The Sha-lug made camp on the seaward side of the coastal road. Their carts had suffered badly, traveling cross country. Else doubted that the band would survive the journey south to Dreanger.

Bone was concerned. "What'll we do if a ship don't come?" Gordimer had vowed that warships would patrol the coast as far norm as the roads of Vantrad until Else and his band were safely home.

"If no ship shows up I'll strap a mummy on your back. And - like some black crow of an old woman, you can lug your baby around while you work."

Bone was no more religious than Else. That was characteristic of Sha-lug. They had seen too much to be unquestioning in their conviction of G.o.d's Mercy. The old man made a sign warding the evil eye. He followed that with a gesture meant to invoke G.o.d's favor-if He so willed.

Bone did not like the dead. He bore a particular prejudice against those dead who had practiced their trade a long time. Of the ancient dead of Andesqueluz, the Demon Kingdom, whose sorcerer kings' accursed relicts Else's Company had pilfered from their tombs, Bone's opinion consisted of irrational hatred deeply awash in stark terror. These days the Demon Kingdom was lost in the backwaters of history, known intimately only to scholars, but echoes of the terrible truth lived on in myth and fairy tale.

But Bone was a good soldier.

Sha-lug was synonymous with Good Soldier.

There were no incidents that night Nevertheless, Else did not sleep well. He could not help antic.i.p.ating further deviltry from the night Al-Azer claimed that the supernatural reverberations of the bogon's destruction had not damped out yet Anything might be attempted by sorcerers who wanted to spy on their neighbors during such unsettled times.

ELSE DID NOT POSSESS AN IMAGINATION ADEQUATE TO ENCOMPa.s.s the magnitude of his one cannon blast. None of the company but al-Azer er-Selim realized that the blast had changed the world forever.

Al-Azer would never speak the words. He would not write them down. Few mortals would realize the truth, even within the supernatural trades. But that one inspired blast had proclaimed the imminent end of Mankind's long subjugation to the Tyranny of the Night. Mankind now had a means to contest with the G.o.ds themselves, did Man but realize it for even the greatest G.o.ds were nothing more than bogons on a mightier scale, some with a dollop of intellect The Wells of Mian vented concentrated magical power, the fertilizer in which the things of night flourished. The Holy Lands seethed with supernatural beings. The region was as critical to the Instrumentalities of the Night as it was to the religions that considered the Wells of Ihrian the Holy Lands.

There were dozens of other wells of magic scattered around the world but none were as potent as those found in the Holy Lands. Nor as concentrated. And all the wells, everywhere, were in a weakening cycle. Which meant a more difficult existence for the Instrumentalities of the Night, much harder work for sorcerers, and a lot more cold along the bounds of the inhabited world.

The greatest, least recognized power of the wells was that their magic kept the ice at bay.

Nothing about the wells was common knowledge. Changes in their flow were never obvious. Nor was the advance or retreat of the ice along the bounds of the world.

Both the Written and secular historical doc.u.ments mentioned lions, apes, and wolves in lands around the Mother Sea. In antiquity. The lions had been hunted out by cla.s.sical times. Apes survived only in the extreme west, in small numbers. Wolves could be found in the forests of the north and the mountains beyond the Kaifate of Qasr-al-Zed. Even the forests around the Mother Sea were, mostly, gone now.

And now a way had been found to tame the Instrumentalities of the Night.

Now a man like Else, with no mystical talent whatsoever, with not one of those delicate skills a sorcerer honed for decades so as to manipulate a few minor spirits, could butcher a count of the night as easily as he could exterminate his own kind.

Understanding left Az filled with stark terror. The falcon's blast might catch the eyes of the G.o.ds themselves.

The G.o.ds-pressed, al-Azer would admit that there were more G.o.ds than the One G.o.d, the True G.o.d, There Is No Other-were not known for indulging mortal behaviors offensive enough to be noticed. In particular, they would resent the threat to their own dominion.

Else did not know what he had done. A threat revealed itself. He did what he was supposed to do. He dealt with it based on hearsay and the tools at hand.

Al-Azer rested more poorly than did his captain.

A SMALL WARSHIP SHOWING THE BANNER OF AL-MlNPHET Appeared early next morning. The vessel brought a letter from Gordimer, meant for Else if the ship happened upon him.

Else gathered his men. "The Lion has ordered me to report to him immediately, with the mummies and their accoutrements. He has another job for me. Already. Bone, that leaves you to take the company home. The galley only has s.p.a.ce for maybe ten more men. One has to be Hagid. Bone, pick the others. There're other patrol ships out. I'll send them to cover you."

Bone named nine names immediately. Each belonged to an injured or sick soldier.

Else nodded. Those men were likely to be more burden than a.s.set. He said, "It should be under a hundred miles to the Shidaun naval fortress. Abandon the carts. You'll make better time."

Else hoped he was not whistling in the dark. The fortified harbor at Shidaun was at least a hundred twenty miles away. Probably more. And while the Kaif's enemies might not be fast enough to catch the Sha-lug from behind, their sorcerers had ways of reaching out to potential allies between here and Shidaun. Once the night returned.

Al-Azer looked grim. He would be the last man in the band allowed to board a ship and scurry away to safety. The Master of Ghosts was the company's most important protector.

Else made the ship's master put in at Shidaun. There he used his authority to compel the garrison commander to send marines north to meet Bone.

That was all that he could do for his men.

3. St. Jeules ande Neuis, in the End of Connec

Brother Candle reached St. Jeules ande Neuis after noon prayers, on the third day of Mantans, in the third year of the Patriarchy of Sublime V in Brothe. Man and boy, adult and child, the villagers should have been getting ready for the bitter long hours of spring planting.

They had been preparing, naturally. But with little enthusiasm. Word had come that a Perfect Master was headed their way. The peasants were eager to see a famous holy man, even if few of them were believers themselves. The people were eager to hear and debate the message the Perfect Master would bring.

Even poor farmers in the Connec enjoyed an active intellectual life. Many minds still could not understand the Maysalean divergences from Episcopal creed-but most Connectens were willing to argue.

The Maysalean Heresy had been around for decades but only lately had it begun to catch on. Though there was as much nationalistic fervor in that as philosophical conviction. The Heresy's growth was a response to the incessant outrages practiced by the illegitimate Patriarchs of Brothe.

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX YEARS HAD Pa.s.sED SINCE THE election of the Connecten Ornis of Cedelete to the Patriarchal throne. Within hours the unheroic Ornis fled the Holy City, harried by a mob whipped into a frenzy by agents of the Brothen Five Families. Who considered the western religious Patriarchy a part of their birthright.

Legitimate Patriarch Ornis, taking the reign name Worthy VI, established himself in the Palace of Kings at Viscesment. Though legitimate in canon law, Worthy's Patriarchy in exile was impotent His own countrymen in the End of Connec did not take him seriously. His successors made up a parade of ineffective, craven, and often quickly murdered Patriarchs. Meanwhile, the illegitimate line of Usurper Patriarchs in Brothe came to be recognized by most of the Episcopal bishops, archbishops, and Princ.i.p.ates. The Five Families of Brothe could pay much bigger bribes. Only lukewarm support from the Grail Emperors kept the Viscesment anti-Patriarchy breathing.

Barely, now known as the Pretender Patriarchy.

The current Pretender Patriarch, Guy ande Scars, styling himself Immaculate II, sputtered and fussed at the Episcopal world from his family estate outside Viscesment. His entire Patriarchal establishment, horizontally and vertically, consisted of fewer than a hundred persons, the majority of them extremely competent Braunsknechts Guards from the Grail Emperor Johannes' own Kretien Electorate. Their presence a.s.sured Immaculate a definite, though modest, level of respect.

For fifty years the usurpers in Brothe had been strong men. Princ.i.p.ality by princ.i.p.ality, by persuasion or by bribe, they had gained the allegiances of the lords of the Church and the Lords Temporal, so disdained by the Collegium.

The Maysalean Heresy renounced all things worldly, power and property and the pleasures of the flesh in particular.

Long ago Brother Candle wore the name Charde ande Clairs and was a wealthy merchant of Khaurene. Once his children were grown and married and had established their own fives, the merchant foreswore the world of trade. As a simple mendicant brother he set out in search of Perfect Enlightenment. His wife, Margete, entered the Maysalean nunnery at Fleaumont, where she attained Perfect status herself. Around Fleaumont Sister Probity was better known man her former husband.

The folk of St. Jeules ande Neuis welcomed the missionary heartily. His arrival guaranteed a break from boredom. Even devout Brothen Episcopals embraced the Perfect. The mendicant brothers were the news bringers of the back country. At a time when the world was quickening with fears and alarums. In rumor of late, it seemed every far land was boiling with conflicts.

Almost out to the edge of imagination, a fanatic styling himself Indala al-Sul Halaladin had overrun much of the Holy Lands, the region known as the Wells of Ihrian. Al-Sul Halaladin served the Kaif of Qasr al-Zed, a man something like a western Patriarch. With much more temporal power. He headed the al-Zhun Path of al-Prama, the Faith. Al-Prama made no distinction between religious and mundane leadership. Every ruler was responsible for both the secular and spiritual welfare of his people.

A few Praman rulers took that charge seriously.

The Kaif of Qasr al-Zed was determined to remove all westerners from the Holy Lands. His successes of a decade ago so disturbed the now-dead Usurper Patriarch Clemency III that the false Patriarch called for a new crusade to recover the holy places and strengthen up the small kingdoms and city states created by crusaders in ages past.

All this and much more Brother Candle explained to St. Jeules the first evening of his stay. Most of it they had heard already, in garbled form. News traversed the rural world slowly but it did travel. Those who were Viscesment Episcopals were intimately familiar with the wickedness of the Brothen Usurper Patriarch Clemency III and his successor, Sublime V. Bishop Serifs of nearby Antieux, sent out by Clemency III to wean the peoples of the eastern Connec from their allegiance to Immaculate II, and confirmed in his mission by Sublime V, was hated with immense vigor by Maysaleans, all subspecies of Episcopals, Devedians, Dainshaus, and the Connec's remaining handful of Pramans, of every station and faction. Because the Bishop seemed to have decided that his main mission was to deprive anyone who defied him of any hint of wealth. Wealth that, somehow, always found its way into his personal control.

Brother Candle was but one of numerous Perfect wandering the byways of the End of Connec, gently witnessing their creed without speaking ill of either Patriarch or anything Episcopal.

He failed to mention, right away, that most of the Perfect would come to St. Jeules after him.

Brother Candle went on to talk about the sharp religious fighting beyond the Verses Mountains, in Direcia, orchestrated by Peter of Navaya, who had married Isabeth, younger sister of Duke Tormond IV of Khaurene, the overlord of the End of Connec.

Brother Candle also predicted a resumption of hostilities between Santerin and Arnhand, partly because of dynastic disputes complicated by confused feudal obligations, but also because Santerin was not satisfied with the disaster their forces had visited upon Arnhand's at Themes in Tramaine last summer.

Connectens cared little about the squabble between Santerin and Arnhand except that it did keep Arnhand from taking an interest in the Connec. Connectens were more concerned about events to the east. It was in that direction that the big predators prowled.

"Tell us what Hansel is doing," Pere Alain insisted. Pere Alain meant the Grail Emperor Johannes III Blackboots, Hansel the Ferocious, supreme warlord of the New Brothen Empire, the Anointed Fist of G.o.d. The Usurper Patriarch Sublime's bitterest foe and abiding nightmare. Little Hans was a fierce critic of ecclesiastical corruption, which ran deep and was almost universal in the Episcopal Church. Johannes blamed all that on the Patriarchy, which defended the priesthood, however heinous or egregious its crimes. He hated Sublime V and held today's Patriarchy in deep contempt.

The Emperor was almost always at war with the Patriarchy somewhere but only desultorily because the Grail Empire could not finance a more vigorous campaign.

Sublime V had been Patriarch for barely two years. In that time he had issued numerous thunderous bulls excommunicating Johannes Blackboots and his captains, frequently to the dismay of those n.o.bles who worried that G.o.d might be standing behind Sublime V instead of Immaculate II.

Hansel tirelessly belabored the point that Sublime was illegitimate and his decrees therefore no more momentous than those of other thieves and perjurers. Only the Patriarch in Viscesment could issue Writs of Anathema and Excommunication.

Unfortunately, even patriotic Connectens admitted that Immaculate II was a feeble joke who would fade faster than morning dew without Johannes behind him.

Pere Alain asked, "Master, will you stay long?"

"Call me Brother. Maysaleans consider all men equal. All men are brothers. We suffer nothing from hierarchy." Hierarchy caused more trouble amongst Episcopals than did any point of dogma. The Church and churchmen were hierarchical in the extreme. And jealous of every little perquisite. Which offended a great many layfolk, who retained the ancient values.

"Will you stay and teach?"

"Of course. That's my work. I teach, I witness, I perform acts of charity. And I'm tired of traveling." Brother Candle grinned his winsome grin but did not mention that other Perfects planned to gather in the village.

They put him up in the chapel. St. Jeules did not have its own priest It was a time of prosperity. Few Episcopals were taking orders. The smaller livings went begging.

The people of St Jeules trekked four miles to St Aldrain's for weekly service. Once a month, old Father Epoine made the difficult climb to St. Jeules to deal with baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and funerals. When extreme unction was needed a boy ran down and one of the donkeys of St. Aldrain's fetched Father Epoine up as fast as might be.

If good Episcopals were involved.

A quarter of the folk of St Jeules belonged in that category, supporting Viscesment. A third were Maysaleans. The rest were largely indifferent, though a handful, all connected to the Ashar family, still favored the ancient ways, bending to the Will of the Night.

By day Brother Candle taught basic ciphering and the most rudimentary fundamentals of reading, more Maysalean habits that scandalized the Church. After supper he sat with those who were interested and helped them explore new ways of thinking about the Creator, his handiwork, and the place the thinking animal occupied in the worldly pit.

One young man, who had been all the way to Antieux and was considered an adventurer, said, "They say the wells of power are weakening. That snow keeps piling deeper and deeper in lands where it's always winter."

"I don't know. That could be. Maysaleans are more concerned with the ice inside."

Their vision mirrored the traditional. To a Maysalean Perfect this world was not the handiwork of a kind and loving Creator. This world was an artifact torn violently from the womb of the void by the Adversary, to become a weapon in His great war with Heaven. Souls caught up in mortal existence were separated from the Light, subject to the Tyranny of the Night Some would cling to the Wheel of Life forever, never attaining Perfection, never rejoining the One.

The End of Connec had been tamed for fifteen hundred years. Yet minor spirits of wood and field and stream abounded, lurking, abetted by the Ashars and their like, doing mischief where they dared. Maysaleans considered all the Instrumentalities of the Night, great or small, to be concrete evidence of their creed's first principle.

The Heresy was a gentle creed. Traditionalists found its social notions more disturbing than its religious absurdities. In a time when senior churchmen lived more grandly than princes, the Maysaleans preached-and lived-lives of poverty and service. Their property ideals were communal, as had been those of the Founders of the Church. Their att.i.tudes toward the sacraments were relaxed, particularly as regarded marriage. Though the Perfect abstained from the pleasures of the flesh. If one yielded to their temptation one fell from Perfection.

There were not many young Perfect.

Old Juie Sachs, the carpenter, told Brother Candle, "Sounds like a slow curse upon the world you got there, Master."

Puzzled, the Perfect said, "Please explain."

"It's a mathematical thing. If only the best people become Perfect and escape the world, then, each time one does, the world will get a little darker."

Jhean, the carpenter's son, said, "Maybe that's why the permanent snows get deeper and the winters get longer and colder. Maybe it don't have nothing to do with the wells of power."

Brother Candle was a fine missionary. When he explained the Maysalean Heresy it sounded obvious and inarguable. He had won countless converts. It was a harsh world even in good times. That made it easy to a.s.sert that life was a toy of darkness rather than a gift of light.

"We inspire the will to do good works by doing good works. The soul of the newborn does not bring with it the burden of sin acc.u.mulated in its previous life. In the beginning we stand equal before the Light, a book not yet written."

That did not answer the question posed, however. And now he was on difficult doctrinal ground. There were several points of view on the clean slate.

"Life starts as a blank tablet," he said. "Character is created and written each day. Meaning that there will always be more good people coming up."

That was an idea difficult to embrace. Common sense said some souls were so black that they could not become better if they went around the Wheel a million times. Even devoted Episcopals offered Sublime and the Bishop of Antieux as examples. The Bishop had taken ecclesiastical corruption into previously unknown realms.

One of the young men announced, "There's another Perfect on the way."

The old men in St. Jeules' little church eyed Brother Candle. It was time for him to tell them why he had come to their village. "All the Perfect who can are going to gather here. They'll come by the most remote and obscure byways."

The announcement caused no stir of excitement.

"We won't presume upon your charity. We'll pay for food and drink. And we'll help in the fields."

Someone asked, "How many Perfect Masters are there?"

"Forty-five," Brother Candle replied, though he had no real idea. "But they won't all come. Most are too far away."

The Maysalean Heresy did well wherever the Church was its most corrupt or oppressive. The ugliest accusations retailed by the Episcopal priesthood convinced no one that the Perfect were evil or out to harvest souls for the Adversary. Nor could the Church obscure the fact that most of the Perfect had been successful men before they donned the white robe.

So the bishops and priests of the Brothen rite peddled tales of devil worship and s.e.xual license in secret, remote places. Credulous folk in cities and foreign places willingly believed anything wicked of anyone different. And neither accusation was an outright lie. Maysaleans did not worship the Adversary but they did believe that it was not the Evil One who had been cast out of Heaven. Nor did they believe in proprietary rights to the flesh of any individual, even in marriage.

Brother Candle said, "No more than twenty Perfect should turn up."

The old men wanted to know why the Perfect were gathering. There had been no Maysalean synod in more than fifty years.

"The Usurper, Sublime, intends to send selected priests to the Connec to destroy our beliefs. Some will belong to the Brotherhood of War. Some will be armed with writs granting them extraordinary powers. Bishop Serifs will be in charge of spiritual affairs throughout the Connec, with permission to use any means necessary to expunge our faith."

Old men spat. Young men cursed Serifs. The women offered prayers for the Bishop's disgrace and ruin.

"He'll be able to get away with anything as long as he claims he's doing it to suppress Those Who Seek the Light."

A key tenet of the Maysalean Heresy was a conviction that its followers were the true Chaldareans. Although that stretch was extreme, in truth, modern Episcopal dogma bore only a lip service resemblance to the gentle, egalitarian, communal doctrines of the Holy Founders.

The Episcopal Church survived on size, inertia, and the staying power of vested interest. It had survived challenges more serious than the Maysalean Heresy. The Borgians of the previous century had been more critical of the establishment and more militant in their defiance and disdain for all temporal power. The Borgians wanted to rid the world of all priests except part-time village clerics, and all n.o.bles, period.

The Borgian dogma was naive. It required an already indifferent G.o.d to make sure no new hierarchies established themselves. It counted on that lazy deity to ensure that no savage invaders descended upon the pastoral Borgian realm, that no bandits took advantage.

The fatal flaw of the Borgian fallacy was that it a.s.sumed all men to be good and empathetic at heart, endowed with an innate drive to harm no one who would not fight back.

There were no Borgians anymore.