Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  HEAVEN’S NEEDLE

  Also by Liane Merciel from Pocket Books

  The River Kings’ Road

  Pocket Star Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

  incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are

  used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or

  persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Andress

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or

  portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address

  Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department,

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Pocket Star Books paperback edition May 2011

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-4391-5913-2

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7069-4 (ebook)

  This one’s for Nathan, who first told me how to fix it,

  and Peter, who walked the dog while I did the fixing.

  Contents

  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

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  SUMMER 1217

  The stench of river mud was suffocating. River mud and coal smoke: the twin perfumes of Carden Vale.

  Corban clapped his sleeve over his nose and breathed shallowly through his mouth as he edged away from the waterside and down a crooked alley, following close on his guide’s heels. The cloth did little to filter the smell, but that wasn’t the point; the purpose of the gesture was not to relieve Corban’s nose, but to hide his face. Few knew him here, but there was no call to be careless.

  Centuries past, this had been a proud town. The Baozites who’d built the fortress overshadowing Carden Vale had needed a river port to service the barges that carried grain from the farmlands and brought back coal and iron from the mountains. They had designed one unrivaled in its age. Under Ang’duradh’s rule, caravans had climbed the high passes and braved the terrors of Spearbridge to buy rare herbs and furs from Carden Vale. Gull-prowed ships and flat-bottomed barges had crowded the sleek white wharves.

  That grandeur was long gone. The fortress stood empty, its cavernous halls filled with dust and silence. The port below it had shrunk to a handful of creaking barges that lumbered through the silt-clogged wharves like dying beasts. Mud piled up between the piers, reeking of the town’s refuse.

  He should have sewn a satchet in his sleeve. The stench was worst at this time of year, after a long summer’s stew, and there was no relief in sight. If Gethel had truly done as he’d promised, there would be worse smells before the day’s work was done.

  The stooped man in front of him seemed oblivious to the filthy-smelling streets. The hem of his robe dragged through a puddle of mud and drunkard’s vomit, but he never glanced down. It took more than merely human foulnesses to disturb Gethel these days. The man didn’t look well, and it had Corban worried. Human eyes shouldn’t stare so blindly; human voices shouldn’t sound so dull. Mountain air would do him a world of good, or perhaps a trip east to take the waters at Dragonsblood Spring. A leave to rest.

  But not until the work was done. Not until then.

  “How much farther?” Corban muttered as Gethel led him down yet another stinking alley. He thought his eyes might actually be watering. A fat, evil-looking rat stared at him from the shadows, its whiskers twitching, and then scurried into the cracked daub at the base of a nearby wall.

  “Only in here.” Gethel stooped by the door of the house where the rat had gone. No lock or bar secured its weather-warped planks.

  Spreading his hands across the dry gray wood, Gethel pushed inward, mumbling slurred syllables that Corban supposed were meant to sound like magic. A blue spark jumped from his fingertips and sizzled as it struck the wood. It might have been impressive if Corban hadn’t spotted the man pinching smokepowder from a sleeve pouch as he bent to the door.

  Gethel had no real magic. None of the self-proclaimed wizards of the Fourfold House did. What they had were tricks and illusions: smokepowder, sleight of hand, a bit of alchemy. Real magic, of the sort that Celestia’s Blessed or the Thorns of Ang’arta commanded, was far beyond such pretenders.

  But even a pretender could stumble upon power, and might be mad enough to seize it when a sensible man would have stepped back. Gethel, blinded by his belief that magic could be mastered without bowing to the gods, didn’t have the wisdom to be wary. He had no idea what he’d found.

  Corban had no such delusions. He knew what it was. In part, at least. And he knew, too, that there was no reason to share the truth with Gethel. Let the man believe what he wanted. It kept him working.

  Gathering his cloak, Corban bowed his head to the low-hanging lintel and followed Gethel into the darkness beyond. A stink of stale urine intensified and then receded as he passed the threshold. There were no windows. Once the door closed behind him, Corban could see nothing but the lines of its planks against weak gray light. He could hear Gethel ahead, moving with the ease of a cat in the dark, and faint whimpers from somewhere past that, but he could see neither man nor moaner.

  “Give me a light,” Corban rasped, and then stopped, surprised by the tension he heard in his own voice. He wasn’t afraid. Not of poor half-mad Gethel, the failed wizard who couldn’t pinch smokepowder without getting caught. Not of him.

  But of what he had found, what he had made … that, if Gethel had truly managed to awaken its power, was something a wiseman would not want to stumble upon in the dark.

  Another spark jumped in the gloom. This time it landed on the wick of a misshapen candle in a stained clay dish. A rancid smell drifted from the candle as it burned, reminiscent of soured lard. Corban wrinkled his nose. That wasn’t bad tallow; that was a dead man’s candle, rendered from the fat of a hanged criminal. Idiots playing at necromancy used them, claiming that their light revealed truths hidden from the sun.

  “Are you ready?” Gethel asked, lifting the candle. Under its smoky glow he seemed more demon than human. Gethel had never been plump, but the wizard had become positively cadaverous since the last time Corban had seen him. His skin sagged loose over bone; shadows seamed his face, and his eyes shone unnaturally bright in their sockets. Most of his hair had fallen out, and what was left straggled to his shoulders in colorless clumps. He look
ed like a walking corpse—and yet in this place, by the light of that candle, there was a coiled vitality to him that made Corban almost afraid.

  Obsession. That was the look Gethel had: of a man in the throes of obsession, readying to return to the mistress who had consumed his soul.

  “I’m ready,” Corban said, clearing the tightness from his throat.

  “This way.” The candle bobbed in his hand as the gaunt man led him to the back of the hovel. There were two rooms inside, the second smaller than the first and separated from it by a curtain of stained sackcloth. The floor ended abruptly at that curtain; Corban stumbled as his foot tried to find purchase on air. Gethel had excavated the second room so that its floor was a full arm’s length lower than the hard-packed dirt on the other side. Moisture seeped down, leaving wet scars in the walls.

  “I needed to keep the smoke from escaping,” Gethel said, evidently as explanation, although he never glanced back.

  Corban looked up. There was no smoke hole, no chimney. No hearth, either, in the glimpses of wall that the candle gave him. “Smoke rises.”

  “Blackfire smoke sinks.” And, indeed, it seemed that a gritty black glitter clung to the dirt, like a residue of sea foam left on the strand. Corban had little time to puzzle over that, though, for Gethel had reached the hovel’s far corner and his light fell on the face of a whimpering man who crouched there.

  The man was a beggar. That much was plain from his tattered breeches and sparse, grimy beard. Even under candlelight, his nose was red and webbed with broken veins. A drunk, and likely feebleminded; there was no sense to his moanings, and he clutched his head in trembling hands, as if trying to hold his thoughts together. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but Corban could not place it. Likely he just resembled some other beggar; poverty crushed all of them into the same miserable mold.

  Corban’s lip curled in disdain. “This is your great success? You told me you’d unlocked the secrets of blackfire, found a way to harness its power at last—and you show me a wretched old drunk?”

  “What? Oh. No.” Gethel set his candle down on a nearby crate and fished through its straw, heedless of how easily it might catch fire. “I’ve done as I promised. Belbas here is simply going to help me prove it.”

  “Belbas? Apprentice Belbas? Your sworn servant?”

  The beggar groaned weakly, as if Corban’s words stirred some fragment of memory from the dark mire of his thoughts, but if that truly was his name, he did not answer to it. Gethel shrugged without lifting his head from the crate. “Oaths mean so little in this day and age. He was going to betray me. But now … now he will be a help. Yes.”

  “What have you done?” Corban breathed. He’d met Gethel’s apprentice only a few times, but he knew the boy was bound to secrecy in exchange for being taught the master’s magic. The details of the Fourfold House’s workings were fuzzy to Corban, who had never set foot in that eccentric world and had no reason to learn its rules. The wizards hadn’t any power beyond rites and oaths and other mystical trappings meant to fool the gullible into believing that they had secrets worth protecting. But the members of the Fourfold House believed their own foolishness wholeheartedly, and Corban could not shake the feeling that he stood witness to a betrayal greater than he could comprehend.

  Perhaps he imagined things. Belbas had been a young man, while the wretch before him was old enough to be his grandfather. Inconceivable that they could be one and the same. Yet as Corban looked harder, he could see the remains of that proud youth in the beggar’s dissipation. The flesh was sagging or swollen, the mind broken behind those unseeing eyes, but the bones were the same.

  Puckered gaps ran down the boy’s neck where his ceremonial tattoos had been carved out. His wounded flesh was pale and bloodless as chopped salt pork; the man who wore them might already have been so much meat, though he still drew breath.

  Impossible. But there it was, sprawled before his feet.

  Gethel straightened from the crate, holding a small crossbow and a pair of quarrels. The weapon glistened with packing grease; flecks of straw clung to the oiled wood and metal. Gethel loaded the weapon and hooked the strap around his foot, grunting as he tugged the crossbow upward. The trigger fell into place with a click, and Gethel offered the spare quarrel to Corban as he mopped the sheen from his brow.

  Though the crossbow seemed smaller and lighter than most of its type—at least in Corban’s inexpert judgment—the quarrel was heavy and oddly balanced. Its head was swollen big as a cherry; he couldn’t see how it was meant to fly. Although the quarrel ended in a sharp iron point, the rest of its tip was filigreed like jewelry. A pebble of gritty black sand glittered between the metal strands. Blackfire.

  Corban held a fortune between two fingers … if the crazed charlatan was right. He reined in his rising excitement. He hadn’t seen it work.

  “As I promised,” Gethel said. “You hold the proof in your hands.”

  “It seems an ungainly design.” Corban turned the quarrel over and handed it back. He wiped the packing grease off on his cloak. “Does it fly? It surely can’t bite very deep when it hits.”

  “It has no need to strike deep. It suffices to draw blood; the magic does the rest. Watch.” Gethel took the candle’s dish from the crate and set it down beside his strangely aged apprentice. A hunched creature scuttled away as the light approached: the rat from the alley. Belbas’ hand was peppered with raw pink spots where it had gnawed at his unbleeding flesh. Yet the apprentice had never pulled back, never flinched; he seemed as insensible to that as he was to the rest of the world.

  Gethel retreated from the candle, beckoning Corban to join him. He pulled back the sackcloth curtain and hoisted himself onto higher ground. “Best to be out of the smoke.”

  “Why?” Corban asked, following. “What happens?”

  “Madness.” Gethel leveled the crossbow across the room, sighting it toward the candle and then up. His hands were steadier than Corban would have believed possible; the weight of the weapon didn’t seem to strain his bony arms at all.

  There was no light beside them, and Corban couldn’t see the gaunt man’s expression. The end of the crossbow stood against the distant candle, though, and he saw where it aimed.

  He folded his arms and said nothing. It wasn’t his place. If the boy thought to betray their work, then this was for the best. And if not … it was still safer to be sure. Corban had invested far too much to risk a word breathed into the wrong ear.

  Besides, he was curious.

  The crossbow twanged. Its bolt took Belbas in the gut. The boy made no attempt to avoid it, and didn’t cry as he was struck. He only sighed, almost gently, and folded forward with his chin slumped to his chest. As Corban had expected, the quarrel’s clumsy design kept it from piercing deeply. Even at this short range, it hadn’t sunk more than half its length into Belbas’ stomach.

  “Is that all?”

  Gethel held up a finger. “Wait.”

  Perplexed, Corban looked back at the apprentice. Belbas drew two breaths, the second weaker than the first, as a dark wet stain spread through his rags.

  On the third breath he exploded.

  Fragments of gristle and bone spattered the walls as his rib cage tore itself apart. Hot blood, speckled with stinging grit, sprayed across Corban’s face; he squeezed his eyes shut so it wouldn’t blind him. When he opened them again, the wreckage of Belbas’ corpse was thrown back in the corner, shrouded by foul-looking black smoke. Gore streaked the walls and dripped from the curtain, yet somehow the candle burned in its dish with barely a flicker to its flame. Its light was murky, but there was no doubting its steadiness amidst the devastation of what had once been a man.

  Corban stared at the wreckage in disbelief. The possibilities dazed him more than the blast had. The force of it … no armor could withstand that. No man could survive it. And that had been a pebble no larger than his thumbnail. What might a larger chunk do?

  What would a king pay to possess it? Gold? Land? W
as there any limit to what he might ask? This was, at last, a weapon that ordinary rulers could use to hold back the Thorns of Ang’arta. Magic at their fingertips, with no need to rely on Blessed … and then, as others saw its power and were frightened, they, too, would come to him to beg their own arsenals. At any price.

  He’d never dared dream, when he’d first found Gethel laboring in obscurity and had given the man a handful of silver to pursue his obsessions, that the prize would be so rich. Never. But now, it seemed, the world might lie open before him.

  If he played his hand well.

  “Blackfire stone wreaks great destruction upon our mortal flesh, yet it scarcely seems to touch anything else,” Gethel murmured, sounding almost mournful. He hopped down from the earthen bank and waded into the smoke that pooled around the body. “Its properties are … peculiar. I have hardly begun cataloging them.”

  “I thought you said the smoke was to be avoided.”

  “It is,” Gethel said, but he offered no further explanation. He stooped into the haze to retrieve the candle. Corban imagined that the smoke drifted up to greet the gaunt man as he knelt; he fancied that tendrils of it curled into Gethel’s colorless hair, like the fingers of a lady drawing her lover down for a kiss.

  A whiff of the smoke drifted toward him. It stank of sulfur and carrion, of dead things rotting in dark places. And yet … there was something almost recognizable within it, something that called to an old, dim memory. He breathed deeper, trying to place it, reaching for remembrance. It seemed important, somehow—but it was gone.

  Corban shook his head and wiped the blood from his face, taking care to use the inside of his cloak so it wouldn’t show when he walked away. The reality of what he had seen was astonishing enough. No need to complicate it with figments of fancy.

  “How many of these quarrels can you make?”

  “The miners have struck a rich lode. There’s no telling how much they might bring out. But my shapers … my shapers have become quite exhausted. If I had more of them, I should be able to work faster.” Smoke swirled around Gethel’s robes as he came back to the edge of the room. Corban stepped back, holding his breath.