Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  Malentir turned to the shade. “Why are your hands bound?”

  “He closed our mouths, but we still wanted. The sickness makes you eat. Its skin is sweet—and when you’re sick enough you start to taste it in your bones.” He held up his left hand. The tip of his ring finger was eaten away, exposing a worn and scratched nub of bone. The ghost thrust its fingers into its mouth, chewing furiously. The flesh peeled away from its fingers as it did so, leaving black-streaked bones to crunch between its spectral teeth.

  “Finger bones would fit between those steel laces, wouldn’t they. And I’m sure these wretches could tear other things to sufficiently small pieces, if they weren’t restrained,” Malentir mused. He glanced back at the Celestians. “Anything else?”

  Bitharn shook her head. Kelland grimaced. “No.”

  “Good. Talking to Maolites is tiresome.” Malentir gestured contemptuously at the shade. His thorn vine tightened, anchoring its barbs into unreal flesh, then wrenched away in ripping coils, tearing the shade into pieces. Howling, the apparition faded into the dungeon’s gloom.

  “Now what?” Bitharn asked. “That was useless.”

  “To the contrary,” Malentir said. “That explained a great deal. A sample of the dirt they were collecting, I suspect, will explain still more.” He peered into one of the cells wormed into the dungeon’s walls. Unlike the others, it was not empty; a mass of coal-stained bones crammed its mouth. The Thorn drew out a human thigh bone, still affixed to half its pelvis by sinew wrapped around the ball of its hip. The pelvis had been chipped into a crude shovel, its edge worn down and coated with black grime.

  “Tools to cut the darkness from the mountain.” The Thorn scraped the shovel along a nearby pit, scratching loam onto the bone. “This, I presume, is what they collected for the master and what drove them to feast upon their own bones. The bowels of Duradh Mal are not the best place to study it, however, so with your permission I shall take this and devote more time to it elsewhere.”

  “That’s it? You want to go now?” Bitharn blinked. “What about the maelgloth?”

  “We have a sample of what they took from Duradh Mal.” Malentir tapped the shovel’s contents onto a small square of cloth, folded it neatly, and tucked the bundle into a silver-capped horn. “There is nothing more we can or should take from this place. All that remains is for the Sun Knight and myself to seal the ruins—a temporary measure, to be sure, but sufficient to keep Gethel and his pets from reentering until we can erect more permanent barriers—close off his perethil, and deal with him at Shadefell, now that we know he is not here.

  “As for these wretches”—he flicked a hand at the maelgloth—“they will have to die. I need their pain, and they serve no other use.”

  Bitharn looked over the blind faces turned up toward the light. At the steel-bound lips, the slimy gray skin, the hands that had been tied to keep them from tearing each other, and themselves, apart. All around them, the savage majesty of the Baozite fortress closed in.

  Evil for evil. Let them all destroy each other. She thought of the perethil’s tainted gate, of the dead hands crawling over her flesh, and shuddered.

  Kelland bowed his head, reluctance written on every line of his face. “As you will.”

  “Of course.” Malentir drew his ivory dagger and dropped it into the center of the maelgloth pit. He did not go in again, but stood at the brink, praying for his Pale Maiden to bless the maelgloth with her gift.

  She did. And the steel laced through the miners’ lips did nothing to silence their screams.

  18

  “You are afraid,” Gethel said when he came.

  “Of course I’m afraid,” Corban snapped, tugging his cloak straighter so that the scholar wouldn’t see how thin he’d gotten, or realize how ragged he’d let his clothes become. The constant wind made it hard to keep the cloak in place, but this miserable lean-to was as far from his blackfire quarrels as Corban wanted to go, even if it meant their meeting had to be unpleasantly cold.

  The two men huddled under a lattice of naked poles wedged into an alley near the apothecary’s shop. Whoever had jammed the poles into the crumbling bricks on either side had meant for canvas to be draped over them to offer some shelter from the elements, but if such a tent had ever existed, it was long gone. The wind whistled with merry cruelty through its wooden bones.

  It might have been better to meet Gethel in the apothecary’s shop, which had a roof and four usable walls instead of a few thin poles rammed into a blocked-off alley … but Corban didn’t want anyone to know where he hid. Even Gethel, who had discovered the blackfire stone and sent it to him, couldn’t be trusted that far.

  Weeks had passed since he’d sent his message up the Windhurst River. Months, perhaps. Time had been slipping away from him ever faster, it seemed, since the night of the rats. It was past midwinter, he knew that much, but the exact date escaped him.

  What did it matter, anyway? It was cold. There was snow. Gethel should have arrived eons ago, and in the meantime Corban had been going mad with fear.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept. His dreams didn’t leave, though; they just came to him awake. Corban was beginning to see things. Hear them. Voices whispered to him in the night, repeating unintelligible chants over and over until he began shouting back just to drown them out. Sometimes he saw pale shapes beckoning from the depths of the sea, or imagined that the cracks in the pier’s boards were filled with oozing black liquid instead of empty air. Twice he had seen that liquid darkness flow and gather into pools. Once it had risen in an undulating pillar, defying gravity before his disbelieving eyes. He knew, somehow, that if he looked into that moving dark he would be able to read it like an oracle … and the truth he saw there would shatter what remained of his sanity.

  Corban wasn’t afraid. He was terrified. What was happening to him? He had never been devout, but he prayed to any god who might listen that Gethel would have an answer for what plagued him. And a cure.

  “You are right to feel fear,” the scholar whispered. Everything he said was a whisper. Corban thought it was a minor miracle that the man could talk at all. Gethel had looked unwell during their meeting at Carden Vale, but now he was a walking corpse. His eyes were a rheumy gray, covered with dirty cataracts; his skin hung loose as a scarecrow’s rags. His nails had grown so long that they curled into his palms like mildewed corkscrews.

  “Why? Tell me why.” Corban hadn’t told Gethel the full measure of his fears—hadn’t told him much of anything, in truth—but, standing face-to-face with the man, he was suddenly sure he didn’t need to. In the scholar’s cloudy eyes he saw his own desperation mirrored.

  “The harvesting of the stone was not simple,” Gethel said. “We had to break seals, brave old evils … Duradh Mal was not abandoned, no. Not in the deeps where the blackfire stone lay. There we found horrors. Things without name. I was able to baffle and blind them with my spells, and we wrestled the blackfire stone from their lairs … but they pursued us, in their way. An old evil lives in the heart of that mountain. An old death. It is hungry, and it is not easily escaped.”

  “You told me you’d purified the blackfire stone,” Corban said. “You said it was safe.”

  “And it is. It was.” Gethel massaged the wrinkled skin under his eyes. “There have been … complications.”

  “What complications?”

  “You saw my poor, late apprentice Belbas. He was the first, but there have been others. Many others. Duradh Mal is a sick place. A cursed one. Its sickness … clings to the things taken from it. I cleansed much of it … but some lingers. It seeps into the minds and souls of the weak, exploiting them, turning them against me.”

  “What of it?” Corban said impatiently. He’d had his fill of Gethel’s delusions about spell-driven conspiracies in the man’s letters, which made vague allusions to their schemes almost as often as they asked for money. Gethel had never bothered to specify what, exactly, he thought these faceless enemies were doing,
much less how he intended to counter them—or what any of it had to do with Corban’s problems.

  “I had to learn to control them. To find and stop them. Some of the tainted souls were obvious. They fell into violent rages. Lashed out. Those I destroyed with the help of stronger and more loyal friends. But there were others who stayed hidden, trying to trap me in subtler snares. Thieves and spies … thieves and spies wearing masks of loyalty. The fire tells them true, but … I did not discover that at once. Some escaped me long enough to finish their schemes. One of those schemes may have replenished the sickness in the blackfire stone I purified. If that is so … their malice creates a many-pronged attack. Unreal voices, delirium … other things.”

  “What other things?”

  Gethel’s mouth opened, then closed. He shook his head, smiling the faint, wry smile of a man who knows he cannot be believed. “Monsters. They tempted men, and turned them into monsters. They corrupted whatever they could … even myself, briefly.”

  “But you can stop them?”

  “I can,” Gethel said. “I have.” He fiddled with a little sun medallion stitched to the inside of his belt. He’d never worn any god’s sign before—had prided himself on his freedom from their supposed superstitions—but Corban wasn’t inclined to mock him about this one. If it worked, he’d wear a medallion of his own. A dozen of them. A hundred.

  “How?”

  “It is not easy,” the scholar warned. “It will test your resolve. The schemes of the dark gods are ever thus: they test you cruelly, hoping that you will weaken and fail.”

  “I won’t.”

  “There are two parts to it. First you must draw the poison into other vessels. It is a delicate balance. Transfer too much, and they succumb to the taint. Too little, and you put yourself at risk. It is one of the reasons I needed the shapers—they drew away the poison for me.”

  “You used children,” Corban said. He felt slightly ill. He had sent some of those children to Carden Vale himself, promising that they’d find work on farms. At the time he’d reasoned that his claims were essentially true, since Gethel was staying in some farmer’s house and they would be working for him … but he hadn’t cared to look too deeply into what, precisely, Gethel was doing with them.

  “They hold it better,” Gethel said, “and recover faster.” He rubbed a knuckle over the sunburst’s pointed rays, pushing the soft gold down. He’d done it many times; the tips were flattened into bulbs, and his knuckles were callused. “It is for the greater good.”

  “I can’t use children.” There were still some lines Corban wouldn’t cross. Couldn’t. Or else he’d be as monstrous as any of the creatures in Duradh Mal.

  “You must use some unsullied vessel. Or succumb yourself.”

  “I’ll find something.”

  He must not have sounded convincing, for Gethel gave him a long look. “Try. Your soul depends on it.”

  “You said there were two parts to it. What’s the second?” Corban asked. He didn’t really want to know, didn’t want to believe any of this nonsense … but something worse than hunger had driven him to eat those rats.

  “Once you are purified, you must remain so. There are many ways to do it … as many paths to the sanctuary as there are gods beyond. But the easiest, I find … the most powerful … is to use the symbols of Celestia.”

  “I thought the Fourfold House didn’t believe in gods.”

  Gethel scowled. His lower lip sagged wide, showing the stumps of his teeth. His teeth had been ordinary enough the last time Corban had seen him, but now they looked like lumps of sugar eaten away by dirty water. “Only fools would deny the gods’ power. No … our grievance is that they demand the fealty of men, and dole out magic sparingly, giving just enough to enslave the people without curing all their ills. The gods use magic as an unworthy king uses gold: to pay their soldiers and keep the commonfolk cowed. The king does not create his gold, and the gods do not create their magic. We should not have to bow our heads to claim a power that is not truly theirs. But in times of war … even a free man may seek refuge behind the walls of a king’s city … and even a wizard may choose to avail himself of the spells of faith.”

  “Fine. What do I do?”

  “You must ward yourself in the symbols of faith. But not those the Dome of the Sun would give you. No. Those are … soft. Weak. They do not have the power to control the curse of Duradh Mal. You must go back to the old faith, the way it was when the Celestians first sealed that place and bound its darkness back. The signs were different then. Had greater strength. I will show you the correct signs, and how they can keep you safe.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” If he made some mistake, or forgot the instructions … “It takes weeks to send letters up the river.”

  “Longer. This has been a hard winter, and it grows harder by the day.” Gethel untied the lumpy sack at his waist and held its mouth open. “But you need not depend on the river trade to reach me. Blackfire stone is not the only magic I have reclaimed from Duradh Mal.”

  Corban peered into the bag, then recoiled in revulsion. It was full of bones. All arm bones, all so small and light that they had to be children’s. They were white as snow, almost translucent, save for a network of black veins that ran through the bone like the red flush of blood jade.

  “Make a gate of them,” Gethel said. Corban’s horror didn’t seem to touch his weary, implacable calm. “On your wall. I will show you. Then you will be able to pass through their hands to reach me, and I will be able to come to you as easily. Mountain snow or river ice will pose no obstacle.”

  I can’t use children, Corban thought. Hadn’t he just said that? Sworn it? But the words felt like a line he’d heard an actor recite in a half-forgotten play. These children were already dead. It wasn’t his choice that killed them. If they were children. He was no expert in bones, and might be confusing bones taken from … lambs’ ribs, or chickens, or some beast. It was possible. It could be.

  Anyway, whatever they were, they were dead by no doing of his. Wasn’t it a greater waste to discard their sacrifice?

  Corban took the sack. “Thank you,” he said.

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, HE LEFT THE apothecary’s cellar to hunt dogs.

  Gethel said he needed innocents to draw off the contamination in the blackfire stone. To Corban, that meant either children or animals. The only adults he knew to be free from sin were Celestia’s Blessed, and he had no intention of drawing their ire.

  Children were out of the question. He hadn’t the stomach for that. He hadn’t the nerve either. Corban wasn’t dealing with orphans in some mountain backwater. He was in the heart of Cailan, surrounded by guards and Sun Knights. Any child he stole might have parents who would wail for justice if their sons or daughters went missing. One misstep and the wrath of court and temple would come down upon him.

  Animals were easier. No one watched the city’s feral dogs. Their lives were hard, desperate, short; they died in droves when the weather turned against them or sickness ran through their ranks. Packs fought one another for the best scavenging grounds. Street children tormented them for sport. No one would notice if a few more went missing. No one would care if they died. And the dogs themselves would never tell a soul.

  Not only were they voiceless and unwanted, but he had no doubt that dogs had emotions. Minds. Souls. They would draw the curse from Corban, and by their innocence save him.

  He caught his first dog near midnight.

  She was a scrawny yellow brindle, not much bigger than a fox, with pricked-up ears and the gangly gait of an adolescent. One of her forelegs was bent stiff after a bad break; she hopped along on the other three, making her slower and easier to catch. At some point she had learned to trust humans, for after an initial wary sniff, she accepted the meat Corban tossed her way. With every piece he lured her closer, until the little dog was eating out of his hand.

  Then he slipped a leather noose over her head, fed her one last piece of sausage, and led the unre
sisting dog down to the secret cellar.

  AFTERWARD HE REMEMBERED ALMOST NOTHING OF THE ritual. The dog yipped once, at the beginning, but only once. There was blood, although not as much as he had expected. A knife. Drawings in charcoal and chalk: scrawled loops of runes and sigils, vital in the moment but meaningless when he looked at them again. Incantations that came into his mind word by word, and fled his memory as soon as each sound was spoken.

  Corban didn’t know where the chants came from, nor from where he drew inspiration for the scribbled runes. He’d never pretended to be Blessed. But there they were, burning bright and ephemeral in his mind, and vanishing like snuffed flames once used.

  What he did remember—the only thing that lingered after the blood was cold and the chalk dust swept away—was the peacefulness that came over him when it was done.

  It was as if a fever broke in his soul. The headaches, the delirium, the fog of weariness and pain that had clouded his thoughts and made every movement a trial—all of it vanished at the ritual’s end.

  Corban sucked in great gasps of air, unable to believe how light he felt. He leaped in the air, just for the joy of it, and laughed, unbelieving, when he landed. Nothing hurt. He was weaker, yes, and a little dizzy from long fasting, but the black miasma was gone and his head felt impossibly clear. He had forgotten how liberating it was to be whole.

  Gethel was right. The curse of Duradh Mal could be controlled. Dazed by his discovery, Corban led the yellow dog off the pier. The animal followed unsteadily, breathing hard, her head down. Blood and black grit dripped from her flanks. He couldn’t recall why the grit was there.

  Opposite the ladder in his cellar, the apothecary had excavated a small cavern and lined it with brick, using it to store contraband. Corban had rigged a rope-and-board gate across its mouth. He pushed the animal in and closed the gate as she licked at the spiral wounds in her sides. As an afterthought he tossed in a dead fish he’d found floating on the water. Gethel had hinted that something dire would happen if he let his sacrifices die after drawing the poison from him, and Corban didn’t care to find out whether he was right.