By Schism Rent Asunder Read Free Page A

along her low bulwarks, pick out her uniformed captain standing aft, near the wheel, see the crew of the forward gun in her starboard broadside reloading their weapon. He looked up at his own sails, then at the schooner’s kraken-like grace, and drew a deep breath.
    â€œStrike our colors, Brother Tymythy,” he said.
    â€œFather?” Brother Tymythy stared at him, as if he couldn’t believe his own ears.
    â€œStrike our colors!” Sawal repeated more firmly.
    â€œBut, but the Bishop Executor—”
    â€œStrike our colors!” Sawal snapped.
    For a moment, he thought Tymythy might refuse. Tymythy knew their orders as well as Sawal did, after all. But it was far easier for a bishop to order an under-priest to maintain the authority of Mother Church “at any cost” than it was for Father Rahss Sawal to get the crew of his vessel killed as part of an exercise in futility.
    If there were any hope of actually delivering our dispatches, I wouldn’t strike, he told himself, and wondered whether or not it was the truth. But it’s obvious we can’t keep away from them, and if those people over there are as prepared to fire into us as I think they are, they’ll turn this entire vessel into toothpicks with a single broadside. Two, at the outside. There’s no point in seeing my own people slaughtered for nothing, and we aren’t even armed .
    The flag which had never before been dipped to any mortal power fluttered down from the courier boat’s masthead. Sawal watched it come down, and an ice-cold wind blew through the marrow of his bones.
    It was a small thing, in so many ways, that scrap of embroidered fabric. But that was how all true catastrophes began, wasn’t it? With small things, like the first stones in an avalanche.
    Maybe I should have made them fire into us. At least then there wouldn’t have been any question, any ambiguity. And if Charis is prepared to defy Mother Church openly, perhaps a few dead crewmen would have made that point even more clearly .
    Perhaps they would have, and perhaps he should have forced the Charisians to do it, but he was a priest, not a soldier, and he simply couldn’t. And, he told himself, the mere fact that Charis had fired upon the flag of Holy Mother Church should be more than enough without his allowing his people to be killed, on top of it.
    No doubt it would, and yet even as he told himself that, he knew.
    The lives he might have saved this morning would be as meaningless as mustard seeds on a hurricane’s breath beside the horrendous mountains of death looming just over the lip of tomorrow.

.II.
    Royal Palace,
City of Manchyr,
Princedom of Corisande
    Hektor Daykyn’s toe caught on the splinter-fringed gouge a Charisian round shot had plowed across the deck of the galley Lance . It was one of many such gouges, and the Prince of Corisande reached out to run his hand across a shattered bulwark railing where the mast had come thundering down in splintered ruin.
    â€œCaptain Harys had his hands full bringing this one home, Your Highness,” the man walking at his right shoulder said quietly.
    â€œYes. Yes, he did,” Hektor agreed, but his voice was oddly distant, his eyes looking at something only he could see. The distant focus in those eyes worried Sir Taryl Lektor, the Earl of Tartarian, more than a little bit. With the Earl of Black Water’s death in battle confirmed, Tartarian had become the senior ranking admiral of the Corisandian Navy—such as it was, and what remained of it—and he didn’t much care for the way his prince seemed to occasionally … wander off into his own thoughts. It was too unlike Hektor’s normal, decisive manner.
    â€œFather, can we go now?”
    Hektor’s eyes blinked back into focus, and he turned to look at the boy beside him. The youngster had Hektor’s dark eyes and jawline, but he had the copper-bright hair of his dead northern