A Mighty Fortress (61 page)

Most of those incidents, he thought—and Doyal agreed—were genuinely spontaneous, the result of personal anger or frustration, and they’d arrested, jailed, and fined several of the people responsible for them. Personally, Gahrvai would have preferred a punishment that was rather more severe, but Viceroy General Chermyn had strongly supported Archbishop Klairmant’s view that the authorities’ response had to balance severity with restraint. Chermyn had made it clear that so long as there were no riots or large- scale violence, he intended to allow Gahrvai and the Regency Council to set policy in such matters, yet he’d also emphasized his own instructions from Emperor Cayleb and Empress Sharleyan to be no more repressive than he absolutely had to be.

Most of the time, Gahrvai appreciated that restraint on Chermyn’s part. For that matter,
most
of the time he agreed with the viceroy general and the archbishop. But there’d been a handful—a steadily growing trickle—of uglier, more violent attacks, and he rather doubted
those
incidents were spontaneous and unplanned. He’d been concerned by the pattern he’d seen emerging over the past several five- days, and now there was this. There was no way to pretend Father Tymahn’s abduction, torture, and murder had been the impulsive act of some individual hothead. This had been carefully planned and executed, and it had been intended as much as a challenge to the secular and temporal authorities as as a warning to other Reformist- minded priests.

There’s restraint, and then there’s weakness,
Gahrvai thought grimly.
When they chose Father Tymahn they deliberately chose one of the most beloved men in this entire city. They
chose
to kill the focus of all that love, all that trust, and they did it, at least in part, to prove they
could
do it. To enhearten the Loyalists—who probably hated him as much as everyone else loved him—and to demonstrate that we can’t even find them, much less stop them from doing it again, whenever they choose to. I don’t think even the Archbishop is going to be arguing in favor of a great deal of “restraint” when we find the butchers who did
this.
But that’s the rub, isn’t it, Koryn? First you’ve got to
find
them, and you don’t even know where to start looking!

He hated—
hated
—admitting that, yet it was pointless to pretend otherwise. Oh, he and Doyal had their own agents, and a surprising number of individuals had been coming forward, generally to speak quietly with their own parish priests about things they’d seen or heard. Aided by those hints, Doyal’s agents had penetrated at least a dozen individual groups—“cells,” as Doyal called them, likening them to the individual cells in a honeycomb—but all of them, so far, had been relatively low level. In fact, most had been little more than groups of drinking buddies with thuggish mentalities. Yet even some of them had operated with more . . . sophistication than they should have been capable of. It was obvious to Doyal—and Gahrvai—that there was a far more tightly organized and centrally directed authority operating behind the scenes, one which was directing and using those low- level groups without ever identifying itself to them, and Doyal had come to the conclusion that it had actually been organized and set up, at least in part, well before the Charisian invasion. Which, considering the membership of the previous Church hierarchy here in Corisande, suggested it had probably been the work of Father Aidryn Waimyn, Bishop Executor Thomys’ intendant.

Given certain suspicions both Gahrvai and Doyal had come to nourish about just who had actually been responsible for Prince Hektor’s murder, the general longed for the opportunity to... discuss a few matters face- to- face with Father Aidryn.

But it’s not going to happen. He’s gone too deeply to ground for that,
Gahrvai thought bitterly.
I know the bastard is somewhere inside the city. I
know
it! but I don’t have a clue where, and without that
—

CRRRRRRRaaasssssshhhhh!

The sudden sound of shattering glass yanked Gahrvai up out of his thoughts. He came to his feet, right hand reaching instinctively for the hilt of the dagger he’d taken off when he entered the study. He spun towards the study windows which looked out over the landscaped garden in the town house’s square central plaza, half- crouched, and his heart raced.

He waited, muscles taut, wondering how someone had gotten past his sentries. But nothing else happened. It was so quiet he could hear the ticking of the clock in one corner, actually hear the quiet “swish- click” sound of the pendulum as it swung steadily, monotonously. After a few moments, he felt himself relaxing—a little, at least—and straightened from his semi- crouch.

There was no light beyond the windows, and he stepped cautiously around the end of the desk, eyes sweeping back and forth, then stopped once more.

There was a rock on his carpet, lying in a halo of glass fragments. It wasn’t a large rock, but his eyes narrowed as he realized someone had wrapped something around it before launching it through his study window.

He walked across to it, hearing broken glass crunch under his boots, and picked it up a bit gingerly. It was wrapped in paper, tied with twine, and he held it in his left hand, using the fingers of his right hand to brush away the slivers of glass which clung to it.

His brow furrowed, and he walked the rest of the way to the broken window, looking out through the shattered panes. Moonlight spilled down over the garden. The pools of silver and inky black were enough to confuse the eye, but not so badly that he couldn’t tell that the garden was empty. No one larger than a midget could have hidden behind its shrubbery or flower beds. So whoever had thrown this through the window obviously hadn’t hung about to see how Gahrvai was going to react. But how had they gotten into the garden in the first place? And having gotten there, how had they gotten back
out
unseen? Gahrvai knew the quality of the troopers assigned to guard his residence. If any of them had seen or heard
anything
— including the sound of breaking glass—his study would be full of armed, angry, alert men at this very moment.

Which, manifestly, it was not.

He walked back across the glass- crunching carpet and sat back down behind his desk, laying the paper- wrapped rock on the blotter in front of him. He gazed down at it for several seconds, then used a penknife to cut the twine and unwrapped it.

The paper was an envelope, he realized, and his own name was written on the outside. He wasn’t particularly surprised by the fact that, to the best of his knowledge, he’d never before seen the handwriting, but he felt a tingle of odd excitement as he weighed the envelope in his fingers and realized it must contain several sheets of paper. He had no idea why his unknown correspondent had chosen to deliver his mail in so unconventional a fashion, but he doubted that it would have taken more than a single sheet to express even the most passionate of death threats, which suggested this must be something quite different from what he’d initially assumed it must be.

He used the same penknife to slit the envelope and extracted its contents. There were eight sheets of paper—thin and expensive, covered with closely spaced lines written in the same neat, precise hand as the address on the outside of the envelope. He laid them on the blotter and adjusted his desk lamp, then bent over the letter curiously.

“Open! Open in the name of the Crown and Holy Mother Church!”

The stentorian bellow was punctuated by a sudden, deafening crash as sixteen men carrying a ten- foot, iron- headed ram slammed it into the closed gate. Whoever had issued the demand clearly wasn’t waiting for a response.

“What?!” another voice cried in obvious confusion. “What d’you think you’re
doing!?
This is a house of
God!
”

The monk assigned as the night gatekeeper dashed out of his little gate-side cubicle, wringing his hands, running for the priory’s gate even as the ram crashed into it a second time. He’d almost reached the closed portal when both halves of the gate flew abruptly open. A piece of shattered gate bar hit him in the shoulder, knocking him off his feet, and then he grunted in anguish as a large, heavy boot slammed down on his chest. He started to shout some protest, then froze abruptly, mouth half- open, as he found himself looking up at the point of a very sharp, very steady bayonet perhaps eighteen inches from his nose.

It wasn’t alone, that boot on his chest. In fact, it was only one of scores of boots as an entire company of grim- faced infantrymen stormed through the gate. More bayonets glittered, voices shouted harsh commands, and more doorways slammed open as musket butts and shoulders crashed into them.

More of the priory’s brethren came tumbling out of their cells, blinking in confusion, shouting questions. They got precious few answers. Instead, their eyes went wide in disbelief as impious hands seized them, spun them around, slammed them face- first into stone walls and columns. None of them had ever imagined such a brutal, direct assault upon monks of Mother Church, and especially not upon brothers of the Order of Schueler. Sheer, stupefied shock at such incredible impiety possessed them. They were the Inquisitors of Mother Church, the guardians and keepers of her law. How
dared
someone violate the sanctity of one of
their
priories?! Here and there, one or two started to struggle, to resist, only to cry out as waiting musket butts hammered them to their knees.

“How
dare
y—?!” one of them shouted, starting back to his feet, only to break off with a choked scream as a musket’s brass buttplate crashed into his mouth this time, not his shoulder. He went down, spitting teeth and blood, and only the quick shout of a sergeant kept that musket from hammering down on the back of his skull with lethal force.

More hands yanked the disbelieving Schuelerites’ arms behind them, rough- toothed rope bound wrists tightly, and then they were dragged—none too gently—back into the priory’s courtyard. Hard- eyed soldiers slammed them down on their knees, and they found themselves kneeling on the cobblestones, surrounded by bayonets that gleamed faintly but murderously in the moonlight while they stared up fearfully, numbed brains fighting to comprehend what was happening.

Sir Koryn Gahrvai left that to the infantry company’s experienced noncoms. His own headquarters lay just outside Saint Kathryn’s Parish, and Father Tymahn had been just as popular with many of his troops as with the majority of people who’d ever heard him preach. Even the ones who hadn’t fully agreed with him had respected him, and his sermons had been energetically discussed by Gharvai’s headquarters company. After what had happened to him, the general rather suspected those noncoms were going to find it more difficult to restrain their men than to motivate them, and he had other matters to attend to.

His boot heels rang on the stone floor as he marched purposefully down the corridor with Yairman Uhlstyn and Captain Frahnklyn Naiklos, the company’s commander, at his heels. They were accompanied by one of Naiklos’ squads, and Uhlstyn and two of the squad’s troopers carried sledgehammers, not muskets.

Gahrvai turned a corner, then looked down, consulting a handwritten sheet of paper.

“There,” he said flatly, pointing at a wall mosaic. “Stand back, Sir,” Uhlstyn replied grimly, then nodded to one of the sledgehammer- equipped soldiers. “Over there, Zhock,” he said, twitching his head, and the soldier nodded back. He and Uhlstyn stood side by side, facing the mosaic’s peaceful pastoral scene, and then the hammers swung in almost perfect unison.

The iron heads crunched into the mosaic, shattering tiles. The sound of breaking stone filled the corridor, and through it, Gahrvai could dimly hear voices from the streets beyond the priory’s walls. Saint Zhustyn’s was one of the oldest, largest priories inside the city of Manchyr proper, located in a well-to- do neighborhood less than ten blocks from Manchyr Cathedral, and the brethren’s neighbors were clearly stunned and not a little frightened by the sudden eruption of midnight violence.

Well, they’ll just have to
deal
with it,
he thought harshly, watching the hammers rise once more.
And it looks like we really did surprise the bastards, too. So maybe the rats I’m looking for are still in their holes. Or
— his teeth flashed in a fierce, predatory grin—
maybe they’re busy dashing down their escape tunnel. I’d almost prefer that, even if I’m not there to see their expressions when they run right into Charlz’s arms!

The sledgehammers thudded into the wall again. More bits and pieces of mosaic flew, but there was another sound, as well. A hollow sound which didn’t sound quite right coming from one of the priory’s ancient, solid stone walls.