Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

Two blocks from the safe house he stopped. A sign showing a bearded hydra swung outside the shuttered windows of the nearest shop. Corban lowered his crate onto the cobblestones by its door. “This will do. Take care with the boxes. Smokepowder can be dangerous to an ungentle hand.”

  The porter’s eyes widened, but he nodded and set down the crates with exaggerated care. Once the boxes were out of his hands, he backed away as if he half-expected them to chase after him, and he asked no further questions before making a hasty retreat around the corner.

  Corban chuckled, as amused by his own cleverness as by the porter’s fear. The smokepowder story explained why he’d paid the porter a full silver shield—it was the least a man could expect for lugging around a box that would reduce him to red vapor and boneshards if he dropped it—and if the porter’s nose was sharp enough to pick up the blackfire stone’s scent of sulfur, the story would explain that away too.

  When the porter was well out of sight, he adjusted his grip on the first crate and hurried past the shop into a twisting alley. The rainwater that skipped down its cobblestones wore a scarf of acrid orange foam—a gift from the neighboring alchemists, whose runoff funneled down this alley to the sea—while the stones themselves were pitted and oddly soft, eaten away by years of such corrosive floods.

  His safe house was here, down a poor street in a poor neighborhood where people were in the habit of ignoring strange doings. Ten or twelve years ago it had belonged to an apothecary, but the man had been hanged for dealing in poisons. After his execution, the Royal Justice had posted a ban on his shop and ordered that it be torn down.

  It was never done. The shop sat at the end of a mazy warren confusing even to the denizens of Greensmoke Alley. Its destruction promised to be an unpleasant, unprofitable job. Amid the press of more urgent matters, it was easily forgotten—by the Royal Justice, if not by the people who had to live in Greensmoke Alley.

  Over the years, the apothecary’s hovel took on an ominous cast in the collective imagination. Eye-watering smells wafted out of its alley on rainy nights. Fish pulled from the waters nearby sometimes came up scaleless and slimy, their deformed fins grabbing at the air like soft pink hands. Rumors about the curse on the house, and what the apothecary had really been doing behind those blind, crooked windows, proliferated with each new sighting. Soon people avoided its alley altogether, turning away out of habit, almost instinct.

  Corban had seen the opportunity at once. And seized it.

  No one would trouble him here. He could leave his blackfire quarrels safely hidden in the apothecary’s cellar—the man had been a smuggler as well as a poisoner, and had dug out a secret sea access under his shop—and no one would think to look for them, or connect Corban to the quarrels if they did.

  He didn’t expect that to be a worry. No one had visited the shop in a dog’s age. Bird droppings crusted the stoop in speckled white. A sun-bleached ribbon, showing a weary remnant of pinkish red at one end, flapped on a scabby-barked tree outside: the last legacy of the posted ban. The door, lifted off its hinges by would-be thieves, leaned against a crooked square of darkness.

  Corban moved the door out of the way, slipping it to the side until it was no longer in danger of breaking the soggy piles of bird droppings. It didn’t really matter, of course. Rain would cover some of the disturbance, and the birds themselves would soon cover the rest, but Corban wasn’t a man who liked to take chances. He wanted to leave as few traces of his visit as possible.

  He ducked as he carried the first blackfire crate inside. The sagging ceiling didn’t offer much room, and the hovel was impossibly crowded. Mummified herbs hung from hooks in the rafters. Their leaves were wrinkled gray and flecked with dead white mold. Fungus pocked their knotted roots. Most likely it was harmless … but that was another chance Corban wasn’t inclined to take. He kept his head low and measured his breaths as he passed beneath them.

  The herbs weren’t the only things the apothecary had left behind. Amid the foliage of that dead, dangling forest, eyes glittered.

  Those eyes were glass, Corban knew. Dead eyes. Harmless. The apothecary had been a taxidermist as well. Stuffed rabbits and moth-eaten foxes pranced over the warped wooden shelves, frozen in eternal frolics around bags of mildewed tea leaves and boxes of pastilles melted together by the damp.

  They still unnerved him. And there were worse creatures among them: the monsters that had sent the early thieves screaming, white-faced, from the apothecary’s shop. Monsters that had started legends which kept other thieves away to this day.

  Bulbous jars held them immured in cloudy brine: two-headed snakes, chunks of intestine packed with ropy worms, a cleft-jawed white piglet with a single round eye in the center of its head. A puppy with six legs and no tail. Two hatchling crocodiles whose limbs, seized by some wasting disease, were bare bone wrapped in green paper skin. The crocodiles had tried to swallow each other in the jar.

  The walls were lined with uneven ranks of pickled monsters—and, Corban suspected, a few stillborn babies, as malformed as any of the animals—slowly disintegrating into fluffy sediment. An unpleasant aroma, like vinegar and fermented fish, lingered over the jars.

  He didn’t like to look at them. Oh, he knew the beasts couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t even bring bad luck; he wasn’t some superstitious fishwife to make sun signs at every shadow or throw salt over his doorstep if a black rooster came near. But the animals floating in those murky jars were … unsettling.

  Useful, though. They frightened off the locals. Corban held on to that thought as he retrieved the other two black-fire crates, keeping his eyes averted from the hanged man’s grotesque trophies.

  A wrinkled rug lay at the back of the hovel. Under it was a trapdoor anchored by a heavy iron ring. Corban lit a candle, then grabbed the trapdoor’s ring with both hands and pulled. The planks were swollen with age and moisture, but on his second try the door came open with a sucking pop. A rusted ladder, bolted to the rough brick wall, descended into the black below.

  Waves lapped in those gloomy depths. The salt breath of the sea blew damp against Corban’s face.

  He hoisted one of the crates into a leather harness, affixed the candle to its top with a gob of cooling wax, and buckled the unwieldy burden onto his back. Offering a silent prayer to whatever god felt like listening, Corban climbed down to the apothecary’s secret cellar.

  It wasn’t much. A dripping brick cavern, a low wooden pier, two bollards for the tying of small boats. If the apothecary had owned a smuggler’s boat of his own, it had been lost before Corban broke into his house. All that remained was a frayed rope wrapped around one of the bollards, its end trailing into the water.

  The cellar was enough to hold his blackfire quarrels, however, and that was all Corban needed. He didn’t expect to use it for long. Once he found a buyer, he’d move the crates out quickly; he only had to hide them until the sale was struck.

  At the end of the pier, Corban took a moment to mop the sweat from his neck, then unbuckled the harness and eased the blackfire crate awkwardly off his back. The other two soon joined the first. He turned to leave, breaking the candle stub off the last crate to light his way, but hesitated before stepping off the pier’s barnacled wood.

  Were the quarrels in good condition? They might have been jostled or broken during the long river ride back to Cailan. The rain might have seeped into their boxes. Corban didn’t think blackfire stone melted like lump sugar if it got wet, but he also didn’t know, not really. Gethel hadn’t told him anything about how the quarrels might react to the damp.

  Corban could hardly sell broken quarrels, nor ungainly, useless ones with their blackfire stone melted out. He had to check. Sticking the candle stub onto one of the bollards, he pried the first crate open.

  A mass of bristly, tarry straw greeted him. Corban plunged his hands in, digging around in search of a quarrel. The straws stuck his fingers and scratched the backs of his hands, but he was in too much of a hurry to care. Although he knew that
the quarrels had simply shaken to the bottom during their transport, he felt an irrational pinch of worry. What if something had happened? Would he have to go all the way back to Carden Vale for more?

  No. The quarrels’ filigree was undamaged; their pebbles of blackfire stone were whole. Corban opened all three crates, plucking out every bolt and laying them in neat lines on the subterranean pier. He counted them—none was missing—and then counted them twice again to make sure.

  Perhaps he worried too much … but he didn’t think so. The blackfire quarrels were precious, almost priceless. There was nothing like them in Ithelas.

  Every child knew that magic belonged to the gods. Only their Blessed could wield that holy power … unless the god, acting through those Blessed, imbued a fragment of magic into an ordinary object, creating a perethil.

  Perethil, unlike prayers, could be used by anyone. Devout or impious, sinner or saint, they would serve their wielders just the same. But perethil were rare, the stuff of legend; the Dome of the Sun held only a handful. Even if Corban had the means to find or buy one—and he doubted the Emperor of Ardashir had wealth enough for that—it wouldn’t have suited his needs.

  The greatest perethil that Celestia had ever created—the eight Sun Swords forged during the Godslayer’s War—could each be wielded by only one champion at a time. All the perethil Corban knew about had similar limitations. By restricting their use to one person, they could keep too much of the god’s magic from falling into dangerous hands. Good for their faiths, Corban supposed, but not for him. He wanted a weapon that could outfit entire companies.

  The idea had come to him after the Battle of Thelyand Ford. Corban hadn’t been there, but he’d heard stories from other traders who’d spoken to survivors, or claimed to. The stories were thirdhand at best, and stretched until they had barely a nodding acquaintance with the truth, but they told him three things: first, that no army without magic could hope to stand against Ang’arta; second, that Celestia’s Sun Knights could stand against them; and third, that there were too few Sun Knights, far too few, to hold the borders against Ang’arta’s next push.

  Taken together, those three things meant that there was enormous wealth to be had for a man who could turn the gods’ power into a weapon that ordinary soldiers could use.

  Corban had investigated the possibility at once. He did so cautiously, expecting little; if the priests were right and the gods were as miserly with their magic as he himself was with his gold, then no perethil existed that could suit him.

  But priests were wrong more often than they liked to admit, and it didn’t cost much to look. Corban turned to the Fourfold House. Its wizards had spent decades searching for godless magic; if any such thing existed, he reasoned, they were the most likely to have found it. And although the wizards liked to pretend they were above such petty concerns as coin, Corban knew that every man living under the Bright Lady’s sun needed gold. The Fourfold House, lacking the prestige or real magic of Celestia’s faith, was starving … for money, and for respect.

  A few coins and a little lip service, and their loyalty was his. Through the Fourfold House he found Gethel, and through Gethel he found the slender possibility of a perethil that could be used by the masses.

  As soon as Corban heard the legends of Duradh Mal, he understood that the ruined fortress might hold the key to his ambitions. What but divinity could have destroyed a citadel defended by the finest soldiers Ithelas had ever seen? The same soldiers, it happened, whose fellows in faith now threatened every kingdom from Calantyr to the Sunfallen Sea.

  It was more than coincidence. It was a sign. Corban had paid for Gethel and his apprentice to travel to the immense libraries in Aluvair. He’d paid for their meals and lodgings and books. He’d paid for them to go to Carden Vale, never asking what they expected to find. Corban had never been superstitious before, but he felt it would be bad luck to put his hopes into words. He’d simply sent the silver, and waited …

  … and now he held the rewards of his patience in his hands.

  What price to put on that?

  Of course he had to set some price. But how much?

  Corban weighed the quarrel across his palm, marveling at the power contained in its rough-worked iron and unassuming blackfire pebble. It seemed, somehow, very important to give the bolt a correct price, as if selling it cheaply would dishonor the magic it held.

  His candle burned out. Corban sat by its cooling puddle, still wondering.

  What was an army’s magic worth?

  THE SCRATCHES WERE AN ANNOYANCE.

  Some of the packing grease had gotten into them, or else he’d had a bad reaction to the straw. Whatever it was, the scratches in Corban’s hands were discolored and the skin around them flushed and bee stung by the time he left the apothecary’s house.

  Nevertheless, Corban decided to put off asking anyone about the scratches until the next day. If they troubled him in the morning, he might seek out a physician or, perhaps, venture to the Dome of the Sun to consult with one of their Blessed … although that would mean wasting at least a day among all the other petitioners who begged for their aid, unless he felt like paying the exorbitant price for a private consultation. It was possible, too, that an Illuminer might connect the scratches to his blackfire stone and ask questions that Corban wasn’t prepared to answer.

  He was reasonably confident that the blackfire quarrels couldn’t be traced to any particular deity. Gethel claimed he’d “freed” the magic, severing the creator god’s connection to the perethil. Even so, Corban doubted that the Illuminers needed to identify which dark god had created the blackfire quarrels to conclude that one of them had, and then to hang him for consorting with fell powers.

  It wouldn’t even matter whether he was guilty, or how good his intentions might be. They’d execute him just to preserve their monopoly on holy power. They’d do it even if it meant ceding half the Sunfallen Kingdoms to Ang’arta.

  He could not, therefore, risk going to an Illuminer over something as petty as a few scratches on the backs of his hands. If it was worse the next day, perhaps.

  But the next day came and went, and the scratches stayed the same. Corban chose to ignore them. They weren’t getting worse, so they probably wouldn’t kill him, and he had other matters on his mind.

  He still hadn’t set a price on the quarrels, and he was beginning to wonder, in his heart of hearts, whether it was altogether wise to sell them at all.

  What if the Celestians traced the quarrels back to him? What if his buyers didn’t believe the blackfire stone could do what he claimed? What if they did, and chose to rob him instead of dealing fairly?

  Old thoughts, old worries. Corban had considered, and dismissed, all of them long before he paid the first silver shield to send Gethel on his way. Yet somehow they loomed larger now that he had the blackfire quarrels in hand—literally. He had fallen into the habit of carrying one around with him. He liked to touch it, reassuring himself with its rough solidity whenever he began to imagine that the promise of blackfire stone couldn’t possibly be real.

  It was real, and it was his. And it would kill him if he dealt it wrong.

  5

  “Come,” said Avele diar Aurellyn. “There is something I want you to see.”

  It was very late. The moon had vanished from Kelland’s high, barred windows. Past midnight, still far from dawn. He had been sleeping.

  She had not. The Thornlady’s hair hung loose over her shoulders in dark brown waves, framing rather than concealing the necklace of purpling bruises that ringed her throat. Her lip was split and bleeding at the corner: someone had hit her, and hard. And yet she seemed luminous, deeply content, like a maiden in the blush of new love.

  The stories said that Aedhras the Golden had been traveling through the decadence of Kai Amur when this woman had captured him and, as was the Thorns’ custom, taken him to their temple for questioning. That he had slipped his chains and turned on her with all the savagery of a man who had
fought his way up from the breaking pits and lived. And that she, improbably, had been so charmed by his violence that she had released him from captivity and followed him west across Ithelas and, in time, bound herself to him in marriage.

  It was the strangest courtship story Kelland had ever heard. But looking at her, bruised and blissful, he could well believe it true.

  He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and wrapped a robe around himself. The fortress, like any drafty castle, was chilly so early in the spring. “What?”

  “A woman. One who claims to be of your faith, though you might disagree.”

  He got to his feet. “You have another Celestian imprisoned?”

  “No. No, you remain unique in my collection.”

  “Who is this woman?”

  “That is for you to decide once you have seen her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Cailan. Dress for the road. You will not be coming back.”

  Kelland hesitated. Travel to Cailan meant bloodmagic, and another journey through the shadows. He hated the feel of the Thorns’ magic … but he was a prisoner, and it was foolish to think that the Spider could not force him to her will.

  He dressed, trying to ignore her presence as he exchanged his robe for the clothes she had brought him. Trousers and tunic, good leather shoes, a cloak of plain warm wool. No weapons. It felt strange to wear anything other than the sun-marked white of the Blessed, and stranger still to venture back onto the road without a sword, but for the first time since his capture, Kelland felt like a person rather than a prisoner.

  While he was dressing, Avele had drawn up a silver chain from her sleeve. A small glass bottle filled with dark liquid dangled from the chain. She unlatched the bottle’s silver cap as she stepped close to the knight. Kelland caught the scent of blood mingled with the myrrh and frankincense of her perfume.

  “What—”

  She interrupted his protest before it was out. “You must be disguised before we go to the city. You are a very distinctive man, and a very famous one, and even by night you would likely be recognized. That would be inconvenient. At best, it would mean questions that I do not have time to answer; at worst, someone might try a rescue, and then I might have to kill half the city to keep you. A nuisance. Better you should let me paint your face.”