Hell's Foundations Quiver: Chapter Two

.II.
Charisian Embassy,
Siddar City,
Republic of Siddarmark.

    “She said what?”

    It was getting on towards dawn — and much warmer — in Corisande. The eastern sky beyond the windows of Sharleyan Ahrmahk’s guest suite in Manchyr Palace was ever so slightly less black than it had beenm and she leaned back against piled pillows in a billow of sheets and filmy steel thistle silk nightgown. She’d actually been asleep for some hours before her husband’s urgent com call awakened her, yet her huge brown eyes were anything but sleepy.

    “Apparently, Jeremiah Knowles wasn’t the only person who left a written record,” Merlin told her wryly. “Mind you, the perspective’s a lot different, according to what Aivah —” He paused, and the image of him projected on her contacts by Owl’s communications equipment snorted and shook his head. “Oh, the hell with it! I’m going to call her Nynian from now on. I swear, that woman’s the only person on Safehold with more identities to keep straight than I have!”

    Someone laughed over the com net, despite the gravity of the moment. It sounded to Sharleyan like Domynyk Staynair, but it might have been Ehdwyrd Howsmyn.

    “That does rather serve you right, Merlin,” Cayleb observed from where he sat with the seijin in the lamp-lit sitting room of his own suite in Siddar City. He wore a fleecy robe over his own pajamas — his preferred habit of sleeping nude was contraindicated in Siddar City in winter — but unlike his wife, he hadn’t quite dropped off to sleep before Merlin’s knock pulled him back out of bed. “What’s that cliché you used about that pain-in-the-arse Zhwaigair’s improvement on the Mahndrayn?” he continued. “‘Hoist by your own petard,’ wasn’t it?”

    “Be fair, Cayleb,” Merlin protested. “I’ve only been doing this for seven years. As nearly as I can figure out, she’s been doing it since she was fifteen!”

    “And damned well, too, it sounds like,” Nimue Chwaeriau said soberly from her chair in Sharleyan’s bed chamber. “Without, I might add, all of your — well, our, I suppose — advantages, either.”

    “I’ve always realized she was a remarkable woma,” Archbishop Maikel Staynair said softly from his bedroom in Archbishop Klairmant Gairlyng’s palace, across the square from Manchyr Palace. “I never imagined anything like this, though.”

    “None of us did, Maikel,” Cayleb pointed out. “That’s rather the point of this little conference. What do we do about her now?”

    “I agree we have to decide that quickly,” Rahzhyr Mahklyn put in from his Tellesberg study. The hour was later there than in Siddar City, though not nearly so late — or early, depending upon one’s perspective — as in Manchyr, and the head of the Royal College cupped his mug of hot chocolate in both hands, gazing down into its plume of steam with a troubled expression. “At the same time, we need to consider very carefully how much of the full truth we share with her.”

    “I don’t know this is a moment for pussyfooting around, Rahzhyr,” High Admiral Rock Point replied.

    The archbishop’s brother sat on the sternwalk of his flagship, gazing across the black mirror of Tellesberg Harbor towards the imperial capital’s gas-lit wharves. Unlike Mahklyn, he’d opted for a glass of whiskey. Now he rolled a deep sip slowly over his tongue, swallowed, and shook his head.

    “We already knew how dangerously capable this woman is,” he continued. “Or we thought we did, anyway. What we didn’t know was that there was actually an organization that’s been around even longer than the Brethren and done just as good a job of keeping its existence a secret that entire time! Given this little bombshell of hers, I’m more convinced than ever that this is not someone you want deciding you can’t be trusted because you’re hiding things she needs — or obviously thinks she needs, at any rate — to know.”

    “I’d have to agree with that,” Merlin said. “Both about her capability and how dangerous it could be to get on her wrong side. You might want to ask a dozen or so dead vicars in Zion about that. Or, for that matter, several thousand Temple Loyalist rioters — or another dozen dead assassins, for that matter — right here in Siddar City.”

    “Not to mention being someone whose principles are probably just a bit less flexible than Ehdwyrd’s best armor plate,” Nimue observed. “I don’t know her as well as you do, Merlin — or you, Cayleb — but I’d come to that conclusion even before she laid this vest pocket nuke on us.” The slender, red-haired woman who shared Merlin’s memories of Nimue Alban shook her head, blue eyes deep with wonder. “Now? This isn’t someone who’s likely to make any suicide runs, but she’s not going to flinch from paying whatever price she thinks is necessary, either. And I’d hate to think of the kind of damage she and her organization could do to us if she put her mind to it. The last thing we need is for her to decide we’re the enemy, too!”

    Merlin nodded in sober agreement, and so did several of the others.

    “You know,” Maikel Staynair said after a moment, “I’d always wondered how a child from her background — a girl whose adopted parents were forced to send her off to the convent when her father became Grand Vicar — not only escaped that convent but became the Temple Lands’ most successful courtesan! For that matter, I’d always wondered where she found the funds for it.”

    “Personally, I’d assumed it was a sort of under-the-table payoff to keep her mouth shut,” Nahrmahn Baytz put in from his virtual reality in the computers of Nimue’s Cave. “Oh, I was sure the primary reason she chose that . . . vocation was to put her thumb into his eye, but I’d also assumed she’d cheerfully turned the screws on him to get the cash to set herself up properly in the first place.” He smiled puckishly. “It’s the sort of thing I’d’ve done, after all!”

    “I’m afraid my logic followed yours, Nahrmahn,” Staynair acknowledged.

    “All of us thought the same thing,” Rock Point pointed out. “And I’m pretty sure all of us thought more power to her, too!”

    “Granted,” the archibishop agreed. “But I’m still trying to wrap my mind around just how wrong we were, and the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that she wanted anyone who figured out who she’d been born to think that. One thing is painfully obvious; this is a woman who not only plans decades — even lifetimes — in advance, but one who’s lived her entire life like a Harchongese nest doll! No matter how many of the people she’s been you take apart, there’s always another one hidden inside it.”

    Staynair, Merlin thought, had a pronounced way with understatement upon occasion.

    It had taken Aivah — Nynian — hours to tell her story, and he wasn’t foolish enough to think she’d even begun to share all of it even now. He certainly wouldn’t have, in her place. Not, at least, until he’d been certain the person he was telling it to was actually who and what she so obviously hoped Merlin Athrawes was.

    “Owl has the entire conversation on record,” he said now. “All of us can peruse it at our leisure, and I don’t think Nynian really expects an immediate answer. She’s obviously aware this is going to throw us for a loop and she doesn’t know anything about SNARCs or coms, so she’s going to give Cayleb and me at least some time to talk it over and decide what to do. But Domynyk’s right about how dangerous it could be to give her any reason to distrust us.”

    His mind ran back over that same conversation, and he felt a fresh flicker of astonishment even now.

 

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    “. . . so while I was at the convent, Sister Klairah recruited me,” Aivah said quietly, gazing down into Merlin’s fire while the wind roared and buffeted about the embassy. “I don’t know how much you know about the Convent of Saint Ahnzhelyk, but it’s the sort of place parents and families send young ladies with rebellious streaks. It has a reputation for turning them around, and a remarkable number of them end up as sisters of Saint Ahnzhelyk’s order. Of course, in my case there were several reasons for stashing me there, but I really didn’t object to the order’s austerity. I suppose I was young and impressionable — I’d just turned fifteen, for goodness’ sake! — but I believed I had a true vocation, and so did Sister Klairah.

    “She was careful about sounding me out, especially given who my father was and who’d raised me, but that very rebelliousness in the girls entrusted to Saint Anzhelyk’s care had made the convent a good hunting ground for the Sisters of Saint Kohdy for many years. Not that most of Saint Anzhelyk’s sisters knew anything about their activities . . . or that they could afford to run any risks that might expose them or tell the Inquisition they existed. The Sisters of Saint Khody were never actually proscribed, but they certainly should have been when Saint Kohdy was purged from The Testimonies. In fact, if I had to guess, the only reason they weren’t proscribed long before that was that the surviving Angels were waiting for the last of the Adams and Eves to die before they acted. It wasn’t that difficult for them to edit The Testimonies, since all the originals were in the Temple’s Grand Library, but according to the Sisterhood’s journals, they’d waited to move against Saint Kohdy’s official memory until none of the people with actual memories of his life were around to question the approved version.”

 

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    Merlin Athrawes had no need to breathe, yet he inhaled sharply in muscle memory reflex as she paused and looked up from the fire at him. The matter-of-fact way in which she’d suggested — no, not suggested; stated — that the most important sacred writings of the Church of God Awaiting, outside of the Holy Writ itself, had been forged, or at least significantly ‘edited,’ was astonishing. Not so much because they had been, but because she was so obviously confident they had. In its own way, that was an almost greater surprise than Maikel Staynair’s revelation of the journal of Saint Zherneau in Tellesberg had been.

    But she clearly wasn’t finished yet, and she smiled crookedly as he waved for her to continue.

    “Saint Kohdy was a seijin, too,” she went on after a moment. “I don’t think he had all the abilities you have, Merlin, but he had quite a few . . . superhuman capabilities. And the stories about Helm Cleaver are true. I know they are, because I’ve handled it myself, used it to shave slivers off a solid block of granite.” She smiled again, the expression softer yet somehow bittersweet, and shook her head. “I didn’t realize when Sister Klairah recruited me — I was much more innocent and naïve in those days — that I would have suffered a very sad accident if she hadn’t been able to convince me she was telling the truth.” Her expression darkened. “Some candidates have ‘suffered an accident,’ and I never would’ve lived to see Helm Cleaver or Saint Kohdy’s journal if Sister Klairah hadn’t convinced me.”

    Merlin stiffened, and she nodded as if his reaction pleased her.

    “We can’t read some of it,” she admitted. “It’s not written in any language we can understand. According to the part of the journal we can read, Seijin Kohdy wrote that part of it in something called ‘Español.’ He didn’t say why, but I’ve read the rest of it dozens of times, and I think he’d begun keeping his journal well before he began to feel any doubt about which side he was on. That’s certainly how the first half reads, at any rate. The ‘Español’ portions are brief, initially, interspersed with the ones we can still read, but its last eight months are recorded entirely in ‘Español.’ I suspect he switched to that language when he wrote down things that might have done serious damage to the cause of Chihiro and Schueler if it had fallen into someone else’s hands. Or perhaps they were things he might not have been certain of in his own mind at the time he wrote them down. From a handful of entries in the part I could read, I think it was a combination of the two. He wasn’t certain, and if it turned out he’d been wrong to doubt and what he’d written were to fall into anyone else’s hands, he didn’t want it to draw others who might trust him because of who and what he was into the same error.

    “I don’t know that for certain, because he never explaned his reasoning in the portions of the journal we can read. Until I encountered that ‘Español’ of his, it had never occurred to me another language might even exist! And however reasonable it may’ve seemed to him at the time, his decision to use it means even the Sisterhood’s members are divided on at least a few points.”

    “Oh?” Merlin tilted his head, and Aivah smiled more than a little tartly.

    “Some of us — myself included — have interpreted the passage in which he recorded his decision to begin using ‘Español’ to suggest that it came from some time or place which predated the Creation. Combined with a few other puzzling references, one could almost read that as saying all of the Adams and Eves were . . . somewhere else before Safehold was called into existence.”

    Her dark eyes were suddenly very intent, boring into him like twin blades, but she went on calmly, almost tranquilly.

    “Even those of us who read it that way are divided about where that ‘somewhere else’ might have been. Most of us interpret it as evidence that not even an Archangel could create a soul — that God Himself must be the sole Creator in that sense — and that all those Adams and Eves were with Him while the Archangels prepared the world in which they would live. But a fair number of us think he might just as well have meant the Adams and Eves lived and breathed on an entirely different world and that God and the Archangels brought them here from that other world, rather than first giving them life on the Day of Creation. It’s a substantial distinction, and one I’ve often thought we could have found the answer to if he’d written the ‘Español’ portions in something we could read. Or,” she added, raising both eyebrows, “that the Sisterhood could read, at any rate.”

    “I might be able to do a little something about that,” he acknowledged slowly. “I can’t promise. And you’d have to trust me with the journal — or a true copy of it, at any rate.”

    “Either we’re going to trust one another a great deal eventually, Merlin,” she said, “or this is going to end very badly for someone.”

 

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    She seemed extraordinarily calm for a woman who’d already acknowledged that the “Sisters of Saint Kohdy” — whoever the hell they were — had murdered an unknown number of young women to keep their secret. Then again, if they’d recruited her when she was only fifteen, she’d spent better than thirty-five Safeholdian years — thirty-two standard years — in that Sisterhood.

    “At any rate,” she said, “by the time the War Against the Fallen was winding towards a close, Saint Kohdy had come to question much of what he’d been told by the Archangels. We know from the parts we can read that he’d met someone — someone fighting to the bitter end on the other side — who’d convinced him that what had happened to Armageddon Reef didn’t necessarily prove Shan-wei had fallen into evil. For that matter, after talking with him, Kohdy had come to question whether or not Langhorne himself had loosed the Rakurai on Armageddon Reef. The Fallen who’d taken up Shan-wei’s struggle after the destruction of Armageddon Reef had insisted it was Chihiro and Schueler who’d turned to evil, not Shan-wei, but Kohdy had always brushed those assertions aside. After all, Shan-wei was the Mother of Lies, wasn’t she?

    “But according to his journal, not all the seijins fought under Chihiro and Schueler’s banner, whatever The Testimonies might tell us today. Some fought for the Fallen, instead. They were called demons by the Archangels and by Mother Church, but Kohdy had met them sword-to-sword. He’d come to doubt their demonhood even before one of them defeated him, and his doubt grew still stronger after the ‘demon’ not only spared his life but revealed a totally different truth to him. I don’t know exactly what that truth was — it was shortly after that point he began writing portions of his journal in ‘Español’ — but it made him question which side he was on. It took time for those questions to ripen, and by the time they did, the War Against the Fallen was almost over. The rebellious lesser angels had almost all been hunted down and destroyed. The servitors who’d fought for the Archangels had largely withdrawn to the Dawn Star, the last of the ‘demons’ fighting for the Fallen had been driven back to their final fastness in the Desolation Mountains, and the Archangels must have been preparing their final assault.

    “And that’s where the journal ends.”

    Merlin stared at her.

    “That’s where it ends?”

    “Yes,” she sighed. “He never wrote down his intentions — unless he did it in Español — but the Sisters’ tradition is that he’d decided to take his questions directly to the Archangel Schueler, the Archangel he most trusted to answer him fully. Whether that’s true or not, he made a final trip to Zion . . . and died there.”

    “How did he die?” Merlin asked softly, and Nynian shook her head.

    “We don’t know. The Order of Saint Kohdy — the Sisterhood’s parent order — was formed when his body was returned to his family. It was created and charged with preparing and maintaining his tomb, just as other orders had been charged to do for many of the other fallen seijins, and it was granted a benefaction for that purpose. I suspect if he hadn’t fought so strongly, been in the forefront of the battle against the Fallen for so long, the Sisterhood would never have been formed at all. As it was, the Sisters quickly found themselves pushed to one side, largely ignored by the rest of the Church. This was in the period immediately after the Fallen’s final defeat, you understand, after Schueler and Cihiro had departed in victory — the period in which I think the remaining Angels were waiting for the last Adams and Eves to die before purging The Testimonies.

    “During that interval, the Sisters’ original benefaction was exhausted, and the Church ignored or misfiled — intentionally, I’m sure — their requests for additional funds. So, left to their own devices, they solicited voluntary contributions, largely from members of their own families to begin with, and invested them. By the time The Testimonies were edited, their investments were returning an income comfortably greater than the Order required to maintain itself and Saint Kohdy’s tomb.

    “The Mother Abbess of the Order had realized Kohdy was going to be cast from Mother Church’s canon of saints well before it actually happened, however. According to the Sisterhood’s records, her brother was a vicar, as their father had been before him, and it would appear, even though she was careful not to say so in so many words, that her family’s connections warned her of what was coming.

    “She was very old by then, almost a hundred years old, and she was no Eve. Her health was poor, but that wasn’t the reason she died when the Order was officially . . . disbanded.”

    Nynian’s voice had gone very low, very quiet, soft enough a normal human ear would have had difficulty hearing her over the sound of the blizzard beyond the embassy’s walls. But Merlin Athrawes had a PICA’s ears. He heard the ancient grief — and the anger — in those words all too clearly.

    She sat silent for endless seconds, staring down into the fire’s incandescent heart once more, then shook herself and looked back up at him.

    “Not all of the Sisters were prepared to abandon Saint Kohdy, even at Mother Church’s command. They might have accepted the decree if any of the Archangels had issued it, but only the last of the lesser Angels remained, and the Mother Abbess had known Kohdy, just as she’d known — had spoken with — both Schueler and Chihiro when she was a very young woman, before their departure. Neither of them had ever cast doubt upon Kohdy’s sanctity, and that was enough for her. So she refused the decree, she and her sisters, and that, Seijin Merlin, is the reason there’s no Abbey of Saint Kohdy today. And why no one ever bothered to officially proscribe the Order. When the Sisters proved . . . intransigent, the abbey — and everyone in it — was destroyed in the middle of the night in a ‘blast of holy fury,’ the last Rakurai of the War Against the Fallen. A blast which, strangely, was never recorded in any of Mother Church’s official records.”

    Merlin stood very still, looking down at her, and her nostrils flared.

    “But the fact that there’s no Abbey of Saint Kohdy doesn’t mean there’s no Tomb of Saint Kohdy,” she said quietly. “The Mother Abbess had moved the saint’s body to a secret tomb well before the abbey’s destruction, just as she’d moved duplicates of the Sisterhood’s records . . . and Saint Kohdy’s journal. And she’d taken advantage of the way in which she and her immediate predecessor had been forced to find alternate funding. A core of the Sisterhood was established in the secret abbey she’d created, and she’d divested the Order of a third of its investments. Those investments — and the income from them — were outside Mother Church’s records, and they provided the surviving Sisters with the funds they required after the rest of their Sisters had been blotted away without warning or any opportunity to argue their case.

    “They were made of stern stuff, those Sisters, and what had happened to the rest of their Order convinced them their Mother Abbess had been right to set a new path for their Order. It’s followed that path to this day, with its Sisters individually members of Mother Church and yet apart from her. The Sisterhood’s done a great deal of good over the centuries of its existence, Seijin Merlin, but always from the shadows, never admitting its existence.”

    “And today?” Merlin asked when she paused, and she smiled again, even more crookedly than before.

 

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    “Sister Klairah didn’t recruit me simply because I wanted Mother Church to be what she’s charged by God to be, Merlin. Many of the Sisters — most of them, really — have been called over the years for the same reason so many of my classmates were sent to Saint Anzhelyk’s: because they were rebels. Because they had not simply the faith or the skills the Sisterhood needed, but because they had the fire, the need to do something with that rebellion — that touch of the anshinritsumei that comes down to us from Saint Kohdy. And in my case,” her smile turned almost impish, “there was even more of that fire than I think Sister Klairah realized. I’m afraid I was never the most . . . dutiful of daughters, whether of my father or of Mother Church. And then, too,” the smile vanished, “I had the example of my own father and of what was happening inside the vicarate.

    “I knew better than most what had really happened to Saint Evyrahard, and I’d come to the conclusion there was precious little chance of the vicarate’s ever reforming itself. The rot was too deep, the momentum building too steadily, for that to happen. Not without a little . . . push, at least. Which is why I became what I became. Oh, I’ll freely admit I took a certain pleasure out of outraging my father and his family connections, especially since he couldn’t openly object without admitting he was my father. But I also knew no one could possibly be in a better position to acquire the sort of . . . leverage that might inspire better behavior out of the worst of vicars than a courtesan — and later a madame — serving the most rarified heights of the episcopacy.

    “Then I became aware of what Samyl and Hauwerd Wylsynn were trying to accomplish.” She shook her head sadly, eyes darkening once more. “At first, I avoided them, since the last thing I wanted was for any of the vicars to see me coming and I was afraid an association with the Wylsynn family might come to light. But then it looked as if Samyl had a genuine chance of becoming Grand Inquisitor, and he was such a good man, and Adorai was already part of his circle. So I made myself a member as well, but only as myself, without ever acknowledging the Sisterhood’s existence to anyone, even Adorai. Only he lost the election — almost certainly because Rayno manipulated the vote, though I could never prove that — and you know what happened from there.”

    She fell silent, and Merlin stood for several minutes, considering all she’d said.

    “I assume the Sisterhood’s secret investments explain where Ahnzhelyk Phonda found the capital she used to build that empire of hers in Zion? And the one here in Siddarmark, as well?” he asked then.

    “You assume correctly,” she acknowledged. “Except that the initial investments in Siddarmark are much older than I am. The Sisterhood’s managed its portfolio well over the centuries, and until very recently its core expenses have been quite low. We’ve been active in charitable work for a long, long time, although we’ve had to be very careful about how we funded them without anyone’s noticing us. The experience we gained in doing that for several hundred years was very useful when we started funding more . . . proactive endeavors.”

    “And your current Mother Abbess doesn’t object to your more . . . secular activities, shall we say?” he asked, and she chuckled throatily.

    “I’m afraid you don’t quite have it straight yet,” she told him. “The Sisters don’t have a Mother Abbess anymore. We have a Mother Superior. She’s the one who determines what the Sisters as a whole do in the world, and, no, she doesn’t object to my ‘more secular activities,’ as you put it. That would be rather difficult for her to do, actually . . . since for the last twenty years or so, I’ve been the Mother Superior.”

 

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    “Trust me,” Merlin Athrawes told the senior members of the inner circle as his attention returned to the com conversation. “Domnyk never said a truer thing in his entire life. Whatever else we may do, we don’t want to turn this woman into our enemy.”