Heaven's Needle

by Liane Merciel

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Carden Vale had been peaceful for so long …” Thierras turned the gold ring over on his finger, hiding its sacred sun and bringing it back around again. “I made the mistake of assuming it would stay quiet. There has been a great deal of turmoil in the world these past years. Dark omens, grim portents. More such signs than I have ever seen, and many we don’t understand. We don’t have enough magic to unravel them all. Not nearly enough. We can watch over a few people and places of great import, but that comes at the cost of ignoring other duties. Falcien and Evenna’s annovair was among the things I chose to ignore. The mistake, and the failure, was mine.”

  Asharre stared at him. That mistake, weighed against hers, was nothing. He had failed to see the warnings from the Dome of the Sun, but she had seen them on the road, in the ferret’s bloodlust and Laedys’ frozen death, and had let her charges traipse blithely past them. “You could not know.”

  “I could have known. I chose to be blind. Because of that, you were set on a road harder and darker than you had any reason to expect. Unprepared, unarmed against the curse of Duradh Mal, you managed to keep two of your three companions alive.”

  “Did I?” Asharre interrupted. “Has Heradion returned?”

  “Not yet,” Thierras admitted, “but our prayers have found him safe on the road. He’s reached Balnamoine, and there are no further dangers on his path. It is no lie to say you sent him back to us. Even if you choose not to accept credit for that, you saved Evenna’s life.”

  “The Burnt Knight did that, not I.” Even the Thorn had played a greater role in rescuing Evenna than Asharre had. The knowledge galled her, but she could not deny it. All she had done was lead them into defeat.

  “You kept her alive long enough for him to find her. That was no small achievement, sigrir. You have nothing to prove. We know what you’re worth.”

  “What I know is that twice I was charged with protecting your Celestians, and twice I failed. What I know is that you gave me a task, and that task remains undone. We escaped the corruption in Carden Vale; we did not end it. Cailan faces a greater danger than that valley ever did. Yet you speak of taking me from the battle and putting me here, training puppies while wolves run wild.”

  “The puppies do need training,” Thierras said mildly. “In any event, purifying Carden Vale is beyond you.”

  “Corban isn’t.”

  The High Solaros raised an eyebrow. “What do you know about Corban?”

  “Little enough, and less I trust,” Asharre admitted. Most of what she had learned had come through Bitharn. They had discussed Corban a few times while sitting in Evenna’s sickroom, waiting for the Illuminer to awaken. Asharre had told the other woman about what she had seen in poisoned dreams and waking delirium; neither knew if there was any truth to what those visions had showed. But the simplest part of it, she thought—the bedrock on which all the distortions rested—was clear. “He was the one who set Gethel on that path and brought ruin to Carden Vale. And he is here, somewhere in Cailan, with more of the Maolite poison.”

  Thierras turned back to the sparring trainees. He said nothing more until their bull-necked teacher bellowed them off the floor, each boy carrying his wooden sword and shield in arms gone limp with weariness. Only then, as they filed from the practice hall, did any of them look up to where the High Solaros watched.

  “They don’t fight to impress me,” he said as the last of them departed. “They fight because they are Called to that duty. Whether I am here or not makes no matter. They would fight with the same dedication either way. The same pride.” He walked down the eastern stairs, motioning for her to follow. “So. You wish to join the hunt for Corban.”

  “Yes. He is a man, or was. If he can die, I can kill him.”

  “Are you certain? Gethel was much more—or less—than human. Corban may be worse. Not only is he likely to be dangerous in himself, but to confront him you will have to accept unsavory allies. Sir Kelland has insisted that the Thorn Malentir is necessary to his cause.” The High Solaros’ stare was piercing. “The Thorns killed your sister. Can you fight alongside one to kill Corban?”

  She didn’t know. “If I must.”

  “Come, then.” Thierras led her across the practice hall and down the long corridor that went to the Dome’s armory. Chalk dust shimmered in stripes of sunlight. The trainees’ sparring left the prickly scent of sweat.

  Asharre knew the armory well, but she was unfamiliar with the path Thierras took. He opened the door to a storage room piled with dented helms, gap-riddled chain mail, and breastplates punched through by lances or bolts. Stepping past the damaged armor, he pulled a sword from a jumble of weapons awaiting repair.

  She knew that sword: the hilt engraved with prayers, the shining silver edge, the jewel on the pommel that held all the delicate promise of the dawn.

  The High Solaros turned back toward her, the blade laid flat across his hands in an unsettling echo of her offering it to Evenna that final, fatal afternoon in Shadefell.

  “No.” Asharre recoiled.

  “Take it,” he said. The gentleness with which he had always treated her was gone. Now he was the High Solaros, not Thierras; the full force of his personality and the weight of his office bore down on her. Asharre felt her resolve weakening. But not her fear.

  “No,” she said again. She couldn’t look away from the sword. The gleam of its rose-edged blue jewel seemed pitiless as a serpent’s eye. It hypnotized her. “That blade is a trap. It betrayed us. It nearly killed Evenna.”

  “Maol nearly killed you. The sword was blameless. The Mad God wove his snares over Aurandane, but he never touched it through living hands. Evenna cast it aside in time, as did the solaros before her. We have purified and reconsecrated it: Celestia’s power, and only Celestia’s power, lives in the Sword of the Dawn.

  “You do not have the luxury of revulsion. In Shadefell and in Carden Vale, our enemies caught you unprepared. Corban must not. Neither must Malentir. Sir Kelland might trust the Thorn, but I don’t.

  “I fear that dark times lie ahead for our faith. Sir Kelland and Bitharn are two of our best; we cannot afford to lose them. Or you. You need Aurandane. Take it, or pass the duty to one who can.”

  She held out her hand.

  The touch of its hilt was a shock. It felt exactly as she remembered. She had thought—had wanted to think—that the scattered fragments of memory she kept from Carden Vale were all wrong, twisted and distorted by the Mad God’s hand. But Aurandane slid into her hands as if it had been forged just for her.

  “Keep them safe, sigrir,” the High Solaros said. “Bring them back to me.”

  Asharre slid it into the place of her caractan, grimly proud that her hands were steady. “I will.”

  THIERRAS TOLD HER WHAT HE KNEW about the sword’s history. It wasn’t much. The eight Sun Swords had been forged early in the Godslayer’s War, once the Celestians realized that the bloodshed might go on for decades. During those years Celestia’s Blessed died in great numbers, far too quickly to be replaced, and the survival of the faith itself was in jeopardy. The Sun Swords were forged to fill that desperate need. Each of the eight blades was dedicated to one of the holy hours—dawn, dusk, the solstice’s Midnight Sun—and each of them held every power Celestia granted to her mortal children. Healing, sunfire, the Light of Truth: the Sun Swords commanded all those prayers, as did any hand that held them.

  Little else was clear in the written histories. Some of the confusion was deliberate, the High Solaros explained; the Illuminers had hesitated to write too plainly, fearing their enemies might use that information against them. Instead they cloaked their meanings in metaphors, or wrote allegories instead of plain fact. At the time, the conventions they used had been widely known … but in the centuries since, many of the allegorical meanings changed, or were forgotten altogether. Thus, while Thierras could tell her that the ancient chroniclers described Aurandane “banishing shadows from the battlefield,”
he could not tell her what that meant.

  Nor could he tell her how to awaken the magic in the sword, or make it do what she commanded. None of the Sun Swords had been used in living memory. All he could tell her, in the end, was that Aurandane would shape itself to fit its wielder’s hand, and shape its spells to meet its wielder’s need.

  It wasn’t much, and it felt like less with the knowledge that she’d soon be facing one of Maol’s servants again, this time with a Thorn as a dubious ally at her side.

  In the days that followed, Asharre tested Aurandane herself. She went to the Sun Knights’ sparring rooms, alone, and tried to coax magic from the sword.

  Nothing came. There was some enchantment in Aurandane; that was clear. Even if Asharre had known nothing at all about the sword, she would have sensed that. The Sword of the Dawn moved light as a dream in her hands, and its edge was keen enough to split the notes of a song. With it she could slice through a falling feather or, just as easily, a fired brick.

  But she could do nothing else. She couldn’t summon sunfire, or light a dark room, or heal the small cut she opened on her arm as a test. The blade might as well have been plain metal. Good metal, stronger and sharper than steel, but metal just the same. Any other power it held remained out of her reach.

  She tried to remember what Oralia had told her about magic: that the power was ever present in her soul, constant as sunlight, shapeless as water. That it had to be given meaning by word and movement, but could be felt even when formless.

  Asharre felt nothing like that from Aurandane. Any power it held slumbered in her grasp, and nothing she did would wake it.

  She sought out the Burnt Knight next.

  Asharre didn’t know Sir Kelland well. She knew of him, of course—just as he doubtlessly knew of her, another oddity in a temple that seemed to collect them—but she had never worked with either the Burnt Knight or his companion Bitharn before. They had spent most of the past few years riding circuit in the west, just as she had traveled with Oralia, and their roads had not crossed until Carden Vale.

  She met them in the gardens, on a morning very like the one that had driven her to find Thierras. Bitharn was wandering under the lindens, idly stroking the trees’ low branches as she passed beneath them. She was dressed like an acolyte in soft beige lamb’s wool, but she still carried her bow.

  Sir Kelland, the Burnt Knight, sat on a tree-shaded bench, watching. He seemed thinner than Asharre recalled. Thinner, and older, with the first strands of silver showing in his braids and new pain lurking in his dark brown eyes. He’d been captured at the end of autumn, she remembered; he would have spent the entire winter imprisoned in Ang’arta. That would be enough to age anyone, let alone a Sun Knight.

  Both of them were a good ten years younger than Asharre herself, but they had none of the dewy innocence that her last charges had shared. Young they might be, but these two had been hard tested, and they had endured.

  Bitharn came over as Asharre approached. She sat next to Kelland on the bench, shifting her bow out of the way and looking up at the sigrir. “You’re to help us deal with Corban.”

  “If you will have me, yes.”

  “We’re not inclined to turn down help.” Bitharn tried for a wry smile and didn’t quite reach it. “Any help.”

  “So I have heard.” There was no harm in bluntness, she judged. Not with these two. “Do you trust the Thorn that much?”

  “It is … not precisely trust.” Kelland said. “Soon after we returned to the Dome, I prayed for guidance. Celestia answered my prayer with a vision. In it, I saw the Irontooths, and Carden Vale between them. The valley was green and peaceful, but mountains that enclosed it were made of black bones. In the first vision—if we let Malentir lead us to Corban and again to Duradh Mal—a blue dawn broke over those mountains. The black bones melted away like mist, leaving slopes of clean stone.

  “In the second vision—if we led the charge against Corban and into Duradh Mal on our own, without the Thorn—the dawn rose red like fire, and those black mountains burned. Their bones burst into flame under the sun. Smoke poured into the valley and the river glowed like a volcano’s spew. In time the smoke blew away, and the river turned back to clear water, but the carnage before that …” His left hand lifted, reaching unconsciously across his thigh toward Bitharn. “I took those signs to mean that the Baozites would go to war with us for Ang’duradh, even at the risk of freeing the Maolite magic contained inside. They want it that badly.

  “They’ve been trying to capture a Blessed for a while. For Duradh Mal, I think. Some escaped. Some died. If I help them, I will be the last.

  “I might be wrong about that. But even if I am, the vision was clear that the better course was to let Malentir lead the way. He has means and magics that we do not. We can’t even find Corban. Any prayer that tries to locate him just returns a vision of churning black and cripples its sender with headaches. Evenna said it’s the same thing that happened to them in the mountains above Carden Vale. Maol is shielding his servant from us … but Malentir might find a way through.”

  “I walked across Spearbridge,” Asharre said. “I have seen what the Baozites are, with or without their pet Thorns.”

  A breeze stirred through the lindens and died. In the silence, a squirrel chattered. Then Kelland spoke, his voice quiet and measured. “I’m not blind to that. They held me in that hole for so long … I know what they are. But tell me true, sigrir: if an outsider looked on your people, would they seem any kinder?”

  Asharre thought of defeated warriors staked out on the ice, of dragonships with their sacrificial tails. Of a solaros with a face of pulped meat. “No.”

  “Then you understand the choice we made. The Baozites are men. Perhaps not good men, but men all the same. Even the Thorns are, after a fashion. ‘One cannot be too choosy with allies, if one expects to have any.’ Inaglione wrote that.”

  “But bad allies are worse than none,’” Bitharn said. “Inaglione wrote that too. We all know the Thorns will be our enemies tomorrow. I just hope we can trust them today.”

  “Thierras did not send me unprepared for treachery.” Asharre drew Aurandane, holding the blade out to the sun. The engravings on its hilt were black rivers in the yellow light, repeating prayers in runes she could not read. The spinel on its pommel shone bluer than the sky.

  “The Sword of the Dawn.” Kelland raised his gaze from the inscribed steel to the sigrir’s face. “That is a powerful weapon.”

  “It is a sharp one.” Asharre slid the sword back. “If it has any other powers beyond its edge, I do not know how to call them. Do you?”

  “No,” Kelland admitted. “Aurandane saved our lives in Shadefell, but it did so in Malentir’s hands. As soon as we returned to the Dome, the Illuminers took it to the High Solaros. I was told they purified it, but I was not a part of that ritual. There’s nothing I can tell you. I’m sorry.”

  Asharre nodded, disappointed but unsurprised. “Then I will hope the legends tell true.”

  25

  The magic was failing.

  Corban didn’t know when or how the change had come. But it had come. His protections, his wardings, even the ritual that had lifted the creeping curse from him and sunk it into his captured dogs … and other things, in the end; there had been other things too … all of them were failing fast.

  Failing, and leaving him to … to what?

  The memories were all in pieces. Shards of colored glass thrown into black water, shapes in fog and shadow. He couldn’t tell, anymore, what was real and what imagined. Often he thought that the things he imagined became real, as if the dead things floating in the apothecary’s jars would see because he thought they could, or the herbs hanging from the rafters would change shape to match his visions.

  Maybe none of it was real. Maybe it all was. How was he to know? The memories spun and slipped through his fingers and shattered. Nothing he did could keep them intact.

  He’d used dogs, for a while.

/>   Wild barks, wild howls. The grief and rage of dogs. His doing. He’d thrown so many dogs into the fire to keep his own skin from burning. It had worked, in the beginning; he’d been free, blessedly free, whole and healthy and strong.

  Then … that strength had gone. He remembered that. He’d sought out other dogs to renew it, so many that he couldn’t keep them penned in the secret cellar … but letting them run loose had proved no problem. Not after the ritual.

  He’d used them up, one by one. Small dogs and big ones, scrawny curs and soft-footed lapdogs. He’d marked them all with spiraled dirt and sent them to the fire. And they had given him strength … but each dog granted a weaker reprieve, and the pain hurt worse every time it came back.

  In the end … Corban ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. What had he done in the end?

  Men. He’d hunted men. The dogs stopped helping, and the agony had driven him to desperation, and so he had … stolen men, yes, drunks and dreamflower addicts, anyone ale-blind enough to accept his pretense of friendship. Not innocents, but they’d do. Corban had led them to his secret cellar, down to the sighing sea, and he had fed them to the flames.

  Three times. The memory hit like a blue bolt of lightning: for an instant everything was illuminated, and then it was gone and he was blind again, dazed with the after image of sight. Corban covered his eyes with his hands, weeping. The tears trickled dark through his fingers, stained by … what? Charcoal? Blood? He shook the dirty tears away.

  Three times he’d led drunks back to his cellar. Three, out of all the drunks he’d accosted in Cailan’s alleys … and only two had done him any good.

  The first one was rotting somewhere nearby. The stink of him drifted in and out of Corban’s awareness, ephemeral as the impish laughter he sometimes heard or the swirling dance of specters at the corners of his eyes. He held his breath when the smell came.