Through Fiery Trials Read online

  But He hadn’t allowed it to continue forever, the vicar reminded himself fiercely. He’d found Rhobair Duchairn, touched his heart, transformed a man who’d been as much a part of the system as anyone and more so than most into the genuine Good Shepherd Mother Church had needed. Surely He could do that again! And in the meantime—

  “Our brother Rhobair will lie in state in The Temple for a full five-day,” he resumed after a moment, his voice husky. “We charge you in his name, and in the name of Mother Church, to join us here with all haste for his funeral mass and for the Convocation to select his successor. To this end—”

  OCTOBER YEAR OF GOD 905

  .I.

  CMS Sea Wyvern, Temple Wharf, and The Temple, City of Zion, The Temple Lands.

  “I wish I was more confident this was one of your good ideas, Your Eminence.”

  Bishop Bryahn Ushyr’s voice had been trained since seminary to carry to the distant corners of even a large cathedral, but it was pitched low enough no one else could have heard it through the tumult and crowd noise as the high-sided steamship nuzzled the wharf’s massive fenders. CMS Sea Wyvern, flying the standard of the Empire of Charis below the golden scepter of Langhorne which denoted her present service to the Church of Charis, was the pride of the Charisian merchant marine: six hundred feet long and forty-five feet from waterline to boat deck. That made her the largest steam-powered vessel ever built on Safehold, for the moment at least, and she towered over every other ship in the vicinity. Her sheer presence almost concealed the presence of the half-dozen steam-powered tugboats, all flying the gold-on-green scepter banner of the Temple Lands.

  The sibilant roar of Sea Wyvern’s venting steam, the jet of white startlingly dramatic as it blasted through the coal smoke from her funnels, contributed quite a bit to that tumult, but it was only an addition, almost an afterthought compared to the noise of the crowd which had assembled to await her arrival. The city waterfront had grown accustomed to the fire-and-smoke-breathing tugs and lesser craft which had become increasingly prevalent, even here in Zion, but the sheer size of the leviathans Charis had introduced to the seas of Safehold, each seemingly larger than the last, was another matter. The big oceangoing freighters normally docked at Port Harbor on Temple Bay, almost a hundred and forty miles from the Temple precincts, and passenger steamers remained a rarity almost everywhere. Sea Wyvern’s size alone would have turned her arrival into an event, yet there was far more to it. This was the first Charisian passenger ship—for that matter, the first Charisian-flagged ship of any type—to dock at Temple Wharf in almost fifteen years … and she carried the first prelate of the breakaway Church of Charis ever to visit the Temple.

  It was impossible to parse the sound coming from the throats of that enormous crowd with any degree of precision, but at the moment it seemed to contain less jeers than cheers, and the Temple Guard and Army of God were both out in force for crowd control.

  “Nonsense! Of course it’s a good idea, Bryahn,” Maikel Staynair told his most trusted aide serenely as he waved to the crowd. “And even if it isn’t,” his expression sobered for a moment as he glanced sideways at Ushyr, “Rhobair Duchairn deserves it of us.”

  Ushyr looked as if he would have liked to argue the point, but he had even more experience than most with the iron beneath the archbishop’s gentle surface. The gentleness was genuine; the stubbornness was elemental.

  “Cheer up,” Staynair told him, turning back to the quayside, “Captain Karstayrs wouldn’t have let me come if he thought it was a bad idea.”

  The bishop gave his superior a moderately smoldering look, then glanced over his shoulder at the remarkably tall, fair-haired captain in the orange-and-white uniform of the Archbishop’s Guard. Aside from his height, Captain Karstayrs’ appearance had nothing in common with Merlin Athrawes, which struck Bishop Bryahn as a good thing. The one thing he was certain of was that bringing Seijin Merlin or Seijin Nimue—or any known seijin—to Zion would have been a very bad idea. He rather doubted Karstayrs was remotely as blasé about all of this as the archbishop’s attitude might have suggested, either. The captain had been scanning the dockside crowd through narrow eyes, but he seemed to sense Ushyr’s look and those brown eyes looked away—briefly—from the wharf to meet the bishop’s.

  “You might as well give up, Bryahn,” a deep, resonant—and resigned—voice said over the plug in his right ear. “He’s got the bit in his teeth, and he’s the only person I know who’s even stubborner than Sharleyan. All we can do is hang on for the ride.”

  Staynair snorted inelegantly but never looked away from the tide of humanity crowding against the cordon of Temple Guardsmen and Army of God infantry. For the moment, at least, the crowd seemed well mannered, despite the strands of protest threaded through its noise, and the truly strident were a distinct minority. There was a sense of excitement and curiosity in the air, but the overriding emotions seemed to be solemnity … and sorrow.

  The archbishop nodded to himself. The passing of a Grand Vicar was always traumatic for the entire Church, but Rhobair II had been truly beloved by the citizens of Zion. Much of the rest of the Temple Lands might have had mixed, or at least conflicted, feelings about Rhobair’s decision to seek rapprochement with the Church of Charis. The people of Zion hadn’t. They’d known the worth of the man they called the Good Shepherd, they’d been prepared to follow his example and embrace his passionate quest for reconciliation, and their grief at his death had been deep and profound.

  Which wasn’t to say there weren’t plenty of people in Zion who would have seen laying the heretic Archbishop of Charis dead on the paving of God’s city as their highest duty to God and the Archangels. And if they truly believed in the Archangels’ divinity and the words of the Holy Writ, they’d be right.

  His bearded lips quirked at the thought and he glanced at the younger bishop beside him with a familiar pang. He never had gotten Bryahn Ushyr the parish he needed. Not for long enough, at any rate. The bishop was only forty, barely thirty-six in the years of long-dead Terra, and he’d had no more than two years as the priest of his own congregation before his elevation to the episcopate. Staynair regretted that. In some ways, he supposed, it didn’t really matter, because Bryahn had been recruited by the inner circle even before the end of the Jihad. He knew what a perversion the Holy Writ truly was, and looked at one way, all he’d really missed was five or six more years of living a lie.

  Staynair still wished he’d had those years, though, because that wasn’t at all the way the archbishop looked at it. There was no question in his mind that Ushyr’s priestly calling was as genuine as his own—that both of them had truly heard the voice of God, despite the Church of God Awaiting. And, like Staynair himself, Ushyr had spent years perusing all of the religious history and texts stored in the computers in Nimue’s Cave. Both of them had attacked those files, those documents, with the ferocity of men finally free to seek God beyond the lie, and as both of them had learned how much of humanity’s great religions Eric Langhorne and Adorée Bédard had stolen to create their Writ, Ushyr had concluded that his archbishop was right. Safeholdians’ faith was no less strong, no less genuine, despite the lies, and God would know His own, wherever they might be or however they might know Him. And He could reclaim them as His own by ripping away the mask of the Church of God Awaiting in His own good time, using the hands of whomever He chose … even those of a woman who’d been dead for a thousand years. Not everyone who’d learned the truth had been able to retain their faith in any God. Indeed, not all of them had even wanted to. But Ushyr had, and so Staynair had no concerns about the state of his aide’s soul. No, his concern was that his protégé had been denied the opportunity—the sheer joy—of ministering to the souls in his charge on an individual basis.

  And the reason he had was that Staynair had never been able to spare him. First as his secretary, then as his aide, and now as the head of his vastly enlarged staff, Ushyr had simply been too invaluable for anything else.

/>   The archbishop smiled at the thought, then raised one hand in a gesture of benediction and blessing as the mooring hawsers went ashore and dropped over the waiting bollards.

  * * *

  “Now behave yourself, Your Grace,” the tallish man in Temple Guard uniform said quietly as the enormous steamship finished tying up. Vicar Zherohmy Awstyn looked at him, his expression less than amused, but Bishop Militant Khanstahnzo Phandys only gazed back with one eyebrow raised.

  “I fully intend to ‘behave myself,’ Khanstahnzo.” Awstyn’s tone was frosty. “I’m not exactly a teenager who needs to be reminded to clean his fingernails before he appears in public!”

  In fact, he was nine years younger than Phandys, which made him one of the youngest members of the vicarate Rhobair Duchairn had been forced to rebuild almost from scratch, and he’d recently been elevated to a post on the new Grand Vicar’s staff. Phandys, on the other hand, was the commander of the Temple Guard, answerable only to Vicar Allayn and the Grand Vicar, and he’d been Rhobair II’s most trusted and most loyal confidant for over ten years. His lingering grief over Rhobair’s passing was there in his eyes for anyone to see, but there was a spark of humor, as well.

  “I know that, Your Grace,” he said now. “And I suppose it’s not well done of me to tease you over it. On the other hand, reminding you is one of my jobs, since I’m the fellow in charge of all of the ceremonial hoopla as well as security. Besides,” he touched the vicar’s elbow lightly, “you looked like you could use the chance to give someone a nifty little set down, and being the someone who helps you get that out of your system is one of my jobs, too.”

  Despite himself, Awstyn snorted in amusement.

  “You were probably right about that,” he acknowledged. “I will behave myself—I promised His Grace I would—but I can’t pretend I’m not in two minds about this.”

  “Of course you are,” Phandys said. “You’re a man of faith, which is one of the reasons Grand Vicar Rhobair supported your elevation to the Vicarate. And you’re not afraid to voice your opinions, which is one of the reasons he treasured you so much after you got there. And it’s why Vicar Tymythy sent you to greet our guests, because he knew how well you’d represent him and Mother Church, whatever personal reservations you might have.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” Awstyn said, more than a little touched by the bishop militant’s insight. Then he drew a deep breath as the brightly varnished gangplank, with its spotless white hand ropes, was run out and up to the steamer’s entry port.

  “And now,” he said with a crooked smile, “I suppose it’s time for me to go start behaving myself.”

  * * *

  “I am Vicar Zherohmy Awstyn, and the Grand Vicar designate has charged me to welcome you to Zion in his own name, that of the Vicarate, and of Mother Church, Your Eminence.”

  The sandy-haired young man in the orange cassock—well, he seemed young to Maikel Staynair, anyway, although he and Ushyr were very much of an age—bowed deeply, but not too deeply, as the archbishop stepped from the end of the gangway onto the marble-faced quay. Despite the enormous crowd, the Temple Guard had actually created an island of semi-privacy, where normal speaking voices could be heard but not overheard by others, the archbishop noticed.

  “I thank you for the welcome, Your Grace,” he replied, returning the bow with one of his own that was no deeper … but no shallower, either. They both straightened, and the archbishop smiled. “Allow me to present Bishop Bryahn Ushyr, the head of my staff, and Captain Samyl Karstayrs, of the Archbishop’s Guard. I’m sure he and Bishop Militant Khanstahnzo have a great deal to discuss, and I apologize—” his smile grew broader, almost impish “—for making so many complications for them. And for you, of course.”

  His smile vanished and his eyes were suddenly dark.

  “And I deeply regret what’s brought me to Zion.” He shook his head sadly. “I will always treasure the opportunity I had to meet Grand Vicar Rhobair at the peace conference, however much all of us may regret the bloodshed which led us to that meeting. I can’t tell you how saddened I was to learn of his death when so many of the great tasks to which he’d set hand and heart were yet undone. But I was saddened for us, not for him. If there was ever a man in all this world whose soul deserved its reward more than Rhobair Duchairn’s, I’ve never met him. He truly was the Good Shepherd Zion called him.”

  Awstyn stood for a moment, looking into Staynair’s eyes, then inhaled deeply.

  “Your Eminence, I was recently reminded to behave myself today,” he said. “I’m sure that one as well informed as you’ve always proved yourself must be aware from your sources here in Zion that I’m one of the vicars who continue to have … reservations about the Church of Charis, however.”

  He paused, one eyebrow raised, and Staynair chuckled.

  “I believe you might take that as a given, Your Grace,” he replied. “On the other hand, I would add that those same sources have always stressed your integrity and compassion,” he added more seriously. “I’m sure the tension between our churches must be difficult for you.”

  “It is,” Awstyn acknowledged, “but that was never because I doubted the sincerity or the depth of your own faith and that of your flock, Your Eminence. And now that I’ve met you, I realize it’s even deeper than I’d thought it was. And whatever our other differences may be, I agree with every word you just said about Grand Vicar Rhobair. I was honored—and deeply blessed—to have known him, and the world is a poorer place today.”

  “In that case, Your Grace,” Staynair laid a hand lightly on Awstyn’s forearm, “why don’t you and I join the rest of the Vicarate to see what we can do about making this visit and this celebration something that would have pleased him?”

  “I think that would be a very good idea, Your Eminence.” Awstyn smiled at him. “And, with that in mind, allow me to escort you to The Temple. The Grand Vicar designate charged me to tell you he’s eager to meet you face-to-face at last.”

  * * *

  Captain Karstayrs tried not to feel undressed as he followed Maikel Staynair towards the box which had been set aside for the Temple’s Charisian visitors. It was difficult, for a lot of reasons.

  The fact that he was unarmed was one of them. The Archbishop’s Guard had never carried the katana that remained part of Merlin Athrawes’ various seijin personas, so Karstayrs had never carried one either, during his so-far brief existence. He didn’t really miss the blade, but he was acutely conscious of the emptiness where his pistol holster should have been. It wasn’t that he distrusted Khanstahnzo Phandys’ competence or the men he’d handpicked for this assignment. It was just that it was his job, not Phandys’, to see to it that Maikel Staynair returned to Charis intact.

  But the absence of his revolver was actually a minor component of his uneasiness. For one thing, there were at least a half-dozen Temple Guard revolvers in his vicinity. If he should happen to require a weapon, he was confident he could … acquire one of them, whatever its current owner thought about the transaction. Then there was the fact that Staynair and Ushyr both wore what Cayleb persisted in referring to as their “antiballistic undies.” As Sharleyan had discovered in Corisande, they couldn’t prevent bruising or even broken bones, but they were impenetrable by anything less powerful than a new-model rifle round at close range, and they’d stop any blade short of his own battle steel katana with ludicrous ease.

  No, the real reason he felt undressed was because he’d been forced to shut down every one of his PICA’s active sensors and his com, as well.

  Maikel Staynair and his party had been lodged outside the Temple precincts in a luxurious mansion three blocks away from the Plaza of Martyrs. No doubt the decision to house them there had been a ticklish one. Technically, he was a mere archbishop—and of a schismatic church, at that—which meant he should have been exiled to the outer edges of the mansions and apartment buildings available to Mother Church, given all the vicars and senior archbishops crowded into the
city. On the other hand, he was also the head of that schismatic church, with a flock far larger than any single prelate of the Church of God Awaiting except the Grand Vicar himself, which meant he should have been given a place of honor within the Annex itself.

  The Church had split the difference with what Karstayrs personally felt was excellent judgment. Staynair’s party had the entire mansion to itself, it was closer to the Temple than any of the housing assigned to any other archbishop, and he’d been not simply invited but encouraged to bring his own Guardsmen with him to assure his security. The Temple Guard had been scrupulous about liasing with Karstayrs, as well. Indeed, Bishop Militant Khanstahnzo had discussed all of his needs with him personally, although Karstayrs wondered how he would have reacted if he’d known who he was really discussing them with! But best of all, from Karstayrs’ viewpoint, the mansion was just outside the hard limit he and Nimue had drawn around the Temple. He could use his PICA’s systems, including his active sensors and internal com, from the mansion’s grounds if he needed them … and as long as he did so with excruciating caution.

  He couldn’t now, and that bothered him. It bothered him a lot, and not simply because he felt half blind without them.

  He knew the true basis for Bryahn Ushyr’s doubts about this visit’s wisdom had less to do with concerns over Maikel Staynair’s physical safety than it did with the thought of introducing a PICA into the Temple itself. Oh, Staynair’s safety was a definite factor in Ushyr’s thinking, but the possibility of … awakening something best left undisturbed was an even greater one. It was also one Karstayrs shared, which was why Merlin Athrawes had flatly refused to allow Nimue Gahrvai or one of her personas to make the trip with them. If something unfortunate were to happen, the inner circle would need at least one surviving PICA to deal with the consequences.