A Mighty Fortress (2 page)

Best not to dwell too heavily on the heresy, Paitryk,
Hainree told himself.
Leave the ones already on fire over that to burn for themselves. Father Aidryn’s right about that; they’ll be hot enough without you. Spend
your
sparks on other tinder.

“I’ve no doubt God and Langhorne—and the Archangel
Schueler
— will deal with that, in time,” he said out loud. “That’s God’s business, and Mother Church’s, and I’ll leave it to them! But what happens
outside
the Church—what happens in Corisande, or here on the streets of Manchyr—that’s
man’s
business.
Our
business! A
man’s
got to know what it is he stands for, and when he knows, he has to truly
stand,
not just wave his hands about and wish things were
different
.”

The last word came out in a semi- falsetto sneer, and he felt the fresh anger frothing up.

“Hektor!” a wiry man with a badly scarred left cheek shouted. Hainree couldn’t see him, but he recognized the voice easily enough. He should have, after all. Rahn Aimayl had been one of his senior apprentices before the Charisian invasion ruined Hainree’s once thriving business, along with so many other of the besieged capital’s enterprises, and Hainree had been there when a cracked mold and a splash of molten silver produced the scar on Aimayl’s cheek.

“Hektor!” Aimayl repeated now.
“Hektor!”

“Hektor, Hektor!” other voices took up the shout, and this time Hainree’s smile could have been a slash lizard’s.

“Well,” he shouted then, “there’s a hell of a lot more of
us
than there are of
them,
when all’s said! And I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready—yet—to assume that
all
of our lords and great men and members of Parliament are ready to suck up to Cayleb like this so- called
Regency Council
! Maybe all they
really
need is a little indication that some of the
rest
of us aren’t ready to do that, either!”

“Hek
- tor!
Hek
- tor!
”

Sergeant Edvard Waistyn grimaced as the crowd streamed closer and its chant rose in both volume and anger. It was easy enough to make out the words, despite the majestic, measured tolling of the cathedral’s bells coming from so close at hand. Of course, one reason it might have been so easy for him to recognize that chant was that, unfortunately, he’d already heard quite a few other chants, very much like it, over the last few five- days.

And it’s not anything I’m not going to be hearing a lot
more
of over the
next
few five- days, neither,
he thought grimly.

The sergeant, one of the scout- snipers assigned to the First Battalion, Third Brigade, Imperial Charisian Marines, lay prone on the roof, gazing up along the narrow street below his perch. The crowd flowing down that street, through the shadows between the buildings, still seemed touched by just a bit of hesitancy. The anger was genuine enough, and he didn’t doubt they’d started out in the full fire of their outrage, but now they could see the cathedral’s dome and steeples rising before them. The notion of... registering their unhappiness was no longer focused on some future event. It was almost
here
now, and that could have unpleasant consequences for some of them.

Still and all, I’m not thinking this is one as’ll just blow over with only a little wind. There’s rain in this one—and some
thunder,
too, like as not
.

His intent eyes swept slowly, steadily across the men and boys shaking their fists and hurling imprecations in the direction of the rifle- armed men formed up in front of Manchyr Cathedral in the traditional dark blue tunics and light blue trousers of the Charisian Marines. Those Marines formed a watchful line, a barrier between the shouters and another crowd—this one much quieter, moving quickly—as it flowed up the steps behind them.

So far, none of the sporadic “spontaneous demonstrations” had intruded upon the cathedral or its grounds. Waistyn was actually surprised it hadn’t happened already, given the ready- made rallying point the “heretical” Church of Charis offered the people out to organize resistance to the Charisian occupation. Maybe there’d been even more religious discontent in Corisande than the sergeant would have thought before the invasion? And maybe it was just that even the most belligerent rioter hesitated to trespass on the sanctity of Mother Church.

And maybe
this
crowd’s feeling a little more adventurous than the last few have,
he thought grimly.

“Traitors!” The shout managed to cut through the rhythmic chant of the assassinated Corisandian prince’s name. “Murderers!
Assassins!
”

“Get out! Get the hell out—and take your murdering bastard of an
‘emperor’
with you!”

“Hek-
tor!
Hek-
tor!
”

The volume increased still further, difficult as that was to achieve, and the crowd began to flow forward once again, with more assurance, as if its own bellowed imprecations were burning away any last- minute hesitation.

I could wish General Gahrvai had his own men down here,
Waistyn reflected.
If this goes as bad as I
think
it could
...A group of armsmen in the white and orange colors of the Archbishop’s Guard marched steadily down the street towards the cathedral, and the volume of the shouts ratcheted still higher as those same protesters caught sight of the white cassock and the white- cockaded priest’s cap with its broad orange ribbon at the heart of the guardsmen’s formation.

“Heretic!
Traitor!
” someone screamed. “Langhorne knows his own—
and so does Shan- wei!
”

Perfect,
Waistyn thought disgustedly.
Couldn’t’ve come in the
back
way, could he now? Don’t be daft, Edvard—of
course
he couldn’t! Not today, of all days!
He shook his head.
Oh, isn’t
this
going to be fun?

Down at street level, Lieutenant Brahd Tahlas, the youthful commanding officer of Second Platoon, Alpha Company, found himself thinking very much the same thoughts as the veteran sergeant perched above him. In fact, he was thinking them with even more emphasis, given his closer proximity to the steadily swelling mob.

And his greater responsibility for dealing with it. “I can’t say I’m liking this all that much, Sir,” Platoon Sergeant Zhak Maigee muttered. The platoon sergeant was half again Tahlas’ age, and he’d first enlisted in the Royal Charisian Marines when he was all of fifteen years old. He’d been a lot of places and seen a lot of things since then—or, as he was occasionally wont to put it, “met a lot of interesting people . . . and killed ’em!”— and he’d learned his trade thoroughly along the way. That normally made him a reassuring presence, but at the moment his face wore that focused, intent- on- the-business- in- hand expression of an experienced noncom looking at a situation which offered all sorts of possibilities . . . none of them good. He’d been careful to keep his voice low enough only Tahlas could possibly have heard him, and the lieutenant shrugged.

“I don’t much care for it myself,” he admitted in the same quiet voice, more than a little surprised by how steady he’d managed to keep it. “If you have any suggestions about how to magically convince all these idiots to just disappear, I’m certainly open to them, Sergeant.”

Despite the situation, Maigee snorted. He rather liked his young lieutenant, and what ever else, the boy had steady nerves. Which probably had something to do with why he’d been selected by Major Portyr for his current assignment.

And Maigee’s of course.

“Now, somehow, Sir, I can’t seem to come up with a way to do that just this very minute. Let me ponder on it, and I’ll get back to you.”

“Good. In the meantime, though, keep your eye on that group over there, by the lamppost.” Tahlas flicked one hand in an unobtrusive gesture, indicating the small knot of men he had in mind. “I’ve been watching them. Most of these idiots look like the sort of idlers and riffraff who could have just sort of turned up, but not those fellows.”

Maigee considered the cluster of Corisandians Tahlas had singled out and decided the lieutenant had a point. Those men weren’t in the crowd’s front ranks, but they weren’t at the rear, either, and they seemed oddly... cohesive. As if they were their own little group, not really part of the main crowd. Yet they were watching the men about them intensely, with a sort of focus that was different from anyone else’s, and some of those other men were watching them right back. Almost as if they were . . . waiting for something. Or
anticipating
it, maybe.

The cluster of Church armsmen was closer, now, Waistyn observed, and the quantity of abuse coming from the crowd swelled steadily. It couldn’t get a whole lot louder, but it was getting more . . . inclusive as shouts and curses with a clear, definitely religious content added themselves to the ongoing chant of Prince Hektor’s name.

“All right, lads,” the sergeant said calmly to the rest of the squad of scout-snipers on the roof with him. “Check your priming, but no one so much as moves an eyelash without
I
give the order!”

A quiet chorus of acknowledgment came back to him, and he grunted in approval, but he never took his eyes from the street below him. Despite his injunction, he wasn’t concerned by any itchy trigger fingers, really. All of his Marines were veterans, and all of them had been there when Major Portyr made his instructions perfectly—one might almost have said
painfully
— clear. The last thing anyone wanted was for Charisian Marines to open fire on an “unarmed crowd” of civilians in the streets of Corisande’s capital. Well, maybe that was the
next
to last thing, actually. Waistyn was pretty sure that letting anything unfortunate happen to Archbishop Klairmant would be even less desirable. That, after all, was what Waistyn’s squad had been put up here to prevent.

Of course, unless we’re ready to start shooting anyone as soon as they get in range of him, it’s possible we might just be a
tad
late when it comes to the “preventing” part,
he thought with profound disgust.