Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  Kelland lowered his sword, straining to see through the forest of paralyzed and failing skeletons. Sweat and smoke-stung tears blurred his sight. But he saw a shape rise from the shadows, and he felt its power roll over him like the tide.

  The creature in the darkness wore Gethel’s tattered skin as a cloak. Only that wrinkled fall of skin, and the glowing heat of its eyes, gave it any shape. It loomed over them, three times the height of a man, and its breath was a furnace blast. The cloak of skin burned where it touched that infernal body, leaving patches of bright, ash-edged lace smoldering across the dead man’s hide. The bones of Gethel’s skull could be glimpsed in its face, rising and receding like the spines of a reef in a wind-wracked sea, but nothing more was left of the man. Kelland knew, as he stood before that hellish presence, that the scholar’s soul was gone, consumed by the deity he had unwittingly served.

  Its appetite had not ended with Gethel. As the shadow creature gathered magic into itself, it destroyed more than the skeletons and long-tongued slaves. It drained the walls’ thrashing tentacles into inert limpness; it drew the pit’s unnatural gloom into its own body.

  And in that hunger—in the sheer extremity of the power gathered against him—Kelland found an unexpected sliver of hope. With the Maolite magic pulled back, consumed to fuel the avatar before him, only ordinary darkness remained … and in it, the knight saw a gleam of steel amid the ancient bones on the floor.

  Aurandane. He felt the echo of Celestia’s magic reverberate in the fallen sword, muted and garbled but still as familiar as the return verse to a song he had begun. He sensed that his goddess’ presence in her perethil was not whole—it felt sick, somehow, or wounded—but it was still, unmistakably, hers. Unlike the magic of the poisoned perethil that had taken them to Duradh Mal and Shadefell, the Sword of the Dawn was still sacred.

  But it was too far away to do him any good.

  Bitharn or Malentir might be able to reach Aurandane, but Kelland was on the wrong side of the pit. He’d have to pass the thing in Gethel’s hide to reach it. The shadow’s fiery eyes fixed on Kelland as if alerted by his thoughts, and he wondered if it knew he had seen Aurandane. If it did, they had no hope at all.

  Submit, it thundered, in a soundless voice that crashed against the insides of Kelland’s skull—the voice from the perethil’s shadowland. His own, stolen and amplified and made monstrous. Give in, and your death will be quick. Fight, and you will suffer.

  Kelland shook his head mutely. His throat was parched; his lungs felt blistered. The shells in his hair cracked from the heat. Celestia’s presence was fragile as a candleflame in his soul, and it dimmed by the moment. “No. You cannot have this place.”

  Submit. You will die. She will die. The burning eyes lifted from him, and the suffocating intensity of its presence relented. Behind him, Bitharn screamed. The scream went on for an eternity, tearing at him, but he did not turn. He kept his face hard, despite the plummeting emptiness in his gut, and never lowered his guard. It was the hardest thing he’d done in his life.

  A pity. The fiery eyes returned to him, and he heard cruel amusement in its thought. Bitharn’s scream ended, cut off in a wet thud of flesh against stone. Something cracked viciously; he didn’t know if it was her bow or her bones.

  I will ask you once more. Only once. A gentle death. Or agony. I will make a puppet of her corpse. A whore for worms and maelgloth. They will make their own holes, burrowing into her flesh. Give in, and you may rejoin her just as swiftly.

  Delay him, said a second voice in his thoughts, as direct as the shadow creature’s but infinitely softer. Delay him, and I will strike.

  He didn’t know whether the new voice was a fragment of his desperate imagination or some new gambit of the Mad God’s meant to distract him, but Kelland ignored it as he had the first booming threats. In his peripheral vision, Malentir got shakily back to his feet. The Thornlord’s shielding shadows were gone. Blood streamed from his nose and mouth, shockingly bright against the pallor of his skin.

  Listen to me, fool. I sense the sword, as you do. Malentir’s black eyes were fixed on the knight’s. There was no mistaking the source of that second voice now. Distract the creature, and I will use it to strike him down.

  Will you? Kelland wondered. Or will you flee through the shadows with the sword, and take it back to your mistress in her tower? But what did it matter? He had no prayer of defeating the shadow creature on his own, and Bitharn was dead, or near it. Aurandane was their only hope. Aurandane, and Malentir.

  The Thornlord wiped the blood from his mouth. It turned to vapor between his fingers, paling to the yellow of old bruises and then luminous ivory. He closed his eyes, breathing hard, and took a step to the side. Toward Aurandane.

  Kelland thought of a winter wood, and of sunlight on snow. Of another Thorn, and another fight.

  He had walked into death then, with so much less at stake. He could do it again.

  Leading with his shield, the knight charged across the carpet of scattered bones toward the fire-eyed shadow. As he did, Kelland drew on the faltering flicker of Celestia’s magic, struggling to gird and arm himself with faith in this place that blasted it away.

  The thing in Gethel’s skin coughed a guttural command as he came. The fallen skeletons’ bones exploded. Jagged shards tore into Kelland, clanging off his shield and lacerating his flesh. Smaller fragments slashed across his face. He turned his head to the right, trying to protect his eyes, and saw Malentir dart toward the sword.

  Almost there. Three steps. Two. Kelland had to hold the shadow creature’s attention; he couldn’t stop, couldn’t fall. But he slowed, driven off balance by the shattering bones and dizzied by the sweat and blood that ran into his eyes. And as he stumbled in his blindness, the skin-robed shadow unhinged its jaw and exhaled a torrent of swirling murk.

  It was not fire. It burned like fire, scorching Kelland’s skin and covering his arms with drooping black blisters, but it reeked of corruption and it clung to him like mucus, dissolving his flesh and melting into it so that he could not tell where his own body ended and the Maolite filth began. The stench of his own putrefaction filled his nostrils. He could see things swimming in the blisters’ bulges, half formed and hideous and growing larger by the moment.

  He prayed. He gagged, and prayed, and ran, angling left to pull the shadow creature’s attention away from Malentir. Celestia answered his call, filling his soul with radiance and purging the taint from his flesh. The burns healed, shedding great ashy flakes; the blisters burst, expelling their fetal monsters. They spattered on the ground, dying, as Kelland charged on.

  The creature in the shadows was waiting. It raised a fist of solid darkness, Gethel’s fingers dangling from its wrist in a smoldering bracelet, and when the knight came within reach it struck.

  Kelland saw the blow coming and raised his shield over his head to deflect it. He slashed a counterstrike at the creature’s arm, even as he dodged the incoming swing.

  His shield caught the shadow giant’s fist, and might have deflected it … but the steel groaned, corroding into rust faster than he could believe. The oak panel in the center crumbled into spongy splinters; the leather straps turned brittle and gray and cracked apart. Before Kelland recovered from the shock, the creature struck his arm through the decayed remnants of his shield.

  The impact knocked him sideways. It was like getting hit by a giant’s maul—and the physical blow was the least of it. His flesh rotted as quickly as the shield had. Creeping corruption purpled his arm, spreading outward from the point of impact. At its edges, feverish heat and the swollen tenderness of a sickened wound assailed him. At its center, he felt nothing at all. That flesh was dead, or beyond dead; sickly yellow bone poked out from its soft, stinking pulp. Kelland knew that if the fist had hit his chest, or his head, he would be a corpse already. Even with the blow partly deflected, he was dying fast.

  But he had served his purpose. Malentir crept silently behind the hulking, faceless creature,
and Aurandane was in his hands. Swift as a snake, the Thorn drove the steel into its side. He was holding it wrong, Kelland thought, dizzy and distant—like a spear, not a sword—but that did not seem to matter. The Sword of the Dawn plunged smoothly into unreal flesh, its blade sheathed in a nimbus of watery, tainted blue.

  And the thing in the shadows was dying, melting, breaking apart. Sheets of darkness sloughed from its body. The scraps of skin and blackened bone that remained of Gethel crumbled into pale gray ash, translucent smoke, nothingness.

  It didn’t feel like victory. It didn’t feel like anything.

  Kelland couldn’t breathe. Everything below his neck was a single pulse of pain. Malentir dropped the sword, and its blue blaze dimmed as it sank into the creature’s failing ashes. It was a slower fade than usual, gentler, as if Celestia was loath to leave a place taken from her for so long. But it went black in the end.

  Silence fell. The faraway gleam of starlight sifted through the wreckage of the tower, sending shafts of softer grayness into the bruised dark. Kelland could hear nothing but his own labored panting and the creak of chains. He couldn’t hear Bitharn breathing.

  Blindly the knight tried to push himself up, failed, fell. He was so weak. His magic was gone; the shadow creature’s parting blow might have poisoned him, might have killed him, but there was nothing he could do to heal himself. He hadn’t the strength to summon a fingerflame.

  Someone stooped over him. His fingers caught on soft cloth, a warm limb. The Thorn staggered slightly and pushed him away. “Be still.”

  A wintry chill washed through the knight as Malentir prayed over him—but it was a cleansing chill. The fever in his chest subsided; the throbbing of his arm became almost bearable. The numbness of near death receded, leaving him wracked with pain. “Bitharn,” he mumbled when the constriction in his chest relaxed enough for him to speak. “Where is she? Is she alive?”

  Malentir’s eyes shone milky white. He straightened, surveying the pit. “Ah. It is not pretty, knight. Be glad you cannot see.”

  Fear seized Kelland’s throat with icy fingers. He grabbed at the Thornlord’s sleeve again, cutting his hand on the man’s barbed bracelets. “Is she alive? Help her. Heal her.”

  “Be still, I said.” Malentir jerked away, hobbling through the dark. “You do no one any good by stumbling around like a halfwit. She is alive, and I will not let her die.”

  “Thank you,” Kelland breathed, collapsing onto the rubble.

  The Thornlord stooped and began another spell. Ivory ghost-light swam around him, illumining Bitharn’s broken body for the heartbeat it took the glow to seep beneath her skin. Even before the woman stirred, Malentir left her and turned his unearthly gaze to Kelland. “This is not kindness. It is a debt. You owe me a life … and you will soon have the chance to repay it. Aurandane was poisoned.”

  22

  Bitharn opened her eyes to a constellation of pain.

  Every muscle in her body ached. Her bones ground against one another and popped at the slightest movement, as if they’d all been forced out of alignment and hadn’t quite slid into their proper places. Blood and sweat soaked her clothing. Her lips were crusted with something that tasted of copper and salt—blood, of course it’s blood—and her teeth wiggled loosely when she poked them with her tongue. She still had them, though. That was something.

  She still had her sight too. It was so dark that she wasn’t sure of it for a moment, but she could make out a smoldering glow behind the walls of bone, and when she touched her lids she could feel the eyes moving underneath. She breathed a sigh of relief. Blindness was one of her great terrors. What good was an archer who couldn’t see to shoot?

  Her fingers slid downward and brushed against her cheeks. She felt the tracks of something too sticky to be tears, too thick to be blood.

  Eyes. Bitharn jerked her hands away, flinching. No. No. She could see. Those couldn’t be her eyes dripping down her cheeks.

  Unless they were healed. Was that possible? Maybe. She didn’t remember exactly what the thing in Gethel’s skin had done to her. She didn’t want to. The flashes that she did have were enough. It had soaked her in a cocoon of slime that forced its way into her mouth, her nose, every seam in her skin. She’d drowned in it, had swallowed it, had begun to welcome its foulness, just as she’d lusted after the corpse caresses in the perethil. That was the worst part, the wanting …

  Stop it. Stop. It’s over.

  Bitharn fumbled for her bow. It was miraculously unbroken, although she doubted that she had the strength to draw it. Not that it mattered. Her arrows were gone; the last three had tumbled out and broken when that shadow thing threw her against the wall.

  “You’re … well?” Kelland asked hesitantly, offering a hand. His shield was gone. The sleeve of his shield arm was soaked with blood and what looked like, but wasn’t, pine tar. Malentir must have prayed over him, too, for the arm itself seemed whole inside that ruined sleeve, but smaller cuts still bled on his chest and shoulders. It was hard to see the extent of his wounds in the gloom; blood didn’t stand out clearly on his dark skin. But he looked as battered as she felt.

  The whole place looked battered. A pale, soft mass, studded with dull steel rings, lay crumpled to her right: the skins of the eyeless hunters. Nothing else was left of them. Around the pit’s perimeter, a ring of bone debris and metal bits had collected—the remains of the skeletal army, Bitharn supposed. Many of the wooden planks had been ripped out of the walls and smashed into flinders by the tentacles’ flailing, or perhaps by the thing in Gethel’s skin. Whoever had destroyed them, there’d be no getting back up those stairs. The only way out, unless Malentir felt like carrying them through the shadows, was through a low-ceilinged doorway at the back of the pit. Through the Rosewayns’ old dungeon.

  Despite the destruction, and the fact that the loss of the stairs left them trapped, the room felt safer than it had while the labyrinth of bones still stood. The suffocating malevolence had lessened … but, Bitharn realized with exhausted dismay, not gone. It lingered like a bad smell, stronger toward that doorway. We’ve won a battle, not the war. The thought was unbearably exhausting.

  She nodded wearily to Kelland, using her bow to push herself up rather than taking his hand. He’d turned his back on her to fight. He had to. We’d be dead or worse if he hadn’t. That was true, and took away some of the sting, but it had still been a shock to open her eyes and see the Thorn standing over her, ghostly eyed and pitiless, instead of Kelland.

  She’d needed him. It wasn’t fair, and she wasn’t proud to admit it, but Bitharn was hurt he hadn’t been there. “I’m alive. Not sure I’d say ‘well.’ Kliasta’s healing seems a little less than thorough.”

  “I do not have strength to spare on your comfort,” Malentir said icily, picking his way through the rubble to the mouth of the tunnel. He moved stiffly, as if crippled by some hurt under his robes, and held the Sword of the Dawn as a walking stick to steady his steps. “You will live, and you will be unmarked. Anything more than that would be wasted. This way, your suffering repays some fraction of what I spent to restore you. If you had any sense you would be grateful for that. Neither of you is in any condition to fight, and we dare not use Aurandane again. Not while it is tainted. I am the only one with any strength left, and I do not expect we’ve seen the last of Maol’s monsters.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing we’ve got you to rely on,” Bitharn muttered, shouldering her bow. Her lantern had been destroyed when she hit the wall, but Kelland’s had survived the fight. She lit it and took the lead.

  Past the shattered labyrinth was a small tunnel dug crookedly into the earth. Iron-grated cells gaped along both sides and in pits pocking the floor. Each held sprawled corpses, sometimes two or three to a cell. All wore the rough homespun of farmers or miners. Men and women alike had shaved heads, each one crowned with four blisters over four. Bitharn thought some of them might have been in the party that killed and ate the boy on Devils’ Ridge, but
the corpses looked so much alike that she couldn’t be sure.

  None had any wounds she could see, but they were dead just the same. “How?” she wondered aloud.

  “Soul-drained,” Malentir answered. He spared barely a glance for the dead, striding past their cells toward the tunnel’s end. “For the Mad God to bring so much of his presence into the world, he needed power. He took it by consuming their souls … whatever was left of them. If his need was great enough that he devoured these wretches, this may be easier than I had thought.”

  The smell of sulfur grew stronger as Bitharn followed the Thorn. There were other smells too: stale urine, unwashed bodies, rotting food. Something had lived down here. Something other than the miners, she hoped.

  The flicker of her lantern light sent phantoms dancing along the tunnel walls. The same phantoms that had haunted the smooth walls of the pit as they descended, Bitharn thought. They’d banished those, but the apparitions lingered here. A premonition of evil prickled at the back of her neck. She eyed the corpses in their cells, touching the hilt of her knife as she hurried past. It was such a small weapon, so close to useless, and it was all she had left.

  Beyond the cells was another open archway, smooth and glossy black, as everything was down here. Runes were carved around it in a ring. They weren’t in any language Bitharn knew, and they seemed to swim and shift when she looked at them, so after the first glance she kept her eyes away. Maol’s magic might have lost its hosts, but it still lurked in this blood-soaked earth.

  The room beyond the archway was dominated by a dais of black-flecked granite. On it sat a great tangled table that looked like a charred bramble bush or some undersea creature petrified in obsidian. Spikes and chains wrapped around the table in chaotic patterns, too unevenly spaced to be restraints. A cloak of dust coated the table and masked the faces of the onyx gargoyles that squatted at its base.