“I assure you, I’ll be as careful as humanly possible,” Cahnyr said after a moment. “And I’ll even promise to obey any orders my escort might choose to give me.”
“And you’ll take Madam Gorjah with you, just in case.”
“No, I won’t,” Cahnyr said firmly. “There’s no point and no reason in allowing Sahmantha to endanger herself up here. Quite aside from any other factor, she’s far too valuable for that, especially considering Father Fhranklyn’s immobility.”
Father Fhranklyn Haine had suffered massive frostbite to both feet struggling through what everyone hoped had been one of the winter’s last blizzards in a vain effort to save a half-starved young mother from appendicitis. He’d lost most of his toes and half of his left foot, which had hurt him far less than losing his patient had. Nonetheless, the injury had confined him to the “hospital” in Green Cove, a hundred miles south of the ruins of Brahdwyn’s Folly. He really should have been two hundred and fifty miles farther back, at the hospital in Tairys, the provincial capital … but, then, so should Cahnyr. And as the Pasqualate had pointed out, there was nothing wrong with his hands. All he really needed was someone to wheel him from patient to patient, and half the time he had some orphaned waif tucked in his lap, making the huge-eyed child laugh at least briefly as they raced down the Green Cove clinic’s crowded hallways shouting for people to get out of the way.
“Speaking as the military commander the Lord Protector and Madam Pahrsahn sent out here to hold this pass, I respectfully disagree, Your Eminence,” Raimahn said flatly. “You don’t quite seem to grasp how central you are to our defense of this province. Fortunately, some of the rest of us do, and we’re not taking any chances we can avoid with you. In other words,” he looked the archbishop squarely in the eye, “when we can’t stop you from doing foolish things”—it was obvious from his tone that he really wanted to use a word considerably stronger than “foolish”—“we’ll just have to do our best to minimize the consequences. And that, Your Eminence, means sending a trained healer to keep an eye on you. At the moment, we only have one of those available. So either you take Madam Gorjah with you or else you admit neither of you has any business up here and go back at least as far as Green Cove.”
Cahnyr opened his mouth, then closed it again as he recognized the unyielding light in Byrk Raimahn’s normally mild eyes. The archbishop fumed, but the truth was that however little he wanted to admit it, he knew Raimahn was right. His presence, his return to Glacierheart, had been met by the starving people of his archbishopric with cheers, and not simply because of the food he’d brought. They’d cheered him as the living proof they hadn’t been abandoned, that the lord protector and the rest of the Republic knew about the stand they’d made—were making—and that if they could just hold on long enough, help would come. And he was also the focal point of every Reformist hope in Glacierheart, the archbishop who’d been outlawed by the Group of Four for his stance against their corruption yet returned, despite the condemnation to the Punishment of Schueler which hung over his head, to lead their fight to return Mother Church to what she was supposed to be.
No one had to know how unworthy of all that hope and faith and trust he truly felt, yet he couldn’t pretend the people of Glacierheart didn’t feel it. And because it was his responsibility to live up to that hope and faith, somehow he’d do it. He didn’t know how, yet he knew he would, that God would show him the way to do it. But he couldn’t ignore his pastoral responsibilities in the doing. He was God’s priest before he was anything else, and his heart wept when he read Raimahn’s messages, realized the grim brutality of the struggle raging back and forth across the hundred-mile stretch of narrow, icy roads and even more treacherous mountain paths between Brahdwyn’s Folly and Fyrmahn’s Cove on the Hildermoss side of the Gray Walls. These were his people, too, the ones dying up here in the snow—the ones killing up here in the snow … and sacrificing bloody bits and pieces of their own souls in the process.
The truth was, although he would never have admitted it to a living soul, he had to make this trip now. His strength, his stamina, was fading more quickly than he thought even Sahmantha realized, and if he’d waited as little as another five-day, he would have been physically unable to make the arduous climb even this far. A part of him had almost been seduced by Sahmantha’s cajolery—and threats—into coming no farther than Green Cove, or even returning to Tairys. After all, young Raimahn was probably right about the effect his death would have, not just on the fighting men resisting the unremitting pressure from Hildermoss but on everyone else in Glacierheart as well. But he was an old man, and if he was going to die this winter, he would do it among the people fighting to protect their families and their beliefs and their faith, not under a pile of comforters in the archbishop’s palace in Tairys.
He wondered again if his determination was some bizarre form of penance, an act of contrition for having survived the slaughter of Samyl Wylsynn’s Reformists. Was he trying to expiate some self-guilt? Or was he actively seeking the release of death to escape his heartsick grief at the ghastly deathtoll Glacierheart had suffered through this bitter, bitter winter of starvation and privation?
Oh, don’t be foolish! he scolded himself. Do you really imagine all of this revolves around you, whatever young Byrk or anyone else may believe? You’re one man, Zhasyn Cahnyr, one archbishop. One servant of God and the archangels. If you should happen to die up here, God will find someone else to take up your burden. And as for owing Samyl and the others some kind of death debt, or being personally responsible for all the suffering of Glacierheart, just how big an ego do you have? It’s your job to do something about it, not to find some reason to justify feeling responsible for every bit of it!
“Very well,” he said, his testy tone and the glitter in his usually mild eye an admission Raimahn had found an argument that would actually make him exercise caution. “Since you intend to be unreasonable about it and I’m merely an old and feeble man who no longer possesses the strength and intestinal fortitude to resist your autocracy, Sahmantha may accompany me. I trust that will be satisfactory?”
“‘Satisfactory’ would be me standing here looking at your backside headed down the trail to Green Cove,” Raimahn said inflexibly. “Under the circumstances, however, and bearing in mind what an ‘old and feeble man’ you are when it comes to having your own way, I’ll settle for what I can get.” He looked over his shoulder and whistled sharply. “Sailys!”
“Yes, Sir?”
A shaggy, brown-haired fellow in a hard-used parka materialized out of the straggly evergreens which provided the illusion of a windbreak for Raimahn’s small fire. It took Cahnyr a moment to recognize Sailys Trahskhat behind the thick beard blowing on the wind. The Charisian’s right cheek was badly mottled by frostbite, making him even harder to recognize, but he smiled in welcome as he saw the archbishop.
“Don’t smile,” Raimahn told him sternly. “The last thing we need is to be encouraging this … this old gentleman to be wandering around up here amongst the mountain peaks!”
“As you say, Sir.” Trahskhat banished the expression instantly.
“That’s better. Now, I’m putting you in charge of making certain he and Madam Gorjah don’t get into any unpleasantness while they’re here. Take one of the ready duty squads with you, and be sure you keep an eye peeled. That bastard Fyrmahn’s out there somewhere—I can smell him—and I don’t want him getting a shot at His Eminence. Is there any part of that which isn’t clear to you?”
He kept one eye on Cahnyr as Trahskhat shook his head firmly.
“No, Sir. I think I’ve got it.”
“Good. Because—I don’t want you to take this wrongly, Sailys—but if he doesn’t come back, you’d better not come back. I don’t think either one of us would like to explain to the rest of Glacierheart how we came to mislay him.”
* * *
Zhan Fyrmahn lay very still under the white canopy which had once been a bedsheet. The cold win
d billowed the sheet, whispering knife-edged secrets, and its bitter kiss sank deep into his bone and flesh.
There wasn’t much of that flesh left, and his belly had stopped snarling and retreated into sullen, aching silence five-days ago. Without the food Wahlys Mahkhom and his men had stolen, over half his own women and children had perished. They’d finally gotten the surviving gaunt-faced mothers and hollow-eyed children out of Fyrmahn’s Cove, passing them up the high road through Heatherton towards safety under Mother Church’s protection in Tarikah. Fyrmahn wouldn’t be surprised if they lost half the remaining survivors before they ever reached Tarikah, and it was all that bastard Mahkhom’s fault. His and all those other heretical, Shan-wei-worshiping traitors who’d betrayed Mother Church in her hour of need.
He’d tried, for a time, not to think about the empty cottages in the village his great-great-grandfather had established over a hundred years ago. About snow blowing in under doors and lying in herringbone patterns across floors where no hearth fire would melt it, drifting ever higher against doors and shutters no hand would open with the coming of spring.
About the bodies hidden under that canopy of white because the ground was too frozen to bury them, or because no one even knew where they’d died.
Oh, yes. He’d tried not to think about it, but he’d failed. And a part of him was glad, for the rage gave him strength when the food ran out. It burned at the heart of him, like a furnace, and he raised the edge of his canopy to peer down the long, steep mountain flank at the trail below him.
He couldn’t see the four men who’d accompanied him, no matter how hard he looked, but he knew they were out there … unless the cold had claimed them. That could happen too easily to men weakened by starvation, and the journey to get here would have been grueling even if they’d all been well fed and in good health. The mountain snowpack was even deeper than usual this year, though the smell of an eventual thaw was in the air. That air was still so cold it squeaked in a man’s lungs, yet he sensed a damp edge behind it, like the breath of that thaw sighing in his ear. When it hit, the snowpack would turn treacherous and mountain streams would become rivers while rivers became torrents. Travel would be almost impossible for several five-days, and he wondered if it would be possible for any of them to return the way they’d come.
We won’t be “returning” anywhere if we don’t capture at least some food, he reminded himself harshly.
The thought held curiously little terror, although he’d insisted to his companions that they planned on returning—that this wasn’t some sort of suicide mission. Yet deep inside he’d always known better, whatever he’d told them. Just as they’d known, whatever they’d told themselves. None of them had anything to return to.
He thought again about Father Failyx. The Schuelerite was a hard man, he thought approvingly, a good hater. Lowlander he might’ve been born, but he had a Highland heart when it came to vengeance. He’d known what Fyrmahn intended when he set off into the mountains, and he’d only gripped the mountaineer’s hand tightly and squeezed his shoulder in silent blessing. One or two of Fyrmahn’s men had muttered that there might have been food enough—if only barely—to have made it through the winter after all, if not for Father Failyx and the lowland troops he’d brought forward. Perhaps they were even right. But without those trained troops, the bastard Reformists with their rifles and bayonets might well have driven Mother Church’s loyal sons completely back out of the Gray Walls. As it was, despite months of bitter fighting which had dyed the snow crimson, the line between Hildermoss and Glacierheart had moved barely thirty miles north.
And even with the food they stole, the heretic scum’s rations are almost as short as ours, he comforted himself bitterly. We’ve whittled them down to the bone, too. If there’s any truth to the rumors about what’ll be moving south when the snow melts, Mahkhom’s and “Archbishop Zhasyn’s” remaining men will never be able to stop it.
The thought gave him bleak, bitter satisfaction, even if he wasn’t likely to see it happen. And in the meantime—
His thoughts broke off and his single eye narrowed as he saw movement.
* * *
Cahnyr considered asking for a halt to catch his breath. Accustomed as he was to Glacierheart’s altitude, he’d seldom been this high, and the thin air was a scalpel in his lungs, despite the muffler wrapped across his mouth and nose. His legs ached, the pernicious weakness which had become an inescapable part of him turned his knees to rubber, and he knew the unsteadiness of his footing came from more than just the ice and snow underfoot.
If you ask them to stop, they’ll turn around and head back, even if they have to bind you hand and foot and drag you behind, he told himself. And the fact that you know as well as they do that it would be the smart thing for them to do only indicates what a sound point young Byrk had about the state of your so-called sanity.
He grimaced at his own perversity behind the muffler, but they had only one more stop before they all turned around and headed back to the ruins of Brahdwyn’s Folly. The outpost ahead of them—the support camp for the advanced pickets covering the approaches from Fyrmahn’s Cove—consisted of barely sixty men, but according to the senior man at their last stop, at least a quarter of them were ill. Even a minor sickness could be deadly dangerous to men whose resistance had been undermined by hunger and cold, and he’d known from Sahmantha’s expression that the healer in her needed to do what she could for them. He’d seen that need warring with her concern for him, and he’d felt the same need himself. Not to heal their bodies, for that skill wasn’t his, but the need to minister to them, to hear their confessions, grant them absolution and blessing … that was even more his duty than healing was hers.
He started to ask how much farther they had to go, but asking that would be as good as asking for a halt. And unless he missed his guests, Sailys Trahskhat would be calling another rest break soon. The man was watching Cahnyr like a hawk; it couldn’t be much longer before he insisted on resting the archbishop’s aged legs.
Of course, the problem is that if we stop to rest them, they’re likely to freeze solid, Cahnyr thought wryly. Either that or just fall off. Maybe it would be better that way. I could sit on my episcopal arse and let them tow me like a sled.
His mouth twitched in an exhausted smile and he tightened his grip on his mountaineer’s staff while he concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.
* * *
Fyrmahn studied the moving figures. This far south, any man he saw was a legitimate target, but there was something about them.…
His jaw clenched as he made out the rifles slung over their shoulders. There were ten of them with the weapons—six carrying them slung, and four with rifles at the ready. Three of the ready quartet broke trail ahead of the main body, while the fourth tagged along behind, watching their rear. They were obviously alert, and their wariness—and their weapons—would make things tricky.
He chewed on his thoughts, watching them come closer. He hadn’t really planned on locking horns with so many men, and especially not so many riflemen. The object had been to creep around behind the heretics’ line, pick off couriers and messengers, wring any information they could out of anyone they managed to take alive, and—hopefully—live off their enemies’ captured food while they spread panic and confusion. But ten of them, in one party, all armed with those infernal rifles … that was more than he and his companions had counted on tackling.
Yet even as he considered, he was watching, wondering what they were doing out here. And as he wondered, his eye was drawn to the two figures at the center of the riflemen.
Neither of them was armed, as far as he could see. And one of them … the shorter one.… That was a woman, he realized abruptly, and what in Shan-wei’s name was a woman doing this deep into the Gray Walls at this time of year?
He scowled, but then, suddenly, his eye widened as he saw the bag slung over her shoulder—the one he was suddenly certain bore the caduceus of Pasquale—
and remembered the reports. Could it really be…?
His gaze went back to the taller but bent figure in front of her, the one slogging through the snow wearily yet with a sort of granite determination, leaning heavily on his staff. If one was a woman, the one in front of her was old, it showed in the way he moved, and only one old man would drive himself along such a bitter trail accompanied by a woman healer. And if they were who Fyrmahn thought they were, no wonder they were escorted by an entire squad of riflemen!
His hollow eye glittered with sudden, burning determination, and he pursed his chapped and bleeding lips. His whistle was barely audible above the sigh of the wind, but he heard it repeated back a handful of seconds later, and he bared his teeth.
Then he slid his already cocked arbalest into position and checked the quarrel with loving care before he set it to the string.
* * *
All right, Cahnyr thought. You win, Sahmantha. I’ve got to take a break, no matter what opportunity it gives you to browbeat me for my foolishness. But at least we’re probably close enough to camp for me to convince you to drag me the rest of the way there instead of turning around and heading back down the mountainside to—
The arbalest bolt came out of nowhere. He never even saw it before it drove into the great muscle group on the front of his left thigh. Agony ripped through him and blood sprayed as the quarrel drove clear through and out the other side. He went down with a cry of pain, and even as he fell, three more quarrels ripped into their party.
One of Trahskhat’s riflemen collapsed without a sound, his body pitching silently over the steep edge of the trail, plummeting into the shadowed depths below. Another staggered, stumbled, and went to one knee, swearing viciously as a quarrel slammed into his right shoulder joint, staining his parka with a sudden flood of crimson.