Petty of Zhaspahr, but it does get his feelings across, doesn’t it? the archbishop mused, deflecting the spyglass from the bodyguards to the vessel still the better part of two miles out from the waterfront. Like so much else of the Temple, that spyglass was a holy relic, finer than anything mortal hands could make, with lenses that were water-clear and powerful. Now he turned the focusing knob until the boat leapt into crystalline clarity, only an arm’s length away despite the distance, and smiled as he saw spray bursting white on the purple-bannered schooner’s weather bow.
It must be chilly out there—among other things—in the boat bouncing in the steep, choppy waves. The thought amused him, since Inquisitor General Wylbyr’s vulnerability to motion sickness was well known and he wasn’t exactly basking in the esteem of the Inquisition’s adjutant at the moment, either.
Of course, Rayno thought, moving the spyglass slowly and delicately in hopes of finding a green-faced Edwyrds leaning over the lee rail, we’ll have to project all of that approval and brotherly love very publicly before we send him back. What I’d like to do is to replace him with someone with a clue, but that would mean someone who’d recognize the need to … moderate the enforcement of Zhaspahr’s directives, and that probably wouldn’t work out any better in the end. Somebody willing to do that might actually at least slow the bleeding, but he’d be lucky to last three five-days before Zhaspahr yanked him home to face the Punishment himself.
The frown that crossed the archbishop’s face was far more worried than he would have permitted himself in front of witnesses. Clyntahn was digging in ever more deeply on his demand that the least sign of heresy be immediately punished. He might still recognize the need to show at least some moderation here in Zion and in the Temple Lands generally, but even that was eroding as he became more and more determined to yield not a single inch more ground. And whatever he was willing to concede here, he insisted upon a complete crackdown on anything that even might be a sign of heresy in the portion of Siddarmark still occupied by Mother Church’s forces and even—or perhaps especially—in the Border States, where the looming threat of heretic invasion, with its suggestion that the heretics might actually be winning their blasphemous war, threatened the faith of Mother Church’s children.
Rayno could understand his need to do something to stop the heretics, yet their own agents inquisitor’s reports clearly indicated that the Inquisitor General’s repressiveness actually fueled Reformist fervor. Even some of those with no desire at all to become part of a heretical, schismatic church had begun to question whether God could truly approve of the Inquisition’s ferocity. There was a reason people even here, in Zion, whispered prayers every night that the Inquisition would at least … moderate its severity.
Yet Clyntahn refused—more adamantly than ever, in fact—to admit that too much severity was actually as bad—or worse—than too little firmness.
It was fear, Rayno thought. Clyntahn would never admit it—not in a thousand years—but that was the reason he refused to relent. The worm of fear ate its poisonous way deeper into the Grand Inquisitor’s heart with every passing day, and his response was to lash out at those whose weakness—whose failures—fed his fear and made it strong. It was a worm Wyllym Rayno was coming to know only too well, one he’d found hidden in his own heart.Yet there was a difference between his fear and Clyntahn’s. Rayno liked it no more than the next man, yet at least he was willing to acknowledge it was fear he felt. Clyntahn wasn’t, and he was building a bubble about himself—a bubble in which it was still permissible to discuss how the Inquisition might respond most effectively to its enemies, or even ways in which specific reverses might be addressed, but no underling dared to suggest Mother Church’s triumph over each and every one of those enemies might conceivably be anything but inevitable.
Whether the Grand Inquisitor would allow even Duchairn or Maigwair to discuss the military situation with anything like frankness at this point was an open question in Rayno’s mind. What wasn’t a question was that even if he would for the present, the time was coming when he no longer would, and what happened then?
We need a miracle, God, he thought, still gazing at the Inquisitor General’s approaching schooner, remembering the celebrants’ reverent, rumbling liturgical responses in the mass he’d celebrated. Treasuring the chanted scripture and the soaring harmonies of the hymns. On a day like this, a Wednesday when he was freshly come from God’s own Presence, when God’s Day loomed so close upon the calendar, he could truly believe miracles were possible. You’ve given enough of them to the heretics. Now we need You to give one to us. Something to show we truly are Your champions, that You haven’t deserted us. That—
He stiffened in shock, his eyes flaring wide, as the schooner disintegrated into a boil of fire and smoke that filled his field of view. He actually saw two of the men on deck, both Schuelerite under-priests, simply disappear as the blast of fury snatched them into its maw and devoured them.
He leapt back from the spyglass and the ball of flame was suddenly tiny with distance, but that distance did nothing to dispel his horror as he watched broken debris—debris he knew included the shredded flesh of the priests he’d seen vanish into that searing wall of flame—arc upwards in dreadful silence while the bells sang sweetly, sweetly behind him.
Just over nine seconds later, the explosion’s rumbling thunder rolled over that golden song like Shan-wei’s own curse.
* * *
Zhozuah Murphai watched the same column of fiery, spray-shot smoke. His waterfront-level vantage point was rather different from Archbishop Wyllym’s … and so was his reaction. The brisk wind began to twist the column into a shredding spiral, bending it so that it loomed towards Zion, standing up from the surface of Lake Pei in a sign visible to every citizen of the city, and satisfaction blazed within him like the heart of a star.
Ahrloh Mahkbyth had been bitterly disappointed when he learned Helm Cleaver wouldn’t be able to reach Wylbyr Edwyrds upon his arrival after all. Security was simply too tight for his people to penetrate—no doubt because of the record of successes the Fist of God and Dialydd Mab had already run up. Mahkbyth’s people might have been able to get to Edwyrds before he left Zion, but the odds were overwhelmingly against it. So Murphai had volunteered to see to that part of the mission. After all, a PICA, had no need to breathe. Given that, it had made far more sense for Murphai to attach the charge—an Owl-provided charge of explosives not even Sahndrah Lywys would be able to duplicate for decades—to the keel of Edwyrds’ schooner while it waited for Edwyrds’ canal boat at Brouhkamp, the capital of the Episcopate of Schueler on the far side of Lake Pei. He’d rather enjoyed the irony of planting the charge in the episcopate named for the Inquisition’s patron “archangel.”
He’d trudged across the bottom of Brouhkamp’s harbor to see to that minor detail two days earlier. The truth was that he could easily have delegated that task to one of Owl’s remotes if he’d so desired. But he’d witnessed entirely too much of Edwyrds’ bloody handiwork over the last two years to let anyone else plant that particular charge.