Heaven's Needle (3 page)

“Well, it's a good thing I'm not
anyone,
isn't it?” she
said, raising her eyebrows with feigned asperity. “I only want to ask him a few questions, Versiel. Please. Kelland was your friend as much as mine, and if there's anything this prisoner can tell us that might help—”

“I just don't want to see you hurt. Thorns delight in twisting words, you know that. Anything he tells you will be half true at best, and he's like to tell you awful things just to cause you pain.”

“Not knowing is worse.”

He sighed and separated a slim golden key from the ring, holding it out without looking. “Be quick. My sanity will return at any moment.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, pressing the cold metal into her palm. “Where is he?”

“The Seventh Ring. Northeast cell.”

“Anyone else up there? Anyone who might hear?”

“Only the other prisoners.” Versiel hesitated again as she took the key, and clasped his other hand over hers. “You don't have to do this.”

“I do.” Bitharn pulled away. She went back to the candle on the windowsill, bowing her head over the flame as if gathering her resolve. Dropping her hand to the dagger belted at her hip, Bitharn picked at the silver wirework and pearls that adorned the hilt. As a girl she'd been a fidgeter, and she hoped Versiel thought she'd kept the habit.
Bright Lady, let him think I'm only nervous about confronting the Thorn.
If he guessed her true purpose, she was lost.

Two of the pearls came loose in her fingers. Immediately Bitharn flattened her hand to trap them and pretended to fidget with her necklace instead. Shielding the small movement with her body, she dropped one of the pearls into the well of molten wax around the candle's flame.

As the pearl sank into the hot wax it became translucent
and collapsed into liquid. The “pearl” was a ball of
irhare
sap, rolled in tailor's chalk and cooled to temporary hardness, then affixed to her knife with a drop of pine gum. An apothecary in a dusty shop tucked into a shabby corner of Cailan had made it for her. Bitharn suspected the harelipped young man did most of his trade with assassins, but she hadn't asked, any more than he had asked why she wanted a dram of
irhare
sap disguised as pearls.

In moments the sap would boil off under the flame, releasing a powerful soporific into the air. The candle's scent would disguise its odor. If all went well, Versiel wouldn't suspect a thing until it was too late.

Bitharn paced around the room, fidgeting with her dagger, until she'd made a circuit of the candles and dropped a poisoned pearl into each one. Then she paused by the doorway, drew a breath to steel her nerves, and waved farewell to the friend she'd just begun to drug.

“Wish me luck,” she said, and slipped out.

The tower stairs were cool and silent. There were no torches; the glass walls of Heaven's Needle radiated their own golden glow, an echo of sunlight from the day past. Bitharn's footfalls resonated hollowly around her as she went up the spiral stairs. With each step the aura of holiness in the air grew stronger. She was not Blessed, and had no magic of her own, but even she could feel the tingling presence of the divine as she neared the tower's peak. It filled her with both glory and dread, and she wondered whether Celestia would smite her for what was in her soul. Surely,
surely,
the Bright Lady had to know her intentions.

No smiting came. After three turns around the tower, Bitharn reached the rune-enscribed arch that led to the Seventh Ring. Like all the entrances in the tower's high reaches, this one had no door. Instead its finely carved marble
held a curtain of gossamer light, shimmering through a thousand shifting shades of gold and white.

If an enemy of the faith tried to pass through that gate, the fires of the sun would boil the blood in his veins and char his bones to crumbling sticks of ash. Should the prisoners on the other side ever manage to escape their cells, they would get no farther than that delicate web of light—unless they intended to flee this life altogether.

Only a soul anointed to the sun could pass through Celestia's portals safely. And only such a one could ensure safe passage for sinners, and then only for good cause. The unworthy came to swift and fiery ends.

Bitharn drew up the chain that held her sun medallion, pulling the emblem out of her shirt and laying it across her breast. The pendant felt impossibly heavy for such a tiny piece of gold; it weighed on her chest like a millstone. She laced her fingers behind her back to hide their trembling, though there was no one but herself to see it.

She stood squarely before the arch as she had been taught, less than an arm's length from the light. This close she could feel its heat and see it rippling before her like the air over a baker's oven in midwinter.

Swallowing around the dryness in her throat, Bitharn lifted her chin and recited the words for passage. “Celestia, Bright Lady, grant me your blessing that I might walk through fire and into the light of your truth.” And then, softly, she added her own: “Please. I know what I do here is wrong—but it is a small wrong, for a greater right, and I know that you must see it. Please, bright goddess, if you have any love for your mortal children, let me pass through and bring Kelland back.”

She stepped into the portal, eyes open.

It felt like something from a dream, like falling from
an infinite height without any sense of being trapped in a body. Like being a sunray, surrounded by warmth and light, woven into it and inseparable from it. There was heat all around her, but it seemed to be part of her own flesh and it did not burn.

Then she was through, and back in the world she knew. It seemed impossibly cold and dim. She stood inside the Seventh Ring, the sun portal a shimmer of gold at her back. The cells opened around her like the glass petals of a jeweler's flower, the tower stairs coiled at their core.

A compass rose was traced in gilt on the floor. Bitharn followed its rays to the northeast cell. Its bars, like those of all the cells on this level, spiraled out from the center in a sunburst. The bars appeared to be made of glass, and were transparent but for a slim strand of gold in the center of each one. The thickest was no wider than her wrist. Bitharn couldn't see how they could imprison a child, but as she approached, she felt a low thrum vibrate through the bars and saw a tall figure rise from the cell's depths to meet her.

Malentir. The Spider's student. Bitharn had never laid eyes on the man, but she knew his name and his crimes. Two of Celestia's dedicants, and one of the Blessed, had died to capture him in a tiny village north of Aluvair last fall. It had been a brutal battle, cruelly fought and hard won. Thorns were hard to kill, and harder to capture. Malentir was the only one the Celestians had ever taken alive.

And she was going to set him free.

“A visitor,” he said as he came to the bars. His voice was cultivated, melodious; it carried a soft eastern accent. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Bitharn studied him carefully before answering. Captivity had not been kind to the Thornlord. He was handsome,
in a fey, cruel fashion, but after half a year in the tower his features were haggard and wan. Dark circles shadowed his eyes, and his robes were threadbare at sleeve and hem. A collar of glass, clear as the bars, with the same thread of gold at its center, ringed his throat. That collar crippled his magic; it kept him safe, kept him harmless. Yet he carried himself with such hauteur that he might have been a king, and she a supplicant before his throne.

She gritted her teeth. “My name is Bitharn. I'm here to take you out.”

“Ah.” He gave her a faint, condescending smile, as if she'd announced that she'd come to clean the chamber pot, and adjusted one tattered sleeve. The cloth was slashed with ivory and black, matching his varicolored hair. She caught a glimpse of pale, pocked scars ringing his wrist. “By whose authority, might I inquire? Ordinarily there are more guards in my escort, you see. I should hate to think that my hosts had stopped caring.”

“No one's. This is an escape.”

“An escape,” he repeated, and Bitharn thought she saw something flash in the Thornlord's cool black eyes.

“That's what I said. Are you coming?”

“That depends. What is your plan? I have not much interest in being recaptured. There are quite a few sun-blinded fanatics who would prefer to see me dead rather than imprisoned, and I have even less interest in giving them a chance to correct that.”

“The Keeper's been drugged. He has spare clothes in his quarters. We'll dress you as a solaros, you'll pull the hood low, and we'll leave while it's dark enough to keep you hidden. The guards outside the tower know me; they won't ask too many questions. They changed after sunset prayers, so the ones who saw me go in won't know that
I came alone. I have horses waiting at an inn not half a league away.”

He cocked his head to one side, considering. Then he shook it. “No.”

Bitharn felt as if she had been punched. “What?”

“Oh, it's a pretty story. It might even be true. But I am not inclined to gamble my life on uncertainties, and I have no assurance that what waits for me outside is a horse rather than an arrow. Escaping prisoners do tend to end badly … and predictably. No, I believe I'll stay.”

“If you knew what I'd done to come here—”

“We all have our sins.” Something about the way she said it must have given him pause, though, for the Thornlord did not return to his bed. “What made you commit yours?”

He didn't deserve the truth, and yet she couldn't think of a lie. “You are to be exchanged.”

“For whom?”

Bitharn didn't reply, but all the answer he needed was in the jut of her jaw.

“Ah,” he murmured, “I begin to understand. They have someone dear to you. A sibling? A friend? A lover, perhaps? Oh, keep your secrets if you like. It doesn't matter. There's been a trade arranged.”

“There has.”

“By whom?”

“The Spider herself. Avele diar Aurellyn.”

“And to think I feared I'd been forgotten.” Malentir closed his hands around the crystalline bars. Their glow lit his pale fingers so intensely she could see the shapes of his bones through his flesh. His black eyes were bright, now, and the shaggy dishevelment of his ivory-and-black hair gave him the look of some caged wild beast. “Where is the exchange to be made?”

“Carden Vale. Do you believe me now?”

“No. But I will let you prove yourself. Free me, and I will take us there. If you aren't planning treachery, you should be glad to save the ride. The roads are cold and hard this close to winter. If you had other plans … well, I'm afraid you'll have to learn to live with disappointment.”

“I will not have you casting spells.” Bitharn drew a sun sign across her chest. She knew the price of the Thorns' magic: blood and death. They worshipped Kliasta, the Pale Maiden, whose province was pain. The stronger the spell, the greater the agony needed to fuel it. Bitharn could guess that a spell powerful enough to carry them to Carden Vale would require tremendous pain. Perhaps a death.

“Then you will not have me at all. Spare me the outrage, please. The men around us are wretches and murderers, every one. They are destined to die in these cages. A life like that is a small price, hardly worth considering … and, even if we left on horseback, you would have to bloody that pretty little blade at your belt.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you think these cells had some enchantment that quiets sound?” Malentir nodded toward the next cell's entrance, not three paces away. “The east cell is empty. But the north one is not, and I am sure Parnas has been listening with great interest to things that do not concern him. Things that he will likely blubber out as soon as someone comes asking. Isn't that so, Parnas?”

Bitharn hardly heard the prisoner's answering moan through the rush of blood in her ears. The heat of mingled fury and embarrassment burned in her cheeks. She'd been foolish as a wine-sotted girl, letting the Thorn bait her into betraying herself.

“No,” a man whined from that cell. “I won't tell anyone.”

Bitharn ignored that voice. She didn't turn to see the face; she didn't want to think of the pleading as coming from a person. It was easier to think of him as a nameless crime. Her eyes stayed on the Thorn, and on his tiny, taunting smirk. “What did he do?”

“Besides listen?”

Bitharn didn't answer that. She simply stared at him, crushing the key in her hand until its metal teeth bit hard into her palm.

At length Malentir sighed and shrugged with an elaborately affected casualness. “He dabbled in bloodmagic. Poorly. I don't know what half-forgotten god he claimed to worship; he wouldn't say. I do know he was never one of my Lady's servants. She does not touch such feeble tools.”

“Why is he here?”

“Prominent relatives, he tells me. Something about a brother with a castle.”

Bitharn nodded. She knew who was in that cell now. It had been a great scandal in Cailan some years back: Lord Corsavin's younger brother unmasked as a murderer and dabbler in bloodmagic. The revelation had nearly cost the family its title; all that saved them was Lord Corsavin's hasty, secret pilgrimage to King Uthanyr's court in Aluvair to beg royal mercy. Even so, Parnassor Corsavin had quietly vanished before he could bring any further shame to their house. She hadn't heard that Parnassor had been sent to waste away his remaining years in Heaven's Needle, but it was hardly a surprise.

“I've heard he killed children,” she said, unlocking the Thorn's door. She willed away her trepidation and went in, coming close enough to take hold of Malentir's collar. The glass was warm against his skin; his hair brushed across her
fingers. He smelled of amber and bitter almond, beautiful and poisonous.