It didn’t matter. Nothing they did could matter. All that mattered was that the Archangels would be waiting to reward him as his services deserved and—
A quiet sound interrupted his thoughts. The chamber door opened, and his stomach tightened as he looked up. He hated that reaction, but even God’s own champion could be excused for feeling an edge of physical fear when he found himself face-to-face with Shan-wei’s foul servants.
The tall, broad-shouldered Guardsman stepped through the door, and Clyntahn’s jaw clenched as a woman, a head shorter than he but clad in the same blackened chain mail and breastplate, followed him. Her red hair showed coppery highlights in the lamplight, and her eyes were the same dark sapphire as her companion’s.
Clyntahn glared at them, refusing to give them the satisfaction of speaking. They didn’t glare at him, however; they only looked at him with cold, disdainful contempt, and he discovered that contempt cut far deeper than any rage.
“Well?” he snapped finally. “Come to gloat, I suppose!”
“‘Gloat’ isn’t the word I’d choose, Your Grace,” Athrawes told him in a cold, thoughtful tone. “I prefer to think of it as … enlightening you.”
“Enlightening!” Clyntahn spat on the chamber floor. “There’s a special place laid up for you in hell, Athrawes! A pit of fire will consume your flesh for all eternity, and I’ll be standing on its brink pissing on you!”
“He still doesn’t get it, does he?” the false seijin said, glancing at his companion.
“No, he doesn’t.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t even realize that we requested the duty tonight so we’d have this opportunity to … explain to him.”
“You have nothing to explain to me, woman!” Clyntahn snarled.
“Oh, now, there you’re wrong,” she said, and the last Grand Inquisitor of Mother Church felt his eyes narrow as her voice began to change somehow. “We have quite a lot to explain to you, Your Grace. And we’ve waited a very long time for the opportunity.”
Clyntahn paled, and he felt himself shrinking back as her voice shifted, deepened, until it was no longer a woman’s voice at all. It had become a deep bass, identical to Athrawes’, and Athrawes smiled coldly as his eyes darted back and forth between them.
“The thing you need to understand, Your Grace, is that you’re won’t be sitting at Schueler’s right hand, passing judgment on anyone. If there truly is a hell, you’ll see it better than most, and I suppose it’s possible you will get to spend time with Schueler, Langhorne, and Chihiro … because that’s where every one of them will be.”
“Blasphemy!” Clyntahn snapped. He grasped his pectoral scepter and shook himself. “Blasphemy! And nothing but what I should expect from heretics!”
“You have no idea what you’re really facing at this moment, Your Grace,” Athrawes said softly. He reached one hand to the solid wooden table at the center of the chamber. He didn’t even look at it, only reached down and grasped it by one corner. And then, one-handed, he lifted its legs six inches off the floor … and held it there. His arm didn’t even quiver, and Clyntahn swallowed hard.
“You talk about ‘demons’ and ‘archangels,’” Athrawes told him. “But Langhorne and Schueler weren’t archangels. They were men—mortal men who lied to an entire world. Mass murderers. Pei Shan-wei was no archangel, either—only a woman who spent her entire life helping others. Only a woman who made it possible for humans to live and prosper on this world. Only a woman who was murdered by Langhorne and Chihiro and Schueler because she was so much better than they were.”
Clyntahn’s eyes were huge, darting back and forth between his face and that motionless table, suspended in midair. But then that same voice came from the woman, and his eyes whipped to her face.
“Only a woman,” she said, “who was my friend.”
“Demons!” Clyntahn whispered hoarsely, raising his scepter between them. “Demons! Creatures of hell!”
“Hell, Your Grace?” She laughed, and the silvery sound was cold and cruel. “You don’t know the meaning of the word … yet. But I think tomorrow, after the trap springs, you’ll find out.”
“Stay back!” he snapped.
“We have no intention of harming you in any way, Your Grace,” she told him. “None. As Merlin said, we’ve come to enlighten you. You’ve talked a lot about your special relationship with Schueler and the archangels, so we thought you might like to meet them—before your hanging, I mean.”
“What do you mean?” the question was betrayed out of him, and he closed his mouth with a snap as soon as he realized what she’d said.
“She means your Holy Writ is a lie,” Athrawes said. “She means every word about the Creation of Safehold is alive. That every page of the Commentaries was written by someone who’d been lied to by Langhorne, and Bédard, and Chihiro. She means she and I are older than your Writ. She means we died before the first human being ever set foot on this world. And she means that tomorrow morning when they hang you, there won’t be any archangels waiting for you.”
“Lies!” he shouted desperately. “Lies!”
“Oh, there’ve been lots of lies on this planet,” the woman told him, “but not from us.”
Clyntahn leapt off the bed, pressing his back against the wall, trying to sink into the solid stone as both false seijins’ eyes began to glow a hellish blue.
“Stay away from me!” he screamed.
“Of course, Your Grace,” Athrawes said.
He set the table down as if it were a feather and the woman withdrew a shiny object from her belt pouch. She set it on a corner of the table and smiled at Clyntahn while those demonic eyes glowed past her lashes.
“Allow us to introduce you to your ‘archangels,’ Your Grace,” she said. “This is what we call ‘file footage.’ We put together an hour or so of it. I think you’ll find it interesting. Especially the bit where Langhorne is explaining himself to Pei Shan-wei.”
She pressed the shiny object, and breath caught in Clyntahn’s throat as the image of a breezy room appeared before him, no more than two feet tall, but perfectly detailed. He’d seen images like it in the Temple, in the Inquisition’s secret records, and he heard someone whimpering with his voice as he recognized many of the faces in that room. He recognized the Archangel Langhorne, the Archangel Bédard, the Archangel Chihiro … the fallen Archangel Kau-yung … and Shan-wei the Accursed herself.
“—and we implore you, once again,” the slender, silver-haired mother of hell said, and he shuddered as that dreadful voice fell upon his ears for the first time, “to consider how vital it is that as the human culture on this planet grows and matures, it remembers the Gbaba. That it understands why we came here, why we renounced advanced technology.”
“Stop it,” Clyntahn whispered. “Stop it!”
“We’ve heard all these arguments before, Dr. Pei,” the Archangel Langhorne said, and it was the Archangel’s voice. He knew it was, because unlike Shan-wei’s, he’d heard it before. “We understand the point you’re raising. But I’m afraid that nothing you’ve said is likely to change our established policy.”