to admit another Schuelerite upper-priest of about Seegairs’ age. Unlike Seegairs, the newcomer had a full head of dark hair and a close-cropped beard, and Seegairs knew him well. They’d been at seminary together, and trained as Inquisitors under Archbishop Wyllym’s own tutelage. Of course, he’d been only Father Wyllym at the time, but they’d known even then that he was destined to do great things in God’s service. So he had, and he’d remembered his students when the time came.
“What can I do for you, Vyktyr?” Seegairs asked, waving the newcomer into the only other chair.
“I have that report you asked for.” Father Vyktyr Tahrlsahn sat, leaned forward, and laid a folder on Seegairs’ desk. “I can’t say there’re any surprises.”
“I didn’t really expect any.” Seegairs shrugged. “On the other hand, given that our friend Father Mahkzwail appeared less than eager to cooperate with us, it seemed like a good idea to double-check what he told me in St. Vyrdyn against the supervisor’s estimates.”
“Do you really think he’d’ve dared lie to the Inquisition?”
“I don’t know.” Seegairs ran a hand over his shaved scalp, eyes dark. “Shan-wei hides in so many places—sometimes even in the hearts of men who have no idea she’s taken them for her own. Archbishop Lawrync, for example.” He lowered his hand and shook his head. “There’s a man on the very lip of hell, willing to give the Holy Inquisition itself orders that would have stayed our hand, left all those heretics and demon worshippers in Sarkyn undiscovered! But was it because he sympathized with them, or simply because of squeamishness, a desire to turn aside from the severity the Archangels demand in times like these? Did Shan-wei seduce him into active evil, or did she simply present herself in the guise of gentleness and mercy?”
“Schueler knows we’ve both seen enough of that,” Tahrlsahn agreed. “Like Father Myrtan. You know him, don’t you? Myrtan Byrk?”
“Fair-haired fellow, a little younger than you or me?”
“That’s him. He was with me when Vicar Zhaspahr sent me down to Gorath after those heretics Earl Thirsk tried to withhold. I’d always thought he had the true iron in him, but he kept urging me to go easy on them on the way back to Zion, kept whining about how sickly they were, how many of her own Shan-wei was claiming along the journey. He said it was because he wanted them to reach Zion alive to be properly sifted, but I’ve never really been sure.”
“It’s hard sometimes.” Seegairs sighed. “Hard for people who don’t have enough of Schueler’s iron in their souls, like Zhaikybs and Byrk, I mean. And maybe for Father Mahkzwail, too. That was why I wanted you to check.”
“The work crew supervisor says basically the same thing he did,” Tahrlsahn replied. “Despite everything Pottyr and the others did, the explosion really only destroyed the eastbound locks. In fact, three of the lock chambers are still intact even in the eastbound flight, and the westbound locks are already back in service. The explosion knocked out some of the pumps and fractured a couple of the main pipes, but the work crews could get to the damage fairly easily. The transfer lock’s still working, too, so they can shunt barges from one lane to the other. Traffic will be slowed, but they can take both directions’ barges through the westbound side until the other one’s fixed.”
“And the supervisor’s estimate on that?”
“Agrees with Father Mahkzwail’s.” Tahrlsahn shrugged. “The Sarkyn Locks aren’t on Vicar Rhobair’s list for prefabricated repair sections because they’re so far behind the front there seemed no way the heretics could get to them. The supervisor’s managed to shortstop timbers and other materials that were being sent forward to the Lake City stockpiles, though. It won’t be pretty, but he says he’s fairly confident they can have the replacement chambers framed in before the freeze. Whether or not he’ll be able to carry out all the other necessary repairs before spring is more than he’ll say at this point.”
“A lot better than it could’ve been,” Seegairs observed. “And if that snake nest had been left intact to try again.…”
His voice trailed off and they looked at one another in grim satisfaction.
Silence lingered for several seconds, then Seegairs gave himself a shake.
“Well, now that we’ve got that out of the—”
He broke off and froze, head cocked, listening hard.
“What the Shan-wei was that?”
* * *
The drover in the howdah never heard the shot that killed him.
The five-hundred-grain bullet struck him a half inch above and in front of his right ear at sixteen hundred feet per second, well above the speed of sound, and his head disintegrated as kinetic energy threw his corpse from his seat. It sprawled over the edge of the howdah, out from under the rain shelter, and blood steamed in the drizzle.
The dragon didn’t like the explosive crack of the rifle, but it was well trained. It stopped instantly when its drover released the guide rein, and the PICA who’d decided he would call this version of himself Dialydd Mab was glad. The dragon had never hurt anyone, after all.
The dead drover’s assistant popped his head out of the barge deckhouse. From his expression, clearly visible to Mab’s enhanced vision despite the gathering darkness and drizzle, he hadn’t heard—or recognized, at least—the sound of the shot. He was trying to figure out why the dragon had stopped, not what had happened to the drover to cause him to stop, and his observations on what was about to happen to the towline as momentum carried the barge over its slack length were pungent.
Mab’s right hand rose from the trigger of the rifle Owl had manufactured from the Delthak Works’ plans. This was the first time an M96 Mahndrayn had ever been used in action, and he couldn’t think of a more fitting time or place. His rising thumb flipped up the bolt handle and moved it smoothly to the rear. The spent case flew clear and his hand rotated, pushing the handle forward once more, chambering a new round and cocking the rear-locking bolt on the return stroke, then dropped straight back down. His index finger found the trigger.
Another shot exploded, echoing along the canal cut, and the assistant drover’s head disappeared back into the deckhouse in its own eruption of blood.
The other passengers must have figured out what was happening when the corpse hit the deck at their feet. Half a dozen Army of God infantry swarmed onto the deck, checking the priming of their rifles as they looked for the shooters who’d fired those two shots, and Mab’s thin smile was far colder than the raw, wet twilight.
He worked the bolt of Taigys Mahldyn’s brainchild a second time, found a target, squeezed.
* * *
“Gunfire?!”
Seegairs stared at Tahrlsahn, his expression startled. There wasn’t any fear in that expression, but there was confusion in plenty, and Tahrlsahn shook his head. He opened his mouth, then snapped it back shut as a deafening volley of rifle fire exploded from the barge’s deck.
The cabin door flew open and another Schuelerite, one of Seegairs’ assistants, shoved his head through it, his eyes wild.
“Both drovers’re dead!” he blurted, and Seegairs’ expression hardened as he saw the huge bloodstain splattered a
cross the other priest’s cassock. “And the helmsman, too!”
“What’s happening? Who’s doing all that damned shooting?” Seegairs demanded while gunfire continued to hammer the air.
“I don’t know! Somebody’s up on the west side of the embankment.”
“Somebody? You mean one ‘somebody’?”
“I don’t know!” the other Schuelerite repeated. “I’m not a soldier! The sergeant was shouting something about ‘get the bastard.’ It sounded like he meant one person! I started to ask him and then—”
He broke off with a shudder and Seegairs’ eyes narrowed.
“The sergeant’s dead, too?” he demanded, and the other priest nodded, his face white with fear.
* * *
Dialydd Mab pressed the release and the empty ten-round magazine fell out of the rifle. He inserted a fresh one, chambered a round, and looked for another target.
It was difficult to find one. The scene before him was daylight clear to his light-gathering optics, but there was no one left alive among the bodies sprawled across the barge. Four of the vessel’s passengers—three Inquisitors and one soldier—had attempted to escape by plunging over the side. Unfortunately for them, his high perch had given him a clear field of fire. Two of the Inquisitors floated lifelessly in the canal; the third Schuelerite and the soldier had gone to the bottom already.
The remaining handful of AOG riflemen had scrambled back inside the deckhouse as soon as they realized the devastatingly accurate fire ripping through them didn’t care how dark it was. He’d placed every one of his bullets within less than an inch of his point of aim in conditions under which all they could see of him were muzzle flashes. Worse, they’d realized all that death and destruction was coming from a single marksman. There was only a single rifle—only one of them—on top of the embankment, yet whoever was behind it had already killed a dozen of them, and done it with terrifying speed. Many of the Church’s soldiers had heard rumors about the new heretic pistols that could fire for hours without reloading. Most hadn’t really believed the whispered accounts, and even if they had, no one had warned them rifles could do the same thing. Yet that was obviously what they faced, and so they’d gone to ground, found cover wherever they could.
Return fire crackled sporadically back in Mab’s direction. It was more scattered than it had been, slower even than the usual restrictions of muzzle-loading might have imposed. Partly that was because they were reloading full-length rifles in the cramped confines of the barge’s deckhouse, but it was also because they were firing through loopholes hastily cut through window shutters or even hacked through the planking of the hull. Anywhere they could find some protection against that impossible rifle blazing away out of the gloom.
Out of the darkness, actually. Full night had arrived, and the barge’s defenders fired blindly, their only hope that enough unaimed fire might actually hit whoever had slaughtered so many of their fellows.
Mab located one of the loopholed shutters, settled his sights, and waited until a reloaded rifle poked back through the opening. His own rifle cracked before the muzzleloader could, and someone shrieked as his bullet punched through the flimsy cover.
He smiled with cold satisfaction and went patiently searching for his next victim.
He didn’t really have to be here in person. He could have simply provided Owl’s remotes with similar weapons and sent them to do the deed, yet he’d never seriously considered doing this any other way.
A corner of his mind felt a detached sort of pity for the soldiers on that barge. Probably at least half of them were conscripts, who hadn’t volunteered even for the Army of God, far less to serve the Inquisition. Yet whatever had brought them into the Church’s service, they were part of what had happened at Sarkyn. Seegairs and Tahrlsahn and the other Inquisitors had been the brain and the malice behind that barbarism, but these soldiers had been the hands that carried it out, and at least some had lent themselves to it as willingly as any Schuelerite.
Besides, they were between him and his prey.
He killed five more of them before the survivors refused to shoot back even from hidden positions. They huddled there, terrified, and he set the rifle’s safety and laid it aside.
He’d chosen his position because it was forty miles from the nearest town. Even the Inquisition would find it difficult to accuse innocent townsfolk of complicity this far from their own homes, and the campsite Owl had built, like the tracks of the horse on which Mab had ridden to the ambush site, would offer additional evidence that the attack had been launched by an outsider. That might not prevent someone like Seegairs—or Clyntahn—from launching reprisals against the locals anyway, but it was the best protection he could give them.
And now it was time to finish this and give them a little more protection in the process.
The dead helmsman had fallen across the tiller, nosing the vessel into the bank. It waited for him, motionless, and he strode down the steep embankment as if the rain-slick grass and mud were a broad staircase and it was full daylight instead of night. He crossed the tow road and stepped into the spill of illumination from the running lights with a revolver in each hand, then leapt lightly to the barge’s deck.
* * *
Hahskyll Seegairs gripped his pectoral scepter in his left hand and a double-barreled pistol in his right as he heard someone land cat-lizard-footed among the bodies topside. A babble of half-hysterical prayer spilled from someone behind him—it sounded like Tahrlsahn—and he heard the harsh breathing of the four soldiers crouched in the darkness between the remaining Inquisitors and the barred deckhouse door. The lamps had been extinguished, plunging the interior into darkness to provide concealment for its occupants while any attacker was silhouetted against the running lights. He smelled gun oil, powder smoke, the stink of blood, and the sweat of fear, and his stomach was a singing void. His nostrils flared as he tried to beat down his own terror, but that terror refused to be subdued. He didn’t want to believe the panicky soldiers’ insistence that all this death and carnage had been wreaked by a single rifleman, yet his own hearing told him it had. He’d heard the shots coming with incredible rapidity yet clearly from the same weapon, and an icy fist gripped his heart as he tried to imagine how that could have been made possible.
Whoever had jumped onto the barge’s deck was as still and silent as the death he’d visited upon the bodies strewn across it. The stillness twisted already tormented nerves still tighter, and Seegairs heard his own voice muttering a childhood prayer for protection against evil.
* * *
Dialydd Mab waited while the SNARC’s remotes swarmed into the barge’s interior and located his targets. There were only thirteen left; four soldiers, five priests, and two Schuelerite lay brothers crouched in the deckhouse while the last two crewmen huddled in the bottom of the hold.
Fine. He knew where they were, and he raised his booted right foot.
* * *
The deckhouse door flew open.
Wood screamed as the locking bar’s bulkhead brackets ripped free, and Hahskyll Seegairs had a moment to see a towering, broad-shouldered shape etched against the forward running light. It was barely a flicker in the eye of eternity, and then the shape’s hands vomited fire.
Seegairs realized he was screaming, although he couldn’t hear the sound of his own voice through the thunder of gunfire in a confined space, and the pistol in his hand jerked up. Yet even as it moved, he seemed trapped in quicksand, the air resisting movement like thick syrup. The pistol rose slowly, so slowly, and the deckhouse was Shan-wei’s own cauldron of crisscrossing thunderbolts.
No one could fire as rapidly as that nightmare shape. No one! It simply wasn’t possible!
The first two soldiers were dead before the door’s panels smashed back against the bulkhead. One of them discharged his rifle, but it was a dead man’s shot, burying itself in the deck; the second simply tumbled sideways … into one of the remaining soldiers.
Jostled by his fallin
g companion, the AOG private shoved back, trying desperately to free himself of the spasming corpse and bring his bayoneted rifle into play. The second round from the revolver in Dialydd Mab’s right hand hit him squarely in the throat.