Hell's Foundations Quiver (72 page)

“I see.”

The two-word response was chiseled out of Lake Pei's winter ice and Clyntahn's nostrils flared. His face, already flushed with anger, got a little redder, but the explosion Rayno had feared failed to put in an appearance.

“All right,” he said finally, like granite crumbling into gravel, “you may be right. And the last thing we need to do is to order their arrests and fail. But I want to see every word of every order, every bit of correspondence, that went back and forth between our good friend Allayn and Wyrshym since the decision was made for the Army of the Sylmahn to stand its ground. Every word of it, Wyllym!”

“Of course, Your Grace.” Rayno produced a seated bow. “I anticipated you might desire that, and my confidential clerks are pulling it together now. I'm afraid it will be quite extensive.”

“I don't care. Have it checked for any evidence of unauthorized ciphers or codes, as well.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

In truth, that had already been done. During a jihad, the Inquisition's oversight of Mother Church's semaphore system became even more inclusive. Copies of
every
semaphore message, including those of the Army of God and the Navy of God, were filed with Rayno's office, and all military communications were routinely inspected for any sign that someone other than the Inquisition might be passing secret messages back and forth. The archbishop had seen no evidence that Allayn Maigwair had conspired with Wyrshym to evade the Army of the Sylmahn's order to stand its ground, but he was confident that a sufficiently painstaking search—and the use of carefully selected excerpts—could prove Maigwair's complicity in the bishop militant's ultimate decision.

Assuming that was what Clyntahn wanted to prove, at any rate.

“And in the meantime,” the Grand Inquisitor finished coldly, “I want the names of Wyrshym's and Abernethy's immediate families.”

 

.VII.

Fairkyn, New Northland Province, Republic of Siddarmark

Bishop Gorthyk Nybar rode out the sally port and headed down the steeply sloping road, accompanied by Colonel Bahrtalymu Hansylman, the officer who would have been called his chief of staff in the Imperial Charisian Army, and Captain Teagmahn Fhrancys, his youthful aide. A cold wind whipped into their faces from the northeast, but it wasn't cold enough, he thought grimly. Snow still lingered, piled deep in places, where it was shadowed by the sun, but elsewhere it had melted. In a normal year, the Guarnak-Ice Ash Canal would have overspread its banks by now, despite the many and ingenious provisions for flood control on mainland canals. This year, the canal bed was barely half full, and all of that was snowmelt, for the locks between Guarnak and Fairkyn had yet to be repaired.

The Ice Ash River, on the other hand, swirled brown and angry below the bluffs upon which what was left of Fairkyn perched. The city's location had been dictated by terrain considerations; it lay at the head of a valley running northwest into the rugged foothills that penetrated into the higher tableland west of the Ohlarn Gap. That valley offered a natural canal route into the central Republic which required the minimum number of locks to reach the New Northland Plateau, but the Fairkyn bluffs had presented the canal builders with a formidable challenge. They formed a barrier, almost a natural escarpment, almost eight miles wide between the valley and the Ice Ash River. Getting through it had been an arduous task, yet the shortest alternative route would have added over a hundred miles to the length of the canal and required almost as many locks in the end, anyway.

Fairkyn itself lay on the narrow spine at the center of the high ground where the locks themselves were located. Because of that, it had been built on two levels, with High Town's canalfront docks, at the head of the valley above the locks, serving the barge traffic moving through the canal proper. Low Town, below the locks to the southeast, backed up against the bluffs, but most of it was barely above or actually below the river's flood plain, built there to serve the traffic headed into or arriving from the river, despite the perennial risk of flooding. The ground broke sharply away from High Town to both southeast and northwest—the locks raised barges over a hundred and eighty feet from the Ice Ash and then lowered them sixty feet to the level of the canal—because gunpowder had been unavailable for blasting away the intervening bedrock when the canal was first constructed. As a result, High Town formed a natural strongpoint, close to two hundred feet higher than the approaches from the river and almost half that far above its western and northern approaches.

Nybar had always known Low Town couldn't be held against a serious overland attack, however, so he'd never intended to try. Instead, he'd withdrawn his entire defensive force to High Town, blown gaps in Low Town's protective levees, and systematically demolished its buildings to deny their use to the heretics.

Thanks to the breached levees, at least half of Low Town—like most of the six and a half miles of the low ground between it and the river—was currently submerged. The only exceptions were a few low hills and a couple of connecting ridgelines rising from the foam-streaked water, too cramped for either side to use as worthwhile military emplacements. The heretics had occupied much of the low ground earlier, but only a handful of infantry remained to picket the hilltops now that they were isolated by the water, and it was difficult to pick out the line of the submerged canal where it crossed the lowlands.

There was no flooding away from the river, unfortunately, and Nybar's eyes hardened as he saw the Charisian and Siddarmarkian banners flying above the heretical earthworks which encircled Fairkyn on every side except the south. The redoubts and batteries erected to seal Nybar's besieged command into the town didn't form a contiguous line of fortifications, but they were more than close enough together to sweep the spaces between them with rifle and artillery fire. They were also far enough from the city's perimeter to deter Nybar from wasting any of his slender stock of irreplaceable artillery ammunition against them. They were not, unfortunately, far enough out to prevent the heretics' longer-ranged artillery from bombarding Fairkyn whenever they chose to, although they hadn't done much of that. The city's (and Nybar's fortifications') high perch meant their artillerists would be firing blind, and until recently the weather must have made it difficult for them to haul huge amounts of ammunition this far forward, as well.

On a planet named Earth, those emplacements would have been called a work of circumvallation; on Safehold, they were simply called “siege works,” but the function was exactly the same, and they were manned by a dismayingly powerful army—a fact which explained why Gorthyk Nybar was making this ride this chill June morning without Father Charlz Kaillyt at his side.

The bishop's jaw tightened as he contemplated Kaillyt's absence. He didn't like the reason he'd had no choice but to leave the cleric safely in Fairkyn, but there was no use pretending, just as there was no use pretending he had any choice about accepting the parley summons in the first place. Sir Bartyn Sahmyrsyt, the heretic commander, had phrased his written message with at least marginal courtesy, but the iron fist inside the rather threadbare silk glove had been there for any to see. And if anyone had missed it the first time around, Sahmyrsyt's flat rejection of Nybar's counteroffer that they meet inside his position—a rejection which had included words like “treachery” and “murderers”—would have made it abundantly clear.

And I don't have any choice but to go meet with the arrogant, heretical son-of-a-bitch wherever he chooses
. The thought burned harshly through Nybar's brain as he neared the designated redoubt.
I wonder if he knows how short our rations really are?
He snorted grimly.
I guess I may find out about that in the next half-hour or so
.

A group of horsemen rode out to meet his small party as it approached the redoubt, and Nybar was uncomfortably aware of the riflemen manning the earthen parapet. Neither they nor the redoubt's half-dozen field guns were aimed directly at him, but that minor detail could be quickly corrected.

At least the bastards were polite enough to meet us outside their own hidey hole
, he reminded himself.
Of course, that probably has more to do with their not wanting me to see anything on the other side of their damned entrenchments than it does with courtesy
.

The heretics drew rein about fifty yards from the redoubt and waited for the trio of Army of God officers to reach them. Nybar continued straight ahead at an unhurried pace, only too well aware of how his own mount's hunger-thinned gauntness compared to the heretics' well-fed, well-cared-for horses.

A message in that, too
, he thought.
I wonder if that's why they bothered to mount up in the first place instead of just walking out to meet us? Or are they making sure they didn't find themselves looking up to us at some sort of psychological disadvantage?

He drew his own horse to a halt a few feet from the dark-haired, dark-eyed heretic with the single gold-sword collar insignia of a Charisian general who had to be Sahmyrsyt. He was a big man, at least two or three inches taller than Nybar's own five feet and eleven inches and yet stocky for his height, with powerful shoulders, a deep chest, dark hair and eyes, and eyebrows that formed a single thick bar across the bridge of his nose.

Sahmyrsyt was flanked on his left by a much younger man with the twin silver crowns of a lieutenant and the look of someone who'd been born on the island of Charis itself. He also looked as if he was perhaps fifteen years old … until someone got a look into those steady brown eyes of his. The man on the general's right had a pair of silver swords on his collar and offered the visual antithesis of the lieutenant, with fair hair, blue eyes, and a full, well-kept beard. All of them, Nybar noted, were immaculately groomed and obviously well fed. Well, he hadn't been able to do anything about his own officers' semi-starved appearance, but at least they were as perfectly turned out as the heretics.

He tried not to think about any words like “thin pretense.”

“Bishop Gorthyk.” Sahmyrsyt's voice carried a strong Chisholmian accent and sort of deep power one might have associated with that thick chest.

“General Sahmyrsyt.” Nybar kept his tone brusque and clipped in response, and his fingers tightened on his reins when Sahmyrsyt smiled ever so slightly, as if that terseness amused him somehow.

“Brigadier Silkiah, my chief of staff,” the Chisholmian said, indicating the blond officer to his right. “And Lieutenant Mahkgrudyr, my personal aide. I see you've brought Captain Fhrancys and Colonel Hansylman along.”

He nodded to Nybar's subordinates with something which might have been mistaken for courtesy under other circumstances, and Nybar felt his expression go briefly blank. How in Langhorne's name had Sahmyrsyt known who Fhrancys and Hansylman were? Fhrancys had been with him since the Army of God marched out of the Temple Lands, so he supposed it was possible prisoner interrogation might have provided his name and rank, even his description, to the heretics. But Hansylman had been detached from the St. Emylee Division to serve as his equivalent of the heretic Silkiah less than three months ago, when Nybar consolidated the skeletons of the division's four original regiments into three regiments which were merely badly understrength.

It doesn't matter how he knows, Gorthyk
, he told himself flatly, banishing surprise's blankness.
He probably got it from some fucking deserter
.
It sure as Shan-wei doesn't mean they've got
spies
inside Fairkyn, anyway! And it's obvious the only reason he dropped the names was to make you worry about it exactly like this, so
stop.

“You requested the parley, General,” he said, looking Sahmyrsyt in the eye, and the Charisian nodded.

“Yes, I did. It occurred to me that this might be a moment to recall the
Book of Langhorne
's injunctions. Chapter Seventeen's to be exact—verses twelve through fourteen. I realize no one seems to have been reading that passage very much from your side lately, but I think it applies.”

Nybar heard Hansylman inhale sharply and sensed young Kaillyt's stiff-faced anger, and his own jaw clenched as Langhorne's words went through his mind.

The time will come when violence mars the peace God Himself has created for His children, and He will weep to see it. Yet there is no virtue in attempting to deny that truth, for Truth is Truth, and God has given all of you freedom of will to choose your own course. Let no man forget that God breathed the breath of life into all Adams and all Eves at the same instant, in the same minute of the same day under the same sun. Whatever the anger you may feel, whatever the fury which impels you to raise hands against one another, you are all equally His children in His eyes and love. So on the day when you face one another with anger in your heart and weapons in your hands, keep that memory in your minds and souls. If war you must, then let mercy stay your hand against the helpless and compassion for the defeated keep you clean of the spiritual poison which must destroy any whom it touches
.

“So I should assume your purpose today is to demonstrate your ‘mercy' and ‘compassion,' should I?” he asked after a moment, the words bitter in his mouth.

“Something of the sort,” Sahmyrsyt agreed.

“But something rather less than that for our inquisitors, I imagine,” the bishop said harshly.

“‘As he sows, so shall he reap, and the mercy he denies to others shall be denied to him in his turn,'” Sahmyrsyt quoted softly. “The sermon was Archbishop Maikel's, but the words are Chihiro's, and in this case rightly applied. You know my Emperor and Empress' policy, and so do any inquisitors in your army who've chosen not to leave that bastard Clyntahn's service.”