The Shattered Vigil

by Patrick W. Carr

  “It’s okay, Branna,” Gael said. “He’s here to help.”

  She still didn’t let me touch her, her gaze darting instead to Rory, Bolt, and Wag.

  Soldiers crashed into the room, armed with pikes and torches, adding their light to ours. Too many times circumstance had contrived to keep me from learning the identity of Elwin and Robin’s killer. I had no intention of allowing it to happen again. When Branna made no move to take my hand, I took hers instead.

  I fell through the rich green of her eyes and into the thoughts and memories beyond, recollections of fear and shame. The threads of her memories streaked past me, most in darker shades. Here and there a brightly colored strand flowed around me, but there were few of those, too few. In her river of memory I spotted a recollection the shade of pitch, and I slid into it, letting it become part of me.

  I walked through the upper merchants’ section of Bunard with my head down, my steps quick, but not fast enough to outpace the burn of shame that lit my face. My throat hurt with the strain of bearing my shame and rage in silence. Home. I just wanted to be home, where I could bathe and hide. Dawn was close, and the city would come alive soon.

  Desires burned in my chest that bore no resemblance to those that allowed Andler to barter me to fellow merchants. I wanted a bath to wash the memory of yet another man’s touch from my skin. I wanted to hide my face and body so that no one would ever see it again. But most of all I wanted Andler dead with a passion that threatened to turn my mind to ash.

  I ducked away from Bunard’s main thoroughfare. Too many people might see me there. Only sellers and night women returning to their own bed would be out at this hour, and dressed as I was, no one would mistake me for anything except what I’d become, what Andler had forced on me. Following the path of the Rinwash, I made my way south, my soft boots silent on the stones.

  And stopped.

  Voices. I heard voices. Ducking beneath the eaves of the nearest building, I considered backtracking through the market, but some early riser would likely see me. I slid around the corner, my back against the wall, wanting to flee but holding.

  Pure night never fell in the city—there were too many people who worked early or late, or conducted their business unseen—and tonight a crescent moon added its own illumination. Near the flood wall, I saw three men—two facing one, each man tense.

  “Come, Elwin,” the lone figure said. “There is no need for doubt.” Tall, but hidden in shadow, he moved like a man in his prime. He stood with his hand outstretched, expectant.

  Slowly, as if in a trance, the other man lifted his hand, reaching.

  “Eldest,” the man with the sword said, “this is some sorcery. Let us wait for dawn.”

  Elwin’s hand stopped, and his movements became tentative. “I saw you.”

  “A likeness placed there by our enemy,” the man said. “I assure you, I’m alive.” He kept his hand outstretched, the offer plain.

  “Where have you been?”

  The man took a half step toward Elwin, and the guard tensed. “Discovering the truth. The exordium, the liturgy, the forest—they are all just phantoms, mere shadows pointing to substance. There is so much more. We are so much more.”

  Some resolve appeared to take hold of Elwin. He stiffened, and his hands balled into fists. “Why meet at night?”

  The other man stepped forward, and the guard tensed again.

  “When does the truth ever come without a price?” the man said. “For uncounted days I lay in the confines of the forest, locked in a struggle to understand its power, its evil. At first I ranged through the trees, lost, disoriented within lightless shadow where the sun never hits the ground.”

  “Why did you go?” Elwin asked.

  “I wanted to understand,” he said. “For uncounted years we tracked those who slipped past the sentinels, never confronting the forest itself.” He inched closer. “I grew weary of my ignorance, and I longed to strike a blow against the evil that could make a man less than he was. And I found it.” He laughed an easy sound that spoke of long familiarity renewed. “Come, Robin, you were ever suspicious of me. I assure you, I am quite safe.”

  The sword in the guard’s hand never wavered. “Where’s Blade?”

  “I’m sorry,” the man said. “I thought I could protect him, but his mind broke after the third day.”

  “You left him,” Robin said.

  The man shook his head. “No. I was taken from him. I fought the insanity of the Darkwater, felt its poison rage within me. Time ceased, and when I came to myself, Blade was gone.”

  “That was ten years ago,” Elwin said.

  “So long?” the other man asked.

  “Eldest,” Robin said, “let us wait for dawn.”

  The man shifted, no longer reaching, his posture relaxed, diffident. “My knowledge is not without cost. My long struggle in the forest has damaged my eyes. I can no longer abide the sun. But if you wish, we can meet again after sunrise.”

  “Tell me what you saw,” Elwin said, his voice almost pleading. “What is the Darkwater?”

  The other man shook his head. “Words can’t describe it. I descended into that place that denies sun and time and came to water that stretched away from me in the darkness. Massive trees rose from its banks. I stood on the shore of a lake whose boundaries are shrouded in perpetual night. Desperate to understand but fearful of what might be lurking within their depths, I remained for a time beyond reckoning.

  “Finally, I stepped into those waters.” He raised his arms, palms up. “And I was reborn.” Figures materialized, separating themselves from the shadows, moving with soundless footsteps and the grace of the gifted. “Sinking through mud, I felt something unexpected. I cast off the strictures of unthinking obedience and plunged my hands through the water and ooze, striking not stone but metal.” His voice lowered. “I knew.”

  Elwin shook his head in disbelief or wonder. “You delved the forest.” He looked as if he would withdraw, but a heartbeat later he leaned forward. “What is the Darkwater?”

  The other man might have moved. “If you want to know, I will show you. Touch me, brother.”

  “Eldest, don’t,” Robin said, his voice pleading. “I can’t protect you.”

  “No,” the man said. “You can’t.”

  Elwin moved as if in a dream, his hand outstretched.

  With a cry of mingled rage and loss, Robin struck.

  I came out of the delve into the light of the room with Branna’s face before me. Around us soldiers stood with pikes. Gael stood beside me, guarding me with the glaring light of the torch Myle had made for her, but it was Bolt’s gaze I sought. The room spun, and I looked at my guard through a narrowing tunnel of black.

  “It was Cesla,” I said as the room and everything in it faded. “He’s alive.”

  Screams erupted from outside the window.

  Epilogue

  Edring, Aille

  Two months later

  In a few more weeks, far to the north, the wind would be blowing down the length of the cut, the mountains channeling the frigid blast into a weapon that would batter the walls of the keep in Bunard. But here in Edring, the seasons were more muted, their voices blending so that the change from one to the next had to be defined by the passage of time rather than the change in the weather.

  Sweat glistened on each brow at the table, but while I shifted and squirmed in the late afternoon sun, wiping the salt water from my forehead, Pellin seemed comfortable, relaxing in the heat. Toria Deel luxuriated in it, as though the sultry breeze from the south sea was the only thing she found pleasurable in our meeting. Fess and Mark, seated next to each other, endured the warmth with the stoic aplomb typical of the urchins—what they couldn’t change, they simply endured.

  Yet there was an emotional distance between the two I’d never witnessed before. Even their offhand exchanges carried notes of formality that grieved me. Bronwyn’s gift had come to Fess despite her best efforts to prevent it. Adding that to
the gift he had received from Balean—something the Vigil had previously thought impossible—the boy had already begun to pay the price.

  I scratched at the bumpy scar along my right arm and tried to be grateful to be alive.

  Somewhere in my mind I became aware that Bolt had finished relating the tale of our escape from Cesla and that Pellin and Toria had turned their attention to me, waiting for an answer.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I missed that.”

  “Why did it take you so long to come to Edring?” Toria said with that tone and expression that communicated quite clearly that this was the second time she’d posed the question.

  I couldn’t find it within myself to take offense. Maybe the summer heat had lulled my tongue and wit to sleep, but probably I was just too tired to care. “If you’ll recall, you abandoned me in Bunard without telling me where you intended to meet. We spent almost two months trying to find you and Pellin and Bronwyn by the Darkwater. We only traveled here because I wanted to check on Custos.”

  Toria waved at one of the flying bugs that plagued the southern half of Aille in such abundance, and the motion served to dispel the objection in my words if not my tone. “He’s ensconced within the library with . . .” She stopped short of saying Peret Volsk’s name.

  And that was probably the real reason she was angry with me.

  “Sending the librarian with Volsk was an unnecessary risk,” Pellin said, but there was no heat to his voice. The discovery that Cesla was still alive had put the expression on his face of a man who’d woken from a nightmare only to discover that the terrors from his dream had followed him into the waking world.

  His fingers twitched toward my arm, the desire to delve me again plain in the unconscious gesture. “For hundreds of years Bronwyn and I have searched the contents of the library over and again. We never found anything that told us why the Darkwater was evil or how to fight it.”

  “What did you see at the forest?” Toria asked, splitting her question between me and Bolt.

  My guard answered first. “The kings and queens have it surrounded, and the lines are drawn.” He shook his head. “But they can’t hold forever. Rumors of gold continue. It’s only a matter of time before it sweeps through them like a fever.”

  Bolt let it go at that, but the news was worse, and it needed to be said. “Rymark, Ellias . . . ” I threw up a hand. “Every army around the forest has caught at least one deserter returning from the forest, but none of them have gone crazy. The commanders in the field are still putting the ones they discover to the sword, but there’s no way to catch them all, and that sort of discipline breeds its own rebellion.”

  “‘Push a weapon too hard and it turns on its wielder,’” Bolt quoted.

  Pellin sighed. “It would have been better if the deserters had gone insane. Now the rest will lose their fear of the Darkwater.”

  “At least we know where your brother went,” I said. “With Jorgen dead, it’s a safe bet Cesla’s controlling those who have entered the Darkwater.”

  Pellin nodded, but only after he flinched at the mention of his brother’s name. “He’s not my brother anymore. Cesla was incredibly gifted and headstrong—a few would say arrogant.”

  Bolt coughed. “Maybe more than a few.”

  “But he was never evil.”

  I looked around the table at our small company. Toria had managed to find someplace for her gaze to land other than Pellin or me. We were an incongruous group, a mix of priests and urchins fighting men. Between the Vigil and the guards and the urchins we were the most dangerous people on the continent, but we were too few.

  Far too few.

  “I can’t figure out why it was so important for him to silence Branna,” I said. “What is Cesla trying to hide?”

  Pellin looked at me before shaking his head. “Since we delved you, I’ve been through every memory I have of Cesla, but nothing within them hints at any weakness I can see.”

  “I’ve done the same,” Toria said, but she spoke to her hands clasped on the table in front of her, and for a moment I saw the tendons flex in tension.

  “Where is Branna?” I asked. Pellin had delved her and hidden her away within hours of our arrival.

  The Eldest took a protracted breath before he answered. “I sent her and Lelwin to Elbas. The Servants there are the best healers on the continent.”

  A dark shadow floated across Fess’s and Mark’s expressions, and I saw their hands reach for their daggers. They knew what had happened to Lelwin, and though I couldn’t fault their reactions, the depth of their rage scared me, because it mirrored my own.

  “We can’t just sit here,” I said.

  That broke Toria’s unseeing gaze, shaking her out of whatever memory had taken her. “What would you have us do? Storm the forest?” She waved at our group. “The Vigil was never meant to fight—we were meant to guard.”

  I leaned back in my chair and took an ale-sized swallow of the wine in front of me until the warmth in my throat matched the sultry air of Edring. She was right. If the Vigil couldn’t fight, then there was no point in going north to the forest.

  I’d never been one to shy away from bleak assessments, and I didn’t bother to now. “The kings can’t hold forever.”

  Before Pellin or anyone else could answer, Wag, too big now to pass as an ordinary dog, came to his feet to stare at the door in expectation.

  Custos and Peret Volsk entered a moment later, discomfited at seeing us all looking their way. Without looking in Toria’s direction, Volsk managed to position himself behind one of the ornamental pillars in the room, blocking her view.

  Custos looked as if he were bleeding from the mouth. Thick red liquid oozed from his lips, leaving small trails down his chin.

  “What happened to you?”

  He blinked, swallowing thickly as he wiped his chin with his sleeve. “Ah. We stopped by the market. They have figs, Willet, the most amazing figs! I’d read about them, of course, but the words can’t convey the reality.”

  I let myself laugh. There would be little enough to laugh about later, and it seemed to me one of the ways to fight the coming darkness, feeble though it might be. “Your mouth looks like someone hit you.”

  “They’re called blood figs, my boy. It’s as if Aer imbued them with wine.”

  Volsk cleared his throat, and Custos turned to give him an owlish blink. “Hmm? Yes! I’ve found something, Willet. Do you remember what I told you about the Everwood?”

  Somewhere in the jumble of my head were all the memories I’d gathered since Elwin had passed me his gift. “No. Remind me.”

  My friend’s eyes brightened until they could have lit the room. “I think we can call them, Willet. The clues were there all along, but it was the language—the language changed so that we didn’t understand what we were reading.”

  I wasn’t the only one who was lost. Except for Volsk, every face in the room mirrored my confusion.

  “Call who, old friend?”

  His smile matched the light in his eyes. “The Fayit.”

  Ah.

  Pellin and Toria slumped in their seats, their disappointment obvious. Gael gave a musical laugh—not mocking, merely fond—but everyone else wore expressions of disbelief. Except Volsk. His mouth tightened, almost as if he were offended on Custos’s behalf. I must have misinterpreted.

  But Custos had surprised me more than once. Of all the people in the room, only I was in a position to fully appreciate the mind that lay behind that unprepossessing gaze. Only I had delved him, and right or wrong, my friend was worthy of respect.

  “How?” I asked. “Do we have to go to the Everwood?” But I knew the answer even as the words left my mouth.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. The rhymes and stories seem to indicate that they have their favorite haunts, but the location needn’t be specific.”

  “Are you sure it will work?”

  He bit his lip, his enthusiasm visibly waning. “I think so, but I haven’t b
een able to find any of their names.”

  Pellin held up a hand for silence, and Custos rocked back on his heels. “I appreciate your efforts, my friend, but I’ve read the texts—dozens of times, actually—and Bronwyn lived in the library whenever she could make her way back here.

  “We spent decades trying to unravel the meaning behind the singsong chants, along with their games.” He looked at Custos, his brows raised in speculation. “Did she ever tell you her theory behind the children’s game ‘the calling of the fates’? No? Well, I’m sure she would have shared it with you eventually. Odd, isn’t it? No matter where that game is played, even on the southern continent, a thousand leagues from here, the rules are the same. The children form a circle of four or six or nine to chant their rhyme and ask the fates who will die.”

  I didn’t need Custos to tell me fate and Fayit had become synonymous in our language. Anyone who’d been an acolyte to the priesthood would know.

  “That’s just it,” Custos said. “I believe, if we can assemble a circle of nine pure talents, six gifts, or four temperaments . . . we can call them.”

  Pellin shook his head. “We tried. It didn’t work. Bronwyn believed the problem lay in the decay of man himself. There are no pure gifts or talents or temperaments in the world any longer. Man has become less than what he was.”

  Custos shook his head. “I think the problem lies in the absence of the name. In the children’s game, they select one of their own to be the Fayit, and then they call him or her by name. Only then do they appear in the circle.”

  Frustration creased Pellin’s brow. “There are no names in those silly rhymes—not in our library or any other.” He sighed at the look on Custos’s face. “I mean no offense, my friend. In this time of encroaching night, you’ve found a way to fill me with wonder I haven’t felt for hundreds of years, but rhymes and songs won’t help us. We don’t have the time to go chasing hints and suggestions. We need a plan and weapons. We are all that remains of the Vigil.”

  I stood, lifting myself out of my chair as he spoke, enamored of a strange impulse, as though the vault in my mind had opened before I could go to sleep. In the midst of the dense jaccara trees of the open-air seating in the village of Edring just north of Cynestol, I could have suddenly pointed north and west to the Everwood with unerring accuracy.