Heaven's Needle
Authors: Liane Merciel
H
EAVEN'S
N
EEDLE
Also by Liane Merciel from Pocket Books
The River Kings' Road
| Pocket Star Books |
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Andress
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Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4391-5913-2
ISBN 978-1-4391-7069-4 (ebook)
This one's for Nathan, who first told me how to fix it,
and Peter, who walked the dog while I did the fixing.
P
ROLOGUE
SUMMER
1217
T
he stench of river mud was suffocating. River mud and coal smoke: the twin perfumes of Carden Vale.
Corban clapped his sleeve over his nose and breathed shallowly through his mouth as he edged away from the waterside and down a crooked alley, following close on his guide's heels. The cloth did little to filter the smell, but that wasn't the point; the purpose of the gesture was not to relieve Corban's nose, but to hide his face. Few knew him here, but there was no call to be careless.
Centuries past, this had been a proud town. The Baozites who'd built the fortress overshadowing Carden Vale had needed a river port to service the barges that carried grain from the farmlands and brought back coal and iron from the mountains. They had designed one unrivaled in its age. Under Ang'duradh's rule, caravans had climbed the high passes and braved the terrors of Spearbridge to buy rare herbs and furs from Carden Vale. Gull-prowed ships and flat-bottomed barges had crowded the sleek white wharves.
That grandeur was long gone. The fortress stood empty, its cavernous halls filled with dust and silence. The port below it had shrunk to a handful of creaking barges that lumbered through the silt-clogged wharves like dying beasts. Mud piled up between the piers, reeking of the town's refuse.
He should have sewn a satchet in his sleeve. The stench was worst at this time of year, after a long summer's stew, and there was no relief in sight. If Gethel had truly done as he'd promised, there would be worse smells before the day's work was done.
The stooped man in front of him seemed oblivious to the filthy-smelling streets. The hem of his robe dragged through a puddle of mud and drunkard's vomit, but he never glanced down. It took more than merely human foulnesses to disturb Gethel these days. The man didn't look well, and it had Corban worried. Human eyes shouldn't stare so blindly; human voices shouldn't sound so dull. Mountain air would do him a world of good, or perhaps a trip east to take the waters at Dragonsblood Spring. A leave to rest.
But not until the work was done. Not until then.
“How much farther?” Corban muttered as Gethel led him down yet another stinking alley. He thought his eyes might actually be watering. A fat, evil-looking rat stared at him from the shadows, its whiskers twitching, and then scurried into the cracked daub at the base of a nearby wall.
“Only in here.” Gethel stooped by the door of the house where the rat had gone. No lock or bar secured its weather-warped planks.
Spreading his hands across the dry gray wood, Gethel pushed inward, mumbling slurred syllables that Corban supposed were meant to sound like magic. A blue spark
jumped from his fingertips and sizzled as it struck the wood. It might have been impressive if Corban hadn't spotted the man pinching smokepowder from a sleeve pouch as he bent to the door.
Gethel had no real magic. None of the self-proclaimed wizards of the Fourfold House did. What they had were tricks and illusions: smokepowder, sleight of hand, a bit of alchemy. Real magic, of the sort that Celestia's Blessed or the Thorns of Ang'arta commanded, was far beyond such pretenders.
But even a pretender could stumble upon power, and might be mad enough to seize it when a sensible man would have stepped back. Gethel, blinded by his belief that magic could be mastered without bowing to the gods, didn't have the wisdom to be wary. He had no idea what he'd found.
Corban had no such delusions.
He
knew what it was. In part, at least. And he knew, too, that there was no reason to share the truth with Gethel. Let the man believe what he wanted. It kept him working.
Gathering his cloak, Corban bowed his head to the low-hanging lintel and followed Gethel into the darkness beyond. A stink of stale urine intensified and then receded as he passed the threshold. There were no windows. Once the door closed behind him, Corban could see nothing but the lines of its planks against weak gray light. He could hear Gethel ahead, moving with the ease of a cat in the dark, and faint whimpers from somewhere past that, but he could see neither man nor moaner.
“Give me a light,” Corban rasped, and then stopped, surprised by the tension he heard in his own voice. He wasn't
afraid.
Not of poor half-mad Gethel, the failed wizard who couldn't pinch smokepowder without getting caught. Not of him.
But of what he had found, what he had made ⦠that, if Gethel had truly managed to awaken its power, was something a wiseman would not want to stumble upon in the dark.
Another spark jumped in the gloom. This time it landed on the wick of a misshapen candle in a stained clay dish. A rancid smell drifted from the candle as it burned, reminiscent of soured lard. Corban wrinkled his nose. That wasn't bad tallow; that was a dead man's candle, rendered from the fat of a hanged criminal. Idiots playing at necromancy used them, claiming that their light revealed truths hidden from the sun.
“Are you ready?” Gethel asked, lifting the candle. Under its smoky glow he seemed more demon than human. Gethel had never been plump, but the wizard had become positively cadaverous since the last time Corban had seen him. His skin sagged loose over bone; shadows seamed his face, and his eyes shone unnaturally bright in their sockets. Most of his hair had fallen out, and what was left straggled to his shoulders in colorless clumps. He looked like a walking corpseâand yet in this place, by the light of that candle, there was a coiled vitality to him that made Corban almost afraid.
Obsession. That was the look Gethel had: of a man in the throes of obsession, readying to return to the mistress who had consumed his soul.
“I'm ready,” Corban said, clearing the tightness from his throat.
“This way.” The candle bobbed in his hand as the gaunt man led him to the back of the hovel. There were two rooms inside, the second smaller than the first and separated from it by a curtain of stained sackcloth. The floor ended abruptly at that curtain; Corban stumbled as
his foot tried to find purchase on air. Gethel had excavated the second room so that its floor was a full arm's length lower than the hard-packed dirt on the other side. Moisture seeped down, leaving wet scars in the walls.
“I needed to keep the smoke from escaping,” Gethel said, evidently as explanation, although he never glanced back.
Corban looked up. There was no smoke hole, no chimney. No hearth, either, in the glimpses of wall that the candle gave him. “Smoke rises.”
“Blackfire smoke sinks.” And, indeed, it seemed that a gritty black glitter clung to the dirt, like a residue of sea foam left on the strand. Corban had little time to puzzle over that, though, for Gethel had reached the hovel's far corner and his light fell on the face of a whimpering man who crouched there.
The man was a beggar. That much was plain from his tattered breeches and sparse, grimy beard. Even under candlelight, his nose was red and webbed with broken veins. A drunk, and likely feebleminded; there was no sense to his moanings, and he clutched his head in trembling hands, as if trying to hold his thoughts together. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but Corban could not place it. Likely he just resembled some other beggar; poverty crushed all of them into the same miserable mold.
Corban's lip curled in disdain. “
This
is your great success? You told me you'd unlocked the secrets of blackfire, found a way to harness its power at lastâand you show me a wretched old drunk?”
“What? Oh. No.” Gethel set his candle down on a nearby crate and fished through its straw, heedless of how easily it might catch fire. “I've done as I promised. Belbas here is simply going to help me prove it.”
“Belbas?
Apprentice
Belbas? Your sworn servant?”
The beggar groaned weakly, as if Corban's words stirred some fragment of memory from the dark mire of his thoughts, but if that truly was his name, he did not answer to it. Gethel shrugged without lifting his head from the crate. “Oaths mean so little in this day and age. He was going to betray me. But now ⦠now he will be a help. Yes.”
“What have you done?” Corban breathed. He'd met Gethel's apprentice only a few times, but he knew the boy was bound to secrecy in exchange for being taught the master's magic. The details of the Fourfold House's workings were fuzzy to Corban, who had never set foot in that eccentric world and had no reason to learn its rules. The wizards hadn't any power beyond rites and oaths and other mystical trappings meant to fool the gullible into believing that they had secrets worth protecting. But the members of the Fourfold House believed their own foolishness wholeheartedly, and Corban could not shake the feeling that he stood witness to a betrayal greater than he could comprehend.