By Heresies Distressed (76 page)

 

Bishop Mylz looked at Ahlvyn Shumay as the screams, shrieks, and sounds of combat abruptly ceased.

The bishop's eyes were shadowed and dark, sick with the reality of the bloodshed and carnage he'd unleashed in the precincts of one of God's own convents. He'd thought he was prepared for what it would be like; he'd been wrong.

Please, God
, he prayed silently.
Let it be over. Let Your will be done, but I beg You to spare me more of this
.

God returned no answer, and even as he prayed, Halcom knew it would be easier next time, and even easier the time after that. He didn't want it to be, but what he wanted couldn't change what was.

At least it's finally over . . . this time
, he thought, and closed his eyes as he murmured another prayer—this one for the soul of the young woman who had just died at his men's hands.

He was still praying when a deep, icy voice spoke.

“Bishop Mylz, I presume,” it said, and his eyes flew open, for he'd never heard that voice before in his life.

Shock bleached the color from his cheeks as he found himself facing not Daivys, or Lahrak, or Abylyn.
This
man wore the black-and-gold of the House of Ahrmahk, and Halcom had never seen him before. But then a sudden stab of lightning blazed sapphire in the guardsman's eyes, and Halcom's heart seemed to stop beating. Only one Imperial Guardsman had eyes that color, but he was with the Emperor in—

“You can't
be
here,” he heard his own voice say, almost calmly.

“No, I can't be,” the man in front of him agreed coldly . . . and he smiled.

Shumay moved suddenly, his hand darting towards his belt and the dagger sheathed there. The guardsman's eyes never flickered. He didn't even
look
at Shumay. His empty left hand simply snapped out like some impossibly swift serpent, closed on the priest's neck, and twisted. Shumay jerked violently, Halcom heard a ghastly,
crunching
sound, and then the guardsman opened his hand again.

Halcom's aide slithered to the ground in a boneless heap, and the guardsman's thin smile could have frozen the heart of the sun.

“Two hours ago,” he said softly, “I was in Corisande, My Lord Bishop.”

Halcom shook his head slowly, disbelievingly, his eyes huge.

“
Demon
,” he whispered.

“I suppose, in a way,” the other man agreed. “By your lights, at any rate. But you've failed, Bishop. The Empress is alive. And I tell you this now: your ‘Church' is doomed. I will personally see to it that it is erased forever from the face of the universe, like the obscenity it is.”

Halcom heard someone whimpering and realized it was himself. His hand rose, trembling uncontrollably as he traced Langhorne's Scepter in the air between him and the nightmare he confronted.

That nightmare simply ignored his hand, totally unaffected by the warding sign of banishment, and Halcom's breath sobbed in his nostrils.

“Your Langhorne is a lie,” the guardsman told him coldly, precisely. “He was a liar, a charlatan, a lunatic, a traitor, and a mass murderer when he was alive, and if there truly is any justice in the universe, today he's burning in Hell, with that bitch Bédard beside him. And you,
Bishop
Mylz—you make a proper priest for both of them, don't you?”

“Blasphemy!
Blasphemy!
” Somehow Halcom found the breath to gasp the word through the vise of despair tightening about his throat.

“Really?” The guardsman's laugh was carved from the ebon heart of Hell. “Then take that thought with you, My Lord Bishop. Maybe you can share it with Langhorne while you squat on the coals.”

Halcom was still staring at him in horror when the katana in the guardsman's right hand sliced through his neck.

Sharleyan finished reloading the last of the rifles and propped it upright against the wall beside its fellows.

“What's happening, Edwyrd?” she asked softly as she started on the pistols.

“I don't know, Your Majesty.” Her last surviving guardsman stood to one side of the smashed window, staying as much under cover as he could as he peered out into the rain while blood dribbled down his slashed cheek, and his voice was taut. “In fact, I don't have the least damned idea, saving your presence,” he admitted. “All I can say is that if there's no more fighting and no one's trying to climb in through this window, or come through that door,” he twitched his head in the direction of the bedchamber doorway, “we're a lot better off than we were. And—” he turned to give her a tight, blood-streaked smile “—if we are, I think I've just experienced my first miracle.”

Sharleyan surprised herself with a laugh. There was, perhaps, a shaky edge of hysteria in it, but it truly was a laugh, and she cupped her face in her palms, pressing her fingertips against her temples.

She felt the stickiness of blood on her hands. Some of it was actually hers, oozing from the cuts on her scalp and the left side of her forehead where splinters of broken shutter had cut the skin as the arbalest bolts came screaming past her. More blood had splashed her long skirts and Charisian-style overtunic, and her face and hands were blackened and smeared with powder smoke. Her right shoulder throbbed painfully, and she didn't want to think about how badly bruised it was. If she hadn't been able to move her right arm—painful though the experience had proven—she would have believed that shoulder must be broken.

The smell of gunsmoke, blood, and death was almost overpowering despite the pelting rain's washing effect. Water blowing in through the broken window had diluted some of the blood puddled thickly on the bedchamber floor, and fresh blood still dripped from the tip of Seahamper's bayonet like thick, pearl-shaped tears. Emotional shock drew a blessed patina of unreality between her and the world about her. Her brain worked with almost unnatural clarity, yet the thoughts seemed somehow distant, and the tearing grief she knew waited for her could not yet break through.

It will
, she told herself bleakly.
It will . . . when you look around and you never see all those faces again
.

She prayed desperately that at least one of her guardsmen besides Seahamper was still alive, and guilt clogged her throat as she realized how unspeakably grateful she was that if only one could have survived, it had been the sergeant. But—

“Your Majesty,” a deep voice spoke from the thunderstorm, and Sharleyan's hands snapped down from her face and her head jerked up as she recognized it.

“
Langhorne!
” Seahamper hissed, as he, too, recognized that impossible voice. The guardsman stepped reflexively between his empress and the window, and his bloody bayonet rose once more, protectively.

“Your Majesty,” the voice said again. “I realize this is all going to be . . . a bit difficult to explain,” it continued, and despite all of the horror which had invaded this dreadful night Sharleyan heard an edge of dry humor in the words, “but you're safe now. I regret,” the voice had darkened once more, “that I couldn't get here sooner.”

“C-Captain Athrawes?”
Even now, Sharleyan felt a stab of irritation at the quaver she couldn't quite keep completely out of her voice.
Don't be such a twit!
the back of her brain told her sharply.
On a night like this, even one of the Archangels would probably sound shaken!

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Merlin replied, and stepped close enough to the window for both of them to see him. Seahamper's bayonet point rose a little higher, and he seemed to settle even more solidly into place, but Sharleyan leaned around him, looking past him, and Merlin studied her expression with his enhanced vision.

She looked terrible, he thought. Her hair had slipped its elaborate coiffure and hung in random braids. Her face was smeared with blood and powder smoke, and her eyes were dark with the knowledge of how many men—men she'd known and cared about—had died to protect her. Yet even after all of that, the familiar sharp intelligence still lived in those eyes, as well. Despite shock, grief, loss, and now the fact that she was forced to confront the sheer impossibility of his own presence, she was still thinking, still attacking the problem before her rather than retreating in dazed confusion or denial.

My God
, he thought.
My God, did Cayleb luck out with
you,
lady!

“How—” Sharleyan paused and cleared her throat. “How can you be here, Merlin?” She shook her head. “Not even a
seijin
can be in two places at once!”

“No, Your Majesty. He can't.” Merlin bowed slightly, still staying far enough back to avoid triggering any protective reaction on Seahamper's part, and drew a deep breath. “Two hours ago, I was in Corisande, in my tent,” he told her.

“Two hours?” Sharleyan stared at him, then shook her head. “No, that isn't possible,” she said flatly.

“Yes, it is,” he said, his tone compassionate. “It's entirely possible, Your Majesty. It simply requires certain things you don't know about . . . yet.”

“Yet?”
She pounced on the adverb like a cat-lizard on a near-rat, and he nodded.

“Your Majesty, Cayleb doesn't know I'm here. There wasn't enough time for me to tell him and still get here soon enough to do any good. As it is, I was barely in time. The problem is that there are secrets not even Cayleb is free to share—even with you, as badly as he's wanted to ever since you arrived in Tellesberg. How I got here, how I knew you were in danger, are part of those secrets. But despite all the reasons he hasn't been able to tell you, I had to decide on my own authority whether to risk letting you learn about them or to stand by and do nothing while you were killed. I couldn't do that. So now I have no choice but to tell you at least a part of the truth.”

“Your Majesty—” Seahamper began sharply.

“Wait, Edwyrd.” She touched him gently on his armored shoulder. “Wait,” she repeated, and her eyes seemed to bore into Merlin.

“No mortal man could have done what you've done,
Seijin
Merlin,” she said, after a moment. “The fact that you appeared so . . . miraculously to save my life—and Edwyrd's—inclines me to feel nothing but gratitude for God's miraculous,” she reused the word deliberately, “intervention. But there are other possible explanations.”

“Yes, Your Majesty, there are. And that's precisely why the secrets of which I spoke are so carefully guarded. Charis' enemies—
your
enemies—would immediately proclaim that my capabilities must be demonic and use that accusation to attack everything you and Cayleb hope to accomplish.”

“But you're about to tell me they'd be wrong, aren't you?”

“I am. On the other hand, I'm as aware as you are that even if I
were
a demon, I'd be telling you I'm not. I had this same conversation with Cayleb, before Darcos Sound, but he'd already known me for over a year by then. You haven't. I know that will make any explanation I can give you even harder to believe and accept, but I beg you to at least try.”

“
Seijin
Merlin,” she said, her lips twisting wryly, “whatever you may be, I wouldn't be alive to be having this conversation, or feeling any crisis of doubt, without your intervention. Edwyrd wouldn't be hovering here, ready to stick a bayonet clear through you if he thought you intended to harm me, either, and that's almost as important to me as all the rest of it. Under the circumstances, I suppose the least I can do is at least listen to what you have to say.”

Seahamper stirred slightly, but he kept his jaw clamped tightly.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Merlin said with the utmost sincerity. But then he shook his head with a snort. “Unfortunately, I don't really have time to give you the complete story. It's already daylight in Corisande, and no one—including Cayleb—knows where I am. I've got to get back there as quickly as possible.”

“You seem to be living an even more complicated life than I'd realized,” Sharleyan observed, and he chuckled.

“Your Majesty, you don't know the half of it,” he told her. “I think you're going to have to, though. Know, I mean. For now, I ask you to accept—tentatively, at least—that I'm neither an angel nor a demon. That the things I can do don't violate any natural or sacred law, however the Inquisition might regard them. That I wish you and Cayleb well, and that I will do all in my power to serve and protect both of you. That there are other people, good and godly people, who know about me and my abilities. And—” he looked directly into her eyes “—that I will die before I allow men like Zhaspahr Clyntahn to go on using God Himself as an excuse to kill and torture in the name of their own ambition and perverted beliefs.”

“You're asking me to accept, even if only ‘tentatively,' a great deal,” Sharleyan pointed out.

“I know that. If you can, though, at least until you return to Tellesberg, I'll try to prove the truthfulness of all I've just told you. I'll admit now that I can't ‘prove'
all
of it, but if you'll see to it that the balcony outside your quarters in the Palace is clear all night on your first night back in Tellesberg, I think I'll be able to produce a friendly witness you'll feel able to trust.”

“Cayleb?” she asked quickly, her face lighting, and Merlin nodded.

“Managing the arrangements so that he and I can both disappear for several hours without sending the entire army into a furor is going to be difficult, you understand. That's one reason I can't give you a specific hour for our arrival. But I feel quite confident that when I tell him about what happened here tonight, he'll insist on coming to you himself. And, now that I think about it, I have two additional requests.”