Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  He saw these things and he charged almost before he understood what they meant. There was no thought, only rage and desperate fear. All he had was a hunting knife, but he kept it sharp and none of them saw him coming. By the time they turned toward him, Haruld was across the clearing. He plunged the knife into the first man’s side and jerked it out and punched the blade back into his stomach, shoving it in until his knuckles pressed into skin. The man hit back, battering at Haruld’s head with his elbow, but his strength was already failing and the blows felt light as rain. Haruld tore his knife out and kicked the man down and he crumpled to the earth, weeping and cursing the pain.

  The rest of them backed away, spreading out to circle him. Haruld didn’t look down at his sister. He didn’t dare look down. “Ingris, run,” he urged, feinting at the men with his knife to keep them at bay.

  He wasn’t sure whether she heard him. She didn’t move. One of the men—the other half-dressed one—lunged forward and Haruld slashed at him, laying open his right arm above the elbow. Too late he realized that it was a distraction, that the real threat came from behind. The armored men still had their weapons. He caught a blur of motion in his peripheral vision and a morningstar smashed into his hand, crushing his fingers and knocking the knife from his suddenly useless grip. Haruld darted to his left, trying to dodge the next blow, but another man seized his arm and the morningstar came in again, smashing his knee.

  He dropped, howling. He saw, too late, that Ingris was already dead. Her eyes stared, sightless, at the sun. A wet brown leaf clung to her cheek. The man he’d slashed on the arm spat on him and stalked away, looking for something to bind his wound. The one he’d gutted was writhing in the grass and screaming louder than Haruld himself.

  “Oh, shut up,” the morningstar-wielder said, bringing the weapon down on his companion’s head. It crunched and the screams stopped. Blood spattered Haruld’s face, warm and sticky. He could taste the sour rust of it. “Bawling like a stuck pig.”

  “What about this one?” One of the men jerked a thumb at Haruld. “We could take him. Put him in the pits. He’s big. Got the north blood.”

  “We could.” The soldier with the morningstar prodded Haruld in the side with a boot. Haruld could only grunt and try to roll away. His crippled knee was an inferno of pain. “He can’t walk, though, and I broke his fighting hand. Seems like more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “What, then?”

  They raped him. They raped him and they gelded him and when they finally let him die, answering his broken, begging prayers, they took their time about that too.

  Blink.

  Asharre came back to herself with bile curdling her tongue. She swallowed with difficulty. Everything she saw had happened long before her grandfather’s grandfather was born. These people were long dead; she walked on their skulls and their ruined standards. There was nothing she could do for them … but knowing that did not make it easier.

  Heradion had fallen two steps behind her. He trembled as a vision passed; she could only guess at what he saw. After he had recovered, he looked at her and managed a wan smile. “Lovely people, these Baozites.”

  “They’re dead,” Asharre said. She wasn’t sure whether her own words were meant as reassurance or regret. “They’re all dead.”

  She went on. She was old; she was young. She was a man, a woman, sometimes a child. Once, she thought, she was a wolf. She died in fire, in water, under a hissing mantle of molten lead, beneath more swords than she could number. She died on sacrificial altars and in the throng of blood-soaked orgies. She died again and again in a cascade of years, but she went on.

  Finally, exhausted, she came to the end. The gatehouse passed in a blur. Spearbridge Tower loomed above her, a monolith of black basalt. Lost in her cursed visions, she’d never noticed it. Had she been an enemy—had anyone been left to man that tower—its archers could have riddled her with impunity. If the gatehouse had been locked, she would have had nowhere to flee.

  The road forked beyond the gatehouse. Around her, Colison’s men changed places on the wagons, letting new drivers take a turn while the old ones stretched their legs. She saw Colison’s hand in that. Switching tasks helped them shake free of what they’d seen. In a few hours, Asharre guessed, these men might be able to joke and laugh again. They’d been through it before. She wondered if the Celestians would recover as quickly—or, for that matter, whether she would. The depravities she’d witnessed seemed to cling to her skin like an oily film.

  “We’ll take the west road from here. Goes down the mountain. East road curves up toward the fortress. No reason we’d want to go that way. This is as close as we come to them.” Colison studied her carefully, an unspoken empathy in his eyes. “You all right?”

  Asharre nodded, not trusting herself to speak. He watched her for a moment longer, not quite believing her assurance, then left to get the rest of the caravan in order. Shortly after Colison had vanished into the bustle of wagons and bullocks, Heradion strode off the bridge. The red-haired youth was swinging his arms in a way she had seen drunk men do when they were shaking off the urge to hit something.

  “Why?” Heradion asked, his voice full of angry disbelief. “Why make this thing? Why keep those memories trapped in time?”

  Asharre glanced up at the battlements of Spearbridge Tower. “The arrows. You’d have been easy prey for the archers.”

  “It’s more than that,” Falcien said. Asharre had not heard him approach. There was an ashen cast to his light brown skin, and his eyes were reddened by recent tears, but the Illuminer’s voice was steady. “It’s a sacrament to their god. Each of those deaths was an act of worship—a gift of blood and conquest that pleased the Iron-Crowned enough to be remembered. As for why it’s here, instead of in some hidden temple … Spearbridge is a show of force: see our strength, and tremble. It would have been a powerful warning to anyone who thought of challenging Ang’duradh’s power.”

  “Not that powerful,” Heradion said. “Someone challenged them. And won.”

  Asharre chuckled bleakly. “And you want to challenge that. Madness.”

  Falcien touched the sunburst pendant that hung over his yellow cloak. “Faith. Not madness.”

  She shook her head but did not argue. They’d lingered long enough. Gals had turned their wagon so that it faced west on the split road past the gatehouse. Most of the others had already started moving. Asharre climbed onto the driver’s bench, waiting for Heradion to join her. “Faith does not mean you’ll win.”

  “No. It only means I must try.” Falcien brushed his pendant again, reverently, and went to his own wagon.

  The afternoon wore on, gray and gloomy. Asharre was startled that it was still the same day; after what she had endured, it felt as if weeks should have passed. Years, maybe. But the world remained indifferent to her turmoil, and although they had lost much of the day on Spearbridge, it was still light enough to travel.

  The wagons rolled down the bare stone road. Snow dusted the basalt around them and fluttered in icy plumes whenever the wind turned. There was little to be seen of Ang’duradh, beyond an occasional glimpse of the Shardfield’s obsidian glitter between the rocky heights, and Asharre was glad for that. She had seen enough of Baozite work for a lifetime.

  Dusk fell swiftly. There was no sunset, no rich blue twilight, only a gradual lowering of the light from grayness into dark. The oxen laboring in their traces became bulky moving shadows, visible only as a curve of horn or the rise of an angled shoulder blade. The wagon drivers lit lanterns and hung them from short poles, throwing spills of yellow light down the mountain.

  “We’ll stop soon,” Colison told them during one of his caravan checks. “There’s another site on this side. Not much farther. We’ll be able to set our tents out of the wind there, and Laedys keeps a wayhouse close by. No beds, but she might have hot broth for us, and we’ll be able to get the latest news from the town. Laedys loves to gossip.” He slapped one of the oxen affectionately and moved
back up the line. “Remember not to drink the water till it’s been tested, and don’t let your animals browse. Don’t know how far the poison’s spread.”

  They plodded on in silence after he had gone. Then Heradion asked: “What did you see?”

  She didn’t have to ask what he meant. “Death.” Asharre had no desire to talk about it, but she knew the youth needed to, so she added the expected question. “You?”

  “The same. A hundred different stories, a hundred different lives, but they all ended the same way. Death. Death and desecration. They never just killed when they could break their victims first.” He fell quiet. The clop of the oxen’s hooves was soothingly monotonous. “Why does anyone follow a faith like that?”

  Asharre shrugged before she remembered he couldn’t see it. “I don’t know. Ask Evenna or Falcien. They study the soul.”

  “I will. I wanted to ask you too. Some say the Baozites aren’t far from wildbloods.”

  “Maybe.” She thought about the memories of fury that had filled her on Spearbridge—the bloodlust, the glory in violence. It had consumed everything else. She had seen echoes of that rage and terrible joy on the faces of her enemies in those visions. “They are not so different in battle. Who they are when they are not fighting—that is different. Wildbloods share the hearts of beasts, but they are Ingvall’s children in their bones. That tension makes them what they are. Baozites do not have that. They are men always, and they are trained like beaten dogs. Beat a dog long enough, and the strong ones become vicious things, while the gentle ones die.”

  “How many wildbloods are left?”

  “Not many.” She kept her eyes on the road. Beyond the bobbing line of lanterns it was black as the trackless sea. “Few have the strength to live torn between two natures. There were never many, but there are fewer now. Some of those who might have become wildbloods choose to follow summerlander gods instead—more each year, the old ones say. In a generation, perhaps two, some think the wildbloods will be gone completely.”

  “Will you mourn them?”

  “Others will. Not I.” The lanterns had stopped ahead. Their bullocks chuffed in surprise as they nearly ran into the wagon before them. Something must be blocking the road. She passed the reins to Heradion. “Stay here. I’ll find out what’s happening.”

  Falcien joined her halfway, having left his own wagon in Evenna’s hands. “Why have we stopped?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  A small crowd had collected in front of the last wagon. Some of the drivers spoke in hushed voices; she could not catch the words, but fear ran through their murmurings. Their gathered lanterns made a shifting pool of light, and at its dappled edge was Colison.

  Asharre pushed her way to the forefront. She was taller and broader in the shoulders than any of the drivers, and she muscled through the men with ease. Falcien followed, silent and sure-footed.

  “What’s happened?”

  “I’m not sure.” Colison’s hand shook as he accepted a lantern from a wagon driver. It was a strange thing to see in a man who had crossed Spearbridge without blinking, and it filled Asharre with foreboding. “Come with me.” He paused, glanced at Falcien, and nodded tersely. “You too. Might be we’ll need your prayers.”

  The mountain wall curved inward as Colison led them along the road, tapping his staff on the stone with every step. Asharre heard water burbling. Bristly brown grass covered a clearing that mirrored the one on the other side of Spearbridge; above its dead carpet, leafless trees swayed in the night.

  “This is the other campsite,” Asharre said. A line of unshod hoofprints, like those of the ponies Colison used, crossed the ice-crusted snow before them. The prints vanished into the dark and came back. The pony had been walking when it left, but trotting when it returned. Something had alarmed the animal or its rider enough to hurry over treacherous footing.

  “Aye.” Colison shifted the lantern to his left hand and tucked his right into a pocket. “Jassel was riding ahead to scout the road. He came this far and turned back.”

  “Why?” Falcien asked.

  “Said there’d been a killing.” Colison trudged across the crunching snow. Asharre followed cautiously.

  Halfway across the clearing, the lantern’s light glittered off small panes of glass. A small cottage huddled against the mountainside. Snow-mounded firewood was stacked against its walls. A second woodpile, nearly as large as the house, stood to one side. It, too, was capped in untouched snow. A hickory pole thrust from the side of the cottage, holding a lamp with a steeply slanted metal cover. It was the hanging lamp’s glass that reflected their light. The lamp itself was dark, and white dusted its bottom rim.

  “No one’s been here in a while,” Falcien noted.

  “Aye. Jassel said that too. Not many come this way in the winter—not that many come this way any other time of year—but he thought it peculiar that Laedys hadn’t been using her wood. Worried something might’ve happened to her. She isn’t a young woman. Then he found the dead man … here.” Colison held the lantern steady as he rounded the woodpile.

  It took Asharre a moment to make sense of what she saw. A thin coat of snow covered the corpse. It hid the man’s face, mercifully, and softened some of what had been done to his body. But not much. There was not much anything could do to soften that.

  Falcien murmured something that sounded like a prayer. The young Illuminer took a few steps back, his eyes wide and white in his dark face. She wondered if he might be sick. No shame in that. Asharre herself had been shocked when she saw the body; it was as if the worst memories of Spearbridge had become real before her eyes.

  But Falcien wasn’t retching. He was moving around Colison to get a closer look. The Illuminer had a stronger stomach than she’d thought. Asharre squatted in the snow beside him, curious for her own sake and also to see what he would notice. If these Celestians intended to investigate the strangeness in Carden Vale—and, now, a murder—they’d need sharp eyes.

  “Well?” she prodded.

  “A ritual killing,” Falcien said, “but I don’t know its purpose.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “They took his bones.” The Celestian motioned to the dead man’s nearest arm. It had been laid open in a straight line from wrist to elbow, and again from elbow to shoulder, like a slash in a lady’s sleeve. His bones were gone. The corpse’s hands and feet were intact, and his face was untouched but for the crossbow bolt that sprouted from his right eye like an obscene flower, but from his neck down to his boots, every bone longer than the palm of Asharre’s hand was missing.

  “You said ‘they.’ Why?”

  Falcien gestured to several pairs of boot prints that dimpled the snow on the far side of the clearing. Even an untrained eye could see that they were old, partly filled by recent snowfalls, and that they had been made by a small group of men. Three to five, Asharre guessed. They’d come together in a group from Carden Vale, circled around the cottage, and gone straight to the corpse behind the woodpile. Then they had gone back the way they’d come, leaving the body behind.

  “You think that is why he was killed?” Asharre asked.

  Falcien nodded.

  “You are wrong.” She took off a mitten and brushed the snow from the bolt in the dead man’s eye. A pool of frozen blood shone black in the socket. “This killed him. Look at the fletchings. Green and black on a gray shaft.” Asharre glanced at Colison, who nodded to confirm her guess.

  “Gals gave Laedys a spare crossbow and some quarrels,” the merchant-captain said. “A few years back, it was. He thought a woman living alone ought to have some way to protect herself, and a crossbow doesn’t need so much strength as a bow.”

  “He was shot here, by the door.” Asharre paced around the tracks to show the other two. Crimson spattered the solitary line of prints in a burst near the cottage door. More blood had fallen across the lone man’s steps as he staggered to the woodpile, softening those marks, but it had frozen before the later
group came to trample the red crusts it left in the snow.

  Returning to the corpse, Asharre lifted a lifeless hand and showed them the blood on his palm, grooved by pale lines where the crossbow bolt’s fletchings had wiped it away. “He staggered to the woodpile, pulled at the quarrel, and fell.”

  “No one could walk that far with a bolt in his eye,” Falcien protested.

  Asharre shrugged and put her mitten back on. It made no sense to her either, but the tracks showed what they showed. “This one did. He died here. Sometime later, the other men arrived. By the time they cut him open, he was already frozen through. Look.” She moved her grip down to his wrist, holding the hacked flesh up to the lantern light. The knife marks looked almost shaggy where they’d torn through frozen muscle. Ice crystals shone in the corpse’s flesh, visible even by the lantern’s glow. “There is no blood underneath him except around his head, from the bolt. These wounds never bled. You see? He was ice when they did this.”

  “They took his bones but left his body?” Colison rubbed his mouth as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “Why? Could at least have had the decency to burn the man. No shortage of firewood about.”

  “I don’t think decency was a pressing concern,” Falcien said dryly.

  “No. No, I suppose it wouldn’t have been.” Colison laughed, a little shakily, and adjusted his grip on the staff. “Well, we ought to do it. Man deserves at least that much. Whoever he was.”

  “A miner, I think,” Asharre said. There was black dust trapped in the crow’s-feet around the dead man’s remaining eye, and more in the knuckles of the hand she’d lifted. His palm was callused by long hours of work with shovel or pick, and his hair was cropped short around his head. He’d shaved it not long before he died.

  “He might have had family in Carden Vale. Someone who knows who he was, and perhaps why he came here. We shouldn’t burn the body until his kin have had a chance to see him … and bid farewell, if they like.” Falcien moved toward the cottage’s door. “In the meantime, we may as well look at the house.”