The Heretic

Abel nodded. “Damn right!” he called out.

“Thrice-damned right,” said Golitsin. “One, two, three. Thrice! And the last one was the prettiest of them all. I tell you she was like water hyacinth and lavender. She was-”

He screamed. The fire had truly reached him now. Their smoke rose, and Abel could barely see his face through the clouds of it. The rifle stocks were beginning to catch now, their dense wood finally giving in to the inevitable flames. Tongues of fire curled around their edges and the oil finish crinkled and blackened.

It was to be as if they, and Golitsin, had never existed.

A shot rang out. It was extreme long range and seemed only another pop, maybe a little louder than most, to add to those emanating from the bonfire. Most present probably thought it was. But in the next instant, the smoke cleared and Abel saw what he’d hoped to see.

A clean hit.

Golitsin had taken the shot in the left eye. A piece of his face had also been blown off from the eye’s boney orbit outward to the ear. Golitsin’s chin instantly slumped down to his chest. He was dead.

Kruso, thought Abel. Best shot in Treville. Maybe in the Land itself.

He’d ordered Kruso to find a spot-likely the roof of the nishterlaub warehouse, for it offered both cover and a good vantage point-and wait until the smoke obscured the priest enough so that those watching wouldn’t be able to tell a bullet had ended his life and not the flames. There were also other Scouts posted about in vantage point, in case Kruso’s shot had missed.

Joab would guess. Probably Zilkovsky. Or maybe they would believe, along with the rest of the crowd, that the shot was merely one of the heretic’s own accursed creations firing, exploding in the last throes of its burning, killing its creator even as it darkened in its own incineration.

The heretic was dead.

The guns were destroyed.

Stasis was served.

Everything could go back to the way it was before. The way it had always been and always would be.

Zentrum was satisfied.

3

She met him in Garangipore on the evening before he was scheduled to board the barge for Lindron. It was the apartment of a servant, near the Jacobson compound in Garangipore. The girl had cleared out at Mahaut’s request and given them the evening in the cramped but comfortable quarters. Most importantly, it was an apartment with a backdoor that opened onto an alley.

Even as he counted the alley entrances as instructed in her note, and entered through it, Abel had thought, This is not the last time I’ll be sneaking around through back alleys to see her, I’ll wager.

She was not in battledress, to say the least. In fact, there was little about her that might have betrayed that this was the woman whom all of Treville was beginning to refer to as “the Rocketeer.”

Mahaut had escaped her own charges of heresy when Golitsin had spontaneously confessed that he had conceived and manufactured the rockets, too. As they had proved less than effective as killers of men (although quite effective as terror to donts), the remaining stockpile, of which there were quite a few, had not been destroyed, but put into the charge of the Regulars, who were now free to adopt the weapon should they like.

And, knowing Joab’s penchant for using any advantage against the Blaskoye to the utmost, Abel imagined they would like the prospect.

He wasn’t so sure about the Women’s Auxiliary. Joab was still opposed to its continued existence, although he had acknowledged, and even praised, its effectiveness in the Battle of the Canal.

“Let me worry about that,” Mahaut had told him. “Your father is stubborn, but not unreasonable. He also knows I am beginning to win a substantial block of Jacobson goodwill to my side, and he needs that to pit against the Hornburgs of the world. I’m actually getting to have more power than I ever expected within the household.” She laughed. “It seems nobody much liked Edgar all along. They feel sorry for me. And I let them.”

Abel kissed her then. “I don’t feel sorry for you,” he said.

They fell together into the servant girl’s bed and made love in a tangle of linen blankets.

When it was over, they sat together, and by the light of an oil lamp, Abel traced a finger in a circle along Mahaut’s scar, her breasts, and her shoulders, her tan lines beginning to reassert themselves after they’d disappeared during her recuperation.

No battledress tonight, but here is its shadow, he thought.

“I have something for you,” she said. “It’s in the other room waiting. He wasn’t going to give it back, but I ‘acquired’ it from his valet with a bit of blackmail. An agreement to keep quiet about some gossip I knew about the man and a town whore. Very cheaply purchased, actually.”

“My pistol?” he asked.

Mahaut nodded.

“Take it with you to Lindron,” she said. “I hear there are certain sectors of that place you do not want to go unarmed.”

“Thanks,” he replied.

“Do you still have my dagger?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered. Then, after a pause. “Can I keep it?”

“Of course.”

“I killed him with it. Rostov.”

“You told me,” she said. She rose up and put her arms around him. The chill of her black onyx bracelet where it touched the back of his neck sent shivers down his spine. Her skin bore the faint odor of hyacinth, her perfume. The servant girl was lucky. It was bound to linger in her sheets for days.

She kissed him, then drew him down to her and whispered in his ear. “Tell me again.”

Epilogue: The Guardian

My Dear Son,

I am sorry that I have not written you in some time. However, my duties in holding the district safe from further incursion have taken me away from my desk more often than I would have liked. The Scouts are holding the Escarpment fairly well, but the Blaskoye are engaged in an enormous rebuilding effort that, I am afraid, is bearing fruit. Even after their ignominious defeat three years ago at our hands, they have not given up on their quest to dominate the Land, or to use this district as a gateway. The Scouts bring the word of a new leader who is arisen. There are strange reports, for it seems that this leader may not be a warrior himself, but a sort of politician among the tribes. To tell the truth, I fear this sort of leader far more than I did the one who pitted himself against us before.

But let me speak no more of these matters here. How is your service to the temple going? In your last letter you told me that, after a bit of trouble, that cabal of older Guardian toughs has eased up on you and you have found a place in the Academy. I compliment you for not killing them, or even seriously hurting them. It is a skill that you will have to employ more and more as you rise in rank and are given command of larger sectors. There will be many people you want to kill, yet cannot.

And always I expect you to continue to comport yourself as befits a Dashian. You were allowed a great deal of freedom in Treville, and I’m very glad that this degree of power and success did not inflame your sense of self-entitlement. The very fact that you could bear yourself humbly and remain an effective Scout and soldier after such victories was as impressive to me as were those victories themselves.

Just remember that in Lindron, you remain a very small fish in a very large pond, no matter what you did in Treville. Yet I do not believe that you are destined to remain in such a subordinate position for long. For now, bear it, with the promise that better things will come for those who are talented and who have the right connections. You have both. I hesitate to write these words, for fear they will betray the greatest hope of my heart,