"That doesn't make much sense, Sir," he said after a long, thoughtful moment.

"No, it doesn't, does it?" Fyshyr managed to keep any exaggerated patience out of his voice. Actually, it wasn't very hard to do, despite Edwyrds' tendency to restate the obvious, given how highly he valued his first officer. Edwyrds might not exactly be the sharpest arrow in the quiver, but he had copious common sense to make up for any lack of brilliance, and he was fearless, unflappable, and totally reliable in moments of crisis. Not to mention the minor fact that he'd held a commission in the Royal Charisian Navy for almost a decade, which made him particularly valuable for Kraken, given that the galleon was no longer the innocent cargo carrier she appeared to be.

"I think," the captain went on after a moment, "that it might not be a bad idea to very quietly rouse the watch below."

"Yes, Sir," Edwyrds agreed. Then he paused and cleared his throat. "Ah, Sir. Would you like me to go ahead and clear away the guns? Without opening the ports?"

Fyshyr gazed at his first lieutenant speculatively.

Either Kevyn's got more imagination than I gave him credit for, or else I really am on to something, he thought. God, how I'd like to find out Kevyn's just being more alarmist than usual!

"I think that might be a very good idea, actually," he said. "But quietly, Kevyn-quietly."

"I trust you've impressed your men with the necessity of showing these heretics sufficient firmness, Captain Kairmyn?"

"Of course I have, Father," Tomhys Kairmyn replied, and turned to look Father Styvyn in the eye. He would have preferred avoiding that particular necessity, but the intendant was one of those Inquisitors with near total confidence in his ability to read the truth in other men's eyes. Which made it most unwise to appear as if one were attempting to refuse him that opportunity.

Father Styvyn Graivyr gazed into Kairmyn's eyes intensely, as if he'd just read the captain's mind.

Which I certainly hope he hasn't, Kairmyn thought, given that Sir Vyk's instructions were almost exactly the reverse of his!

"Good, Captain," Graivyr said after a moment. "Good."

The intendant turned away once more, gazing out from the dense black shadows of the warehouse. There was very little to see-yet-and the upper-priest inhaled audibly.

"I realize," he said, almost as if he were speaking to himself, "that not everyone truly realizes the danger of the precipice upon which we all stand. Even some members of the episcopate don't seem to fully recognize what's happening."

That, Kairmyn thought, is almost certainly a reference to Bishop Ernyst.

The reflection didn't make him particularly happy.

"I suppose it's hard to blame them," Graivyr continued. "All men want to believe in the goodness of other men, and no one wants to believe mere mortals could overset God's own plan for man's eternal well-being. But even the Archangels"-he touched his heart, then his lips-"discovered to their sorrow that sin can destroy any goodness, can corrupt even an archangel herself. These Charisians"-he shook his head slowly-"have set their hand to Shan-wei's own work. And, like their eternally cursed mistress, they've begun by mouthing pious concerns that cloak their true purpose."

Kairmyn watched the intendant's back, listening to the deep-seated anger-the frustration-in the other man's voice.

"Any man, even the Grand Vicar himself, is only mortal," Graivyr said. "That's what makes their accusations so damnably convincing to those of weaker faith. Yet whatever His Holiness' mortal frailties in his own person, when he speaks as Langhorne's Steward, he speaks with the infallibility of God Himself. There may be . . . imperfections among the vicarate. There may be isolated instances of genuine corruption among the priesthood. That's one of the things the Office of Inquisition was commissioned by the Archangel Schueler to root out and punish, after all, and the Inquisition's tasks will never be completely accomplished, however zealously we strive. But when sinful men challenge the primacy of God's own Church, however carefully they may couch their challenge in seeming reason, it's Shan-wei's work, not Langhorne's, to which they've set their hands. And"-he wheeled once more, half glaring through the darkness at Kairmyn-"they must be stopped. Shan-wei's poison must be cut out of the body of the Faithful as a surgeon cuts away a diseased limb, purged with fire and the sword."

Kairmyn wished he had the courage to ask the intendant whether or not the bishop had authorized his presence here this night. Or, for that matter, if Bishop Ernyst even knew where Graivyr was. But he dared not-any more than he'd dared to question Graivyr when the intendant turned up with a dozen of his fellow Schuelerites to be assigned to the various troop detachments detailed to tonight's operation.

And for all I know, he's completely right about what's happening in Charis, what it means for the rest of us. I'm only a soldier-what do I know about God's will? About the Grand Vicar's infallibility? What the Charisians say sounds reasonable, given what they say the "Knights of the Temple Lands" really meant to happen to them, and why. But how do I know they're the ones telling the truth when Mother Church herself insists their charges are all lies? Father Styvyn's right about at least one thing, after all-they don't call Shan-wei "Mother of Lies" for nothing!

"Father," he said finally, "I'm a soldier, not a priest. I'll do my best to follow my orders, but if it's all the same to you, I'll leave decisions about doctrine and theology to those better suited and trained to make them."

"That's exactly what you ought to do, Captain." Graivyr's voice was warmer, more approving, than anything Kairmyn had heard from him so far. Then the intendant turned back to look out into the night, nodding his head.

"Exactly what you ought to do," he repeated softly.

"Will you please come to bed?" Lyzbet Walkyr demanded.

"What?" Edmynd Walkyr turned back from the rail as his wife appeared behind him. She looked at him for a moment, then folded her arms and shook her head.

"I said that it's time you came to bed," she told him severely.

"Yes, I know. I'm just. . . getting a little fresh air."

"Standing up here trying to gather the courage to tell me you plan on leaving me home next time, you mean."

Edmynd winced slightly at the directness of her acerbic challenge, but then he shrugged.

"That's part of it, I guess," he admitted. "I'm sorry. I know it's going to make you unhappy-which probably means I'll be lucky to get back to sea myself without getting my head split open with a cookpot! But, there it is. I'm not going to have something happen to you, Lyz. I'm sorry, but I just can't do that."

He couldn't see her face very well on the darkened poop deck, but he recognized the softening in her body language. He didn't speak all that often of the depth of his love for her, although he knew she knew how deep it truly was. She stood there for another moment, then crossed to his side and put her arms about him.

"Don't you dare cheat that way," she said softly, laying her cheek against his chest. "And don't think you can turn me up all soft and obedient with a little sweet talk!"

"Oh, believe me, I'd never think that," Edmynd told her, hugging her back.

"Good." She stood back, holding him by his upper arms as she gazed up into his face in the dim backwash of the anchor lights. "I wouldn't want you thinking I'm going soft in my old age. But"-she leaned closer and kissed him-"if that's the way you're going to be about it, I suppose I'm going to have to put up with it. This time, anyway."

Edmynd was wise enough not to breathe any prayers of gratitude where she might hear them.

"In that case," he said, instead, "let me make one more swing around the deck, and then I'll be happy to come below and turn in."

"Good," she repeated, in an entirely different tone, and he grinned as he heard the challenge-and promise-in her voice.

He gave her another quick kiss, patted her on her still remarkably firm and shapely posterior, and started forward.

"All right, let's go!" Sergeant Dekyn whispered harshly, and his platoon started moving silently-or as close to silently as twenty-five cow-footed infantry troopers were ever likely to move-down the length of the dimly illuminated pier.

He glanced over his shoulder at the under-priest who'd attached himself to the platoon. Dekyn didn't much care for the priest's fervent manner. And he cared even less for the feeling that the platoon had two sergeants now. Or for the fact that the second one was senior to Dekyn himself Enough room for things to go straight to Hell already without having the troops looking to someone else for orders at the same time, he thought grumpily. Why, oh why, can't officers and priests just stay the Shan-wei out of the way and let the sergeants get on with handling the details?

He returned his attention to the task at hand as he and his men neared the first vessel on their list. They were just coming even with the lantern at the foot of the ship's gangway when there was a sudden shout from farther up the pier.

"You, there! Stand aside! We're coming aboard!"

"Shan-wei!" Dekyn swore as he recognized the voice.

He'd never thought a great deal of Sergeant Zohzef Stywyrt, who ran the company's second platoon. In his considered opinion, Stywyrt was stupid enough to make a perfectly serviceable officer, but they'd both been present when Captain Kairmyn gave them their orders. Which meant even Stywyrt should have gotten his men aboard the very first ship on his list before he started shouting challenges from pierside!

"Okay, let's pick it up!" he barked at his own men as shouts from the Charisian galleon's harbor watch responded to Stywyrt. The Charisians didn't sound very happy-or cooperative-and Stywyrt shouted something louder and considerably more obscene.

"Idiot!" Dekyn muttered under his breath. "What the fuck does he-?"

The sergeant's question chopped off as the shouts were abruptly punctuated by the unmistakable "chunnnng" sound of an arbalest's steel bow and a throat-tearing scream.

"Goddamn it!" Dekyn snarled.

Less than a minute into what's supposed to he a quick, quiet job, and that stupid son-of-a-bitch's already letting his men shoot civilians!

Greyghor Walkyr was fourteen Safeholdian years old. He'd spent almost a third of his life at sea on one of the family's two galleons, but this was the first voyage when he'd been allowed to actually begin discharging some of the duties of a real officer, rather than being stuck as a glorified cabin boy. It had been a heady experience, but even that hadn't been enough to blind him to the tension gripping his parents, especially since their arrival here in Ferayd. He didn't fully understand all the issues involved-in fact, he didn't fully understand any of the issues involved-in Charis' confrontation with the Church. He'd been too focused on his own suddenly expanding professional horizons to worry a great deal about that.

Still, he'd felt the anxiety, and-like his mother (and, for that matter, every other member of the crew, as well)-he knew exactly where his father went to worry about things aboard Wave. He wasn't about to intrude upon his parents. His ears would have rung for five-days from the clout his mother would have fetched him if he'd dared to do anything of the kind! On the other hand, a junior officer, even one in the early stages of his training and career, had certain responsibilities. Which was why Greyghor had taken to making his own quiet rounds of the ship before turning in at night.

He'd been careful not to get too close to his father and mother as he waited for them to go below so he could be about his self-assigned additional duties without the undoubtedly sarcastic comments they would have made if they'd realized what he was up to. But he was close enough to see his mother's head snap up as voices shouted somewhere farther along the pier Greyghor was still trying to figure out exactly which direction the shouting had come from when it was interrupted by the most horrible scream he'd ever heard in his life.

He jerked to his feet from where he'd been seated on a coil of rope and started across the deck towards his mother just as she crossed to the pierside bulwark with three or four quick strides. She grasped the rail, looking down towards the pier.

"Who are you?!" she shouted suddenly. "What d'you think you're doing?!"

The shout from dockside was too indistinct for Greyghor to understand. Something about "Mother Church's name," he thought, even as he heard his father shouting something urgent at his mother from farther forward.

"Stand off!" his mother barked. She charged down the steep poop deck ladder to the main deck and towards the head of the gangplank. "Stand off I tell you!"

"We're coming aboard!"

This time, Greyghor understood the shout from the pier, despite the Delferahkan accent of the shouter.

"The Shan-wei you are!" his mother shouted back, and snatched a belaying pin from the pinrail beside the entry port. "This is my husband's ship, and you bastards aren't-"

The meaty, ripping "thud" the arbalest quarrel made as it tore through his mother's body in a spray of blood was the most horrible sound Greyghor Walkyr had ever heard.

The impact threw her aside, without even crying out.

"Mother!" Greyghor shrieked. He thundered across the deck towards her even while he heard fresh shouts-angry, conflicting shouts-coming from the pier.

"Whystlyr, you goddamned idiot!" Allayn Dekyn bellowed. "I told you no shooting, damn it!"

"But the heretic bitch was going to-" the trooper began to protest.

"I don't give a fuck what she was going to do! We're not out here to kill goddamned women who're only-"

Greyghor reached his mother. Life aboard a square-rigged sailing ship was seldom easy, and never truly safe. Greyghor had seen men killed in accidents and in falls from aloft, seen at least one man lost overboard and drowned. And as he looked at his mother, lying in the spreading pool of blood with the terrible wound in her chest, he knew death when he saw it once more.

He didn't call her again. Didn't shout for his father. He didn't even think. He only leapt to the rail where his father had ordered the swivel-mounted wolf loaded after the galleon Diamond's crewmen had been beaten in one of Ferayd's alleys.

The light guns Charisians called "wolves" came in several bores and weights of shot. The one mounted on the swivel on Wave's bulwark had an inch-and-a-half bore and threw a round shot that weighed just under half a pound. At the moment, however, it had been loaded with an entire bag of musket balls, instead, and Greyghor Walkyr's eyes blazed as he yanked it around, trained it on the men starting up the gangway, and snatched up the slow match whose glow had been hidden from dockside by the bulwark.

He touched that glowing match to the wolf's priming, and a lightning-bolt muzzle flash shredded the night.

Allayn Dekyn never really registered the muzzle flash. There was no time before the charge of musket balls, like buckshot from an enormous shotgun, streaked straight down the gangway and ripped him, the trooper who'd fired the fatal shot, and three more of his platoon into bloody rags.

The Inquisitor who'd attached himself to the sergeant's platoon bellowed in shock as Dekyn's blood splashed over him in a hot, salty wave. For an instant, he couldn't move, could hardly even breathe. But then the poisonous power of his own panic touched his hatred for the "heretics" of Charis, and he whipped his head around to glare at the platoon's surviving twenty men.

"What are you waiting for!?" he shrieked in a voice sharp-edged with terror-born fury. "Kill the heretics! Holy Langhorne and no quarter!"

"Damn it!" Tohmys Kairmyn swore savagely as the flash o Wave's wolf lit the entire waterfront like the Rakurai of Langhorne. "What the hell-?"

He chopped himself off abruptly, remembering the upper-priest standing at his side, but the question continued furiously through his brain. So much for Sir Vyk's orders to do this quietly!

"It had to be the heretics," Father Styvyn grated. Kairmyn looked at him, and the intendant shrugged angrily. "That was no arbalest, Captain! I may not be a soldier, but even I know that much. And that means it came from the accursed heretics. Of course their very first response is to resort to the cowardly murder of men serving God's will! What else should you expect from Shan-wei's murderous get?"

Kairmyn couldn't fault the Schuelerite's analysis of who'd fired that shot, although he might have quibbled with the last couple of sentences. Which unfortunately, did nothing to stop what was about to happen out there in the darkness.

All along the harbor's piers, Delferahkan soldiers and sailors who'd been quietly approaching their assigned objectives heard and saw the wolf's discharge. So did the harbor watches aboard the Charisian ships they'd come to seize, and the Delferahkans heard shouts from aboard those vessels, heard ships' bells clanging the alarm, heard bare feet beginning to run across deck planking as the rest of the galleons' crewmen responded to the duty watch's shouts.

For a moment, the boarding parties hesitated. But only for a moment. Then the orders of their own sergeants, the passionate shouts of the Inquisitors who'd attached themselves to the boarders, sent them charging forward, rushing the gangways in an effort to get aboard before more resistance could be organized.

Startled merchant seamen, still running towards the rails of their own ships while they tried to figure out what was happening, found themselves face-to-face with armed soldiers, charging up the gangways to their ships. Quite a few of those seamen turned and ran, but Charisian sailors weren't noted for their timidity. Storm, shipwreck, and pirates tended to weed out the weaklings ruthlessly, and like Lyzbet Walkyr, defiance and a fierce defense were their natural response to any threat to their ships.

Men snatched up belaying pins and marlinespikes. Others, whose captains, like Edmynd Walkyr, had felt the tension building, grabbed the cutlasses which had been quietly broken out, instead, and here and there along the waterfront, other loaded wolves flashed and thundered.

"Langhorne!" Kevyn Edwyrds exclaimed.

He and Harys Fyshyr found themselves side by side at Kraken's after rail, staring towards the dockside. Kraken hadn't been able to find room alongside one of the piers when she arrived, and she was anchored a good fifteen hundred yards out into the harbor. Which was close enough to see and hear even light artillery being fired in the middle of the night.

"Those bastards!" Fyshyr snapped an instant later. "They're trying to seize our ships!"

"You're right about that, Sir. And look there!"

Fyshyr followed Edwyrds' pointing finger, and his lips drew back in a snarl as he saw the pair of launches pulling towards Kraken. The rowers had clearly been surprised by the sudden tumult from the port. Even as he watched, their stroke redoubled, but they obviously hadn't expected the alarm to be raised this soon, and they were still at least ten minutes away from Kraken.

And ten minutes will be more than long enough, he thought viciously. "All hands!" he bellowed. "All hands, repel boarders!"

.XIV.