Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  “I’ve heard worse,” Evenna said. “As long as you aren’t cheating on your tithes—”

  “Never that,” Bassinos said, mock aghast.

  “—then I suppose we’ll have to forgive you. But when did the mountain towns rediscover their faith? Was there some disaster up there? Men aren’t usually swept by a sudden love for prayer unless there’s been war, plague, famine …”

  “No, nothing. I haven’t been north myself in some time, but I would have heard the stories. There’s been nothing like that. Well, bandits, but there’ve been bandits on the iron road and pirates on the Windhurst since there was a road and a river.” Bassinos paused, momentarily reflective. “Not many of those either, lately, come to think of it. Usually I lose a shipment or two every season, but this past year … it’s been quiet. Completely. Even Gerros Tulliven hasn’t been raided, and he manages to hire a few highwaymen disguised as guards every year.”

  “There are stories,” Melora said, lifting her head. Her fingers danced over the tines of her fork. “The mad wind.”

  “Melora, dearheart,” her father said gently, “those are just stories. Our guests are worried about threats on their way to Carden Vale. The mad winds aren’t likely to give them any trouble.”

  “Oh,” the girl said, flushing pink. She dropped her head again, and Asharre thought with astonishment that she might be hiding tears.

  Falcien cleared his throat. “I’d be interested in hearing about these winds. There’s often a grain of truth in those old folktales—and even if there isn’t, I love a good story.”

  Bassinos nodded, a flicker of appreciation crossing his blunt face at the Celestian’s courtesy. “I suppose there’s no harm in the telling. It’s an old tale, but it seems to have picked up new life this past season. The way the story goes, the ghosts of Duradh Mal ride the night winds in the Irontooths. They’re cursed, either for what they did in life or by how they died, depending on the teller. They can’t cross the Last Bridge until they’ve confessed all their sins, and there’s no one like a Baozite for sinning. So they roam the mountain peaks looking for travelers who’ll hear their confessions … but the sins they’ve committed are so ghastly, and the suffering they endure as ghosts so awful, that anyone who listens to them goes mad. Men strip naked and wade into the snow, letting themselves freeze to death, after listening to the mad wind. Women leap from the peaks or throw themselves into the rivers. Their deaths add to the spirits’ litany of sins, and so they wander on, seeking new listeners forever.”

  “It’s a ghost story?” Asharre said, disbelieving.

  “This is a land for ghosts, my lady. We’ve nothing else to do but tell stories to fill the winters. Anything can spawn a tale, and that’s likely how this one started. Someone heard a wind that sounded like screaming and invented some meaning to fit it. Someone else found a poor frozen soul who wandered out at night and got lost. Put one with the other, and that’s your story. Oddities and accidents, with a dash of ghost lore thrown in for spice. To hear it told now, the wind freezes plants in summer, turns winter snow red as blood, and drives people mad all year round. Sometimes the ghosts who ride it are said to come from Duradh Mal, sometimes from Shadefell. Whatever the teller thinks sounds best.”

  “Shadefell?”

  Bassinos only shrugged. He scooped more turnips onto his plate, seeming faintly embarrassed. Heradion took up the tale. “That one’s a ghost story too. King Aersival gave the first Lord Rosewayn the land around Duradh Mal as his fief. He’d earned it, fighting in two hard campaigns and clearing out the Long Knives from the Smokewood, but some said that the king gave the valley to Rosewayn because he wanted the man as far from the capital as possible. Rosewayn had an ugly reputation. Some of the things he did to make captured Long Knives betray their brothers … there were rumors that he was a secret Kliastan. It was that bad. Many historians claim King Aersival felt it would be easier to turn a blind eye to Rosewayn’s excesses if the lord was in Carden Vale.

  “The Celestians sealed the lower reaches of Duradh Mal and some of its high towers, but they didn’t seal the central fortress, perhaps because some lord at the time wanted to lay claim to the castle. I don’t know. Be that as it may, Lord Rosewayn certainly wanted it. The locals told him the place was cursed, that the Doom would claim him, too, but the old lord wouldn’t hear of it. Said it was the best strategic hold in the Irontooths, which was likely true. Say what you will about Baozites, but those bastards know war.

  “The Baozites couldn’t keep Ang’duradh, though, and Lord Rosewayn’s luck was no better. He drained his fortune trying. Few craftsmen would travel that far, or brave the curse of Duradh Mal, and those who did met bad ends. Walls collapsed, beams broke, keystones cracked over the builders’ heads. Some of them wandered into the empty halls and were never seen again. Other men swore they could hear the lost ones’ voices calling from the dark, crying out for help.

  “When the old lord died, his sons were glad to end the folly. They left Ang’duradh to its ghosts and built a new hold in the mountains. Shadefell, they called it. From there the Rosewayns ruled for a time, no better and no worse than any other lords. But over the years, the stories started to change.

  “People vanished from the roads around Carden Vale. Mostly children and virgins, according to the stories. Travelers too. Entire parties disappeared, only to be discovered as chewed bones when the snows melted. Finally word came back to the Dome. Armed with Aurandane, the Sword of the Dawn, some Knights of the Sun ventured up to Shadefell to end it. The Rosewayns greeted them as honored guests, then tried to eat them as they slept. When their hosts revealed their true faces, the Knights saw that they were monsters. They fought a desperate battle through Shadefell’s halls, half the house burned down, and when the smoke cleared, they found all sorts of atrocities in the ashes. Human bones in the pantry, torture pits in the cellars, tubs of rendered corpse fat that Lady Rosewayn smoothed into her skin for eternal youth—any horror that a bard might embroider onto the tale has been claimed at one point or another.”

  “And these voices, too, whisper on the mad wind?” Asharre asked.

  “So they say.” Bassinos refilled his glass with cider. “It’s only a story.”

  Melora was still blushing and fidgeting with her fork. Asharre was not surprised to hear Falcien take his turn at distracting her. These Blessed were gracious to a fault.

  “As you’ve been kind enough to give us a story, and Heradion has as well, I suppose I should take my turn,” he said, and told them about the Winter Lake, a few weeks’ ride east of Cailan, where the water was near freezing even in midsummer. Fishermen saw ice glistening over its heart, no matter how hot the sun shone, and heard the voices of women singing over its waves at dusk. Those who listened to the songs said that they were beautiful but unsettling; those who listened too often pushed their boats to the lake’s center, where they leaped eagerly into the water and drowned.

  By the time he had finished, Melora was listening raptly, her timidity forgotten. “Is it true?” she breathed, eager as a child listening at her nursemaid’s knee.

  “It’s true that the water is cold,” Asharre told her. “I’ve been there. It’s cold enough to kill a man, but I’ve never seen ice or heard songs. I stayed with a woman who swore her husband had been called to his death by a fairy lure … but gossips in the village told me he was a drunk, and just as likely to fall out of his boat as come home every day. It’s a cold lake, nothing more. By the White Seas we have springs that come up scalding. If rivers run hot under the snow, why should they not run cold in the summerlands?”

  “Why not, indeed,” Melora agreed. She did not seem disappointed by the explanation; if anything, her dark eyes shone brighter. “Do you have any stories?”

  Asharre would have preferred to keep her silence, but she saw no way to decline gracefully. She’d never felt comfortable retelling folktales—she didn’t have the gift to make them come alive—so instead she told them about the travels she’d had w
ith Oralia: the cities they’d seen, the people they’d met, the odd dishes her sister always insisted that she try. Her sister seldom took so much as a nibble herself, pleading her restrictions as a Blessed, but Asharre had long suspected that Oralia just used that excuse to make her eat sheep-gut sausages and honey-baked crickets because, as she said every time, “one of us has to pay respect to the local delicacies, and I can’t. Enjoy!”

  It was the first time she’d spoken about Oralia since reporting her death to the High Solaros. Somehow, sitting around this table in the company of friends, it didn’t hurt. The memories were good ones, and as she spoke, Asharre felt the weight of her grief lighten to something almost bearable.

  Evenna followed her with a story about Mesandroth Fiendlorn, the sorcerer who burned the Belled Stag. On moonless nights, the story went, a ghostly inn appeared on the ashes of the sorcerer’s crime, and the dead gambled with the living for their souls.

  After her telling, a quiet descended on their table. Then Melora laughed, and Heradion clapped, and the mood was broken. Bassinos poured himself a last glass of tea. The servants came to clear the dishes, and Melora showed them to their rooms.

  Asharre lay awake long after. Heavy curtains covered the windows for warmth. It was black as pitch inside her room. Somewhere down the hall, a man was snoring. A dog barked at passing shadows outside.

  Restlessly she got to her feet and pushed the curtain aside. The moon painted the world in silver and sparkled on the chapel’s frosted roof. High above, the vaulted sky seemed a reflection of that jeweled lace. If the Belled Stag only appeared on starless nights, its ghostly gamblers would be idle tonight.

  Evenna’s story of the cursed inn lingered in her thoughts. It was only a story, she knew, with no more substance than the fairy songs on the Winter Lake. The shades of the dead did not dice with the living. If they came back at all, it was as a bloodmage’s thralls.

  Still … if it were true, what would she give to gamble with ghosts? What would she risk for that? To give them a message, if she won, and hope that they might carry it back across the Last Bridge when they disappeared. To say I’m sorry and ask Why?

  Was that worth the chance of never coming back?

  Asharre stood by the window awhile longer, gazing at the silent chapel, and then went back to bed.

  7

  “Someone’s coming up the slope.”

  “Hunters?” Malentir asked.

  Bitharn shaded her eyes against the sunlight. The morning was new and cold, but the sere hills shimmered with heat, making it difficult to tell if anything moved among them. She shook her head. “Maybe. They’re gone now.”

  They were a day north of Carden Vale, at the bottom reaches of the bleak, scarred hills that the maps called Duradhar and the locals called Devils’ Ridge. Once these slopes had been rich and green, fertile enough to feed the Baozite host that held the fortress above. Then Ang’duradh fell, and the same curse that killed its soldiers blighted the land around it. Wheat fields and orchards burned from their roots up, leaving barren rocks and steaming rifts where they’d stood. Six hundred years later, the earth still smoldered all through Devils’ Ridge. Wraiths of pale blue smoke drifted down the hillsides, and the earth was ash gray underneath.

  For centuries, Devils’ Ridge had been abandoned to its smoky ghosts. That desolation was one of the reasons Malentir had chosen to come to Devils’ Ridge rather than travel directly to Carden Vale. Anyone who saw him would know him for a Thorn, and in town that would end badly. Out here, there were fewer eyes to find him, and a greater chance that anyone who did could be quietly subdued. It was likely, if that happened, that he’d want to kill the witness and wear the dead man’s face for a disguise. Bitharn hadn’t decided what she would do about that. She hoped she’d never have to.

  She looked down again. Near the last fringe of green in the valley, metal glinted amidst the budding trees. Bitharn crouched, watched, and waited. After a long moment she saw another flash, and a pair of waxwings startled into the sky.

  Malentir had seen them too. “No hunter in these hills will be looking for game,” he said.

  “They won’t be looking for us either.”

  “No?”

  Irritably Bitharn brushed a loose strand of hair from her eyes. “How could they? No one knows we’re here. We—the Blessed, I mean—can’t talk to the dead the way you can. Parnas couldn’t have told anyone where we went, and he’s the only one who knew. Even if they did somehow learn we’re here, the Blessed can’t walk through shadows. It’s impossible for them to have gotten to Carden Vale so quickly. Whoever’s down there can’t have anything to do with us. It might not even be a person. Likely it’s just a stray pack mule.”

  “A pack mule,” Malentir repeated, hardly bothering to conceal his disbelief. “No doubt.”

  “Stay here. I’ll have a look.”

  “You trust me at your back? Already? I’m touched.”

  “I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you.” She gestured to his slashed ivory-and-black robes and equally striped hair. “But you stand out like a gold crown in a beggar’s bowl, and I’d rather not be spotted coming down the slope. Stay here and keep low.”

  “That must be a fearsome mule,” the Thornlord said, but he found a rock to sit on, and he stayed out of her way.

  She was glad to leave him behind. The hills were steep and treacherous, and keeping quiet took all her skill. Spell-blasted stones offered scant cover, but at least the smoke’s swirl masked her movements. Bitharn moved carefully, testing each step before trusting her weight to it. No matter how cautious she was, loose rocks skittered away underfoot, rattling down the hillside and sometimes letting up plumes of sulfurous steam. The noise made her wince, but there was no sign that it alarmed whoever, or whatever, was approaching from below.

  She didn’t think it was a pack mule. She didn’t think it was Celestians either, but that possibility was harder to dismiss. Her subterfuge wouldn’t last more than a day or two before the Blessed’s goddess-granted visions revealed the truth of what had happened in the tower. Then the High Solaros would send Sun Knights and dedicants out to recapture the Thorn, and to take her as a traitor for helping him escape. They couldn’t have come to Carden Vale so quickly … but they would come, eventually.

  Not a pleasant thought. But she had known what would happen before she started, and she’d done it anyway. She hoped they would understand, that they would forgive the necessary evil she’d done … but if they didn’t, Bitharn had made her peace with that. Let them call her a traitor if it meant getting Kelland back. Nothing the Celestians did to her could be worse than what he was suffering in Ang’arta.

  There would be time to pay that price later. Here and now, her only concern was staying clear of pursuit long enough to trade the Thorn for Kelland’s freedom. She’d thought they were too early—it was barely past Greenseed, and the full moon was still three weeks away—but Malentir had assured her it did not matter. He said the Spider would know he was free, and would come early to claim him. Bitharn could only hope that was true.

  The sun was past its peak by the time she reached the end of Devils’ Ridge. Green shoots poked through the cracked rocks. Oaks grew ahead, and chestnuts showing their first spring buds. Bitharn breathed a sigh and slipped gratefully into the forest, moving more quickly through familiar terrain.

  It wasn’t a hunter coming up the hill. It was a boy, barefoot and in a tunic far too thin for the weather. He was fourteen, or a little younger. His left foot was badly twisted, though he stumbled on despite it. The limp made him clumsy; that was why Bitharn had been able to sneak up on him so easily. He made so much noise blundering through the forest that he would never have heard her.

  Bitharn was about to call out to the boy, to offer him her cloak or ask what had driven him so urgently into the forest, when he lifted his head toward Devils’ Ridge and she caught sight of his face. The call died in her throat.

  His face was bloated and pale, under
laid with a violet tinge like an old bruise. Inky spatters stained the corners of his lips and dotted his cheeks in a smiling arc toward his ears. As the boy stood there, chest heaving, Bitharn saw that the purple-black spatters weren’t stains. They were sores eaten through the inside of his mouth, as if he had packed his cheeks with lye and waited for it to find its own way out.

  She crouched in the brush, too shocked to move, until the boy regained his breath and plunged back into the trees. He went north, heading toward the blasted ridge as swiftly as his bad leg would let him. By the time she thought to follow, there was another crashing in the forest. Someone else was coming.

  A sense of wrongness seemed to roll through the air, sharp as the tingling before a storm. Bitharn pressed herself closer to the ground. She didn’t know what was coming, but she knew with a sudden, wild desperation that she did not want to be seen. There wasn’t any reason for it, and that frightened her almost as much as the terror itself did. She wasn’t a child, wasn’t given to jumping at imaginary dangers … and yet she was certain, somehow, that what came through the forest was far worse than the boy with the spotted face. Chin in the dirt, Bitharn breathed shallowly through her mouth, praying that whoever—whatever—it was would not find her.

  The branches parted. Four men came through. They were deeply sunburnt and wore miners’ clothes blackened along the seams with greasy coal dust. The incongruity of their clothes and their complexions was hardly the only oddity about them. Their heads had been shaved recently, and their scalps were white through the stubble of returning hair. Blisters dotted each man’s head in the same pink constellation, four over four.

  The men carried picks and shovels slung across their backs. Each wore a long bone knife, too, strapped bare bladed at his hip. The knives were smeared with something dark. Not blood; it was the wrong color for that, and too grainy. She was too far to be sure, but it looked like the blades had been rolled in tarry sand.