Heaven's Needle (31 page)

Charred starbursts stained the wall opposite the herb room's door. Cinder-flecked blood drew messy arcs on the floor around it. Two stubby lengths of blackened metal lay near bloodied dents in the wall, their ends blown outward like iron flowers. There might have been a third one with them; it was too dark for her to see.

A trap. Bitharn hurried forward, blanching. “Wait. Let me have a light.”

“Light nothing here,” Malentir snapped. “
Burn
nothing here. Remember the pyre. Madness spreads in the smoke.”

“We don't need a candle for light,” Kelland said. He spoke a short prayer, outwardly calm, but the tightness of his grip on his sun medallion told Bitharn that he hadn't fully recovered from the disaster of his godsight. She tensed, waiting to see if this prayer would end as badly.

It didn't. Golden radiance flared around the knight's sword. It steadied into a softer glow, shedding enough light to illumine the drying room and much of the hallway outside.
The Thornlord bared his teeth and retreated as if the light pained him, leaving Bitharn to study what it revealed.

There
had
been a trap. The stubby bits of metal were crossbow quarrels. They were oddly formed, with openwork bulbs at the ends instead of sleek tips; they looked too heavy to fly. Strands of filigree were punched out from the center of each quarrel's head, blasted apart by an explosion from within. Kelland's light drew black smoke from a gummy residue on the metal. Bitharn stepped away, holding her breath.

The rest of the trap was easy to see. The snapped remnants of its trigger strings dangled from the drying room wall. There were three small hooks mounted inside the door. It would have been easy to loop the strings on before closing the door, or ease them off before opening it.

A trio of crossbows, propped on a crate and angled upward, pointed toward the door. All three had been triggered; none held a second shot. Smoke curled from them, dissolving in the knight's holy aura. More smoke billowed from the depths of the drying room as Kelland crossed the threshold, creating a shroud so thick that at first Bitharn couldn't see inside.

It cleared a moment later. She wished it hadn't.

The drying room was filled with bones. They bowed the shelves and dangled from the walls between ropes of knotted herbs. Many had been fashioned into tools: shoulder blades and hip bones served as shovels, affixed to the long bones of leg and arm by sinew wrappings. Other bones had been sharpened into picks and chisels. Some appeared to be knives. All were pitted and grooved by hard use, and all of them were human. Bitharn remembered the boy in the woods, trying to run on his cankered leg, and cringed. Were his bones among the trophies on the wall?

Black dirt caked the bone tools' edges. Like ice melting into steam, it softened and flowed and skirled away under the blaze of Kelland's light, leaving empty ridges behind.

The bones held Bitharn so transfixed that she almost failed to notice the other things in the room. The plants dangling from the ceiling and layered on drying racks were not the usual healer's collection. Bitharn was no herbalist, but she knew enough to recognize feverfew and comfrey, wintermint and blackroot. She would have expected to see those plants gathered here. Instead, the misshapen lumps of beggar's hand were the only ones kept in store.

At the back of the room was a cast-iron cauldron filled with chunks of rancid fat. Strips of skin clung to the pieces; one chunk, bigger than the rest, had been hacked from a human belly. Coarse black hair sprouted around its navel. Under the cauldron was a small pyre of splintered bone and black-stained wood, same as the logs by the dule tree. Next to it, a crusted candle mold waited to be filled.

A cluster of golden sun pendants, similar to the one Bitharn wore, hung above the cauldron on braided cords. The leather was gritty with clinging cinders; the rays of the suns were dull with soot.

“The priest,” Malentir said, his voice soft with wonder. “Of course.”

“No. No, he was going to help them. He took them to Shadefell in hopes of a cure. The others found proof of it … all those writings in the inn …” But Bitharn's words sounded hollow in her own ears, and Malentir merely raised an eyebrow at her protest.

The bones on the walls, the defiled sun symbols, the cauldron to render corpse fat into dead man's candles … all of it hidden behind a trap loaded with Maolite corruption. There was no accident, no innocent explanation.
Whether he knew what he was doing or was deluded into believing that he could save his people by some grisly “magic” in his rites, the solaros had acted to serve the Mad God's will in Carden Vale.

“He did not take them to Shadefell for a cure,” the Thornlord murmured. “He took them to be sacrificed.”

S
he dreamed of bones.

Asharre's sleep had been troubled since they'd come to Carden Vale. Her nights were full of wraiths and shadows. In her dreams, she ran from amorphous dangers that lurked behind the walls of unreal cities and hunted her through misty forests whose trees melted skyward into slumber and fog. She couldn't fight—she could never fight—only run. Most mornings she woke exhausted, but she had the small consolation of knowing her nightmares were just that, and over.

This dream was different.

She walked down a tunnel of blackness. Behind her it was an infinite coil, twisting endlessly through the bones of a mountain without ever reaching air. Ahead of her it led to the mountain's heart, hot and red and deadly. Asharre felt the heat pounding against her face, burning more fiercely with every step.

Bones surrounded her. There was no light, but somehow she saw them clearly. The earth was paved with knobs
of spine and shoulder, interlaced with the filigree of finger bones. Skulls in stacks on the walls stared down, their secrets locked behind grinning teeth. The long bones of arms and legs came together in a steepled arch overhead. Fleshless hands dangled down among them, grasping weakly at her hair.

These were the dead of Carden Vale. Some had died during the town's recent troubles; others had perished centuries earlier. All were victims of the same ancient corruption. Asharre was sure of that, although she didn't know how she knew. Perhaps that was part of the dream.

They were the lucky ones. She knew that, too, with the unquestioning logic of dreams. These were the lucky ones, who died in the tunnels before coming to the mountain's red heart. They still had their bones, and something of their souls. Those less fortunate, who reached the end of the road, had neither. The fire consumed them completely.

Skeletal hands brushed Asharre's ears and tugged at her short-cropped hair. She walked faster, trying to escape them, even though each step brought her closer to burning.

The skulls' teeth rattled. A ghostly susurration blew through the bones: the voices of the dead, straining to speak across that final silence.
Wait
, they whispered,
wait. Do not run. It is a trap … a trap. Fear drives you to him
.

It did. The realization hit her so hard she stumbled. Sweat rolled from her chin and pattered onto the bone-tiled floor, steaming. By fleeing from the dead, she hurried toward her own doom—but these were the bones of people who had resisted, and had succeeded in keeping themselves from utter destruction. Fear was the Mad God's tool to keep her blind. Terror made her deaf to the secrets they might share.

They wanted to help her. They wanted to keep the evil in the mountain from claiming her too. She heard them struggling. The spirits of the dead fought against the magic that had killed them and held them trapped in this place; their voices were a babbling breeze. Asharre tried desperately to distill some meaning from the noise.

She saw the mountain's heart glowing ahead. A gust of wind, hotter than any forge's breath, came sighing down the tunnel. It ruffled her hair and dried the sweat on her brow. Asharre winced, bowing to its force. She knew that when she reached the source of that blistering heat, she would die. Worse than die: she would lose her soul. But she could not stop herself from walking toward it. She had slowed from a run, but her legs refused her frantic commands to
stop
.

“Help me,” she cried to the dead. “
Help me!
”

Row upon row of hollow-eyed skulls stared back at her mutely. Their jaws creaked with their efforts to break free of their cursed silence. The hands hanging from the ceiling trembled; the finger bones laced into the floor shook. But all that escaped from them was an endless hiss, meaningless as the mutterings of the tide.

The glow did not brighten as she drew closer. It became hotter, crueler,
hungrier
… but never brighter. A sense of inexorable evil, nameless and older than time, pressed down on her. And still she could not stop.

“
Listen
,” one of the skulls exhaled. She didn't know which one spoke; it was already behind her, lost to the darkness, by the time it managed to force out the words. “
Listen
, and we will keep you from the Mad God's maw. Take my hand.
Take … it
…”

“Which hand?” Asharre asked, twisting her head back as her feet kept dragging her forward.

The skull made no answer. But all around her, the hands began rattling, clattering against the ceiling of bones and twitching their fingers through the suffocating air.

She reached up and seized the nearest. As their hands touched, living flesh against dead, dreamed bone, Asharre felt a shock of recognition. Memories flooded into her mind. Not hers—not of any life she could have imagined. They were older, starker, ripped from the edge of despair. They overwhelmed her. It was like standing on Spearbridge again, but the torrent of memories came faster, whirling in a blizzard of images she could not begin to comprehend. Horrors, but also glimpses of hope, and a circle of sigils drawn in flame.
Protection
.

Asharre faltered, but the skeletal hand would not let her fall. It dug its bony fingers into her palm, drawing blood. The jolt of pain slapped her back to her senses; the strength of the dead kept her standing. And the hand stopped her, finally, from going on.

“Thank you,” she mumbled. Then the tunnel and its memories were breaking apart, spinning away into emptiness, and she was awake.

Blood pooled in her palm.

Asharre stared at it stupidly. Then she swore and threw back her blankets, keeping her hand cupped so the blood wouldn't spill out. She hobbled out of the Rosy Maiden and flung it into the street.

Four deep wounds punctured her right palm. Asharre ran her good hand through her hair, struggling to remember. The dream had already receded in her memory; she could barely recall what she had seen or felt in it, aside from a lingering disquiet.

There had been bones. She was sure of that much. There were bones, and they had … she had … reached for them,
hoping for salvation. But the details melted away like frost on a spring morning. Her other nightmares had lingered long past waking; this one, the only one she
wanted
to remember, was already gone.

Asharre scowled and wrapped a strip of blanket around her hand, knotting it over the palm to stanch the bleeding. What dream left wounds? It was impossible. Yet the proof lay throbbing in her hand.

The injury made her clumsy, and by the time she finished making tea and porridge for breakfast, she was in a foul temper. Evenna was unusually late to rise, which worsened Asharre's mood. She wanted to be out of Carden Vale. But until Evenna woke, they could not go.

The sun crept steadily upward, and still Evenna did not come down. The Illuminer hadn't missed dawn prayers once during their travels, but it was halfway to highsun and she was still abed. Finally, her patience stretched to snapping, Asharre stalked upstairs and threw open the Celestian's door. “Wake up!”

Evenna mumbled and thrashed, but didn't stir. Scowling, the
sigrir
strode to the Celestian's bed. And, upon reaching it, stopped cold.

Sweat soaked Evenna's raven hair and plastered her shift to her body. Her legs were strangled in her sheets, swollen to an angry purple; as she flailed in the grip of her nightmares, the knots tightened even more. Heat radiated from her skin so intensely that Asharre, standing at her bedside, felt as if she was next to a furnace.

She should be dead with a fever that hot. Asharre had seen enough sickness during her travels with Oralia to know that. But Evenna was very much alive, if delirious. Her lips moved in a stream of mumbled gibberish, and she lashed her head from side to side, whipping the pillows
with sweat-damp hair. Her fists yanked at the sheets as if she were trying to rip the cloth apart, or trying to rip herself free.

The violence of the Celestian's dreams was almost as disturbing as her fever. Asharre wasn't sure what the right treatment might be—her sister always relied on holy prayers for the most serious ailments—but she had to do
something
.

Lacking any other ideas, she took the most direct course. She retrieved a bucket of water and dumped it over Evenna's head. Only after the water splashed across the Illuminer's head and blankets did Asharre wonder: what was it, again, about the water?
Something
she was supposed to remember … some prayer, perhaps … but too late now.

The Illuminer jolted up, spluttering. She wiped straggling hair from her face and stared at Asharre, coughing up the water that had gotten into her nose. “What was that for?”

“You slept late. We should have been on the road hours ago.”

“I … oh, my.” Evenna pushed the sheets away. She gaped at her bruised legs in confusion, looked at the window and the lateness of the day, and winced. “I'm sorry. I didn't realize. I had … bad dreams.”

“What dreams?”

“There was a forge, and it … it burned bones.” Evenna touched her temple. “It was so vivid, but I can't remember anything else. Just the forge, roaring as it burned human bones. For some reason I thought it was important, desperately important, to pull them out before the fire consumed them. I was about to brave the flames to take them …” She rubbed her hands over the wrinkled sheets, then frowned at Asharre's bandaged palm. “What happened to you?”