Which means you may both be mistaken: I've been thinking over the chain of events that brought Maj Phandys to our attention, and that little missive Vicar Hauwerd dropped on Rhobair.
I'm not sure what it means - Himself is holding this one pretty tightly, so far - but there are a few straws in the wind:
1. there are Guardsmen who are no happier with the pre-Jihad state of the Church than the Circle was. We've met one, and although he's retired, he still has links to the Guard, so I can't believe he's unique.
2. Hauwerd was himself a Guardsman, and would have been a natural center for that unhappiness. He was also not a trusting soul, and would have anticipated Clyntahn's response if he could ID the Circle. He may well have been taking steps to counter that response, but not have had time to get fully organised. There's also the fact that the situation with Charis made it possible for Clyntahn to make his response far more extreme than Hauwerd would initially have expected, so his plans _couldn't_ deal with it.
3. Nynian is an even less trusting soul. I would be very, very surprised [which means, of course, that in fact this is exactly what is going on
] if either of the Wylsyn brothers, or anybody associated with them, knew anything at all about the SSK, never mind Helm Cleaver. Nynian will always have considered the possibility of them being put to the Question even if it never crossed their minds. She may or may not have kept herself clear of anything Vicar Hauwerd might have been up to, but if she didn't she herself would have been the only point of connection with the SSK.4. Vicar Rhobair is making plans with _somebody_, plans that don't involve a direct confrontation with Clyntahn and the Inquisition. That suggests that he doesn't think the balance of forces is in his favour [currently, at least]. I would not be surprised if those plans depended on contacts supplied by Hauwerd in that little note, since Rhobair doesn't strike me as having been particularly devious and conspiratorial in the past. At least, not by the standards current in the Vicarate.
Where does that take us? Dunno, but my reading is that it suggests that there is a substantial fraction of the Guard still in Zion who were Wylsyn loyalists, and who have transferred that loyalty to Duchairn. And that a number of them figure on Clyntahn's list of trusted agents.
McGuiness wrote:A few observations on your suppositions:Silverwall wrote:Personally I see Clynthan as most likely being killed by the (in my opinion) inevitable coup by Duchairn and Magwair. It's very clear that while both are loyal to the church that neither feel that Clynthan's leadership of proceedings is actually improving the chance of victory for the Church.
Also consider that Magwair just had most of the disloyal subcommanders killed off for him by Nynian and her cronies and we have a reverse of what traditionally happens when a dictator feels the need to prop up his reigeme.
Clynthan's reigeme protection forces are rapidly getting killed off and in a face to face the temple guards still loyal to him will be overwhelmed by AoG or the properly trained Harchong forces.
Also such a coup could take a leaf from Merlins book and either break of suborn the church semaphore chains so Clynthan doesn't know the army is comming. A few key men suborned 1 step down the chain from Zion and the grand fornicator has no idea where the forces really are. They are totally dependant on the semaphore for information flow, there is very little done by messanger.
1. Clyntahn did not suffer from having a majority of his loyal sub-commanders killed off by either the Seijins or by Magwair. The Seijins killed a few dozen fanatics who'd particularly distinguished themselves in their brutality towards "heretics" and the unfortunates in the prison camps. There's no textev at all that Magwair has been offing the more fanatical of the CoGA army's leadership, although for the preservation of his own skin I'll agree that it's a good idea. After all, the Army of Glacierheart would still be functional and dangerous if its commander wasn't a Clyntahn toady. So you're certainly correct that Magwair and Duchairn are correct that the jihad would go better without Clyntahn's interference!
Of course Clyntahn won't hesitate to eliminate either of them if he feels it's necessary to preserve his own skin, and in the fantasy world he lives in, he might kill them even if they pose no danger to him at all.
2) As far as we know, the Temple Guard forces in and around Zion are all loyal to the Inquisition (or are members of it) so we shouldn't expect a coup from them.
Keep in mind that there are inquisitors embedded with every army unit, and no CoGA army would be so impious and move on Zion to express their unhappiness with Clyntahn personally, especially an army of fanatically loyal Harchongese. Magwair literally cannot order an army to attack the Temple Guard around Zion because that order would be unlikely to be obeyed. It would probably result in a bloodbath among the troops as some moved against the inquisitors embedded with them, while others rose to their defense.
Of course now that I've ruled out that possibility, RFC will promptly begin a civil war among the CoGA forces, or Phandys will finally do something, which we've been waiting for almost as long as we've waited for the ICN to sail into Gorath Bay in retribution for Dohlar turning the Charisian POWs over to the Inquisition in AMF! Barring a highly unlikely coup, I expect the Temple Guard around Zion will die when the ICN sails into Temple Bay and starts offloading the troops. A King Haarahld VII may not be able to sail up the Zion River to the Temple, (although it might...) but the City class ironclads certainly can!
3) Much of the message traffic on the semaphore network is routinely encoded, so it wouldn't be possible to take over a station en route and alter the contents of the message traffic that passes through it - certainly not the military or church messages, which are all encoded. So it makes little difference whether a tower is suborned or blown up, although if a tower in each of the chains that lead to Zion stopped passing military messages, the resulting confusion would buy some time for whichever "enemy" force was approaching Zion.
So your proposal to suborn a tower does have some merit, if a delay of a few days or hours before the forces around Zion realize that something is wrong with the semaphore network is crucial. Unfortunately you'd have to capture/suborn a tower in almost every chain that ends in Zion, so it's far more feasible to blow up one or more towers in each chain instead.
Nice thinking out of the box there. Keep it up!
