Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  Gethel.

  He needed the scholar’s gate. Oh, it looked a horror … but Gethel had been right about the ritual, right about the blackfire stone, right about everything. And he was too far away, much too far. The gate would bring him closer, and all his wisdom with him.

  Corban had left the bag of bones among the blackfire crates on the pier. He went back and hoisted it over his shoulder. It weighed almost nothing. The dog whined and scratched behind its makeshift gate as he passed, but the boards held it back.

  Behind the ladder was a narrow space backed by a wall of crooked bricks. Corban could just fit inside if he bent and squeezed himself under the rusting rungs. The wall was patched and ugly, carelessly maintained by a dozen hands sealing rat holes and replacing lost bricks over the years. There wasn’t an inch of it that didn’t either bow or bulge … but it was straight enough to hold the gate of bones.

  Fumbling in the cramped confines, Corban pulled an arm from the sack. He could scarcely see what he was doing; the angle was bad, and he hadn’t room to turn his head. It was easy for his imagination to play tricks on him. The black veins laced through the small bones seemed to be shifting and spreading, responding to something in the wet dark. Inside the sack, the other bones clicked against one another, making a dry tick-rattle. It sounded almost purposeful, almost alive … and that unnerved Corban more than it should have.

  He held the bony arm up to the wall, pushing it blindly against the scraggled bricks. Gods willing, it would catch in a cranny and stick.

  It didn’t. Instead the bony fingers spread wide and dug into the rotting mortar, anchoring themselves in the crevices they made. While Corban gaped at the skeletal hand hanging from the wall like some pale nightmarish spider, the next one scuttled out of the bag. It sprang onto the wall, climbing across the bricks until it was aligned with the first, fingers to shoulder ball.

  Another arm followed, and then another. Faster than he could fathom, the bones tumbled out of the bag, and Corban stood slack mouthed at the outline of an archway drawn in animated bones before him. The sack dangled, deflated, in his hand. The space under the stairs was so tight that the knuckles of one skeletal hand brushed his nose.

  He had done nothing. Almost nothing. Yet the gate stood whole before him.

  Whole, but inert.

  Gethel had told him this would happen. Seeing the gate, however, was entirely different from listening to the scholar describe it. Seeing the hands—the arms, the white clawlike fingers, all mere inches from his eyes, all possessed of something that wasn’t life but moved like it—frightened him so badly that he would have fallen backward if the ladder hadn’t held him up.

  The dead hands waited on the crooked bricks, arms laced in a black-vined gate that reached higher than his head. Not a finger twitched, yet Corban stared at the bones with frozen, fascinated dread. Run now, try to run, and they’ll grab you. They’ll pull you apart.

  Corban didn’t run. Clumsily he drew the horn-handled knife from his belt and slashed it across his palm, quickly, twice and twice again, before he could cringe from the expectation of pain.

  The pain never came. The blade bit in clean and deep, drawing four lines of blood that crossed in the center and starred his palm with eight red rays, but it might have cut someone else’s flesh for all Corban felt. His hand felt dull and dead, not his at all.

  But it bled. He forced his numb fingers flat and pressed his wounded palm against the bricks at the center of the gate, following the scholar’s instructions. Blood trickled along the channels in the rough mortar, spidering out to the sides as it fell.

  One by one, like leaves turning toward the light, the skeletal hands at the periphery of the arch stretched their palms toward Corban’s blood. As it passed through their fingers, the crimson stain flushed black—infinitely black, dizzyingly so, the light-swallowing emptiness of a void that knew nothing of warmth or sound or life.

  The edges of the bricks adjoining the inky lines crumbled and trickled into the void. Then the bricks themselves did, faster and faster, breaking away in chunks that fell to grit and then to powder as they spun into the abyss and vanished. Soon there was nothing but gaping black inside the ring of bones. Corban, staring at it, felt the emptiness pulling him in. He had to avert his eyes and turn away before it swallowed him as well.

  Gethel’s magic had worked. He had a gate.

  He thought of that infinite dark, and wondered: what else had a gate?

  19

  There were no mice in Shadefell’s kitchens.

  Sacks of flour and barley spilled across the floor, rounds of bread gone hard as granite piled the shelves, and ropes of onion and garlic dangled from the ceiling, their bulbs withered to gummy balls inside crackling paper husks. The kitchen’s windows were broken and the garden door was cracked, inviting all the wild world to share in its bounty … yet not a roach skittered across the flagstones. The only animals in sight were the ones cut open on the counters.

  Dogs and cats lay there, bound to the stone counters by dusty threads of dried blood. They had not been butchered, not properly; dirty fur clung to the bodies, crusted into wild tufts around the cuts. No one had cleaned them, and the meat was still there, dried to corrugated knobs of black leather. Only the bones were missing.

  The animals were all small. Pets, Asharre guessed; none had the size to be a hunting hound or guard dog. Several had gray muzzles.

  “Bones again,” Evenna muttered as she came into the kitchen, arms clasped tightly over her chest. “Bones when I sleep, bones when I wake …”

  “They were trying to fuel the fires.” Asharre stroked a finger along one of the little bodies, tracing the gouges in its leg. It was strangely soothing. His people lit the way to enlightenment. Falcien had not lied: the solaros had followed this path before her. She pulled her hand back reluctantly. “These pets must have come from Carden Vale, so we know the townspeople reached the house. They cannot be much farther.”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s true. Just … give me a moment, please.” Evenna slumped against a counter, pressing the heel of her free hand into her eyes. “Maol’s presence is so strong here. The temple in Carden Vale was nothing like this.” She managed a wan smile, though she did not move her hand from her eyes. “I feel like … like I’ve eaten a bellyful of wormy plums, and I’m dressed head to toe in lead plate, and I’ve got to walk uphill in a hailstorm with the deadwinter wind trying to blow me straight across the Last Bridge.”

  Asharre swallowed the lump in her throat. She knew what Evenna meant. For days on the walk up to Shadefell her thoughts had been murky and obscure. Concentrating on anything was like trying to piece together a shattered vase without glue: she could fit together two pieces, sometimes three, but after that it fell apart into a meaningless jumble. Inside the house she felt a little clearer, but the Illuminer seemed worse. She tried to put a good face on it, though, forcing herself to sound as lightly casual as she could. “Is that all? Then it is almost nothing.”

  “Almost.” Evenna’s smile faltered. Her hand fell back to her side. In the broken light of Shadefell’s kitchen, the marks of exhaustion were stark on her face. Weariness ringed her eyes in bruise purple and black; new lines etched the papery white of her skin. She looked a short step from death. “I’ll manage. Let’s go.”

  The sigrir hesitated. “We do not have to go now. In the morning you might be stronger—”

  “How? Nothing will change.” Evenna glanced around, shivering. “Nothing can change until we break the Mad God’s hold on this place. Delaying only makes me weaker, and him stronger. We have to go on.”

  “As you say,” Asharre agreed, quelling her unease. She pushed open the creaking door and led the way, her hand never far from her sword.

  Shattered glass glittered in a wavy band along the threshold, following the door’s sweep. Asharre stepped over it and into a high-ceilinged dining hall. A great oaken table ran from one end to the other, each of its legs carved with rearing serpents and the rose-br
aided wheels of the Rosewayns. Glimmers of gilt chased the serpents’ scales and the roses’ petals, though most of it had been chipped away so that it looked like an army of mice had been at the wood.

  The last feast held in that hall had ended in carnage. Heavy blows had smashed the chandeliers into rib-caved skeletons of glass and metal; blood and dust dulled the fragments of crystal that clung to their rickety hoops. Not a chair stood upright at the table. Most were thrown back, as if their occupants had been suddenly roused; others had toppled over on splintered legs. The table looked like it had been washed in blood, and the walls were no cleaner.

  More crusts of dried brown rimed the glasses and bowls on the table—but those, Asharre thought uneasily, did not look like accidental spatters. She lifted one and sniffed it, but the only smell was dust and mold.

  Bones lay on a tarnished platter. Small ones. Child size. The other dishes were gone, but the looters hadn’t dared disturb that roast to take its silver plate. She saw the delicate, dust-webbed fans of fingers locked behind the curve of a fire-browned spine, and swiftly averted her gaze.

  “The last feast of the Rosewayns,” Evenna whispered. “I thought that was just a story.”

  “No,” Asharre said. She plucked a hair from a streak of dried blood on a chair back. It curled between her fingers, long and blond. “But it ended long before we came. All of this is ancient. It is none of our concern.”

  “Isn’t it? It’s all connected.” Evenna dug her fingers into her tangled hair. Much of it had fallen out of her once-neat healer’s halo, and it hung in a wild black shag around her shoulders. “What happened before, what’s happening now … if only I could think.”

  Asharre studied a rose-marked cup with feigned intensity, trying to mask the wrench of pain she felt at her helplessness. They needed to find Aurandane. Once they had the sword, Evenna would be able to hold off the Maolite curse. She dropped the cup back to the table and searched the hall. The people here had come close. The dreams had told her so. She had only to follow their tracks.

  The legless chairs and broken glass had been pushed aside in a trail that led from the kitchen to the two doors on the left. “This way. Someone came here.”

  “How can you tell? I can’t see a thing.”

  How can you not? Asharre wanted to ask. It wasn’t that dark. The hall’s windows were buried inside and out in cobwebs and leaf litter, but enough light seeped in from the kitchens to pick out every detail. It had been harder to see under the glaring daylight outside.

  Perhaps some enchantment was to blame. Maol’s hold on this place clearly crippled Evenna; it was no stretch to think it could blind her as well.

  Asharre bit back her worry. They had to find something soon. She couldn’t lead a blind woman through this hellhole. Leaving the hall’s ghosts to their ruined feast, she turned to the nearest door.

  It opened to a small room littered with broken furniture. The walls were gouged by sword swings, the marquetry floor scuffed and bloodied. Curling blossoms of char climbed toward the ceiling. A decapitated skeleton in a gold-trimmed doublet slumped by the far door, its long-haired skull cradled in its lap and an arrow in its ribs. The skull’s teeth were filed to points, and Asharre felt its gaze following her as she walked past.

  You will die here, the skull whispered, so quietly that only Asharre could hear. Foolish to have come. Little breather, little bleeder. You will die here, little fool, and I will eat your bones. Eat, and live again. Yesss … The words faded into whispery laughter, prickling the small hairs on Asharre’s neck.

  She drew her caractan and swung, smashing the skull where it lay. The yellowed bones of skull and spine cracked easily, pulverized between Asharre’s steel and the sword-scarred wall. The skeleton toppled, and its whispery laughter died.

  Evenna gawked at her, dropping the chair leg she’d picked up as a makeshift cudgel. She stooped and picked it up slowly, as if bending to the ground pained her. “Why did you do that?”

  “I did not like how it looked at me.” Asharre wiped bone dust from her blade and slid it away. Maybe she’d imagined the laughter; maybe she hadn’t. Either way, it was gone.

  She walked past the skeleton into a long gallery decorated with portraits on one side and dead trees in stone basins on the other. Tall, slender windows stood between each of the basins, letting in a dusty light. The fighting in Shadefell seemed to have stopped with the fanged defender in the last room, but the violence had not.

  Every one of the Rosewayn portraits had been slashed and burned. Dark oils cracked as the canvas curled away from the rents in each painted face. Several had been torn out and trampled; those that remained hung askew, their features masked by dust and damage. Their eyes followed her, though, as the fanged skull’s had before. Asharre refused to meet their stares, trying not to show the tension that knotted her shoulders and soured her stomach. The last thing she needed was for Evenna to think she was going mad. Or to be going mad.

  “Oh.” Evenna fingered one of the tattered portraits. “What is this?”

  “What?”

  “Someone’s … fed the portraits. Or tried to.” She turned one of the portraits toward Asharre. A grainy daub of blood smudged the face’s lips, dripping thickly down the ripped canvas. It had been done after the picture was torn; both the painted and the bare sides of the canvas were soaked in the sludge.

  You will die here. The portrait’s blood-smeared lips did not move—of course they didn’t; they couldn’t—but Asharre heard the words clearly. She felt its gaze drill into her. You will die here, and we will feast, we will feed, and we will live again.

  The other portraits took up the chant. We will feast, we will feed. Wisps of shadow stretched from the rips in their painted faces and the black blots of their mouths, reaching toward the living women in their midst. We will live again.

  Asharre stumbled away, raising her sword defensively. She put her back to the wall, framing herself between two windows so that their weak spills of sunlight kept the hungry dark at bay.

  Evenna had not moved. “What’s the matter?” she asked, her eyes wide and white with fear. She clutched the cudgel like a talisman. “Why do you look like that?”

  Asharre shook her head, unable to force any sound past the knot of terror in her throat. The shadows were taking on greater definition as they reached farther into the gallery. Some had grasping talons; others stretched into mouths, wide and thin and fringed with splintery obsidian teeth. They slithered toward the Illuminer, who stood blind and defenseless in their midst. The portrait in her hands was laughing, its voice a dissonant jangle of glee.

  They aren’t real, she told herself. They can’t be real. Pictures don’t laugh. Shadows don’t hunt. This is nothing but madness—some Maolite trap of the mind. But she could not deny what her eyes were seeing, and she couldn’t stand by as the fanged tendrils closed on Evenna. Cursing, Asharre attacked.

  To her astonishment, her sword bit in. What it struck was not quite solid—but neither was it empty air. Something recoiled from the steel and shrieked, high and shrill as a glazier’s saw on glass. More tendrils came at her as the wounded one flinched away. They snaked in from all sides, darting and flickering, trapping her in a vortex of swirling darkness.

  Asharre fought desperately, her caractan a blur. Her sword cut through the shadows and left them thrashing on the floor. Yet there were always more, far more than she could stop. They bit at her legs, clawed at her sides, tore at her shoulders. Blood streamed from the wounds, spattering the floor as freely as her sweat.

  The sight of it snapped Evenna out of her confusion. Clasping her sunburst medallion, she lifted the golden emblem into a shaft of sunlight and chanted. The incantation was familiar to Asharre—it was the same one she had used to make a dome of light in the maelgloth-besieged temple—but its results were not.

  Instead of creating light, Evenna’s prayer splintered it. The watery sunlight falling through the garden windows intensified to diamond whiteness, steadied,
and burst into the shadows like a thicket of glowing lances. The creatures in the darkness shrieked and died as the holy fire stabbed their half-real bodies. And they were creatures, not just the claw-tipped tentacles or gnashing mouths that Asharre saw before the light struck them.

  One fell at her feet, spasming. A sunbeam had burned a fist-size hole through its chest. The monstrosity had the size and shape of a man, though its head and hands were far too large and the skin over its skull was webbed like a frog’s feet. Pustules raddled the spaces between its ribs, and its mouth was a wide, grinning gash that slashed from ear to ear.

  Its entire body, and those of all the other shadow creatures that lay dead or dying around it, was made of wet black grit. Even as the women stared at them, the bodies dried out and dissipated into grains of black sand. Moments after Evenna’s spell faded, nothing was left of their assailants. Only the scratches and bites on Asharre’s body proved the attack had been real.

  “You’re hurt,” Evenna said.

  “Not badly.” Asharre sheathed her sword and wiped her palms. She tied strips of cloth around the worst of her scratches and banded her wrists so that blood would not spill over her hands. It took several tries; her hands were shaking badly. “These wounds are nothing. Save your spells.”

  It would have been better to wash the cuts, but they had no time for that. She wouldn’t take blood poisoning in the next few hours. Asharre shouldered her pack again. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know.” Evenna fingered her medallion, glancing uneasily at the portraits. “That was how my goddess chose to answer my prayer. It was nothing I willed.”

  “Then trust to her wisdom,” Asharre said. “Perhaps it was not oathbreaking. Ghaole do not live, and these things of dirt and shadow were deader than ghaole. If they were not alive, it was no sin to destroy them.”