Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  It unsettled her to see such brutal scars on this holy place. Other than the marks on their windows, the other buildings in Carden Vale were undamaged, but here the memory of rage hovered like a living spirit in the air. There had been hatred here, hatred as strong as if the long-dead Baozites had risen to find their ancient enemy’s temple on their land.

  “Who would do this?” Evenna asked softly, to silence. The young Illuminer stepped forward, picking her way carefully over masonry and fallen blocks. She laid her hands over the damaged wood, as if she could heal its wounds, then pushed inward gently. The door gave way with a shudder.

  Inside, the devastation stopped abruptly. It was as if the invaders, having forced their way in, immediately lost interest. The only damage Asharre saw was a series of scrapes on the floor where some barricading object had been forced back by the hammered doors. The barricade itself, whatever it had been, was gone.

  The rest of the small antechamber was undisturbed. It held pegs for cloaks and benches for aged worshippers to rest while they waited. An ever-flowing bowl, enchanted so that water flowed in equally from all sides of its rim and created the illusion of stillness in the center of perpetual motion, stood on a pedestal to one side. The bowl was a common symbol in Celestian temples; it invited visitors to wash the dirt from their hands and the weariness from their bodies, ritually purifying them before they proceeded into the sanctum. Straight ahead, a low arch, wide enough for two men to walk abreast, led to the main prayer hall. Rows of pews waited in dusty silence there.

  “This place is desecrated,” Evenna whispered as she led them in.

  If it was, Asharre could not feel it. There was a coldness in the air, and a whiff of rot, but it was nothing compared to the ugliness she’d seen in Laedys’ cottage.

  The other Celestians, however, seemed to agree with Evenna. Even Heradion, never the most pious of souls, frowned and ran a thumb over his sword’s pommel as he stepped across the threshold. He eyed the ever-flowing bowl as if he expected the water to turn to lye at any moment, and he kept close to the two Illuminers. Both of them made ritual obeisance at the bowl, dipping their fingers into the water and touching it to brow and heart, but neither Asharre nor Heradion did.

  “There’s no holiness here anymore,” Heradion said when the Illuminers looked at him. “No point in being purified for it.”

  “This temple is laid out in the traditional pattern,” Evenna said, pointedly ignoring his comment. “Patients’ rooms and healing garden to the east, to draw upon the dawn light. The solaros’ private chambers to the west, where the long sun sets. The library, if he had one, will be to the west as well.”

  They went to the library first. A quiet air of loneliness hung over its cozy clutter. An overstuffed armchair, its once-red leather worn to a frayed pink, sat in the room’s center with a round table at its elbow. Small, empty bottles dotted the floor at the chair’s feet, along with a clay mug and a stack of well-thumbed books. Asharre leaned against the wall, crossing her arms. She understood the need to investigate, but nothing in this room seemed significant, and it felt ghoulish to pry into the details of someone else’s life.

  The others did not seem to share her compunctions. Heradion picked up a book resting beside the armchair. “The Thousand Journeys of Shalai the Wise,” he read aloud. A loose button dangled from its pages, held by a knotted thread that served as a bookmark. He set it down and examined the next book. “The Garden of Perfumed Delights. I remember this one. Racy reading for a country solaros. Badly treated, though. Almost all the pages are torn out. Maybe he wanted to keep the good bits by his bedside?”

  “Shouldn’t need to tear a book apart for that. Why not just take the whole thing?” Evenna picked up the mug and held it to her nose. She paused, then sniffed again, frowning. “Dreamflowers? Was he having trouble sleeping?”

  “The Garden of Perfumed Delights can be quite rousing,” Heradion said. Evenna shot him an acid look, and they moved on.

  A door on the far side of the library opened to the priest’s private chambers. These rooms, too, had an air of comfortable, bookish poverty. More leatherbound volumes, and more tiny bottles, covered the lone table in the solaros’ sitting room. They looked older, and grimmer, than the texts in the library. A plate and jug were pushed an arm’s length from the table’s only chair, allowing the books to be brought closer.

  “A man who put writing above eating,” Evenna observed.

  “He’d have made a good Illuminer,” Heradion agreed, leafing through the books. “Curious choices for dinner reading, though. Eristhei on the Twelve Corruptions. A Codex of Curses. A Life of Halivair Rosewayn. I rather preferred the books in the other room.”

  “So did he, I’m sure.” Evenna lifted the Codex and riffled through it. Papers covered with hasty, smudged writing were tucked between its pages. Some were homemade rag papers, clumpy and matted. Others, Asharre realized, were the missing pages from The Garden of Perfumed Delights and the other torn books, their margins and the spaces between their lines filled with scribbles. The man must have been desperate for notepaper.

  “This wasn’t pleasure reading,” Evenna said. “Look at these notes. Every page. He annotated every page. I can barely read this, the script’s so small and shaky.” She waved a hand at one of the empty bottles. “And do you smell that?”

  Heradion sniffed at the greenish residue inside. “Burned cat hair?”

  “Close. Tincture of vigil’s friend. Burned cat hair would probably taste better. He must have been drinking it straight, or near enough to make no difference. It’s a wonder he could keep his hands steady enough to write—and no wonder he needed dreamflowers to sleep. Our solaros was drugging himself for alertness and concentration, then drugging himself to sleep when he couldn’t hold off exhaustion any longer.” Evenna clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “A man could kill himself doing that.”

  “Seems a bit excessive just to take some notes,” Heradion said.

  “He was looking for a cure.” Falcien glanced up from the book he held propped against one knee. “He knew there was some dark magic at work in Carden Vale. With the passes frozen and the river trade stopped, where could he hope to find answers except in his books? A shame his library wasn’t equal to the task. The Codex of Curses is more fairy tale than fact, and while Eristhei collected the best information available in his time, much of what he wrote was badly distorted or untrue. But at least we know our solaros was working on the problem.”

  “We also know he failed,” Heradion pointed out.

  “But not why.” Asharre stepped through the next door into the solaros’ tiny bedchamber, leaving the others to their reading.

  The blankets on the bed were knotted and untidy. Wrinkled starbursts showed where they’d been crumpled in sweaty fists. The stench of fear lingered on them, rank and bestial, and something else as well. Asharre had never smelled it before, but she knew at once what it was: bad dreams. Many nights of bad dreams.

  A forest of burned-out candles sprouted from the bedside table. More lay in a box at the table’s feet. On top of the boxed candles was a book with dated entries. It looked like a diary, but Asharre couldn’t begin to decipher the crabbed writing, so she carried it back to the Illuminers. “This was in his bedroom. Nothing else.”

  “I’ll start work on it tomorrow,” Falcien said, taking the diary and tucking it into his satchel. “We’ll need more space to sort through all this, and I can’t say I’m eager to try squinting my way through the man’s handwriting by candlelight.”

  Evenna glanced at the windows. Azure twilight was rapidly fading to black. “Neither am I. The reading can wait until morning. Let’s collect whatever else there is to find here and go back.”

  Each of them lit a candle from the solaros’ stockpile, and Evenna led them to the chapel’s east wing. The curved hallway ended in a door of goldenwood and dark windows: the entrance to the glassed gardens, where healing herbs could be cultivated when snow mounded the fields and the eart
h was frozen to icy rock.

  The next door, Asharre guessed, would be the drying room, used for the preparation and storage of herbal medicines, bandages, and other tools of the healer’s trade. Carden Vale might have had a real physician or two when the Baozites ruled Ang’duradh, but the poor town it had become had little to attract, or hold, such a man. Good doctors were nearly as rare as Blessed, and had no holy strictures preventing them from catering exclusively to the rich. The village solaros was probably the only healer in Carden Vale, whether or not he actually knew anything about the art.

  Evenna bypassed the garden and the drying room to try the patients’ rooms. The first two were unremarkable. Clean, airy, scented with a lingering hint of wintermint and wormwood. One had a wide, slanted table for women who preferred to give birth in a holy place, under the Bright Lady’s gaze, rather than in their own homes.

  The third room was a cell. It had been hastily built: the floor stones had been pried up to drive iron bars into the earth, and only ash-smeared wood replaced them. The stones lay jumbled behind the door, caked with crumbling earth. The cell’s bars were plainly scavenged from other places; though all of them looked sturdy, no two matched, and several had been crudely sawed off to fit. Decorative whorls swirled up and down one brass bar, dull between the bright toothmarks left by saws all along its length. The next bore a verdigrised lady’s face in profile. The others, newer, showed no such artistry.

  In the corner of the cell was a millstone with a chain looped through its center. The ends of the chain were linked to a man-size leather harness. Rawhide mitts dangled from the harness; rather than shackling the wearer’s wrists, the restraints had been designed to immobilize his hands entirely. The mitts were frayed and spit stained, as if wild dogs had been at them.

  There was nothing else in the cell. No dishes, no chamber pot, not so much as a blanket to ward off the cold. Its only adornment was a massive iron lock dangling from the door.

  Papers covered in the same scratchy hand as the solaros’ diary lay scattered across a rickety table facing the cell. Evenna set her lantern on the table and examined the pages.

  “Anatomical diagrams,” she said, holding one up.

  It looked like a child’s drawing of a half-remembered nightmare. The creature sketched on the page was impossible. Twisted limbs sprouted from its body at odd, useless angles; misshapen mouths broke through its skin like gaps in the seams of a rag doll. The solaros had drawn a stream of wavery black lines behind it, as if the creature left a trail of slime in its wake. Asharre couldn’t imagine how it walked. She couldn’t imagine how it lived. “What is that?”

  “‘Vordash of Knight’s Lake,’” Evenna read. She looked up, doubtful. “A mercenary. The occupant of this cell, I believe.”

  “Maelgloth,” Falcien said. “He was one of the Malformed. Not ansurak.”

  “What’s the difference?” Asharre asked.

  The olive-skinned Illuminer pointed to the drawing’s jumbled limbs and drooling mouths. “Power and intent. Maelgloth are warped by the power of Maol coursing through their flesh, but they do not have the strength of ansurak. The transformation is just the last stage in their corruption; there is only enough magic in them to break their minds and turn their bodies into a misery, and they die soon afterward. This creature was not meant to live long. He was maelgloth.”

  Evenna squinted at the pages next to the grotesque drawing, rummaging through them until she came to some that were more text than pictures. “This Vordash came to the temple in early winter, complaining of inflamed scratches on his hands. Something he’d been working on for his employer … a visiting scholar? I can’t quite make this part out. Later he was tormented by bad dreams. The solaros, treating him, worried that the dreams might be … contagious? Not sure about that bit either. He advised Vordash not to return to his company and to remain here for observation. Over time, the man’s demeanor changed. He became violent, delusional. The solaros had him confined for his own safety while he sought a cure. The physical changes began while Vordash was confined. It’s possible that the other killers in Carden Vale might have become something like this, if they hadn’t been executed, but Vordash was the first to live that long.”

  Asharre wondered how the solaros had faced that horror. He’d been an old man, ready for retirement. A country priest lived a quiet life, dealing with farmers’ mishaps and colicky babies. He might have seen the occasional broken arm or knifing among merchants’ guards, but real magic, real danger, was something for tavern stories.

  Until it wasn’t.

  How would he have dealt with it? How could he? A solaros in this backwater village, lacking Celestia’s Blessing or any real knowledge of magic, would have been helpless before such a threat.

  It seemed that he had tried, though. She admired the courage in that, even as she wondered why he had not gathered his people and fled. “What happened then?”

  “The solaros built this cell.” Evenna folded the papers and tucked them away. “He believed he could cure it, or treat it. In the end, however, he failed. Vordash died and was sent to the pyre. By then the priest was overwhelmed, so he sought a stronger cure.”

  “What?”

  “He never says outright. ‘A sword like a sliver of the blue dawn. A blade sharp enough to cut darkness from the soul.’ He thought he could find it in Shadefell. That’s all he wrote.”

  “Aurandane,” Falcien breathed. Awe shone on his face. “Of course.”

  “Aurandane?” Asharre asked.

  The Illuminer touched his sun medallion reverently. “The Sword of the Dawn. It was one of eight Sun Swords forged for the Godslayer’s War, and among the strongest. It was lost when the Sun Knights razed Shadefell.”

  “I know that story,” Heradion said. “Sir Galenar, who had the Sword of the Dawn, chased shadows away from his companions. Well, they thought he chased shadows. He swore there were monsters, and ran off to kill them while the other knights fought the Rosewayns and their servants. After the battle, they found him wandering around the servants’ quarters, dazed but unhurt. Aurandane was nowhere to be found. He couldn’t remember how he’d lost it—he couldn’t remember much of anything, other than a voice singing to him—and the others couldn’t find it. He died of fever outside Knight’s Lake, a year to the day after his misadventure in Shadefell. Some say he died of embarrassment, really.

  “I suppose the sword might still be in Shadefell,” he added doubtfully. “I always assumed some scavenger dug it out and sold it ages ago, though. People are always trying to sell false relics on the streets of Cailan; why couldn’t one of them have something real? The story’s too well known, and the prize far too valuable, for it to have sat neglected all these years.”

  “This Aurandane could have turned maelgloth back to men?” Asharre asked.

  “Perhaps,” Falcien said, regarding the drawings doubtfully. “More likely it would kill them … but who can say where the Bright Lady’s power ends? If it were truly to be found in Shadefell, it would have offered more hope than he had here.”

  Asharre took her candle and examined the cell more closely. How many days and nights had the solaros sat at that table, watching his monstrous charge and recording his hopes of a cure? Could such a thing be cured?

  The cell held nothing to allay her doubts. What she had taken for saw marks in the brass bars were scrapes left by the gnawing of teeth harder and sharper than metal. The gray smudges on the wooden planks were not ash, as she’d thought, but the flaking residue of something that might have been the slime trails shown in the solaros’ sketches. There seemed to be half-formed patterns in the peeling curls. Drawn, or accidental? She couldn’t make out their meaning …

  Asharre straightened, her teeth gritted. “The priest thought he could cure this?”

  Evenna hesitated. “He had hopes.”

  “Hopes?” Heradion echoed. “Doesn’t sound terribly optimistic to me.”

  “Before resorting to the ‘blue-dawn’ sword—Aura
ndane, I suppose—he wrote about trying to treat it with herbs. There is no herb I’ve seen or studied that could cure something like this. Nor does it seem he was successful, since he eventually gave up and chased Shadefell’s legends instead.” The slender woman shrugged. “But I’ll admit to being curious about what he tried. We’re here, so I suppose we might as well see what the drying room holds.”

  “Not the garden?” Asharre asked.

  “No,” Evenna said. “You saw what was growing on the mountainside. Whatever the plants in his garden were, they must have become beggar’s hand by now. The drying room is more likely to be helpful.”

  Asharre glanced through the darkened glass as they walked back to the end of the hall. Clouds swathed the moon, letting only a hazy glow slip through, but it was enough to illumine the shape of the temple garden. Under the withered carpet of last year’s herbs, the earth was roiled and hunched, its orderly rows heaved sideways and upward in frozen convulsions. Though nothing moved in the garden, Asharre could sense its suffering as clearly as if the earth had screamed aloud.

  “This place is desecrated,” she muttered, turning away.

  “You sense it now?” Falcien nodded. “Yes. It feels … stronger … here. The center of the taint is nearby. I think it is the cell where Vordash was held. Places can take on a residue of corruption from their inhabitants.”

  Asharre didn’t think the corruption came from the cell. Her sense of it came from the garden, flowering over the dead earth like some rank black weed. But the Celestians had studied these things, and she had not, and it hardly mattered anyway. Whatever the source of the chapel’s corruption, it didn’t change their purpose in this place.

  Falcien pulled on the door to the drying room. The door rattled but did not open. “It’s stuck,” he muttered, and pulled harder.

  There was a sound like a bowstring snapping. The door jolted open and three blurred black shapes hurtled out. Birds, Asharre thought, and then: no. They were too fat to be birds, too ungainly to be airborne; they were as improbable in flight as bumblebees, but infinitely larger and deadlier in their sting.