The Shattered Vigil

by Patrick W. Carr

  “That’s what’s wrong,” I said. I pointed to the four men and women dressed in the color of their order, red for Merum, white for Vanguard, blue for Absold, and brown for the Servants. “Where is the speaker for the Clast?”

  My guard searched the thin crowd. “Not here. Maybe they’re taking the day off.”

  “Rabble-rousers don’t usually do that,” I said. “They don’t like to give people time to reflect on how idiotic their arguments are.”

  “Killed during Bas-solas, perhaps?” Bronwyn asked.

  I shook my head. “Along with all his cohorts? One can only hope. But what would that mean?”

  Her stare became icy. “That they’d all been to the forest. I’ll inform Pellin. I think he’ll want to take a closer look at our friends from the Clast.”

  We continued through the nobles’ portion of the city. The eccentricities of the Vigil took some getting used to, but the way Bronwyn peered at me, her green eyes sharp and intent like a bird’s, put me on my guard.

  “When was the last time you slept?” she asked without preamble.

  I allowed myself half a smile. “Last night, of course.”

  “You know what I mean, Lord Dura.”

  I did, and the topic was one I took pains to avoid with the Vigil. They didn’t view it similarly, however, and as I was the newest addition to the group, they seemed to think they could ask me any question they wished and expect an answer. Worse, they were right.

  “I haven’t been able to stay asleep since before Bas-solas,” I sighed. “Bolt keeps me in my quarters and I catch a bit of sleep during the day when I can.”

  Her mouth constricted, compressing into a thin line of disapproval, accentuating the age lines surrounding it. “You can’t go on like that indefinitely.”

  A fatigue so deep it felt as if it emanated from the marrow of my bones washed over me, and I pulled a length of chiccor root from my cloak and took a nibble. “No argument there. I imagine I will be able to sleep soon enough.”

  “How so?” Bronwyn asked.

  I turned in my saddle to gaze at her. “Because it appears we’ve captured almost all of those infected by the Darkwater. There are only thirty or so left in the cells of the Merum cathedral. Pretty soon the last vault will be broken and the guards and apothecaries won’t have to put the drooling idiots we’ve created out of their misery under cover of darkness. Bunard will have a night without murder, and then I will sleep.”

  I saw her stiffen, and Balean shot me a look that said he wanted to deliver some type of physical chastisement. “Your pardon, Lady Bronwyn,” I said. “I know they went to the Darkwater of their own volition, but these are the very people I promised Laidir I’d protect.” I said the king’s name like a penitent flogging himself, trying to expunge my failure by reminding myself of it.

  Bronwyn must have caught the shift in tone. “You did everything you could.”

  “Did I?” I shrugged. “We say that, but in my mind I can see a hundred things I might have done differently so that he might have survived that night.”

  Her eyes caught the light, the green iridescent in the late afternoon sun, and for a moment I saw the woman she must have been hundreds of years ago. “Missed opportunities and guilt are their own burden, Lord Dura,” she said. “Beware of them. It’s not just the weight of memories that can undo us.”

  I wasn’t in a position to argue, and the sight of Jeb, the chief reeve, coming toward us scattered my train of thought anyway. The muscles in his jaws worked as if he wanted someone to try and take a swing at him so he’d have an excuse to pound them to a pulp. I put Dest in his path and dismounted.

  “Good morrow, Jeb.”

  He stopped, and I heard the knuckles in his hands pop. “What’s good about it, Dura?” He spared a couple of heartbeats to glance at Lady Bronwyn and our guards. “When are you going to get back to your job?”

  Jeb didn’t know what had happened to me or what I’d been doing for the past few weeks, so I couldn’t really respond to his accusation. “Soon, I hope.” Which was the truth, no matter how unlikely.

  “Might as well be never, if it’s not. Kreppa.” Jeb used curses the way most people use punctuation. “You’d think with a war every few years and the slaughter of Bas-solas, we wouldn’t be so eager to kill our own.”

  I’d suspected my sleeplessness the previous night had been due to murder in the city, but having Jeb confirm it awoke a familiar hunger. “They’ll stop in a few days,” I said, “once the worst of the suspicions die down.”

  Jeb shook his head. “People are stupid, Dura. They’ll suspect anybody.” He looked over my shoulder at Bronwyn. “Go play the noble with your friends. Let me know when you get bored and want to do some real work again.”

  We crossed over the broad multi-arched bridge that led to the upper merchants’ section of the city, the houses only a little less splendid than those of the lesser nobles.

  The mention of Laidir, my dead king whom I’d failed, had served to sharpen my mind despite the fog of sleeplessness I wore. Something more than idle curiosity lay behind Bronwyn’s request to accompany me to Ealdor’s church, and judging by the way tension stiffened her spine as we drew closer, it wasn’t a pleasant duty.

  We continued on the main thoroughfare until we came to the bridge leading from the upper merchants’ portion of the city to the lower merchants’ quarter, and I could see the rear of Braben’s Inn, where it backed up against the river. Longing awoke in my chest, and I faltered for a moment, considering a brief detour to indulge my selfish need for hospitality. Braben had always welcomed me, even after Laewan had tracked the Vigil to his inn and tried to burn it down. Braben’s gift of helps must have included a large portion of grace.

  We turned right to parallel the southernmost branch of the Rinwash, and two hundred paces later we stopped in front of a ramshackle parish church, the weather-battered emblem of the Merum order out front resolutely visible in defiance of time and elements. “You didn’t want to come here,” I said. “Why did you, Lady Bronwyn?”

  Balean held out a hand to help her dismount, and she took a moment to smooth her skirt before answering. “Pellin ordered it.”

  “That’s not much of an answer,” I said. “After Bas-solas, I thought we were past the games we played with each other.”

  She gave me a sad smile that said she would have liked nothing better. I had the good sense at that moment to be afraid.

  “I protested his order, Lord Dura,” she said, “but he insisted. You perhaps know better than the rest of us how time can be an enemy. None of the Vigil has seen time as anything but an ally for centuries now. We are unaccustomed to haste.”

  Her tone, as if I were a wounded animal that needed calming, sent threads of fear up and down my spine. How much can a man lose? I really didn’t want to know. “Why did he insist?”

  Bronwyn took a deep breath. “The Eldest shares his counsel when he sees fit, Lord Dura, often keeping it to himself, but in this he was unusually forthright. He means you to be a member of the Vigil.”

  “That implies I’m not.”

  Her expression refused to settle long enough to convey any emotion I could identify. “There are . . . things within your mind that preclude us from taking you fully into our confidence, Lord Dura.”

  “Things.” I wrapped my mouth around the unexpected word. “Plural. As in more than one.”

  “We need your services, Lord Dura,” Bronwyn said, sidestepping the obvious question.

  “Out of desire or necessity?”

  She allowed herself a smile that fought the tension in her shoulders. “Necessity. It is that necessity that brings me here, to begin your healing. Your vault is beyond our power, but . . .” She spread her hands.

  I stopped to look at the church, a bit more run-down than I remembered—perhaps more than a bit. “I don’t understand.”

  Her mouth tightened before she stepped forward to take my arm in hers, like a grandmother offering her wisdom. “Come
inside and you will.”

  Chapter 3

  No candles burned in the small, gloom-filled narthex, the entry hall abutting the sanctuary, but that wasn’t unusual. Most priests didn’t hold mass until evening time, and Ealdor’s parish, sitting as it did in the part of the city that had been abandoned since the last war had depleted Bunard’s population, rarely had visitors.

  But I’d never seen it looking this disused.

  “What do you see, Willet?” Lady Bronwyn asked.

  She’d used my first name, just my first name. I gritted my teeth against the answer, as if she meant some insult to one of the few men I could claim as friend. “It’s a run-down church,” I said, my voice sharp. “That’s by Ealdor’s choice. I’ve offered him money to fix it up, but he always tells me to save it for those in the poor quarter.” I turned to face Bronwyn and her guard. Bolt stood off to one side, his face expressionless. “He’s the best churchman I’ve ever met.”

  Bronwyn nodded, her eyes moist. “I don’t doubt it, Willet.”

  “Why is it you people only use my first name when you’re about to give me bad news?” The skittering sound of rodent feet came from my left. “You need to make up your mind—you’re either beating on me like a cheap anvil or you’re treating me like spun glass.” My gesture encompassed the whole of Ealdor’s run-down church. “Just what is it you want to see here?”

  Bronwyn gave her head a little shake. “It’s what we want you to see.” She stepped past me, and for once, Balean didn’t follow her. Instead he waited, looking at me with cold eyes. I stepped through the arch of rotting wood into the sanctuary. Bronwyn stood just inside, her expression unreadable. “Use the skills that made you a reeve,” she said, pointing inside around the lofted space, “and tell me what’s written here.”

  I hardly needed her encouragement. I’d been doing exactly that ever since we’d entered the narthex, but what I saw made my head hurt. The building, never well-kept, wasn’t just decrepit, it was on the verge of collapse. Thick dust and bird droppings lay undisturbed on the pews and floor, and shafts of sunlight streamed through holes in the roof as big as my fist.

  I opened my mouth to offer an explanation, some defense, but Ealdor wasn’t here. And the sense that all men who’ve been to war possess—the one that tells them they’re without hope or succor in the midst of battle, that they are irrevocably alone and lost—told me he wouldn’t be here. I took a deep breath that carried the smell of roosting birds within it and forced the memories of the last war away. If I started down that road, it would be some time before my mind returned to the present.

  Instead I concentrated on the footprints in the dirt and dust—my footprints, only mine—leading from the narthex to the crumbling altar and kneeling rail at the front of the sanctuary. Bronwyn had told me to use my skills as a reeve. I did so, coming to one begrudging deduction at a time. Since I’d last seen him, Ealdor hadn’t walked from the altar to the entrance of the church, and no one from the outside had ventured in.

  I set my jaw, refusing to come to the obvious conclusion, and followed my tracks with my head down, focused on each print like a dog on the scent as they led me to the altar. I didn’t bother to ask whose or to lift my foot and check the sole. I knew the familiar track of my boots as well as the feet I put them on.

  At the front of the church I stopped, pausing in the area between the last of the splintered pews and the steps leading up to the altar, the same altar where I’d performed mass in contravention of the rules of the Merum priesthood. Bolt didn’t bother to accompany me there—there was no physical danger present. A single set of tracks ascended the steps to the altar to disappear behind it before leading to the confession rail and the side entrance.

  I didn’t have to go any farther; Bronwyn had accomplished her task. “There’s no one here.” I murmured those same four words over and again in a voice small enough to fit in the palm of my hand.

  “This is the truth I would have waited to reveal, Willet,” Bronwyn said.

  Annoyed, I might have made some dismissive gesture with my hand, as if brushing away a fly. “Don’t do that. Don’t call me by my first name because you’re afraid.” The single set of tracks in the dirt and dust of the long-dead sanctuary held my gaze like some mythical wizard’s spell. I sifted through every memory of Ealdor I could dredge to the surface of my thoughts. They seemed so real.

  They were real, my mind kept telling me.

  But the physical evidence of the church told me they couldn’t be. While Bronwyn watched me, while our guards scanned for threats from voles or mice, I backed through the logic, trying with methodical desperation to reconcile my memories with the tangible reality that lay at my feet. They couldn’t be resolved. I extended the logic a step further.

  Nothing could be resolved.

  Bronwyn came forward and placed a gloved hand on my shoulder. I could feel the touch, light as a bird, more as a sensation of warmth than the pressure of weight. Looking back and forth between the green of her eyes and the black leather of her glove, I shook my head. “I remember, I remember, Ealdor doing that exact thing countless times.”

  “But feel it, Lord Dura,” she said. “I’m here now, and I’m real. Look at my tracks in the dust.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not that simple. For all I know, you’re the fantasy I’ve invented in my mind.” I waved a hand at the run-down church. “Perhaps this is all a dream I’ve built to keep some truth hidden from myself.” Unbidden, a memory of Calder came to me. We’d fought together in the war and had formed the friendship of men trying to survive. And we had—or mostly. After we came back to Bunard, Calder’s grip on reality slipped a bit more each week until he couldn’t see anything but the last battle. They found his body floating in the Rinwash a couple of miles downstream with a pike still locked in his grip. We buried it with him.

  Bolt came forward out of the shadows. “He deserves to know the truth of your experience, Lady Bronwyn, and he’s stronger than you think. Men are like swords, tempered by circumstance.”

  She nodded. “Very well. I can’t prove to you what is real and what isn’t. The nature of memory is fluid. Often when we delve a person, the memories we see are phantoms they’ve invented without realizing it, but to us, they appear as real as any other memory. When Pellin and the rest of the Vigil delved you, they believed Ealdor to be as real as you until Pellin came here to speak with him.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know,” I said with a shake of my head. “I’ve seen reeves question a woman or a man, if you can call it that, telling them they had committed a crime, insisting that others had seen them do it.” I swallowed my disgust. “I’ve watched simple tradesmen confess to something they’d never done, building a memory to match what they’d been told.” I looked around the ruins of the church. “But that doesn’t get me any closer to the truth.”

  Bronwyn still held my shoulder and I felt a gentle squeeze. “In my experience, one of the ways to know the difference between the truth and a lie is that the truth hurts more. Lies are easier to believe.”

  There, she had me.

  I looked at Bolt. “It’s not one of yours, but you should probably write that one down.” Bronwyn’s simple assessment had managed to cut through all of my internal wrangling with the merciless efficiency of a knife. Life was loss. Anyone that tried to tell you it was something else was lying. I took one last look at the church where I’d found comfort so often and resolved never to return. “I think I’d like to go now.”

  We stepped from the empty shadows of Ealdor’s—or whoever’s—church into the ruddy glow that marked the end of the day. The streets were already clear of merchants and hawkers, pickpockets and night women. Normally, they would be out for hours yet, filling the cobblestoned market street that ran the length of the city, trying to squeeze a bit more prosperity from spring and summer here in the north. I checked the rooftops as we went but couldn’t spot any sign of what I searched for.

 
; “They’re up there,” Bolt said, catching my inspection. “The urchins haven’t seen anything since Bas-solas. Hopefully, they won’t see or hear anything tonight either.”

  Fatigue as deep as the main flow of the Rinwash ran through me, slow, but massive, like the river in summer. I tried to remember what a real night of sleep felt like, an evening without murder. “I hope so. What about the villages?”

  Bolt shook his head. “The same, nothing since the eclipse. Evidently, Laewan put everything he had into the attack. Perhaps this is all over.”

  I mulled that over for the space of an entire heartbeat. “You believe that?”

  “Not really.”

  When our horses passed through the gates of the Merum cathedral, Toria and her guard, Elory, were waiting for us. The youngest member of the Vigil stood in the middle of the yard like a portent of doom.

  We were halfway into dismounting when her voice, clipped and sharp as it always was now, cut through the background murmur of stable hands and tack. “There’s something you need to see.”

  She turned, her hair momentarily flaring into the wind, and strode toward the entrance of the cathedral, her heel strikes loud against the stones. I saw Bronwyn raise a brow to her guard, surprised by Toria Deel’s lack of deference.

  The Elanian stopped before the wide double doors of the room where we delved and then broke those who’d participated in the attack. “I’ve had them brought here along with a healer.”

  “Brought who, dear?” Bronwyn asked. At her side Balean had shifted, angling his body toward the door, his hands beneath his cloak.

  “Some of those we’ve broken.” Without bothering to explain further, she opened the door to the right and slipped through.

  I stumbled as I entered. Twelve men sat on stools, lined up along one wall, their mouths open and eyes staring at nothing, reflecting the emptiness within their minds. And they were all stripped to the waist.

  Dark blotches, some as large as my hand or bigger, discolored the skin of every man, the deep red-and-purple colors lurid and painful in the fading light. I’d seen marks similar to those before on the backs of men who’d been beaten for disobeying orders, but those bruises had been red with the halo discoloring the skin around them from the impact.