Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  Malentir scrabbled after the sword, trying to seize the weapon and get back to his feet at the same time. Asharre gave him no chance to do either. She punched him, again and again, swinging anything she could reach. The tattered remnants of his shadowshield stopped her first strikes, but they grew thinner with each blow, and soon her fists thudded into unresisting cloth and flesh. The exertion tore her own wound wider, but Asharre ignored its sting.

  Finally she sat back on her heels, breathing hard. The Thorn lay crumpled on the planks, his own breaths a weak echo of hers.

  She stepped over him, collecting the sword. Warmth flowed into her, restoring her strength and sealing the gash in her chest. Malentir lifted his head, looking at her with bruised, exhausted eyes.

  “Vengeance?” he asked.

  “Justice,” she said.

  “Justice.” He laughed, weakly and without mirth. “For whom? Not the Celestians. They will not thank you for this.”

  “No.” She had nothing to gain by telling him, not really … but she wanted him to know the truth before he died. “For my sister. Oralia. You killed her at Sennos Mill.”

  “I had no part in it. I was in the tower, did you forget?”

  “Your kind killed her.”

  “She killed herself.”

  Asharre pressed Aurandane’s point to the soft skin of his throat, drawing a bead of blood. “What do you know of it?”

  “What we all know.” He did not seem discomfited by the steel at his neck; he closed his eyes and leaned into its cold, cutting kiss. “We wanted her alive, as we wanted the Burnt Knight alive. He chose to aid us. Your sister chose otherwise.”

  “Why?”

  “For Duradh Mal. Why else? The evil that holds it is ancient, and rooted very deep … and beyond our power to burn out. We needed one of Celestia’s chosen. More than one, perhaps.” He inhaled again, shuddering at the effort. A slow red line seeped from his throat where it pressed against the sword’s edge. “If some misfortune befalls the Burnt Knight in Duradh Mal—and that is very likely; it is a cursed place, and he is too brave for his own good—we will take another of the Bright Lady’s Blessed. And another, when that one fails. We will steal them and burn them like candles, and when one is exhausted or ends herself as your sister did, we will discard her and find another to light the halls of Ang’duradh. But you have a piece of the sun. Give us that, and we will have no further need of Celestia’s mortal candles.”

  Lies, Asharre thought, but she remembered Kelland’s words too well to believe that.

  They’ve been trying to capture a Blessed for a while. For Duradh Mal, I think. If I help them, I will be the last.

  She looked at the blue-flamed steel in her hand. Weighed it, and thought of the horror that twisted Bitharn’s face when she saw the Burnt Knight gasping near death, of her own blind grief when the headman of Sennos Mill told her of Oralia’s end. She thought of the novice Sun Knights in the Dome’s practice halls—so few, so young, so determined to stand against all the world’s evils—and wondered how many of them might die in the cursed depths of Duradh Mal, and how many more might be scarred by those deaths.

  Was it surrendering to give up the sword?

  Yes, Asharre decided, but that was not all it was.

  Let them take the poisoned bait. Let them have Carden Vale with its madness and its ghosts. They use us, Kelland had said. Why can’t we use them?

  Bring them back to me, the High Solaros had told her.

  She withdrew the sword from the Thorn’s neck.

  Quickly, before Malentir could try some new treachery, Asharre stepped on each of his outflung hands, crushing the fingers underfoot. She would have cut his hands off, but she did not know if the sword could heal that. He made a small, hissing cry, recoiling violently, but she kicked him back down.

  “Swear to me that if I give you Aurandane, you will not take the Burnt Knight into Duradh Mal and you will not capture any other of Celestia’s faithful to use as your pawns,” she said. “Swear it on behalf of all Ang’arta.”

  Malentir licked his blood-flecked lips. His eyes shone black as onyx in the sword’s unearthly light. Asharre watched him closely, ready to slit the Thorn’s throat at the first sign of betrayal, but the man only nodded, his mouth drawn tight with pain. “Very well. I will swear to it. Give us Aurandane, and we will release the Burnt Knight from his oath to purify Ang’duradh. We will take no more of the Bright Lady’s servants, Blessed or not.”

  “Good.” She struck each of his ankles hard with the flat of her sword, kicking his feet sideways at the same time. Again the Thorn screamed; again Asharre ignored him. He’d need the pain to walk the shadows back to Ang’arta, and she needed the time to make good her escape. She was no Celestian, and his oath did nothing to protect her.

  She thrust Aurandane between the slats of the crates at the other end of the pier. Inky smoke poured from the boxes of blackfire stone as the sword’s magic began to consume them.

  Asharre did not wait to see the end of it. She strode away, past the writhing Thorn and into the narrow tunnel that led back up to Cailan, and from there to the sweetness of the open sky.

  EPILOGUE

  “Have you seen Asharre?” Heradion asked.

  Bitharn looked up from her book, resting a finger on the pages to mark her place. With her other hand she shaded her eyes against the late morning light.

  She sat on a sun-warmed bench in the temple gardens. Lacy flowers sighed on the trees around her, shedding petals across the bench and surrounding paths. Heradion’s cloak wore a dusting of white and yellow petals too; he’d been walking through the gardens for a while.

  He looked … healthy. A little thinner, a little tired, but whole and well. Bitharn smiled. “When did you get back?”

  “Yesterday. As soon as I arrived they hauled me up to the High Solaros and then it was questions, questions, questions all night long. Being interrogated by that man is more terrifying than anything I saw in Carden Vale. They finally let me go around midnight, but I was too exhausted to do anything but collapse. I thought a walk around the gardens this morning would help me recover, and so it has. Anyway, have you seen Asharre?”

  “She went by a while ago,” Bitharn said, pointing to the path that led to the herb gardens. “Walking her little yellow brindle. Why?”

  “Oh, I was just hoping to tell her about all the blood-curdling adventures I had on my way back from Carden Vale.”

  Bitharn raised her eyebrows, using polite disbelief to conceal a little tingle of alarm. Had one of the monsters of Carden Vale escaped? “That dramatic, were they?”

  “No.” He stretched his arms over his head, grinning broadly. “No, they were not. In fact, I didn’t have a single one. No bandits, no maelgloth, not so much as a thieving raccoon in my camp. The worst part was being forced to eat my own cooking on the road, and past Balnamoine, I didn’t even have that bit of misery anymore. It was …” He lowered his arms. The grin subsided into a vastly contented smile. “… boring. Gloriously boring.”

  “Gloriously?”

  “Indeed.” Heradion paused. “Did you say Asharre was with a dog? I thought pets were forbidden in the temple.”

  “They are. Generally. But when the groundskeepers tried to tell Asharre that, she said if the High Solaros wanted her to train his puppies, he was going to have to tolerate hers. No one’s said a word against it since.”

  “Wise of them. I wouldn’t want to cross her over a dog.”

  “Especially not that dog,” Bitharn murmured.

  Heradion gave her a questioning look, but when she didn’t immediately elaborate, he shrugged and turned toward the path she had indicated. “Well, I’ll try to catch her. If you see her before I do, tell Asharre I’m looking for her. I’d like to thank her for keeping me alive long enough to get so wonderfully bored on the way home.”

  “I will,” Bitharn said, amused.

  “And thank you, too. For keeping her alive.”

  She glanced up, smiled
, and returned to her book.

  Hours passed in welcome stillness. Clean air, warm sun, the sweetness of spring flowers … it was a world apart from the bleakness of Duradh Mal, and its verdant lushness banished the shadows from her soul. Bitharn had spent most of her days in the temple gardens since finishing their work with Corban, luxuriating in the sunny calm.

  She hadn’t seen much of Kelland in recent days. He seemed preoccupied, sometimes secretive; she wondered about that, and worried, but had decided not to press him on it. They had each endured their troubles over the past winter, and she hadn’t felt much inclination to talk about hers, either.

  All wounds healed in time. Maybe his just needed a little more.

  She could hardly fault him for that. Bitharn still remembered the retreat from Corban’s den vividly: the limp weight of the knight dragging at her side, the storm pounding her head and heels as she raced death back to the temple. The Illuminers had kept Kelland in the healing rooms for weeks after her return. It was a miracle that he’d lived, they said, and a greater one that he’d sustained no lasting damage.

  At least she had the consolation that he’d be spared any further strain in Duradh Mal. Neither she nor Kelland had seen Malentir since leaving him with Asharre that awful night. The sigrir had returned, with that skinny yellow dog and without the Sword of the Dawn, but the Thorn had not.

  Asharre never said what she had done there, but Bitharn knew. She read the answer in the High Solaros’ silence over Aurandane’s loss and Malentir’s failure to return. Either Asharre had killed the Thornlord, or she had given him the Sword of the Dawn. Whichever it was, it had ended any chance of alliance.

  And Bitharn was relieved. She had no desire to see the Thorn again; she dreaded the prospect of walking back into Duradh Mal. The memories unnerved her as much as the danger did. Guilt, terror, grief … there was no escaping those ghosts in the mountains. Not for her. If the blight of Ang’duradh could be cured without her, and without Kelland, she was all too happy to stand aside.

  Bitharn closed her book, brushed stray flower petals from her clothes, and started back toward the Dome. After a few steps she stopped. A quiet thrill of nervousness went through her; her palms went damp at her sides. Kelland was approaching.

  He had something small in his hands. A box. It was flat and rectangular, made of some reddish wood polished to a satin sheen. A goldsmith’s mark was incised on its top. She didn’t recognize the house; it wasn’t the one that made most of the temple’s sun medallions.

  The expression on his face startled her. He looked frightened but determined, as he often did before marching into battle. His back was stiff, his shoulders squared; he cradled the box so gingerly that she wondered if it held live coals.

  “Oh, did you buy me a ring?” Bitharn asked. She meant it as a joke, hoping to lighten his tension, but Kelland started as if she’d dropped an icicle down his back.

  “I can’t give you a ring,” he said gravely. “I want to, and I will, but … not yet. That must wait until I’m ready to step down from the order. Until then … I’d like you to wear this.” He offered her the box.

  Feeling oddly hesitant, she folded her hands behind her back. “What is it?”

  “Open it.” The trepidation was still in him, but his lips twitched too, as if he wanted to smile and didn’t quite dare. “It’s not a snake, I promise.”

  “I was thinking hot coals,” she said, lifting the box’s lid.

  Gold twinkled on a bed of velvet inside. Two sun medallions nestled next to one another, separated by thin golden pins that affixed them to the velvet. They were similar to the one Bitharn wore, but more finely wrought, and each of them had a chip of diamond throwing fire at its heart.

  She looked from the jewelry to Kelland, astonished. “What is this?”

  “A gift,” he said, pressing his hands over hers on the box. They trembled, although he no longer seemed afraid. “I read about it when I was researching Bysshelios … and the history of my oath. In Pelos, near the end of the Ardasi Flowering, it was the custom for newly married couples to exchange sun signs at weddings. They gave each other medallions that were made of gold, as ours are today, but were also set with a diamond to symbolize their love: a part of this mortal earth, but a beautiful one—and a prism through which the full splendor of the light could be seen.”

  “It’s lovely,” Bitharn breathed.

  Kelland exhaled, relaxing visibly at her approval. He unpinned one of the medallions and held its glimmering chain over her head. “Will you wear it?”

  “Yes.” She tilted her face up, mirroring his smile. Happiness swelled in her. As he settled the delicate chain carefully around her neck, Bitharn leaned forward, surprising him with a kiss. “Yes, I will.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This was a hard book to write. I have quite a few people to thank for the fact that it ever got done, rather than ending unceremoniously as a never-finished manuscript buried in an unmarked … um … trunk. I owe debts of gratitude to:

  Jennifer Heddle and Marlene Stringer, for their encouragement, clear-eyed honesty, and (especially!) willingness to crack the whip when this thing got mired too long in the bogs of despair.

  Victoria Mathews, who saved me from at least seven face-plants in print.

  Dan Andress, Nathan Andress, Ian Hardy, David Montgomery, and Cliff Moore: the valiant team of early readers, who generously gave of their time and brainspace to read half-finished drafts on short notice and comment thoughtfully on same.

  Hugh Burns, for being extraordinarily understanding when deadlines crashed into deadlines.

  Peter, for being calm, patient, and quick to distract me with zombie cowboys on flaming horses when mere rationality wasn’t going to do the trick.

  And my dog, Pongu.