“Yes,” the Thornlord said. “I found no one living in Carden Vale, but I did find recent hoofprints. And a yellow cloak, bloody and torn, with a Celestian sunburst for its clasp. It seems your fellows in faith passed through not long ago. They are gone, now … but they left a warm pyre behind. So, as I said: almost nothing.”
14
The tracks were too scuffed to follow. Someone had brushed them out, replacing disturbed rubble where they’d gone and flattening dead grass in false trails where they hadn’t. Bitharn might have been able to pick out the true trail, given time, but the day was waning quickly and she had no wish to linger in Carden Vale after nightfall. Not after Kelland had identified some of the tracks as belonging to maelgloth.
There was no one else living in the town. All the shops and homes were shuttered, if not simply falling where they stood. Bitharn had peeked into a few of the abandoned buildings to see if anyone might be hiding inside.
In one home, she’d found the mummified bodies of three children, dressed in their Godsday best and lined up on a straw pallet. They should have rotted—Carden Vale wasn’t cold or dry enough to preserve bodies, and it had rained almost every day since Bitharn arrived—but they hadn’t. She could see their bones, strangely dark under thin-stretched skin, like sunken logs glimpsed in a frozen lake. Their lips peeled back from blackened gums in rictus smiles. There were no wounds on their bodies, but their clothes had wrinkled where they’d been dunked in water and left to dry. An empty basin, rimed white to the rim, rested nearby.
She’d found the mother slumped in the next room. The dead woman, as unnaturally preserved as her children, sat on the floor with her back to the wall. Rust red tracks ran in forked rivers from her wrists. The knife dangled from her fingers, caked to her palm by dried blood.
No struggle. No broken furniture. Just a mother and her three drowned babies, resting peacefully where they’d died.
After that Bitharn stopped going into the houses.
There weren’t any bodies outside, but there weren’t any signs of where they’d gone either. Bitharn scowled in frustration and straightened from her crouch. She raked her hands through her hair, tugging a few golden strands loose from her braid.
It was no use. If she’d had the eyes of a hawk and the nose of a bloodhound, she might have been able to find them, but she was only human and there was no hope for it. The sun was going down, and maelgloth would come out with the stars. Time to go. Hoping that Kelland had had better luck, she headed back to the inn.
The knight was sitting in the Rosy Maiden’s common room, as he’d been since dawn prayers. Papers and books fanned over the table in front of him. Some were from the town’s chapel, some from its gaol. All had been collected by the Celestians who had come to Carden Vale before them, and who had fled in such a hurry that they’d left their books behind.
Kelland had spent the day reading those pages, searching for something that might tell where the Celestians had gone or what had befallen the town, while Bitharn hunted for tracks and the Thornlord sifted through the memories of Carden Vale’s dead.
Still annoyed, Bitharn thumped the door on her way in. Kelland looked up.
“I can’t tell where they’ve gone,” Bitharn said. “I picked up their tracks at the chapel. Didn’t go inside, but I saw that they fought maelgloth on its doorstep. At least one of them was badly wounded or killed. Then they came back to this inn … but after that? I think they rode south, but there are signs pointing north as well. And east, and west, and every other direction under the sun. I can’t be sure.”
“South to safety,” Kelland murmured. He stared out the inn’s red-specked windows, thoughtful. Sunlight glinted off the white shells she had rebraided into his hair. The last vestiges of his spell-woven disguise had faded, leaving the knight wholly himself once again. Although she knew his appearance didn’t change who he was, Bitharn was glad to have Kelland back in his own skin. Deception didn’t suit him.
She thought he felt the same way, for he had chosen to dress in the formal white tabard of his order instead of the plain wool garments that had been packed with the rest of their supplies. Bitharn had noted, with some amusement, that Malentir eschewed the plain wool too; he kept to his ragged old robes, as if he needed to display the emblems of his own identity because the Sun Knight was wearing his.
With a sigh, she refocused on the matter at hand. “They might have gone south. Or north to the old coal mines, or east to Duradh Mal. It could be any of those. They were two or three days ahead of us. Time enough for a trail to fade, even if they hadn’t hidden it. Did you find anything in the books?”
“Some. The gaoler’s book is a chronicle of madness. The other writings tell the same story in bits and pieces. A sea of violence washed over this place, and when it receded, the town was gone. The Celestians retrieved this book and made a few notes, but I can’t see that they got much more out of it than I did.” He thumped shut the book he had been reading. A handful of papers scattered from between its pages, fluttering across the floor.
Bitharn gathered them up before they could fly farther. Cramped writing, more symbols than letters, covered the pages. “What are these?”
The knight leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms over his head, shaking out the stiffness. “Dreams. In the later days of the madness, many people had nightmares. The local solaros was among them. He tried to decipher what the visions might mean; as the whole town shared the same nightmares, he thought there must be some divine purpose to them. Some kind of warning, or guidance. Many dreamed of ‘waking nightmares’ and ‘old death in the mountain.’ The dreamers saw a darkness rising out of Duradh Mal. The priest believed the Bright Lady was trying to show them how to protect themselves against the evil that encroached on Carden Vale. Most of the scribblings are his attempts to remember the images he saw while sleeping. He thought they showed magical symbols that might ward off the taint.”
“It doesn’t work that way. Does it?”
“Not usually. There are stories about prophetic dreams, though, and some said they told the truth.” Kelland rapped the book’s cover with a brown knuckle. “Did these? Perhaps. The wardings, though—those would have been useless. Wards channel power, they don’t create it. Runes without a god’s blessing are nothing but pretty pictures. Eventually the solaros realized that and gave up. He took the survivors of Carden Vale north, looking for a sword or a man who he hoped might be able to save them. I’m not sure which it was—maybe both—but it’s clear where he went. To Shadefell, and Gethel.”
“Do you think the Illuminers went there too?”
“It’s possible. Many of the pages that describe what the solaros intended, and where he went, are missing. The Illuminers might have taken them to guide them along the same path. I hope they had the sense to go south again … but if you didn’t find their tracks, our best course may be toward Shadefell. If we’re wrong, our mistake won’t cause them any harm, and it might aid our investigation of what happened here. If we’re right … well, if we’re right, and not too late, we may be able to help them.”
Bitharn nodded unhappily. She’d found some of the Celestians’ letters and personal belongings among the baggage discarded with their dead animals in the Rosy Maiden’s stables. From those effects, they’d learned that the High Solaros had sent Illuminers to Carden Vale, not Knights of the Sun. Newly ordained Illuminers, at that.
A scholar and an herbalist serving their annovair were ideally suited for a placid mountain village that needed closer ties to the Dome of the Sun. They were not well suited for surviving, much less containing, a plague of Maolite evil.
Bitharn wasn’t sure that she and Kelland were prepared for that—she didn’t count the Thornlord as an ally—but they wouldn’t be helpless either. The entire purpose of Kelland’s order was blending steel and prayer to deadly effect. She didn’t have that, but she had her arrows, and if her confidence in them wasn’t quite as steadfast as Kelland’s faith in their goddess, it was close.
They had a chance. The Illuminers did not.
She hoped they realized that. One of them, perhaps more, had survived the fight with the monsters that Carden Vale’s people had become. If they were wise, the young Illuminers would have seen the better part of valor and retreated.
If they were wise, she thought with a sigh, they wouldn’t have been Blessed.
“I want to look more closely at the chapel,” Bitharn said. “It felt … wrong … while I was there. Like something was inside. Watching. Waiting. Something hungry. It unnerved me.”
Remembering made her shiver again. Staring into those calm, cool shadows, listening to the familiar gurgle of a temple’s ever-flowing bowl, she had been seized with a sudden, inexplicable urge to run away and never look back. That part terrified her the most—that she should have been so afraid of a sanctuary of her own faith. “Something attacked the Celestians there, and I’d like to know why.”
Kelland didn’t question her. “Do you want to go now?”
“Yes,” Bitharn said, although that was a lie. She would have preferred to go in the morning, with a full day of sunlight ahead. Better yet, she would have preferred never to see Carden Vale’s chapel again. But if they wanted to unravel the mystery of what had befallen these people, they needed to look there.
And they needed to go soon, before the taint crept over them too. Not in the morning. Now.
“I’ll get the Thorn,” Kelland said, pushing away the books and striding toward the stables. Malentir had been there since dawn, weaving the spells that let him drain the secrets of the dead.
There were no human bodies in the stables, only the corpses of animals. Nevertheless, Bitharn did not follow, and Kelland did not ask her to. She couldn’t look at the Thorn’s handiwork without remembering Parnas and feeling a sick twist of guilt for his death. Yes, the man was a murderer; yes, he would have been hanged if not for the accident of his birth. But what had happened to him in Heaven’s Needle was not justice.
Kelland knew that, and knew the guilt she felt over it. He tried to spare her the memories. For that Bitharn loved him, fiercely and a little sadly. He shouldn’t have to protect me from my sins.
He couldn’t, anyway. As long as they traveled with the Thorn, there would be new ones. Smaller ones, maybe. Perhaps they even did some good by keeping him controlled. But if they did, it was a small good, and she worried that it wasn’t worth the corrosion of his company.
Drop a ladle of piss in a barrel of wine, and you’ve got a barrel of piss, a village solaros had once told her. Drop a ladle of wine in a barrel of piss, and you’ve still got a barrel of piss. Vulgar, but true: it was always easier to sully the pure than purify the sullied.
She was remembering that when the door swung open and the Thorn stepped through. He moved with easy, feline grace, untouched by the blight that blanketed the town. Blood stained the pads of his fingertips. Cold and clotted, almost black.
“You want to go to the chapel?” he asked. Kelland came in behind him, stone faced.
“Yes,” Bitharn said.
He nodded. “I would have suggested the same. But we should go to the pyre first. If my guess is correct, we will find the origin of the maelgloth written in ashes there. It may help us understand what we see in the chapel.”
Bitharn glanced at Kelland, but the knight raised no objection, so she picked up her bow and inclined her head to the Thorn. “Show us.”
He led them through the fading day. For a little while, in the golden hour, the loneliness of Carden Vale receded. Orange sunlight warmed the houses’ walls and lent a firelit glitter to the town’s few glass windows, creating the illusion that people still lived inside. But weeds filled their gardens and climbed over their doorsteps; spring storms had torn away shutters and let rain pour in unchecked, leaving rippled brown rings on the floors. No one was there to stop it, or care.
Once Bitharn noticed that, the illusion was broken, and the false warmth of the afternoon drained away. The town seemed lonelier afterward.
To distract herself, she studied the houses they passed. Many bore crudely daubed red marks on their doors and windows. There was no apparent pattern to which houses were marked, and she could not identify the sign. It resembled a crooked sunburst, or perhaps a compass rose, but all the arms curled off at odd angles instead of pointing to their directions. The ends of each ray were bulbous, like open hands extended to the air.
“What is that?” she asked Kelland.
“I don’t know. I’ve wondered that too. It’s not any Celestian sign I know. With the hands, it almost looks like a mark of Maol.”
“It is,” Malentir said without turning. “It is a mark of misbelief.” He offered no more, and Bitharn did not press him, for they had come to the pyre.
It looked different by daylight. Last time Bitharn had been so worried about Kelland that she had scarcely noticed her surroundings, and night had masked the town’s ruin. Now the signs of neglect were all too clear. Moss and mushrooms grew on the wall of firewood nearby. A bird had begun building its nest in the arms of the dule tree, though it had abandoned the half-finished bowl of mud and straw to a slow, sodden collapse. Animals had tracked through the damp ash.
No, not animals. Bitharn approached cautiously, taking care not to disturb the prints. Kelland stopped beside her without needing a word. He knew when she had picked up a trail.
Two people had come this way within the last few days. A man and a woman, Bitharn guessed, judging by the length of their strides and the depth that their feet had sunk in the rain-softened ash. Cinder flecks lay atop some of the prints but had been pressed down into others. They’d built a large fire, watched while it burned, and walked back into town afterward.
No mystery there. One of the Celestians had died, and two others had built a pyre for their fallen companion. She felt a twist of shared, silent grief.
They were not the only visitors. Other tracks, newer, crossed over the Celestians’. No human made such tracks. No animal either. These creatures shuffled and staggered, dragging their limbs in laborious circles that moved sideways as much as forward.
There might have been as few as three of them or as many as half a dozen. Bitharn couldn’t be sure; their trails tangled over each other like skeins in a knotted ball of yarn, and their individual gaits changed from step to step. They always moved like cripples, but the nature of the crippling was constantly in flux.
Maelgloth. Bitharn wondered what god could be so cruel as to break his followers and twist their bodies into something men would call Malformed. They couldn’t even learn to use their mangled bodies before Maol’s power broke them anew. She could hardly imagine their suffering.
The maelgloth had come to the pyre looking for something. Their fingers had raked long furrows in the ash; their footprints were deeper toward the toes, showing where they leaned forward eagerly as they dug. There were wider grooves, too, dotted with curling bits of dead skin. The marks put her in mind of pigs rooting through loam for acorns. Had the maelgloth snuffled through the cinders with their mouths? Had their lips peeled and torn as they did?
Their trails wove a dizzying web. The maelgloth had crossed and recrossed the pyre pit so many times that there was scarcely a finger’s width of ground undisturbed. In places their feet had sunk deep in the ash, indicating that they’d stood still for some time. When they were finished they had trotted off together, heading north.
“Two of the Celestians burned a dead companion within the past three or four days,” she told the others. “Maelgloth came after they left. They dug through the ashes, looking for … something.”
“This?” Malentir bent, plucked something from the pit’s edge, and tossed it at her.
Bitharn caught it reflexively. It was a splinter of charred bone. Tooth marks pocked its surface and had scraped away its marrow. More bone shards littered the ash. Not unusual, for a pyre pit, but all of them seemed to have been chewed.
She thought of the hunters who had chased
down that crippled boy and devoured his dripping flesh. Dropping the fragment, Bitharn wiped her hand. “Why would they want bones?”
“Maelgloth are beyond any need for mortal sustenance, but their god’s handiwork calls to them.” The Thornlord smoothed the ends of his sleeves. It looked like an innocuous gesture, but Bitharn saw the cloth catch over the barbs of his bracelets as he pressed them down. Beads of blood seeped into the fabric. “If they came here to chew the Celestian’s bones, it means that one succumbed to some degree of corruption. They were Blessed?”
Kelland answered. “Two were Illuminers. The rest were not.”
“Most likely the dead one was not, then. It would take tremendous power to corrupt one of your Blessed into a state where maelgloth would be driven to gnaw his bones … and yet, until we know otherwise, it might be safest to assume that is what happened. Regardless, we did not come here to see whether maelgloth felt obliged to bid your dead companion farewell.”
Malentir circled the pyre pit, stopping when he was within a pace of the stacked firewood. He gestured to the mushrooms that sprouted from ledges of windblown soil between the logs. “Dead man’s feast. Morduk ossain is its proper name, but I would not expect you to know that. This was the beginning of the corruption’s spread.”
“That’s morduk ossain?” Bitharn peered at the mushrooms with nauseated fascination. Dead man’s feast was infamous among poisoners, herbalists, and anyone who foraged the woods for food. No one could work it. Only madmen tried. It killed scavengers that ate the corpses of its victims; it poisoned people who breathed the dust brushed from its caps. It was perfectly lethal, and perfectly useless.
It was also rarer than a Kliastan’s mercy. Folklore claimed that morduk ossain grew only on the bodies of victims who succumbed to the mushrooms’ poison. Bitharn had never seen it herself. Most people destroyed it on sight. Over the years, it had vanished from the world, until it survived only on the borders of Pafund Mal and in other blighted places.
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