Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  They were crossbow bolts. The first one whipped a line of blood across Falcien’s cheek and nicked his earlobe before clattering against the wall. The second thudded into his chest; the third hit his left thigh just below the groin. None pierced deeply, but the two that hit him lodged in his flesh.

  Evenna started forward, a prayer on her lips and the glow of Celestia’s power already flaring around her. Falcien stumbled away, thrusting out his arms as he retreated to the garden door. “Get back,” he gasped. “Get back!”

  Evenna’s eyes widened as if she’d been slapped, but she stopped. “Why?”

  They never heard an answer. Falcien’s mouth worked in frantic silence for a tortured beat. Another. No sound escaped. Then the quarrels exploded into heat and grit and sulfurous black smoke, engulfing the end of the hall. Asharre’s nostrils filled with the choking stench of brimstone. Blinded, cursing, she groped along the temple wall. Her hand fell on someone’s shoulder; she couldn’t tell whose. Grabbing it desperately, she dragged the unresisting bulk with her as she staggered away from the smoke. Something wet and warm rolled underfoot; she tried not to think about what it might be.

  The smoke ended at the antechamber. Asharre fell to her knees, gasping for air. She felt groggy, as if she’d taken a blow to the head after drinking too much. Her vision was blurred, her throat raw. Rancid oiliness filled her mouth.

  It was Heradion she’d grabbed. He didn’t appear to be hurt, but he was insensible, muttering incoherently and staring at the room with unfocused eyes.

  Footsteps sounded behind her. Asharre scrambled out of the way, pulling Heradion with her. Evenna stumbled out of the hall, coughing, with Falcien draped like a bloody cloak around her shoulders. Gore and greasy soot smeared her clothes; cinders flecked her black hair.

  Falcien was breathing. Asharre looked at him and just as quickly looked away. She had seen bodies mutilated in countless ways—many in her own life, more while crossing Spearbridge—but she had never seen a man so grievously broken and still breathing. Half his body had been blasted away. His left leg was gone entirely; a red hole swallowed his hip. The undersides of both arms were gone, leaving wings of flapping flesh over the exposed bones. His torso was ripped open, and in the wound his lungs showed wet and pink, studded with splinters of shattered bone. They moved, hideously, as he fought for breath.

  “Let him die,” Asharre rasped. Each word hurt coming out. She felt her throat, astonished. She had taken only one breath in the smoke.

  “I can heal him,” Evenna said. “If we can get him out of here—out of this desecration—” The young Illuminer coughed and spit, red flecked with black. “I can heal him.”

  It wasn’t true, Asharre thought. It couldn’t be true. Blood pulsed sluggishly from Falcien’s hip. That wound should have gushed blood in a torrent; instead it leaked a slow black sludge. Magic poisoned his flesh. She did not think there was a spell in the world that could cure it.

  Asharre closed her eyes and let her forehead rest against the floor’s cool stone, waiting for the world to stop spinning. The foulness in her mouth was beginning to fade. Beside her, Heradion groaned and got back to his feet.

  “We have to go,” Asharre mumbled to the floor. “We have to get out of here.”

  Heradion leaned against the door frame like a drunk man, gazing into the darkness. At the sound of her voice, he turned toward the two women and his friend’s ruined, breathing body. His face was grim.

  “We can’t,” he said, and looked back to the night. A shivering howl splintered the stillness. Another took up the cry, closer. A pair of eyes, too large and radiantly white to be human, reflected the moonlight for an instant and was gone.

  “We’re not alone,” Heradion said, unnecessarily, and reached with a shaking hand for his sword.

  12

  “Light,” Asharre croaked. “We need light.”

  She pushed herself to her knees, then to her feet. Blood rushed to her head. The world swam before her eyes but she swallowed, counted two breaths, and stayed upright.

  A third howl sounded. Beyond the flickering pinpoints of their candles, the splintered door opened to blackness. Clouds buried the moon, and the empty buildings around them thickened the shadows to velvet dark.

  Evenna balked. “If I pray for light, I won’t have enough strength to heal Falcien. He’ll die.”

  “If you don’t pray for light, we’ll all die.” Asharre drew her sword and stood in the doorway. Her head ached abominably; the caractan felt bulky and unfamiliar in her hands. What had that smoke done to her? “I can’t fight blind.”

  “I’m not sure I can fight at all,” Heradion said. The cords on his neck stood out, white and taut; between them his pulse fluttered visibly and far too fast. His face looked bloodless. “Feel like I might fall over if I tried.”

  Asharre grimaced. The doorway was a good defensive position, but holding it meant fighting shoulder to shoulder. If Heradion stumbled and fell in her way, he’d get them both killed. Safer if he stayed back. “How good are you with that bow?”

  “I’m not. Rabbits and squirrels mock me with impunity. Monsters … I don’t know what monsters might do.” He placed a palm against the wall, steadying himself. “They are monsters, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t know what they are,” Asharre said. “We need light.”

  There was a short silence, punctuated by the horror of Falcien’s breathing. Then Evenna made a choked little sound and began to chant. The words were more sob than speech, but she finished the prayer. The candleflames stopped flickering and rose toward the temple ceiling like curving needles of golden glass. Strands of light spread from each elongated flame, arcing toward one another and joining the candles in a radiant web.

  Bits of solid darkness wriggled in that web like inky eels trapped in a fisherman’s net. Impossible—but there they were, burning between the strands of enchanted light. Asharre tried to ignore them. There were worse enemies in the night than shadow fish. She shifted her grip on the caractan’s hilt and waited.

  “I really had hoped for a toothless dog,” Heradion said.

  She wondered whether fever had baked his wits. “What?”

  His voice was frail, breathless, the words too quick. The smile he flashed her looked like a skull’s. “If we were going to fight on the road. I’d hoped it would be an old toothless dog. Toss a stick and scare it away. Tell a braggart’s story about it later. Never … never thought I’d actually have to fight monsters. Not for my first fight. Not ever, ideally, but … certainly not the first time out.”

  “Think of it as your goddess keeping you honest,” Asharre suggested, hoping her reassurance sounded more convincing to him than it did to her. “Now you will have a true story to tell.”

  “Knew I’d be punished for my sins someday.”

  Asharre chuckled grudgingly and squinted into the dark. The holy light seemed to have intimidated whatever was out there, and she began to hope that perhaps they’d get out of the shrine without any more trouble … but then their foes shambled out of the night.

  They were not human. But they had been. Asharre saw it in the mumblings of their mouths trying to form words, in their shuffling efforts to make contorted bodies walk upright. The horror of what they had become warred with the madness in their eyes. They remember. They remember, and they hate us for being what they were.

  Because they were monsters now. Maelgloth. The things that came out of the darkness, snarling and slavering and cringing away from Evenna’s prayer, were not like the ansurak whose bronzed skulls stood on the southern wall. The ansurak radiated power, even as clean-picked bones. These creatures were miserable, and terrifying in their torment.

  One had a wild thicket of gnarled, yellowed teeth that sprouted through his lips and cheeks like a beard of bones. His teeth broke through the skin, curled across his face, and burrowed back into his flesh, caging his head in their tangled mesh. Every time the creature wailed, the skin tore between his teeth and added to the b
ib of blood that hung down his wrinkled chest.

  The one to Asharre’s left was even more grotesque. It scuttled on its belly, keeping close to the ground, like an enormous, soft-skinned cockroach. Its arms and legs had withered to lumps of bone rattling inside empty socks of skin. Its belly was covered with lesions, through which its intestines poured like a mass of fat, dirt-covered worms. It was on that writhing bed of worms that the creature moved, squirming back and forth between its hunger for prey and its fear of the light.

  “Maol has taken them, poor creatures,” Evenna said softly. “They cannot be helped.”

  More shapes moved behind them. They were too far back for Asharre to see clearly, and she was glad for that. What she could see was bad enough.

  But they could be killed. She clung to that thought like a talisman. They could be killed.

  “Come on, you bastards,” she muttered. “Come and die.”

  The maelgloth with the mangled mouth cocked his head at her. His eyes were red and rheumy; what sentience was left in them drifted in and out of focus. Her words stirred something in them, though. The creature grabbed at his own lips, digging his fingers into the gaps between his teeth, and hit them frantically with the side of his other hand. The yellowed enamel cracked and broke. Shaking away the fragments, the creature moaned. “Save us. Help us. Heal us.”

  The one with the belly of worms took up the cry. Its mouth was a useless flap of skin hanging over a fleshless jaw; its voice came instead from the sucking holes that riddled its guts. They gasped in a slurred chorus: “Save us. Heal us.”

  “Evenna, don’t,” Asharre ordered, thrusting a hand out to hold the young Blessed back.

  “I wasn’t,” the Illuminer said. “Maelgloth are too far gone. There’s nothing I can do for them.”

  “Save us!” the first creature howled, flinging tooth shards from his cheeks with the force of his cry. When no answer came, he threw his head back and screamed.

  That shriek was like nothing Asharre had heard before—inhuman, deafening, so shrill and despairing it set her bones vibrating and stopped the breath in her throat. It was the sound of a millstone crushing a condemned thief’s hand, of an iron door clanging shut on a prisoner’s last glimpse of light. If raw madness had a voice, it was in that scream.

  Heradion gasped and Evenna cried out. Asharre slumped against the door frame, struggling to shake off the terror of that sound. As if the cry had been a trumpet calling the Maolite host to war, the gutted one doubled over. The worms in its belly churned. They grabbed at the ground and flattened out, and then all at once they pushed. The maelgloth sprang forward, its bare-boned jaw gaping open and its limbs flying wildly through the air.

  Asharre saw the attack coming and braced herself for it, but the creature was quicker and wilier than she’d imagined. It landed just short of the rubble before the chapel doors, rearing back to flail at her with the dirt-crusted tentacles that writhed through the sores in its chest. Had she leaned forward to slash at it, she would have been dangerously overextended across the broken stones.

  Instead she flicked her caractan out in a short arc, testing the creature’s reaction. The maelgloth recoiled as the blade whipped past, wrapping its tentacles around its own body and pulling its torso back into an exaggerated curve. It hissed at her, filling the air with a stink like vomited meat, and in the wet black flesh of its throat she glimpsed more tentacles wriggling as they pulled themselves up through the maelgloth’s gut.

  The other one was circling around to her left. Asharre kept him in the corner of her eye as she stepped carefully across the teetering stones. Halfway across, she feigned a stumble. The bloody-mouthed maelgloth lunged.

  She was ready. Asharre brought the caractan around in a horizontal slash, swinging with a strength and speed that no summerlander could have matched. The maelgloth was monstrous, but he was no fighter; he was utterly surprised by the attack, and the blade crushed into his chest. His sternum cracked; ribs popped in a grisly staccato. Blood welled from the wound, dark and slow, as if it had already clotted in his veins.

  The maelgloth reeled and stumbled, betrayed by the uneven footing and overbalanced by the weight of the teeth tangled around his head. Asharre seized the opportunity and hacked downward with a two-handed blow. Her weapon was a brutal thing, more cleaver than sword, but it held enough of an edge to take off his head. The maelgloth’s wail died in his throat, and he collapsed at the chapel door.

  A frantic chittering sounded from the streets just out of Evenna’s light. Asharre couldn’t see what made the noise, but she could hear it, clacking chitin against stone.

  She hoped the others could handle that, whatever it was; she couldn’t. The tentacled maelgloth had scuttled closer. A pace away, it reared again. Its mouth gaped open so wide that its chin sank into the putrefying flesh of its chest. Its desiccated eyes rolled back in its head. The wormlike guts that she had glimpsed in its throat had pulled themselves into its mouth, where they pulsed like a mass of chewed tongues.

  With a stuttering cough, the maelgloth vomited at her. Ropy bile spewed from the torn guts in its mouth, spattering over Asharre’s chest and the side of her neck. She turned away too late to avoid the spray that came up across her face. It hit her like boiling oil; she heard her skin hissing as it seared. Acid stung her eyes, and she cried out, blinded.

  Something sticky and wet took hold of her shoulder, wrapped around her arm, and yanked her forward. It, too, burned. Asharre felt skin and flesh bubbling, smelled the acrid stench of it. She could see nothing but throbbing red, like staring at the sun through closed lids, and wondered if her eyes were watching themselves dissolve.

  “Help me,” Asharre implored, then stopped, shocked by the sound of her own voice. The words were slurred, malformed. Her lips felt strange: loose and numb, as if they weren’t connected as they should be. She shook her head dumbly, knowing it wouldn’t help, unable to stop herself. A clot of acid-softened hair fell on her cheek and slid down, leaving a new trail of fire in its wake. “Help me!”

  She heard Heradion’s steps crunch over the rubble at the shrine’s doors, followed by a sharp intake of breath. She didn’t know whether it was because he saw her or something else. The insectlike chittering was close. Too close. Her skin crawled.

  “Gods be good,” Heradion swore, and plunged past her. Asharre felt the brush of air from his cloak. A sword cracked against a wooden shield; something that sounded far too much like a child screamed. She heard the scuff of the Celestian’s boots as he was driven back, or drove some unseen foe forward. There’d be no help from him—not soon enough. Maybe never.

  Something wet and warm was licking at her hand, pulling it in to be eaten. Asharre could barely feel it. She dropped the hilt of her caractan toward her left hand, praying to Celestia or the wildbloods’ spirits or whoever else might listen that she would catch the weapon and be able to use it.

  The hilt thudded into her palm. It was slick and sticky and her fingers sank into a pulp of her own digested flesh, but she had it. At once she struck left-handed at whatever had her right arm. She was too close to hit with any real force, but with luck the blow might drive the thing away long enough for her to kill it.

  The caractan hit awkwardly, barely grazing her assailant, but the tentacled creature screeched as if she’d run it through. Asharre smelled hot iron and boiling bile, felt a gout of sticky steam. New heat washed over her scalded skin. She swung, and swung again, battering blindly while she had the strength to stand.

  Abruptly the caractan sheared through empty air. Asharre staggered at the sudden lack of resistance. Her foot struck something on the ground and she nudged it cautiously. A tendril rolled away, clinging to the stones. Next to it was something heavier and softer, filled with rattling lumps: one of the maelgloth’s atrophied limbs.

  It was dead. Her strength fled at the realization. She slumped to the ground, using her caractan as a crutch to control her fall.

  The sounds of fighting carried on with
out her. Close, dangerously close, but they might have been on the other side of the world for all Asharre could do. She closed her eyes, or thought she did—there was no change in the red emptiness that filled her vision, and nothing she could feel through the burning bile—and let herself sob with the pain.

  Footsteps approached. New ones, soft and tentative. Asharre gripped her sword. She doubted that she could lift the weapon, but she did not intend to die meekly.

  “Don’t move,” a familiar voice whispered. Evenna. “Bright Lady have mercy, it’s a wonder you’re alive.”

  A hand lighted on her shoulder. She could feel it. A wonder. Soothing warmth flowed from that touch, and after it a flowering of new feeling: pain, then the bone-deep ache and buried itch of flesh knitting itself back into wholeness.

  The crimson blindness receded. She could see the night again: skeletal weeds in a patch of starlight, the ivory glow of a spring moon through clouds. Bodies sprawled in the sea of blackness that lapped among the houses. She could not tell the hour, but it seemed darker than she remembered. After a moment, she realized why: the radiant web that Evenna had woven in the chapel was gone.

  A ring of candles burned around the broken doors. Several had blown out, but enough remained to line the entrance in fiery orange tongues. The chapel’s interior, and the town beyond the heap of rubble, were left entirely in shadow.

  “The fighting is done.” Evenna stood, clutching her hip and straightening like an old woman. “Heradion killed the last of the—the bone people. He is hurt, but he can walk and ride. So can you. We have to go. Now. The maelgloth that attacked us are dead, but who knows how many more there are. We’ll be safer in the inn.”

  Asharre nodded. Standing taxed what little strength the Illuminer’s prayer had restored, but after a few false starts she managed it. She waited out another rush of blood to her head—it seemed longer this time, worse, but perhaps that was just the toll of her wounds—then went back into the chapel to retrieve the records they’d fought so desperately to keep.