Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  The Thorn led them nearly to the water’s edge. In the harbor, past the last ragged fringe of buildings, ships curled tight against the driving rain and bobbed on swirling waves. Slick-backed rats scurried through the alleys, quarreling over choice morsels. Corban’s house squatted in one of those alleys, but no rats ran down that way.

  The hovel’s door, taken off its hinges, sagged against its entrance. Bird droppings caked the step in front of it. Rather than forming a dumpy ridge like every other such pile Asharre had seen, those droppings rose into vaguely familiar, spindly-stalked shapes.

  “Mushrooms,” Bitharn said. “They’re making the shapes of the mushrooms we saw in Carden Vale. Morduk ossain.”

  Malentir’s hood dipped in a nod. “That is not Corban’s doing, but his god’s. It gives me hope … and fills me with fear. The Mad God is not fool enough to let morduk ossain bloom on the Dome of the Sun’s doorstep, but no Maolite could mistake this sign. There is a locus of Maol’s power inside, it tells them: enter, and be sanctified. But does that signal mean that Corban has given himself completely to Maol, or that his god seeks new vessels to replace a failed one?”

  Kelland moved past him without answering. He grabbed the door in gloved hands and pulled, shattering the unnatural sculptures on the stoop. For an instant something seemed to squirm inside the cracked shells of bird dung—as if larval things, neither worms nor mushrooms but blind pale squirmers somewhere between the two, gestated inside. Then the door swept across them, knocking them apart, and they dissolved into the rain.

  Bundles of herbs dangled from the rafters of Corban’s hovel. They hung swollen and strangled in their strings, dripping slow brown slime. No longer were they feverfew or chamomile, wintermint or tansy; while a few moldy leaves on the outside of each bundle still retained their original shape, their hearts had all bulged into the contorted knots of beggar’s hand.

  Fat glass jars squatted under the bundled herbs and drying racks, and in them dead things swam. Kelland’s light skittered over dissolving arms and shriveled tails, toothless mouths filled with brine and sleeves of decaying flesh that hung loose from soft soaked bone.

  The stench of rotting, fermented fish that emanated from the jars was incredible. Several of their lids were askew. Wrinkled fingers clutched at their rims, stilled in the act of climbing out. The creatures’ bodies, malformed and plump with brine, swayed gently in their jars; their fingers, exposed to unforgiving air, were dried and cracking on the glass.

  “What stopped them?” Bitharn wondered. She walked over to one—a curled white thing with stubbed teeth and a single round eye over its upturned snout—and leaned over, using her belt knife to poke at its paws.

  It didn’t move, but something else did. Asharre glimpsed something, or things, slinking predatory and swift through the hovel’s shadows. A familiar, wild rankness came from them. Something like …

  “Dogs,” Asharre realized aloud, a heartbeat before they came.

  The dogs poured like rats from the walls, charging in a snarling, yapping horde. She couldn’t fathom where they’d come from; the hovel was far too small for them to have hidden as the Celestians entered. Yet they rushed in, a dozen or more of them, as real as she was. Some were big and muscular, with the wedge-shaped heads and slab shoulders of dockside maulers. Others were gaunt and mangy: feral scavengers from the streets. One, barely bigger than Asharre’s boot, had the silky fur and butterfly ears of a highborn lady’s pet, but it growled as ferociously as the scarred mastiff beside it.

  Not one of the dogs was whole. The fur along their flanks was shaved in winding curves, and in those patterns their skin was cross-hatched with thin black cuts. Around those cuts their flesh was hideously bubbled, glistening like hard black roe. Their eyes were wet black marbles, and their front paws were stretched to grotesque fingers, each knuckled with two joints unlike any true dog’s toe. Several dogs had gaping, gnawed wounds, dealt by their own teeth or others’. The little lady’s lapdog had the worst of these; its bones bulged out from a rip that laid it open from tail to shoulder. That wound should have killed it, but the dog wasn’t even slowed.

  “Back to back,” Kelland shouted. A terrier ducked a low swing and snapped at his legs. He brought a boot down on its head, crushing the animal’s skull, and kicked the struggling body away. “Back to back!”

  Malentir shook back his sleeves, staying where he was. Asharre and Kelland backed toward one another, closing defensively in front of Bitharn. The girl retreated out the open door, setting an arrow to her bow once she had room enough to draw.

  The beasts were on them. Brave or stupid, the Thorn was on his own. Asharre drew Aurandane. She had no time to hesitate, no time to doubt. The beasts were on her, and she attacked. Uncertain as she was of Celestia, the sigrir had perfect faith in her own skill.

  As if in answer to that faith, pale blue radiance blazed up from the steel. It eclipsed the smoky light of Bitharn’s lantern with its brilliance. The dogs drew back, snarling soundlessly. Smoke trickled out between their teeth and wept from their lifeless eyes. Then their hesitation snapped, and the animals leaped.

  Asharre met them with Aurandane. Her sword caught the mastiff under its jaw and sheared cleanly through its skull, spraying blood and motes of sticky blackness that hissed and burned as they flew. The headless body staggered on a few steps, stumbling over moldy leaves and broken glass. She hit it again and sent the corpse careening into a drying frame. It collapsed in a shower of cracking wood. Asharre dashed scarlet spray from her brow—thicker and colder than it should have been, closer to wine-jelly than blood—and squared to meet the next.

  An unnatural chill spread through the air. Frost crackled across the sodden floor, spreading quick as wildfire. The dogs’ paws froze to the ground, and although many fought free, they left behind claws and entire toes when they pulled loose. In the corner of her eye, Asharre saw the Thorn raise his cupped hands higher.

  Pale mist spilled from his fingers. The mist slowed some dogs, killed others. Their skulls fractured, burst open by ice swelling the flesh inside their bones. Frost-flowers of sickly yellow and dead gray blossomed from their eyes and nostrils; their jaws creaked open as frozen bile pushed its way out.

  Bitharn chose her targets from the dogs that didn’t die. She shot cleanly between the sigrir and the knight, but the confusion of their bodies hurt her aim; the gray goose shafts still flew true, each one burying itself in a furry throat or chest, but they came slower and fewer than Asharre liked.

  “Hold them,” Kelland rasped. “I need time.”

  Bait them, you mean. She couldn’t hold them back herself. Asharre jerked her head in a nod and bulled forward, pulling the throng away from the knight.

  The little lapdog seized the opportunity. It sank its teeth into Asharre’s ankle, its entire body whipping from side to side as it worried at her flesh. Blood filled her boot. Two of the mastiffs lunged at her; Asharre slashed one deep across the chest and sidestepped the other. It charged past her, its claws scrabbling on ice. The wounded one stumbled, knocked off-stride by her blow. Blood soaked the short black fur on its chest. She’d heard its breastbone crack at Aurandane’s impact, knew the force behind the swing … but the dog was not dead, hardly even seemed slowed. Blackfire had the animal deep in its grasp, and it did not let go lightly.

  Asharre closed on the injured dog. It sprang, and the shining sword smashed into its jaws. She heard the rattle of the dog’s teeth striking the wall, heard Kelland’s voice lift in prayer. The dog’s raspy growls, labored and wet, sounded much louder than the Celestian’s chant. Blood and froth drooled from its ruined mouth. Its heart, a withered black thing, throbbed in the mangled hollow of its chest. And still it did not die.

  Golden light blossomed around her, joining the dawn-pale blue of Aurandane’s glow. Kelland’s prayer, she realized, as the light rose to fill the hovel. Asharre felt only welcome warmth as the aura closed around her, but the dogs burst into flame. The little one locked onto her ankl
e whined, its teeth still buried in cloth and muscle, and looked up at the sigrir with what she would have sworn was sudden awareness, and sudden horror.

  The fur fell from its face like dust blown in the wind; the black lumps of its eyes dissolved, leaving empty holes in a bare-fleshed skull. Sinew and muscle cracked like sunbaked clay and fell away in smoldering showers. The bones stood naked an instant longer; then they, too, crumbled in a wash of heatless flame.

  The others fell more quickly, although not as completely. Their insides melted away, leaving their empty skins collapsed on the apothecary’s floor. Above them, the hanging knots of beggar’s hand erupted into colorless flame; below, the Thorn’s spell-summoned ice hissed into steam. As fire and ice and cursed unlife all sputtered out, Kelland let his prayer go.

  Once the immediate danger faded, the pain of Asharre’s injured ankle flooded back in. She sucked in a breath, shifted her weight off the bad foot, and clutched Aurandane’s hilt tighter. The Sword of the Dawn had the power to heal her wound. The magic was there, locked in its steel … but it had vanished as soon as the last of the dogs fell, and she didn’t know how to call it back. Useless.

  Instead she used the sword’s tip to prod the wrinkled dogskin. “What were they?”

  “An attempt at making servants,” Malentir replied. He didn’t appear to have been wounded, although his spell-woven guise had eroded visibly after Kelland’s prayer. The ivory pallor of his own skin showed through the fading tan of his false face, and his tunic and trousers seemed baggier, reverting toward the loose flow of robes. “Maelgloth, most likely. Perhaps ansurak. Whichever it was, the attempt was not entirely successful. They were unevenly transformed—that is why the skins are left of some, and nothing of the rest—but I don’t know why. Nor do I know why the Mad God channeled his power into dogs rather than men. Ordinarily his servants take humans when they can. It is a promising sign, however. His dominion here is incomplete.”

  “Let me see your foot,” Kelland said. He knelt beside Asharre, examining her ankle, while Bitharn and the Thorn sifted through the wreckage of the hovel to find Corban’s hiding-hole. Warmth flowed from the knight’s hands as he prayed, washing the pain away.

  Asharre bit the inside of her lip. If only she could use the sword the High Solaros had given her, she wouldn’t have to be a burden on the Blessed. Instead all she could do was nod gratefully to the knight as he finished.

  “Found it,” Bitharn called, pushing a mold-stiffened rug away from the other side of the hovel. A small trapdoor sat in the floor underneath. She reached for the ring in its center, but Malentir waved her away.

  “I will look first,” he said.

  Bitharn shot him a sour look, but she stepped aside without comment.

  The Thorn ignored her, sweeping his hands a few inches over the trapdoor. After tracing its outline twice, he nodded to himself and pulled the door up by its ring. He drew out a sparrow’s carcass from a hidden pocket in his robes, whispering over the stiff curled body. The bird opened its wings and straightened its head with a tiny crack of cartilage, then plummeted through the open door. Malentir settled back on his heels, waiting. Twice he murmured inaudibly to himself, but he never spoke to them.

  The others exchanged a glance. Then Kelland shrugged and sat crosslegged in a corner, lapsing into meditative prayer. Bitharn wandered among the dogskins, retrieving what arrows she could. She was sliding the last of them into her quiver when Malentir finally stirred.

  “Our quarry awaits,” he said.

  27

  Kelland approached the open trapdoor cautiously. “What did you see?”

  “The ladder goes to a small cellar,” Malentir answered. “Part of it is closed off with boards and rope. There is a dog behind the boards, but I do not believe it can escape. A short tunnel leads to a smuggler’s pier. There is a warding at its threshold; I did not send my bird onto the pier.”

  “Anything dangerous?”

  “Nothing insurmountable.”

  The knight’s lips thinned in annoyance at the Thorn’s reply, but he nodded. “I’ll take the lead. Asharre, after me. Bitharn follows. Malentir has the rear. No one goes past this warding until we’ve both examined it.” Sheathing his sword, Kelland took hold of the ladder’s top rung and swung down. Asharre waited at the top, holding the lantern high. Once he reached the floor, she passed it to the knight. He set the lantern on the ground nearby and moved deeper into the tunnel.

  Asharre followed. The descent was cramped, and her body blocked most of the light, so she felt her way along the ladder half-blind. Flakes of rust broke off on her palms. The metal rungs creaked and swayed under her weight. She did her best to ignore that, as she did the sweat that trickled slowly from her temples to her chin.

  Halfway down, Asharre glimpsed something in the cracked brick wall behind the ladder’s rungs. Some shape, some ghostly outline, barely visible in the shifting gloom. It looked like a scratched-out circle—the silhouette of a doorway, maybe—marked by peculiar, uneven holes in the bricks. For the merest instant, she saw the spectral image of a ring of bones hanging on the wall, arm locked around arm in a grisly wreath … and as soon as she realized it, Asharre closed her eyes, shaking her head in refusal.

  That trap had caught her in Carden Vale. The illusion of meaning was just a snare, one of Maol’s infinite tricks to lure the unwary into his grasp. She wouldn’t fall into it again.

  No sooner did the thought come to her than the rungs under each of her feet gave way with an oddly wet noise, closer to the ripping of flesh than the pang of snapping metal. The ladder’s sides ran through her hands like a rope of sawblades, tearing her palms. Asharre hit the ground hard. Pain shivered up her legs and back. Trembling, she tested her footing and felt a flash of surprise that she had not broken a leg.

  The twang of a crossbow—no, two—sounded behind her. It was a sound out of nightmare: the same sound that she’d heard before Falcien fell. Panic blanketed her mind.

  Snatching up the lantern, Asharre ran to Kelland’s aid. He was on the ground, gasping, two black bolts protruding from his chest. Past him, the lantern’s light revealed two crossbowmen sprawled outside the low-ceilinged entrance to the smuggler’s pier.

  They were already dead. Rivers of black blood spilled from their noses and ears. Ice crystals glittered on their skin. Their chests, carved with ashen spirals and runes, drew no breaths; their hands, elongated and bulb-knuckled like the toes of the deformed dogs’ paws, lay limp on the stocks of their weapons. The only wounds on the bodies were those that marked their transformation from men into maelgloth, but the Thorn had never needed blades to kill. Asharre was not surprised to look back and see him alighting at the bottom of the ladder. He approached the fallen knight and crouched, examining his injuries.

  Kelland scarcely seemed aware of the Thorn. His shell-tipped braids snaked across the floor; his dark lips moved as he mumbled something she couldn’t hear. The bolts jutted obscenely from his body.

  Quickly, mercilessly, Malentir pulled them free and tossed them aside. Kelland’s torso jerked convulsively; Asharre flinched, watching.

  “Help him,” Malentir ordered.

  “How? I’m no Blessed.”

  “You have the sword. I pulled the quarrels from him before they could explode, but their poison is killing him. Use the sword to burn it out, or the knight will die.”

  Asharre licked her lips uncertainly. She nodded, holding Aurandane out like an awkward dowsing rod as she approached to examine the knight’s injuries.

  The first bolt had hit him low and to the side, scratching the ribs. It might have struck a lung; she couldn’t tell. If it hadn’t, he might survive. Many men took fever and died after a deep puncture like that, but she’d seen a few recover, with care.

  There was no surviving the other. The stink of it told her it was a gut shot even before she looked down to confirm it. Asharre grimaced. That might have been an accident, or else very good aim. If the taint took him, he’d stagger on, ha
lf alive and utterly mad, like those wretched dogs. If not … it was a cruel death for an enemy.

  Black grit stained the wounds. Asharre touched it, cringing inwardly. The blood was cold, the grit burning hot, as if it drained life’s warmth to fuel its own inner fires. It dissolved in the blood on her finger, just as it dissolved in the knight’s body. She could see the blackfire taint seeping into his flesh, trickling through torn muscle and opened veins.

  Could she heal that? Asharre clutched Aurandane’s hilt, blind with fear and ignorance. She’d called flame from it before, but now the Sword of the Dawn sat inert as ordinary steel in her hands.

  She held her breath, willing herself to touch that power again. To shape it. Something tugged at her soul, like the strains of distant music or the far-off crash of the sea. It called to her, and it struck a quivering chord of terror in her heart. Divinity.

  Asharre pulled back from it, even as she longed to follow its numinous song. She couldn’t relax her hard-won control, couldn’t trust that siren melody, without seeing dream-Falcien on his bier and her own hand tracing corrupt sigils on Evenna’s brow.

  Was it truly Celestia’s presence she felt, or did Maol’s touch still linger in the steel? If Aurandane was pure, did she trust the Bright Lady to save her Blessed when the goddess had failed Oralia and Evenna and herself? How? She did not know the shape of spells. She could kill, but healing was another art entirely.

  Kelland was dying. There was no time. Decide!

  She shoved the sword at Malentir. The Thorn had drawn upon Aurandane’s magic once before. He knew how to channel its power—and he could do so again quickly, and surely, enough to save Kelland. She could not.

  “Heal him,” Asharre said, choking on her helplessness.

  Malentir asked no questions. He took the Sword of the Dawn and slid it into the larger, deadlier wound. Blood gurgled around the blade, weakening with the knight’s pulse. But Aurandane began to shine, blue and white, its steel becoming translucent as crystal. Spectral flames pulsed in Kelland’s flesh, casting a scarlet radiance up through his skin; the buried sword burned like the deep heart of the earth.