Off Armageddon Reef (10 page)

“But you did request that he send them?” Cahnyr pressed, and Dynnys allowed an expression of overtried patience to cross his face.

“Of course I did, Zhasyn,” he replied. “I dispatched the original request via semaphore to Clahnyr over two months ago, as we all agreed, to be relayed by sea across the Cauldron. Obviously, I couldn't go into a great deal of detail in a semaphore message, but Father Mahtaio sent a more complete request via wyvern the same day, and it reached Clahnyr barely a five-day later. We also notified Sir Hauwerd's man of law here in Zion of our requirements and informed him that we were passing the request along to his client.”

“‘Two months ago' doesn't leave very much time for any documentation to arrive from so far away. Particularly at this time of year, given the sort of storms they have in the Cauldron every fall,” Cahnyr observed in a deliberately neutral tone, and Dynnys showed his fellow prelate his teeth in what might possibly have been called a smile.

“True,” he said almost sweetly. “On the other hand, the message was sent
over
two months ago, which seems more than sufficient time for Zherald to have relayed my request to Sir Hauwerd and for Sir Hauwerd to have responded. And for a dispatch vessel from Charis to cross back to Clahnyr, weather or no weather, with at least a semaphore message to alert us that the documents in question were on their way. In fact, I've exchanged another complete round of messages with Zherald on other topics over the same time frame, so I feel quite sure the dispatch boats are surviving the crossing, despite any autumn gales.”

Cahnyr looked as if he was tempted to launch another sharp riposte of his own. But if he was, he suppressed the temptation. Rayno and Myllyr only nodded, and Dynnys hid a mental smirk.

He often found Cahnyr's brand of personal piety rather wearing, although he had to admit it gave his rival a certain cachet in the Temple's hierarchy. He wasn't quite unique, of course, but most of the archbishops and vicars charged with administering God's affairs were too busy for the sort of simpleminded pastoral focus Cahnyr seemed to prefer.

Dynnys was prepared to admit that that was even more true in his case than in many others'. It could scarcely be otherwise, with Charis so far from Zion and the Temple. Cahnyr's archbishopric was less than half as distant, although, to be fair, most of the weary miles to Glacierheart were overland, and Cahnyr made two pastoral visits per year, not just one. But he could also make the journey without being totally out of touch with the Temple. Thanks to the semaphore chains the Church maintained across Haven and Howard, the two-way message time between Glacierheart and the Temple was less than three days.

Dynnys had occasionally wondered if a part of Cahnyr's enmity might not stem from the differences between their archbishoprics. He
knew
that at least a portion of the bad blood between them came from the fact that Cahnyr had been the son of a minor Dohlaran nobleman, whereas Dynnys was the son of an archbishop and the grandnephew of a grand vicar. Cahnyr stood outside the traditional great ecclesiastic dynasties which had dominated the Temple for centuries, and he'd never seemed to quite grasp how those dynasties played the game.

That game, as Dynnys was well aware, explained how he'd gotten Charis and Cahnyr…hadn't. Despite the other prelate's ostentatious piety, he couldn't be totally dead to ambition, or he would never have attained a bishop's ruby ring, far less his present rank, and Cahnyr's archbishopric was a mere province of the Republic of Siddarmark, whereas Dynnys' was the entire Kingdom of Charis. It was always possible that fact did, indeed, account for Cahnyr's hostility, although Dynnys rather doubted it in his calmer moments. Craggy, mountainous Glacierheart was barely a quarter the size of Charis proper, and sparsely populated compared with the rest of Haven, but it probably had almost as many inhabitants as the entire kingdom.

Although not
, he reflected complacently,
a tenth as much wealth
.

Haven and Howard were the principal landmasses of Safehold, and Langhorne and his fellow archangels had planted humanity far more thickly across them than anywhere else. Even today, eight, or possibly even as many as nine, out of every ten inhabitants of Safehold were to be found there, so it was little wonder Mother Church's attention was so fully fixed there as well. The long chains of semaphore stations, reaching out from Zion in every direction, allowed the Temple to oversee its far-flung archbishoprics, bishoprics, cathedrals, churches, congregations, monasteries, convents, and ecclesiastical manors, as well as the intendants assigned to the various secular courts, parliaments, and assemblies. Those semaphores belonged to Mother Church, and although she permitted their use by secular authorities, that use was always subject to availability. And as more than one prince or king or governor had discovered, “availability” could be quite limited for anyone who had irritated his local ecclesiastical superiors.

But not even Mother Church could erect semaphore stations in the middle of the sea, and so the only way to communicate with such distant lands as Charis, or the League of Corisande, or Chisholm, was ultimately by ship. And ships, as Dynnys had long since discovered, were slow.

An additional semaphore chain had been extended across Raven's Land and Chisholm, on the far side of the Markovian Sea, but even there, messages must cross the Passage of Storms, a water gap of almost twelve hundred miles between the semaphore stations on Rollings Head and Iron Cape. That gave Zherohm Vyncyt, the Archbishop of Chisholm, a two-way message time of almost seventeen days, but the situation was even worse for Dynnys. It took only six days for a message to travel from the Temple to the Clahnyr semaphore station in southern Siddarmark, but then it had to cross over three thousand miles of seawater to reach Tellesberg. Which meant, of course, that it took twenty-five days—five five-days—on average for one of his messages just to reach his bishop executor.

The actual voyage from the Temple to Tellesberg, however, took two full months…one way. Which explained why Dynnys simply could not absent himself from Zion and the Temple for more than a single pastoral visit per year, usually in late autumn. That got him out of the Temple Lands before Hsing-wu's Passage froze over and let him spend the Temple's ice-blasted winter in Charis, which was not only in the southern hemisphere but less than thirteen hundred miles below the equator. Summer in Tellesberg was
ever
so much more pleasant than winter in Zion! Of course, that same distance from Zion (and the Temple) also explained why some of those more distant lands—like Charis itself, upon occasion—were sometimes just a bit more fractious then those closer to Zion.

“Erayk has a point, Zhasyn,” Rayno said now. “Certainly everyone involved in this dispute has been arguing back and forth long enough to recognize how important it is to comply with any documentary requests we may have. If Breygart hasn't seen fit even to acknowledge the receipt of our request, that speaks poorly for him.”

“It may speak more poorly of the quality of his purported evidence,” Myllyr pointed out. “If he truly has proof Mahntayl's claims are false, he ought to be eager to lay that evidence before us.”

Cahnyr shifted in his seat, and Rayno quirked one eyebrow at him.

“Yes, Zhasyn?”

“I only wanted to observe that from the very first, Sir Hauwerd Breygart—” the Archbishop of Glacierheart stressed the title and surname very slightly “—has maintained that Mahntayl's claim to descent from the fourteenth earl was false. And,” he looked around the conference table, “he accompanied his initial arguments with depositions to that effect from over a dozen witnesses.”

“No one is disputing that he did, Zhasyn,” Dynnys pointed out. “The point under consideration is Breygart's assertion that he's uncovered proof—not depositions, not hearsay evidence, but documented
proof
—that Tahdayo Mahntayl is not Fraidareck Breygart's great-grandson. It was that ‘proof' we asked him to share with us.”

“Precisely,” Rayno agreed, nodding solemnly, and Cahnyr clamped his lips firmly together. He glanced at Myllyr, and his lips thinned further as he read the other prelate's eyes.

Dynnys could read the others' expressions just as well as Cahnyr could, and he couldn't quite completely suppress his own smile. Myllyr's support for his position was hardly a surprise; not only were they both Langhornites, but the two of them had been scratching one another's backs for decades, and both of them knew how Mother Church's politics worked. Rayno had been a bit more problematical, but Dynnys had confidently anticipated his support, as well. The Inquisition and Order of Schueler had been less than pleased by Charis' growing wealth and power for almost a century now. The kingdom's obvious taste for…innovation only made that worse, and the energy the Charisian “Royal College” had begun displaying over the last ten or fifteen years rubbed more than one senior Schuelerite on the raw.

The view that religious orthodoxy waned in direct proportion to the distance between any given congregation and Zion was an inescapable part of most Schuelerites' mental baggage. Rayno, despite his own sophistication and ecclesiastical rank, still regarded such distant lands as Charis with automatic suspicion. In Charis' case, the power of its trade-based wealth and apparent inventiveness, coupled with the “Royal College's” active support for that inventiveness and the Ahrmahk Dynasty's domestic policies, made him even more suspicious. And the fact that Haarahld of Charis, unlike the majority of Safehold's rulers, had stayed out of debt to the Temple's moneylenders was one more worry for those—like Rayno—who fretted over how to control him if the need should arise.

The Schuelerites' dominant position in the Church hierarchy would have been enough to put Charis under a cloud in the Church's eyes all by itself. But the kingdom's steadily growing wealth, and the influence its vast merchant fleet gave it in lands far beyond its own borders, made a bad situation worse in many respects. While most of the more mundane suspicion and ire of the Council of Vicars focused on the Republic of Siddarmark simply because of the Republic's proximity to the Temple Lands, there were those—including the Grand Inquisitor himself—who felt that Charis' attitudes and example were even more dangerous in the long run.

Dynnys' own view, buttressed by reports from Zherald Ahdymsyn and Father Paityr Wylsynn, the Order of Schueler's own intendant in Tellesberg, was that Rayno's suspicions of Charis' fidelity to Mother Church's doctrines were baseless. True, Charisians' willingness to find new and more efficient ways to do things required a certain degree of vigilance. And, equally true, the Charisian branch of the Church was rather more permissive on several issues than the Council of Vicars would truly have preferred. And, yes, it was even true that this “college” of Haarahld's was actively seeking new ways to combine existing knowledge, which could only enhance that national fetish for “efficiency.” That, however, was exactly why Father Paityr was there, and his reports—like those of his immediate predecessors—made it quite clear that nothing going on in Charis came remotely close to a violation of the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng.

As for domestic policies and dangerous examples, Dynnys was willing to grant that King Haarahld's great-grandfather's decision to legally abolish serfdom throughout his kingdom could be construed as a slap in Mother Church's face, if one were determined to view it that way. Dynnys wasn't, especially given the fact that there'd never been more than a relative handful of serfs in Charis even before the institution was officially abolished. Nor did he believe the claims—mostly from the Charisians' competitors—that his parishioners' focus on trade and the acquisition of wealth was so obsessive that it inspired them to ignore their obligations to God and Mother Church and skimp on the kingdom's tithe. Bishop Executor Zherald and his tithe-collectors would certainly have made their own displeasure known if they'd suspected there was any truth to
those
tales! Ahdymsyn might not be the most brilliant man ever to attain a bishop's ring, but he was no fool, either, and Mother Church had centuries of experience with every way kings or nobles might try to hide income from the tithe-assessors.

And the Church's—and Inquisition's—grip on the mainland populations was surely firm enough to suppress any dangerous notions which might creep across the seas aboard Charisian merchantmen.

No, Dynnys had no fear Charis was some sort of hotbed of potential heresy. Not that he hadn't been prepared to play upon Rayno's suspicions and the Council of Vicars' basic distrust and dislike for the kingdom.

Which,
he reflected,
made the fact that Haarahld was clearly one of Breygart's strongest supporters the kiss of death as far as Wyllym was concerned
.

He supposed it was actually a sign of Rayno's moral integrity that it had taken him this long to come openly out in support of Tahdayo Mahntayl's claim.

His fraudulent but extremely
well-paying
claim
, Dynnys reflected silently, allowing no trace of his inner satisfaction to show. And the fact that Lyam Tyrn, the Archbishop of Emerald, was going to owe him a substantial favor for supporting Prince Nahrmahn's candidate wasn't going to hurt, either.

“I think,” Rayno, as the senior member of the court, continued, “that in light of Breygart's failure to provide his supposed proof, or even to respond to our request in a timely fashion, we must make our decision based upon the evidence already presented. Rather than rush to a conclusion, however, I would suggest we adjourn for lunch and afterwards spend an hour or so meditating upon this matter in privacy. Let us reconvene at about the fifteenth hour and render our decision, Brothers.”