At the Sign of Triumph

by David Weber

  It’s over.

  The thought went through his mind softly, quietly, with something almost like a sense of … relief. No, not relief. That was the wrong word. But he couldn’t think of the right word for the strange empty, singing silence deep within him.

  It doesn’t matter what Brygham or Walkyr or Rainbow Waters can do in the field, he thought. Not anymore. There’s simply no physical way we can haul enough food, enough ammunition, or enough men forward to support them. They could fight like Chihiro himself come back to earth, and it wouldn’t change one damned thing in the end.

  He saw the same awareness, the same recognition, in Allayn Maigwair’s eyes, and he started to open his mouth. He wasn’t certain what he was going to say, how he’d find the words, and someone else spoke before he found them.

  “I think it might be time to … seek direct contact with Cayleb and Sharleyan and Stohnar.”

  The hesitant voice was Zahmsyn Trynair’s, and Duchairn’s eyes widened in astonishment as the Chancellor looked nervously at Clyntahn.

  The Grand Inquisitor seemed not to have heard him for a handful of seconds. Then he turned his head, looking back at Trynair.

  “What did you say?” he asked, and Duchairn’s astonishment grew.

  The question had come out calmly, almost courteously, as if Trynair’s suggestion had been perfectly reasonable, and now Clyntahn cocked his head. His expression was almost as calm as his tone, and he made a little encouraging motion with his right hand.

  “I said … I said it might be time to seek contact with Cayleb and Sharleyan and Stohnar,” Trynair said, and leaned forward slightly. “I know none of us want to even contemplate that, but if … if the situation’s as … as serious as it seems to have become, then it seems unlikely we can expect a … successful resolution on the battlefield. So perhaps it’s time we sought a diplomatic approach.”

  “A diplomatic approach,” Clyntahn repeated. He leaned back in his own chair, folding his hands across his midsection, and raised his eyebrows. “What sort of ‘diplomatic approach’ did you have in mind, Zahmsyn?”

  “Well,” Trynair said a bit hesitantly, “I think we probably have to begin by forming a … a realistic view of what Mother Church’s prospects are if we continue the war. I mean, we need to have an accurate understanding of our capabilities—and how they compare to the heretics’—before we can assess what we can realistically ask for.”

  “Ask for at the negotiating table, I presume you mean?”

  “Yes.” Trynair nodded, his expression more animated at the evidence of Clyntahn’s willingness to hear him out. “It’s always important to decide ahead of time what points are and aren’t negotiable, Zhaspahr. And it’s just as important to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of both sides’ positions before sitting down at the table. Each of them is going to assess what it demands—or what it’s willing to concede—based on what it expects continuing the war would cost it.”

  “And I imagine it’s equally important to decide what’s the minimum you’re prepared to accept from the other side. Especially when you’re negotiating on God’s behalf,” Clyntahn observed in that same calm, reasonable voice, and something in his eyes sent a thousand tiny, icy feet scuttling up and down Duchairn’s spine.

  “Oh, absolutely!” Trynair nodded again, firmly, and Duchairn could almost physically feel the Chancellor’s eagerness. It was like watching someone awaken from a trance, rousing as he realized his diplomatic competence and experience had suddenly become relevant once more.

  “You always have to understand what you can and can’t bargain away,” he went on. “And it’s always important to remember that you’re not going to get everything you ask for. In this case, I think we’re all in agreement that Mother Church can’t bargain away her religious authority. That has to be guaranteed at an absolute minimum. But we might be willing to offer some accommodations to the Reformists’ less outrageous demands.”

  “I don’t think it would be acceptable for Mother Church to surrender any significant doctrinal points, Zahmsyn,” Clyntahn said thoughtfully.

  “Oh, no! Not permanently,” Trynair agreed. “I’m not suggesting we should do anything of the sort! But we might need to convince them we’d be willing to, if only to get them started talking to us. If we tell them we’re prepared to negotiate and both sides agree to a cease-fire in place while we do, I’m sure we could spin the talks out at least to the end of summer. Trust me, my people and I are old hands at that sort of thing!” He smiled. “If we get them talking in the first place, I’m confident we can keep them talking until the first snow shuts down the fighting. That would give us all winter to improve our military position, and if we did that, we’d be able to hold out for much better terms next year. The longer they give us to recover, the more expensive it becomes for them to defeat us militarily. And the more expensive that becomes, the more … amenable to reason they’ll be.”

  “And you genuinely think you could negotiate an acceptable balance of authority between Mother Church and someone like Cayleb Ahrmahk or Greyghor Stohnar? Forgive me if I seem just a trifle skeptical about that, after all this time and all this bloodshed.”

  “I don’t know,” Trynair said frankly. “I only know it’s our best chance—our only chance, really—given how bad things look. I may not be able to get them to agree to our minimal terms, but there’s at least the possibility that I can. On the other hand, if we continue the Jihad and lose—and that’s exactly what seems to be happening, Zhaspahr—they’ll be in a position to dictate any terms they want, and I think we can all imagine what those terms would be like.”

  “I imagine we can,” Clyntahn agreed. He sat for several more moments, his lips pursed in thought, then gave a small nod and stretched out an arm. He passed one hand over the glowing God light on the table before him, and the council chamber door slid open once more as one of the purple-cassocked agents inquisitor in the antechamber answered the soft chime.

  “Yes, Your Grace?” he said, signing himself with Langhorne’s scepter and bowing to the Grand Inquisitor.

  “Arrest him,” Clyntahn replied conversationally, and pointed at Trynair.

  Zahmsyn Trynair slammed back in his chair, staring at Clyntahn in disbelief, but the agent inquisitor only nodded, as if the order to arrest Mother Church’s Chancellor was nothing out of the ordinary. The sound of his heels was loud in the brutal, echoing silence as he crossed to Trynair’s end of the table.

  “If you’ll accompany me, please, Your Grace.”

  The words were courteous, but the tone was icy and Trynair shook his head, still staring at Clyntahn.

  “Zhaspahr, please,” he whispered. “You can’t! I mean—”

  “I know exactly what you mean, Zahmsyn,” Clyntahn said, and the veneer of thoughtful, interested curiosity had vanished. “You mean you’re willing to sit down across a table from that bastard Cayleb and that harlot Sharleyan and bargain away God’s own authority to save your worthless arse.” His voice was as implacable as his frozen eyes. “I should’ve realized long ago that you’d betray Him and His Archangels anytime you saw an advantage to it. But just as God knows His own, His Inquisition knows how to deal with Shan-wei’s own.”

  “But I’m not!” Trynair rose from his chair, holding out an imploring hand. “You know I’m not! I’m trying to save Mother Church from losing everything if the heretics defeat our last armies!”

  “Don’t be any stupider than you have to be,” Clyntahn sneered. “Mother Church is God’s Bride. She can’t lose—not in the end—so long as one faithful, loyal son stands to fight for her! But I don’t suppose a traitor to God could be expected to understand that, could he?”

  “I—”

  Trynair broke off, his face paper-white, terror beginning to flare in his eyes as panic leached away the anesthetic of shock. He stared at Clyntahn, and then his eyes darted desperately to Duchairn and Maigwair.

  “Don’t expect them to save you,” Clyntahn said flatly, je
rking the Chancellor’s eyes back to him, and contempt edged his voice. “Unlike you, they’re dutiful sons of Mother Church. They understand their responsibilities … just as they understand the consequences of failing to meet those responsibilities.”

  Duchairn’s jaw clenched so tightly he expected his teeth to shatter, but he managed to hold his tongue. It wasn’t easy when he saw the horror in Trynair’s eyes, but he couldn’t miss the message in Clyntahn’s. The Grand Inquisitor was perfectly prepared to make a clean sweep, to have all of them arrested to free his own hand for the Jihad. If he did, the consequences would be disastrous for Mother Church, but none of them would be there to see it when he took the entire Church down in ruin with him.

  He’s mad, Duchairn thought. He’s finally gone completely mad. He knows—intellectually, he knows as well as I do—the Jihad’s lost. As Allayn and Zahmsyn do. But he’ll never admit it. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. He’s ready to ride the Jihad all the way to Mother Church’s total destruction if God isn’t willing to validate him by producing the miracle it would take to prevent that. And he’ll kill anyone who disagrees with him.

  The awareness, Clyntahn’s challenge, lay between them, stark and ugly, and Rhobair Duchairn made himself sit back in his chair. He forced himself to meet Clyntahn’s cold serpent’s eyes without flinching … but he said nothing.

  Clyntahn’s nostrils flared and his lip curled. Then he looked back at the agent inquisitor.

  “Take him,” he said, and the agent inquisitor laid a hand on Trynair’s arm.

  Trynair stared down at it for a single heartbeat. But then his eyes closed and his shoulders slumped. He stood a moment longer, until the agent inquisitor tugged. When his eyes opened again, they were empty—empty of fear, of hope, of anything at all—and he followed the agent inquisitor from the chamber, walking like a man lost in nightmare.

  Clyntahn watched him go, then rose from his own chair and stood facing Duchairn and Maigwair across the table.

  “Nothing can excuse the treason of a vicar—especially of Mother Church’s own Chancellor—when she’s fighting for her very life against the forces of hell unleashed upon the world.” Every word was carved out of ice, and his eyes were colder still. “Understand me well, both of you. Anyone who betrays the Jihad, regardless of position or power, betrays God, and that will never be tolerated, never pass unpunished. Never. The Inquisition’s rod will find him out, and it will break him.”

  He held them with those frozen eyes, daring them to speak, then inhaled deeply.

  “Perhaps it’s as well this has happened,” he said then. “It’s time all of God’s children were made aware that anyone who fails God must pay the price. And so they will. The Holy Inquisition will teach them that when Zahmsyn faces the Punishment tomorrow.”

  He gave them one final, icy look, then stalked from the chamber in silence.

  AUGUST

  YEAR OF GOD 898

  .I.

  The Halberd Rest Tavern,

  City of Zion,

  The Temple Lands.

  “I’ll be honest,” Captain Ahksynov Laihu said somberly as the waitress set the fresh tankard on the table and disappeared with the latest empty one, “I never thought I’d see anything like today. Never.”

  He buried his nose in the tankard, swallowing a deep draft of the honeyed mead he favored, then set it down with a thump. The background noise was more muted than one ever heard in The Halberd Rest. The raucous shouts of greeting, the cheerful ribaldry directed at the long-suffering waitresses—who normaly gave back as good as they got—and the clink and rattle of cutlery were all subdued, as if a cloud of silence hung suspended in the tobacco smoke among the rafters.

  “Don’t know why not, Sir,” Sergeant Phylyp Preskyt said from the other side of the square table. Laihu looked at him, and Preskyt shrugged. “Not exactly the first vicar to face the Punishment,” he pointed out.

  Trust Preskyt to put it into perspective, Ahrloh Mahkbyth thought, nursing his own glass of whiskey.

  He sat between the captain and the sergeant at the small table tucked into an alcove in the back of the tavern’s dining room. It was a very inconveniently placed alcove, right beside the swinging doors from the kitchen. The traffic was heavy as waiters and waitresses shuttled back and forth past it with trays of food, and the noise as orders were shouted to the cooks through the huge, square window beside the doors made it difficult for people sitting in it to hear one another without raising their voices. On the other hand, it was almost impossible to see into it from most of the dining room floor, and if the people around the table found it difficult to hear one another, it was even more difficult for anyone else to hear them.

  I really shouldn’t be doing this, Mahkbyth told himself now, looking back and forth between the two Temple Guardsmen. What I should be doing is sitting at home, keeping my head down and making damned sure I don’t draw any attention to myself!

  Unfortunately, that had turned out to be rather more difficult than usual.

  He’d gone to witness Zahmsyn Trynair’s Punishment for a confused tangle of reasons he couldn’t completely sort out. Part of it, and he was honest enough to admit it to himself, was that he’d wanted to see Trynair’s death. If any man had ever deserved to suffer the Punishment, it had to be one of the four who’d launched the madness of the Jihad and condemned so many millions of others to the same fate. He didn’t really want to see and hear anyone screaming as the white-hot irons were applied, or as the roaring pyre consumed his tortured body, but if it had to happen to anyone, he couldn’t think of a better candidate. Well, no, that wasn’t quite true. He could definitely think of a better candidate, but the odds against anyone condemning Zhaspahr Clyntahn to that fate were … slim.

  He’d also gone because he’d been quietly underlining his piety ever since Zhorzhet Styvynsyn and Marzho Alysyn died in the Inquisition’s custody. It turned his stomach, but he knew the value of protective coloration. And he’d gone to touch base with two or three old comrades from his own days in the Guard. Maintaining those contacts was part of his public persona, and their willingness to share barracks scuttlebutt with an old retired sergeant often provided Helm Cleaver with useful tidbits of information. Besides, many of them had been his friends for decades—like Laihu and Preskyt—and he missed them.

  He hadn’t expected them to invite him to The Halberd Rest for sausages and beer, though. Food was the last thing he would’ve thought of after the hideous spectacle they’d just witnessed. But he’d forgotten the pragmatism of serving guardsmen, just as he’d forgotten the way in which familiar food and drink could comfort a man when he needed it worst.

  Laihu was quite a few years younger than Mahkbyth, with the dark hair and eyes of his Harchongese ancestry. He was also an intelligent, insightful fellow who’d learned the realities behind the Temple’s façade only too well over the course of a thirty-year career, and once upon a time, long, long ago, Mahkbyth had been the senior sergeant in Lieutenant Laihu’s platoon for almost five years. He’d come to know the other man well during those years, and it amazed him sometimes that Laihu could have served that long a career, well over half of it right here in Zion, without succumbing to the cynicism that was so much a part of Temple duty. It amazed him even more that Laihu was still on active duty in Zion, given the doubts he knew the captain had cherished for many years about the fashion in which the vicarate’s morality reflected—or didn’t—the Archangels’ true intentions.

  Of course, you always knew he was a smart fellow, Ahrloh. Certainly smart enough to keep his mouth shut about the sorts of things that get a man killed!

  He did, indeed, know that. In fact, he’d considered attempting to recruit Laihu for Helm Cleaver more than once. But the captain was also a man of stubborn integrity who took his oaths seriously. There’d never been much chance he’d violate those oaths, even for an old friend.

  Not before the Jihad, anyway, Mahkbyth reflected. Might be a little different these days. But it mig
ht not, too.

  “You’ve got a point, Phylyp,” Laihu said now, his expression that of a man who’d just tasted something spoiled. “Never sat right what happened to Vicar Hauwerd. Never. And I’ll tell you what.” He looked Mahkbyth straight in the eye. “Vicar Hauwerd and his brother? No way they were guilty of all the crap they were accused of! I never knew Vicar Samyl well, but I served under Hauwerd when he was with the Guard. So did you, Ahrloh! You think the two of them would’ve conspired against Mother Church?”

  “I think you may have had a little too much mead, Ahksynov,” Mahkbyth replied. “That’s not exactly the sort of question a dutiful son of Mother Church ought to be asking another dutiful son of Mother Church at a time like this.”

  “If you can’t ask another dutiful son of Mother Church, who can you ask?” Laihu shot back.

  “Pretty sure that’s not exactly what Ahrloh meant, Sir,” Preskyt said. The sergeant was a solid, square shouldered fellow with a stolid, intensely loyal personality. He’d been Mahkbyth’s senior corporal when they’d both served in Laihu’s platoon, and he’d been with Laihu ever since. Now he shook his head. “Business of a good sergeant is to keep officers from doing the stupid stuff,” he pointed out. “And I hate to say it, but asking the wrong question where the wrong set of ears can hear comes under the head of really stupid stuff right now.”

  Despite himself, Mahkbyth chuckled. Then he looked back at Laihu.

  “That’s exactly what I meant,” he said. “Mind you, Phylyp’s much more eloquent than I am, but he’s grasped the nub of my thought.”

  Laihu snorted into his mead, and Mahkbyth shook his head with a smile. But then the smile faded, and he shrugged.

  “Having said that, no. I don’t think for a second the Wylsynns were guilty of everything they were accused of. I’m not prepared to say they weren’t guilty of anything they were accused of, but I’ll guarantee you they were never in this world involved in Shan-wei worship or an effort to destroy Mother Church.”