Through Fiery Trials

by David Weber

  The temptation to simply send the stealthiest possible passive array along with Staynair had been almost overwhelming. In fact, that was exactly what Cayleb, Sharleyan, Nahrmahn Baytz, and Owl had all argued they should do. And they’d had a point. But Merlin Athrawes had no intention of entrusting Staynair’s safety to anyone else, and a sensor array came in a piss-poor second to a PICA where that was concerned. There were some people whose lives he was prepared to risk in the service of Nimue Alban’s great task. Maikel Staynair wasn’t one of them, although he’d given up on getting Staynair to see things that way, and if it came to it, he would go fully active inside the Temple itself if that was what it took to get Staynair out of it alive.

  He’d been careful to not mention that particular resolve where the archbishop might hear it.

  Staynair’s protection was the counterargument he’d unscrupulously deployed to swing Sharleyan into actively supporting his decision, but he’d admitted—if only to himself and Nynian—that it was only a part of his own reasons. It was the weightiest part, by far, but only a part. Because even though it might not be entirely rational, the opportunity to come onto the grounds of the Temple itself, to enter the very heart of the abomination Eric Langhorne had created here on Safehold, had been too much for him to resist. He’d had to come, had to be here, had to see this and feel this for himself.

  And it was probably a good thing he had, because no remote small enough for them to infiltrate under someone’s clothing or disguise as a piece of jewelry without anyone’s noticing could have pulled in everything the much more sensitive ones hidden inside him had already gathered. And were still gathering, for that matter. And that smaller, less capable sensor wouldn’t have had the flexibility to look in all the directions he was looking as he followed individual power runs and placed them—and the devices they served—on the map he was creating. It would be partial and woefully incomplete when he finished it, that map, but it would be incomparably better than anything they’d had before.

  And it would bear some serious thinking on once he got it home, too, because what he’d already picked up only emphasized how right Nahrmahn was to worry about the possibility of whatever had gone wrong with Chihiro’s master plan fixing itself.

  The Temple was riddled with even more—far more—power sources than they’d been able to detect and track from outside its walls. They’d blazed up on his passives the instant he and the rest of Staynair’s party had been ushered across the Plaza of Martyrs and into the Temple proper.

  He’d always thought Chihiro’s decision to plate the Temple’s silver dome in eight centimeters of armorplast had been ridiculous, even for a lunatic like him. There’d been far less … exorbitant ways to keep that dome mystically mirror bright for centuries on end. It certainly hadn’t been required for any conceivable structural reason! Indeed, when Nimue Alban first observed the Temple, she’d thought she’d seen flimsier planetary-defense command bunkers.

  It hadn’t occurred to her—and it damned well should have—that the reason she’d thought that was that she had seen flimsier PDC bunkers. Because even though the people living and working in the Temple and its “Archangel-built” Annex didn’t know it, a planetary-defense bunker was precisely what Chihiro and the surviving “Archangels” had set out to build.

  The Temple’s exterior walls might look as if they were faced with seventy-five centimeters of fine de Castro marble, but that “marble” was actually solid ceramacrete, carefully disguised to look like marble, and it was sandwiched around battle-steel bulkheads that were themselves twenty centimeters thick. The central dome was a hemisphere of “marble-faced” battle steel almost as thick as the walls’ bulkheads, and the skylights which pierced it were ten-centimeter slabs of armorplast, all of that under the eight centimeters of the exterior armorplast. The “stained glass” of its spectacular windows was equally formidable, and while its interior walls were rather less impenetrable, even they would have sneered at any conceivable muscle-powered—or, for that matter, gunpowder-powered—assault. They were also riddled with molecular circuitry controlling power, light, air conditioning and heat, powered doors, fire suppression systems, information terminals, surveillance systems which obviously reported to something, and the smart walls in the endless offices and living quarters. He’d detected over two dozen separate wireless nets, spreading beyond even the walls’ mollycircs, tying together literally hundreds or even thousands of high-tech devices and artifacts the Church and its servants either never knew were there or else took totally for granted as part of the all-encompassing proof of the Temple’s divine nature.

  He had no idea, even now, how deep the complex went, but he’d come to the conclusion that it must go deeper than they’d believed. Nimue’s Cave was actually a complex of artificial caverns, each bigger than most of the Terran Federation Navy’s shuttle hangers, hollowed out to house and conceal the tech base Pei Shan-wei and her terraforming crews had left for her. It was big enough to provide a formidable support base and fabrication facilities which could easily have springboarded modern technology on a planetary scale, if only they’d been able to operate openly. But it couldn’t have supported and maintained anything on this scale, and he’d already detected a half-dozen concealed doors—concealed from the current Church hierarchy, not just interlopers such as himself, he suspected. Two of them, including one which opened directly into the Plaza of Martyrs, were big enough full-scale assault shuttles could have passed through them with ease when they were open. There were clearly ramps behind those concealed doors, diving deep into the earth, and he found himself wondering just how big a hole Chihiro had dug when he built the place … and what those ramps might lead to. Since there was no other high-tech presence on the planet, they’d always known any support base for the Temple had to be under it, but they’d never suspected how big it must be or how deep it might go.

  Which was stupid of us, he thought now. Chihiro built this place after the Commodore turned Langhorne and Bédard into plasma, but not as the exercise in megalomania I’d thought it was. Or not just as an exercise in megalomania, at least. This was his HQ, the command center he and Schueler used in their fight against the “Fallen.” Of course he built it like a damned bunker! And of course the SNARCs couldn’t pick all this up from the outside. Just the thickness and damping effect of the fortifications would have made that difficult, and whether it was before or after the War Against the Fallen, he obviously took a lot of additional steps to harden this place against passive sensors, as well as active ones. Be interesting to know whether that was because he was more worried about the Fallen or about hiding from any Gbaba probe that happened by.

  He’d never know the answer to that question, but at least he understood now why he’d been able to see so little from the outside. What he still didn’t know—and what not even this visit could tell him—was what Chihiro might have hidden away in his cellar.

  They reached the designated box. It was located in a place of high honor, to one side of the box set aside for the Grand Vicar himself, on the occasions when he attended a mass celebrated by someone else here in what was, after all, his church. At the moment, the Grand Vicar’s box was unoccupied, which meant Staynair had been assigned the most prestigious seat in the entire Temple, and Karstayrs wondered how that decision had sat with the more conservative vicars.

  Now Father Zhon, the Langhornite upper-priest who’d been assigned as Maikel Staynair’s guide and personal liaison to the Grand Vicar designate, waved courteously for Staynair and Ushyr to seat themselves in one of the box’s luxurious pews. Like every other aspect of the Temple, those pews and the box about them had been built at the same time the enormous circular cathedral was first constructed. No one would have dreamed of altering the Archangels’ handiwork, and the Temple’s inhabitants took the occasional “holy servitor” which appeared whenever repairs were necessary for granted as one more of the everyday miracles that “proved” the Temple’s divinity.

  Karstay
rs shook his head, politely declining a seat of his own, and took up a parade rest position just inside the box’s door. Father Zhon glanced at him quizzically, then smiled, gave a small bow, and disappeared.

  As he did, the voices of the magnificently trained choir which kept the Temple perpetually awash with sacred music so that God’s house might always be filled with His praise, faded into silence.

  * * *

  As a bishop militant, Tymythy Symkyn had seen more than his share of combat. Much of it had been ugly. He’d been certain he was going to die at least three times in the campaign of 897. He’d thought he knew then what terror was.

  He’d been wrong.

  The cheers thundered about him, louder and stronger than ever as he neared the end of the traditional five-mile procession route from the Borough of Langhorne’s Church of the Holy Langhorne to the foot of Temple Hill and the shining silver-and-bronze gates of the Plaza of Martyrs rose before him. Those cheers had been with him from the moment he emerged from the church’s doors to begin his final journey as a vicar. Every yard of sidewalk, every cross street and intersection, had been packed by the children of God, and every cheering voice, every shouted benediction, every banner and every drape of bunting, had only told him how unworthy he, of all men, was to walk in the footsteps of giants this day.

  He drew the crisp air deep into his lungs and tried to order his pulse rate to slow. His pulse didn’t listen to him, and a voice which sounded remarkably like that of Rhobair II reminded him that he was only mortal, not an angel or an archangel with the power to command the physical universe to obey him.

  His lips twitched at the reminder … and at the memory of the Grand Vicar he’d served and the mentor he’d learned to love. If anyone in all of the Creation would have understood his nervousness, his sense of profound unworthiness, and his determination to be worthy anyway, it would have been Rhobair Duchairn.

  He straightened his shoulders … again. From personal experience, he knew his ceremonial vestments really did weigh more than old-fashioned chain mail, which shouldn’t have surprised him, given their thickly encrustated bullion embroidery and the number of gems and pearls which adorned them. And it was going to get worse when he was vested with the full formal regalia of his new office.

  At least they protected him from the chill.

  Actually, he thought, glancing up as the solid phalanx of vicars escorted him solemnly into the Plaza of Martyrs and across it towards the Temple’s soaring majesty, God and the Archangels had provided a beautiful day for his consecration. He remembered the weather on the day of Rhobair II’s consecration. It, too, had fallen in October, but the heavens had been heavy, gray clouds swirling low above the City of God, rain sifting down to contribute a raw, wet edge to the bone-chilling wind. Today’s temperature was merely cool, not even brisk for Zion in October, the gusty breeze was a laughing, cheerful thing, and the sky was a brilliant blue vault, just burnished around the edges with wispy white clouds. The breeze blew a scattering of dried, colorful leaves across the plaza before him—not even the Temple’s gardeners could keep all of them raked, this time of year—and the morning sun turned the Temple’s silver dome into a brilliant mirror.

  It had seemed wrong to him, when he rose with the dawn, realized what sort of weather the day had brought. Wrong that he should have sunlight and a wind that laughed with the joy of Creation while Rhobair, the man who’d done so much, risked so much, to break Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s iron tyranny had gone to his consecration through blowing billows of icy rain. He’d found himself taking God to task for that as he knelt in his normal morning meditation … then been shocked to realize he was scolding God on this of all days! It was fortunate that He who had created humans understood their frailties so well, he’d thought—not for the first time. That was another thing Rhobair Duchairn had helped him realize. That God understood. That He wasn’t just the stern Lawgiver or the pitilessly just Judge of the Book of Schueler. That He was also the compassionate Father of the Book of Bédard, Who accepted human beings for who and what they were, frailties included, and wanted them to bring their problems and their doubts and, yes, even their anger to Him. If they didn’t bring those things to Him, how could they let Him help them deal with them?

  And as he’d thought about that lesson, as he’d bent his head in apology to God and his mind and heart heard not the thundering anathemas of Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s God but rather the laughing sympathy of Rhobair Duchairn’s, he’d realized the Good Shepherd hadn’t needed clear skies. That it had been fitting, somehow, for him to go to his consecration through God’s rain and wind, washing away the filth which fallible mankind had allowed to encrust His world and His Church. Despite the cold and the wet, the Plaza of Martyrs and every street and boulevard leading to the Temple’s high, green hill had been packed by the people of Zion, by every child of God who could possibly reach the city, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, holding up children so they could see the man who’d brought down the Inquisition as he walked through that rain, bareheaded, to receive Langhorne’s crown, and they hadn’t cared. They hadn’t cared that they were cold and wet, because they’d understood what they were seeing, realized what they’d become part of as they watched the procession pass.

  So, no, Rhobair II hadn’t needed sunlight and blue skies. He’d had something vastly more important than that.

  Not that Tymythy Symkyn didn’t appreciate them to the full, and he suspected the watching crowds didn’t mind them one bit, either.

  He actually chuckled at that thought, grateful for it. And then he drew another, still deeper breath, and felt the presence of God pour through his soul as he stepped through those silver-and-bronze gates into the enormous Plaza of Martyrs.

  The sweeping, majestically proportioned steps ascended from the Plaza to the Temple itself, where graceful columns rose more than sixty feet to support the gleaming dome and the eighteen-foot solid gold icon of the Archangel Langhorne which topped it. The six-acre Plaza was large enough for scores of thousands of the faithful to gather on God’s Day to hear the Grand Vicar’s annual sermon, and, like the streets leading to it, today it was a solid ocean of humanity on either side of the central avenue cordoned by the Temple Guard for the procession to pass through. Their cheers faded into abrupt, reverent silence as the procession crossed the broad band of gold inlaid into the Plaza’s marble at the foot of the Temple stairs and protected from centuries of foot traffic just as the floor of the Temple was. That band marked the formal boundary between the Plaza and the Temple proper, and he murmured a brief, familiar, heartfelt prayer of thanks that the Plaza had been restored to its pre-Jihad beauty and sanctity. His memory of the charred stakes, the grim pyres which had consumed so many of the Inquisition’s victims, was only too clear, and he understood precisely why Rhobair Duchairn had made the Plaza’s cleansing and restoration one of his most urgent priorities. Symkyn had been here, standing less than fifty yards from where he was at this moment, with sixty thousand other of the Faithful, as the newly consecrated Grand Vicar Rhobair II had conducted the open-air mass of contrition, formally acknowledging Mother Church’s guilt for the atrocities committed here. And he’d been here when the plaque acknowledging those atrocities, memorializing their victims and beseeching God’s forgiveness for the way in which they’d died, had been set into the façade of the central Fountain of Langhorne … and when Rhobair had rededicated and reconsecrated the Plaza to its original purpose.

  But now Rhobair was gone, and Tymythy Symkyn felt very small, very frail, and more mortal than he’d felt in years as the procession started up those sweeping stairs through the ringing, reverent silence—burnished and perfected, not broken, by the laughter of the breeze and the pop of banners—and the moment roared towards him.

  * * *

  The mighty doors of the Temple swept open. Not the smaller doors, set into those enormous bronze—only they weren’t really bronze, Captain Karstayrs reflected—portals. These were the Doors of Langhorne themselves, for
ty feet high and covered from top to bottom with bas-relief representations of the Archangels in glory, which were opened only once each year, on God’s Day, when the open air of God’s world swept into every corner of the stupendous cathedral dedicated to His worship.

  But they were also opened on one other occasion—the investiture and consecration of a new Grand Vicar. They were opened so that God might enter His house to witness as the newest heir of the Archangel Langhorne took up his Scepter in God’s name.

  No mere mortal could have opened those stupendous slabs of battle steel. Instead, they swept apart with ponderous, majestic grace as the Door Wardens pressed their hands to the glowing god lights, and a wordless sigh of renewed wonder and awe swept through the packed cathedral at the fresh evidence of God’s finger moving in the world.

  Samyl Karstayrs’ face was impassive, but his built-in sensors detected the activation of additional electronics buried in the Temple’s vaulted ceiling. And then, just below that ceiling, the air itself began to glow with a soft, golden radiance, a halo floating like a crown eighty feet above the crystoplast floor. Then the seals of the “Archangels” set into the lapis three inches below the crystoplast’s surface began to glow, as well. The skylights in the dome, soaring to almost a hundred and sixty feet above the floor, were designed so that shafts of sunlight illuminated those seals, and powered mirrors made certain those columns of light stayed where they were supposed to be whenever the sun was in the heavens, despite its motion. But today, they were lit not with simple sunlight but with an inner illumination that glowed with all the colors of the seals themselves.

  Those in the pews nearest the seals bowed their heads, signing themselves with Langhorne’s Scepter, and it was harder for Karstayrs to maintain his impassivity as he watched them. No wonder these people had never doubted the truth of the Holy Writ! And no wonder that Writ mandated that every true child of God make the pilgrimage to the Temple at least once in his or her life. How else could they be properly indoctrinated with the physical proof that Mother Church did proclaim the will of God?