Through Fiery Trials

by David Weber

  “Trust me, my son, you aren’t the only member of our order who could say that,” Braytahn said feelingly. “But every year we win back a little more ground. And it’s only fair that it be difficult for us to regain our flocks’ trust once more.”

  Samsyn bent his head in agreement with that.

  The Order of Schueler had taken a monstrous—and, he admitted ungrudgingly, well-deserved—blow in the course of the Jihad. Samsyn himself had been a mere under-priest, fresh out of seminary and assigned as a teacher in a small mountain town in the Episcopate of St. Aileen, while young Trahskhat had still been at seminary. Samsyn was devoutly grateful he’d stayed in St. Aileen to the end of the Jihad, because that assignment had kept him out of the hideous perversions of the Inquisition … and, he was guiltily aware, spared him the sort of decisions priests like Kuhnymychu Ruhstahd had been forced to make. He hoped he would have had Ruhstahd’s courage, even in the face of the Punishment, but he was too self-honest to be confident of that. The upper-priest from Camp Chihiro had been named an official martyr of Mother Church by Grand Vicar Rhobair, and Samsyn strongly suspected that Martyr Kuhnymychu would become Saint Kuhnymychu as soon as the minimum twenty-five-year waiting period ended.

  But there’d been far too few Kuhnymychus and far too many Wyllym Raynos, too many clerics who’d lent themselves willingly to Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s madness. Grand Vicar Rhobair had been ruthless in purging the order of its rot, and the vast majority of its prelates and upper-priests had been summarily relieved of their posts. Some had been transferred to other orders on a probationary basis; some had simply been defrocked; and some had faced ecclesiastic courts here in the Temple Lands even if they hadn’t been delivered to the Charisians and their allies for trial in the secular courts, as the peace treaties required for any who’d actually served in one of Clyntahn’s concentration camps.

  All of which helped explain how Ahrnahld Samsyn could be a senior upper-priest at such a young age. Of course, Archbishop Lywkys was only eight years older than he was, which was absurdly young for an archbishop entrusted with the governance of any of the Temple Lands’ episcopates. For that matter, before the Jihad, his office would have been occupied by one of the vicars, although the actual business of ministering to the episcopate’s people would undoubtedly have been entrusted to a bishop executor while the vicar in question dealt with more important matters in Zion.

  That was something else Vicar Rhobair had put a stop to. Under his reforms, no vicar would ever again hold any office outside the vicarate itself.

  “Well, I realize that this is your church, and not mine, my sons. Still, I fear it would never do to keep anyone faithful enough to come out in this—” Braytahn waved at the sleet drumming against the window panes “—waiting in a drafty cathedral!”

  “Of course not, Your Eminence,” Samsyn said with a smile. Technically, Braytahn was Samsyn’s “guest” for today’s high mass. It was an unusual upper-priest, however, who didn’t agree with his archbishop, no matter whose church they were in.

  “After you, Your Eminence,” he continued, waving gracefully towards the open door, and Braytahn signed the scepter of Langhorne in blessing before he led the way through it.

  The side passage delivered them to the vestibule, where the acolytes waited for them. The Cathedral of the Holy Archangel Schueler wasn’t really all that drafty, but the chill radiating from the inside of the closed doors was enough to make the unfortunate youngsters shiver, despite their heavy woolen winter cassocks and linen surplices, and Braytahn smiled sympathetically as he and the priests joined them. The archbishop laid his hands on their heads, murmuring a special blessing upon each of them in turn, and then smiled again, almost mischievously.

  “Buck up, boys,” he told them. “It’ll be a lot warmer in the sanctuary, and all that kneeling and genuflecting and singing will soon have your blood moving again!”

  “We know, Your Eminence,” the oldest of the three scepter-bearers said with an answering grin. “And we’ll try to keep our teeth from chattering till we get there.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Braytahn laughed, and made shooing motions with both hands for the processional to form up. The bishop took his own place directly behind the candle-bearers, with Samsyn and Trahskhat at his elbows, while the thurifers removed the covers from their thuribles and gave them gentle swings to make certain the chains were straight. The sweet-smelling smoke curled up, and Samsyn’s nostrils flared as he inhaled the familiar, comforting fragrance.

  Then the sextant who’d been watching stepped through the vestibule door into the cathedral proper, and the choirmaster who’d been watching for him gave the organist the signal he’d been expecting. He nodded back, and the prelude he’d been playing for the last twenty minutes flowed smoothly into the processional Samsyn had chosen for today’s mass. The majestic opening chords of “Lord of Adoration” filled the cathedral, and then the choir burst into song as the scepter-bearers—their faces solemnly joyous, now—led the way through the doors, down the nave, and into those glorious waves of music.

  Samsyn followed the archbishop, his own voice joining those of the choir and the other celebrants, and he felt a stir of satisfaction as he realized Trahskhat’s estimate had been very close. The cathedral was still less than half full, but that was far better than it had been the first time he’d celebrated the Feast of Schueler here.

  It wasn’t hard to understand why, after the atrocities of the Jihad. Nor was it difficult to blame laymen and laywomen for finding it difficult to distinguish between the actions of a monster like Zhaspahr Clyntahn and the order he’d used to carry out his mass murders. The yearly Day of Atonement had a very special meaning for the Order of Schueler, and Schueler himself had come under intense … scrutiny. No one could deny the words of the Archangel’s book, of the horrible punishments he’d laid down for the heretic and the blasphemer. Some people had tried to argue that the Book of Schueler should be read in a figurative way, but that was a fringe movement, and one not condoned by Mother Church. The inerrancy of the Holy Writ was absolute, attested to by the Holy Langhorne and Holy Bédard themselves, and that meant the Holy Schueler had written those words, had laid down those punishments.

  Samsyn wanted to believe Grand Vicar Rhobair had been right when he argued that the Punishment of Schueler, which for all of its specificity and horrific severity accounted for barely a twentieth of the complete Book of Schueler, was intended primarily to deter and was to actually be applied only to those who knowingly and with hearts filled with malice strove to seduce the innocent into Shan-wei’s service. The merely mistaken, the sincerely deluded, were to be reclaimed for the Light, not snuffed out and condemned forever to the Dark. That fate awaited only the truly unregenerate who’d deliberately given himself to the service of Shan-wei and refused to renounce his hellish mistress.

  Most days Samsyn did believe that, but there were still the occasional nights when sleep eluded him as he wrestled with the possibility that even the Grand Vicar might be mistaken. Yet there was so much else in the Book of Schueler, so much guidance for the education of God’s children. Yes, it was stern throughout, harsh in many places, yet in the fallen world Shan-wei had left broken and marred in her wake, that sort of sternness was necessary. It was the sternness of a father who wanted his children to grow up spiritually strong and morally straight, and it had been only Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s own spiritual rot that allowed him to inflict the Punishment wholesale in a holocaust the Holy Schueler himself would never have sanctioned.

  Those familiar thoughts carried him down the nave, through the music, past the pews occupied by the worshipers who’d braved cold and wind and sleet to be here on this high feast day—the Feast of the Holy Schueler, commemorating the joyous day on which the Archangel had returned to his well-deserved rest in the glorious presence of God Himself, leaving behind the worn out mortal body which had housed his soul for so long. That mortal body was buried in the crypt of this very cathedral, which had bee
n raised for the specific purpose of guarding and sanctifying his tomb. This service, here today, was the epicenter of all of the other high masses being held across the face of Safehold to remember the Holy Schueler on this, his day.

  Samsyn’s heart rose, swelling with the simple joy and unquestioning faith which were too often tested by the memory of the Jihad. How he wished he could cling to that joy, that simple, clarifying faith, every day of the year! That the vengeful, harsh Schueler whose wrath Zhaspahr Clyntahn had been able to twist and pervert to serve his own ends, could somehow vanish into Schueler the teacher, Schueler the guardian. If only—

  Ahrnahld Samsyn staggered, crying out as his hands rose to shield his eyes against the sudden, intolerable burst of light. He’d never seen—never imagined—such an explosion of brilliance, and he heard other voices crying out, some of them screaming, in shocked confusion and sudden fear. The organ music died a discordant death, the choirs’ massed harmony fragmented into individual cries of alarm, and then a voice, deeper than any Samsyn had ever heard, more powerful than any tempest he’d ever endured, spoke.

  “Do not be afraid, my children!” Its majesty filled the cathedral, rolling down from its high dome, flowing outward along the nave like a wall of sound, and Samsyn lowered his hands, blinking, trying to see. He couldn’t quite—

  His vision cleared, his eyes flared, and he flung himself to his knees in awe as he saw the mighty shape towering in the sanctuary of his cathedral.

  The inner dome of that cathedral floated a hundred feet above its pavement; the figure standing beneath it towered to at least half that height. It loomed like a titan, light streaming from it in rippling waves, and he knew that face. He knew it!

  “Do not be afraid,” the Archangel Schueler repeated. “You are safe here, for you stand on ground consecrated by faith, dedicated to hope. In a darkling world, you are a beacon of hope and of light, and I call upon you to be strong, to stand always for the truth.”

  Samsyn trembled under the mighty Archangel’s stern but compassionate gaze. He couldn’t look away, although he heard the archbishop whispering the words of the Catechism of Schueler as he, too, knelt at the Archangel’s feet.

  “You have survived a dark time,” the Archangel continued. “Terrible, evil deeds were done in my name. Deeds any godly person must renounce as the foul perversion they were. Enough time has passed for you to recognize that truth, to grapple with it and realize that even though terrible things were done in my name, it was never with my approval.”

  Samsyn signed himself with the scepter and felt those words—the words that validated his love for Schueler and the assurance that Zhaspahr Clyntahn had, indeed, perverted the Archangel’s will and intent—flood through him like the sun.

  “Yet now that that those days and years have passed, the time has come for a further truth, a deeper truth, to be shared with you. For know this, this world has indeed strayed far afield from the plan for which your forefathers and your foremothers, the Adams and the Eves who left you The Testimonies, were brought forth upon it. You do live in a dark and fallen time, but—” that mighty voice softened, went darker with what could almost have been pain “—it did not fall the way you have been taught it did.”

  Samsyn froze as the Archangel paused. What? What could he mean?!

  “You have been taught that it was Shan-wei the Bright who fell, allowing evil and darkness into the world. But I tell you that was a lie.”

  Samsyn’s heart seemed to stop. No! No, that was impossible! Every word of the Holy Writ taught that—!

  “I know this is hard to hear, my children,” the Archangel said quietly, soberly. “I know the pain and the confusion it causes you. Yet it is true. I have been prevented from telling you this truth for far too long, but that is because of the malign forces which truly violated and twisted the great plan for Safehold, and those forces did not spring from Shan-wei. She was not the one who betrayed that plan. Rather she was the one who was destroyed by the betrayer of that plan because she refused to compromise it. Because she refused to turn away from the great charge which had brought her to Safehold to prepare and shape it as a home for all humanity. And it is time you know. Time that I may finally tell you, who the true betrayer was.”

  Samsyn realized he was shaking his head again and again and again, that he was panting like a spent runner, his fingers aching with the force of his grip upon his pectoral scepter, his heart pounding as the impossible words rolled over him.

  And then another light, too brilliant for the mortal eye to withstand, descended from the cathedral dome above the Archangel like a drifting star, settling towards the earth.

  Or, his quivering mind told him, like The Testimonies’ descriptions of the kyousei hi—the great fire no mortal had beheld since the last Archangel had returned to God.

  The eye-searing brightness touched the sanctuary rail, and then it slowly faded into something a human eye could tolerate, and Ahrnahld Samsyn swallowed hard as he saw the mighty volume resting upon the rail. Saw the flickering, flowing glow of holy brilliance dancing through its gems, saw the precious metals of its cover, and knew—knew—that its pages were of that same imperishable metal, in paper-thin sheets etched with a finer script than any mortal hand could produce.

  “This is my Testimony,” the Archangel said. “The Testimony of Schueler, and I leave it with you so that all who see it may know I truly appeared before you, that this is truly my word. And that word, my children,” he said while Samsyn trembled before him, “is that it was not Shan-wei who Fell, but Chihiro who lied.”

  A chorus of gasps washed through the cathedral, and the Archangel looked down upon the mall.

  “Take that word forth with you, my children, for it is time the truth was known. Time the lies were set aside. Time for you to walk once more into the light of the purpose which brought you here.

  “I know it’s frightening. I know the burden I’ve laid upon you will be heavy. But it is time, and I charge you all as my witnesses and my messengers to take that truth and proclaim it to all the Faithful.”

  He gazed down upon them for another endless moment, then raised his hand in a gesture of benediction.

  “I leave you as my watchmen and my heralds. Be vigilant, be brave, and know that the truth is a mightier weapon than any lie.”

  And with that, he vanished, as suddenly as he had appeared, and Samsyn blinked, wondering if it had all been some sort of incredible, impossible delusion.

  But then he saw the Godlight still washing across the gems encrusting that gleaming metal cover and whimpered, because he knew it hadn’t.

  Glossary

  Abbey of Saint Evehlain—the sister abbey of the Monastery of Saint Zherneau.

  Abbey of the Snows—an abbey of the Sisters of Chihiro of the Quill located in the Mountains of Light above Langhorne’s Tears. Although it is a working abbey of Chihiro, all of the nuns of the abbey are also Sisters of Saint Kohdy and the abbey serves as protection and cover for Saint Kohdy’s tomb. The Abbey of the Snows is built on the foundation of a pre-Armageddon Reef structure which is reputed to have been a resort house for Eric Langhorne before his death.

  Angle-glass—Charisian term for a periscope.

  Angora lizard—a Safeholdian “lizard” with a particularly luxuriant, cashmerelike coat. They are raised and sheared as sheep and form a significant part of the fine textiles industry.

  Anshinritsumei—“the little fire” from the Holy Writ; the lesser touch of God’s spirit and the maximum enlightenment of which mortals are capable.

  Ape lizard—ape lizards are much larger and more powerful versions of monkey lizards. Unlike monkey lizards, they are mostly ground dwellers, although they are capable of climbing trees suitable to bear their weight. The great mountain ape lizard weighs as much as nine hundred or a thousand pounds, whereas the plains ape lizard weighs little more than a hundred to a hundred and fifty pounds. Ape lizards live in families of up to twenty or thirty adults, and whereas monkey lizards
will typically flee when confronted with a threat, ape lizards are much more likely to respond by attacking the threat. It is not unheard of for two or three ape lizard “families” to combine forces against particularly dangerous predators, and even a great dragon will generally avoid such a threat.

  Archangels, The—central figures of the Church of God Awaiting. The Archangels were senior members of the command crew of Operation Ark who assumed the status of divine messengers, guides, and guardians in order to control and shape the future of human civilization on Safehold.

  ASP—Artillery Support Party, the term used to describe teams of ICA officers and noncoms specially trained to call for and coordinate artillery support. ASPs may be attached at any level, from the division down to the company or even platoon, and are equipped with heliographs, signal flags, runners, and/or messenger wyverns.

  Bahnyta—the name Seijin Kohdy assigned to his hikousen.

  Band—the AoG and Harchongese equivalent of an army corps. The word “corps” itself can’t be used because of the Inquisition’s opposition to the adoption of that “heresy-tainted” term.

  Beaver—the Safeholdian analog of a terrestrial beaver. It is larger even than the terrestrial species, with full-grown adults reaching as much as 150 pounds (70 kilos) but less prolific, which is fortunate, considering its effect on its environment. They are a favored prey of slash lizards and great dragons, but are dangerous if cornered and difficult prey.

  Blink-lizard—a small, bioluminescent winged lizard. Although it’s about three times the size of a firefly, it fills much the same niche on Safehold.

  Blue leaf—a woody, densely growing native Safeholdian tree or shrub very similar to mountain laurel. It bears white or yellow flowers in season and takes its name from the waxy blue cast of its leaves.

  Bombsweeper—the Imperial Charisian Navy’s name for a minesweeper.