Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  This is your fate. The fruit of your doubts. The Thorns never tested you, not really. They kept you, but they never tried to break you. The Spider wanted you whole. You would have been useless without your power. Yet still you doubted, even then, and that seed has flourished into fatal bloom.

  You stand on the brink of heresy now. You know this to be true. Sleepless nights, doubt-filled days. You took the hand of evil, embraced the Thorn you should have slain. Blind fool, flailing fool—you flounder in love, pushing it away in your clumsiness, and you will fail her too. Fail … and fall … and join us here, forgotten.

  I won’t, he wanted to reply, but before he could say the words—before he had even finished forming the thought—he was stumbling out of the perethil ‘s dreamscape and back into the world he knew. It was just as dark, just as filled with swaying shadows … but here they were cast by real things, and they danced only to the wind.

  A tower loomed before him, circled by ruined halls. Its tarnished point thrust into the bellies of low-hanging clouds; its base was garlanded with drifts of snowy petals, silver-blue in the moonlight, that had fallen from the cherry trees behind him. Celestian sunbursts glinted at the tower’s tip, but Kelland drew no comfort from them. All that emblem meant, in this place, was that her worshippers had failed before.

  Bitharn stood beside him. Her face was bloodless and her hands white knuckled at her sides; she stared at the tower’s door as if she read her death written in its rusty stains. Malentir waited a pace away, maddeningly serene.

  “How do you stay so calm?” Bitharn asked the Thorn.

  “How do you not?” He raked his striped hair behind his ears, looking past her to the tower’s door. “We train for this. Don’t you? Anything that an enemy might do to us, any torture they might inflict, we have already visited upon ourselves and survived. What men most fear is what they do not know, and there is precious little left unknown to us. Anyone who survives to leave the Tower of Thorns has already endured, or at least seen, every torture my mistress can devise. Anything Maol might attempt, next to that …” Malentir shrugged. “Anyone will break if tortured long enough. But it would take more than two walks through a perethil’s illusions to accomplish that.”

  “Might not for me,” Bitharn muttered. She unhooded her quiver, glancing at Kelland. “Ready?”

  He nodded, raising his sword. Holy flame limned the steel. Surrounded in its nimbus, Kelland led the way in.

  Rubble littered the threshold. The ruins of the tower’s upper floors, destroyed by some vast explosion, lay in rusting chaos around a gaping pit. Shards of bone and mangled metal studded the pit’s walls. Wrinkled black ribbons flapped on them, and after an instant of blank incomprehension, Kelland realized that they were the remains of blood and flesh. Wooden planks hammered into the walls led downward in an uneven spiral.

  The sense of evil that permeated the place was overwhelming. It pulsed in the air, suffocating; it wept from the walls like dungeon damp. Kelland’s little light was fragile and distorted, and the pitiless deep pressed in from all sides. Kelland clenched his teeth and bowed his head, counting his breaths, until his will and the sacred flame steadied.

  To his surprise, the Thornlord seemed even more affected. Malentir’s eyes were closed. His throat trembled; beads of sweat gathered at his temples. It took him longer to overcome the spiritual assault than it did the knight.

  “I thought you trained for this,” Kelland said.

  “We do.” Malentir laughed hollowly. He wiped his brow with the back of a wrist. The steel thorns of his bracelet left red scratches across his forehead. “Oh, we do. I was … made to remember it, that is all. The moment is past. Let us go.”

  Kelland started down the groaning stairs. Bitharn stayed close, her bowstave slung across her shoulders to free her hands. Malentir followed silently at their rear. The pit’s walls grew smoother as they descended, shifting from metal-panged earth to glassy green-black stone. Occasionally the knight caught glimpses of pale faces trailing after them inside those stones, as if they were dark windows to some other place … Narsenghal, or an echo of it … but he steadfastly refused to glance their way. Whether he saw them because the perethil had planted the idea or because the faces were really there, there was nothing to be gained by staring at them.

  The air became hotter and fouler as they descended. Kelland’s holy light began to flicker at its periphery; curls of black smoke hissed away from his sword. A smoldering red glow signaled the pit’s heart below the last twist of the stairs.

  At the bottom of the steps was a crooked door propped open by a coil of chains. Flakes of broiled skin clung to the door’s iron handle. Past it lay a labyrinth of bones. Dull crimson light seeped through the labyrinth’s rings; it was momentarily obscured as a stooped old man shuffled out.

  “Gethel,” Malentir said. The name sounded like a curse. The old man lifted his head, turning slowly toward them. Kelland recoiled. The ancient scholar’s eyes were solid black, like spheres of polished obsidian. Inky liquid dribbled from them.

  “Yes,” Gethel replied. His words were faintly slurred. The inside of his mouth glistened as black as his eyes. “Yes, I had that name.”

  The Thornlord made a small gesture, so quick that Kelland nearly missed it. His voice became sharper, more imperious, resonant with magic. The knight felt a breath of winter pass by him in the furnace pit. “What have you done here? Tell us everything.”

  Gethel flinched. Black tears crept down his cheeks. He licked them away with an ebon tongue, thin and long as a snake’s. “Everything …,” he repeated, fixing his empty eyes on the Thorn. “Everything would take a long while to tell.”

  “You came here to study blackfire dust, did you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “It is … powerful. A great power.” Gethel scratched the back of his head. The withered skin parted like wet paper, and a chunk of discolored bone fell from his skull. He brushed it away absently, revealing a bloodless hole filled with crumbling black grit. “Magic without the gods. I have the secret at last. At great cost … oh, great cost … but it is mine.”

  “Poor fool,” Bitharn murmured. No one else seemed to hear her.

  “What cost?” Malentir pressed.

  “Devotion. Such devotion. So … hard for the weak-willed to accept. So many who should have helped me turned against me. They were envious. Greedy. Fearful. They were dealt with, yes, I dealt with them. Traitors. Monsters that hounded our heels. Dead things that lurked in the deeps. Many of my loyal helpers gave themselves to buy me time. But it was not in vain. Not in vain. I found the answers. I found the truth.”

  “And what of them?” interrupted Kelland. “What happened to your ‘helpers’? Are any of them still alive?”

  Gethel turned his blind black eyes onto the knight. His gaze was repellent; meeting it felt like being doused with filth. “Yes. Some few.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In the workshop.” He lifted a gnarled, long-nailed hand to the labyrinth of bones behind him. “The safest place. Consecrated. Monsters come here, too … but they can be dealt with when they do.”

  “What about the Celestians who came here before us?” Kelland asked. “Two women. Did you see them?”

  “No. Only monsters came here. Only monsters.”

  “What are you doing with the blackfire stone?” Malentir broke in impatiently.

  “It is … it can be a weapon. An ignoble use of magic, I know. But necessary to repay my patron. Without him I should never have had the opportunity … so I will send him the treasures he wanted, the weapons my shapers made … and when he has enough, when he is finished, I will turn my research to its true ends. Wisdom, and the betterment of the world.”

  Contempt hardened the Thorn’s aristocratic features. “Who is this patron? What weapons did you make, and where did you send them?”

  “I cannot tell you,” Gethel whispered, shaking his head. Black grains spill
ed across his shoulders from the hole in his skull. He wet a wrinkled fingertip on his lips and dabbed them up, licking away the grit like a starving man savoring crumbs. “I swore an oath. I cannot give his name.”

  “Someone fell hard here,” Bitharn murmured quietly to Kelland. She tilted one end of her bow unobtrusively toward the floor. “Broken glass. Herbs spilled on the ground. Not long ago.”

  He refrained from looking down himself, not wanting Gethel to realize what Bitharn had seen, but nodded to acknowledge her words. Locked on each other, neither Gethel nor the Thorn seemed to have heard her.

  “I cannot say,” the scholar moaned again.

  “You can and you will.” Malentir twisted one of his bracelets, pressing it viciously into his own flesh. “Who was it? What did you send him?”

  Gethel whimpered, stumbling forward as if struck from behind. Murky tears funneled into the creases of his cheeks. “Corban. His name is Corban. I sent him quarrels. Hollow tipped, set with blackfire stone. The dust … becomes stone and reacts … unusually … to blood, once it’s had a taste to whet its hunger. It was … what he wanted. Why he paid.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Cailan,” Gethel mumbled. “I sent the quarrels to Cailan.”

  “You truly were a fool.” The Thorn dismissed his spell with a single sharp word. “There is nothing else of use to be had from this one. Kill him.”

  Bitharn already had an arrow set to her bow. Before the last word passed Malentir’s lips, she pulled back and let it fly. The arrow whipped between the two Blessed and buried itself in Gethel’s throat.

  The old man crumpled onto the wall of bones behind him. He sighed as he slid down, and the sound was echoed by a whistling through the bloodless hole that the arrow had punched in his throat. The doubled sigh went on and on, endless and unbearable. Gethel’s body had fallen out of sight behind the bones, but Kelland saw a plume of black dust fountaining above them. His prayer-granted light shrank back as the dust billowed toward them, and the sense of evil intensified in its reach.

  Baffled and alarmed, the knight strode forward to see what was happening.

  Gethel was collapsing. His skin was a wrinkled husk, like the shell of a rag doll with its stuffing torn out. Black smoke poured from his ears, his nostrils, the hole scratched in his skull. It spread out with astonishing speed, stretching sooty fingers from the corpse to the labyrinth around him. The smoke vanished into the crannies between the piled bones, and all around him Kelland heard the groan of walls tearing themselves up from their foundations, loud as the breaking of the world.

  Bitharn cried out in dismay. Kelland glanced back and saw that the smoke had reached past the labyrinth to the pit’s blood-painted walls, high overhead. Wherever the cloud touched the walls, bone and metal fragments slid toward it like iron filings to a lodestone. Ropes of dried blood twisted up to join them, binding the shards of steel and bone into thrashing whips that cut off any retreat.

  In front of him, the walls were pulling themselves apart with fleshless hands. The hands dug through the loose bones like five-legged ants, grasping pieces and fitting them together. From the rubble, skeletons rose. Some were so old that the bones of their limbs were brown and fractured; their skulls had no teeth, their feet no toes. Clouds of blackfire dust hung between their bones, forming ghostly replacements for missing ribs and jaws. Other skeletons were fresher, more intact; rags of skin clung to their shoulders and their joints squeaked over cartilage. The stench of sulfur and decay choked the air as they rose from the wreckage of the walls.

  Some of the skeletons showed grins full of filed teeth, and all had bones webbed with blackfire corruption, but they were human. Mostly.

  The four creatures that loped out from the back of the labyrinth to join them were not. They walked on two legs, and they had the rough shape of men, but their skin fitted over them strangely: bulging in some places, sunk into wrinkled pits elsewhere. Shiny scar tissue filled their eye sockets, smooth as rippled water. Steel rings pierced their throats, dragging down the wattled skin. Their tongues were enormous, so thick and long that Kelland couldn’t imagine how they fit inside the creatures’ mouths. Each was raddled with a line of holes that whistled as the creatures flicked their monstrous tongues through the air.

  The song they sang was strangely hypnotizing. Thin and discordant, it slipped under Kelland’s armor, past the protection of his holy light; it vibrated along his skin, creating a physical sensation as real, and as hard to ignore, as centipedes crawling over his flesh. He could shut it out with an effort, but that was a distraction in itself, and in the tumult of battle it might well prove fatal.

  “That’s the monster that led the miners to the boy on Devils’ Ridge. The one they ate,” Bitharn whispered. “There’s more than one of those?”

  “What are they?” Kelland asked.

  “Mine,” Malentir answered, shaking back his sleeves. His wrists were wet with blood. The bracelets drew it up along their thorns and diffused it between their points, surrounding his hands in crimson fog. “Destroy the lesser creatures.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Bitharn said. Her voice was steady, but tension radiated through every word. “Bones don’t bleed. My arrows won’t help.”

  Only a scattering of small bones remained of the labyrinth’s walls. The skeletons were crowded too closely for him to count, but Kelland guessed there might be twenty to one against them, and he could feel the Mad God’s touch corroding his magic. Sunfire wouldn’t work. Even if he could have destroyed them all with it, he wasn’t eager to unleash that prayer here. It had raged out of control in Duradh Mal; he had no idea what it might do in this place. Magic became dangerously unpredictable, even deadly, when one god’s power directly challenged another’s. If he had no alternative, he might risk the inferno … but there were better choices.

  “Steel Mirror.” It was an untried spell, something the Sun Knights had developed in the wake of Thelyand Ford but never tested. They hadn’t faced masses of the walking dead since that battle.

  But it was the best weapon they had. Bitharn nodded, reaching back to her quiver, and her bow began its savage song. At such close range she could hardly miss. Each shaft lodged in a hollow rib cage, one after the other.

  With the eyeless ones’ discordant whistling in his ears, Kelland recited the unfamiliar words for Steel Mirror. The prayer drew from the one all Celestia’s Blessed learned to keep themselves warm through northern winters. That one used fragments of glass to amplify the sun’s heat just as ordinary mirrors amplified light, filling a sickhouse or a castle with goddess-granted heat. The variant was—if it worked, if he remembered its verses—more lethal.

  Sunlight twinkled on the bodkin in the nearest skeleton’s chest. It was the barest of glimmers, scarcely visible through the smoke, but it shone more brightly from the two flanking the first, and brighter still from the two flanking those. The light danced from arrowhead to arrowhead, gaining brilliance with every leap. Halfway through its course, it was strong enough that a blazing beam could be seen lancing from each skeleton to the next, and the steel bodkins burned inside each one as if their hearts were fallen stars.

  The last skeleton burst apart in smoke and glowing cinders as the sunfire struck. Immediately the light retraced its path, still intensifying with each leap, and springing out to new ones as Bitharn continued to empty her quiver. The skeletons in its path crumbled into belching smoke, burning away too swiftly for a single dust mote to escape. As the last arrow-struck skeleton toppled into white-gold flame, the holy magic vanished. It was over before Bitharn had finished shooting.

  Kelland blinked the stinging afterimages from his eyes. They’d destroyed a third of the skeletons. Perhaps half. But the rest kept coming, trampling through the dissolving smoke of their decimated companions, and now they were too close to risk a second prayer. Knots of dark smoke pulsed in the skeletons’ chests; embers flared in their eyes. And Bitharn was nearly out of arrows.

  Abruptly Kelland r
ealized that the skeletons’ march and their own breathing were the only sounds he could hear. The eyeless ones had fallen still and silent, their tongues clamped, bloody, between their teeth. Ivory mist climbed their limbs in ghostly vines, drawing out streaks of livid blackfire wherever they passed. Those dark streaks reacted violently to the incursion of Malentir’s magic; the spell strands tumbled and spun around one another like the breaking of cloud and light at the end of a storm, each tearing at the other with no sign of which might prevail.

  The Thornlord was as motionless as his victims. Shadows cloaked the man, obscuring everything but the outline of his face and his long white hands. Utterly absorbed in his own arcane fight, he was oblivious to the danger marching toward them.

  “Stay back,” Kelland told Bitharn. He could hardly hear his own voice over the click of fleshless feet. Bitharn nodded and retreated toward the stairs, trying to stay out of the thrashing tentacles’ reach.

  If he’d had time, Kelland would have woven a trapfire wall to guard his back and give the others some protection … but there was no time. He’d barely chosen his position and raised his shield before they were upon him.

  The skeletons raked at him with fleshless fingers, prying at his mail; they belched sulfur and fire, blinding him in a many-throated haze of smoke. Kelland bashed them away with his shield, trying to keep them from reaching Bitharn or circling around to attack him from behind.

  One seized Kelland’s blade, trying to wrench the weapon from his grasp even as its holy aura blasted the thing’s fingers away. They died around him in waves, unable to withstand his goddess’ fury, and yet they kept coming. He wondered if they wanted to die, as the maelgloth had, or if they simply had no minds left with which to comprehend their doom.

  Or, he thought bleakly, as a malignant presence rose overwhelming in his soul, blotting out his own magic like a cloud over the sun, if they were only meant to delay.

  The marching dead slowed and stopped. A great shadow rose above them. Where it fell, the light fled from the skeletons’ eyes, the coiled smoke flowed up through their ribs to join it, and their bones clattered, empty, to the ground. The eyeless ones resisted an instant longer, but they, too, surrendered with spectral wails, their innards dissolving into fine black sand and pouring from their mouths. As it spilled across the floor, that sand melted into black mist and sifted upward into the shadow. Malentir gasped, staggered by the sudden dissolution of his spell.