Tibold reopened his glass to study the standards once more. Columns of smoke rose behind them—columns which had once been farmsteads and small villages. The people who’d lived there had either come to join the “heresy” or fled to escape it, and he was grateful they had, for the smoke told him what the Guard’s orders were. Mother Church had decided to make an example of the “rebels” and declared Holy War, and her Guard would take no prisoners.
“Well, Father,” he said at last, “I don’t see much choice. I’ve got five hundred musketeers, a thousand pikemen, and four thousand with nothing but their bare hands. Even with God on our side, that’s not a lot.”
“No,” Stomald sighed. “I wish I could say God will save us, but sometimes we can meet our Trial only by dying for what we know to be right.”
“Agreed. But I’m a soldier, Father, and, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to die as one—without making it any easier for them than I have to.”
“I don’t know of any Writ that says you should,” Stomald said with a sad smile.
“Then we’ll fall back to Tilbor Pass. It’s less than four hundred paces across, and it’ll take even this lot a few days to dig us out of that.” Stomald nodded, and the Guardsman smiled crookedly. “And in the meantime, Father, I won’t take it a bit amiss if you ask God to help us out of the mess we’ve landed ourselves in!”
“You’re joking!” Sean stared at the images from the remote. “Angels?”
“Yep.” Sandy’s eyes sparkled. “Wild, isn’t it?”
“My God.” Sean sank onto his couch. All the others were gazing as fixedly as he at the display.
“Actually, it’s not as crazy as it sounds,” Harriet mused. “I mean, we obviously weren’t mortals—not with bio-enhancement, grav guns, and plasma grenades—and if you aren’t mortal, you’re either a demon or an angel. And I’ve been back over your reports.” Her voice wavered, for the others had prepared their promised implant download. She still had no memory of the event, but the download had shown it all to her through her friends’ eyes. She shivered as her mind replayed the image of her own bloody body, awaiting the torch, then shook herself. “It looks like the only two they saw clearly were Sandy and me.”
“That’s what I gather from what this Father Stomald is saying.” Sandy switched to an image of the priest and smiled wryly as she recalled the last time she’d seen the broad-shouldered, curly-haired young man with the neatly trimmed beard. He looked far more composed now as he stood talking to the hard-faced soldier at his side.
“He’s kind of cute, isn’t he?” Harriet murmured, then blushed as Sean gave her a very speaking look and she remembered what that cute young man had almost done to her. She rubbed her eye patch and gave herself another shake.
“Anyway, if we’re the only ones he saw, it all makes sense. Their church is patriarchal—well, for that matter, most of Pardal is. Malagor’s sort of radical in that respect; they actually let women own property. The thought of a woman in the priesthood is anathema, but there Sandy and I were in Battle Fleet uniform … which just happens to be what their bishops wear for their holiest church feasts. Add the fact that this patriarchal outfit has decided, for reasons best known to themselves, that angels are female—”
“And beautiful,” Tamman inserted.
“As I say, angels are female,” Harriet went on repressively. “They’re also immortal, but not invulnerable, which explains how I could have been injured, and this Stomald seems to realize you three deliberately didn’t kill anyone when you came in like gangbusters. Given all that, there’s actually a weird sort of logic to the whole thing.”
“Yeah,” Sean said more soberly, and changed the display himself. The marching columns of armed men sent a visible chill through Israel’s crew, and he sighed. “We may not have killed anyone, but it looks like maybe we should have. At least then we would have been ‘demons’ instead of some kind of divine messengers that’re going to get all of them massacred.”
“Maybe … and maybe not…” Sandy was gazing at the advancing Temple Guard, and the light in her eyes worried Sean.
“What d’you mean?” he demanded, and she gave him a beatific smile.
“I mean we just found the key to the Temple’s front door.”
“Huh?” her lover said sapiently, and her smile became a grin.
“We don’t want all those people slaughtered for something we started, however unintentionally, do we?” Four heads shook, and she shrugged. “In that case, we’ve got to rescue them.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“Oh, that’s the easy part. Those guys are a heck of a lot more than a hundred kilometers from the Temple.”
“Hold on there!” Sean protested. “I don’t want to see Stomald and his fellow nuts massacred, but I don’t want to massacre anyone else, either!”
“No need,” she assured him. “We can probably scare the poo out of them with a few holo projections without even a demonstration of firepower.”
“Hum.” Sean looked at the others, and his eyes began to dance. “Yeah, I suppose we could. Might even be fun.”
“Don’t get too carried away,” Sandy said, “because what happens after we scare ’em is what really matters.”
“What are you talking about?” Tamman sounded puzzled.
“I mean that whether we like it or not, the fat’s in the fire. Either we let the Church massacre these people, or we rescue them. If we rescue them, do you think the Temple’s just going to say, ‘Gosh! Looks like we better leave those nasty demon-worshiping heretics alone’? And they’re not going to go home like nothing happened, either, because if we save them, we reconfirm their belief in divine intervention.”
“Great,” Sean sighed.
“Maybe it is.” He looked up in surprise, and she shrugged. “We didn’t do it on purpose, but we can’t undo it. So if the Temple wants a crusade, why not give it one?”
“Are you saying we should instigate a religious war?!” Harriet stared at her in horror, and Sandy shrugged again.
“I’m saying we already have,” she said more soberly. “That gives us a responsibility to end it, one way or another, and we’re not going to be able to do that without getting our hands bloody. I don’t like that any more than you do, Harry, but we don’t have a choice—unless we want to sit back and watch Stomald and his people go down.
“So if we have to get involved, let’s go whole hog. The Church is too big, too static. Even the secular lords are lap dogs for it. But the only way Stomald’s going to survive is to take out the Inner Circle … and that just happens to be what we need to do to get into the Sanctum.”
“I don’t know…” Harriet said slowly, but Sean was staring at Sandy in admiration.
“My God, Sandy—that’s brilliant!”
“Well, pretty darn smart, anyway,” she agreed. Then she laughed. “Anyway, we’re certainly the right people for the job!” Sean looked blank, and her grin seemed to split her face. “Of course we are, Sean! After all, we are the Lost Children of Israel, aren’t we?”