By Heresies Distressed (79 page)

“I'm beginning to get a headache keeping track of who knows which part of our current set of lies,” Cayleb grumbled. He thought for a moment, then nodded. “I think you're right,” he said. “And I expect Nahrmahn will take it fairly well. He's smart enough to understand why we couldn't risk telling him about something like this until we'd had a chance to evaluate how wholeheartedly he'd decided to support the Empire.”

“Exactly.”

“All right. But in that case,” Cayleb met Merlin's eyes levelly, “do we tell
him
about Halbrook Hollow?”

“Cayleb, we're talking about your wife's uncle,” Merlin replied quietly, then shook his head in self-condemnation. “We all knew he had Temple Loyalist sympathies, and I should have been keeping a closer eye on him. I had the capability, but as you pointed out to me quite a while ago, I just don't have the time to watch everything. I had to prioritize, and I made a serious mistake in his case. I think I let the fact that he obviously did love her make me overconfident. And I probably counted on Bynzhamyn's natural suspicion more than I had a right to.” He shook his head again. “However it happened, I didn't make watching him one of my priorities, and it almost killed Sharleyan.”

“But it didn't,” Cayleb told him. “And as I also pointed out to you on the occasion to which you've just referred, it was inevitable that something like this was going to happen sooner or later. There's only one of you, Merlin. No matter how wondrous you seem to be, no matter how hard you drive yourself, there's only
one
of you.”

“I know, but—”

“Stop beating yourself over this,” Cayleb said sternly. “It's over, and she's still alive. That's the important thing. Now, you were about to say about the Duke?”

Merlin looked at him for a moment longer, then gave a slight nod of acceptance.

“I don't know whether or not anyone will find his body,” he said. “Daivys shoveled enough dirt across him and his armsmen, and enough of that whole area is still the next best thing to virgin forest, that even searchers
looking
for a grave might well miss it. But if Wave Thunder goes after Kairee, his connections to Halbrook Hollow are almost bound to come out. And explaining away his mysterious disappearance at a time like this. . . .”

He let his voice trail off then, and Cayleb snorted sourly.

“Not exactly designed to put Sharleyan's Chisholmians' minds at ease, is it?” the emperor said.

“No. And especially not in the Chamber of Commons, given his close relationship with the Army and with Green Mountain. But that's not really what you were thinking about, anyway, was it?”

“No,” Cayleb admitted with a sigh.

“She's a very smart lady,” Merlin pointed out sadly. “Much too smart not to figure it out eventually, whether we tell her about it or not. Especially if Bynzhamyn goes after Kairee. So I suppose the real question is whether there's any point in trying to protect her.”

“And how she's likely to react when she finds out we tried to,” Cayleb agreed.

“Either way, I think we definitely need to tell Nahrmahn. First, because his advice on how we handle that entire nasty part of the problem would be extremely valuable. Second, because he's as smart as Sharleyan is. Whether we tell him or not, he's going to figure it out, so we might as well tell him the entire truth—about that, at any rate—from the beginning and save everyone a little bit of time.”

“You're right, of course.” Cayleb's shoulders slumped. “I only wish you weren't. She loved him like a father, Merlin. This is going to break her heart. And, to be honest, I'm a little afraid.”

“Afraid she'll blame it at least indirectly on you?” Merlin asked gently. “That she'll see her decision to accept your proposal as the real cause for what he did . . . and for his death?”

“Yes,” the emperor admitted.

“I can't promise she won't, Cayleb. No one could. But Sharleyan isn't the first person who's had someone close to her disapprove of her marriage. And she didn't survive that long on the throne of Chisholm without learning to understand the way people's minds—and hearts—work where politics and power are concerned. Let's face it—she brought her uncle to Charis in the first place because she was afraid she wouldn't be able to trust him back home in Chisholm. She knew that much about him before she ever married you. People can punish themselves for things that don't make any sort of rational sense at all, of course, so it's possible she'll decide her marriage did ‘push him' into the actions he took, however much her intellect knows the final decision was still his and his alone. But even if she does, I think she's more likely to blame
herself
for accepting your proposal than she is to blame you for extending it.”

“I'd almost rather she did blame me,” Cayleb said very quietly, looking down at his hand as he toyed with a box of marker tokens on the edge of the map table.

This time, Merlin made no reply. Silence hovered for several seconds, and then Cayleb straightened once more.

“All right,” he said more briskly. “I think you're right about Nahrmahn, so I suppose I'd better send word that I want to see him.”

“And while we're waiting,” Merlin said, “you and I need to give some thought to the minor problem of figuring out how an emperor, who's also his own field commander, can disappear from his headquarters encampment for at least—oh, four or five hours in the middle of the night, shall we say?”

“Not to mention how we get the aforesaid emperor and field commander
out
of his headquarters encampment in the first place,” Cayleb agreed. He shook his head and chuckled. “I'm really looking forward to actually seeing this ‘recon skimmer' of yours—scared to death, mind you, but looking forward to it. But coming up with a way to get me out of here is going to be a lot harder than simply figuring out how to accomplish something as minor as, oh, convincing Hektor of Corisande that I'm really his best friend.”

Cayleb Ahrmahk's nose was pressed firmly against the inner skin of the armorplast canopy as the recon skimmer tore through the night heavens. He was the first native Safeholdian to actually fly in well over eight centuries, and Merlin could almost physically feel the young man's delight as the emperor sat in the flight couch behind his.

Getting the two of them out of the encampment had proved far simpler than Cayleb, at least, had assumed it would. It wasn't his fault he'd overestimated the difficulties, of course; unlike Merlin, he hadn't known about things like portable holographic projectors. Like the skimmer's smart skin, the projector strapped to Merlin's belt worked best under conditions of less than optimal visibility, but they'd been fortunate in the rain clouds which had moved in during the late afternoon. The rain hadn't come down very hard, but its mistiness had reduced visibility and helped the two of them blend into their background well enough that they'd been able to get a considerably earlier start, well before full darkness had fallen.

There hadn't been much point in leaving any sooner than that, given the time difference. Nineteen hundred in Corisande was only thirteen hundred in Tellesberg, but Merlin was just as happy to have the extra time in hand. It meant he didn't have to fly at high Mach numbers this time, which was good, since there weren't any handy thunderstorms to conceal his sonic boom and he'd just as soon not fly so fast he had to worry about the skimmer's skin temperature being picked up by any orbital sensors that didn't belong to
him
. And he preferred to get there a little early if he could. He could always spend the time circling high above Tellesberg, impossible for anyone to see from the ground below, and the earlier he could set the two of them down on Sharleyan's balcony, the better.

Cayleb had reminded Merlin rather forcibly of the emperor's younger brother when he actually saw the skimmer. In fact, if Merlin wanted to be accurate, he'd seemed
younger
than Crown Prince Zhan as Owl brought the vehicle into a smooth hover and deactivated the stealth features.

“Oh,
my
!” the emperor had murmured, watching through huge eyes as the skimmer abruptly snapped into visibility and settled gently into the drift of dead leaves carpeting the woodland clearing two miles outside his camp's perimeter.

His obvious delight had caused Merlin to look at the skimmer's lean, rakish gracefulness through fresh eyes, although he could scarcely imagine how its needle-nosed sleekness and swept wings must look to someone who hadn't grown up in a high-tech universe. Cayleb's reaction underscored the vast gulf between Nimue Alban's life experience and his own in a way that Merlin's time here on Safehold really hadn't.

The emperor had watched the canopy slide back and the boarding ladder extend itself, then clambered up it just a bit gingerly under Merlin's tutelage. He'd settled into the rear flight couch, and somehow he'd managed not to jump right back up out of it as its surface moved under him, configuring itself to the contours of his body. Fortunately, Merlin had warned him what would happen, but his astonishment had been obvious, anyway.

Merlin had taken him patiently through the various displays. He hadn't bothered to warn Cayleb not to touch anything he hadn't been specifically told he
could
touch. First, because Cayleb was smart enough not to do anything of the sort, anyway. Second, because Merlin had locked all of the flight controls to the front cockpit. He'd shown the emperor how to reconfigure his visual displays so that he could direct the skimmer's after optical head wherever he wanted to, and Cayleb had spent the first thirty or forty minutes of their flight delightedly swiveling the head and zooming in on the land, ocean, and islands under them.

He'd also spent those same thirty or forty minutes chattering about everything he could see from an altitude of just over sixty-five thousand feet. But now, finally, he'd sobered.

“So this is what Langhorne and the others took away from all of us,” he said softly, sitting back in his seat again at last.

“This is a
part
of what they took away from you,” Merlin corrected gently. “Believe me, Cayleb. As exciting and novel as all of this is for you, it's barely scratching the surface of what Shan-wei wanted to give back to your ancestors. Oh, Langhorne and the mission planners were right about one thing—for the first three centuries or so, they had to bury any memory of the infrastructure that could have produced something like this skimmer. The stealth systems built into it, and the fact that its signature would be so tiny and hard to pick up anyway, meant they could operate at least some similar vehicles without risking anything the Gbaba could have picked up without doing a detailed in-atmosphere search. And if they'd gotten close enough to do an in-atmosphere search, it wouldn't have mattered whether Safehold had possessed advanced technology or not.

“But you could have had this back—and everything else that goes with it—four or five hundred years ago without worrying about whether or not the Gbaba would stumble across you. Or, at least, without worrying that they'd spot you because they were actively looking for you, at any rate.
That's
what they took away from you, and from your parents, and your grandparents, and your great-grandparents.”

“We could have had the stars,” Cayleb half-whispered.

“With the exercise of a little bit of caution, yes,” Merlin agreed. “In fact, from the starting point of the knowledge Shan-wei was trying to preserve in Alexandria, by now humanity would probably have developed a high enough level of technology to go looking for the Gbaba, instead of the other way around. Not to mention the fact that the average lifespan for someone born when Nimue Alban was alive was in excess of three hundred years.”

“Or the minor consideration that the lying bastards left us stuck with ‘spiritual shepherds' like Clyntahn,” Cayleb added harshly.

“Or that,” Merlin agreed.

“You know, Merlin,” Cayleb said in a rather different voice, “up until this moment, despite Saint Zherneau's journal and the other documents, I haven't really been able to wrap my mind around what you mean when you talk about ‘advanced technology.' Maybe that's because I haven't really tried to. I've been too concerned, too focused, on just surviving to really try to imagine what the future—or maybe I should say the past—could have been like. I guess the fact that you're alive, and the incredible things I've seen you do, should have given me a clue, but to be honest, I've still been thinking of you like
Seijin
Kohdy. You're not ‘technology,' not something one of Howsmyn's mechanics might've designed or built if they'd only had the right collection of nuts and bolts and the right wrench. You're
magic
—any ninny could tell that! But now—”

He broke off, and as Merlin glanced into the small view screen beside the pilot's right knee, the pickup in the rear cockpit showed him the emperor's shrug.

“There was a writer once, back on Old Earth,” he said. “He died over three hundred years—three hundred Old Earth years; that would be about three hundred and thirty Safeholdian years—before we met the Gbaba, but he wrote something called ‘science-fiction.' His name was Clarke, and he said that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic.”

“ ‘Indistinguishable from magic,' ” Cayleb repeated softly, then nodded. “That's a good way to think of it, I suppose. And it makes me feel a little better, a little less like some sort of ignorant savage.”

“That's good, because there's nothing ‘ignorant savage' about you, Sharleyan, Nahrmahn—not even Hektor. Within the scope of the worldview you've been permitted by the Church, you're as smart, capable, and inventive as anyone in the history of mankind, Cayleb. In fact, while I wouldn't want you to get a swelled head or anything, you and Sharleyan are pretty damned incredible, when you come right down to it. All we have to do is break down the barriers Langhorne and Bédard built to keep you all in prison, and that intelligence, capability, and inventiveness will do the rest.”