Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  One of which, it seemed, was Carden Vale.

  Bitharn held her breath as she studied the scrawny fungus. The mushrooms grew in nodding clusters. Their stalks were spindly white and shorter than her finger; the caps were blue as a corpse’s lips. Fine white hairs cocooned the dirt where they clung.

  She committed each detail to memory, and then she stepped away. “Morduk ossain couldn’t have been the beginning. Anyone who ate it, anyone who touched it … they’d have died.”

  “Possibly,” Malentir said. “It is not always lethal to Maolites. If its victims were under the Mad God’s sway, the mushroom might not have killed them. Not instantly. The soil, however, is what I meant. The stories about morduk ossain are true: it grows only on the remains of poisoned bodies. But those bodies need not be those of its own victims. If Maol’s power touched the corpse, morduk ossain can take root on it. We learned that in Pafund Mal. Maelgloth and rotworms grew bouquets of dead man’s feast when they died, though it was us and not morduk ossain that killed them. So. What does that tell you?”

  “The dirt it’s growing on is … bodies? No. Ash from bodies.” Bitharn frowned, working through it. “Ash blown away from the pyre when they burned. That means the executed criminals were corrupt enough for their ashes to sustain morduk ossain … which meant they were deep under Maol’s thrall … but we already knew that from the things described in the gaoler’s book. What difference does it make if morduk ossain grew on their ashes?”

  “Think of who would have been here when they burned,” Kelland said quietly. He turned a hand outward, encompassing the dandelion-spotted sward. “Remember how many people came to see justice being done when we rode through Langmyr? The bloodiest crimes, the most vile killers—those always drew the entire town. People wanted the reassurance of knowing those murderers were dead. Imagine how many would come to see the monsters of Carden Vale burn. All of them stood here, watching, while the ashes blew into their faces and the smoke blew into their lungs. That is how the corruption spread.” He glanced at Malentir. “That is what you came to see.”

  “One of the things, yes,” the Thornlord said. “I wanted to confirm my guess. I also wanted to know if the maelgloth were here recently … and, if they were, where they went when they left.”

  “North,” Bitharn said. The hair she’d tugged from her braid tumbled into her eyes; she pushed it back impatiently. “They left in a pack. If they were human I’d think they were in a hurry, by the length of the strides, but maybe maelgloth always move like that.”

  “They do not.” Malentir half-lidded his eyes for a moment. Wisps of darkness gathered around him, fluttering over his robes like wind-torn cobwebs. Bitharn gave him a questioning look, but the Thornlord ignored her. “Were they following the Celestians?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. Once the pyre had finished burning, the Celestians went back to the inn. After that? Bright Lady only knows. I couldn’t follow their trail. The maelgloth didn’t hide theirs, though. Do you want me to track them?” Not that she wanted to. Something had the Thornlord uneasy enough to gather a shield of shadows around himself, and that put her on edge too.

  To Bitharn’s relief, Malentir shook his head. “It isn’t important. What matters is that they left. With them gone, it might be safe enough to investigate the chapel.”

  The chapel hardly looked safe when they reached it, though. The doors were smashed wide open, as they’d been when Bitharn examined it hours earlier. Rubble cluttered the entrance, spotted with stringy ichor and blood new and old. There’d been bodies among them, earlier, but something had eaten them and licked at the blood spilled during that macabre feast. Swooped smears showed where tongues had lapped over the stones.

  “Desecration,” Kelland muttered, striding over the dirty stones into the chapel. His lips moved in a near-silent prayer that Bitharn knew well: godsight. It enabled the Sun Knight to read the patterns of divine magic and thus counter its attacks. While it lasted, he would be disoriented in the mortal world, but in this place it was invaluable.

  As the knight prayed, Bitharn felt the malevolence she’d sensed earlier intensify around them. She couldn’t see anything, but she felt it gathering like a bank of bruised clouds on the horizon, massing in preparation for the storm. The air thickened until she could scarcely breathe. An invisible hand pressed down on her, pushing her hair into a sweaty mat on the back of her neck.

  A shimmer of gold settled over the knight’s deep brown irises as his prayer came to a close. That much was ordinary … but as he spoke the last words, motes of blackness seemed to break away from his pupils. They swam amidst the gold like leaves caught in a whirlpool, spinning faster and faster, then expanding into streamers that widened until they eclipsed Kelland’s eyes completely. Black sheeted his eyes from lid to lid.

  “Kelland?” Bitharn whispered. There was no answer. The knight stared at her with black, blank eyes, his face vacant. His mouth fell open slightly; a rattling moan came out. Alarmed, Bitharn turned to the Thorn. “What’s happening? What’s wrong with him?”

  “Take him out of here,” Malentir ordered. “Quickly. Into the sun.”

  Fear gave Bitharn strength. She pulled one of Kelland’s arms over her shoulders and wrapped her own arm around his back, guiding his unresisting steps across the rubble and back into the waning light. He was weeping, she realized, dismayed. Inky tears trickled across his skin, burning it like lye. One struck her shoulder and ate into the leather of her jerkin with a bubbling hiss.

  Once outside, she guided the knight into a seated position on a rough-edged chunk of stone. Malentir grabbed his jaw and turned his face into the sun; Bitharn winced, but Kelland never blinked. More black tears ran down his cheeks, leaving blistered streaks across his face.

  The Thorn hissed. He dug his fingers into the knight’s face, murmuring an invocation to his Pale Maiden. Crescents of blood welled under his nails. Flecks of black grit emerged with it, and drop by drop the blood washed it away. Kelland’s poisoned tears stopped as Malentir worked; his vacant expression twisted into a grimace of pain.

  The bloodletting went on for an age—long enough to turn the knight’s tabard into a butcher’s apron, long enough for Bitharn to contemplate sending an arrow through the Thornlord’s back to stop the torture—but she held off, shaking with anxious anger. As much as it hurt her to see Kelland suffer, it was better than the terrible emptiness that had claimed him before.

  Finally it ended. Malentir removed his hands and stepped back. There were no wounds on Kelland’s face; the cuts and blisters were gone without a hint of swelling. Blood and black grit dripped across the golden sun on his tabard.

  The knight jerked to his feet and yanked the dirty tabard off. He balled the cloth up and hurled it away, swearing and brushing his chest afterward. Malentir watched him with open amusement, Bitharn with equally open worry.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Maol,” Kelland answered. The name sounded like a curse. He rubbed his cheeks where the tears had run. “The chapel is corrupt. I saw threads of poison swimming in the ever-flowing bowl; I saw it hanging in the air. It was so strong that it blinded me. I felt it … clinging to my eyes, trying to push its way in.”

  “Windows to the soul,” Malentir said, visibly amused. Despite what Kelland had just endured, the Thorn seemed on the brink of laughter. “Do you want to go back in?”

  “Yes.” Kelland avoided any glance in the direction of his discarded clothing. “There’s something in there that the Mad God does not want us to see. If he’s trying to stop us, that’s all the reason I need to go inside.”

  “After you,” the Thornlord said.

  “No,” Bitharn said. “I’ll take the lead. If we can’t use Kelland’s godsight, I have the best eyes.” Without waiting for either Blessed to answer, she started back in.

  There was more blood in the entry hall. Crinkled papers lay in drifts where the wind had pushed them against the walls. Some we
re trampled and stained with black grease; others were clean. Soot smudged the floor in a trail leading to the temple’s east hall. Clots and streaks of ichor, and a few spatters of red-brown blood, dotted the largest smear.

  “Something was dragged here, and died here,” Bitharn murmured. “Or someone.” She couldn’t think of any reason the Celestians would have dragged the corpse of a maelgloth from the east hall to this room. More likely the marks had been made by their companion’s body. If she was reading the signs right, he’d been the source of the ichor as well, somehow. Not a comfortable idea.

  Only the ever-flowing bowl in the anteroom looked clean—and if what Kelland had seen was true, that was a font of corruption worse than the rest. Bitharn glanced at it uneasily.

  “This place was a locus of contagion,” Kelland said. “The water. The soil. Even the writing on those pages … the ink is soaked through with Maolite magic. What happened here?”

  “My guess?” Malentir shrugged. “Maol did blindly what you or I would have done with purpose. He eliminated the only thing that could pose a threat to him. Perhaps he was drawn to your goddess’ presence in the consecrated fountain; perhaps there was some other magic that it sensed. Regardless, once the temple was compromised, there would be no magic to oppose his and no moral authority to raise the people against him. A surprisingly sensible strategy for a madman.”

  Kelland’s jaw set. “East. It was stronger that way.” He took the lead from Bitharn, drawing his sword as he stepped forward.

  Darkness cloaked the curving hallway. The only light came from windows in the rooms and the garden door at the end; there were no windows in the hall itself. Half-burned candles, rooted in their own wax, sprouted from the walls and floor like crooked mushrooms. The air smelled of stale smoke and rancid tallow. Ash and blood streaked the floor, unmistakable despite the gloom.

  Like most provincial chapels, this one had rooms for patients who had traveled too far, or were too ill, to return to their homes the same day. One was fitted for birthing, another not, and the third one … the third one, Bitharn realized with deep dismay, was a cell.

  Before she could ask Kelland what a prison was doing in a holy place, the knight walked past. He glanced at the cell, shook his head, and went on. “Not there. That wasn’t what I saw—what I sensed. It was here.” He stopped outside the drying room. The faint scent of dried herbs and liniments lingered there, barely perceptible through the newer smells of smoke and sulfur.

  Charred starbursts stained the wall opposite the herb room’s door. Cinder-flecked blood drew messy arcs on the floor around it. Two stubby lengths of blackened metal lay near bloodied dents in the wall, their ends blown outward like iron flowers. There might have been a third one with them; it was too dark for her to see.

  A trap. Bitharn hurried forward, blanching. “Wait. Let me have a light.”

  “Light nothing here,” Malentir snapped. “Burn nothing here. Remember the pyre. Madness spreads in the smoke.”

  “We don’t need a candle for light,” Kelland said. He spoke a short prayer, outwardly calm, but the tightness of his grip on his sun medallion told Bitharn that he hadn’t fully recovered from the disaster of his godsight. She tensed, waiting to see if this prayer would end as badly.

  It didn’t. Golden radiance flared around the knight’s sword. It steadied into a softer glow, shedding enough light to illumine the drying room and much of the hallway outside. The Thornlord bared his teeth and retreated as if the light pained him, leaving Bitharn to study what it revealed.

  There had been a trap. The stubby bits of metal were crossbow quarrels. They were oddly formed, with openwork bulbs at the ends instead of sleek tips; they looked too heavy to fly. Strands of filigree were punched out from the center of each quarrel’s head, blasted apart by an explosion from within. Kelland’s light drew black smoke from a gummy residue on the metal. Bitharn stepped away, holding her breath.

  The rest of the trap was easy to see. The snapped remnants of its trigger strings dangled from the drying room wall. There were three small hooks mounted inside the door. It would have been easy to loop the strings on before closing the door, or ease them off before opening it.

  A trio of crossbows, propped on a crate and angled upward, pointed toward the door. All three had been triggered; none held a second shot. Smoke curled from them, dissolving in the knight’s holy aura. More smoke billowed from the depths of the drying room as Kelland crossed the threshold, creating a shroud so thick that at first Bitharn couldn’t see inside.

  It cleared a moment later. She wished it hadn’t.

  The drying room was filled with bones. They bowed the shelves and dangled from the walls between ropes of knotted herbs. Many had been fashioned into tools: shoulder blades and hip bones served as shovels, affixed to the long bones of leg and arm by sinew wrappings. Other bones had been sharpened into picks and chisels. Some appeared to be knives. All were pitted and grooved by hard use, and all of them were human. Bitharn remembered the boy in the woods, trying to run on his cankered leg, and cringed. Were his bones among the trophies on the wall?

  Black dirt caked the bone tools’ edges. Like ice melting into steam, it softened and flowed and skirled away under the blaze of Kelland’s light, leaving empty ridges behind.

  The bones held Bitharn so transfixed that she almost failed to notice the other things in the room. The plants dangling from the ceiling and layered on drying racks were not the usual healer’s collection. Bitharn was no herbalist, but she knew enough to recognize feverfew and comfrey, wintermint and blackroot. She would have expected to see those plants gathered here. Instead, the misshapen lumps of beggar’s hand were the only ones kept in store.

  At the back of the room was a cast-iron cauldron filled with chunks of rancid fat. Strips of skin clung to the pieces; one chunk, bigger than the rest, had been hacked from a human belly. Coarse black hair sprouted around its navel. Under the cauldron was a small pyre of splintered bone and black-stained wood, same as the logs by the dule tree. Next to it, a crusted candle mold waited to be filled.

  A cluster of golden sun pendants, similar to the one Bitharn wore, hung above the cauldron on braided cords. The leather was gritty with clinging cinders; the rays of the suns were dull with soot.

  “The priest,” Malentir said, his voice soft with wonder. “Of course.”

  “No. No, he was going to help them. He took them to Shadefell in hopes of a cure. The others found proof of it … all those writings in the inn …” But Bitharn’s words sounded hollow in her own ears, and Malentir merely raised an eyebrow at her protest.

  The bones on the walls, the defiled sun symbols, the cauldron to render corpse fat into dead man’s candles … all of it hidden behind a trap loaded with Maolite corruption. There was no accident, no innocent explanation. Whether he knew what he was doing or was deluded into believing that he could save his people by some grisly “magic” in his rites, the solaros had acted to serve the Mad God’s will in Carden Vale.

  “He did not take them to Shadefell for a cure,” the Thornlord murmured. “He took them to be sacrificed.”

  15

  She dreamed of bones.

  Asharre’s sleep had been troubled since they’d come to Carden Vale. Her nights were full of wraiths and shadows. In her dreams, she ran from amorphous dangers that lurked behind the walls of unreal cities and hunted her through misty forests whose trees melted skyward into slumber and fog. She couldn’t fight—she could never fight—only run. Most mornings she woke exhausted, but she had the small consolation of knowing her nightmares were just that, and over.

  This dream was different.

  She walked down a tunnel of blackness. Behind her it was an infinite coil, twisting endlessly through the bones of a mountain without ever reaching air. Ahead of her it led to the mountain’s heart, hot and red and deadly. Asharre felt the heat pounding against her face, burning more fiercely with every step.

  Bones surrounded her. There was no light, but someh
ow she saw them clearly. The earth was paved with knobs of spine and shoulder, interlaced with the filigree of finger bones. Skulls in stacks on the walls stared down, their secrets locked behind grinning teeth. The long bones of arms and legs came together in a steepled arch overhead. Fleshless hands dangled down among them, grasping weakly at her hair.

  These were the dead of Carden Vale. Some had died during the town’s recent troubles; others had perished centuries earlier. All were victims of the same ancient corruption. Asharre was sure of that, although she didn’t know how she knew. Perhaps that was part of the dream.

  They were the lucky ones. She knew that, too, with the unquestioning logic of dreams. These were the lucky ones, who died in the tunnels before coming to the mountain’s red heart. They still had their bones, and something of their souls. Those less fortunate, who reached the end of the road, had neither. The fire consumed them completely.

  Skeletal hands brushed Asharre’s ears and tugged at her short-cropped hair. She walked faster, trying to escape them, even though each step brought her closer to burning.

  The skulls’ teeth rattled. A ghostly susurration blew through the bones: the voices of the dead, straining to speak across that final silence. Wait, they whispered, wait. Do not run. It is a trap … a trap. Fear drives you to him.

  It did. The realization hit her so hard she stumbled. Sweat rolled from her chin and pattered onto the bone-tiled floor, steaming. By fleeing from the dead, she hurried toward her own doom—but these were the bones of people who had resisted, and had succeeded in keeping themselves from utter destruction. Fear was the Mad God’s tool to keep her blind. Terror made her deaf to the secrets they might share.

  They wanted to help her. They wanted to keep the evil in the mountain from claiming her too. She heard them struggling. The spirits of the dead fought against the magic that had killed them and held them trapped in this place; their voices were a babbling breeze. Asharre tried desperately to distill some meaning from the noise.