Despite the comfort, despite the splendor which underscored the majesty and power of God’s Church, a curiously fragile tension hovered in the chamber’s atmosphere. Voices were lowered, in some cases almost to the level of whispers, and some of the wineglasses required more frequent replenishment than usual.
Zahmsyn Trynair sat in his own chair, the one reserved for the Chancellor of the Council of Vicars, located just to the right of the Grand Vicar’s empty, elevated throne. Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s chair flanked the throne from the other side. Each had chatted easily with the members of his staff, making the occasional small joke, showing his calm assurance, but after exchanging a single, smiling nod of greeting, the two of them had made a point of not speaking to one another since they’d taken their seats.
Rumors of their recent . . . disagreement had filtered throughout the Temple’s hierarchy. No one knew precisely what it had been about, although a great many people suspected that it had owed something to the explosive news from Ferayd. The totally unprecedented findings of the Ferayd Tribunal certainly suggested that it had, at any rate. Even the most jaded Temple insiders had been astonished by the tribunal’s conclusions, and the penance Clyntahn had been assigned by the Chancellor, speaking for the Grand Vicar, had been equally unheard of.
Clyntahn had accepted his penance with every outward sign of humility, humbling himself before the high altar, leading memorial masses for the innocents who had been slain along with the obvious heretics in Ferayd. He had even performed his five-day of service, laboring in the Temple kitchens to feed his far humbler brethren, serving plates with his own two, well-manicured hands.
However humble he might have chosen to appear, no one believed for a moment that he had enjoyed the experience, and there were persistent rumors that he held Trynair personally responsible for his humiliation. Needless to say, neither Trynair nor Clyntahn had confirmed any such thing. Indeed, they’d both taken considerable pains to establish that whatever their confrontation had been about, it had constituted—at worst—a temporary rift between them. Of course, some of the Temple insiders would suspect that their obvious rapprochement was all a mask, a disguise to prevent their many enemies on the Council of Vicars from scenting blood. Showing just the right degree of friendliness and cooperation to warn any potential enemies that an attempt to exploit any division among the ranks of the Group of Four would be . . . unwise was a delicate task, and never more than today. Too much or too effusive a display of friendship would transmit the wrong message just as surely as too cold and formal an attitude. Especially today. It would never have done for either of them to have seemed as if he might be suffering some sort of last-minute attack of nerves, after all.
Theater, Trynair thought. It’s all theater. I wonder if there’s a single man in this Chamber who couldn’t have earned his living on the stage if he hadn’t been born to be elevated to the orange?
There were other differences between this year’s Address from the Throne and those of years past. Normally, there would have been a standing crowd of junior archbishops and senior bishops behind the seated vicars. In theory, the members of that crowd would have been selected randomly, in reflection of the universal equality of the priesthood’s members. In fact, of course, invitations to the Address from the Throne were carefully considered tokens of power for the vicars and of prestige and influence among the recipients. This year, however, there was not a single bishop, nor any member of the laity, present. Even some of the more junior archbishops had been excluded, and the senior archbishops were virtually silent in the presence of their superiors.
Maybe it’s not all theater, after all, Trynair thought more somberly. Not this year, at any rate.
A single, musical chime echoed suddenly, and the hushed conversations stilled abruptly. That, too, was unusual. Normally, at least some of those side conversations would have continued even through the Address itself. After all, every vicar would have already received his copy of the text. Some of them might not have bothered to read it yet, but it would have been waiting for them in their offices when they got around to it. Besides, everyone would already have known what was in it, even if he hadn’t received a copy.
Today was very different, however. No one had yet seen the text of this year’s Address—no one outside of the Grand Vicar, Trynair, the other three members of the Group of Four, and the Chancellor’s most trusted aides, at least. And the rumors concerning its probable content had swirled throughout the ranks of the vicarate like a spring riptide as one report after another underscored the challenge the Kingdom of Charis had thrown into the Church’s very teeth.
Word of the marriage between Cayleb of Charis and Sharleyan of Chisholm had reached the Temple only three five-days before, hard on the heels of word of what had happened at Ferayd, and the news had shaken the vicarate to its core. The fact that news of the marriage and the creation of this new “Empire of Charis” had taken so long to reach Zion, even allowing for the winter weather, was only one more sign of the threat to the Church’s power. The chains of Temple couriers who would normally have carried that word across the Cauldron to the semaphore stations, winter gales or no winter gales, had been broken for the first time in the history of Safehold. And the messages from the bishops and senior priests whose correspondence would have announced and analyzed the event had never been written, for the men who now held those offices were loyal not to Zion and the Temple, but to Cayleb and Sharleyan.
That would have been sobering enough. The realization that Chisholm had voluntarily joined Charis in its defiance of Mother Church had gone beyond sobering to frightening, and the execution of sixteen consecrated priests had hit even harder, in many ways. Even those who had held quietly to the belief that the Group of Four’s heavy-handed mismanagement had driven the Charisian crisis had found themselves confronting the emergence of a brand-new empire which, in the fullness of time, must inevitably take its place among the great kingdoms and realms of Safehold. An empire solidified not by simple conquest, or mere dynastic marriage, but upon the common foundation of its defiance of Church authority—a defiance it had underscored with brutal finality in Ferayd. And one which had already added the Princedom of Emerald to its territories and would certainly move upon the League of Corisande within five-days or months, if it had not already.
Two years ago no member of the Council of Vicars could even have imagined a world in which such a political and religious grotesquerie could have existed. Now, all of them found themselves face-to-face with the hideous specter of a schism which not only had not been crushed but was actively growing, spreading steadily from the initial source of corruption in Tellesberg.
In a world so much of whose certainty had crumbled, the Grand Vicar’s annual address loomed with enormous importance, and all eyes and heads turned quickly towards the Grand Vicar’s throne as that single chiming bell announced his arrival.
As the Church’s oldest traditions required, Grand Vicar Erek XVII, the secular and temporal head of the Church of God Awaiting, God and the Archangel Langhorne’s steward on Safehold, entered the Grand Council Chamber alone and unattended. In this room, on this day, he was officially only one more vicar, come to report to his brother vicars on the state of God’s Church throughout Safehold. If the nature of his entry proclaimed his equality, however, the glittering crown upon his head, the magnificent robes of state (which, with their weight of pearls, gems, and fine embroidery weighed more than most suits of armor), proclaimed a very different message. They underscored the absolute power which lay in the hand of the master of the church which was mistress of all the world.
Erek certainly looked the part of a proper grand vicar, Trynair thought sardonically. He was a tall man, with broad shoulders, hair which had silvered with the passing years (and the judicious assistance of the Grand Vicar’s valet and hairdresser), piercing eyes, a powerful, arched nose, and a high and noble brow. Fortunately for Trynair’s purposes, the man inside that impressively regal appearance understood
the realities of Temple politics at least well enough to take direction properly.
Now the Grand Vicar proceeded to his throne through the hushed silence. He seated himself upon it, looking out across the rows of vicars and archbishops, and his expression was calm. Despite the fact that every member of his audience knew his expression was a part of the carefully scripted theater they were all here to observe, many of them actually found themselves relaxing, at least slightly, as they beheld it. Trynair observed their reaction with satisfaction. Erek’s ability to project that air of reasoned, calm assurance was, after all, one of the primary reasons Trynair had selected him for elevation to the Grand Vicarate.
“Dear brothers in God,” the Grand Vicar said after a moment, “we welcome you, and we thank you for the godly brotherhood in which we have all gathered that we might report to you the state of God’s Church and work among the millions upon millions of souls committed to our pastoral care by the all-powerful hands of God and His servant Langhorne.”
His voice was another reason Trynair had selected him. It was a deep, magnificent, velvety bass that reached out to its listeners with the assurance that here was a man who knew what he was about, was as confident internally as his expression proclaimed externally. That impression was further reinforced by his ability to memorize lengthy speeches, like the Address, and deliver them sincerely, passionately, and without so much as glancing at notes or a script. If Erek had possessed the force of intellect to match his other qualifications for the grand vicarate, he would have been a man to be feared . . . and Zahmsyn Trynair would have sought a different puppet.
“Much has transpired in the past year,” the Grand Vicar continued gravely, delivering the lines Trynair had composed for him with measured, earnest sobriety. “Much of that has been good, redounding to the glory of God and the salvation of His Faithful. Yet, as all of us are aware, we have also found ourselves confronted, as no previous Grand Vicar or Vicarate since the days of Langhorne himself, by Shan-wei’s open challenge in this world. The Dark Mother of Evil has thrust her finger once again into the perfection of God’s work, once more seeking to mar and subvert all which is good into the service of evil.”
One or two of the vicars appeared to stiffen, and Trynair concealed a mordant smile behind his own carefully schooled expression. Obviously at least some of the vicarate’s members had continued to hope this could all just be made to go away. Precisely what might have inspired them to cling to such a futile hope was more than the chancellor would have ventured to say. No doubt some of them—the name of Samyl Wylsynn came to mind—had clung to the belief that some sort of compromise might still have been patched up between the Church of Charis and the legitimate Church of God Awaiting. Well, it was time to knock that notion on the head once and for all, assuming the Ferayd Tribunal hadn’t already done for it.
“All of us,” Erek continued, “are only too well aware of the events which have transpired in Charis, and now in Chisholm. We have heard the pretexts upon which the schismatics have based their apostasy, their defiance of Mother Church’s legitimate, God-given authority over the souls and spiritual well-being of all of God’s children. We’ve heard their lies, recognized their distortions. And more recently, we have seen evidence of their willingness to resort even to the bloody-handed murder of God’s own priests. To take into their own secular, unsanctified hands the consecrated judgment of God’s priesthood which the Holy Writ has reserved solely for the Office of Inquisition and Council of Vicars, acting with all due deliberation and under the guidance of God Himself and the Archangels.”
He paused, surveying his audience solemnly, then continued in that same level voice.
“All of those crimes, those perversions, are sufficiently dreadful to fill any godly soul with horror and repugnance. Yet I must tell you, my brothers, that the Office of Inquisition has amassed fresh evidence, new knowledge, which makes it plain that this schism, this defiance, is part of a long and carefully nurtured conspiracy. That the baseless accusations the schismatics have leveled against Mother Church are the opening wedge not for a mere defiance of Mother Church’s authority, but for a heretical rejection of the most basic and fundamental doctrines handed down to us from the Archangels themselves.”
Throughout the vast Grand Council Chamber faces tightened and eyes narrowed. Zhaspahr Clyntahn had seen to it that carefully crafted, fragmentary rumors about the confessions of the Charisians in the Inquisition’s custody had reached the proper ears. But they’d been only fragments, deliberately fashioned to prepare the ground for the Grand Vicar’s address without giving away that address’ content.
“Much of what we have recently learned confirms things we have believed to be true. That belief was foremost in our mind when we took the grave step of excommunicating the schismatic leadership and placing the entire realm of Charis under the heavy burden of the interdict. Yet we have not made them public, nor shared them even with our brothers among God’s vicarate, because we found them so disturbing, so difficult to credit, that we demanded evidence. We will not share with you even now all that we have learned. To be honest, we continue to believe additional evidence must be provided before such serious charges may be publicly levied against any child of God. In the fullness of time, when that evidence is in hand and the time to deal with God’s enemies has fully arrived, we will share with you—and with the entire body of God’s Church—the full nature of the enemies who have arisen to dispute God’s mastery of His own world.
“And do not be deceived, brothers. Whatever they may claim in Tellesberg and Cherayth, their ambition is nothing less than to overthrow, forever, Mother Church’s legitimate authority as God’s and the Archangels’ chosen shepherd. The violence which wracked the peaceful city of Ferayd in August has been far surpassed by the brutal attack, devastation, and sack which the so-called Charisian Navy carried out so savagely little more than a month ago. And the murder—for such it was—of sixteen of our consecrated brethren, sixteen servants of Mother Church and the Office of Inquisition, was but the tip of an iceberg of murder and rapine in that unhappy city. Two-thirds of that city—two-thirds, brothers—lies in broken and burned ruins, littered with the bodies of its defenders and all too many of their wives, daughters, and children.”
He shook his head gravely.
“Who can look upon such actions, such savagery and destruction, without recognizing the hand of Shan-wei herself? And who but the servant of Shan-wei would use tales of the ‘guilt’ of the Inquisitors of Ferayd in an attempt to buttress all of their other lies and false, blasphemous accusations against Mother Church? Shan-wei is crafty, my brothers, and her snares are cunning. See how they fasten upon the failures of a handful of God’s priests and proclaim that all of God’s priests are corrupt and fallen! How they strive to convince the foolish, the credulous, that God’s Church—the hand of God Himself in this world—is responsible for atrocities, for groundless persecutions, for corruption.
“It was with heavy heart that we reviewed the findings of the Ferayd Tribunal, and we will not deceive you; we were gravely tempted to order those findings sealed. To turn away from confronting such painful things, for we already knew how the schismatics had fastened upon those sad and tragic events as a weapon against God. Yet however tempted we might have been, we recognized that temptation itself as the work of Shan-wei. We realized that we dared not fail in any least aspect of our duties before God—and most assuredly not in a duty as grave and heart-wrenching as this—lest we display weakness before God’s foes. And so we accepted the tribunal’s finding, and thus we demonstrated who the true guardians of the Church are. We demonstrated that we would take even the allegations of schismatics seriously when there was evidence of wrongdoing on the priesthood’s part, and that we would not permit impious rebellion against Mother Church’s authority to prevent us from doing our duty as Langhorne’s steward on Safehold.
“Yet all of this is nothing more than the beginning. Nothing more than the attempt to set
in place the lies and deceptions the schismatics will use, in the fullness of time, to justify their all-out assault on Mother Church, on the authority of the Archangels, and upon God’s own plan for the safekeeping of men’s souls. Believe me, my brothers, what has happened in Delferahk is but a shadow, the merest foretaste, of what they intend for Zion and the Temple Lands in the fullness of time.”
The normally inaudible motion of the chamber’s circulating air could actually be heard when the Grand Vicar paused. The men seated in their orange cassocks to listen to him might have been carved from stone, and he shook his head once more, slowly, regretfully.
“Brothers, there is a reason we have chosen to deliver our yearly Address only to the most senior of Mother Church’s servants. We charge you to remember in your own utterances, your own discussion of what we say here today, that the enemies of God have ears in all places. The time is not yet meet for us to further alarm the members of our flock. Yet it is time we shared with you, our brothers and the guardians of Mother Church, our belief that full-scale Holy War lies before us.”
Some of the seated vicars flinched visibly, and Trynair hoped the members of his staff who’d been briefed to watch for that exact reaction had gotten all of their names.
“As we say, the time is not yet. Just as there are preparations to be made, plans to be cast, weapons to be built and forged, there is also the heavy responsibility laid upon us as God’s true servants to establish once and for all, beyond any question or contradiction, the true depth and depravity of our enemies’ plans and intentions before resorting to such stern and awful measures. No matter how just the war, how imperative the action, the innocent will suffer as well as the guilty, as, indeed, events in Ferayd have already demonstrated so tragically. No true son or daughter of God could contemplate all the horrific consequences of such a conflict without fear and trembling. Without the necessity of knowing that no other option, no other course of action, lay open to them. And we do not utterly foreclose the possibility of some less drastic resolution. It is our hope, our earnest prayer, that the subjects of the rulers who have made themselves the enemies of God will recognize their responsibility to rise in righteous fury and cast off the servants of Shan-wei who have led them into this apostasy and sin. It is for this reason that we issued our writs of excommunication and our proclamation of the interdict upon Charis and have subsequently extended it to Chisholm and Emerald. Yet however earnestly we may pray for that eventuality, we cannot rely upon it. It is our responsibility, as God’s steward, to make timely preparation for the more drastic measures which we greatly fear have become inevitable.