Seconds trickled away, and—finally—the sergeant in Charisian uniform touched him on the shoulder. The Charisian pushed gently, giving the prisoner the option of dignity, but Clyntahn whirled. He stared up at the stands again, his face white, his hands trembling.
“Please!” he cried hoarsely. “Oh, please! It was—I thought—I can’t—!”
He went to his knees, holding out his hands imploringly.
“I thought I was right! I thought … I thought the Writ was true!”
Stohnar stiffened. The man was mad. Here at the very end, finally face-to-face with death, with retribution for his millions of victims, he was mad.
“Please!” he half-sobbed. “Don’t! It’s not my fault! They lied!”
The sergeant who’d tried to leave him the gift of dignity drew back. Then he glanced at his companions, and four of them reached down, pulled the prisoner to his feet, and bore him towards the gallows. He fought madly, twisting and kicking, but it was useless. They dragged him across the platform, held him while the executioner put the noose about his neck. He tried to cry out again, but one of the guards clamped a gloved hand across his mouth while a young brigadier in the uniform of the Glacierheart militia unfolded a sheet of paper.
“‘Zhaspahr Clyntahn,’” he read, “‘you have been tried and adjudged guilty of murder, of torture, and of crimes too barbaric and too numerous to enumerate. You are cast out by the Church, stripped of your offices, deprived of your place among God’s children by your own actions. And so you are condemned to be hanged by the neck until dead, and for your body to be burned into ashes and the ashes scattered upon the wind so that they do not pollute sacred ground. This sentence to be carried out on this day at this hour.’”
He paused and folded the paper, then nodded to the sergeant whose hand was clamped across Clyntahn’s mouth.
“Do you have anything you wish to say?” Byrk Raimahn asked as that hand was removed, remembering the Starving Winter in Glacierheart, remembering all the Glacierhearters who would never come home.
“I … I—” The voice wavered around the edges. It cracked and died, and the mouth worked wordlessly.
* * *
“I wish the Commodore and Shan-wei were here to see this,” Nimue Chwaeriau’s voice said quietly in Merlin Athrawes’ ear, and he knew every other member of the inner circle heard her in that same moment, even if none of the others could reply.
“And Gwylym,” he replied over his own built-in com, sapphire eyes hard as he watched the trembling Grand Inquisitor with the noose about his neck. “Everyone else the bastard had murdered.”
“I know. But we’ve come a long way from where you started, Merlin. A long way.”
“Maybe. But we’ve got an even longer way to go, and there’s that ‘Archangels’ return’ to worry about. The way Duchairn’s salvaging the Church, finding some way to deal with that should keep us … occupied.”
“Of course it will,” Nahrmahn Baytz’ voice said. “But since you’re so fond of Churchill quotes, what about this one? ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’”
* * *
Byrk Raimahn waited another ten, slow seconds. Then he stepped back.
“Very well,” he said coldly, and nodded to the executioner.
The trap opened, the rope snapped tight, and the body jerked once as the neck broke cleanly. There was a sound from the watching crowd. Not of jubilation, not of celebration. Only a vast, wordless sigh.
* * *
“I don’t know how it looks from your perspective, Merlin,” Nahrmahn said quietly, “but from mine? It’s been one hell of a beginning, my friend.”
Merlin gazed at the body, watching it sway slowly, and put his hands on Nynian’s shoulders. She covered the hand on her right shoulder with her own and turned her head to look up at him. He looked away from the body, meeting her eyes, and smiled slowly.
“It has that, Nahrmahn, it has that. And if we’ve got a long way to go,” he squeezed Nynian’s shoulders gently, “at least we’ve got good company for the trip.”
Author’s Note
Some of you may have noticed that there is no character list in this book. Some of you may have felt a certain relief that there’s no character list in this book.
A combination of factors came together to cause its omission this time around. Part of it was the simple length of the manuscript and the thought of what adding another forty thousand or so words to it would have done in terms of my readers’ skeletal muscular injuries. Part of it was that I was delayed getting the book in and that, in fact, Tor has done a remarkable job to get it through production in time for delivery.
And part of it was that I intend—eventually—to post a comprehensive list of all the characters in all the Safehold novels on my website at davidweber.net. I will also be posting the master electronic map of Safehold. It requires some work before it’s ready for prime time, however, and the same is true of the character list. So if you come looking for either of them in the immediate future, you probably won’t find them. Give me another month or so, and you should be able to.
Thanks for coming along for the ride this far. I promise Merlin still has lots more story to tell.
Glossary
Abbey of Saint Evehlain—the sister abbey of the Monastery of Saint Zherneau.
Abbey of the Snows—an abbey of the Sisters of Chihiro of the Quill located in the Mountains of Light above Langhorne’s Tears. Although it is a working abbey of Chihiro, all of the nuns of the abbey are also Sisters of Saint Kohdy and the abbey serves as protection and cover for Saint Kohdy’s tomb. The Abbey of the Snows is built on the foundation of a pre-Armageddon Reef structure, which is reputed to have been a resort house for Eric Langhorne before his death.
Angle-glass—Charisian term for a periscope.
Angora lizard—a Safeholdian “lizard” with a particularly luxuriant, cashmere-like coat. They are raised and sheared as sheep and form a significant part of the fine-textiles industry.
Anshinritsumei—“the little fire” from the Holy Writ; the lesser touch of God’s spirit and the maximum enlightenment of which mortals are capable.
Ape lizard—ape lizards are much larger and more powerful versions of monkey lizards. Unlike monkey lizards, they are mostly ground dwellers, although they are capable of climbing trees suitable to bear their weight. The great mountain ape lizard weighs as much as nine hundred or a thousand pounds, whereas the plains ape lizard weighs no more than a hundred to a hundred and fifty pounds. Ape lizards live in families of up to twenty or thirty adults, and whereas monkey lizards will typically flee when confronted with a threat, ape lizards are much more likely to respond by attacking the threat. It is not unheard of for two or three ape lizard “families” to combine forces against particularly dangerous predators, and even a great dragon will generally avoid such a threat.
Archangels, The—central figures of the Church of God Awaiting. The Archangels were senior members of the command crew of Operation Ark who assumed the status of divine messengers, guides, and guardians in order to control and shape the future of human civilization on Safehold.