Merlin managed to keep his expression blank, but it was harder than usual. Admittedly, Rahzwail had certain advantages, given the significant boost one Merlin Athrawes and his friend Owl had provided to the Safeholdian science of pyrotechnics. And the resources of the archangels’ allowable technology gave Safeholdians a much broader base of capabilities to build upon than their pre-Merlin artillery and explosives might have led most people to expect. Still, the captain’s summary had been almost breathtaking, carrying him—conceptually, at least—all the way from the corned powder of the seventeenth century through Thomas Rodman’s prismatic powder in mid-nineteenth century to the German “cocoa powder” of the 1890s in no more than a handful of sentences.
And he doesn’t even know about Sahndrah’s little discovery yet! Dear Lord, what are these people going to come up with next?
He didn’t have a clue, but as he sat at that conference table, looking back and forth between Sir Ahlfryd Hyndryk and Ahldahs Rahzwail, he suddenly felt far less concerned about how they were going to react when he had to get around to telling them about the information the traitor in Hairatha had sent to Zhaspahr Clyntahn.
The bastard can steal whatever “secrets” he wants, and he’s still going to fall further and further behind, Merlin thought with grim, harsh satisfaction. He can’t begin to match what our people can come up with, even without me standing in the corner handing out ideas. And that’s why the son-of-a-bitch is going to lose. I don’t care how many men he can put into the field, our people— my people—are going to kick their sorry arses all the way back to the Temple, and then that bastard is going to pay the price for Gwylym Manthyr and everybody else his sick, sadistic butchers have tortured and killed.
“That sounds like a very interesting idea, Captain,” he said out loud, his voice calm, his expression intent. “Have you given any thought to how you might do that? It occurs to me, that if you were to manufacture a form—a nozzle, perhaps—of the right shape, then force a gunpowder paste through it under heavy pressure using one of Master Howsmyn’s hydraulic presses, what you’d get would be—”
.IX.
Archbishop’s Palace, City of Tellesberg, Kingdom of Old Charis, Empire of Charis
It was strange how alike and yet unalike Manchyr and the city of Tellesberg were, she thought, standing on the balcony and looking out across the Charisian capital. Tellesberg was cooler, without the fiercer heat of the city of her birth, but it was also twice as far from the equator. The flowers and trees were very different here, as well, yet equally bright, and Lady Hanth was a botanist. She’d spent much of her time here, especially since her marriage, cataloging the countless differences between Chisholm’s northern plant life and her new home’s. She’d been making that knowledge available to Irys and enthusiastically expanding her own store of knowledge by adding everything Irys could tell her about Corisandian botany to it. And the two of them had made several visits to Emperor Cayleb’s Royal College, to discuss the subject with Doctor Fyl Brahnsyn, the College’s senior botanist.
Irys’ hands tightened on the balcony railing as she thought about those visits. She remembered her father’s comments on the College, the way he’d recognized—and envied—the advantages it bestowed upon King Haarahld and yet simultaneously seen it as one of Haarahld’s great vulnerabilities. He’d been right about both those points, she thought now. He usually had been right about things like that, and she knew he’d been tempted to emulate the Charisian king. But in the end, he’d decided the advantages the College had given to Charis had been outweighed by the vulnerability it created. Instead of copying Haarahld, he’d been careful to avoid any policies which might have suggested to Mother Church that he was tempted to follow in Charisian footsteps where questionable knowledge was concerned. And he’d been equally careful—and invested enormous bribes—when it came to pointing out to the Inquisition just how “questionable” the Royal College of Charis’ knowledge truly was. In fact, she admitted, he and Phylyp Ahzgood had been quite … creative when it came to carefully crafted rumors about the way in which the College was secretly transgressing against the Proscriptions, despite all its public professions to the contrary.
Actually, she thought, they hadn’t been so much creative as inventive. She rolled the word over her mental tongue, tasting its implications, for it represented the biggest single difference between Manchyr and Tellesberg. In Corisande, “inventive” remained the pejorative it had always been under Mother Church; in Charis, the same word had become a proudly worn badge of men—and women—who deliberately and aggressively probed the limits of what man might and might not properly know.
It made her skin crawl, sometimes, to realize how hard and how far people like Rahzhyr Mahklyn and his colleagues were pushing those limits. The proof of her father’s appreciation of the College’s value to the House of Ahrmahk was all around her, in the forest of sails and rigging she saw in the harbor, the huge, sleek, low-slung warships lying to anchor or heading out into Howell Bay, the enormous stacks of crates, boxes, and barrels waiting to be swayed aboard merchant ships and ferried off to every corner of Safehold. It was that same “inventiveness” which had allowed those warships to defeat every foe who’d sailed against Charis, and in many ways, it was also that inventiveness which was allowing Safehold’s newest empire to blunt the starvation the Sword of Schueler’s fanatics had wreaked upon the Republic of Siddarmark. Yet, what if that butcher Clyntahn was right? Not about his bloody persecutions, or his amoral policies of assassination and terror, or his gluttonous, sensual lifestyle, but about the taint which clung to all this Charisian innovation? What if the Royal College of Charis truly was Shan-wei’s foothold in the world God and the archangels had made?
And why did the possibility he was right bother her so much? Fill her with such a confusing mix of trepidation, apprehension, foreboding, and … regret.
Because you want it, too, she told herself now, finally admitting the point, remembering the hours she’d spent talking to Brahnsyn, the gleam of delight in his eyes as he’d jotted down note after note from her recollection of Corisande’s botany. The questions he’d asked had elicited more details than she would have dreamed she could have provided, too. He’d known exactly which to ask, actually assembled the information he’d already gotten from her in ways that let him shape and focus his follow-on questions almost as if he’d physically examined the plants she could describe to him only in frustratingly incomplete ways. The sheer depth of his knowledge had been astonishing, yet he’d been only one of the scholars she’d spoken with, all of whom had willingly taken time from their own studies to answer her questions and ask questions of their own.
She hadn’t understood a great deal of what Doctor Mahklyn had had to say about the new mathematics. She’d been forced to acknowledge that after the first five minutes—or, perhaps she’d actually managed to stay in shouting distance for the first nine minutes, although she was certain she’d been completely lost by the time he got to ten. But even the limited amount she’d been able to follow had filled her with wonder and a sense of half-terrified delight. There’d been nothing in what he’d said that actually violated any aspect of the Proscriptions, so far as she could tell, yet the implications of his new “calculus” and the other, frankly brilliant, mathematical operations and theories he’d proclaimed, would affect everything. She knew very little about scholarship in general, compared to the minds assembled in the College, but she knew enough to recognize the way in which Mahklyn’s new math must provide those minds with new, immensely potent tools. She’d seen proof of that already in the pages of diagrams Doctor Dahnel Vyrnyr, another of those scholars had enthusiastically displayed to her.
Vyrnyr was the College’s leading expert in the field of pressures, which wasn’t something Irys would have thought of as a field of study in its own right. The Writ explained why the Archangel Truscott had arranged for the boiling point of water to increase in a tightly sealed vessel, after all, and taught mankind how to co
nstruct pressure cookers to take advantage of his foresight in seeing to it that it was so. The benefits for food preparation and preservation were well known to anyone who’d read the Book of Truscott and the Book of Pasquale, yet Vyrnyr wanted to understand how the Holy Truscott had arranged for it to work, and she’d been using her own observations and Mahklyn’s new mathematical tools to pursue that understanding. She’d shared some of what she’d discovered with Irys on one of the princess’ visits to the College with Lady Hanth, and the scholar’s eyes had glowed with pleasure as she displayed the elegant rules and processes Truscott had imposed on the seemingly simple act of lighting a fire under a sealed pressure cooker.
There was a beauty to those rules, those processes, Irys thought now, leaning on the balcony rail, gazing out over the sun-soaked roofs of Tellesberg, listening to the voice of the city that never slept, seeing the new construction sweeping up over the hills around the city as the Charisian Empire’s southern capital grew yet larger and watching gulls and sea wyverns of every description and hue swirl in raucous crowds above the flotsam-rich harbor. The meticulous way in which the archangels had fitted the universe together had never been more obvious than when Doctor Vyrnyr explained about pressures, or Doctor Mahklyn attempted to explain the magnificent inevitability of mathematics, or Doctor Lywys demonstrated the ways in which separate, dissimilar materials combined into new and unique compounds, or Doctor Hahlcahm talked about his efforts in conjunction with Doctor Vyrnyr’s studies of heat and pressure to determine how Pasqualization purified milk and food. Surely God couldn’t object to His children trying to understand and appreciate the majestic beauty and intricate detail with which His and His archangels’ gifts had imbued His universe?
Yet there’d been another side to Doctor Vyrnyr’s studies and revelations, for it was obvious they provided a basis for the systematic expansion and improvement of processes which already pressed far too closely for the Inquisition’s taste on the bounds of the Proscriptions. The College had even proposed new names for the practical applications of Vyrnyr’s studies. “Hydraulic” and “pneumatic” fell strangely on Irys’ ear, and the fact that the College had seen a need to coin those words—indeed, had set up a committee chaired by Doctor Mahklyn himself, for the express purpose of naming new fields of study—was a chilling reflection on how its faculty’s determination to expand and quantify human knowledge drove them inevitably towards the Proscriptions’ limits.
And you want to join that quest, don’t you? she asked herself, hazel eyes dark as Tellesberg’s morning breeze teased tendrils of silk loose from her braided hair. That’s what truly frightens you, isn’t it? You see that beauty, want to understand that intricacy, and you’re afraid the Inquisition is right after all, that it truly is exactly the same lure Shan-wei and Proctor used to seduce men into damnation when they first rebelled. That’s what Clyntahn’s saying, after all, and he’s not the only one. You want the people who say that to be wrong, but inside you’re afraid they aren’t. That Shan-wei and Proctor are still using that temptation, that hunger to get just a glimpse of the mind of God, to entice men away from the God they think their quest honors.
“Good morning, Your Highness,” a voice said behind her. “May I join you?”
“Of course you may, Your Eminence.” A smile replaced her brooding frown, and she turned from the railing to greet the speaker. “It’s your balcony, after all.”
“True, in a manner of speaking,” Maikel Staynair replied with an answering, gentle smile. “For the moment, anyway. Personally, I prefer to think I’m simply holding it in trust for my eventual successor. Although, actually, you know, I really miss my rather more spartan little palace over there.” The ruby ring on his hand glittered in the sunlight as he indicated the building on the far side of Tellesberg Cathedral which was home to the Bishop of Tellesberg. It was, indeed, smaller than Archbishop’s Palace … and still bigger than any other structure in sight. “A humble little hovel, I know, but the truth is that I really don’t need the extra seventeen bedchambers, the second ballroom, or the state dining room,” the Archbishop of Charis continued, his smile turning almost impish. “Fourteen bedrooms and a single dining room—on the large size, admittedly, but only one—were quite sufficient for my needs when I was a simple bishop, and I’m sure I could get along under such straitened conditions even now if I truly had to.”
Irys’ lips quivered at Staynair’s tone, and that, too, was something she wouldn’t have believed was possible as little as two months ago. The archbishop was the very heart of heresy and voice of apostasy, after all. That was what the Inquisition taught, and Staynair’s ability to seduce the faithful away from Mother Church, even from among her own priesthood, was legendary. She’d read Earl Coris’ reports about Staynair’s visit to Corisande, about the way he’d drawn her father’s subjects towards him, and she hadn’t understood how it could have happened. What sinister gift had Shan-wei bestowed upon him to allow him to so easily beguile the faithful into accepting his words? To bewitch Mother Church’s own bishops and priests into accepting his authority over that of the Grand Vicar himself? Whatever might have been true about Cayleb Ahrmahk’s reaction to the assault upon his kingdom, his father’s death in battle, Maikel Staynair, the fallen bishop and betrayer of Mother Church, bore the true guilt for the schism, for it was he who had led the revolt against the Temple and the Vicarate from inside Mother Church, splitting all the world into warring camps for the first time since Shan-wei’s Rebellion.
Yet she’d discovered it was impossible to see that monster in the heretical archbishop’s gentle, compassionate eyes … or to spend ten minutes in his presence without feeling the way he reached out almost unconsciously to those about him.
Cayleb and Sharleyan had been meticulous about not requiring Daivyn and her to attend mass in Tellesberg Cathedral. They’d even guaranteed them regular access to Father Davys Tyrnyr, an upper-priest who’d fearlessly maintained his loyalty to the Temple and the Grand Vicar. They’d allowed him to celebrate mass privately for them in one of Archbishop Palace’s numerous small chapels, and the sanctity of the confessional had been rigorously observed. It was amazing enough, and totally contrary to the Grand Inquisitor’s version of events in Charis, that Temple Loyalists were actually allowed to practice their faith—their adherence to the Grand Vicar and the Group of Four—openly in the very heart of Tellesberg, without fear of suppression from Crown or Church. She knew only too well what had happened to anyone who openly professed Reformism–far less any suggestion of support for the Church of Charis!—in Delferahk or any other mainland realm. How could it possibly be that here, in the very capital of an empire which had no hope of victory, or even survival, without Mother Church’s defeat, those who remained loyal to her were protected by the Crown even while Reformists were savagely persecuted in other lands? It made no sense—none at all—yet the evidence of her own eyes and ears had forced her to recognize that it was true, and Father Davys himself had acknowledged as much.
Yet it had taken Irys over three five-days to discover that the person who’d actually made certain she and Daivyn had access to Father Davys had been Maikel Staynair himself. She had no doubt—now—that Cayleb and Sharleyan would have granted that access anyway, but it was Staynair who’d made it explicit, ordered his personal Guardsmen to admit a known Temple Loyalist and his acolytes to Archbishop’s Palace without even having them searched for weapons, despite at least two Temple Loyalist attempts, one on the floor of his own cathedral, to assassinate him. And he’d insisted upon that because he truly did believe human beings had both the right and the responsibility to decide for themselves where their spiritual loyalties lay. That the human soul was too precious for anyone but its owner to endanger or constrain it, and that no political purpose, however vital, could be allowed to trump that fundamental, essential article of faith.
She’d been stunned by that discovery. She’d grown up a princess. She knew how political reality sometimes had no choice
but to transgress even against the letter of the Writ. Mother Church herself acknowledged that, made provision for rulers to confess their transgressions, do penance for the times they’d been forced by necessity to compromise the Writ’s full rigor. Her own father had paid thousands of marks to Mother Church and the Office of Inquisition for dispensations and absolution under exactly those provisions, and Irys Daykyn knew every other ruler, upon occasion, had found himself or herself forced to do the same.
Yet where personal faith and obedience to God were concerned, Maikel Staynair flatly rejected that concept. He would not compromise his own faith, and he refused to force anyone else to compromise his, and that, Irys had realized, almost against her will, was the true secret of his ability to “seduce” the faithful. The reason even many of the Temple Loyalists here in Old Charis respected him as a true son of God, however mistaken he might be in what he believed God and his own faith required of him.
She’d attended mass in the cathedral three times now, although she’d insisted Daivyn not do so, and she’d heard Staynair preach. And as she’d listened to him speaking from the pulpit, seen the joy bright in his eyes, heard it in his voice, she’d recognized the proof of what she’d already come to suspect. He was, quite simply, the gentlest, most devout, most compassionate and loving man she’d ever met. It might be true, as the Temple Loyalists insisted, that he was doing Shan-wei’s work in the world, but if he was, it was never because he’d knowingly given his allegiance to the Dark.