Heaven's Needle (10 page)

But the Spider seemed to have no difficulty. And if her control was that strong, then she could break his prayer and return the room to night on a whim.

She did not. After a moment he looked back to the woman on the table. Jora's hair had been cropped to the skull recently. Beneath the stubble, her scalp was stark white and dotted with eight large blisters in an uneven circle. Elsewhere her skin was nut brown and wrinkled by long days spent laboring under the sun. A farmwife, maybe. Before Maol's touch had taken root in her soul.

Jora's eyes focused on his face. He couldn't tell whether she was lucid, or whether she would be responsive to his prayer. She seemed calmer, though, and it seemed to him that the holy light soothed some of the madness that roiled in the woman.

“How did you come here?” Kelland asked. He kept his voice gentle. His magic would bind her to tell the truth, or what she
thought
was the truth, but he had no idea how much the prayer would help with a mind so corroded.

Jora licked her lips. Blood from the eyeflowers had funneled around her mouth while she screamed. The dried tracks of it cracked when she answered. “On a boat. I served. I did blessed work … until
she
caught me.” Her eyes rolled white under the bloody lenses.

“What blessed work?”

“The children. We need them. We need them. The nightmare is waking. The old death is coming.” Her words were so faint that Kelland had to lean closer to hear. He tensed, wary that she might lunge up for a bite. “Only pure hearts can hold it back. Only the pure can draw fire from the stone. The scholar told us. The scholar warned us. Keep the fires burning, and the nightmare cannot take us.”

“What nightmare?”

“The old dream. The old death. So long it's been waiting, whispering … but it is louder now. We are holding it back, with help, with pure hearts. But it eats them …
it eats them … and the longer we hold it, the stronger it gets.” She nodded furiously, as far as her bonds would let her. Half-dried blood clotted at the corners of her eyes like poisoned tears. “It comes in the dark, it speaks in the dark, and the whispers never go away …” Real tears began trickling out under the glass, softening the knots of gore and cut lashes at the eyeflowers' edges.

None of the woman's ramblings made sense to Kelland, but he pressed on doggedly. If she let slip
something
that he could follow, it might shed some light on the rest. “How are you holding it back?”

“Prayers. Prayers and pyres. The Bright Lady has shown us the way in her flames. The fire takes them and cleanses us. The fire keeps us safe.”

“If fire keeps you safe, why do you need children?”

“They are the shapers. Little hands. They bring the holy fire from the stone, stone cut from death's hollow heart. It is their blessing, their gift … theirs to shape, and share with us. It is the only weapon that kills the monsters. Without them we would fail.”

“Where are the children?”

“Safe.”

“Where?”

Jora's hands trembled against the table. Her wrists, raw and bleeding, shook in their restraints. A soundless word rose to her lips and died. She tried again, and the second time managed to whisper: “Shadefell. You must go. Go to them. I know what you are … what you can do. Protect us. Our prayers are failing … and they are in Shadefell.”

The name meant nothing to Kelland, but he could not press her further. His prayer was exhausted. The magic slipped out of his grasp, elusive as sunlight once more.

Kelland plucked the eyeflowers away carefully. The tiny
blades pricked his fingers, but he got them free. He could give the woman that much mercy. Jora sighed and closed her eyes, or tried to. There was too much flesh missing for her lids to meet, and the red-veined whites of her eyes peeked through the gaps. The last of Kelland's dawn light danced across those bloody whites, and then the dark returned.

Avele took the candle from its alcove. “Is there anything more you wish to know?”

“What did you do with the children she captured?”

“We destroyed them, of course. They carried the Mad God's contamination; there was nothing else to be done. But we did not find them all. Some were sent back to Jora's village. Precisely how, I cannot say. Smuggled, perhaps. We found tallies for them, but no record of their transport.”

Kelland gave her a hard look, but no reproval. If the children had truly carried Maol's touch, they were more dangerous than plague bearers. He would have preferred healing them, but if the Thorns had neither the means nor the will to do so, a cure by fire was better than letting them roam free.

Maol—the Four-Armed Beggar, the Mad God—was unlike any other deity in Ithelas. Like them, he could not exercise his will in the world except through his mortal servants. But the Mad God was different in that he did not seek out strong souls to champion his faith. He sought weak ones, and he corrupted and consumed them, eventually destroying any creature who fell under his sway. His Blessing leapt from host to host like a disease, and it had to be treated like one to be stopped.

Sometimes, if the contagion was caught early, its victims could be cured. Sometimes they couldn't.

Three years ago, the last time a Maolite had been active in Cailan, he'd done his god's work by kidnapping children,
inducting them into the Mad God's mysteries, and releasing them to be found by their families. Even after several families were found with throats slashed in their sleep, few had been willing to test their children for the taint, knowing that their sons and daughters might spend the rest of their years in Heaven's Needle if it was found. No one wanted to believe that a child gone for a single afternoon could have been warped so badly. The carnage went on for weeks before the Celestians found and stopped the Maolite cultist, and even after that there'd been more killings as the last few children returned home.

It was ugly. But it would have been uglier if they hadn't acted swiftly.

“You must go to Carden Vale,” the Spider said.

Kelland did not answer immediately. He'd felt the creeping corruption in Jora's soul. He'd heard the torment in her ramblings. Whatever her “nightmare” was, whatever the “old death” meant, he was sure that Maol lay at its heart.

It was his duty, as a Knight of the Sun, to stand against the enemies that no one else could. If that was the Spider's price for his freedom, it was no more than his oaths already bound him to. And yet … what she offered him was not truly freedom, was it? Only a longer leash. If he went to Carden Vale, he'd run as Ang'arta's dog.

For an instant he longed for his tiny hole in the dungeon. In the safe, stinking dark, nothing had been expected of him. It had been miserable, yes, and it was cowardly even to think such things … but, in a perverse way, he missed it. He'd have died there, but he would have died honorably, quietly,
simply.
Unconflicted.

Duty was cold comfort. Though he should have been grateful for the chance of glory and a last glimpse of the sun, Kelland found himself wishing that Celestia had given
her Blessing to someone else. Anyone else. He'd lost his taste for glory somewhere in the dark, and his cowardice made him unworthy to stand in the light.

“Bitharn will be so disappointed,” the Spider said into the silence of his hesitation.

The knight's head snapped up. “What?”

“We made a bargain, she and I. She cares for you very much. And she expects to see you in Carden Vale.”

“Why?”

“Because it is your duty to be there,” the Spider said, her eyes glittering with malicious mirth. “Isn't it?”

It was. Kelland looked at Jora and thought of the children, the ones tallied but never found. There was no choice. He was a Knight of the Sun. Whatever his fears about Ang'arta's plots, whatever his secret indecision between duty and desire, he was oathbound to help. That much, at least, was clear.

He looked back to the Spider. There was no harm in speaking frankly; the only other witness was the madwoman on her table, and it was unlikely that she'd live to see another morning, much less tell anyone what she had heard. “Why does it matter to you?”

“I have my own interests there, and reason to believe they are linked with yours. It would please me, and benefit us both, if we worked together in this.”

“If not?”

“Then you will do what you must do, and I will do the same. Regardless, you must go.” She gestured to a long, flat box lying against the far wall. The table and the feebleness of the candle's glow hid it from view; Kelland had not noticed it earlier. “My parting gift. Take it. I expect you'll need it.”

It was his sword.

T
hey left Cailan two weeks before Greenseed, the festival of first planting. It was early for travel, but the two young Blessed were eager to begin their
annovair,
and Asharre, once she'd made the decision to go, was eager to leave her unwanted memories behind.

The ride gave her time to take the measure of her companions. Evenna was a soft-spoken beauty who carried herself with a solemnity far beyond her seventeen years. The young Blessed had blue-black hair that she plaited and looped around her head in a healer's halo, a style among the Illuminers that dated back to Alyeta the Redeemer. Oralia had worn her hair the same way. She had moved with the same quiet grace, too, and her clothes carried the same fragrance of wormwood and wintermint, anise and aloe. Healer's herbs. The perfume of ghosts.

Asharre tended to avoid her. It was no fault of Evenna's, but it was too easy to catch the girl in the corner of her eye and forget, for an instant, that it was not Oralia riding beside her.

Falcien's company was easier to bear. The other Illuminer had the small, wiry build of an Ardasi knife fighter. His coloring was southern as well: olive skin, eyes and hair of a rich, mutable color between brown and black. His accent was pure Cailan, though, and he laughed easily with the others about things that had happened in the city when they were young. He had never been an outsider. Not like her.

Her companions gave her space. Sometimes Asharre caught them looking at her scarred face, or at the two-handed
caractan
she wore across her back, but they kept their questions to themselves. The
caractan
was thicker and heavier than the longswords favored by the Knights of the Sun. Though it had an edge and Asharre kept hers sharp, it was a weapon made to crush rather than cut. It seldom saw use outside the White Seas clans, for none but Ingvall's children had the strength or stature to wield it effectively. Still, strange as it must have been to them, neither the Blessed nor Heradion asked about her sword.

She was content to let them wonder. The ride settled her spirits, allowing her a tranquility she hadn't felt since Oralia's death. It wasn't until Heaven's Needle dwindled to a sparkling mote on the horizon that Asharre realized how much Cailan had been her sister's city. There was hardly a handspan at the Dome of the Sun that did not carry a freight of memory. Away from it, at last, she could see the world with her own eyes.

It was more beautiful than she remembered. Asharre had never been on the road without a certain wariness, if not outright fear. Her first journey had been away from their homeland, guarding her sister through hostile territory, toward the unknown. She knew when they left that they would never return. Afterward she had traveled only
as Oralia's protector, and while they had seldom been in real danger after that first year, she had never let down her guard.

Now she did, a little, and looked at the world unfolding.

They rode past untilled fields blanketed by yellow straw and wrinkled, frost-kissed leaves. Ancient stone walls and dark green hedgerows separated one farmer's land from the next; gnarled apple trees and pollarded willows dotted the hills between. Mastiffs barked at them from farmhouse yards, while small, timid deer darted through the trees.

The land grew rockier and the hills steeper as they continued. Village walls changed from simple boundaries to solid fortifications of mounded earth and stakes. Then those, too, receded in the distance as the earth became too stony to support farmers. Two weeks north of Cailan, all Asharre could find to mark human habitation were thin brown goats cropping at weeds between the rocks.

The last town worthy of the name was Balnamoine. It marked the informal boundary of Calantyr; though the villages and mining towns to the north belonged to the realm on maps, in truth the king's rule ended at Balnamoine. The mountain people kept to their own ways.

That might, Asharre reflected, be why the High Solaros had sent two of his Blessed to serve their
annovair
in Carden Vale. Their presence would be a light touch of civilization, a gentler means of bringing the mountain villages into the fold than sending a company of the king's soldiers to force their allegiance.

Perhaps. The politics of northern Calantyr weren't her concern. Her only duty was seeing the Celestians safely to Carden Vale. Ahead, the Irontooths solidified from a misty band across the horizon to a towering wall. The mountains'
slopes were rough and gray as battle-scarred steel, their peaks so white they vanished into the clouds.

Evenna drew them aside as they came to the gates of Balnamoine. “I have an old friend here,” she told them. “An old patient, really. Nessore Bassinos. He's a merchant who does some trade with the mountain villages. I thought it might be helpful to talk to someone who knew the lay of the land, so I sent him a letter before we left Cailan. We have a standing invitation to dinner.”

“How's his cook?” Falcien asked.

“Better than you,” Heradion said. “If he offered us boiled boot leather and fried mud, I'd consider it a welcome respite from what you've been serving up.”

Asharre shook her head, amused despite herself. “Where is his house?”