Heaven's Needle (35 page)

Within moments nothing was left. Kelland let his hands fall and stared into the darkness, as if wishing he could summon sunfire to consume the bodies of the
maelgloth
, too, but shortly he shook himself and started back to the farmhouse. Bitharn fell in beside him, taking his hand on the way.

“Is it done?” Malentir asked when they returned.

“She's at peace.” Kelland eyed the painting as the Celestians set about their final preparations. The stars outside were nearly in the position shown on the altered canvas. Less than an hour left. Bitharn checked the knives in her belt and boots for the thousandth time, then ran a finger
over the stiff fletchings of the arrows in her quiver. In war, archers had boys who ran along their lines to replenish their arrows, but Bitharn didn't have that luxury. She had her hooded quiver and a second bag of oilcloth stiffened by wicker hoops, and that was all.

Malentir didn't even have that. The Thornlord wore a long knife, more ornament than weapon, sheathed at his hip. It was a single piece of carved ivory, its hilt worked into garlands of thorned vines. Other than that eccentric blade, which would surely shatter the first time it struck anything, he was unarmed. He wore no armor, either, and carried no shield.

Kelland had donned a hauberk of steel rings and a new surcoat of snowy white. A sun-marked shield was strapped to his left arm. He'd worn the same armor to confront the Thornlady in the winter wood, and Bitharn felt a tickle of dread at the sight of it. Foolishness, she told herself firmly, pure foolishness. He needed armor in the halls of Duradh Mal.

She herself wore hardened leather reinforced with chain between the gaps. Bitharn hadn't the strength to fight in full chain, and she'd never really learned to use a shield, but she knew better than to venture into battle unprotected. The Thorns were mad, all of them, for choosing to fight unarmored.

A star fell from the painting.

It struck the floor with a peal like the tolling of a funeral bell. While the sound was still shivering in the air, another star fell, then a third. As the echoes died and Bitharn's heart began to beat again, another chime ripped through the bruised stillness. Again and again the stars fell and sounded their unnatural tolls, each one sharper and more jangling than the last.

The final star did not fall. Around it, the painting's unnatural blackness rippled into fissures, peeling open the canvas—peeling open
reality
—in a web that took its lines from the points and angles of that last razor-sided star. Eight lines: a deformed sunburst. The embrace of Maol. It hung there, a ghastly wound in the world, edged in bleeding wisps of black. The rift was just large enough for a man to step through—but step through into
what
? All Bitharn saw within the gate was a wall of black and poisoned red, pulsing like an exposed heart through a mask of clotting blood.

“I'll go first,” Kelland said, readying his shield. “Bitharn next. Malentir last. If the gate closes before you're through, Thorn, you can follow us through shadows.”

Bitharn swallowed hard. “Go.”

Kelland stepped into the well of tainted light. Tendrils of red and black clutched at his surcoat, pulling him in and closing around his back. Then he was gone. Gritting her teeth, Bitharn followed.

Darkness surrounded her. She could see nothing but a dim impression of red light, far away and flecked with black. The air was close, moist, uncomfortably warm. The bellows of heavy breathing sounded behind her, close enough to riffle the hairs on the back of her neck. Musk and smoky incense filled the air, underlaid with the stench of unwashed, rutting bodies—a strange smell, repulsive and intriguing at the same time.

Unseen hands wrapped around her. She couldn't tell whether they were attached to bodies or were simply parts of the darkness made manifest. They pressed against her lips, cupped her breasts, grabbed at her thighs and crept upward. She felt the bones jab through the fingers' soft, sloughing flesh, smelled decay and the reek of blackfire on them.

The hands terrified her, repelled her, and yet brought a pang of perverse arousal. Her breathing quickened; her skin seemed to become more sensitive to the corpse hands' caresses. She wanted to relax, to open herself to their rotting touches.
Why?
Her reaction frightened and disgusted her more than the hands did. Bitharn clenched her teeth against the intruding fingers, shook her head fiercely, and kicked the groping hands away.

Laughter filled the darkness, mad and meaningless and horribly
certain
. There was no sound to it; she felt the laughter directly in her mind. Invisible lips, cold and spongy with decay, brushed her brow. A tongue curled wetly over her breast, impeded by neither armor nor cloth. Then she stumbled forward into hard stone and stale air, infinitely cleaner than what she'd breathed in the
perethil
's gate. Bitharn spat the taste of corpse flesh from her mouth, wiped the sticky residue of corpse hands from her face, and breathed hard as she tried not to cry.

“It's all right,” Kelland's voice said from the blackness beside her. He sounded shaken, but the knowledge that he was safely through did more to calm Bitharn than anything else could have. She clung to the familiar sound of his voice, using it to right her sense of reality after the
perethil
's assault. “We're through. It's over.”

“It's not over.” She croaked the words, harsh and half strangled. The taste of sulfur and rotting flesh poisoned every breath she took. Her skin crawled under her armor, and she cursed the fact that she couldn't change or bathe. “We have to go back. This had better be worth it. I can't see a thing. Where are we?”

New footsteps scuffed the stone behind her, lighter than Kelland's, softer than her own.

“We are in Duradh Mal,” Malentir said.

T
he Thornlord's fingers brushed over Bitharn's eyelids, light and cold as falling snowflakes. When the chill shock of his magic passed, she could see.

It was not human sight. The world was black as a starless night, with only a fleeting silvery sheen across their surfaces to tell her where walls and ceiling stood. She felt as if she was standing in a blurred artist's sketch of Duradh Mal, not in the bowels of the actual stronghold. It dizzied her.

Her companions looked still stranger. All the living colors of their skin and clothes were gone. Instead they were a radiant white, brighter than mirrors held up to the sun. She could scarcely stand to look at them. Around them the world was better defined, as if the living shed light upon their surroundings.

There were subtle differences between the two men in this alien vision. Kelland was limned in ghostly golden flame; the sight spoke to her of danger. Malentir's aura had an ivory tinge, and he felt
cold
, as if whatever power had
touched her resided in him. It was terrible, and commanding, and she fought away quailing.

“What have you done?” Bitharn whispered.

“You see the world as the
ghaole
do,” Malentir answered. “They need no light, sense the living, and are able to recognize who is a threat—and who is their master.”

“How long will it last?” Kelland's hand came to rest on his sunburst medallion, and by that Bitharn knew he liked this strange vision no better than she did.

“Until dawn. We have time, but that hardly means we should waste it. We are near the Gate of Despair, if my memories do not mislead me. North and east, the halls will take us back to the Shardfield or to the sentinel towers over Spearbridge. West will take us to the towers that watch over Carden Vale. South are the halls leading to the dungeons.”

“Where do we need to go?” Bitharn asked.

It was Kelland who answered, pointing his sword down the hallway. “That way. Down to the heart of the mountain. I can feel it burning.”

“Yes. The trail of Gethel's magic leads down.” Malentir strode to the front and turned left when the corridors branched. “Through the Gate of Despair.”

“Picturesque name,” Bitharn muttered. “Why is it called that?”

“Because it leads to the dungeons.” Kelland fell in behind the Thornlord, letting Bitharn guard their rear. “Every Baozite fortress has one. Ang'arta's is aptly named.”

He would know. Bitharn suppressed a wince and followed.

The halls loomed black and empty around them. Two men could have ridden abreast down the halls of Ang'duradh, and once there would have been ten thousand
soldiers to watch them go. Their trophies hung on the walls: banners from noble houses whose names no loremaster remembered, tapestries depicting nameless battles on forgotten fields. The skulls of a thousand heroes dangled overhead, speared upon their own weapons and worked into grisly chandeliers. Soft black dust covered everything.

“This will all have to be burned when the Baozites retake it,” Kelland said as they walked, their steps echoing in the stillness. “Maol's presence permeates it all.”

“Perhaps.” Malentir did not look back. “Aedhras the Golden has little interest in anyone's victories but his own, so he might not weep to see all this burned. But if he wants it preserved, it will be … ghastly and tasteless as it is.”

“You don't approve?”

“Whether I approve counts for nothing. My mistress adores the man; anything he desires, she will do, and I obey her commands.”

“That can't be easy.”

“Duty is never easy, knight. Hadn't you noticed?”

They went on in gloom and silence. Even if there was no trail Bitharn's eyes could follow, the Thornlord seemed to know his path. He led them down crooked stairs and pillared halls, stopping at last before an oaken door that towered twice Bitharn's height. An iron gargoyle snarled at its center. Rust hung a wavering beard from the gargoyle's chin, but the iron and wood had held strong through the centuries.

The lock had not. Fragments of it, ruptured by a tightly focused explosion, lay scattered across the floor. Two bodies sprawled among them: men in miners' clothes, with tool harnesses over their shoulders and water bags at their belts. They looked like they'd been savaged by a beast with a bear's height and a lion's claws. Fearsome teeth had torn
out one's throat. Both bodies were desiccated, like those of the drowned children Bitharn had found in Carden Vale, their lips pulled back in yellowed grins.

Hunger knotted a fist in her belly at the sight of the bodies. Bitharn folded her arms, pressing on her stomach to quell the hunger and the nausea that came with it. It was just a part of whatever enchantment gave her the
ghaole-
sight, she told herself; it had nothing to do with her passage through the
perethil
. She wasn't sure that was much better, but at least that way she could hope the desire to feast on corpses would end when the Thornlord's spell did.

She forced herself to study the bodies dispassionately. The dead men had no defensive wounds, yet their tool harnesses were empty. Where had their weapons gone? Had their killer looted them? How, if it was a beast? Bitharn bent closer, trying to make sense of the scene.

She couldn't. The
ghaole
-sight defeated her. The flickering dance of silver light over black made it impossible for her to find the details that could tell the corpses' story.

A lantern had fallen near one man's outflung hand, leaving a greasy stain on the floor. Not all its oil had spilled, however; some gleamed in the dented reservoir. By its light, she'd be able to see what had killed these men, and maybe learn whether it was still in the fortress …

“
Burn nothing here
,” Malentir snarled, kicking the lantern away. It clanged against the wall. “I had hoped you were listening the first time I said that, but evidently you're a slow learner. Much slower and you'll be a dead one. Did you learn
nothing
at the pyre? Blackfire spreads its corruption through smoke. That lantern is a trap for curious fools like you.”

“I only wanted to find out what killed them,” Bitharn said lamely. She waved at her eyes. “I can't read the tracks like this.”

“Then you should have asked. In theory we are working together. If you cannot trust me enough to ask something that simple, this alliance is doomed and I might as well slit my wrists now.” Malentir exhaled audibly and ran a hand through his striped hair. “I did not give you
ghaole
-sight because I had nothing better to do with my time. There are other ways to learn what you wanted to know.”

Ways that leave me dependent on what you tell me
. Bitharn bit her tongue. Instead she said: “Fine. How did they die?”

He pointed at the gargoyle door with a wire-circleted hand. “This is the Gate of Despair. It was the last seal I left intact. Obviously Gethel found a way to open it.”

“Celestian magic didn't kill these men,” Bitharn said.

“Truly, your perceptiveness never ceases to amaze.”

Nettled, Bitharn narrowed her eyes. “If sunfire didn't kill them, what did?”

“Where else have you seen your goddess' magic set awry?”

“Are you suggesting the seal was corrupted the same way the
perethil
was? Even if that's so—even if that's
possible
—how could it have done this?
Why
would it have done this? Why tear apart two men and not all of them?”

“Because these two still were men, and Gethel was not. I don't know whether he was that far gone before he came to Duradh Mal or if it was the magic lurking in these halls that finally claimed him. For the sake of my pride, I will hope for the latter; it would be altogether too embarrassing to think I overlooked a soul that tainted. Either way, Maol recognized him for what he was and spared him so that he might spread the Mad God's evil through the world. These two”—he nudged a corpse's lolling head with his boot—“were ordinary, and easily expendable to lay a trap for whoever might come later.”