Big but vulnerable, and he knew, by now, the vulnerable point. Styphon wasn't a popular god, like Dralm or Galzar or Yirtta Allmother. The priests of Styphon never tried for a following among the people, or even the minor nobility and landed gentry who were the backbone of here-and-now society. They ruled by pressure on the Great Kings and the Princes, and as soon as the pressure was relieved, as soon as the fireseed monopoly was broken, those rulers and their people with them would turn on Styphon's House. The war against Styphon's House was going to be won in little independent powder mills all over the Five Kingdoms.
But beating Gormoth was the immediate job. He didn't know how much good Skranga would be able to do, or Xentos's Dralm-temple Fifth Column. You couldn't trust that kind of thing. Gormoth would have to be beaten on the battlefield. Taking Tarr-Dombra had been a good start. The next morning, two thousand Nostori troops, mostly mercenaries, had tried to force a crossing at Dyssa Ford, at the mouth of Pine Creek; they'd been stopped by artillery fire. That night, Harmakros had taken five hundred cavalry across the West Branch at Vryllos Gap, and raided western Nostor, firing thatches, running off cattle, and committing all the usual atrocities.
He frowned slightly. Harmakros was a fine cavalry leader, and a nice guy to sit down and drink with, but Harmakros was just a trifle atrocity-prone. That massacre at the Sevenhills temple-farm, for instance. Well, if that was the way they made war, here-and-now, that would be the way to make it.
Then he sat for a while longer, thinking about the Art of War, here-and-now. He hoped taking Tarr-Dombra would hold Gormoth off for the rest of this year, and give him a chance to organize a real army, trained in the tactics he could remember from the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of his own time.
Light cannon, the sort Gustavus Adolphus had smashed Tilly's unwieldy tercios at Breitenfeld with. And plenty of rifles, and men trained to use them. There was a lot of forest country, here-and-now, and oddly, no game laws to speak of, everybody was a hunter. And bore-standardization, so that bullets could be issued, instead of every soldier having to carry his own bullet-mould and make his own bullets. He wondered how soon he could get socket bayonets, unknown here-and-now, produced. Not by the end of this year, not along with everything else. But if he could get rid of all these bear spears, and these scythe-blade things, whatever they were called, and get the spearmen armed with eighteen-foot Swiss pikes, then they'd keep the cavalry off his arquebusiers and calivermen.
He dug the heel out of his pipe and put it down, rising and looking at his watch (the only one in the world, and what would he do if he broke it?). It was 1700; dinner in an hour and a half. He went out, returning the salute of the halberdier at the door, and up the stairway.
His servant had the things piled on a table in his parlor, on a white sheet. The tunic with the battered badge that had saved his life; the gray shirt, torn and blood-stained. The breeches; he left the billfold in the hip pocket. He couldn't spend the paper currency of a nonexistent United States, and the identification cards belonged to a man similarly nonexistent here-and-now. He didn't want the boots, either; the castle cordwainer did better work, now that he had learned to make right and left feet. The Sam Browne belt, with the empty cartridge-loops and the holster and the handcuff-pouch. Anybody you needed handcuffs for, here-and-now, you knocked on the head or shot. He tossed the blackjack down contemptuously; blackjacks didn't belong here-and-now. Rapiers and poignards did.
He picked up the.38 Colt Official Police, swung out the cylinder and checked it by habit-reflex, and dry-practiced a few rounds at a knot-hole in the paneling. He didn't want to part with that, even if there were no more cartridges for it, but the rest of this stuff would be rather meaningless without it. He slipped it into the holster and buttoned down the retaining-strap.
"That's the lot," he told the servant. "Take them to High Priest Xentos." The servant put them compactly together, one boot on either side, and wrapped them in the sheet. Tomorrow, at the thanksgiving ceremony, they would be deposited as votive offerings in the temple of Dralm. He didn't believe in Dralm, or any other god, but now, besides being a general and an ordnance engineer and an industrialist, he had to be a politician and no politician can afford to slight his constituents' religion. If nothing else, a parsonage childhood had given him a talent for hypocritical lip-service.
He watched the servant carry the bundle out. There goes Corporal Calvin Morrison, he thought. Long live Lord Kalvan of Hostigos.
VERKAN Vall, his story finished, relaxed in his chair and sipped his tall drink. There was no direct light on the terrace, only a sky-reflection of the city lights below, dim enough that the tip of Tortha Karf's cigarette glowed visibly. There were four of them around the low table: the Chief of Paratime Police; the Director of the Paratime Commission, who acted only on the Chief's suggestion; the Chairman of the Paratemporal Trade Board, who did as the Commission Director told him; and himself, who, in a hundred and twenty-odd days, would have all Tortha Karf's power and authority-and all his headaches.
"You took no action?" the Paratime Commission Director was asking. "None whatever. None was needed. The man knows he was in some kind of a time-machine, which shifted him not into the past or future of his own world but laterally, in another time-dimension, and from that he can deduce the existence, somewhen, of a race of lateral time-travelers. That, in essence, is the Paratime Secret, but this Calvin Morrison-Lord Kalvan, now-is no threat to it. He's doing a better job of protecting it in his own case than we could. He has good reason to.
"Look what he has, on his new time-line, that his old one could never have given him. He's a great nobleman; they've gone out of fashion on Europo-America, where the Common Man is the ideal. He's going to marry a beautiful princess, and they've even gone out of fashion for children's fairy-tales. He's a sword-swinging soldier of fortune, and they've vanished from a nuclear-weapons world. He's commanding a good little army, and making a better one of it, the work he loves. And he has a cause worth fighting for, and an enemy worth beating. He's not going to jeopardize his position with those people.
"You know what he did? He told Xentos, under pledge of secrecy, that he had been banished by sorcery from his own time, a thousand years in the future. Sorcery, on that time-line, is a perfectly valid explanation for anything. With his permission, Xentos gave that story to Rylla, Ptosphes and Chartiphon; they handed it out that he is an exiled Prince from a country completely outside local geographical knowledge. See what he has? Regular defense in depth; we couldn't have done nearly as well ourselves."
"Well, how'd it leak to you?" the Board Chairman wanted to know. "From Xentos, at the big victory feast. I got him off to one side, got him into a theological discussion, and spiked his drink with some hypno truth-drug. He doesn't even remember, now, that he told me."
"Nobody on that time-line'll get it that way," the Board Chairman agreed. "But didn't you take a chance on getting that stuff of his out of the temple?"
He shook his head. "We ran a conveyer in the night of the feast, when it was empty. The next morning, when the priests discovered that the uniform and the revolver and the other things had vanished, they cried, 'Lo! Dralm has accepted the offering! A miracle! I was there, and saw it. Kalvan doesn't believe in any miracles; he thinks some of these transients that left Hostigos that day when the borders were opened stole the stuff. I know Harmakros's cavalry were stopping people at all the exit roads and searching wagons and packs. Publicly, of course, Kalvan had to give thanks to Dralm for accepting the offering."
"Well, was it necessary?"
"Not on that time-line. On the pickup line, yes. The stuff will be found… first the clothing and the badge with his number on it. Not too far from where he vanished; I think at Altoona. We have a man planted on the city police force there. Later, maybe in a year, the revolver will turn up, in connection with a homicide we will arrange. The Sector Regional Subchief can take care of that. There are always plenty of prominent people on any time-line
who wouldn't be any great loss."
"But that won't explain anything," the Commission Director objected. "No; it'll be an unsolved mystery. Unsolved mysteries are just as good as explanations, as long as they're mysterious within a normal framework."
"Well, gentlemen, all this is very interesting, but how does it concern me officially?" the Paratemporal Trade Board Chairman asked.
The Commission Director laughed. "You disappoint me! This Styphon's House racket is perfect for penetration of that subsector, and in a couple of centuries, long before either of us retire, it'll be a good area to have penetrated. We'll just move in on Styphon's House and take over the same way we did the Yat-Zar temples on the Hulgun Sector, and build that up to general political and economic control."
"You'll have to stay off Morrison's-Kalvan's-time-line," Tortha Karf said.
"I should say they will! You know what's going to be done with that? We're going to turn that over to the University of Dhergabar as a study-area, and five adjoining time-lines for controls. You know what we have here?" He was becoming excited about it. "We have the start of an entirely new subsector, identified from the exact point of divarication, something we've never been able to do before, except from history. I'm already established on that time-line as Verkan the Grefftscharr trader; Kalvan thinks that I'm traveling on horseback to Zygros City to recruit brass-founders for him, to teach his people how to cast brass cannon. In about forty or so days, I can return with them. They will, of course, be the University study-team. And I will be back, every so often, as often as horse-travel rates would plausibly permit. I'll put in a trade depot, which can mask the conveyer-head…"
Tortha Karf began laughing. "I knew you'd figure yourself some way! And, of course, it's such a scientifically important project that the Chief of Paratime Police would have to give it his personal attention, so you'll be getting outtime even after I retire and you take over."
"Well, all right. We all have our hobbies; you've been going to that farm of yours on Fifth Level Sicily for as long as I've been on the Paracops. Well, my hobby farm's going to be Kalvan Subsector, Fourth Level Aryan Transpacific. I'm only a hundred and thirty; by the time I'm ready to retire…"
IN the quiet of the Innermost Circle, in Styphon's House Upon Earth, at Balph, the great image looked down, and Sesklos, Supreme Priest and Styphon's Voice, returned the carven stare almost as stonily. Sesklos did not believe in Styphon or in any other god; if he had, he would not be sitting here. The policies of Styphon's House were too important to entrust to believers, and such could never hope to rise above the white robed outer circle, or at most don the black robes of under-priests. None might wear the yellow robe, let alone the flame-colored robe of primacy. The image, he knew, was of a man-the old high priest who had, by discovering the application of a minor temple secret, taken the cult of a minor healer-god out of its mean back-street shrines and made it the power that ruled the rulers of all the Five Kingdoms. If it had been in Sesklos to worship anything, he would have worshiped the memory of that man.
And now, the first Supreme Priest looked down upon the last one. Sesklos lowered his eyes to the sheets of parchment in front of him, flattening one with his hands to read again.
PTOSPHES, Prince of Hostigos, to SESKLOS, calling himself Styphon's Voice, these:
False priest of a false god, impudent swindler, liar and cheat!
Know that we in Hostigos, by simple mechanic arts, now make for ourselves that fireseed which you pretend to be the miracle of your fraudulent god, and that we propose teaching these arts to all, that hereafter Kings and Princes minded to make war may do so for their own defense and advancement, and not to the enrichment of Styphon's House of Iniquities.
In proof thereof, we send fireseed of our own make, enough for twenty musket charges, and set forth how it is made, thus:
To three parts of refined saltpeter and three fifths of one part of charcoal and two fifths of one part of sulfur, all ground to the fineness of bolted wheat flour. Mix thoroughly, moisten the mixture, and work it to a heavy dough, then press into cakes and dry them, and when they are fully dry, grind and sieve them.
And know that we hold you and all in Styphon's House of Iniquities our deadly enemies, and the enemies general of all men, to be dealt with as wolves are, and that we will not rest content until Styphon's House of Iniquities is utterly cast down and destroyed.
PTOSPHES,
Prince of and for the nobles and people of Hostigos. That had been the secret of the power of Styphon's House. No ruler, Great King or petty lord, could withstand his enemies if they had fireseed and he had none; No ruler sat secure on his thrown except by the favour of Styphon's House. Given here, armies marched to victory; withheld there, terms of peace were accepted. In every council of state, Styphon's House spoke the deciding word. Wealth poured in to be loaned out again at ursury and returned more weath. And now the contemptible Prince of a realm a man could ride across without tiring his horse was bringing it down, and Styphon's House had provoked him to it. There had been sulfur springs in Hostigos, and of Styphon's Trinity sulfur was hardest to get. Well, they'd demanded the land of him, and he'd refused, and none could be allowed to defy Styphon's House, so his enemy, Prince Gormoth, had been given gifts of money and fireseed. Things like that were done all the time. Three moons ago, Ptosphes and his people had been desperate; now he was writing thus to Styphon's Voice himself. The impiety of it shocked Sesklos. Then he pushed aside Ptosphes' letter and looked that the one from Vyblos, the highpriest at Nestor Town. Three moons ago, a stranger calling himself Kalvan and claiming to be an exiled Prince from a far country, had appeared in Hostigos. A moon later, Ptsophes had made this Kalvan commander of all his soldiers, and set guards on his borders, that none might leave. He'd been informed of that, but had thought nothing of it. Then, six days ago, the Hostigi had taken Tarr-Dombra the castle securing Gormoth's best route of invasion into Hostigos, and a black-robe priest who had been there had been released to bear this letter to him. Vybios had sent the letter on by swift couriers; the priest was following more slowly to tell his tale in person.
It had, of course, been this Kalvan who had given Ptosphes the fireseed secret. He wondered briefly if this Kalvan might be some renegade from Styphon's House, then shook his head. No; the full secret, as Ptosphes had set it down, was known only to yellow-robe priests of the Inner Circle, upper priests, high priests and archpriests. If one of these had absconded, the news would have reached him as fast as relays of galloping horses could bring it. Some Inner Circle priest might have written it down, a thing utterly forbidden, and the writing might have fallen into unconsecrated hands, but he doubted that. The proportions were different: more saltpeter and less charcoal. He would have Ptosphes's sample tried; he suspected that it might be better than their own. A man, then, who had rediscovered the secret for himself. That could be, though it had taken many years and the work of many priests to perfect the process, especially the caking and grinding. He shrugged. That was not important. The important thing was that the secret was out. Soon everybody would be making fireseed, and then Styphon's House would be only a name, and a name of mockery at that.
He might, however, postpone that day for as long as mattered to him. He was near his ninetieth year; he would not live to see many more, and for each man the world ends when he dies.
Letters of urgency to the archpriests of the five Great Temples, plainly telling them all, each to tell those under him as much as he saw fit. A story to be circulated among the secular rulers that fireseed stolen by bandits was being smuggled and sold. Prompt investigation of reports of anyone gathering sulfur or saltpeter, or building or altering grinding-mills. Death by assassination of anyone suspected of knowing the secret.
That would only do for the moment; he knew that. Something better must be devised, and quickly. And care must be taken not to spread, while trying to suppress, the news that someone outside Styphon's House was making fireseed. A Great Council of all the archpriests
, but that later.
And, of course, immediate destruction of Hostigos, and all in it, not one to be spared even for slavery. Gormoth had been waiting until his own people could harvest their crops; he must be made to move at once. An archpriest of Styphon's House Upon Earth to be sent to Nostor, since this was entirely beyond poor Vyblos's capacities. Krastokles, he thought. Lavish gifts of fireseed and silver and arms for Gormoth.
He glanced again at Vyblos's letter. A copy of Ptosphes's letter to himself had gone to Gormoth, by the hand of the castellan of Tarr-Dombra, released on ransom-oath. Why, Ptosphes had given his enemy the fireseed secret! He rebuked himself for not having noticed that before. That had been a daring, and a fiendishly clever, thing to do.
So, with Krastokles would go fifty mounted Guardsmen of the Temple, their captain to be an upper priest without robe. And more silver, to corrupt Gormoth's courtiers and mercenary captains.
And a special letter to the high priest of the Sask Town temple. It had been planned to use Prince Sarrask as a counterpoise to Gormoth, when the latter had grown too great by the conquest of Hostigos. Well, the time for that was now. Gormoth was needed to destroy Hostigos; as soon as that was accomplished, he, too, must be destroyed.
Sesklos struck the gong thrice, and as he did, he thought again of this mysterious Kalvan. That was nothing to shrug off. It was important to learn who he was, and whence he had come, and with whom he had been in contact before he had appeared-he was intrigued by Vyblos's choice of the word-in Hostigos. He could have come from some far country where the making of fireseed was commonly known. He knew of none such, but the world might well be larger than he thought.
Or could there be other worlds? The idea had occurred to him, now and then, as an idle speculation.
THE man called Lord Kalvan-except in retrospect, he never thought of himself as anything else now-sipped from the goblet and set it on the stand beside his chair. It was what they called winter-wine: set out in tubs to freeze, and the ice thrown off until it was sixty to seventy proof, the nearest they had to spirits, here-and-now. Distillation, he added to the long list of mental memos; invent and introduce. Bourbon, he thought; they grew plenty of com.
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