She glared down at him, raising one mock-ferocious fist, and he lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender.
“Sorry!” he told her while laughter sounded over the com channel. “I couldn’t resist. But,” his expression sobered, “Sharley’s put her finger on the real reason I backed Dustyn so strongly when he and Ehdwyrd first came up with the notion. I almost argued against it, really—for all the reasons you just cited. But then another aspect of their proposal occurred to me.”
“What sort of aspect?” she asked, lowering her fist, her own expression more serious as his tone registered.
“What’s our end strategy, Nynian?” he countered, and she frowned.
That was a question which the Inner Circle’s members had discussed often enough, both before and after she’d become a member of it, she reflected. And while parts of it were simplicity itself to answer, others were anything but.
Initially, Charis’ overriding objective had been simple survival, although Maikel Staynair’s quest for freedom of conscience had run a close second. Of course, Charis’ survival had required the Group of Four’s defeat, and as the jihad grew increasingly bitter and ever bloodier, that priority had broadened as all Charisians, aside from the dwindling number of diehard Temple Loyalists, had come to demand a complete separation from the Church of the Temple, coupled with the destruction of the Inquisition’s power. And that—hard though many Charisians, including a great many of the most ardent Reformists, had fought against accepting it—meant more than simply defending Charis against the immediate threat of invasion and conquest. It meant the Church itself had to be beaten into submission on the field of battle, because that was the only way a Zhaspahr Clyntahn could be forced to abandon that effort.
But those were the strategic imperatives all Charisians knew about—the same imperatives that operated for the Republic of Siddarmark, following Clyntahn’s brutal assault upon it. They were not Nimue Alban’s overriding imperative, and Nimue’s imperative—which had become that of the Inner Circle—was the outright destruction, not simply the defeat, of the Church of God Awaiting. It was her task, her mission—the burning purpose for which the original Nimue Alban had died—to overturn the Proscriptions, proclaim the truth about the ‘Archangels,’ liberate the human race from the anti-technology shackles Eric Langhorne had fastened upon it, and—above every other priority in the universe—prepare it to face the peril of the Gbaba once again.
“Ideally,” Nynian said finally, “the end game’s to compel the Group of Four—well, Group of Three now, I suppose—to surrender and give us possession of the Temple so we can get at whatever’s in the basement.” She grimaced. “Of course, as we’ve all agreed, the chance of pulling that off ranges between slim and none.”
“Exactly.” Merlin shrugged. “And even if they were willing to let us into that basement, it might not solve our problem. We realized even before Paityr brought us the Stone of Schueler that we couldn’t just waltz into the Temple and start shutting off power switches.” He smiled very thinly. “Leaving aside the probability that someone as paranoid as Chihiro and Schueler would’ve left safeguards to prevent anybody from deliberately—or accidentally—shutting anything down, we know that at least one ‘Archangel’ left at least one booby-trap down there. God only knows what somebody else may’ve left! And how would every believer in Zion react if all the Temple’s ‘divine’ environmental services, lighting, and repair-mech ‘servitors’ suddenly go down? Since ‘every believer in Zion’ happens to be the same thing as ‘every living human being in Zion,’ that’s a not-minor consideration.
“And would any vicarate, even one that somehow deposes Clyntahn and the others, be willing to let us ‘heretics’ profane the Temple, whatever happens? I suspect they’d balk at that. They might be reduced to offering passive resistance, but I could see the truly devout among them standing on the Temple steps to block our access unless we were willing to use physical force to move them, and the last thing we want to do is to physically invade the Temple. At the moment, we’re totally undermining Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s moral authority. Of course, he’s our best ally in that endeavor, but if we landed ‘heretical’ troops in Zion to violate the precincts of the Temple.…”
He shrugged again, much less nonchalantly, and his sapphire eyes were darker and deeper than the sea.
“I can’t think of a single thing more likely to provoke fanatical resistance. The kind of resistance where children with bombs strapped to their backs run straight into the machine guns and parents encourage them to do it. God knows we’ve seen enough of that sort of fanaticism, and not just on the Temple Loyalists’ side. Look at some of the things that happened in Glacierheart and Tarikah and Hildermoss.” He shook his head. “That’s the largest city on Safehold, Nynian. The body count could well be in the millions, even if we ‘won’ in the end … and that assumes the bombardment platform isn’t programmed to protect the physical integrity of the Temple by automatically taking out any attacking army or fleet, which I suspect it damned well is. Hell, I’m not a crazed, mass-murdering lunatic, and that’s how I’d’ve set it up!”
“But if we can’t invade Zion,” Cayleb said quietly, drawing Nynian’s gaze to him, “then the chance of our being able to … undo the Holy Writ just because we defeat the Group of Four goes from ‘unlikely as hell’ to completely impossible. When we started this—once the ‘Inner Circle’ really understood what was at stake, at least—we were willing to settle for driving the Church back, breaking the Inquisition’s kneecaps, and creating a situation in which the Church of Charis gradually destroyed the Church’s authority. We were thinking in terms of decades, even generations, of slowly undermining the Writ and the Proscriptions through example and gradual reinterpretation. And we were willing to take however long we needed to take to find a solution to the bombardment system. But then Paityr brought us the Stone … and Schueler’s promise of the ‘Archangels’ return.’ And that gave us a deadline we hadn’t known we faced.”
Nynian nodded, her own expression somber. None of that was new to her, although this was really the first time she’d been inside the gradual evolution of her Charisian allies’ thinking. By the time she’d become aware of them—and they’d become aware of her—that evolution had already completed itself.
“We don’t know for certain that the ‘Archangels’ are actually going to return at all,” Merlin said. “And if they do, we don’t know how they’ll return. One possibility would be for PICA ‘Archangels’ to suddenly emerge from vaults under the Temple. Frankly, I don’t think that’s likely, because if they’d prepared a stack of PICAs in the first place, they’d probably also have continued to interact with the flesh-and-blood population of Safehold. We had the capability to build a single PICA out of the resources in my cave, once Owl and Nahrmahn figured out how to do it. It’s for damn sure Chihiro and Schueler had that capability after Langhorne’s death. Oh, they might’ve needed to do the same research Owl did, although I think it’s more likely they would’ve already had the necessary information. But they certainly could’ve done it before or during the War Against the Fallen if they’d wanted to, and if they had, they could have had clearly superhuman ‘Archangels’ and ‘angels’ leading their armies in the field instead of relying on mortal seijins, like Kohdy. Think how that would have cemented the Church’s authority—especially if the same ‘Archangels’ or their ‘angelic’ successors were still available to be the Church’s public face.” He shook his head. “No, if they’d been willing to go the PICA route, then when Nimue Alban woke up in a PICA here on Safehold, her entire mission would have been flat out impossible instead of simply damned near impossible.”