Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  “What were they?”

  The sigrir shrugged, feigning a nonchalance she didn’t feel. “Dead.”

  “I suppose that’s what matters.” Evenna followed as Asharre resumed her exploration. The gallery ended in another debris-strewn room. A staircase spiraled into the musty gloom, its steps worn gray in the middle by decades’ use. To the left was an archway of sea green stone carved into flowers and vines around rose-braided wheels.

  The stairs seemed less dusty and more recently used, so Asharre went there. Ascending, she found a servants’ hall. These rooms were cleaner than those below: their floors were swept, their windows washed, chamber pots and basins scavenged to suit their occupants’ needs. But they were just as empty.

  The smell of a goodwife’s sachets, lavender and lemon balm, lingered in one. Another held a box of toys and a leash of red-and-blue leather, braided by a childish hand to fit one of the little dogs eviscerated in the kitchen. All were painfully tidy, with only the slight shabbiness of their furnishings to show that anyone had lived inside.

  There was nothing in these rooms for her. Asharre knew that even before she opened the doors. They felt wrong: stale, empty, abandoned to dust and fruitless hopes of safety.

  But what she sought was nearby. She was certain of it: Aurandane was close. The air was heavy with its presence. Magic crackled along her skin like the tingle of an impending storm on a hot, dry day. The fog that had swamped her thoughts for days was lifting, and in its place was a diamond clarity that Asharre had never felt before. This was the answer to their quest.

  The sensation became stronger as she reached the end of the hall. She rested a hand flat on the last door. A faint breath of carrion came from the other side, but Asharre hardly noticed it. The sword was here. She felt its power thrumming through the thin gray wood. Trembling with anticipation, she pushed the door open.

  The solaros lay rotting on a death-stained bed. His hands were folded atop his chest, the chain of a sun medallion woven through his waxy fingers. Unkempt stubble covered his cheeks; veins spidered green down the side of his neck, vanishing into the collar of his stiff yellow robes. The cold had slowed the body’s decay, but his chest was puffed with foulness. Two small bottles of dark glass rested by the foot of his bed, both empty. The lip of one was stained with the final, fatal residue of its contents.

  She did not see a sword. A wave of anger, hot and unexpected, rose in her chest and made her clench her blistered hand. Aurandane was here. Somewhere. It had to be.

  A slip of paper rested under the solaros’ medallion. Asharre had overlooked it in her haste and frustration, but Evenna worked it carefully from the man’s fingers. The writing was larger and clumsier than that in the solaros’ diary, and it stumbled rightward down the page as if his hand had grown heavier with every letter.

  “All it says is ‘Forgive me. Hope baited the snare,’” Evenna said. She put the note down and peered at the dead man’s lips, then at the empty bottles by his bed. “He might have wanted to write something else, but the poison caught up with him first. Two bottles of dreamflower extract. I’m surprised he stayed conscious long enough to finish the second one.”

  “He had the sword,” Asharre said. She threw open the trunk at the foot of his bed, but all it held was a heap of old clothes—moth eaten and crumbling, not even the priest’s—and another handful of clinking, poison-filled bottles.

  “Yet he stayed mad, and he died.” Evenna rubbed her temples. Pain wrinkled her forehead. “What does it mean? The answer’s there, right at my fingertips, but I can’t think. He came to Shadefell. He found the sword. Then he … drank enough dreamflower extract to kill an ox, wrote a nonsensical note, and died? Why?”

  “Because he was weak.” Asharre gave up on the trunk and went back to the middle of the room. Evenna looked startled by her vehemence, but the sigrir pretended not to notice. To have hope, to have a weapon, and to choose death instead of a fight … that was pure, contemptible weakness. She would make no such mistake.

  But why do we need a weapon when we came here for a cure?

  She dismissed the question as soon as it came. Of course they needed a weapon. The attack in the gallery had proved that. This place was infested with monsters and demons, and Aurandane would defeat them. Then they could find a cure, if the sword itself was not one.

  Standing in the center of the room, Asharre held her hands out at her sides and inhaled slowly, centering her thoughts as the dream-Falcien had taught her. It felt ridiculous, but he had sworn that it would work, and she had nothing else to try. The sigrir focused on her need, letting her consciousness flow outward, seeking, from that one command. Find the sword.

  She opened her eyes. Her gaze drifted down from the bed and the corpse, past the clothes she had scattered on the floor, to the floorboards themselves. The cracks between the boards fascinated her. There was a secret significance to them, a purpose to the lattice of crooked black lines between the planks. As she watched, the darkness between them rippled and flowed out of the cracks, spreading into a slow spiral on the floor.

  “What are you staring at?” Evenna asked.

  Asharre did not answer. Her eyes stung with the strain of keeping them open so long, but she had to know what the shape would be, and blinking would ruin it all. She could not blink; she dared not speak. She had to hold the magic.

  The wavering lines that had been floor cracks crept up the wall, pulling themselves along like climbing caterpillars. They stretched and dripped into a symbol Asharre knew: the sunburst Falcien had shown her, drawn in wet black shadow. Four over four. Their sign of salvation.

  “It is in the wall,” she said. The vision disappeared as soon as she moved, but Asharre had what she needed. She felt along the wall where she’d seen the sunburst, and when one of the boards wiggled loose, she pulled it out.

  Aurandane waited in the space between the walls. A net of tattered strings cocooned the sword, and it was wrapped in an old yellow robe, but Asharre recognized the long, slim silhouette. She reached in, brushing aside the strings, and too late froze as the memory of Falcien’s death flashed before her. Strings then, too, snapping and loosing black death.

  But these were already broken, and they threw no quarrels at her. They had none to throw. As she peered into the hiding hole, Asharre saw that the strings were, indeed, part of a trap … but they were linked to sun medallions on bent-back sticks, not crossbows, and both sticks and strings were broken. Corroded. The sticks were dry and brittle, the strings brown and frayed, though they could only be a few days old if the solaros had set them. More than time has touched them.

  Why should that surprise her, though? Magic had guided her to Aurandane; magic had cleared her path. She closed her hand around the steel and pulled it out, shaking off its wrappings.

  Aurandane was a thing of beauty. It was heavier than she’d expected, more like her own caractan than the longswords that the Sun Knights favored. Hilt and scabbard were engraved with winding prayers in a tongue she did not know. The blade was steel edged with some brighter metal, white as new silver, and unmarked save for a thin fuller that ran along two-thirds of its length. A sky blue spinel, tiny as a teardrop, shone on its pommel. Hints of lavender and dusky rose twinkled in its facets, the color of the heavens at the first kiss of dawn.

  “Take it,” the sigrir said to Evenna, holding the sword flat on both hands.

  The Illuminer recoiled. “Why me?”

  “It is Celestia’s creation. You are her servant. You should take it.” And I do not want it. Her head ached miserably from whatever small, nameless spell she’d used to find Aurandane; the blisters on her palm throbbed as if filled with liquid fire. If that was the cost of magic, she wanted no more of it.

  “It’s a sword. You should use it.”

  “I have a sword. This one is consecrated to your Bright Lady. It is the weapon we came here to find, the key to banishing Carden Vale’s curse. Will you take it or no?”

  “I … I suppose I wi
ll,” Evenna said. She lifted the sword hesitantly.

  As soon as the blessed blade was taken from her grasp, the agony in Asharre’s blistered palm subsided. She flexed her hand surreptitiously, trying to hide her relief. “Good. Then we have only to find the missing townspeople so that we can cure them. We know they are not here. Where would they have gone?”

  “To pray,” Evenna answered. “To the last, best sanctuary of our faith.” The dark-haired woman gestured through the tiny windows to the shrine in the central courtyard.

  There Shadefell’s tower rose, its verdigrised spear point sharp above a ring of cloud white cherry trees. Celestian sunbursts glimmered in a gilded band around the tower’s peak, bright despite the centuries. Paths of crushed marble, barely visible through the wild weeds, wound through the neglected gardens and converged on the tower like the strands of a ghostly web.

  By the time the women reached the tower, dusk stained the cherry blossoms blue. A cool wind sighed through the bracken, raising gooseflesh on Asharre’s arms.

  The scratches inflicted by the gallery’s dust creatures burned and swelled under their bandages, but she ignored the pain. Evenna had no magic to spare for her. The prayer in the gallery had drained her, and it seemed that carrying Aurandane was doing the same. Her abbreviated sunset prayer—shortened to two chanted lines, as it was for the Sun Knights on the battlefield—had relieved her weariness for a while, but she was visibly flagging as twilight fell. She used the sword like a walking stick, leaning heavily on the weapon.

  But it will lend her strength. It must.

  A spill of ash stained the earth on the lee side of the tower. Spring rains had washed the finer dust away, leaving a pebbled hill of charred bone fragments. Blue stalks of morduk ossain, half hidden in the gloaming, fringed the ash heap. They did not quite reach the walls, and Asharre let herself be reassured by that; perhaps the fact that Maol’s weeds could not touch it meant Celestia still protected her sanctuary.

  Whether she did or not, they were committed. Asharre sent a silent prayer to her sister’s goddess and another to the old spirits of her clan. She looked back to see that Evenna was near. Then she pulled open the door, streaked with verdigris and rust, and stepped into the tower.

  Black silence folded around her. It smelled of sulfur and the sour rust of old blood. Time and massive explosions had made a wreckage of the upper floors; beams and boards tumbled around her, filtering the moonshine into scattered fingers of silver light.

  The stairs were a ruin of mangled iron and splintered wood, and the floors were more gaps than whole. A mouse couldn’t have balanced on those teetering beams. Below, a pit yawned.

  It was a rough thing, a pool of deeper darkness that had been blasted out of the earth rather than dug. She saw bits of metal embedded in its walls, a spiral of nailed boards leading into its depths, and nothing else: only the endless rift.

  “Down,” she told Evenna, moving back to the open door. The night’s clean air tasted sweeter than wine. “They went down.”

  “It’s pitch-black in there,” the Illuminer said dubiously, peering into the ruins.

  “Light a torch,” Asharre suggested, though she felt a flicker of unease at her own words. A torch would signal to anyone down there, human or maelgloth, that they were coming.

  But they could hardly walk blind into the depths, and the noise would ruin any attempt at stealth anyway. She shook away her doubts while Evenna fished out her lantern and struck a spark to it. Juggling the lantern with her awkwardly held sword, she followed Asharre back inside.

  The lantern made it even clearer that no shovel had touched the pit. Asharre traced her fingertips over the ridged earth. Metal fragments studded the dirt. Steel was the most common, but she saw brass, melted tin, iron gone orange with rust. Most of the shards looked like shattered chain links, but not all. Some could have come from plate … or pots, or bent knives, or even chunks of statuary.

  There were pieces of bone among them, too, none larger than her smallest finger. Here and there she saw dented fragments of plate with bits of bone lodged in the dents as if driven in by great explosive force. Gobbets of dried gore crusted over the metal.

  Falcien. The realization made her drop her hand in horror. A death like his—if the victim was wearing plate mail, if he was wrapped in coiled chains—could have made those layered spatters on the walls. A hundred of them could have dug a gaping pit.

  Would a hundred suffice? How many deaths would such an excavation take? Asharre couldn’t imagine; she didn’t want to. She looked away. Evenna was staring past her down the steps, her face drawn and sweat on her brow.

  “This isn’t a sanctuary,” the younger woman whispered. “This is the heart of corruption. Bright Lady save me, it is so strong.”

  “Can you do it?” Asharre asked. “Do we go down?”

  “Yes. I must.” Evenna stepped forward. Black smoke hissed away from her lantern, surrounding them in a grainy mist. There was a pattern in its swirling dance … one she had seen before, Asharre thought.

  “Wait,” she said. Scraping a handful of dirt from the wall, the sigrir picked out the bits of bone and metal until only coarse earth was left. She spat into the dirt and mixed it with a finger to make a paste. The blisters on her bandaged hand broke open, soaking through the cloth and into the mud. Asharre ignored it. However unpleasant the mix, it was only a means to an end.

  She dipped a finger in the paste and brought it to Evenna’s brow. “Let me ward you.”

  The Celestian frowned but did not move away. “Where did you learn wardings?”

  “From a friend. It should keep away the smoke—it will protect us against breathing in the poison.” Hoping she remembered the sigils correctly, Asharre daubed the mud into a wavering circle, then added eight lines radiating outward and a dot at the end of each line. Four over four: Celestia’s sunburst to keep her children safe. She painted the same onto her own forehead, unable to see the marks but confident that she had followed the shapes Falcien showed her in the dream. When the last stroke was in place, the mark seemed to melt and ripple, sinking into the Illuminer’s skin. The mud turned an ugly shade of purple, then lightened gradually, through mottled green into the yellow of an old bruise and vanished. Evenna winced, but Asharre felt nothing. She rubbed a finger over her own forehead and felt only smooth skin. The dirt paste was gone.

  And it worked. The murky smoke drifted away, buffeted by circling winds that never ruffled the ebon locks around Evenna’s ears.

  “There is no magic without the gods,” Evenna murmured uneasily, eyeing the rippling haze. But she lifted her lantern, and they went down.

  The steps were planks wedged into the pit’s sides. Asharre picked her way down cautiously, switching her caractan from hand to hand as she circled the abyss. It was much deeper than she’d imagined; the vault seemed to bore into the mountain’s heart. Soon the wooden webbing of the collapsed upper floors was lost to shadow, and the world shrank to the wavering sphere drawn by Evenna’s lantern.

  Farther down the creaking steps, the walls became smoother. No blood discolored them this far down; no metal glinted at their sides. Heat rose from the pit’s depths, and with it the spoiled-egg reek of sulfur.

  The blasted earth gave way to green-black stone, its mortarless pieces fitted so cunningly and the joins polished so smooth that the walls seemed to have been grown organically as a single whole, rather than being put together by mortal hands. It felt old, older than Shadefell, and in its way as inhumanly majestic as the soaring glass of Heaven’s Needle.

  She didn’t belong here. No human belonged here. The Rosewayns had been trespassers in their own day, digging into the nameless depths and putting up their flimsy stairs as if they, or anyone, could pretend to own this place.

  They were fools if they’d believed it. This place belonged to an older power, a greater one. In its eyes human bodies were sacks of walking meat, held together by the thinnest puppet shells of skin, and as Asharre moved closer to it
s lair, she saw herself and Evenna the same way. Prey. Food.

  But we have teeth. We can fight. This battle was won once. She prayed it could be again.

  A crooked door waited at the end of the stairs. Behind it was a furnace red glow. Asharre knew that glow; she had seen it in her dreams.

  The door’s planks were baked into rattling unevenness. A wrist-thick chain coiled next to the door; a broken hasp dangled from the stone wall at its side. A sunburst in a spiral of delicate runes stood on the heat-warped wood. Vicious, black-edged scratches defaced the gilded carvings, but enough remained for the emblem to be identifiable.

  The sight of it sent a stabbing pain through Asharre’s head. Hot tears filled her eyes. She squeezed them shut, shaking her head dumbly. Beside her, the light swung and swam as Evenna’s grip faltered on the lantern.

  “Open it,” the Celestian whispered, teetering on the sheathed sword. The words were half a sob. “Open it. Oh, Bright Lady, how was this done to you?”

  Asharre clenched her teeth and took hold of the door’s handle. It was like grabbing a fistful of coals. Her hands burned, though the pitted iron was no warmer than the hilt of her sword. She felt the sticky heat of fusing flesh, smelled her skin roasting. The pain was maddening but she jerked the door open then ripped her hands away, cursing Shadefell and her own weakness and whatever magic corrupted Celestia’s symbol into something that caused such pain.

  Beyond it was a charnel house. Bones, some whole but most burned black and small, piled up into ringed walls higher than the top of her head. The gaps between them glowed red as a setting sun.

  An old, old man shuffled among the bones. He was tall but stooped so low that his chin nearly touched his chest, giving him a vulture’s aspect. Loose robes hid his hands to the fingertips; loose skin fell in papery white folds around his throat, so voluminous that it seemed he wore a fleshy beard. He looked up slowly as they entered, and Asharre saw that his eyes were completely black. Liquid darkness filled them from corner to corner, trickling out in rivulets that he wiped away as he spoke.