Heirs of Empire

* * *

Stomald shouted the exorcism with all the faith in him as the shining oil coated the demon. She paused— perhaps she even gave back a step—and hope flamed in his heart. But then hope turned to even greater horror, for the demon neither vanished in a flash of lightning nor fled in terror. Instead she came a step closer … and she smiled.

“Begone yourself, wretched and miserable one!” He reeled, stunned by the terrible thunder of that demonic voice, and his brain gibbered. No demon could speak the Holy Tongue! He retreated a faltering step, hand rising in a warding sign, and the demon laughed. She laughed! “I have come for my friend,” she thundered, “and woe be unto you if you have harmed her!”

Crashing peals of laughter ripped through him like echoes from Hell, and then she reached out to the nearest torch. The holy oil sprang alight with a seething hiss, clothing her in a fierce corona, and her voice boomed out of the roaring flames.

“Begone lest you die, sinful man!” she commanded terribly, and the furnace heat of her faceless, fiery figure came for him.

* * *

Sean watched Sandy confront the priest. Her implant-amplified voice made his head hurt—God only knew how it must have sounded to the priest! Yet the man had stood his ground until she touched the oil to flame. That was too much, and he took to his heels at last, stumbling, falling, leaping back to his feet and running for the imagined sanctuary of his church while Sandy’s bellowing laughter pursued him.

Yet there was no time to admire her tactics, and he slung his grav rifle and charged across the square. Tamman’s energy gun splintered more cobbles, driving the villagers still further back, but Sean hardly noticed. He scattered heavy faggots like tumbleweeds, and his face was a murderous mask as he gripped the chain about Harriet’s body and twisted the links like taffy. They snapped, and he hurled them aside and caught at the manacles. His back straightened with a grunt. Anchoring bolts screamed and sheared like paper, and if she was still breathing as her limp body slid into his arms, he was close enough to read her implants directly at last. He paled. The damage was at least as bad as Brashan had said, and he cradled her like a child as he turned and ran like a madman for the cutter.

* * *

Stomald cowered in the nave of the broken church, rocking on his knees and praying with all his strength amid lumps of stone blown from the vault above him. He clung to sanity with bleeding fingernails, then cringed in fresh terror as something flashed into the very heavens beyond the village. A howling streak of light exploded across the stars in an echoing peal of thunder, and a hot breath of air rolled down through the church’s cracked roof on the shrieking wind of its passage as it screamed low over Cragsend.

Then it was gone, and he buried his face in his hands and moaned.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Father Stomald stared at the garments on his vicarage table while wagons creaked beyond his windows. Nioharqs dragged loads of rubble down Cragsend’s streets, drovers shouted, and repair crew foremen bawled orders, but the men laboring within the church itself only whispered.

The youthful priest felt their fear, for their terror was graven in his mind, as well, and with it an even greater horror.

Mother Church had failed them. He had failed them, and he steeled his nerve and touched the bloodstained fabric once more. He was but the vicar of a small mountain village, but he’d made his pilgrimage to the Temple and served at the Command Hatch as High Priest Vroxhan intoned mass. He’d seen the Temple’s magnificence and the Sanctum that housed God’s Own Voice and marveled at the high priest’s exquisite vestments, at their splendid fabric and shining gold braid, the glitter of their buttons…

And all that splendor paled beside these bloodied garments, like a child’s clumsy copy of reality.

He made himself lift the tunic, and its gleaming buttons flashed under the window’s sunlight, trapping the sun’s heart within the crowned glory of God’s holy Starburst. But his breath hissed as he looked closer, for a strange, winged creature—a magnificent beast whose like he’d never imagined—erupted from the Star’s heart to claim God’s Crown … even as the demon had erupted from the flames as she advanced upon him.

He fought a hysterical urge to fling the garment away. Blasphemy! Blasphemy to deface those holiest of symbols! Yet that beast, that winged beast, like the winged badge of a Temple courier and yet unlike…

He forced calm upon his mind and examined the garment once more. Splendid as the buttons were, they were but ornaments, unlike those of High Priest Vroxhan’s vestments. A quivering fingertip traced the invisible seal which had actually closed the tunic, and even now he could see no sign of how it worked.

When they’d first tried to strip the profaned fabric from the … the woman, the heretic or … or demon, or whatever she’d been…

His shoulders tensed, and he made them relax. When they’d tried to strip it from—her—they’d found no fastenings, and it had laughed at their sharpest blades. But then, with no real hope, he’d tugged—thus.

The cloth opened, and he licked his lips. It was uncanny. Impossible. Yet he held it in his hands. It was as real as his own flesh, and yet—

He opened the tunic wide once more, caressing the union of sleeve and shoulder, and bit his lip. He’d watched his own mother sew and done sewing enough of his own at seminary to know what he should find, yet there was no seam. The tunic was a single whole, perfect and indivisible, as if it had been woven in a single sitting and not pieced together, its only flaws the holes punched in it by musket balls…

He went to his knees, folding his hands in prayer. Not even the fabled looms of Eswyn could have woven that fabric. Not the Temple’s finest tailor could have formed it without thread or seam. No human hand could have wrought that magic closure.

They must have been demons. He told himself that fiercely, quivering with remembered terror before the thunder of the demon’s voice. Yet there was an even greater terror at his heart, for the rolling majesty of that voice had crashed over him with the words of the Holy Tongue itself!

He moaned to the empty room, and the forbidden thought returned. He fought to reject it, but it hung in the corners of his mind, and he squeezed his eyes so tightly closed they ached as it whispered in the silence.

They’d come from the Valley of the Damned, and lightning had wracked the cloudless heavens above the Valley. They’d smitten Cragsend with fire and thunder. One of them, alone, had ripped the entire roof from his church. Another had shattered three heavy wagons. A third had blazed alive in the flames of Mother Church’s holiest oils and laughed—laughed! And when the smoke had wisped away, Stomald had stared at bubbled sheets of glass, flashing like gems under the morning sun, where the smithy had burned to less than ash.

Yet with all that inconceivable power, they’d killed no one. No one. Not a man, woman, or child. Not even an animal! Not even the men who’d wounded and captured their fellow and intended to burn her alive…

The Church taught love for one’s fellows, but demons should have slain—not simply frightened helpless mortals from their paths! And no demon could endure the Holy Tongue, far less speak it with its own mouth!

He opened his eyes, stroking the tunic once more, recalling the beauty of the woman who’d worn it, and faced the thought he’d fought. They had not—could not—have been mortals, and that should have made them demons. But demons couldn’t have spoken the Holy Tongue, and demons wouldn’t have spared where they might have slain. And if no woman might wear the vestments of Mother Church, these were not those of Mother Church, but finer and more mystical than anything Man might make