By Heresies Distressed

by David Weber

  His mind captured fragments of memory. Lieutenant Hahskyn, bayoneting one foe, his rifle spinning in his hands as its butt crushed another man’s skull, and then the sword driving in under his arm, through the opening in the side of his cuirass, and the lieutenant going down. Another guardsman fighting desperately against two opponents, somehow holding both of them at bay, until a third took him from behind and cut his throat. A sword opened a bleeding gash on Seahamper’s own cheek, another hammered the breastplate of his cuirass, a third glanced off his helmet, and somehow he and Tyrnyr were still on their feet, still falling back to where the pistol shots cracked behind them.

  They reached the guesthouse door, and Tyrnyr shouldered Seahamper behind him as a fresh rush surged towards them. Seahamper staggered backward, half-falling through the doorway, and his heart twisted as two swords cut Tyrnyr down before he could follow.

  There was no time to feel grief. There was only the desperate need to somehow protect the empress he’d guarded since she was a little girl. The young woman he’d helped to raise, and the monarch he’d proudly sworn to serve. The Temple Loyalists could come at him only down the hallway now, and he bellowed his own hatred as he met them with his red-running bayonet. Hot blood turned the stone floor slick underfoot, and bone crunched as one of the Temple Loyalists slipped and sprawled full length and he drove the butt of his rifle savagely downward onto the fallen man’s neck. His world consisted solely of that hallway, of the men storming forward along it, of the growing, terrible ache of his arms and the stink of blood.

  Thunder bellowed explosively, louder than ever, shaking the entire guesthouse, but it was a distant thing, unreal and unimportant.

  And because it was, he never realized that this thunder came not from the west, but from the east.

  The pistol roared. The shape which had loomed in the window tumbled back out of sight, and Sharleyan’s slim hands and wrists felt as if she’d just hit them with a hammer as she turned to toss the fired pistol to Daishyn Tayso. But the guardsman didn’t take it. He sat still and silent in his chair, hands frozen in midmotion by the arbalest quarrel buried in his left eye socket.

  “I’ve got it, Sharleyan!” Carlsyn Raiyz shouted. He snatched the pistol from her and started reloading it as she and Tayso had taught him. His hands were clumsy with the unfamiliar task, but he jerked his head at the window. “You worry about that!”

  “Go on! Go on!”

  Mytrahn Daivys’ voice was hoarse and cracked. His throat felt raw and broken, but he continued to shout, whipping his men on with his voice. He heard Charlz Abylyn shouting in snatches even through the tumult, as well, but Lahrak’s voice had gone silent.

  He saw the two guardsmen fighting in the very doorway of the guesthouse, and then one of them was down, trampled under the boots of his Temple Loyalists as they stormed forward. The madness had them by the throat. Survival itself had become unreal, immaterial, beside their driving need to reach their objective.

  It’s a good thing we don’t want her alive after all!

  The thought flashed through some tiny segment of his brain, and he knew it was true. His men’s bloody-fanged hatred and determination would have made it almost impossible to take Sharleyan alive now, even if they’d wanted to.

  I don’t—

  His thought broke off as an impossible peal of thunder crashed overhead. It was scarcely unexpected—although the rain had almost stopped for the moment, the storm was far from over—but this thunder crack was so loud, so violent, that he flinched. And then, suddenly, there was one more guardsman still on his feet.

  Daivys blinked, scrubbing at his eyes to clear the rainwater still running out of his soaked hair, trying to figure out where that single guardsman had come from. It was as if he’d materialized out of the air itself.

  The Temple Loyalist’s eyes narrowed suddenly as he realized that this guardsman wasn’t soaked with rain. But that was impossible . . . wasn’t it?

  He thrust the question aside. There would be time to worry about details later; right now, he had other things to attend to, and he charged.

  This one doesn’t have a rifle, either, he realized as the guardsman drew two swords. One was considerably shorter than the other, and something about them joggled a scrap of memory. Something about someone who carried two swords. . . .

  The back of his brain was still grappling with the memory when a battle steel katana, moving so fast he never actually saw it move at all, slashed his head off his shoulders.

  What is it about thunderstorms and assassination attempts?

  The question darted through Merlin Athrawes’ mind as Daivys’ head flew just as the rain begain pounding down once more. It was a distant thought, lost below the steely focus of his desperation as he charged into the Temple Loyalists from behind.

  A part of him twisted in anguish, crying out in useless protest as he saw the Imperial Guardsmen sprawled amid the tangle of their enemies’ dead. He’d known every one of those men. He’d helped train them, helped select them for their duty . . . and he’d watched every one of them die through his SNARC’s remotes while the recon skimmer hurtled through the Safehold sky at better than Mach five.

  Just flying at that velocity had constituted a risk he knew he couldn’t truly justify. Despite the skimmer’s stealth systems, that kind of speed in atmosphere generated so much skin heat that an orbital scanner—like the ones which might well be incorporated into the orbiting kinetic bombardment system Langhorne had left behind—just might detect it anyway. Yet even at that speed, it had taken him an hour and a half to make the flight from Corisande.

  No one on Safehold had ever heard the incredible thunder of a supersonic aircraft at low altitude. Not until tonight . . . and very few of those who had just heard it were going to survive the experience, he thought grimly. Without the courage and determination of the men who had died in Sharleyan’s defense, he would have been too late, anyway. Even now, he might be, and his sapphire eyes were merciless as he sliced into the Temple Loyalists.

  Most of them never had a chance to realize anyone new had joined the battle. Merlin’s nervous impulses used fiber optics, not chemical transmission. When he released the governors he’d set to keep himself from betraying his more-than-human abilities too badly, his reaction speed was a hundred times that of a flesh-and-blood human, and his impossibly sharp battle steel swords were driven by “muscles” ten times as powerful as any mortal man’s.

  He seemed to simply stride through his enemies, moving almost slowly, yet bodies cascaded away from him. The first few men he faced died far too quickly for them to realize there was anything particularly odd about the man killing them, but as the lightning picked him out, flashed in stroboscopic spits of brilliance from his flying swords and the sprays of blood trailing in their wake, their fellows recognized, however dimly, that they faced something they’d never imagined was possible.

  “Demon!” a voice wailed. “Demon!”

  Merlin paid no attention. There were twenty men between him and the guesthouse; three of them lived long enough to try to run.

  Edwyrd Seahamper had no idea what was happening outside the guesthouse. All he knew was that the seemingly endless stream of attackers who’d been crowding in upon him had abruptly disappeared. He could still hear shouts and screams through the tumult of the thunderstorm, though, and a pistol cracked behind him yet again.

  He turned and ran down the short hallway to the bedchamber door.

  “It’s me, Your Majesty!” he shouted as he put his shoulder to the closed door. He burst through it into a bedchamber reeking of powder smoke just as Sharleyan stepped back from the shuttered window with a raised pistol in both hands.

  Gunsmoke hovered like a thick, blinding fog, but he saw the last of the broken shutters fly into fragments as a human body hurled itself against them, and a man burst half-way through the opening. The intruder froze as he found himself staring into the muzzle of Sharleyan’s pistol at a range of less than three feet, and then
Seahamper felt as if someone had just smashed his ears between two sledgehammers as she squeezed the trigger.

  She staggered a half-pace backward with the recoil, and the back of her enemy’s head disintegrated as the massive bullet exploded through his skull. He disappeared back out the window in a spray of blood, tissue, and snow-white splinters of bone, and the empress turned towards Carlsyn Raiyz for another. But the priest, too, was down, an arbalest bolt standing out of the center of his chest while blood pooled thickly on the floor beneath him.

  Sharleyan’s face crumpled as she saw him, but then Seahamper shoved past her just as yet another Temple Loyalist tried to force his way through the window. The new assailant looked up, then screamed, both hands clutching at his chest, as Seahamper drove a vicious bayonet thrust between his ribs. The guardsman twisted his wrists as he recovered his bayonet, and another Temple Loyalist shrieked and fell away from him as he thrust yet again.

  Behind him, Sharleyan reached for the last loaded pistol with frantic haste, and Seahamper swore harshly as another man tried to clamber through the window. He thrust yet again, and then, abruptly, there were no more attackers.

  Merlin Athrawes recovered, the corpse slithered off his battle steel blade, and suddenly he was the only man standing in the convent courtyard.

  He looked around slowly, literally knee-deep in bodies, and for once his eyes were as hard as the composites of which they were made. This time he could afford to leave no survivors to tell wild tales about the “seijin.” No doubt most of those tales would have been explained away as wild exaggerations, the way all the other tales about Merlin had been. But this time, the mere fact that “Seijin Merlin” had been here at all would be enough to generate all the accusations of “demonic influence” which had to be avoided at any cost. He’d already dispatched half a dozen of the Temple Loyalists’ wounded, and little though he liked the thought of killing men who couldn’t fight back, this time he was prepared to make an exception.

  It’s the penalty for treason, anyway—and it’s not as if I didn’t “catch them in the act,” he thought harshly as he waded through the tangled drifts of men who were already dead, dealing with his grim task. He closed his ears to the pleas for mercy, to the prayers, and to the curses and concentrated on dealing death as cleanly and as quickly as he could.

  And then there were no living men in the entire convent courtyard. But that didn’t necessarily mean none of the attackers were left, he thought. Rain and darkness were feeble obstacles to his enhanced vision, and he easily picked out the two men waiting by the main gate.

  He zoomed in, and his mouth tightened as he recognized them.

  Bishop Mylz looked at Ahlvyn Shumay as the screams, shrieks, and sounds of combat abruptly ceased.

  The bishop’s eyes were shadowed and dark, sick with the reality of the bloodshed and carnage he’d unleashed in the precincts of one of God’s own convents. He’d thought he was prepared for what it would be like; he’d been wrong.

  Please, God, he prayed silently. Let it be over. Let Your will be done, but I beg You to spare me more of this.

  God returned no answer, and even as he prayed, Halcom knew it would be easier next time, and even easier the time after that. He didn’t want it to be, but what he wanted couldn’t change what was.

  At least it’s finally over . . . this time, he thought, and closed his eyes as he murmured another prayer—this one for the soul of the young woman who had just died at his men’s hands.

  He was still praying when a deep, icy voice spoke.

  “Bishop Mylz, I presume,” it said, and his eyes flew open, for he’d never heard that voice before in his life.

  Shock bleached the color from his cheeks as he found himself facing not Daivys, or Lahrak, or Abylyn. This man wore the black-and-gold of the House of Ahrmahk, and Halcom had never seen him before. But then a sudden stab of lightning blazed sapphire in the guardsman’s eyes, and Halcom’s heart seemed to stop beating. Only one Imperial Guardsman had eyes that color, but he was with the Emperor in—

  “You can’t be here,” he heard his own voice say, almost calmly.

  “No, I can’t be,” the man in front of him agreed coldly . . . and he smiled.

  Shumay moved suddenly, his hand darting towards his belt and the dagger sheathed there. The guardsman’s eyes never flickered. He didn’t even look at Shumay. His empty left hand simply snapped out like some impossibly swift serpent, closed on the priest’s neck, and twisted. Shumay jerked violently, Halcom heard a ghastly, crunching sound, and then the guardsman opened his hand again.

  Halcom’s aide slithered to the ground in a boneless heap, and the guardsman’s thin smile could have frozen the heart of the sun.

  “Two hours ago,” he said softly, “I was in Corisande, My Lord Bishop.”

  Halcom shook his head slowly, disbelievingly, his eyes huge.

  “Demon,” he whispered.

  “I suppose, in a way,” the other man agreed. “By your lights, at any rate. But you’ve failed, Bishop. The Empress is alive. And I tell you this now: your ‘Church’ is doomed. I will personally see to it that it is erased forever from the face of the universe, like the obscenity it is.”

  Halcom heard someone whimpering and realized it was himself. His hand rose, trembling uncontrollably as he traced Langhorne’s Scepter in the air between him and the nightmare he confronted.

  That nightmare simply ignored his hand, totally unaffected by the warding sign of banishment, and Halcom’s breath sobbed in his nostrils.

  “Your Langhorne is a lie,” the guardsman told him coldly, precisely. “He was a liar, a charlatan, a lunatic, a traitor, and a mass murderer when he was alive, and if there truly is any justice in the universe, today he’s burning in Hell, with that bitch Bédard beside him. And you, Bishop Mylz—you make a proper priest for both of them, don’t you?”

  “Blasphemy! Blasphemy!” Somehow Halcom found the breath to gasp the word through the vise of despair tightening about his throat.

  “Really?” The guardsman’s laugh was carved from the ebon heart of Hell. “Then take that thought with you, My Lord Bishop. Maybe you can share it with Langhorne while you squat on the coals.”

  Halcom was still staring at him in horror when the katana in the guardsman’s right hand sliced through his neck.

  . XV .

  The Guesthouse,

  Convent of Saint Agtha,

  Earldom of Crest Hollow,

  Kingdom of Charis

  Sharleyan finished reloading the last of the rifles and propped it upright against the wall beside its fellows.

  “What’s happening, Edwyrd?” she asked softly as she started on the pistols.

  “I don’t know, Your Majesty.” Her last surviving guardsman stood to one side of the smashed window, staying as much under cover as he could as he peered out into the rain while blood dribbled down his slashed cheek, and his voice was taut. “In fact, I don’t have the least damned idea, saving your presence,” he admitted. “All I can say is that if there’s no more fighting and no one’s trying to climb in through this window, or come through that door,” he twitched his head in the direction of the bedchamber doorway, “we’re a lot better off than we were. And—” he turned to give her a tight, blood-streaked smile “—if we are, I think I’ve just experienced my first miracle.”

  Sharleyan surprised herself with a laugh. There was, perhaps, a shaky edge of hysteria in it, but it truly was a laugh, and she cupped her face in her palms, pressing her fingertips against her temples.

  She felt the stickiness of blood on her hands. Some of it was actually hers, oozing from the cuts on her scalp and the left side of her forehead where splinters of broken shutter had cut the skin as the arbalest bolts came screaming past her. More blood had splashed her long skirts and Charisian-style overtunic, and her face and hands were blackened and smeared with powder smoke. Her right shoulder throbbed painfully, and she didn’t want to think about how badly bruised it was. If she hadn’t been ab
le to move her right arm—painful though the experience had proven—she would have believed that shoulder must be broken.

  The smell of gunsmoke, blood, and death was almost overpowering despite the pelting rain’s washing effect. Water blowing in through the broken window had diluted some of the blood puddled thickly on the bedchamber floor, and fresh blood still dripped from the tip of Seahamper’s bayonet like thick, pearl-shaped tears. Emotional shock drew a blessed patina of unreality between her and the world about her. Her brain worked with almost unnatural clarity, yet the thoughts seemed somehow distant, and the tearing grief she knew waited for her could not yet break through.

  It will, she told herself bleakly. It will . . . when you look around and you never see all those faces again.

  She prayed desperately that at least one of her guardsmen besides Seahamper was still alive, and guilt clogged her throat as she realized how unspeakably grateful she was that if only one could have survived, it had been the sergeant. But—

  “Your Majesty,” a deep voice spoke from the thunderstorm, and Sharleyan’s hands snapped down from her face and her head jerked up as she recognized it.

  “Langhorne!” Seahamper hissed, as he, too, recognized that impossible voice. The guardsman stepped reflexively between his empress and the window, and his bloody bayonet rose once more, protectively.

  “Your Majesty,” the voice said again. “I realize this is all going to be . . . a bit difficult to explain,” it continued, and despite all of the horror which had invaded this dreadful night Sharleyan heard an edge of dry humor in the words, “but you’re safe now. I regret,” the voice had darkened once more, “that I couldn’t get here sooner.”

  “C-Captain Athrawes?” Even now, Sharleyan felt a stab of irritation at the quaver she couldn’t quite keep completely out of her voice. Don’t be such a twit! the back of her brain told her sharply. On a night like this, even one of the Archangels would probably sound shaken!