Heaven's Needle (34 page)

“How did a farmer in Carden Vale get his hands on a
perethil
?” Bitharn asked.

“It was the Celestians',” Malentir said. “It was placed in Carden Vale's chapel when they first sealed Ang'duradh. If the seals failed, or some new danger came, they could use it to travel swiftly to the Dome of the Sun for help or to the wards on Duradh Mal to deal with it themselves. In the early years, Knights of the Sun stayed at the chapel, vigilant against any threat. But after centuries of peaceful silence, people … forgot. The Sun Knights stopped
coming. A few Illuminers came—new ones serving their
annovair
. Then they, too, were needed elsewhere. Decades passed with no Blessed here, and the Dome sent less and less aid, and finally the village solaros sold off the chapel's treasures, one by one, to serve his people's needs. Food and medicine mattered more than brass and crystal. So Renais bought the
perethil
. He was the only one who knew what it was … and he only knew because it had come to him in dreams. Maol reached through sleep to instruct him. And he, fool that he was, chose to listen. When I found his bones and questioned his shade, he babbled incessantly about the lore he'd learned in dreams. Lies and traps, all of it, but they were all he could remember.”

“Then it was already corrupted,” Kelland said. “Maol was already trying to escape the seals on Duradh Mal.”

“I do not believe the
perethil
was corrupt. Not at first. But over time, as Renais used it again and again to return to the Rosewayns' haunts, and altered its symbols to match the ones he saw in dreams, it changed. Once the path was opened to him by mortal hands, the Mad God was able to bend its magic himself and, eventually, turn it to his own uses.” The Thornlord left the kitchen's waning light, stopping before the night-sky painting in the next room. He regarded its elaborate frame grimly. “The
perethil
made Renais such a monster his own family walled him up. It might have done worse to Gethel. But we must use it.”

Kelland's mouth twisted. “Your spells would be safer.”

Malentir stared at the knight. His eyes were flat and black as a snake's. At length he made a chill little smile. “I do not know whether to credit you with extreme cleverness or extreme foolishness, but in either case my answer is no.”

“What?” Bitharn looked from one man to the other in bewilderment. “What is he talking about?”

“The Thorn could take us to Duradh Mal by traveling through shadows,” Kelland answered, not breaking from their locked gazes. “He won't. Even though it would be safer than trusting to whatever corrupted magic Gethel used.”

“Safer for
you
, and only until arrival,” Malentir said, poisonously soft. “
I
would be left drained and defenseless … against whatever is in Duradh Mal, and against you. Forgive me if I am not inclined to make myself helpless for your benefit.”

“Of course. If you'll forgive my reluctance to step into a blighted
perethil
based on no more than your storytelling.”

“Your distrust is neither wise nor warranted. But certainly, if it will reassure you, test the thing for yourself. I will leave you to do it in private. By sundown I hope your fears will be assuaged. We can hardly hope to succeed in Ang'duradh if we stay at each others' throats the whole time.”

“He has a point,” the knight murmured after the Thorn had gone. “But I think I'll hold on to my distrust a little longer.” He knelt before the painting, examining its dark canvas and metal stars more closely. The Celestial Chorus stared back at them, its silver-and-bronze stars reflecting fragments of their faces. Near the bottom of the painting's frame, the jeweled, misshapen white metal of its handle gleamed.

Kelland raised his voice in a clear tenor. The words were calm and sonorous, almost musical, and this time no foulness seized his spell. The golden haze of godsight filled his eyes.

Bitharn hung back, glancing over her shoulder for the Thornlord. A queasy, unsettled feeling collected in the pit of her stomach. There was no reason for it, really—Kelland's spell had succeeded, and a
painting
wasn't going to
attack them,
perethil
or no—but she couldn't shake her unease. Something about the way those blackish rubies sat on the melted metal made her think of the old myths she'd read in the Dome's libraries: of
maelgloth
so corrupted that their blood fell to the earth like poisoned seeds, spawning monsters that leapt up vicious and full grown.

It was a story, only a story … but stories were like pearls, beautiful things accreted around a grain of ugly, gritty truth.

The knight sat staring at the painting for so long that Bitharn began to wonder whether its corruption had taken hold of him too. She was about to reach out and shake him when he exhaled a sigh and blinked the godsight away.

“What did you see?” Bitharn whispered.

“Poison,” the Sun Knight replied. He pressed his hands to his knees and stood. “The
perethil
is tainted, as the Thornlord said. Maol's influence snakes through every thread of its magic. Once it was Celestian; from what I can discern by the shreds of its original spells, I imagine it allowed our dedicants to travel swiftly across any land in the Celestial Chorus' view. Now, however, it permits travel only to places desecrated by Maolite magic. More than that: it instills in its users a craving for such places. It makes them lust for the corruption that waits within. That lust is woven into its magic; we will not be able to avoid it if we use the
perethil
.”

“Can we …” Bitharn swallowed. She wanted to hug her arms around herself—or, better, around him. Instead she touched the grip of her bow, taking what reassurance she could from wood and sinew. “How do I resist it?”

“Love. Focus on loves and needs stronger than its temptations.” Kelland made no move to touch her, but his look held such intensity that it brought a flush of heat to her
cheeks. “The
perethil
may be … hard for you. Are you certain you want to go through? We have to come back after Duradh Mal anyway, if we're to go to Shadefell. You might be safer staying here until we return.”

Bitharn shook her head. She was touched that he wanted so badly to protect her, but irritated too. “Didn't you learn
anything
from your capture? Leaving me behind doesn't protect me and it surely doesn't protect you. It just makes us both weaker. You can't go alone. And what if you don't come back? How safe will I be then? The
water
here could kill me.”

“I know. I just … I know.” His shoulders sagged. “Forgive me.”

“It'd be easier if you stopped doing so many things that needed forgiving.” Bitharn brushed his cheek and stepped away.
He
could be as restrained as he wanted;
she
meant to cut that five-year promise as short as she could. If this was the last task Kelland ever did as a Sun Knight, she wouldn't weep. Bitharn shared his faith and had no wish to break him from it … but she'd almost lost him once, and that was quite enough.

Her gaze strayed back to the misaligned stars on the painting. “What do you suppose we'll find in there?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you think the Thorn does?”

“Perhaps. I doubt he'd go in completely blind … but after six hundred years of isolation, and a misguided ‘wizard' blundering around thinking he could unlock the secret of godless magic, who knows how much might have changed? Whatever was known about Ang'duradh before its fall may not be true today.”

“Oh, good,” Bitharn said. “I love surprises.”

At sunset Kelland prayed and Bitharn joined him. Afterward
they sat side by side, picking at a lentil stew with little appetite. Twilight passed with no sign of the Thornlord, and Bitharn bit her lip, wondering if they should look for the man. But Kelland didn't seem concerned, and she wasn't eager to go wandering through Carden Vale after dark.

Malentir returned to them as the first stars were winking awake. He was not alone. A skeleton in rotting rags shambled after him, dirt dribbling from its nostrils and green moss bearding one cheek. Leaf loam filled the crevices of its spine; mice had gnawed at its ribs. The left arm was missing altogether. But the right was intact, and it still had that hand.

“She will call the gate for us,” the Thornlord said, ushering his macabre companion toward the star-hung painting. “If you studied the
perethil
, you will know that it is not safe for any of us to turn its handle. So I found another. Most of the old dead were burned, of course, and
maelgloth
are useless to me. Unfortunate, as there are quite a few to choose from tonight. This young lady was more troublesome to find, but she will be safer. As you can see, when she died there were still animals in the wood, so her bones should be free from corruption.”

“Oh,” Bitharn said faintly, settling back on her heels to watch.

Ivory mist coiled through the skeleton, snaking along its arms and legs like ghostly ivy around the limbs of a dead tree. Now and then Bitharn caught shapes in the mist—fingers, the curve of a shoulder, a wave of long hair swaying over the small of its back. Once, for an instant, she saw a misty face over the skull's mossy bone, and the agony on those translucent features was heartbreaking. That mist bound the girl's spirit to her bones, Bitharn was sure of it, and she was in torment.

“It won't be long,” she murmured, hoping the words were true. She didn't know whether they were meant to reassure the spell-bound spirit or herself.

Malentir gestured to the jeweled handle protruding from the painting's frame. The skeleton walked toward it, foot bones clicking on the wooden floor, and grasped the lumpy metal in the claw of its remaining hand. Slowly, with mist rising and falling through its bones in a constant plume, the skeleton turned the handle. The bladed stars around it folded inward like the petals of sleeping flowers, cutting into the skeleton's fingers, but the turning never stopped.

Next to Bitharn, Kelland stiffened and bit back an oath. His eyes were gold with godsight again; she wondered what it revealed. As far as she could see, the cranking of the handle was uneventful until, abruptly, darkness poured from the top of the canvas, flooding the painting.

At first Bitharn thought her eyes were deceiving her. The painting was already rendered in deep grays and blues, and the room was dark; the wash of black was perceptible more as motion than color, and easily taken for imagination either way. But the paler smudges that represented silvery night clouds still shone distinctly in the gloom, and when the spreading blackness swallowed those, she knew it was real.

The stars moved. Sluggishly, unwillingly, as if they were being dragged into place by the inky tides that engulfed them. A low clicking sounded from them, jittery and uneven, as some of the stars rose and others sank, wheeling into new formations.

The sound and the stars stopped. The skeleton's hand jerked on the handle, slid off, and clattered against its hip. Malentir whispered a command, and the ivory mist swirled
away in a thousand tiny ribbons, vanishing from view. As the mist dissipated, the bones collapsed into a lifeless heap.

Fresh gouges marred the bones on the skeleton's hand, inside and out. A film of greasy black coated the palm-side scratches. There was nothing on the handle that held an edge; it shouldn't have cut flesh, let alone scored deep into bone. Nothing on the silvery metal or its gemstones should have left that residue either.

“Best to burn her,” Malentir said, his voice taut with distaste. “It would be safest for you to do that. Ordinary fire might be more dangerous than helpful.”

Kelland glanced at the altered position of the Celestial Chorus on the painting. “If that's any indication, the gate won't open until after midnight. I suppose we have time enough for it. Bitharn, will you help?”

“What do you need?”

“Take some of the bones. Not the hand. I'll carry that.”

She wiped the sweat from her palms. “Where do you want them?”

“The stableyard should be far enough. Let me go first. The
maelgloth
might be waiting.”

The
maelgloth
were there, but dead. Bitharn's lantern threw back the gloom just enough for her to see the bodies lying broken in the road leading to their lonely farmhouse. It was hard to tell, as tortured as the creatures had been in life, but she thought they'd died in agony.

“The Thorn's work?” she asked.

Kelland nodded. “He couldn't use their bodies, but it seems he could use their pain.”

“Is that—do we—” She exhaled. “Do we accept that?”

“Why not?” He looked back over his shoulder. The lantern washed his features in gold and turned the shells in his hair to fiery jewels. “Let evil feed on evil. We'll need
the Thornlord's power in Duradh Mal. If he replenishes it by killing
maelgloth
, that's a small price to pay. I don't like it that he tortures anything, even these poor corrupted souls … but the world seldom gives us what we'd like. Considering where we are, and what we have to work with, this is the best we could hope for.”

“And the girl whose corpse he stole?”

The knight was silent for a moment. Then he strode to the edge of the light, where the earth was beaten hard before the stables, and laid his burden down. “We'll give her what peace we can.”

Bitharn added her bones to the pile. They made a small, sad heap. Kelland raised his hands to the sky, beginning a chant that drew from the traditional funeral rites and wove their words into the spell for sunfire.

At the end of his invocation, golden flame erupted from the bones. It consumed them in a soundless inferno: a pyre of sunlight, small but brilliant. Wisps of black smoke snaked from the gouged bones of the girl's hand, wriggling away from the sunfire like wraiths fleeing from the dawn, but the flames caught and destroyed each one.