The Shattered Vigil

by Patrick W. Carr

  The sounds from the cell grew more frantic, scaling upward. “Why would you have me do such a thing?”

  Instead of answering directly, Cesla continued as though she hadn’t just begged him for an explanation. “With a few notable exceptions—mostly those who hold their humanity in higher esteem than their life—men and women are only one unfortunate circumstance from the animals. There may come a time when you will have to use your gift as a weapon.”

  The prisoner screamed again, wetly.

  “Never!” she panted. “I will never take a life again.”

  He nodded, but clearly not in agreement. “That is your decision, of course, but you may find others will die if you do not.”

  Toria Deel opened her eyes in the confines of the carriage, mentally stepping away from the room where she stored her memories before that conversation with Cesla fully played out. She knew how it ended, had no desire to relive circumstances she couldn’t change.

  The more she pondered the incident, decades old, the stranger it became. Cesla, Eldest of the Vigil, had commanded her to plant conflicting memories within that man’s wellspring, ostensibly to demonstrate just how far they could go with their gift. But such a horrific example was hardly necessary. Just as easily, they could have implanted a pleasant memory into someone whose life and circumstance needed light.

  She shook her head. With the distance of a hundred years, the memory gathered less clarity instead of more. Cesla’s mind had been a labyrinth even then, and the rest of the Vigil had joked that if he couldn’t see to the end of days it was because he hadn’t bothered to look yet.

  Even now it was impossible to determine all of his reasons for what had happened that day.

  Chapter 47

  Toria rolled to the floor of the rocking carriage, her hands covered by leather and her wrists and arms bound behind her with a multitude of thin strands of rope. Tears ripped their way free from her eyes as regret filled her. She couldn’t afford grief, but as she fought her way to a kneeling position, turning so that Lelwin—still sitting on the opposite bench—could see her bonds, accusations rose in her mind.

  How many justifications had she espoused when others had to pay the price?

  Savagely, she thrust those denunciations away as she struggled to work the gag from her mouth. Of course death would be less painful than living. When had it ever been otherwise? The carriage rolled north toward the Darkwater with the relentless momentum of an approaching execution, and finally, after what seemed like hours, the gag slipped to her neck.

  “Lelwin, you have to free my hands,” she insisted, loud enough to be heard inside the carriage but not outside. “I can get us free, but I need access to my gift.”

  She heard nothing behind her that might have indicated acknowledgment, so she waited and beckoned again. “Lelwin, please, I can’t help you if you don’t free my hands.”

  Nothing.

  Shifting onto her knees so that she faced her apprentice, she bent and clamped her teeth on Lelwin’s shirt, pulling and tugging until she’d managed to expose Lelwin’s face. “Do you want vengeance?” she said to her unblinking stare. “Help me.”

  Frustrated, she bit the cloth of the young woman’s shirt and pulled once more. Lelwin slid from the bench to land on her, and they lay on the floor of the carriage in a tangle.

  “Leave me alone.” It might have been nothing more than the whisper of the wind outside the carriage or an echo of hooves that her ears and mind had twisted into speech.

  “I can’t. Lelwin, they’re taking us to the Darkwater. If we spend a night there, our minds won’t be our own.”

  “Good. I don’t want to remember.” Her voice sounded hollow, dead.

  “But you will,” Toria rasped. “I’ve delved enough of them to know. You’ll live each day with your memories, and at night you will rage. You won’t even be human anymore.”

  “Do you have any idea what they did to me?”

  “Yes.”

  She felt Lelwin shake her head. “Has it ever happened to you?” Challenge and anger filled the question.

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t know what they did to me.”

  She pulled the stuffy, stale air of the carriage into her lungs. “Lelwin, do you know how old I am?”

  “You’ve told me.”

  “I am over a hundred years old. In the history of the Vigil, only two others have come to the gift at a younger age than I. During my time in the Vigil I have delved any number of women taken against their will, some of them so physically broken they died soon after. But it’s worse than that. I’ve also had to delve the men who betrayed and killed so much of their humanity that they would do such a thing and find pleasure in it. I’ve lived every detail of their crime, Lelwin, submersed in their twisted pleasure until I thought I could never be clean again. I know.”

  She waited, watching Lelwin’s heart-shaped face for some sign of fight, but for long moments her apprentice did nothing more than continue to stare through her surroundings. Then a sob, solitary and alone, so that it might have been nothing more than the swift intake of breath, broke the silence. Another followed it. By the time Toria bent enough to rest her forehead against Lelwin’s, tears poured from her eyes. “It hurts when I move.”

  After a moment, but far too soon, Toria straightened. “I know. Can you help me fight?”

  Lelwin met her gaze and nodded. “What can you do?”

  Behind her back, Toria flexed her hands, but she left the door to Cesla’s memory closed. She had the information she needed. “Something just. Something I’ve done before. Something forbidden.”

  They spent the next few moments trying to disentangle themselves from each other and more time after that positioning themselves so that Lelwin could get her teeth on the leather that covered Toria’s hands.

  Toria bent double and pushed her legs against the sway of the carriage. “Chew a hole through the leather at the bottom, so that when I’m upright they won’t see it.” She felt a tug from her apprentice’s teeth. “Make it just large enough for my smallest finger.”

  The steady pull paused for a moment. “Why?”

  “I have to be able to touch each of them without the others knowing.”

  The leather proved durable. The tugs and jerks on her arms as Lelwin tried to chew her way through it continued for an hour. Not until the carriage slowed with the russet light of impending sunset discolored by dust did the faintest sound of tearing reach Toria’s ears.

  “I have to delve you, Lelwin.”

  Her answer, when it came, hardly stirred the air in the carriage, but it was no less emphatic for that. “No. You’ll see what they did to me.”

  Toria would have used her authority or appealed to friendship if she thought either of those had a chance of working, but Lelwin, like all of the urchins, hardly acknowledged authority existed, and their friendship was still too new, too tenuous. With no other recourse, Toria appealed to vengeance.

  “Your memories will be the executioner’s axe.”

  “How?”

  Toria sighed. Days of riding in the carriage with her hands constantly bound had forced her to soil herself. Now that feeling of being unclean worked its way into her heart. Instead of grieving with Lelwin and looking forward to a time when she might forgive her assailants, Toria had instead stoked her need for revenge. Now she was about to enlist her apprentice’s aid in something forbidden.

  “I’m going to take your memories and place them in each guard’s wellspring.”

  “What’s a wellspring?”

  Toria sighed again. “It’s aptly named. Within the mind is the origin of thought and memory, the beginning of recollection and comprehension. The stream of memory that members of the Vigil enter is circular, returning to the wellspring before it issues forth again. Our gift is that we can enter that stream, pick a memory and follow it like a thread in a tapestry to its origin. If we go far enough, we come to the wellspring.”

  “I don’t under
stand.”

  Toria nodded. “It’s a difficult concept to explain. Why do you remember?”

  To her apprentice’s credit, she took time to frame her answer. Twice, she began her reply before cutting her response short. “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I,” Toria said. “Not in any absolute sense. But I do know where memory comes from, and my gift allows me access to it.”

  “What will happen?”

  Toria nodded in approval. Better to focus on the immediate concern. “Their minds will be unable to reconcile the same event from two different perspectives. Your pain will serve to awaken their consciences.”

  “How can any of them have one?” Lelwin spat.

  She sighed. “I have encountered men who fit that description, but rarely. The conscience of even very evil men still exists in some twisted form that allows them to do what they do. They will go mad.”

  “You swear?” Lelwin said.

  “To the very best of my knowledge and ability,” Toria said.

  Lelwin leaned forward like a supplicant at the rail.

  By the time the carriage jerked to a stop they had resumed the positions from hours before—Toria lying across one bench with her arms behind her, and Lelwin curled into a protective ball with her face tucked out of sight.

  The sound of hooves thundered away from them to the north just before the door opened and one of the guards, not the speaker, climbed in, smiling in Lelwin’s direction. “We’ve stopped for the night.”

  When his gaze shifted to Toria, his expression went flat. Roughly, like a man handling a piece of firewood, he pulled her up to a sitting position on the bench and turned her around to inspect her bonds.

  Staring ahead, she waited as time inched forward, felt his hands slide down over the ropes that kept not just her wrists bound, but her arms as well. Then she felt what she’d been waiting for, pressure on her hands through the leather for a cursory check. She would only have this instant. As quickly as she could manage without jerking or startling her captor in any way, she thrust the smallest finger of her right hand through the hole in the leather and reached for his skin.

  The interior of the carriage disappeared as she fell into his mind. She would have to be quick, quicker than she had ever been. She lashed out against his will, attacking the strands of thought and feeling that comprised his actions in the carriage, holding him still.

  She raced backward in time, his memories washing through her, filling her with filth, until she came to the memory of him standing with the speaker in front of a taller man, hooded, who gave the speaker a sheet of parchment with her likeness and orders in a resonant voice she knew.

  Jorgen.

  Before she reached toward the guard’s wellspring, Toria took just enough time to wonder what had happened to corrupt him, to consider how he and Laewan could have both been turned from their duty. When she found the wellspring she slowed, thinking. If she placed Lelwin’s memories too shallowly, his transition to insanity would put the rest of the men on their guard, but if she planted them too deep, they would arrive at their destination before they had a chance to escape.

  Reaching into the shadowed recesses that composed the origin of his thoughts and memories, she opened the door in her mind where she’d stored Lelwin’s memories of violation. The black strands poured forth, thick and tough as pieces of boiled leather. As soon as the memories were released, she concentrated on pulling her fingers closer to her in the real world, balling her hands into fists.

  The interior of the carriage appeared in her vision and she waited, hardly daring to breathe, to see if the guard had detected her touch. She gave her head a small shake. Nothing could save him now. He was dead, his mind broken beyond repair, as surely as if she had dosed him with a gallon of averin sap. But if he suspected he’d been touched, she would never get the opportunity to touch the others.

  She tried to still the sudden thunder of her heart. Opportunity needed to present itself soon, or she and Lelwin would find themselves either at their destination or within the Darkwater Forest.

  Her guard stilled for a moment, and then her world spun as he shoved her away. She landed on her back, saw him reaching for Lelwin, who tried to back away though there was no place to go. Her legs kicked out, pushing, as she tried to become part of the seat that held her.

  “Leave her alone!” Toria cried.

  The guard smiled at her. “Do you want to take her place, yah? You with your highborn ways?”

  Horror etched itself across her face, but she forced herself to nod. “Take me instead.”

  He laughed, the sour stench of his breath filling the cabin. “I’ve a better idea, yah? How about I take you as well?” He leered at her apprentice. “The speaker won’t be back ’til morning, and what a man doesn’t know . . .” He shrugged. “You’re a bit old for my tastes, but seeing as how you’re willing . . .”

  Somewhere deep in her chest lay the twisted hope that his end would be particularly painful. Inside her thoughts, a vengeful version of herself waited, hoping circumstances or Aer would allow her to witness the guard’s descent into the insanity that would kill him.

  Her offer had its intended effect. He reached out, clamped his hands on her shoulders, and backed out of the carriage, turning to shove her toward two other men who stood next to packs. She tried to prolong the fall, strove to keep her balance—her intention to land in the arms of the men and touch one of them, masking the use of her gift in the confusion.

  But the ground betrayed her and she fell short. Springing to her feet she ran, her shoulders swinging back and forth as she tried to negotiate the uneven footing without the use of her arms. Curses, more annoyed than angry, filled the air behind her. When she looked back, the man who’d entered the carriage plowed after her, gaining with each stride.

  She ground her teeth in frustration. With the speaker gone, only three men guarded them, and she’d already disabled one. When the sounds of his panting came from just behind her, she dropped to the ground, curling into a ball. The ruse, as old as time, worked. The man, caught by surprise, tripped over her, kicking her in the ribs before he went tumbling down the hill.

  She gasped for breath, pulling air against the spots that swam in her vision, and ran along the ridge. Curses from the direction of the carriage fell on her ears like benedictions. In less than a minute, hands grabbed her from behind, and she squirmed, pretending to try and break free but fighting to reach the bare skin of the man’s arm with the finger she’d poked through the hole in the leather sack.

  He lifted her from behind by her wrists, and she gasped in pain, fearing her shoulders would pop from their sockets. Straining, she reached.

  And fell into the man’s mind. She ignored the allure of his past, rushing along the stream until she came to his wellspring, where she thrust the memories of Lelwin’s rape in among the man’s own.

  And came to herself, kicking and screaming until the man punched her hard enough force the air from her lungs. She collapsed, curled around the pain in her middle as she strained to breathe. When the spots cleared, the man stood above her with his hands balled into fists.

  “Get up. If you make me carry you back to the carriage, you’ll regret it.” He aimed a kick at her side that sent her rolling, trying to dodge. She ended up on her stomach. With awkward jerking motions, she pulled her legs beneath her and stood.

  The first guard crested the hill, but the second waved him away. “You heard the speaker, Lemm. We don’t touch her, and we don’t let her touch us.”

  “I’m not going to touch all of her, Kruin, just a few bits here and there, yah?”

  The man who stood over her, Kruin, pulled a wicked-looking hooked knife and gestured toward the first man with it. “Wrong answer.”

  Lemm gave a curt nod and a glare for Toria that carried threats. “When the speaker’s done with you, I’ll make your acquaintance, yah? Then it won’t matter what Kruin says.”

  She walked toward the carriage, angling for the
third man, who busied himself with the horses, working to get them unhitched. She pretended to stumble then regain her balance, carrying her a few paces to the right. If she could fall his way, she might be able to touch him before they bundled her back into the carriage.

  Five paces from her goal, the third guard shifted, moving to the other side of the horses without ever looking in her direction. She watched him shift beyond her reach with her heart falling into her stomach. Kruin shoved her toward the open door of the carriage.

  She stopped, playing for time. “I need water.”

  Instead of answering, he pointed to her prison with his dagger. She clambered up and in, seating herself between the open door and Lelwin. Anyone who came for her apprentice would have to move her first. She prayed it would be the third man.

  But Kruin closed the door, and no one came.

  Lelwin looked at her expectantly. Toria shook her head. “I managed two but couldn’t touch the other.” Lelwin’s eyes widened, and Toria sighed. “We shall see.”

  The sky darkened, and they waited, listening for any sound from outside the carriage that would signal Lemm’s or Kruin’s insanity.

  “How long?” Lelwin whispered.

  “I don’t know. I’ve only done this once before, and that was a long time ago. From what Cesla told me, it’s more of an art than a science.”

  Screams jolted Toria awake, pulling her from dreams where she tried to run but couldn’t seem to lift her legs. The cries outside the carriage scaled upward in pitch and volume until Toria sought to cover her ears. Other voices screamed in response, calling, but Lemm ignored them. A crash into the side of the carriage brought her heart to her throat, but a moment later the screams receded.

  Then she heard the scream fall away, the cry of Lemm’s insanity interrupted at intervals as he fell down the hillside for the second time that day. Then they grew fainter still. Cursing outside the carriage accompanied the approach of light, and she blinked against the sudden glare when someone flung open the door.