Bolt followed my gaze, his brow furrowing.
I tried to find the girl holding the tankards, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to focus. I caught a glimpse of her four paces away, but my gaze kept sliding from her. A gleam of light off polished steel caught my eye.
Bolt stood, his sword leaping into his hand. “What do you see, Dura?”
I tried to point to the woman bringing ale to our table, but there was nothing there.
Two paces away, a man’s elbow jerked as if hit from behind.
For a split second I thought I saw the woman coming toward me, but then the image was lost. Bolt put himself by my side. Part of my mind screamed at me to understand.
A gleam of light off polished steel?
A knife?
The whistle of air came, horribly close, steel coming for my throat. I threw myself backward in my chair and threw my dagger toward the sound. I didn’t have time to ready the throw. The knife stopped in midair before falling harmlessly to the floor. Bolt leapt and slashed in the same motion but found nothing.
I caught an impression of her again, coming for my side, but I couldn’t keep her in sight. Every time I blinked I lost her.
I kicked out with my feet and tried to roll under the table, but I was falling. I managed to squirm a pace away. Bolt straddled me, his sword weaving a net of protection over me that cut the air with high-pitched whines. But his head jerked back and forth, unable to see her.
I heard a footfall behind me and caught a hint of her again. Bolt shifted, aiming for the sound. Too late.
Something brushed my leg, and I threw my arms up to block a strike I couldn’t see.
A dagger hurtled through the air and stopped two feet above my chest, then disappeared. Another followed the first, a bit lower.
A gurgling sigh preceded the thud of a body dropping to the floor, and I looked over to see a woman lying beside me on the floorboards, daggers in her throat and chest, her eyes wide with surprise.
Chaos erupted as a crowd of patrons tried to flee for the door at the same time. Chairs and tables were tossed aside, and from where I lay on the floor I could hear the thunder of boots rushing into the night. A few customers had drawn steel and were crouching behind overturned benches or trestles, their eyes showing white.
I rolled the dead woman over, searching her face. Nothing in her sightless gaze called to me, no hints of eternity or judgment, no longing in my chest to see what church and theology told me she should be witnessing right now. Her eyes, devoid of every last trace of color, held all the knowledge and allure of an empty glass.
I pulled the knives, recognized the workmanship. When I turned and scrambled to my feet like a scarecrow testing its legs, Rory stood at my side, his young face livid and angry.
“If you let some pretty thing put a dagger in your chest, what am I supposed to do for a home, yah?”
Before I could answer, he turned on my guard. Bolt stood looking at the woman’s body as if she were an impossible affront, a negation of his skill that shouldn’t exist.
Rory spat. “How could you miss?” He nudged the dead woman’s leg with one foot. “Any boy or girl who’s been with the urchins for a year could have taken her.”
Bolt didn’t respond at first, standing bemused, as if the dead woman had managed to cast a spell over him that persisted after her death.
Braben came over, his face filled with a mixture of sorrow and anger. I knew what he meant to say, so I held up a hand. Until I left the city, I still owned a minor title. Braben stopped, his head dipping in respect.
“Master Braben,” I said, then stopped. Braben wasn’t a peasant. He was my friend. “I’m sorry, my friend. I would never have come back here if I’d known this would happen. I will see to it that you’re repaid for whatever business you’ve lost, for however long you’ve lost it.” A sigh whispered across my lips. “And I won’t come back until I can guarantee your inn peace. Your friendship deserves no less.”
Rory cleaned his daggers on the dead woman’s skirt and tucked them out of sight. Bolt lifted the body as easily as he would have a child’s. Then he handed her to me.
“Why do I have to carry her?”
His mouth pulled to the side in disgust. “Because I can’t guard you if my arms are full.”
Rory snorted. “You couldn’t keep him safe when your arms were filled with weapons.”
Bolt’s face darkened and he appeared on the verge of cuffing Rory across the head before he gave a grudging nod. “I can’t deny it.” His eyes narrowed. “If she’s what I think she is, your youth is more of an advantage than you can know. We’ll take her to Bronwyn for confirmation, but I think someone’s made a dwimor.”
Chapter 6
I wouldn’t have recognized the word except for the knowledge Custos had given me. “Phantom?” I shrugged. “She looks real enough to me.”
“It describes how they move, not what they are.”
I flashed my reeve’s badge at a squad of the watch and commandeered their horses for the trip back to the Merum cathedral, trying not to think about the dead woman or her blood. My cloak was covered with it. At least this time I knew where it had come from. Bolt’s craggy face had shut as completely as a tomb. He hadn’t said a word since we left Braben’s.
I pointed to a side street. In the aftermath of Bas-solas, they were all brightly lit. “Shouldn’t we avoid the open in case there are more?”
Bolt shook his head. “Speed is more important than stealth.” He dug his heels into the flanks of his horse and began a trot that set my teeth to jangling.
Rory trailed us by a few dozen paces, his legs sticking out from the side of his horse and his hands holding the reins as if he were keeping serpents at bay, eyeing them as if they might decide to bite him at any second. But his expression didn’t match his circumstances. His eyes were lit and avid with curiosity. Bolt reined in with a curse until Rory’s horse caught up with ours.
“You’re going to have to teach him how to ride,” I said to Bolt.
He twisted in his saddle, and I saw a muscle in his cheek twitch. “Among other things. He’s about to find out just how dark the world can be.”
Rory had grown up in the poor quarter. Like a lot of the urchins, he’d been orphaned by circumstance or neglect and ended up making a living as a petty thief among the detritus of the city. Yet he’d survived and had even managed to wring a measure of success from his circumstances by finding other children likewise abandoned and bringing them together in a community, giving them a chance at life.
I guessed Rory to be about fourteen or fifteen—it was hard to tell. With decent food he might have been taller—he certainly would have been thicker. Growing up in the poor quarter had exposed him to the worst that human nature had to offer. Thieving, whoring, abuse, and neglect were the stock-in-trade for many who lived there.
I knew it, and more importantly, Bolt knew it. If something about the dwimor could shock his young apprentice, I wasn’t so sure Rory should learn of it.
“Is it something he has to see?” I asked. Nominally, Bolt served me, but when it came to matters of training his replacement, I had no say.
For an instant that might have lasted a heartbeat, Bolt’s expression softened. “He has to know.” He paused, the muscles in his jaws bunching as if he were trying to keep from speaking. “I can’t protect you from their like. If there are more of them coming for you, the boy’s daggers are the only thing that might keep you alive.”
I could hear him grinding his teeth, and he wore the expression of a man itching for a fight. We crossed the northernmost bridge over the Rinwash and turned into the Merum courtyard a moment later. The detachment of guards at the entrance, eight in all, stiffened at the sight of the corpse and drew weapons.
Bolt dismounted in front of the lieutenant in charge. “I need the ages of your men.”
“Sir?” His eyes widened in the torchlight.
Bolt ground out a pair of curses that put steel in the man’s po
sture before enunciating each word of his question as if the lieutenant were an idiot. “How old are each of the men you have with you?”
The man twisted, barking the order to report. Bolt listened, nodding as each man gave his age. I nodded in appreciation. They were all veterans, serious-minded professional soldiers, unlikely to panic, no matter the threat.
“Great,” Bolt huffed. “They’re all very experienced. Not a pink-cheeked recruit among them.” He pointed to the nearest. “You. Run into the cathedral and bring three acolytes out here to help you keep watch tonight.” He turned to Rory. “How old are you?”
The thief’s shoulders made the trip to his ears and back. “Fifteen, I think.”
“You think?” Bolt grated.
His tone slid from Rory’s expression like water sliding from oil. “It’s not like I had a big party every year on my naming day, yah?”
“Humph.” Bolt turned back to the man. “Make sure the acolytes are fourteen or younger. Give them chiccor root, if you have to, but make sure they stay alert and keep watch all night. They’re to yell and point if they see anyone approaching the gates.”
The lieutenant cleared his throat. “Begging your pardon, sir, but that’s our job.”
Bolt’s sword, useless at Braben’s tavern, appeared in his hand, the point at the lieutenant’s throat. “And you can’t do it if you can’t see them coming. Do you understand me, Lieutenant? Only the young can see them, or do you not know the rhyme from your childhood?”
Bolt ground his teeth at the lieutenant’s blank stare, then started chanting in his gravelly voice.
“Facing east and turning west,
Then scouting north and south,
You can’t see him or spot her.
To find the ones who wear the wind,
Go bring your sons and daughters.”
With a growl at the now wide-eyed lieutenant, Bolt announced, “We’ll take her inside. Pellin and Lady Bronwyn will need light.” His tone held all the warmth of granite in winter, but he took the woman who’d tried to kill me and cradled her in his arms as if he wanted to protect her.
Rory glanced up at the bell tower looming over us and gave his head a small shake. “I’ll be returning to the poor quarter. Bounder will make a decent head of the urchins if I can keep him from being too aggressive with his thieving. Taking so much attracts attention.”
“No,” Bolt said in a voice that forbade discussion. “They will want to see you most of all.”
Rory muttered something under his breath that I couldn’t quite make out, but it almost brought a smile to Bolt’s face.
We passed the assembly room where we’d broken the vaults of a fair portion of Bunard’s inhabitants and entered the maze of halls that made up the living quarters of the Merum order, vastly reduced since the church had split hundreds of years before. I sent a pair of acolytes ahead of us, one to notify Pellin, Bronwyn, and Toria that we were headed to them with a dwimor, the other to fetch Custos. Pellin had yet to agree to Rory’s and Custos’s attachment to the Vigil, but he hadn’t said no either.
Bronwyn’s guard, Balean, stood at her door, sword bared with two white-robed acolytes facing opposite ways down the long hall. The one facing us pointed in our direction.
“I see two men and a lad about my age,” he said. “The old one is carrying a woman. I think she’s dead.”
Bolt made an affronted sound in his throat. “The old one? Decades of service keeping the northern continent safe and that’s the thanks I get, to have some drippy-nosed church boy point his soft hand at me and call me ‘the old one’?”
Balean spoke through the wood of the door and it opened to reveal Pellin, Allta, Lady Bronwyn, Lady Deel, and her guard, Elory, in the room beyond.
Bronwyn motioned us in, but when she saw the expression on Bolt’s face, her gaze darted away again. “Come in quickly. Balean, remain with the acolytes.” Her lips tightened, and she reached up to brush one of the wrinkles that lay around his eyes. “Don’t trust your vision—trust theirs.”
Bolt put the body of the dwimor on a table large enough to seat eight. Without hesitation, Pellin put his thumbs on the dead woman’s eyelids and pried them open. A sigh whispered from him. He turned to Bolt, his expression a mixture of curiosity and shame. “How did you know what she was?”
The anger I’d sensed Bolt harboring during the ride back to the cathedral surfaced at last. “The day after I challenged and was assigned to protect you, Cwellan took me aside and told me about every threat the Vigil guards had ever faced or ever might.” Bolt’s voice rose until it filled the room. “He made me repeat the list back to him until I could recite it word for word.” He pointed to the dead woman. “Not once did you mention her kind.”
Pellin and Bronwyn exchanged glances. “We didn’t think it was needed.”
Whatever Bolt wanted to say next, he swallowed and took a half step back, crossing his arms over his chest.
I went through everything I’d been able to surmise, deciding not to waste time having the Eldest confirm the obvious. Bronwyn didn’t look very forthcoming; she’d gotten that tight-lipped cast to her face that said information would be hard to come by. “How is it done?” I asked. “And if it can be done, why wasn’t it done earlier?”
“Still the reeve?” Pellin asked.
I nodded. “Ever and always,” I said. “Though some of it seems to be wearing off. I have no idea where you’ve been for the last two days, for example.”
Even Toria Deel, whose willingness to push the boundaries of respect rivaled my own, started at my comment, but Pellin didn’t rise to the bait. “Do you suspect everyone, Lord Dura?”
“It’s kept me alive so far.”
“No one can fault you there,” Bronwyn said. She made a gesture toward Toria, inviting her to look at the body. “Check the eyes, my dear. It’s the only way to be sure.”
The youngest member of the Vigil, other than myself, moved over to the table and copied Bronwyn’s inspection from a moment earlier. “The irises are clear, like glass, but what does it mean?”
“It’s a dwimor,” Pellin said. “A person whose mind has been completely erased, or nearly so.”
A sound came from Bronwyn’s throat, and she swallowed against whatever memory or emotion caused her face to appear as if the dead woman might rise up and accuse her. “I haven’t seen one in centuries.”
I pulled in a breath as the reason behind the depth of Bolt’s anger became clear. “Not since the Vigil made the last one.”
Toria pivoted toward me, her anger as quick as a sword stroke. “Do you never tire of accusing us? You think we are responsible for this monstrosity?”
She would have said more, but Bronwyn cut her off, her voice all the more terrible for its quiet. “Lord Dura is correct. This is of our doing.”
“What?” Toria asked, looking to Pellin for support but finding none. “That’s impossible. I’ve read through the history of the Vigil countless times. Nothing even alludes to this.”
Bronwyn sighed. “The Gift Wars were three hundred years and more in our past when I came to the Vigil, and in the foolishness of youth, I assumed nothing like that could ever happen again. Every nation on both continents had agreed to the proscription against gift-gathering.”
Her green eyes grew watery. “But it happened again. Not gathering, exactly, but to the same effect, as countries battled for the gift of kings.” She shook her head. “You could have waded for days through the blood that was spilled. King Agin had gained control of the southern half of our continent.” She fought whatever shame she felt enough to look me in the eye.
I recognized the name and suppressed a shudder. What kind of a man would deliberately plunge the nations into famine? “He tortured the kings into surrendering their gift to him and his siblings.”
Bronwyn nodded. “We needed a weapon.”
“So you made the dwimor—assassins that couldn’t be seen.”
She nodded, accepting the responsibility of
her admission while Toria gaped, shaking her head as if she could restore her image of Bronwyn. “How could you conceive of such a thing?”
Bronwyn’s chest rose and fell twice before she answered. “There, we were aided by the theologians. They pored over the exordium and the rest of the liturgy, searching for anything that might help us. It was Alor, a young Merum priest, who first thought of the idea. He’d read that passage in the fourth book that spoke of seeing a man for his gifts and talents and temperaments instead of his appearance.” A hint of a smile played across her lips at some portion of the memory. “We tend to think so rigidly about the world around us, never suspecting there are wonders right before our eyes. Alor was one of those who saw wonders everywhere he looked. I still remember his smile, the way it lit the space around him. He was the one who argued that if you could empty a man of everything that defined his personality he would be almost impossible to see. He said the inspiration came from the child’s rhyme.” She looked at us. “You know the one—‘Who will be the king’s best man, filled with his desire? Empty him out and fill him up, full of fateful fire.’”
Bronwyn’s thin shoulders lifted a fraction before settling back into place. “We scoffed at him at first, but necessity is a slow, implacable torturer. One by one we went back to the liturgy and reread the verses Alor claimed for his justification.”
“You will know a man by his character,
A woman by her nature.
As the fruit reveals the tree,
So the deeds reveal the mind.
Thus will the sons and daughters of men be reckoned.
Thus will they be seen by others.”
Toria’s face went stiff with disapproval. “It had to be done by the Vigil. No other gift would allow you to empty a man.” She pulled a breath, her chest working as if the air had become too thick to breathe. “And you forced men into giving up themselves so that they could kill.”
Pellin shook his head but gave no other sign that he objected to Toria’s accusation. “We were desperate. Winter was coming, and Agin had us pinned in the north. We were about to lose half our army to starvation. Our ranks were filled with men and women who’d lost everything to that butcher. We asked for volunteers. Even after we explained what would have to be done, we turned them away in droves.”
The Shattered Vigil Page 6
