One of her hands had risen to her throat, and he smiled gently, compassionately … sadly.
“That’s what you must understand,” he told her with implacable gentleness, “and I must explain it to you clearly, as unambiguously as I possibly can, despite the pain I fear that explanation may bring you, because it’s an explanation you must grasp. One you must understand before you make any choice, any decision, because of who and what you are, because of who and what your brother is. There is nothing on the face of this world I would more treasure than your decision to commit yourself to the cause to which I’ve committed myself, but I won’t—I can’t, Irys—counsel you without being as completely honest as I can. There are things I can’t explain to you, that no one can explain to you, right now. That’s true for everyone on Safehold. But before you commit your heart and your soul—that strong, valiant heart and soul—you must understand that in this much, at least, Zhaspahr Clyntahn has spoken the truth. He doesn’t understand why, and he doesn’t understand how, and there is nothing but foulness in that man’s soul, yet in the midst of all the hatred and poison he spews out, there is this one slender fragment of truth. If the Church of Charis lives, we will change the Church of God Awaiting more profoundly than she has changed since the Creation itself. If you cannot give yourself—your strength, your courage, your hope, your passion, all you are or ever hope to be—to that goal, then as a priest of God, I cannot advise you to embrace the Church of Charis, for it will lead you only to heartbreak and sorrow.”
Silence fell, enfolding them, perfected and made somehow absolute by the faint sound of voices from the deck above, of water rushing about wooden planking and the breeze blowing through the open window to play with the end of Irys’ braid. She stared at him, looking into his eyes as if she could somehow see the truth in their depths. And then she drew a deep breath.
“And if I can give myself to that goal, Your Eminence?” she said very softly.
“Then you may still find heartbreak and sorrow,” he told her unflinchingly, “but it won’t be because you have acquiesced in evil in God’s name, and it will never be the heartbreak of fear and uncertainty. We may yet fail, Irys. I don’t believe God would have allowed us to come this far, achieve this much, if that was what we were destined to do, but I could be wrong. And if we do fail, Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s vengeance on all we love or care for will be terrible beyond belief. Yet at least we will have this—that we chose knowingly. That we decided what we stood for and that as Cayleb himself said, we could do no other.”
He looked back into her eyes, his gaze gentle and caring and as unyielding as steel.
“So I suppose the question, Irys, is what you believe God wants you to stand for.”
* * *
“Have you seen Irys, Mairah?”
“Irys?” Mairah Breygart looked up from the book she’d been reading to her seven-year-old stepdaughter as the Empress of Charis stepped into her cabin. “I thought she was with you.”
“No.” Sharleyan shook her head. “I thought she was still here, thinking.”
“She left over an hour ago,” Mairah said. Fhrancys tugged on her sleeve, pouting at the interruption, and Mairah wrapped her arms around the child and kissed the top of her head, but she never looked away from the empress. “It was closer to two hours, really. I thought she was going to talk to you about whatever it was she had on her mind.”
“I haven’t seen her.” Sharleyan looked perplexed. “And it’s not as if thiswere an especially big ship, but no one seems to’ve seen her, and I’m beginning to get a little—”
“Excuse me, Your Majesty,” a voice said behind her. “Were you looking for me?”
Sharleyan turned quickly, her face showing her relief as she saw Irys standing in the cabin door behind her.
“Yes, I’m afraid I was. I didn’t realize someone besides Merlin could just … disappear aboard a ship in the middle of the ocean!”
She smiled, and Irys smiled back, but there was something odd about the younger woman’s expression.
“I didn’t mean to cause you any alarm, Your Majesty. I just found myself in need of a conversation with His Eminence. And after that, I had a few things I needed to discuss with Phylyp—I mean, Earl Coris. I … didn’t want to be disturbed while I was talking to either of them, and I’m afraid I asked Tobys to be creatively vague about my whereabouts.”
“I see.” Sharleyan’s smile had faded into a thoughtful expression, and she cocked her head. “Or, more honestly, I don’t see … yet.”
“I’m not trying to be mysterious, Your Majesty. It’s just that my life’s been even more complicated than I’d realized myself. I needed … I needed a little clarity.”
“And have you found it?” Sharleyan asked carefully.
“Clarity?” Irys’ tone was wry. “Yes, I believe I’ve found that. Courage, though … that came a bit harder. I think it did come in the end, though. That’s what I had to discuss with Phylyp.” She snorted gently. “I suppose I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was to realize he’d already figured out what I was thinking.”
“Which was…?”
“Which was that I’ve been contaminated by the pernicious, heretical, blasphemous apostasy of the Church of Charis,” Irys said softly. “And if that costs me my soul in the end, then at least I’ll be in better company than Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s at the Judgment.”
.VIII.
Siddar City, Republic of Siddarmark
“I’m getting a bit tired of surprises,” Greyghor Stohnar said grimly, looking down at the updated map on the enormous table.
“Pleasant surprises I could handle,” Cayleb Ahrmahk told him from the other side of the table, studying the same map. “Unfortunately, those seem to be a little thin on the ground just now.”
“There’ve been a few of them, Your Majesty.” The lord protector looked up. “Like those food convoys of yours. But the bad do seem to have outnumbered the good, don’t they?”
Cayleb nodded, his expression equally unhappy. And the truth was that although he wasn’t actually surprised by the latest news, that very lack of surprise only made his mood worse. He’d decided he liked Greyghor Stohnar quite a lot, and that made his inability to share information even more irksome than usual. He reminded himself—again—that the Republic was so enormous there was time for most information to reach Siddar City by … more conventional means before it became critical.
Sure. Just like there was plenty of time for Stohnar to react to the “Sword of Schueler,” right?
“We’d’ve found out sooner if we hadn’t lost those semaphore stations in Cliff Peak,” Daryus Parkair growled, and this time Stohnar and Cayleb both nodded.
The raid out of western Shiloh, across the Branath Canal through the gap between the Clynmair Hills and the Branath Mountains, had crossed the southern tip of Glacierheart, stabbed deep into Cliff Peak, and burned three semaphore stations—one a junction station for multiple chains. It had also massacred the entire crew of all those stations, and it might have done even more damage if it hadn’t taken the time to make sure the massacres were done right. The Republic’s military was primarily infantry, but it did have some cavalry, and a detachment of it had overtaken the raiders.
There hadn’t been any prisoners.
“Well, we know now,” Samyl Gahdarhd said gloomily. “Who would’ve thought Rahnyld of Dohlar, of all people, could actually move faster than someone expected?”
“I have to agree it’s not what we would’ve expected out of him a few years ago,” Cayleb replied.
He looked back up from the map and glanced over his shoulder at Merlin. Stohnar and his ministers had very little problem accepting Merlin’s position as Cayleb’s aide and one of his most trusted military advisors as well as “simply” his bodyguard.
“I’m not certain this can all be laid at Rahnyld’s door, Your Majesty,” Merlin said now. “All the same, I have to admit Rahnyld—or the Dohlarans, at least—have actually been Clyntahn’s most effective minions
so far. Certainly they have on a man-for-man basis, at any rate.”
“What bothers me even more than the fact that he’s moving at least three five-days sooner than we expected is that he seems to be moving faster, too,” Parkair admitted, tapping a map token already over a hundred miles inside the South March border.
“The canal and road net out of Thorast and Reskar are good enough to explain a lot of that,” Stohnar said. “And it looks like they must’ve hired a semi-competent quartermaster this time, too.” His lips twitched humorlessly. “Who would’ve thought he could have found one of those in Dohlar?”
“I suspect that may be because we’re looking at a supply organization managed by Mother Church, not Rahnyld, My Lord,” Merlin murmured, and Stohnar looked at him sharply. Then, after a moment, he nodded.
“A very good point, Seijin Merlin. And one we should all bear in mind.”
Other heads nodded around the map table, and a profound silence fell as all of them considered what had already been said.
Merlin was glad to see it. The Republic’s leaders’ disdain for the Royal Dohlaran Army was probably inevitable … but it was also dangerous as hell. These weren’t stupid men. In fact, they were smart, competent, gutsy, and willing to actually exercise their brains, or they wouldn’t have survived this far. But their estimates of Dohlaran capabilities were predicated on realities which had existed two or three years ago. Try though they might—and they were trying, conscientiously and hard—it was difficult to cast aside decades of hard-won experience when it came to evaluating their opponents.
The forces Rahnyld of Dohlar—or the Church of God Awaiting, at any rate—had sent marching out of the Duchy of Thorast into the South March consisted of forty-two thousand men, two-thirds of them cavalry, under General Sir Fahstyr Rychtyr (an unfortunately capable-seeming sort), but it was only his vanguard. Another fifty-five thousand men—three-quarters of them infantry, this time—would cross the border within the next five-day or so under Sir Rainos Ahlverez’ personal command, and they were a very different breed of cat lizard from anything any Siddarmarkian general had ever before seen. Eighty percent of those infantry would have rifles or smoothbore muskets and bayonets, and the new-model artillery which would roll along behind them was equipped with at least a partial loadout of exploding shells, as well as round shot, grapeshot, and canister. The Church’s—and Dohlar’s—main field gun was a twelve-pounder copied directly from Charis (essentially an Old Earth twelve-pounder Napoleon), but Dohlar had added lighter horse guns and—at Earl Thirsk’s insistence—it was actually developing its own howitzers, though none had yet been deployed, thank God. Any conventional pike block that went up against that army would be massacred, and he hoped Stohnar’s field commanders had accepted that unpleasant truth as thoroughly as the lord protector and his personal staff seemed to have.
At the moment, most of that infantry was still only a threat on the horizon, but Rahnyld’s vanguard was advancing at better than twenty miles a day—and could have doubled that rate if it hadn’t been linking up with rebellious militia units as it came. The Dohlaran horsemen heading that column, unlike their infantry, would normally have been no match for organized Siddarmarkian pike blocks. That didn’t much matter, though, since it did have six-pounder horse artillery. Worse, there were no organized bodies of pikes left in its path, aside from regiments still clinging to isolated forts here and there, and the Republic was already beginning to lose additional semaphore stations in the path of the advance. Many were being captured or destroyed well before the Dohlarans could have reached them, too, which suggested careful coordination between the invaders and the rebels under the Temple’s control.
For that matter, the Royal Army itself was effectively under the Church’s direct control, with “special intendants” attached to every major unit. They were careful to maintain the pretense that they were there simply as spiritual advisors, yet no one was under any illusions in that respect, and given the criteria by which Clyntahn and Rayno chose their agents, the atrocity quotient had probably just risen yet again.
“Given that the Church is managing Rahnyld’s supplies,” the lord protector said finally, “I think we’re going to have to look carefully at the possibility Rahnyld and Mahrys may actually end up cooperating. After all,” he showed his teeth briefly, “it won’t really be them cooperating at all, will it? Just their inquisitor keepers.”
“I think you’re right about that, My Lord,” Cayleb agreed. “Our own agents indicate Desnair’s well behind Dohlar at this point, and I don’t think they’re going to be moving any sooner than we’d originally anticipated. But at Rahnyld’s present rate of advance, he could be into Shiloh in no more than a month and a half, given that the rebels hold Fort Tairys and both ends of the Tairys Gap. Or, if he’s willing to cut loose from the Sheryl-Seridahn Canal and head northeast, he could hit Saint Alyk’s and punch through the gap between the Snakes and the Branath Mountains. And if Mahrys follows up through Silkiah, he can come in on Rahnyld’s heels headed in either direction.”
The emperor ran his finger across the Gulf of Mathyas and up the Silkiahan coast.
“We can flood the Gulf of Jahras with light cruisers, and we’ll have a couple of squadrons off the grand duchy that can operate as far up as Sandfish or Thesmar Bay. That cuts Desnair’s direct canal links to the South March, but we can’t operate into Salthar Bay until we’ve dealt with the Dohlaran Navy and gained control of the Gulf of Dohlar, and I just don’t think we’ve got the hulls to do that this summer. We’ve got to control eastern waters, protect Duke Eastshare’s move to the Republic, interdict enemy ship movements, support army operations along the coasts and, probably, inland on the rivers as well, and deal with the fact that the idiots on the other side have finally started systematically attacking our commerce. Which means they’ll also be doing their damnedest to attack any transports shipping food, munitions, and men into the Republic from the Empire.”
“I understand,” Stohnar said, “but as long as they’re free to move supplies through Port Salthar and then up the Silk Town–Thesmar Canal, their supply line’s going to be effectively secure at least to the South March border. It’ll be slower than if they could ship directly across the Gulf of Mathyas, and staging overland through Hankey and Coastguard will entail a lot more wastage, but there won’t be anything we can do to interfere with it.”
“Trust me, I’m entirely too well aware of that, My Lord,” Cayleb replied grimly. “But our agents report the Temple”—by common, unspoken consent, the Church of God Awaiting controlled by the Group of Four had become “the Temple,” and not “Mother Church,” here in Siddar City—“is getting its own exploding shells into production in greater quantity than we’d hoped. And Earl Thirsk isn’t letting any grass grow under his feet.” The emperor shook his head, his expression wry. “I don’t know exactly how he pulled it off, but he’s managed to get the entire shell output of one of Dohlar’s larger foundries dedicated to his fleet, and he’s seeing to it that they get allocated to their coastal fortifications as well. By the time we could redeploy enough of our galleons to go in after him, his defensive batteries will all be equipped with exploding shell, and I’m afraid galleons burn—and blow up—somewhat more readily than fortresses. Those river barge conversions we’re working on ought to be able to reach Siddarmarkian waters, and they could probably operate effectively along your coasts in the Gulf of Mathyas. That ought to give us at least a little immunity from shell fire in those waters—until we’ve actually seen them in action we can’t say how much for certain—but they could never reach Dohlaran waters. We’re working on an answer to that problem, but it’s going to take us at least through into the winter before we can have it ready to use.”
“In that case, we’re just going to have to do the best we can, and give thanks to Langhorne you can watch our own coast for us.” Stohnar’s nostrils flared, then he looked back up. “Don’t mistake me, Your Majesty. I’d love for you to be able to get i
nto their back garden, but the last thing I’m going to do is complain! Since Clyntahn and the other three wouldn’t trust us with a navy of our own, we’d’ve been helpless against Desnair in the Gulf if you hadn’t destroyed Mahrys’ navy for him. They’d be sending in men and supplies literally by the shipload, and the fact that you’re in a position to support us along the coast and they can’t do a damned thing about it will be a huge advantage. Without it—”
He shook his head, his eyes cold.
“In the meantime, though,” Cayleb said, “there’s the question of what we want Earl Hanth to do. My thought is that I should join the Earl in Eralth as soon as possible. With Admiral Hywyt covering our flank, we could move up the Dragon Fish or even try a combined naval and land attack to retake Fort Darymahn. If we managed that, we could operate up the Taigyn towards the Shingle Mountains, and we could probably get there in time to block Rahnyld’s advance further east. If we manage that, then—”
“No.”
Stohnar’s single word stopped Cayleb in midflight. The emperor looked at him, and the lord protector shook his head again.
“You are not going to lead less than eight thousand men, more than two-thirds of them sailors, off on an adventure in the South March against at least forty thousand Dohlarans, Your Majesty,” he said flatly
“With all due respect, My Lord—” Cayleb began, then stopped himself as he saw the other expressions around that table. Including, he observed, Merlin Athrawes’.
“I don’t like sending my people in harm’s way without me,” he said instead, very quietly, remembering the Gulf of Tarot and his sense of utter, wretched powerlessness as he watched the men he’d sent out to die, and Stohnar inhaled deeply.
“I realize that. And I sympathize—I’ve had the same experience, and never more than this past winter. But you’re going to be far more valuable here in Siddar City when Duke Eastshare gets here, or even back in Tellesberg, making sure everything runs smoothly from that end, given how heavily we’re all going to be depending on your manufactories, than you could ever be at the front. You’re going to have to leave that part of it to someone else. Like your Earl Hanth.”