Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  “Thank you,” Kelland mumbled as they came to the landing.

  Scar Face gave him an unreadable look. The shiny welt of his scar flexed as his jaw worked. “She wants you, so she’ll have you,” he said, “and I’m not sure you should be thanking me for that.”

  Kelland nodded, and regretted it as the torchflame swam in his vision. For the rest of the way he simply followed the soldier, concentrating on the monumental task of putting one foot before the other. After an eternity of steep gray steps. Scar Face unlocked a massive wooden door and took him down another hall.

  The air was cleaner up here. Kelland noticed the change even through his daze. The dungeons stank of excrement and misery; the common halls were thick with the smells of old rushes and unwashed bodies and sour ale. This hall was quieter by far, and the air carried only a whiff of woodsmoke and sweet pine.

  The first door they reached was barred by an oak beam, thicker than Kelland’s arm and mounted in iron brackets. Spidery marks, inlaid with some lusterless gray metal, were carved along its length. Scar Face lifted the beam, grunting at its weight, and let its butt end slide to the floor. He pulled the door open and propped it with a boot. “You’ll wait here.”

  “Another cell?”

  “A guest room.”

  “Your lady’s hospitality warms my heart.” Still, he was too weak to fight, and there was no reason to lose his dignity over such a petty struggle. Kelland went in.

  The door closed behind him. He heard the scrape of wood on stone, the soldier’s muffled curses, and the dual thud, one side after the other, as Scar Face wrestled the beam back into its brackets. But these noises barely registered, for in the room was a pure gift of hope.

  It was clean. That in itself was a gift. There was a bed with fresh linens, a platter with cheese and dried plums and new bread. Beside it was a washing bowl with brush, mirror, and razor. The luxury—the cleanliness—of it was unimaginable, but all those things paled beside the greatest blessing of all.

  Windows. Tiny, high, and barred, but open to the sky.

  It was almost dawn. He could see the first tendrils of it beginning to soften the deep blue of the fading night. In an hour, perhaps less, the sun would rise and morning would break and he, who had been so long immured in the dark, might feel his goddess’ radiance on his face again.

  Kelland bowed at the waist to the dawn. He raised his arms to his chest as he came up, then over his head and back down in the ancient forms. His muscles protested at the stretching—it had been too long since he had observed the full dawn prayer—but the grace of the movements was not lost to him. He had not been broken. He could still pray.

  The Sun Knight bowed again, continuing the measured sequence, and wept silently in gratitude as his Lady’s light filled his soul.

  “I TRUST YOU ARE WELL RESTED.”

  Kelland opened his eyes. There had been no sound to signal the Spider’s arrival; he had not heard the bar lift, nor the door open. It was possible she did not need to lift bars or open doors to move about the fortress. The Thorns could pass directly from shadow to shadow, flitting through darkness and avoiding the light.

  If she had hoped to surprise him, though, she would have to be disappointed. Kelland hadn’t been sleeping. He had been in light meditation, renewing his atrophied muscles with the blessings of his faith. Months in that tiny hole had crippled him … but one short day after being allowed sunlight, Kelland was almost fully restored. Awake, and immersed in prayer, he had felt her approach like a shadow falling across his soul: the presence of her goddess against his.

  The Spider sat in a high-backed chair near the door. She was not what he had expected, but no one could have been.

  Avele diar Aurellyn was thin, small breasted, and finely boned, with the pale golden complexion and slightly tilted eyes of her homeland. She was as beautiful as the stories said, though it was a coolly elegant beauty, no more welcoming than a frost-laced mountain pool. Jewels sparkled on her fingers and in the silver lattice of her necklace, bright over a high-necked dress of black velvet. Unlike every other Thorn he had seen, she was not visibly maimed.

  “As well as any man can be in his enemies’ den,” Kelland said, swinging his feet to the floor. Several paces separated him from the Spider, but the intimacy of this audience still set his teeth on edge. He took refuge in formality, using brittle courtesy to create distance and sanctuary.

  A smile touched her lips. “I am not your enemy, sir knight.”

  “No? Then I must apologize. No doubt when your minions captured me and locked me in that pit, they did so out of dearest friendship.”

  “I do not dispute that things were done in the past. Put them aside. You have more urgent concerns, as do I. Why do you suppose you were brought up here?”

  Kelland had been wondering that himself, but he pressed his lips together, mute.

  The Spider had been admiring her rings. At his silence she glanced up, then laughed aloud. Her laughter was warm and low, and deeply discomfiting.

  “Not for that,” she said. “I can only imagine what the soldiers must have said—but I hope it will not insult your pride to say that, however charming you might be, there is nothing in you to tempt me away from my lord.”

  “What, then?”

  “You want to be free, yes? That is what I am offering you: liberty.”

  Freedom. Clean air, sweet water, the ability to walk wherever he wanted, as long and as far as he wanted, without the screams of the breaking pits echoing in his ears. The freedom to read a book, tucked away in a sunlit corner of the Dome’s library, or to eat meals—to taste real food—of his own choosing.

  The freedom to find Bitharn. To rejoin her, if the Bright Lady smiled on his search.

  And then?

  He didn’t know. Dangerous even to let his thoughts stray in that direction … but he would have the freedom to make that choice too.

  The idea dizzied him. After an eternity in Ang’arta’s dungeons, freedom was not just a word. It was bigger than that, and smaller. It was hot bread and cool wind and the shared joy of prayer in a cathedral, smoky incense swirling to the eaves. It was, if he was lucky, a smile and a touch he’d missed for too long. “But with a price.”

  “Of course,” the Spider agreed serenely. “There is always a price. That hardly bears noting.”

  “What is yours?”

  “What do you remember of Duradh Mal? Surely it must have been mentioned when you were in training at the Dome of the Sun.”

  It had, although Kelland remembered its history only vaguely. Six hundred years ago, Ang’arta had not been the only seat of Baozite power in the west. The fortress of Ang’duradh, nestled among the peaks of the Irontooth Mountains, was its twin and rival. Had the two strongholds been closer to each other, they might have fought the other more viciously than any outside foe; their god rewarded strength, and there was no worthier foe than his other dedicants.

  But Ang’duradh had not been conquered by its western sibling. No one knew what had befallen it. The last known visitors to the fortress were a small band of pilgrims seeking refuge from an early snowstorm. The Baozites let them in for a handful of silver, as was their custom. After that, they closed their gates … and no more was known.

  The Irontooths’ passes froze in autumn and thawed in spring; months passed while the fortress lay locked behind walls of snow. That spring, a few desperate travelers knocked on the Baozites’ doors for shelter, only to find silence at their gates and rotting corpses behind their walls. Not a single soldier survived. The mystery of their deaths had never been answered.

  The ruins were named Duradh Mal: Duradh’s Doom. They were reputed to be cursed, or haunted. Wise men and fools alike avoided that place. Since then old kingdoms had fallen, new kingdoms had risen, and six hundred years later, Duradh Mal was still no concern of his.

  Kelland shrugged. “A long time ago, a Baozite fortress fell. No one knows why.”

  “And the town of Carden Vale sits below its rui
ns.”

  “What of it?”

  “A curious coincidence. No more. For now.” She laced her jeweled fingers together and rested them on her knee. “There is one other thing I wish to discuss with you before I go. Faith.”

  “I doubt we share much in that regard, lady.”

  “More than you might think. You serve your goddess faithfully, as I do mine. Without that devotion to guide it, your life would have no purpose. Yet you are tempted by love, as I was, and you do not know how to reconcile the two. Do you deny it?”

  Behind his calm facade Kelland’s temper began to burn. He reined it back firmly. It was no surprise that the Spider knew of his weakness; it was, after all, how her disciple had caught him in the woods. He’d let them manipulate him once. It would not happen again. “No.”

  “Good. Then I will tell you, and perhaps you will listen. Now, or when you are ready. I cannot, of course, force you to believe what is true.” Her smile took a wry twist. “But you are crippled until you do. A divided heart is no proper vessel for the gods’ power. So.

  “We spend our lives in service to our gods, and yet we know so little of what they require. Oh, we know the simplest rules. Sunlight. Pain. But beyond that? Laws and oaths are handed down through the ages, and some of them truly must be observed, while others … others, I think, were invented by mortal men to enhance their own prestige, when the gods care nothing either way. And sometimes the intention is all that matters.

  “If I tell a lie, knowingly, my magic fails. Honesty is required of us. It is not difficult to understand why: the truth cuts deeper than any lie, and if everyone knows that the Thorns are truthbound, no one can salve his suffering by pretending otherwise. What we say must be true. That is a holy order. But if I say something that is not true, while believing it to be so, nothing happens. Perfection is not required. Intentions matter.”

  “Your point?”

  “Is very simple. Your oath of chastity is one where intentions make the difference. If the act is not a choice, there is no sin. Celestia does not withdraw her blessings if her servants are raped … to the chagrin of some of my lord’s soldiers, who had hoped we might have found an easy solution there. And if the act is an expression of love, rather than baser desires, there is no impurity of the soul and, again, no loss of your Bright Lady’s blessing.”

  “Bysshelios believed that,” Kelland said grimly. The Bysshelline Heresy had nearly torn the Celestian faith in two before it was stamped out. The infighting had ended less than a century ago, and the rifts were not yet healed. Some of the villages in the remote reaches of the Cathilcarns still clung to Bysshelline beliefs.

  “He was right.”

  “He was a heretic.”

  “Heresies seldom survive, much less spread, without some truth at their core.”

  Kelland shook his head. The cowrie shells braided into his hair clinked. “Pretty promises from a treacherous tongue. You will forgive me, lady, if I choose to believe the High Solaros over you when it comes to the strictures of my faith.”

  “As you like,” the Spider murmured. “I cannot force you to believe. But I hope you will come to accept the truth soon, as you are useless until you do.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

  “It is not me you disappoint. It is your faith that needs you, not I. They are the ones in danger.” She bowed her head politely as she rose to depart. “But now it is near sunset, and I will take my leave. I should not wish to interfere with your prayers.”

  3

  Thirteen.

  Sweat dripped into Asharre’s eyes as she pulled her chin up over her knotted fists and the iron bar between them. She blinked it away, ignoring the sting, and lowered herself with deliberate slowness. Her arms burned, her jaw was clenched so tight it ached, and her feet were going numb from the weights around her ankles, but she wasn’t ready to stop. Another set. Another after that, if exhaustion failed to claim her.

  She reached the full extension of her arms. Her toes would touch the ground if she let her legs straighten. She didn’t. Instead Asharre tensed her wrists and pulled herself up again, forcing herself through the burn until her chin came over the bar once more.

  Fourteen.

  As many as it took to reach oblivion.

  “Asharre. Asharre!”

  She ignored the call. The voice was a gnat trying to disrupt her concentration. There was nothing worth coming down from the bar. There hadn’t been since Oralia died. Everyone at the Dome of the Sun knew that, and left her to her misery.

  Fifteen.

  “Asharre!”

  Everyone except this gnat, evidently.

  Asharre shook the sweat off her face and tilted her chin so that she could see the speaker. He was a young man, conventionally handsome, with strong shoulders and a square jaw beneath a fall of red-gold hair. Not Blessed; he wasn’t wearing a Sun Knight’s white tabard or an Illuminer’s yellow robes. No doubt he cut quite a swath among the ladies of Cailan, then. What was his name? Heras—no, Heradion, that was it.

  “What?” she snapped, keeping her arms flexed and herself suspended in the air. She could still work toward exhaustion, even if she had to waste time talking on the way.

  “The High Solaros wants to see you.” The youth was out of breath; he must have run to get her. Of course he had. Thierras d’Amalthier, Anointed of Celestia, stood highest among the goddess’ servants in Ithelas. His voice spoke for the entire faith. Kings quailed before his displeasure; the Emperor of Ardashir sent gifts of spices and carved ivory to curry his favor. No one kept the High Solaros waiting.

  Asharre didn’t straighten her arms. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” The boy was not good at hiding his anxiety. “But you must come at once.”

  She grunted and went back to ignoring him. Only after completing her count of twenty did Asharre lower herself to the ground. She stripped the weights off her ankles and stretched through a modified version of the dawn prayer to keep her limbs from tightening, then mopped her brow with a towel from a nearby bench. “Well, let’s go.”

  Heradion stared at her sleeveless, sweat-soaked tunic and loose cotton breeches. After an impressively short pause he mustered the courage to ask: “Do you need a moment to ready yourself?”

  “No. He wanted me to come at once.” And Thierras d’Amalthier did not deserve that much respect from her. He was one of the reasons her sister was dead.

  It was a credit to his good sense that Heradion did not protest again. He closed his mouth and took the lead, setting a swift pace through the chalk-dusted gymnasium and the baths beyond. Bathers crowded the communal pools of hot and cold water, soaking in the lassitude that came after hard exercise. Their conversations dwindled to uncomfortable silences as the pair passed. Asharre could feel their stares, curious and pitying, on her back. As tall as Heradion was, she stood a head taller, and her arms were thicker muscled to boot. There were no women like her in the summerlands. Southerners never knew what to make of sigrir.

  She walked faster. Past the honey-veined marble arches that led to the baths, through the summer gardens that Oralia had loved and Asharre now avoided. The gardens lay dormant after a long winter; the rosebushes were gnarled brown sticks, the fountains dry. A thread of perfume from some early-blooming flower caught her, and she quickened her step to escape it.

  The Dome of the Sun rose up before them. Its namesake dome glowed with the warm light of late afternoon; its ornate rose windows sparkled like gems. To the north, the spire of Heaven’s Needle gleamed pink and gold against the clouds. The smaller buildings that serviced the temple’s daily needs ringed the base of the hill where the Dome stood, so that none of them would touch it with shadow. For Heaven’s Needle, that was not a concern; the glass tower cast only a ribbon of softer light, clear as water, and never dimmed the earth at all.

  Heradion led her through the budding trees and broad avenues to the Sanctuary of the High Solaros. The guards at the door were not ones she knew, but she saw re
cognition flash across their faces as she approached. They were too professional to let the pity show, though. Asharre was grateful for that.

  Inside there were more guards, and long, hushed halls lined with rich Ardasi carpets over saffron marble polished until it shone. Maps and books in gilt-edged cases covered the walls. Scrolls from a hundred dead kingdoms, sheathed in ivory and bronze, rested in niches between them. Celestia represented the metaphorical light of knowledge as well as its more literal forms, and her temples drew scholars from sun-scorched Nebaioth to the White Seas. The High Solaros’ private library was the envy of emperors.

  In spite of herself Asharre was awed by the Sanctuary’s grandeur, though she had seen it before and felt no particular reverence for the man at its center. Celestia had been Oralia’s goddess, not hers, and while Asharre was not so foolish as to deny the Bright Lady’s power in Ithelas, neither was she inclined to bow her own head in prayer. The goddess had failed them in their time of need. Asharre owed her nothing.

  But she was conscious of the cooling sweat that matted her hair and made her clothes cling, and she half-wished she’d taken Heradion’s hint.

  Too late for that. Heradion bowed formally to the last set of guards and recited the first half of the holy verse that served as the day’s passphrase. Even when guards could see their visitors’ faces, they required passphrases for entry: it was a safeguard against assassins who could wear the faces of the dead, or Thorns who seized people’s bodies and used them like puppets.

  The guards returned his bow and the verse’s second part. Something about seasons of the soul; Asharre listened with half an ear. The doors to the High Solaros’ private quarters swung open between them. She stepped through.

  “The High Solaros will meet you in his study. Do you know where it is?” Heradion asked.

  “I’ve been a few times.” More than a few. It seemed that they’d been summoned whenever Thierras needed a healer to ride circuit on dangerous roads. At the time Asharre had been pleased that her sister’s talents were so well recognized by her temple, and proud to protect her in the course of her duties. Now those honors were bitter as ashes, and the thought of them brought only emptiness wrapped around a kernel of rage.