The Shattered Vigil

by Patrick W. Carr

  Two miles out from the village his horse dropped out of its gallop. Allta’s and Mark’s faltered a split second later, but the dim light obscured his vision, frustrating his efforts. He didn’t see any signs, but there hadn’t been any in the village either. He raised his hand, prepared to force his mount back to a gallop.

  Allta caught it on the way down in a grip that could have doubled as a carpenter’s vise. “Eldest, I can’t protect you if I don’t know what we’re running from.”

  Didn’t he understand? “The boundaries of the forest have spread. It encompasses the village now.”

  Allta’s eyes widened in the lurid sunset, but no sign of fear touched him. “If we don’t know where the boundary is, we run the risk of not reaching it if the horses drop beneath us,” Allta said.

  Panic filled his mind and chest, screaming at him to run the horse until it died if necessary. “We have to get away.”

  “Eldest, those people in the village have vaults. It will be dark soon and there is no moon tonight.”

  Pellin dropped his hand as a different fear fought the first, and he gulped for air.

  “What do we do?”

  “Alternate between a fast trot and a gallop until dusk fades, Eldest. We’ll get more distance from them.”

  Pellin nodded, pushed back against the unreasoning terror that filled him. He dug his heels into his horse, following Allta and Mark as they set out westward once more. He watched the sun sink beneath the horizon, the sliver of crimson visibly shrinking until the barest hint of fire remained.

  Questions chased each other around his head, queries that centuries of service in the Vigil had failed to answer. When did the poison of the Darkwater overtake those who entered it? Did it claim you if you were within its boundaries any time after dark, or did it require more time to infect you?

  He searched through his mind like a man fumbling in the dark, feeling his way with the gift of domere. Would he feel it when he went insane? Would he even know? The doors within his mind, so many after centuries of exercising his gift, remained secure. No strands of black, as Lord Dura described them, came from the darkness to ensnare him. His own thoughts, even filled as they were with panic, seemed to be his. Nothing within gave any hint they were under attack.

  The sun vanished.

  A chill breeze swept across them, but Allta kept their horses trained like an arrow toward the west. They rode as before, but while they rode, Allta searched the graying landscape ahead, seeking. “Eldest, we must choose.”

  Choose? What choice was there to make? They had to make sure they were outside the Darkwater’s boundary. “What can we do but ride?”

  Allta shook his head. Already, details in the distance were lost to sight. “The boundary of the Darkwater is undetermined, but you have delved some of the villagers. We have to assume they are all infected, and night is falling. Will they remember our passing?”

  Pellin nodded. “Those with vaults in Bunard acted based upon the knowledge their daylight experiences provided, though it does not work in reverse.”

  His guard nodded. “Then they will surely come for us.”

  “I don’t see how,” Mark said. “None of them seem able to hold a hand aloft for more than a moment.”

  Allta shook his head even as he pointed to an outcropping of rock in the distance to the south. “Ordinarily, you would be correct, but those who have a vault defy the normal physical boundaries of their existence, able to push their bodies past pain and fatigue until they are almost gifted. We must assume they will come for us.”

  Pellin reluctantly nodded. “Agreed.”

  “Then we must find a place to hide and, if we are discovered, make a defense.” He gestured to the rocky hillside a few hundred yards away. “We have just enough time to gather firewood. They cannot abide light.”

  “From a distance that very light will draw them to us,” Pellin said. “No, we must hide.”

  Allta shook his head. “Eldest, they will track our horses. There is no hiding from them in the dark.”

  “It’s a shame we have no solas powder,” Mark said. The young thief dug into his saddlebag as they rode, rummaging until he found a wide strip of cloth. “I would have liked a bit of moon better.” He draped it around his neck.

  Pellin shook his head. “I appreciate your efforts,” he said to Mark, “but you’ve spent all day in the light. Putting your thief’s cloth around your eyes after the sun has set seems a bit like locking the barn door after all the horses escaped.”

  Mark nodded. “We’re ten miles from the village. Even if they move like gifted, they have no horses to ride and they’ll have to track us. That will give us enough time to build a fire and allow my eyesight to adjust—some anyway. If I can lure them close enough to the flames, I can take care of some of them.”

  The grim smile that wreathed his face should have looked ridiculous on those downy cheeks. A chasm split and opened in Pellin’s heart as he envisioned his apprentice killing one villager after another. “If they come at us in strength, you’ll never be able to get them all.”

  Mark’s smile never wavered. “I won’t have to. I’ll just take care of the ones he can’t,” he said, nodding toward Allta. “By the time they get close enough to the fire to attack me, he should be able to put an arrow into them.”

  His guard nodded. “It’s not a bad plan, but I’ll need enough light to use my bow.” He reined in as they reached the base of the rocky foothills. “We’ll want to keep them on the plain in front of us.”

  Pellin clamped his mouth shut around his next objection. All of their planning and preparation wouldn’t save them if they were still inside the boundary of the Darkwater Forest. Evil would take them and put a vault within each of their minds. They might not even realize they’d been corrupted.

  They dismounted, and Allta and Mark foraged for twigs and old deadfalls that they could use for fire. Pellin offered a quick prayer of thanks. While there were a limited number of trees on the rocky hillside, there were plenty of dry sticks and thicker branches they could scavenge. Allta and Mark would have no trouble getting their fires to light.

  “Mark, place the pile about two hundred yards out,” Alta said. “That’s the farthest I can shoot with any reliability.” He watched for a moment as Mark ran. “Make the pile as big as possible.”

  He then pointed to a large boulder that had tumbled from higher up the hillside. “Eldest, hide behind that rock.”

  “They see better in the dark than owls,” Pellin said. “Where can I hide that they cannot find me?”

  “No amount of night vision will let them see through rock,” Allta said. “If the Mark and I can keep them distracted, they may not know you’re there.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “but I think hiding will avail me little. They’ve seen all of us, and they will hunt all of us.”

  Allta shook his head. “Laewan is not here. There is no one to guide these villagers in their attack. If you can stay hidden, they will have no reason to search for you.”

  “I hope you’re right, but we are in uncharted waters,” Pellin said. He swallowed against a new fear. “The forest has leapt its boundaries.”

  As the sky faded from charcoal to black and a few stars peeked through the clouds, Mark returned, his right eye covered by thick swaths of cloth. Sound drifted to them on the night air, grunts and groans of exertion. Allta leaned forward, listening, as he knelt down and repositioned the pile of sticks at his feet. “They are still some distance away. The ground is hard. Perhaps they are having difficulty tracking us.”

  “Well and good,” Pellin said. “Mark, what can you see?”

  A sensation of movement came to him out of the night air that might have been nothing more than Mark shaking his head. “Little more than you,” the boy said. “My eyes haven’t had enough time to adjust.” His soft laughter whispered in the night. “All in all, I think I would prefer it if the ground prevented them from finding us.”

  Pellin nodded, knowing the
gesture to be pointless. “Agreed, but it’s foolish to rely on that hope.”

  Allta heard his unspoken question. “The hills behind us will offer us the advantage of height, and the fire will distract them, but ‘if battles were fought on the strength of plans . . .’”

  “‘Then men wouldn’t need to die,’” Pellin finished.

  “With luck,” Mark said, “Allta will be able to see the villagers by the light of the fire and pick his targets at leisure.” His dry tone said plainly what his thoughts were on their having such luck.

  “The church teaches that there is more to the universe than blind circumstance or luck,” Pellin said. He’d run into doubters countless times over the centuries, but Mark’s casual disbelief, as if the existence of Aer couldn’t have the slightest bearing on him personally, grieved him.

  “Urchins have no need for the three-fold god,” Mark said. “Religion is for those with full bellies and warm hearths and time to indulge it.”

  A knot of desperation clenched in Pellin’s chest, tight with the need to convince his apprentice of the truth. “And do you not acknowledge the necessity of a creator? Look up.” Despite the darkness, Pellin pointed at the sky. “Even in the night, the stars and moon proclaim him.”

  “Oh, I see them all right,” Mark said in a tone that was the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “I’ve heard all the arguments. I’ve seen the carpenter craft his chair”—his tone turned amused, but it carried harsh undercurrents—“and I’ve seen that same carpenter sit on his chair, but I’ve also seen chairs that didn’t turn out well thrown into the fire for kindling. That’s what life did with the urchins.”

  After a moment, the boy’s sigh just made it to Pellin’s hearing across the stillness. “They’re nice to look at—the stars, I mean—but they really don’t have much to do with me.”

  Pellin withdrew into himself, stymied by Mark’s simple and eloquent denial. Seven hundred years of reading and thinking offered him nothing in the way of evidence for the existence of Aer’s love and goodwill. In this Mark argued from a position of greater strength. By acknowledging the possibility of a creator, but denying his personal involvement, the urchin could immediately point to his own experiences as a foil to any theological argument Pellin could offer.

  “Perhaps in time, you will see things differently,” Pellin said.

  “I’d like that,” Mark responded, and for a moment Pellin’s heart leapt within his chest, “but if the exordium of the liturgy and all the rest that followed were true . . . why did no one bother to help the urchins until they were forced to?”

  It was a small opening, and Pellin could see the flaw in what he was about to say, anyone could, but he grasped for it like a man swept downstream reaching for a branch he knew would break. “But someone did,” he said. “From what I’m told, Willet helped the urchins and the night women of the poor quarter almost every day.”

  “Willet wasn’t part of the church,” Mark said. “He was one of us.”

  “That’s what the church says about the three-fold one,” Pellin said, “that while we were lost, Aer sent himself to be one of us. The currency of the church is sacrifice.”

  “Currency? That’s the silliest—”

  Screams rent the darkness with jagged edges of sound across the distance. Pellin could make out different voices, cries of terror and hatred tearing loose from the throats of men, women, and children. And they were closer now.

  “They must have found our tracks,” Allta said. He paused, listening. “If they spread out on the plain, they’ll come upon us from a dozen different directions. We need to draw them in. Mark, light the fire now.”

  “They may be too close,” Pellin said. “Build a fire here instead.”

  Allta turned from him, his face and expression lost in shadow. “Mark, you will ignore any order from the Eldest that conflicts with mine. That fire must be lit.”

  Pellin could sense the boy’s uncertainty as he weighed the conflicting commands, but in the blink of an eye he was gone.

  “Mark,” he hissed, “get back here.” Nothing. “Mark!”

  “He’s gone,” Allta said. It was impossible not to hear approval in his voice.

  “He’s not supposed to go!” Pellin snarled. “He’s supposed to be my apprentice.”

  “But he’s mine as well, Eldest,” Allta said. “And he understands that.”

  Tears Pellin never expected turned the moon and stars into smudges of light. “He’s just a boy. Does he even understand he just refuted his own argument? Running off into the darkness to save us?”

  Allta nocked an arrow and waited, unblinking. “Some see more clearly with their heart than their mind, Eldest.”

  Chapter 32

  “Get him back here!” Pellin ordered. “Now!”

  Allta stood unmoving and unanswering in the darkness, nothing more than a shadow against the black of night.

  “If you will not retrieve him, I will.” Pellin set his eyes on the first hint of fire in the distance and managed to lift one foot to move in that direction before Allta’s hand clamped on his arm.

  “Eldest, consider.” Allta spoke in a reasonable tone of voice at odds with the grip that threatened to render his flesh into mush. “The Mark can see better in the dark than either of us. Doubtless he can hear better as well. You and I are not equipped to aid him. Plus, he is in no danger as of yet. Listen.”

  The screams—obviously human but with an animal quality that raised the hair on Pellin’s neck—sounded once more, drifting across the distance.

  “There’s nothing out here to absorb or block the sound, Eldest, and the weather is clear. The villagers are still some way distant. They have not encountered the Mark yet.” He bent and struck flint and steel to light the small pile of wood and brush by his feet. “Hopefully, the Mark’s bonfire will blind them to this one. Regardless, I need enough light to aim by.”

  In the distance the glow of light flared and danced until it strengthened into a steady flame that licked at the darkness. Pellin peered into the night waiting for some sight or sound that Mark lived. Time dragged as if he’d dropped into a delve.

  Then a scream—a man’s, thank Aer, and not Mark’s—pierced the silence with a thorn of pain, and Allta drew the bow and loosed. Out by the fire, Pellin saw a hint of movement just before Mark stepped into the ruddy circle of light, a knife in each hand, crouched, his head jerking from side to side.

  No more screams sounded. “You missed,” Pellin said.

  By the light of the tiny fire he used to aim, Allta nodded. “A shot in the dark. Poor odds.”

  Out in the night, hints of movement taunted Pellin’s eyesight, as if playing a childish game of keep away. Mark jerked in the dancing firelight, shifting back and forth like a crazed marionette, his gaze intent on the darkness.

  Pellin pointed. “What is he doing?”

  Allta’s gaze narrowed. “He’s trying to keep the fire between himself and his attackers.” He shook his head. “But he’s doomed to fail. Already his fire is dying.”

  Bands of fear constricted Pellin’s chest. “Why doesn’t he come back to us?”

  His guard considered for a moment before answering. “Doubtless, he has reasoned that if he departs the circle of light, they will be able to attack him. For the moment, he is safe and playing for time.”

  With a sudden jerk, Mark turned his back to the night and the villagers who filled it and then spun back again, his arm sweeping out in a backhanded throw that he concealed until the last instant. A cry sounded in the darkness, abbreviated. Mark resumed his odd dance around the fire.

  “That was well done,” Allta nodded. “Your apprentice is a fine marksman with those knives.”

  Pellin looked at the dimming light of the fire, the flames reaching toward the stars a little less with each guttering flare. Within his chest, hope for Mark’s survival died. As the fire dimmed, shadowed figures moved to surround the boy, those behind him closing in whenever he turned his back. The glow from
the fire barely kept them at bay. In moments, they would have him. “Aer have mercy,” he breathed. “He’s dead.”

  “Don’t borrow trouble from the future, Eldest.”

  “He needs help now,” Pellin rasped. “Shoot them!”

  Allta shook his head. “They’re moving with him. Any arrow I loose will find nothing but air and dirt. If the boy is going to live, he’s got to save himself.”

  Out in the night, Mark continued to circle the fire, but his movements were more frantic now. Without warning, he dropped and rolled, practically on top of the coals of the fire, and Pellin saw a glint of reflected firelight from a thrown dagger.

  Another followed the first, and Mark’s scream of pain and anger tore through the darkness.

  “They have him now,” Allta said. “Come, Eldest. You must hide. I will hold them off as long as fire and light allow.”

  Pellin tried to pull his arm from Allta’s grip, knowing it was useless. “A man should have at least one friend with him when he dies.”

  Two more daggers flew in the darkness, and they watched as Mark threw himself aside, landing on his back on top of the fire. Flames danced on the edges of his cloak, and he continued his roll, leaving the thick cloth behind.

  Light blazed like a beacon, swallowing the darkness around Mark and capturing the villagers in its glare. Over a dozen howls of pain and surprise cut the air as the villagers curled to protect their eyes against the sudden flare.

  “Now!” Pellin screamed. “While they’re stunned!”

  But Allta was faster. Already three shafts were in the air, whistling toward their immobile targets. Pellin blinked against the spots in his vision, but by the time his vision cleared the fire, the Mark, and the villagers were gone.

  Pellin searched the darkness, but the distant embers were too dim and too few. He clutched Allta’s arm as his guard lowered his bow. “Where is he?”

  Howls of rage filled the air.