“Seijin Merlin is, indeed, a seijin in the old sense of the word,” she said quietly. “I can tell you of my own personal observation that he has all of the capabilities Saint Kohdy had, and several I doubt even the Saint possessed. And,” she smiled faintly, “I can now honestly say I understand the journal’s references to being transported by the Archangels’ hikousen. It’s … not quite what we thought it was, but the actual experience is certainly miraculous enough.”
“The Seijin’s been touched by the kyousei hi?” Sister Emylee’s eyes widened, and Merlin shook his head.
“I would never make such a claim, Sister,” he told her. “And, trust me, no holy fire burns about me!” He quirked a smile at her. “Madam Pahrsahn—well, Mother Nynian, really, I suppose—has a somewhat questionable sense of humor. I’m sure you’ve observed that for yourself.”
Aivah shot him a humorous glare, and the nun chuckled. The byplay seemed to relax her, and she sat back in her chair.
“The truth is, Emylee,” Aivah said then, “that when Saint Kohdy wrote about his hikousen he wasn’t actually referring to the kyousei hi the way we thought he was. A hikousen was actually a … a vessel empowered by the mysteries of the Archangels, I suppose is probably the best way to describe it. Seijin Merlin can summon the same sort of vessel to his service when he requires it, but the kyousei hi which enveloped the hikousen of the Archangels themselves was visible to mortals only because they were the Archangels’ own vehicles.”
Sister Emylee’s eyes widened once more, this time in wonder rather than shock, and Merlin nodded gravely. It went against the grain to give even passing credibility to the lie of the “Archangels,” but it was scarcely the first time he’d had to tread the measures of a Safeholdian’s faith carefully. And, as Sandaria Ghatfryd demonstrated, even a Sister of Saint Kohdy was likely to be ill prepared for the wholesale destruction of all she’d been raised to believe. If Sandaria found the truth difficult to accept even with the evidence of Nimue’s Cave all about her, how could anyone expect Sister Emylee to accept it without that evidence?
Aivah was right … again, he acknowledged. I may not like it, but it’s clearly time for a variant on the “the seijin sees visions” gambit.
And, as had been the case with King Haarahld and his councilors, that explanation was entirely true … as far as it went. That was important to him, and Aivah had agreed it was essential that they never lie to the Sisters. The potential consequences if those who’d trusted them discovered they’d been lied to were bad enough to contemplate, but for all the masks Aivah had been forced to assume, all the times she’d had no choice but to dissemble, her position was as driven by moral considerations as by pragmatism. She owed her sisters the truth; if she couldn’t give it to them in its entirety, she would at least give them no falsehoods in its place.
“Even though Seijin Merlin has access to his own hikousen, he can’t simply go dashing about the world in it,” she continued now. “Not openly, at least. I’m sure you can imagine how Clyntahn and the Inquisition would denounce it as proof of his demonic origins, especially if it wasn’t touched by the kyousei hi whenever it was seen!”
She rolled her eyes, and Sister Emylee nodded emphatically.
“Well, for the same reasons, I can’t just suddenly appear in Zion—or anywhere else, for that matter—either.” This time Aivah laughed softly. “Your Keepers’ reaction when the seijin and I came hiking up the mountainside makes that clear enough, doesn’t it?”
Sister Emylee nodded again, winter-blue eyes twinkling, and Aivah smiled back at her, then allowed her expression to sober once again.
“The real reason the seijin brought me here was to allow him to examine the journal, Emylee. As Saint Kohdy himself recorded, seijins are touched only by the anshinritsumei. For all their other abilities, they aren’t Angels or Archangels, and he wishes to consult Saint Kohdy’s account of the War Against the Fallen for whatever insight it may provide. And—” she met Sister Emylee’s eyes levelly “—to read the sections of the journal we’ve never been able to.”
* * *
Saint Kohdy’s tomb was beautiful.
The chapel dedicated to Bédard was lovely enough, although small. The simple chambers of the Keepers were half-built and half-carved into the stone of the cavern walls to either side of its entrance. That entrance had itself been closed by a stone wall, pierced by four beautiful stained glass windows which portrayed famous episodes from the Archangel Bédard’s acts on Safehold. Little light came through them in the winter, but in the summer they must have turned the cavern’s interior into a jewelry case of richly colored illumination. That light was also directed inward, to where the Archangel’s chapel, dominated by a statue of her holding the lamp which was her symbol, sealed the end of the cavern.
Or what seemed to be its end, at any rate.
In fact, the cavern extended over a mile deeper into the mountain, and it was only part of an even larger series of caves which ran much farther, although the Sisters of Saint Kohdy had closed off his tomb from the rest of the cave system with a masonry wall. There were no stained glass windows here, but the native stone of the natural cavern had been smoothed and polished to form a perfectly circular rotunda, then carved with scenes from Saint Kohdy’s life. Alternating, perpetually lit lamps of silver and gold, filled with perfumed oils, had been set into those walls at regular intervals. Centuries of lamp smoke and incense had darkened the rough stone roof of the cavern, and their light spilled over the carven panels and filled the hushed reverence of that chamber with honey-toned illumination.
The sarcophagus at the rotunda’s center had been carved out of a single massive block of de Castro marble. That rose-colored stone, marked by dense swirling patterns and quarried from the de Castro Mountains in North Harchong, was the favorite medium of the Church’s sculptors and architects. Exactly how the stone for the sarcophagus—over ten feet long and four feet tall—had been hauled to its present site was undoubtedly a story worth hearing, but Merlin already knew whose hands had created the larger-than-life recumbent effigy of the saint which adorned it. The detail of that incredibly lifelike image was breathtaking, and the sides of the sarcophagus were ornamented with a beautiful rendition of what appeared to be infinitely repeating patterns of highland lilies, the flower associated with martyrdom and the seijins who’d battled the forces of darkness in the War Against the Fallen.
Like the reliefs adorning the cavern’s walls, the creation of that sarcophagus had been no an easy task. Nor had it been accomplished quickly, and every square inch was the work of the Sisters of Saint Kohdy, for no outsider had ever set foot here before Merlin himself.
There’d been no stonemasons or sculptors among the Sisters who’d first concealed Kohdy’s body here. That had come later, as the hidden order slowly increased in number and some of its members with the talent for the task were trained for it in the great Zhyahngdu Academy in southern Tiegelkamp. Zhyahngdu had produced the Church of God Awaiting’s sculptors for almost nine hundred years, and it was obvious that the Sisters whose hands had created the beauty around him could easily have been among the most famous of all Safeholdian artists. But they hadn’t chosen to share their talent with the rest of Safehold; all of it had been lavished on this hidden, polished gem they’d known the rest of the world would never see, never even know existed.
He stood for a long, silent moment with the respect the faith and piety of the tomb’s creators and caretakers deserved. The man buried here had been no more divine than the “archangels” who’d created the Church he’d served. But that took nothing away from his service, just as nothing could ever diminish the fidelity, belief, and devotion of those who revered his memory, and Merlin’s nostrils flared as he inhaled the perfume of the lamps which burned perpetually in Kohdy’s memory.
Then, finally, he turned from the sarcophagus to the equally beautiful golden reliquary which housed Saint Kohdy’s journal. It sat atop a pedestal of gold-inlaid marble in a niche c
arved into the cavern’s northern wall, flanked by an armor tree bearing an antique cuirass and helmet and a featureless block of de Castro marble impaled by a long, straight-bladed sword. The armor looked like bronze, and the sword like Damascus steel, but both were actually made of battle steel, and that sword could have been drawn from its stony sheath by anyone. For that matter, it could have been drawn through that block of stone, for its edge was every bit as keen as that of the wakazashi riding at Merlin’s hip.
Aivah and Sister Emylee stood watching as he crossed to the reliquary and opened it. The volume which lay within it appeared to be bound in leather, but that, too, was deceptive. He lifted it gently from its velvet nest, opened the cover, and looked down at the strong, sharply slanted handwriting of its first page. Like the armor and the sword, the journal was made out of advanced synthetics, and its pages were as flexible as the day they’d been extruded.
“My name is Cody Cortazar,” it began, “and I am an Adam, honored far beyond any mortal man might have deserved to stand beside the Angels and Archangels themselves against the forces of Darkness.
“My service began in the dark days of the opening battles of what has become the War Against the Fallen. Much of my memory of my early life has become unclear, almost as if it had been no more than a dream, but I remember volunteering to serve against the Fallen. And I remember awakening in the sacred sickbay, attended by the Archangels’ servitors and with my mind filled by knowledge and skills far beyond the merely mortal, endowed by the very touch of God.
“The fight against Kau-yung’s followers was not going well, and.…”
.IX.
The Delthak Works, Barony of High Rock, Kingdom of Old Charis, Charisian Empire
“Well, it’s certainly impressive, Brahd.”
Ehdwyrd Howsmyn folded his hands behind him as he walked down the length of the hulking “steam automotive” which sat silently on the gleaming steel rails. Brahd Stylmyn, the mastermind behind the project, walked beside him, followed by Stahlman Praigyr.
“The question, of course,” Howsmyn continued, “is whether or not the damned thing will actually work.”
“The models have all worked the way Doctor Vyrnyr and Doctor Mahklyn predicted, Sir,” Stylmyn pointed out respectfully. “And Stahlman here swears the full-scale will work just as well.”
“And very reassuring that is, too, I’m sure,” Howsmyn said dryly, glancing over his shoulder at the small, tough-looking man behind them. “So I should take it you’re confident enough to take it out on its first run, Master Praigyr?”
“Aye, Sir. That I am.” Praigyr’s wide grin showed his two missing teeth. “Those early models of Master Stylmyn’s were fun clear through, but I’m really looking forward to seeing this ’un in action!”
Howsmyn shook his head, but he smiled while he did it. Watching Praigyr chuff around the circular path of the test track on the undersized models of experimental automotives had been a source of considerable amusement for the Delthak Works’ labor force. Many members of the audience had spent their time laughing, in fact, but it had scarcely been the first time the baby steps of one of Delthak’s offspring had generated amusement even among the people most devoted to making the contraption work.
The industrialist paused, looking up at the automotive’s tall smokestack, then backed deliberately away until he could see the entire vehicle without turning his head.
For all its size, it had a curiously unfinished—or perhaps the word he wanted was “crude”—appearance compared to the imagery of last-generation steam locomotives from Old Earth with which Owl had provided him. By the same token, though, it looked far sleeker and much more sophisticated than its early-nineteenth-century predecessors ever had. It was built in what would have been called a 2-4-0 configuration back on Old Earth, with a two-wheeled front bogey followed by two paired drive wheels powered by two twenty-one-inch-diameter drive cylinders with a thirty-inch stroke. Unlike the marine engines which were Praigyr’s first true love, the automotive used a fire tube arrangement, with the hot gases from the furnace carried through a water-filled boiler. It was, however, designed to run at rather higher pressure and temperature than most Old Earth locomotives prior to the twentieth century, and it incorporated both a superheater (tubes in which boiler steam passed through the hot furnace gasses in front of the boiler proper, which further heated it to produce “dry steam” for the cylinders) and a blast pipe using waste steam to boost the firebox draught to increase its efficiency. The superheater had been one of Praigyr’s ideas, based on his work with the marine engines, but the blast pipe had been Howsmyn’s suggestion, based on input from Owl and Doctor Dahnel Vyrnyr’s suggestions. There was enormous room for improvement in the efficiency of both, since Vyrnyr’s development of pressure dynamics was still at a very early stage, and there were still a few problems with the poppet valves which admitted steam to the cylinders. Despite that, the current design would produce about sixty-one dragonpower (over fifteen hundred Old Earth horsepower) by Owl’s calculations and was probably already on a par with those of the last two decades or so of the nineteenth century.
The prototype before him had cost an enormous amount in terms of skilled labor and resources at a time when both were in critically short supply, but as with so many of the Delthak Works’ other projects, the men (and women) responsible for designing it had kept their eye firmly on how to produce its progeny as efficiently as possible. While the prototype was essentially hand built, it was designed so that its successors could be constructed from a series of subassemblies, all sized and planned to facilitate rapid fabrication.
That would help a great deal if Howsmyn committed to putting them into production, but that would still require yet another expansion in his ability to produce the necessary large scale—very large scale—steel castings. In fact, he’d have to add a dedicated automotive works to his already enormous facility, not to mention an even larger one dedicated solely to rolling out rails for the eventual tracks. On the other hand, that sort of expansion was something Howsmyn had learned to take in stride, and the work Delthak had carried out in designing and building the Navy’s steam power plants, armor, and new heavy guns would help enormously if he did. And he was pretty sure he would, given the personal interest Cayleb and (especially) Sharleyan were taking in the project.
Of course, how I’m going to produce enough steel to keep all of my balls in the air at once is an interesting question, he reflected dryly. Thank God the Lake Lymahn Works are finally coming online! But even with that extra output.…
He managed to suppress a shudder as he considered the additional strain this promised to place upon his steel works. Whatever Stylmyn and Praigyr—or Sharleyan, for that matter—wanted, railroads were simply going to have to take second or even third priority for the immediate future. He had the ironclads to finish, the King Haarahlds (and their guns) to complete, and all the artillery and small arms required by the Imperial Charisian Army to build first. After those minor matters were out of the way, he’d be able to give the automotive the priority Stylmyn clearly felt it deserved.
And Brahd isn’t far wrong about that, either, he reminded himself. It was railroads more than anything else that really drove the development of Old Earth’s steel industry. And to be honest, railroads are going to go even farther towards breaking the Proscriptions’ grip than artillery is. This is something anyone—especially any land-based power—who wants to compete industrially will simply have to have. Once they find out about it, anyway.
“All right,” he said finally, turning away from the automotive and meeting Stylmyn’s gaze. “Father Paityr’s coming by tomorrow or the next day for you to demonstrate your new monstrosity for him. So far, he seems comfortable with the idea, so please try to avoid blowing it up in front of him.”
“We’ll do that thing, Sir,” Stylmyn assured him with a grin, and Howsmyn snorted.
“Easy enough to say now,” he observed darkly. “If it does blow up, you’ll get bl
own up right along with it, though. Which means I’m the one who’ll have to explain it all to him after the fact!”
“Stahlman and I will do our best to avoid putting you to that sort of inconvenience, Sir,” Stylmyn promised.
“See that you do,” Howsmyn said sternly, then sighed. “And now I have to go have a few words with Master Mahldyn about the new rifle lines.”
“Good luck, Sir,” Stylmyn said, and Howsmyn snorted again and headed for his waiting bicycle.
Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s work force was the largest Safehold had ever seen. The Delthak Works alone employed more than forty thousand workers, which didn’t include his army of miners or his gasworks—or his canal builders, bargemen, and shipyard workers, for that matter. Nor did it include any of his other foundries and manufactory sites. All told, he had well in excess of a hundred thousand workers in his employ, and the number continued to grow steadily. Delthak was, however, by far his largest single enterprise, and it was over two miles from the fledgling automotive shop to the Urvyn Mahndrayn Rifle Shop, the manufactory floor where the Imperial Charisian Army’s revolvers and new rifles were produced. The permanent pall of smoke cast by the coking ovens and blast furnaces gave the air an acrid, sinus-stinging edge and the noise level and sheer, hurtling energy level were both daunting to the uninitiated and more than enough to impose caution on any cyclist trying to make his way through it.
He passed scores of other bicycles—they were becoming steadily more common, especially around Howsmyn’s various manufactories—and he heard handlebar-mounted push bells chiming as their riders warned people they were coming. It was insufficient warning to prevent the occasional collision and fall, but most of his workers were acquiring the habit of nipping out of the way before they were run down by the new contraptions. They certainly made movement faster and more efficient, and if Nahrmahn Tidewater’s proposal to manufacture pneumatic tires from Corisandian rubber worked out.…