Heirs of Empire

“Which means, of course, that we can’t get to them, either.”

* * *

Sean sat in the cutter bay hatch, high on Israel’s flank, and gazed sightlessly out through the wavering distortion of her stealth field. They were still making progress on their linguistic programs, helped by the fact that they were no longer afraid to use their remotes at full range as long as they stayed outside the Temple’s hundred-kilometer kill zone, yet two weeks had passed since Sandy’s bombshell, and none of them had the least idea what to do next. The only good thing was that Harriet was completely back on her feet now—she was even jogging on Israel’s treadmill again.

He sighed and tugged on his nose, looking very like an oversized, black-haired version of his father as he contemplated the problem. He’d expected difficulties getting into the Temple, but he’d never anticipated that they wouldn’t even be able to use Imperial small arms! Hell, they might not even be able to use their own implants, so how did four humans—and one Narhani, who’d be mobbed on sight as an incontrovertible “demon”—break into the most strongly guarded fortress on the entire goddamned planet?

There was, of course, one very simple answer, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t even think of it without nausea. Kahtar’s journal indicated “the Sanctum” was heavily armored and deeply dug in, but they could always take the place out with a gravitonic warhead, and Israel could launch hyper weapons from atmosphere. They could hit the Temple before the quarantine system even began to react, and if the computer went down, so did the entire system. Unfortunately, they also killed everyone in Pardal’s largest city—almost two million people, by Sandy’s estimate.

He squeezed his nose harder. His clever stratagem to get them down had worked, all right, and he’d poked their collective heads right into a trap. They couldn’t take off—assuming they’d had anywhere to go—without the quarantine system killing them for trying to leave the planet, but there wasn’t any way to shut the system off from the planet!

“Sean?” He looked up at Sandy’s voice. She was standing at the far end of the bay, waving at him. “Come on! You’ve gotta see this!”

“See what?” he asked, climbing to his feet with a puzzled frown.

“It’s too good to spoil by telling you.” Her expression was strange, and she sounded amused, frightened, excited, and surprised, all in one.

“At least give me a clue!”

“All right.” She eyed him with an odd, lurking smile. “I didn’t have anything else to do, so I sent a remote back to take a peek at the village we pulled Harry out of, and you won’t believe what’s going on!”

* * *

“Well, Father,” Tibold closed the spyglass with a click and grimaced at Stomald, “it seems His Grace was unimpressed.”

Stomald nodded, shading his eyes with his hand, and tried not to show his own despair. He hadn’t expected Bishop Frenaur to accept his unsupported word without question, but he certainly hadn’t counted on this.

Mother Church’s blood-red standards advanced up the twisting valley, blue and gold cantons glittering, and metal gleamed behind them: pikeheads and muskets, armor, and the dully-flashing barrels of artillery.

“How many, do you think?” he asked quietly.

“Enough.” The Guard captain squinted into the sun, frowning. “More than I expected, really. I’d say that’s most of the Malagoran Temple Guard out there, Father. Call it twenty thousand men.”

Stomald nodded again, grateful Tibold hadn’t said, “I told you so.” The Guard captain had argued against sending the good word to the Temple. Unlike Stomald, Tibold wasn’t a native-born Malagoran, but he knew the Temple regarded Malagor as a hotbed of sedition, and seeing that armed, advancing host, Stomald was just as glad he’d at least agreed to send his news by semaphore rather than taking it in person.

He shook that thought off and pressed his lips together. Surely God had sent His angels to Cragsend for a purpose. He didn’t promise His servants would always be bright enough to see His purpose, but He always had one. Of course, sometimes it wasn’t a very safe one…

“What do you advise?”

“Running away?” Tibold suggested with a smile, and Stomald surprised himself with a chuckle.

“I don’t think God would like that. Besides, where would we run to? We’re backed up against the mountains, Tibold.”

“Just like a kinokha in a trap,” the Guard captain agreed, wondering why he wasn’t more frightened. He’d thought his young priest was mad at first, but something about him had been convincing. Certainly, Tibold told himself yet again, those hadn’t been demons. He’d seen too much of what men, touched with God’s immortal spirit, were capable of in time of war. No, if they’d been demons, Cragsend would be a smoking ruin peopled only by the dead.

And, like Father Stomald, he could think of only one other thing they could have been, though he did wish they’d been a bit less ambiguous in their message. Still, he supposed that was his fault. He was the damn-fool idiot who’d shot the first of them down. Even an angel might forget her message with a bullet in her head, and the others had seemed more intent on getting her back than dropping off any letters.

He snorted. The other local villages and towns—even Cragwall, the largest town in the Shalokar Range— had sent their priests to stare at the wreckage and hear Father Stomald’s tale. Tibold had never realized just how powerful a preacher Stomald was until he heard him speaking to those visitors, bringing forward other villagers to bear witness, describing the angel who’d spoken in the Holy Tongue even while the sanctified oil blazed upon her. It was a pity he couldn’t have a word or two with the commander of that army, for he’d brought everyone else around. Of course, his audience had been Malagorans, with all a Malagoran’s resentment of foreign domination, and Tibold knew better than most how jealous the Temple was of its secular power. Whoever was in command down there had his orders from the Circle; he was hardly likely to forget them on the say-so of a village under-priest, however eloquent.

Tibold reopened his glass to study the standards once more. Columns of smoke rose behind them—columns which had once been farmsteads and small villages. The people who’d lived there had either come to join the “heresy” or fled to escape it, and he was grateful they had, for the smoke told him what the Guard’s orders were. Mother Church had decided to make an example of the “rebels” and declared Holy War, and her Guard would take no prisoners.

“Well, Father,” he said at last, “I don’t see much choice. I’ve got five hundred musketeers, a thousand pikemen, and four thousand with nothing but their bare hands. Even with God on our side, that’s not a lot.”

“No,” Stomald sighed. “I wish I could say God will save us, but sometimes we can meet our Trial only by dying for what we know to be right.”

“Agreed. But I’m a soldier, Father, and, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to die as one—without making it any easier for them than I have to.”

“I don’t know of any Writ that says you should,” Stomald said with a sad smile.

“Then we’ll fall back to Tilbor Pass. It’s less than four hundred paces across, and it’ll take even this lot a few days to dig us out of that.” Stomald nodded, and the Guardsman smiled crookedly. “And in the meantime, Father, I won’t take it a bit amiss if you ask God to help us out of the mess we’ve landed ourselves in!”

“You’re joking!” Sean stared at the images from the remote. “Angels?”

“Yep.” Sandy’s eyes sparkled. “Wild, isn’t it?”

“My God.” Sean sank onto his couch. All the others were gazing as fixedly as he at the display.

“Actually, it’s not as crazy as it sounds,” Harriet mused. “I mean, we obviously weren’t mortals—not with bio-enhancement, grav guns, and plasma grenades—and if you aren’t mortal, you’re either a demon or an angel. And I’ve been back over your reports.” Her voice wavered, for the others had prepared their promised implant download. She still had no memory of the event, but the download had shown it all to her through her friends’ eyes. She shivered as her mind replayed the image of her own bloody body, awaiting the torch, then shook herself. “It