The Shock of Night Read online

  © 2015 by Patrick W. Carr

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-6546-3

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by LOOK Design Studio

  Author represented by The Steve Laube Agency

  To my father, Major Joe William Carr, USAF, and to all the other men and women who carry the wounds of war on their body and in their spirit.

  Thank you

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Map of Continent

  The Exordium of the Liturgy

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Patrick W. Carr

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  THE EXORDIUM OF THE LITURGY—

  The six charisms of Aer are these:

  For the body, beauty and craft

  For the soul, sum and parts

  For the spirit, helps and devotion

  The nine talents of man are these:

  Language, logic, space, rhythm,

  motion, nature, self, others, and all

  The four temperaments of creation are these:

  Impulse, passion, observation, and thought

  Within the charisms of Aer, the talents of man,

  and the temperaments imbued in creation

  are found understanding and wisdom. Know and learn.

  Prologue

  Elwin stopped at the edge of the forest, his eyes scanning the trees for any movement that might presage an attack, though the man at his right, Robin, would surely be doing the same and better than he. Still, no one living stood in a better position to appreciate their danger. Within the shadowed canopy of twisted black-leaved trees nothing stirred. No bird called its summer cry, no squirrel foraged the floor, no fox hunted.

  Elwin almost touched the sliver of metal tucked away in his cloak, stopping just short of brushing the shiny yellow fragment of aurium, afraid to confirm its impossible existence.

  “A blacksmith,” he muttered.

  Robin turned from his inspection of the cursed forest to give him a questioning look. “Eldest?”

  For a moment he considered brushing aside the invitation to explain, but Robin’s insight had proven valuable before, despite his youth. “The dead man back there was a blacksmith. Soot marked the scars of old burns on his hands, and his clothes still held the smell of fire and quenching oil.” Elwin tapped his cloak pocket where the shard of metal rested, the man’s death sentence had he not already been dead. “That still doesn’t explain how he managed to survive as long as he did.”

  Robin nodded. “How does a blacksmith come to be in possession of aurium?”

  Elwin nodded and then shook his head. “How does anyone come to possess the forbidden metal?”

  They continued riding north, their horses ascending out of the fertile valley stretching east and west that marked the border between Owmead and the northernmost kingdom on the continent, Collum. The question lay between them, unanswered, like the death of a patriarch no one dared mention, but they’d left the torn and mauled body of the blacksmith behind as a warning, according to the law of the kingdoms that bordered the Darkwater Forest.

  They kept to the edge of the forest as the landscape grew rockier, defying the efforts of those who farmed it. After another mile, Robin pointed. “There. Another one,” he said in a tone of voice like the crushing of rock.

  The mound of torn and matted fur, buzzing with flies in the sun, brought a surge of bile to Elwin’s throat, and he looked away to bring his stomach under control. “Check it,” he ordered in a voice that sounded hollow and strangely far away.

  Tying a strip of cloth across his mouth and nose, Robin dismounted. The flies shifted at his approach—and for a moment Elwin’s guard wore a dark halo—but no other carrion eaters defiled the carcass. The body of the sentinel, larger than a wolf by half and more heavily muscled as well, had been left untouched this close to the forest. The sentinels sparked fear even in death.

  Elwin nodded to himself—animals were wise in such things. He saw Robin’s chest rise and fall in a sigh even before he turned from the body.

  “Like the others,” Robin said. “It bled to death. There are cuts all over it.” He stooped to pull the lips back from the muzzle, its triangular shape a testimony to the power in the jaws. “Clean. Whoever killed it managed to do so without taking any injuries.”

  “Any sign of the pup?” Elwin asked.

  Robin surveyed the landscape for a moment, then pointed to a smaller mound some twenty paces away. “There.”

  With a mental wrench that rose almost to the level of physical pain, Elwin abandoned another hope. Fantasies and delusions would no longer help them. “Could you do such a thing, Robin?”

  To anyone else the question might have been an accusation. That Robin had never left his side since becoming his protector cast the query in a different light. His guard cocked his head, his eyes growing distant, and Elwin knew he fought the beast at his feet within his mind, playing stroke and parry before answering. “Yes,” he said finally. “But not alone.”

  “Are you saying there is someone out there better than you?” Elwin asked.

  Thankfully, his gu
ard shook his head, leaving him one of his few remaining hopes. “No. Some of the wounds on the sentinel are on the back flanks and legs. I would think three or four men attacked it. I do not think any one of them to be my equal.”

  He caught the slight emphasis on think and tried to keep the surprise from his face, but Robin had only paused.

  “I wouldn’t want to come up against these men without my brothers to help. They’re certainly gifted.”

  Elwin growled a curse that had nothing to do with his time in the priesthood of the Merum order. “Or something like it. That’s a half dozen sentinel deaths in the past year. We don’t have the replacements.” He tapped the sliver of aurium in his pocket and looked at the forest as if the trees might uproot themselves and attack there in the noonday sun. “Faran can’t keep up. It takes years to breed and train a sentinel.” Despair clogged Elwin’s throat, and for a moment it broke free of his ability to contain it. “I wish Cesla were here.”

  Robin turned away at the mention of Elwin’s brother, unwilling, perhaps, to intrude upon the grief that still seemed so recent. “What of his gift?” he asked softly.

  Elwin nodded in approval. His guard possessed a talent for knowing others in addition to his more obvious physical ones. Descending into that familiar grief wouldn’t serve them. “We follow the trail as best we can,” he said with a sigh. “Sometimes I think we did our job too well. We’ve hidden ourselves so completely that the gift becomes difficult to find if it goes free.” He patted a pocket. “But there’s a rumor from the village of Cryos.”

  “Convenient,” Robin said without explaining.

  Elwin nodded. “Yes, we can visit Faran and see if there is any way he can replenish the sentinels more quickly.” The thought of the journey north wearied him. He carried too many memories, and his mind bowed beneath their weight, like a wagon axle trying to support too many bags of grain.

  Elwin held out his hands to survey them in the muted sunlight that filtered through the cloud cover. The prominent veins and the skin, as thin as the papery outer layer of an onion, still surprised him. “I’m almost ready to move on, Robin. I’ve used the gift too often, and now it’s used me up.”

  The sentinel lying dead at their feet brought a surge of anger, and he straightened in his saddle. “But before I go, I need to bring justice to the men who did this.”

  He twitched the reins, and they rode northwest, following a trail only he could sense, deeper into the kingdom of Collum.

  Chapter 1

  The Twentieth Year of King Laidir’s Reign

  The pounding on my door pulled me from slumber, and I drifted toward waking, my mind a piece of sodden wood floating toward the surface of a lake. I had one hand on the door latch and the other clutching a dagger behind my back before I managed to get both eyes open. Through the peephole I saw a guard—one of the king’s by his dress—standing next to Gareth, a night constable. I snuck a glance out the window of the apartment the king provided me as a lord of his employ. The glass wasn’t of sufficient quality to offer me anything more than an impression of what lay beyond, but I could tell the sun wasn’t up yet.

  The remnants of some dream I didn’t want to remember cracked my voice as I opened the door. “What?”

  The guard gave me an almost imperceptible bob of his head. My title was the least in Laidir’s court. “You’re needed, Lord Dura.”

  I tried to keep my temper in check. My unique position in service to the king seemed to require the same hours as a midwife’s. “What about Jeb?” I asked, mentioning the chief reeve, the one who should have been awakened instead of me.

  Gareth shook his head. “We thought we should wake you first. There’s been a killing in the lower merchants’ quarter.”

  A thread of panic shot through my chest, filling my heart with ice, but I kept my gaze on Gareth with an effort. What had I dreamed? I kept my voice steady and played the part of the interrupted sleeper as best I could. “So? What’s so dire about some fool shopkeeper who can’t keep his money safeguarded?”

  Gareth’s plain soldier’s face lost what little expression it held. “It’s a churchman.”

  I stifled my next comment and turned back into the apartment to get dressed. It took me a moment to realize I already was. Only my cloak and boots were missing. Another surge of panic brought me to full wakefulness, and I moved quickly to prevent the guards from entering at my delay. I lit a candle and spotted my cloak lying across a chair on the far side of the room. I crossed over and lifted it.

  An oath crossed my lips before I could prevent it at seeing spots of blood on the hem. I rolled it into a bundle and shoved it beneath the armoire before retrieving another and picking up my weapon. All of the city’s reeves wore a sword, but most of them didn’t expect trouble. Except me. I attracted it the way a lodestone drew iron. I moved to a small stand and tucked a pair of daggers into leather pouches stitched into the back of my belt and slid another into the inside of my right boot. Then I tried to reconcile myself to being awake before dawn.

  Jeb ran the city watch and did it well. If it came to brawling or persuading some poor unfortunate to confess, Jeb’s methods yielded results. His fists served as a fair approximation of iron, and he enjoyed using them to convince people to mend the error of their ways. It was amazing how the sound of his knuckles popping loosened a man’s tongue.

  But murder presented a different challenge, particularly one without witnesses or one involving people of importance. Jeb’s persuasion couldn’t quicken the tongues of the dead, which explained Gareth’s presence at my door. And I had proven my worth to the king. A year prior, I’d had the mixed fortune of solving a crime that earned me his favor. Over the objections of the rest of the nobility, the king raised me to lordship, though without lands or gift. I became the least in his service. My current duties were the price I paid for my nobility and another reward he’d given me that I esteemed more highly.

  We exited the halls of King Laidir’s stronghold and came out onto one of the blocky staircases that led downward, descending the massive tor on which it had been built, carved from gut rock. Enormous granite stones merged with the mountain that defined the ponderous edifice of Laidir’s seat. The vertical walls were high enough to be impervious to ladders, and the surrounding landscape made it difficult to bring siege engines close enough to do any real damage.

  The massive city of Bunard, King Laidir’s seat of power, spread beneath us. The Rinwash River curved around the stronghold to the north and west, but the river had been diverted into channels to supply water to each quarter of the city. If the sun had been up I could have seen the bridges connecting each section of the city, but in the darkness only the ends were visible, illuminated by the watch fires at each bank.

  I followed Gareth downward until we arrived at the king’s stables, the smell of horse strong in the still air of the morning. Mounting quickly, we set out for the lower merchants’ quarter as the sky showed hints of slate in the east, riding southwest, passing by the four massive cathedrals of the divisions of the church, each with their criers’ stand out front—thankfully empty. I appreciated the silence. By the time I returned, the day’s chosen lector would be out front, declaring each division’s interpretation of the Word for the unbelieving.

  After crossing the first bridge, we rode through the opulence of those living nearest His Majesty, structures just short of castles, with broad sweeping arches and stained-glass ballrooms. The scarcity of land precluded the types of formal grounds many of them maintained in their holdings, but their meticulously groomed gardens exuded wealth and order just the same.

  They were as welcoming as iron.

  We crossed the next bridge over the Rinwash, heading into the upper merchants’ quarter, and turned south, passing homes nearly the equal of the nobility, though they lacked the space for private gardens and they held about themselves the concentrated energy of those focused on profit.

  When we passed over the next bridge, the buildings changed
from heavy-cut granite to wood, first with several stories, then with just two or one, their plain windows already glowing as those within began preparations for their day in the marketplace or at their craft. The ring of a hammer started somewhere off to my right, and the smell of bread drifted to me, reminding me I’d yet to eat.

  Gareth took the opportunity our travel afforded to provide what little information he had around mouthfuls of dark bread. “We found two men, one dead from blood loss, the other nearly so.” His mouth pulled to one side beneath a nose that had been broken so many times that it changed directions often. “A seamstress heard the clash of steel and started screaming, but by the time the night watch arrived, the attackers had fled.”

  I logged Gareth’s pithy summary away. My heart beat faster with each step closer, and the abstraction I felt in the presence of the dead commanded my attention. I concentrated long enough to ask a proper question. “Do you have any names?”

  He nodded. “The watchman recognized them. The dead man is Robin. He’s the menial of Elwin, the man who got hit on the head. They’re Servants.”

  I pulled the mist of predawn into my lungs and squinted through the darkness. Some might resent the studied aloofness of a Merum priest or the zeal of the Vanguard, and others might even take exception to the aggressive mercy practiced by the Absold. But no one in their right mind begrudged a Servant. They seldom preached—the only exception being their crier—wouldn’t fight or try to change anyone. They served others. But for some reason, two men of the most humble of the four orders on the continent had been attacked. My heart quickened again.

  We rounded a corner and came to the edge of a small grassy area bordering a clump of plain wooden buildings that huddled against the dark. A stone wall about eight feet high separated the area from the bank of one of the man-made branches of the Rinwash River.

  Gareth pointed to a pile of limbs and cloth sprawled against the base of the wall. Here and there pale white skin showed against stone or fabric. Dark wet blotches covered the tunic. Gaping wounds assaulted my vision as the smell of blood hit my nose, and I fought to keep the remnants of my last meal in place. Gareth said something that almost penetrated the spell cast by the dead man, but none of the words registered as important.