“Even the Inquisition would’ve hanged him if they’d found out what he’s been up to,” the colonel said now. “I’d hate for the Charisians to pass up the opportunity to do the same thing. Now go.”
“Yes, Sir!”
Rahmahdyn signed Langhorne’s scepter in salute and disappeared back out the office door. Tymahk looked around for a moment, then crossed to the desk, grabbed the corpse by the collar of its cassock, and dumped it on the floor. The blotter followed, and he used a swath of cloth ripped from the cassock to mop up the scattered splashes of blood and brain tissue the blotter hadn’t caught.
Father Aizak was going to need someplace to work, after all.
* * *
Baron Green Valley watched the SNARC imagery as Brigadier Braisyn’s 3rd Mounted Brigade trotted steadily along the road from Five Forks to the mostly ruined buildings of what had been the town of Lakeside. Braisyn would reach that destination well before nightfall. By tomorrow morning he’d reach Camp Dynnys, the first of the Inquisition’s concentration camps to be liberated.
It would be a long time before Green Valley or anyone else forgave themselves for how long it had taken, but they’d had to deal with the Army of the Sylmahn—and the Ice Ash and North Hildermoss Rivers had had to be opened and free of ice once more—before he could have assumed the logistical burden of simply feeding the camps’ half-starved inmates. Even now, that burden was going to significantly impact the ability of Army of Midhold and the Army of New Northland to press the offensive. In terms of cold-blooded military logic, he ought to be striking directly for Lake City and the eastern terminus of the Holy Langhorne Canal rather than allowing himself to be diverted from what was currently the biggest strategic prize of northern East Haven, but there were times cold-blooded military logic had to be ignored.
This was one of those times.
His own forces were about to liberate Camp Dynnys. A column from Bartyn Sahmyrsyt’s Army of New Northland was already en route to Camp Lairays near the town of Hyrdmyn, two hundred miles northeast of Ohlarn, and Trumyn Stohnar’s Army of Hildermoss’ entire cavalry corps was on its way down the Jylmyn-Waymeet High Road to Camp Shairys. From Lairays, Sahmyrsyt’s mounted infantry would drive another three hundred miles to reach Camp Chihiro, while Green Valley continued down the Hildermoss to Cat-Lizard Lake and Camp St. Charlz. The number of inmates per camp varied from a low of 20,000 to just under 110,000. The average was about 70,000, which meant that over the next half-month or so, they were going to liberate the next best thing to 310,000 sick, starving, desperate people. The weather—thank God—promised to remain mild while they went about trying to evacuate them and move them to safe areas deeper into the Republic, but their numbers would actually exceed the number of men in the liberating armies, which explained the serious impact it was going to have on his logistics. That number also explained why Cayleb and Greyghor Stohnar—and Sharleyan, if Stohnar had only known—had decreed that this time humanity had to trump military expediency.
It remained to be seen how many of the other camps’ garrisons would emulate Colonel Tymahk and his men. The SNARCs had suggested Tymahk intended to try something to prevent the wholesale massacre of the Camp Dynnys prisoners, but the decisiveness—and effectiveness—of his actions had still surprised Green Valley. Tymahk wasn’t making any strenuous efforts to prevent the camp’s inquisitors from fading away—aside from that rat-bastard Cumyngs and his immediate accomplices, at any rate—and Green Valley rather regretted that. Still, he supposed they’d end up catching quite a few of Wylbyr Edwyrds’ loathsome minions before they were done, and Tymahk had hung onto the cream of the crop from Camp Dynnys. The written instruction from Bishop Maikel was a nice touch, too. It didn’t really prove anything, but it would be at least circumstantial evidence that Tymahk and his guards had refused direct, written orders to execute the camp’s inmates rather than allow them to be rescued. The colonel couldn’t know Green Valley had actually watched the entire confrontation and knew every word he planned to say in defense of his soldiers was the literal truth, nor did Green Valley intend to suggest anything of the sort. Despite which, Colonel Tymahk and Father Aizak were going to find themselves being treated quite a bit better than they’d probably dared to hope.
Decency’s too rare a commodity on the Church’s side for me to let it go to waste, the baron thought with a sense of profound satisfaction, shutting down the imagery and returning his attention to the paperwork on the desk before him. Tymahk and Mohmohtahny have managed to thread the moral needle without compromising themselves. That’s one hell of an achievement, under the circumstances. I suspect we’re going to see more of that, too, and not all of it out of people who do it because they genuinely are decent human beings. The bastards’ morale’s starting to crumble; the trick is to keep the process moving … and accelerating.
.X.
The Temple, City of Zion, The Temple Lands
The atmosphere in the luxurious council chamber could have been chipped with a knife, assuming someone could have found a knife strong enough and sharp enough for the task. The faces of three of the vicars sitting around the enormous table might have been masks carved from frozen marble. The fourth radiated the heat and fury of molten lava, instead, driven by what might possibly be the dawning awareness that his power was less than absolute after all. It was at least remotely conceivable that the man behind that fury had actually realized he could no longer simply hammer aside anyone who opposed him and make the truth be whatever he needed it to be.
And it’s always conceivable that he hasn’t, too, Rhobair Duchairn thought bitterly.
He didn’t feel that bitterness because he gave a single solitary damn about what Zhaspahr Clyntahn thought he needed, and he would have been more than human if he hadn’t felt an enormous caustic satisfaction at watching the Grand Inquisitor come face-to-face with the consequences of his own vicious arrogance and cruelty. No, he would shed no tears for Zhaspahr Clyntahn or his minions like Wyllym Rayno or Grand Inquisitor Wylbyr. But that didn’t prevent him from recognizing catastrophe for Mother Church, as well, when he saw it.
“So General Rychtyr believes he’ll be able to hold his position on the Sheryl-Seridahn at Fyrayth for the rest of the summer and fall, now that the new artillery’s come up in sufficient numbers,” Allayn Maigwair was saying. “By the beginning of September, he should have another forty or fifty thousand men under his orders, as well. It’s possible he’s being overly optimistic, but I’m inclined to believe his appraisal is realistic.”
The Captain General paused and looked around the table. Clyntahn jerked an impatient nod, but it was obvious he wasn’t particularly concerned about the threat to Dohlar at the moment, and Maigwair looked back down at the file open on the table in front of him.
“Farther north, Earl Silken Hills will be in position at the southern end of the Black Wyverns within another five-day,” he continued. “Baron Falling Rock is already in place at Lake City, and Earl Rainbow Waters’ vanguard will join him there no later than next Thursday. Of course, it will take considerably longer—at least two five-days, and more probably three—for his entire force to come up, given the congestion on the Holy Langhorne.”
He glanced at Duchairn, his eyes opaque, and the Treasurer looked back with matching impassivity. Neither of them bothered to look at Zahmsyn Trynair. The Chancellor hadn’t said a word in the last hour and a half and it was unlikely he intended to say one now. He’d washed his hands of military and logistic decisions, retreating into the narrow, increasingly irrelevant sphere of Mother Church’s diplomacy. There was no longer any pretense that the Church was doing anything besides issuing orders to the secular states, which turned Trynair’s diplomats into little more than messengers. The only place anything remotely like true diplomacy mattered was in the efforts to keep Desnair actively involved in the Jihad at all, and given the state of Desnairian arms and industry, failing in that regard would have little real negative impact. Still, it let Trynair push n
otes back and forth while resolutely removing himself from any of the Group of Four’s truly important decisions.
Neither Duchairn nor Maigwair had that luxury, however. For all practical purposes, the Group of Four had become the Group of Three, and that new power relationship was still … fragile. None of its members knew precisely where the limits currently lay. Clyntahn clearly held the whip hand where the power of suppression was concerned, but however much he hated admitting it, he needed the other two. His ability to ignore inconvenient truths would lead quickly to outright military disaster; even he realized that, somewhere deep inside, although he would die before admitting it. And unlike him, both of them were only too well aware of the way in which the Holy Langhorne Canal had become the vital lifeline of the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels. That would have been bad enough under any circumstances; as it was, the strain of simultaneously moving the Mighty Host forward and somehow bringing up the supplies to establish a sufficient forward magazine at Lake City was perilously close to unsustainable. It would get better—probably, at least a little—once the personnel movements had been completed, but it was never going to be anything Duchairn would have called good, and he shuddered to think what another disaster like the one at Sarkyn the previous autumn might do to them all.
“Then why isn’t Falling Rock already advancing?” Clyntahn demanded harshly … and entirely predictably, Duchairn thought.
“Because we’d sort of like him to survive, Zhaspahr!” Maigwair snapped.
The Grand Inquisitor locked fiery eyes with him, but the Captain General refused to look away. The meeting which had been preempted by the Fist of God’s attack on Second Pasquale’s had … clarified his relationship with Clyntahn. It had also cost Clyntahn his most valuable tools within the Army of God’s senior hierarchy, and Maigwair had moved rather more effectively than even Duchairn had expected to capitalize on those unexpected vacancies by putting men he trusted into those positions. And he’d been a great deal more careful about just whom he decided he could trust while he’d been about it.
“He’s only got fifty thousand men,” the Captain General continued now. “If he advances beyond the line of the Hildermoss River, he’ll be massacred!”
“No, he won—”
“Yes, he will!” Maigwair slammed his open hand down on the table—rather gently, actually, all things considered, in Duchairn’s opinion. “Your own agents inquisitors’ estimate gives Sahmyrsyt better than eighty thousand men. Green Valley has at least that many more men, and that bastard Stohnar’s got close to a hundred thousand of his own. What d’you think’ll happen to fifty thousand men who find themselves under attack in the open field by the next best thing to three hundred thousand men with superior weapons?! And that doesn’t even consider the fact that the heretics control Hsing-wu’s Passage as far west as Saint Phylyp’s Bay! Or the fact that their ironclads are operating as far up the North Hildermoss as the Darailys locks. Thank God the captain commanding the Darailys picket had the gumption to blow the locks without waiting for authorization from someone higher up the command chain! At least we’ve got them stopped there—for the moment, at any rate—but if Falling Rock marches out into the middle of all that, the heretics will annihilate him.”
Clyntahn’s face was clenched in rage, but he slammed himself back in his comfortably upholstered chair. The struggle to control the stream of vituperation locked behind his teeth was obvious, yet it was equally obvious Maigwair was correct.
Charisian galleons and schooners had flooded into Hsing-wu’s Passage as soon as the ice melted, and they’d been accompanied by more of the new sort of ironclads which had effectively demolished the harbors of Geyra, Malyktyn, and Desnair the City. In fact, Duchairn suspected they were the same ironclads; surely, not even the heretics had an unlimited supply of them! The good news (such as it was and tattered though it might be) was that they clearly lacked the endurance of the sail-powered vessels, but a Marine landing force, covered by the ironclads’ heavy guns, had gone ashore in Regyr’s Cove and seized the small coastal city of Seryga in the Episcopate of St. Phylyp. They hadn’t just raided Seryga, either. They’d come to stay, throwing up fortifications and establishing a depot under the protection of the ICN’s artillery to provide the ironclads with coal.
And Seryga’s barely three thousand miles from Temple Bay, the Treasurer thought grimly. That’s halfway from the Icewind Sea, and who’s to say they couldn’t go the rest of the way before winter closes the Passage down and they have to pull back again?
It was a terrifying thought, and he reminded himself—again—of the danger of assigning invincibility to the heretics. But he rather doubted Clyntahn was thinking about it the same way he was. No, what Zhaspahr was thinking about was the fact that the river town of Darailys was barely eighty miles from the confluence of the North Hildermoss and the Tarikah River. That put the Charisian Navy within little more than three hundred miles of Lake City … and less than a hundred and forty of Camp St. Charlz. The heretics hadn’t seized the camp—yet—according to their latest reports, but Duchairn would be astonished if that remained true for very much longer. St. Charlz was barely two hundred and eighty miles from Camp Dynnys, after all. For that matter, it was entirely possible the heretic Green Valley had already seized St. Charlz and Zion simply hadn’t heard about it yet thanks to the disruption of Mother Church’s communications. The confusion and chaos in Icewind Province and eastern Tarikah as Faithful refugees fled west, followed by heretic mounted columns, would be almost impossible to exaggerate.
“All right, Allayn,” Clyntahn grated at last in an ugly voice like crumbling limestone. The effort it took to exert even that much control was only too evident, and he glared at Maigwair and Duchairn. “I realize there are all those dozens of military reasons for Falling Rock to sit on his arse in Lake City. I’m sure you and Rhobair can describe them to me in excruciating detail, no matter what argument I put forward about our responsibilities to God and Mother Church.”
The hatred in the Grand Inquisitor’s eyes boded ill for Maigwair, Duchairn thought, but the Captain General met them coldly. The Treasurer wondered how much of that courage was bravado, how much was the result of growing confidence in his own power base, and how much of it was simply the determination of a man who was resolved to deal with a crisis and no longer cared what Clyntahn might say or do.
“But if there are all of those goddamned reasons why we can’t move Falling Rock and the rest of the Harchongians forward, then you and Rhobair had fucking well better find a way to pull the inmates of every damned camp in Tarikah and northern Hildermoss back into the Temple Lands before the Shan-wei-damned heretics reach them!” Clyntahn continued harshly. “Understand me, both of you. If the Army and the Mighty Host simply stand there with their thumbs up their arses and watch my Inquisitors lose those camps and all the unsifted heretics in them, whoever—whoever, and I don’t give a single fucking damn who that whoever might be—is responsible for that decision will face the Punishment right here in Zion! Whoever it is.”
His meaning was abundantly clear as he glared at Maigwair and Duchairn, and a chill ran through the Treasurer. This was the most openly Clyntahn had threatened the only two members of the Group of Four who still had the will to question his will. The polarization within the Group of Four was now complete, and Duchairn wondered if Clyntahn realized the totality with which he’d just driven him and Maigwair into one another’s arms.
“You’re talking about thousands of inmates, Zhaspahr,” he said in a deliberately calm tone. “I know you don’t want to hear about ‘military reasons’ why we can’t do things, but we don’t have anywhere near the capacity to move that many people back along our remaining transportation routes. It’s not that we have it and we’re refusing to make it available to you for some reason. It simply doesn’t exist.”
“Then Allayn had better find the troops to march the bastards back into the Temple Lands on their own feet!” Clyntahn snarled. “Or else, he?
??d better find the troops—troops who will goddamned well obey their orders instead of hiding under their beds for fear of ‘Dialydd Mab’ and his assassins!—to execute every single one of those prisoners where they stand.”
“Inquisitor General Wylbyr’s own reports make it clear his inquisitors haven’t had time to sift the guilty from the innocent, Zhaspahr!” Duchairn protested. “That’s why they’re still in the camps.”
“And better a thousand innocent children of God return to Him and the Archangels than that a single servant of Shan-wei be rescued by her vile, corrupt servants and returned to the struggle against Mother Church!” Clyntahn shot back. “God will know His own, and He’ll welcome them to His arms as the martyrs they’ll become!”
Duchairn began a hot retort, then made himself shut his mouth. At the moment, Clyntahn’s agents inquisitor and the Temple Guardsmen and city guardsmen who’d been coopted into the Inquisition’s security forces had a near total monopoly on armed power in Zion. Maigwair had a few thousand men in the city’s vicinity, but the majority of them were in staff and administrative positions. Even if that hadn’t been true and all of them had been combat forces, they were easily outnumbered by close to ten to one by the armsmen available to Clyntahn and Wyllym Rayno. For that matter, it was far from certain they would defy the Inquisition if Maigwair asked them to, and Clyntahn’s goaded irrationality was only too plain to see. If Duchairn and Maigwair chose to challenge him openly, he would launch that armed force against them. In fact, that was probably exactly what he wanted to do.
The Fist of God’s continued strikes in and around Zion—and the way the broadsheets and pamphlets reporting those strikes continued to proliferate—were an intolerable challenge to his personal authority which fed his steadily increasing frustration, anger, and hatred. For that matter, however little he wanted to admit it, his inability to crush the Fist or even find the printing presses churning out all that anti-Inquisition propaganda was probably terrifying to him. So, yes, no doubt he did want to lash out at whatever enemies he could find.