The Shattered Vigil

by Patrick W. Carr

  Then the swirling breeze died before coming steadily out of the west and the other sentinel’s scent came to me, strong and clear, from the center of the city, near the harbor.

  “This way,” I said. Of the four of us, I would be of the least use in a fight, but I pulled a dagger anyway. Steel whispered against leather all around me.

  Chapter 56

  Small hints of movement from rats and other vermin drew Wag’s attention, and I kept jerking my head in sympathy. The towers built to protect the city loomed over us, cutting off the sparse moonlight.

  I heard the whistle of wind through fletching, the sound of air being shoved aside by an arrow coming straight for my heart, and knew I didn’t have enough time to get out of the way. I tried to move anyway, hoping I might take it through my shoulder instead of my chest.

  A blow like the punch of a hammer hit me from the side before the arrow arrived, knocking me sideways. Fire raced across my shoulder to the sound of cloth and flesh tearing. The ground raced up to meet me, and I hit my head.

  Lights twirled and spun behind my eyes.

  “Get behind the horses!” Bolt’s scream echoed back from the keep. “Wag, keep him down!”

  Another arrow struck sparks inches from my face, and a splinter of stone tore across my cheek. I tried to stand, pulling my way hand over hand up the reins of my horse, but even upright, the world wouldn’t stop spinning. Teeth clamped onto my arm and pulled me back down and a small mountain of fur and muscle lay on top of me. I heard sounds from the last war, the meaty chunk of arrows finding their mark and the screams of horses.

  Bolt stood over me, wrapping the reins of my horse around his free hand, keeping it from fleeing. It screamed again as an arrow took it through the lungs. It shuddered. Any second it would go down.

  “Rory, get the archer!”

  I shook my head, trying to focus, but my thoughts scattered like dust in the breeze. For some reason I could only express as instinct, it was important to keep Rory close.

  But it was too late, he was already gone, fading into the darkness to try to get to whoever stood on top of the keep shooting arrows at us. “Bring him back,” I said, or tried to. My tongue didn’t want to cooperate.

  “Rory,” I said more simply.

  “Stay down and behind the horse, Dura,” Bolt growled. “Rory will take care of the archer in a moment.”

  As if he had the power of prophecy, the arrows stopped. Gael darted away from her horse, and I felt more than saw her touch my face. “Willet, are you well?”

  There was no way Rory could have gotten to the roof so quickly. “Too soon,” I struggled to pull the words together. The pounding in my head wouldn’t let me speak. I rolled under Wag’s weight, belly down in the dirt and sand, reaching.

  I scooped it into my hands and threw, broadcasting sand all around us.

  Bolt stared at me. “What—” he began before oaths spilled from him. Lurching toward me, he wove a blur of steel that whined in the air. “Gael! What do you see?”

  Wag went on point, but his head swept back and forth as he tracked the scent. I kept throwing. My hands slid across the dirty sand, and I felt pebbles, lots of them, roll under my skin.

  “There’s nothing,” Gael said from the other side of me. Her sword wove a series of figure eights in the air fast enough to create a dissonant harmony. “Wait.”

  I saw her head jerk to the left, behind us. Clenching my hands in the pebbles, I threw, heard the sound of gravel hitting something other than the ground.

  Her sword broke from its pattern to lash out at the same time a dagger flashed over her shoulder, finding its mark. I winced at the sound, but Gael flicked her wrist and riposted from the other direction as another dagger hit her opponent.

  I heard a muted thump followed by the crack of someone’s head hitting rock. My knees might have belonged to someone else for all the control I had over them, but I made it to a standing position.

  Torches sprouted in the distance, bright glowing flowers against the night. They gathered together, then started toward us.

  “We can’t stay here,” Bolt said.

  I looked at the dead man. Dressed in nondescript clothing, he had the thick shoulders and neck of a soldier, but his features were completely ordinary. Even before he’d been turned into a dwimor, there was nothing remarkable about him. There was just enough light here between the buildings to see his eyes and the hooded stare that had taken them in death, but I was uninterested. I had no compulsion or desire to ask him what lay on the other side of eternity. What had he surrendered to obtain his near invisibility?

  Rory came running up from the side just before the men with torches came into view. “I never even caught a glimpse of him. No one was up there.”

  The sky overhead might have lightened from black to charcoal. I couldn’t tell. “Are we in time?” I asked.

  “I don’t think he’d waste time on this attack if he’d already found the girl,” Bolt said.

  Rory pointed. Reflected light showed beyond the arc of the street. Any moment the men holding those torches would come into view. Even now I could hear the heavy-heeled stomp peculiar to annoyed soldiers.

  “I think we should leave.”

  Bolt nodded. “Come quickly. Leave the horses. Now, before they see us. Soldiers are like boys and dogs. Nothing arouses their instinct to chase more than seeing someone run away.”

  Gael ran to her mount to dig through the packs at the back. She pulled out a pair of unlit torches wrapped with thick black cloth held in place by wire and tucked them under her arm. “A gift,” she said. “We’ll need them.”

  We backtracked along the arc of the road until we came to an alley that intersected, leading inland toward the cliffs and the duke’s keep that overlooked the city and running the opposite direction toward the docks.

  “This way,” Bolt murmured. “The soldiers will head toward the docks.”

  I followed, trying and failing to make my footfalls as silent as everyone else’s. “Why?”

  “The lifeblood of this city is the shipping trade,” Bolt said. “Above all, the duke is supposed to safeguard the merchants.”

  We ran another two hundred paces, the buildings quickly transitioning from wealth to squalor as though the five sections of Bunard had been condensed. Bolt took another alley to the right and the smell of too many people in too small of a space hit my nose like a blow. I wondered how Wag managed to stand it.

  We stopped when Bolt held up a hand, calling for silence, but no sounds of pursuit came. He turned to me. “Which way?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  He pointed to Wag. “We’re out of time, Willet. If we don’t hurry, he’s going to find Branna before we do. There are only two possibilities. Which one is her?”

  I thrust my hands toward Wag, fell headlong into his thoughts, conjuring an image of two faceless women along with the scents he’d detected earlier. Where are they?

  His head moved, and I followed the motion, my eyes open to see him sighting toward the docks and the sea, the scent of one of the women overlaid with the smell of the sea. Then he turned toward the interior, his head angled up, looking toward the massive keep that guarded the city.

  I stood as my mind and heart tried to outrace each other. Where would she have gone? A snatch of liturgy fell from my tongue, more pleading than prayer, and I set off at a run toward the keep. “This way.”

  “How do you know?” Bolt asked. I pounded up the incline toward the keep, tried to ignore how easily everyone else, with their gift, kept up with me. “She’s a child of Bunard,” I panted. “Stone is her friend.”

  Fatigue burned through my legs and lungs, and I stumbled, still hundreds of paces from the keep’s entrance. “Go,” I said to Wag and the rest of them. “Find the girl. I’ll catch up.”

  Bolt turned to Rory. “Stay with him.”

  Wag’s strides lengthened, and he flew ahead, Bolt and Gael racing behind him, their legs blurring. They dis
appeared ahead of me, rounding a turn in the path. I heard Wag’s challenge, deep and angry, just before Rory and I rounded a broad outcropping of rock.

  Fifty paces in front of us, I saw a guardhouse at the near end of a bridge leading over the chasm. Four bodies, lit by the dim torchlight, lay scattered in postures that living men would never assume. Halfway across the bridge a figure raced toward the keep with a sentinel by his side.

  Gael, Bolt, and Wag raced down the path but stopped at the guardhouse. I heard Gael’s voice on the wind, high and strident, but I couldn’t make out the words. Bolt and Wag skidded to a stop as Gael thrust one of the two torches she carried into the embers of a guttering torch that lay next to one of the dead guards.

  Light like the sun flared, and I shut my eyes against the glare. When I opened them again I saw Bolt’s arm outstretched, the torch spinning end-over-end above and beyond the dark figure and the other sentinel. It landed by the doors of the keep, burning like a star come to earth, and the man skidded to a stop with a roar of anger, his arm over his eyes.

  I ran to catch up, arriving with Rory at my side as the figure rounded on Gael and Bolt, his strides eating the distance between them. Malice poured from the hood of his cloak, and a sword and dagger appeared in his hands as if by magic.

  Casually, almost disdainfully, Gael thrust her remaining torch down into the embers.

  “Come then, if you dare!” She raised that flare of sunlight aloft. “Face the light!”

  I came alongside, my legs and lungs begging for respite. “How long will they burn?” I panted.

  Gael’s voice came out in a growl. “Long enough.” She took a step forward. “He’s pinned between the two torches.”

  With a cry of rage, the figure scooped his sentinel under one arm and ran toward the keep. We raced after, following the light of Gael’s torch. Ten paces from the massive doors, he took two steps, bounded off the parapet and upward into darkness.

  I waited, listening for the fading wail of someone falling to their death or the impact of the figure against the rocks below, but nothing came. Gael thrust her torch forward. By its fading illumination, I could just make out a figure against the dark keep wall, clinging absurdly to its face. Impossibly, with the sentinel in his grasp, the figure started to climb, inching toward a window twenty paces above.

  The doors of the keep opened, and a dozen soldiers poured out. “Stand where you are.”

  “We can’t wait for this,” I said.

  “Keep Wag with you,” Bolt murmured under his breath. He looked to Rory and Gael. “These men aren’t our enemies. Put your hands up and let them close, then use the flat of your blade.”

  Dark-liveried soldiers surrounded us, sword points forward. Bolt, Gael, and Rory formed a triangle around me and Wag.

  “Now,” Bolt said.

  I didn’t see most of the blows, but I heard them along with the clatter of swords and bodies hitting the stones. We raced into a high-vaulted hallway.

  “Wag,” I said. “Find her.”

  We raced up the nearest stairwell as more soldiers poured from a corridor leading back into the cliff. Cries of alarm trailed us as Gael and Bolt dispatched squads of soldiers that blocked our way.

  “How are we going to get out of here?” Rory asked. “They’re going to bottle up the entire keep.”

  “One thing at a time, boy,” Bolt said. “Let’s get to where we’re going first.”

  We raced up another staircase, and Wag stopped before a door, growling. Bolt hit it at a run with his shoulder, and it flew inward, the lock splintering through a handsbreadth of solid oak.

  Gael tossed her torch into the room and star-white light illuminated the surroundings. A cry outside a broad arched window keened through the keep with madness.

  My scream of jubilation died in my throat as a massive furred shape vaulted through the open window, scented the air once, and launched itself toward a bed along the far wall.

  Hope died in my chest as Bolt and Rory threw daggers that missed their mark, piercing the air where the sentinel had been. So close. We’d come so close.

  Inches from impact the sentinel hit a wall of muscle and bone and sinew, and the room erupted in violence.

  Wag.

  Growls of rage rebounded from the walls as Wag and the other sentinel fought, rolling across the floor, each working to cripple and kill the other.

  By the light of Gael’s torch, I could see just what Wag’s injury had cost him. Quick and heavy as he was, the other sentinel was bigger and faster. Bolt moved toward the melee, his sword drawn to put the other sentinel down, but they were moving too fast, their positions switching in the blink of an eye. Blood spattered the floor, and I heard a high-pitched yelp to accompany the crack of bones in Wag’s leg.

  Bolt’s indecision was all I needed.

  Stripping my gloves, I jumped toward the sentinels, both hands extended. Bloody jaws moved for Wag’s throat.

  A snatch of prayer that never made it to my lips flashed across my mind. Please.

  Just before I made contact, Wag and the other sentinel saw me coming. My hand touched Wag’s mane as the other sentinel’s jaws closed on my arm and then released.

  I heard the bones crack before the pain—Wag’s, mine, the other sentinel’s—exploded through my mind in white-hot flashes of lightning, but somehow I managed to hold my grip on the other sentinel.

  Howls and screams tore from my throat and filled the stone keep as two pair of eyes, one familiar and the other malevolent, leapt at me, washing all sense of self away. My mind fractured. Swept like a twig on a tidal wave, I fought to right myself, but the minds of the two sentinels, both filled with fury and pain, blended with mine.

  The coppery taste of blood flowed across my tongue, and I longed for more, even as the desire to rip the throat from my enemy filled me. I lashed out with my mind, trying to still the memory, and felt the room pitch sideways as Wag released his hold on his sister and the other sentinel shook me like a rag.

  For a pair of heartbeats that stretched for an eternity, I lost my hold on the other sentinel, and only my thoughts and Wag’s filled my mind. Rory, Bolt, and Gael looked as if they were wading through water to get to me, they were moving so slow.

  Save the Master! Kill sister! Kill Modrie!

  Wag’s thought blistered through me despite his pain. Despite his broken leg, he moved so that I could maintain my bond with him through my gift.

  No! I thought back. Back away!

  His growl of refusal carried all the pride and power of his breed. Wag refused to obey. “Save him,” I yelled to Bolt. Then I let go and used my free hand to grab the thick ruff of the other sentinel.

  Threads of memory flowed by me, the memories and emotions of the sentinel’s mind. There weren’t so many as a human might have, but Wag’s mind and that of his littermate, Modrie, were only a few weeks old. Even so there were more strands of memory than I expected.

  And all of them were black.

  Then out of the darkness a strand of obsidian, sticky and barbed, latched on to me, then another, tying me to Modrie’s mind. Memories of Barl came to me, the butcher who’d gone to the Darkwater out of envy and hate. His vault had been open when I touched him, and the evil that had taken him had tried to trap me in his mind as he died.

  But the sentinel’s mind and body were in no such distress. Though the barbed strands hurt, they carried no immediate threat of snuffing out my mind. I opened my eyes, and the room pitched in my vision as I reckoned time normally once more. My companions had hardly moved. In a fraction of a heartbeat I would hit the floor, slammed against the stones like a rag doll.

  I closed my eyes, saw again the strands of black that constituted the memories of Wag’s sister. Then their import became clear. Not one of Modrie’s memories brought her joy. From the time her sire had placed his paw upon her head, pain and torture had been all she’d known.

  Fire blazed through my mind, and I slashed at the threads binding me in place, burning them w
ith my outrage. More came for me out of the darkness, but I ignored them. If I spent too much time in Modrie’s mind, I would die, dashed against the stone floor like a squirrel thrashed by a dog.

  I had no idea if it would work, but there was nothing left to try. Lashing out, I tore every black memory within her, ripping them into smaller and smaller pieces until they were nothing but dust, until nothing remained of Modrie’s past at all.

  I opened my eyes to find myself flying through the air, loosed by the sentinel at the moment I’d broken her mind. The stones of the wall rushed to meet me, but before the world went black I heard the beginnings of another cry of rage from outside.

  When I came to I could have counted the parts of my body that didn’t hurt on one hand, or might have if my hands hadn’t hurt so much. Footsteps thundered along the hallway, and cries of fear echoed from the walls. Wag nosed once at his littermate who lay on the floor with her eyes open but unseeing.

  “Find her, boy,” I said through clenched teeth. “Find the girl.” He limped, whimpering, on three legs to a bed tucked into a corner of the room, pushed his nose against a huddled figure beneath her blankets.

  Chapter 57

  Somehow I’d ended up on my back looking at the ceiling. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there. Gael’s face appeared above me, lit by the light of a too-bright torch.

  “Oh, Aer,” she cried. “You’re a mess, Willet.”

  I tried to sit up, but Gael put her hand on my chest, holding me still. Across the room, Wag still nosed at the figure huddling on the bed.

  “Take me to her,” I said. The pain constricting my throat made it sound like a threat. “Hurry, before the duke’s men get here or I pass out.” Already the room was starting to spin.

  Gael cradled me into her arms like a newborn, but the motion tore a scream from my throat as the broken bones in my arm shifted.

  Rory and Bolt put steel around me as Gael laid me on the bed and pulled back the blanket. Branna didn’t look any different from the day I first saw her, though no one with me except for Gael would have known that. I held out a shaking and bloody hand to touch her, but she recoiled.