Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  But he’d kept his magic to the end.

  The histories taught at the Dome of the Sun argued that Bysshelios had not held Celestia’s power, but had shifted allegiances to another god—perhaps Anvhad, whose ambit was treachery and deception—and received magic that mimicked the Bright Lady’s in order to mislead the commonfolk and cause a bloody rift in their faith. Despite the Spider’s claims, Kelland still believed that was true.

  Perhaps it wasn’t. Bysshelios might have kept Celestia’s magic despite his sins. For Kelland, however, it didn’t matter. He had sworn his oath. He was bound by it. The world was ever shifting and uncertain; the reasons he had been given might not be true. But temptation led to heresy, and he was a Knight of the Sun. He would keep his word.

  “I cannot be more to you than I have been,” he said to Bitharn, still holding her hand. “Not while I serve as a Sun Knight.”

  “But—”

  “I can only ask you to wait.” He searched her eyes, hoping she would understand, could give him even more after all she’d already done. “When my work is done, I’ll step down from the order. Then—then we might have more.”

  Bitharn looked down, took her hand back, turned her own sun medallion over on its chain. Inhaled, a little unsteadily, trying to hide whatever she felt. “How long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A number. Give me a number, and I’ll decide.”

  “Five years.” He hesitated, shying away from the weight of that request. “It might be less. It won’t be more.”

  “Five years.” Bitharn nodded. “Fine. But if you ask for more than that …” She forced a tremulous laugh. “Well, then you had better pray the Thorns drag you back to their dungeons instead of leaving you to my mercy.”

  “Devoutly.” He circled the table, gathering her in his arms so that he could press a kiss to the top of her head. Her hair smelled of pine and new leaves.

  “Good,” she mumbled. There was a silence. Kelland kept his face buried in her hair, hoping the moment might stretch into eternity. Hoping, against all rational thought, that it might lead to more.

  It did not. Bitharn pulled away, gently but insistently. “I thought you’d be angry when you learned what I’d done. I thought you’d be furious. I betrayed our temple, Kelland. I had to. They wouldn’t help. The High Solaros was sympathetic … but all he offered me was prayer and tears, and I’d had my fill of those on the ride to Cailan. He wouldn’t help.”

  “He couldn’t have.” In the dungeons Kelland had had the luxury of infinite time to consider that problem. It was, he had concluded, impossible for the High Solaros, or any figure of authority in the temple, to negotiate for his release. Ransoming him from the Thorns would only have encouraged them to capture other Blessed. The wiser course was to turn their backs on him and show Ang’arta that they would not be manipulated so easily.

  At the time, he had believed that meant he would languish in his cell until he died. He hadn’t considered how bullheadedly stubborn Bitharn could be—or how brave.

  “I know,” she said. “I can’t do it again. Please don’t make me.”

  The simplicity of her plea cut him more deeply than anything else could have. She would do it again, if she had to. She would dismantle a mountain with her bare hands for his sake. And, knowing that, he knew with equal certainty that he could never put such a burden on her again.

  “I won’t,” Kelland promised, for himself as much as for her. “Whatever else happens.”

  “I’d be more confident about that if we had some inkling of what we were facing.” She dried her tears and stood, red eyed but resolute. “Something better than ‘nightmares,’ anyway.”

  That brought back something he’d puzzled over earlier. “What happened to the family in this house?”

  “Did Malentir kill them, you mean?” Bitharn shook her head as she walked toward the house’s larder. “I’d wondered that too. I don’t think he did. The kitchen garden’s gone to weeds, but there are a few rows of unpulled carrots and turnips. I found barrels of cider laid up in the cellar, none tapped, and dried apple pulp near the stables, none eaten. To me, that says these people left the house around the end of autumn. Maybe early winter. They didn’t use any of their stores. That means they were gone before we left Heaven’s Needle—so Malentir couldn’t have killed them, nor could any of the other Thorns, unless their prophecies are a good deal more specific than we’ve been led to believe. Something else drove them out.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe they noticed their neighbors were turning into monsters and rotting from the inside out.” Bitharn raised a tawny eyebrow. “That would get me on the road right quick.”

  “Fair enough.” Kelland followed her to the larder, looking over her shoulder as Bitharn rummaged through sacks of dried beans and barley. She twisted a bulb of garlic off one of the hanging ropes that crowded the ceiling, then dug up a fat yellow onion and a handful of long-whiskered carrots from a burlap-covered box in the corner.

  “They left without taking their food,” he observed from the doorway.

  “Any of it, as far as I can tell. It’s peculiar.” She brushed past him, emptying her finds onto a table near the kitchen hearth. “This time of year, you’d be lucky to scrape together as much as a dandelion salad by foraging, and only a fool would trust to being able to buy all his meals along the road. So why did they leave all this behind? Let’s say they abandon the servants to fend for themselves. That leaves the husband, the wife, and at least three children. Too many to support by scavenging. It’s strange, too, that we’ve seen no sign of the servants. A house this wealthy surely had some. If they didn’t go with the family, they should have stayed in the house to keep it safe from bandits.”

  “Or us,” Kelland added.

  “Or us.” Bitharn picked up a paring knife and scraped off the carrots’ whiskers. “If they did go with the household, then it’s strange they left the pantry so well stocked, and stranger yet that they didn’t take their valuables when they left. Nobody’s rich enough to abandon their silver to thieves.”

  It was clear that Bitharn didn’t want to revisit their earlier conversation. Kelland considered trying to help with the cooking, but that tenseness in her shoulders meant she wanted to be alone. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  What he found was precious little. Bitharn was right; whoever had lived here, they’d left all their worldly treasures behind. The family silver lay untouched inside cedarwood drawers. A carafe of cut Amrali glass, worth more than most farmers could hope to earn in two years, stood on a side table between two dust-mantled goblets. The goblets were of hammered silver, edged in gold and set with tourmalines in blue and stormy sea green; they were better suited to a king’s table than to this rustic house.

  How had a farmer outside Carden Vale come to possess such treasures? Why hadn’t he taken them when he fled? One of those cups would buy passage on a riverboat to Cailan. Two would get most captains to journey up the Windhurst to fetch them, even if there was some curse on the town.

  Before Kelland could puzzle his way to an answer, he saw an even more perplexing artwork.

  On the wall behind the carafe hung a towering painting in an ornate frame of mahogany and brass. The metal had been burnished to a golden sheen. At the top, the wavy rays of a Celestian sunburst formed a gilded crown; near the bottom, the frame’s dark wood was carved into curling waves, their tips capped with mother-of-pearl. Cascades of sunbursts ran down either side of the frame. Their rays were flattened, spoonlike, on the ends.

  The frame was so ornate that Kelland didn’t immediately notice the picture it housed. The painting was surprisingly drab: a night sky rendered in simple sweeps of blue and black, with occasional slashes of silver to represent starlight or clouds. Silver and brass stars, fashioned of sharp-edged metal, had been punched through the painted canvas.

  The knight recognized their pattern at once. The metal stars formed the Celestial Chorus. That constellation, the firs
t to rise each night, crossed the sky and greeted the sun each morning. It was a popular pattern among the Knights of the Sun. To them, the Celestial Chorus represented virtuous men and women who kept faith alive through the world’s dark hours. Every night the Celestial Chorus’ stars burned bright, scattered and tiny though they were, and every morning the sun came to relieve them, restoring light and warmth to the world.

  Outside their order, however, the Celestial Chorus was little known. The constellation was not nearly as infamous as the Spire Crown sacred to Kliasta, nor was it as useful as the Wayfinder’s Star. It was an obscure symbol of a faith that had nothing else to do with the night, and it was vaguely unsettling to find it adorning a painting outside Carden Vale. The stars were slightly misaligned, their positions wrong in the sky and relative to each other, but if there was any astrologer’s significance to the change, it escaped him.

  “That’s an odd frame,” Bitharn said, wiping her hands dry on her shirt as she left the kitchen.

  “It’s a bit excessive,” Kelland agreed.

  “Not just that. Look here. There’s blood on its edge.” She crouched next to him, tracing the edges of three bladelike stars. They hung near the bottom, over the wooden waves. Leaning closer, Kelland saw crusts of old brown blood on the metal … and something else, too, tucked behind the stars.

  Bitharn saw it as well. Reaching to the back of the frame, she teased out a small latch and tugged it. One by one the bloodied stars split and parted. A jeweled handle emerged from between them, offering itself to the Celestians.

  It was made of some bright white metal, richer than silver. White gold, perhaps, or platinum. Citrines sparkled on the handle like fat drops of sunlight, alternating with rings of moonstones that shone with a ghostly gray luster. A last ring of tiny, near-black rubies twinkled at its base. The metal was scarred and misshapen beneath those stones, as if the jewels had been moved and welded back into place by a clumsy hand.

  “I wonder what it does,” Bitharn mused. “Maybe there’s a compartment hidden behind the painting.”

  Kelland hesitated. A premonition of dread tickled the back of his neck. He couldn’t say why, but he did not want that handle turned. “Let’s leave it.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “Aren’t you curious to see what it does?”

  “No.” He was being foolish, and knew it. There was no reason for his fear. Still, Kelland could not shake the sense that there was some hidden danger in the painting. It was a subtle unease, like the jangling of warning bells from a town on the horizon. No immediate threat, perhaps nothing that needed to concern him at all … and yet only a fool would ignore it. “It’s a curiosity, to be sure, but I don’t see how it helps us. I’ll see what else I can find.”

  Upstairs he found most of the rooms neat and disused … save one, which had been boarded up at some point in the past and then, more recently, smashed open. The entrance to that room was concealed behind the back wall of a linen closet; Kelland would never have found it if someone else hadn’t splintered the wooden paneling and strewn the linens and their sachets all across the hall.

  Through the hole smashed into the closet, he saw a tiny, filthy bedroom. Books piled over the bed and slid down in yellow-leafed avalanches; loose papers buried the floor. Open inkwells sat on every flat surface, many with black-gummed quills slanted inside like arrows caught in dry corpses. Here and there metal twinkled: knives, paperweights, forks and knives left lying on plates that mice had long ago picked clean.

  Holy signs too. There were dozens of amulets in the room. Sunbursts, nightingales, the Kliastan chain of thorns. Some of them were new; they dangled over the splintered closet entrance like the strands of a beaded curtain, chiming gently as Kelland ducked under them to enter. Inside, more rested atop stacks of paper or hung from nails on the walls. Three small windows overlooked the kitchen gardens on the far side of the room, and every one of their diamond-shaped panes had a sunburst etched crudely upon it by a shaking hand.

  Dust lay thick on the bedroom’s books and papers. At the center was a vanity that someone had been using as a desk, and the materials there seemed to have been more recently read. The dust was lighter on them.

  Kelland brushed aside a leaf of wrinkled parchment to reveal the age-cracked tome beneath. The Flame at Midnight, it read, Being a Study of Magic Without the Gods. The gilt on the letters had peeled away, and there was a gash in one corner that let a few pages peep through.

  The knight frowned. The title was vaguely familiar; if he’d paid more attention to his history lessons at the Dome of the Sun, he might have recognized it. At the time, though, those dry lectures about dead cults and competing theologies had been an unwanted interruption in his swordwork.

  No use regretting it. He moved to the next book, a thin treatise bound in shabby red leather. Volane on Enchantments. Beside it, a six-legged dragon reared on the silvered cover of Auberand and the Winter Queen, a story he recalled from his childhood. It wasn’t a long story, though, and the book that bore its title was hundreds of pages thick.

  Kelland lifted the book and flipped it open. The pages were beautifully lettered, with gilt capitals and illuminations after each chapter, but someone had scribbled notations between each line. The scrawled notes were written in a tiny, crabbed hand, slanted sharply to the right as if the writer was in a rush to spill out the words. The book had been a work of art, but whoever had written on it had defaced it as thoroughly as if he’d taken a knife to the pages.

  Kelland turned to the beginning, wondering what might have possessed someone to react so vehemently to a children’s story. Before he could begin reading, however, a scream sounded from downstairs.

  Bitharn.

  He dropped the book and flew down the stairs, taking the steps two at a time. As he rounded the common room, he saw Bitharn standing by the kitchen hearth, white faced. Steaming barley and broth made a spattered arc on the floor by her feet. A wooden spoon hovered over the kettle, snared by a tendril of solid shadow.

  “It’s nothing,” Bitharn said hurriedly. “I was startled, that’s all. I’m not hurt. There’s no danger.”

  “Untrue.” Malentir stepped out of the pantry, seemingly unruffled. Cool air and the scent of smoke clung to him; he had just returned from whatever he’d been doing outside. “You nearly died. You might have thanked me for saving you, but I’ve learned not to expect gratitude.”

  “I was just tasting the stew.”

  “It would have been the last thing you tasted.” The Thornlord made a small gesture, hidden within his sleeves, and the spoon clattered to the floor. “Except, perhaps, for blood.”

  “Explain yourself,” Kelland said sharply, a hand on his sword hilt.

  “Carden Vale is poisoned. Its water is lethal. I should have realized that would happen once the seals were broken; all the water here is mingled with what runs down from the mountains.” Malentir glanced back at the pantry. “I did not sense it in the food, so perhaps it has not yet poisoned the things growing in the valley, but it would be best not to risk that. Do you know the purification prayer?”

  “Yes,” Kelland said. The purification prayer was one of the Illuminers’ most basic spells. Sometimes what commonfolk called a plague was caused by bad water, or by eating food that had spoiled without showing its rot. When the water was purified, or the spoilage cleansed, the sickness ended. For a healer tasked with the well-being of an entire town, a prayer that could rid rivers of pestilence was invaluable.

  That spell was slightly less important to the Knights of the Sun, who focused on more martial pursuits. Still, anyone who spent time traveling in the wilderness soon developed a healthy appreciation for a spell that could keep mold from blanketing rain-soaked food. A flux in the bowels could kill a man just as quickly as a sword thrust, so all the Sun Knights learned the purification prayer before they left the Dome.

  “Use it,” Malentir said. He pointed to the bubbling stew pot. “Start with that.”

  There wer
e a thousand questions Kelland wanted to ask, but he could see the Thorn was not about to give up his secrets. Rather than waste his breath, the knight walked to the steaming pot and prayed. The invocation was a simple one; he barely had time to feel his goddess’ presence ignite in his soul before the magic flowed into the shape he needed and left him.

  A finger-thin wisp, thickening rapidly, rose from the stew pot. Not steam: it was darker and fouler and it writhed like a living thing. As he released his spell, more black smoke belched from the soup. Its tendrils twisted and knotted around one another like a mass of serpents; he imagined that he could almost hear them, shrieking in shrill pain, just outside the range of sound.

  The smoke hung there for another heartbeat, churning, and then it broke apart and blew away as if it had never been.

  “Good,” Malentir said smugly. “You can banish it.”

  “What was that?” Bitharn whispered, shaken.

  “The doom of Ang’duradh. Of Carden Vale, too, I expect.” The Thornlord retrieved the wooden spoon from the floor. “What killed one seems to have killed the other. The town is empty. If there are any survivors, I did not see them. I found some records in the riverport offices, and more in the town’s last inn. Beyond that, there is almost nothing of note.”

  “Almost nothing?” Bitharn pressed.