Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  Kelland drew a sun sign over his chest. “The Rosewayns’ altar.”

  “Once. It served another purpose more recently.” Malentir approached the altar, his black eyes lit with macabre curiosity. The Thorn hooked a finger around the chains, following their course, and bent one of the table’s twisted arms up for closer examination. The arms were jointed and eerily flexible; the piece of obsidian moved almost like a human limb. “There is blood on this one, and less dust. Gethel modified it to suit his needs. Here and here. But why—aah. Of course.”

  “What?” Bitharn peered at the chains from the doorway, unwilling to set foot in that room.

  “The price of his godless magic.” The Thorn raised the table’s arm higher so they could see it. A cuff was crudely affixed to the stone. It was made to bind a human’s arm to the table’s, and it had a slight backward angle that would force a captive’s hand into the shallow cup behind it.

  That cup was too small to hold an adult’s hand. Bitharn recoiled. “He was sacrificing children?”

  “Using. Not sacrificing. It would have done him no good if they died too quickly.” The Thorn moved out of the lantern’s reach, vanishing into the darkness on the far side of the altar. “His knives are here. Knives, and the blackfire dust his creatures brought up from Duradh Mal. This is where his shapers bled, awakening the spirit in the dust so that it could be formed into weapons.”

  Bitharn glanced at Kelland. When the knight stayed silent, she looked back to the Thorn. “Shapers?”

  “Come and see. There is no more danger in the altar than anywhere else in this accursed place.”

  Reluctantly she entered the altar chamber, clutching her lantern. Whispery hisses surrounded her as she crossed the threshold. Tiny faces—the hungry, bloodless reflections of creatures not there—swam up from the obsidian table’s depths to gape at her. The gargoyles at the altar’s feet gurgled quiet laughter, and their breath left a clammy whiff of decay in the air. The sounds, and the sensations, died when Kelland walked in. He’d drawn into his exhausted reserves to call forth a fingerflame of holy light, and its radiance seemed to quell whatever restless phantoms lingered.

  Bitharn took small comfort in that. Whether her perceptions were madness or truth, they were brought by the hand of Maol. And there was another doorway on the other side of the chamber, so they still had farther to go.

  Three bone knives hung from hooks on the far side of the altar. Two boxes of coarse black grit rested under them, and a third was filled with lumpy pebbles the size of quail eggs. The pebbles had ridges that reminded Bitharn of her dismal attempts to make piecrusts as a child. She’d never been able to work the dough well; she always squeezed it too hard, breaking it into chunky crumbs that showed the lines of her fingers.

  “This was the shapers’ work? Pressing blackfire dust into balls with their hands?”

  “With their hands and their blood, on the Mad God’s altar. Yes.” Malentir looked more haggard than he had in the labyrinth; the veins stood blue on the backs of his hands, and the shadows under his eyes had spread until his face looked like a skull’s. But his voice did not quaver. “Bone and blood awaken its magic. That was one of the reasons his creatures used tools of bone in Duradh Mal, and that is what he did here. He cut the children’s hands and had them pack the dust between their bleeding palms, and so the stones were made. Gethel might not have understood the power he tapped, but something guided him toward the proper rites.”

  Kelland had been peering through the archway past the altar while they spoke. “Something’s alive in there. Something human,” he said abruptly, striding from the chamber.

  Bitharn hurried after him, gripping her knife. A kernel of anger had begun to burn through her fog of fear and fatigue, but that nascent rage froze as she came to the doorway. Sniffling sobs drifted through it, and the woeful familiarity of the sound chilled her bones.

  A child’s suffering had been used to bait them into a trap once before, outside Tarne Crossing. There would be no rescue if they fell victim to one here. Maol, unlike the Thorns, had no reason to show them mercy.

  Cautiously Bitharn crept forward. Kelland’s shoulder blocked some of her view, but she saw a short hall of black stone that ended in another archway. This one, however, was not empty as the previous doorways had been. Obsidian carvings wrapped around its frame in a serpentine tangle. Each of its black tendrils was an arm, and each one ended in a bony hand that reached toward them, its claw-tipped fingers outstretched. No door of wood or stone barred the entrance, but the air crackled with malign power, as palpable as that of the curtain of sunlight that held prisoners in Heaven’s Needle.

  On the other side, something moved.

  “Thorn!” Kelland shouted. “Remove this ward.”

  Malentir came down slowly, tapping Aurandane before him like an old, blind man with his cane. He brushed past Bitharn in a swirl of tattered robes and unsettling fragrance; he had reapplied the scent of amber and almonds to ward off Shadefell’s stenches.

  “Are you certain that is what you want?” he asked. “They are tainted, these creatures. Dangerous.”

  “They’re human. I can save them. Remove the ward.”

  The Thornlord did not move at once. “Some of them,” he said, studying the flow of the obsidian carvings around the doorway, “will have to die. I can unravel this spell, if that is what you want. It is crude, and much of its strength died with Gethel. But if I do that, I will not have the strength to take us all from this place. I certainly will not be able to carry all the survivors along my Lady’s path. Not without their bloodprice. Are you willing to pay that?”

  Kelland’s jaw clenched. The tiny flame hovering over his hand flared white. But he nodded.

  Malentir drew his ivory stiletto and went to the tangle of hands. “Then move back. I cannot work with you holding that flame so close.” The Sun Knight retreated, his light dimming with distance, and the Thorn stabbed at the archway’s outstretched palms. He pierced each one precisely in the center, striking clean through their hands as if the obsidian were living flesh. The hands clenched into fists, grasping futilely at the ivory blade, and dissolved into black sand.

  White cores of bone stood revealed as they crumbled, like the ephemeral skeletons of burning leaves; then those, too, broke apart. Bitharn had a glimpse of the monstrosity that lay around the doorway: a spell-forged creation of dismembered arms, grasping for the last memory of life left to them … but, mercifully, the vision dissipated as its bones did. She closed her eyes to forget.

  “It is clear,” the Thornlord said, stepping aside. He closed his eyes, tilting his head back and struggling to breathe. “Go.”

  Bitharn did, dreading what she might find. Near the entrance she saw dried human feces and well-gnawed bones. She took another step, pushing the darkness away.

  Half a hundred eyes stared back at her. Children, gray and gaunt, huddled in the lightless room. Most were bald, and all were naked or near it, clad in rags as filthy as their skin. The whites of their eyes were muddy yellow, their pupils wide and black, their teeth eroded to gray mush … but they were human.

  All their hands were scarred. Wounds crisscrossed their palms, raw red lines scored over half-healed ones in a palimpsest of pain. Dark grit was embedded in the cuts, and Bitharn could see the children’s bones, black under their pallid flesh.

  Some warbled softly to themselves in singsong cant. One scrawny boy cradled his bent head in the crook of his elbow, swinging it back and forth. A girl had peeled the lips off all around her mouth, leaving her teeth exposed in a monstrous grin. She picked at the remains, but the torn gray flesh didn’t bleed. Most of the children just stared at Bitharn, glassy-eyed and apathetic.

  At the wavering shore between light and shadow, a woman’s boot stuck out. Brass nails glinted in the sole. The heads were worn from long walking, but a sunburst showed on each one. Bitharn’s breath stopped. Cobblers in Cailan used those nails, promising the faithful that such boots would help them “
walk in the Lady’s light” and keep them in good fortune.

  “Oh, no,” Bitharn whispered.

  She’d found Evenna and Asharre. They were alive. Alive, and not maelgloth … but that was the best she could say for them. Biting her cheek to keep from crying, Bitharn raised her lantern over them.

  Evenna’s beauty was gone. She’d raked the lower half of her face to rags. It looked like a horrid Festelle mask, all curls of twisted leather around a seeping pit of a mouth. Above her cheekbones, her face was untouched except for a sooty smudge on her brow. A mote of blood dotted the tip of her nose.

  The Illuminer’s hands lay motionless in her lap. Her nails were caked with blood and pink strips of skin. She’d done this to herself … and now she sat serenely uncaring, her attention fixed on empty space. Bitharn turned away, unable to bear the sight.

  Asharre wasn’t maimed, but there was such a terrible despair in her eyes that it was almost easier to look at Evenna. Although the sigrir was head and shoulders taller than the black-haired Illuminer, she slumped so low against the wall that they seemed to be of equal height. Behind its wall of ritual scars, her face was dully hopeless. Grease and cinders caked her short ice blonde hair. Her brow, too, was stained with dried mud, and there was a ring of wilted blisters under that. Four over four, Bitharn saw with a chill.

  “I betrayed them,” Asharre mumbled. The words had the sound of rote repetition, their meanings long worn away. Cottony blackness coated her tongue. More stained the palms of her hands and the pads of her fingers, creeping up her wrists like a fungus. “I failed. I betrayed them.”

  “It wasn’t your doing,” Bitharn said. “Gethel and his blackfire dust corrupted these people, not you.”

  “It was my failure.” Asharre turned her face to the wall and raised a black-stained palm to thrust their intrusions away. “Maol knew I was the weak one. He knew. Leave me to my failure. Leave me.”

  “We do need deaths,” Malentir said, toying with his ivory knife and looking over the huddled figures with evident amusement. Neither the filth nor the misery of the children in the pit seemed to touch him; if anything, he seemed stronger in the presence of their pain. His own weariness receded as he stood there, watching.

  “Not hers,” Kelland said.

  “Then whose, knight? Please choose quickly. Gethel is dead, and we have found your so-precious victims, so our work is finished in this place. I have no wish to linger. Maol’s presence is still strong here, and the taint I took from Aurandane spreads deeper by the moment. Wait long enough, and we may well rebuild that labyrinth with our own bones, for all our ‘victory’ in battle.”

  “How many deaths do you need?” Bitharn asked.

  “For us? One. For all these poor useless souls …” He gave the room’s hollow-eyed occupants a considering look. “There is likely to be some interference with my prayer to keep us from escaping, and I am weaker than I was. So let us say five. These creatures are dull minded, and their ability to feel pain is lessened, but five should suffice.”

  Bitharn nodded. She pointed out four of the unmoving ones and the girl with the torn lips, quickly, before Kelland could do or say anything. The Sun Knight couldn’t choose some and condemn others—not without committing a grievous sin—but she could. And they had no other way out.

  Better for some to die than all of them. She chose the children because in the cold, hard part of her soul that could consider such things, she thought they might be too deep under Maol’s sway to save. The graylings were already half monster, whereas Evenna and Asharre were still themselves … and if Kelland could clear their minds, and if the Thorn did plot some betrayal before they returned to the Dome of the Sun, the Illuminer and the sigrir would make better allies than unarmed children.

  So Bitharn told herself, knowing that there was no right answer and that, in truth, she was trying to convince herself only because she had to believe something to endure the Thorn’s choice. She hoped death would be a release rather than a torment for the empty-faced children, and she hoped Celestia would forgive her.

  The Thorn took the nearest child’s chin in one hand, turning the boy’s face up to his gently. It looked like the prelude to a kiss … but as Malentir smiled, he raised the ivory dagger. Bitharn averted her eyes.

  One of the children whimpered, but the rest succumbed in silence, and the others sat like statues around them as they died. Bitharn didn’t look at Kelland until it was over. Instead she fixed her thoughts on Evenna and Asharre, and on the children who would survive because the others did not. It had to be done.

  “Gather them,” Malentir said.

  The children didn’t resist as Bitharn shepherded them into the middle of the room. They shuffled along uncomprehendingly, stumbling to stops when she let go of their wrists. Some had to be lifted bodily, and she was shocked by how light they were; they felt like hollow husks. Kelland worked beside her, helping Asharre and Evenna toward the others, but Bitharn couldn’t meet his eyes. It was a surprise, and a welcome one, when he clasped her shoulder in passing.

  Malentir began his prayer as soon as the children were gathered. The shadows swelled and swayed to the rhythm of his words; frost sharpened in the air. An icy rime spread across her lantern, killing its light with a crystalline snap. At first the darkness held back from the white burn of Kelland’s fingerflame, but at a gesture from the Thornlord, the knight closed his hand and let the flame die. Utter blackness engulfed them.

  Bitharn felt the magic solidify around her in a cage cold as winter iron. It clamped around her, vise tight, so frigid that her skin would surely freeze and tear away if she moved. The sensation built to overwhelming pain, forcing a gasp from her in the blackness, but she never heard the sound. Tears trickled down her cheeks and froze to tinkling ice. The agony intensified, driving her to the edge of breaking—

  —and yet the cage of pain was almost comforting compared to what she sensed beyond it. A chittering malevolence lurked there. Vast and manifold, it pressed against the weave of the Thornlord’s spell, searching for a way in. She wasn’t sure if it was many minds or a single one fragmented beyond recognition, but its hate for them was absolute.

  With a sudden sense of alarm Bitharn realized that something was clawing at the spell cage from the inside, trying to weaken its strands enough to admit the screeching madness. Unseen claws scratched around her, shrill as the scraping of steel on steel.

  “No,” Bitharn whispered. The chill in the dark became a bone-cracking freeze. If she had plunged naked into the White Seas she could not have been colder. The claws stopped—were frozen, she knew somehow, were dead—and the madness outside receded as it was left in the distance, howling.

  Bit by bit, the icy dark thawed. Land and air separated. The scents of earth and spring sap filtered in. Woodsmoke touched the air, which was warm enough to move once more. Wispy clouds limned the branches of an ancient oak and silhouetted the thatch of a low-roofed cottage. A forest spread around them.

  Over the wood, the spire of Heaven’s Needle shone gold. They were twenty leagues north and west of the Dome, Bitharn guessed. Perhaps a little more. That put them in Lord Gildorath’s land. A wise choice for a Thorn: Gildorath’s commonfolk were well accustomed to closing their eyes and ears to uncomfortable things.

  The lonely cottage, however, seemed deserted. Brambles had begun to reclaim the path that threaded through the forest toward it. There was no one to see them arrive—or what might happen to them after. Bitharn bit her lip and turned as Kelland struck a spark to her lantern, shining it over their charges.

  A third of the children were dead. Ice glittered on their eyes. Their heads were crushed like the shells of boiled eggs, fissured and dimpled but intact. Evenna and Asharre were still breathing, though the blood in Evenna’s hair had frozen into tangled black icicles.

  Malentir looked over them with weary annoyance. He staggered away from the huddled group, dusted pine needles and loam from a boulder on the other side of the cottage’s clearing,
and sat. “They tried to bring the Mad God with them. Had they succeeded, we would be dead, or worse. It was necessary to stop them.”

  “I know,” Bitharn said. “I felt it.”

  “Are we safe?” Kelland asked.

  The Thornlord shrugged. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back tiredly. In the moonlight his face was very white, with an unhealthy bloom of blue at his lips and temples. “More than we were, less than we should be. These children are Maol’s creatures, and they carry his taint. As do I, and as does Aurandane. Sooner or later, if it is not burned out, he will be able to reach through the creatures he has corrupted. I will wait to see whether you can restore them. If not, I will destroy them before returning to my mistress’ side.”

  “You’re leaving us?” For some reason the thought startled Bitharn. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, and she should have been glad to see him go … but she wasn’t.

  He isn’t even an ally. Not truly. The soldiers of Cailan had a saying for that: “The enemy of my enemy makes good arrow bait.” Accurate, if unsavory; a shared enmity could be useful, but only a fool put any trust in it.

  But the Thorn had saved them. He hadn’t betrayed them.

  Malentir cocked his head at her. She was uncomfortably sure he could read her thoughts. “For a time. It is possible, even probable, that I will return. Corban is here, or was, and he poses a greater threat than Gethel did. Gethel was a deluded fool who had no idea what he invited, and he was isolated. Corban knows, or knew, and chose to tamper with it anyway. And he is in Cailan. Where there are enough people—enough victims—to infect all Ithelas with the Mad God’s plague.”

  “We will be glad to have your aid,” Kelland said. Bitharn’s eyebrows went up; she agreed with him, but she hadn’t expected the knight to accept so quickly. Malentir saw her surprise and smiled, though he said nothing until Kelland left to pray over the rescued children. As the Sun Knight began an invocation to Celestia, Bitharn took a seat on a mushroom-spotted log near the Thorn. She didn’t especially want his company, but there was nowhere else to sit except in the dirt.