Heaven's Needle (26 page)

“You won't be fighting them,” Evenna said, opening a tiny ceramic bottle and sniffing the tincture it held. “You'll be running. The
maelgloth
don't leave the town, and they don't come out by day.” She exchanged an uneasy glance with Asharre. “They seem to be kept away by that variant sunburst we've been seeing too. Maybe. If they do come, you might try it. Anyway, if you leave soon, you'll be out of the Vale by nightfall.”

“Well.” Heradion gazed into the hearth, holding his palms toward the flames. “Nothing to hunt, no water but what I carry, monsters at my back, and madness in the mountains. Why, that's hardly any challenge at all. Are you
sure
you wouldn't like to cripple my horse first? Maybe tie
my hands, give me a blindfold? Just to keep me from getting complacent, you understand.”

“You'll go?”

“Of course I'll go.” He looked up, grinned. “I could never refuse two beautiful ladies.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Evenna said crisply. “Best go as soon as you've eaten. No sense wasting daylight.”

They saw him off after a breakfast of boiled millet and honey. A night in the inn had calmed the gray mare enough to take a saddle, and the animal seemed glad to leave. Asharre stood in the cold, watching them, until they were out of sight behind greening trees and rocky walls. Then she went to help Evenna build Falcien's pyre.

A dule tree stood outside the crumbling walls north of Carden Vale. Under its rope-scarred branches, the earth was bare and blackened. Most towns had a communal burning ground, and this one was little different from the others Asharre had seen. A bark-roofed wall of firewood, spotted with small white mushrooms, ran alongside the pyre pit. Soot flecked the wood and sat between the logs like little drifts of black snow.

Asharre did most of the work, arranging the firewood in a cross-hatched pyramid. A proper Celestian pyre involved incense and prayers while laying the logs in ceremonial patterns, but Asharre didn't know the prayers or the patterns, and if she made any mistakes in her ignorance, Evenna did not correct them. The Illuminer hardly seemed to notice what was going on; she often fell into fugues or started at sounds Asharre didn't hear. The
sigrir
wondered how badly her companion was suffering for her sleepless night.

By midday the pyre was ready. They laid Falcien atop the logs, still shrouded in his altar cloth, and Evenna scattered handfuls of herbs and flowers over his body. Dried
chamomile, for peaceful sleep. Dandelions, yellow and ubiquitous as sunlight. There were others whose names and significance Asharre did not recognize. After tossing the last sprigs over the logs, Evenna doused them with lamp oil and thrust a torch into the pyre's belly.

The fire was slow to start, but once it caught, it burned with a sudden red fury.

They watched it burn until sunset. Several times the wind turned, stinging Asharre's eyes with smoke and bringing a nauseating wash of decay from afar. The smell of Carden Vale's corruption, she thought. It stank of infected wounds and dead things rotting in mud, of sulfur and old urine and mold. But Evenna showed no reaction to the smell and never stepped back from the smoke, and Asharre's pride would let her do no less. She ignored it, at least outwardly, and refused to blink at the windblown ash.

After the first few times it was easy; by dusk she hardly noticed it at all. Weariness helped make her stoic. At sunset Evenna prayed by the smoldering remains of the pyre. After she finished, the two of them walked back to the Rosy Maiden to wait out the night.

The town closed bleak and empty around them. Even its ghosts seemed to have deserted it; Asharre could not imagine that the loneliest specter would linger inside the houses that leaned over weed-choked gardens and pitted streets. Shadows filled the broken windows, and the wind moaned across the clattering roofs in a haunting echo of the
maelgloth
's cries. She gritted her teeth and willed herself not to hurry toward the inn.

It was a relief to shut the Rosy Maiden's doors against the dark. Asharre couldn't pretend that the inn was safe—not with Falcien's blood staining the commons and the stench
of death seeping in from the stables—but it was better than facing the night and the creatures that hunted it.

The
sigrir
stayed up long past midnight, staring out the windows with a blanket around her shoulders. Sometimes she thought she saw misshapen figures darting through the streets, but they could not reach her and she did not fear them. Not as much as she dreaded the morning.

In the morning they went to Shadefell.

“S
he wants Ang'duradh,” Malentir said. “She intends to reclaim it in her husband's name, for his glory and the triumph of Ang'arta. When our work is done, the Lord Commander will lead his armies here, and the Baozites will regain a foothold in a part of the world they lost six hundred years ago.” The Thornlord folded his hands into his sleeves, regarding Bitharn and Kelland in turn. “I tell you this so that there will be no mistake about my goals or interests in this matter.

“My task, before my capture, was to learn the cause of Ang'duradh's fall and find a way to retake the fortress. I'd made substantial progress before events intervened. Thanks to your gracious intercession, I have the opportunity to finish my task and atone for my failure. I am in your debt.” There was a hint of sarcasm in that, but only a hint, Kelland thought.

They sat in the common room of a farmer's house outside Carden Vale. Two Celestians and a Thornlord from Ang'arta, seated around a white oak table like old friends.
Hard to believe that the moment was real, but there they were.

There was no trace of the farmer or his family. Malentir had sworn that he had not killed them when he brought Kelland and Bitharn to the place. His sparrow spotted the house from afar, he said; its isolation, coupled with its relative proximity to the town, made it ideal for the three of them to use while they investigated Carden Vale.

Kelland couldn't argue with the second part of that, but he wondered about the first. It seemed an improbable stroke of luck that they should stumble upon an empty house precisely when and where it was needed. It was a rich house—incongruously rich, given the poverty of the town—and it hadn't been empty for long. Mice had barely touched the larders, and the footpaths leading back to town were in good repair. The farmer and his family might not be
dead
, but their disappearance certainly seemed convenient.

He'd ask Bitharn about it when they were alone. Her talent for tracking might uncover clues that his own eyes couldn't find. For now, that mystery had to wait. There was another that needed unraveling first.

“The Spider suggested to me that we might share some interest in Carden Vale,” Kelland said. “She showed me a woman her servants had captured in Cailan. Her name was Jora.” It was important to remind himself, and them, of that. Jora had been an ordinary woman, with a name and people who loved her, before evil blighted her soul. She deserved to be remembered that way.

“Jora was … poisoned,” the knight continued. “I felt something in her, corrupting her heart and mind. A touch of evil. Inhuman. Divine.” He avoided the word “Maolite”; if that was the enemy they faced, he wanted the Thorn to
confirm it without prompting. “It terrified her. She mumbled things about a ‘nightmare waking' and an ‘old death,' and she claimed that she, or people she had been helping, were holding it back somehow. She said that they needed children to do it. ‘Shapers,' she called them.

“The Spider said that Jora had been kidnapping children in Cailan and sending them back to this town. She suggested that our interests might align in Carden Vale. She did not tell me why. Now you say that the Spider's interest lies in reclaiming Duradh Mal. I fail to see how these things are related, or why it would be in my interest, or my temple's, to help you do that.”

“It's the same thing, isn't it?” Bitharn turned toward the Thornlord. The morning light shone in her hair, turning it to a river of soft gold and amber. In profile, Kelland could see the faint lines that exhaustion had drawn on her face, but he thought she had never been more beautiful. Those lines were part of the price she'd paid for him. “Whatever took hold of Jora was the same thing that corrupted the boy I saw. It's the same power that prevents you from taking Duradh Mal.”

“It is,” Malentir said.

“What is it?” Kelland asked.

The Thornlord rose and paced across the room. His steps were soundless on the brightly colored rag rugs that covered the farmer's floor. “The last visitors to Ang'duradh were a band of monks known to history only as the Gray Brothers. The Baozites were never much for record keeping, and after six hundred years, you can imagine how little is left to mark the Brothers' passing. Calantyr was not yet founded, and the local lords were puffed-up bandits perched on piles of rocks. Few of them could read a word. I spent years trying to retrace the monks' steps, hoping to
find some indication of who they were and how a handful of wandering pilgrims laid Ang'duradh low. I did not expect to find much.

“And yet, to my surprise, they
were
remembered. Wherever they'd passed, local folklore was full of dire tales: faceless, gray-cowled wraiths who stole wandering children, babies born as monsters, men and women who became ravening murderers after being bewitched by evil spells. Common stories all, but on the Gray Brothers' path they had unique details that echoed, however faintly, of truth. There was nothing directly useful to me in those stories … but much that corroborated my suspicions.”

Bitharn's expression had sharpened, as it did when she was trying to puzzle out a confusing trail. She sat up a little straighter. “If the records held nothing, how could you know where they passed?”

“The records on the road held nothing,” Malentir corrected her. “There is one account of the Gray Brothers that survives. Blessed Erinai of the Illuminers accompanied the expedition sent to Duradh Mal when the Celestians realized that the fortress had fallen. It is thanks to her journals that we know anything about the monks. Her writings are kept at the temple in Aluvair. I studied them at length.”

“Wearing another face, I imagine,” Kelland said.

The Thornlord smirked, but did not slow his pacing. “Several. I was there for some time. One would hardly have lasted long enough. In any case, through Blessed Erinai's writings I was able to trace much of the Gray Brothers' course north from what is now Calantyr into the Irontooths—and, ultimately, to Ang'duradh. Erinai believed, as I did, that the monks were corrupted by Maol. But this left a mystery, which neither she nor I was able to solve: how, if they were Maolites, were the Gray Brothers able to overwhelm the fortress?

“Servants of the Mad God seldom have much power. Few worship Maol of their own free will. Only the most degenerate are drawn to him, and fools of that sort make poor vessels for divinity. They destroy themselves before accomplishing anything worthwhile. Most Maolites—the unwilling ones—do not even have that. They are consumed by their god; they stagger about like fever victims, delirious and doomed, and the only danger they present is that they might spread their contagion before they die.

“Given the limited power possessed by most Maolites, it puzzled me that they were able to overwhelm Ang'duradh so completely. It is true that most Baozites have nothing of the god in them, just as the peasants who flock to your chapels are not touched by Celestia, but Maolites die like any other men, and Baozites are very good at killing. Even if the Gray Brothers possessed some real power, Baoz still had priestesses in that age, and they should have been able to deal with Maol's Blessed easily. They did not. They died.

“It was perplexing, but it could not be an immediate danger. Those who sealed the ruins, after all, had not suffered the same fate. When I was unable to learn anything more from indirect study, I opened the seals. Carefully, of course. Very carefully. I was better prepared than the Baozites who had been caught by surprise centuries ago, but I had no desire to be taken unawares by Duradh Mal.”

“What seals?” Bitharn asked.

“Most of Duradh Mal was sealed by Celestia's Blessed soon after its fall,” Kelland told her. “The Knights of the Sun and the Illuminers worked in tandem to craft those wards. After centuries of Baozite rule, the fortress was a locus of the ironlords' power. We destroyed what we could and sealed the rest to prevent innocents from stumbling inside … or people like the Thorns from trying to use it.”

“You did,” Malentir agreed. “To your credit, it was not easy to determine the pattern and unravel the weavings, and there were some moderately challenging traps hidden among them. But they were never meant to guard against
us
, and any wall can be broken, given time and the right tools.”

“If you're so terribly clever, why don't you have Ang'duradh already?” Bitharn interrupted. Kelland was grateful for her retort; he was too unsettled to think of his own. What the Thornlord said was true: they
hadn't
considered that the Baozites might work in concert with another power to unravel the wards. The Spider had been sitting in her tower for the better part of a decade, weaving webs on Ang'arta's behalf, and they hadn't thought to change the seals on Duradh Mal. He never had, at least, and it seemed that the High Solaros hadn't either.

Who could have foreseen that the Baozites would want to revisit such a disastrous defeat, though? Or that they would find a way to reopen it? They fought
wars;
they weren't scholars of dead magic.

“I was not the only one interested in the ruins,” Malentir said. “There was a fool from the Fourfold House visiting Aluvair at the same time that I was. He, too, was interested in Blessed Erinai's journals. His name was Gethel. A feeble old man, half dead by the looks of him. I considered him of no account. That might have been a mistake.