trophy.
It had been surprisingly difficult to acquire any sort of accuracy with the thing, and he’d quickly used up all of the ammunition which had been captured with it. A silversmith had no problem preparing the mold he needed to cast his own bullets, however, and he’d practiced hard even before Sir Koryn Gahrvai had arrested Father Aidryan and broken Hainree’s own organization. He’d also sawed two inches off its barrel in order to make it more easily concealable and he’d devised a canvas scabbard to carry it under his left arm, hidden inside his generously cut tunic. There’d been times he’d wondered why he’d bothered, and why he’d kept a weapon which would automatically have convicted him of treason against the Regency Council if it had been found in his possession.
Now, as the heel of his left hand cocked both locks in a single, practiced swipe, his right hand raised the weapon, and he squeezed the trigger.
Flame flashed from the pistol’s priming pan and Merlin heard the distinctive “chuff-CRACK!” of a discharging flintlock in the instant before he reached Sharleyan.
His own pistol fired in the same fragment of time. It all happened far too quickly, too chaotically, for even a PICA to sort out. The two shots sounded as one, the assassin’s second barrel discharged into the floor, Merlin’s fingertips touched Sharleyan’s shoulder… and he heard her sudden sharp grunt of anguish.
Impossible.
The single word had time to flash through Paitryk Hainree’s mind before the sapphire-eyed Imperial Guardsman’s bullet exploded through his right lung a quarter inch from his heart. No human being could move that quickly, react that quickly!
Then the agony ripped him apart. He heard himself cry out, felt the pistol buck in his hand as the second barrel fired uselessly, felt himself going to his knees. He dropped the smoking weapon, both hands clawed at the brutal chest wound, he felt blood spraying from his mouth and nostrils in a choking, coppery tide, and a sudden terrible fear roared through him.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He’d come here knowing he was going to his death, succeed or fail, so what was wrong with him? Why should the actual approach of death terrify him this way? What had happened to his faith, his belief? And where was God’s comfort and courage when he needed Him most?
There were no answers, only the questions, and he felt even them pouring out of him with his blood as he swayed and then toppled weakly from his knees.
But I did it, he told himself, his cheek pressed into the floor in the hot pool of his own blood as the blackness came for him. I did it. I killed the bitch.
And somehow, in that last bitter moment of awareness, it meant nothing at all. . IX.
Sir Koryn Gahrvai’s Townhouse and Royal Palace, City of Manchyr
“So what do you think of her now, Alyk?”
Koryn Gahrvai sat back in his comfortable chair, listening to rain drum on the roof. The lanterns illuminating the garden at the heart of the square-built townhouse were barely visible through the pounding raindrops, and thunder rumbled intermittently, still somewhere to the south but rolling steadily closer.
“I’d ask her to marry me, if she weren’t already married to an emperor,” Alyk Ahrthyr said. He reached out to the punch bowl on the table and stirred it gently with the silver ladle, then snorted. “And if she didn’t scare me to death!” he added.
“Now why should she do a thing like that?” Gahrvai’s father asked sardonically. He sat at the head of the table, in the chair which would normally have been his son’s, nursing a glass of Chisholmian whiskey. “It’s not like she’s done anything extraordinary lately, now is it?”
All five of the men sitting around that table looked at one another as a louder peal of thunder grumbled its way across the heavens. Lightning flickered, and Gahrvai raised his own glass in an acknowledging salute to his father before he looked at the Earl of Tartarian and Sir Charlz Doyal.
“Did either of you see that coming?” he asked.
“Which ‘that’ did you have in mind?” Tartarian inquired dryly. “Her performance, the assassination attempt, Seijin Merlin, or the fact that she survived?”
“How about all the above?” Gahrvai retorted.
“ I didn’t see any of it coming, at any rate,” Doyal admitted. “Just for starters, she certainly hadn’t discussed any pardons that I knew of.”
He raised his eyebrows at Earl Anvil Rock and Earl Tartarian, but both of the older men shook their heads.
“Not with us,” Anvil Rock said. “And I had a word with Archbishop Klairmant afterward, too. She hadn’t mentioned anything about it to him, either.”
“I didn’t think she had,” Doyal said. “And something I find almost as interesting is that she didn’t ask anyone for a copy of their trial transcripts, either. Despite which she seemed to know more about all of them than we did.”
“That might actually be the most easily explained part of it,” Tartarian observed. Doyal looked at him with an expression of polite incredulity, and the earl chuckled. “Don’t forget, it was Seijin Merlin’s agents here in Corisande that put us onto the plot in the first place, and we still don’t have any idea how they gathered some of the information they gave us.” He shrugged. “All we do know is that every bit of that information checked out when we investigated. I think it’s entirely possible they may have kept back some facts and suspicions they figured couldn’t be proven in a court, and I don’t imagine Merlin would have many reservations about sharing something like that with Empress Sharleyan.”
“I suppose that could explain it,” Doyal said in a tone which implied he believed nothing of the sort, and Tartarian pointed an index finger at him.
“Don’t you go shooting holes in my perfectly good theory unless you’ve got one to replace it with, young man,” he said severely. Doyal, who wasn’t that many years Tartarian’s junior, laughed, and Tartarian shook his head. But then his expression sobered. “And don’t go shooting holes in my theory until you’ve got an explanation that won’t scare the shit out of me when you come up with it, either.”
“She really is more than a little frightening, isn’t she?” Gahrvai said into the small silence Tartarian’s last sentence had produced. Lightning flashed again overhead, close enough this time that the thunderclap seemed to rattle the opened garden windows in their frames.
“I’m not sure frightening is exactly the right word,” his father objected, but Tartarian made a moderately rude noise in his throat.
“It’ll do until we can come up with a better one, Rysel,” he said.
“I think a lot of it was Archbishop Maikel’s fault,” Doyal put in. The others looked at him and he raised his right hand, palm uppermost as if he were releasing an invisible bird. “Remember how he reacted after that assassination attempt in Tellesberg Cathedral. According to the reports, he didn’t even hesitate-just went ahead and celebrated mass with the assassins’ blood and brains splashed all over his vestments. Frankly, I had my doubts about the stories at the time; now I’m starting to think it must be something in the water in Charis!”
“You may be righter about that than you think you are, Charlz,” Gahrvai said ruefully. Doyal raised an eyebrow, and Gahrvai shrugged. “Don’t forget, before he celebrated mass, he also rebuked the members of his congregation who wanted to go out and start stringing up Temple Loyalists in revenge. Does that remind you of anything?”
Doyal gazed at him for a moment, then nodded, and Gahrvai nodded back while his mind replayed the chaos and confusion of the assassination attempt.
The only thing he’d been able to think when the would-be killer shouted was that Cayleb Ahrmahk would never forgive Corisande for allowing his wife to be murdered on her very throne. There’d been no way the man could miss, not from a range of no more than fifteen feet. Gahrvai would have been one of the first to admit that it was far harder to fire a pistol accurately than most people probably believed, especially when someone was gripped by
