The Shattered Vigil

by Patrick W. Carr

  “They know who I am,” Toria said. Try as she might, she couldn’t keep the statement from sounding like a death sentence. “More accurately”—she pushed on in an attempt to redeem it—“they know my name and enough about me to keep my hands covered. If I could get free, I could delve them and break their minds.”

  Lelwin’s eyes widened until the whites showed all around. “You can do that?”

  She nodded. “It’s similar to breaking a vault, and it’s forbidden, but I think our circumstances warrant exceptional responses.”

  “How many times have you done that?”

  She shrugged. “Only once, but the process is simple enough if I could just touch them.”

  Lelwin shook her head. “I don’t think you’ll get the opportunity. They spoke a bit when they believed both of us to be unconscious. They fear your touch, even though they don’t speak of it with any knowledge.”

  “If I turn around, can you get to my bonds and untie them with your teeth?”

  Her apprentice nodded. “It’s possible, Lady Deel, but is this the best time? Look outside.”

  Toria leaned toward the slit of light that remained of the covered window, squirming around until she could just make out the sun kissing the western horizon like a parting lover. In half an hour it would be dark, completely dark.

  “We’re nearly out of time,” Toria said. Panic squeezed her throat so that her voice came out as a hoarse whisper.

  “I don’t think they have vaults,” Lelwin said. “Nothing about them appeared different as we rode away from the city last night.” She licked her lips, and the fear that had been lurking behind her eyes broke free. “But they’re men with two women captives. Men don’t require a vault to conjure evil. I heard the speaker—you matter, I don’t.”

  The sound of footsteps outside the carriage and coarse laughter turned Lelwin’s expression frantic and wild. “I swore I’d never be taken that way again.”

  Toria watched the fear and rage build within her apprentice, saw it break free of any control she might have tried to exert over it. “Lelwin,” she hissed. “Stop it.”

  The girl’s gaze swept past her, and Lelwin bared her teeth as if she meant to tear the throat from her imagined attacker. Toria lashed out with her foot, catching her in the shin with enough force to make her gasp.

  “Listen to me,” Toria said. “For over a hundred years I’ve delved the worst humanity has to offer. I know from a score of memories what a man is capable of and a woman as well for that matter. We do not know their intent, but if they’re determined to take you, you cannot fight it.”

  Lelwin’s gaze flashed to the door of the carriage. Toria kicked her again. “You must live!” she hissed.

  “I will not bear it!” her apprentice hissed back. “I still have one of my daggers.”

  “There are at least three men guarding us. You don’t have to bear it,” Toria said. “Make a door within your mind and place everything within it. Lock every touch, every sight, every sound and smell away as if they belonged to someone else.”

  Voices whispered outside the carriage door, and Lelwin’s expression became feral. “I don’t have your gift.”

  “You don’t need it, not for this. I taught Peret how to do this same thing.”

  The door opened, and a man Toria hadn’t seen before stood outside, the setting sun at his back, his face hidden in shadow. Without a word he reached into the carriage, grabbed Lelwin, and pulled her outside, but not before Toria saw three other men standing in the fading light of the sun, their expressions twisted, hungry.

  Lelwin curled into a roll as her feet hit the ground, and she ran, nimble as a goat. But the men standing outside were faster. With a look that might have carried threat or amusement, the man who’d pulled Lelwin from the carriage shut the door.

  Toria squeezed her eyes shut and tried to close her ears against the sounds that came from outside.

  But she couldn’t, and worse, she couldn’t lock them away so conveniently as she’d counseled Lelwin to do, not if she wanted to aid her. The sounds of the men, stripped of their humanity, devoid of compassion or pity, continued well into the darkness that descended after sunset. Through anger that painted every detail of the interior of the carriage in crimson, she fought to think.

  Yet the sounds of laughter and jests that covered Lelwin’s whimpers filled her with rage that threatened to break her control over the doors she held within her mind. No! She needed to think!

  Depravity had been known to her since she’d taken up the gift a hundred years before. It was more immediate now, more personal, but it was no more brutal now than it had been a century ago.

  Think!

  She forced herself to listen to the nuances of their conversation, parsing their words as she searched for some scrap of information that might help them. A surge of pride for her apprentice flared like a spark from flint and steel. Lelwin was most likely correct. The men didn’t seem to have vaults within their minds. Their conversation and behavior gave no hint that they were anything more than underlings within the Clast. That, coupled with the fact that they had stopped for the night, meant her captors were limited by the same need for light as normal men.

  But just as sparks died without tinder, so hope sputtered and vanished within her chest. They still had no means of escaping.

  She needed her hands.

  First she tried to curl and slip them down over her hips. If she could just get the knotted rope in front of her where she could get her mouth on it, she could pull them free with her teeth. She squirmed and bent until the muscles in her abdomen cramped with the effort. Each time she thought of giving up, she opened her ears and listened, flaying her soul with the noises that came from outside.

  Later, sweating and panting, with her shoulders aching as if they’d been popped from their sockets, she surrendered. They’d tied her wrists too tightly to allow for any such maneuver. Despair washed over her, followed a moment later by impotent anger. Helpless.

  “What good is this gift you’ve given me if I can’t help her?” she prayed at Aer. “I’m supposed to be the instrument of justice for you when all else fails. How is this just?”

  Her clerical training, a mixture of all four of the orders after her childhood exposure to the forms of the Merum allowed for such conversations with Aer, but none of the orders had ever taught her how to force Him to answer.

  Chapter 46

  Sometime during the night the men opened the door to the carriage and shoved Lelwin inside, where she fell, discarded, onto the floor. A sliver of moonlight illuminated her apprentice, caught the glassy stare of her eyes that refused to blink or focus. Toria waited until the sounds of the men walking away stilled before crouching to whisper in Lelwin’s ear. “I’m here.”

  Her apprentice responded by curling into a ball on the splintered boards of the floor until her face disappeared behind her curtain of hair.

  “I can help you,” Toria pleaded, “if you’ll just remove the cloth from my hands.”

  Lelwin curled tighter.

  For an hour, Toria wept and pleaded for Lelwin’s aid, but no response came from the figure on the floor, not even weeping. So she straightened, resolved to remain awake, to stand watch against the night and possible return of their captors. But against her will, sleep took her, turning her surrender to exhaustion into condemnation. Even in this, she was powerless.

  The next morning the door opened again, and the speaker stepped up, ducking to wedge himself to one side before lifting Lelwin from the floor and depositing her on the end of the bench seat opposite Toria. Lelwin gave no sign of awareness other than to turn her head, hiding her face.

  The speaker inspected Toria for a moment, as if searching for weapons. Then he grasped her shoulders and swung her around as if she were a sack of grain and inspected her bonds. Turning her back, he reached behind her to untie the gag that lay useless around her neck. For a moment she considered attacking him, imagining the lunge and snap of her jaws that
would bury her teeth in his throat. Though choosing to do nothing, she immersed herself in the image as if it were balm for her soul and Lelwin’s.

  Then the cloth was back in her mouth and a sickly sweet scent filled the carriage. She slumped sideways to lie on the seat, the cushion rising up to meet her as the interior of the carriage spun in her vision. Just before she lost consciousness she saw the speaker leave, heard the sound of the door being shut and locked.

  When she woke it was still light, and the rocking of the carriage told her they were moving. She looked across the narrow space of the carriage to her apprentice. Lelwin still sat with her face hidden, tucked away from light and awareness.

  The smell of drugs and bile from the gag filled Toria’s nose, and she retched helplessly, filling the small space with the twin odors. Lelwin remained unmoving.

  Thirst burned her throat, and hunger gnawed a hole in her middle. Bound and helpless, she retreated into her memories, turning her attention inward until all sight and smell and sound dwindled and faded to the merest pinpoint.

  She stood in her room—the construct she’d made in her mind over a hundred years earlier, where she stored the memories she gleaned from the use of her gift. It had little in common with Dura’s, which was modeled after the sanctuary within the Merum library in Bunard. She’d fashioned hers after the library in Cynestol, a grand hall, almost square, with dozens of soaring arches that met at a single point overhead and stained-glass windows that diffracted the sun into a thousand different hues of light. Where the real hall held delicate works of marble in each alcove between the arches, hers held doors, each barely big enough for her to enter, so many were there within her mind. Someday, if she survived, she would have to rebuild the hall, make it larger to accommodate new memories she stored here, but for now it sufficed.

  She lifted her arms as she walked, letting hues of crimson, viridian, and cerulean wash across her skin. With a sigh, she turned toward the north end of the hall, bemused that even within her mind light failed to reach those shadowed recesses. She stopped before an array of doors that held her own memories, recollections she kept stored away from herself so that they would not, could not, interfere with her work. She shook her head, surprised that there would be so many. She stepped forward to brush her hand against the polished wood of the most recent door, not even a year old, where she’d put her love and affection for Peret Volsk after his betrayal of the ideals of the Vigil had become plain. Someday she would let loose those memories, allow them to wash over her and fill her with the grief she’d set aside just before Bas-solas. Someday. If she survived.

  She turned to her left, passing one narrow door after another until she came to a paneled door, incongruous in its lack of decoration. Fashioned decades ago, she’d made it plain so that she might more easily ignore it. She paused, hesitating. Using the memories behind this door carried more than the peril of judgment from the rest of the Vigil—this use of her gift, powerful and seductive, held threats of damnation from Aer himself.

  Here, as the newest member of the Vigil, she’d stored the uses of her gift that had been denied to her, inferences of power that Cesla and Elwin and, to a lesser extent, Pellin, had taught her to avoid lest she come under judgment.

  She put out her hand and opened the door into memory.

  “Here,” Cesla said, stopping the prison guards who accompanied them through the cells in Cynestol. A hundred feet below the ground, the heat of summer lived on as nothing more than a distant memory in the minds of the inmates. The granite wept with the cool, and the guards wore cloaks against the preternatural chill.

  One of them stepped forward to unlock the heavy door. The other preceded them, torch in one hand and sword in the other, though the wretch beyond could hardly pose a threat. The prisoner sat on the stone floor, his head resting on his folded arms, which rested in turn on his knees.

  “You may leave us,” Cesla said to the prison guards with a nod toward their Vigil guards, Axa and Bracu. “We are more than safe.”

  The guards retreated with a lift of their shoulders, leaving them with one of the torches to find their own way out.

  Inside the cell, Cesla removed his glove and with the air of a surgeon placed his hand on the prisoner’s neck for the duration of a dozen heartbeats before taking it away.

  He motioned her forward, and she moved toward the prisoner, her steps timid, cautious despite the protection afforded her by two of the most dangerous men alive. Some instinct must have roused the condemned man from his stupor for he shifted enough to gaze at her in the torchlight, his eyes clear and green.

  “Have mercy.” His soft laughter filled the cell.

  She faltered, stepping backward in the confines of the cell until she felt Cesla at her shoulder. “His mind is broken.”

  “Not yet, daughter. You misunderstand him. He’s not begging,” Cesla said, his voice flat. “He’s quoting.”

  It took her a moment to fully realize the import of the Eldest’s statement, but when understanding came, he nodded in approval at her expression. “The deeper you place the memories within the wellspring of his mind, the longer it will take for some chance sound or smell to bring them into realization for him. Shallowly, daughter.”

  She stepped forward and put her hand on the prisoner’s neck. A flood coursed through her as she fell into a river of threaded memories imbued with color and sound. She shifted, as she’d been taught, to avoid being swept up in any of the black-tinged recollections, but there were so many, so many.

  Within an effort of will, she fought the allure of living another’s life, no matter how stained, and forced herself to float above the stream of memories that flowed past her. She pushed herself forward in the opposite direction of the flow until she came to the wellspring within the prisoner’s mind that resembled a hole in the ground from which a stream that would become a river emanated.

  She’d never seen one before, had never had the need to see one; memories were sufficient. Cesla had told her how to find it. She stood over it, unsure, but then the prisoner’s words came back to her. Have mercy. Her resolve firmed until it became as indomitable as iron. How many of the threads had held those same two words uttered by this man’s victim? She held the gift of domere, the right to judge innocence and guilt, and she would not quail.

  Thrusting her hand deep within the wellspring of the prisoner’s memories she touched bottom, the origin, felt its spongy surface, let the cool wash of emotions that would become memories flow over her skin. Shallowly. She pulled her hand back from the bottom of the well without pulling out.

  Without remorse or pity she opened the doors within her mind to let the memories of this man’s victims loose, those he had allowed by purpose or chance to live, those she had delved. One after another, she threw those doors of pain and suffering and horror open, forcing the man she now delved to take those emotions and memories as his own. There were four, only four, though Cesla had told her the man’s victims numbered a dozen or more.

  The memories discharged, she pulled her hand from his wellspring and waited until the first implanted memory came forth, a small liquid thread of black that lengthened and thickened as it flowed. Nodding to herself, she stood and broke the delve.

  And jerked as screams resounded from the walls of the cell.

  She blinked to clear her vision, saw Bracu’s arms around her, pulling her away from the prisoner as Axa closed the door. But not before she caught a vision of the prisoner, eyes wide and staring, screaming as if he wanted his lungs to burst and running back and forth, uncaring that he slammed into the walls of his cell over and over again.

  The door clanged shut, and Axa locked it with the air of a man shutting a clothes closet. The man’s face appeared in the barred window for an instant as he clashed with the door, and a hollow boom echoed through the prison. She heard the hoarse intake of breath before he screamed again. Already his voice had become rougher and softer than before.

  “How long will it last?” she
asked.

  Cesla shrugged, and she interpreted his gesture as saying her question was not difficult to answer but held no significance either. “Until he dies. You planted his victims’ memories in his wellspring. His mind cannot reconcile the memories from two vantage points with such different emotions. Just as oil and water do not mix, neither can his pleasure and his victims’ pain. Had you remained in his mind, you would have seen the memories you unleashed, black as midnight, cling to his own. Even the colors are incompatible.”

  She shook her head, not understanding. “But his memories were black as well. I saw them in the stream.”

  Cesla, taller than either of his brothers, turned to her and his eyes softened. “The darkest memories you saw in him were recollections of his pain, my daughter. They would have hurt you had you touched them, but not nearly so much as the brightest colored memories you saw. Those strands of gold and silver, flaring like shooting stars in the night, were the memories of his greatest pleasures. And they would have hurt you far more.”

  Her stomach roiled, and she fought to keep from retching. “Was he ever anything other than evil?”

  Cesla nodded, pointing toward the prisoner’s cell. Muffled thumps came through the door, the sound of the man running back and forth into the rock walls, trying to escape the memories she’d implanted. “No man or woman is born evil, but the gift teaches us just how thin the dividing wall between you, me, and that prisoner really is. The civilization of mankind is often nothing more than an illusion that crumbles at the first test. Ask any soldier and he will tell you the same. Touch those who’ve survived famine or pestilence and see what people will do to survive. Those of us who have been in the Vigil the longest know it best, though we do not speak of it often.”