“What?” Bitharn looked from one man to the other in bewilderment. “What is he talking about?”
“The Thorn could take us to Duradh Mal by traveling through shadows,” Kelland answered, not breaking from their locked gazes. “He won’t. Even though it would be safer than trusting to whatever corrupted magic Gethel used.”
“Safer for you, and only until arrival,” Malentir said, poisonously soft. “I would be left drained and defenseless … against whatever is in Duradh Mal, and against you. Forgive me if I am not inclined to make myself helpless for your benefit.”
“Of course. If you’ll forgive my reluctance to step into a blighted perethil based on no more than your storytelling.”
“Your distrust is neither wise nor warranted. But certainly, if it will reassure you, test the thing for yourself. I will leave you to do it in private. By sundown I hope your fears will be assuaged. We can hardly hope to succeed in Ang’duradh if we stay at each others’ throats the whole time.”
“He has a point,” the knight murmured after the Thorn had gone. “But I think I’ll hold on to my distrust a little longer.” He knelt before the painting, examining its dark canvas and metal stars more closely. The Celestial Chorus stared back at them, its silver-and-bronze stars reflecting fragments of their faces. Near the bottom of the painting’s frame, the jeweled, misshapen white metal of its handle gleamed.
Kelland raised his voice in a clear tenor. The words were calm and sonorous, almost musical, and this time no foulness seized his spell. The golden haze of godsight filled his eyes.
Bitharn hung back, glancing over her shoulder for the Thornlord. A queasy, unsettled feeling collected in the pit of her stomach. There was no reason for it, really—Kelland’s spell had succeeded, and a painting wasn’t going to attack them, perethil or no—but she couldn’t shake her unease. Something about the way those blackish rubies sat on the melted metal made her think of the old myths she’d read in the Dome’s libraries: of maelgloth so corrupted that their blood fell to the earth like poisoned seeds, spawning monsters that leapt up vicious and full grown.
It was a story, only a story … but stories were like pearls, beautiful things accreted around a grain of ugly, gritty truth.
The knight sat staring at the painting for so long that Bitharn began to wonder whether its corruption had taken hold of him too. She was about to reach out and shake him when he exhaled a sigh and blinked the godsight away.
“What did you see?” Bitharn whispered.
“Poison,” the Sun Knight replied. He pressed his hands to his knees and stood. “The perethil is tainted, as the Thornlord said. Maol’s influence snakes through every thread of its magic. Once it was Celestian; from what I can discern by the shreds of its original spells, I imagine it allowed our dedicants to travel swiftly across any land in the Celestial Chorus’ view. Now, however, it permits travel only to places desecrated by Maolite magic. More than that: it instills in its users a craving for such places. It makes them lust for the corruption that waits within. That lust is woven into its magic; we will not be able to avoid it if we use the perethil.”
“Can we …” Bitharn swallowed. She wanted to hug her arms around herself—or, better, around him. Instead she touched the grip of her bow, taking what reassurance she could from wood and sinew. “How do I resist it?”
“Love. Focus on loves and needs stronger than its temptations.” Kelland made no move to touch her, but his look held such intensity that it brought a flush of heat to her cheeks. “The perethil may be … hard for you. Are you certain you want to go through? We have to come back after Duradh Mal anyway, if we’re to go to Shadefell. You might be safer staying here until we return.”
Bitharn shook her head. She was touched that he wanted so badly to protect her, but irritated too. “Didn’t you learn anything from your capture? Leaving me behind doesn’t protect me and it surely doesn’t protect you. It just makes us both weaker. You can’t go alone. And what if you don’t come back? How safe will I be then? The water here could kill me.”
“I know. I just … I know.” His shoulders sagged. “Forgive me.”
“It’d be easier if you stopped doing so many things that needed forgiving.” Bitharn brushed his cheek and stepped away. He could be as restrained as he wanted; she meant to cut that five-year promise as short as she could. If this was the last task Kelland ever did as a Sun Knight, she wouldn’t weep. Bitharn shared his faith and had no wish to break him from it … but she’d almost lost him once, and that was quite enough.
Her gaze strayed back to the misaligned stars on the painting. “What do you suppose we’ll find in there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think the Thorn does?”
“Perhaps. I doubt he’d go in completely blind … but after six hundred years of isolation, and a misguided ‘wizard’ blundering around thinking he could unlock the secret of godless magic, who knows how much might have changed? Whatever was known about Ang’duradh before its fall may not be true today.”
“Oh, good,” Bitharn said. “I love surprises.”
At sunset Kelland prayed and Bitharn joined him. Afterward they sat side by side, picking at a lentil stew with little appetite. Twilight passed with no sign of the Thornlord, and Bitharn bit her lip, wondering if they should look for the man. But Kelland didn’t seem concerned, and she wasn’t eager to go wandering through Carden Vale after dark.
Malentir returned to them as the first stars were winking awake. He was not alone. A skeleton in rotting rags shambled after him, dirt dribbling from its nostrils and green moss bearding one cheek. Leaf loam filled the crevices of its spine; mice had gnawed at its ribs. The left arm was missing altogether. But the right was intact, and it still had that hand.
“She will call the gate for us,” the Thornlord said, ushering his macabre companion toward the star-hung painting. “If you studied the perethil, you will know that it is not safe for any of us to turn its handle. So I found another. Most of the old dead were burned, of course, and maelgloth are useless to me. Unfortunate, as there are quite a few to choose from tonight. This young lady was more troublesome to find, but she will be safer. As you can see, when she died there were still animals in the wood, so her bones should be free from corruption.”
“Oh,” Bitharn said faintly, settling back on her heels to watch.
Ivory mist coiled through the skeleton, snaking along its arms and legs like ghostly ivy around the limbs of a dead tree. Now and then Bitharn caught shapes in the mist—fingers, the curve of a shoulder, a wave of long hair swaying over the small of its back. Once, for an instant, she saw a misty face over the skull’s mossy bone, and the agony on those translucent features was heartbreaking. That mist bound the girl’s spirit to her bones, Bitharn was sure of it, and she was in torment.
“It won’t be long,” she murmured, hoping the words were true. She didn’t know whether they were meant to reassure the spell-bound spirit or herself.
Malentir gestured to the jeweled handle protruding from the painting’s frame. The skeleton walked toward it, foot bones clicking on the wooden floor, and grasped the lumpy metal in the claw of its remaining hand. Slowly, with mist rising and falling through its bones in a constant plume, the skeleton turned the handle. The bladed stars around it folded inward like the petals of sleeping flowers, cutting into the skeleton’s fingers, but the turning never stopped.
Next to Bitharn, Kelland stiffened and bit back an oath. His eyes were gold with godsight again; she wondered what it revealed. As far as she could see, the cranking of the handle was uneventful until, abruptly, darkness poured from the top of the canvas, flooding the painting.
At first Bitharn thought her eyes were deceiving her. The painting was already rendered in deep grays and blues, and the room was dark; the wash of black was perceptible more as motion than color, and easily taken for imagination either way. But the paler smudges that represented silvery night clouds still shone distinctly in the gloom, and
when the spreading blackness swallowed those, she knew it was real.
The stars moved. Sluggishly, unwillingly, as if they were being dragged into place by the inky tides that engulfed them. A low clicking sounded from them, jittery and uneven, as some of the stars rose and others sank, wheeling into new formations.
The sound and the stars stopped. The skeleton’s hand jerked on the handle, slid off, and clattered against its hip. Malentir whispered a command, and the ivory mist swirled away in a thousand tiny ribbons, vanishing from view. As the mist dissipated, the bones collapsed into a lifeless heap.
Fresh gouges marred the bones on the skeleton’s hand, inside and out. A film of greasy black coated the palm-side scratches. There was nothing on the handle that held an edge; it shouldn’t have cut flesh, let alone scored deep into bone. Nothing on the silvery metal or its gemstones should have left that residue either.
“Best to burn her,” Malentir said, his voice taut with distaste. “It would be safest for you to do that. Ordinary fire might be more dangerous than helpful.”
Kelland glanced at the altered position of the Celestial Chorus on the painting. “If that’s any indication, the gate won’t open until after midnight. I suppose we have time enough for it. Bitharn, will you help?”
“What do you need?”
“Take some of the bones. Not the hand. I’ll carry that.”
She wiped the sweat from her palms. “Where do you want them?”
“The stableyard should be far enough. Let me go first. The maelgloth might be waiting.”
The maelgloth were there, but dead. Bitharn’s lantern threw back the gloom just enough for her to see the bodies lying broken in the road leading to their lonely farmhouse. It was hard to tell, as tortured as the creatures had been in life, but she thought they’d died in agony.
“The Thorn’s work?” she asked.
Kelland nodded. “He couldn’t use their bodies, but it seems he could use their pain.”
“Is that—do we—” She exhaled. “Do we accept that?”
“Why not?” He looked back over his shoulder. The lantern washed his features in gold and turned the shells in his hair to fiery jewels. “Let evil feed on evil. We’ll need the Thornlord’s power in Duradh Mal. If he replenishes it by killing maelgloth, that’s a small price to pay. I don’t like it that he tortures anything, even these poor corrupted souls … but the world seldom gives us what we’d like. Considering where we are, and what we have to work with, this is the best we could hope for.”
“And the girl whose corpse he stole?”
The knight was silent for a moment. Then he strode to the edge of the light, where the earth was beaten hard before the stables, and laid his burden down. “We’ll give her what peace we can.”
Bitharn added her bones to the pile. They made a small, sad heap. Kelland raised his hands to the sky, beginning a chant that drew from the traditional funeral rites and wove their words into the spell for sunfire.
At the end of his invocation, golden flame erupted from the bones. It consumed them in a soundless inferno: a pyre of sunlight, small but brilliant. Wisps of black smoke snaked from the gouged bones of the girl’s hand, wriggling away from the sunfire like wraiths fleeing from the dawn, but the flames caught and destroyed each one.
Within moments nothing was left. Kelland let his hands fall and stared into the darkness, as if wishing he could summon sunfire to consume the bodies of the maelgloth, too, but shortly he shook himself and started back to the farmhouse. Bitharn fell in beside him, taking his hand on the way.
“Is it done?” Malentir asked when they returned.
“She’s at peace.” Kelland eyed the painting as the Celestians set about their final preparations. The stars outside were nearly in the position shown on the altered canvas. Less than an hour left. Bitharn checked the knives in her belt and boots for the thousandth time, then ran a finger over the stiff fletchings of the arrows in her quiver. In war, archers had boys who ran along their lines to replenish their arrows, but Bitharn didn’t have that luxury. She had her hooded quiver and a second bag of oilcloth stiffened by wicker hoops, and that was all.
Malentir didn’t even have that. The Thornlord wore a long knife, more ornament than weapon, sheathed at his hip. It was a single piece of carved ivory, its hilt worked into garlands of thorned vines. Other than that eccentric blade, which would surely shatter the first time it struck anything, he was unarmed. He wore no armor, either, and carried no shield.
Kelland had donned a hauberk of steel rings and a new surcoat of snowy white. A sun-marked shield was strapped to his left arm. He’d worn the same armor to confront the Thornlady in the winter wood, and Bitharn felt a tickle of dread at the sight of it. Foolishness, she told herself firmly, pure foolishness. He needed armor in the halls of Duradh Mal.
She herself wore hardened leather reinforced with chain between the gaps. Bitharn hadn’t the strength to fight in full chain, and she’d never really learned to use a shield, but she knew better than to venture into battle unprotected. The Thorns were mad, all of them, for choosing to fight unarmored.
A star fell from the painting.
It struck the floor with a peal like the tolling of a funeral bell. While the sound was still shivering in the air, another star fell, then a third. As the echoes died and Bitharn’s heart began to beat again, another chime ripped through the bruised stillness. Again and again the stars fell and sounded their unnatural tolls, each one sharper and more jangling than the last.
The final star did not fall. Around it, the painting’s unnatural blackness rippled into fissures, peeling open the canvas—peeling open reality—in a web that took its lines from the points and angles of that last razor-sided star. Eight lines: a deformed sunburst. The embrace of Maol. It hung there, a ghastly wound in the world, edged in bleeding wisps of black. The rift was just large enough for a man to step through—but step through into what? All Bitharn saw within the gate was a wall of black and poisoned red, pulsing like an exposed heart through a mask of clotting blood.
“I’ll go first,” Kelland said, readying his shield. “Bitharn next. Malentir last. If the gate closes before you’re through, Thorn, you can follow us through shadows.”
Bitharn swallowed hard. “Go.”
Kelland stepped into the well of tainted light. Tendrils of red and black clutched at his surcoat, pulling him in and closing around his back. Then he was gone. Gritting her teeth, Bitharn followed.
Darkness surrounded her. She could see nothing but a dim impression of red light, far away and flecked with black. The air was close, moist, uncomfortably warm. The bellows of heavy breathing sounded behind her, close enough to riffle the hairs on the back of her neck. Musk and smoky incense filled the air, underlaid with the stench of unwashed, rutting bodies—a strange smell, repulsive and intriguing at the same time.
Unseen hands wrapped around her. She couldn’t tell whether they were attached to bodies or were simply parts of the darkness made manifest. They pressed against her lips, cupped her breasts, grabbed at her thighs and crept upward. She felt the bones jab through the fingers’ soft, sloughing flesh, smelled decay and the reek of blackfire on them.
The hands terrified her, repelled her, and yet brought a pang of perverse arousal. Her breathing quickened; her skin seemed to become more sensitive to the corpse hands’ caresses. She wanted to relax, to open herself to their rotting touches. Why? Her reaction frightened and disgusted her more than the hands did. Bitharn clenched her teeth against the intruding fingers, shook her head fiercely, and kicked the groping hands away.
Laughter filled the darkness, mad and meaningless and horribly certain. There was no sound to it; she felt the laughter directly in her mind. Invisible lips, cold and spongy with decay, brushed her brow. A tongue curled wetly over her breast, impeded by neither armor nor cloth. Then she stumbled forward into hard stone and stale air, infinitely cleaner than what she’d breathed in the perethil’s gate. Bitharn spat the taste of corpse fl
esh from her mouth, wiped the sticky residue of corpse hands from her face, and breathed hard as she tried not to cry.
“It’s all right,” Kelland’s voice said from the blackness beside her. He sounded shaken, but the knowledge that he was safely through did more to calm Bitharn than anything else could have. She clung to the familiar sound of his voice, using it to right her sense of reality after the perethil’s assault. “We’re through. It’s over.”
“It’s not over.” She croaked the words, harsh and half strangled. The taste of sulfur and rotting flesh poisoned every breath she took. Her skin crawled under her armor, and she cursed the fact that she couldn’t change or bathe. “We have to go back. This had better be worth it. I can’t see a thing. Where are we?”
New footsteps scuffed the stone behind her, lighter than Kelland’s, softer than her own.
“We are in Duradh Mal,” Malentir said.
17
The Thornlord’s fingers brushed over Bitharn’s eyelids, light and cold as falling snowflakes. When the chill shock of his magic passed, she could see.
It was not human sight. The world was black as a starless night, with only a fleeting silvery sheen across their surfaces to tell her where walls and ceiling stood. She felt as if she was standing in a blurred artist’s sketch of Duradh Mal, not in the bowels of the actual stronghold. It dizzied her.
Her companions looked still stranger. All the living colors of their skin and clothes were gone. Instead they were a radiant white, brighter than mirrors held up to the sun. She could scarcely stand to look at them. Around them the world was better defined, as if the living shed light upon their surroundings.
There were subtle differences between the two men in this alien vision. Kelland was limned in ghostly golden flame; the sight spoke to her of danger. Malentir’s aura had an ivory tinge, and he felt cold, as if whatever power had touched her resided in him. It was terrible, and commanding, and she fought away quailing.
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