Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber

awareness.
    â€œSo,” he said to the younger man walking beside him, “I take it we still haven’t received the documents from Breygart?”
    â€œNo, Your Eminence,” Father Mahtaio Broun replied obediently. Unlike his patron’s, his priest’s cap bore only the brown cockade of an upper-priest, but the white crown embroidered on his cassock’s right sleeve marked him as a senior archbishop’s personal secretary and aide.
    â€œA pity,” Dynnys murmured, with just a trace of a smile. “Still, I’m sure Zherald did inform both him and Haarahld that the documentary evidence was necessary. Mother Church has done her best to see to it that both sides are fairly presented before the Ecclesiastical Court.”
    â€œOf course, Your Eminence,” Father Mahtaio agreed.
    Unlike the prelate he served, Broun was careful not to smile, even though he knew about the private message from Dynnys to Bishop Executor Zherald Ahdymsyn instructing him to administratively “lose” the message for at least a five-day or two. Broun was privy to most of his patron’s activities, however…discreet they might be. He simply wasn’t senior enough to display amusement or satisfaction over their success. Not yet, at least. Someday, he was sure, that seniority would be his.
    The two clerics reached the sweeping, majestically proportioned steps of the colonnade. Dozens of other churchmen moved up and down those steps, through the huge, opened bas-relief doors, but the stream parted around Dynnys and his aide without even a murmur of protest.
    If he’d barely noticed the beauty of the Temple itself, the archbishop completely ignored the lesser clerics making way for him, just as he ignored the uniformed Temple Guards standing rigidly at attention at regular intervals, cuirasses gleaming in the sunlight, bright-edged halberds braced. He continued his stately progress, hands folded in the voluminous, orange-trimmed sleeves of his snow white cassock, while he pondered the afternoon’s scheduled session.
    He and Broun crossed the threshold into the vast, soaring cathedral itself. The vaulted ceiling floated eighty feet above the gleaming pavement—rising to almost twice that at the apex of the central dome—and ceiling frescoes depicting the archangels laboring at the miraculous business of Creation circled the gold and gem-encrusted ceiling. Cunningly arranged mirrors and skylights set into the Temple’s roof gathered the springtime sunlight and spilled it through the frescoes in carefully directed shafts of brilliance. Incense drifted in sweet-smelling clouds and tendrils, spiraling through the sunlight like lazy serpents of smoke, and the magnificently trained voices of the Temple Choir rose in a quiet, perfectly harmonized a cappella hymn of praise.
    The choir was yet another of the wonders of the Temple, trained and dedicated to the purpose of seeing to it that God’s house was perpetually filled with voices raised in His praise, as Langhorne had commanded. Just before the morning choir reached the end of its assigned time, the afternoon choir would march quietly into its place in the identical choir loft on the opposite side of the cathedral, where it would join the morning choir’s song. As the afternoon singers’ voices rose, the morning singers’ voices would fade, and, to the listening ear, unless it was very carefully trained, it would sound as if there had been no break or change at all in the hymn.
    The archbishop and his aide stepped across the vast, detailed map of God’s world, inlaid into the floor just inside the doors, and made their way around the circumference of the circular cathedral. Neither of them paid much attention to the priests and acolytes around the altar at the center of the circle, celebrating the third of the daily morning masses for the regular flow of pilgrims. Every child of God was required by the Writ to make