“I speak for the Clast!”
Toria beckoned Elory closer, her conversation with Lelwin forgotten. “At last, we can take a closer look at this heresy.” Casually, so that only he would notice, she pulled her gloves free and tucked them into the wide belt that circled her waist.
“Lady Deel, I cannot safeguard you in such circumstances.”
She pointed to the crowd. “Look at them. As rapt as children at a puppet show. Why? What is he offering them?”
Elory’s head swiveled as he searched for threats. “Can we not wait until the crowd has begun to disperse before you delve the speaker?” he whispered.
After a moment, she nodded. “Yes, there is time. Let us hear what the Clast has to say.”
Chapter 39
Toria Deel waited at the edge of the crowd gathered around the crimson-faced speaker—screamer was more like it—with her hands bared but safely tucked into her cloak.
“Fools!” the man screamed as the color of his face deepened until it took on a purplish cast. “You are all fools playing a game that only the church and the nobles can win. They line their pockets with the sweat of your brow, and you can think of no response except to hope that a free gift will come and elevate you to the very nobility you despise. Yes,” he sneered, “you are all fools.”
“And who are you to be calling us fools?” A bearded man with dark eyes held up a fist, and Toria could see fresh soot and old burns on the skin. “Are your clothes so fine?”
The man on the platform laughed. “Like you, I was a fool once. I worked for my noble, plying my trade, rising before the sun and working long after it had set. Most of my work went to line my lord’s pockets, but like every good man or woman, I took a portion of what was left to me in poverty and gave it to the church to help those whose straits were worse than mine.
“Until I discovered that the poor they were supposedly helping never got any less poor unless they joined the ranks of the Merum, the Servants, the Absold, or the Vanguard. No, the rich got richer and the poor stayed poor. Yes, I was a fool like you.”
The speaker held out his arm, pointing, and swept his arm and his lurid gaze across the crowd in silence. Toria felt it slide across her like the chill from a cloud blocking the sun. The mass of people fell silent, waiting.
“What can be done?” the speaker said softly. And hundreds of people leaned forward, straining to hear. “What can ungifted cobblers and smiths and weavers do with their sorry lot in life? Only this . . . ” He held up a finger. “Stop listening to the lies that come from those who say you’re powerless and stupid.” He shook his head. “Perhaps I ask too much of you. Perhaps your belief in the lies of the nobility and the church is too ingrained. Perhaps”—his voice rose—“you do not have the strength and the courage to challenge your most basic assumptions.”
The smith, the man who’d questioned him earlier, shouldered his way through the crowd. “My name is Angis, and I will gainsay any man who says so.” He held up a horseshoe, took an end in each hand, and pulled until it had flattened into a broad arc.
“Well and good, Angis,” the man said. “You have the strength, but are you courageous as well? Can you fight your fear in the hope of a greater good for yourself and your family?”
Angis raised a fist the size of a melon. “Try me and see.”
“Then I tell you all this,” the speaker said. “The oldest lies have the most power. For generations we’ve been told the Darkwater Forest is evil. ‘Don’t go into it,’” he said in a mocking falsetto. “Ask yourselves this: What is it they don’t want you to know?” He reached into his pocket. “I have been to the forest. Do I look crazed?” He pulled his hand out and held up a yellow lump of metal with a faint bluish tinge between his thumb and forefinger. It was no larger than Toria’s thumbnail, but the crowd gasped at the sight of it, and everyone took an involuntary step toward the speaker. “If you wish to know whether the rumors of gold in the forest are true, here’s your answer. The nobles and the church have the gifts and the gold. What do you have?”
He took a step back toward the stairs leading up to the podium. “I have nothing more to say except this—the Clast opened my eyes. When you tire of living someone else’s lie, we are here to help you see the truth.”
Toria watched as the speaker descended the rude ladder back to the ground, his guards enforcing space around him, keeping everyone who’d witnessed his speech and display at bay. More than ever she needed to touch him, to use her gift to delve into the speaker’s mind to discover his true intentions.
“He’s well-spoken for a rouser,” Lelwin said.
Toria started. She’d forgotten the presence of her apprentice, so intent she’d been on the speaker for the Clast. “A what?”
Lelwin chuckled softly and smiled, enhancing the heart shape of her face. “A rouser is what we call someone who works a crowd. We don’t have any in the urchins—people don’t really respond to calls for action from a child—but we’ve hired a few from the thieves’ guild from time to time to create a distraction when we needed to steal during daylight.” She shook her head. “None were so skilled as this one, though. The gold nugget was a perfect touch. A few dozen speeches like that one and the Clast could field its own army.”
Toria nodded. “And that may be exactly what he intends.” She flexed her hands, checking over her shoulder for Elory. “Lelwin, stay close. Elory, follow at a distance.”
Her guard’s face went flat. “No. I cannot protect you. Let us wait until he separates himself from his guards.”
She put her hand on his chest, avoiding any contact with his bare skin. “Even then there is no guarantee you could keep me safe.” She nodded toward Lelwin. “A pair of women will hardly be seen as a threat. A brief touch of greeting coupled with a few inane questions about the Clast and we will retreat.” She tightened her hand into a fist. “Then, if we find what I suspect, we will send word to the kings and they can stamp out this heresy once and for all.”
Lelwin shook her head. “Heresies, especially the attractive ones, die hard.”
“No,” Elory repeated. “I cannot allow it, Toria Deel. The survival of the Vigil is in our keeping. This is foolish.”
He actually meant to defy her. “You are sworn to protect and obey me. In this instance you cannot do both the way you would wish.” The speaker for the Clast had negotiated the end of the crowd and was moving away, toward the inner part of the city. “Do both as well as you are able. I am going to follow and delve him now. If you are by my side, our danger increases.”
Without waiting for his next argument, she turned and hurried after the man she intended to touch with Lelwin by her side. Elory, shaking his head and his face filled with lightning and thunder, dropped back until ten paces separated them and moved out to the side, walking parallel to her in a meandering path so that no one would suspect they were together.
The speaker for the Clast rounded a corner into a street that ran perpendicular to the river, his strides eating up the ground. Toria debated calling out to the speaker but was saved the trouble when another man, the smith, Angis, also following after the speaker, hailed him.
“Speaker! Speaker!”
The red-faced man turned, his gaze imperious, and watched as the man approached. Toria fell in just behind him, hoping the speaker would assume they were together.
“What do you want?” the speaker asked.
“I want the truth,” Angis said.
The speaker’s gaze took in the smith from head to toe and back again, then slipped to Toria and Lelwin, his face filling with disdain. “Few have the stomach for the truth. Besides, I’ve already given it to you.” He turned, nodding to his guards and walked away.
For a moment, Toria quailed, her opportunity slipping away, but Angis was undeterred. He hustled after the speaker, calling for attention, and Toria followed.
But the speaker ignored them, moving farther from the docks and the boats, heading deeper into the city.
Angis,
his face florid, lost patience just as the speaker stopped at the juncture of a narrow alley and the street, and Toria nearly ran into him at the sudden stop. “I am Angis, the smith.” He held up one huge fist. “You will answer me.”
In the back of Toria’s mind an alarm sounded. The smith’s threat of violence was stiff and clumsy, the gesture of a player who had lost his lines and was left with no choice but to improvise.
Lelwin must have divined the truth as well. Her mouth opened to call the watch even as her hands darted to her belt for the knives she kept there, but the smith’s first blow took her in the temple.
Toria saw the second fist coming, knew she would be unable to duck it. She lurched back and flung up one naked hand before the blow brushed aside her fingers and crashed into her skull.
Everything went black.
She woke inside a room that smelled of old wood and dust. Pain lanced up her fingers and wrists like bolts of lightning, and her elbows twitched in response. The room glowed faintly by the light of a pair of candles resting on a crude trestle table to her left—the only piece of furniture other than the chair that bound her.
She corrected that. On her right, Lelwin sagged in a chair against the ropes that kept her prisoner. A trickle of blood ran down one cheek from a split on her temple, emphasizing the pallor of her skin.
The speaker stood in front of her along with a single guard from the group that had surrounded him during his speech. Of the smith and the rest of the guards there was no sign. The speaker waited for her to take in her surroundings, his face no longer red from the exertions of his speech. For a moment she considered bluffing her position, but a glance at Lelwin persuaded her otherwise. Much of the blood on the side of her face had already dried. So, they’d been more than just momentarily unconscious from the smith’s blows. Elory wouldn’t be coming for them. She swallowed against her guilt.
“Do you always treat postulants this way or just the women?”
His pale eyebrows lifted and she noted the green of his eyes in the candlelight. “So I’m to believe you followed me to join the Clast?”
“Why else would I follow you?”
“You’re better clothed than most who wish to join our order,” the man said. “Soft, well-made boots, a skirt of fine wool, an expensively dyed linen shirt and vest. These all speak of some wealth, if not nobility.”
“And have you never had anyone come to you as a refugee from their own house?” she asked. Elory had to be seeking her. She refused to believe he might be dead. The Clast could not possibly own men gifted enough to kill her guard, and the sun had still been up when she and Lelwin had been taken.
“A few, but none so calculating in their approach.”
Her stomach tried to fall through her lap to the floor. Somehow she’d been spotted and taken, but how had they escaped Elory? “I only wished to learn more of the Clast.”
He nodded, his head bobbing up and down. “Oh, of that I have no doubt, but you were guarded by one of the gifted.” The speaker smiled at her, the expression of a man who’d just won a great prize. “And a pure gift at that. Even I was surprised at how long he fought to regain your side. But as the church likes to say, all men die.” He reached into his cloak and withdrew a piece of folded parchment. “Allow me to answer your deepest question.”
Moving to the table, he slid it across the floor until it and the candles it held were in front of her. By the light, she could see thin wisps of blond beard on his cheeks. With careful, almost reverent motions, he unfolded the parchment one crease at a time. Open, it faced him and he regarded it, his gaze roving across it as if to reassure himself of its contents. Then he turned it to face her, tilting it so that the light of the twin candles fell upon it.
She had no physical gift or talent that would have made her an artist or sculptor of renown, but she enjoyed drawing, and portraiture most of all. She recognized a similar talent, not gifting, in the lines that flowed across the parchment. Lines that showed her face in accurate detail.
The speaker nodded and refolded the parchment. “I was surprised to see you, yet I will be rewarded for my vigilance in taking you captive.”
She tried to breathe, but the air in the room had become thick and close, and her lungs worked against the constriction of her throat.
“Wiggle your fingers,” the speaker commanded.
Spellbound by the realization that she’d been the one being hunted, she moved her wrists against the bonds, straining to bring blood and feeling back to her hands. When burning pain came an instant later, she reached with her fingers and found cloth covering her hands.
“You are fortunate beyond expectation, Toria Deel.” The man smiled. “You will have what you’ve desired. You will meet the leader of the Clast. I am commanded to take you to the Darkwater, where you will meet the Icon.”
Her throat opened at last and she drew breath to scream, but the speaker stood in front of her. Laughing, he stuffed a bit of dirty rag into her mouth. Then he pulled a stoppered bottle from his cloak and sprinkled the cloth with a thick, yellowish liquid.
Chapter 40
For three days we had ridden toward Bunard as hard as our horses would allow, starting each morning when the sky lightened to charcoal from black and continuing past sunset each evening, using Rory’s night vision to guide us until it failed before setting up camp. On the afternoon of the third day we came in sight of the tor, rising up from the foothills and overlooking the broad flow of the Rinwash River.
“I don’t see smoke,” Bolt said. “That’s a good thing. It doesn’t seem to matter what goes wrong in a city, you can always count on some fool starting a fire.”
“Perhaps they skirted Bunard,” I said as I dismounted, but I didn’t really believe it. I pulled my glove to put my bare hand on Wag’s head. The wound in his side was still visible, but new pink tissue showed beneath the covering of tar, and after the first day out of Isenore, he’d jumped lightly from Dest’s back to run alongside the horses for long stretches.
A thousand scents of the city I’d never known existed jumped into my awareness, but mingled with those were “sister” and two that Wag knew as “killers.”
“The men we’re following and the sentinel are both here,” I said. “Or were as of five days ago. Their scents are a bit fresher, but we’ve only picked up a day or two.”
We came at the city from the northwest and boarded the ferry that would take us into Bunard proper. I motioned Bolt to join me at the rail, where I tried to keep Wag shielded from the farmers and villagers who’d boarded the ferry with us. I hoped they would just assume he was a big dog, but there was no mistaking the unnerving sense of intelligence in his clear gray eyes. Normal dogs might show a quizzical tilt of the head, but Wag’s glances held too much comprehension.
“We need a plan that doesn’t involve us walking into a trap.”
Bolt looked at me. “You might not be a target.”
I nodded. “I certainly hope not, but the wind shifted this morning. It’s coming out of the north now and there’s little chance the other sentinel hasn’t smelled her brother. The only question is whether or not the man managing her is aware of it.”
Bolt grew still, and the crags of age and weather that lined his face grew deeper. “It would be like Bas-solas all over again, both of us hunting the other, one with the advantage at night, the other with it during the day.”
I nodded. “I’d really like some way to weight the bones so that the odds are in our favor.”
Bolt looked out across the rail to the city, his eyes narrowed in thought. “The first thing you should do is check to see if he’s in the city. Find out where he’s been and you’ll get a good idea of who he’s hunting. Just don’t do it anywhere you will be noticed,” Bolt said, shaking his head. “You have this issue with Brid Teorian, if you recall. If the Chief of Servants sees you out and about in Bunard, she might drop you into the deepest prison she can find and leave you there. She let you go once. Don’t take that to mean
you have your freedom permanently.”
“What will she do once she discovers the sentinels have been all but wiped out and someone is hunting the Vigil? What kind of woman is the Chief?”
Bolt’s thick shoulders shifted beneath his cloak. “A few months ago you could have told the Chief not only what you were going to do, but what she was going to do as well and she would have done it. Her respect for the Vigil went that deep, and Brid took it personally that Elwin was killed in her city.” He shook his head. “But things have changed.
“I like Pellin, but he’s not as good with people as Elwin was, and nobody commanded respect and obedience like Cesla. The heads of the church don’t snap to and nod for Pellin. Worse, they’re scared—and rightly so. The Vigil is on the edge of extinction on the northern continent.” He gave me a very direct look. “The fact that you came to the Vigil through unorthodox means, along with your personal circumstances, makes it even less likely Brid Teorian will allow you to keep your freedom.”
I shook my head. “Stop talking around it. I have a vault.”
Bolt nodded. “All right, you have a vault.” His head jerked. “I make it a point to be adaptable, but even I can’t say that without the feeling I’ve got rats in my gut. We’ve spent too long hunting people like you. Nobody knows the truth of you, Willet. Not the Eldest. Not the heads of the church. Not even you.”
“And hopefully not whatever has gotten free of the Darkwater,” I added.
“‘Don’t borrow tomorrow’s trouble,’” Bolt quoted.
“I like that one,” I said, “but I don’t have to borrow it. I wake up with it every day and too many nights.” We stared out over the rail as the other shoreline drifted closer. By the time the ferry nestled into its dock and bumped the pier, I knew the first thing I had to do was to keep a promise. It wasn’t wise or smart or planned, but it felt right. “Let’s go see the queen.”
The Shattered Vigil Page 34