The Shattered Vigil

by Patrick W. Carr

  The man on the ornate bed beside her, as consumed by the years as she, smiled before answering. “I do, and if the fire for you has dissipated from my loins, it burns ever hotter in my heart. You, body and mind, are the one I love and desire.”

  She laughed. “You always were a flatterer. There are thousands of women in Aille with their smooth olive skin and unlined faces that define beauty, but I thank you for your words.”

  “Silly girl,” he chided softly. “There were a thousand upon a thousand women that others would have considered beautiful in our youth, but none of them sufficed. When the priest corded us together with his seven strands and pronounced us wed, you became the standard, gazed upon and made new each day, by which others were measured, and they were all found wanting. Silly girl,” he mouthed, his breath coming too shallow here at the end to push the words against the cords in his throat with enough force to make himself heard. “There was never anyone else.”

  Toria Deel came out of the link, shaking her head at her own memories now. Queen Lona had never quite believed her husband could have married her for herself instead of the power she wielded. Toria, barely five years into the Vigil, had allowed herself to be persuaded to use her gift to confirm once and for all the husband’s love. He had spoken true.

  In that moment, Toria had sworn she would never make Lona’s mistake, that if real love came her way she wouldn’t doubt, not for a moment. And in that decision, she, Toria Deel of the Vigil, had laid the foundation for her heartbreak. Peret Volsk had indeed loved her as deeply as any man had ever loved a woman, so much so that he had become willing to sacrifice himself and the lives of others to keep it. She shook her head. The paradox would have been funny if it hadn’t bored a hole through the center of her heart.

  “Lady Deel?”

  Toria turned in her saddle to Lelwin’s curious expression, casting back for the last words to leave her lips. “I . . . wouldn’t have listened to those who might have cautioned me against the man I loved. Some lessons must be learned firsthand.”

  Lelwin’s lips compressed into a line, and her gaze went flat. “I have little to worry about on that account, Lady Deel. I have no interest in the thing men name love.”

  Toria had yet to delve the earnest thief, but Lelwin’s presence in the urchins—pretending to be a boy of thirteen instead of a young woman of eighteen—provided probable insights to her past. The young thief spoke of men with the jaded finality of a woman two or three times her age.

  “Even you might find yourself lonely someday, Lelwin.”

  The girl surprised Toria by turning that earnest heart-shaped face toward her with amusement. “I’ve heard the others talk around it often enough, Lady Deel. Just how old are you?”

  Toria covered her surprise with an approving nod. “Good, you can make sense of circumspect conversations. Considering your previous profession, you should understand why some women would be uncomfortable discussing their age.”

  “Silly custom,” Lelwin said. “As if painting their cheeks with rouge and their eyes with shadow could fool anyone who wasn’t too drunk to walk a straight line. I hid my age because the people I marked on the street needed to believe the picture I put before them. I’ve seen men look at you, Lady Deel, the way they look at a woman in the flower of her youth, as something to be taken, the look a cat gives to the unsuspecting mouse before it strikes.”

  Toria sighed. “I stopped counting quite some time ago, but I am over one hundred years old, and I believe every one of us, man or woman, whatever their age, desires love and companionship.”

  Lelwin shook her head. “The poor quarter is a warren of thieves and night women. What all men and many women name companionship is nothing more than an appetite, quickly and easily satisfied. Some men trade coin for it. Husbands, pretending love and affection, will offer gifts or service to their wives for it if they are patient.” She grew quiet for a moment. “If not, the threat of violence usually suffices to pry a goodwife from the bonds of her clothing.”

  There at the last, Toria Deel heard a hint of the past that jaundiced Lelwin’s view of the bond between a man and a woman, but some instinct kept her from following that thread. Instead she kept to a strategy she’d learned from Pellin long ago. She asked a question.

  “And is there no man for whom you might hold a different opinion?”

  The girl’s slight pause, almost too brief to be noticed, provided her with some hope.

  “No, no one who is not already claimed by another,” Lelwin said.

  “And if they were not claimed?” she asked.

  Lelwin pushed through her reticence, but her gaze found someplace else to land besides Toria’s face. “Willet Dura is one whose touch might be borne or even enjoyed. What other noble ever sacrificed himself for the urchins?”

  Toria nodded, but within her chest too many opposing emotions clashed for her to speak: Dura held a vault within his mind. He had revealed Peret’s treachery. He alone of the Vigil had faced Laewan in Criers’ Square. He was betrothed to Lady Gael. He was a rogue.

  “I understand your reticence, but I will hold out some small hope for myself. I have been alone for quite some time.”

  Lelwin tucked the book in her saddlebag and turned her attention on the road ahead of them. “Alone,” she sighed. “It sounds like balm for the soul.”

  If only, Toria thought. She considered the door that held Queen Lona’s memories along with those of her consort, but she left it closed, for now.

  Chapter 30

  Five days after their departure from Andred, Pellin and his guards came into Broga, a village nestled on the western side of the Sundered Hills. Somewhere in his approximately seven hundred years of memory, a recollection of the village surfaced. How long had it been? Three hundred years? He didn’t know for certain. Regardless, there was nothing about the village now that resembled its earlier condition, except its location against the series of foothills that climbed upward until the landscape fell away into the broad bowl that defined the cursed forest.

  Most of the buildings—simple plank-and-post affairs with thatched roofs—huddled together in a hollow between the two westernmost hills. At his side, Mark looked up from his latest slumber and regarded the village with the expression of someone who’d encountered a scene he found slightly nauseating.

  “This is stupid. Why is there a village here?” he asked.

  “Even they don’t know,” Pellin answered. “The reason for the village is doubtless recorded in some dusty tome that no one has read for hundreds of years, but the people remain. Their lives carry a certain momentum. They won’t change unless they’re given a pressing reason to do so.”

  “Sometimes not even then,” Allta said.

  Pellin nodded as he nudged his horse forward. “Let us see if we can secure lodging for the night.”

  Mark shook his head. “You think there’s an inn here?”

  The boy’s expression was laughable. “Not in the usual sense, but wherever you have people, you have a tavern, if not an inn. We should be able to find something that will suit our needs.”

  Dust swirled and trailed behind them as they rode past one building after another. The sameness grated on Pellin’s nerves, and though there were children present, their play and calls in the street lacked some quality of joy or mirth he couldn’t pinpoint.

  The desultory blows of a hammer rang out from beneath a shed where a blacksmith worked without the benefit of a sign to advertise his trade. A farmer sold barley and turnips from the back of his cart, his eyes barely registering Pellin’s passing. Across the street a woman traded a pair of mended shoes for a few copper coins. Her house at least held a faded sign with the cobbler’s symbol on it.

  In the center of the village, they found a larger building with a broad porch where a few men and women had gathered to nurse ale from battered tankards. The sense of displacement, that some circumstance had skewed the village and its inhabitants, grew within his mind. “Mark,” he said loudly enough f
or the villagers on the porch to hear, “see if you can locate the provisions we need.” He checked the porch. Other than a glance or two, the villagers paid him no mind. “Be careful,” he muttered under his breath, “but find out what you can about this village. Allta and I will meet you here.”

  Mark dismounted to tie his horse to the rail in front of the tavern. Pellin followed his lead, Allta a half step behind him with his hands close to his weapons. The undersized room of the tavern held only four tables, three of them unoccupied. At the other one, a lean man with reddish hair leaned forward on his elbows, one hand raised as he spoke to the other man at the table, but his gesture seemed tenuous, unsure. His gaze swept over Pellin and Allta in mild surprise, and he blinked as if trying to conjure some memory of purpose.

  “We’re traveling,” Pellin said, “and hoping to rent a room where we can bed down for the night.”

  The man blinked, his brows drawing together in obvious concentration. “A room,” he muttered. Pellin watched as his head went slowly from side to side. Something in the man’s mind must have cleared. “Yes. Just the one.” He squinted with the effort of thinking. “It’s around the back by the stable, but it’s yours if you want it.”

  Pellin moved in random directions, edging closer to their table, surveying the interior of the inn. The air smelled of must, the open door and windows insufficient to dispel the odor of disuse. He pointed to one of the tankards. “I see you have ale. Do you have anything to eat?”

  Again the man’s face showed discomfort with the question before he managed to give another vague response. “Nothing cooked,” he said. “There’s some cheese and bread.”

  “That will do nicely,” Pellin said, moving closer and tucking his gloves into his broad belt. “My companions and I appreciate your hospitality.” He stuck out his hand. The man he assumed to be the innkeeper stared at the unfamiliar gesture for a moment before taking it into his own.

  Pellin fell into the delve, burrowing through the innkeeper’s abstracted gaze and into his thoughts and memories. Streamers of memory flowed past him like a river, but instead of the brightly colored strands of thought and emotion he expected, these were muted, nearly colorless. He found it far easier than he should have to maintain his own sense of self and identity. Nothing within the innkeeper’s immediate past possessed enough emotional importance to capture him.

  With a mental surge, he pushed, moving backward against the tide of time and experience, and as he did so a curious thing happened. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the innkeeper’s memories began to show a bit of vitality, hints of color revealing some joy or sadness that had touched him. The further Pellin went, the brighter they became, until, four or five months in the past, they appeared almost normal. Nowhere did he see evidence of Bronwyn or Toria Deel passing through.

  Then he saw the vault, there at the bottom of the innkeeper’s mind, as a black scroll with indecipherable writing. He pushed back further, searching for the source, but found nothing. What had possessed a man living on the edge of the Darkwater to brave sentinels and insanity alike to venture in?

  He broke the delve, straightening and smiling into the vacuous stare of the innkeeper before turning to the other man at the table and offering his hand. “Perhaps you’ll allow me to join your conversation over a tankard later this evening.”

  The other man, shorter and with dark unkempt hair, peered at the customary greeting just as the innkeeper had before he took Pellin’s hand.

  Again the interior of the inn disappeared as his gift asserted itself, but this time the presence of memories without color or vitality held no surprise for him and he allowed them to flow by. Racing backward into the past, he noted the flashes of light and darkness within the man’s mind that evidenced day and night, and he counted them until he saw the vault within the man’s mind.

  He made a cursory search of this man’s memories, just as he had with the innkeeper but didn’t linger. Frustrated but unsurprised by the absence of the memory he sought, he broke the delve and released the man’s hand, digging into his purse to place a silver half crown on the table.

  “Thank you for your room. If you’ll be so good as to draw three tankards for us, my companions and I will join you shortly, after we take care of our horses.” He turned to Allta, concentrated on keeping his voice calm. “Let’s not keep these gentlemen from their discussion any longer.”

  Outside, three-quarters of the sun shone above the horizon, bathing the town in crimson light, like an omen of blood. “How much time do we have until full dark?” he asked.

  Allta spared a glance west before answering. “This far north we have a bit less than a quarter of an hour until sunset and then another quarter of an hour of dusk.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Pellin walked toward the far end of town, toward the weathered church he’d seen on their way in.

  “Eldest?”

  “Keep an eye out for Mark. If you see him, call him to us. We have about half an hour to find someplace defensible for the night.”

  Chapter 31

  Pellin checked over his shoulder. The nearest villager stood in front of the smithy some twenty paces away. From his stance it was impossible to determine if he was a customer or a member of the man’s household. He gazed at and through Pellin and his guard in the same absent-minded manner as the two men in the tavern. He didn’t bother trying to attempt a delve with the man, but if there was a priest of any order remaining in the village, that would help confirm his suspicions.

  “Both of those men in the tavern have a vault,” Pellin said under his breath. He put a hand on Allta’s shoulder, felt the dense muscle beneath the cloak. “But I don’t think they’ve been to the forest.”

  Allta shook his head. “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m hoping a conversation with the priest will provide a clue.” He stopped in front of the weathered door of the church, more of a chapel, really. It might have had room for fifty people, but certainly no more.

  “Let us see if anyone remains.”

  Allta took the lever of the door in one hand, his other holding a dagger hidden in the folds of his cloak. They entered into the gloom of unlit spaces at sunset, and Pellin noted the dust first, then the same smell of disuse that had filled the tavern. “These people are barely alive.”

  With Allta leading, they passed through the small narthex and into the sanctuary, where they proceeded up the narrow aisle in single file. Dust covered the backless benches and the penitent’s rail. The intersecting arcs, the universal symbol of the faith, hung suspended over the altar next to a wooden carving of an oversized sword, the emblem of the Vanguard, but dust covered even these, and of the priest, there was no sign.

  Or almost none.

  “There,” Allta pointed. Footprints marred the dust, leading to and from the back of the altar, heading toward a small door in the back.

  They entered a small rectory, hardly more than a single room added on to the church, constructed of posts and planks and smelling of old wood. They found her there, sitting in a chair that had been placed so that as much light as possible from the single window would find her. Her white robe held a single stripe on the sleeve, marking her as a sublieutenant in the Vanguard, which was no surprise. A village this small barely rated a priest. Its proximity to the Darkwater, not its population, would have been the deciding factor for the church to place a parish here.

  At first Pellin thought her dead, her stare unfocused and unblinking. Then she shifted slightly, turning her face from her mute consideration of sunset, and it was only then that Pellin noticed that the skin of her face stretched over her skull, leaving her cheekbones protruding like the blunted edge of an axe. Her lids fluttered in a blink that took far longer than it should have.

  “What’s your name?” Pellin asked. Fool. The emaciated woman probably couldn’t speak.

  “See if you can find some water,” he told Allta as he stripped his gloves off. His guard’s footsteps sounded
loud against the ancient floorboards, but sight and sound faded as he reached out for her hand.

  He fell through the vacant, brown-eyed gaze into another stream of colorless memories. Again he raced backward in time, searching for the memory when the priest beneath his touch had left her parish to enter the forest and stay as night fell. Just as before, he found the vault in her mind, but no memory of entering the Darkwater to go with it.

  Realization and awareness came to him at the same moment Allta entered holding a dusty pitcher scavenged from inside the church or rectory. He forced his old man’s legs into a run. “Follow,” he rasped. The sound of weapons being drawn followed him as he ran back through the church.

  And almost bowled over Mark come to find him.

  “Eldest . . . ” His apprentice clutched at his sleeve, but Pellin didn’t slow. Please, Aer, give us enough light to get away.

  “There’s some kind of plague here,” Mark breathed. “All the animals are dead.”

  He ran back through the entrance of the church without bothering to explain, Allta and Mark trailing in his wake. Horses. They had to get to the horses.

  A semicircle of red fire still showed above the horizon to the west, bathing the dead village in blood. Pellin cudgeled his old man’s legs to go faster, back toward the horses they’d left at the small tavern.

  Without pause for breath or explanation, he untied the reins from the rail and threw himself into the saddle.

  “Chase the sun!” he screamed. “We have to get away from the village before nightfall.”

  He dug in his heels hard enough to make his horse rear before it thundered down the road into the sunset. Holding the reins in one hand, he slapped his horse’s hindquarters with the other hard enough to sting, and for an instant he fell into its mind and smelled his own fear.

  “Eldest,” Allta yelled at him as he pulled even, “how do we fight?”

  He shook his head, screaming over the rush of wind. “We can’t fight this! The Darkwater has claimed the village. Don’t stop riding until the light is gone. Only distance can save us.” The sun slipped lower, the horizon to the west eating the light.