His position at the moment was over three hundred miles as a wyvern flew from Thesmar, at the mouth of the Seridahn River. Given everything else that had happened, he was certain the heretic Hanth had been heavily reinforced since Duke Harless’ bloody failure to storm Thesmar’s entrenchments at the very beginning of the Fort Tairys campaign.
It was obvious the Army of Shiloh had been not simply outfought but out-thought. It had been sucked into doing exactly what the heretics wanted. There was no point pretending otherwise, and the heretics who’d baited the trap would scarcely have overlooked the potential threat Thesmar represented to that army’s rear. And as Makyntyr had quietly pointed out to him, the Charisian Navy could easily have landed another ten or twenty thousand men in Thesmar Bay.
Ahlverez still couldn’t figure out how the heretics had managed it so smoothly, but it had become painfully evident that Bryahn Kyrbysh had died in the same massacre as the rest of the Fort Tairys garrison. All his dispatches detailing the starvation and demoralization of the heretic Eastshare’s understrength army had clearly come from someone else, and Ahlverez felt his teeth grinding once more as he visualized the grinning heretic duke dictating those lying messages.
Just how inaccurate “Kyrbysh’s” reports had been had become obvious when Eastshare’s “starving, outnumbered” army attacked out of Fort Tairys to trap the Army of Shiloh between his healthy, well-fed, numerous troops and the second heretic army which had marched clear across Cliff Peak without being spotted.
The fact that the heretics had been able to produce that many troops—that many Charisian regulars—was frightening in more ways than one. A defeated army always tended to overestimate its opponent’s numbers. Ahlverez knew that, but by his most conservative estimate, there must have been upwards of a hundred thousand men involved in springing that trap. Mother Church had assured him the Charisians had nowhere near that many available for service in Siddarmark, and if the Inquisition’s information had been so thoroughly wrong about that, what else had it been wrong about?
There was no way to answer that question—yet, at least—and it didn’t really matter as far as his current situation was concerned. What mattered was that he had no idea how many of those hundred-thousand-plus men were marching hard to overtake him. He had no better idea of what the Earl of Hanth might have been up to, but in the heretics’ place Ahlverez would have been doing his utmost to crush what was left of the Army of Shiloh between the Thesmar garrison and Duke Eastshare’s pursuit.
Sure you would, Rainos, he told himself, glowering at the bland, uninformative sketch map. But how much of that is because you realize just how exhausted your men are? It’s obvious to you that the logical step would be to finish you off, but you don’t know what other problems might seem more urgent to them. There’s still that arsehole Hennet’s cavalry at Cheyvair, for example. And truth be told, the Army of Shiloh’s already been “finished off.”
His stomach churned as he admitted that, yet truth was truth, and the one luxury he absolutely could not afford was self-comforting delusion. A third of his men no longer even had weapons. His artillery train—what little of it had escaped the heretics’ initial trap and the destruction of the rearguard he’d left to delay the pursuit—was laughable. His men were sick, starving, with worn-out, leaky boots and uniforms indistinguishable from beggars’ rags, and their fighting spirit was virtually nonexistent. The truth was, he admitted bleakly, that it might actually be to the heretics’ advantage to let what was left of the Army of Shiloh go. The men who’d escaped the nightmare of the Kyplyngyr Forest had been brutally traumatized. Letting them go home to tell their fellow soldiers what they’d endured was probably the surest way to undermine the morale of any new army the Kingdom of Dohlar might put into the field.
Stop that! he told himself harshly. Yes, you got reamed. They were three moves ahead of you—a dozen moves ahead of that idiot Harless—every step of the way, but that’s no excuse to just throw up your hands and give up! You owe Mother Church and the Kingdom more than that. And however badly they may’ve outsmarted you this time, there’s always the next time. There’s that old proverb about the burnt hand, isn’t there? Well, you got your hand burned right down to the bone, Rainos. What matters is what you learned from it.
He looked at the sketch a moment longer, then back up at Lattymyr.
“All right, Lynkyn,” he said, his voice level, “we’ll keep pushing on to link up with Colonel Ohkarlyn at Malys. After that, unless Colonel Tyrwait reports that something’s headed our way from Thesmar, I think we’ll have to assume our good friend Hanth has other fish to fry. Probably General Rychtyr, I’m afraid.” He grimaced. “If that’s the case, though, they’re going to be pushing towards Evyrtyn and then up the Sheryl-Seridahn toward Thorast and Reskar.”
He paused, and both Lattymyr and Makyntyr nodded in grim understanding. It was barely three hundred and forty miles from Evyrtyn to the Dohlaran border.
“I don’t see a lot we can do about that,” Ahlverez admitted. “On the other hand, if that is what Hanth’s up to, he won’t be looking our way. In that case, our biggest worry is the damned Charisians moving down the high road from the Kyplyngyr towards Cheryk. And, of course, the possibility that there really is someone coming after us from Sygmar. There’s not much we can do about that, either, except to keep moving as quickly as we can in this slop and be sure we’ve got the closest thing to an effective rearguard we can come up with.”
Makyntyr was nodding more emphatically, and Ahlverez shrugged.
“The way I see it, our best bet is to strike northwest from Malys, through Thyssyk, across the high road, and then through Fyrnyst and on up to Fort Sheldyn. Once we cross the high road, we break almost due north for Alyksberg.”
“That’s a long way, Sir,” Lattymyr pointed out in a painfully neutral tone, and Ahlverez barked a laugh.
“‘A long way’ is putting it mildly, Lynkyn. Or maybe I should say tactfully!” He shook his head and began rolling up the tattered sketch map. “Either we’re going to find out I’m wrong, and the same bastards who punched out Brahnselyk and Roymark will be waiting on the line of the high road up ahead of us, or else we’re going to march an extra two hundred miles or so with stragglers dropping the entire way. But at least this way we’ve got a chance of getting some of the men home again. If we march towards Trevyr or Evyrtyn, we’ll be walking right into Hanth’s arms. If this army were fit to fight a battle, coming up behind him might be the best thing we could do, but it isn’t. And do any of us really think that after putting together what they did to us at Fort Tairys and Eastshare Cayleb wouldn’t have provided Thesmar with the same damned sort of portable angle-gun they used on us? I hate to say it, but if I were Hanth, the one thing I’d want most in all the world would be for us to be stupid enough to attack him in the open field.”
His two subordinates looked grim, and more than a little anxious. Not simply because of the additional miles he was proposing to march his exhausted army, but because marching to Alyksberg instead of moving to the sound of the guns might well be taken by the Inquisition as defeatism.
Ahlverez understood exactly what they were thinking, and they might be right. The last thing he needed as the senior surviving officer of the Army of Shiloh, and the one who’d handed the initial message from “Colonel Kyrbysh” over to Harless, was to give Zhaspahr Clyntahn additional ammunition when it came time to make examples. On the other hand, if that was how the Grand Inquisitor was thinking, there was already an enormous target pasted to his back. Nothing he did was likely to change that, and if the Inquisition was going to make an example out of him, then he would by God and all the Archangels save as many of the men under his command as he could first.
“I’ll discuss it with Father Sulyvyn this evening,” he continued, tucking the rolled-up map back into his saddle bag. “I feel confident he’ll agree it’s our best option, though, so go ahead and start passing the orders now.”
“Yes, Sir. Of
course.” Lattymyr saluted again, turned his horse, and trotted squelchingly back the way he’d come.
“Sir,” Makyntyr began, “I think—”
“I’m pretty sure I know exactly what you think, Ahlfryd,” Ahlverez interrupted with a twisted smile. “Unfortunately, it’s what I think that matters, isn’t it?”
Makyntyr gazed at him for a moment.
“Yes, Sir. I suppose it is.” He held Ahlverez’ eyes for another moment, then inhaled deeply. “I’ll just go see about redistributing those draft dragons, Sir.”
His tone said something very different from his words, and Ahlverez felt a faint stir of surprise as he realized how much hearing that approval from the ex-naval officer and ally of the Earl of Thirsk meant to him.
“You do that, Ahlfryd,” he said, climbing up into his own saddle once more. “I’ll see you at supper.”
.VIII.
A Recon Skimmer, Above the Mountains of Light, and Langhorne’s Tears, Mountains of Light, The Temple Lands
“Do you think Sandaria’s going to make the adjustment, Aivah?”
“I don’t know.” Aivah Pahrsahn’s expression was troubled on the small cockpit screen. “Before you and Nimue took us to your cave, I would’ve bet almost anything that she’d be able to. But that was before I knew how much you were going to ask us to believe. Sandaria’s one of the Sisters who’ve interpreted Saint Kohdy’s journal to indicate the Adams’ and Eves’ souls had been somewhere else—with God—before they awakened here on Safehold, not that their physical bodies preexisted the Creation itself! What you’re asking both of us to believe instead is so far outside anything we’d ever conceived of that I just don’t know if she will. For that matter, I’m sure some of the other Sisters’ initial reactions would be as bad as Sandaria’s—or worse—if we told them the entire truth.”
Merlin nodded, his own expression sober.
The problem, from the viewpoint of someone attempting to debunk the lie Langhorne and his command crew had crafted so carefully, was that literally nothing in the Safeholdian worldview offered a thread he could pull to unravel it. Safehold possessed a complete, continuous, seamless historical record from the very Day of Creation, with no breaks, no point at which any researcher or scholar could find a fundamental inconsistency. Unlike the historical record available to the theologians of Old Earth, there were no blank spots, no prehistoric eras, no sacred books whose authorship might be debated, and no civilizations which pre-dated writing, used a different alphabet, or even spoke another language. There were no periods which had to be reconstructed without contemporary, written sources—primary sources—of unimpeachable authenticity. Secular histories and even The Testimonies might disagree over minor factual matters or interpretations, yet that only strengthened the lie’s foundation, because human beings always saw or remembered events differently. The fact that those differences were acknowledged within the body of the Writ and all of the Church’s other histories only validated their integrity. And when he came down to it, those histories and firsthand accounts were absolutely honest. The people writing them truly had seen, heard, and experienced the events they set forth.
By the same token, the cosmology Langhorne had created, the explanation for natural forces and why things happened, was completely internally consistent. Worse, from Merlin’s perspective, the “laws” the Writ laid down—Pasquale’s laws for health and medicine, Bédard’s principles of psychology, Sondheim’s precepts for agronomy, Truscott’s instructions for animal husbandry—worked in real life, and disobeying them produced exactly the consequences the Writ predicted. There were no inconsistencies between religious doctrine and the observations and experiences of forty generations of human beings.
Given that lack of inconsistencies, validated again and again throughout that enormous body of recorded history, the very concept of “atheism” had never even existed on Safehold. No one on the entire planet—outside the inner circle, at least—had ever doubted that God and the Archangels existed or that those Archangels had done every single thing the Holy Writ said they’d done. Some might be a bit lax in their observation of the Writ’s injunctions, some might attend the services of Mother Church only irregularly, yet every single one of them believed, with a unanimity that would have been almost more alien than the Gbaba to any citizen of the Terran Federation.
And, as Aivah had just pointed out, even the Sisters of Saint Kohdy believed in the integrity and truth of the Holy Writ. In that sense, they were fundamentally different from the Brethren of Saint Zherneau, because they lacked the equally ancient, equally first-person account and third-party documentation from the Terran Federation’s past which Jeremiah Knowles had left the Brethren. Under those circumstances, it was far more remarkable that Aivah—Nynian—had been able to accept the truth than that Sandaria hadn’t been. And Aivah was right about how dangerous that could prove if—when—other Sisters reacted the way Sandaria had.
“So you’re certain this is the way you want to handle it?” he asked quietly. Aivah chuckled, and there was at least some genuine humor in it.
“I’m not certain about anything just at the moment! If you mean am I confident this is the best way to go about it, given what you’ve told me and how hugely that differs from what the Sisters have always believed, the answer is yes. If you mean am I confident it’s going to work just because it’s the ‘best way,’ the answer is I’ll be damned if I know.”
As responses went, that wasn’t the most reassuring one Merlin had ever heard. But at least it had the virtue of frankness. And the bottom line was that if Aivah was to become a full partner of the inner circle, the inner circle had to trust her judgment about the best way to approach the other members of her circle.
“Well,” he said, checking the navigation display, “we’ll be on the ground in another fifteen or twenty minutes. I hope you’re bundled up properly.”
* * *
The sun shone down from a sky of flawless, frozen blue. It wasn’t far above the mountain peaks—it never got much above the horizon in these high northern latitudes in winter—but the brief day was bright.
Which was not to say it was particularly warm. In fact, the temperature hovered five degrees below zero, and the brilliant sun-sparkle off the deep, drifted snow was a sharp (and blinding) contrast to the blue dimness in the depths of the narrow alpine valleys. That snow was several feet deep—deeper than Merlin was tall, in places—and it wasn’t going to melt before June. It would have provided heavy going for any flesh-and-blood human, although one might have been forgiven for concluding otherwise as the two travelers moved across it.
Merlin slogged along briskly in the practiced, swinging stride of an expert snowshoer. In fact, he was rather short of the years of experience he was displaying, but a PICA’s ability to program muscle memory made up for a lot. Unlike the aforementioned flesh-and-blood human, he needed to perform an action properly only once in order to be able to perform it again, flawlessly, any time he had to. He could no longer count the number of times he’d found that capability useful here on Safehold, but if pressed, he would have been forced to admit he’d never anticipated doing what he was doing at the moment.
“You really are quite good at this, Merlin!” Aivah remarked. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder, and she grinned at him. “I’m a fairly good skier myself, but snowshoes and I have never gotten along. Even if we had, I’m so badly out of shape I’d be panting like a bellows by now.”
“Which doesn’t even consider how much you’re enjoying yourself at the moment, does it?”
“It is rather fun,” she acknowledged cheerfully. “I remember how Father—Adorai’s father, I mean; not that miserable excuse for a human being who got my mother pregnant—used to take turns carrying both of us piggyback when I was a little girl.” Her tone softened. “When he did, I knew what a real father was like. There’s no way I could ever repay him and Mother for giving me the opportunity—the gift—to understand there truly is love in th
e world. Sometimes, when the decisions are especially hard, that’s all that keeps me going.”
“I know.” Merlin’s voice was as soft as hers had been. “I’ve been … damaged by a lot of things, Nynian, starting with the fact that I grew up knowing I was going to die before I was forty and that the entire human race was going to die with me. That … leaves a mark, and finding out what happened to Shan-wei and the Commodore and everything that’s happened here on Safehold since I woke up didn’t exactly make everything all better. But you’re right about how much difference something as simple—and profound—as love makes. It’s what keeps me trying and as close to sane as I still am.”
“You seem almost insanely sane to me, given everything you’ve been through,” Aivah objected.
“Appearances can be deceptive.” He shrugged easily, despite her weight on his back. “Although I probably am a bit closer to sane since Nahrmahn chewed me up one side and down the other for floundering in self-pity after the Canal Raid. But I’m afraid I’m still a little more dubious about my sanity quotient than my friends are.” His smile was a bit twisted.
“For what it’s worth, I’m on their side.” Aivah rested her mittened palm lightly against his cheek. “And I don’t envy you. I always thought the task the Sisters and I had undertaken was hard enough, and we only wanted to reform the Church, not destroy it! That doesn’t hold a candle to the one that got dumped on your shoulders.”
“Maybe. But it didn’t exactly get ‘dumped’ on me, you know. Or not on Nimue Alban, at least.”
“But that’s an important distinction,” she pointed out as the two of them moved from brilliant sunlight into the deep shadows of the valley before them. “You didn’t volunteer, whatever Nimue Alban might have done. You accepted the responsibility without any memory of having agreed to shoulder it, and the you you are today, Merlin Athrawes, is the product of that acceptance. You’re not Nimue Alban; you’re you, and from everything I’ve seen, you’re quite a remarkable human being who just happens to live inside a machine.”