Merlin Athrawes had no need to breathe, yet he inhaled sharply in muscle memory reflex as she paused and looked up from the fire at him. The matter-of-fact way in which she’d suggested — no, not suggested; stated — that the most important sacred writings of the Church of God Awaiting, outside of the Holy Writ itself, had been forged, or at least significantly ‘edited,’ was astonishing. Not so much because they had been, but because she was so obviously confident they had. In its own way, that was an almost greater surprise than Maikel Staynair’s revelation of the journal of Saint Zherneau in Tellesberg had been.
But she clearly wasn’t finished yet, and she smiled crookedly as he waved for her to continue.
“Saint Kohdy was a seijin, too,” she went on after a moment. “I don’t think he had all the abilities you have, Merlin, but he had quite a few . . . superhuman capabilities. And the stories about Helm Cleaver are true. I know they are, because I’ve handled it myself, used it to shave slivers off a solid block of granite.” She smiled again, the expression softer yet somehow bittersweet, and shook her head. “I didn’t realize when Sister Klairah recruited me — I was much more innocent and naïve in those days — that I would have suffered a very sad accident if she hadn’t been able to convince me she was telling the truth.” Her expression darkened. “Some candidates have ‘suffered an accident,’ and I never would’ve lived to see Helm Cleaver or Saint Kohdy’s journal if Sister Klairah hadn’t convinced me.”
Merlin stiffened, and she nodded as if his reaction pleased her.
“We can’t read some of it,” she admitted. “It’s not written in any language we can understand. According to the part of the journal we can read, Seijin Kohdy wrote that part of it in something called ‘Español.’ He didn’t say why, but I’ve read the rest of it dozens of times, and I think he’d begun keeping his journal well before he began to feel any doubt about which side he was on. That’s certainly how the first half reads, at any rate. The ‘Español’ portions are brief, initially, interspersed with the ones we can still read, but its last eight months are recorded entirely in ‘Español.’ I suspect he switched to that language when he wrote down things that might have done serious damage to the cause of Chihiro and Schueler if it had fallen into someone else’s hands. Or perhaps they were things he might not have been certain of in his own mind at the time he wrote them down. From a handful of entries in the part I could read, I think it was a combination of the two. He wasn’t certain, and if it turned out he’d been wrong to doubt and what he’d written were to fall into anyone else’s hands, he didn’t want it to draw others who might trust him because of who and what he was into the same error.
“I don’t know that for certain, because he never explaned his reasoning in the portions of the journal we can read. Until I encountered that ‘Español’ of his, it had never occurred to me another language might even exist! And however reasonable it may’ve seemed to him at the time, his decision to use it means even the Sisterhood’s members are divided on at least a few points.”
“Oh?” Merlin tilted his head, and Aivah smiled more than a little tartly.
“Some of us — myself included — have interpreted the passage in which he recorded his decision to begin using ‘Español’ to suggest that it came from some time or place which predated the Creation. Combined with a few other puzzling references, one could almost read that as saying all of the Adams and Eves were . . . somewhere else before Safehold was called into existence.”
Her dark eyes were suddenly very intent, boring into him like twin blades, but she went on calmly, almost tranquilly.
“Even those of us who read it that way are divided about where that ‘somewhere else’ might have been. Most of us interpret it as evidence that not even an Archangel could create a soul — that God Himself must be the sole Creator in that sense — and that all those Adams and Eves were with Him while the Archangels prepared the world in which they would live. But a fair number of us think he might just as well have meant the Adams and Eves lived and breathed on an entirely different world and that God and the Archangels brought them here from that other world, rather than first giving them life on the Day of Creation. It’s a substantial distinction, and one I’ve often thought we could have found the answer to if he’d written the ‘Español’ portions in something we could read. Or,” she added, raising both eyebrows, “that the Sisterhood could read, at any rate.”
“I might be able to do a little something about that,” he acknowledged slowly. “I can’t promise. And you’d have to trust me with the journal — or a true copy of it, at any rate.”
“Either we’re going to trust one another a great deal eventually, Merlin,” she said, “or this is going to end very badly for someone.”
