Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  It was ugly. But it would have been uglier if they hadn’t acted swiftly.

  “You must go to Carden Vale,” the Spider said.

  Kelland did not answer immediately. He’d felt the creeping corruption in Jora’s soul. He’d heard the torment in her ramblings. Whatever her “nightmare” was, whatever the “old death” meant, he was sure that Maol lay at its heart.

  It was his duty, as a Knight of the Sun, to stand against the enemies that no one else could. If that was the Spider’s price for his freedom, it was no more than his oaths already bound him to. And yet … what she offered him was not truly freedom, was it? Only a longer leash. If he went to Carden Vale, he’d run as Ang’arta’s dog.

  For an instant he longed for his tiny hole in the dungeon. In the safe, stinking dark, nothing had been expected of him. It had been miserable, yes, and it was cowardly even to think such things … but, in a perverse way, he missed it. He’d have died there, but he would have died honorably, quietly, simply. Unconflicted.

  Duty was cold comfort. Though he should have been grateful for the chance of glory and a last glimpse of the sun, Kelland found himself wishing that Celestia had given her Blessing to someone else. Anyone else. He’d lost his taste for glory somewhere in the dark, and his cowardice made him unworthy to stand in the light.

  “Bitharn will be so disappointed,” the Spider said into the silence of his hesitation.

  The knight’s head snapped up. “What?”

  “We made a bargain, she and I. She cares for you very much. And she expects to see you in Carden Vale.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is your duty to be there,” the Spider said, her eyes glittering with malicious mirth. “Isn’t it?”

  It was. Kelland looked at Jora and thought of the children, the ones tallied but never found. There was no choice. He was a Knight of the Sun. Whatever his fears about Ang’arta’s plots, whatever his secret indecision between duty and desire, he was oathbound to help. That much, at least, was clear.

  He looked back to the Spider. There was no harm in speaking frankly; the only other witness was the madwoman on her table, and it was unlikely that she’d live to see another morning, much less tell anyone what she had heard. “Why does it matter to you?”

  “I have my own interests there, and reason to believe they are linked with yours. It would please me, and benefit us both, if we worked together in this.”

  “If not?”

  “Then you will do what you must do, and I will do the same. Regardless, you must go.” She gestured to a long, flat box lying against the far wall. The table and the feebleness of the candle’s glow hid it from view; Kelland had not noticed it earlier. “My parting gift. Take it. I expect you’ll need it.”

  It was his sword.

  6

  They left Cailan two weeks before Greenseed, the festival of first planting. It was early for travel, but the two young Blessed were eager to begin their annovair, and Asharre, once she’d made the decision to go, was eager to leave her unwanted memories behind.

  The ride gave her time to take the measure of her companions. Evenna was a soft-spoken beauty who carried herself with a solemnity far beyond her seventeen years. The young Blessed had blue-black hair that she plaited and looped around her head in a healer’s halo, a style among the Illuminers that dated back to Alyeta the Redeemer. Oralia had worn her hair the same way. She had moved with the same quiet grace, too, and her clothes carried the same fragrance of wormwood and wintermint, anise and aloe. Healer’s herbs. The perfume of ghosts.

  Asharre tended to avoid her. It was no fault of Evenna’s, but it was too easy to catch the girl in the corner of her eye and forget, for an instant, that it was not Oralia riding beside her.

  Falcien’s company was easier to bear. The other Illuminer had the small, wiry build of an Ardasi knife fighter. His coloring was southern as well: olive skin, eyes and hair of a rich, mutable color between brown and black. His accent was pure Cailan, though, and he laughed easily with the others about things that had happened in the city when they were young. He had never been an outsider. Not like her.

  Her companions gave her space. Sometimes Asharre caught them looking at her scarred face, or at the two-handed caractan she wore across her back, but they kept their questions to themselves. The caractan was thicker and heavier than the longswords favored by the Knights of the Sun. Though it had an edge and Asharre kept hers sharp, it was a weapon made to crush rather than cut. It seldom saw use outside the White Seas clans, for none but Ingvall’s children had the strength or stature to wield it effectively. Still, strange as it must have been to them, neither the Blessed nor Heradion asked about her sword.

  She was content to let them wonder. The ride settled her spirits, allowing her a tranquility she hadn’t felt since Oralia’s death. It wasn’t until Heaven’s Needle dwindled to a sparkling mote on the horizon that Asharre realized how much Cailan had been her sister’s city. There was hardly a handspan at the Dome of the Sun that did not carry a freight of memory. Away from it, at last, she could see the world with her own eyes.

  It was more beautiful than she remembered. Asharre had never been on the road without a certain wariness, if not outright fear. Her first journey had been away from their homeland, guarding her sister through hostile territory, toward the unknown. She knew when they left that they would never return. Afterward she had traveled only as Oralia’s protector, and while they had seldom been in real danger after that first year, she had never let down her guard.

  Now she did, a little, and looked at the world unfolding.

  They rode past untilled fields blanketed by yellow straw and wrinkled, frost-kissed leaves. Ancient stone walls and dark green hedgerows separated one farmer’s land from the next; gnarled apple trees and pollarded willows dotted the hills between. Mastiffs barked at them from farmhouse yards, while small, timid deer darted through the trees.

  The land grew rockier and the hills steeper as they continued. Village walls changed from simple boundaries to solid fortifications of mounded earth and stakes. Then those, too, receded in the distance as the earth became too stony to support farmers. Two weeks north of Cailan, all Asharre could find to mark human habitation were thin brown goats cropping at weeds between the rocks.

  The last town worthy of the name was Balnamoine. It marked the informal boundary of Calantyr; though the villages and mining towns to the north belonged to the realm on maps, in truth the king’s rule ended at Balnamoine. The mountain people kept to their own ways.

  That might, Asharre reflected, be why the High Solaros had sent two of his Blessed to serve their annovair in Carden Vale. Their presence would be a light touch of civilization, a gentler means of bringing the mountain villages into the fold than sending a company of the king’s soldiers to force their allegiance.

  Perhaps. The politics of northern Calantyr weren’t her concern. Her only duty was seeing the Celestians safely to Carden Vale. Ahead, the Irontooths solidified from a misty band across the horizon to a towering wall. The mountains’ slopes were rough and gray as battle-scarred steel, their peaks so white they vanished into the clouds.

  Evenna drew them aside as they came to the gates of Balnamoine. “I have an old friend here,” she told them. “An old patient, really. Nessore Bassinos. He’s a merchant who does some trade with the mountain villages. I thought it might be helpful to talk to someone who knew the lay of the land, so I sent him a letter before we left Cailan. We have a standing invitation to dinner.”

  “How’s his cook?” Falcien asked.

  “Better than you,” Heradion said. “If he offered us boiled boot leather and fried mud, I’d consider it a welcome respite from what you’ve been serving up.”

  Asharre shook her head, amused despite herself. “Where is his house?”

  Evenna showed them. It was a large dwelling, and Nessore Bassinos had not stinted on its ornaments. Both the balustrades flanking the great doors and the doors themselves were marked wi
th the Celestian sunburst and looked like new additions. The earth around the house was rutted by builders’ wagons and trampled by their boots. Come summer, the house’s gardens would cover the damage, but for now it was still raw.

  A servant greeted them as they rode up. An old woman with a snow white scarf tied over her hair in a fashion that had gone out of date in Cailan generations ago, she fussed over Evenna like a mother embracing a wayward child. Asharre was glad to hand her horse’s reins to the stablehand who came for them, and gladder when the old woman offered them the use of Bassinos’ baths.

  The merchant had not one bathhouse but two, one for the men and one for the women, that faced each other across a portico of yellow sandstone. Tiny windows near the ceiling pierced their curved walls. A garden lay behind them, and a chapel past that.

  The chapel wasn’t new, but several of its windows were. Their stained glass sparkled against mastic as pristine as fresh snow. Other windows were boarded over, their old glass not yet replaced. The holy sunburst in the largest of the new windows had an unusual design; its eight wavy rays were all of a size, instead of being longer at the cardinal points and shorter between, and the tip of each one was rounded like an onion’s bulb. For some reason they made Asharre think of open palms reaching for something. Enlightenment, perhaps? One of the Blessed might know. She brushed the thought aside and went in for her bath.

  The bathhouse was extraordinary in its luxury. It held basins of hot and cold water, three kinds of scented soap, a goldenwood brush with boar’s-hair bristles, and decorative trinkets whose uses baffled her. Evenna came in as she was examining a sculpture of a dancing woman holding a bowl. Putting the tool aside, Asharre filled a bucket from the steaming basin.

  As she sluiced water over her head, she caught Evenna looking sidelong at the scars that striped her ribs. That, too, was something Asharre had taught herself to ignore, but something in the younger woman’s face made her pause.

  Their eyes met. Evenna had the grace to blush. Asharre did not think it was because they were unclothed; a healer would be used to that, just as she was. Modesty died quickly on the battlefield.

  The first words out of the girl’s mouth confirmed her suspicions. “I’m sorry,” Evenna said, still blushing. “It’s just … I’ve never seen so many scars on a woman.”

  Asharre grunted. She supposed her stripes and welts, earned across a decade and a half spent fighting one thing or another, might be startling to a stranger. Over the years, her skin had become a tapestry of old hurts. “Lucky for them.”

  “Are they … did you … those aren’t from Oralia’s annovair, are they?”

  Asharre shook her head, understanding the girl’s trepidation at last. This was the first time Evenna would have been so far from home or temple, and the tales of the mountain people could be frightening to someone who did not know the truth.

  “No,” Asharre said. “Most of them … the first man who taught me how to hold a sword was Surag One-Eye. He had to teach me, had to respect my oath as sigrir. You understand? It was his obligation as a warrior of Frosthold. But he did not have to like it, and he didn’t have to be gentle about it. Most of them weren’t. For a woman to become sigrir to negotiate her sisters’ marriages is not so strange, even today. For her to take up arms is … an old custom. Very old, and very rare. Even before the sun worshippers came to the north it was not a common thing. Most often, women took that oath when all the clan’s warriors had been killed raiding and warring and the only men left were graybeards and boys. So for me to learn the sword … it was not the same as saying that Frosthold’s warriors were feeble or childish, but it was not far from that, and most of the men were not pleased by it.

  “Surag was different. To him it was a source of pride, not an insult, that I wanted to learn the ways of war. He was … tradition was very important to him, and a sigrir who hewed to the old ways was, in his mind, a credit to our clan’s honor and fierceness. He was proud to teach me.

  “He was the one who found us when Oralia and I left Frosthold.” Asharre closed her eyes. More than fifteen years ago, that was, but the memory still grieved her. “When we disappeared, he tracked us. No one else did. We were not much loved in the clan. There had been rumors all winter about my sister’s afflictions. Most of them … most of them would have been content to let us go, and would have counted themselves well rid of her strangeness. Not Surag.”

  “What happened?” Evenna whispered. Her bare shoulders were so white they glowed in the thin gray light; her face was almost as pale.

  “He tried to stop us. Surag One-Eye was, as I said, a man to whom tradition mattered. For us to go south, to join the Blessed, was a betrayal of the clan’s beliefs. He would not let us pass. I fought him. Surag was much more experienced, and still strong … but he was old, and blind on one side, and the cold did him no favors.” Asharre had never been more frightened in her life than she was on that winter morning, her teacher’s face become a stranger’s and a blade bare in his hand. Terror, and desperation, had lent her ferocity. “I did not want to kill him. But whenever I flinched, he cut me again, and finally it was clear there was no choice. So: that is where I got most of these scars. He taught me one last lesson as sigrir that morning.”

  Asharre finished washing—the water had grown cold—and toweled herself dry. Evenna followed suit more slowly, looking thoughtful.

  As Asharre was buckling the strap of her caractan back over her gray-green cloak, Evenna touched her forearm.

  “I’m sorry for your scars,” the young Blessed said.

  “Don’t be. Vanity is nothing. Scars mark what you have done.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” Evenna said uncertainly. She rallied behind a smile. “I’m grateful to have such a formidable guardian. We all are.”

  “You should have no need of me. You are only going to serve your annovair. Thi—the High Solaros would not have sent you into danger.” Or me, she added silently. Thierras d’Amalthier knew when his tools were too brittle for a task.

  They rejoined the others for dinner. It was a small meal, served only to the merchant’s family and his guests, but a lavish one. Asharre sat between Heradion and Bassinos’ eldest daughter, Melora, a plain-faced girl who seldom lifted her eyes from her plate. After her halting attempts to draw Asharre into conversation were met with grunts, Melora sank into a timid silence that lasted until Falcien, sitting on her left, distracted her with gossip about courtiers in Cailan. Asharre paid little heed; the pratfalls of the pompous held no interest for her. Instead she turned her attention to the food.

  There was plenty of it, served on dishes inlaid with bright lines of gold and copper. The drinking glasses bore the same design: eight-rayed sunbursts, Celestia’s holy sign, rendered in the same curious fashion as the ones on the chapel windows.

  Asharre was not the only one who noticed them. “I don’t remember you being so pious,” Evenna teased, holding up her glass. She drank cold whitebriar tea, as Falcien did, and it sparkled in the candlelight. “When did you turn your house into a chapel?”

  Bassinos shrugged, smiling. He was in his late middle years, broad shouldered and blunt featured, and had the easy confidence of a man who had built a good life using his own hands and wits. Though his beard was more silver than brown, his eyes kept a boyish twinkle. “Piety is profitable these days. The mountain folk are all mad for prayers and sunbursts, especially the Open-Handed Sun. Some of them won’t deal with a man who doesn’t pray under it. I don’t mind. One chapel window looks the same as another to me, and whatever I spend on glassblowers and builders, I’ll recoup three times over by this time next year. I’ve already snatched a dozen contracts for coal and furs from Wyssic, and the passes are still frozen. I’ll have twice as many when they open.”

  “Why’s that?” Heradion asked.

  “Wyssic likes his feather bed. I can’t fault him for it, at his age, but he misses too many dawn prayers. Best time to negotiate with these Vale men is right after servi
ces. Meet them at the chapel, bring them back for breakfast, and the deal’s good as sworn once they see their new sun on my plates and windows.” Bassinos chuckled, refilling his glass with cold whitebriar tea. In deference to the Blessed at his table, he hadn’t served ale, although Balnamoine was said to have several good local brews. Asharre regretted his courtesy; she would have liked a mug to go with the chestnut-sauced quail.

  “New sun?” Falcien sounded casual, but he leaned in, putting an elbow on the table. “Do you mean these sunbursts with the rounded rays?”

  “Aye. You noticed? Well, of course you would. That’s your business, after all.” Bassinos covered a burp politely and reached for another helping of baked turnips. “The Vale traders insist on it. Past the point of decency, if you ask me. One of them smashed our town chapel’s window for its ‘impious’ design. Do you have any idea how much that damned window cost? That red glass came from Aluvair! And the gilding—aaah, but no matter. It’s done. Anyway, that one was a fool and a fanatic, but they’re all a sight more comfortable under their new suns. Don’t seem to care much for our old ones.”

  “A heresy?” Evenna asked. A thin line appeared between her eyebrows.

  “The High Solaros never mentioned one,” Heradion said. “I doubt he’d have sent us if he had any such suspicions. Most likely it’s just some local fashion—maybe a bit of folklore they’ve woven into their prayers. Every village seems to have a few of those. Farther you get from Cailan, the more there are. But they’re harmless, really, and good business for the glaziers.”

  “Good business for anyone who’ll pray with ’em,” Bassinos said. “Crass to use my faith like that, I expect, and worse to admit it to the Bright Lady’s own Blessed, but I’ve always been honest about my sins. They’re not such awful sins, are they?”