With surprising gentleness, Malentir pulled the sword away and gave it back to Asharre. The blade came up bloody, spattering crimson drops across the floor … but it was clean blood, and warm. The blackfire dust was gone from both wounds. But the holes remained, pooled dark with blood that spilled over his body every time Kelland drew a breath.
Those wounds would kill him, blackfire stone or no, if he was not brought to the Blessed soon. Asharre returned to the ladder and looked up. Bitharn was staring down, her face white and stiff with fear. “What’s happened?” she whispered.
“Kelland is badly hurt,” Asharre said. “He will die if he does not get to the Dome soon. Can you take him there?”
Bitharn nodded fiercely. Her eyes were glassy with unshed tears, but the white shock was fading rapidly. “Yes. I will.”
Asharre took hold of the knight by the shoulders and dragged him to the ladder, then hoisted him bodily up the rungs. Blood spattered across her face as she boosted him above her head. He grunted once, and made a small strangled gasp when she pushed him up, but never said a word. Bitharn caught him under the arms and, with Asharre’s help, pulled the knight out of the cellar. The sigrir stood by the ladder, watching, until Kelland’s red-stained boot soles slid out of sight. Then she scrubbed the blood from her face with a sleeve and walked away.
Had the Thorn known the crossbowmen were waiting? She couldn’t read those flat black eyes … but a prickle of suspicion crawled up her back, and it grew stronger when she brushed past him to examine the rest of the tunnel.
“He’ll live?” Malentir asked.
“If Bitharn reaches the temple in time.”
“Then he’ll live. The second coming of Maghredan would not stop that girl.”
Asharre wondered if it was disappointment or relief she heard in his voice. Or neither. Perhaps he hadn’t betrayed them at all … but she looked at the dead crossbowmen, and thought of corpse-hands moving on puppet strings of mist and magic, and felt that prickling distrust sharpen into a sting.
There was nothing to do but go on, though. Whether or not Malentir had manipulated the crossbowmen’s ambush to isolate her—and she might have imagined that; why would the Thorn eliminate his strongest ally before they’d even reached Corban?—it was too late to turn back. They had the Maolite cornered. He’d surely flee if they let him, and Asharre had no intention of letting that happen.
Partway to the secret pier, a makeshift barrier of boards and ropes clogged part of the tunnel wall. Dog hair feathered the gaps between the boards; the smell of feces and wet hound was overpowering. A few cracked bones with blackfire stains in their marrow-gaps littered the floor nearby.
Asharre glanced over her shoulder at the Thorn. “This is where you saw the dog?”
“Yes.”
“There is only one inside?”
“Yes.”
She nodded, pulling away loops of rope and loosening the boards. Through the widening gaps, she saw a limping yellow brindle cringe from her. The dog bore cruel black spirals similar to those on the dogs they’d fought in the apothecary, but its cuts didn’t seem as deep, and they didn’t cover as much of the animal’s flanks. Although its eyes were clouded with a murky haze, they weren’t completely black, as the others’ had been. Asharre guessed that this dog had been one of Corban’s early victims. Perhaps he hadn’t mastered the magic he used to transform the others, or perhaps his connection to Maol had been weaker in the beginning. Whatever the cause, it was clear to her that this yellow brindle was not as corrupted as the others.
“What are you doing?” Malentir asked.
Asharre broke a section of the barrier free and pushed it to the side. The dog flattened its ears and pulled its lips back to show sharp, black-veined teeth, but it did not attack as she approached. “A test.”
“Of what?”
“Faith.” She advanced into the tiny cavern, holding Aurandane slanted defensively as she closed the dog into a corner. The brindle’s hackles rose, but it backed away.
When she was close enough to touch the dog, Asharre stopped. She concentrated on Aurandane, seeking the faint, luminous melody she’d sensed from it when Kelland fell. After a moment she felt it, or heard it, or simply knew, instinctively, that it was there. The magic was at once enveloping and elusive; trying to control it was like walking into a bank of sea-mist and grabbing at it with her hands.
She didn’t try. Steeling herself against all her instincts and training, Asharre simply opened herself to the magic, allowing it to flow through her in whatever shape it chose. It took all her discipline to let go … but that, she thought, must be the essence of faith.
Surrender was anathema to her, and trust in Celestia only slightly less so, but Asharre forced herself to embrace both.
Aurandane flared into flame. Blue and blush and silvery-pale, all the colors of the dawn. Light washed over the dog. The cataracts melted from its eyes in smoky tears. The spirals in its sides wept black fog, leaving clean bone and muscle.
The dog sank onto its side. It was still hurt—dying, maybe, with the artificial sustenance of its blackfire corrosion stripped away—but the eyes that stared up at Asharre were a clear soft brown, and the yellow brindled tail wagged weakly against the ground.
She redoubled her efforts, trying to heal the newly cleansed wounds. The half-heard song swelled into a thundering assault, and suddenly she understood what Oralia meant when she had spoken of being overwhelmed by Celestia’s power. It was like standing in a waterfall: she couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe through the pounding torrent.
Staggered, she pulled away, closing her mind to the sword’s song. The light went out like a snuffed candleflame. Asharre retreated from the cavern and, by the infinitely weaker glow of her lantern, replaced the boards she’d removed. She left them leaning against the wall; she wanted the dog to be able to escape when it felt well enough to walk. It might, eventually. In the last glimpse she’d had before the magic died, its wounds had been a healthy pink.
Malentir watched her back away from the cavern. Around him the shadows stirred like living things, pulling close to his body. “Are you satisfied with your test?”
She shrugged off his question. “Where is Corban?”
“This way. The entrance was warded.” He pointed to the wall above the low-ceilinged hole that led to the smuggler’s pier. The bricks around it were cross-hatched with scratches. Asharre swept her lantern over them. Some of the marks had blood and black dirt embedded in the gouges, but the rest were only scratches. The clean ones were newer.
She lowered the lantern. “Was? The wardspell is gone now?”
“It was gone before we came.” The Thornlord traced two fingertips over the scratches without touching them. “Corban defaced the sigils himself. It seems Maol’s yoke does not sit easy on his shoulders.”
“Good,” Asharre said, stepping through.
On the other side was a subterranean dock. A short wooden pier stretched over black water, with the sigil-marked hole at one end and two mooring bollards at the other. Loose ropes trailed from the bollards into the water. Dusty crates, stamped with the mountain-over-river of Carden Vale, were stacked at the pier’s far end. Her lantern’s light scattered in wide yellow ripples around the pilings, shining over barnacle-speckled wood and empty water. No boats.
Smudged rings of chalk and charcoal stained the pier. Rusty brown dappled the boards, and tufts of dog hair fluttered from splinters. A human corpse lay near those bloodspatters, reeking of rot. The body wasn’t marked with black spirals, however, and it appeared to be purely dead, so she walked by. Nothing else moved until Asharre was halfway down the pier.
“That is far enough. Any closer, and I shoot.” The voice was rusty and frail; it was a voice that barely remembered the shape of words.
Asharre slowed, setting the lantern down carefully, but she did not stop. No one who called out warnings after she’d killed his dogs, stepped over the corpses of his curse-bound guards, and seen his Maolite wa
rdings was likely to shoot her for walking down a pier. She’d declared herself an enemy and had shown herself to be a dangerous one. If, after all that, the speaker hadn’t shot her on sight, she had little to fear from his threat.
Corban—it had to be Corban—was a scrawny man crouched behind the crates at the pier’s end. His arm trembled as he pointed a crossbow, one-handed, in her direction; the bulbous quarrel swung drunkenly through the air. A pebble of blackfire stone rattled inside its filigreed head.
“Put it down,” Asharre said. She didn’t expect him to obey; she just wanted him to hesitate long enough for her to close on him. Yet, to her surprise, Corban lowered his weapon shakily.
“I never wanted this,” he said. A dry sob wracked the man’s body. “You must believe me. I wanted … I wanted … I was greedy. I confess. But this was never supposed to happen. Not this. Gods save me, I’ve suffered for my sins. Haven’t I suffered enough? This is not what I wanted.”
There was something wrong with him, Asharre thought. Not his mind; despite his obvious thralldom, he seemed surprisingly lucid. But there was something amiss with his body. The shadows it cast were all wrong. She took another cautious step, reaching for Aurandane’s magic as she did so. It was easier this time, almost natural. Blue flame sprang up around the blade, allowing her to see more clearly.
It wasn’t the shadows that were wrong. It was his flesh. Asharre stopped, staring at Corban in disbelief.
Half his body, in bits and pieces, was … missing. Erased. His right arm was gone below the elbow. Two-thirds of his face had been cut away: one remaining eye stared out over the twin slits of his nostrils and a split, frayed bottom lip. There was no upper lip. Chunks of his thighs were missing in a spiral of carved flesh around the bone; what was left was white, wrinkled, and bloodless as a cellared turnip.
Darkness filled the gaps. It was thick, tenebrous, pulsing with something disconcertingly like life. It wrapped around his exposed bones and sent oozing tendrils under his skin. When he moved, it seemed to Asharre, it was the darkness that moved first, manipulating Corban’s body on its tentacles like a mutilated puppet of meat and bone.
“The Mad God has taken you,” she whispered.
“No. No. There is a demon. A voice in the stone. He has not taken me … but he tries. He tries. I hear him. He whispers … offers me power. Offers me peace. Such dreams. Such threats.” Corban shook his head vehemently, nearly dropping his crossbow. Flecks of something—hair? flesh? corruption?—flew from his scalp, struck the water, and vanished. “Always he whispers. And hurts me, hurts me so I will obey. He drives me like a beaten ox … and gods help me, gods forgive me, I have run before those blows. I have sinned.”
“Is that why you cut yourself?” Asharre kept her voice calm, her movements slow. The man’s condition repulsed and frightened her, but she had a duty to end this. She took another step toward him.
“I cut the traitor flesh. The … the hand that touched blackfire stone, the tongue that tasted it. The eye that saw it and wanted more. I wanted it so badly.” His skinny shoulders jerked with another sob. “I couldn’t stop the wanting … so I mortified the sin. To punish myself. To show him. I wouldn’t give in. I wouldn’t succumb. After all his tricks, all his traps … no more.”
Another moment, and she would be in striking distance. She needed him distracted just a little longer. “Why did you do it?”
“Because I believed it was possible to separate the gods’ power from their purpose.” A laugh caught, choking, in his throat. “I believed that. Such … such a fool. Such a greedy fool.”
She was close enough that Aurandane’s blue light fell across Corban. He recoiled from it, but not quickly enough to avoid a swift blaze of magic across the darkness that engulfed him. Some of the cloudiness seemed to leave him; something like sanity crept back in. Corban looked to his missing hand—the hand that was made up of shadows woven around dead white bone—and his features contorted in sudden loathing. He jerked his wrist upward, flapping it from side to side as if he could shake away the corruption like water from his skin.
He threw back his head and howled through his torn lips, a sound of raw and absolute anguish that made Asharre flinch back. Not for long, though; she recovered swiftly and closed the remaining distance.
Corban didn’t seem to care. He got to his feet, panting with the effort, and hurled the loaded crossbow away. The weapon flew past Asharre and clattered on the far side of the pier, near the tunnel that led back to the smuggler’s den.
“I can’t hold off the whispers for long,” Corban wheezed. He pressed the heel of his good hand to his chin, digging the fingers into his flesh. The hand climbed up his face like a giant, spasming spider, dimpling his cheeks and brow. He stared at her wildly through the gaps between his fingers. “I have tried everything to keep them at bay. Everything. I cannot do it. He will not let me go. The men you killed, the dogs … they were not my guards. They were my jailors. He keeps me here. Captive. Isolated. He wants to pry the knowledge out of my skull—to make me finish my original plan, to make me sell madness and death to fools. Pain didn’t break me, so he gave me awareness instead … let me remember, let me dwell on all the evils I’ve done. And when I can bear it no longer, when the weight of the guilt destroys me, I will beg him for oblivion … and he will have my mind. It will happen. He will win. Save me, lady. Stop me. You have a sword. Use it. Use it.”
“Gladly,” Asharre said, and thrust Aurandane into Corban’s heart.
He died quietly. She had expected something more—a crack of thunder, a flash of sunfire, something—but there was none of that. Corban made a little grunt and doubled over onto the blade, clutching it like salvation. A muted blue glow shone from the hollow of his body where the sword went in; the darkness that permeated his flesh swirled like a windspout as it was drawn into the light and destroyed. In moments it was gone.
Asharre stepped away, withdrawing her sword. She nudged the corpse with a boot. It shifted limply, well and truly dead. Barely a third of Corban’s original body remained on his bones.
She turned back to the tunnel, lowering the Celestian blade, and froze before taking a step.
“Drop your sword,” Malentir said. The slack-mouthed corpse stood next to him, Corban’s crossbow in its hands. The Thorn’s puppet held the weapon perfectly steady, its deadly quarrel leveled at her.
She curled her lip, refusing to show her fear. “I knew you were a traitor.”
“A traitor would have to be a member of your faith, no? I’ve never made any pretense of that. Now drop the sword, please, lest I be forced to kill you.”
She thought of other dead men with other crossbows. Other Maolites used to keep blood off Malentir’s hands, so he could claim without lying that he had not murdered his companions. “As you killed Kelland?”
“He won’t die. I need him alive. You, however, I do not need, and as you still cling to your weapon …” He shrugged, and the corpse’s hands twitched.
The quarrel took her just below the left breast. There was a punch of pain as it sank in, but that was immediately swallowed by stranger and more frightening sensations.
Her flesh was melting and re-forming around the quarrel, losing whatever made her human and becoming something else, something alien and malign. Bubbles formed just below her skin, bulging and deflating it violently as they rose and popped. Feverish heat spread from her wound, yet her own blood was cold on her hands. The black grit that flecked it was burning hot, just as it had been in Kelland’s wounds.
It all happened in an eyeblink, maybe two … and the horror of it, Asharre realized with a sudden snap of panic, was meant to distract her from the horror that would come. She dropped Aurandane and grabbed desperately at the quarrel, fumbling to pull it out before its blackfire stone exploded.
The quarrel’s ungainly design saved her. The blackfire bolt hadn’t dug in deeply. On the second tug it came loose. She tossed it onto the pier, where it bounced once and rolled off the planks,
tumbling into the sea. A muted thunderclap sounded from the black depths, shaking the pier on its pilings … and Asharre fell to her knees, gasping in agony.
She was alive, but the poison was still in her. Hot tears ran down her cheeks. Clenching her teeth against terror and spasming pain, Asharre reached for the fallen sword.
Malentir stepped in front of her, nudging her hand away with his boot. Unhurriedly he stooped and picked up the Sword of the Dawn himself. “I will take that, thank you.”
“Why?” Asharre croaked. Aurandane blazed into life as soon as the Thorn lifted it, and the sword’s blue-dawn glow made her eyes water anew. She raised a hand feebly to block it from her sight. “Why do you need the sword?”
He paused, tilting his head at her, and then shrugged and turned away. “I owe you no answers.”
Asharre grunted, hunching her back in a half-feigned shudder. Her pain was real—but it was rapidly subsiding into the familiar pain of an ordinary wound. Whether Malentir willed it or no, the Sword of the Dawn was burning out the venom in her veins, just as it had freed Corban from his bonds of madness and slain the corrupted dogs. The gods’ power cannot be separated from their purpose. That truth had doomed Corban, but it might save her.
The shadows that surrounded Malentir were weakening in the sword’s light as well. They fluttered wildly around him, trapped and burning. The sight gave her hope, and desperation gave her strength. If he realized his spell was failing, or saw that she was feigning her weakness, or decided to kill her cleanly rather than prolonging her misery for his own magic …
She lunged forward, throwing herself against Malentir’s ankles. Against any half-decent swordsman it would have been suicide, but the Thorn was no better trained than the Illuminers had been, and she took him unawares. He tumbled onto the pier, stripped of his grace for once, and Aurandane skittered across the boards.
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