By Schism Rent Asunder (78 page)

From Wylsynn's perspective, that would almost certainly be a very good thing. From the perspective of the Group of Four and those like them, it was anathema, complete and total.

“All of you know my son was Dynnys' intendant,” he continued. “In fact, he understood from the beginning the reasons why I actually helped Clyntahn engineer his ‘exile' to Tellesberg rather than trying to fight it. I've shared most of his private letters with other members of the Circle. He's convinced—and I have great faith in his judgment—that whatever else the Charisians may be, they aren't servants of Shan-wei, and that their general hostility towards Mother Church is directed at her
hierarchy
—at the Group of Four … and at the rest of the vicarate because of our failure to restrain people like Clyntahn. So I believe we have to ask ourselves a fundamental question, Brothers. Which is more important? The outward unity of Mother Church, enforced by swords and pikes against the will of God's children? Or the continued, joyous communion of those children with God and the Archangels, even if it be through a hierarchy other than our own? If the only point of true doctrinal disagreement lies in the infallibility of the Grand Vicar and the overriding authority of the vicarate, isn't it perhaps time we considered saying to our brothers and sisters in Charis that they are still our brothers and sisters, even if they refuse to submit to the authority of the Temple? If we let them go their own way to God, with our blessing and continued prayers for their salvation, rather than attempting to force them to act in violation of their own consciences, perhaps we can at least blunt the hatred between Tellesberg and the Temple.”

“Accept the schism as permanent, you mean?” Hysin asked. The Harchongese vicar seemed surprised to hear such sentiments from any Schuelerite, even a Wylsynn.

“So long as it's only schism, and not true heresy, yes,” Wylsynn agreed.

“That's getting much too far ahead of ourselves,” Tanyr said after a moment. “First, we have to survive, and somehow Clyntahn and the others have to be taken out of the decision-making positions of Mother Church.” He smiled without any humor at all. “That's quite enough of a challenge for
me
, I think.”

“To be sure.” Wylsynn nodded.

“Actually, in some ways, I find Duchairn more worrisome than Clyntahn at the moment,” Hysin said. Several others looked at him questioningly, and he frowned. “Unlike the rest of the Group of Four, I think Duchairn's actually rediscovered the
Writ
. Everything I've seen suggests a genuine resurgence of faith on his part, but he's still wedded to the rest of the Group of Four. In an odd sort of a way that actually serves to legitimize the Group of Four's policies in a way Clyntahn doesn't … and can't.”

“Because it's obvious that unlike Clyntahn, he's not making cynical calculations—anymore, at least—you mean?”

“That's exactly what I mean, Hauwerd.” Hysin nodded. “Even worse, I think he may well prove a rallying point for vicars who might otherwise support the Circle. Vicars who're genuinely tired and heartsick over the Church's abuses may see in him and in his regenerated faith the model for their own regeneration. And I'm very much afraid that whatever
we
may think about the acceptability of a permanent schism, Duchairn isn't prepared to entertain that concept at all.”

“Perhaps it's time we started thinking about recruiting him for the Circle,” Foryst suggested.

“You may be right,” Samyl Wylsynn said after several seconds of careful thought. “But even if it might prove possible to recruit him, we need to be very, very cautious about how we approach him. First, because we might be wrong—he might regard us as traitors, as an internal threat to Mother Church's unity at the greatest moment of crisis in her history. But, second, because he's so close to Clyntahn. And Trynair, of course; let's not forget that our good Chancellor is scarcely an idiot, however much he may act like one upon occasion. But I would be absolutely astonished to discover that Clyntahn isn't using the Inquisition to keep tabs on his three ‘allies.' If he is, and if we approached Duchairn even a little clumsily, it could be disastrous for everyone.”

“Agreed,” Foryst said. “And I'm not suggesting we rush right out and invite him to our next meeting. But I do think it's time we began considering this possibility seriously, and thinking about ways we might approach him if the time should come when it seems appropriate. Arguments to convince him we're right, and ways of presenting those arguments that aren't likely to trigger any alarms in Clyntahn.”

“I see you haven't lost your taste for formidable challenges, Erayk,” Hysin said dryly, and a chuckle ran around the seated vicars and bishops.

“Very well,” Samyl Wylsynn said after the chuckle had died. “We've all been brought up to date, and we've all had a chance to discuss our current thinking where the schism—and the Group of Four—are concerned. I don't believe we're in a position to decide on any new policies or strategies at this point. Not, at least, until we've had an opportunity to see how the Group of Four's version of events in Ferayd, Charis, and Emerald plays out once it's finally presented to the rest of the Council. Between now and then, I think all of us need to pray and meditate in hopes that God will show us our true path.”

Heads nodded gravely, and he smiled more naturally and openly than anyone had since their arrival.

“In that case, Brothers,” he said, “won't you join me in a moment of prayer before we venture back out into all that wind and rain?”

.V.

Army Training Ground and Manchyr Cathedral,
Duchy of Manchyr,
Kingdom of Corisande

The SNARC's deployed sensor was parked on Hektor of Corisande's right shoulder, where it provided Merlin with, among other things, an exquisitely detailed view of the prince's ear hair. There were times—many of them—when Merlin had felt severely tempted to use the sensors' self-destruct capability to remove Hektor from the equation once and for all. The remotes had been designed to be capable of working together with their clones to destroy specifically targeted circuits in enemy installations with their incendiary/shaped-charge “suicide pills,” and it wouldn't have been particularly difficult for him to maneuver several of them deep into the Corisandian's ear canal and use their combined charges to eliminate him while he slept.

Unfortunately, he wouldn't be able to disguise what had happened, and even if Safeholdian healers had been trained by rote according to
The Book of Pasquale
rather than on any scientific basis, an explosive burst of flame sufficient to burn holes through tempered steel plates inside an ear canal would be hard for any postmortem exam to miss. The questions
that
would raise—including the inevitable allegations that the Charisians must have done it using black arts provided to them by their true mistress, Shan-wei (which, after all, would be uncomfortably close to the truth)—scarcely bore thinking upon.

It's bad enough that everyone in Corisande already thinks we tried to kill him once
, Merlin reflected, swiveling the sensor's field of view away from the prince's hairy earlobe and back out across the grassy hillside on which Hektor, his daughter, and the Earl of Coris sat their horses with Earl Anvil Rock.
Adding charges of witchcraft to the mix couldn't make anything better!

The thought brought a slight smile to his lips, but his amusement vanished as he reflected upon what Hektor had come here to see.

Manchyr was six hours ahead of Tellesberg. Although it would be some hours yet before the sun rose over Cayleb's capital, the morning was already well advanced in Corisande, and the troops who'd been detailed to demonstrate their new weapons for Hektor had been waiting for him and the princess for almost an hour.

“All right, Rysel,” Hektor said. “Your reports have been interesting enough. I'm looking forward to seeing the actual guns.”

“I don't think you'll be disappointed, My Prince,” Anvil Rock told him.

“I'm not expecting to be,” Hektor assured the earl.

Anvil Rock grinned at him, then nodded to the youthful officer standing beside him. The young man picked up a flag from the grass at his feet and waved it vigorously overhead. Someone down at the deployed battery of guns saw it and waved another flag in response, and the waiting gun crews swung into action.

The guns themselves looked odd, especially in comparison to the pieces Seamount was in the course of providing for Charis. The barrels were short and stubby, which only made sense, Merlin supposed, since they'd been copied directly from the sketches Captain Myrgyn had sent home. Myrgyn had sketched only the carronades the Charisian galleys had mounted in their broadsides, not the long guns they'd mounted as chase weapons, and most of the new Corisandian artillery was being made to that pattern.

Earl Tartarian had recognized the implications of the carronades' shorter inherent range once the Navy had begun test firings, and the third pour of naval artillery had increased barrel length to extend the weapons' range. Anvil Rock and his son were familiar with the modified, longer naval pieces, but they'd chosen to stick to the carronade pattern for their new field artillery. That let them put considerably heavier guns into the field for the same weight of metal, and even the “field carronades,” as Merlin had decided they needed to be called to separate them from proper field
guns
, had several times the effective range of smoothbore matchlock muskets. Against that sort of infantry weapon, the artillery Anvil Rock had designed made excellent sense. Unfortunately—or, perhaps,
fortunately
, from Merlin's perspective—Anvil Rock wasn't aware of the fact that the Charisian Marines were now armed with
rifles
, not smoothbores.

Not that his carronades aren't going to be a big enough pain in the ass to go on with
, Merlin thought grimly.
And he and his son were certainly right about the throw-weight side of things. They're going to be deploying twenty-four-pounders on carriages the size of the ones we're using for
twelve
-pounders, and there are going to be plenty of instances in which we can't make use of our rifles' maximum ranges against them. Which is going to
hurt
. A lot.

And if they haven't figured out about rifles, Anvil Rock's over-clever, pain-in-the-ass son has obviously figured out the implications of the flintlocks our artillery uses instead of slow match.

The new musket-sized flintlocks already being issued to the Corisandian Army might still be smoothbores, but they were going to fire a lot faster and be a lot handier than the old-style matchlocks. Fortunately, the Corisandians had run into a bottleneck producing the smaller, lighter wooden stocks for the converted weapons, but they were still going to have a lot more of them available than Merlin and Cayleb had hoped.

The gun crews had been busy while he pondered the gloomy implications of the field carronades' existence and the new muskets. They'd made full use of the concept of bagged charges, as well, he observed. They were still using meal powder, at least—Myrgyn's notes clearly hadn't told them how corned powder was made—which meant it was weaker, weight for weight, and that even the individually bagged charges had a tendency to separate into their constituent ingredients if they were carried very far. But while that was all well and good, they'd still improved their artillery's rate of fire considerably.

And that's another place where their shorter gun tubes are going to help them,
Merlin reflected.
Their gunners are going to be able to fire more rapidly than ours can, which means
that
shoe, at least, is going to be on the other foot … and pinching hell out of our toes, at that
.

The distant flag down by the artillery waved once again, and then the guns boomed. The flat, hard, dull concussion pounded at the witnesses' ears, their horses twitched under them at the unfamiliar noise, and the weapons' shorter barrels made their muzzle flashes even more impressive. Perfectly round, dirty-white smoke rings drifted off on the gentle breeze, and the guns' round shot smashed into the waiting targets with terrific force.

Baron Seamount favored straw-stuffed mannequins as demonstration targets, and Merlin had always found the clouds of flying, golden hay highly—even gruesomely—effective for making his point. Earl Anvil Rock, on the other hand, favored casks of water, and the huge, sun-shot spray patterns as the round shot tore through the barrel staves were spectacular. So was the rate of fire the gunners demonstrated as they moved through the routine of serving their pieces as smoothly and efficiently as any Charisian gun crew.

I
do
wish the other side could be composed solely of idiots
, Merlin thought glumly, watching the nascent Corisandian field artillery demonstrate its paces for Prince Hektor.
Those things are going to be copper-plated bitches to deal with, especially in any sort of close terrain. And given how much less metal there is in each carronade, their foundries can turn out more of them
—
and faster
—
in the time they've got
.

In the long run, he felt confident, Seamount's longer field guns ought to be able to master their shorter-ranged Corisandian counterparts. But “the long run” wasn't something he especially wanted to rely upon, not when “the short term” was going to be punctuated with Charisian bodies. At least the lack of any Corisandian experimentation with rifles meant Charisian infantry was going to retain a major advantage in any sort of ranged combat. That alone ought to pretty much guarantee tactical superiority on the battlefield.