Through Fiery Trials Read online

  Star Rising’s eyebrows began to rise, but then they lowered as he, too, heard the beat of galloping hooves. A moment later, a single rider thundered around the bend behind them, head down and riding hard.

  The baron and his retainers were well to one side of the broad roadway, and the rider was on the broad swath of turf that paralleled the high road, reserved for imperial post-riders. Star Rising felt himself relax—a little—as he recognized the horseman’s distinctive uniform, but then the rider looked up, saw him, and brought his mount to a slithering, sweating stop.

  “My Lord Star Rising!” he gasped. “Thank Langhorne I’ve found you!”

  Star Rising stiffened and glanced quickly at Gwanzhi. The armsman looked back with his usual lack of expression, but the sudden darkness in his eyes belied his calm. He shrugged his chain mail-armored shoulders ever so slightly, and the baron turned back to the post-rider.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I have dispatches for you,” the man said, and for the first time Star Rising truly realized how exhausted he was. He couldn’t have been much older than Star Rising’s own older son, Laiouzhyn, but the strain and fatigue in his face made him look far closer to Gwanzhi’s forty-plus years as he unbuckled his dispatch case.

  He extracted three envelopes and handed them across, and Star Rising glanced at them. The biggest—and least smudged—was addressed to him from Captain of Horse Hauzhwo Zhanma, the commander of the Zhynkau city guard. A second was simply addressed to him, with no sender noted, but bore the wax seal of an imperial dispatch. The third bore only his hastily scrawled name above an all but illegible signature that looked elusively familiar. It took him several seconds to realize it was Baron Blue River’s.

  He looked down at all three of them for a long moment, and then—moved by an impulse he couldn’t have explained even to himself—handed the other two to Gwanzhi while he opened the one from Blue River with his remaining hand.

  It was a very short note.

  “I owe you my family’s lives.”

  That was all it said, but an icy chill went through Star Rising as those words sank home. Then he looked up at the exhausted post-rider.

  “I’m sure there’s a lot of information in your dispatches, Captain of Bows, and I’ll read them all,” he said. “But I’m also sure Captain of Horse Zhanma told you why he wanted you to ride your horse half to death catching up with me. So now tell me why he did.”

  “My Lord, the dispatches—”

  “I said tell me,” Star Rising said flatly, and the younger man swallowed hard.

  “My Lord, I’m not sure about the imperial dispatch. From what Captain of Horse Zhanma said, though, I expect it’s an order to proceed home and begin arming and organizing Ti-Shan’s garrison.”

  Something in his tone tightened Star Rising’s stomach.

  “Why?” he asked, and the young officer swallowed again.

  “My Lord,” he said, like a man who’d just heard his arm had to be amputated, “the serfs … the serfs have stormed Shang-mi. Most of the city was in flames when the galley that carried word to Zhynkau left.”

  The baron heard the unflappable Gwanzhi inhale suddenly, almost explosively. He was surprised that he himself felt so little surprise. Perhaps it was simply the anesthesia of shock.

  “How?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure, My Lord. The dispatch may tell you more. All the crew of the galley could tell us was that somehow a group of rifle-armed serfs stormed West Gate. They got inside—no one knows exactly how—and the street fighting began. The galley captain says he thinks the guard might have contained the attack if the dockside labor gangs hadn’t rioted. From there, it spread. It sounds like … it sounds like a lot of the other labor gangs joined in, and then the street rabble started burning and looting.”

  Star Rising’s expression tightened. The labor gangs were serfs—in some cases, outright slaves—whose owners rented them to businesses and individuals in Shang-mi who needed cheap labor. In most cases, they were “troublemakers” whose owners were relieved to pack them off, get them away from the estates where they might contribute to unrest. That meant they didn’t really want them back, so they weren’t going to complain very loudly about anything their renters might do with them.

  And it also means far too many of the most bitter, hopeless “troublemakers” in the entire Empire are concentrated in one place, he thought grimly. No wonder they rioted as soon as they had the chance!

  As for the captain of bows’ “street rabble,” that probably described better than half of Shang-mi’s total population. The wretched, poverty-stricken inhabitants of the capital’s tenement stews, hidden away in all their squalor behind the magnificent façades of aristocratic palaces and mansions that fronted the city’s broad avenues. The people who never knew if they’d survive the next winter, how they’d clothe their children. Who worked their fingers to the bone for whatever wretched pittance they could earn because it was that or starve.

  And who all too often starved, anyway.

  “The captain couldn’t tell us who actually started the fires, My Lord,” the post-rider continued. “He thinks they started in the warehouses around the southern docks, but he’s not sure. What he is sure of—” he braced himself visibly “—is that they spread rapidly. And that the Palace was heavily afire before his galley left the harbor.”

  “Shan-wei,” Gwanzhi muttered at Star Rising’s elbow. The baron doubted he even realized he’d spoken.

  “And His Majesty?” he heard someone else ask with his own voice.

  “We … don’t know,” the captain of bows admitted wretchedly, but something in his tone made Star Rising look at him very sharply. The younger man looked away.

  “Tell me,” the baron commanded.

  “My Lord,” the captain of bows looked back at him, and his eyes glistened with what might have been unshed tears, “we don’t know. But … but the galley captain says he heard that … that His Majesty’s carriage and its escort never reached the galleon waiting for him.”

  Star Rising felt as if someone had just punched him in the belly.

  “What about Earl Winter Glory? Where was he while all this was happening?!”

  “My Lord, we don’t know. He never reached Shang-mi.”

  “What?!” Star Rising stared at him. “He had fifteen thousand men! What do you mean ‘he never reached Shang-mi’?!”

  “None of his men reached the city, My Lord. We … don’t know why.”

  It was Star Rising’s turn to suck in a shocked, disbelieving draft of air. He sat staring at the white-faced young rider for several seconds, then shook himself.

  “I see why Captain of Horse Zhanma sent you after me,” he said. “What are your instructions now that you’ve found me?”

  “My Lord, I’m at your service for the immediate future. I’m to accompany you the rest of the way to Ti-Shan, wait until you’ve read all of your dispatches and consulted with the mayor and the garrison commander, and then take your written response back to Zhynkau. If … if there’s still no word of His Majesty, Captain of Horse Zhanma and Mayor Zhengtu will send their own reports to … to Yu-kwau.”

  Star Rising nodded in acknowledgment of what the captain of bows hadn’t said. Emperor Waisu might still have been in the capital, but Crown Prince Zhyou-Zhwo and the rest of the imperial family had taken that “vacation trip” south after all. And if the worst had happened, he was no longer Crown Prince Zhyou-Zhwo.

  “I understand, Captain of Bows,” he said. “In that case, I think you’d better join us. We’ll get you a fresh mount at the next posting station. For that matter,” he looked at Gwanzhi, “we may requisition fresh mounts for all of us.”

  .V.

  The Temple, City of Zion, The Temple Lands.

  “How much of this is confirmed?” Grand Vicar Rhobair II asked, looking around the table in the quiet comfort of a council chamber that was rather less luxurious than it once had been.

  “Almost all of it,
I’m afraid,” Vicar Allayn Maigwair replied heavily. The Captain General of Mother Church was six years younger than the Grand Vicar. He looked older, however. The last thirteen years had been less than kind to him.

  “We know what happened to Winter Glory, at any rate,” Maigwair continued with the grim expression of a man who’d seen—and been responsible for—far more carnage than he’d ever wanted to. “It was … ugly, Holiness.”

  In private, it remained “Rhobair” and “Allayn.” In official settings or in front of others, Maigwair was always careful to observe every point of formal etiquette. As he’d said to the man who’d been Rhobair Duchairn on the day of his formal elevation to Grand Vicar, “The last thing we need is anyone wondering whether or not you’re the one in charge, and you damned well are … praise God and all the Archangels!”

  There were times—many of them—when Rhobair II wished with all his heart that he wasn’t. It looked like this was going to be another of them.

  “Tell me,” he said, and Maigwair’s nostrils flared.

  “They caught his entire column in the middle of the Mai-sun Forest, Holiness. If I had to guess, he didn’t have scouts out on his flanks. The terrain’s incredibly constricted, and it would have slowed him down when he was under orders to reach Shang-mi as quickly as possible. Besides, he was a Spear, not a regular. I doubt it would even have occurred to him to worry about a bunch of ‘rabble’ attacking him, no matter what the terrain was like.

  “Anyway, they must have surprised him completely. They set the woods on fire in front of him and the wind was in his face. Then they set the woods on fire behind him, as well.” Rhobair’s face tightened, and Maigwair continued in the same flat tone. “There was nowhere they could go. Fifteen thousand men, not counting their supply echelon, caught strung out on the high road in the middle of a roaring forest fire. None of them got out.”

  “None, Allayn?” Vicar Zherohmy Awstyn asked. Awstyn was young—ten years younger than Maigwair. Then again, a lot of Rhobair’s vicars were young.

  “If they did, the rebels finished them off,” Maigwair said grimly. “To be honest, though, I doubt any of them did.” He shook his head. “No, they were all burned to death, Zherohmy. Unless they were fortunate enough to die of smoke inhalation first. Or shot themselves or cut their own throats.”

  His voice was harsh, his eyes haunted. Every man sitting around that table had seen far too many people burned to death by Zhaspahr Clyntahn and his inquisitors. When Rhobair looked around their faces, his own guilt for letting that go on so long looked back at him from behind their eyes, as well.

  “Do we know how they managed that?” Vicar Tymythy Symkyn, the man who’d become Rhobair’s Chancellor, asked. Maigwair looked at him, and the Chancellor shrugged. “The timing, I mean. How did serfs separated by so much distance—what? Five miles? Ten miles? How did they … coordinate, I guess, so well.” He shook his head. “That sounds a lot more sophisticated, for want of a better word, than anything we’ve seen out of Harchong since the Jihad.”

  He spoke from a certain personal experience, and in more ways than one, Maigwair thought. He’d served as Rhobair’s representative to Shang-mi for two years before being recalled to assume the chancellorship after old Vicar Raiyn’s death. And like the Grand Vicar himself, Tymythy Symkyn was a Chihirite. But whereas Rhobair Duchairn was a Brother of the Quill, Symkyn was a Brother of the Sword. Like Maigwair, he’d been a soldier, not a clerk. In fact, he’d served under Archbishop Militant Gustyv Walkyr during some of the most desperate fighting of the Jihad’s final campaign. That meant he’d had the chance not simply to see the corruption and arrogance of the present court, but also the results of Earl Rainbow Waters’ decision to turn the serfs under his command into effective soldiers. And that meant—

  “I see where you’re going, Tymythy,” the Captain General said. “And you’re right, ‘sophisticated’ is exactly the right word, at least where the timing’s concerned. I think burning fifteen thousand men to death is about as unsophisticated as a tactic comes, but getting both sets of fires lit in the right window of time took some forethought. They certainly weren’t in direct communication with one another across that many miles of woods. I’ve never been there myself, but some of the officers I’ve talked to tell me the Mai-sun is even worse than the Kyplyngyr or the Tarikah, and with a lot more oil trees. That’s what made the damned fire so effective—and so hot. It was like soaking the entire forest in lamp oil and then dropping one of the Charisians’ candles into it. But if you’re suggesting Rainbow Waters was involved in this, I’m positive he wasn’t. This is the last thing he’d be trying to do.”

  “Which doesn’t mean some of his ex-officers and men weren’t involved,” Awstyn pointed out. Maigwair looked at him, and he shrugged. “I’ve been in close contact with the Earl, Allayn, and I’m sure you’re right about him. But as much as all of his veterans respect him, no one could possibly expect them not to be looking for ways to go home. Or at least to rescue their families, for Langhorne’s sake!”

  Rhobair nodded. Awstyn was one of Symkyn’s senior deputies, included in this conference because he was the vicar responsible for Mother Church’s contacts with the two million—two million—Harchongians who’d been summarily denied the right to return to their own homes, their own families. Men who’d fought their hearts out for Mother Church and then been told they could never come home again lest they contaminate their fellow peasants and serfs with all those dangerous, radical notions they’d absorbed when they were treated as human beings in a foreign land.

  Of all the many atrocities which had resulted from the Jihad, all the crimes he had yet to expiate, that one weighed upon him even more heavily than most, because he and Allayn Maigwair were directly responsible for the training which had turned the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels into the most effective military force Mother Church had. They were the ones who’d convinced Zhaspahr Clyntahn to support the very measures which had made the Mighty Host too dangerous for Waisu VI’s ministers to ever let it come home. And, despite all his own power as the Grand Vicar of Mother Church, God and Langhorne’s deputy on Safehold, he’d been unable to shift that bedrock intransigence a single inch.

  It’s not like you didn’t see this coming, Rhobair, he told himself drearily. The idiots—the idiots!—can’t even consider any response but to double down. To actually ramp up their brutality any time the serfs even look like they’re getting “uppity,” and the Church is supporting them! My God, those poor people think I support what’s happening to them!

  His eyes burned, and he thought again about the decision he’d made when Waisu issued his decree. Maigwair had argued against it, and maybe he should have listened. If Mother Church had supported Rainbow Waters, launched him and that superbly trained Mighty Host into Harchong as an avenging, liberating army, nothing in the Empire could have stood up to him. It was simply impossible to conceive of the Emperor’s Spears lasting a single summer against Rainbow Waters’ veterans, especially with the downsized but still potent Army of God in support.

  But if he’d done that it would have tainted his efforts to bind up all of the Jihad’s other wounds. He would have ended the Jihad against the Church of Charis and Mother Church’s own Reformists only to inaugurate a fresh civil war against the recalcitrant Harchongese church. He’d told himself he couldn’t do that, not when so many millions had already died. And, he knew, he’d told himself that because he’d realized exactly how a war like that, even under a commander like Rainbow Waters, must engender a million fresh atrocities as the serfs who’d been abused, tormented, and brutally oppressed for so many generations took vengeance upon the ones who’d done that to them. There was no point pretending human nature could have allowed any other outcome.

  And is it going to be any better this way, Rhobair? he asked himself bitterly. Fifteen thousand human beings burned to death in a single afternoon. And if the reports coming out of Shang-mi are anything like accurate, two-thirds of the ca
pital’s gone up in flames all its own! And in the middle of all that, do you really think the rioters and the serf “army” that took the city didn’t slake its appetite for blood and rape just as horribly as anything you could possibly imagine?

  “You were right, Allayn,” he said. “Four years ago, you were right.”

  “Maybe I was,” Maigwair said, but he also shook his head. “On the other hand, so were you, Holiness. I wouldn’t want to say anything about the Grand Vicar’s infallibility when he speaks from Langhorne’s Throne,” the Captain General actually managed a smile, “but if we’d armed and supported Rainbow Waters and sent him home—and that’s assuming he’d have been willing to invade his own homeland, which he probably wouldn’t have been—this is exactly what would’ve happened anyway. Oh, not where his own troops or ours were concerned,” he said quickly, waving one hand as Rhobair opened his mouth. “He’d never have allowed it, and neither would our men! But out in front of him, as he advanced, do you really think the serfs who heard he was coming wouldn’t have done exactly what these people are doing? Langhorne, Holiness! Who wouldn’t do what they’re doing after the way they’ve been treated?”

  “Vicar Allayn has a point, Holiness,” Symkyn said, and there was a note of personal experience in his voice. The experience of Bishop Militant Tymythy, not Vicar Tymythy.

  “And I’m pretty sure Zherohmy’s right about where these people’s ‘sophistication’ comes from,” he continued. “There were over two million men in the Mighty Host. There’s no way under God’s sun Rainbow Waters could keep tabs on all of them, even if he’d tried. And if only a couple of thousand—even only a couple of hundred—of them got past the Spears, found men and women desperate enough to listen to them, that could explain everything we’ve heard so far.”