By Schism Rent Asunder Read Online Free PDF

serious bellyache when he gets around to Corisande!”

.III.
    Tellesberg Cathedral,
City of Tellesberg,
Kingdom of Charis
    It was very quiet in Tellesberg Cathedral.
    The enormous circular structure was packed, almost as crowded as it had been for King Haarahld’s funeral mass, but the atmosphere was very different from the one which had prevailed on that occasion. There was the same undertone of anger, of outrage and determination, but there was something else, as well. Something which hovered like the sultry silence before a thunderstorm. A tension which had grown only more taut and sharper-clawed in the five-days since the old king’s death.
    Captain Merlin Athrawes of the Charisian Royal Guard understood that tension. As he stood at the entrance to the royal box, watching over King Cayleb and his younger brother and sister, he knew exactly what that vast, not-quite-silent crowd was thinking, worrying about. What he wasn’t prepared to hazard a guess about was how it was going to react when the long-anticipated moment finally arrived.
    Which , he thought dryly, it’s going to do in about twenty-five seconds .
    As if his thought had summoned the reality, the cathedral’s doors opened. There was no music, no choir, on this occasion, and the metallic “clack!” of the latch seemed to echo and re-echo through the stillness like a musket shot. The doors swung silently, smoothly, wide on their well-oiled, meticulously maintained hinges, and a single scepter-bearer stepped through them. There was no thurifer; there were no candle-bearers. There was simply a procession—relatively small, for the main cathedral of an entire kingdom—of clergy in the full, glittering panoply of the vestments of the Church of God Awaiting.
    They moved through the stained-glass sunlight pouring through the cathedral’s windows, and the stillness and silence seemed to intensify, spreading out from them like ripples of water. The tension ratcheted higher, and Captain Athrawes had to forcibly remind his right hand to stay away from the hilt of his katana.
    There were twenty clerics in that procession, led by a single man who wore the white, orange-trimmed cassock of an archbishop under a magnificently embroidered cope stiff with bullion thread and gems. The ruby-set golden crown which had replaced the simple bishop’s coronet he had previously worn in this cathedral proclaimed the same priestly rank as his cassock, and the ruby ring of his office flashed on his hand.
    The other nineteen men in the procession wore only marginally less majestic copes over white, untrimmed cassocks, but instead of crowns or cornets, they wore the simple white-cockaded priests’ caps of bishops in another prelate’s cathedral. Their faces were less serene than their leader’s. In fact, some of them looked even more tense, more worried, than the laymen waiting for their arrival.
    The procession moved steadily, smoothly, down the central aisle to the sanctuary, then unraveled into its component bishops. The man in the archbishop’s cassock seated himself on the throne reserved for the Archangel Langhorne’s steward in Charis, and voices murmured here and there throughout the cathedral as he sat. Captain Athrawes didn’t know if the archbishop had heard them. If he had, he gave no sign of it as he waited while his bishops took their places in the ornate, and yet far humbler, chairs which had been arranged to flank his throne.
    Then the last bishop was seated, and the silence was absolute once more, brittle under its own weight and internal tension, as Archbishop Maikel Staynair looked out over the congregation.
    Archbishop Maikel was a tallish man, for a Safeholdian, with a magnificent beard, a strong nose, and large, powerful hands. He was also the single human soul in that entire cathedral who actually looked calm. Who almost certainly was calm, Captain Athrawes thought, wondering how the man managed it.