Heaven's Needle (19 page)

Falcien joined her halfway, having left his own wagon in Evenna's hands. “Why have we stopped?”

“I don't know yet.”

A small crowd had collected in front of the last wagon. Some of the drivers spoke in hushed voices; she could not catch the words, but fear ran through their murmurings. Their gathered lanterns made a shifting pool of light, and at its dappled edge was Colison.

Asharre pushed her way to the forefront. She was taller and broader in the shoulders than any of the drivers, and she muscled through the men with ease. Falcien followed, silent and sure-footed.

“What's happened?”

“I'm not sure.” Colison's hand shook as he accepted a lantern from a wagon driver. It was a strange thing to see in a man who had crossed Spearbridge without blinking, and it filled Asharre with foreboding. “Come with me.” He paused, glanced at Falcien, and nodded tersely. “You too. Might be we'll need your prayers.”

The mountain wall curved inward as Colison led them along the road, tapping his staff on the stone with every step. Asharre heard water burbling. Bristly brown grass covered a clearing that mirrored the one on the other side of Spearbridge; above its dead carpet, leafless trees swayed in the night.

“This is the other campsite,” Asharre said. A line of unshod hoofprints, like those of the ponies Colison used,
crossed the ice-crusted snow before them. The prints vanished into the dark and came back. The pony had been walking when it left, but trotting when it returned. Something had alarmed the animal or its rider enough to hurry over treacherous footing.

“Aye.” Colison shifted the lantern to his left hand and tucked his right into a pocket. “Jassel was riding ahead to scout the road. He came this far and turned back.”

“Why?” Falcien asked.

“Said there'd been a killing.” Colison trudged across the crunching snow. Asharre followed cautiously.

Halfway across the clearing, the lantern's light glittered off small panes of glass. A small cottage huddled against the mountainside. Snow-mounded firewood was stacked against its walls. A second woodpile, nearly as large as the house, stood to one side. It, too, was capped in untouched snow. A hickory pole thrust from the side of the cottage, holding a lamp with a steeply slanted metal cover. It was the hanging lamp's glass that reflected their light. The lamp itself was dark, and white dusted its bottom rim.

“No one's been here in a while,” Falcien noted.

“Aye. Jassel said that too. Not many come this way in the winter—not that many come this way any other time of year—but he thought it peculiar that Laedys hadn't been using her wood. Worried something might've happened to her. She isn't a young woman. Then he found the dead man … here.” Colison held the lantern steady as he rounded the woodpile.

It took Asharre a moment to make sense of what she saw. A thin coat of snow covered the corpse. It hid the man's face, mercifully, and softened some of what had been done to his body. But not much. There was not much anything could do to soften that.

Falcien murmured something that sounded like a prayer. The young Illuminer took a few steps back, his eyes wide and white in his dark face. She wondered if he might be sick. No shame in that. Asharre herself had been shocked when she saw the body; it was as if the worst memories of Spearbridge had become real before her eyes.

But Falcien wasn't retching. He was moving around Colison to get a closer look. The Illuminer had a stronger stomach than she'd thought. Asharre squatted in the snow beside him, curious for her own sake and also to see what he would notice. If these Celestians intended to investigate the strangeness in Carden Vale—and, now, a murder—they'd need sharp eyes.

“Well?” she prodded.

“A ritual killing,” Falcien said, “but I don't know its purpose.”

“What makes you say that?”

“They took his bones.” The Celestian motioned to the dead man's nearest arm. It had been laid open in a straight line from wrist to elbow, and again from elbow to shoulder, like a slash in a lady's sleeve. His bones were gone. The corpse's hands and feet were intact, and his face was untouched but for the crossbow bolt that sprouted from his right eye like an obscene flower, but from his neck down to his boots, every bone longer than the palm of Asharre's hand was missing.

“You said ‘they.' Why?”

Falcien gestured to several pairs of boot prints that dimpled the snow on the far side of the clearing. Even an untrained eye could see that they were old, partly filled by recent snowfalls, and that they had been made by a small group of men. Three to five, Asharre guessed. They'd come together in a group from Carden Vale, circled around the
cottage, and gone straight to the corpse behind the woodpile. Then they had gone back the way they'd come, leaving the body behind.

“You think that is why he was killed?” Asharre asked.

Falcien nodded.

“You are wrong.” She took off a mitten and brushed the snow from the bolt in the dead man's eye. A pool of frozen blood shone black in the socket. “This killed him. Look at the fletchings. Green and black on a gray shaft.” Asharre glanced at Colison, who nodded to confirm her guess.

“Gals gave Laedys a spare crossbow and some quarrels,” the merchant-captain said. “A few years back, it was. He thought a woman living alone ought to have some way to protect herself, and a crossbow doesn't need so much strength as a bow.”

“He was shot here, by the door.” Asharre paced around the tracks to show the other two. Crimson spattered the solitary line of prints in a burst near the cottage door. More blood had fallen across the lone man's steps as he staggered to the woodpile, softening those marks, but it had frozen before the later group came to trample the red crusts it left in the snow.

Returning to the corpse, Asharre lifted a lifeless hand and showed them the blood on his palm, grooved by pale lines where the crossbow bolt's fletchings had wiped it away. “He staggered to the woodpile, pulled at the quarrel, and fell.”

“No one could walk that far with a bolt in his eye,” Falcien protested.

Asharre shrugged and put her mitten back on. It made no sense to her either, but the tracks showed what they showed. “This one did. He died here. Sometime later, the other men arrived. By the time they cut him open, he was already frozen through. Look.” She moved her grip
down to his wrist, holding the hacked flesh up to the lantern light. The knife marks looked almost shaggy where they'd torn through frozen muscle. Ice crystals shone in the corpse's flesh, visible even by the lantern's glow. “There is no blood underneath him except around his head, from the bolt. These wounds never bled. You see? He was ice when they did this.”

“They took his bones but left his body?” Colison rubbed his mouth as if he'd bitten into something rotten. “Why? Could at least have had the decency to burn the man. No shortage of firewood about.”

“I don't think decency was a pressing concern,” Falcien said dryly.

“No. No, I suppose it wouldn't have been.” Colison laughed, a little shakily, and adjusted his grip on the staff. “Well, we ought to do it. Man deserves at least that much. Whoever he was.”

“A miner, I think,” Asharre said. There was black dust trapped in the crow's-feet around the dead man's remaining eye, and more in the knuckles of the hand she'd lifted. His palm was callused by long hours of work with shovel or pick, and his hair was cropped short around his head. He'd shaved it not long before he died.

“He might have had family in Carden Vale. Someone who knows who he was, and perhaps why he came here. We shouldn't burn the body until his kin have had a chance to see him … and bid farewell, if they like.” Falcien moved toward the cottage's door. “In the meantime, we may as well look at the house.”

Colison balked. “It's empty. That firewood hasn't been touched in days. Weeks, might be. It's clear what happened here. Laedys caught the man prowling about, shot him, and was so frightened she went down to the village rather
than stay out here alone. No need to go prying about her home while she's away.”

“It isn't prying,” the Illuminer said. “We're looking for anything that might explain who this man was, why he came, and what happened to him—both when he died and after. Laedys will probably be glad she didn't have to deal with it herself.”

“Still don't like it,” Colison grumbled, but he went.

There was no answer when Asharre knocked at the cottage's door, so she tried the handle. It was locked from the inside, but after three good kicks the door gave way.

Inside, the cottage was black and cold. Nothing moved. There was a stale smell to the air, and a whiff of the charnel house kept muted by the chill. Asharre stepped away from the splintered door and reached out a gloved hand. “Give me the lantern.”

Colison hooked the metal handle over her fingers. Holding it high, Asharre went back in.

The place was a wreck. Broken dishes littered the floor. A brass mirror on one wall had been scratched and gouged until it became a maze of crazed, opaque lines. The wooden shutters that covered the cottage's two tiny windows rattled loose in the wind; lines of snow and broken glass shone white beneath each one. Cold ashes filled the hearth; scraps of charred paper lay among them.

As Asharre moved into the cottage, her lantern's light fell upon charcoal markings scribbled in loops all across the floor. They had the repetitive intensity of a madman's scrawl, though they were pictures rather than words. Most were meaningless to her, but some looked like the sunburst that Bassinos had put in the windows of his chapel: four rays over four, each one ending in a bulbed tip that made her think of grasping hands.

She went on. Countless sheets of paper fluttered on the far wall, rustling like a forest of dead leaves. Crabbed writing covered each sheet, some in charcoal and some in a reddish brown ink that looked uncomfortably like dried blood, but any curiosity about what they said was driven out of her mind by the corpse that crouched in the corner.

It was Laedys. Asharre had no doubt of that. The corpse was a small, gray-haired woman wrapped in a patchwork quilt that had yellowed and gone rancid with the sweat of bad dreams. At first Asharre thought she had simply died with her face in her hands, but then she saw the dark webs of blood spilled over the woman's wrists and realized that the first two fingers of each hand were sunk to the knuckles in her eyes. She had been dead long enough that the smell of slow decay crept through the cold air.

“Falcien!” she called. Her voice echoed strangely in the cottage, and for an instant she imagined that the papers nailed on the walls flapped in response. “Come here. I want you to look at this. Colison—better if you stay out. Laedys is dead, and it is not pleasant to see.”

Glass cracked under Falcien's boots as he entered. The Illuminer stopped by Asharre's side, taking in the corpse and her scribbled surroundings with a quiet “Oh.”

“What do these things mean?” Asharre asked.

“The markings on the floor are protective sigils, though none quite like I've seen before,” he said, tracing one of the circular scrawls. “This one wards against the ‘hunter in dreams'—one of Anvhad's servants, a creature that has not been seen in Ithelas since Rhaelyand fell. It isn't drawn correctly; these dots are misplaced. They should be here and here”—he tapped one of the sigils to indicate—“above the script, not below. Doing it in reverse changes the meaning. This one, the double spiral, is modified from an even
more obscure sequence. It's at least six hundred years old. The original was intended to help its user find her way out again from god-granted visions, distilling truth from obscure symbolism and awakening her to reality when the spirit journey was finished. But it, too, is changed. The spiral's end faces in the wrong direction, west instead of east, and the doubled drawings cross lines too often. They should be kept clear of each another, and they aren't. Again, the alterations change the meaning, but I'd have to study them to determine exactly how.”

“Do they have any power?”

“No. Well, I shouldn't say no. It's unlikely. The inscriptions have no power in themselves; all they do is channel the magic that a deity gives to one of her Blessed. Unless Laedys was secretly Blessed, these are just marks on the floor. Remarkable ones, though. I wonder how she knew so much of runecraft.”

Asharre shrugged. “What about the writings on the walls?”

He hesitated, but plucked one off its bent metal pin and held it to the light. “This is written in bastardized Rhaellan. An older form, almost archaic, but that isn't uncommon in the mountains.”

“What does it say?”

“‘They are watching me. They are watching me. Eyes peeping in the glass, madness in the mountain's belly. The nightmare is waking, the old death is coming. This is my warning. Turn back: death comes from the mountain. It watches me in the glass and in the water and I cannot blind its eyes. Eyes everywhere.' It goes on like that.” Falcien cleared his throat. “The others say similar things. Over and over again.”

“But nothing that explains why she shot that man or clawed her fingers into her skull?”

“Not that I've seen so far. I'll have to take them to study, of course. I haven't read them all. But these writings suggest that she was trying to protect herself against something—watching eyes, evil dreams, the ‘death from the mountain,' whatever that might mean. It doesn't appear she was successful.”

Asharre rubbed the hilt of her
caractan.
The weapon was comforting, but not as much as she would have liked. “You still want to press on to Carden Vale?”

“We must. Whatever is happening here, it's killed at least two people already, and it will not be stopped by mortal means. I know we're young, and we must seem terribly green to you … but this is what we train for, what we live for: to meet the enemies that others cannot.”