David Weber - How firm a foundation

Rayno glanced away for a moment, looking up at the sky above Zion, touched with a colder, brighter autumn blue. The last blossoms had fallen from the elaborate gardens beyond the Plaza of Martyrs’ elaborate fountains, and fall color was creeping into the foliage. It would be winter again all too soon, and snow and ice would close in around the Temple once more. He thought about that, then looked back at his superior.

“I hope you’re right, Your Grace,” he said.

There was an unusual edge of doubt in his voice, however. Not disagreement, simply a note of… reservation. Clyntahn heard it, but he chose to let it pass. One of the things that made Rayno valuable to him was that the adjutant was perhaps the only person left who would argue with him if he thought Clyntahn was wrong.

“I am right,” the Grand Inquisitor said instead. “And if I’m not, I’ve got you and Major Phandys keeping an eye on him, don’t I? We’ll know if he starts to become a genuine threat. As for his absence this afternoon, I’ll let him have that much. It’s not as if anyone else is going to ignore today’s lesson, is it? Besides,” Clyntahn smiled suddenly, the smile of a slash lizard scenting blood, “it’s useful in its own way.”

“I beg your pardon, Your Grace?”

“Wyllym, Wyllym!” Clyntahn shook his head, still smiling. “Think about it. First, he’s such a convenient focus for anyone who might disagree with us. All we have to do is watch for anyone who seems inclined to suck up to him instead of to me and we’ll know where the real weak links are. And, second, Trynair and Maigwair are so busy trying to stay out of the line of fire between me and Rhobair that neither one of them is even going to consider doing something to make me think they’re choosing his side instead of mine. Oh, they may side with him over some purely technical issues, like how we balance the books and pay for the jihad, but not on anything fundamental. From that perspective, it’s far better to have him right where he is, driving them into our arms in their desperation to make it clear they’re not rushing into his.”

Rayno was still thinking about that when the bells began to ring.

Sir Gwylym Manthyr could hardly stay on his own feet, yet he wrapped his right arm around the man beside him, draping the other Charisian’s left arm across his own shoulders and somehow supporting the shambling, stumbling weight. The two of them staggered along, two more “penitents” in the rough, scratchy burlap robes that covered their savagely scarred, emaciated nakedness. For now, at least.

It was a beautiful day, Manthyr thought, listening to the magnificent, silver-throated bells of Zion as he looked around at the handful of his men who’d survived this long. There weren’t many. He didn’t have a definite count, but there couldn’t be more than thirty, and he was amazed the number was that high.

Tough, those Charisian seamen, he thought. Too tough and too stupid for their own good. The smart ones gave up and died. But that’s all right, because I’m not very smart either, I guess.

He knew every one of those thirty shambling, broken wrecks of human beings had been given the option: confess their heresy, admit their blasphemies and all of the hellish crimes to which they had set their hands in the service of their accursed emperor and empress, and they would face the garrotte, not the Punishment. Some of his men-a handful-had taken that offer, and Manthyr couldn’t find it in his heart to condemn them for it. As he’d told Lainsair Svairsmahn a seeming eternity ago, there was only so much any man could endure, and there was no shame in breaking under the savagery of the Question.

But if there was no shame in breaking, there was pride in not breaking, and his heart swelled as he looked around at those stumbling, crippled, tormented ruins and knew exactly what they’d already endured without yielding. As long as one of them- one of them-was still on his feet, still defiant, Sir Gwylym Manthyr would stand beside him at the very gates of Hell. They were his, and he was theirs, and he would not- could not-break faith with them.

They marched across the plaza, and he saw the heaps of wood, the charred wooden posts arranged on the marble flags-many of them cracked now with the heat of past fires-between the fountains and the Temple’s soaring colonnade. They marked where others of Clyntahn’s victims had already died, those posts, and he watched his men being separated from one another, dragged to those heaps of wood, chained to those grim, scorched posts. He watched inquisitors coating their bodies with pitch that would take the flame and cling to them even as it offered their flesh a brief, transitory protection that would make their dying even longer and harder. He saw leather gloves, knuckles reinforced with steel studs, striking anyone who didn’t move fast enough, who showed any trace of fight. They had to use those weighted fists quite often, he thought, watching, taking it all in. When it was his turn to appear before the Throne of God he wanted to be certain he had it all straight as he gave his testimony against the men who had twisted and perverted everything God stood for.

Then all of his men were chained, fastened atop their pyres, and there was only him. A pair of inquisitors started to drag him past his men, but he found the strength to shake off their hands and walk-slowly, but steadily, under his own power, making eye contact for one last time with every man he passed-towards the platform which had been reserved for him. The platform with the wheel and the rack, the white-hot irons waiting in their nests of glowing coals.

He longed for one final opportunity to defy the Inquisition, to speak for his men, to ridicule the charges against them, but they’d taken that from him when they cut out his tongue. He could still scream-they’d proven that to him-but they’d silenced his ability to deny the “confession” they were going to read and attribute to him. He’d held out, he’d never admitted or signed a single damned thing, but that wasn’t the story they were going to tell. He knew that. They’d explained it to him in smirking detail in a last-ditch effort to break him into actually signing, and it grieved him that he could never set the record straight. Not so much for himself, but because it meant he couldn’t speak out for his men, either.

It doesn’t matter, he thought as he climbed the steps to the platform, eyes hard with hate and defiance as they met Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s in person at last. Anybody who’d believe Clyntahn’s lies in the first place would never believe anything I said. And anyone who knows the truth about Clyntahn already knows what I would have said if I could. Those people, my Emperor and my Empress and my Navy, they know, and the time will come when they will avenge every one of my men .

He saw the torches, flames pale in the cool autumn sunlight, as the inquisitors strode towards his chained and helpless men, and his belly tightened. They were going to burn the others first, let him listen to their screams and watch their agonizing deaths, before it was his turn. It was the kind of “refinement” he’d come to expect out of Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s Inquisition.

Two more inquisitors seized his arms, stretching them out, chaining them to the rack, and Zhaspahr Clyntahn stepped closer to him. The Grand Inquisitor’s face was studiously calm, set in stern lines of determination as he prepared to play out the final line of this carefully scripted farce.

“You have heard the judgment and sentence of holy Mother Church upon you for your blasphemy, your heresy, your wanton defiance of God and allegiance to Shan-wei, Gwylym Manthyr,” he said, his voice carrying clearly. “Have you anything to say before that sentence is carried out?”