Hell's Foundations Quiver (15 page)

Which was not to say it was particularly
warm
. In fact, the temperature hovered five degrees below zero, and the brilliant sun-sparkle off the deep, drifted snow was a sharp (and blinding) contrast to the blue dimness in the depths of the narrow alpine valleys. That snow was several feet deep—deeper than Merlin was tall, in places—and it wasn't going to melt before June. It would have provided heavy going for any flesh-and-blood human, although one might have been forgiven for concluding otherwise as the two travelers moved across it.

Merlin slogged along briskly in the practiced, swinging stride of an expert snowshoer. In fact, he was rather short of the years of experience he was displaying, but a PICA's ability to program muscle memory made up for a lot. Unlike the aforementioned flesh-and-blood human, he needed to perform an action properly only once in order to be able to perform it again, flawlessly, any time he had to. He could no longer count the number of times he'd found that capability useful here on Safehold, but if pressed, he would have been forced to admit he'd never anticipated doing what he was doing at the moment.

“You really are quite good at this, Merlin!” Aivah remarked. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder, and she grinned at him. “I'm a fairly good skier myself, but snowshoes and I have never gotten along. Even if we had, I'm so badly out of shape I'd be panting like a bellows by now.”

“Which doesn't even consider how much you're enjoying yourself at the moment, does it?”

“It
is
rather fun,” she acknowledged cheerfully. “I remember how Father—Adorai's father, I mean; not that miserable excuse for a human being who got my mother pregnant—used to take turns carrying both of us piggyback when I was a little girl.” Her tone softened. “When he did, I knew what a
real
father was like. There's no way I could ever repay him and Mother for giving me the opportunity—the
gift
—to understand there truly is love in the world. Sometimes, when the decisions are especially hard, that's all that keeps me going.”

“I know.” Merlin's voice was as soft as hers had been. “I've been … damaged by a lot of things, Nynian, starting with the fact that I grew up knowing I was going to die before I was forty and that the entire human race was going to die with me. That … leaves a mark, and finding out what happened to Shan-wei and the Commodore and everything that's happened here on Safehold since I woke up didn't exactly make everything all better. But you're right about how much difference something as simple—and profound—as love makes. It's what keeps me trying and as close to sane as I still am.”

“You seem almost insanely sane to me, given everything you've been through,” Aivah objected.

“Appearances can be deceptive.” He shrugged easily, despite her weight on his back. “Although I probably
am
a bit closer to sane since Nahrmahn chewed me up one side and down the other for floundering in self-pity after the Canal Raid. But I'm afraid I'm still a little more dubious about my sanity quotient than my friends are.” His smile was a bit twisted.

“For what it's worth, I'm on their side.” Aivah rested her mittened palm lightly against his cheek. “And I don't envy you. I always thought the task the Sisters and I had undertaken was hard enough, and we only wanted to
reform
the Church, not destroy it! That doesn't hold a candle to the one that got dumped on your shoulders.”

“Maybe. But it didn't exactly get ‘dumped' on me, you know. Or not on Nimue Alban, at least.”

“But that's an important distinction,” she pointed out as the two of them moved from brilliant sunlight into the deep shadows of the valley before them. “
You
didn't volunteer, whatever Nimue Alban might have done. You accepted the responsibility without any memory of having agreed to shoulder it, and the you you are today, Merlin Athrawes, is the product of that acceptance. You're not Nimue Alban; you're
you
, and from everything I've seen, you're quite a remarkable human being who just happens to live inside a machine.”

“Nice of you to say so, anyway.”

Merlin's light tone fooled neither of them, and she patted his cheek again before replacing her hand on his shoulder and adjusting her balance. Not so much to help him, as to position herself as comfortably as possible on his back.

Despite her slenderness and the fact that she was a foot shorter than he was, she knew she was no lightweight. Whatever disparaging remarks she might level at her own physical condition, vigorous exercise had always been a part of her life. She'd walked, run, and ridden horses whenever she could, and her Zion mansion, like her Siddar City townhouse, had boasted a well-appointed gymnasium to tide her over the winter months. Part of that was because she enjoyed the workouts, and part of it had been a courtesan's need to fine-tune—and preserve—her physical attractiveness. But for both those reasons, she was remarkably well-muscled, even more than Sharleyan Ahrmahk, and that made her a solid, substantial weight no flesh-and-blood human being, even one Merlin Athrawes' size, could have carried so effortlessly.

Or so long. Merlin had landed the recon skimmer on a mountainside above the northernmost of the alpine lakes Safeholdian geographers had named Langhorne's Tears. It was an inconvenient eight straight-line miles from their objective, which worked out to twice that distance on foot, but the landing spot he'd chosen had the advantage of a cave large enough to accommodate the skimmer. And as he'd been demonstrating for the last two hours, neither her weight, nor the altitude, nor the snow, nor the steepness of the slopes made any difference to him. In its own way, that was more impressive than all the other wonders he and Nimue Chwaeriau had demonstrated to her and Sandaria.

And it never seems to cross his mind that he's actually
better
than a flesh-and-blood human
, she thought
. He comes from a place and a … technology
—she tasted the still unfamiliar word carefully as she used it—
none of us could possibly have imagined; he has knowledge most of us
can't
imagine, really, even now; and he's potentially immortal. Yet despite all of that, he treats us as his equals—in the privacy of his own mind, not just for public consumption—without even seeming to realize he's doing it. I wonder if he even begins to understand just how remarkable that makes him?

She'd found Ahbraim Zhevons fascinating when they first met in Zion. She hadn't known the source of the understanding and compassion she'd seen in his brown eyes, yet they'd been intensely attracting qualities even then. Now that she'd been allowed a glimpse inside the life and soul of Merlin Athrawes, she found them far more than simply attractive. How did someone survive a lifetime's hopeless fight against the extinction of her entire race and then endure all the human being inside Nimue Alban's PICA had been through here on Safehold and still
feel
so deeply, without walling himself off?

Her own life had taught her too much about barriers and the price of survival, and she wondered if perhaps that was the reason she felt such an intense kinship with Merlin. Despite all the centuries in which his PICA had rested in its hidden cavern,
experientially
he was fifteen Safeholdian years younger than she. Yet his life had demanded even more sacrifice, dedication, and secrecy than her own. More than anyone else she'd ever known, even among the Sisters, he understood what she'd done with her own life … and what it had cost her.

She found herself snuggling more closely against his back—as closely as her parka permitted, at least—and rested her chin on his right shoulder, her cheek against the side of his neck, as he carried her smoothly down the valley.

*   *   *

There was nothing particularly distinctive about the mountain above them.

It was steep—sheer in places—yet no steeper than many others. Its summit soared well above the tree line, its permanent snowpack gleaming brilliantly in the sunlight, but so did most of the others reaching upward around it. Merlin had gone back over the mapping imagery Owl had collected from orbit once Aivah told him where their destination lay, and the narrow track up from the valley floor could be picked out in the imagery from high summer. So could the gardens the Sisters tended during that brief warmth, yet now all those clues lay hidden under the featureless snow stretching away up the mountainside.

It was ironic, he thought, that the hidden Tomb of Saint Kohdy lay barely five hundred air miles from the cave in which his own PICA had slept away so many centuries. And that it, too, was concealed in a cave. The Church's lack of SNARCs probably made that degree of overhead cover redundant—these days, at least—yet that might not have been the case when the tomb was first established, for he had no idea what the “minor angels” who'd expunged
Seijin
Kohdy from the Church's annals might have been capable of. The fact that they'd commanded sufficient kinetic-energy weaponry to destroy the Order of Saint Kohdy's original abbey, even after the “Archangels'” departure, was not a pleasant thought, especially when he found himself wondering who else might have been left the equivalent of the Wylsynn family's Stone of Schueler.

At least Merlin had ample evidence that the
Group of Four
possessed no aerial reconnaissance assets. If it had had them, the Great Canal Raid could never have succeeded and the trap Duke Eastshare had sprung on the Army of Shiloh would never have worked. So presumably the only way the present-day Church could spot the Tomb of Saint Kohdy would be for someone to literally stumble over it on the ground, and that made the Abbey of the Snows, sixty-odd miles to the west on the Stone Shadow River, the Tomb's true protection.

Like the Tellesberg Monastery of Saint Zherneau, the Abbey of the Snows, overlooking the largest of Langhorne's Tears, had existed since the days of the War Against the Fallen. The imagery and radar mapping Owl's SNARCs had amassed since Aivah told them about it confirmed that it had been built on the site of an even earlier structure, although the Abbey contained no lingering trace of the technology Safehold had been forbidden to develop. The evidence of that technology was clear enough from the arrow-straight approach road cut up to it through the steep sides of the Stone Shadow's narrow valley and from the ceramacrete of which its ground floor had been constructed, however. It also accorded well with the Abbey's own traditions that it had been built on what had once been an earthly dwelling place of the Archangel Langhorne himself. The lakes took their name from his traditional association with them as a spot to which he'd retreated when he needed solitude and the severe serenity of their beauty to refresh his soul. They'd been called Langhorne's Joy before the Fall; they'd been renamed the Tears after his mortal body was destroyed by Kau-yung's treachery.

Despite the spike of anger Merlin always felt when he encountered yet another charming legend about Langhorne, he understood exactly why an austere, contemplative order would find this the ideal place to build an abbey, and the Chihirite nuns who lived here and maintained the Abbey with loving devotion found a deep, sincere joy in sharing it with others.

During the summer months, it wasn't at all unusual for pilgrims to trek up the winding, narrow, steeply climbing Stone Shadow Valley to spend several five-days in retreat and introspection in the Abbey's guest quarters. Of course, by September, the snows for which the Abbey was named were already falling this high in the Mountains of Light. By mid-October, the only route in was closed by snow and ice, and it stayed that way until June. The nuns of the Abbey passed those winter months in study, prayer, and the calligraphy of the beautiful hand-lettered copies of the
Holy Writ
for which their scriptorium was famed.

What no one outside the Abbey knew was that for all its long association with the Order of Chihiro, the Abbey of the Snows had been thoroughly infiltrated by the Sisters of Saint Kohdy over six hundred years ago. Indeed, the process had begun even before that … about the time a forethoughtful abbess of the Order of Saint Kohdy had enlisted the assistance of the abbess of the Sisters of the Snows who'd happened to be her second cousin. The Sisters of the Snows had been instrumental in the secret construction of Saint Kohdy's first, simple tomb in the mountains east of Langhorne's Tears. Only a handful of them had known what was actually hidden there, but gradually, over the years, that had changed. By now, the entire Order of the Sisters of the Snows had been absorbed into the Sisters of Saint Kohdy. Or perhaps it would be equally accurate to say that the Sisters of the Snows had extended their membership—and their protection—over the Sisters of Saint Kohdy.

In either case, every Sister of the Snows was also a Sister of Saint Kohdy, and the Abbey of the Snows served as the protective gatekeeper of the cavern sanctuary which shielded the saint's mortal remains.

It was, Merlin acknowledged, a remarkably effective defense in depth, yet the Abbey of the Snows was too remote and inconveniently located to serve as the Sisters' operational headquarters. That was why the current mother superior had based herself in Zion—prior to her move to Siddar City—although Merlin doubted the majority of her predecessors had. Everything he'd learned from Aivah so far seemed to confirm his suspicion that young Nynian Rychtair had seen the Order's role rather differently from those who'd come before her.

The Sisters had been a persistent, quiet force for good within Mother Church from their inception, but Nynian had … radicalized them. That was the best way to put it, he supposed. It was possible some of her predecessors would have made the same decisions she'd made, if they'd lived to see the corruption of the vicarate Nynian had seen, yet he rather doubted that
any
of those previous mothers superior would have spent thirty years training a cadre of assassins and saboteurs in the name of their patron saint. The sheer size of the Order's network and its deeply embedded traditions of secrecy and anonymity had offered superb cover, concealment, and a support structure for Nynian's more … proactive preparations, although he had to wonder if she'd ever truly believed she'd be in a position to make use of those assassins and saboteurs.