The Invasion of the Tearling

Thinking of the Mace’s uncanny ability to appear and disappear from walls at will, Tyler almost smiled. The Mace would find him, no matter where he went, but Tyler didn’t bother to correct the Holy Father. He wondered what the Queen would say if she could see this room.

“What happens after she dies?” he asked, startling himself.

“There will be a bit of squabbling, certainly, but eventually the Tear will become a Mort protectorate.”

Tyler blinked. “The Red Queen is a noted unbeliever. Will that not be worse for the Church?”

“No.” A smile played at the corners of Anders’s mouth. “Everything has already been arranged.”

Poor bedfellows, Tyler thought sickly, recalling the Mace’s words. “My leg is still weak, Your Holiness. I would like to go back upstairs.”

“Of course,” Anders replied, his tone solicitous now. “We will go at once.”

Anders locked the door behind them and they moved slowly back between the tombs. Tyler’s leg had gotten so bad that he was now forced to hobble.

“We will take the lift, Tyler, to spare your leg.”

Together, they crowded onto the thick platform of wood that stood beside the staircase, and Anders nodded to the two priests who waited there.

“Brothers’ quarters.”

Tyler grabbed the railing, slightly sick again, as the lift began to rise.

“This is a test, Tyler,” the Holy Father told him. “God is testing your faith, your loyalty.”

Tyler nodded, but he felt lost and bewildered. He had lived in the Arvath for his entire adult life, considered it home. But now it seemed a strange landscape, pitted with unknown dangers. When the lift reached the quarters, he wandered away from the Holy Father without a word, past Seth and down the hallway, past the staring eyes of his brothers, past Wyde, who waited beside Tyler’s doorway, his eyes downcast.

“I’m sorry,” Wyde murmured. “I didn’t want to, Tyler, but—”

Tyler closed the door in his face and went to sit on the bed. The bare walls seemed to glare at him, and he tried to ignore them, tried to pray. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that no one was listening, that God’s attention was elsewhere. Finally he gave up and pulled the small vial out of his robes, rolling it in both hands, running one thumb over the wax stopper. The liquid inside was perfectly clear; Tyler could look straight through and see a distorted image of the tiny room around him, the room where, not so long ago, he had expected to live contentedly for the rest of his life. He thought of the Queen’s library, the way time seemed to disappear as Tyler sat there, everything melting away until he felt that he was part of some better world. He could not do this thing, but he could not leave his books either. There seemed no way out.

Tyler got up and placed his hand on the wall, smoothing a palm across the white stone. There was no help for him in prayer, he saw now, nor could he afford to wait for miracles. God would not single Tyler out. If he wanted salvation, he would have to save himself.

THIS IS A fool’s errand,” Mace grumbled.

“You think all of my errands are foolish, Lazarus. I’m not impressed.”

They were traveling in near darkness, through one of Mace’s many tunnels that seemed to beehive the Keep. The only illumination came from a torch carried by Father Tyler, who limped alongside Pen. In the dim amber light, the priest’s face looked paler than ever. Kelsea had asked Mace what was going on in the Arvath, to make Father Tyler so miserable, but Mace, being Mace, had refused to say, remarking only that the new Holy Father was even worse than the old.

It was Father Tyler who had sent Kelsea on this little jaunt. The vision of William Tear had sent her into a kind of frenzy, and in the past week she had torn Carlin’s library apart, determined to find some information about Lily Mayhew, about Greg Mayhew, about Dorian Rice, about any of them. When Father Tyler had arrived this morning, Kelsea had been sitting there on the library floor, in a rut of sleeplessness and failure, surrounded by Carlin’s books, and she seized on the priest as a last resort. Were there any written histories about the years surrounding the Crossing, the life of William Tear? There had been no actual publishing after the Crossing, of course, but perhaps there was a handwritten history? Someone should have kept a journal, at least.

Father Tyler shook his head regretfully. Many of the original generation of utopians had indeed kept journals, but in the dark period after the Tear assassination, most of them had disappeared. Several fragments had been preserved in the Arvath, and Father Tyler had seen them, but they discussed everyday problems of survival: the scarcity of food, the labor of constructing the fledgling village that would one day become New London. Most of Father Tyler’s own knowledge of the Crossing was based on oral history, the same folklore that pervaded the rest of the Tearling. No real writings had survived.