Off Armageddon Reef

by David Weber

  Fortunately, Zion was a very large city, and Madame Ahnzhelyk's establishment was in an expensive and exclusive section of it, almost five miles from the Temple proper. That gave him a certain comfort zone where unidentified energy signatures were concerned, as long as he was discreet, and he'd discovered he could be very, very discreet when the need arose.

  Now he listened via the remote riding in a fold of Dynnys' cloak and nodded with satisfaction. He had nothing personally against Dynnys—yet, at least—and he felt pleased satisfaction as he eavesdropped on Ahnzhelyk and Dynnys' assistant coachman. The archbishop's injuries were undoubtedly painful, he reflected as he packed away the handheld tractor unit he'd used on Dynnys' feet, but it didn't sound as if they were life-threatening. That was good. Merlin didn't want to get into the habit of casually killing people he didn't have to kill, and overall, he preferred Dynnys to a potentially more doctrinaire and . . . rigorous replacement.

  On the other hand, it was obvious the archbishop's right leg, at least, was badly broken. Probably his right shoulder, as well, judging by what Merlin's light-gathering systems could see from here and what he could overhear. Dynnys would be a long time recovering. By the time he did, Hsing-wu's Passage would certainly be frozen over for the winter, and Merlin rather doubted anyone in the Temple would expect the archbishop to make the arduous winter overland journey to Clahnyr and cross the Cauldron, especially so soon after such a nasty accident and injury. Which ought to delay Dynnys' pastoral visit for at least another five or six Safeholdian months.

  Long enough for me to get things up and running and erase my own fingerprints, anyway . . . I hope, he reflected. At any rate, it's the best I can do for right now. And I need to be getting back "home."

  He chuckled inside at the thought. It was broad daylight in Charis at the moment. He'd told Haarahld and Cayleb (truthfully enough) that he needed some time in privacy to deal with certain aspects of his visions. The king had agreed to allow him to seek solitude in the mountains near Tellesberg while he did so, although it was obvious Haarahld was none too happy about the thought of allowing Merlin out on his own and unprotected. Cayleb, on the other hand, had merely looked thoughtful—extremely thoughtful—when Merlin made his request, and Merlin wondered exactly what was going on in the crown prince's mind.

  Whatever it was, the sooner Merlin got home to deal with it—or to divert the prince's suspicions, as the case might be—the better.

  He climbed very quietly down from his rooftop perch, arranged his poncho about himself, pulled up its hood, and strode briskly away. Owl would be waiting to collect him with the skimmer's tractors, but not until he'd put at least ten more miles between himself and the Temple. At least, he reflected sardonically, he'd have the city streets pretty much to himself on a night like this.

  II

  Royal Palace,

  Tellesberg

  Crown Prince Cayleb raised his hand to knock courteously, then paused just outside the half-open chamber door. One eyebrow rose as he listened to the quiet, crisp clicking sound. It came again, then ceased, then began yet again.

  The prince frowned, wondering what fresh novelty he was about to encounter, then shrugged and continued his interrupted knock on the door frame.

  "Come in, Your Highness," an amused voice invited an instant before his knuckles actually contacted the wood, and Cayleb shook his head with a crooked grin and pushed the door fully open. He stepped through it into Merlin Athrawes' comfortable, sunlit sitting room and paused just inside the threshold.

  In keeping with his official position as Cayleb's personal bodyguard, the seijin had been moved from Marytha's Tower to quarters in the royal family's section of the palace. In fact, they were quite near Cayleb's own, with a view of the harbor that was almost as good as the one from the prince's bedchamber, although they were considerably more modest.

  The seijin had risen respectfully from his chair behind a desk at Cayleb's entry. Now he stood there, clad in the kraken-badged livery of the House of Ahrmahk, head cocked, with a quizzical smile of his own. His sword and the matching shortsword were racked on the wall behind him, and Cayleb smiled slightly as he glanced at them. The longer of the two swords was unlike anything anyone in Charis had ever seen before. It was also, apparently, unlike anything anyone had ever seen in Harchong, judging from Master Domnek's reaction, at least. The arms master was obviously being eaten alive with curiosity about the seijin and his weapons, but his Harchongese pride refused to let him ask the questions burning within him.

  The crown prince shook his head and looked away from the sword rack, and one of his eyebrows quirked. There was a peculiar device on Merlin's desk—a rectangular wooden frame, about two feet long and six inches tall. Twenty-one vertical rods connected the upper and lower sides of the frame, and there were six flattened beads on each rod, five below and one above a wooden dividing strip near the outer frame's upper side. The beads on the rods were arranged to slide up and down, and their present configuration formed an obviously deliberate—if incomprehensible—pattern.

  There were also several sheets of paper on the desk, covered with the seijin's strong, clear handwriting, but also with columns of some sort of symbols or characters Cayleb had never seen before.

  "Oh, sit down, Merlin!" the prince said, crossing the chamber to him. The seijin only smiled more quizzically still, then waited until Cayleb had seated himself in the chair in front of the desk before sitting once more behind it. Cayleb shook his head and snorted.

  "I thought we were supposed to be leaving for Helen this afternoon?" he said.

  "We are, Your Highness," Merlin agreed. "Catamount's been delayed, though. The page taking you a copy of his note probably passed you on your way here. We won't be leaving for at least another hour or so, so I thought I'd spend the time jotting down a few notes."

  "Is that what those are?" Cayleb nodded to the neatly inscribed sheets of paper, and Merlin nodded. "What sort of notes?"

  "Most of them are for High Admiral Lock Island—today, at least," Merlin replied. "I've got some I've already worked up for Doctor Mahklyn and Master Howsmyn. I was just completing some calculations on manpower and tonnages—Hektor's and Nahrmahn's, not your father's—for the High Admiral."

  "Calculations?" Cayleb leaned back in his chair, then gestured at the rectangular frame on the desk. "Since you knew it was me outside the door without even looking, you must know I was eavesdropping shamelessly. I imagine that clicking sound I heard came from this thing?"

  "Indeed it did, Your Highness," Merlin said gravely, his peculiar sapphire eyes glinting with amusement while the notes of distant birdsong floated through the open window.

  "Yet another of your little surprises, I suppose. Just what does this one do, if I might ask?"

  "It's called an 'abacus,' Your Highness," Merlin replied. "It's a device for doing mathematical calculations."

  "It's what?" Cayleb blinked.

  "It's a device for doing mathematical calculations," Merlin repeated.

  "How does it work?" Cayleb could hardly believe he'd asked that question, and he felt a momentary stab of panic as he realized he'd laid himself open to the sort of "explanation" Frahnklyn Tohmys, his tutor, had always delighted in administering.

  "Actually," Merlin said with a wicked smile, "it's quite simple." Cayleb shuddered at the dreaded "simple" word, but the seijin continued mercilessly. "Each vertical rods represents one integer, Your Highness. Each bead in this group here, above the divider, represents the value of five when lowered. Each bead in this group here, below the divider, represents a value of one when it's raised. At the moment"—he waved a finger at the device's first four rods—"the setting of the beads represents the number seven thousand four hundred and thirteen."

  Cayleb had opened his mouth to disavow any interest in further explanation, but he paused, disavowal unspoken. He had no idea what an "integer" was, but he'd spent more than enough time working his laborious way through the endless numbers contained in the sort
of report Merlin had been preparing for Admiral Lock Island. Surely it wasn't possible to represent a number that high with only four rods and twenty-four beads!

  "You can keep track of numbers that high on something that size?" he asked almost incredulously.

  "Or much higher," Merlin assured him. "It takes practice, but after you've learned to do it, it's quick and simple."

  Cayleb only looked at him for several seconds, then reached out and drew one of the sheets of notes across in front of him. He glanced down the page, and made a soft sound in the back of his throat as he reached one of the columns of peculiar symbols. From the context, it was obvious that they represented the results of some of the calculations Merlin had been making, but they made absolutely no sense to Cayleb.

  "Admittedly, I've never been the most enthusiastic scholar my family ever produced," he said with masterful understatement, looking up at Merlin. "Still, it occurs to me that I've never seen anything like this." He tapped the column with a fingertip.

  "It's simply another way of writing numbers, Your Highness." Merlin's tone was almost casual, yet Cayleb had the definite impression that there was something watchful and focused behind those odd sapphire eyes, almost as if the seijin had deliberately arranged this moment of explanation.

  It was a feeling the prince had had before.

  "Another way of writing numbers," he repeated, and chuckled. "All right, I'll grant you that. Somehow, though, I don't think 'simply' really enters into it," he observed, and in that moment, although he didn't realize it himself, he looked remarkably like his father.

  "Well," Merlin said, sliding a blank sheet of paper across to Cayleb and handing him the pen with which he'd been writing, "why don't you write down the number set here on the abacus? Seven thousand four hundred and thirteen," he reminded helpfully.

  Cayleb looked at him for a moment, then took the pen, dipped it in the desk's inkwell, and began scribbling down the number. When he'd finished, he turned the sheet around and showed it to Merlin.

  "There," he said just a bit suspiciously, tapping the number with the end of the wooden pen holder.

  Merlin glanced at it, then took the pen back and jotted four of his incomprehensible symbols under it. Then he turned the sheet back around to Cayleb.

  The prince looked down at it. There was the number he'd written—"MMMMMMMCDXIII"; and under it were Merlin's odd symbols—"7,413."

  "It's the same number," Merlin told him.

  "You're joking," Cayleb said slowly.

  "No, I'm not." Merlin leaned back in his chair.

  "That's ridiculous!" Cayleb protested.

  "Not ridiculous, Your Highness," Merlin disagreed. "Only different . . . and simpler. You see, each of these symbols represents a specific value from one to ten, and each column—" He tapped the symbol "3" with the end of the pen holder, then tapped the first of the rods on his "abacus," as well. "—represents what you might think of as a holding space for the symbol. The wise woman who taught them to me many years ago called them 'Arabic numerals,' which I suppose is as good a name as any for them. There are only ten symbols, including one which represents nothing at all, called 'zero,'-"—he drew another symbol, which looked for all the world like the letter "O," on the sheet of paper—"but I can write any number you can think of using them."

  Cayleb stared at him. The prince often joked about his own aversion to "book learning," but he was far from stupid, and he was also the crown prince of his world's leading maritime power. Recordkeeping and accounting were critical to Charis' traders and shippers, and they were also functions which ate up the efforts of huge numbers of clerks with a voracious appetite. It didn't require a genius to recognize the huge advantages of the system Merlin was describing, assuming it actually worked.

  "All right," the prince challenged, taking back the pen briefly. "If you can write 'any number' using these numerals of yours, write this one."

  The steel nib of the pen scratched across the paper as he wrote "MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMDCCII." Then he passed both of them back across to the seijin.

  Merlin looked it over for a moment, then shrugged. The pen scratched again, and Cayleb's eyes narrowed as Merlin wrote simply "19,702."

  "There you are, Your Highness," he said.

  Cayleb stared down at the sheet of paper for several long, silent seconds, then looked back up at Merlin.

  "Who are you, really?" he asked softly. "What are you?"

  "Your Highness?" Merlin's eyebrows rose, and Cayleb shook his head.

  "Don't play with me, Merlin," he said, his voice still soft, his eyes level. "I believe you mean me, my father, and my kingdom well. But even though I may still be young, I'm not a child any longer, either. I'll believe you're a seijin, but you're more than that, too, aren't you?"

  "Why do you say that, Your Highness?" Merlin countered, but his own voice was level, taking Cayleb's question seriously.

  "The legends and ballads say seijin may be teachers, as well as warriors," the prince replied, "but none of the tales about them mention anything like this." He tapped the sheet of paper between them, then gestured at the "abacus" lying to one side. "And," he looked very steadily at the other man, "I've never heard any tale about even a seijin who could cross an entire unfamiliar city through the middle of the winter's worst thunderstorm as quickly as you did."

  "As I told your father, Your Highness, I was alerted by my vision. You were there at the time I experienced it, yourself."

  "Yes, I was," Cayleb agreed. "And you seemed . . . distracted enough by it that I followed you to your rooms to be certain you'd reached them safely. I got there only seconds behind you, and I thought I heard something from inside your chamber. So I knocked. There was no answer, so I knocked again, then opened the door, but you'd already disappeared. The only way you could have done that was to go out the window, Merlin. I noticed that you never actually specifically answered Father's question when he asked you how you'd done it, but I saw no rope ladder you might have climbed down, and the sheets were all still on your bed."

  "I see." Merlin leaned back in his chair, gazing steadily at the prince, then shrugged. "I told you—and your father—I possess some of the powers the tales say seijin possess, and I do. I also possess some the tales don't mention. Some which must be kept secret. I think—hope—I've demonstrated that I do, indeed, mean you and Charis well. That I'll serve you—and Charis—in any way I can. And someday, perhaps, I'll be able to tell you more about those powers and abilities I must keep secret for now. I promised your father the truth, and I've never lied, although as you've obviously noticed, that isn't necessarily the same thing as telling all the truth. I'm not free to tell all the truth, however. I regret that, but I can't change it. So I suppose the question is whether or not you can accept my service with that limitation."

  Cayleb looked back at him for several seconds, then inhaled deeply.

  "You've been expecting this conversation, haven't you?" he asked.

  "Or one like it," Merlin agreed. "Although, to be honest, I'd expected to have it with your father, or possibly Bishop Maikel, first."

  "Father is more confident of his ability to judge men's hearts and intentions than I am." Cayleb shrugged slightly. "He's been doing it a lot longer than I have. I think some of the same questions have occurred to him, and he's simply chosen not to ask."

  "And why should he have made that choice?"

  "I'm not sure," Cayleb admitted. "But I think perhaps it's because he truly believes—as I do—that you mean Charis well, and because he's already guessed there are questions you can't, or won't, answer. He knows how desperately we need any advantage we can find, and not just against Hektor and Nahrmahn, and he's unwilling to risk losing your services by pressing the point."

  "And Bishop Maikel?"

  "Much the same, I think." Cayleb shook his head. "I'm never really certain what Maikel thinks, in a lot of ways. He's a Charisian, and he loves this Kingdom. He also loves my father and our family. And even though he's never e
xpressly said it to me, I think he actually fears the Temple. He—"

  Cayleb paused a moment, then shook his head.

  "Let's simply say he's well aware of the way our enemies could use the Temple and the Church against us, and why. Like Father, he knows the trap we're in, and if he says he senses no evil in you, then he doesn't. Which isn't exactly the same thing as saying he has no reservations at all."

  "And do you agree with your father?"

  "Yes . . . to a point." Cayleb looked Merlin in the eye. "But I will require one answer from you, Seijin Merlin. This"—he gestured at the sheet of paper and the "abacus" once again—"goes beyond visions and attempted assassinations. The 'services' you're offering now will change Charis forever, and eventually, they're going to spread beyond Charis and change the entire world. I suspect there are going to be even more changes than I can imagine at this moment, changes some will fear and hate. Changes some may even argue violate the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng, with all the dangers that would entail. I think the thunderstorm you disappeared into was no more than a spring shower beside the typhoon following on your heels. So the one question I have, the one answer I require, is why? You once said many of our enemies 'serve darkness,' whether they realize it or not. But which do you serve, Merlin? Darkness or light?"