Heaven's Needle (20 page)

“That's what the Knights of the Sun train for,” Asharre corrected him. “Not you.” She'd seen Falcien handle a sword during their practice sessions. Once. A sick kitten would have bested him. For all his grace, the Illuminer had no idea how to fight.

“There isn't one Knight in a hundred who could have identified those runes. This is our battle. Whether you come with us or not, we have to fight it.”

“I won't be coming,” Colison said from the doorway, faceless in the dark. “Nor will my men. I don't know what's out there, but I've heard enough. We're going back. Any aid I can leave you, I will, but my first charge is my caravan, and that means we leave.”

“Of course,” Falcien said, lifting his head as if startled that the merchant-captain was still there. “We're grateful for all you've done.”

“Least I could do.” Colison turned away, hesitated, and added over his shoulder: “About the runes. I couldn't help hearing. I don't know what they are—don't care to come in
and see them either, if it's all the same to you—but I know for a fact that Laedys was no scholar. She couldn't read or write a word, Bright Lady bless her. She'd save the letters her daughter sent so that I could read them to her when our caravan came through. And those were in Calant, not Rhaellan.”

Falcien froze. Then he nodded, slowly, his lower lip pushed out slightly in a pensive frown. He took down the pinned pages, stacking them in the same order that they had hung on the walls. When they could no longer hear Colison's retreating steps, the Celestian glanced at Asharre. “Will you go with him?”

She shook her head. It wasn't even a question. She'd failed Oralia; she would not fail these Illuminers too. “Magic didn't cut the bones from that man outside. Knives did that. Knives in human hands. You need my sword. I'll stay.”

S
ummer passed into autumn, and autumn's leaves turned red, without Corban selling a single blackfire quarrel. He hadn't even sent letters to any of the prospective buyers he'd considered. Every time he drew up a chair and opened his inkwell to begin, Corban found his mind locked stubbornly mute. He couldn't think of a simple salutation, let alone how to explain what he'd discovered without sounding like a liar or a madman.

In addition to being deadly as tools of war, the blackfire stones seemed to possess some healing magic. The scratches on Corban's hands, which had been inflamed and painful for days, were soothed almost immediately when he clasped a quarrel between them. They healed soon afterward, leaving scars like charcoaled bird tracks across the backs of his hands, but causing him no further pain.

A few days after the scratches had healed, Corban was plagued by sudden, blinding headaches. The quarrels were the only thing that could alleviate the pain, and they worked miraculously. After a few visits to his safehouse, the
headaches were cured altogether. When he came down with a wracking cough the next week, he visited the apothecary's cellar once more—and that ailment, too, vanished.

Gethel hadn't mentioned that the blackfire stones could heal, but perhaps the scholar simply hadn't known. Anyway, why should it surprise him? The Sun Swords were said to be able to inflict vicious wounds and cure them with equal ease. It was only logical that another god's
perethil
could do the same.

Sometimes Corban caught himself wondering just which god had created the blackfire stone. It didn't matter, really—Gethel had cut the
perethil
free from their creator, whoever it was—but now and then he wondered, prodding at the question as he might have poked a sore tooth. What deity would release such savagery into human hands?
Why?

Was it really wise to sell that?

That worry wasn't the only reason he hesitated to sell the quarrels, though. If that had been Corban's only concern, he would have shaken it off and sold all three crates the next day. He'd dealt in swords and arrows long enough for his conscience to have developed calluses over its calluses. Men would brutalize each other no matter what he did. If his new weapons frightened them enough to stop the bloodshed, well and good; if not, the sins were theirs, not his. He was only a seller of tools.

But this tool was different enough to terrify him. Not in itself, but because of what might befall him if the Celestians found it and took it as evidence that he'd been worshipping dark gods. The thought that someone might stumble upon his secret cache, and steal it or betray it to the Dome of the Sun, kept Corban awake half the night. He could hardly walk by a sausage-seller's cart without smelling his own pyre in the sizzle of smoke and roasting meat.

As the months went by, the idea of giving up the quarrels became increasingly repellent to him. For all those old reasons, yes … but also because they were the only things that brought him pleasure anymore.

Hidden in the apothecary's cellar, Corban could forget his fears and imagine the joys the blackfire quarrels would bring him: money, women, prestige at court. Once he let go of the bolts, the terror came rushing back, but
while
he held them he was soothed, and could relax into the pleasures of his imagination. He loved them as a miser loves gold: for their own beauty, and for the power they held, but above all for the limitless potential of what they might buy. They were the distillation of freedom, offering him infinite choices … as long as he never settled on one.

There was little danger of that. Enthralling as his imagined delights were, the reality of them had palled. No courtesan's perfumed caresses could be as tender as the ones he dreamed of in the seaside cellar. No wine could be so intoxicating. Money, once the measure of his victories, no longer interested Corban; he became so indifferent that he forgot meetings, neglected clients and suppliers, left cargoes to rot in ships' holds.

His clothes became shabby, his face gaunt under a beggar's beard. He barely noticed. His little orange cat, tired of waiting by an empty bowl, wandered off to hunt in the alleys. He was glad to be rid of the chore.

By the time autumn's last leaves flapped away on the winds of winter, Corban's once-thriving business had shriveled to nothing. He might have revived it, perhaps, if he cared … but he didn't. His world had narrowed to the apothecary's hovel, the secret cellar, and the crates that held the only thing under the Bright Lady's light that mattered to him.

And as he discarded the world, it discarded him. His
friends walked past him without recognizing, or
seeing,
his face. To them he was just a dirty pauper; he didn't warrant a single glance, let alone a second. The courtesans' palaces refused him, turning him away without so much as a glimpse of their sandalwood doors. Corban had money. He'd scarcely spent a penny since coming back to Cailan. But money alone had never been enough to buy the time of an Amrali-trained lady, and his once-polished manners had tarnished in the cellar.

None of it mattered. Their rejections only showed how little he'd lost. If his friends were that easily blinded by a little dirt, they were no true friends of his. If women who sold themselves for coin wanted to put on airs, let them;
he
knew what they were. Corban had better friends and sweeter comforts than anything they could offer.

He rarely left those comforts. The world outside his cellar was too cold, too bright. It stung his face and made his skull ache. Corban had grown sharp eyed in the dark: he could pick out the smallest details without a lantern, and the merest glimpse of the sun made his eyes water in pain. Another reason to stay below.

For weeks on end he kept vigil by the quarrels, crawling back into the city only when hunger forced him. Even that seldom happened. Corban had learned to pry off the sickly gray barnacles that clung to the pier's pilings. Sometimes he caught rats squealing in the dark. Not fine fare, but it was better than venturing up to the streets.

Once, as he was creeping back from an expedition to the city, Corban glimpsed his reflection in a sheet of pitted glass left over from one of the dead apothecary's experiments. He stared at it, unable to see himself in the bent gray man who gaped back.

The longer he stared, the more disquieted Corban became.
It wasn't only that the face was wrong—although that surely couldn't be
his
face that was so worn and feverish—but that the eyes were.

They weren't his own eyes. Something else stared out at him from that makeshift mirror. Something that meant him harm.

Corban smashed the glass. He didn't think; he just balled up his fist and swung at those alien, reflected eyes. A white web shivered across the rippled surface; a few shards tinkled out of its center. Sucking on his bleeding knuckles, Corban hobbled away.

After that he avoided reflections. He kept a pocketful of rocks to throw at puddles, and he covered as many of the apothecary's monster jars as he could. Those he couldn't drape with scraps of stolen cloth, he hurried past, keeping his head down and eyes averted.

It helped, a little, but it couldn't give him peace of mind. Nothing but the quarrels could give him that.

The smell of smoke and sulfur, which had once repelled him, was now a reassurance: it told him that his secret treasure was still there, still safe. Sometimes Corban spent hours with his face buried in the packing straw, inhaling openmouthed so that when he left, he might take the scent of consolation with him.

In the increasingly rare moments that he slept, he curled around the blackfire crates, cradling them in the hollow of his body like a cat nursing kittens. His dreams were strange and garish, filled with impossible sensations. In them, Corban made love to headless women whose foggy bodies collapsed and dissolved under the force of his exertions. He drank black wine that filled his veins in place of blood, while his own blood poured out from slits in his wrists and filled the empty bottle.

Those were the ones he could recall. Most he could not. They were more alluring, more disturbing. Corban woke trembling and sweaty, glad to have escaped but yearning to return—to
remember.

He never could.

Time flowed on, uncounted. Winter hardened its grip on the city, bringing long nights and gray, sunless days. Corban noticed the cold, vaguely, but he never considered leaving. The subterranean cellar was insulated enough for him; it wasn't comfortable, but it was safe, and that counted for much more.

If it had stayed safe, he might have whiled away the rest of his life there.

It did not. No human thieves violated his sanctuary … but late one night, as Corban lay in restless sleep, the rats did.

The sound of gnawing woke him. Rats and mice were as common in Cailan's underbelly as fleas on a mangy dog; while the noise was very close, Corban thought nothing of it until he rolled over, opened his eyes, and saw the wet brown backs of wharf rats scurrying in and out of his crates.

They were eating his blackfire stone.

He knew it immediately, furiously, scarcely stopping to question
why
rats would eat the foul-smelling stuff. They would and they were. The animals scattered and fled as he came at them, stamping and kicking, crushing them bare-handed against the pier.

Some of the rats didn't run. Couldn't. They writhed on the pier, flopping like landed fish and shrilling piteously as the blackfire worked through their guts. Corban grabbed the nearest and dug his fingers into its throat, ripping the animal open. It was a thief—a cursed, sneaking thief—and
he would have back what it had stolen. He tore away fur and flesh until he reached its stomach, the membrane pulsing hot around the meal that was killing it.

His
meal.

With shaking hands he wiped blood and hair from the exposed stomach, ignoring the rat's dying squeals. He could just make out the inky slosh of dissolving blackfire stone inside. It was liquid; there'd be no stuffing it back into the quarrels.

He could still salvage it, though. He could.

Trembling, Corban pinched off one end of the rat's stomach and pulled it out. He fit the bloody end to his lips and pushed its contents out, filling his mouth with bitter bile.

What am I doing?
he wondered for a cold, panicked instant, but the thought vanished before he swallowed. He was doing the only thing he
could
do: punishing the thief and reclaiming what was his.

The taste wasn't unpleasant. There was just the slightest tang of acrid smoke. Afterward he could not remember exactly how the blackfire bile tasted … only that he craved it, would have sold his soul for more. Desperate as a dreamflower addict, Corban reached for the next flailing rat, and the next.

And then, suddenly, there were no more. Corban blinked in confusion, looking around as though waking from a drugged dream. He wasn't sure, for a while, where he stood.

His hands were red to the wrist, striped with crimson smudges above that. He dimly remembered licking those spatters. Looking down, Corban saw six little bodies on the pier around him. They were stiff, doubled over around the holes he'd torn in each one's belly.

What have I done?
Corban shivered. He wiped at his mouth, licked reflexively at the back of his hand, and then froze in horror at his own gesture.

What am I
doing?

Retching, he grabbed the rats' bodies and threw them into the water. He washed the blood from the pier, scrubbing at it until what was left became indistinguishable from the old stains of the sea. With the worst of the grisliness out of sight, some of his terror began to subside. Corban spat into the water, trying to ignore the fact that nothing had come up in any of his heaves. Whatever he'd swallowed, it was still in there. Still in
him.

He sat on his heels, digging his hands into his hair and rocking back and forth as if he could shake a solution free from his skull. Something had overwhelmed him. Something had made him commit a horror.