Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  “With blood?”

  “With magic.”

  Her fingertips were feather light as she traced runes in blood across his face, whispering an invocation to her cruel goddess. The blood was warm, perhaps because it had been kept close to her body, perhaps because it was freshly drawn. Kelland stared fixedly at a point on the far wall, waiting for it to be done.

  The painted sigils cooled swiftly on his face. As she finished chanting, they warmed until the marks were painfully hot, the blood boiling on his skin. Then, abruptly, the heat was gone, and the wetness with it.

  He looked down. His hands, which had been a deep, rich brown all his life, were now sun browned on top and pale beneath, with the calluses and ridged, swollen knuckles of a man who’d spent his life fighting, and had done it with fists as often as swords. Astonished, Kelland went to the mirror and saw looking back at him an unfamiliar face, hard eyed and stubble chinned, and light. He pushed back his cloak and pulled open the neck of his tunic. Where his skin was shielded from the sun, it was almost white.

  White, and branded with the emblem of a gauntleted, upraised fist.

  “You’ve made me a Baozite,” he said, and then stopped at the sound of his spell-altered voice. It was harsher and deeper than his own, a voice that had rarely spoken in joy, whose prayers would sound like curses. A Baozite voice.

  The Spider shrugged, unperturbed. “He was rebellious. His life was forfeit, and his death not to be mourned. If I had not intervened, my lord husband would have killed him anyway. Instead, he serves as an example, and you have a disguise.”

  “How efficient.”

  “Yes.” She emptied the last of the bottle’s blood into his washing basin, then swirled the glass through the water to rinse it, replaced the cap, and tucked it back into her sleeve. “Come. The night is fading.”

  He bit his tongue. She was close enough that the silver foxfur on her sleeves brushed against his wrists; the scent of myrrh and frankincense clung to her hair. It was no longer alluring.

  The Spider began a new chant. Softly, sibilantly, in a language that was not made for human tongues but seemed to speak to the darkest parts of his soul. The shadows gathered around them, and with the darkness came a breath of unearthly cold. Her hand closed around his wrist, and blackness engulfed him.

  An uncountable time later, the soft light of the stars told him that he was back in the world of the living, back under the open sky. A cool wind carried the scent of the sea and, closer, the rankness of tidal mud and rotting fish. He could hear the lap of waves in the harbor and the creak of mooring ropes. The water was out of sight, though, and the buildings silhouetted before him were cramped and sagging, their walls scabbed with scalloped crusts of salt. To the north, above their slanting roofs, the spire of Heaven’s Needle shone against the sky.

  He was in Cailan. The worst part of it, but still the city that had been home, or something close to that, for almost all his life. The knowledge lifted a weight of despair from his soul. He had never really believed, until now, that the Thorns would release him.

  Avele moved with perfect confidence through the warren of Cailan’s dockside. Occasionally Kelland glimpsed retreating movements and half-seen figures in the alleys, but no one confronted them. No one even came into view. That puzzled him. The Spider was ludicrously out of place in her jewels and furs, and unlike himself, she was not so unusual that footpads should have recognized her and backed away from a distance. At this hour, an unarmed woman in rich clothes should have been accosted by a dozen beggars, and twice as many robbers, before she reached the first corner.

  Instead the streets were silent. He saw no living souls.

  “Are they so afraid of this face?” he asked as she stopped outside a swaybacked house.

  “No. They think we are a hunting party.”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes we come to the slums when we are short of bodies. One Thorn, a soldier or two. We take as many as can easily be transported and return. Ordinarily, vermin are preferred, but if someone wants to be foolish and offers himself up, who are we to refuse? Earlier it was easier. Since then, the clever ones have learned, and the stupid ones are gone.”

  “You come all the way to Cailan to seize victims for your sacrifices? Why?”

  “I dislike killing the useful. It weakens my lord’s domain. Oh, on occasion there are veselde who forget their places, or soldiers who become disobedient … but for the most part, people fulfill their duties and so strengthen my lord’s rule. Why, then, should we prey on them? Better to come to Cailan and remove some of the filth from its gutters. The city should thank us.”

  Kelland’s borrowed skin crawled. “Why are you telling me this?”

  She knocked on the door, twice in close succession and a third time after a pause. “Because you asked.”

  From inside the house came the rasp of a bar sliding back. A girl opened the door. She was very pale, unhealthily so, and wore a modest blue dress that brushed the floor.

  “Lady,” the girl murmured, curtsying low. She held a candle cupped in a ceramic dish, and did not seem surprised to see them.

  “Brielle. Take me to your guest.”

  The girl straightened and nodded. The irises of her eyes were red, Kelland saw; not the deep red of blood, but the cloudy near pink of jasper. If she had been a Thorn, it would not have been so striking—the Maimed Witches were known for much worse than red eyes—but he would have put her age at sixteen or seventeen, too young to be a Thornlady, and she was otherwise ordinary.

  She led them up a rickety staircase. Spiders clung to dusty webs in the corners; mice scurried inside the walls, heard but not seen. At the top of the stairs was a room bare but for a three-legged chair in the corner and a mold-spotted hanging on one wall.

  The girl put the candle dish down on the chair and pushed the hanging aside. Behind it was a door, which she unlocked to reveal a steep staircase leading down through the wall of an adjacent building. The secret stairs smelled of dust, hot wax, and oiled metal. Old blood spotted the steps.

  “Shall I come?” Brielle asked, retrieving her candle as she stepped aside.

  “No, thank you,” said the Spider, drawing up her robe. She lit a second candle from the girl’s and speared its end into an empty dish. “Wait here. We won’t be long.”

  Avele went down the narrow stairs. Kelland followed cautiously, trying to ignore the smell of blood and sweat. The same stench filled the dungeons beneath Ang’arta—but this was Cailan, he told himself, and surely the city guards would not turn a blind eye to such abominations in their midst.

  At the end of the stairs was a curiously fashioned door barred in iron. It was tiny and set deep into the wall, and it had an ivory lock without a keyhole. The Spider shook back her sleeve and pressed a fingertip to the lock, murmuring a verse of prayer.

  Soundlessly the door swung open. Kelland saw that it was at least six inches thick, though compared to the walls it seemed thin as a parchment leaf. Both walls and door were hollow. Raw wool and scraps of cork stuffed the gaps between their planks, and as the door opened, the knight understood why: to silence the screams.

  A gaunt woman lay shackled on a table inside. Her hands were curled in bony claws, her temples stained with bloody tear tracks. A sweat-soaked yellow dress clung to her body. She screamed endlessly, senselessly, her voice feeble as a wind through rattling reeds. The walls were hung with hooks and knives and stranger implements of pain, but Kelland could see no injury on the woman except the rings of blood around her eyes.

  He came closer. There were crystal lenses laid flat over her eyes, each one fringed with minute steel blades like the petals of some grisly flower. Though the lenses themselves were smooth, the woman blinked constantly at the weight of them resting on her eyes, and she had cut her lids to shreds upon the blades. The tiny razors were caked with clotted blood and loose eyelashes, and still she blinked against them.

  Kelland looked away, disgusted. He had seen brutality in war an
d more of it in the Baozite fortress, had even dealt some of it himself, but the things the Thorns did—the things they called “art,” and prided themselves on perfecting—turned his stomach. “Why was this done?”

  On the other side of the table, the Spider stood and gazed down at her victim with a gentle smile. She stroked the woman’s brow after setting her candle in an alcove overlooking the table. A line of blood followed her touch, though there was no blade in her hand. “Why? Because what Brielle lacks in wisdom—and that is no small lack—she tries to make up for in zeal. As I never told her not to touch our guest, it is little surprise to find her wearing eyeflowers.”

  He had no reply for that. “This is why you brought me?”

  “It is.” Avele drew her hands away and folded them behind her back, smudging her robe with crimson. “I didn’t expect the eyeflowers, but they should not affect any interrogation. The woman’s name is Jora. She claims to be a Celestian, though you might disagree. We caught her stealing children from the streets.”

  “You didn’t thank her for helping to clean the gutters?” There was little humor in the question, but black humor was better than rage. Whatever game the Spider was playing, he’d need his wits to counter. Anger could only lead him into folly.

  She shook her head. “Listen to her. Listen, and you will understand.”

  He did. At first he heard nothing. The woman had screamed herself past hoarseness. Her howls had become pantomimes, empty of sound. But as he stood there concentrating, Kelland became aware of something more: a faint, unpleasant sensation, just below the level of hearing, like the buzzing of a thousand unseen bees or the swarming of black flies over a battlefield. The vibration thrummed along his skin and under his nails, maddening as an itch that couldn’t be reached.

  Maol. Kelland drew back abruptly. The buzzing sensation vanished, but he still felt unclean. The taint that emanated from the ragged woman was as different from the Spider’s as a song howled by dissonant throats was from one played on a master’s harp … but just as both those sounds were “music,” so he knew that what lay in both their souls was the touch of divine evil.

  There was no mistaking that jangling discord. The Mad God had laid claim to this woman’s soul. “She’s no Celestian.”

  “I see your years of training were not wasted.” There was an acid edge to Avele’s voice. “No, she is no Celestian, but she claims she is. She believes she is. Ask her. If you can force any sense into her answer, that is what you will hear. That is what I brought you to see.”

  Kelland frowned. The Thorns could not lie, but what they said was not always truth, not as any reasonable soul would take it.

  He set his palms on the bloodstained table, framing the woman’s head between them, and reached out to Celestia’s power. Doubt flickered in him for an instant—had his failure in Tarne Crossing severed his link to the divine?—and the prayer would not come. He stopped, steadied his focus, and began the invocation again. This time the glory of his goddess’ presence filled him, humbling and terrifying. Sweet as the sight of the sun had been, it was nothing compared to the return of the Bright Lady’s magic. The familiar words of the prayer guided his concentration, letting him gather and shape the formless magic like sunlight through a glass.

  Holy light surrounded Jora in a halo. It was a hazy blue-violet, fragile as the last gleam of twilight, and dimmer than Kelland had expected. Had his captivity made him so weak? Or was his magic still diminished by doubt? Then he saw the Spider watching him, and understood. Her power was that much greater than his; she was holding him back.

  She hadn’t spoken a word, though, and she made no movement. His unease grew stronger. It was possible to invoke magic without word or gesture, but it was not easy, and the difficulty increased monumentally with the strength of the spell. Magic, as given by the gods, was amorphous as water. Prayers created a vessel that could channel it toward a purpose. But first the spell caster had to convey the purpose, and few had the clarity of mind necessary to do that without words. It was like trying to hold the entirety of an epic poem in one’s mind at once. Nuances of meaning slipped away; sequences tangled and tumbled around one another. Irksome, when retelling a saga; fatal, when controlling a spell.

  But the Spider seemed to have no difficulty. And if her control was that strong, then she could break his prayer and return the room to night on a whim.

  She did not. After a moment he looked back to the woman on the table. Jora’s hair had been cropped to the skull recently. Beneath the stubble, her scalp was stark white and dotted with eight large blisters in an uneven circle. Elsewhere her skin was nut brown and wrinkled by long days spent laboring under the sun. A farmwife, maybe. Before Maol’s touch had taken root in her soul.

  Jora’s eyes focused on his face. He couldn’t tell whether she was lucid, or whether she would be responsive to his prayer. She seemed calmer, though, and it seemed to him that the holy light soothed some of the madness that roiled in the woman.

  “How did you come here?” Kelland asked. He kept his voice gentle. His magic would bind her to tell the truth, or what she thought was the truth, but he had no idea how much the prayer would help with a mind so corroded.

  Jora licked her lips. Blood from the eyeflowers had funneled around her mouth while she screamed. The dried tracks of it cracked when she answered. “On a boat. I served. I did blessed work … until she caught me.” Her eyes rolled white under the bloody lenses.

  “What blessed work?”

  “The children. We need them. We need them. The nightmare is waking. The old death is coming.” Her words were so faint that Kelland had to lean closer to hear. He tensed, wary that she might lunge up for a bite. “Only pure hearts can hold it back. Only the pure can draw fire from the stone. The scholar told us. The scholar warned us. Keep the fires burning, and the nightmare cannot take us.”

  “What nightmare?”

  “The old dream. The old death. So long it’s been waiting, whispering … but it is louder now. We are holding it back, with help, with pure hearts. But it eats them … it eats them … and the longer we hold it, the stronger it gets.” She nodded furiously, as far as her bonds would let her. Half-dried blood clotted at the corners of her eyes like poisoned tears. “It comes in the dark, it speaks in the dark, and the whispers never go away …” Real tears began trickling out under the glass, softening the knots of gore and cut lashes at the eyeflowers’ edges.

  None of the woman’s ramblings made sense to Kelland, but he pressed on doggedly. If she let slip something that he could follow, it might shed some light on the rest. “How are you holding it back?”

  “Prayers. Prayers and pyres. The Bright Lady has shown us the way in her flames. The fire takes them and cleanses us. The fire keeps us safe.”

  “If fire keeps you safe, why do you need children?”

  “They are the shapers. Little hands. They bring the holy fire from the stone, stone cut from death’s hollow heart. It is their blessing, their gift … theirs to shape, and share with us. It is the only weapon that kills the monsters. Without them we would fail.”

  “Where are the children?”

  “Safe.”

  “Where?”

  Jora’s hands trembled against the table. Her wrists, raw and bleeding, shook in their restraints. A soundless word rose to her lips and died. She tried again, and the second time managed to whisper: “Shadefell. You must go. Go to them. I know what you are … what you can do. Protect us. Our prayers are failing … and they are in Shadefell.”

  The name meant nothing to Kelland, but he could not press her further. His prayer was exhausted. The magic slipped out of his grasp, elusive as sunlight once more.

  Kelland plucked the eyeflowers away carefully. The tiny blades pricked his fingers, but he got them free. He could give the woman that much mercy. Jora sighed and closed her eyes, or tried to. There was too much flesh missing for her lids to meet, and the red-veined whites of her eyes peeked through the gaps. The last of Kelland
’s dawn light danced across those bloody whites, and then the dark returned.

  Avele took the candle from its alcove. “Is there anything more you wish to know?”

  “What did you do with the children she captured?”

  “We destroyed them, of course. They carried the Mad God’s contamination; there was nothing else to be done. But we did not find them all. Some were sent back to Jora’s village. Precisely how, I cannot say. Smuggled, perhaps. We found tallies for them, but no record of their transport.”

  Kelland gave her a hard look, but no reproval. If the children had truly carried Maol’s touch, they were more dangerous than plague bearers. He would have preferred healing them, but if the Thorns had neither the means nor the will to do so, a cure by fire was better than letting them roam free.

  Maol—the Four-Armed Beggar, the Mad God—was unlike any other deity in Ithelas. Like them, he could not exercise his will in the world except through his mortal servants. But the Mad God was different in that he did not seek out strong souls to champion his faith. He sought weak ones, and he corrupted and consumed them, eventually destroying any creature who fell under his sway. His Blessing leapt from host to host like a disease, and it had to be treated like one to be stopped.

  Sometimes, if the contagion was caught early, its victims could be cured. Sometimes they couldn’t.

  Three years ago, the last time a Maolite had been active in Cailan, he’d done his god’s work by kidnapping children, inducting them into the Mad God’s mysteries, and releasing them to be found by their families. Even after several families were found with throats slashed in their sleep, few had been willing to test their children for the taint, knowing that their sons and daughters might spend the rest of their years in Heaven’s Needle if it was found. No one wanted to believe that a child gone for a single afternoon could have been warped so badly. The carnage went on for weeks before the Celestians found and stopped the Maolite cultist, and even after that there’d been more killings as the last few children returned home.