A Mighty Fortress (69 page)

Even those who’d contrived to get out of Zion had only delayed the inevitable. They were all being watched by trusted Inquisitors who were simply waiting for the semaphore message to take them into custody.

I suppose it’s remotely possible one or two of them might manage to escape, at least briefly
.
But not more than one or two . . . and anyone who does run won’t get far.

No one who knew Lysbet Wylsynn would have recognized her in “Chantahal Blahndai’s” warm, but extremely plain, Harchong- style poncho, worn over an equally utilitarian hooded, woolen coat. At least, Lysbet thought, as she tucked her mittened hands into her armpits under the poncho, burrowed her chin deeper into her woven muffler, and hunched her head against the wind, she devoutly hoped they wouldn’t have.

She’d always hated Zion in the winter. Her husband’s estates lay in the southern Temple Lands, just across the border from the Princedom of Tanshar. Lysbet’s own family, although it had connections to quite a few of the great Church dynasties, was Tansharan, and while winter could be cold enough along the Gulf of Tanshar, it was never as bitterly frigid as winter in Zion. Her husband had been born barely five miles on the Temple Lands’ side of the border, and he fully understood—and shared—her distaste for Zion winters. He seldom insisted that she join him here for the winter months.

He hadn’t planned on her joining him this winter, either, and for considerably more weighty reasons than her dislike for snow. In fact, he’d sent her word (very discreetly) that he thought it would be wise for her to make alternate travel plans. Unfortunately, she’d become aware, even before his message arrived, of the fact that she and the children were being watched.

It hadn’t been anything most people would have noticed, but Lysbet Wylsynn wasn’t “most people.” She was a smart, observant woman who’d recognized when she accepted Samyl Wylsynn’s proposal that wedding a husband from that particular dynasty was inevitably going to embroil her in Temple politics. The notion had repelled her, but despite the differences in their ages, Samyl most definitely had
not
— her lips twitched in bittersweet memory—and she’d shared his outrage over what Mother Church had become.

She hadn’t expected things to get this bad. Not really. No one ever
really
expected the end of their world, even when they genuinely thought they were prepared for it. Yet she’d always been at least intellectually prepared for the possibility of disaster, and over the last couple of years—especially since the Group of Four’s disastrous assault on the Kingdom of Charis—she’d been quietly taking precautions of her own. And unlike the other members of Samyl’s Circle within the vicarate, Lysbet had known who the true hub for the Reformists’ communications had been. When Adorai Dynnys had been forced to flee to Charis following her husband’s arrest, she’d passed her own responsibilities on to Lysbet. In the process, she’d had to give Lysbet certain information only Adorai and Samyl had possessed, which meant Lysbet had become aware of Ahnzhelyk Phonda’s importance to the Circle . . . even though almost no one else
in
the Circle had entertained the least suspicion of that importance.

So far as Lysbet knew, she and Samyl—and Samyl’s brother, Hauwerd—were now the only people in the Temple Lands who knew about Ahnzhelyk’s connection to the Circle at all. So when she’d realized she and the children were being watched, that any effort to flee would be instantly intercepted, she’d decided on a plan of her own. Instead of staying away from Zion, she’d written—openly, using her privileges as a senior vicar’s wife to send it over the Church semaphore—to tell Samyl she’d be joining him there this winter, after all. And she’d made arrangements to do just that.

Then she’d made rather
different
(and much quieter) arrangements with Ahnzhelyk. She hadn’t expected all three of the Inquisitors who’d been spying on her to end up dead in the process, but she hadn’t shed any hypocritical tears over their demises, either. Unfortunately, Ahnzhelyk’s initial plan to immediately get her and the children out of the Temple Lands had proved unworkable in light of the clandestine but intense search for them which Wyllym Rayno had instigated. The open hunt for her family’s “abductors” would have been a serious obstacle under the best of circumstances, yet it was Rayno’s ruthlessly efficient
secret
hunt which had inspired Ahnzhelyk’s caution.

And her determination to get as many
other
families out of the city as she can,
Lysbet reminded herself now. The selfish mother in her—the mother who wanted
her
children in safety, and Shan- wei with anyone
else’s
children!— bitterly resented that decision on Ahnzhelyk’s part. Most of her, though, agreed entirely. Despite her terror for her own family’s safety, she knew that simply abandoning anyone else they could have saved would have been a betrayal of everything the Circle had ever stood for.

And since her husband, and her brother- in- law, and most of their dearest friends in the vicarate were going to
die
for what the Circle had stood for, Lysbet Wylsynn could no more have betrayed their cause than Ahnzhelyk could.

None of which had made the nerve- racking five- days hiding here in Zion, the city which had become the heart of the beast itself, any easier to endure. The good news was that Chantahal Blahndai didn’t look at all like Lysbet Wylsynn. She was older, her hair was a different color, she had a prominent mole on her chin, and she was at least thirty pounds heavier than slender, youthful Madame Wylsynn. Not only that, but whereas Madame Wylsynn had been accompanied by both of her sons and her daughter when she disappeared, Chantahal had only a single son.

It was amazing how skilled someone who’d followed Ahnzhelyk’s vocation became when it came to matters of cosmetics and hair dye, and winter clothing made it far easier to pad one’s figure without anyone noticing. And while most mothers wouldn’t normally have wanted their twelve- year- old daughters and eight- year- old sons spending the winter in what was, however elegant it might be, a “house of ill repute,” Lysbet had no concern in Zhanayt’s or Archbahld’s case. In fact, she couldn’t think of anyplace they might have been safer, and her greatest concern had been that one of them—especially Archbahld, in view of his youth—might inadvertently betray them all to the Inquisition. Her older son, Tohmys, on the other hand, was fourteen now—a serious boy who already shared his father’s sorrow (and anger) over what Mother Church had become. He was his uncle’s nephew, as well, however. Like Hau werd, he’d been headed for a career in the Temple Guard, and despite his youth, he was a skilled swordsman and an excellent shot, whether with a matchlock musket, an arbalest, or a standard bow. He was also fiercely protective of his mother, and he’d flatly refused to join his younger brother and sister in hiding.

Truth to tell, Lysbet hadn’t tried all that hard to convince him to do so. Partly because she recognized his father’s son and knew a futile endeavor when she saw one. But mostly because as much as she trusted Ahnzhelyk, and as effective as Ahnzhelyk had always proved herself to be, Lysbet hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to put all of her eggs in one basket. Which was also the reason Ahnzhelyk had made completely different arrangements to whisk Lysbet’s oldest daughter (well, stepdaughter, technically, although she was the only mother Erais had ever actually known) and her husband and son out from under the Inquisition’s nose. Lysbet suspected that her own willingness to come to Zion had been a factor in Ahnzhelyk’s ability to do just that. She’d been so clearly willing to walk directly into the spider’s web that the Inquisition’s vigilance over Sir Fraihman Zhardeau and his wife and son had lapsed, at least a little.

She’d rejoiced in quiet, fervent gratitude when Ahnzhelyk got her word that Fraihman, Erais, and young Samyl had made good their escape . . . at least for the present. But now, under a wind- polished sky of frozen blue, as she made her way along an icy sidewalk half- blocked by overnight snowdrifts, their centers trampled down by the feet of earlier traffic, she felt the familiar weight of despair. Not for her own safety, and not really for the safety of her children and grandchild—although that was a much sharper, more bitter- edged anxiety than any she might feel for herself. She had no intention of becoming careless, yet she’d come to the conclusion that if the Inquisition had been going to find her or her children, they would have done so by now. No, the despair she felt was not for herself, but for her husband and all he’d striven for so long to accomplish. For the friends and trusted colleagues who’d given him their allegiance and their assistance . . . and who were going to share in his agonizing death when the moment came.

It’s not as if he tricked or deceived any of them into supporting him,
she thought, hugging herself more tightly under her poncho as the keen- toothed wind whistled between the tenements on either side of the street.
All of them were as angry and determined as
he
was, and all of them knew this could happen. Yet to know it
is
going to happen, that someone like that greedy, bloody- minded bastard Clyntahn is going to
win
after all
...

Lysbet had no way of knowing how her own thoughts, her own anger at God for allowing this to happen, mirrored her brother- in- law’s reaction. If she had known, it wouldn’t have surprised her; she’d known Hauwerd as long as she’d known Samyl, and in many ways, she and Hauwerd were more alike than she and Samyl. Which was probably the reason she’d been so much more strongly attracted to Samyl from the very beginning than she’d ever been drawn to Hauwerd—as a husband and a lover, at least. As a brother- in- law, he’d always been her favorite. Dearer to her, in fact (though she would never have admitted it), than either of her birth brothers. There was a reason she’d been so content to see Tohmys taking so strongly after his uncle, for she couldn’t imagine a better pattern he could have chosen for himself.

She reached the corner where Hahriman Street met Market Street, halfway between her cheap, spartanly furnished tenement apartment and Zion’s third largest market, and glanced across the street at the milliner’s.

She didn’t even pause as she turned the corner, and her stride never hesitated, but her eyes first widened, then narrowed, as she saw the shop window. A bolt of blue fabric—steel thistle silk, she thought—was displayed in that window, and the shop’s coal heaver must have spilled a couple of large lumps of coal just on the other side of the barred delivery gate when he made the morning’s delivery. Someone had spilled them there, at least. Lysbet could see the glittering black chunks, starkly visible against the dirty snow, just far enough inside the gate that none of the city’s desperate poor could glean them.

It took only a single glance to note the silk and the coal, and she bent her head a little more deeply as she found herself walking directly into the wind, now.

She would continue to the market, she thought. It was Chantahal’s regular shopping day, and she would chaffer for the ruinously expensive potatoes and winter- woody carrots she’d come to purchase. She might even pick up a few onions, assuming they weren’t
too
pricey this late in the winter, before she headed back to her tenement once more.

What ever she did, however, she would give no sign, and no indication at all, that she’d seen that blue silk or those lumps of coal.

That she’d recognized in them Ahnzhelyk’s warning to be ready to move on an instant’s notice.

Madame Ahnzhelyk’s Townhouse

and

The Temple,

City of Zion,

The Temple Lands

Ahbraim Zhevons gazed into the mirror at his hazel eyes and brown hair. There was a faint—very faint—“family resemblance” to Merlin Athrawes and Nimue Alban, he thought. Something about the lips that he hadn’t managed to randomize as much as he’d intended. He wondered if his subconscious had been responsible for that, or if it was simply a quirk in the PICA software which had carried over. Prior to her cybernetic reincarnation, Nimue had never been particularly interested in the software which allowed a PICA’s appearance to be modified at will. She’d been more interested in its applications for extreme sports. For that matter, she’d never really
wanted
a PICA at all; it had been a gift from her wealthy father she simply hadn’t had the heart to turn down. So she was nowhere near as well versed in the “cosmetic” aspects of her current physical avatar as she might have been, and it
was
possible something in its software might have been responsible for the carryover.

Sure it could have been,
“Ahbraim” thought sardonically.
But it wasn’t. You know that perfectly well, Merlin
.