How Firm a Foundation (31 page)

“I can no longer prove that to you by showing you the incontrovertible, inviolable word set down by the immortal Archangels. I can only ask you to reach inside yourself once more, to seek the wellsprings
of faith and to look at all the wonders of the universe—and all the still greater wonders which are about to become available to you—and decide for yourself. Merlin and I had a discussion about this very subject the night he and I first told Cayleb the truth. I wasn’t aware then that I was following in the footsteps of another, far more ancient philosopher when I asked him what I could possibly
lose
by believing in God, but now I ask you the same question, Paityr. What do you lose by believing in a loving, compassionate God Who’s finally found a way to reach out to His children once more? Will it make you an evil man? Lead you into the same sort of actions that ensnared the real Langhorne and the real Bédard? Or will you continue to reach out in love to those about you? To do good, when
the opportunity to do good comes to you? To reach the end of your life knowing you’ve truly labored to leave the world and all in it a better place than it might otherwise have been?

“And if there
is
no God, if all there is beyond this life is a dreamless, eternal sleep—only nothingness—what will your faith have cost you then?” The archbishop smiled suddenly. “Do you expect to feel cheated or
swindled when you realize there was no God waiting beyond that threshold? Only two things can lie on the other side of death, Paityr. It’s what Merlin or Owl might describe as ‘a binary solution set.’ There’s either nothingness, or some sort of continued existence, whether it leads us to what we think of now as God or not. And if it’s nothingness, then whether or not you were ‘cheated’ is meaningless.
And if there is a continued existence which doesn’t contain that Whom I think of as God, then I’ll simply have to start over learning the truth again, won’t I?”

Paityr gazed at him for several more seconds, then drew a deep breath.

“I don’t know what to believe at this moment, Your Eminence,” he said finally. “I never imagined I could feel such turmoil as I’m feeling right now. Intellectually,
I believe you when you say you’ve experienced the same things, and I can see you truly have found a way for your faith to survive those experiences. I envy that … I think. And the fact that I don’t know whether I truly envy your certainty or resent it as yet another manifestation of the lie sums up the heart of my confusion. I’ll need time, and a great deal of it, before I can put my spiritual
house back in order and say ‘Yes,
this
is where I stand.’”

“Of course you will,” Staynair said simply. “Surely you don’t think anyone
else
has ever simply taken this in stride and continued without missing a step!”

“I don’t really know
what
I think right now, Your Eminence!” Wylsynn was astonished by the note of genuine humor in his own response.

“Then you’re about where everyone is at this
point, Father,” Merlin told him, and smiled with a bittersweet crookedness. “And believe me, I may not have had to grapple with the knowledge that I’d been lied to all my life, but waking up in Nimue’s Cave and realizing I’d been dead for the better part of a thousand years was just a
little
difficult to process.”

“I can believe that,” Wylsynn said, yet even as he spoke his eyes had darkened,
and his expression turned grim.

“What is it, Paityr?” Staynair asked quickly but softly, and the intendant shook his head hard.

“It’s just … ironic that Merlin should mention ‘a thousand years,’” he said. “You see, not
everything
about the Archangels and Mother Church was set forth in the
Writ
or
The Testimonies
after all, Your Eminence.”

.III.

A Recon Skimmer, Above Carter’s Ocean

Merlin Athrawes leaned back in his flight couch, gazing up through the canopy at the distant moon. The waters of Carter’s Ocean stretched out far below him like an endless black mirror, touched with silver highlights. The stars were distant, glittering pinpricks overhead, but ahead of him lay a wall of cloud, the back edge of a massive weather front
moving steadily eastward across Corisande.

It all seemed incredibly peaceful, restful even. It wasn’t, of course. The winds along the leading edge of that front were less powerful than those which had battered Cayleb further north, but they were quite powerful enough. And they were going to catch up with
Dawn Star
in the next few hours. The galleon and her escorts were passing through Coris Strait,
about to enter South Reach Sound southeast of Corisande before looping back westward through White Horse Reach to the Corisandian capital of Manchyr, and Merlin wondered if the bad weather was going to be his ally or his comeuppance. Getting on and off a sailing ship in the middle of the ocean without being detected was a nontrivial challenge, even for a PICA. As it was, he’d officially retreated
to his cabin to “meditate,” and Sharleyan and the rest of her guard detail would see to it that he wasn’t disturbed. He’d even left a rope trailing helpfully from the galleon’s sternwalk so he could shinny back aboard, hopefully unnoticed. After so long, it had become almost a well-established routine.

Except, of course, that if the weather’s as bad as it looks like being tonight, there’re going
to be people keeping an anxious watch on little things like rigging and sails or rogue waves … any one of whom might just happen to notice the odd
seijin
climbing up a rope out of the ocean in the middle of the night
.

His lips twitched at the thought, yet he wasn’t really worried about it. He’d be able to spot any lookout before the lookout could spot him, and a PICA could easily spend an hour
or two submerged in the ship’s wake, clinging to a rope and waiting patiently until the coast was clear. Not only that, but he’d be back aboard several hours before local dawn, with plenty of darkness to help cover his return. In fact, that was the real reason for the timing of the conference with Father Paityr. They’d had to make sufficient allowance for Merlin’s transit, and he’d had to plan on
both departing and returning under cover of night if he wanted to be certain he wasn’t observed.

And that’s exactly what you’re going to be doing
, he told himself.
So why don’t you stop worrying about
that
and start worrying about what Father Paityr just told you, instead?

His brief almost-smile disappeared, and he shook his head.

I guess fair’s fair. You’ve cheerfully torn lots of other people’s
worlds apart by telling the truth about Langhorne and Bédard. It’s about time somebody returned the compliment
.

He closed his eyes and his perfect PICA’s memory replayed the conversation in Maikel Staynair’s office.

*   *   *

“What do you mean ‘Not everything about the Archangels and Mother Church was set forth in the
Writ
or
The Testimonies
,’ my son?” Staynair asked, his eyes narrowing with
concern as Paityr Wylsynn’s tone registered.

“I mean there’s more than one reason my family’s always been so deeply involved in the affairs of Mother Church, Your Eminence.”

Wylsynn’s face was tight, his voice harrowed with mingled bitterness, anger, and lingering shock at what he’d already been told. He looked around the others’ faces and drew a deep breath.

“The tradition of my family’s always
been that we were directly descended from the Archangel Schueler,” he said harshly. “All my life, that’s been a source of great joy to me—and of a pride I’ve struggled against as something unbecoming in any son of Mother Church. And, of course, it was also something Mother Church and the Inquisition would flatly have denied could have been possible. That’s one of the reasons my family was always
so careful to keep the tradition secret. But we were also specifically
charged
to keep it so—according to the tradition—when certain knowledge was left in our possession.”

Merlin’s molycirc nerves tingled with sudden apprehension, but he kept his face expressionless as he cocked his head.

“May I assume your possession of the Stone of Schueler was part of that tradition and knowledge, Father?”

“Indeed you may.” The bitterness in Wylsynn’s tone was joined by corrosive anger. “All my life I’ve believed this”—he lifted his pectoral scepter, the disguised reliquary which concealed the relic his family had treasured for so long—“had been left as a sign of God’s approval of our faithfulness.” He snorted harshly. “Except, of course, that it’s nothing of the sort!”

“I don’t know why it was
left with you, Father,” Merlin said gently. “I’m pretty sure whoever handed it to your ancestors—and it may actually have been Schueler, for all we know—didn’t have any particular faith in God. From what I’ve heard about your history, though, that hasn’t kept your family from believing in Him. As for what the ‘Stone of Schueler’ actually is, it’s what was called a ‘verifier.’ Once upon a time, it
might’ve been called a ‘lie detector,’ instead. And however it came into your possession, Father, it truly does do what your ancestors were told it did. It tells you whether or not someone is telling you the truth. In fact,” he smiled wryly, “it’s a full-spectrum verifier, which means it can also tell when a
PICA
is telling you the truth. Which required a certain … circumspection when I answered
the questions you once put to me in King Haarahld’s throne room.”

“Given what you’ve just told me about Safehold’s true history, I’d say that was probably an understatement,” Wylsynn replied with the first thing like a true smile he’d produced in the last hour or two.

“Oh, it was!” Merlin nodded. “At the same time, what I told you then was the truth, exactly as it insisted.”

“I believe that,”
Wylsynn said quietly. “What I’m struggling with is whether or not I should believe anything
else
I once thought was true.”

There was silence for a moment, then the young man in the Schuelerite cassock shook himself.

“I’m going to have to deal with that. I know that. But I also understand why you have to be leaving shortly, Merlin, so I suppose I’d better get on with it.”

He drew a deep breath,
visibly bracing himself, then sat back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap.

“When I was a boy, my father and Uncle Hauwerd told me all the tales about our family’s history and the role we’d played in the vicarate and in Mother Church’s history. Or I thought they told me
all
the tales, at any rate. It was enough to make me realize we had a special, joyous duty, and it helped me understand
why my family had stood for reform, held tight to the truth, for so many centuries. Why we’d made so many enemies as corruption set deeper and deeper into the vicarate. The voice of conscience seldom makes comfortable hearing, and never less comfortable than to those who know deep in their hearts how far short of their duties and their responsibilities they’ve fallen. All of the orders teach
that, and it was enough—I thought then—to explain everything.

“Yet it wasn’t until I’d graduated from seminary and been ordained that Father told me the
complete
truth about our family and our traditions. That was when he showed me the Stone of Schueler and the Key.”

He paused, and Merlin’s eyebrows quirked. He looked quickly at the others and saw the same expression looking back at him. Then
all of them returned their attention to the young priest.

“The ‘Key,’ Father?” Merlin prompted.

“According to the secret history Father showed me, the Key and the Stone were both left in our possession by the Archangel Schueler himself. The Stone you know about. The Key must be another piece of your ‘technology,’
Seijin
Merlin, although it’s less spectacular at first glance than the Stone. It’s
a small sphere, flattened on one side and about this far across”—he held up thumb and forefinger, perhaps two inches apart—“which looks like plain, polished steel.” His lips flickered in a small smile. “In fact, it’s so plain generations of Wylsynns have hidden it in plain sight by using it as a paperweight.”

There was a ghost of genuine humor in his voice, and Merlin felt himself smiling back,
but then Wylsynn continued.

“By itself, the Key really is nothing but a paperweight,” he said soberly, “but in conjunction with the Stone, it becomes something else. The best way I can describe it is as a … repository of visions.”

Merlin straightened in his chair, his expression suddenly intent.

“Father, I never had the opportunity to actually examine the Stone. I just assumed that it filled
only a small section of your scepter’s staff. But it doesn’t, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Wylsynn confirmed. “It fills almost the full length of the staff, and it can be removed. When it is, it mates to the Key. Its lower end clings unbreakably to the flat face of the Key, as if they’ve become one, and they can be released from one another only by someone who knows the proper command.” His eyes
watched Merlin carefully. “Should I assume you know how it works and why?”

“I’d have to examine both of them to be certain,” Merlin replied, “but I’m reasonably sure that among the instructions your family was left was a ritual which regularly exposed the Stone to direct sunlight?” Wylsynn nodded, and Merlin shrugged. “What that was doing, Father, was to charge—to empower—the Stone. In time,
you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about. For the moment, simply accept that there’s nothing demonic or divine in the process; it’s a simple matter of physics.

“At any rate, what you’re calling the Key is a memory module, a solid chunk of molecular circuitry. You could fire it out of a cannon without hurting it, and that single sphere you’ve described could easily contain all the knowledge
in all the libraries of the entire Charisian Empire with space left over. The problem is getting it out, and for that you need a power source. So I’m reasonably sure that when you remove the Stone entirely from the scepter, the length of it that ‘mates to the Key’ doesn’t glow the way the rest of it does, right?”