The Corvallan looked around, licking his lips. The eyes on him were not particularly friendly, and in un conscious reflex he searched for someone who wasn't glaring. Eilir tapped her ear with two fingers and shook her head at him with a look of pity that he found disqui eting. John Hordle was smiling… but he was also lean ing an elbow on the pommel of the four-foot sword he usually carried slung across his back, with his right hand on the long quillions of the guard. When their gaze met, his thumb jerked out to point to Alleyne Loring.
The envoy made a mute appeal to Alleyne, and the Englishman shrugged slightly and silently mouthed, Pay up!
The Corvallan sighed and reached a hand inside his jacket. When it came out he held a rectangle of black leather; he opened it and pulled the fountain pen out of its loops.
"Will you take a check drawn on the Faculty Senate's account with First National of Corvallis, Lady Astrid?"
"By all means," Astrid said, all graciousness again. "Make it payable to Dunedain Enterprises, Limited, if you prefer the common tongue. In Edhellen, that would be Gwaith-i-Dunedain, Herth."
****
Corwin,
Valley of Paradise, Montana
February 1, CY22/2021 A.D.
The Church Universal and Triumphant had come to the high green pastures of Paradise Valley a decade before the Change. Their leaders had told them that the end of the world would come soon, in nuclear fire. The elaborate maze of underground shelters and stockpiled weapons hadn't been very useful when the end came instead with a soundless flash of light, but the massive stores of foodstuffs and tools and clothing most emphat ically had. Still, they had been deep in quarrels with the local ranchers when the Prophet arrived with a few followers, fleeing the great dying of California. The Church had taken him in, and its leader proclaimed that his vision was from the Ascended Masters…
Sethaz felt himself sweat as he backed out of the Pres ence. It was getting worse, the darkness and the smell and the long ranting harangues. Thank the One that it had been fairly comprehensible this time. It was almost as bad as his mother had been, once the Alzheimer's had progressed. The pillow had been a mercy. Perhaps…
No! he thought. Not yet.
The path outside was lined with his personal Cutters, Guardians of the House of the Ascended, the Sword of the Prophet; they went to one knee in the snow as the Son of the Prophet appeared, the sheathed tips of their shetes resting in the snow ahead of them, their heads bent over the hilts. The red-brown of their lacquered leather armor showed brilliantly against the pale carpet of winter, with the golden-rayed sun on their breasts; if they'd been on a mission instead of guarding the House of the Prophet, they'd have worn white cloth over it.
The cold lay on his face as he looked up to the Absa roka Mountains to the east, so intense that it made the air seem liquid. Snow peaks cradled the Valley of Par adise on both flanks, floating high and holy where the air thinned between the world of Man and the Beyond. Between him and the mountains loomed the unfinished bulk of the Temple of the Dictations, swarming with workmen even in winter. Smoke drifted high against heaven, smelling of hot brick and scorched metal.
There was a long silence as he stood and watched the morning light tinge the jagged white horizon with a hint of pink, letting the clean wind blow the nausea out of him. He wasn't an imposing sight in himself, a man just short of thirty, a little on the tall side of me dium, his cropped hair brown and his eyes an everyday hazel, slender and strong with a swordsman's thick wrists and an archer's broad shoulders. Yet the aura about him was enough to keep others at a deferential distance.
At last Councilor of the Way Charom came over, boldest of a knot of ecclesiastical bureaucrats. They had grown over the domains of the Church Universal and Triumphant like mold over bread these last ten years, but there was no way to do without them.
"What is the word of the Prophetic Channeler, your holiness?" he said.
"Wheel may turn wheel, and that wheel may turn a wheel or a shaft, but no more, lest the anger of the As cended Masters be again turned on us, and mankind's pride be broken in the dust again."
The stout shaven-headed man in his wool and furs bowed over linked hands, but he couldn't hide a flicker of relief. Sethaz inclined his own head, very slightly, but a mark of acknowledgment all the same. It would have been very awkward if the gearing necessary to run wind mills to pump water had been declared Abomination. The Guardian of the Way was what a secular state might have called an interior minister, and it would have been his responsibility to enforce the edict.
There was enough trouble making sure that all the women covered their hair.
"May I ask how the Prophet is?" he asked, greatly daring.
Sethaz thought, then decided to allow it. "His earthly, human shell of this embodiment grows weak," he said, which everyone knew. "One day soon he will rejoin the Unseen Hierarchy and cast aside the envelope he wears. It is a burden and a torment to him, though one he bears willingly for us."
Charom nodded again and spoke with unctuous relish: "It is good that you will be here, his chosen Son and successor, trained through many Embodiments to receive the Dictations."
You mean it's good that you got in with the winning side early, Sethaz thought, and flicked a hand in dismissal. The minister withdrew.
Alone he paced between the compounds, with only the six triads of Cutters that accompanied him every where. Little remained of pre-Change Corwin; most of that had burned in the fighting when the Church took full control of the valley. Now it was a complex of new buildings, most built in two-story blocks of gray stone and shingle roofs set around courtyards, a few of the older ones of timber; covered walkways connected them above the streets. In the summertime the gardens were very beautiful, but now they lay dormant, banked under earth and straw and mounded snow that glittered with ice crystals.
The snow was colored brown with dirt where sleds carried loads through the tree lined streets; grain in sacks, salvaged metal bound for the smithies or weapons and tools out of them, firewood, charcoal, frozen sides of beef and mutton, a thousand other things that came in as tribute from the regions that acknowledged the Dictations.
People swarmed as well, women in headscarves and long skirts and overcoats, men in pants and jackets and fur caps, officials of the Church in their heavy robes, ex pressionless slaves in thick rags carrying burdens or pulling sleds. All paused reverently when a priest climbed a podium set beside the street and read a brief passage from the Dictations. He caught a snatch of it.
" '… Vigil of the Violet Flame, but the soulless min ions of the Nephilim prevailed over the men of Camelot, and…' "
"Amen! Amen! Amen!" the chorus thundered out when he'd finished, and then the folk turned back to their business.
Sethaz went in under an arch marked with the sun disk; he liked to do unannounced inspections. If you relied too much on written reports or scheduled visits there was always the danger you'd end up in a puzzle palace of deceptions stage managed by underlings. The guards there-trainees were strictly segregated-slapped left fist inside right hand and bowed low. This building was one of the Prophetic Guard's; the courtyard was roofed over, rising in a laminated timber barrel vault with many skylights, with the cells of the students looking down from all around and open classrooms, offices and librar ies and refectories below. The layout made it easier for a single observer in the courtyard to keep track of ev erything that occurred, as well: it was called the panop ticon, and the Dictations attributed the method to the Ascended Master Plato.
Several dozen of the youngest students knelt in one end of the court, resting from physical training and chanting:
The beloved Maha Chohan gave me a grant
Of many good and fine life streams
Like a golden chain, girdling the Earth,
Is the Unseen Hierarchy of the Ascended Lords.
Without the Unseen Hierarchy,
The Earth would long ago
Have passed into oblivion…
A se
nior student prowled behind them with a rod of split ash, waiting for an error or hesitation. The faces of the novices were glazed with the effort of the endless repetitions; only so could the Truth be ground into the soul, with sleeplessness and hunger. Not an eye of the juniors flickered away from the Preceptor who led the chant. The rattle and thud of weapons practice came from the center of the courtyard; for a moment Sethaz and his personal guards watched.
The trainees were young, their faces smooth and hairless, scalps shaved, a mixture of levies from the newly conquered regions and the sons of ambitious families closer to the core territories. The Sword of the Prophet were like the priesthood, a pathway to office and power. The older classes were sparring, stripped to the waist, using wooden swords or staffs or hand-to hand. There was a constant clatter of wood on wood, an occasional thump and grunt as a blow went home. Sweat ran down their shaven scalps and muscular tor sos, giving the air a musky pungency under the scents of wood and soap and stone; the instructors here were in the armor of Guardians, often nearing middle age, always scarred. Some lacked a hand or foot or were otherwise crippled.
The students bore scars as well, of the scourge and hot iron, from punishment or self-inflicted efforts to reach the trance state where you became one with the Mas ters. Pictures of those Ascended Lords graced the walls, above the mirrors and stretching bars; Christ and Zoroaster, Muhammad and Gautama Buddha, Blavatsky and Mundy, his own mother and the current Prophet.
Sethaz watched the practice in silence for a few min utes. Then he snapped his fingers and the senior instructor came over. He had the chin beard and close cropped hair of a warrior elder, streaked with the first gray hairs. He'd been a fighting man even before the Change, and joined the Church not long after.
"How do they progress, Commander Sean?" the Prophet's son asked.
"Son of the Prophet, they're doing fairly well," the man said. "But we haven't the training cadre to expand the program as quickly as I'd like."
Sethaz cocked an eye at the oldest class, the eighteen year-olds. He was less than thirty himself, but he felt like one carved from the granite of the hills compared to them.
"They look to be shaping well."
Sean nodded. "Yes, Dispenser of the Word, and they can help with the basics for the new intakes. But their knowledge is still theoretical. They need combat experience before they're fit to be instructors themselves."
Sethaz nodded. "Let's see how they do at second-level trials."
Then he stripped off his heavy winter coat, and the sweater and silk shirt beneath it. One of the students let that distract him, and went down under his opponent's staff. The instructor added a few hearty kicks before he rose.
"Those three," Sethaz said.
Staff scurried to bring practice armor, much like the combat variety except that it was more battered and worn, and blunted blades-a step up from the lath-and-wood of everyday drill. After the suit had been strapped on he reached out his arms, and shield and shete were there. The rest of the students grouped themselves in files of three and went to one knee, watching silently and controlling their breathing with drilled ease.
Sean was grinning as he turned to the similarly outfit ted students. "The Son of the Prophet does you a great honor. Push hard on the word of command… fight!"
The students didn't waste any time on preliminaries; the center man of the triad lunged with blade outstretched.
"Cut! Cut! "
Not bad, Sethaz thought, as he swayed aside and clubbed the trainee on the back of his helmet with the edge of the shield, a short chopping stroke. In the same instant he caught the second's stroke at the side of his leg on his own shete and kicked him in the belly, hard. The armor spread it; the steel-toed riding boot would have killed a man without the plates and padding, and even with he doubled up with an ooof.
That left the third. He came on gamely, shete flash ing. It cracked hard on Sethaz's shield, then rang on the steel of his blade. After a moment he found the rhythm of it, and left an opening. The student's shete lunged and then it was caught between his right arm and his flank, clamped hard by the inside of his arm. The trainee fool ishly tried to wrestle it clear rather than abandoning it and going for a dagger, and took a head butt in the face. Sethaz pulled the blow; that was another one that could kill. It jarred him a little, even with the steel of the helmet and the padding between him and the impact. The youngster's nose broke with a crunching sound and he lurched back to the matting, lying dazed with blood pouring down over his mouth.
Sethaz kept the grin off his face, standing and mak ing the air whine as he whipped the blunt practice shete through figure eights.
"What have you learned from this?" Sean barked at the kneeling spectators.
One of them raised a hand. At a curt nod, the youth said, "Sir, that a fighter should not think only of his shete, just because he has a shete in his hand. Everything is a weapon to the warrior's mind."
"Correct," Sethaz said. "And always use conditions and circumstances, which are unique to each fight. Remember that."
He let the servants strip off the armor, went through into the bathhouse, showered and took the cold plunge. Then he sighed and changed into a robe.
Back to business, he thought, crossing over a street in the enclosed walkway and into the building that housed his private offices and quarters and his Women's House.
The sanctum he used for most of his despised but could not-be avoided paperwork held only a mandala, desk and office furniture, but the broad windows looked out across a vista of river and cottonwoods and snowy pastures, up to the green of ponderosa-pine forest and the glaciers above. A murmur and click of abacus beads came from the offices on the ground floor, but he felt private here-except for a triad of the guards, of course, and his secretary, Geraldine. It had been a refuge when he was younger, still uncertain and feeling his way as the Prophet withdrew into his visions and the generals and priest-bureaucrats jostled for power.
More servants brought him fresh bread and a bowl of lamb stew with onions and potatoes as he read through the most important dispatches. Things were going well down in the Powder River country; the last of the pow erful ranchers there were asking for terms, ready to ac cept the Dictations. And the Sioux had finally yielded all the Hi-Line, retreating eastward into their strongholds in the Dakotas and agreeing to allow missionaries from the Church to preach in their camps.
Let's hope that works, he thought. They make poor slaves but they'd be very valuable subjects.
He clapped hands to have the tray taken out, and sat sipping borage tea. Which left another matter, one less easily solved with a few regiments or preachers.
"Bring him in," he said.
The secretary genuflected and went to the door, and a near-naked figure was thrust through to stumble to a halt and stand blinking. Kuttner was in his thin drawers, teeth still chattering from the cold of the unheated basement cell. His hands were bound before him, and the guards had thrust a pole between his elbows and his back, and were steering him by it. They pushed him down on his knees; Kuttner bent to touch his forehead to the tiles of the floor. There was a crusted slow healing scar on his left cheek, ending in an empty socket.
"I beg for mercy, Son of the Prophet!" he wailed. "I have failed the Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant. Mercy!"
Then he sensibly fell silent. There was no excuse for failure; it showed a lack of proper openness to the Dictations.
"I am disappointed in you, Kuttner," Sethaz said, offering none of the usual titles or formulae of polite ness. "We had great hopes… and the Prophet himself has said that the matter of Nantucket is important."
If that's not just his madness speaking, Sethaz thought, then pushed the deadly siren song of doubt away. I must have faith.
Kuttner licked his lips. He was a capable spy, and they'd spent years infiltrating him into the household of the young bossman of Iowa before he inherited from his father; his file indicated that he was cynical, but fundamentally loyal, a
mbitious, and highly intelligent. Brains were in far shorter supply than zeal. Now there was something in his single remaining eye that made Sethaz a little uneasy.
"Son of the Prophet, the Prophet's words were truer than my weak and doubting spirit could have imagined. There is something dangerous on the island. Some thing… I don't understand, something beyond the world of men. Our previous expedition disappeared without trace, until I found that shete with our mark. My attempt penetrated the mystery."
"Yes," Sethaz said, looking down at the report on his desk.
How much of it can I believe? he mused. Kuttner used to be a reliable man.
"And we'd have known more of it if you hadn't let this man Vogeler escape. To be precise, he penetrated the mystery; you were lost in visions."
Kuttner licked his lips again. "I was sure that he had made submission to the Church and was ready to learn the Dictations," he said.
"And you thought you had established a secure control link."
"I was not wrong, Son of the Prophet. I… just didn't have time to use it. I was careless."
"And lost an eye because of it," Sethaz said.
Though that is fortunate for you, he thought. If you had not been so badly wounded, we might have suspected collusion.
Kuttner went on in desperate haste: "But Son of the Prophet, he did tell me of his vision before I revealed myself. He had no reason not to, and no reason to lie while he still thought I served the bossman of Des Moines. The vision of the sword, and the dreams that told him to take the news to the far west and seek this Sword of the Lady."
Sethaz came to a decision, and motioned. One of the guards drew his shete and flicked twice at the cords in the same blur of motion. Kuttner remained motionless while the knife-sharp weapon went tick against the wood of the pole. The staff clattered on the floor of the sanc tum; another flicker of steel between his bound hands, and Kuttner grunted as he rubbed his wrists and felt the pain of circulation returning.
"However, the men I sent to the west didn't do too well with Vogeler either," Sethaz said. "A most obdurate apostate and traitor. In fact, the observation team saw him carried out of this Sutterdown place towards the lair of the Witch Queen herself… and that is precisely who we wanted to keep Vogeler's story from. You are pardoned, provisionally, and restored to your rank of High Seeker of the God-flame. You have until snowmelt to come up with a plan. Consult the archives and interview agents as you wish."
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