The Shattered Vigil

by Patrick W. Carr

  I shook my head at the strange notion, eyeing the short, thick stone buttresses along the walls of the sanctuary. I counted back and realized I hadn’t celebrated mass—or imagined I had—since just before Bas-solas back in Bunard.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I announced.

  Surprisingly, Bolt didn’t protest or order Rory to follow me. Instead he looked to the sentinel pup. “Wag?” The hound lifted his head and stared into the forest while he sniffed, his nose making a small twitching motion and his ears up, but after a moment he laid his head back down and closed his eyes.

  Bolt gave me a small, confident nod. “It’s safe.”

  I didn’t bother to try to disguise the doubt on my face.

  He nodded to say Wag’s nose settled the matter and put another stick into the crude pyramid for a fire. “After Wag’s healed, I’ll show you. The king of Moorclaire’s best hunting dogs can’t begin to approach what a sentinel is capable of. If Wag’s not worried about anything in the forest, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Moorclaire, with its long stretches of rolling plains, boasted the finest hunting dogs in the world, and the best of those belonged to the king. The nobles there bred and trained dogs the way other monarchs lavished their time and attention on horses.

  I pointed at Wag. “Just how much of the forest can he smell?”

  Bolt straightened. “The wind is swirling here between the hills. There’s nothing anywhere close.”

  The hills surrounding us were miles away. At first I thought he’d made a joke, but the craggy lines of his face remained in their unamused position.

  The inside of the church reminded me of Ealdor’s parish. Perhaps abandonment had conspired to reduce both edifices—one in the city, the other in the forest—to their essence.

  Saplings had pried the stones apart on the main aisle leading to the altar. I threaded my way between them, noting the stone pews on the way. I paused to survey the interior of the sanctuary a bit more closely. Except for the roof, which had rotted away, everything in the church had been sculpted or fashioned from stone. The roof had been mostly thatch resting on a lattice-work of wood strips laid across a few beams.

  I stepped over the crumbling remains of one of them that had fallen from its lofty perch to shatter against the altar, knocking one of the stones loose from the corner. On a flat smoothed stone in the center of the altar the intersecting arcs of Iosa—the symbol of faith, regardless of order—had been carved. I traced it with my fingertips, then stared out over the benches, but the expected longing didn’t wash over me.

  I stood there pretending to address the shades and shadows that constituted my congregation and raised my hands in benediction or warding. “The world is more than just priests and altars and celebrating haeling.”

  I heard the soft tread of a footstep an instant before the voice.

  “You mean you don’t want to officiate anymore, Willet?” Ealdor asked me. He walked out from behind a crumbling stone buttress to one side of the dais where I stood, draping his worn linen stole across his shoulders. I stared at the phantom as it approached. Aer help me, I could hear his footsteps.

  “You’re not real,” I breathed.

  His eyes narrowed as he smiled. I couldn’t help but search the dust for footprints. Mine were easy enough to see even in the fading light. I walked past Ealdor, or the image of Ealdor, or the latest piece of insanity my mind had conjured, and searched the path he’d walked for proof.

  There wasn’t any.

  I looked up at the trees that served as the roof of the abandoned church, mocking me with their ordinary healthy green. “It’s the forest,” I muttered. “Nothing good happens in the woods, Darkwater or no.”

  Ealdor shook his head. “These woods have nothing in common with the Darkwater, Willet. You know that.”

  He looked so solid. “You’re a phantom,” I said to it. “I conjured you from my pain and loss and turned you into a friend I thought I’d known since childhood.” I stopped to sift through the memories of my life before war and fighting and the Darkwater twisted it from Aer’s intention. “And I don’t have a single memory of you with anyone else around.”

  He smiled. “And do your senses and memories determine what is real?”

  I almost laughed but stopped just short. The more I fed my mind’s notion that Ealdor was real, the harder it would be to dispel. I needed to leave. Arguing with it only gave it more of a hold over me. “Yes, what better?”

  “You’ve never been to the southern continent, Willet,” Ealdor said amiably, “or Aille, or Caisel, or Moorclaire, or—”

  “I get your point,” I said. “But I have verification that those places and the people in them are real.”

  He nodded as if I’d just offered up my bishop or queen in a useless gambit on the ficheall board. “So only the things that can be independently verified are real. Is that what you’re saying?”

  I knew this trap from my days as a Merum acolyte, knew that as soon as I answered Ealdor would have me. If I said yes he would pose the question of faith and how men could have faith in Aer without material proof of His existence. If I answered no, then I’d refuted my own argument.

  But either answer only played into a larger trap, that of conversing with Ealdor at all. By engaging in a theological argument with him, I gave this figment of my wounded imagination all the force and authority of reality. “I’m not talking to you anymore. You’re not real.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I’m real,” Ealdor said softly.

  I didn’t answer, but I didn’t leave either. The figment my mind had conjured and named Ealdor had been one of the few friends I could boast after the Darkwater. Between him and Custos, and to a lesser extent, Gareth, I’d forged enough companionship to keep me from slipping into the downward spiral that had consumed so many of my brothers-in-arms. I’d managed to avoid the deaths—quick or slow, drink or drug—that came to so many of us by our own hand after war.

  Ealdor had been my closest friend, a priest who’d heard my confessions of night-walking, of entering the Darkwater and coming out alive the next day, of wanting Gael and knowing I couldn’t have her.

  I sat on the moss-covered steps of the dais. “I should have seen it. No one was ever in your church. The building kept getting more and more decrepit. What kind of priest turns down offerings to help rebuild his parish?” I thought through our conversations. “And you never told me anything I didn’t already know. Nothing new, just advice I would have given myself in my better moments.”

  He laughed and sat down next to me, but the dust didn’t stir with the motion. “That’s all any priest with sense does. Wisdom has to be earned.”

  I gave a weak little laugh, resolving not to tell Bolt or Rory or anyone how I’d been outwitted and outargued by a phantom of my own imagination. “I don’t even know what we’re fighting. Laewan’s dead, but now somebody with the power and knowledge of the Vigil has sent dwimor to kill us. I didn’t even know what they were until a few days ago. That puts another tally mark on the list of things Pellin hid from me. I wonder how many other secrets the Vigil holds.”

  I turned my head just enough to see if I’d taken Ealdor by surprise. He sat there staring into the empty gloom, my phantom pretending to be a man with his own memories. Of course not. “And we’re still no closer to the real enemy.” I swallowed against a surge of fear and bile that tried to close my throat. “What is the Darkwater? Why is it evil?” I shook my head. “Pellin and the rest of the Vigil, for all their age and wisdom and experience, are no closer to the knowledge than I am. There are a thousand questions, and they don’t have any answers. Pellin looks to his gift, Bronwyn searches children’s rhymes, and Toria Deel quotes proverbs, all of them covering their ignorance with their favorite trick. They don’t know the truth of what we’re fighting. They only know who the current captain is.”

  He reached out to pat me on the shoulder, and I jerked away, standing.

  Ealdor shrugged. “You’re a
bright fellow, Willet, and the queen’s reeve. I’m sure you can find a solution if you put your mind to it.”

  I laughed. “That’s real helpful. Why don’t you tell me something I don’t know, something I can use?”

  “You said I couldn’t,” he replied with an arch of his brows. “Focus on what’s happened here. Your enemy is going to a lot of trouble to eliminate all of the sentinels.”

  I nodded and tried not to think too hard about the fact that I stood in a crumbling, abandoned church talking to myself. “Thanks, but I know that with both parts of my brain. The enemy still has the same end in mind—get as many people into the Darkwater as he can and then use them to fight.” I shook my head. “But that just brings us back to the same questions the Vigil can’t answer. To what end? What does he want?”

  Ealdor’s pale blue gaze locked onto mine. “You know the questions you can’t answer—at least you can’t answer them yet. You’re missing something, something small and important.” He gave a small laugh.

  I stared at him. “What’s the joke?” I shook my head. “Something small and . . . ah, the pup.” I knew Ealdor to be nothing more than an externalized part of my mind, a ghost I’d conjured so that I would have someone to talk to, but I answered him as if he were real anyway. “The pup’s not going to make it,” I said. “I’ve seen wounds like that before. We’re too far from a healer to keep it from fouling.”

  Ealdor pointed at the saplings growing in the sanctuary, small trees with soft leaves that were half a shade lighter than those of a full-grown maple. “You know most medicines come from the forest. Those are young bation trees.”

  I turned to look at them, the hint of a memory lurking just below the surface of my mind. It seemed I had heard something about them once upon a time. I shrugged. Born and raised in the city of Bunard, I had no woodcraft to speak of, but if we dressed the sentinel pup’s wound with bation leaves, it might help. Without some intervention the animal was going to die anyway. It certainly wasn’t going to hurt.

  I stripped the two closest saplings of all the leaves I could reach. Behind me Ealdor lifted his hands as if he were officiating over haeling instead of watching me stuff my pockets. “‘And the leaves of its tree will be for the healing of my people,’” he quoted.

  I laughed and turned to see him smiling at his own jest and had to remind myself he wasn’t real, just a created apparition that didn’t bother to leave footprints. “If all the enemy wanted was to let people into the Darkwater, he would have killed all the sentinels, but he took one.” I paced the aisle, ducking under the branches of the saplings that were the little church’s only adherents to the faith. “He doesn’t need it for protection. What can the pup do that he can’t?” A memory of Wag came to me, his nose lifted, searching the smells of the forest for danger and not finding any. I still wasn’t sure if Bolt had exaggerated the pup’s abilities, but knowing the paranoia with which he viewed his responsibility, he at least believed Wag could smell danger from that far off.

  I spun back to Ealdor, saw him watching me, his brows framing eyes the color of a cloudless sky at noon. “Who is he tracking?”

  Ealdor shrugged. “Anyone who represents a threat.”

  “The Vigil. They’re on the move and they’re impossible to find because they’re hiding from the heads of the orders.” I took a deep breath and let it out in a long whispering sigh. “I remember when the only people that wanted to kill me were the nobles in Laidir’s court. I didn’t know how good I had it.” Ealdor sat, placid as any priest, and watched me work through my logic. “If the men I saw in Wag’s memory double back for any reason, we’ll die. Bolt and Rory can’t defeat them, and against that kind of giftedness my sword is as useless as Custos’s books.”

  I couldn’t answer the deeper questions of the Darkwater, but I knew the question that needed answering next. Walking back to the dais with its ancient altar I extended my hand, felt Ealdor’s grip and the warmth of his smile. “I know you’re not real, but it was good to see you again.” I turned, looked around at the crumbling ruins around me. Friends who cared for you without the prospect of gain were hard to find and harder to leave behind once you’d found them. Even the imaginary ones. “Do you only appear in abandoned churches?”

  But when I looked back Ealdor was gone, the dirt and debris where he’d walked and sat, perfectly undisturbed.

  Chapter 26

  Bolt and Rory sat by a small fire that punctuated their intermittent conversation with pops and cracks and occasionally offered commentary with understated hisses. Rory fed Wag from the provisions we’d taken from Faran’s cabin, the pup careful to lick his hand clean after each bite.

  I knelt next to Rory and pulled the bation leaves from my pockets. The linen binding we’d put around the pup’s wound was still wet. “Here, I found some bation leaves in an abandoned church. They’ll help keep his wound from fouling.” Rory blinked at me. “He seems to like you best,” I said. “Put these on the cut and rewrap it.”

  I accepted Bolt’s offer of a wedge of cheese. “We have a problem,” I said.

  Bolt’s eyebrows lifted. “Only one? Things are looking up.”

  I shook my head, letting Bolt’s invitation to banter slide by. “I’ve been ta . . . thinking,” I said, ignoring my guard’s frown of disapproval. “The only reason our enemy would want a sentinel pup is so he can track down and kill what remains of the Vigil. But I don’t think he knows that Wag survived.” I stepped over and rubbed the pup’s ears through the thin leather of my glove, smiling as his tongue came lolling out. He didn’t move, just gave a weak thump of his tail.

  I looked at Bolt. “Do you think Wag can track the other pup and the men who took it?”

  He nodded. “You know I won’t be able to protect you from him in a straight-up fight.”

  “You have a habit of assuming the worst.”

  He nodded. “I tend to stay alive that way.”

  That last might have come from me. “When we get to Gylden, we’ll find an alchemist and buy some solas powder,” I said.

  Bolt shook his head. “If he comes on us by surprise, we’ll be dead by the time we get it lit.”

  “If Wag smells danger, we’ll light torches against the darkness, but that brings us to the other problem. We need a way to throw the other sentinel off the track. Is there any way to confuse their sense of smell?”

  Bolt gave me a level look. “The things people try don’t actually work, even on regular dogs.”

  I pulled a breath filled with the scents of growing things into my lungs. “All right, it was worth a try—anything that could buy us time.”

  “‘Dying later is better than dying earlier,’” Bolt quoted in agreement.

  Memory sent pinpricks running up and down my arms. I’d heard that saying before—from the commander of the southern mercenaries just before we escaped into the Darkwater.

  Across the fire, Rory pointed down at the sentinel pup dozing on his lap. “Why don’t you ask Wag?”

  I shook my head. “How would he know? His conscious memories are all of three days old.”

  Bolt nodded. “His are, but that spot on his head means something more.”

  Intrigued, I pulled the glove from my right hand and reached out to put it on Wag’s head. He saw the movement through half-slitted eyes and his tail twitched in anticipation. “It’s not a scratch behind the ears,” I told him.

  I fell through the crystalline gray-blue eyes and into Wag’s consciousness. Pain still clouded everything and I could feel the weakness of his injury as if it were my own, an aching line of unquenchable fire that ran the length of my ribs and kept me from breath. In his vision I saw myself and all the rest of our company sitting around the fire, seen in oddly muted colors where yellow and blue predominated and everything else showed in shades of gray.

  But our scents filled my nose with wondrous detail, as if the world had suddenly been transformed from a child’s crude sketch to the depth and breadth of a master painter’s rea
lity. Bolt smelled strong and resolute, even obstinate in his commitment to die rather than let harm come to his packmates. Rory’s smell carried the strong, almost acrid, scents within his sweat that presaged his body’s transformation into adulthood. But already those odors were associated with the companionship I had used to identify my littermates within the pack.

  Volsk had departed, but his lingering scent carried bitter tastes, undercurrents that colored his movements, leaving taints of despair upon the wind wherever he went. In the part of my mind that I kept as myself, I considered that. Not just one, but several different odors of anguish followed and flowed from the former Vigil apprentice. Within Wag’s mind, I couldn’t help but note the similarity between Volsk’s smell and the one I had carried during my wounded time alone.

  The scent memory of Custos was light and of barely any consequence, yet it carried a sense of kindness and friend. Strangely, within my mind, it smelled somewhat like the almond-crusted figs he so adored.

  I turned my attention to the man who rested his bare hand on my head. His smell came closest to Bolt’s, but it carried doubt and fear mixed within the resolution, and deeper, far beneath those, lay an essence of corruption that raised the hackles on my neck and brought a growl to my throat.

  I gathered a sense of myself, Willet, and searched for and found the memory of Wag’s littermate being taken away. I followed the receding scent in his mind until it faded beyond reckoning to the south. My throat tightened around the terror and fear that permeated the doggy smell of my friend. The smell coming from the men would have been laughable it was so ordinary. They’d made no attempt to disguise it at all. None. I followed the memory back in time until I could smell them coming, entering the clearing with their swords drawn, but the pack leaders raised no alarm. They must be friends. Then the swords fell. I tried to understand, wanted to run, but my dam and sire weren’t moving. Strokes of steel fell from the direction of the sky and the hot smell of blood came from everywhere. At the last second I gathered my legs beneath me where I lay by my mother, but too late. Fire raced along my side as the edge of the man’s blade parted fur and skin and muscle. Then my mother’s paw found my head, imparting awareness as she died. I lay on the ground, breathing as shallowly as I could manage, knowing that to whimper was to die.