By Heresies Distressed Read Online Free PDF Page B

on
Destroyer
’s deck were frantically trying to fling themselves from side to side, as if they thought they could somehow break free of their rough-edged hempen halters, and it took a pair of Marines each to keep them on their feet as the drums gave one last, thunderous roar, and fell silent at last.
    Lakyr heard one of the condemned inquisitors still babbling, pleading, but most of the others stood silent, as if they were no longer able to speak, or as if they had finally realized that nothing they could have said could possibly alter what was about to happen.
    Baron Rock Point faced them from
Destroyer
’s after deck, and his face was hard, his eyes bleak.
    â€œYou stand condemned by your own words, your own written reports and statements, of having incited the murder of men—and of women and children. God knows, even if we do not, what other atrocities you may have committed, how much other blood may have stained your hands, in the service of that man-shaped corruption who wears the robe of the Grand Inquisitor. But you have convicted yourselves of the murders you did here, and that is more than sufficient.”
    â€œ
Blasphemer!
” Graivyr shouted, his voice half-strangled with mingled fury and fear. “You and all your foul ‘empire’ will burn in Hell forever for shedding the blood of God’s own priests!”
    â€œ
Someone
may burn in Hell for shedding innocent blood,” Rock Point said coldly. “For myself, I will face God’s judgment unafraid that the blood on
my
hands will condemn me in His eyes. Can you say the same,
‘priest’
?”
    â€œYes!” Graivyr’s voice gusted with passion, yet there was something else in it, something buried in its timbre, Lakyr thought. A note of fear that quailed before something more than the terror of impending death. At least one thin sliver of . . . uncertainty as he found himself on the threshold of mortality. What
would
he and the other inquisitors discover when they found themselves face-to-face at last with the Inquisition’s victims?
    â€œThen I wish you pleasure of your confidence,” Rock Point told Graivyr in an iron-hard voice, and nodded sharply to the parties of seamen who’d tailed onto the ends of the ropes.
    â€œCarry out the sentence,” he said.

. II .
Merlin Athrawes’ Cabin,
HMS Empress of Charis,
Chisholm Sea
    Sergeant Seahamper was a natural shot, Merlin Athrawes decided as he watched Empress Sharleyan’s personal armsman at pistol practice.
    And so
, he reflected wryly,
is Sharleyan herself! Not very ladylike of her, I suppose
. He chuckled silently.
On the other hand, the lady
does
seem to have a style all her own, doesn’t she?
    Had anyone happened to glance into Merlin’s small, cramped cabin aboard HMS
Empress of Charis
, he would undoubtedly have assumed Merlin was asleep. After all, it was already two hours after sunset aboard the fleet flagship, even though there were still several hours of light left back home in Tellesberg. That might be a bit early, but Captain Athrawes had the morning watch at Emperor Cayleb’s back, so it made sense for him to get to bed as early as possible, and at the moment, he was stretched out in the box-like cot suspended from the overhead, swaying gently with the ship’s motion, eyes closed, breathing deep and regular. Except, of course, that, whatever it looked like, he wasn’t actually
breathing
at all. The individual known as Merlin Athrawes hadn’t done that in the last nine hundred years or so. Dead women didn’t, after all, and PICAs had no need to do anything so limiting.
    There was no real need for him to be feigning sleep—or breathing, for that matter—he supposed, either. No one was likely to barge in on Emperor Cayleb’s personal armsman during his off-duty time, and even if anyone had, Merlin’s reflexes were as inhumanly fast as his hearing was inhumanly acute. Someone whose