Hell's Foundations Quiver (33 page)

Once, Kuhnymychu would have agreed unhesitatingly with that damming indictment. Now he was … uncertain, and fresh fear filled him as the stake loomed before him.
Had
he failed God in the moment of his greatest test? Or had it truly been the Holy Bédard who'd moved his heart and guided his actions? One way or the other, he was about to learn the truth, and his lips moved in silent prayer—the only form of prayer left him, for they'd cut out his tongue lest he take this last opportunity to strike out at Mother Church's work in the world—as the chains went about him.

A tear surprised him, crawling slowly down his cheek, and he realized he wept not for himself, but for a little girl he'd met only once. A little girl whose courage and love had reached out and broken his armor of certitude and breached the fortress of faith about his heart. No doubt she'd been doomed from the moment she set out to find help for her father just as surely as
he'd
been doomed when he gave it, and it was God's own mercy she'd been spared what was about to happen to him. Yet even though all of that was true, he wished she might have lived.

God had willed otherwise, he thought. He made himself raise his head and open his eyes once again, remembering the three still bodies which had been carried out of that prison barracks the very next morning. The inmates had brought them forth and laid them side-by-side, the children flanking the father, in the churned snow. They hadn't tried to conceal the deaths, as they usually did, in hopes the living would continue to receive their rations until the guards discovered they'd died. And they hadn't scavenged the pitiful family's garments the way they usually did, either. They'd laid them out as decently and with as much respect as they could. It had been their own act of defiance, and they'd watched in silence as the labor party of other inmates impressed for the duty carried them to the vast, unmarked graveyard where so many others had already gone.

They hadn't been buried immediately. Too many others died every day for that. Instead, they'd been laid side-by-side in the open trench. Then they'd been left, abandoned to the short northern day, the long northern night, and the sifting snow, waiting for the more tardy of the dead to join them, until the frozen chunks of dirt had been shoveled over all of them the following day.

No one had spoken any words for them, unless it had been the labor gang, praying as silently as Kuhnymychu prayed now. He hoped they had, and even as he stood among the piled faggots and gazed at the flaming torch, pale in the sunlight, a strange feeling of joy flowed through him when he realized he was praying for them just as much as for himself.

“You have heard the judgment and sentence of holy Mother Church, Kuhnymychu Ruhstahd,” a deep voice intoned. “Have you anything to say before that sentence is carried out?”

He looked away from the torches, and he realized suddenly that he no longer questioned why he'd tried to help Stefyny. He knew Whose voice he'd heard in that moment. Knew it now, beyond any possibility of doubt or mistake. He'd heard the rumors about the heretic Gwylym Manthyr's execution, even seen one of the illustrated broadsheets, though he hadn't been supposed to. He hadn't believed the story that broadsheet had told … then. Now, as Father Zherohm Clymyns put that question to him, he knew it had told the truth.

And that meant Zhaspahr Clyntahn, and the Inquisition, and Mother Church herself had lied. Gwylym Manthyr
had
been silenced before his death, and for the same reason
he
had: fear. Fear that just as Erayk Dynnys had done in the Plaza of Martyrs itself, he would have spoken the truth from the very shadow of death. And the Inquisition he had served, Kuhnymychu Ruhstahd knew now, dared not face that truth.

He gazed at Clymyns, his eyes hard above the mouth which could no longer speak, and he knew why Clymyns had come. The upper-priest was Wylbyr Edwyrds' senior aide, taking more and more responsibility and authority upon his shoulders. He was the brain and soul of the Inquisition in Siddarmark, the very voice of the Inquisitor General, and he'd come to be that voice here, today, accompanied by Father Fhrancys Ostean and Brother Zhorj Myzuhno. Both of them were also members of Edwyrds' personal staff, and despite Myzuhno's relatively junior rank, all three were members of the Inquisitor General's inner circle. They were here to drive home the lesson of Ruhstahd's fate for any other Schuelerite whose ardor might falter or fail.

He could no longer speak, but as Clymyns' eyes met his, filled with scorn and the knowledge that he couldn't, he remembered again that broadsheet of Gwylym Manthyr's defiant death. It might not seem like much, here at the very end of all mortal things, but it was all he had, and there were far worse examples he might have followed.

He spat defiantly at Clymyns' feet and matched the defiance in his own eyes against the upper-priest's scornful contempt.

*   *   *

Dialydd Mab lay on the hillside in his white snow smock and waited patiently, twelve hundred yards from the execution site. Over half that distance was deep virgin snow no one could get across in a hurry even after they figured out where he had to have been. The cross-country skis beside him would have taken him far away by the time they did, and no merely mortal pursuer was going to overtake a PICA on skis.

That was important, because it meant he'd been able to come himself, instead of dispatching one of Owl's remotes. And it meant there'd be ski tracks for those pursuers to find and follow—tracks which would prove a human being had been there and lead the inevitable pursuit well away from any town or village as they sped straight towards the Samuel Mountains and escape.

He found himself wishing there'd been a way to spirit Ruhstahd away, as well, but there hadn't been. That was another reason why he was here. He couldn't save the man, but there was one last gift he could give him.

Well, two, really, he supposed as he nestled his cheek into the stock of his rifle and prepared to deliver the first.

It looked like a standard M96, but appearances could be deceiving. Owl had built that rifle especially for Dialydd Mab. Its rifling was more precise than anything even Taigys Mahldyn's shops could have cut, the barrel lining was chrome plated, the stock was precisely tailored to his height and reach, and the cartridges in its magazine—loaded with a smokeless propellant centuries in advance of anything pre-Merlin Safehold could have produced—drove its massive bullets at well over two thousand feet per second, with a muzzle energy of better than five thousand foot-pounds. The pre-fired cases he'd brought to leave behind him had been filled with black powder to leave the proper residue for anyone who examined them, even though that precaution was almost certainly unnecessary. He'd also brought along a half-dozen black powder-filled squibs to produce the appropriate smoke cloud and be sure the camp guards found his position, the tracks leading them astray, and the letter to Wylbyr Edwyrds he intended to leave behind. But for this moment, on this day, he wanted the most precise instrument Owl could give him.

He didn't need any special sighting system to take advantage of that precision. Not when he had one of his own built in. Now pitiless sapphire eyes, far colder than their artificial origin could ever have explained, gazed over the rifle's open sights and his index finger stroked the trigger.

*   *   *

“Very well,” Zherohm Clymyns said flatly, hard gaze glittering with triumph as he nodded to the inquisitor with the torch, “if you have nothing to say, then—”

His head exploded.

The impact energy sent the corpse stumbling forward to sprawl on its belly. Sheer incredulity held the assembled audience motionless, trying to grasp what had happened, as the crack of the rifle which had delivered justice upon him—tiny with distance, yet sharp and clear through the icy air—reached them almost two seconds later.

The second round announced its arrival two and a half seconds after the crack of the first. It struck Fhrancys Ostean between the shoulder blades as he turned towards Clymyns, ripped through his heart and lungs in a spray of crimson, and wounded yet another Schuelerite.

The first ripples of panic washed through the spectators as understanding dawned. They began to turn, looking for the source of that deadly fire, and Zhorj Myzuhno collapsed with a hoarse, squealing shriek as the third bullet slammed its way through his liver and erupted from his back.

The panic became total, then. Faith was a frail shield against those heretical thunderbolts, and the warriors of Mother Church's Inquisition fled wildly towards the protection of Camp Chihiro's buildings. To their credit, a handful of the Army of God officers assigned to the camp's guard force kept their heads, going prone but scanning the hills until they found the telltale puffs of smoke.

Kuhnymychu Ruhstahd saw it all and somehow he knew who was behind that rifle. He knew it was the same rifle which had spoken from the bank of the Holy Langhorne Canal, and he, too, stared at that distant powder smoke, for he knew something else, as well. He knew the
seijin
behind that rifle—the true
seijin
, called by God as surely as any
seijin
of old, whatever Zhaspahr Clyntahn might claim—had one last gift for him. He watched that hillside, eyes bright and suddenly unafraid as he waited for that gift, and never heard the fourth and final shot that killed him instantly.

 

.XVI.

St. Tyldyn, Northland Province, Republic of Siddarmark

The bullet hissed by, not quite close enough to actually hit him but not so wide a miss as all that, and Traveler shied in protest.

“My Lord, will you
please
keep your head down!” Lieutenant Slokym snapped with rather more asperity than a mere lieutenant was supposed to use in addressing a general officer. “We really,
really
don't need anything … untoward happening to you!”

“I don't intend for
anything
to happen to me, toward or not, Bryahn,” Baron Green Valley said mildly, and touched Traveler with a heel to encourage him to move smartly. It would be embarrassing, to say the least, to get himself killed by one of the zealots of the Temple rearguard.

Impatience and frustration are piss-poor reasons for getting yourself killed by
anyone
, Kynt
, he reminded himself rather more tartly than he'd spoken to his aide.
And not even SNARCs will keep you from doing that if you insist on being stupid. Just like your nannies won't do a whole lot to keep you alive if you take a bullet someplace like—oh, the heart or the brain, maybe?

A sudden crackle of fire, clearly from the 5th Mounted Regiment's M96s, answered the single shot which had whistled past his head and splinters flew from the stable loft where the marksman had taken his stand. Three more rifles cracked from inside the stable, smoke spurting from hastily hacked loopholes in its walls, and then another shot blasted out from the same spot as the first, far too quickly to have come from a muzzle-loading weapon.

“I'm getting just a bit tired of those newfangled rifles of theirs,” he remarked to no one in particular as he swung down from the saddle in the shelter of a nice, solid stone wall. It looked as if it had once been part of a smithy. Of course, that had been before the retreating Temple Boys burned three-quarters of the town of St. Tyldyn to the ground.

“I can't say they make me very happy, either, My Lord,” Slokym said sourly.

More of Colonel Gairwyl's riflemen were firing at the stable, but their initial rate of fire had eased and Green Valley nodded approvingly. Additional ammunition had come forward, and they'd expended less of it taking Esthyr's Abbey than he'd allowed for, yet the new cartridges remained in less than bountiful supply. He'd impressed the need to avoid wasting them upon his COs, and he was glad to see Gairwyl had taken his admonition to heart. The mounted infantry were still sending enough forty-five-caliber bullets the stable's way to encourage the Temple Boys inside it to keep their heads down, but they weren't simply blazing away when they had no clear target.

Green Valley peeked around one end of the wall at the sudden firefight, then glanced at his aide and his lips twitched at the lieutenant's expression. It was obvious that what the young man really wanted was to grab his idiot superior by the scruff of his oh-so-senior neck and drag him bodily back behind the wall.

“Forgive me, My Lord,” Slokym continued after a moment, “but didn't our spies say they weren't supposed to have any of those damned rifles before mid-April?”

His expression, Green Valley noted, was not one of approval.

“Actually,” the baron replied judiciously, one eye still on the stable, “our spies said they wouldn't have
very many
of ‘those damned rifles' before April. And spies, alas, have been known to be mistaken, Bryahn.”

Slokym scowled, and Green Valley didn't really blame him. The Empire of Charis and its allies had been rather spoiled by the quality of their intelligence reports. Getting those reports where they needed to be quickly enough was sometimes a problem, but they were accustomed to knowing the reports they did receive were accurate ones. And so they usually were. Not always, however. Even their allies might have become suspicious if Charis' “spies” never made a mistake. Worse, there were occasions on which no one could have come up with a credible explanation for how a particular bit of intelligence could be gotten to the recipient who needed it quickly enough to do any good. When that happened, it simply
didn't
get to that recipient, and that sort of problem had a particularly acute relevance for the Army of Midhold at the moment. Merlin Athrawes, even with Nimue Chwaeriau's assistance, could give faces to only so many
seijins
, and no one but a
seijin
would be operating in the bitter winter wastes of Northland Province.