Like a Mighty Army

by David Weber

  “You’re wrong, my dear,” Staynair said softly, hugging her more tightly. “There is something I can do, and I can’t leave until I’ve done it.”

  Irys’ throat tightened, and she wanted to deny what he’d just said. Hektor had already received the last rites; the only thing Staynair could do for them now was to be here to share the moment when her husband took his last breath and her heart shattered forever. She knew how much she would need that comfort, and yet if she sent him away, perhaps the moment would never come. If he wasn’t here, if he couldn’t comfort her, perhaps Hektor wouldn’t die after all. It was irrational, and she knew it, yet she opened her mouth to argue anyway, only to pause as Staynair straightened suddenly and turned his head towards the glass doors to the bedchamber’s balcony.

  There was something about his expression—a sudden flicker of something that might almost have been joy blended with worry—and then he turned back to her. He captured the hand which wasn’t holding Hektor’s between both of his own large, powerful palms, and looked deep into her eyes.

  “My daughter,” he said softly, “I’m about to ask you to do something you shouldn’t have to do. Something you may not be able to do. But I know the strength of you, and I know the love within you, and so I ask it of you anyway.”

  “Your Eminence?”

  She felt the weight of his words even through her exhausted despair, and she was suddenly afraid. Afraid in a new and different way, as if she stood on a precipice above a deep gorge filled with a howling tempest. It was absurd, and she had no idea what that gorge might be or why the wind shrieked so as it hurtled through it, yet it seemed so clear, so real.…

  “A moment, my dear.”

  He gave her hand one last squeeze, then crossed to the diamond-paned doors. He reached for the latch and looked over his shoulder at her.

  “You’ve been through enough for a dozen princesses already today, my child,” he said quietly. “I would prefer not to put you through still more, but I have no choice. I ask you to trust me and to believe me when I say that what I see in what’s about to happen is the direct and personal finger of God reaching into this mortal world.”

  “You’re frightening me, Your Eminence,” she said, hazel eyes looking deep into the serene faith of his darker, gentler gaze, and he smiled.

  “I don’t intend to, because there’s nothing here to fear. Yet there is ample cause for wonder. Be open to it, my daughter.”

  His fingers found the latch and her grip tightened around Hektor’s cold, limp hand as he turned it. And then her nostrils flared, her eyes opening in shock and disbelief, as a very familiar sapphire-eyed man in the blackened breastplate and uniform of the Charisian Imperial Guard stepped into the bedchamber from the fourth-story balcony.

  “I came as quickly as I could, Your Highness,” Merlin Athrawes said softly.

  .XXII.

  Nimue’s Cave, The Mountains of Light, The Temple Lands

  “She took that better than I expected, really,” Cayleb Ahrmahk said soberly. “A lot better.”

  “I hate having put her in that position,” Sharleyan Ahrmahk said from her cabin aboard HMS Southern Star, midway between Chisholm and Corisande. “I know what it’s like when something like this comes at you cold.”

  “Something like this?” her husband repeated. “Sharley, right at the top of my head I can’t think of anything else remotely like this.”

  “I don’t know about that, Cayleb.” Nahrmahn Baytz’ tone was thoughtful. “We could always try telling her that there’s the ghost of this overweight little prince who haunts a computer buried forty thousand feet underneath Mount Olympus in the middle of the Temple Lands. That might come pretty close.”

  “I notice none of us considered talking to the Brethren before we acted,” Maikel Staynair put in from Manchyr, and Merlin barked a laugh.

  “Given that you’re the one who put out the call for me in the first place, I think this time around we’ll just let you do the explaining, Your Eminence.”

  “Oh, nonsense!” Staynair replied in a tone that verged on the smug. “You have more experience—and seniority!—than anyone else, Merlin. I’m sure they’ll take it much more calmly from you.”

  “Sure they will.”

  Merlin shook his head and leaned back in the comfortable chair in the cave under the Mountains of Light. There’d been only two good things about the last nightmare day. The first was that he’d long ago injected Hektor and Irys—and Davyn and Earl Coris, for that matter—with the same nanotech with which he’d injected every member of the inner circle. And the second was that Major Athrawes had already been dispatched by Emperor Cayleb on another unspecified mission. His actual mission had been to drop in on Duke Eastshare as Ahbraim Zhevons, but that had been aborted the instant Owl reported the attack in Manchyr and his recon skimmer had gone hurtling towards Corisande at far too many times the speed of sound. Each time he made one of those insane rushes he risked attracting the attention of the bombardment system’s sensors which was why he’d returned to Nimue’s Cave at a far more leisurely pace.

  There’d really been no pressing need to return to the cave at all, but he’d needed a place to which he could retreat. A place where he could be with friends, one where he could lower his barriers while they tried to deal with the day’s earthquake events and their consequences. And a place, he admitted to himself, where he felt … secure.

  I named it “Nimue’s Cave” for a reason, and not just because I decided to become someone named Merlin. It’s always been my “place of power,” my sanctum where my familiar and all that arcane knowledge reside, and just this moment, I need to be here, in the middle of who Nimue was and what brought me to Safehold in the first place.

  He closed his eyes, recalling the desperate race to Manchyr, remembering his dread of how Irys would react to his appearance. He’d developed a deep respect—and a deeper affection—for Hektor Daykyn’s daughter, but no one had prepared her for the truth about him, about Safehold, about the Archangels, or about Nimue Alban’s true mission. They’d thought they had plenty of time, ten years of it, to do that preparing and decide whether or not to tell her those terrible, consuming, impossible-to-believe truths. But fate—or perhaps Maikel’s “finger of God”—had forced his hand much as it had been forced by Sharleyan’s attempted assassination. And so he’d raced to save Hektor’s life … dreading all the way that he would be too late and, even more, what he might be forced to do instead if Irys proved unready to accept who and what he truly was when he stepped into the bedchamber with the medical kit.

  This time he hadn’t had to make the decision entirely on his own. Oh, it had been his decision, and he would have made it in exactly the same way even if every other member of the inner circle had opposed it. There was no other decision he could have made, any more than he could have permitted a trio of krakens to devour a boatload of children on a long-ago day on Helen Island.

  But neither Cayleb, nor Sharleyan, nor Nahrmahn, nor Maikel had hesitated. He was perfectly well aware of the part their love for Hektor and their deep affection for Irys had played in that. Yet there’d been other reasons—hardheaded, pragmatic reasons—as well, for Hektor’s death at the Rakurai’s hands on the very day of his wedding could have had cataclysmic consequences.

  The reaction in Old Charis scarcely bore thinking on, given the young Duke of Darcos’ place in the hearts of its people. He himself remained largely unaware of it, yet they remembered all too clearly how Hektor Aplyn and King Haarahld had fought back-to-back, alone against twice a hundred enemies on the quarterdeck of Haarahld’s flagship. They remembered how their king had died in his arms, and that king’s final words to an eleven-year-old midshipman had become part of their national heritage. And they’d seen that midshipman grow into an officer of whom their king would have been proud and been enthralled by his rescue of the enemy prince and princess they’d taken to their hearts.

  The polarizing reaction in Corisande could have been even mo
re disastrous, especially if neither Irys nor Daivyn could be told the truth. Those who opposed Corisande’s union with Charis might well have taken heart, found a rallying point to do more than simply resent that union. And the effect on Irys and Daivyn, both of whom had come to love him deeply, would have been impossible to predict. The odds were that it would have driven them to oppose the Group of Four even more bitterly, but at what cost? Would it have poisoned them with hatred? And how could they ever have been told the truth later … and known Hektor might have been saved after all if only the inner circle had been willing to trust them with that truth then?

  And, finally, there’d been the chill, pragmatic calculus of empire. It was true that Sharleyan had stipulated that Irys must wed Hektor because she’d known they loved one another, yet that hadn’t been her only reason, as both Hektor and Irys had realized. That sign of the union of the House of Daykyn with the House of Ahrmahk was of untold value on a planet which still thought as much or more in terms of dynasties as in terms of nationhood. For Corisande and Charis alike, that marriage was the proof they stood together in the teeth of Mother Church’s Jihad, and they simply could not afford to lose it.

  But we almost did anyway, he thought somberly. If I hadn’t pumped everybody’s base nanotech after I lost Haarahld, we would’ve lost him. Even with it, it was a damned near thing. Of course, that leaves us a few problems of its own.

  “I wish we could get him back here to the medical unit,” he said out loud. “He’s going to be five-days recovering from this in Manchyr. And I doubt he’s going to have much use of his left hand afterward, anyway.”

  “We all wish that, Merlin,” Cayleb said quietly. “But how the hell do we explain his recovering from those wounds in no more than a day or two? And what happens when one of the Palace servants or Pasqualates come to check on him and he’s off in the Mountains of Light being miraculously cured? Not even Maikel and Irys together could’ve kept someone from discovering he’d disappeared down a rabbit hole, and then we’d all be royally screwed.”

  “I know that. For that matter,” Merlin’s lips twitched in an unwilling smile, “Irys knows it. In fact, she explained it to me at some length when I mentioned the cave. It’s going to be hard enough for the Safeholdian medical establishment to accept how quickly he recovers if we leave him in Manchyr!”

  “The problem won’t be how quickly he recovers,” Staynair said dryly. “It’s going to be the fact that he survived to recover.”

  “You’re probably right about that,” Merlin acknowledged, and shook his head. “I always knew upgrading you all to mil-spec nannies could … complicate things if you got hurt, but this—!”

  “Speaking as someone else they kept alive long enough for you to get there, I think it was a very good idea,” Nahrmahn put in.

  “I’m sure you do, but however right Maikel may be, there are going to be questions about his recovery.”

  “Nonsense, Merlin!” Sharleyan’s smile was almost impish. “Irys will just keep him in bed and nurse him herself, without sharing him with a batch of healers who might notice things they shouldn’t. And, no, I don’t think she’d want us to deliberately extend his convalescence just so she could play doctor. But do any of you think word won’t leak about how Princess Irys is personally nursing her husband back to health? For that matter, you know as well as I do that public opinion’s going to decide it was her care and love that kept him alive when every healer despaired and everyone knew he was dying!”

  “Exactly,” Nahrmahn agreed. “That’s just how the story will play out in Corisande. And with just a little encouragement, we can probably see to it that it plays out the same way in Chisholm, Emerald, Old Charis, and Tarot, too.”

  “That’s dreadfully calculating of you, my son,” Staynair observed. “Not that I think you’re wrong, of course.”

  Several people chuckled, as much in a release of tension as in amusement, and Merlin smiled. Trust Sharley and Nahrmahn to put their fingers on the political advantages to be wrung from the situation. For that matter, he was pretty sure Irys was thinking along exactly the same lines by now.

  She’d actually accepted the truth more rapidly than Sharleyan had after the attack on Saint Agtha’s. Part of that had probably been due to her desperate hope that Hektor might be saved after all. Sharleyan had been dealing with the astonishment of her own survival after the fact, not of the man she loved before he’d been saved. Then there’d been Maikel Staynair’s presence to vouch for Merlin’s nondemonic origins. And, Merlin suspected, the same heart hunger which had drawn her to the Royal College had quickened at the revelation of just how big and magnificent the universe truly was.

  He hadn’t had time to prepare coms for her and Hektor, but Owl was busy putting together their communicators—among other things. He was sure they’d get the hang of them quickly with Staynair right there in Manchyr to tutor them, and he’d promised to personally deliver them, if somewhat more sedately, before he returned to Siddar City.

  And I’ll deliver their “antiballistic undies” at the same time. His smile faded at the thought. If they’d had them before the damned bomb, neither of them would’ve been hurt in the first place! At least now I can get them into the same sort of protection as the rest of the circle. And with Irys and Hektor on board, we’ll be able to do the same thing for Daivyn, too.

  “Have we figured out how they pulled it off?” he asked, opening his eyes, and Nahrmahn’s image shrugged.

  “I doubt we’ll ever have all the details, but Owl and I have been over the SNARCs’ imagery. We’re pretty sure we know how the attack was executed, even if we don’t have a clue how the assassin got herself to Corisande originally.”

  “Herself?” Staynair repeated sharply.

  “Yes, Your Eminence,” Owl replied. “We have no imagery of the device’s actual detonation, but we do have imagery from before and after the attack, and I believe Prince Nahrmahn’s analysis of what happened is correct.”

  “And that analysis is what, Nahrmahn?” Cayleb asked, frowning intently.

  “We examined the imagery of the reserved section as closely as possible,” Nahrmahn said. “It was crowded and rather hectic, but we were able to isolate at least some images of almost everyone in it. There was one person, an older man in a wheelchair, who attracted my attention because I couldn’t understand why he was there.”

  “To see the wedding, I would’ve assumed,” Sharleyan said.

  “And I wouldn’t’ve disagreed, except for the fact that he wasn’t paying any attention to it at all. He just sat there in the wheelchair. In fact, I’d judge he was in the final stages of the gray mists.”

  Merlin’s lips tightened at the fresh reminder of everything Langhorne had cost the people of Safehold. “The gray mists” was the Safeholdian term for what had once been known as Alzheimer’s disease … which Old Terra had conquered more than three hundred years before humanity ever met the Gbaba.

  “His head was down, he displayed the classic joint contractures, and he seemed totally disconnected from his surroundings, even when the cheers were loudest,” Nahrmahn continued. “So the more I looked at him, the more I wondered why he was there. I thought at first that he might’ve been brought by a son or daughter who wanted to include him in one last family outing, but he was escorted by an attendant—a woman—in the uniform of a Pasqualate lay sister. It was still possible he had family elsewhere in the crowd, but it seemed more likely that if they’d known they were going to be separated, his family would’ve left him in peace at home. So I asked Owl to take a closer look at him.”

  He paused, and Owl responded smoothly to the conversational cue he wouldn’t even have recognized a year earlier.

  “I did as His Highness requested,” the AI said, “and determined that the individual’s wheelchair was not of a standard design. Instead of the open framework usually employed in order to keep the weight low, this wheelchair’s back and seat were boxed in. It was impossible to determine exactly how
the covering was contrived or out of what material, but the enclosed volume measured approximately five and a half cubic feet. If it were packed solely with gunpowder, that volume could contain a charge of over three hundred pounds.

  “Analysis of the damage patterns suggests the explosion was, indeed, centered upon the wheelchair in question. From the explosion’s evident power, a substantial portion of the volume must have been used to shape and aim the directional blast rather than filled to capacity with powder. I estimate that there were some fifteen hundred musket balls in the device, which would have come to approximately forty pounds of lead, propelled by an equal weight of gunpowder.”

  Merlin winced. Ten pounds of gunpowder were sufficient to throw a thirty-pound round shot three thousand yards. Hektor and Irys had been less than thirty yards from a charge four times that large.