By Heresies Distressed (75 page)

The pistol roared. The shape which had loomed in the window tumbled back out of sight, and Sharleyan's slim hands and wrists felt as if she'd just hit them with a hammer as she turned to toss the fired pistol to Daishyn Tayso. But the guardsman didn't take it. He sat still and silent in his chair, hands frozen in midmotion by the arbalest quarrel buried in his left eye socket.

“I've got it, Sharleyan!” Carlsyn Raiyz shouted. He snatched the pistol from her and started reloading it as she and Tayso had taught him. His hands were clumsy with the unfamiliar task, but he jerked his head at the window. “You worry about
that
!”

“Go on!
Go on!
”

Mytrahn Daivys' voice was hoarse and cracked. His throat felt raw and broken, but he continued to shout, whipping his men on with his voice. He heard Charlz Abylyn shouting in snatches even through the tumult, as well, but Lahrak's voice had gone silent.

He saw the two guardsmen fighting in the very doorway of the guesthouse, and then one of them was down, trampled under the boots of his Temple Loyalists as they stormed forward. The madness had them by the throat. Survival itself had become unreal, immaterial, beside their driving need to reach their objective.

It's a good thing we don't want her alive after all!

The thought flashed through some tiny segment of his brain, and he knew it was true. His men's bloody-fanged hatred and determination would have made it almost impossible to take Sharleyan alive now, even if they'd wanted to.

I don't
—

His thought broke off as an impossible peal of thunder crashed overhead. It was scarcely unexpected—although the rain had almost stopped for the moment, the storm was far from over—but this thunder crack was so loud, so violent, that he flinched. And then, suddenly, there was one more guardsman still on his feet.

Daivys blinked, scrubbing at his eyes to clear the rainwater still running out of his soaked hair, trying to figure out where that single guardsman had come from. It was as if he'd materialized out of the air itself.

The Temple Loyalist's eyes narrowed suddenly as he realized that
this
guardsman wasn't soaked with rain. But that was impossible . . . wasn't it?

He thrust the question aside. There would be time to worry about details later; right now, he had other things to attend to, and he charged.

This one doesn't have a rifle, either
, he realized as the guardsman drew two swords. One was considerably shorter than the other, and something about them joggled a scrap of memory. Something about someone who carried
two
swords. . . .

The back of his brain was still grappling with the memory when a battle steel katana, moving so fast he never actually saw it move at all, slashed his head off his shoulders.

What
is
it about thunderstorms and assassination attempts?

The question darted through Merlin Athrawes' mind as Daivys' head flew just as the rain begain pounding down once more. It was a distant thought, lost below the steely focus of his desperation as he charged into the Temple Loyalists from behind.

A part of him twisted in anguish, crying out in useless protest as he saw the Imperial Guardsmen sprawled amid the tangle of their enemies' dead. He'd known every one of those men. He'd helped train them, helped select them for their duty . . . and he'd watched every one of them die through his SNARC's remotes while the recon skimmer hurtled through the Safehold sky at better than Mach five.

Just flying at that velocity had constituted a risk he knew he couldn't truly justify. Despite the skimmer's stealth systems, that kind of speed in atmosphere generated so much skin heat that an orbital scanner—like the ones which might well be incorporated into the orbiting kinetic bombardment system Langhorne had left behind—just might detect it anyway. Yet even at that speed, it had taken him an hour and a half to make the flight from Corisande.

No one on Safehold had ever heard the incredible thunder of a supersonic aircraft at low altitude. Not until tonight . . . and very few of those who had just heard it were going to survive the experience, he thought grimly. Without the courage and determination of the men who had died in Sharleyan's defense, he would have been too late, anyway. Even now, he might be, and his sapphire eyes were merciless as he sliced into the Temple Loyalists.

Most of them never had a chance to realize anyone new had joined the battle. Merlin's nervous impulses used fiber optics, not chemical transmission. When he released the governors he'd set to keep himself from betraying his more-than-human abilities too badly, his reaction speed was a hundred times that of a flesh-and-blood human, and his impossibly sharp battle steel swords were driven by “muscles” ten times as powerful as any mortal man's.

He seemed to simply stride through his enemies, moving almost slowly, yet bodies cascaded away from him. The first few men he faced died far too quickly for them to realize there was anything particularly odd about the man killing them, but as the lightning picked him out, flashed in stroboscopic spits of brilliance from his flying swords and the sprays of blood trailing in their wake, their fellows recognized, however dimly, that they faced something they'd never imagined was possible.

“Demon!” a voice wailed.
“Demon!”

Merlin paid no attention. There were twenty men between him and the guesthouse; three of them lived long enough to try to run.

Edwyrd Seahamper had no idea what was happening outside the guesthouse. All
he
knew was that the seemingly endless stream of attackers who'd been crowding in upon him had abruptly disappeared. He could still hear shouts and screams through the tumult of the thunderstorm, though, and a pistol cracked behind him yet again.

He turned and ran down the short hallway to the bedchamber door.

“It's me, Your Majesty!” he shouted as he put his shoulder to the closed door. He burst through it into a bedchamber reeking of powder smoke just as Sharleyan stepped back from the shuttered window with a raised pistol in both hands.

Gunsmoke hovered like a thick, blinding fog, but he saw the last of the broken shutters fly into fragments as a human body hurled itself against them, and a man burst half-way through the opening. The intruder froze as he found himself staring into the muzzle of Sharleyan's pistol at a range of less than three feet, and then Seahamper felt as if someone had just smashed his ears between two sledgehammers as she squeezed the trigger.

She staggered a half-pace backward with the recoil, and the back of her enemy's head disintegrated as the massive bullet exploded through his skull. He disappeared back out the window in a spray of blood, tissue, and snow-white splinters of bone, and the empress turned towards Carlsyn Raiyz for another. But the priest, too, was down, an arbalest bolt standing out of the center of his chest while blood pooled thickly on the floor beneath him.

Sharleyan's face crumpled as she saw him, but then Seahamper shoved past her just as yet another Temple Loyalist tried to force his way through the window. The new assailant looked up, then screamed, both hands clutching at his chest, as Seahamper drove a vicious bayonet thrust between his ribs. The guardsman twisted his wrists as he recovered his bayonet, and another Temple Loyalist shrieked and fell away from him as he thrust yet again.

Behind him, Sharleyan reached for the last loaded pistol with frantic haste, and Seahamper swore harshly as
another
man tried to clamber through the window. He thrust yet again, and then, abruptly, there were no more attackers.

Merlin Athrawes recovered, the corpse slithered off his battle steel blade, and suddenly he was the only man standing in the convent courtyard.

He looked around slowly, literally knee-deep in bodies, and for once his eyes were as hard as the composites of which they were made. This time he could afford to leave no survivors to tell wild tales about the
“seijin.”
No doubt most of those tales would have been explained away as wild exaggerations, the way all the other tales about Merlin had been. But this time, the mere fact that “
Seijin
Merlin” had been here at all would be enough to generate all the accusations of “demonic influence” which had to be avoided at any cost. He'd already dispatched half a dozen of the Temple Loyalists' wounded, and little though he liked the thought of killing men who couldn't fight back, this time he was prepared to make an exception.

It's the penalty for treason, anyway—and it's not as if I didn't “catch them in the act,”
he thought harshly as he waded through the tangled drifts of men who were already dead, dealing with his grim task. He closed his ears to the pleas for mercy, to the prayers, and to the curses and concentrated on dealing death as cleanly and as quickly as he could.

And then there were no living men in the entire convent courtyard. But that didn't necessarily mean none of the attackers were left, he thought. Rain and darkness were feeble obstacles to his enhanced vision, and he easily picked out the two men waiting by the main gate.

He zoomed in, and his mouth tightened as he recognized them.