The men themselves wore white snow smocks over fleece-lined outer parkas and trousers of supple, well-tanned caribou hide. Inside that came inner parkas of steel thistle silk-lined, triple-knit wool over woolen shirts and corduroy trousers, and more steel thistle silk had been expended on each man’s long-sleeved and legged underwear. That “layered” effect was essential for arctic clothing, and the silk served as a barrier against the menace of water vapor. Arctic air could accept less water as vapor, so moisture like sweat quickly condensed out of it. The steel thistle silk prevented perspiration from saturating the layers outside it, which would quickly have destroyed their insulating capacity.
To protect his hands, each man wore heavy, multilayered mittens or thick fleece-lined gloves over an inner glove of knitted wool and a separate liner of steel thistle silk. The mittens were warmer than gloves because they gathered and held the heat of the entire hand, not individual fingers, but they were clumsy, to say the least, and the gloves allowed greater manual dexterity when it was required.
Boots had been as carefully considered as the rest of the troops’ gear. Made of sealskin and lined with fleece, they had double soles and an inner, moccasin-like liner which could be removed to dry, or worn as a sort of house shoe inside one of the tents.
The weight of all those garments was a significant burden, but one which allowed them to move and operate in temperatures far below freezing. Nature had provided the caribou and snow lizards with their own formidable insulation, and the High Hallows had been bred by centuries of Chisholmian breeders for conditions very similar to these. Nonetheless, arctic rugs had been provided for the horses as additional protection if the temperature plunged still lower.
The snow made marching difficult, even with snowshoes, but it provided easy going for the sleds which followed in the broad, beaten-down lanes the infantry’s snowshoes provided. In many ways, conditions were actually less difficult than they might have been for dragons pulling conventional wagons cross-country in mid-summer.
And best of all, Green Valley thought, no one on the other side has a clue of just how winter-mobile we are.
If he’d ever entertained any doubts on that subject, the SNARC imagery of the Army of God’s outposts would have put them to rest. Very few of those half-frozen men, shivering in inadequate clothing as they crouched around fires in whatever structures they’d found or whatever huts they’d been able to piece together, had any interest in going anywhere else. Nor would they survive if their shelters were destroyed, Green Valley reflected, his expression bleak under the two layers of snow mask—what would have been called balaclavas back on Old Earth—and the ski goggles he and every other man in the column wore. Freezing to death was a very unpleasant way to die, and the baron took no pleasure in the thought of inflicting that particular death even on his enemies.
Which wouldn’t stop him from doing it for a moment.
.V.
Two Recon Skimmers, Above East Haven, and Nimue’s Cave, The Mountains of Light, The Temple Lands
“I never imagined clouds could look so beautiful from above,” Aivah Pahrsahn said softly. She sat in the recon skimmer’s rear seat, turned to the left to look down from the rear canopy over its wingtip as it banked, and the moon shining down through the thin, cold atmosphere turned the clouds’ summits into shining silver and their gulfs into bottomless ebon canyons far below. “I always knew God was an artist, but this.…”
She shook her head, and Merlin smiled as he gazed out through his own canopy. They’d come two thousand miles from Siddar City in a little over three hours; they should reach their destination in the Mountains of Light in another hour and a half. He’d been a bit surprised by how calmly Aivah had taken the materialization of not one but two recon skimmers out of the snowy dark, but however calm she’d been, her sense of wonder had been obvious. If she’d felt any trepidation at climbing the access ladder into the needle-nosed, swept-wing skimmer, she’d concealed it admirably, and her enjoyment of the trip so far reminded Merlin irresistibly of Cayleb Ahrmahk’s first flight.
He leveled the skimmer as he completed the turn, and glanced out over his starboard wing to where an identical skimmer kept meticulous station upon him. He hadn’t initially anticipated needing both of them, but each could carry only a single extra passenger and Aivah had insisted upon being accompanied by Sandaria Ghatfryd, who’d been her personal maid for the last two decades. At first, he’d been surprised by the anxiety that seemed to indicate, but that lasted for only a very few minutes after the two women had joined him in the service alley behind Madam Pahrsahn’s luxurious townhouse.
Sandaria was a good two inches shorter than Aivah, with mousy brown hair, a swarthy complexion, and an even more pronounced epicanthic fold than most Safeholdians, courtesy of her Harchongese mother. Merlin knew she’d been with Aivah for at least twenty years; what he hadn’t known (until Aivah explained there in the alley) was that she’d actually been with her ever since Nynian Rychtair’s convent days. In fact, Sandaria Ghatfryd had been a novitiate at the same time, and today she was a senior member of the Sisters of Saint Kohdy, not to mention Aivah’s second-in-command … and closest confidante.
Sandaria, unlike Aivah, had evinced a little nervousness when they emerged from the city via one of Aivah’s discreet routes and she discovered that she and Aivah would be aboard separate skimmers. She’d handled the silent appearance of the craft remarkably calmly; it was clearly the separation that concerned her. Unfortunately, except for the armored personnel carriers—and the full-sized assault shuttles—in Nimue’s Cave, they were the only passenger vehicles available. The assault shuttles were about the size of an old pre-space jumbo jet, and hiding something that size in proximity to Siddar City would have been … a nontrivial challenge even with Federation technology. The APCs were smaller and more readily concealable than assault shuttles, but they were also much slower. Even on counter-grav, they were uncompromisingly subsonic, capable of only about five hundred miles per hour, and Merlin preferred to have a supersonic dash capability in hand, just in case. And while the far smaller air lorries were easier to conceal, they’d been designed to transport cargo. It had never occurred to anyone they might find themselves shuttling people back and forth from Nimue’s Cave in job lots. Now that the possibility had suggested itself to them, Owl’s remotes were busy converting two of those lorries into air buses at this very moment, but the process would require another day or so, and no one had wanted to wait the extra time.
Besides, the second recon skimmer had let him bring along a second pilot.
“How much longer will it take, Merlin?” Aivah asked now, and he looked down into the small display which connected him to the rear cockpit.
Aivah looked back out of it at him as if she’d been using coms all her life. She’d operated the controls he’d demonstrated to her with equal facility and confidence, and a smile tugged at the corners of his lips as he reflected on why she’d needed only a single demonstration.
Yet another mystery solved, he thought dryly. No wonder the SNARCs and I never caught her decoding anything. She never needed to! And I do feel a little better about her remembering details of Ahbraim and Merlin to match against each other. “I have a very good memory,” indeed!
The rare gene group which produced true eidetic memory had been discovered (many skeptics had argued that “invented” was a better verb) in the mid-twenty-first century, and gengineering it into children had been something of a fad for the next fifty years. It had been far less damaging than some of those fads had proven before the whole field of human genetic design was brought under rigorous control, but with the development of direct neural interfacing and the cloud storage of memories, everyone had effective eidetic memory. Interest in the ability had waned, and far fewer parents had opted to build it into their offspring. Nonetheless, it had remained far more common than it had been among earlier generations and it still cropped up occasionally—not often, but more frequently than on pre-space
Old Earth—on Safehold.
Nynian Rychtair had it. She’d never needed to consult her codebooks when she wrote or read a message, because she carried them—all of them—in her head. Merlin and Owl had always known she smuggled a voluminous correspondence back and forth across the Border States, despite the war, but so far as they’d been able to tell, all of it was fairly innocuous: correspondence with the business managers she’d left behind, letters to some of the young women who had worked for Ahnzhelyk Phonda for so long, or messages from refugees to family and friends left behind, for example. They’d been unable to keep track of all of that correspondence once it flowed into Zion or other major Temple Land cities, and since they’d “known” none of it had been encoded—and that Aivah was on their side, at least for now—they hadn’t actually tried all that hard, given all the other charges on Owl’s surveillance ability.
“We should be there in about another ninety minutes,” he said now. “We’ll get there well before dawn, not that I expect anyone would be in a position to see us even at high noon. Not in the middle of the Mountains of Light in March.”
“I imagine that would be … somewhat unlikely,” she acknowledged, and he snorted.
“I think you can pretty much take it for granted. That’s the real reason Nimue’s Cave was located here in the first place.”
“‘Nimue’s Cave’?” she repeated with a quirked eyebrow. “That’s an odd name, even for a seijins’ training camp. Does Captain Chwaeriau’s name have anything to do with the person it’s named for?”
“Actually, it does. Quite a lot, in fact. I can’t explain exactly what the connection is—not yet—but I think you’ll understand once we get around to explaining everything else to you.”
“I’m looking forward to that … I think.” Aivah’s eyes gleamed with anticipation, yet his indirect reference to how little she still knew, how much faith it had required to come this far on the basis of so few hard facts, awakened an undeniable darkness under the anticipation. “I have to admit it was probably wise of you not to tell me quite how far we’d have to travel for that explanation until we were in the air. I won’t guarantee I wouldn’t have backed out and run for my life, despite Saint Kohdy’s journal and his description of his hikousen, if you’d told me any sooner!”
She did not, he noticed, mention how much easier the isolation of their destination would make it if the inner circle ultimately decreed she must disappear.
“Oh, I think you’re made of sterner stuff than that,” he said out loud. “Still, honesty compels me to admit that my timing wasn’t exactly a coincidence.”
“No, really? I never would have thought anything of the sort!”
“Of course you wouldn’t have,” he agreed gravely. “On the other hand, I felt confident that someone of your … accomplishments would understand my thinking without taking it personally.”
“I think that’s a compliment.”
“A very deep one, as a matter of fact. In many ways, you remind me a great deal of Prince Nahrmahn.”
“Ah.” She smiled. “I never met Prince Nahrmahn. For that matter, I never crossed swords with him professionally, either. Still, everything I’ve ever learned about him suggests he was one of the best at the Great Game. I deeply regretted his death. Is it true he died protecting his wife from one of Clyntahn’s Rakurai with his own body?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“Then I regret his death even more deeply.” Aivah sighed and turned to look back out through her canopy. “I’ve seen enough of cynicism, narcissism, and self-centeredness to last me two or three lifetimes. That’s what happens when you grow up too close to the vicarate. Sometimes it’s hard to remember there really are people willing to risk everything they have for the ones they love.”
“Odd,” Merlin said. She turned back to up at him from the display once more, and this time his smile was almost gentle. “As far as I can tell, you’ve spent your entire life risking everything for people you love even if you’ve never met them.”
She opened her mouth, as if she meant to protest, then paused. Their eyes locked once again, and then, slowly, she nodded.
“You might have a point,” she told him. “I won’t say it’s the way I’ve always thought of myself, and I won’t pretend my motivation, especially in the beginning, didn’t have a lot more to do with anger and revenge than with love. But at least I already knew there truly were people in the world who loved me—loved me, whatever my miserable excuse for a father was like—because I had Adorai and her parents. And I had Sister Klairah at the convent, and Sandaria, and the rest of the Sisters since then.”
“Yes, you did. I don’t doubt for a minute that the need for revenge—vengeance—was a huge part of what started you on this road. But I’ve worked with you pretty closely for the last year or so, and I’ve talked to Adorai. I think it was that love you’re talking about that turned what you wanted into justice rather than personal vengeance.”
“Somehow I don’t think of myself as the new holy lawgiver,” she said dryly.
“I remember something Nahrmahn said once,” he countered. “We were talking about saints, and he said he suspected most of them had been pains in the ass.” Aivah chuckled, and he grinned. Then he sobered. “For a lot of reasons—reasons I think will become clear to you shortly—the last thing I’d want to be is a ‘holy’ anything. That’s not who or what I am, and I’ve seen where that kind of belief in your own infallibility can lead.”
“So have I, Merlin. So have I. And I think you and Cayleb and Maikel Staynair are right. Even if we manage to destroy the Group of Four we’ve got, the only way to prevent something just like it from reemerging is to break the Church’s monopoly on God’s own authority.” She shook her head, eyes sad once more. “I don’t like admitting that, because there’s so much good in what the Church could accomplish—so many good things the Church has accomplished—and even as a Sister of Saint Kohdy, it’s hard to reject the vicarate’s authority. To decide the Grand Vicar doesn’t speak with God’s own voice. But if God’s children are going to live together the way He wants them to, the thing His Church has become needs to be broken. I don’t think Samyl Wylsynn could ever have accepted that in his heart of hearts, but I also think that deep inside he knew it was true, anyway. And I’m sure Hauwerd did.”
Merlin nodded, his own eyes dark as he wondered how she was going to react to the full truth. Despite everything she’d said about Kohdy’s journal, even her belief that the original Adams and Eves had been “somewhere else” while the archangels created Safehold, the depth of her faith—of her belief in what the Church “was supposed to be”—upheld her like a pillar of iron. How would she respond when she learned what the foundation of that iron pillar truly was? And how would he deal with what he’d have to do if she responded … poorly? The decision to take her and Sandaria to the cave would give him options he hadn’t had far too many other times, yet even so.…
“Well, it won’t be so very much longer before you and Sandaria are in a position to see exactly why we think that way,” he told her.
* * *
The recon skimmers grounded side-by-side in the vast main cavern of the complex Merlin had christened “Nimue’s Cave” so many years before. The canopies retracted, and Aivah and Sandaria sat very still, gazing up at the towering, glass-smooth vault above them. In a way, Merlin suspected, they found the sheer size and sweep of that obviously artificial chamber even more impressive than the skimmers which had brought them here.
He climbed up out of his flight couch and dropped lightly to the cavern floor without recourse to the boarding ladder. As his boots hit the stone, he heard another pair of heels as Nimue Chwaeriau vaulted down from the second skimmer, and he grinned, despite his anxiety. Nimue was the next best thing to a foot shorter than he was, with dark red hair. That hair went well with the blue eyes they shared, but how would Aivah react when she discovered that eyes weren’t the only things they shared?
“Welcome
to Nimue’s Cave, ladies,” he said, looking up at their passengers as the skimmers’ ladders extruded themselves from the fuselage sides. “If you’ll come down and join us, we’ll give you a short guided tour. That seems like the best place to start.”
* * *
For all her redoubtable personal toughness and resilience, Aivah’s eyes were shadowed with wonder as she and Sandaria followed Merlin and Nimue up a long, wide flight of steps from the main cavern’s floor. Merlin hadn’t tried to explain everything they’d seen on their brief “guided tour,” but what he had explained had been more than enough to stagger any Safeholdian. Even one who’d read Saint Kohdy’s journal. What they were seeing at this moment was the actual reality of the Holy Writ’s descriptions of the archangels’ kyousei hi and all the other “servitors” sprinkled about The Testimonies and the Book of Chihiro. Kohdy’s journal had prepared them for the fact that the servitors had not, in fact, been alive themselves, but there was a vast gulf between knowing that—believing that—and actually seeing and touching the truth.
At least the tour had given her and Sandaria the chance to adjust a bit. Tension still drifted off of them like smoke, especially in Sandaria’s case, but the worst, sharpest edge had been taken off it. Which meant it was time for them to be shown Nimue’s sanctum sanctorum and told the rest of the truth, and Merlin’s hands—faithfully mimicking a flesh-and-blood human’s reaction to his emotions—were cold at the thought of taking their guests across that Rubicon.