He paused, and Wylsynn looked at him silently, unable to speak, and Staynair shook his head slowly.
“I can’t and won’t try to dictate the ‘right way’ to deal with what you’re feeling at this moment,” the archbishop said quietly. “That would violate my own most deeply held beliefs. But I will ask you to think about this. The Church of God Awaiting wasn’t created by God. It was built by men and women… men and women who’d seen a more terrible tragedy than anything you and I could possibly imagine. Who’d been broken and damaged by that experience, and who were prepared to do anything- anything at all -to prevent it from happening again. I believe they were terribly, horribly mistaken in what they did, yet I’ve come to the conclusion over the years since I first discovered Saint Zherneau’s journal-and even more in the time since I’ve known Merlin, and gained access to Owl’s records of pre-Safeholdian history-that for all their unspeakable crimes, they weren’t really monsters. Oh, they did monstrous things in plenty, and understanding the why can’t excuse the what of their actions. I’m not trying to say it could, and I’m sure they did what they did for all the flawed, personal motives we could imagine, as well, including the hunger for power and the need to control. But that doesn’t change the truth of the fact that they genuinely believed the ultimate survival of the human race depended upon their actions.
“Do I think that justifies what they did? No. Do I think it makes the final product of their lie any less monstrous? No. Am I prepared to close my eyes, turn away and allow that lie to continue unchallenged forever? A thousand times no. But neither do I think they acted out of pure evil and self-interest. And neither do I believe anything they might have done indicts God. Remember that they built their lie not out of whole cloth, but out of bits and pieces they took away from the writings and the beliefs-and the faith- of thousands of generations which had groped and felt their way towards God without benefit of the unbroken, unchallenged-and untrue -scripture and history which we possess. And so I come to my final rhetorical question. Do I believe the fact that men and women made unscrupulous by desperation and terror misused and abused religion and God Himself means God doesn’t exist? A million times no, my son.
“I can no longer prove that to you by showing you the incontrovertible, inviolable word set down by the immortal Archangels. I can only ask you to reach inside yourself once more, to seek the wellsprings of faith and to look at all the wonders of the universe-and all the still greater wonders which are about to become available to you-and decide for yourself. Merlin and I had a discussion about this very subject the night he and I first told Cayleb the truth. I wasn’t aware then that I was following in the footsteps of another, far more ancient philosopher when I asked him what I could possibly lose by believing in God, but now I ask you the same question, Paityr. What do you lose by believing in a loving, compassionate God Who’s finally found a way to reach out to His children once more? Will it make you an evil man? Lead you into the same sort of actions that ensnared the real Langhorne and the real Bedard? Or will you continue to reach out in love to those about you? To do good, when the opportunity to do good comes to you? To reach the end of your life knowing you’ve truly labored to leave the world and all in it a better place than it might otherwise have been?
“And if there is no God, if all there is beyond this life is a dreamless, eternal sleep-only nothingness-what will your faith have cost you then?” The archbishop smiled suddenly. “Do you expect to feel cheated or swindled when you realize there was no God waiting beyond that threshold? Only two things can lie on the other side of death, Paityr. It’s what Merlin or Owl might describe as ‘a binary solution set.’ There’s either nothingness, or some sort of continued existence, whether it leads us to what we think of now as God or not. And if it’s nothingness, then whether or not you were ‘cheated’ is meaningless. And if there is a continued existence which doesn’t contain that Whom I think of as God, then I’ll simply have to start over learning the truth again, won’t I?”
Paityr gazed at him for several more seconds, then drew a deep breath.
“I don’t know what to believe at this moment, Your Eminence,” he said finally. “I never imagined I could feel such turmoil as I’m feeling right now. Intellectually, I believe you when you say you’ve experienced the same things, and I can see you truly have found a way for your faith to survive those experiences. I envy that… I think. And the fact that I don’t know whether I truly envy your certainty or resent it as yet another manifestation of the lie sums up the heart of my confusion. I’ll need time, and a great deal of it, before I can put my spiritual house back in order and say ‘Yes, this is where I stand.’”
“Of course you will,” Staynair said simply. “Surely you don’t think anyone else has ever simply taken this in stride and continued without missing a step!”
“I don’t really know what I think right now, Your Eminence!” Wylsynn was astonished by the note of genuine humor in his own response.
“Then you’re about where everyone is at this point, Father,” Merlin told him, and smiled with a bittersweet crookedness. “And believe me, I may not have had to grapple with the knowledge that I’d been lied to all my life, but waking up in Nimue’s Cave and realizing I’d been dead for the better part of a thousand years was just a little difficult to process.”
“I can believe that,” Wylsynn said, yet even as he spoke his eyes had darkened, and his expression turned grim.
“What is it, Paityr?” Staynair asked quickly but softly, and the intendant shook his head hard.
“It’s just… ironic that Merlin should mention ‘a thousand years,’” he said. “You see, not everything about the Archangels and Mother Church was set forth in the Writ or The Testimonies after all, Your Eminence.” . III.
A Recon Skimmer, Above Carter’s Ocean
Merlin Athrawes leaned back in his flight couch, gazing up through the canopy at the distant moon. The waters of Carter’s Ocean stretched out far below him like an endless black mirror, touched with silver highlights. The stars were distant, glittering pinpricks overhead, but ahead of him lay a wall of cloud, the back edge of a massive weather front moving steadily eastward across Corisande.
It all seemed incredibly peaceful, restful even. It wasn’t, of course. The winds along the leading edge of that front were less powerful than those which had battered Cayleb further north, but they were quite powerful enough. And they were going to catch up with Dawn Star in the next few hours. The galleon and her escorts were passing through Coris Strait, about to enter South Reach Sound southeast of Corisande before looping back westward through White Horse Reach to the Corisandian capital of Manchyr, and Merlin wondered if the bad weather was going to be his ally or his comeuppance. Getting on and off a sailing ship in the middle of the ocean without being detected was a nontrivial challenge, even for a PICA. As it was, he’d officially retreated to his cabin to “meditate,” and Sharleyan and the rest of her guard detail would see to it that he wasn’t disturbed. He’d even left a rope trailing helpfully from the galleon’s sternwalk so he could shinny back aboard, hopefully unnoticed. After so long, it had become almost a well-established routine.
Except, of course, that if the weather’s as bad as it looks like being tonight, there’re going to be people keeping an anxious watch on little things like rigging and sails or rogue waves… any one of whom might just happen to notice the odd seijin climbing up a rope out of the ocean in the middle of the night.