Hell's Foundations Quiver: Chapter Eight

.VII.
A Recon Skimmer,
Above the Mountains of Light,
and
Langhorne’s Tears,
Mountains of Light,
The Temple Lands.

 

    “Do you think Sandaria’s going to make the adjustment, Aivah?”

    “I don’t know.” Aivah Pahrsahn’s expression was troubled on the small cockpit screen. “Before you and Nimue took us to your cave, I would’ve bet almost anything that she’d be able to. But that was before I knew how much you were going to ask us to believe. Sandaria’s one of the Sisters who’ve interpreted Saint Kohdy’s journal to indicate the Adams and Eves’ souls had been somewhere else — with God — before they awakened here on Safehold, not that their physical bodies preexisted the Creation itself! What you’re asking both of us to believe instead is so far outside anything we’d ever conceived of that I just don’t know if she will. For that matter, I’m sure some of the the other Sisters’ initial reactions would be as bad as Sandaria’s — or worse — if we told them the entire truth.”

    Merlin nodded, his own expression sober.

    The problem, from the viewpoint of someone attempting to debunk the lie Langhorne and his command crew had crafted so carefully, was that literally nothing in the Safeholdian worldview offered a thread he could pull to unravel it. Safehold possessed a complete, continuous, seamless historical record from the very Day of Creation, with no breaks, no point at which any researcher or scholar could find a fundamental inconsistency. Unlike the historical record available to the theologians of Old Earth, there were no blank spots, no prehistoric eras, no sacred books whose authorship might be debated, and no civilizations which pre-dated writing, used a different alphabet, or even spoke another language. There were no periods which had to be reconstructed without contemporary, written sources — primary sources — of unimpeachable authenticity. Secular histories and even The Testimonies might disagree over minor factual matters or interpretations, yet that only strengthened the lie’s foundation, because human beings always saw or remembered events differently. The fact that those differences were acknowledged within the body of the Writ and all of the Church’s other histories only validated their integrity. And when he came down to it, those histories and firsthand accounts were absolutely honest. The people writing them truly had seen, heard, and experienced the events they set forth.

    By the same token, the cosmology Langhorne had created, the explanation for natural forces and why things happened, was completely internally consistent. Worse, from Merlin’s perspective, the “laws” the Writ laid down — Pasquale’s laws for health and medicine, Bédard’s principles of psychology, Sondheim’s precepts for agronomy, Truscott’s instructions for animal husbandry — worked in real life, and disobeying them produced exactly the consequences the Writ predicted. There were no inconsistencies between religious doctrine and the observations and experiences of forty generations of human beings.

    Given that lack of inconsistencies, validated again and again throughout that enormous body of recorded history, the very concept of “atheism” had never even existed on Safehold. No one on the entire planet — outside the inner circle, at least — had ever doubted that God and the Archangels existed or that those Archangels had done every single thing the Holy Writ said they’d done. Some might be a bit lax in their observation of the Writ ’s injunctions, some might attend the services of Mother Church only irregularly, yet every single one of them believed , with a unanimity that would have been almost more alien than the Gbaba to any citizen of the Terran Federation.

    And, as Aivah had just pointed out, even the Sisters of Saint Kohdy believed in the integrity and truth of the Holy Writ . In that sense, they were fundamentally different from the Brethren of Saint Zherneau, because they lacked the equally ancient, equally first-person account and third-party documentation from the Terran Federation’s past which Jeremiah Knowles had left the Brethren. Under those circumstances, it was far more remarkable that Aivah — Nynian — had been able to accept the truth than that Sandaria hadn’t been. And Aivah was right about how dangerous that could prove if — when — other Sisters reacted the way Sandaria had.

    “So you’re certain this is the way you want to handle it?” he asked quietly. Aivah chuckled, and there was at least some genuine humor in it.

    “I’m not certain about anything just at the moment! If you mean am I confident this is the best way to go about it, given what you’ve told me and how hugely that differs from what the Sisters have always believed, the answer is yes. If you mean am I confident it’s going to work just because it’s the ‘best way,’ the answer is I’ll be damned if I know.”

    As responses went, that wasn’t the most reassuring one Merlin had ever heard. But at least it had the virtue of frankness. And the bottom line was that if Aivah was to become a full partner of the inner circle, the inner circle had to trust her judgment about the best way to approach the other members of her circle.

    “Well,” he said, checking the navigation display, “we’ll be on the ground in another fifteen or twenty minutes. I hope you’re bundled up properly.”

 

---

 

    The sun shone down from a sky of flawless, frozen blue. It wasn’t far above the mountain peaks — it never got much above the horizon in these high northern latitudes in winter — but the brief day was bright.

    Which was not to say it was particularly warm . In fact, the temperature hovered five degrees below zero, and the brilliant sun-sparkle off the deep, drifted snow was a sharp (and blinding) contrast to the blue dimness in the depths of the narrow alpine vallies. That snow was several feet deep — deeper than Merlin was tall, in places — and it wasn’t going to melt before June. It would have provided heavy going for any flesh-and-blood human, although one might have been forgiven for concluding otherwise as the two travelers moved across it.

    Merlin slogged along briskly in the practiced, swinging stride of an expert snowshoer. In fact, he was rather short of the years of experience he was displaying, but a PICA’s ability to program muscle memory made up for a lot. Unlike the aforementioned flesh and blood human, he needed to perfom an action properly only once in order to be able to perform it again, flawlessly, any time he had to. He could no longer count the number of times he’d found that capability useful here on Safehold, but if pressed, he would have been forced to admit he’d never anticipated doing what he was doing at the moment.

    “You really are quite good at this, Merlin!” Aivah remarked. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder, and she grinned at him. “I’m a fairly good skier myself, but snowshoes and I have never gotten along. Even if we had, I’m so badly out of shape I’d be panting like a bellows by now.”

    “Which doesn’t even consider how much you’re enjoying yourself at the moment, does it?”

    “It is rather fun,” she acknowledged cheerfully. “I remember how Father — Adorai’s father, I mean; not that miserable excuse for a human being who got my mother pregnant — used to take turns carrying both of us piggyback when I was a little girl.” Her tone softened. “When he did, I knew what a real father was like. There’s no way I could ever repay him and Mother for giving me the opportunity — the gift — to understand there truly is love in the world. Sometimes, when the decisions are especially hard, that’s all that keeps me going.”

    “I know.” Merlin’s voice was as soft as hers had been. “I’ve been . . . damaged by a lot of things, Nynian, starting with the fact that I grew up knowing I was going to die before I was forty and that the entire human race was going to die with me. That . . . leaves a mark, and finding out what happened to Shan-wei and the Commodore and everything that’s happened here on Safehold since I woke up didn’t exactly make everything all better. But you’re right about how much difference something as simple — and profund — as love makes. It’s what keeps me trying and as close to sane as I still am.”

    “You seem almost insanely sane to me, given everything you’ve seen been through,” Aivah objected.

    “Appearances can be deceptive.” He shrugged easily, despite her weight on his back. “Although I probably am a bit closer to sane since Nahrmahn chewed me up one side and down the other for floundering in self-pity after the Canal Raid. But I’m afraid I’m still a little more dubious about my sanity quotient than my friends are.” His smile was a bit twisted.

    “For what it’s worth, I’m on their side.” Aivah rested her mittened palm lightly against his cheek. “And I don’t envy you. I always thought the task the Sisters and I had undertaken was hard enough, and we only wanted to reform the Church, not destroy it! That doesn’t hold a candle to the one that got dumped on your shoulders.”

    “Maybe. But it didn’t exactly get ‘dumped’ on me, you know. Or not on Nimue Alban, at least.”

    “But that’s an important distinction,” she pointed out as the two of them moved from brilliant sunlight into the deep shadows of the valley before them. “ You didn’t volunteer, whatever Nimue Alban might have done. You accepted the responsibility without any memory of having agreed to shoulder it, and the you you are today, Merlin Athrawes, is the product of that acceptance. You’re not Nimue Alban; you’re you , and from everything I’ve seen, you’re quite a remarkable human being who just happens to live inside a machine.”

    “Nice of you to say so, anyway.”

    Merlin’s light tone fooled neither of them, and she patted his cheek again before replacing her hand on his shoulder and adjusting her balance. Not so much to help him, as to position herself as comfortably as possible on his back.

    Despite her slenderness and the fact that she was a foot shorter than he was, she knew she was no lightweight. Whatever disparaging remarks she might level at her own physical condition, vigorous exercise had always been a part of her life. She’d walked, run, and ridden horses whenever she could, and her Zion mansion, like her Siddar City town house, had boasted a well appointed gymnasium to tide her over the winter months. Part of that was because she enjoyed the workouts, and part of it had been a courtesan’s need to fine-tune — and preserve — her physical attractiveness. But for both those reasons, she was remarkably well-muscled, even more than Sharleyan Ahrmahk, and that made her a solid, substantial weight no flesh and blood human being, even one Merlin Athrawes’ size, could have carried so effortlessly.

    Or so long. Merlin had landed the recon skimmer on a mountainside above the northernmost of the alpine lakes Safeholdian geographers had named Langhorne’s Tears. It was an inconvenient eight straight-line miles from their objective, which worked out to twice that distance on foot, but the landing spot he’d chosen had the advantage of a cave large enough to accommodate the skimmer. And as he’d been demonstrating for the last two hours, neither her weight, nor the altitude, nor the snow, nor the steepness of the slopes made any difference to him. In its own way, that was more impressive than all the other wonders he and Nimue Chwaeriau had demonstrated to her and Sandaria.

    And it never seems to cross his mind that he’s actually better than a flesh-and-blood human , she thought. He comes from a place and a . . . technology — she tasted the still unfamiliar word carefully as she used it — none of us could possibly have imagined; he has knowledge most of us can’t imagine, really, even now; and he’s potentially immortal. Yet despite all of that, he treats us as his equals — in the privacy of his own mind, not just for public consumption — without even seeming to realize he’s doing it. I wonder if he even begins to understand just how remarkable that makes him?

    She’d found Ahbraim Zhevons fascinating when they first met in Zion. She hadn’t known the source of the understanding and compassion she’d seen in his brown eyes, yet they’d been intensely attracting qualities even then. Now that she’d been allowed a glimpse inside the life and soul of Merlin Athrawes, she found them far more than simply attractive. How did someone survive a lifetime’s hopeless fight against the extinction of her entire race and then endure all the human being inside Nimue Alban’s PICA had been through here on Safehold and still feel so deeply, without walling himself off?

    Her own life had taught her too much about barriers and the price of survival, and she wondered if perhaps that was the reason she felt such an intense kinship with Merlin. Despite all the centuries in which his PICA had rested in its hidden cavern, experientially he was fifteen Safeholdian years younger than she. Yet his life had demanded even more of sacrifice, of dedication, and of secrecy than her own. More than anyone else she’d ever known, even among the Sisters, he understood what she’d done with her own life . . . and what it had cost her.

    She found herself snuggling more closely against his back — as closely as her parka permitted, at least — and rested her chin on his right shoulder, her cheek against the side of his neck, as he carried her smoothly down the valley.

 

---

 

    There was nothing particularly distinctive about the mountain above them.

    It was steep — sheer in places — yet no steeper than many others. Its summit soared well above the tree line, its permanent snowpack gleaming brilliantly in the sunlight, but so did most of the others reaching upward around it. Merlin had gone back over the mapping imagery Owl had collected from orbit once Aivah told him where their destination lay, and the narrow track up from the valley floor could be picked out in the imagery from high summer. So could the gardens the Sisters tended during that brief warmth, yet now all those clues lay hidden under the featureless snow stretching away up the mountainside.

    It was ironic, he thought, that the hidden Tomb of Saint Kohdy lay barely five hundred air miles from the cave in which his own PICA had slept away so many centuries. And that it, too, was concealed in a cave. The Church’s lack of SNARCs probably made that degree of overhead cover redundant — these days, at least — yet that might not have been the case when the tomb was first established, for he had no idea what the “minor angels” who’d expunged Seijin Khody from the Church’s annals might have been capable of. The fact that they’d commanded sufficient kinetic energy weaponry to destroy the Order of Saint Kohdy’s original abbey, even after the “Archangels’” departure, was not a pleasant thought, especially when he found himself wondering who else might have been left the equivalent of the Wylsynn family’s Stone of Schueler.

    At least Merlin had ample evidence that the Group of Four possessed no aerial reconnaissance assets. If it had had them, the Great Canal Raid could never have succeeded and the trap Duke Eastshare had sprung on the Army of Shiloh would never have worked. So presumably the only way the present day Church could spot the Tomb of Saint Khody would be for someone to literally stumble over it on the ground, and that made the Abbey of the Snows, sixty-odd miles to the west on the Stone Shadow River, the Tomb’s true protection.

    Like the Tellesberg Monastery of Saint Zherneau, the Abbey of the Snows, overlooking the largest of Langhorne’s Tears, had existed since the days of the War Against the Fallen. The imagery and radar mapping Owl’s SNARCs had amassed since Aivah told them about it confirmed that it had been built on the site of an even earlier structure, although the Abbey contained no lingering trace of the technology Safehold had been forbidden to develop. The evidence of that technology was clear enough from the arrow-straight approach road cut up to it through the steep sides of the Stone Shadow’s narrow valley and from the ceramacrete of which its ground floor had been constructed, however. It also accorded well with the Abbey’s own traditions that it had been built on what had once been an earthly dwelling place of the Archangel Langhorne himself. The lakes took their name from his traditional association with them as a spot to which he’d retreated when he needed solitude and the severe serenity of their beauty to refresh his soul. They’d been called Langhorne’s Joy before the Fall; they’d been renamed the Tears after his mortal body was destroyed by Kau-yung’s treachery.

    Despite the spike of anger Merlin always felt when he encountered yet another charming legend about Langhorne, he understood exactly why an austere, contemplative order would find this the ideal place to build an abbey, and the Chihirite nuns who lived here and maintained the Abbey with loving devotion found a deep, sincere joy in sharing it with others.

    During the summer months, it wasn’t at all unusual for pilgrims to trek up the winding, narrow, steeply climbing Stone Shadow Valley to spend several five-days in retreat and introspection in the Abbey’s guest quarters. Of course, by September, the snows for which the Abbey was named were already falling this high in the Mountains of Light. By mid-October, the only route in was closed by snow and ice, and it stayed that way until June. The nuns of the Abbey passed those winter months in study, prayer, and the calligraphy of the beautiful hand-lettered copies of the Holy Writ for which their scriptorium was famed.

    What no one outside the Abbey knew was that for all its long association with the Order of Chihiro, the Abbey of the Snows had been thoroughly infiltrated by the Sisters of Saint Kohdy over six hundred years ago. Indeed, the process had begun even before that . . . about the time a forethoughtful abbess of the Order of Saint Kohdy had enlisted the assistance of the abbess of the Sisters of the Snows who’d happened to be her second cousin. The Sisters of the Snows had been instrumental in the secret construction of Saint Kohdy’s first, simple tomb in the mountains east of Langhorne’s Tears. Only a handful of them had known what was actually hidden there, but gradually, over the years, that had changed. By now, the entire Order of the Sisters of the Snows had been absorbed into the Sisters of Saint Kohdy. Or perhaps it would be equally accurate to say that the Sisters of the Snows had extended their membership — and their protection — over the Sisters of Saint Kohdy.

    In either case, every Sister of the Snows was also a Sister of Saint Kohdy, and the Abbey of the Snows served as the protective gatekeeper of the cavern sanctuary which shielded the saint’s mortal remains.

    It was, Merlin acknowledged, a remarkably effective defense in depth, yet the Abbey of the Snows was too remote and inconveniently located to serve as the Sisters’ operational headquarters. That was why the current mother superior had based herself in Zion — prior to her move to Siddar City — although Merlin doubted the majority of her predecessors had. Everything he’d learned from Aivah so far seemed to confirm his suspicion that young Nynian Rychtair had seen the Order’s role rather differently from those who’d come before her.

    The Sisters had been a persistent, quiet force for good within Mother Church from their inception, but Nynian had . . . radicalized them. That was the best way to put it, he supposed. It was possible some of her predecessors would have made the same decisions she’d made, if they’d lived to see the corruption of the vicarate Nynian had seen, yet he rather doubted that any of those previous mothers superior would have spent thirty years training a cadre of assassins and saboteurs in the name of their patron saint. The sheer size of the Order’s network and its deeply embedded traditions of secrecy and anonymity had offered superb cover, concealment, and a support structure for Nynian’s more . . . proactive preparations, although he had to wonder if she’d ever truly believed she’d be in a position to make use of those assassins and saboteurs.

    Now he set her on her own feet — or, rather, on the second pair of snow shoes he’d towed behind them the entire way here — and gazed up that bleak, bare mountainside.

    “Back on Old Earth, they used to say that real estate value was all about location, location, location,” he remarked.

    “The Sisters would certainly agree with that, Seijin Merlin.” Aivah’s eyes twinkled, but her tone was serious. “When the Angels themselves decree your extermination, there’s no such thing as a location that too remote.”

    “I can see how that might be the case.”

    “I’m sure you can, given what you’ve said about the bombardment platform and the capabilities of your own SNARCs. Of course, our true first line of defense hasn’t been hiding from the Inquisition; it’s been preventing the Inquisition from realizing we exist.” She smiled thinly. “People don’t look for things they don’t know exist, and we’ve been careful to keep it that way where the Inquisition is concerned.”

 

---

 

---

 

    “Make sense to me,” Merlin acknowledged, and took her elbow as they began making their way up the steep slope. “I suppose that’s the reason for the Bedardist chapel in the same cave?

    “Of course it is,” Aivah replied, although the combination of thin air and exertion left her rather breathless.

    He arched an eyebrow at her, and she chuckled.

    “Like I said, there’s no such thing as being too remote, Merlin, but we have to have some traffic in and out of the Tomb. And we normally have a dozen or so Sisters here, where their official job is to care for the Holy Bedard’s chapel and live lives of deep meditation and prayer. We call them the Keepers, and you might not believe just how sought-after that duty is. Our veneration for the Saint’s never precluded sharing his tomb with the Archangels, and the Sisters’ve always felt a strong kinship with the Bedardists, so there’s nothing fraudulent about our devotion to her chapel. And few other houses of religion, including the Abbey of the Snows, offer such a wonderful opportunity for contemplation and prayer. All of us treasure that, and this is the very heart of what our Order was created to accomplish, a place where we can be who and what we truly are without fear of giving away the secret of our existence. It’s a refuge we can return to, a place where we can be with our sisters and rejuvenate both our purpose and our faith.”

    “The Brethren of Saint Zherneau feel the same way about their monastery in Tellesberg,” he told her, and she nodded.

    “We’re like them in an awful lot of ways, I suppose, although I have to say that the way they accomplished so much . . . preparation in Charis before you ever arrived is more impressive than anything we’ve achieved. And I envy their ability to accept the truth about you so much more readily than many of my Sisters will be able to.”

    “Don’t sell yourselves short!” Merlin shook his head and then half-lifted her over a particularly difficult section of the putative trail they were following. “You’ve been at least as active for four hundred years longer than they have, and you’ve done it in the belly of the beast, as it were. Right here on the Mainland — even in the heart of Zion, for God’s sake!”

    “Oh, I know that.” She smiled up at him and patted his parka covered breastplate in thanks as he set her back on her feet. “What I meant is that they not only managed to survive after learning the truth — the full truth about the Archangels and the Church, which we never did — but to hang onto their own faith in God despite all the lies they knew had been told in His name. That’s impressive, Merlin.” It was her turn to shake her head. “I hope the Sisters can do the same thing.”

    “Really?” He gazed down at her, sapphire eyes dark.

    “Of course I do.” She met those eyes levelly. “I think Archbishop Maikel’s entirely correct. Your waking up here, the corruption of the vicarate, the Group of Four’s actions, the rise of the Reformists, King Haraahld’s readiness to accept your help and defy Clyntahn, and the creation of the Charisian Empire — for that matter, the existence of two people as remarkable as Cayleb and Sharleyan to lead that empire. . . I genuinely believe all of that truly is God working to reveal the truth to His children once again, Merlin. I don’t pretend to understand all His purposes, or why He’s waited so long to act, and as an intellectual exercise, I’m prepared to admit I may believe all of this is part of His plan because I’m not brave enough to reject my faith in Him. But in here,” she pressed her left hand against her own chest, “there’s no doubt about Him or about His love for His children.”

    She grinned suddenly.

    “I was prepared to topple the vicarate if the opportunity presented itself, Merlin, because I knew it couldn’t possibly be doing His will, whatever it claimed. If I believed God Himself was calling me to do that when I also believed every sentence of the Writ was His own inerrant word, how can I possibly question this newer and far greater revelation you’ve shared with me?”

    “You’re a remarkable woman, Nynian Rychtair,” he told her. “I don’t imagine I’m the only one who’s ever told you that, but I trust you’ll acknowledge that I have a rather clearer perspective on that than most others to.”

    “Merlin, your perspective — not simply on the situation here on Safehold but on what it means to be human — has to be the closest thing to truly unique that’s ever existed.” Her grin faded into an intense, serious expression and she shook her head. “I’ve tried to imagine what that sort of perspective might be like, but I don’t think I can. I don’t think anyone else could.”

    He gazed at her for another moment, then looked back down at the slippery trail as he considered what she’d said. She probably had a point, yet her own life experience undoubtedly put her in a better position to understand his own perspective than anyone else on Safehold — outside Nimue Chwaeriau, at any rate.

    “I —” he began, only to stop in mid-word.

    “What?” she asked.

    He looked up the slope for a second, then smiled crookedly at her.

    “I’ve been monitoring the remotes Owl deployed around the Tomb. One of your Sisters just looked out the window, it seems. There appears to be just a bit of consternation raging up ahead.”

    “I can imagine,” Aivah said dryly. “I suppose that under the circumstances, we should probably pick up the pace — pick up my pace, really — so we can set their minds at ease a little sooner.”

 

---

 

    Sister Emylee, the senior Keeper, sat in the plain but comfortably cushioned wooden chair across the refectory table and watched Aivah and Merlin sip hot tea. She was in her mid-fifties, two or three years older than Aivah, with dark hair beginning to show broad swaths of silver and eyes the color of a clear winter sky. At the moment, those blue-gray eyes were dark, filled with shadows and lingering questions.

    She’d sent the other Keepers — there were only nine of them at the moment — back to their duties. It said a great deal for the Sisterhood’s discipline that they’d gone without argument, although not even their obedience had been enough to prevent lingering looks over their shoulders. Only four of them had ever actually met their Mother Superior, and there’d been consternation in plenty when Aivah turned up in the depth of winter, on foot, with Merlin in tow.

    Sister Emylee, Merlin thought, obviously shared that consternation in full.

    “I’m pleased to see you, Mother,” she said after several moments, “but I’m sure you can understand how . . . astonishing I find your arrival here. And yours, of course, Seijin Merlin.”

    “As I’m sure you’ve already realized, Sister Emylee, the seijin has quite a lot to do with my arrival,” Aivah replied. “After all, you’ve read Saint Kohdy’s journal.”

    The Keeper’s eyes flickered as Aivah mentioned the journal in front of Merlin, but she only bent her head in acknowledgment. Aivah sipped more tea, then set the heavy mug on the table and met Sister Emylee’s gaze levelly.

    “ Seijin Merlin is, indeed, a seijin in the old sense of the word,” she said quietly. “I can tell you of my own personal observation that he has all of the capabilities Saint Kohdy had, and several I doubt even the Saint possessed. And,” she smiled faintly, “I can now honestly say I understand the journal’s references to being transported by the Archangels’ hikousen. It’s . . . not quite what we thought it was, but the actual experience is certainly miraculous enough.”

    “The Seijin’s been touched by the kyousei hi?” Sister Emylee’s eyes widened, and Merlin shook his head.

    “I would never make such a claim, Sister,” he told her. “And, trust me, no holy fire burns about me!” He quirked a smile at her. “Madam Pahrsahn — well, Mother Nynian, really, I suppose — has a somewhat questionable sense of humor. I’m sure you’ve observed that for yourself.”

    Aivah shot him a humorous glare, and the nun chuckled. The byplay seemed to relax her, and she sat back in her chair.

    “The truth is, Emylee,” Aivah said then, “that when Saint Kohdy wrote about his hikousen he wasn’t actually referring to the kyousei hi the way we thought he was. A hikousen was actually a . . . a vessel empowered by the mysteries of the Archangels, I suppose is probably the best way to describe it. Seijin Merlin can summon the same sort of vessel to his service when he requires it, but the kyousei hi which enveloped the hikousen of the Archangels themselves was visible to mortals only because they were the Archangels’ own vehicles.”

    Sister Emylee’s eyes widened once more, this time in wonder rather than shock, and Merlin nodded gravely. It went against the grain to give even passing credibility to the lie of the “Archangels,” but it was scarcely the first time he’d had to tread the measures of a Safeholdian’s faith carefully. And, as Sandaria Ghatfryd demonstrated, even a Sister of Saint Kohdy was likely to be ill prepared for the wholesale destruction of all she’d been raised to believe. If Sandaria found the truth difficult to accept even with the evidence of Nimue’s Cave all about her, how could anyone expect Sister Emylee to accept it without that evidence?

    Aivah was right . . . again, he acknowledged. I may not like it, but it’s clearly time for a variant on the ‘the seijin sees visions’ gambit.

    And, as had been the case with King Haarahld and his councilors, that explanation was entirely true . . . as far as it went. That was important to him, and Aivah had agreed it was essential that they never lie to the Sisters. The potential consequences if those who’d trusted them discovered they’d been lied to were bad enough to contemplate, but for all the masks Aivah had been forced to assume, all the times she’d had no choice but to dissemble, her position was as driven by moral considerations as by pragmatism. She owed her sisters the truth; if she couldn’t give it to them in its entirety, she would at least give them no falsehoods in its place.

    “Even though Seijin Merlin has access to his own hikousen, he can’t simply go dashing about the world in it,” she continued now. “Not openly, at least. I’m sure you can imagine how Clyntahn and the Inquisition would denounce it as proof of his demonic origins, especially if it wasn’t touched by the kyousei hi whenever it was seen!”

    She rolled her eyes, and Sister Emylee nodded emphatically.

    “Well, for the same reasons, I can’t just suddenly appear in Zion — or anywhere else, for that matter — either.” This time Aivah laughed softly. “Your Keepers’ reaction when the seijin and I came hiking up the mountainside makes that clear enough, doesn’t it?”

    Sister Emylee nodded again, winter-blue eyes twinkling, and Aivah smiled back at her, then allowed her expression to sober once again.

    “The real reason the seijin brought me here was to allow him to examine the Journal, Emylee. As Saint Kohdy himself recorded, seijins are touched only by the anshinritsumei. For all their other abilities, they aren’t Angels or Archangels, and he wishes to consult Saint Kohdy’s account of the War Against the Fallen for whatever insight it may provide. And —” she met Sister Emylee’s eyes levelly “— to read the sections of the journal we’ve never been able to.”

 

---

 

    Saint Kohdy’s tomb was beautiful.

    The chapel dedicated to Bedard was lovely enough, although small. The simple chambers of the Keepers were half-built and half carved into the stone of the cavern walls to either side of its entrance. That entrance had itself been closed by a stone wall, pierced by four beautiful stained glass windows which portrayed famous episodes from the Archangel Bedard’s acts on Safehold. Little light came through them in the winter, but in the summer they must have turned the cavern’s interior into a jewelry case of richly colored illumination. That light was also directed inward, to where the archangel’s chapel, dominated by a statue of her, holding the lamp which was her symbol, sealed the end of the cavern.

    Or what seemed to be its end, at any rate.

    In fact, the cavern extended over a mile deeper into the mountain, and it was only part of an even larger series of caves which ran much farther, although the Sisters of Saint Khody had closed off his tomb from the rest of the cave system with a masonry wall. There were no stained glass windows here, but the native stone of the natural cavern had been smoothed and polished to form a perfectly circular rotunda, then carved with scenes from Saint Kohdy’s life. Alternating, perpetually lit lamps of silver and gold, filled with perfumed oils, had been set into those walls at regular intervals. Centuries of lamp smoke and incense had darkened the rough stone roof of the cavern, and their light spilled over the carven panels and filled the hushed reverence of that chamber with honey-toned illumination.

    The sarcophagus at the rotunda’s center had been carved out of a single massive block of de Castro marble. That rose-colored stone, marked by dense swirling patterns and quarried from the de Castro Mountains in North Harchong, was the favorite medium of the Church’s sculptors and architects. Exactly how the stone for the sarcophagus — over ten feet long and four feet tall — had been hauled to its present site was undoubtedly a story worth hearing, but Merlin already knew whose hands had created the larger-than-life recumbent effigy of the saint which adorned it. The detail of that incredibly lifelike image was breathtaking, and the sides of the sarcophagus were ornamented with a beautiful rendition of what appeared to be infinitely repeating patterns of highland lilies, the flower associated with martyrdom and the seijins who’d battled the forces of darkness in the War Against the Fallen.

    Like the reliefs adorning the cavern’s walls, the creation of that sarcophagus had been no an easy task. Nor had it been accomplished quickly, and every square inch was the work of the Sisters of Saint Kohdy, for no outsider had ever set foot here before Merlin himself.

    There’d been no stonemasons or sculptors among the Sisters who’d first concealed Kohdy’s body here. That had come later, as the hidden order slowly increased in number and some of its members with the talent for the task were trained for it in the great Zhyahngdu Academy in southern Tiegelkamp. Zhyahngdu had produced the Church of God Awaiting’s sculptors for almost nine hundred years, and it was obvious that the Sisters whose hands had created the beauty around him could easily have been among the most famous of all Safeholdian artists. But they hadn’t chosen to share their talent with the rest of Safehold; all of it had been lavished on this hidden, polished gem they’d known the rest of the world would never see, never even know existed.

    He stood for a long, silent moment with the respect the faith and piety of the tomb’s creators and caretakers deserved. The man buried here had been no more divine than the “archangels” who’d created the Church he’d served. But that took nothing away from his service, just as nothing could ever diminish the fidelity, belief, and devotion of those who revered his memory, and Merlin’s nostrils flared as he inhaled the perfume of the lamps which burned perpetually in Kohdy’s memory.

    Then, finally, he turned from the sarcophagus to the equally beautiful golden reliquary which housed Saint Kohdy’s journal. It sat atop a pedestal of gold-inlaid marble in a niche carved into the cavern’s northern wall, flanked by an armor tree bearing an antique cuirass and helmet and a featureless block of de Castro marble impaled by a long, straight bladed sword. The armor looked like bronze, and the sword like Damascus steel, but both were actually made of battle steel, and that sword could have been drawn from its stony sheath by anyone. For that matter, it could have been drawn through that block of stone, for its edge was every bit as keen as that of the wakazashi riding at Merlin’s hip.

    Aivah and Sister Emylee stood watching as he crossed to the reliquary and opened it. The volume which lay within it appeared to be bound in leather, but that, too, was deceptive. He lifted it gently from its velvet nest, opened the cover, and looked down at the strong, sharply slanted handwriting of its first page. Like the armor and the sword, the journal was made out of advanced synthetics, and its pages were as flexible as the day they’d been extruded.

    “My name is Cody Cortazar,” it began, “and I am an Adam, honored far beyond any mortal man might have deserved to stand beside the Angels and Archangels themselves against the forces of Darkness.

    “My service began in the dark days of the opening battles of what has become the War Against the Fallen. Much of my memory of my early life has become unclear, almost as if it had been no more than a dream, but I remember volunteering to serve against the Fallen. And I remember awakening in the sacred sickbay, attended by the Archangels’ servitors and with my mind filled by knowledge and skills far beyond the merely mortal, endowed by the very touch of God.

    “The fight against Kau-yung’s followers was not going well, and . . . .”