"He was smart enough to believe his eyes, when he didn't let his obsessions get in the way. With some people you need to use visual aids to make a point. I'm still a freak of nature, but I'm a freak they don't dare to diss."
A long-haired Persian cat jumped up on the table. Tiphaine dumped it unceremoniously down; Sandra smiled slightly.
She wouldn't have dared to do that once, she thought, tucking a lock of her graying brown hair back under her headdress; the silver-and-platinum band around it chinked softly.
Aloud: "Isn't it interesting that this Prophet fellow was prepared to send assassins all the way to Mackenzie country? And isn't it even more interesting that they knew this Vogeler was heading there? What do we know about these people? Refresh my memory; I've had more pressing business lately."
"It's a father-son team running a cult," Tiphaine said, speaking without consulting the notes in the folders be fore her. "Our sources aren't certain if the son is natural, or adoptive and the natural son of the woman who ran the cult before the Change."
"The Church Universal and Triumphant, yes?"
"Yes, my lady. Generally known as the Cutters, or at least their musclemen are, or the Corwinites, from their headquarters. It's in the country just north of the old Yellowstone National Park. They were there before the Change, and already had a couple of rungs missing from their ladders if you ask me, but the Prophet moved in and took them over with a group of followers in late 'ninety eight and added a lot of new stuff."
"He's not native there?"
"Rumor has it he was in California on the day of the Change itself. He'd been blowing up scientists in the eighties and nineties-had a major hate on for technology-and he was in jail in Sacramento. He escaped in the confusion, felt that God had personally answered his requests with the Change, and headed for Montana. That he got there does say something about his survival skills."
They all nodded thoughtfully; California had been a charnel house as bad as anywhere on the globe, that day when the lights went out.. . and the water stopped coming through the pipes that kept nearly two-score million alive in a natural desert. Not one in a thousand had lived through it, the ones who'd run early and fast; reports said there were places where the desiccated corpses still lay three deep on the edges of the Mohave, despite a generation of sun and wind and crows and coyotes.
Dead as LA, went the proverb.
Tiphaine went on: "The new management of the CUT started small just after the Change, but they've been expanding recently, both by straightforward conquest and by conversion; they cover most of what was Montana by now, and chunks elsewhere. If they take over you con vert or die, so it snowballs. I've looked into the theology. They're. .."
Her tone remained flatly unemotional as she paused for a moment to search for the appropriate phrase and then resumed: "… mad as Tom O'Bedlam. Living on a different planet. Fucking bughouse nuts."
"Yes, I've perused it a bit, too," Sandra said. "Even stranger than the late unlamented Pope Leo here. Sort of a mishmash of Christianity and Buddhism and every lunatic and charlatan from Madame Blavatsky on, with an explanation of why God sent the Change, too-floods having been tried before, as it were. And they're getting uncomfortably close, if they win this war with New Deseret. I wish we had access to this easterner Vogeler who was involved. The Mackenzies didn't exactly brief Mathilda on it."
Conrad's brows went up; when the scars on his face moved, he looked more like a gargoyle than ever. "The CUT are a bit far away to worry about, surely?"
"That's the time to worry. Knowledge is power. And now that we've absorbed the Palouse-"
"The western half of it," Tiphaine said, with pedantic accuracy.
"-there's only Boise and Deseret between us and them."
Conrad shrugged massive shoulders. "You're the sovereign. They're basically a bunch of sheep shaggers, though. And they think anything with gears in it is sacrilegious, don't they?"
"Yes, but you should read more widely in history, dear Conrad. There are any number of cults which've caused no end of trouble, though their first followers were few and poor. Especially when they preach salvation at the sword's edge. In the event of trouble, how are we placed?"
She knew most of the answer, but it never hurt to go over the facts again. Conrad's blue eyes took on a slightly abstracted look. He'd been an accountant by trade before the Change, as well as a fellow member of the Society for Creative Anachronism and a close friend of Norman and Sandra Arminger.
"The treasury's got a full year's revenue on hand in cash, our paper is trading at par and we can borrow at excellent rates if we have to-the customs and excise taxes are blossoming nicely with the way trade's picked up. It would be even better if it weren't for the Haida raiders and plain-and-simple pirate scum all over the Pacific basin."
"The pirates we'll have to leave to the naval powers like Tasmania, but for the Haida we need a Warden of the Coast. But who to appoint Marchwarden? Piotr has the most lands in that direction, but. .."
"But I wouldn't appoint him to supervise an orgy at the Slut and Brew," Conrad said.
Tiphaine nodded. "There's Juhel Strangeways, Lord de Netarts. He's competent, and even fairly honest. And he already has County Tillamook in ward, for Lady Anne. It'll be-"
"Five years until she reaches her majority," the regent said.
"By then, he could have the place organized. He already dealt with that Haida raid, October before last."
"A matter in which our Rudi had a hand," Sandra said thoughtfully, stroking the cat in her lap. "He attracts trouble as sparks fly upward, that boy."
"Coincidence?" Conrad rumbled.
"I'm far too paranoid to believe in coincidence, Count Odell."
The other two smiled. "Neither do I," the man said, and Tiphaine nodded. "De Netarts, for Marchwarden of the West, then?"
Sandra nodded, and he went on: "The basic mesne tithes are coming in without too much trouble as well; it's easier now that we don't have to split them with the Church."
Sandra smiled like a cat. That had been one of the many reasons she'd unobtrusively arranged for Pope Leo to shuffle off his mortal coil, and for Portland's Church to be reunited with Rome-or rather with the Umbrian hill-town of Badia, which was where the Swiss Guard had escorted the remnant of the Vatican when Rome went under.
Poor Norman, he did so want a pope of his own in true medieval style, and Bishop Rule was just the sort of madman to suit the role, once he'd decided that God considered everything since about June 15, 1297, a mis take. Of course, the Change was some evidence for that.. . on the whole, though, Pope Log is preferable to Pope Stork.
Despite the occasional tussle with Benedict and his successor Pius XIII over things like the nomination of bishops, and despite how useful a tame inquisition had been. One sane pope six months away was far easier to deal with than an all-too-active lunatic in Portland, and it had made reconciliation of a sort possible with Mount Angel and the other so called Free Catholic bishoprics. Mount Angel's mutant order of warrior Benedictines was becoming uncomfortably influential, through its budding university and with its daughter settlements helping the more badly battered areas get on their feet again.
Stalin had meant mockery when he asked how many divisions the pope had, but in the end his bewildered successors had found it didn't matter; and men at arms and castles could come into the same category. At sev enth and last men were ruled from within their heads by ideas as much as by clubs from without, and a careful ruler kept it in mind. The Church of Rome had outlasted any number of systems that looked stronger than iron at the time, and had ridden out many storms that claimed to be the wave of the future; she was wise with years, and infinitely patient, and bided her time.
Best to take advantage of that, for herself and her daughter and her daughter's children to come, rather than trying to build dams against it.