Rewrite That Witch
CH067 · Rewrite
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Chapter 67: Battle of Hermes (Part 2)

By the time the God’s Army finished, the rain had slackened to a drizzle.

Alicia stood at the assembly point until it was over, because she didn’t know what else to do with herself, and watching felt more honest than not watching. The hundred-and-some warriors in silver armor moved through the remaining beasts and returned through the gate as they finished, some of them bleeding from wounds that should have removed them from the field and had not. The man whose arms had been bent at the impact of the Fallen Angel’s claws walked back under his own power. He moved like someone whose arms hurt when they moved, which was different from someone who had decided not to use them.

Tucker Thor answered her questions when she asked them — how many in the Army, how they were trained, how long it took. He was honest in a way that suggested he had been briefed on what he was allowed to say and was saying it without embellishment in either direction.

When he was done answering, she thanked him. She gathered her eleven and sent them to the medical assembly point. She found herself a section of wall that was still standing and put her back against it and looked at the sky, which was lightening slightly in the direction of dawn.

The New Holy City would hold.

She had known it would hold the moment the first member of the God’s Army caught a Fallen Angel’s claws with his bare hands. But knowing a thing and feeling a thing were different processes, and the feeling was still catching up to the knowledge.

She thought about her captain, folded against the stone with his armor still on. She thought about what was left of the men from the wall, the ones the mangonels had cleared along with the beasts.

She thought about Tucker Thor’s face when he said my brother is in the Army.

Bishop Mayne stood at the highest window of the Cathedral and watched the last of it through a glass.

It was a good glass, Venetian craftsmanship, and through it the remaining fighting below was visible in some detail: the red cloaks moving, the beasts falling, the survivors on the assembly ground watching. A clean view of a messy thing, which was what good glass usually provided.

“We can stop the mangonels,” he said. “The Army has it.”

“In a moment.” Archbishop Tayfun stood beside him, grey-bearded and deliberate in all his movements, the kind of old man who gave the impression of having opinions formed over long periods and held through longer ones. “Let it conclude properly.”

“It has concluded.”

“Then let it look concluded.” He folded his hands. “The survivors need to see the full sequence. Not just the rescue — the aftermath.”

Mayne set down the glass. “You’ve arranged the optics of this.”

“I have arranged nothing. The optics arrange themselves.” Tayfun looked out the window with the expression of a man watching something he has been waiting for. “The armies of four kingdoms were deployed in the field this season. Their trained soldiers, their equipment, their command structure. And now they are gone.” He was quiet for a moment. “Their lords will need four years to rebuild. Perhaps five. In those years, they will not be in a position to refuse us.”

“We lost our own soldiers to make this work.”

“We lost soldiers we would have lost anyway, sooner, less cleanly.” Tayfun’s voice did not change in register. “The beasts are coming in greater numbers each year. The Months of the Demons grow longer. This is documented. This is not disputable.” He finally looked at Mayne. “If we do not unify the continent before the real assault, there will be no continent to unify.”

The third archbishop laughed.

Heather was younger than both of them — early thirties, if Mayne was being generous about what ‘early’ meant — with the pleasant, attentive face of someone who has long since stopped finding most things distressing. She served as the Church’s judge. She had held trials for thousands of witches. Mayne knew that what this job did to people varied enormously by temperament, and that Heather’s temperament had arrived at a destination that was not precisely comfortable to be in a room with.

“Wonderful day,” she said pleasantly.

“You’ve already said that.”

“I mean it more each time.” She looked at the window with the air of someone reviewing completed work. “Five thousand soldiers and a thousand knights. Four to five years before they’re operational again. And in the meantime, anyone who wants to debate the Church’s authority has fewer swords to debate with.” She folded her hands. “I think God would be proud of us.”

“Heather.” Tayfun’s voice sharpened.

“I mean it sincerely. Assuming God cares whether we survive, which I grant is an assumption.”

“That is—” Tayfun turned from the window. “That is heresy. That is explicit heresy, and if I were presiding at—”

“But you’re not presiding,” Heather said pleasantly. “Mayne is. And Mayne has heard me say this sort of thing before and has determined that it is less efficient to try me than to continue using me, which I consider a sound judgment.” She glanced at Mayne. “Am I wrong?”

Mayne rubbed his temple. “You’re insufferable, Heather.”

“Yes, frequently.” She uncrossed her arms. “But correct?”

He didn’t answer that.

“Enough,” he said instead, to both of them, with the authority of someone who has made a career of stopping conversations that were about to become consequences. “Tayfun — complete the report on the Army’s performance numbers. I need losses and projections for the Pope.” He looked at Heather. “The trial backlog. I want it cleared before spring.”

Heather’s face arranged itself into a more professional expression, the one she wore when she was categorizing rather than philosophizing. “The backlog from the eastern provinces?”

“All of it.”

“As you wish.” She pressed her hands together in the formal salute and went. Tayfun followed, with the particular carriage of a man who intends to spend the next hour composing his objections and will deliver them in memorandum form.

Mayne turned back to the window.

Outside, the God’s Army was returning through the North Gate in its methodical way — the way they did everything, with the controlled precision of people who had survived their own transformation and understood, viscerally, the cost of carelessness. A hundred and fourteen of them, down from a hundred and twenty at the start of the day. Six lost. Six men who had taken nearly a decade to produce.

In a century of accumulation, the Church had built a force of a thousand.

A thousand was not enough. The beasts were increasing in number and intelligence — he had read Iron Axe’s reports, filtered through three levels of reporting, but the core data was consistent. Something was changing in the pattern of the Months of the Demons, and what it was changing toward required a larger force than the Church currently possessed, and what a larger force required was a continent unified enough to feed the process of producing it.

The logic was Tayfun’s logic, and it was sound, and Mayne had accepted it.

He stood at the window and looked north — past the Mountain of Despair, past the endless white of winter, past the boundary of what any human could see from this height even with the best Venetian glass — and thought about what the ancient books said about where the beasts came from, and what they said about what came after them, and what it had felt like the first time he had read those pages and understood that the Church’s entire project was not salvational but prophylactic.

How do you know he cares for us more than the devil? Heather had asked.

Mayne picked up the glass again.

Because he will love the winning party, he thought, and we intend to be it.

He watched the last of the God’s Army come home.

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