Hell's Foundations Quiver (3 page)

“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 bedchamber. “Without, I might add, all of your—well,
our
, I suppose—advantages, either.”

“I've always realized she was a remarkable woman,” 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 that 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 archbishop 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.

*   *   *

“… 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 Ahnzhelyk's care had made the convent a good hunting ground for the Sisters of Saint Kohdy for many years. Not that most of Saint Ahnzhelyk'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 Kohdy 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.”

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 explained 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.”

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?