How Firm a Foundation (100 page)

It was difficult to be certain in such poor light, but the newcomer certainly looked as if he wore the uniform of a Charisian
naval officer, although it was obviously somewhat the worse for wear. He paused and cleaned his sword on the tunic of a fallen dragoon, then sheathed the weapon with smooth, economical grace. Coris was still staring at him when he heard a splashing sound.

“If you don’t mind, Phylyp,” Irys Daykyn said tartly, her teeth chattering slightly, “I’d really appreciate a hand.”

He turned quickly, reaching
down to take Daivyn as she and Raimair boosted the shivering, obviously frightened boy out of the icy mountain water. The prince flung his arms around Coris’ neck, clinging tightly, and the earl patted his back reassuringly.

“It’s all right, Daivyn. It’s all right now,” he said soothingly.

“I know,” Daivyn said in a tight voice, and nodded once, convulsively, but he never relaxed his hold, and
Coris looked helplessly down at Irys over her brother’s shoulder.

“Allow me, Your Highness,” someone else said in a pronounced Charisian accent, and the newcomer in the naval uniform was suddenly beside him, reaching down both hands to Irys. She looked up at him for a moment, then reached to take the offered hands. The Charisian wasn’t especially tall or broad-shouldered, but he boosted her effortlessly
out of the water. Then he reached down again and hoisted Tobys Raimair out, as well.

“That was quick thinking, getting them below ground level that way when the shooting started,” he congratulated the sergeant. It was still a ridiculously young-sounding voice, Coris decided, but it was also crisp and decisive. A very
reassuring
voice, all things taken together.

“Excuse me,” its owner continued,
turning back to Coris, Irys, and Daivyn. He bowed gracefully. “Lieutenant Aplyn-Ahrmahk, Imperial Charisian Navy, at your service. If you’re ready to go, I have two boats waiting about a mile downstream from here. It’ll be a little crowded,” teeth gleamed faintly in the moonlight which was finally probing into the darkness at the foot of the waterfall, “but I believe you’ll find the accommodations
preferable to these.”

“I believe you’re right, Lieutenant,” Coris said gratefully. “In fact—”

“Beg pardon, Sir,” another voice interrupted, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk—and did that name indicate this youngster was who Coris
thought
he was?—turned towards the interruption with a frown.

“What is it, Mahlyk?” he asked in a no-nonsense tone.

“Beg pardon for interrupting, Sir,” the other voice belonged to
what could only be a professional Charisian petty officer, “but I think this is important.”

“And what, exactly, is ‘this’?” Aplyn-Ahrmahk prompted.

“Well, Sir, Zhaksyn put the arm on this priest here when he tried to scamper off downstream,” the petty officer said, dragging a prisoner into the moonlight. “And we found the officer in command of this here ambush, too, Sir. Seems
somebody
”—the
petty officer kicked the prisoner to his knees, and Coris saw the priest’s cap and cassock—“blowed the poor bastard’s—beg pardon for the language, Your Highness”—he bobbed Irys a brief bow—“blowed the poor bastard’s brains out. ’Twasn’t any of us, because from the powder burns, whoever it was shot him from behind and real up close and personal, like. And a funny thing, Sir, but this here priest? He’s
got blood and brains splashed all over his right arm.”

“Does he now?” Aplyn-Ahrmahk said in a deadly soft voice.

“I’m a priest of Mother Church!” the captive thundered suddenly, surging up as he started back to his feet. “How
dare
you—?!”

He went back down again, this time squealing in pain, as the petty officer casually, and with brutal efficiency, stamped down—hard—on the back of his right
knee.

“A priest, are you?” Aplyn-Ahrmahk said in that same deadly voice. “And a servant of the Inquisition, no doubt?”

“A priest of any order is still a priest of God!” the prostrate cleric shouted furiously, both hands clutching at the back of his knee. “And he who lays a hand on
any
priest of God is guilty of blasphemy!”

“An inquisitor, all right,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk said, and looked past the
petty officer still standing over the Schuelerite. “Zhaksyn, go find me the senior prisoner. Bring him here.”

“Aye, Sir.”

“I tell you, you’re all—!” the priest began again, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk looked at the petty officer.

“Mahlyk?” he said quietly.

“My pleasure, Sir,” the petty officer said, and kicked the priest none too gently in the belly. The inquisitor doubled up into a ball with a shrill,
whistling cry of pain and then lay grunting and gasping for breath while the petty officer watched him with a mildly interested air.

The priest was just starting to get his breath back when the man named Zhaksyn returned with a Delferahkan dragoon. The man had been wounded, and a rough dressing around his upper left arm was stained black with blood in the moonlight, but the shock of such abrupt
defeat when victory had seemed certain was obviously more debilitating than any sword cut.

“This here’s the senior sergeant, near as I can tell, Sir,” Zhaksyn said.

“Thank you.” Aplyn-Ahrmahk turned to the Delferahkan. “
Are
you the senior prisoner?” he asked.

“Aye, that I am … Sir,” the Delferahkan said. “Leastwise, I am if the Lieutenant’s really dead.”

“Oh, he’s dead, mate,” the petty officer
said. “Shot in the back of the head, and from real close, too.”

“What?” The Delferahkan looked back and forth between Aplyn-Ahrmahk and the petty officer. “That don’t make no sense … Sir. The Lieutenant, he was behind us. And the Father said he was dead before any of you lot started shooting from the hills! I thought the shot had to come from here.”

He jabbed the index finger of his good hand
at the rocky edge of the pool.

“That’s exactly what you were supposed to think, Sergeant,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk said grimly. “This Schuelerite bastard murdered your lieutenant in order to turn what should have been an orderly surrender into a massacre. And it would have
worked
if we hadn’t already been here keeping an eye on things—and you—when your lot first arrived, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know
as how—” the sergeant began uncomfortably, then stopped. “Aye, Sir,” he admitted in a lower voice. “Aye, it would’ve, that it surely would.”

“This is all lies!” the priest sputtered suddenly, still more than a little breathless from that kick in the belly. “Lies by heretics and blasphemers—by excommunicates! Sergeant, you can’t take
their
word for this! Why, it probably
was
one of them, deliberately
shooting poor Lieutenant Wyllyms down from ambush without warning, just to discredit me! Is it
my
fault I was standing so close to him I was splashed with his blood when
they
killed him?!”

The sergeant looked down at the priest for a moment, then met Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s eyes in the moonlight.

“He weren’t the very smartest officer nor I ever served under, the Lieutenant,” he said, “but he were a
good lad, an’ he always tried to do what was right. Didn’t always manage it, but he
tried,
Sir. And in a fair fight, all the holes would’ve been in the front, not the back like this. It ain’t right, Sir.” He shook his head, his voice stubborn. “It ain’t
right
.”

“No, it isn’t, Sergeant,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk agreed. “So I have only one more question for you.”

“Sir?” the Delferahkan said a bit cautiously.

“This man is obviously a Schuelerite,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk said. “Can you confirm that he’s also an inquisitor?”

“Aye, Sir,” the Delferahkan replied. “That he is. Attached to Colonel Tahlyvyr special by Bishop Mytchail. Heard him telling the Colonel myself, I did.”

“Think what you’re doing, Sergeant!” the priest snapped. “By God, I’ll see you put to the Punishment for collaborating with heretics!
I’ll—”

The Delferahkan flinched, but then his shoulders hunched stubbornly and he glared down at the priest.

“He’s an inquisitor, Sir,” he said firmly. “Sure as sure.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.” Aplyn-Ahrmahk nodded to the Delferahkan, then looked at the petty officer. “Stand him up, Mahlyk,” he said flatly.

“Waste of good sweat, Sir,” the petty officer said. “He’ll only be back down in a minute
or two.”

“Even an inquisitor should have the chance to die on his feet, Stywyrt,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk replied in a voice of iron.

“What?” The priest stared up at him in shock. “What did you just say?”

“You and your friend Clyntahn should pay more attention to proclamations coming out of Tellesberg,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk said coldly. “Some of those men you tortured and butchered in Zion were friends of mine,
and every damned one of them was innocent. Well, the blood on your cassock says you’re
not,
and my Emperor and Empress’ policy where inquisitors are concerned is very clear.”

“You can’t be—I mean, I’m a
priest!
A priest of Mother Church! You can’t just—”

“I know priests,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk told him as Stywyrt Mahlyk hauled him to his feet by the collar of his cassock. “I even know a
Schuelerite
priest—a good one, the kind who truly serves God. And that’s how I know you
aren’t
one, whatever that fat, greedy bastard in Zion might say.” He drew a pistol from his belt and cocked it. “If you want to make your peace with God, you have thirty seconds.”

“
Damn
you! Who do you think you
are
to threaten a consecrated priest of God! You wouldn’t
dare
—!”

“You don’t want to make peace?” Aplyn-Ahrmahk
said. “Fine.”

His hand rose, his finger squeezed, and Dahnyvyn Schahl’s eyes were just starting to widen in disbelieving terror when his head disintegrated. The body dropped like a sring-cut puppet, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk turned to Earl Coris and Princess Irys.

“I apologize for the delay,” he said as the muzzle smoke of his pistol wisped away on the cool, damp breath of the fall. “Now, I believe
those boats are still waiting for us.”

FEBRUARY,
YEAR OF GOD 896

.I.

Nimue’s Cave, The Mountains of Light, The Temple Lands, and Tellesberg Palace, City of Tellesberg, Kingdom of Old Charis

“So just exactly how was it you were planning to get home again without raising any eyebrows?” Cayleb Ahrmahk asked, leaning back in the rattan lounge and gazing up at a spectacular sunset.

His daughter lay curled on his chest, her nose pressed into the angle of his neck
while she slept with the absolute limpness possible only for small children and cat-lizards, and Empress Sharleyan’s crochet hook moved busily as she looked across at him and smiled.

“Why should I get home without raising any eyebrows?” Merlin responded over the com plug in his ear. “I’m a
seijin—
the mysterious, deadly, probably magical
Seijin
Merlin!” There was a clearly audible sniff. “I come
and go, and no man sees me pass.”

“You’re getting remarkably full of yourself, aren’t you?” Sharleyan inquired sweetly.

“Well, I think I’ve done fairly well the last few five-days,” he pointed out.

“That’s true, I suppose,” Cayleb said judiciously. “I especially liked the bit with the voices shouting to each other there at the end, on top of the gunshots. No wonder they thought all of you were
right in front of them!”

“If you’ve got a programmable vocoder for a voice box, you might as well use it,” Merlin replied smugly, but then he sighed. “Actually, though, I think I’m blowing my ego out of my ears because I’m bored and I want to come home.”

Sharleyan looked across at Cayleb, and her expression softened.

“We’re looking forward to
seeing
you at home,” Cayleb assured him, speaking
for them both. Then he shrugged—very gently, so as not to disturb the sleeping child next to his heart. “I agree sending you personally to oversee Irys and Daivyn’s rescue was the right move, but having you operate openly that far away’s inconvenient as hell in a lot of ways.”

“I’ve noticed that myself,” Merlin said dryly. “I’m thinking about adding a few extra members to Master Zhevons’ ensemble
cast. It can be a pain covering for absences on my part while Zhevons—or someone else, for that matter—runs around in the middle of Howard, but it saves us from having to account for all of this damned ‘transit time’!”

“I see your point, but I think it was a good thing you were ‘running around in the middle of Howard’ this time,” Sharleyan said soberly, and Merlin shrugged.

“I’m inclined to
agree, given my own modest contribution to getting them out of Talkyra and delivering them to the rendezvous, but Hektor did pretty well himself, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Cayleb agreed. “Yes he did. Especially for someone as young as he is.”

“This from the gray-bearded septuagenarian sitting on the throne of Charis, I see,” Merlin replied, and Sharleyan giggled.

“All right, so I was only a couple
of years older than he is now when you took me in hand,” Cayleb acknowledged. “But he still did a
damned
good job.”

“No question about that,” Merlin acknowledged, and there wasn’t.

Faced with the loss of all of the expedition’s senior officers, Aplyn-Ahrmahk had decided to continue the mission, despite the risk of additional encounters with the Delferahkan militia. So he’d transferred all his
wounded into four of the six boats and sent them back downstream with orders to remain in the middle of the current as much as possible. The Sarm wasn’t an enormous river, but it was broad enough that troops armed with the relatively short-barreled, smoothbore matchlocks dragoons carried would play hell trying to hit a target in midstream. Artillery would have been a different matter, but the Royal
Delferahkan Army had no new model field artillery. For that matter, it didn’t have very much artillery at
all,
and the cumbersome, slow-firing pieces it did possess lacked the mobility to intercept boats moving at the better part of twelve miles an hour under sail and oars while the river’s current worked
for
them instead of against them.