Dagger groggily sat up on the dusty stone floor. It was cracked and dirty, aged as if a hundred armies had marched across it. The room had walls of shadow that gave one the sense of hidden, limitless distance, and the light overhead had no apparent source. It gave the impression that walking in any direction would carry one no further from the light. There were several other shadows around her who were starting their own wake-up.

"We all here?" Dagger asked.

"Yeah," Saber said checking his body for the injuries he could remember sustaining just a seconds before he opened his eyes. He sighed with relief.

"Sound off," Dagger said.

"We've got everything. Equipment, arms and legs," Powder answered, gently shaking Pitch awake. The alchemist gasped and clutched around his body and lay back down. Vice was already on his knees, praying his gratitude for their deliverance. Dagger did not disturb him. She could see his armored hands were clean again, not so much as a bloody scrap of hair or skin decorating the rivets that studded the banded steel.

"You have arrived safe?" a dry voice whispered.

The figure was shrouded by flowing cloth. Its hands were clasped at what could have been its waist. For all The Armory knew, the handservants of the Vigil may as well have been stone obelisks clad in monk's robes. The cloth had no color, no weave of fiber and no pattern. Even the wrinkles where the cloth draped seemed painted on. Its whisper came from the space around each of their ears, not the figure itself.

"Thank you for the rescue," Dagger said.

"You paid the toll for the return, and several others besides. How is our little brother? The one who actually believes," the figure said wryly.

Dagger turned to look at Vice, who was still on his knees, his face contorting with the force of his prayer.

"Ecstatic," Dagger muttered.

"He's a good servant," the robed figure said. "As for the rest of you, well, we're grateful. Even the Watcher in the Darkness who might have closed his eyes is grateful."

"How do you know?" Dagger asked. She would have preferred that Vice make this kind of small talk with his god's servants, but he never did. At least the servants spoke to her in an ordinary matter, they didn't intone like some religious scree.

"Faith, I suppose. Come. Your return is nearly ready," the robed figure said.

"Already?"

"We need you down there, not up here. Don't forget that."

"Be hard to forget."

"Yes. Forgive me. You all serve the Vigil, and it's appreciated. But the machinery must be tended. And our stores are running dry. It's put us all on edge."

"We'll go. Better not to rock the boat."

"Or the afterlife in this case," the robed figure said with a dusty chuckle, "such as it is. This is not a place for the living. Come. We must hurry. The cargo you brought us must be processed before their own gods notice."

More robed figures like the one Dagger spoke to milled around the edges of the dark boundary, tending to clumps of gray-scale people who seemed to buzz and flicker around their edges. Dagger was sure if she'd stared hard enough she might have been able to see through them. Their shoulders were, to a one, slumped and defeated. Every now and then one would look up and glance around the expanse they waited in, fruitlessly and forever, and then returned their eyes to the space between their feet as if words of consolation were written on the stones. What was not empty, or filled with milling, disconsolate souls, was wound back and across with dusty machinery that stumbled when it rumbled. Pipes coiled like serpents, leading to and from a sentinal network of boilers, funnels and tanks. The robed figure led the Armory to a cage suspended a dozen feet above the ground. Inside were the twenty people they'd killed just before the end in Dahlsvaart. Alive again and very much not happy. They were shouting and rattling at their prison bars. Unlike the others in this place, they were full color and tangible. Some still held the weapons they'd died with, and they were fruitlessly trying to break the cage bars. This was not the beyond their faiths had promised them, if they had any. Many of them had probably given up on gods in this age and had expected a velvety blackness when their eyes closed for the last time, if they had thought about it at all. They had expected their lives to end. They had not expected to be captured.

"Twenty is a steep," Dagger said. "Where's the rest of them?"

"Twenty was just for your exit and return. The others you... collected...."

"You mean killed."

"Yes. Those have gone to repairs. The machine is less efficient than ever," the robed figure said.

They passed a trio of the robed figures standing around a large vat beneath which burned gray fire. Pipes connected to the vats belly extended away into the darkness. The robed servants of the Vigil grabbed a full-color soul from Dahlsvaart and pushed him protesting into the vat. He only had time to scream once before he was melted down to nothing and the pipes connecting to the van began glow dully as what was left of him was piped away to where it was needful. Dagger could hear the sound of tools in the darkness and of clanking machinery.

"Less efficient... Let's be honest. It's falling apart," the servant of the Vigil told continued. "We fix it as best we can but..."

"But you didn't build it."

"No," the robed figure said sadly. "And every year, the prayers from below grow fainter and fewer. More of our believers come here to wait forever. We must continue to steal."

Dagger nodded. Nothing lasted forever. Not even heaven. "It works out in our favor."

"Yes, it does."

"Let us the fuck out of here!" One of the laborer's screamed from inside the cage.

"Shortly," the robed figured answered. Vice caught up with them and pushed his way through the rest of the Armory to stand before the robed figure. He knelt.

"Rise, little brother," the robed figure said in a more formal tone. "The one you are kneeling to can no longer see it, and I am not fit to stand in the Watcher's place."

"It's all breaking down isn't it?" Vice said.

"It is," the robed figure said, "there are a few out in the world keeping us sustained. Soon you will return so that you might offer them your protection, that you might reaffirm their faith."

"We are ready. Where?"

"A town. Forty believers live there. Their lives have been... interrupted. There is a mortal threat. We think."

"You think?" Dagger asked.

"We weren't aware of them until recently. But with so few faithful, it's a bit like hearing a single voice once a chorus goes silent. And something nearby is making it difficult for us to hear them. Their prayers are garbled. There's fear, a lot of it. The details were burned away by panic."

"How recently?"

"Perhaps two hundred of your years."

"That's a long time."

"No. It isn't."

"How long have they been asking for help?"

"It is quite odd. It is as if something suddenly allowed the prayers to come through."

"So they could have been praying for... they could already be dead."

"No. We can feel them. They are alive. They can speak. And they aren't here."

Some of the twenty souls in the cage still screamed to be freed. Others had sat down, dejected and confused. Some called to friends they reconized, the others the Armory had killed in Dahlsvaart, as the servants of the Vigil prodded them to the rendering cauldrons and forced them in. The servants of the Vigil took this glowing material and were using it to repair the various contraptions barely visible at the edges of the room. Dagger turned back to the cage.

"These souls are fine for now," the Vigil's servant said. "They'll power the machines a bit longer. But they're nothing compared to the sustained prayers of the living. Render what aid you can. Keep them alive. They are no good to us here. We have no way to send them on."

"Couldn't you..."

"No!" Vice burst out.

The Vigil's robed accolyte seems to shrug or shake its head, or those gestures were just suggestions implanted in their minds.

"Calm yourself, little brother. Dagger, we've considered that. There's too little of them left. It wouldn't be worth that sort atrocity. Yet."

Dagger nodded. "Prep the machine."

The servant went to a lever and threw it. Mechanisms coughed and heaved to life with the whine of steel on steel. The cage holding the protesting souls of Dahlsvaart moved on a trellis across the room until it was suspended over a funnel. A different servant threw another lever and the funnel rattled as the grinders in its base started up. The souls in the cage looked down and started to scream. They tried to climb the bars and each other in a panic to get away from the base of the cage. Dagger didn't know what it looked like in there, and didn't ever want to, but she imagined a lot of really fast teeth. The cage bottom split, dumping its cargo into the funnel. A few of the workers managed to catch hold of the edge of the funnel, the rest hit the sides and slid into the grinders with a wet, crushing sound. The Vigil's servants went around the rim of the funnel with long, hooked poles and casually shoved the souls trying to climb out back until they tumbled into the grinders. Lights blazed on the machines around them and soon all coughed into dusty halflife. The light overhead brightened and the shimmering clusters of the Vigil's faithful sighed and raised their hoods to their heaven's sun.

Dagger turned to the rest of the Armory and gestured for them to follow as the Vigil's robed servant led them to a platform bathed in light.

"Your chariot," the servant said.

"Will it hold this time?"

"Sorry about that. We miscalculated the number we needed. That was a fresh malfunction. We've adjusted."

The Armory stood upon the platform. "We're ready," Dagger said.

Another switch was thrown. The edges of the Vigil's heaven blurred and faded.

Soon they were hurtling through the heavens in an igneous ball, fast as if they'd been fired from the bore of one of Powder's guns.