Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  “Then you will not have me at all. Spare me the outrage, please. The men around us are wretches and murderers, every one. They are destined to die in these cages. A life like that is a small price, hardly worth considering … and, even if we left on horseback, you would have to bloody that pretty little blade at your belt.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you think these cells had some enchantment that quiets sound?” Malentir nodded toward the next cell’s entrance, not three paces away. “The east cell is empty. But the north one is not, and I am sure Parnas has been listening with great interest to things that do not concern him. Things that he will likely blubber out as soon as someone comes asking. Isn’t that so, Parnas?”

  Bitharn hardly heard the prisoner’s answering moan through the rush of blood in her ears. The heat of mingled fury and embarrassment burned in her cheeks. She’d been foolish as a wine-sotted girl, letting the Thorn bait her into betraying herself.

  “No,” a man whined from that cell. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  Bitharn ignored that voice. She didn’t turn to see the face; she didn’t want to think of the pleading as coming from a person. It was easier to think of him as a nameless crime. Her eyes stayed on the Thorn, and on his tiny, taunting smirk. “What did he do?”

  “Besides listen?”

  Bitharn didn’t answer that. She simply stared at him, crushing the key in her hand until its metal teeth bit hard into her palm.

  At length Malentir sighed and shrugged with an elaborately affected casualness. “He dabbled in bloodmagic. Poorly. I don’t know what half-forgotten god he claimed to worship; he wouldn’t say. I do know he was never one of my Lady’s servants. She does not touch such feeble tools.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “Prominent relatives, he tells me. Something about a brother with a castle.”

  Bitharn nodded. She knew who was in that cell now. It had been a great scandal in Cailan some years back: Lord Corsavin’s younger brother unmasked as a murderer and dabbler in bloodmagic. The revelation had nearly cost the family its title; all that saved them was Lord Corsavin’s hasty, secret pilgrimage to King Uthanyr’s court in Aluvair to beg royal mercy. Even so, Parnassor Corsavin had quietly vanished before he could bring any further shame to their house. She hadn’t heard that Parnassor had been sent to waste away his remaining years in Heaven’s Needle, but it was hardly a surprise.

  “I’ve heard he killed children,” she said, unlocking the Thorn’s door. She willed away her trepidation and went in, coming close enough to take hold of Malentir’s collar. The glass was warm against his skin; his hair brushed across her fingers. He smelled of amber and bitter almond, beautiful and poisonous.

  “We all have,” he said, and she felt the vibration of his laughter through the glass. “Do you trust me to take you to Carden Vale, then?”

  By way of answer, Bitharn snapped the collar. She stepped away quickly, dropping the curved shards. “Not for my own sake. But the Spider expects you to be there before the moon turns, and me with you. I don’t imagine you’re eager to disappoint her.”

  “Indeed not,” Malentir murmured, following her out of his prison. He went to the north cell, gazing through the translucent bars. His back was turned to Bitharn, and she could not see his expression, but whatever it was drew more whimpers from the man inside. “Do you have a key?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a knife?”

  Wordlessly she unsheathed her dagger and offered it to him. He took it and closed his hand around the blade, exhaling a sigh as blood ran through his fingers. Then he let go of the knife and pressed his maimed hand against the lock of Parnas’ door. The glass shattered with a high, musical tinkling, and Parnas moaned. Bitharn heard the man’s nails scrabbling as he pushed himself backward along the floor.

  She looked away, and wished she could avert her ears as easily as her eyes.

  Sometime later the screams died. Awhile after that, Malentir returned. He’d wiped most of the blood from his hands, but red crescents still showed under his nails. A trickle of crimson snaked across the floor of Parnas’ cell.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, handing back the dagger. It was wet with blood on blade and hilt; Bitharn took the knife between two fingers, glanced at it distastefully, and dropped it on the ground.

  “Now that I’ve been overpowered and kidnapped by an escaped murderer of a Thorn, yes,” she answered sweetly, and took a fleeting pleasure in his surprise. The evidence was damning: a broken collar, a magically shattered door, and a prisoner slain by her obviously stolen knife. The last traces of the poison she’d used on Versiel would melt away by morning, so his drug-induced dreams could be blamed on the Thorn’s magic too.

  Even through her anger, Bitharn felt a hard glint of satisfaction. She could trap him right back.

  The satisfaction didn’t last long, though. “Come,” Malentir said, beckoning her to follow him into the dead man’s cell.

  Bitharn balked. “Why?”

  “We must have shadows to leave this place. This tower was made to let light flood in from all sides. Your cloak might cover our heads, but the light would still come from beneath. I need full darkness for my spell. Parnas will help us.”

  She went in reluctantly. The smell of blood hung sweet and foul in the air, and with it the nauseating stench of bile. Parnas lay sprawled on the glass floor, his bowels tangled about his legs. A coil of intestine was clenched in his teeth: the Thornlord had gagged the man with his own guts. Bitharn inhaled sharply and looked away, but the obscenity of the death was seared into her sight. She had allowed it to happen, and she bore her share of the guilt.

  “He was a wretch,” Malentir said, watching her. “A murderer and a coward. A waste of life.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t it? I think it makes all the difference in the world. Or should.” He stepped onto the body, keeping his balance effortlessly as Parnas’ torso rolled under his weight. The Thornlord offered a hand to help her up beside him.

  Bitharn pushed it aside. She used the wall instead, doing her best to block out the disconcerting softness of the corpse underfoot.

  It wasn’t the first corpse she had stepped on. She clung to that thought, trying to find some kind of solace in it. But the others had been strangers on battlefields, dead by no fault of hers. Nothing like this. This … this … she failed for a word, something that might begin to capture the enormity of it, and found herself settling on the same unwanted answer: obscenity.

  Her work. The Spider’s price. She closed her eyes to hold back angry tears.

  Malentir was chanting. His words were in no human tongue; they flickered at the edge of understanding and conjured phantoms in the corners of the mind. The Thorn-lord’s prayer was almost an echo of the ones she knew so well, but where Celestia’s invocations were proud and solemn, those to Kliasta were soft and sadistic. The torturer’s caress, the kiss of hot iron—those were the visions his prayer evoked, and they came with a purring pleasure that made her stomach twist.

  Cloth brushed across her shoulders. Shadows blotted out the tower’s glow. The scent of amber and almond wrapped around her again with the sweep of the Thorn-lord’s cloak; Bitharn tensed and kept her eyes shut. She’d stood so close to only one man before.

  Please, Bright Lady, Bitharn prayed as Malentir finished his invocation and the darkness drew down, let me be doing the right thing.

  2

  Time lost its meaning in the dungeons of Ang’arta.

  Neither day nor night touched those grim, circled halls, dug deep into the granite beneath the fortress. There was only torchlight, the smoky glow of the torturers’ fires, and the screams from the breaking pits. Kelland could not say how long he’d lain in his cell listening to that endless wail. It might have been months; it might have been years. He had no way to tell. He had nothing save the firelight and the screams.

  Worm had put out his eardrums to end that screaming. It h
ad taken him ages to sharpen some dead prisoner’s finger bone to a point, clenching it in his teeth and scraping it against the stone of his cell. Then he had wedged it into a crevice and rammed his ears onto it, one side after the other, to buy himself silence with pain.

  He died not long after. Kelland had never learned what his true name was or how he had come to the dungeons. He was only a pale, mutilated face in the cell opposite. The torturers of Ang’arta had taken his arms and his legs, his eyes and his tongue. They left him blind and voiceless, a worm that had been born a man.

  The soldiers came when the body started stinking. They took Worm’s corpse to feed the ghaole or the greenhounds or some other creature of the Thorns’, and a new prisoner filled his cell. Kelland did not know his name either.

  “Don’t Speak,” someone had scratched into the stone near the cell’s mouth. The warning was well founded. There was no talking in Ang’arta’s cells. Any attempt to speak, or to tap a message through the walls to the man in the next hole, led to a swift and brutal beating. Not for the one who’d spoken—Kelland would have accepted that penalty without complaint—but for the one he’d been trying to reach. That kept them quiet, mostly. There were a few who didn’t care, or were glad to inflict suffering on others to relieve their own misery, but most of those were soon taken from the solitary cells. They went down to the breaking pits, to suffer the soldiers’ casual abuse and fight their fellows tooth and nail for scraps of food, drops of water.

  If they were lucky and cruel, they would survive to take their place among the Iron Lord’s reavers. If not, they joined Worm in a ghaole’s belly.

  Kelland wondered how long it would be until he fed the ghaole himself. It was hard to imagine, sometimes, that there had ever been anything more in his life than this.

  There had been, once. He remembered fighting in a winter wood, his sword bare in his hand and his goddess’ power bright as sunfire in his soul. He remembered the Thornlady and her pack of dead-eyed ghaole, and the touch of her magic like rust creeping through the iron of his resolve. He remembered the moment of doubt that had shattered him—and now, as he lay imprisoned in the strong-hold of his enemies, surrounded by the stink of sweat and blood and shit, that doubt consumed him.

  He had no magic here. His cell was carved from the bowels of the earth, sunk in stone and barricaded by iron so that the sun could not reach him. Without sunlight he was powerless. Kelland needed the sun as surely as the Thorns needed pain, for one was the manifestation of his goddess as the other was of theirs, and without that touch of the divine he was nothing but flesh and blood and breath. Only mortal.

  Death was never far away. Fever took its share of souls; putrefying wounds and ill-use claimed others. Some prisoners simply lost their will to live, becoming hollow-eyed ghosts that sat mutely until their bodies followed their spirits across the Last Bridge. Stripped of his goddess’ presence, cold and friendless in the dark, Kelland sometimes felt himself sliding toward that final, absolute despair.

  It was the memory of Bitharn that pulled him back from the abyss. He remembered her in flashes and fragments, as if some instinct warned that it would hurt too deeply to remember her in full. If he dwelled too long on what was lost, it would break him.

  Instead he allowed himself moments: the sun catching gold in her hair; the quick warmth of her hand on his arm; the silhouette of her sitting watch by the fire, tireless and vigilant. Her bravery and her cleverness and the intensity that sharpened her eyes—sometimes gray, sometimes hazel flecked with motes of greening gold, depending on the light—in the fraction of a heartbeat between drawing back an arrow and loosing it. She had the same intensity whether she was shooting at a straw-filled dummy or a charging boar. And sometimes, too, when she looked at him. When she kissed him.

  That thought was dangerous as a live coal, and just as likely to burn. Kelland always pulled away from it, and always came back to it, unable to let go of the gift and burden of truth.

  Bitharn had loved him. She had never said so, but he had known all the same. A blind man would have seen it. And he had loved her in turn—loved her, and desired her, despite his Blessed oath of chastity.

  He had never touched her. But he had wanted to … and that wanting had been his undoing. A mistake, not seeing the truth within his own soul. Desire had weakened his will and undermined the faith that was the wellspring of his power. The Thornlady saw it before Kelland did. Without faith, he had no magic; without magic, he was defenseless against the Thorns. Unable to choose between his lady and his goddess, he lost both.

  He didn’t know what had happened to Bitharn after he was taken. Perhaps she had been captured too; perhaps she’d stayed safe, as he hoped. Kelland didn’t know. But the thought of her trapped in Ang’arta was bleaker than the absence of sunlight, and so he tried to put her out of his mind. Instead he slept, seeking refuge in dreamlessness from the nightmare that awaited when he woke.

  A pounding on the cell bars roused him from uneasy sleep. Not a nightmare, this time. It was a man who waited for him, one of Baoz’s hard-faced reavers, clad in boiled leather with a red fist on his chest. A wide, cruel scar striped his face from cheek to chin; his teeth were blackened splinters where it passed across his mouth. He unlocked the door with a jangling iron key ring and lifted his tarred torch. Its flame, painfully bright after so long in the dark, stung tears into Kelland’s eyes.

  “Celestian. You are to come with me.”

  Kelland crawled to his knees and, with a great effort, out of his cell. He could hear drums booming down the hall. Their hammering was no louder than the thundering of blood in his ears. He swayed on his feet and caught himself against the wall before he fell. Scar Face watched, pitiless.

  He mastered himself and stood. I am a Knight of the Sun. I will not be weak. It was pride, foolish pride, but what else did he have? The Baozites respected one thing and one thing only: strength. Kelland willed away the trembling in his knees and the hollowness in his stomach. They had fed him nothing but cups of watery gruel, one a day for however many days he’d spent locked in this hole, and standing left him light-headed. But he made himself let go of the wall and forced his spine straight as a swordblade, drawing on will when his body threatened to fail.

  “Why? Where are we going?” His voice was a rusty croak, hardly recognizable as his own. He hadn’t spoken in so long.

  Scar Face spat on the floor. “The Spider wants to see you.”

  Without another word the soldier strode down the hall. Kelland was hard-pressed to keep up, and the whirl of his thoughts didn’t help.

  For centuries Ang’arta had been a blight on the surrounding kingdoms. The reavers of the Iron Fortress worshipped war; they trained for it from childhood, and as youths were plunged into the pits to be reborn as warriors. Their discipline was as legendary as their cruelty, and they were the finest soldiers in the world.

  Yet they were, and for centuries had been, also the weakest in magic. Baoz gifted his favored warriors with divine power—strength and endurance beyond that of ordinary men, swift healing, bloodmadness in battle. But he did not give them spells. Only his red-robed priestesses with their iron horns and crimson smiles commanded true magic, and the last of those had died three hundred years ago.

  And so, over the years, an uneasy equilibrium took hold. Few kingdoms had ever been able to field armies that could match Ang’arta’s, but the Knights of the Sun stood ready to lend their spells where steel might fail. Because of them, the ironlords had been held back from conquering Calantyr in its fragile youth or devouring the crumbling ruins of Rhaelyand before new kingdoms rose out of the empire’s ashes.

  It was not an easy balance or a bloodless one, but it held.

  Eight years ago, that had changed. Eight years ago, Aedhras the Golden, then an ordinary soldier, returned from his sojourn to the east with the Spider as his wife. Soon after that, the Baozites had magic. True magic. It was not their god’s, but it was theirs to command, and that was the Spider’s doing
.

  Kelland had never seen Avele diar Aurellyn, the Lord Commander’s wife and the leader of the Thorns in this part of the world. Few had. Rumor had it that she spent her days spinning webs high in the Tower of Thorns, and sent her maimed disciples out to do her will rather than risk herself. She was said to be beautiful, ruthless, and cunning as a fiend.

  He followed Scar Face up a long crawl of stairs, passing soldiers who chuckled to their companions and jeered at him as they shoved by. Kelland tried to make himself deaf to their words, but he couldn’t ignore them completely. They knew who he was: his dark brown skin and the white shells braided in his hair made him as unique in their world as he’d been at the Dome of the Sun. The Burnt Knight, champion of the Celestians, had become a prisoner paraded for their amusement. Anger and shame twisted around each other, hot in his heart, but he kept his face still as stone.

  One of the Baozites drove an elbow into the knight’s ribs as he passed. Kelland tried to pivot and thrust an arm out to catch himself, but he was too slow, too weak after so long in the cell. The side of his head cracked against the wall. Pain blinded him; he felt blood running down his cheek. He stumbled to a knee on the steps, defenseless.

  Scar Face stepped between them. He swung his torch at Kelland’s attacker as if fending off a wolf. “Enough. The Spider wants to see him, and she doesn’t want to see him with half his face a pulp.”

  “Not pretty enough for her bed that way?” the Baozite sneered, but he backed away.

  “She just likes to do it herself,” one of his companions said, to laughter, and they left.

  After they had gone Kelland pushed himself back up against the wall. There was a wet smear on the stone where he had struck it. He held a sleeve to his temple, trying to quell the throbbing in his head. Scar Face watched, impassive, and made no move to help. But he set a slower pace until they reached the top of the stairs, and he kept himself between Kelland and the Baozites on the steps.