“Don’t expect them to save you,” Clyntahn said flatly, jerking the Chancellor’s eyes back to him, and contempt edged his voice. “Unlike you, they’re dutiful sons of Mother Church. They understand their responsibilities … just as they understand the consequences of failing to meet those responsibilities.”
Duchairn’s jaw clenched so tightly he expected his teeth to shatter, but he managed to hold his tongue. It wasn’t easy when he saw the horror in Trynair’s eyes, but he couldn’t miss the message in Clyntahn’s. The Grand Inquisitor was perfectly prepared to make a clean sweep, to have all of them arrested to free his own hand for the Jihad. If he did, the consequences would be disastrous for Mother Church, but none of them would be there to see it when he took the entire Church down in ruin with him.
He’s mad, Duchairn thought. He’s finally gone completely mad. He knows—intellectually, he knows as well as I do—the Jihad’s lost. As Allayn and Zahmsyn do. But he’ll never admit it. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. He’s ready to ride the Jihad all the way to Mother Church’s total destruction if God isn’t willing to validate him by producing the miracle it would take to prevent that. And he’ll kill anyone who disagrees with him.
The awareness, Clyntahn’s challenge, lay between them, stark and ugly, and Rhobair Duchairn made himself sit back in his chair. He forced himself to meet Clyntahn’s cold serpent’s eyes without flinching … but he said nothing.
Clyntahn’s nostrils flared and his lip curled. Then he looked back at the agent inquisitor.
“Take him,” he said, and the agent inquisitor laid a hand on Trynair’s arm.
Trynair stared down at it for a single heartbeat. But then his eyes closed and his shoulders slumped. He stood a moment longer, until the agent inquisitor tugged. When his eyes opened again, they were empty—empty of fear, of hope, of anything at all—and he followed the agent inquisitor from the chamber, walking like a man lost in nightmare.
Clyntahn watched him go, then rose from his own chair and stood facing Duchairn and Maigwair across the table.
“Nothing can excuse the treason of a vicar—especially of Mother Church’s own Chancellor—when she’s fighting for her very life against the forces of hell unleashed upon the world.” Every word was carved out of ice, and his eyes were colder still. “Understand me well, both of you. Anyone who betrays the Jihad, regardless of position or power, betrays God, and that will never be tolerated, never pass unpunished. Never. The Inquisition’s rod will find him out, and it will break him.”
He held them with those frozen eyes, daring them to speak, then inhaled deeply.
“Perhaps it’s as well this has happened,” he said then. “It’s time all of God’s children were made aware that anyone who fails God must pay the price. And so they will. The Holy Inquisition will teach them that when Zahmsyn faces the Punishment tomorrow.”
He gave them one final, icy look, then stalked from the chamber in silence.
AUGUST
YEAR OF GOD 898
.I.
The Halberd Rest Tavern,
City of Zion,
The Temple Lands.
“I’ll be honest,” Captain Ahksynov Laihu said somberly as the waitress set the fresh tankard on the table and disappeared with the latest empty one, “I never thought I’d see anything like today. Never.”
He buried his nose in the tankard, swallowing a deep draft of the honeyed mead he favored, then set it down with a thump. The background noise was more muted than one ever heard in The Halberd Rest. The raucous shouts of greeting, the cheerful ribaldry directed at the long-suffering waitresses—who normaly gave back as good as they got—and the clink and rattle of cutlery were all subdued, as if a cloud of silence hung suspended in the tobacco smoke among the rafters.
“Don’t know why not, Sir,” Sergeant Phylyp Preskyt said from the other side of the square table. Laihu looked at him, and Preskyt shrugged. “Not exactly the first vicar to face the Punishment,” he pointed out.
Trust Preskyt to put it into perspective, Ahrloh Mahkbyth thought, nursing his own glass of whiskey.
He sat between the captain and the sergeant at the small table tucked into an alcove in the back of the tavern’s dining room. It was a very inconveniently placed alcove, right beside the swinging doors from the kitchen. The traffic was heavy as waiters and waitresses shuttled back and forth past it with trays of food, and the noise as orders were shouted to the cooks through the huge, square window beside the doors made it difficult for people sitting in it to hear one another without raising their voices. On the other hand, it was almost impossible to see into it from most of the dining room floor, and if the people around the table found it difficult to hear one another, it was even more difficult for anyone else to hear them.
I really shouldn’t be doing this, Mahkbyth told himself now, looking back and forth between the two Temple Guardsmen. What I should be doing is sitting at home, keeping my head down and making damned sure I don’t draw any attention to myself!
Unfortunately, that had turned out to be rather more difficult than usual.
He’d gone to witness Zahmsyn Trynair’s Punishment for a confused tangle of reasons he couldn’t completely sort out. Part of it, and he was honest enough to admit it to himself, was that he’d wanted to see Trynair’s death. If any man had ever deserved to suffer the Punishment, it had to be one of the four who’d launched the madness of the Jihad and condemned so many millions of others to the same fate. He didn’t really want to see and hear anyone screaming as the white-hot irons were applied, or as the roaring pyre consumed his tortured body, but if it had to happen to anyone, he couldn’t think of a better candidate. Well, no, that wasn’t quite true. He could definitely think of a better candidate, but the odds against anyone condemning Zhaspahr Clyntahn to that fate were … slim.
He’d also gone because he’d been quietly underlining his piety ever since Zhorzhet Styvynsyn and Marzho Alysyn died in the Inquisition’s custody. It turned his stomach, but he knew the value of protective coloration. And he’d gone to touch base with two or three old comrades from his own days in the Guard. Maintaining those contacts was part of his public persona, and their willingness to share barracks scuttlebutt with an old retired sergeant often provided Helm Cleaver with useful tidbits of information. Besides, many of them had been his friends for decades—like Laihu and Preskyt—and he missed them.
He hadn’t expected them to invite him to The Halberd Rest for sausages and beer, though. Food was the last thing he would’ve thought of after the hideous spectacle they’d just witnessed. But he’d forgotten the pragmatism of serving guardsmen, just as he’d forgotten the way in which familiar food and drink could comfort a man when he needed it worst.
Laihu was quite a few years younger than Mahkbyth, with the dark hair and eyes of his Harchongese ancestry. He was also an intelligent, insightful fellow who’d learned the realities behind the Temple’s façade only too well over the course of a thirty-year career, and once upon a time, long, long ago, Mahkbyth had been the senior sergeant in Lieutenant Laihu’s platoon for almost five years. He’d come to know the other man well during those years, and it amazed him sometimes that Laihu could have served that long a career, well over half of it right here in Zion, without succumbing to the cynicism that was so much a part of Temple duty. It amazed him even more that Laihu was still on active duty in Zion, given the doubts he knew the captain had cherished for many years about the fashion in which the vicarate’s morality reflected—or didn’t—the Archangels’ true intentions.